soos_mite_ah

Annoying People in the Travel Niche I have been doing some research for some upcoming trips I want to do and as a result, I'm interacting with a lot of travel related content. I feel like under the travel umbrella, there are a number of different niches and communities that are all very different from each other. And I think it boils down to people having different travel styles, different reasons as to why they travel, and different logistics around travelling as well. Some of these circles are hella annoying lol and I want to write about that. 1. The Luxury Traveler: I would characterize this as the group of people who spend a lot of money on hotels, often emphasize resorts, who spend a lot of money before the trip even begins, and spends a shit ton of money on tours. I wrote about this niche more in a previous post: These people usually focus their content on Europe, Asia, and the Carribbean. Their content isn't always exhorbitantly expensive, sometimes it's cheap. But it's in a developing country where the USD and Euro go much further (think of the influencers that go to Bali and talk about 5 star hotels only being $80 a night). My issue with experiences like this is the implications around how the locals are being affected and how this exasserbates issues in the global south. In my opinion, it's fucked up to be enjoying a 5 star hotel experience when the workers probably aren't earning a living wage and the locals are struggling to get by because the tourism industry gobbled all the other industries up to where now, the place is a shell of what it used to be and is catered around people with money. I wrote about the colonial implications in the post above as well as how for some people, travel is just an extention of their overconsumption. I'm not opposed to spending money and splurging here and there so long as it makes sense for my budget and I feel like I'm getting my money's worth out of it (like I'm not going to spend $500 on a hotel knowing I'm just going to sleep in there and be outside like 90% of my waking time there). I just want to make sure that I'm approaching travel in a responsible and ethical matter that allows me to enjoy myself but not at the expense of others as much as I can help it. I feel like the luxury travel niche can be a good place for inspo at times but generally speaking, it should be taken with a huge grain of salt regarding ethics and budgets. 2. The Enlightened Traveler: This is the group of people who believe that travel gave them a new perspective on life and now they're making their whole personality the trip that they took. I think there is a more and a less annoying version of this. The less annoying version of this is people who genuinely travel to learn and expand their perspectives and they got something out of it. The more annoying version of this is the person who either has a giant ego about the places they have been to and as a result, they think they are better than the people who didn't travel as much, OR the person who thinks they are this enlightened, cultured person for going to so many places when really, they didn't challenge themselves one bit. Like no Jason, you're not cultured, you're just an alcoholic who went on a 1 month bender where you went clubbing in 20 different European countries. I wrote about this in the post linked above but I think it can exist in a less extreme version where you just exist in the ecosystem of tourists. I saw this comment under a Youtube video a while back. I referenced this in the linked post but I'm including it here because it's relevant: I would also say that a lot of country counters fall under this umbrella as well. Country counters are basically people who try to visit as many new countries as possible. Often times, these people have a quantity over quality mindset where they don't ever want to delve into a country, revist a country, or they say they've been to a country when really they just had a 3 hour lay over. Most of the country counters I encounter in this niche are usually people who backpacked around Europe since it's easier to skadaddle around different countries in a short period of time there. I find it annoying when someone is like *oh I'm super well travelled, I've been to 10 countries* and all of those countries are in Europe. Let's say you have two people who have gone to 5 countries each. Person A went to the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and Luxemburg. Person B went to Spain, Brazil, Kenya, Japan, and Iran. I would consider Person B to be more well travelled overall more so than Person A even though they went to the same number of countries. I would still give credit to Person A to being more well travelled in Europe specifically but I think that Person B has more of a diversity of experiences and is more well rounded in terms of different places they have been to. I'm not trying to downplay the list of countries Person A went to but there isn't as much of a difference between Netherlands and Belgium as there is between Brazil and Kenya. Also, on a similar note, if you're from a large, diverse country like the U.S., India, Brazil, or China, I would argue that you can be well travelled without leaving your home country. You can have a wealth of experiences by interacting with the variety of people in these countries or by travelling to the myraid of landscapes and biomes your country has. Someone from the UK would have to go to Morocco to experience a dessert for the first time near them. My ass can drive to Arizona and get a similar vibe in terms of climate and landscape. In most major U.S. cities, you can get food from different countries and have it taste good and legit. By living in Dallas, I can get good Mexican food, good Indian food, and good Italian food in the same day without hassel. That's not something you can say about most places in the world. In India, you have so many different cultures, customs, religions, and people from a variety of walks of life from living in big cities, to living in more isolated tribes. As far as Spiral Dynamics goes, I think India, while mostly Blue/ Orange, has large elements of the whole spiral there. I have people in my life that either never left the U.S. or India or if they did, they just went to 2-3 countries, and some of those people are more well educated and more cultured than a lot of people under this enlightened traveller umbrella. 3. The "Live Like a Local" Traveller: These are the people who get all pretentious about what you chose to do in your trip. Usually, they have the hipster attitude about not wanting to do certain things because they're too mainstream and touristy. Sometimes, they're like the opposite of the country counter where they don't think you can get a good experience of a country without spending 3 or more weeks there. I touched on this in the linked post: I see the validity around some of their points, especially when it comes to getting sucked into consummerist traps as well as how you don't REALLY know a place until you have visted a few times or for an extended period of time. I kind of view travelling to different countries like meeting new people and having interesting conversations. Whereas, living in a place like if you studied abroad there for a few months, moved their for work for an extended period of time, or you settled there in your travels for a few months is more like becoming friends with people as opposed to just meeting them and having a good conversation. I'll use South Korea as an example. South Korea is kind of like the party friend who is fun to be around, who knows all the cool fashions and cafes, and you can generally have a good time. But, if you try to get to know them deeper, that's when you discover the toxicity and the dysfunction around this friend and the ways that they treat other people behind closed doors. South Korea is a fun place to visit, but due to a number of social issues and economic problems, it's not the best place to settle down in and a lot of native Koreans have to deal with the problems there. Continuing on the making friends vs meeting people analogy, while making friends and deepening connections, or in this case, committing to a couple of countries and taking the time to learn about them, is the ideal, you can still learn a lot by simply meeting a lot of people and having good conversations, or in this case by visiting a lot of countries. The later can still significantly open your mind and introduce you to new perspectives. And I think the whole *you need to be somewhere for a longer period of time to experience a place* can be pretty shortsided in terms of not taking into consideration of the logistics travellers experience. Like unless you're a college student on summer vacation, a student who had the means to save up for a gap year, a travel influencer, someone with a trust fund, or someone who has a very generous PTO program with their work place, staying in one place for a while doesn't really make sense. I remember once stumbling upon a section of the internet where Europeans were making fun of Americans being like crackhead travellers since Americans are usually running around trying to see the entireity of Italy in one week and squeeze in everything into their itinerary. The conversation then evolved into talking about how most Americans don't have a lot of PTO and the little they do have usually goes to using them during the holidays to visit their families. So as a result, they don't have the luxury to meander about Italy in their once in a decade trip. I also know for me and my needs/ desires that while I do like travelling, if I'm just bouncing around places for more than 4 weeks, I start to get fed up. Or if I'm staying put in a place for longer than 4 months that's not my home country without the intention of settling there, I start to get a little antsy. I have the stamina for travelling for a while and dealing with the logistics of travel to where I can probably handle a job that has a lot of travel requirements since I'm not travelling to relax, I'm not travelling for escapism, and I'm not travelling for novelty. As a result, the whole *save a ton of money, quit your job, and travel for a year* move doesn't really make sense for me. And going back to the meeting people vs making friends example, you can become friends with people and not really know a lot about them or have real ass conversations with them and just get lulled into a rhythm or sense of familiarity. Nothing wrong with that, but let's not conflate the length of a friendship with the quality of growth you get out of it or how deep that friendship is. Similarly, you can have a drawn our visit to a country and not engage with it deeply. Or you can go for a short period of time and get a lot out of that trip in the same way that meeting someone and having a few conversations can still be incredibly impactful in your life. For me personally, since I have some time retraints with the places I'm going to, while I cannot do everything in a country, I try to do what is the most meaningful to me and what I think are the heavy hitters in terms of getting to know a country and their culture. If I really want to do a second trip in the future to go in more depth, I can do that. 4. The Sex Tourist: I was thinking of leaving this one out because this isn't something that annoys me. To say it annoys me is to downplay how it infuriates me. I was also going to label this as being a passport bro, but I went with sex tourist because 1. while men are the main demographic that does this, women can also be creeps and 2. passport bro doesn't sound as bad as being a sex tourist and I feel like the term passport bro is a euphemism. I don't think I need to elaborate much here. It's a gross exercise of power dynamics and it's dehumanizing to entire groups of people. I'm just putting this here because I have encountered people who think this way and as someone who cares about travel, I want to distance myself from this group as much as I can. Also, I can't help but think that a lot of red pill men who believe that women who solo travel are whores who are sleeping around is just them projecting what they would do in a situation where they were travelling alone since they have a misogynistic world view and they would engage in that type of dehumanization if they were to go abroad. Like no, I'm not going to Vietnam to sleep around. I have a list of museums, landscapes, historical sites, and food to try. Men and dating are the last thing on my mind, especially as someone travelling alone since safety can also be a concern and I'm not about to run off with some strange men to have sex in a foriegn country where no one would know if I went missing. 5. The Extreme Budget Tourist: I love getting good deals on trips and managing my money so that I can travel but also meet my other financial goals. I love finding ways to make travel more accessible to people so that it's not being gatekept by a pay wall. I think it can be a common misconception in the U.S. that to travel Europe that it has to be something that you have to save like $10,000 for. You can get flights for cheap by using airline miles. You can stay in hostels instead of hotels. You can get cheaper and better food by avoiding tourist traps. You can get a good deal by planning your own logistics instead of getting an expensive tour. And you can save a shit ton of money just by using public transport. You can travel to Europe in a sustainable way. However, when I am talking about the annoying extreme budget tourist, I'm not talking about the above. I'm talking about the person who sacrifices their baseline well being and safety just to save some money. I'm talking about the person who goes to developing countries, does a tour of the slums, then eats something questionable on purpose, and complains about the country and food poisoning for the remainder of the time. Personally, whenever I find travel influencers, I use the way that they talk about and approach places like India as a good litmus test on how much I should trust them. There is nothing wrong with acknowledging that India is a developing country and that the standard of living is not the same as a developed country. However, there is something wrong with purposefully going out of your way to show the worst version of life in a country, portray it as if that's the only way people live, and give yourself the worst experience possible when you have the means to have a better experience by paying slightly more. No one told you to go into the questionable motel that's like $10 a night in the sketchy part of the city. You could've had a much better experience and still had a budget friendly trip by spending $60 a night. Instead of reaching for the grossest street vendor, you could've gone to another street vendor with better quality control on food and had a much better experience for slightly more money. I'm also talking about the westerners that feel the need to haggle for everything in developing countries. I know that in some places that negotiating is the norm and it's part of the custom for buying things so you taking part of it is kind of like you participating in that culture. Sometimes you gotta do that to avoid getting upcharged by an exhorbitant amount just because you're a foreigner. However, I think it can cross the line when it comes off as entitlement in situations where you're arguing over buying a ceramic bowl for $2 as opposed to $3, even though in local currency, that $1 USD might be a jump. Like that $1 isn't going to make that big of a difference in your budget, your American ass will be fine. The vendor on the other hand is just trying to feed their family. Getting pissy about such a small amount of money when you very clearly have the upper hand in terms of power dynamics is giving colonizer. But yeah, despite travelling being a huge part of my life, it's a part of my life I can't be sharing to just anyone because there are plenty of pretentious weirdos out there in the travel niche. I try to keep things low key so that I act like I have some sense, so I don't get disconnected from reality, and so that I can engage with complex topics responsibly. Also, this isn't really a *I'm trying to protect myself from weirdos* thing but it's more of a understanding that just because the people around me like travelling, that doesn't mean that I'm automatically going to click with them or that we should travel together. But I know that my style of travelling doesn't always mesh with those around me. Some people focus on vacationing and relaxing when they travel. Other people do things on a faster pace. Some people want to go with the flow and meander. Others want a more structured itinerary. Some people prioritize the novelty around travel. Others like to a couple of reliable places. Some people budget more on some things over others. Some people focus on nature. Others care more about big cities. Some people travel and have an existential crisis. Others travel to forget about their worries. I can keep going. But it's not the travel that makes people cultured or educates people about the world around them. It's about the way you engage with travel and why you travel. Not all travel is created equally and not everyone has the same relationship to it, for better and for worse. And these niches all exist for a reason and I have gotten some degree of value from each of them despite their clear blindspots (EXCEPT from the sex tourist parts.. yall nasty).

