Lovingly compiled archive of short posts from Cohost
The posts you can see underneath have been taken from both our main account and our (rarely used, sometimes secret) personal side accounts. They’re not long enough to be proper essays, but we don’t want to lose them, so now their home is here.
I think realizing that I can like something without needing to be an expert on it (or educating myself at all, really) truly helped me appreciate life just a little bit more. There are things and fields that I absolutely want to consume me intellectually... and then there are things that I simply enjoy on the surface level. Like birds. I love birds. I couldn't tell you one thing about them or even recognize most of them in the wild.
And for the longest time I thought that I couldn't really be calling myself a Bird Fan without having thoroughly researched them first, and interpreted my lack of interest in doing so as a complete lack of interest in the topic after all; as proof that I didn't truly "like" birds, whatever that might mean, that I was just fooling myself, and that claiming an interest in them would be too shallow.
But I am simply uninterested in biology as a field of research. Recognizing and differentiating various species of birds would require too much attention and visual and auditory effort from me, both of which are not my strongest suit (I'm awful at perceiving the world around me). Why would I have to force myself to learn something I don't care about only to feel justified in saying that I like it? Why can't I appreciate birds just because, because they're my favourite animals, because they're beautiful and cute and magnificent?
(The answer is, of course, that I can. Nobody's stopping me. It's all in my head, entangled in my ego and intellectual complexes.)
And I've been slowly making peace with that. I am completely immersed in social sciences and have no interest nor brain power to spare towards other scientific fields, but that doesn't bar me for liking things that lie outside of my area of expertise. That's obvious to most people, but for some reason it didn't use to be to me (and is still very difficult to fully acknowledge even now).
I would really love to be able to attend sociology lectures without actually having to major in it
The field is the most fascinating to me as someone who has already dabbled some in psychology and linguistics (and found both lacking on their own on the account of needing the wider perspective sociology provides). Finding worthwhile resources by myself is a bit disorienting, though, as I'm bombarded by many things from many different angles without clear direction as to what to focus on first as a beginner.
At the end of the day, academia could give me valuable foundation upon which I could start building knowledge later on. It's a shame majoring in it would be way too much of a pain in the ass only to obtain a degree that would be pretty much useless (to me, personally).
sometimes i wonder if i really am aromantic or if it's just a result of having been raised by parents stuck in a loveless abusive marriage who should have divorced decades ago and yet never did and that completely destroying my faith in romantic love as a concept. i also wonder if it even matters at the end of the day. the result is still the same
we sure do pride ourselves on being sooo peaceful with each other for a system in which someone ends up writing a lengthy angry essay trying to put other headmates in their place statistically once a week or so
"no bro trust me we are so peaceful and agreeable towards each other" i say, desperately trying not to pay any attention to another angry fucker queueing right behind me ready to stir up a storm in our notes app/discord server the moment i switch out
i feel like this mindset is mostly a result of us having lurked a lot in disordered spaces during our syscovery period, where absolutely HATING each other seemed to be the default. so to us, who never even thought of calling anyone a persecutor or writing a reddit post titled "how do i evaporate my alters out of existence", our system seemed exceptionally peaceful despite the lack of stability and general Horrors ^TM
and this conviction just kind of never went away despite having since moved away from toxic places like that. doesn't matter how much conflict there is, we will still believe ourselves to be a perfect example of a peaceful, chill system. nooo don't look at [redacted]'s discord channel which has been a PvP zone for over a month now we're chill i promise i promise!!!!
THIS THING IS OUR ONLY HOME THIS THING IS THE TRANSLATION OF US TO THE WORLD AND YOU ARE THROWING IT TO THE WOLVES BECAUSE YOU'D RATHER CONTINUE TO SUFFER THAN ADMIT YOU'RE SUFFERING
everybody wants to be saved & nobody wants to admit they need saving
truly wish i lived all alone so that i could try banging my head against the wall and see if it brings some release
#i bet it would i bet it'd feel really good
nevermind. 12 hours of sleep fixed me. for now
#i still bet it'd feel super good though
journaling is so good but it only starts feeling good when you start doing it semi-regularly
we used to journal once or twice a month at best and it was always extremely exhausting and emotionally draining, which in turn made us avoid it even more. but we actually started writing journal entries more often at the end of April - we do it every couple of days now - and it has actually become healing. we don't force ourselves to do it, we only write when we have some stronger feelings to work through, but those do tend to appear at least once or twice a week, and so our journal has been getting filled up rapidly.
not only has it started to have the healing effect of helping us be more at peace with our emotions (as opposed to making us exhausted and shaken like it did in the past when we journaled more rarely), but it also greatly helped with dissociative amnesia; looking back at the entirety of May (and the end of April), there are LOTS of memories we managed to keep simply because they're somehow related to the things we had written down. we remember the past month better than we ever have, and that's certainly an achievement since we've been super switchy this month too and that tends to greatly fuck with our perception of time in general
i recommend journaling i promise it's great after you manage to get through the initial horrors phase
#>🌌
you can stop now. it's ok. you're free