in therapy my therapist and i were talking about my own feelings of self worth in relationships. and she asked me to say qualities about myself that someone else would be attracted to, on a romantic and platonic level. so i named some things like compassionate, empathetic, etc. and she said “you named things that you can give someone. ways you can serve, rather than ways that you are” and y’all..my mind was blown that’s gonna stick with me forever like she then proceed to tell me actual innate qualities about myself that she liked and thought anyone else would like as well and i hadn’t even considered those because like she said i was focused on things i could do outwardly to attract and maintain connections rather than who i was as a person..goddamn!!! thats tea!!!
With this in mind, this also makes me think of the ways people describe us. When people say the reasons that they love/like you or describe you as a person, are they only naming ways that you serve them? Are they equating your worth with how much you do for them?
ex. “You’re such a good listener. You’re so generous, you’re so compassionate. You’re always there for me. You always hold me down. You’re reliable”
vs.
“You’re so funny! You’re very vibrant. You’re creative, passionate, and intelligent. You’re optimistic. You’re so talented at ____” , etc. I think that’s very telling.
My hip new communications theory is actually that millennial/gen z/internet native humor is so weird and abstract because of the sheer amount of words we’re exposed to daily. we’ve heard a lot of words in a lot of different orders so if you wanna get a reaction out of us you usually gotta put words in an order we haven’t seen before
So like normally structured jokes aren’t as funny anymore but “lemon lime spine” is a one-hit K.O.
you know i wanna disagree with you on principle, because it can’t be that simple, but “lemon lime spine” just made me crack up for the first time all day.
So one of our new vocabulary words is “malus”, meaning “bad”, and I asked my students if they could think of any English derivatives, telling them that just about any English word that begins with M-A-L is going to mean something “bad”.
I’m expecting stuff like: malice, malcontent, malnourished, or even malware or Maleficent.
Instead I get this one girl in the back of the room say “male” with the most dead-eyed expression.
This has the same energy as two years ago when another student said she remembered “vir” meant “man” because “it looks like virus, and men are a virus”.
One of my Latin students, whenever I’d ask if they wanted a couple extra minutes to review before a test, would always say, “No, we die like men.” And so finally I asked her why it was always ‘like men’. She said, “We die like men, unprepared and useless.”
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