Just created yet another journal since my other journal was getting too long. I've also been wanting a new start and a new space since my last journal was started way back in 2021 when my life was very different from where I'm at right now. Here are my two previous journals for a quick reference/ recap: Psychoanalyzing Myself: 9/1/2021- 12/25/2024 The Joy Journal: 7/19/2020 - 9/7/2021

I've been enjoying this guy's videos about travelling to different countries in Africa

The Big 250 I went to Washington D.C. to see what the 250th Independence Day was going to be like. I was a bit wishy washy on my decision to go but I went ahead and decided since I had a friend who was going to be in the area. I flew in on the evening of July 3rd and then flew out early in the morning in July 5th. During the day, I did go near the National Mall. It was completely blocked off for Trump's fair. I didn't bother to go in because I didn't want to support that man and I heard it was a shit show from the quality of the vendors, the stage accident that almost killed the performers, and the reflection pond that turned green with algae because Trump painted the bottom dark blue, causing the water to heat up and become a breeding ground for the swamp. I did see the crowds around the area. It was very white with a chunk of people that looked like they were from Duck Dynasty. There were also some Christian extremists around the crowd that were yelling out "JESUS DIED FOR YOUR SINS REPENT!" on top of their lungs with a group of people who were trying to convert people into Christianity. There were also a handful of Chinese and Indian tourists that were there just taking everything in. I also saw a few military grade vehicles and a few people who work for the National Guard on duty as security there. And all of this was under 100 degree weather with the sun beating down. I also ran into huge crowds at the subway stations. The lines were huge. The crowd made me feel like I was in a pack of sardines, and most of the people were just confused with the public transport. I know there wasn't as much of a crowd in the mall itself according to reports and because a ton of people in D.C. were just boycotting the event all together. I avoided the crowds and I went to the National Museum of the American Indian and afterwards I went to the National Holocaust Memorial. Of course the Trumpies wouldn't be at the museum lol. But I had a good experience in both of these places. It just felt right to go there to pay my respects for Independence day and also keep in mind what is going on in the world from people getting kidnapped by ICE gestapo style and with what's happening in Palestine. I'm not a huge museum person but I do think that they are good places to go in order to reflect on various topics. I found myself thinking of course about things like genocide and state building, the way that it affects people immediate to that experience, and the ways that people live on afterwards. In this country, we had mass death in the way that we treated the Native Americans as well as through the Atlantic Slave Trade. Then there are the multiple genocides of the 20th century from the Holocaust, the Armenian Genocide, the Cambodian Genocide, the Congolese Genocide, the Bengali Genocide, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Bosnian Genocide. And of course, we have the present day conflicts in Palestine, Sudan, the Congo, and Armenia. But amongst that, I also saw evidence of people living their regular lives along side these big historical events and doing regular human things like working, living amongst each other, making art, and telling their stories. I find that regular live proceeding while shit is constantly hitting the fan is both grounding and disorienting at the same time. It can be disorienting to feel like you have to carry on as normal and not have the space to feel when things are going on. It's like you're being gaslit. At the same time, it's grounding in the sense that there is some sense of normalcy you can hold on to in order to regulate your emotions and not just succumb to what's going on and bed rot. I really liked the Native American museaum and how it showed the ways that Native Americans contributed to the military, the way that lived their lives, the way that the continue their practices, the way that they continue making art in various genres, and the ways that their vocabulary, customs, and culture still show up and are embedded in day to day life. I think that the 250th annivesary is happening at a very disorienting time. On another hand, you have ICE terrorizing people and the U.S. causing chaos internationally whether it be Cuba, Venezuela, Iran etc. You have the government mistreating people socially, economically, and politically and creating a cluster fuck. At the same time, on the other hand, you have the World Cup being hosted here, you have a bunch of tourists enjoying American culture outside of the plethora of issues this country has, and you do have some semblance of people coming together. And then finally, on the other hand, you have people trying to keep their head above water and live their mundane day to day lives amongst the chaos and amongst the excitement. While I don't feel patriotic because of the festivities in the National Mall, I enjoy going to the museums whenever I'm at D.C. because it makes me feel patriotic knowing that a small amount of my tax dollars goes to things like the Smithsonian. I like on how there are so many free things to do in this city and I thought going to these museums was the best way for me to celebrate my patriotism because of the ways that they approach complex topics, the way that they show a variety of perspectives and stories from different communities, the way that those perspectives overlap and contribute to the overall culture, and the way that all of those things apply to what we are going through as a country right now. Later that day, I went down to the National Harbor to meet up with my friend, her boyfriend, and later her boyfriend's brother so that we can see the fireworks but not deal with the crowds. The scheduling for the fireworks got delayed like 3 times. Trump did a long ass speech around 11 pm when everyone was tired and over it. It was raining at random times throughout the evening, and at times it was raining pretty hard. But instead of doing the fireworks at 11 when it wasn't raining during Trump's speech, the fireworks started when it started raining hard. As a result, the fireworks would get extinguished right when they would go off so it kind of looked like an explotion with a ton of smoke with a little bit of glitter thrown in there. The fireworks were also mainly red and orange thus adding to the explotion/ end of the world vibe. It was giving nuclear mushroom from where we were standing. Apparently on TV, it looked good, but in person, it was train wreck. Eventually, I managed to get back to my hotel at around 1:30 am. We weren't planning on being out that late. Usually the fireworks would happen arount 9, right after sunset, but Trump wanted to be different so that he can have his big speech and moment. I would have gone back earlier but the only reason I gave this event any grace was because it was the big 250. I felt bad because my friend had to be up early the next morning for work. I felt bad for the little kids there who were also antsy about waiting so long. I also had to be up early to go to the airport to fly back to Dallas. I saw a lot of traffic as I was driving back but thankfully, I had less traffic in the direction I was going. There were a bunch of cars parked along the highway to get a glimpse of the show. It was chaotic. My flight was at 8 am meaning I needed to be at the airport at 5 am. I tried to sleep from 2 am to 3 am so that I could wake up, pack, and take a shower. But I ended up sleeping from 2 am to 5:42 am. I woke up in a panic. I didn't brush my teeth or wash my face. I put on my pair of pants, threw everything in my suitcase, rushed out the door, and checked out of the hotel by 5:50. I had half of a left over turkey sandwich that I ate as I waited on my uber. I ubered to the airport and the only thing I was thinking was how badly Trump fucked up my 4th of July and how I'm not going to let this man cause me to miss my flight. This whole trip from the flight, to the hotel, to the food (D.C. in general has an expensive food scene) and how the uber has been expensive. I wasn't about to add to the cost by missing my flight. Thankfully, I didn't encounter any traffic going to the airport and I didn't have much of a line in TSA so I managed to get to the gate with about 30 minutes to spare before boarding began at 7:15. During that time, I went to the bathroom, brushed my teeth, washed my face, did my makeup, and put on deoderant so I would feel like an actual person. Then, I went to one of the airport stores and got myself some tea and some yogurt so that I has something in my system. I got to the plane and fell asleep soon after. Apparently my flight also got delayed because of some issues with the engine. I remember overhearing it vaguely as I was mostly asleep. It got delayed by an hour so instead of landing at 10:30 in Dallas, I got there at 11:30. I woke up after a couple hours and I was sitting next to a lady and we talked about a number of things ranging from her experience working for an airline years ago, her family, caring for her aging relatives, and her experience at the National Mall the night before. The lady said that there was about 150,000 people there and that they had to evacuate the area because of the lightening and the storms. The "evacuation" in question was everyone rushing out and either going to the train station or to any other building near by. Then, every time it would stop raining, people would try to go back to the mall again by rushing through security. It's not like they had wristbands or anything so the crowd had to go through security multiple times. She mentioned that she was lowkey scared on how disorganized and mishandled this event was and how people were rushing back and forth because it looked like it could go crazy and start a riot where people would get trampled. She also told me that it took her until 3 am to get back to her hotel because of how packed the trains were and how she didn't even sleep at night so that she wouldn't miss our flight. Let's just say that I'm glad I wasn't at the National Mall during this time given the story I got from her. Anyways, the big 250 felt like a mess but I'm glad that I experienced it and I think I have a couple of interesting stories to tell when I'm 76 during the 300th Independence Day. Hopefullly it will better and I do wonder where we will be at as a country by then, for better and for worse.

It's Crazy On How Much It Didn't Happen I frequently start thinking of this scene from Mad Men when thinking of my plastic surgery experience. The context of this scene is that Peggy had a traumatic pregancy (since she didn't even know she was pregnant) and went into labor. Don on the other hand had a whole secret life that he left behind during the Korean war. He was originally a man named Dick Whitman and after he got drafted, he didn't want to go back to his old life so he stole the identity of a man in his unit who died. Don is the only one who knows about Peggy's delivery other than her family and to preserve her professional reputation, Peggy lied and told everyone else that she was in quarantine with tuberculosis. Don's way of being encouraging to help Peggy be resilient after such a traumatic instance is to basically tell her to carry on as if nothing ever happened and eventually, this whole thing will be a blip in her story and she would have moved on. While I don't have nearly as much of a traumatic and dramatic story around my surgery, no one knows what happened other than my family and my boyfriend. I recovered well from the surgery and it's something that I don't think about in most days. I'm happy with my results and I feel good in my body over all. The results, while very noticable to me, are fairly natural so it's not like my proportions are so exaggerated to where I know everyone is talking about it. Since the surgery, I only had a couple of people take notice and say something along the lines of *girl, your waist looks snatched* to which I said a simple thank you and that was the end of the conversation. I was expecting more people to notice my surgery results, comment, and have a whole conversation about it. I even took a while to socially prepare for the reprucussions of this surgery in case anyone brought it up so that I can approach the topic in a responsible manner. But honestly, not much has changed in my life externally. I have heard stories of people who had work done and suddenly, since they are more conventionally attractive, people are nicer to them, more opportunities are available, and life is overall better. I had no such experience. I think part of it is because I'm working a normal corporate job and that I'm not in an industry that is dependent on my looks or that hyperfocusses on my appearance. I'm also fortunate that I'm not surrounded by superficial people who switch up on me after I altered my appearance or people who constantly comment on people's bodies and evaluate them on those basis. And honestly, thank god my external world didn't change all that much because I never did this with the external world in mind. I never really wanted my surgery to be brought up or speculated on. I just wanted to keep this aspect of my life private. At the same time, despite wanting privacy, I am shocked on how easy it has been for me to hide this aspect of myself from the people in my life. The bulk of recovery was during the first 2 months after the proceedure and then after that, the only symptom I had was some minor swelling that I only noticed. I worked from home a bit more than usual during those 2 months. I reduced down my social obligations. And I carried on like normal afterwards. While this surgery was very important for me, I'm glad I did it, and I don't mean to downplay the recovery process to trivialize this, it is wild on how this feels like a blip in my story. It feels like a blip medically, emotionally, and even financially due to the way I planned this out and the way that I carefully thought through and prepared for this proceedure. The only reminder that I have is the scar across my hips that is fading and that I don't really see very often because of how low down it is. Even if I wear a really skimpy swimsuit, no one would be able to see the scar. It's like this never happened.

Parenthood Makes You A Better Person I feel like the notion that parenthood makes someone a better person to be a widely held belief by parents and they use it to justify their decision to procreate. I don't think it's the whole picture. I think whether or not parenthood makes someone a better person is due to a number of factors and it isn't a gurantee that this is the path for self actualization for everyone. I can see why people come to this conclusion. Parenthood does compell you to a greater degree of selflessness. You have to put someone elses needs above your own. You need to be more planned out because you cannot act on impulse in the same way. You have to cultivate patience and model good behavior. For some people, especially young parents, parenthood gives them the structure they need to not continue getting into trouble. But there are plenty of people who don't do the above and they don't become more selfless, more considerate, more patience, and less impulsive. Some people start off as a train wreck and they stay a train wreck because they never learn the life lessons to turn their lives around, even when a kid is involved. There are plenty of crack heads and narcissists that have kids. There are also people who start off relatively put together but then parenthood brings out the worst in them. Suddenly they're constantly over stimulated, constantly annoyed. They lose their spark because they no longer have that sense of independence or spontaneity in their lives. They get depressed and the life is drained out of them. They are stressed because they aren't good with dealing with chaos. Their values and ideal life style aren't compatible with the demands of parenthood. I think the notion that parenthood makes you a better person can also have negative implications, because then what does that say about people who chose not to have kids. Are they lesser in some way? Of course not. Their path to self-actualization is different and they can still cultivate those same qualities good parents get in parenthood in their own lifes. This is why I don't moralize the decision to be a parent. In the same way not everyone was meant to be an accountant and would find that career path fulfilling, not everyone is meant to be a parent and find that fulfilling.

I find myself contemplating motherhood a lot in terms of me trying to make more long term plans for my life. I'm trying to figure out if this is the path for me, if this is something I should do, and if this is something I'm even cut out for. I also want my thoughts to be organized in one place.

