About ten years ago I decided that the next step I needed to take in my life was to accept and explore what it meant to be a failure and to have failed. This infuriated almost everybody in my life and clearly terrified a lot of people. People do not want you to accept failure. They dont want you to like… Sit with and think about it and pick it up and turn it arpund in your hands and really examine it. They want you to keep throwing yourself against the impossible walls until your body explodes! They do not want you to say “alright then, I’ve failed. What does that mean for me? Im still here. What does the life of someone who has failed look like?”
This makes people very angry and panicky.
My mental health improved in ways it had not in the previous DECADE once I stopped. And. Sat. With failure. And thought about what my failure … Was. And looked at the structures that produced it and examined them critically.
It is so taboo to fail and admit it openly and talk about it. It is so taboo to talk about or think about failure in an accepting way rather than hiding it shamefully until you experience a degree of success in some area which allows you to present the past failure as “a stepping stone” to your current situation. Fuck that. We are put in positions of guaranteed failure by society every day and then punished and shamed for it. Lets fucking talk about failure
Me, literally, actually less than a week ago: “haha I think perhaps I shall check out the rest of the discography of the band that made brass goggles- oh hey the musicians are wearing makeup in most of their stage performances- oh cool it seems there’s lore-”
y'all know that whole left-brained/right-brained thing is fake right? and the “brain fully develops at age 25” thing? and the “we only use 10% of our brains” thing? yeah they’re all complete horseshit please yell at anyone who says them
okay people are doing nuance in the notes about the kernels of truth in neuroscience myths but I really really need you to understand that that is not important here. people don’t believe there are “right-brained” and “left-brained” people because they’ve misunderstood lateralisation of the central nervous system, they believe it because that binary framework was deliberately pushed by people who wanted to define who was logical enough to lead, and surprise surprise, white adult heterosexual men are left-brained. people don’t believe the brain “finishes developing at 25” because they’ve misunderstood life stage differences in neuroplasticity, they believe it because the idea that children, teens, and young adults have inferior brains is a convenient rationalisation for a society that marginalises them. people don’t believe you “only use 10% of your brain” because they misread an fMRI study, they believe it because it’s useful bullshit for everyone from hyperindividualist historical revisionists pushing the great genius concept of scientific progress to hucksters recruiting for cults that will teach you to unlock your latent telekinesis for just $5000 a month. that’s why it’s fucking important to know that many popular science ideas are false and to push back on them loudly and frequently, because they’re not just mildly incorrect, they are often active components of systems of violence.
https://archiveofourown.org/users/LostOneHero
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my ask thing is always open
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Feel free to build off what I put out because I will love it no matter what. *just tag me*
Also all of you are amazing that is all.
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( https://paypal.me/Lostonehero )
you guys really don't have to but it's there if you like.
