Re: “X is not a replacement for therapy”. I won’t argue that there’s any one thing that’s a replacement for therapy, but I will say it’s *possible* to
1. be a person who “needs therapy” 2. become a person who gets DMs saying “this conversation helped me more than my therapist”
“Go to therapy” has become a sort of shorthand - and I’ve used it myself too as a sort of placeholder (typically like, “go to therapy if you need to”). But even therapy itself is no guarantee of anything. Some people go to therapy to find elaborate ways to justify their bullshit
I’m sure there are lots of great therapists out there who are doing their best to help people, I see you, appreciate you, etc etc.
And- simultaneously- I’ve sensed that there’s been this strange... valorization? glorification? of therapy happening. It feels v artificial to me
QC had a great thread a while ago that suggested (this is my interpretation), if you’ve gone to therapy, and you subsequently become this judgey person who’s dismissive of other people’s attempts to become better people, maybe your therapist wasn’t very good? What are you doing
It’s the same with drugs, with travel, with reading good literature, with any sort of experience that’s supposed to help you become better in some way.
If you come out of it still being needlessly mean to people, (sometimes even more so!), what was the point?
If you have A Way that works for you: yoga, keto, box-breathing (changed my life!), introspective journaling, martial arts, jogging, lifting, whatever - truly, that’s fantastic. Just... maybe consider being less judgy & more inviting in how you share that information with others
this thread was about encouraging people to read more literature; same idea. I want people to be more awesome in every way too. Which includes doing therapy if it’s right for them! Just saying that shaming & condescension is not effective persuasion for whatever you’re selling
I love this question because I am naturally a person who makes things complicated. 😂 If I were to 🐝 truly, fully myself, I would be 10x more complicated than I pretend to be in public for social reasons
The natural language inside my head is byzantine and ornate, the sentence structure is convoluted, the vocabulary esoteric. Does that seem pretentious? I’m a naturally pretentious person! I love pretending! I love to make things up and imagine things and build elaborate fantasies
I have spent a million words getting to know myself very intimately, a million more getting to know others, and so I have no anxieties about my pretenses or complexity. I am always myself whether I’m talking to a baby or to a shitposter. My earnestness is genuine, people can tell
for context tho my patrons (mostly men) do collectively pay me a thousand bucks a month to tweet whatever I feel like tweeting, and I hardly ever even get my tits out
it can be a sort of strange loopy, "as above, so below" sort of thing – you can start with yourself, too, and work your way out. you can start by identifying the things about yourself that you respect – look back for moments when you respected yourself most – and do more of that
or you can look around you. make a list. this is something you can cultivate a sensitivity to. "I really respected it when... [insert thing your friends did or did not do]". That teaches you something about your values. When you live in alignment with your values, that's amore
hey let's play a game: throw something at me (an image, a name, whatever arbitrary thing) and I will tell you precisely how cursed or blessed it is. and then you can vote with your likes about how accurate my assessment is
self-response: this game itself is curse-adjacent. tricky business. kind of dangerous. but it takes on the energy of the person playing it, and I have pretty blessed energy overall so I have a good feeling about this
69% blessed 31% cursed
crossing 70% blessed is a major threshold that enhances your persuasion efforts, so being 69% blessed is itself a sort of sisyphean meta-curse