Mom Shaming I found myself in this side of the internet a couple times before and I personally find the concerns a little absurd sometimes. I know there is much more pressure put on the mother because we are seen as the primary caregiver, we are seen as the ones where parenthood should come naturally to, and we are also put on a pedestal. And I think as a result, every decision you make as a parent comes under scrutiny even when you're just doing your best. There are people who judge you for breast feeding. There are people you judge you for bottle feeding. There are people who judge you for being a stay at home parent. There are people who judge you for going back to work. There are people who judge you for not bouncing back to your prebaby body in time. There are people who judge you on not being able to keep your house extremely clean. There are people who tell you to sleep when the baby sleeps but also, you need to do your chores and work out as the baby sleeps and then judge you for being exhausted. Hell, there are people who judge you even before the baby comes into the picture where there are people who judge you for getting an epidural, not getting an epidural, giving birth naturally, or giving birth via c-section. Like one time, I went down this rabbit hole that your birth doesn't count and that you're less of a woman if you opted for medication or you had to get a c-section. Which is laughable to me because the baby is still here and it exists. But it's also so scary that there are people who will evaluate your womanhood based on how much pain you can endure and make the process of birth harder than it needs to be. There is also a lot of fear mongering around mothers which leads to them to go down weird crunchy and alt right pipelines where they are not vaccinating their kids and are scared of generic food labels. I think when you do have kids, you are hyper aware of their safety and wellbeing and there are political entities that try to exploit that. And don't get me wrong, the world is a scary place. But also, sometimes our fear gets hijacked and redirected towards the wrong entity. Like Jessica, stop worrying about the red dye 40 that's in your kid's fruit snacks and start worrying about how little Timmy can't read and how his attention span has been hijacked by Cocomelon. I don't have kids and I think I can sometimes be at prey to this type of thing and fall into reactionary thinking patterns. Part of me thinks that if I choose to be a parent, that I should just homeschool my kids because other people's kids are feral, I don't trust their parenting, and I don't want my parenting to be tainted by the broader influences of the world. But I can also recognize that homeshooling is part of the problem because it contributes further to the underfunding of public schools, which leads to the feral kids in question, it contributes to my kid being shut in without socialization which isn't good for their development, and it encourages a hyper individualistic change as opposed to systemic justice. Part of me also thinks that I need to basically bar my kid from the internet because of the crazy shit that's out there and I don't want them to get groomed by some man with a podcast. But that's not the answer either because kids do need some exposure to technology to learn how to deal with such a thing and to have a basic amount of tech literacy so that they don't fall behind their peers. So as a result, I can understand why a lot of mothers specifically are on edge because it feels like they cannot do anything right, they're getting judgement and opinions from all corners, and there is constant fear mongering everywhere. This and the whole process around pregnancy, labor, and post partum is the reason why I'm hesitant to be a mother even though I'm pretty open to parenthood as a whole. I joke about this sometimes but I often think that I would love to be a dad, but a mom..... oooofff that comes with a lot of baggage to unpack. At the same time, I feel like some mothers use the victimization and the very real pressure they're under to even shut out constructive criticism. It's not mom shaming to say that your place shouldn't be so unhygenic to where you have 8 dirty diapers scattered around your place. It's not mom shaming for me to criticize you for not vaccinating your kids. It's not mom shaming if I as a community member step in to say something to your kid to keep them in line and I inform you what happened. The last one is something that I'm grappling with more these days. I think there is a cultural difference at play here that I'm noticing with my boyfriend's white American family. I feel like whenever I'm at any South Asian cultural event, it's pretty typical for the parents to be doing their own thing and the kids to be running loose. The kids aren't unsupervised. The rest of the community is looking after them. If one of them misbehaves, even if you aren't the parent, you call that out, and inform the parents as to what is going on. It's not seen as overstepping. Similarly, growing up, my aunts and uncles had just as much of a responsibility to discipline me and my cousins as our parents did. And now, when I'm with my cousin and his kid, there are definitely boundaries I'm not overstepping, but I do still keep an eye on the kid when we are out and about. When I told my boyfriend this, his initial reaction was *Why are you watching the kid, that's the parents' job. Why are they putting that stress onto you?* Then I explained everything I said earlier and we had a wider conversation on how American families, specifically white familes, conduct themselves. Apparently, white moms tend to take a lot more things personally. Like if you tell her that her kid is misbehaving, instead of seeing that as *oh I'm getting feedback on what my kid is up to, thanks for being an extra set of eyes, let me go and handle this* its interpreted at *oh you're catching me slipping as a parent and you reporting my kid's misbehavior is you being passive aggressive/ judgemental towards my parenting choices and your insinuating that I'm not doing enough.* And I think a lot of this comes down to indivualism vs collectivism when it comes to the notion of whose responsibility is it to be a parent / authority figure to these kids. I also think that in a hyperindividualistic culture like the U.S., it's common for parents to feel like the entire weight of parenthood is on their shoulders and that they want and need help. In other words, they want a villiage. But I think the concept of a village is overly romanticized in left leaning circles where people don't have immigrant parents. I wrote about the commodification of community in my main journal and I want to include some of that here: Like parents say they want to have a community but the moment that people start having a different opinion or approach to parenting, the moment that it comes to your child free friend needing you to show up for them, the moment that you befriend someone and their kid and your kid don't get along, then suddenly *poof* community ideals and conflict resolution goes out the window. In some situations I get it. Like if you are trying to have a certain approach to parenting and the people around you are contridicting that, it can send mixed messages to the kid, making it harder to discipline them if they are young. And also, you don't want to encourage toxic approaches to parenting like hitting your kids just because the other parents are doing that. Sometimes, child free people do have difficulty with understanding the demands of parenthood (which is why you communicate with them, not just cut them off because you ASSUME they will understand since they don't have the same experiences as you or because they aren't in the same life stage as you). Sometimes your kid is having a real hard time getting along with your friend's kid because there is something fundamentally wrong. But in a lot of situations, parents in the U.S. just don't have the communication/ conflict resolution skills and the tolerance for chaos to navigate the dynamics in a community because it's not convenient for them nor does it fit in their hyper individualistic narrative. I remember growing up, there was a kid that I didn't get along with and our parents were friends. My parents didn't stop being friends with this couple. Me and this kid just had to figure things out and argue. And you know what, I think that was good for our social development if anything. My parents also had friends who had kids who were like a decade older than me. In those instances, again, my parents didn't stop being friends with this couple, I just had to find ways to occupy myself even though I had no one to play with. My parents also had situations where I was friends with people and they either didn't get along with my friend's parents or they just didn't click like that. My parents still coordinated with those parents and socialized with them so that I can have a life too and get invited places. My parents didn't always agree with the way that other parents were raising their kids and pushed back against that to show that there are different ways to raise your kid. And other parents didn't agree with my parents and they pushed against them too. Finally, even though my parents didn't have a large section of people who were childfree around them, I do have a child free uncle and aunt and they were very involved in our family and my parents showed up for them on a regular basis, even though they were really frustrating at times. My point is that community also comes with a lot of friction that you need to know how to navigate as parents so that you get the help you need but also, you show up for other people and you maintain boundaries to protect yourself and your family. It isn't as straight forward as having help for your kid when raising them whenever you want it, however you want it. Like some people say they want a village, but they don't want to be a villager, and their definition of a village is the group aligning with them on every level and giving no friction or pushback (because then it's mom shaming). At that point, you don't have a village, you have unpaid help and one sided dynamics.

Pronatalism, Antinatalism, and Eco-Fascism I was reading up on things related to pronatalism and I found a video that summarizes it well: There is a lot of weird shit in this subculture ranging from people believing in the white genocide so they should have more white babies so white people don't go extinct, people worried about preserving capitalism, people using this as blanket to discriminate against migrants, attacking women's healthcare/ rights, and more. There is less weird stuff out there like how some governments are willing to give extra cash to people who decide to have kids but none of that has worked in terms of raising the birthrate. My issue with a lot of these more antinatalist policies, even when they're not explicitly against womens rights, they don't attack the systemic issues that cause people to not want to have kids. Instead of a child tax credit, how about you raise the minimum wage? Make college free? Keep guns out of school? Increase maternity and paternity leave? Create policy around tackling climate change? Increase the overall quality of life? You can't force people to breed. Forcing people to have kids causes more harm than good and forcing cannot be done ethically. Instead, I think you need to improve quality of life in more indirect ways through things like proper governance. Like not gonna lie, the whole free day care for kids 2 and under that Mamdani rolled out make me want to not only move to NYC but have a hopeful enough outlook on the future to contemplate becoming a parent. I didn't feel the same way when Kamala Harris was talking about the child tax credit. ------------------------------------ Then you have the anitnatalist weirdos. I didn't find a good video about this that goes in depth like the video above but I did come across various reddit threads over the years. I don't want this to come across as people should breed and shouldn't be childfree, that's not what I think at all. If you choose to be childfree, that's on you. It's a perfectly fine life path to go on. My issue with this ideology and subculture is the way that it berates children and the people who decide to have children, and the ecofacistic undertones beneath the contempt for humanity. I think calling children brats when they're literally not doing anything or just acting out in age appropriate ways is weird. I know sometimes I call small children crotch goblins (and I think I should stop that lol), but I mean that in a lighthearted way, not as a way to dehumanize them. And while I think this runs rampant in antinatalist and some child free communities, I think you also see this amongst normies as well. Like no, Susan, your baby is not trying to manipulate you to give it more attention, it's a baby. It just got here and can barely speak. It's not playing 4D chess to fuck with you. And no, your toddler isn't a spawn of Satan for running around and throwing a tantrum. They're just acting like a toddler. And yeah, your teenager is disrespectful and might hurt your feelings, but you need to figure out what's going on to cause them to act that way and address that in a way that treats them like an actual person instead of taking things personally and writing off their life experience as them being hormonal. Then you have some antinatalist people and also some really bitter childfree people that gets irritated at kids on sight and they demand childfree spaces everywhere. I get some places need to be childfree (bars, some weddings etc.) but I think advocating for everything to be childfree in public just excludes parents (especially women) causing them to be even more of a shut in and it causes kids to not be socialized properly. You're entitled to a child free life personally, but you're not entitled to a childfree world. You also have people on both sides that use children as polticial pawns, people who force people to have kids and then mistreat them when they get here, people who see their kids as mini mes or just straight up property, and you have issues around child labor. The worst part about it is that there is only so much kids can say to advocate for themselves and there is a large power dynamic between children and adults. I think it's fair to see children as a marginalized class. The video below does a good job explaining this: --------------------------------------- Finally, you have the ecofacism of it all. This is something that a lot of pronatalist and antinatalist weirdos have in common. Ecofacism is the intersection point between facism and environmentalism. It's this notion that the earth has finite resources and as a result, part of the population needs to die out to preserve the earth and the population. The pronatalist believes that their specific group of people deserves said resources and that they need to keep popping out kids. The antinatalist thinks that everyone is a leech on the earth and no one should have kids. This is where I think a lot of issues around over population and under population comes into play. I remember when I was growing up, people would joke about over population because 8 billion people is a lot and the population doubled since the 70s. I think the baby boom and then the uptick of millennials once the boomers were old enough to have kids contributed to this. And I'm sure that increase in population was pretty alarming. But now, I think it's funny that the script flipped and now the Elon Musks of the world are worried about birth rates and under population. I think that's why when Gen Xers talk about over population, the whole thing feels dated. I don't think over population is really an issue. I think we do have enough resouces to sustain a huge population of humans, we just do a shit job at distributing said resources in a sustainable and equitable way. And I think it's easier for billionaires to look at regular people and tell us to stop breeding as opposed to acknowledge their systemic contribution to inequality. I also don't think under population is much of an issue. I do think it can have very bad consequences if it drops too significantly below replacement level. But I think that things like immigration can fill in the gaps of such a thing even if the racists will throw a fit. I think a low birth rate is more of a symptom rather than the disease. The disease is a general decline of quality of life as well as an apathetic screen addicted population. But then there are people who freak out about the under population because that means that the billionaires won't continue to make money and we won't have a steady supply of consumers and workers to exploit. I don't have much to say about that other than, fuck those kinds of people.

