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“People think children’s lives are simple, easy, but it’s the opposite. Everything that happens around them affects them, and they don’t have the power to affect any of it back.
A man like mayonnaise in human form stalks toward them, eyes only on Jenny.
What a pleasure it is to have you all here, celebrating our first step back into quality children’s programming. Or, as we like to think of it, programming quality children!”
To erase the lie of Bliss and replace it with the harsh grit of the truth. The desert, unchanged and unchanging, no matter how hard people pretend otherwise.
they make it very clear that they will let you get hurt—or hurt you, if they have to, to keep you safe—until you finally do what you’re told.
You finally admit that the people who are supposed to love you will do anything to keep you in line. Will let anyone do anything to you if it means you stop fucking up their lives.
You never forget the lesson that they would rather destroy you than let you inconvenience them.”
“No one tells you how hard it is to be a parent, but they also never tell you how terrifying it is.
“You can’t get better until you’ve hit rock bottom.
the worst kind of bad. The kind that makes you pretend so hard that everything is okay, you forget yourself in the pretending. Bad that insists you look right at it and call it good until you believe it.
old familiar sludge of shame
“All words are imaginary. Sounds that we attached to meaning, images and emotions conjured out of the air. So really, all words are magic. Something from nothing. Forcing others to feel things, to think things, to understand things simply by uttering the right combination of noises.
They conjure words out of nothing, as easy as breathing, but we have to carve them free, dredge them up from where they’re cold and sleepy at the bottom.
confusing obedience for love, confusing arbitrary rules for actual goodness. Playing parts so they wouldn’t be punished.
Children accept absurdity because everything is absurd, everything made up of complex rules and systems that they don’t understand.
Maybe, in addition to regular rules, you were given a god who watched everything from an easy, safe distance. A god you poured love into, who gave you rules and condemnation in exchange. A magic man demanding perfect obedience and the performance of a life instead of the living of one.
Regardless of who gave them to you, the rules you had to navigate this biting, lonely, absurd reality changed you. Told you that you deserved to be broken, you should be grateful to be broken, and you should be ashamed of it, too.
The good feelings and the bad, because in that space, there’s no distinction. No qualifiers. They’re all just feelings, and they’re yours, and Mister Magic loves everything that makes up the wonder that is you.
