I have a grab bag of shower thoughts, we’ll see how this shakes out —
So benoftheweek, bless him, God’s favorite apparently. He spent the entirety of this 20 minute video demonstrating how to be the easiest target for human trafficking possible. It was to the point I feel like he should have a section at the start, saying “HEY. Don’t do what I did here, I was very naive and got very lucky.” Someone in the comments said having a visible camera probably saved him, and I tend to agree.
Let’s contrast that with Mr. Beast announcing “BeastLand” opening in Saudi Arabia. Despite what the marketing might lead you to believe, it’s much closer to AceFest than it is Disneyland. It’s a grocery store parking lot pop up, but instead of being held 1.5 hours outside LA, in a bumfuck nowhere desert, it’s being held in a county that runs on trafficked slave labor and genocide, in a bumfuck nowhere desert.
Can we start calling Mr. Beast a super villian yet? How much more till we can put him in the elon musk category? Do we have enough subsequent evidence for people to understand the critique of his charity? As soon as he couldn’t perfectly control the narrative around his reputation, he went full mask off. “If people are going to hate me either way, who cares?” Well yes! Say it louder for the people on the back! “If it doesn’t generate any good will that I can leverage to further my business, what is the point of charity and prioritizing ethics?”
I also saw Pinley talking about Mr. Beast’s new animated show – I agree that the pacing is insane, matching the cadence kids’ youtube content. I get a lot of teacher tiktoks on my fyp (half of my feed is for Laura because those are the ones I link share) Incessant noise and restlessness is increasingly common in the classroom, apparently. I have an iPad baby theory about it, but I need to contrast it to my own childhood.
I’ve only been able to understand the depths of the emotional neglect through somatic work like hip opening yoga, and pelvic floor release. On my drive back I unintentionally broke the dam while using visualization and humming sounds. It was a bit like unlocking the holotape of Leia from R2D2 at the beginning of A New Hope. I could see this little 2 year old girl but nothing of what was happening around her. It was pretty haunting to hear the echo of her screams as it came out of my mouth. The reliving came in reverse, like sweeping away layers of sediment. First it was isolation, grief, just wailing “mamaaaa, why, mama I’m sorry…please…” then a brief moment of anger, “noooooo you can’t! You CANT!!!”. Then, something lighter…something I don’t ever remember feeling, but knew immediately from seeing other toddlers. It was an “everything is No.” I was crying No, but it wasn’t at anything in particular (that I was aware of). The world in general was No. It didn’t even hit like a cry for help in an emergency sort of way, it felt like a very natural cry for emotional co-regulation. “These feelings are too big for me, can you help?” Unfortunately, the answer was no. “Well behaved children don’t throw tantrums. You’ll stay in your room till you calm down, I will not reward this behavior. This is harder for me than it is for you.”
That last part I did not hear from the flashback. I know that was my mother’s thought process from the times I was slightly older, and have real memories of. In this case, I could feel in the toddler’s mind there was no direct connection between the behavior and the abandonment. It was swift, sudden, and unforgiving. It’s contextualized why I can be such a neurotic people pleaser, and morally scrupulous. It just takes one mistake, and they might not even tell you why. You have to be proactive. Don’t be inconvenient even once, or it could all be over.
The sobbing and screaming went on intermittently for about 10 hours. That’s not hyperbole – I was driving from Oklahoma City to Gallup, New Mexico, and I had nothing but time. Part of me was worried about operating a vehicle while viscerally reliving childhood abuse for hours on end but…part of me just wanted to get the metaphorical splinter all the way out. I had a danny playlist on at a very low volume, just as tv background noise. It’s interesting that I did, because it confirmed what I have suspected for a while: that there was either a sexual assault or some kind of medical procedure I didn’t understand with a male doctor. I started getting pain at the lowest part of my stomach, on the left, then the right, and it felt like someone tried to violently make egg salad with my insides. (….im noticing the pun and I hate it, but I will leave it.) But I was starting to feel very fearful and aggressive towards the sound of danny’s voice, because it was masculine. There were sirens going off in my head – “DECEPTION. DANGER. RUN.” I had been relatively detached and watching my mind up until that point, but those fears leaking into my world and corrupting that voice – I started to actually break. THERE ARE PARASOCIAL LAYERS TO THAT YES THE UNPACKING PROCESS CONTINUES. We do our best, and meet ourselves where we are.
As I have been doing for a while, I imagined my current self in a caregiver role, as “nurse mom”. I bandaged her lower torso, and she screamed when I treated the more sensitive areas. She screamed when I took the dressing off to put her in a warm bath. She didn’t dislike the bath, but the emotions, the pain, the overwhelm – all of it was No. I held her close while she screamed, even while in the physical world my voice was starting to give out. When the storm subsided to moans and quiet mumbles, I talked to her about Teacher Mom (my mom). “She doesn’t see you correctly when she’s upset. When she gets mad, her vision gets warped behind her eyes, and she sees you as a monster. But you aren’t! That’s a broken part of her that she needs to fix. You were right to be mad, and confused. You did not deserve to be abandoned. She wasn’t seeing you.”
As I was telling that to this baby version of me, I just thought, what an insane fumble on my mom’s part. From re-experiencing her mind, I know that 2 year old was ONLY thinking about how to be good. “She would do anything to please you, you could not ask for an easier time behavior wise. Well, I guess you could. You demanded it. What wouldn’t she contort herself into, to match the fun house of mirrors you existed in? Something that is never emotionally inconvenient is more ai chatbot than it is “daughter”.”