Being The Adult In The Room In my previous post, I linked a video that came on my YouTube recommended that I watched and reacted to. Then, I started to view more of this lady's content.... Her channel is called the Average Gen Xer and I think based on the 5-6 videos I watched, she very much embodies a very specific Gen X archetype that I want to dissect a little more while also looking at Boomers, Millennials, and Gen Z. Her personality and vibe feels like it was frozen in 1997 and then it was transported to a body of a woman in her 50s. I think it's the jaded attitude, the snark, and the knee jerk negative reaction to things like conformity and religion. I think those things also paint a picture towards the Gen X archetype of being rebellious and against authority. But the reason why it feels jaded and a little stale is because being rebellious and against the status quo in 2026 simply looks different. I wrote about that in a previous post in my main journal and I keep coming back to the same quote: And I get why people in the Gen X cohort have a knee jerk reaction to things like conformity and religion. They honestly got a much more crazy version of it in the overall cultural ziegiest than what I was exposed to. I think about this in the context of the Four Turnings theory on how Gen X and Baby Boomers are reacting against the collectivism that was present in the High and Awakening phase and as a result, they swinged the pendulum too far to the individualistic side to where now, Millennials and Gen Z are reacting against the hyperindividualism of the Unraveling and the Crisis phase. Basically, collectivism is in the highest during the High because things are going great and people want to conform, it decreases in the Awakening as people starts questioning things, it's at an all time low in the Unraveling because thats when systems start to fall apart and people become jaded, and it's starts to perk back up in the Crisis because it's a necessity to rely on your neighbors and the people around you to pull through til the next High. I found a chart that explains the different phases really well: Gen X were young adults during the Unravelling and I feel like the column above really encapsulates what was considered progressive in their time. Their childhoods were during the Awakening and in the most recent awakening, there was a real backlash against religious values and authority. I know this was mainly led by Boomers since they were young adults during the awakening, but I think of this video But now, in 2026 when the cultural weight isn't so much on Stage Blue, the Stage Orange backlash that the Boomers and Gen X had starts to feel really dated in some instances, or like it's part of the problem as it contributes to the excesses of Stage Orange in other instances. I just wrote about how a lot of adults as they move into their 30s can get stagnant and how that can manifest in healthy and unhealthy ways. And I think there is a way that generations can collectively stagnate and get stunted. I don't think everyone in Gen X for example has the same kind of stunting. I know Gen Xers in my life who are with the times and are expanding their wisdom. But I think that each generation has their specific archetype of being stunted according to when they were young adults in the Four Turnings model. I think the lady in the Average Gen Xer channel is an archetype of a stunted Gen X. I reviewed her content and I saw a lot of fatphobia, this bitterness when it came to conformity, and a lot of talk about over population (I'm making a post on that next). I have yet to see content from this lady regarding this, but I know a lot of Gen Xers who have this vibe of *you can't tell me what to do, fuck authority.* I also see the fatphobia, the kneejerk negative reaction to conformity, and this desire to do things outside the norm that might freak people out in Leo's content as well. I know he's like the elder half of Millennials but he also borders Gen X and I can see shades of that. The attitude to be against authority would be great if it was a principled stance but it backfires when their version of giving authority the middle finger is Gen X refusing to get vaccinated, believing in conspiracy theories, and voting for Trump because of his rhetorical style. I get that institutions are crumbling and they have flaws that need to be questioned and I get that y'all had a lot of toxic conformity and blind allegence to authority, but sometimes people are experts and have positions of authority because they are qualified and have expertise that the average person doesn't so it makes sense to follow their lead. You can't let your issues with authority cause you to act like a petulant child. Sometimes following authority isn't blind. Sometimes it's genuinely substantiated. I think the stunted archetype of the Boomer is simply someone who doesn't know how the world works anymore and has too rosy of a view of how to succeed in today's climate. I know this trope has been overplayed, but it's the guy who still thinks you can pay for college with a minimum wage part time job and that since people aren't doing that, they're going into debt because of their laziness. Then of course, you have the racism, sexism, homophobia, the *i hate my wife* and *my husband is a hopeless idiot* jokes. My favority from my personal life is when my Boomer uncle randomly gave me $20 this one time and told me to go get myself a meal at a nice 5 star restaurant. I accepted since $20 is $20 but in my mind I was like *great, I can get myself Chipotle.* While Gen X is stunted in the way that teenagers want to rebel against authority for the sake of it, Boomers are stunted in the way that some children don't have the most nuanced and updated view of the world. Like no, going to school, getting good grades, and getting accepted to a good college won't necessarily lead to a decent paying job, a marriage, and white picket fence with 2.5 kids. Life is not that simple. I think this naiveity and simplistic world view is also why a lot of boomers fall for the phone scams. A lot of stunted boomers work under the straightforward narrative of the modern era and they didn't move into a more post modern narrative structure. I also wrote the following in a previous post: Finally, I think the archetype that comes to mind when I think of stunted millennials is the girl boss. Rather than looking at the systems that are perpetuating harm, this archetype just wants the fucked up system to have slightly more representation. It's this notion of *WE WANT MORE FEMALE DICTATORS.* You also have the archetype of the 40 year old that is too attached to the 90s because that's when their childhood was and they cannot move past that. I think this also concides with the Disney adult as well as the Harry Potter adult where they are leaning into escapism and nostalgia hard to cope with the chaos that's currently happening rather than facing the chaos and guiding younger generations. You can see the escapism in the form of parents that are glued to their phones to dissassociate from their stressful jobs and they just give their kid an ipad instead of being present parents. I think the archetype of the Gen Z stunted adult is something that has yet to fully come into fruition. After all, the age ranges of Gen Z is 15 to 30 so we're just now coming into adulthood. But I do think that things like the cultural nihilism I wrote about in my main journal, the looksmaxxing, the ageism, the billionaire worship, the YOLO attitude with finances, the tradwife/soft girl aesthetic, the alpha male podcast bros and more are not going to age well. So why am I writing about this in the Contemplating Motherhood journal? I think in order to be a reliable parent and/or a reliable guide to future generations, you cannot let yourself get stagnant in your world view and your politics. It's going to be difficult to look to the future and give advice to the future when you're stuck in the past and your advice no longer applies because the world moved on and that context no longer exists. I think this is one of the things that my own dad got right. Don't get me wrong, in a lot of ways he is a typical boomer but I do admire the way that he wants to update himself so he doesn't sound like his brother when his brother hands me a $20 bill lol.

People Don't Think Shit Through I watched this whole video and I also went through a phase when I went to the r/RegretfulParents subreddit. And all it confirmed to me is how a lot people don't think shit through when it comes to the decision to be a parent. I'm just going to number the posts to record my reactions and evaluations: 1. This lady was talking about how she hates motherhood so far with their 5 week old and how both she and her husband are experience post partum depression as well as post partum rage. She was dreaming of motherhood her entire life and it feels like a big shock to her that she hates it and as a result, she feels really guilty. It sounds like there was a lot of parenthood romanticization that was involved relating to the fantasy this person had around motherhood since they wanted to be a mother since they were 6 years old, after their mother had died, and they wanted a baby since 15. Later posts in this thread also talks about potential health issues the baby might have for them to be reacting this way. It sounds like more common health issues (like colic) but it's still difficult. And I think a lot of people go into parenthood assuming the best case scenario and the easiest version of parenthood and taking care of a baby. The speaker in the video also talks about the whole thing that some people in the older generation say to young girls on how you will never know true love until you have a kid and that motherhood is the best thing that can happen to a women. I will say that both of those things feel icky and gross. It feels like grooming in a weird way I have trouble describing. I know some people think I'm overthinking this or I'm being too anxious, but basically, if I decide to have a kid, I'm going to spend a good amount of time basically preparing for war when it comes to pregnancy to the first 3 years. I know I can't prepare for everything, but I'm not making those years harder than it needs to be. I'm physcially working out so that my body can deal with preganancy and have an easier time recovering. I'm going to make sure that I have an amazing and involved partner. I'm going to be pouring into my retirement and savings for years before that baby is born. I'm going make sure I have some degree of support around me, I'm going to make sure that I'm well established in my career to where I can take breaks and get accomodations in a way that makes sense for my position. I'm taking things like post partum depression, anxiety, and hell even post partum psychosis (I know a lady who dealt with that) into consideration to at the very least mentally prepare for this and know what I'm signing up for. Like I'm not making the decision to be a parent based on the fantasy of being a parent, I'm making it based on the realities of being a parent. I'm not about to make decisions about my reproductive choices based on an idealization as opposed to actual facts. And as a result, it really catches me off guard when people are like *I didn't expect parenthood to be this hard.* LIKE BE SO FUCKING FOR REAL!! And to clarify, I'm not shaming parents who are like this. A lot of people were lied to when it comes to what parenthood and having a baby is like. I'm not mad at them, I'm mad for them. 2. The thing that jumped out at me is how this person never wanted to be a parent but was pressured to keep the preganancy by their religious mother. The post sounds miserable and it sounds like they hate every aspect of motherhood but they still suck it up and show up to fufill their responsibilities regardless. Not to mention, they are a single mother amidst all this. The mom sounds unprepared and I really hate the relgious mother in this circumstance because I vehemntly hate people who force people to give birth. Personally, listening to this lady's responsibilities doesn't sound like the worst from my perspective. But I can see on how it's not for everyone and I can understand how it can suck the life out of someone if that's not what they truly want. I do appreciate that this person is trying their best and are living according to the principle of still taking care of the kid even if that's not what she wants to do and doing things like fake excitement and interest, as well as not rush the kid to grow up so that they can enjoy their childhood for the sake of the child and development. But my god... I hate relatives that compell you to make personal and permanant life decisions when they aren't the ones who are going to live with the reprussions of said life decisions. So many people's lives get ruined in this way. Then there is the single mother aspect of it all. It sounds like all of the responsibilty of parenthood is falling on her shoulders and I don't know how old this person is, but kind of like what I said earlier, it's so important to have you life solidified and established before bringing a kid in the world to avoid unnecessary suffering. I can understand that even if you do your due diligence, you can still find yourself as a single mother (i.e the parent dies, divorce, etc.) which is why it's so important that you are committed to this path 100%. Later in this thread, another lady talks about how she thinks that her personality isn't well suited for this because she is introverted, likes to sleep, and likes an orderly environment but she decided to have 3 kids. My actual response was THREE, ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME??? LIKE IT'S ONE THING TO HAVE ONE AND DECIDE PARENTHOOD ISN'T FOR YOU BUT WHY WOULD YOU KEEP POPPING THEM OUT??? Don't get me wrong, one kid can be a lot but I think bringing multiple kids in the mix doesn't multiply the chaos, it exponentially increases it. 1 kid is hard. 2 kids isn't twice as hard, it's 4x as hard. 3 kids isn't 3x as hard, it's 12x as hard. And then after 4 it gets easier, but that's usually because there is parentification and neglect that enters the picture. Like you can want to have order and just decide to have one kid. Yes, it will be crazy for a couple years, but there is only so much chaos that one kid can cause. WHY TF WOULD YOU HAVE MORE?? >>>I know there is also a lot of pressure and shaming around just having one kid. Like some people look at one and done parents and think that they don't really want to be parents or that they are dooming their kid to a sad and lonely life by not giving them siblings. First of all, having siblings doesn't gurantee a good relationship between the kids nor does it gurantee things like being their for each other when the parents pass away. I know a lot of dysfunctional sibling relationships of simply sibling relationships where they just aren't that close. Secondly, speaking as an only child, I think it's way better to be a good parent to one kid than to be a mediocre or even neglectful parent to multiple kids just so that they can have the sibling experience. Your experience in parenthood matters just as much as the childhood you provide them since they affect each other so it's important to not burn yourself out and spread yourself too thin based on the opinions people have on you and how small your family is. 3. Then there is the lady who has 4 adult children who grew into "fine adults, but they are very selfish, just like so many people of that generation." She then goes on to say how she feels drained after giving them everything, how she's going through empty nest syndrome, and how she feels like she wasted her life being always busy taking care of others and rushing through the years. First of all, I wonder what she means by her kids being selfish and why she's making it out to be a generational thing. I wonder how much of it is her pent up resentment because again, she took on more than she could handle. Like I wonder to what extent she feels like her kids owe her something for her sacrifices and how them living their own lives is contridicting that. I think there is more exploration that needs to be done to get a better sense of what is actually happening. I do think that things like empty nest syndrome can be exasserbated by revolving your entire life around the kids if you decide to be a parent. I think it's still important to have friends, hobbies, and nurture your marriage so that you don't wake up 18 years later and realize you neglected every aspect of your life for the sake of parenthood. Plus, it's not healthy for the kids to see you burn yourself out and have no identity outside of parenthood. What does that teach them (especially about a woman's role) and what kind of model of adulthood are you giving them? Additionally, I think it's important to fulfill a lot of important and big life goals before deciding to be a parent if that is what you decide to do. I'm not saying you need to have everything in your bucket list checked off, but I am saying that you need to have lived life to your fullest to where you feel ready to make a sacrifice like parenthood and not get resentful about it. The last thing you want to do is be the parent that's like *I gave everything up for you and I could have been living my life if you weren't here.* I think it's much easier to have a more balanced life with one kid than with three unless you have a solid village around you. Then one of the comments under this post said that "at least toddlers are cute. Adult children are like forced acquaintences." Not gonna lie, I did chuckle at this a little bit because what kind of adult your child becomes can be unexpected and you might not mesh the best with them. But also, I couldn't help but think this was a bit odd. Part of it might be just my bias on how babies and toddlers seem intimidating and much of my desire to be a parent comes from dealing with kids, teens, and young adults with more fully formed views and personalities. But also, I think it's weird to go as far to say your adult child is like a forced acquaintence. Like I get if you might not have a lot in common or that you clash personality wise, but do you not have an interest in their lives and what they are doing? I think it also feels weird since I am one of those people that can as a baseline get along with most people so I'm inclined to wonder what exactly went wrong for you and the kid to feel so distant to one another. Another comment talks about how they miss being able to travel and go on spontaneous adventures because of their "little brats." Again, it goes back to how you need to do a lot of the things you want to do with your life before you have kids because it's going to be a lot harder logistically and more expensive to do them once they are here. Or maybe, if this is a permanent lifestyle for you and this spontaneity is a part of what settling down looks like for you, maybe having kids isn't the ideal life style choice for you. And also, calling them little brats just reeks of resentment just because you didn't think things through.

