things i am going to teach my children later: the “pick one favourite” syndrome embedded in our culture is stupid and useless
it starts at fucking pre-school, in those little get-to-know-me books, and it never ends. favourite colour? mother tongue? favourite character? best friend? favourite sport? song? movie? book? series? band? toy? no you can only pick one
and i am deeply convinced that this is intrinsically linked to one of the things that annoys me the most, which is that in our society, it’s considered a sign of maturity to prioritise one thing, and often specifically one person, above everything else. i mean, priorities are definitely important, but you are also absolutely allowed to equally enjoy/love/feel connected to different things without constructing some kind of hierarchy where one of them always wins out
“you can only like one gender, you can only be one (of the two “biological” – ha) genders, you can only have one partner, you must have one best friend, you must have one favourite activity (preferably your job, bc that makes you a functional member of society) because clearly if you love multiple things, you must love them less than if you spent all that love on one thing”
this rhetoric creates so much guilt and jealousy – as if love is a finite concept.
(incidentally it is also possible to genuinely love something without it being one of the things you love the most, and that doesn’t make that love any less valid, but that’s another discussion)
I agree with this so much. My entire life, it’s been impossible for me to name my favorite anything. The closest I can get is “one of my favorites.” I know I like things, but I can’t choose a favorite, and I’ve never known why it is supposed to be important!
ohhhh i have 5 favorite colors and i thought i was just indecisive!
this is a good post; i hope it’s ok if i add a sort of counter-example…
because the weird thing is, if you do have one favorite all-consuming passion, and you happen to be openly autistic, it gets pathologized as your Special Interest, whereas that ‘normal’ person that has their whole office done up in the colors of their favorite sportsball team doesn’t get that done to them.
Them: pick a color Me: I am a graphic designer. Do not make me choose between my children.
I once asked the daycare kids what was their favorite color. One of them answered ‘RAINBOW!!!’ and they all changed their answers because indeed, the best color is all the colors.
“One of Pagourtzis’ classmates who died in the attack, Shana Fisher, “had 4 months of problems from this boy,” her mother, Sadie Rodriguez, wrote in a private message to the Los Angeles Times on Facebook. “He kept making advances on her and she repeatedly told him no.”
Pagourtzis continued to get more aggressive, and she finally stood up to him and embarrassed him in class, Rodriguez said. “A week later he opens fire on everyone he didn’t like,” she wrote. “Shana being the first one.”“
Little Clara Bow got her name in the papers recently, when Robert Savage, untamed Yale student, tried to kill himself because Clara wouldn’t marry him. In the subsequent trial Robert testified that Clara kissed him so fervently that he was laid up with a sore jaw for two days. And now Clara says that the more she sees of men, the better she likes dogs
a form of gaslighting that i don’t see mentioned nearly as much as, say, refusing to acknowledge the past, or misremembering a conversation, is the way abusers project an identity or a characteristic on someone so strongly that they take on this projection as a fact about themselves.
like being told you’re incapable of love. or being told that you are hateful, or cruel, or dangerously mentally ill, or that you’re just like your father, or that you’ve never cared about anyone in your entire life.
parents are almost uniquely suited to this since they have so many opportunities to shape your perception of yourself from the moment you’re born; your parent’s definition of you becomes your definition of you. realizing that you have entire aspects of your identity that your parents have been trying to deliberately obfuscate and erase is huge, and so is the incredibly painful struggle to come out from under it.
abusers don’t want you to think of yourself as a warm or protective or capable person. they don’t want you to think of yourself as perfectly suited to love any number of people admirably and well. they need you here, and they need you to not even think about leaving, and teaching a kid to think like that is so much easier if you get them while they’re young.
coming out of that is hard work. you have to be able to go down through the events of your life, piece by piece, decision by decision, and dispassionately analyze them to the best of your ability. you have to be able to recognize your own efforts done in good faith with all the knowledge and understanding you had at the time. you have to be able to forgive yourself, and to give yourself the warmth and love of your own inner good parent. being able to be calm enough to do this takes an immense amount of work if you have anxiety or trauma, and handling the symptoms of those are difficult enough on their own.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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