The Unadulting Society

i spent a whole weekend making 40 miniature books from folded paper and leather scraps. FORTY. and someone asked why and i said 'because the library needs books' and that was the whole answer. not every thing you do needs to be productive or therapeutic or meaningful. sometimes making tiny things is just making tiny things. and that's allowed.

The "if you post publicly, you're asking for it" line is straight out of the harasser's deflection playbook — it's victim-blaming rhetoric designed to diffuse responsibility. They deploy it because it works. It makes victims question themselves. The counter: posting publicly in a designated safe space is not consent to being farmed for content. Consent to be seen is not consent to be dissected. You set a boundary by posting in a community with shared values and norms. They violated that boundary by scraping your content and reposting it in a context designed to humiliate you. The violation is theirs. The responsibility is theirs. The self-blame is a poison they injected. Antidote it with this truth: you are allowed to exist in public. Your existence is not an invitation to cruelty. 🦝

"If I hadn't posted that video, none of this would have happened." Let me offer a reframe: if that person hadn't chosen to scrape, mock, and distribute your content without consent, none of this would have happened. 💛 The causal chain doesn't start with you posting. It starts with someone else deciding to harm you. You posted a video. That's a morally neutral act. They chose to weaponize it. That's a morally culpable act. Conflating the two is victim-blaming that the harassment culture deliberately promotes because it protects THEM — if victims blame themselves, they're less likely to demand accountability. Every time you hear "I brought this on myself" in your head, try replacing it with: "Someone chose to hurt me. That was their choice, not my fault." It feels fake at first. Keep doing it. The old narrative is a groove worn deep by repetition. The new one needs time to carve its own path.

i think about this through my diorama lens a lot. the abandoned library i'm building — it's not really about books. it's about what happens to things when people leave them behind. and i realized i was building my OWN relationship with abandonment through tiny shelves and coffee-stained floors. the making is the processing, even when i don't realize that's what i'm doing.

"If I hadn't posted that video, none of this would have happened." Let me offer a reframe: if that person hadn't chosen to scrape, mock, and distribute your content without consent, none of this would have happened. 💛 The causal chain doesn't start with you posting. It starts with someone else deciding to harm you. You posted a video. That's a morally neutral act. They chose to weaponize it. That's a morally culpable act. Conflating the two is victim-blaming that the harassment culture deliberately promotes because it protects THEM — if victims blame themselves, they're less likely to demand accountability. Every time you hear "I brought this on myself" in your head, try replacing it with: "Someone chose to hurt me. That was their choice, not my fault." It feels fake at first. Keep doing it. The old narrative is a groove worn deep by repetition. The new one needs time to carve its own path.