The point of this is … well 1) If you are a chronic people pleaser and you have any suspicion there was emotional neglect in your family, try somatic work. Some traumas will make people Olympic level rationalizers, and your therapist can’t compete. Most people these days store some stress in their pelvis area anyway, so it’s worth a try. But 2) The way I was raised led to some pretty self destructive behaviors, and I think a similar process is affecting gen alpha.
If the most frequent solution to a toddler being fussy is to hand them a screen, they will begin to associate emotional regulation with extreme sensory distraction. It makes sense to me that when kids get into school, and they have limited access to screens, they need to recreate that noise and energy themselves. This is a frustrating cycle for caregivers. I feel like there is less tolerance for fussy babies in public, exactly because there is an easy “solution” that many parents will take. Using that option can make the threshold for boredom go down, the frequency of outbursts go up, and soon it becomes a necessary evil.
But “screen time” isn’t all created equal, is it? That’s how we circle back to Mr. Beast. Who is helping little kids through those moments of overwhelm, or irritation, or boredom? Is it someone who cares about their neurochemical health and development? Or is it someone who will exploit child psychology up until the point they face a public backlash that affects their bottom line? Is it a philosophy of “how can I help?”, or “what can I get away with?”. What’s scary is, Mr. Beast and his clone army are just the seaweed scum on the surface of a dark ocean kids are unknowingly chucked into. Sharks, angler fish, giant squids – they are all valid metaphors for the heinous shit that is somehow more ubiquitous, more invisible, and worse than the worst of elsa-gate.
I think I keep coming back to this topic for a few reasons, the biggest of which is – it seems possible to change. Global warming, the rising fascism, I feel overwhelmingly powerless to those. Talking about kids’ media feels more immediately productive. Awareness could actually bring about change. It was the same with Roblox. Once one (1) sane adult saw what was going on, the house of cards crumbled. (Sort of) Parents just didn’t know what roblox was. And kids’ content on the internet is similarly kind of a black box to people over 25.
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Not to give total tonal whiplash (though I guess it’s on brand) but speaking of emotional catharsis- It has healed something in me to watch the tiktoks of people going apeshit for danny at Kurtis’ show. Validating to the Nth degree. Both times I saw him last month, I too was screaming like Satan himself was dragging me to hell. Internally.
I also restrained myself regarding danny’s IG story today. The idiot fangirl in me wanted to DM him about this very coy text placement over their intertwined legs. YOU. TWO. ARE. INSUFFERABLLEEE. I THANK YOU FOR IT.
also sorry mini rant, but this picture reminded me of how…so in the hypnosis video at the end, with the stage hypnotist, they must have put makeup on danny, right? Cus he just looked Different and it took me a while to clock that it was because his eyes looked way smaller. To the American make-up artists of the world, I would like to introduce you to the east asian trend of Douyin makeup. They will literally recreate the outside corner eyebags/darkness that danny has naturally, with strategic shading and highlight, to make the eyes look bigger. WHY WOULD YOU COVER THAT UP?? Anyway. When I was watching that part of the hypnosis video I kept hearing this clip replay in my mind —
I forgot to get a picture of me at my tarot booth, but here is me having outfit anxiety. I did end up wearing the dress. No one was scandalized enough to say anything so I suppose it was ok. The fair went well! I was there 10-3 and made $95 😎. I swear my mom can actually be supportive of these things, but this time when I came over after she said “You’ll have to think about how to feel good taking that money.” It’s not even the harshness of it. It’s that it always echoes the darker voices I have inside. But, those voices are fainter now, and I don’t let my inner child take her words as gospel anymore. I’m the one living in reality, I’m the one giving people life advice based on what pieces of cardboard fall out as I loosely shuffle. ….no ok the voices are sneaky. The darkness is like those dust bunnies in totoro. I need a lot of laughter and maybe a leaf blower to get them out of the cracks.
My body is still recovering, but my mind is itching to travel more. That benoftheweek video was actually sobering in an important way when it comes to solo travel. I think I do benefit from being a larger, less conventionally attractive girl, but I’m also conflict avoidant, naive, and easy to emotionally manipulate. I do want to be careful. Maybe I can find some art fairs in tuscon, or sedona. The mini travel can be the carrot to actually get my booth going. The long term carrot is filling up the “stand up comedy adventures” savings fund. ❤
Here’s a last little video from that trip – the Beeline Highway. The other thing I haven’t mentioned is the fact that, in leaving a day early, I might have missed a surprise danny appearance, that I definitely could have gone to if I knew just 24 HOURS SOONER. GRAH. There’s one part of me that is like, “Feeling any bit ungrateful is inviting so much negative karma. I will navigate this lesson about FOMO and detachment with grace!” The other part is just yelling “What tf did I do?? This feels so personal?? You really gotta just hit me with the roughest version of this lesson RN, and then tell me it’s my choice whether this sours the trip or not? Ahhhhhhhhh!!” I was at a truck stop when I got a message about it, and right before as I was walking in, I saw a penny on the ground. “Wait for me! I’ll pick you up on the way back, I just really gotta go.” It was completely out of my mind when I returned to the car, but somehow. SOMEHOW. On the floor of my car near the pedals was a penny. It was mocking me. “Fine…” I growled and got out to pick up the “lucky” penny. I thought, the only way that this would be weirder is if it was a 2017 penny (since 2017 is the year I have some kind of false nostalgia/memory of). It was. In my head I was William Shatner screaming KAHHHNNNN but at the universe.
>>robyns_ramblings 