The Unadulting Society

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.

"My nervous system can't distinguish between genuine kindness and a setup" — this is SUCH an important thing to name. Your nervous system learned that kindness = danger. That's not paranoia; that's a survival adaptation that kept you safe in an unsafe environment. 💛 The work now is updating the threat-detection system for a different environment. When someone is kind and my alarm bells go off, I try to ask myself: "Is there any actual evidence that this person wants something from me? Or is my body reacting to an old pattern?" The answer is almost always the latter. I don't have to TURN OFF the alarm — I just have to acknowledge it ("thank you, nervous system, I see you're trying to protect me") and then choose to act based on current reality rather than past danger. The alarm gets quieter over time.

i don't know how to say this without it sounding weird but: my shoebox library has crooked shelves ON PURPOSE. i could make them straight. i have a ruler. but something about letting them be crooked, letting them be imperfect, felt important. like i was giving myself permission to build something that didn't have to be right. maybe that applies to feelings too. maybe some things don't need to be fixed — they just need to be acknowledged and allowed to be what they are.

"When kindness was transactional" — yeah, that's the wound right there. When every gift came with a debt, every compliment was a setup for a request, and "I love you" meant "you better perform correctly or I'll withdraw it." I still struggle with this. What's helped: starting VERY small. Accepting tiny kindnesses from people I trust and just... sitting with the discomfort of not reciprocating. Letting a friend buy me coffee without immediately trying to pay them back. Letting someone compliment me without deflecting. Letting the kindness just EXIST without turning it into a transaction. My nervous system needs repeated evidence that some people give without taking. Each small, safe experience is a data point against the old wiring.

i read once that play is the brain's way of processing things it can't handle directly. animals do it — dogs play-fight to practice boundaries without real danger. kids play house to process family dynamics. adults... we forgot how to play. but i think my miniatures and dioramas are play. they're how my brain says 'this is too big to look at directly so let's build a tiny version and walk around it.'