my vocabulary is all complaints.

how do you say good things about things and people?

even when i try to do that i overshoot and correct, i'm like a baby trying to hold something by squeezing as tight as it can because i only know how to On and Off

i end up saying "this thing is amazing, truly very very incredible - well there's this one bit i'm not that into, and this other thing about it that i'm not too fond of",

and so it just goes back to complaining/criticising again.

i don't big things up by putting other things down anymore, that's something i had to learn.

no, like, "this thing is way better than the other things". 'cos even if it's good, the other things don't deserve that

and it's never good, in any context, to be "one of the good ones"

if someone says "you're a lot better than everyone else in your category, most of whom are pretty bad",

that's not a compliment.

can you tell that justin mcelroy thing from like a week ago is gonna stay with me for a while

so, 'cos i can't compliment things by comparing them to things i like less anymore,

i'm forced to try to do -actual- compliments, and i'm really bad at it.

yesterday a music artist i like posted a selfie on here and they were doing this face and this pose and

i just thought like "wow that's an embarrassing look",

and then "-i- wouldn't do that",

and then "-why- wouldn't i do that?
They're having fun, they're happy about themselves. Why wouldn't i do that?",

and now i'm trying to keep my grip on this monster i don't fully understand yet.

don't want to draw any lines or make any big statements 'cos it's completely unexplored ground for me,

but some versions of happiness and fun are embarrassing to me, sometimes funny.

The image of someone not caring and having fun is very funny to me and that's not good actually

At school i considered myself "street smart" which is really weird, 'cos, no.

What i actually meant was that i understood what was and wasn't embarrassing.

These of course being hammered into me by my family but i didn't think about that at the time, i thought it was normal.

what i didn't realise was that, obviously, my whole sense of what was and wasn't embarrassing was shaped by my family specifically. Not society, my family.

Occasionally TV but even then, I never had control of the remote, so that counts as my family signing off on all that.

The truth is i'm paranoid. There are layers & layers, an invisible number of different parts that don't all come off as one thing

I'm not as paranoid like i used to be but I'm still paranoid, things dried onto my skin for so long i don't even know they're separate things anymore

I would never take a selfie like that aforementioned artist because what if someone sees.

i would never have fun without caring because -fuck- that's embarrassing, it's not just embarrassing it's -funny-, everyone would laugh at me.

My unconscious self is smarter than me and for some reason this paranoia is related to the first thing i was talking about in this thread, the being bad at compliments.