An Increase in Introspection It's no coincidence that my time off work means that I am writing significantly more. I have a lot more time to ponder and one of the reasons why I wanted to take time off was to be able to sit with my thoughts and process various things that were going on up there. I compared how much I wrote from May 20th to June 30th in each of my active journals and compared the amount I wrote in previous months. I have made 5 posts in Processing Negative Emotions, 13 posts in Formed Frontal Lobe Thoughts and 20 posts in Contemplating Motherhood in the past month and a half. To put it in perspective, I made 5 posts in Processing Negative Emotions from February 23 to April 5. I made 13 posts in Formed Frontal Lobe Thoughts from November 23rd, 2025 to May 13th, 2026. And I have made 20 posts total from the start of my Contemplating Motherhood journal in Septembr 2023 to April 5th 2026. Note, I'm also counting posts as entries I have wrote at least a paragraph or two on, not just entries where I link YouTube videos. In other words, I feel like the amount I journaled in the past month and a half rivals how much I have journaled over a 6 month plus period. I feel like I have cleared out my mind and worked through a lot of existential crisis I had going into taking this time off for myself to a more manageable, less dread inducing place. I don't know how exactly this is going to translate into actual growth but I think I'll get a better idea in the coming months. I know that I have felt rather stagnant since graduating college simply because of how life is structured. Back when you're in school or in college, you job was to educate yourself and in your free time, you're socializing with other people, you're meeting various milestones, and you're experiencing so many new things. Basically, your life is built around self development in a way. However, once you graduate, your life is built around creating shareholder value for 8 hours a day and then suddenly, you have to schedule things like socialization, investing in hobbies, self development, and self education into your day to day or else it will get neglected. As a result, a lot of adults start to stagnate after school, either because their jobs and families are so demanding that they are just taking care of themselves but not necessarily growing, or because some people lack the internal motivation to pursue growth so as a result, since their lives are no longer built around growth externally, they kind of fall flat on their face. I wouldn't say I felt like my development was at a standstill rather I felt like I was developing and processing things in a slower rate compared to where I was in the past because of my job being a time sink. That's just the self development/ emotional processing sphere. I would say that the larger problem still applies even if you aren't working because of how everyone elses lives are structured. Like friendships I have developed in adulthood in the course of 3 years are friendships I would have been able to develop in school in 1 year. Life twists and turns so much when you're in school because you're in so many activities and being exposed to so many people on a regular basis to where you can totally restructure your life within a year or two. Whereas now as an adult with bills, an apartment lease, and a committed career path, there are more working variables you have to navigate to make various changes in your life. So as a result, instead of taking a year or two, it might take much longer if you're trying to do something in a sustainable, constructive way (unless something big happens in your life that turns everything upside down). Another point I want to add is that I think there is a difference between settling in to your life, settling down, and just settling period. Settling into your life is more along the lines of your life and sense of self stabilizing. I remember when I was a teenager, I would change so much from year to year to where looking back a year or two was cringe inducing. But now, I was looking back at journal posts and I don't feel all that different even when I look back 3 years ago. When it comes to stuff 5 years ago, it is a bit cringy but not in a *I'm embarrased* way but more of a *the amount of change feels a bit jarring (key phrase, a bit), I feel like I'm reading posts written by a different person, and I feel a bit exposed* way. That's not to say there wasn't growth and additional life experiences from when I was 23 to now at 26 but it is to say that I'm not wildly changing myself and my mental health isn't having the same volatile swings as before. As a result, I would say settling in is largely a good thing. Settling down is more about knowing what you want from a long term life style sense and either working towards that or enjoying that. I think it's typical for people in their early to mid 20s to try to answer large questions like *where do I want to live long term?* *what kind of career do I want?* *what kinds of relationships do I want to engage in?* *what does marriage and kids look like for me?* etc. And settling down ideally is the process of making conscious choices in those big questions in a way that feels authentic to you after you have gathered the data on a number of life experiences. However, in practice, a lot people just either go with the flow of what they think adulthood looks like, copy their peers, or stumble into really permananent decisions like getting a 30 year mortgage and popping out a kid or two. They do this without thinking through things, or being exposed to alternatives, or really questioning if this is how they want to do their lives or if this is the only way they have been taught to do their lives. Settling down isn't inherently bad. I think it's very age appropriate and if anything, if I encountered a 42 year old man that still had no idea what they were doing and they were just drifting through life, I would side eye him a little bit because what have you been trying to figure out and build during all this time? Settling down can be only as healthy as the people who are settling down and the process they have used to arrive to the conclusions of what settling down looks like for them. As a result, I would say settling down is neutral because whether it is positive or negative really comes down to the individual. Finally, just settling period is about stagnating and just giving up on your life. I don't mean this in a *oh I'm in a place where I'm content and I don't feel the necessity of subjecting myself to this constant cycle of self/life optimization.* I mean it's more like *welp.. this is my life now, this is it. I can't do any better.* It's like the difference between deciding to get married to a partner because you have found a great person, built a great relationship and you at a place of contentment to where you don't feel like you have to keep looking for a hotter, sexier partner because you accept the other person, flaws and all, versus getting married to a partner because you have nothing else going for you and this is just what you do when you're an adult. I would also say this is where you get a lot of older adults who haven't updated their world view since the 90s and are disconnected with reality. These are the types of people who often think that their lives end at 30. These are the types of people who haven't read a book since highschool. I know these are some more extreme examples of how this mentality can manifest, but I'm just trying to paint a picture for the archetype. Overall, settling period is not good. I think some of the stagnation I have experienced is healthy when it comes to me settling in to my life and me trying to answer what settling down looks like. Some of the stagnation is more systemic because of how long it takes to make changes in your adult life. And I think this leave was me really trying to address the negative forms of stagnation that comes in the form of "settling" when it comes to my personal development.

The Catchup Friend Epidemic I deleted my social media for the last 2.5 months and I think that was really helpful for my mental health and where I have been with this whole journey about figuring out my friendships. I think social media can distort how close you actually are. Going off the previous post about how I decribe the difference between people actively in your life (Meals), versus people who are more so dormant friends (Snacks and Desserts), I feel like social media can make it seem like your Snack and Dessert friends are Meal friends if you see your friends frequently posting their lives. It gives you the illusion of being in their life and them being in yours when really, you guys are spectators rather than participants in each others lives. Again, I think there is a very real grief that comes from changing relationships or not being close to people anymore like you used to be. But I think holding on to social media isn't always helpful in the same way that it's not helpful to follow your ex on social media after y'all broke up. It prevents you from fully moving on and accepting reality. I think social media also contributes to the changing landscape of adult friendships as I have described above. I think there are some existing phenomenon that social media exasserbates. For example, people talk about how your compare your bloopers to other peoples high light reels because people are posting the most curated versions of themselves on social media. Well, this still would happen in 1996 but on a smaller scale, mainly with acquaintences. Unless you saw people on a regular basis (which adulthood isn't really built for), you don't have an accurate picture of what's going on in people's lives and you're more likely to just compare yourself to the idea you have of them or the image they are projecting. Comparison, flexing, gossip, unrealistic body standards, fad diets, misinformation were always problems but now they look different and are magnified on a global scale. Social media isn't creating new social issues, rather it's making old issues bigger. However, while the social issues social media exasserbates isn't novel, you can't deny that technology changes material conditions. I would say that because of social media, it's so much easier to keep up with dormant friends (your snacks and desserts). And that's a very beautiful thing. Now, instead of losing touch with people and seeing them decades later, it's much easier to keep in touch with people you care about. It's easier to keep in touch with family and your culture if they live abroad. If my mom had to immigrate to the U.S. a 100 years ago, she would basically lose touch with her entire family and I wouldn't have the same relationship that I have with my culture today. Maybe she could visit them once every 15 years. Instead, now, she can keep up with her siblings and talk to them on WhattsApp every day and visit them every 2 years. That is amazing. Now, I don't have to say good bye to all my childhood friends because I moved to a different part of the country. I can still share things like my wedding and my college graduation, and other big moments in my life and have them be a part of them in the way that we would fantasize when we were children. Even if we don't see each other regularly, we still have a medium to keep in touch. At the same time, I think there is a way that the catch up friendships and special occasion friendships can get excessive and being able to keep in touch with everyone can backfire. Like I said earlier, social media can prevent you from grieving properly and accepting the reality that you are no longer in some people's lives since there is an illusion of being a participant through things like comments and likes, when really, you're not participating in their life, you're just a spectator. There is nothing wrong with catching up with a friend you haven't seen in a while because they're in town or inviting a friend you haven't seen in a while to your wedding because they are still an important part of your life. But the problem is when these types of interactions dominate your social calendar to where you don't have the room to be actively in people's lives. Like I have two friends who live near me and despite that fact, I have to schedule out hang outs 6-8 weeks in advance just to see them rather than just being able to incorporate them in my life. That's because they have their social lives booked out like a google calendar with a bunch of catch up friends and special occasions they have to show up for. And hey, due to the nature of the interactions, I cannot say for sure how exactly this is affecting them. But I do know that there are limitations to Snack and Dessert friends and that causes me to question the degree of interaction and depth they have to the people they are dedicating their time to. I'm not saying that I expect special treatment because I live closer to them. I know that the way that they are treating me is similar to how they are treating all of their friends and they seem a bit spread thin to say the least. Again, I'm not friends with weirdos who don't value me. I guess I started thinking of this because I was thinking about why people aren't actively in each others lives and have a lot of Meal level friendships. If we're still using the food example, I would say it's kind of like spoiling your meals or your dinner because you ate too many snacks and desserts before hand and now you feel too full to have a proper dinner so as a result, you just resort to girl dinner, aka more snacks masquerading like dinner. It's not that people don't have friends when they're adults. I know people don't have room in their lives for a lof ot reasons like work, family, mental health, etc. But if we push all of that to the side, It's that a lot of people don't have room to actively be in the lives of people it makes logistical sense to pour into because we're still carrying over old connections now that we have more avenues of communication to keep in touch with people. Another social phenomenon I think of is modern wedding culture. Because we keep up with people now, even when people move, that doesn't mean we lose touch. And people are moving around now more than ever because it's easier to do so due to cheap travel and a lot of people need to do so due to economic instability/ opportunity. So lets say in 1976, you might have a season in your life where you have a bunch of weddings to go to because you're in that stage of your life where your friends are getting married. In 2026, that season may involve you having to travel across the country multiple times and pretty much every wedding is a destination wedding since your friends are much more spread apart. Attending 4 weddings in a year to people who are close by in your proximity is just having 4 parties you have to go to in a year. Attending 4 weddings in a year that basically feel like destination weddings is a financial commitment, a hit to your PTO, and a logistical nightmare for many who have to choose between people they care about. In 1976, the friends who were spread apart will naturally fade out and you are more likely to be friends with people immediate to you since it's likely that people aren't moving around every 2 years. Communities were much more localized and the years together along with proximity ensured that you were less likely to have people drop from the meal category to the snack or dessert category. So as a result, instead of having nourishing meals, social media and modern life has incentivized and made it easier to maintain a host of snacks and desserts. Again, nothing wrong with snacks and desserts, they are still part of a healthy diet. And again, it's beautiful that we can still keep in touch with people that would have other wise completely fizzled out. But we cannot have the snacks and desserts get in the way of having meals. Which is why a lot of people can be booked and busy socially yet still feel lonely or feel like something was lost along the way.

