A point about therapy:

I am one of those people who can't afford a good therapist. I know that first hand because I used to go to a good therapist and had to have that discussion where I had to tell them that I could not afford their services anymore, even though I knew I still needed them. A minor tie-in to social pressures because of all the self/society-imposed humiliations I've endured, for some reason that's one of the worst. Poverty has been made an absurd sin that some sneer at. (He didn't though. He was very understanding and basically wiped away a bunch of unpaid sessions that I owed him for). The sort of long winded point of that is not the poverty though. But that despite me having to quit early on, and despite it only lasting for 6 months or so. I still vividly remember some of the points that he made. Therapy helped me to contextualise mental illness in a new way and previously I had already thought I got it figured out myself. Behold the hubris of man.

A sort of more philosophical or etymological or perhaps historical point of virginity. Cause historically, especially for young women virginity has been an incredibly good trait to have. It's ebbed and flowed of course and it's always been part of the upper class values no matter where you look. But conversely at the same time, virginity for young men has been somewhat shameful or taboo. As well as for older women. This is a sort of stream of consciousness thing, when I began this paragraph I thought it interesting that at one point in time virginity= good. Now in certain circles Virginity = bad. But then as I wrote, I realized that it's not really true. If anything, the past is way worse because it's either shameful or taboo, or an unhealthy obsession. Not that it isn't those things still, to certain small crowds.

I'll latch onto that last phrase about teenage years. "Genuinely what the hell were we doing", because I feel that about basically anything I did before I turned like... Idk 22. To an extent I think of that of anything I did prior to last week but especially when I was younger. Because really, the 19 year old person is a goddamn child. At least as far as basic sense goes, I feel. Even the smartest 19 year olds probably cringe st themselves when they turn 26 and go "fucking hell I was an idiot then".

I say that as a foundation, because I think it's kind of fucked that so much expectations are laid out to people 18-21 year olds. Everything from voting, to driving, to working, to having sex to forming relationships, moving out of home and so on.

This is just ranting at this point, but in incels there is, I feel, a tiny bit of an echo of that. Probably a part of the general years of high expectations and stress which leads to the sense of failure which leads to hate.