vulnerability comes from the depths

hello, i guess.
[i was once told saying hello is what you're supposed to do when meeting people]
but really, this is treated as my personal space...

you can think of the following as guiding statement of purpose ig. if you're gonna snoop around in my personal bubble of rambles, may as well try to get something from it...

something i ask myself often wrt public-facing mental health talk: are we just normalizing "going through shit"?
collective traumadumping... this is a potential problem with just venting. saying words to elicit sympathy to soothe.
in less friendly and more loaded terms: "attention seeking".

venting is not necessarily bad; indeed, it's a necessary step to fully recognize the issues as they are — cementing them in language.
but the issue comes when the healing stops at this embryonic stage.
the dual edge of venting is that, with language, personal struggles are brought down from the abstract and the messy into the realm of comprehensibility. with this comprehension comes processing, that mentally transformative learning. without being intentionally shaped with care around your core, you risk it all.

waking up one day and not recognizing who you are. the things you've done. the thoughts in your head.

that's what i fear, at least.

wrt stopping at venting, here's the bleak vision: an apathy towards one's problems. feeling frozen, defeated, and hopeless. an artificial, detrimentally low standard to calling issues sisyphean to seek the opium of [even imagined, internally sourced] sympathy. worse, a trend towards portraying struggles for the purpose of signalling and as a means to manipulate.

so here's the rule and the reasons:

don't come at me with anything you read here, unless i specifically bring it up. maybe if i am close to you, asking me about / commenting on something is ok, but only if we're like, go-back-years-of-dms close, to be explicit (y'all get a pass). i need to be able to write in a void. a void that i have some stake in, one that's mildly friendly and may even whisper back on occasion, but a void nonetheless. this is an artistic project to repair and grow myself. shining light into the void evaporates whatever seeks its shelter. leave me alone to create.

i reiterate. do not reference to me the contents my journal. i will not appreciate this boundary being crossed. keep it to yourself. i allow you to intrude in my writing on this site, but you're on your own. i hope you find something useful. or are mildly entertained ig. (otherwise why do you keep on reading?)

just remember that i have a real stake in these writings.