The Superficiality of Adult Friendships I wrote the following like a month ago in my private journal and I don't know why I never posted it. I wrote in a previous post about how the landscape of making and maintaining friends changed as you move into adulthood and how that has resulted in shallower connections for me. I’m pretty sure I have touched on these points before but I want to dedicate an entire post to this and talk about it more in depth. The decreased frequency of interactions: Due to jobs, conflicting schedules, and just in general life, even if you’re trying to be proactive with maintaining friendships, you still find yourself seeing people less often just by design of y’all no longer going to school together and seeing each other on a regular basis. This decrease of frequency can result in a lot of deeper friendships to turn into catch up friendships or friends who show up on special occasions. That doesn’t mean that the degree of effort that it takes to catch up or show up to major life events is diminished but it does mean the degree of interaction has changed. The way I see it is the following: Meals: People who you interact with regularly and as a result, people who are actively in your life. I compare this to a meal because a meal has many different parts. They can be healthy or unhealthy, balanced or off balance. If someone is actively in your life, you guys have a number of different types of interactions. It can range from sending little memes back and forth, catching up, having light hearted conversations, showing up for each other during heavier seasons etc. It’s multifaceted, like a meal. I would say these are people you hang out with or talk to at least 2-3 times a month or more. Snacks and Desserts: These are people who used to be in the meal category but have since dropped down due to various logistical and life situations. You aren’t in a place to actively be in each other’s lives but you still make the effort to show up in their lives during the important moments and maintain the connection. The connection might not be getting deeper but it is something that keep up with. As opposed to the meal category, I think of snacks and desserts as dormant friends. Snacks: This is where I put the catch-up friends at. The catch up friends can still be multifaceted like a meal but they are much smaller. Healthy snacks are often like mini meals to help you get through until you get to a full meal (think of a veggie tray with hummus). Like meals, you can have healthy and unhealthy snacks (i.e. Hot Cheetos) . I feel like a lot of people love or hate “low-maintenance friendships” but I think a lot low-maintenance friendships fall on a spectrum of healthy and unhealthy. Healthy low maintenance friends have proactive communication, still maintain friendship with boundaries, and had a foundation established before they became low maintenance. Part of the health in low maintenance friends is understanding that in adulthood, not everyone is going to be available like they were growing up and that you can still have that love while giving each other space. Unhealthy low maintenance friendships can look like a lack of proactive communication, ghosting, and acting like you’re best friends despite only seeing each other 2x a year without investing in the relationship prior. You’re not maintaining a friendship that you built up before like in the healthy example, rather you’re expecting full friendship benefits without any commitment or work beforehand to establish trust. Desserts: This is where I would put the special occasion friends at. These people are much like the catch up friends in that they aren’t actively in your life but you show up to maintain the connection. But, unlike a snack, they are even less multifaceted and aren’t like mini meals. Rather, it’s people you see at parties, weddings, religious events etc. They are sweet and it’s nice to be able to share these big life events with people who have been in your life for a while. These people might be so busy that they cannot schedule the catch-up sessions but the care is still there. That’s in a healthy situation where the connections have more substance (think fruit cups as a dessert since they have more nutrients and fiber than say a handful of M&Ms). But desserts can also be unhealthy/ nonsubstantive. I think a lot of people’s party/ clubbing friends can fall in this category. They’re sweet and here for a good time but they aren’t super substantive and filling. It’s alright if you have some friends like this, but they cannot be a part of your social diet in the same way your diet shouldn’t just be a handful of M&Ms. The Buffet: The buffet is like your larger social circle comprising of people outside of your friends. It includes your general sense of community extending to people like your coworkers, the family members of your friends, your friends significant other you don’t know very well, friends of friends etc. They aren’t your friends but they have the potential to be your friend, kind of how you can look at a buffet and decide whether or not you want to incorporate it into a meal. But that potential needs to be acted on by the parties involved. People who straight up not in your life at all: These are people you know but aren’t connected with anymore. I’m talking about people you went to high school with, ex friends, the significant others of the people who fall in the buffet category etc. These are people who I would say “hi” to if I ever ran into them in a grocery store. I would say that I’m socially malnourished as opposed to socially starved. I feel like I have a 2-3 people who I put in the meal category and everyone else is in the snack and dessert categories. It’s been difficult to see friends who used to be actively in your life drop down into being dormant friends. And while I will say this paradigm is not a linear expression on who I’m closest to (for example, there are people in the Dessert category I would say is closer to me than those in the Meal category just because the people in the Meal category, I’m still in the process of building a relationship with), I do think that there is a correlation. The problem with the snacks and desserts is that you don’t really know what’s actually going on in someone’s life. You might get a general idea but because you’re not seeing the day to day, there is only so much you can know. It’s not necessarily fake, but it can be inauthentic at times. There is only so much you can cover about what’s going on in your life during a catch-up call or by meeting up for coffee. There is only so much you can disclose when you see someone at a special occasion. Like you can say you’re going through a rough time at a party, but you don’t want to go in depth of it because of the social setting in question. Or even if it’s something positive like a trip you went on and enjoyed, there is only so deep you can go at a party. The infrequency of interactions can also result in certain types of socialization to be seen in a different light. For example, let’s say you’re going through a difficult breakup and you feel like you need to talk to your friend 5 times to fully process it and debrief about it. You have two friends. The first friend is someone who is actively in your life and you see them once a week (52x a year) and the second friend is someone who is more of a catch up friend you see once a month (12x a year). If you talk to Friend 1 5 times about the break-up, that’s like 10% of your yearly interactions. If you talk to Friend 2 5x, that’s almost 50% of your interactions in the year. The second friend is more likely to feel like you’re constantly negative or “trauma dumping” due to the extent of interactions. You don’t have as many additional interactions to round out your debrief sessions so as a result, it can feel heavy. The infrequency of interactions can also exacerbate various social consequences, miscommunications, and the ways people fall short in relationships. For example, I remember growing up in high school not thinking it was a big deal if one of my close friends cannot make it to my birthday. Hey, sometimes things come up and because I’m seeing this person on a regular basis, I have countless examples of how this person treats me and the quality of our relationship. But I have seen now in adulthood, people take things like birthdays more seriously with this attitude of *It’s literally one day out of the year, what do you mean you can’t show up this one time? What does that say about our relationship and the way we prioritize each other?* And growing up, I saw this attitude to be stunted and weird, but I kind of get it now. Let’s say you have two college classes. The first class has a daily attendance grade, weekly discussion boards, a bunch of assignments, a handful of group projects, along with a couple of tests, and papers. The second class has 2 tests and a paper. In the first class, if you fuck up on any one of the assignments (even if it’s a major test), you’re still fine because you have the rest of the course work to make up for things. In the second class, if you fuck up on any one thing, you’re cooked. And as a result, I think with friends you see on a regular basis, there is more elasticity, more room to make mistakes and learn, and more opportunity to repair when things go wrong. However, with your catch up and special occasion friends, things are weighed more heavily when you fuck up and you have fewer chances to redeem yourself. Finally, the infrequency of interactions also makes it harder to build new relationships. I think I read some where that in order for someone to become your friend, you need to spend about 100 hours with them. Those 100 hours are much easier to log if you see them every day in school as opposed to going on friend dates when you’re older and trying to make friends outside of your work-place. I think I have been able to successfully make two friends outside of my workplace and I cannot help but think about how if I were in school with these people, the depth of friendship I have created in the course of a year or two is the depth of the friendship I could have made in a semester. The timeline of establishing a friendship is more stretched out in adulthood and it takes more patience to garner a sense of trust even if they are actively in your life. And that can be frustrating for people who are starved of friendships which can result in people going after intensity over intimacy (think the platonic equivalent of love-bombing) or put waaay too much of an emphasis on charisma and personality as opposed to someone’s character and getting to know someone in a sustainable pace (like if you don’t click instantly with a person, they aren’t worthy of being friends with). And I find that to be kind of discouraging for me personally because I’m not a super charismatic social butterfly. I feel like people can fall into three categories: a fan favorite, an acquired taste, and a niche interest. I have friends who are fan favorites and can instantly make friends wherever they go. I myself am more of an acquired taste. It take me a moment to warm up to people and people to warm up to me. Rather than being the life of the party, I think I have an observational period where I sit back and do a vibe check before interacting. It’s not a lack of confidence rather it’s just the way that I operate. I think the fan favorites are like a bright light. They attract everyone, and that includes bugs (weirdos and crazies). I think as an acquired taste, I have more of a natural filtration process built in so while I don’t attract a lot of people, the people who do end up being my friend usually aren’t weirdos. I like to think that my resting bitch face has protected me from insane people and situations. Finally, you have the niche interest which is where I put my boyfriend. He doesn’t click with people or make friends often but when he does, y’all are locked in for a long time. That goes for platonic and romantic. Most of his friends are people he knows for a decade plus and even with our relationship (the only romantic relationship he has ever had), we’ve been going strong for 4 years. The downside of this is that you can have long stretches of not having a lot of people in your life. But the upside is that you have that sense of commitment and stability. To tie it back, I think when you’re trying to make friends in adulthood, the fan favorites thrive much more than the acquired tastes and niche interests. The later two takes more time and effort and not a lot of people are into that, much less know that this is what they have to do in order to make friends in adulthood. And to avoid the work and time it takes to make friends, some people try to speed up this process by resorting to apps to see if they can get that instant click. And those apps can lead to it’s own form of brain rot. As a result, due to the nature of interactions, the increase of social consequences, and the amount of time it takes to build close friendships (or friendships in general). I think people are more incentivized to keep things more surface level. I remember growing up seeing my parents have trouble with opening up and being vulnerable with people. Some of it is trauma but I think a chunk of it is the changing landscape of friendships as you go into adulthood. There is more of an emphasis on saving face. There is less of an emphasis on holding people accountable and having difficult but real conversations. In my opinion, in order to hold someone accountable and give life advice, you need to really know the person and what’s going on in their life so that you have that degree of trust established and you know it’s good faith, and so that you can give well thought out advice given the nuances of the person and situation. And when you don’t see people super frequently, it’s harder to establish that sense of trust, good faith, and genuinely good advice. I think that’s one of the reasons why my parents would say things like “your family is the only person to have your best interests and that you can take advice from”, “your family knows you the best” and “ you can’t be honest about what you’re going through with other people because they will be quick to judge” because to my parent’s, family was the only group of people who were actively in their life. That advice didn’t make sense to me while I was in school and I think was toxic for me because I had people I was friends with in school who did see me on a regular basis, who knew me well, and established trust with. But now as an adult, I can say that all of the Snack and Dessert friends fall into category of people who I care about and who cares about me but in the end of the day, we don’t really know each other, what’s really going on in each other’s lives, or what kind of people we’re growing into. I think some of my Meal friends also lack a degree of context as well. First is my friend who I will call Sam. Sam is more of a Snack friend. She had a chaotic year and we had lots to talk about when catching up. Then, later in the year, Sam explains that she’s been dating someone for a year and is engaged. This was surprising given the chaos of the year and a little concerning. Then, the guy turned out to do something crazy right after proposing, she broke off the engagement, and then started dating someone new in a relatively short period of time. This rang alarm bells in my brain but also, I don’t know what the grief process looks like and what her day to day life looks like so it’s hard to give advice or insight for this situation. I don’t know Sam well enough anymore to comment and hold her accountable since there is only so much I can know about someone who is a catch up friend. I don’t think she is intentionally hiding things for me, rather just by the nature of out interactions, there is a lot of incomplete information there and I hesitate to say anything because I don’t want to give advice that may accidentally backfire due to specific nuances. Then there is my friend who I will call Sophie. Sophie is regularly in my life and I know some of her friends through mutual interactions. She has a friend (lets call him Cayden) who she has had to utilize conflict resolution with. From the initial description, it sounded like normal conflict resolution skills that are important for people to strengthen and grow within in a relationship. Later on, she had a bad falling out with Cayden and then it is revealed that Cayden was abusive. The advise that made sense in a normal situation, to give people chances, to communicate what’s going on, to have patience as people are trying to improve, would make this situation worse if dealing with a bad faith actor. Despite me knowing Sophie and regularly talking to her, I still didn’t know what was going on. There is a degree of unintentional inauthenticity on Sophie’s end and a malicious fakeness coming from Cayden’s end that I wasn’t able to clock within him because of my limited interactions with Cayden. Being Fake vs Being Inauthentic Both of these situations also highlight a safety level of not interacting with people on a regular basis. I think that the infrequency of interactions can be a breeding ground of fakeness and inauthenticity. I would characterize fakeness as a deliberate action towards concealing things mixed with malicious intent. Inauthenticity can be unintentionally not giving the full picture, or giving a more curated version of the truth due to the nature of interaction and to be empathetic to the other person. Let’s say you have a coworker named Heather who you don’t like. Being fake would involve you trying to be chummy / besties with Heather to get the tea and so that you can spread office gossip. Being inauthentic may look like being cordial with Heather and concealing your feelings of dislike because you want to maintain your professionalism, keep good professional relations with Heather and your coworkers by not creating unnecessary drama, and because even if you don’t like Heather, that doesn’t mean that you betray your morals on how to treat people with basic respect. At the same time, you’re not going out of your way to be besties with Heather and be weird. Since I’m not surrounded by weirdos, I think a lot of my Snack and Dessert friends can come with a sense of inauthenticity as opposed to them being fake. But I have had to deal with a fake person before who hung out with me for months as if nothing was going on and then cut me off with little to no explanation. And I couldn’t help but wonder if we were still in a school setting that I would have been able to clock the weirdness, her changes in personality and values etc. quicker. It’s easy to put on a mask when you’re hanging out with someone for 3 hours every 2 months. It’s harder to maintain a mask when you see someone 8 hours a day every day. On a similar note, I remember when I was a kid being shocked about how my parents didn’t know how toxic the other adults around them were. Now that I’m an adult, I get it because that stuff is easy to conceal when you don’t see people on a regular basis. I knew about the toxicity of the other adults around me because I saw their kids who were my age on a semi regular basis and we would have actual conversations of what was happening in each other’s households. I was actively in the lives of those kids, my parents weren’t actively involved with the other parents. Sometimes, I’m surprised on how inauthentic and put together I can seem to other people unintentionally. I have talked to my friends about mental health stuff going on coherently. I even touched on somethings with coworkers I trust. But my partner who sees me on a daily basis sees me ugly crying and crashing out since he lives with me. He sees the full extent of how things are affecting me, messy emotions and all, while my friends get a more analytical, clean cut, spark notes version. Speaking of being fake/ inauthentic, I think this is exacerbated in the work place. I think most people (unless they are a corporate pick me) have a work personality of sorts. I don’t think it’s advisable to show up as your full self at work and it’s important to maintain some boundaries. I’m not going to go off on an anti-capitalist rant at 7 am Monday morning and I’m not going to talk about my drunk night out with my coworkers. As a result, to maintain my professional relationships and have a sense of credibility at work, I kind of have to be the most vanilla version of myself. It’s also out of respect of the people around me because I don’t want to pry into personal life stuff they don’t feel comfortable revealing at work and I understand most people are just trying to do their jobs, get their check, and live their lives outside of work. So since most people have a degree of inauthenticity at work, thought it’s not inherently malicious, I think before becoming actual friends with people at work, you need to vibe check the living daylights out of them even though y’all spend a lot of time together and it’s easier to log those 100 hours it takes to build a friendship. I mentioned this in a previous entry but I have always expected my relationships to change as I got older. I don’t expect people to stay the same and I think dynamics shift based on that. But what I didn’t expect was that relationships will change and that can sometimes mean they become shallower and fade out. I think there is real grief around that. I also feel like this can cause me to feel disposable, forgotten, and replaceable. I know I’m around genuine people but due to the shallow nature of interactions, there is a certain element that feels dehumanizing, not because people are personally slighting me, but because of the overall landscape of adult friendship. It’s in the same way where your coworkers and your boss are decent/ fine, but the fact that you have to continue working like nothing is happening in this chaotic world feels like an attack on your sense of humanity as you’re attending meetings and answering emails amidst a war, a genocide, ICE kidnapping people, and more. It’s the system that is dehumanizing, not the treatment I’m getting from individuals. I miss actually knowing what’s happening in people’s lives and people actually knowing what’s happening in my life. While I know that you can still care about people and have people care about you without them knowing every detail about your life, I think there is a level of dehumanization that comes from only knowing parts of people and them knowing parts of you due the surface level interactions rather than the whole.

