(no subject)

 I'm having some trouble detaching from outcome and expectation, and I tell myself over and over again, do nice things for people, volunteer, post to the internet all because you want to, not because it gets you something.   I'm not buying anything with the things I do, not love or security or peace or praise or membership to some secret or notsosecret ingroup.

 

But oh, do I want the praise.  And for some reason (hah!  some reason almost always equals=flaming insecurity) the praise I get is never the praise I want, it never soothes whatever wild beast lives in my brain that just wants to know if I did the right thing in the right way to make everyone happy with me so I don't need to be scared.   

 

And that's never possible, I'm always going to be scared, I'm never going to please everyone, I'm doing the sort of things with both the cons that people are going to have Strong Opinions about and once those come into play I'm never going to please everyone.  And the underlying truth is that I don't actually want to, I want to draw all sorts of lines in the sand and hold them, lines about consent and bullying and advocacy and I think I actually am comfortable being disliked for some of those.

 

But fuck does that placating response come on strong.  And fuck there are parts of me that want to validate everyone's experience and get everyone to acknowledge different people are working with different sets of information.