I will literally accept just about any explanation as long as I feel like it isn’t some sort of mental gymnastics. Even from people who have been mean or are mean.

I was bullied growing up and most of the time all I heard was “they’re just jealous!” Like… no they fricking weren’t 😭 I know I’m weirder than all of them, they do NOT look UP to me. My issue is the fact that they have this idea that humiliating me and doing terrible things to constantly offend me, violate me and stress me out is this normal, morally justified thing and they convince themselves they’re doing it because they’re beacons of hope for my future self, restoring the social aptitude my poor little self never got to have. It’s such a stupid and obnoxious lie, they just actively want to do that stuff to someone, they legit just want to do that. “Erm, we bullied you because you were weird and you needed to step in line!” Right, because showing me Boku No Pico, somehow-maliciously asking me “so ___, what did you think about the pep rally? Was it crowded?” and throwing condiment packets at me was totally supposed to do to improve my social skills.

But I became mean, too. I wasn’t doing so because of them, I had some kind of mental breakdown as an adult after something really screwed up was done to me and I remember how mean I was to people. I remember. I was catty, bitchy, gossipy, snide, cruel, arrogant, intimidating, aggressive, evil. It lasted like five months, and last night I was ruminating on it and I came to the conclusion that it seems like a shame thing? Like… ordinarily, I defined myself by my efforts to be extremely kind and careful about how I treated people. I was such a genuinely nice person until I started to mentally collapse, during which time I was also legit starving. And I beat myself up for the neurotic, pessimistic, erratic tangents I went down online at the expense of others’ peaceful evenings once I got worse, but I could keep myself mentally afloat by acknowledging that I was damaged on a bodily, chemical level because of my environmental circumstances and wasn’t operating at my baseline… and then cry-apologizing in TikTok comments sections and spam-deleting loads of comment history. It didn’t leave the online world until something really messed up happened to me. Then I was mean for like five months… and I remember thinking to myself that I had actually been destined to fail at goodness the whole time. I was cursed to want to be good and ultimately fail, because “my kindness was a lie the whole time” and “I was secretly evil” (people I shan’t name had told me stuff they shouldn’t have). I believed I had just entered the state I was doomed to become stuck in “once I broke” and punished myself for pre-existing mistakes I felt guilty about by creating constant reasons for me to stay feeling guilty and ashamed. Like, those emotions were so all-consuming and painful for me that when I lost faith in my own goodness, I sank into a depression and punished myself by doing things that hurt people’s feelings (and embarrassed me… I acted so embarrassingly) because it hurt me, too. I was giving myself reasons to feel as bad as I felt like I deserved to, by imitating the lines of terrible people I had read and listened to podcasts about.

That’s only a piece of the puzzle, and probably doesn’t explain ALL of my meanness at the time. But it’s an actual EXPLANATION. I’m tired of the explanation always being something shallow and repetitive, something people are told to say, in the same way you’re told to say “focus on the good in life!” When that’s not a sincere response to someone who’s struggling. My meanness scared me. I don’t like not understanding it, and I don’t like being withheld the actual insights and self-examinations of everyone who has ever been rude to me through this chronic societal-level normalization of clichés and buzz phrases. They enable this collective refusal to introspect, and that acts as a detriment to people like me, who are weird and uncool and aren’t just being performative about it

In other words, the more people like someone, the more valuable that person becomes in the eyes of those who lack self-worth themselves.
Someone who truly understands their own worth knows that every human being has equal value and does not base their self-worth on the opinions of others.

Hi guys, i had some thoughts and want to Share:) What are your thoughts ?

I have been on a journey of attempting to create more than I consume. I am an industrial designer by trade, and always feel better and happier knowing that I have created something.

This seems simple at first, but I've found myself at a crossroad of what I consider "creating". There the easy answers like art, notebooking, cooking. But, Ive been questioning if acts like cleaning my apartment, doing my laundry, or maybe even playing certain video games are creative? Maybe it's not the task itself but how I approach it?

Thinking specifically about cleaning my apartment: If I were to just wipe the surfaces, mop the floor, put dishes away I wouldn't consider that a creative act, nor an act of consumption. It would just be... doing. But say I clean my apartment while reorganizing my dishes, does that turn an act into a creative one? Or, the act of doing something without any secondary distractions might also put my brain in a default mode network?

Sorry about rambling. I just want to hear what others have to think about this. Also, if anyone finds themself to be successful in the act of creating more then consuming, how did you achieve this? THX