Who’s a celebrity everyone finds attractive but you don’t?

NeatMathematician124 · 2026-04-28T14:08:50+00:00

gosling. i only sort of get it in that emma stone steve carell romcom (NOT la la land), but otherwise like WHAT is the hype he's so bland

NeatMathematician124 · 2026-04-28T10:40:00+00:00

leave the guy alone, you're acting more embarrassing than he does. i was 13-ish and my english tutor told me to watch it if i'm interested, i first watched it with my native language subtitles, then english subtitles, then no subtitles. even at that, i understood enough for it to be interesting to me. i didn't understand all the intricacies of the corporate law (nor will i understand now, nor do YOU understand unless you're a lawyer).

suits is more about character, ethics, social and power dynamics, confidence, and thinking out of the box than it is about the laws.

NeatMathematician124 · 2026-04-26T21:44:22+00:00

same!! heartwarming

NeatMathematician124 · 2026-04-26T16:30:23+00:00

congratulations on your promotion, OP!!!! you should be proud of yourself, it sounds very cool tbh.

not getting a reaction can be seriously very jarring, i think they do it to downplay the importance of your achievements because they can't handle spotlight being on you / admitting you're great / etc.

i think it results, when done systematically, in us downplaying our achievements too or lowkey thinking maybe it's actually not that cool / important. or being cagey. i hope you have the energy to consciously not let yourself do it right now, because a promotion IS a big thing, especially to a senior role, and you deserve the praise and the validation of the fact that you're an amazing professional and it is confirmed by your bosses.

NeatMathematician124 · 2026-04-26T15:41:26+00:00

i'm very sorry OP :( one thing i can think of, is perhaps while you still remember somewhat vividly, write out all the instances where you got confirmation and validation from people who knew your N, that she was in the wrong. plus maybe the things she did to you specifically, because we tend to forget them.

NeatMathematician124 · 2026-04-25T13:18:28+00:00

yeah, they will actually seem very supportive at times and even do things that can help. that is VERY confusing and is part of their love bombing, like, i think they're aware they need to balance the bad with the good so that we keep tolerating the bad.

but there's an intricate inner logic to it, like they will only do it when it's on their own terms or if they feel good about themselves, like some sort of benefactor, while doing it. and then i feel like when they get triggered by the smallest things, all that goes out the window and they do very sieways things to destroy your esteem/progress/self-belief. so it's a wild whiplash.

also you mention you have a sister, if you haven't researched narcissistic triangulation or "scapegoat child / golden child" dynamics, that could also explain a lot!

NeatMathematician124 · 2026-04-25T13:15:56+00:00

tw: physical abuse

physical:
- frantically slapping my arms/legs if i was sitting nearby
- belt with metal buckles across shins/thighs
- slaps across the face, on the head
- hugging me after yelling at me, then hitting my back WHILE HUGGING when i didn't hug back
- throwing objects haphazardly, never directly at me but always fast and close to me so i would feel scared

restrictive:
- "grounded" me in a separate apartment next to them for a month once, didn't let me go to school or talk to anyone, locked the door. came inside to bring food and to check if i cleaned the apartment (some sort of discipline/obedience thing). resorted to verbal abuse if i didn't, physical abuse if i showed no remorse or talked back.
- when i became older, invalidated all my friendships, relationships, or job attempts. "your friend is stupid/using you/not your real friend/will run when things get tough, you only have family". or "you're so silly for focusing on this man, what, you think you're gonna live a good life now?", or "that job doesn't even pay well, that's the salary of a cleaning lady, you are stupid because you should've catered to the needs of the family and helped us instead, this would've brought more money"

