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It's raining.
It's raining.
If you wonder why those kids were cruel. Yes, that's the reason I don't live in the North. They are very proud of what they call “tactful”. And the more educated a family is, the more they are super crazy about it. Public school was kind of more normal where there were kids from different backgrounds.
My first month in literature, I got the almost worst score of the whole team. In the second month, I was the 3rd best. There was this girl who hated me for no reason because I never cared enough to talk to her, said I got lucky that one time, and I should enjoy while it lasted. After the 3rd month, I was consistently the first, and always left the 2nd a whole lot behind, whoever the 2nd was. The rest of them routinely took turns with the wide range from being the worst and the 2nd, in no particular order. I couldn't keep track of where each one of them went. Nor did I care for.
I'm not that upset that I'm behind. I was never a fast learner. I couldn't just do what everyone else does without understanding why first. And it made me slower than everyone, every time.
But I'm thinking about how I was struggling with every word I wrote down. And how it turned out to be the most amazing power that I have.
The irony is people who preach about trust are the least trustworthy of all.
They overestimate their “integrity”.
A group of friends preaching about the importance of kindness and empathy and how they are totally not at all jealous of each other, is like how a couple uses only one joint bank account and then swear every day that they trust each other.
Well it could be the case. Or you can save everyone's effort and to just accept that someone's feelings, whether jealousy or greed, probably don't have much to do with you.
Like, 10 years ago, I outsourced some business-related tasks to my childhood best friend (soon will be demoted to just a regular friend, when I secure a new best friend). My first thought was, “Can I pay him slave labor?”. Yes, my greed hardly has anything to do with other people.
You could then save all that time arguing about trust to do something else fun instead.
“Entrepreneurs” have a strange way of defining relationships. Where they call people they do networking with, “friends”. Then they go on to describe “friendship” based on the template of what they do with said “friends”. Then they complain that what other people do with their normal friends doesn't live up to their virtuous standards.
“You shouldn't be jealous and always happy for your friend's success!” Sure you can. That's why my sister didn't brag about going on vacations when I was jobless.
“You should always uplift and elevate each other!” Yes, that's why I didn't ask my mom about my drawing talent. Her compliments would have only made me even more jobless.
Just be a normal person with normal emotions. People don't have that many options and probably would still keep being your friends for years.
Not to brag but once I stick to someone, it's very hard to get rid of me.
So some people actually came out and said the description of gaslighting and manipulation was borderline and not narcissism. Some other people will get extremely upset, because they thought the borderline label gave them the good rep of being hyper empathetic. Activists have sold the narrative that they are much better than narcissists for quite a while. And somehow borderline with a successful treatment will act more stable, and look a lot like a boring narcissist who simply looks down on people with smugness, as opposed to actively impulsively spreading false rumors out of splitting, projection and projective identification.
At the same time, some other people asked the question: Is personality disorder is mental illness, or just personality?
Which, some people got a bit defensive and thought it was the denial of treatment to sick people from the people who asked that question.
My perspective is a bit different because I'm not in the medical field. But in the early days of the movement, many smart people looked relatively sane, and offered good insights. They got more paranoid and splitting as the movement got more attention and brought them career and monetary advances in a short amount of time. I don't know their childhood. I don't know if they had traumas that caused them a lifelong problem. But I saw that they chose to be borderline, therefore, “sick”, as adults, because it benefited them.
I saw the same thing in cryptocurrency. When they came up with a neat narrative where there is a clear evil (splitting), they got more popular. And I wouldn't call those people or the activists above “sick”, simply not-a-good-person, if they thought to themselves, huh this is a good narrative to trick people to join the movement and it's good for my finances. They convinced themselves that it was the whole truth to escape guilt. Evidence lies in how they destroy their own real-life relationships, also through splitting, projection and projective identification.
So this is the news briefing for today. See you in the next one.
I'm glad Spotify Premium is back so I don't have to listen to Vietnamese music ad breaks anymore. That will save me several meltdowns during the day.
I'm not good with numbers, but I'm good at analyzing. In high school, I was the only one who answered the advanced history question correctly analysing a battle and got the maximum grade in the whole school. So the history teacher asked me to join the history competition. Which I had to lie my ass off to get out of. I still couldn't remember which year I was in.