selja@hepta

1

when i really don't like something, i will not do it. if you try to make me, i will protest, i will growl, i will bare my teeth. if i knew how to cry still, i might. i have been like this forever: if i find something truly miserable, you will have to force me to do it with violence or leverage.

there are grades and nuances to this, of course. there are activities i would characterise as "miserable" but will nevertheless take part in, perhaps to avoid further hurt in the future. i may not want to start doing a thing despite enjoying doing the thing itself - that is, i may not do a thing i like because it feels bad to get started, or to do something that i'd need to get started.

but ultimately the point is that i can tell when i really, really don't like something. when i really, really don't like something, it will cause me to feel the symptoms of my dislike physically. i may get anxious or nauseous, or angry.

2

sometimes if i really enjoy a work, if it really affects me, i can readily identify it as "good". some of those things i would even characterise as "my favourite". sometimes works may engage me, grip me, even if consciously can tell that they're "bad", that i don't like where they're going or what they're doing with their material. sometimes a work is so bad that i will stop engaging with it on the spot and never return.

but much of the time... i just read a book or watch a movie, and i don't know if i think it was good or bad. if i watch the matrix reloaded scene where morpheus cuts a car with a sword and then shoots it with his glock until it explodes and consider that scene to be some of the coolest shit i've ever seen, does that mean i think the matrix reloaded is "good"? do i reread novels by william gibson because they're particularly good, or because they have some other quality that makes them good reading on a train or at an airport?

and, like, how do i know how i feel about things?

3

so, like, that's not a rhetorical question. i'm dealing with a real thing here, and it's got a name and everything. psychologists have bad and incorrect theories about it, as is their wont. but i don't, mostly, care about that, and i only really care about diagnoses insofar as they are pertinent to achieving some purpose, like a medical intervention. i don't need to go to a doctor to be told i have executive function issues, or gender, or a broken arm - but i might have to go to a doctor to get e2 or an arm xray.

and thus the real concern here i have is that this is really difficult to deal with at times. i don't know what the impression other people get of me is, but certainly i feel like i don't really know what my favourite things are. i feel like the emotions i feel about things are mostly just "i don't like this" or "oahhhh" and if it's not at either of those ends i couldn't possibly tell you whether i enjoyed this hundred hour video game experience or not. isn't that really strange?

sometimes i feel like i would like to review the media i experience, but i can't really do that because i can't put to words what i like, or in what ways i like it. to some degree this is undoubtedly a skill to learn, but i feel like most people can at least identify the ways in which they feel about things.

coda

i wrote this instead of sleeping. i started thinking about it several hours ago and then i had to do it until it was done. this is what you'll get out of me for now.

the posts i promised are still in draft stage.