“How many fics are in your ao3 history” this and “what’s your most read fic” that. Listen. Listen to me. I don’t go into my ao3 history. Whatever is there is between the archive and god and it is quite frankly none of my business what past me decided to open.
You might know Smokey Bear of “Only YOU Can Prevent Forest Fires” fame, but I want you to meet his lesser-known compatriot, “Give A Hoot Don’t Pollute” Woodsy Owl:
I am once again explaining that in order for walkable cities and public transit to work for disabled people, there also need to be more public bathrooms available in and around those areas. Not just places to sit down or rest. Bathrooms. We need accessible, clean bathrooms. With sharps bins. With multiple wheelchair accessible stalls. With an area to set down supplies needed to maintain one’s body. Even if it’s not being used to get rid of bodily waste, bathrooms are one of the few spaces disabled people have to maintain some sort of privacy when they’re in the middle of a flare up or they need to take medication or what have you. Designing a public space? Include bathrooms.
Btw when someone says “don’t talk to me like that, I don’t know you” the normal thing to do is apologize for the perceived overfamiliarity and correct the behavior. Just in case anyone was wondering
If someone said that to me I would unironically dig an underground bunker by hand and only ever leave to pick up doordash orders and nobody would ever see me again ever holy shit
Alternatively I would just jump off a bridge immediately god damn even just reading that makes my soul want to fucking die
hey dude this is a really weird thing to say to a stranger!
Buddy you don’t get it I would fucking perish
Hey dude i know rejection sensitive dysphoria is a thing but if you react this strongly to people setting simple boundaries you need to figure out how to work through that
Oh I deal with it. By being incredibly careful about anything I say to anyone in person ever
Although I once asked my cousin if I could join her dnd group (I have noclue how it works) and she went “Uh… No” and basically was like “you’d fuck it up” (she was very nice about it but damn I felt like the dumbest bitch alive ever)
And I haven’t recovered since! So yeah that’s why I’m a freak online because real life is impossible lmao! Hope this explains it!
That’s not dealing with it but good luck I guess
Fyi, this is not only a bad way to deal with it bc it’s straight up leaning into your own disordered thinking, but it’s also EVEN MORE inconsiderate than the original offense of being overly familiar.
Y'all may not realize the things you do are manipulative, but responding to a fair boundary (that isn’t even stated in a rude way) with “If anyone ever set this reasonable boundary with me I would run away into the woods” is manipulation. You are making it more difficult for people to feel safe telling you when you’ve made them uncomfortable or crossed a boundary, which means they’ll likely respond by either cutting you off or allowing you to walk over their boundaries for fear of setting you off.
That’s manipulative. You might genuinely be mortified, but that is something you NEED to work on, because the alternative is forcing everyone to walk on eggshells around you at the risk that politely setting any boundaries will set you off.
If you’d be fucked up if someone said that to you, that’s understandable. I would be. So apologize politely, then deal with your own shit on your own time.
All of this, AND: Having lived the majority of my life experiencing the Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria “if i am rejected, I will dig a hole in the ground and never come out ever again” thing….. Look, if this is you, please take some real time to consider whether you feel secure about setting your own boundaries. Like GENUINELY secure. Because I didn’t. I was deep in RSD and trauma, and I’d been raised to put other people’s needs and feelings before my own, and since being rejected hurt SO MUCH, I didn’t want to make anyone else feel that way either. So I didn’t set any boundaries at all.
I worked very hard to erase my boundaries for people, or move them, or ignore them, because I didn’t want to set a boundary and ruin the friendship/relationship. Which meant that I allowed a LOT of people to hurt me, often without even knowing that they were hurting me until I reached my limit and couldn’t repress any more and eventually just snapped at them. ….whiiiiiich ruined the friendships. So this experience taught me over and over again that communicating my boundaries = losing someone I cared about. Boundaries became this huge HUGE thing, like the entire Great Wall of China, and it took up so so so much of my emotional energy to figure out how and when to navigate a minor nudge of one of my boundaries (like, idk, a friend wanting me to listen to her vent about her love life when I have errands to run) because I felt like whatever I did to advocate for myself and take care of my own needs was gambling with the connection I had with this person I liked.
I also felt like setting boundaries was the same thing as attempting to control another person’s actions, so I struggled with it on an ethical level: “How is this different from manipulation? How am I supposed to be as kind and fair as I want to be, when I’m forcing someone to act in a certain way?”
All in all, I was living in a constant state of borderline emotional burnout JUST from the struggle I with this one specific thing.
And then literally like five months ago, I had this epiphany that a really good expression of a Healthy Boundary isn’t a *prescriptive* statement (such as ordering someone to do something, bossing them around, steamrolling them) – but a DESCRIPTIVE one: It is a description of who you are and what your needs are. The actions the other person takes in response are entirely their own business and have very little to do with me. Since then, it has gotten a LOT easier to express my boundaries (though this is a very new growth arc for me and I’m still practicing!) and all of these good things started happening in my life – new work opportunities, new friends who are learning to be good at boundaries themselves and DELIGHTED to be practicing with me, new changes to my physical environment to optimize my home for what my needs are – and I have a truly shocking amount of extra energy. I won’t say that I’ve magically become “a much happier person”, but I am a person with energy I didn’t have before which I can now put towards pursuing the things that generate happiness, and I feel a lot more confident and assertive than I did even six months ago. Literally that’s how fast the change has happened.
You don’t have to live in the hole in the ground. You don’t have to live in constant pain and fear and burnout. You don’t have to put other people’s needs before your own. You don’t have to feel the weight of all that shame and guilt crushing you alive. The weirdest and most surreal thing that I have discovered this year is that when I started setting boundaries the right way, the rejection DECREASED and the amount of acceptance and love I had in my life INCREASED DRAMATICALLY.
But no one really teaches you HOW to set a boundary properly, do they? They just say “Set healthy boundaries!” like you’re supposed to just understand the concept – tbh, if you’re as deep in RSD shame as I was, you might genuinely not know the procedure for how to do it.
For that, I recommend an amazing book called (shockingly) The Book Of Boundaries by Melissa Urban, which not only has amazing discussion of boundaries but also provides ACTUAL SCRIPTS for loads and loads and LOADS of different real-life scenarios:
you have NO IDEA how wide my eyes got when I realized that the Green boundary counted as Setting A Boundary. Or when I realized that I’ve had a habit of ignoring/repressing my boundaries during the stage when the Green response would be useful, and then after a while of putting up with it skipping directly to the Yellow response with quite a lot of built-up resentment. MY WHOLE BRAIN EXPLODED, THIS WAS A REVELATION.
Anyway highly recommend this book, great book, so useful. Learning this shit can be really hard, but at least for me it was not anywhere close to as hard as I expected it to be. I just needed to figure out the trick – and it is a deeply cool trick once you’ve got the hang of it. <3
As someone who, thanks to the typical (for my generation) upbringing by a Polish intelligentsia family, had no boundaries, and occasionally still struggles with setting them, please READ, learn the cool tricks and APPLY. BTW, no matter what you do, and how nice and accommodating you are, NOT EVERYONE WILL LIKE YOU. So what, do you really care that much about pleasing some of these people? Or do you just think you should? Trust me, you don’t have to.
The concept of abortion does not exist in soap operas. “Oh no it’ll ruin my life if they find out I’m carrying the child of my boyfriend’s evil uncle” girl kill that thing