The Kids Are Not Alright On today's episode of emotional birth control...... I keep trying to tell myself that social media shows the most extreme versions of the literacy crisis and the kids acting out but then I talk to my teacher friends, my child psychologist friends, and my friends who have younger siblings who are in high school and they confirm that this shit is real. I also try to reframe my thoughts by reminding myself that if I have a kid, it will likely be in the mid 2030s meaning they won't enter school until the late 2030s or early 2040s meaning that the schools and society can change a lot within the next 15ish years. So there is a chance that the schools might not be a shit show by then. Nevertheless, this shit is existential crisis inducing and I have wrote about this in the past. And of course, I don't want to blame the kids in these videos. It's clear that their parents and society as a whole is currently failing them. The world is in chaos. The adults are sure as hell not fine, so it's no surprise that the kids aren't either.

I think a lot of my posts can be summed up by this post that I saw a while back that said the following: "The decision to have a child is an inherently selfish decision that needs to be paid back by a lifetime of selflessness."

Is All Life Worth Living I wrote this in a previous post and I still stand by it. I also caught myself thinking of the book Breasts and Eggs that I read a few weeks ago. There is a part of the book that really lingers with me as I am contemplating the question of parenthood for myself. For context sake, the book is written in first person with the main character, Natsuko, who is contemplating on getting sperm donor so she can have baby since she's in her mid 30s without a partner. She met some people at this sperm donor convention where people who were conceived via sperm donation were talking about the ethics of such a practice and how it impacted their lived experience. She met and became friends with Aizawa, a doctor and someone who was conceived via sperm donation, and Yuriko is Aizawa's ex-girlfriend who was also concevied via sperm donation. Part of the reason why Aizawa and Yuriko became close is because when Aizawa found out he was a product of sperm donation and had no clue who his father was, it blew up his entire life. The person he was engaged to previously broke up with him because she didn't want to have a kid and have the kid not know who his paternal grandfather was. He started viewing himself and all his family dynamics differently, He dealt with a lot of stigma surrounding this issue as this was Japan in the early 2000s and basically, he personally had a breakdown over who he thought he was, what was real etc. Yuriko shared her experiences with also being conceived via sperm donation and she explained that her mom had her via sperm donation and her father (not biological, just married to her mom) repeated raped her growing up. In a way, finding out she was conceived via sperm donation was freeing because at least wasn't her biological father who molested her all those years. That's what she told Aizawa. She's telling all of this to Natsuko and expanded on this story, telling her that not only did her father molest her, but he also pimped her out multiple times in her childhood. It wasn't just in her home, but in her father's car by the river near a park. She illustrated how she remembered every moment of those instances, from the shapes of the clouds to the children her age playing in a park near by as she was getting raped by multiple men. This goes on for a few pages and then Yuriko starts talking about the ethics of having children period. p. 350- 351 Then Yuriko talks about Aizawa's experience in the children's ward of the hospital he worked at. p. 352-353 I think about the forest metaphor often as I'm writing in this journal. I think about how the decision to bring life into this world is a gamble whether it has to do with your current circumstances, how the world changes over time, what kind of kid you get, their temperment, how you experience parenthood, the chance of disabilities etc. I think the odds are better for some more than others. But even if the odds are good, it's still a gamble. And like the book said, no one thinks they're drawing the short straw. And I think what the forest metaphor means to me, is not how good the odds are as a basis of how ethical making this bet is, but if the bet being made is ethical at all. You can make the arguement that Yuriko's circumstance is due to bad parents and that it could have been avoided. Another story that I find myself thinking of is the accounts of a pair of sisters who survived the Nagasaki atomic bomb. I had to watch the documentary for a class and I can't find it right now but basically, the sisters were the only ones in their family who survived the bomb. They both had life threatening injuries and saw the horrific impact of all the people dying around them. At the time, they were only children. Once they go to their 20s, the older sibling committed suicide. She couldn't take the pain of her life experiences and the trauma that came with it, even though her physical injuries long healed. The sister who continued living who is now roughly in her late 60s, early 70s, said that some people see her living as a testament to her bravery and resilience, that even though she went through something like this, that she decided to continue living and that she still saw life worth living. But she clarifies this and says that she's not brave or resilient. This event bled into every ounce of her life. If anything, her sister who took her life was the brave one because she could face death and see that as an resolve from the pain. She didn't continue living because life was worth living. She continued living because she wasn't brave enough to die. And yes, I understand that the atomic bombing is a very extreme example. But my point is that things completly out of your control, even if you have taken every precaution to hedge the bets in your favor, can create a situation for your kid that would make their life no longer worth living. And in that case, was it worth having them in the first place? Again, you're not betting on your life, you're betting on another person's life.

Wanting a Better Life for Your Kid I'm getting a lot of soccer related videos recommended to me because I'm interacting with Fifa related content and I came across this video of Cristiano Ronaldo talking about his son and applying what he as seen to the rest of his son's generation. I don't agree with everything he is saying but I do empathize with him. He honestly sounds like a lot of parents I have met, specifically a lot of immigrant parents who came to the U.S. who made a middle to upper middle class living. I think that especially comes out when he talks about how the newer generation doesn't have the same kind of hunger that he has to strive for better. If I remember correctly, Ronaldo grew up in the slums and didn't always know where his next meal was coming from. That is a very big contrast to where he is right now as one of the highest paid athletes in the world. And I can imagine that relating to his kids would be challenging in the way that their childhoods have been so different which then affects difference in mentality / world view. Again, there is a version of this amongst regular people who aren't pro athletes, particularly in the immigrant community. I'm imagining that times a million. I can also empathize with the kid as well on how living under your father's shadow and how there is this notion that you can never live up to that level of achievement even if you tried because you didn't suffer in the same way or come up against systemic factors in your way. And I think as a result, we need to be very careful on the topic of romanticizng your own suffering. I'm just thinking out loud at this point, I'm not saying Ronaldo is doing this since I don't know him. I think when you're trying to come to terms with difficult things in your life, often times to build that sense of resilience, you look for the silver lining of the situation and you look at the ways that it has caused you to be stronger in some way. I think that can be healthy and it can be a crucial step in people's healing and sense making. But that's the thing, it should be a step on your journey, not the destination. I think that while you can recognize the positives of a bad situation, you still need to recognize the situation for what it is, which is that what happened to you was fucked up and shouldn't be replicated or romanticized. I'll use myself as an example. I've had situations in my life that has caused me to mature faster than my peers and that caused me to be hyper independent. I remember being 19 and thinking that I was the shit because I was more disciplined, I was more dedicated to my personal development, I made better decisions, and overall, I was more mature than my peers who were going out, partying, engaging in impulsive behavior etc. This was my way to reconcile with the shitty childhood I had. However, after going to therapy, I realized that while these qualities I have cultivated were good, I created those qualities within myself DESPITE my circumstance, not BECAUSE of it. Because there are plenty of people who go through similar things as me but they react very differently and less favorably to where they have even more adverse life conditions. Plus, the peers I was judging for going out, partying, engaging in impulsive behavior, they aren't unhealthy, they're doing things that are developmentally appropriate for them. Because I was in survival mode trying to figure out all types of shit for myself without the help or support from my parents, I wasn't able to socially grow, take risks in a safe environment, and be carefree unlike my peers who had more of a safety net. And then, I caught myself thinking about how things might be different if I had a kid and raised them in a healthy environment. In someways, my kid might turn out to be dumber and less responsible than I am. That element of being less intelligent and less responsible doesn't negate my good parenting in the same way that my intelligence and responsibility doesn't negate my parent's bad parenting. Good parenting is not about the immediate good results, rather it's about the consistent practices you have employed over years and decades to eventually lead to good results. I saw a post a while back that talked about how a lot of Asian parents raise good/ successful kids but they don't always raise successful adults. Like sure, it's great that your kid got a perfect SAT score but fast forward another 10 years and you kid has no communication skills and cannot boil an egg. Like sometimes your kid acting out in an age appropriate way is not an indication that you're failiing as a parent because they cannot get ahead, rather, it's an indication that you're doing something right. I'm less worried about the 3 year old that throws the occasional tantrum and I'm more worried about the 3 year old that never does anything bad and just sits quietly in the corner not doing anything. The later kid has a higher chance of acting that way not because of stellar parenting but because they are anxious and terrified of the adults around them. So yeah, sometimes raising your kid in a healthier, and better circumstance can make them look like they are underperforming next to you if your good performance in any area of life (sports, school, spirituality etc.) is rooted in some kind of trauma. It isn't because they suck or are weak, rather, they are developing in slower, more sustainable, and healthier way that is more conducive to them being a more successful and well rounded adult 20+ years into the future. Another thing I have witnessed is parents being envious or resentful of their kids for having a better life. Like yes, the parents worked their ass off to give their kids a better life and god forbid those kids reap the fruits of their labor lol. Like damn... why aren't you happy that I don't have to walk 7 miles to go to school. Isn't that what you wanted lmaoooo. And I think the most common manifestation of this is the mentality of *well I had to go through xyz , so should you.* This mentality isn't just reserved to parents, rather you see this in any social progression. The first example that comes to mind is the people who got into a ton of student loan debt, somehow managed to pay it off, and then when you talk about student loan forgiveness, they get all pissy about it because if they could pay it off, other people should do so as well. And I can see this being a tough spot to be at subconsciously where afterall, if you didn't HAVE to suffer, what does that say about the pain that you have gone through? Then, you're forced to grapple with the meaningless harm and injustice of it all while also seeing people who do have the opportunity to be in a better situation than you and deal with the envy that comes with it. That is a lot to emotionally unpack and it's much easier to spew out snarky comments on the internet. Similarly, on the parenting side of things, I feel like as South Asian daughter, rather than having other South Asian women, particularly aunties and my own mother, build me up and express gratitude to the privileges I experienced, I just got a lot of resentment. For example, it's very typical to learn how to drive and go places alone in the U.S. when you're like 16 years old. My mom was against me having this freedom because *well, I wasn't driving at your age, so you can't either.* I've also had the same sentiment come back to me when it came to hanging out friends, dating, or really just doing anything other than school work. Like lady, you came to this country and you love to praise how many more rights and freedoms we have here socially and politically, but when it comes to me and other South Asian women exercising said rights and freedoms, all hell brakes loose in the household. Make it make sense. There was a TikTok trend a while back where people were talking about how their ancestors are proud of them but tbh, I'm pretty sure that if my grandma was watching over me, she would probably think that I am and old whore because I'm living with my boyfriend and paying my own bills and that I need to get an arranged marriage ASAP. Here are some more wholesome compilations of this trend where the ancestors are supportive lol Personally, I relate to 3:53 to 3:58 In conclusion, if I am fortunate enought to provide a better future for my kid or the world evolves so that future generations don't have to deal with the same tom foolery we do, I hope I'm not one of the bitter old people who looks down on future generations for not suffering like I did.

