azure, feeling ancient and calcified and decrepit: “oogh ack urrrg, i am turrrning to dussst…”

the Internet:

i swear someone has their thumb on the scale, because this shit feels so incorrect to me

…

thinking again of how my then-spouse didn’t allow me to shave my scraggle that made me so unhappy, because when i did, i “looked like a girl,” which filled them with disgust and sexual uncertainty, which instead of processing they would turn into rage and take out on me for making them feel that way

and it’s like,

• you’re the one who married a girl
• you have always had a type
• you knew what you were getting before i even did
• your fears and your desires were there decades before i came along

it’s not my fault that you’re ashamed of who you are; that’s no reason to shame me for who i am

it’s more than the shame, though; it’s the one guiding terror behind every choice a narcissist makes:

what might the people you’ve been manipulating your whole life think of you, if the web came unwound and they ever saw you for real?

what if you had no other recourse, but to trust?