The comments under this are killing me lmaooo "If he would have been born a thousand years earlier, we would all be speaking norwegian now" "Using someone's face to score a goal has to be one of the most badass football moments ️‍" "Imagine 1000 years ago that dude comes at you with a sword"

I'm just creating a separate journal for myself where I can pour all of my negative emotions into and just rant/ vent in. I'm not dealing with an influx of negative emotions rather I just want to have a separate space for this apart from my main journal where I have more constructive and coherent posts. I have been journalling privately about things like this so I can have the space to just let things out but sometimes I feel like I want to share things that are kind of in the middle of me spewing things out (which I can do privately) and me having more contructive thoughts (which I have been doing in my main journal).

Different Experiences of Motherhood I watched this episode of Supernanny and I cried the whole time. I feel like this depicts one of my nightmare scenarios when I think of me deciding to go on the path of becoming a parent. Basically, Antionette meets her husband Dwight, gets married, has a couple kids with him, and then soon after that, Dwight passes away. The kids are pretty young too. The younger kid is only like 5 months old when the dad passes away and the older is about 2 years old. Unlike a lot of the other episodes of Supernanny, the parents seem like reasonable people who did do a lot of things right. They aren't super young with 5 kids and keep popping more out. The kids seem relatively normal and not feral (tbh, it was nice to see how this 2-year old acts as a reference of what is normal after seeing episodes of demon kids feeding off each other). And that's why I wrote about the notion of wanting to be a parent unconditionally because you can do everything right, and still be in the trenches and find yourself as a single mom of two young kids. The episode was very touching. It mainly focused on helping the mom have some degree of structure in her day to day, give her space to grieve, and brushed up on some parenting techniques. I loved how the show got her community involved to help her through this and the amount of time they dedicated to keep the dad's spirit alive for the kids so that they will still know their father in some way and still be connected to their father from the relationship the dad had in their community. The scene where Antoinette was expressing the anger in her grief really stuck with me because imagine dating around, nothing working out, and then eventually you finally meet the love of your life in your late 30s. Everything is going great and you're building a life together, you have two kids, and shortly after that, he just dies. Imagine having to go through your preganancy and raising infants while having to provide end of life care for your husband. Like I have thought of scenarios like this of what to do if shit really hit the fan while I have a kid. And I think I could handle it even if it's difficult. But I don't think I could handle something like this if it happened in the first 5 years of me having a kid, much less having multiple kids. The baby and toddler stage already freak me out. But imagine having to deal with that with a bunch of disasters happening in your personal life and you have to hold it together for you kid. Motherhood can show up in many different ways depending on someone's personal history, their life situation, where they are in the world, their socioeconomic class, how supportive their partner is, what kind of community they have around them, what kind of infrastructure (parenting can look different in a suburb vs a city for example), and of course, random life events happening. I try to tell myself that my experience of motherhood can be very different depending on all of these factors. In a more positive note, I think I will have a very different relationship to motherhood compared to my mom and grandma who didn't have much of a choice in the matter because of how carefully I'm thinking through this, how I would prepare for a life event like this, and the extent of which I have an education and a career to where I can financially stand on my own. I will have a very different relationship to motherhood compared to my peers who got preganant and had their kid in their teens and early twenties. In the same way that losing a parent when you're in your 20s is a very different experience to losing a parent in your 40s or 50s, I believe that having a kid in your teens/early 20s is very different from having a kid in your 30s or 40s. It's still going to be hard and there are tradeoffs on whichever age you become a parent, hence why there is no perfect time to be a parent, but some trade offs are worse than other imo. I know some people talk about having kids young so you have the energy, but I think that having kids older is a much more stable time to have your kid. I know I wrote above on the different levels to adulthood and I think that when you're at level 1 or 2 of being an adult and you have a kid, you have to figure out how to be an adult and raise the kid at the same time. Both are difficult things to do, and having to do that at the same time often means you're stunting yourself in a lot of ways which then seeps into how you rais your kid, stunting them as well. I know the counterarguement will be *well, you have to grow up faster if you become a parent young* and to that I would say that just because you grow up fast, doesn't mean you grow up right. And often times, when you are rushing, you're missing key milestones and a sustainable pacing that will help you grow your maturity in a more solidified way. I feel much more capable of parenthood at 26 than I do at 23. I wrote about this before but I remember at 23 feeling like I have so much more to figure out in life to where pregnancy and motherhood felt like a death sentance. Maybe part of the reason why parenthood also felt really scary back then is because literally some of the craziest people I knew were getting pregnant and they were getting pregnant very young to where having a kid was a super disrupting event. I'm not saying that having a kid in your 30s and beyond isn't also disrupting, but it isn't like developmentally disruptive. Similarly, if you were 27 when COVID happened, even though it sucked, you probably came out unscathed since you had a fully formed brain. But if you were like 7 when COVID happened, that probably disrupted your social, emotional, and educational development and still probably affects you today. So basically, considering that I'm thinking through my decision to become a parent carefully, I'm working with a therapist to deal with my various neurotic tendencies, I am a relatively stable and well adjusted adult, I have a good amount in savings and financial stability, and I have some basic education on how to raise a kid, all those things can mitigate how difficult parenthood can be for me. And that's not even considering the fact that if I decide to be a parent, I'm probably not going to have the kid until I'm in my mid 30s, giving me another 7-8 years to prepare and get my life together. Something that makes me emotional about this decision is how I have the opportunity to choose differently in my life compared to all the women before me in the way that parenthood is optional and I can create a beautiful and fulfilling life apart from it. Sure, it's had being in conflict with myself and being in this existential crisis, but the luxury of choice is not a luxury that everyone has. But, even if I do decide to go on the more conventional route and be a parent, I'm still going to experience parenthood very differently. On a more negative note, I could do everything right and have motherhood be difficult because life can be difficult. Going back to the Supernanny episodes, one of the things that really hit me was when the mom was saying things like "I wasn't supposed to be by myself and raise these kids alone" when talking about her husband suddenly passing away from cancer and leaving her to raise two young kids. I also think of how you can financially prepare and then have some fucked up life event that causes you to be in poverty and raise your kids in that situation. Again, the situation is less likely and the severity can be mitigated if you saved before, but you can still be in very difficult financial situations with a kid. Hell, something could happen to you and then your spouse has to raise the kid alone so it's so important to pick a good partner because they will be with you through some very difficult moments and they will have to pick up where you left off. You could have a perfectly healthy kid, they could get into a horrible accident, and then you have to care for a special needs kid which then changes the trajectory of their life and your experience in parenthood. Life is so long and so much can happen, and things can unfold in ways you didn't expect in a both negative and positive way. Also, taking both the good and bad into consideration, even though I'm pretty sure I would only have one kid if I decide to be a parent at all, I find it interesting when I hear stories of siblings who have a pretty big age gap and as a result, had completely different versions of their parents despite having the same parent. I think in general, while people love to talk about siblings having the same childhood, that isn't always accurate and the truth is more nuanced than that. Even if they were close in age, birth order can affect things and so does personalities and how they clash/ compliment with the parents. Each sibling can also have different ways they navigate the dynamics in the household and they can respond to the same upbringing or life events in different ways. I think of the example of Ross and Monica in Friends where the siblings were treated very differently from each other by the parents where Ross was the golden child of sorts and Monica was seen as the scapegoat. Sure, that's a more toxic example, but I think healthy versions of this can manifest in familes as well. Then there is the age gap of it all. The craziest example I can think of from my own life is this guy I was friends with in high school. His mom had him when she was 19 years old and his dad walked out on them. He never knew his father and grew up as an only child. In addition to his mom, he was also being taken care of by his aunt and grandma who he is pretty close to. But then, when we were 17 years old, his mom got pregnant with his half sister. Granted I didn't keep in touch with him after highschool, but I remember even when we were in highschool and his sister was just born, I remember he was experiencing some grief around how his mom is having another kid in a much more stable part of her life and how his sister will have her dad in her life. And it was like watching the sibling have a much healthier childhood he never got to experience. I wonder how that has evolved over the years and I really hope they're all doing well. I have an older father and I was born when my dad was 42. He has some regret around having a kid so late in life because that means that he will have less time with me and potentially his grandkid. But then I think about how my life would have gone had I been born in 1989 instead of 1999. Even though he was 32 and was at an age where its very typical to have a kid, and most of his peers were having kids, I would have gotten a very different version of my dad. That version had yet to unpack his PTSD and was still getting flashbacks. That version was very financially unstable and would have materially given me a very different life compared to the upper middle class upbringing I had. I wouldn't have had the education I had much less be able to pay for college. I wouldn't have gone on the family vacations that enriched my childhood and contributed to the adult I am today. That version had a lot more issues mentally, emotionally, and financially he had yet to work through. Don't get me wrong, my dad wasn't perfect when raising me but I am thankful that I didn't go through any of that.

I feel like I need to rant about my body image for a little bit. I think 75 hard is causing me to hyper focus on my body composition. I know I lost a little weight based on how my clothes are fitting and how I have more muscle tone. But for some reason, I feel even fatter now as if I'm hyper aware of the squish. I also feel like my sense of what is considered thin is distorted with society's shift back to being really skinny. It's good that I'm off social media and that I'm limitting my exposure to that type of content but sometimes, despite me limiting my media consumption, it feels inescapable. I feel like no matter where I look, I see celebrities getting really skinny, people talking about how pilates got them long lean muscles even though it doesn't work that way, skinny tok people, people talking about being in a calorie deficit, people talking about maximizing protein, ozempic, and people rejecting body positivity. While society is losing it right now, I won't deny and say that some of it isn't my fault either. My body image has never been stable. Even though I have felt good and bad about my body throughout the years, I never felt like I had an accurate perception of what my body looks like. I'm not skinny. I'm like 5'2" and a 150 lbs. But I can't say I'm big either since I typically wear a small or extra small. But sometimes I have to size up to a medium or large to fit my chest. I can't say I'm skinny fat. I'm not particularly flappy or squishy. I can't say that I'm athletic because I do have parts of me that is squishy and I'm not lean. Like yes, since I'm 150 lbs and 5'2" but I wear a small, I do have a good bit of muscle mass. But at the same time, I still feel considerably larger than women who are my height, especially when I think of the whole "pilates body" thing. I have a large chest (I'm a 30I) and often times I feel like that throws me off but I don't think I can say I'm curvy either because I'm like 5'2". Like yes I do have a chest and a butt, but because of my height, I don't feel curvy rather I just feel compressed. It's like I'm smaller than the average woman, but bigger than the average woman who is 5'2". I'm more athletic than average which is why I don't look squishy but I'm not super lean so I don't look shredded. But I'm also not fat either but then my chest throws everything off. It's like I cannot cleanly fit into any body type or category which messes with my head and also makes shopping hell. The best way I can describe my body type is dense. I'm working out twice a day and I'm really sweaty all the time. I know body changes take time but there is something about working out twice a day as opposed to 3 times a week that makes it feel like it's dragging out. Also, I do notice improvement in my overall fitness. The other day, I ran a mile on the elliptical in 6 min 57 seconds. My cardio is improving. I'm doing betting my fitness classes. The weights I have been lifting have been getting heavier. I have a higher baseline of physical activity. And as a result, I rarely feel sluggish and overful when eating out. So performance wise I'm improving, but I feel like the way my body feels doesn't match how it looks in an odd way. I also tried the 12-3-30 treadmill workout the other day. I completed it and I want to continue doing it because I want to challenge myself and get better. At the same time, I felt kind of trash doing it. I had to do two 15 min sessions with a break in between rather than doing the 30 min entirely. I was also holding on to the treadmill during most of it. I would give myself 1-2 min without holding the treadmill and then like 2 min holding the treadmill and I alternated according to my ability. I was told this was a beginner workout and while I ultimately completed it, I feel like I struggled.