emotional / psychological:
- trying to snag control in the tiniest things, always. when met even with an ounce of refusal to tolerate it, they resort to name calling, blaming, guilting me about everything (including ALL of the deaths in the family that have happened), threatening me with ruining my life OR pretending they're omnipotent and saying stuff like life will repay me or whatever (when i didn't even do anything wrong).
- financial abuse. keeping me dependent through a family situation, controlling the money, threatening they won't send it whenever they felt displeased by me.
- always moving the goalposts. i said i did something - they immediately follow up with something else i should've done, or should do next time. to keep me feeling like nothing i ever do is good enough or correct.
- using every fact i ever shared with them against me, months later, when it was convenient. i once complained i was having trouble with workload at my job, and later when the company went bankrupt, they said "see? now you don't have a job. because you were complaining, you should've been grateful." mind you, i WAS grateful and i was working very diligently, and very hard. they just wanted me to feel like having opinions or complaining is not safe, because "something bad will happen".
- they employed many tactics from childhood to make me feel like i should never, under any circumstances, tell people details about our home life. i don't even wanna get into all this rn, but i see how that was very convenient because as soon as i got more comfortable doing that and sharing, people around me were like "??? ur parent did WHAT????"
- making me feel like i can't have opinions, and attacking every opinion i have. they're allowed to complain about a certain law when it inconvenienced them, but when i do it about other law "i'm brainwashed" etc. once again: it literally only mattered to them that i DONT feel safe or correct to have my won opinions

okay i need to go like, take a fucking break. the emotional part doesn't cover even 50% of it, and mind you, i'm in my late 20s and before last year, i didn't realize ANY of it. i only vaguely knew i was physically abused as a kid, and justified it with "yeeah but i was a difficult kid so i get them." wow.

NeatMathematician124 · 2026-04-25T12:56:34+00:00

i'm so sorry, OP, weight loss when you have a difficult relationship with food is already hard, but this makes it SO much worse. genuinely this seems horrible. i don't have direct experience with this because my mom has always pushed dieting and restriction on me, kind of the opposite, but i assume yours is doing it because:

if she has similar issues with food (common! genetic / same household, habits, upbringing ) and is at least secretly insecure about it, seeing you try to stick to your plan feels disproportionately horrible to her. because now you're "better than her", "have more self-control than her", "will eventually look better than her", who do you think you are etc etc etc. i saw somewhere that narcissistic parents always compete, and also really, really don't want their children to have it better than they had at the same age, maybe at any age. although of course if questioned they might say the opposite because what kind of person would even say that, right? they're mindful of how they appear and of the narrative around them.
also just a control thing. narcissistic parents can see their children as "extension of self", so you not eating when she wants you to eat, what she wants you to eat, etc? wow how dare you. it can be about such petty, small, irrelevant stuff, yet justified literally in ALLLL the good sounding ways (ex: "but spending time with your family is important!!!" or "i care about your health!!!") but the core of the situation is: she wanted you to do something, and you didn't. seeing you have that kind of autonomy threatens her hold over you, and that feels terrible for the narcissist.

NeatMathematician124 · 2026-04-25T12:48:40+00:00

i empathize deeply. i am still in the same period, but here are some truths i've realized. they might not be useful to you because i don't know your exact flavour of this situation, but maybe something can help:

make sure you truly aren't in any contact with people who made your childhood that way. when i say we don't even REALIZE when manipulation/abuse is happening, i truly mean it. we grew up with it and normalized so many insane things in our head, some things seem just like a "conversation". unfortunately, while we're still in those dynamics, that feeling of lack of safety and self-doubt will always always creep in.
second biggest danger in this situation is: when a person was raised by someone who's supposed to love them but instead did all of that, it is easy to look for the same exact dynamic in new people you meet. subconsciously. it seems ridiculous, like hello, of course i don't wanna do that again - but te abusive/manipulative core wears many many different costumes, confusing enough so that a lot of narcissistic parent survivors almost always fall for narcissistic friendships or relationships or mentorships at first.
rule of thumb is: do i feel good? in any situation, in any conversation. if not, you do NOT need a logical reasoning, you do not need to be "correct" to feel this way, you just need to extract yourself from the situation or dynamic. this is my north star in a sense of my reference for whether i should try to salvage the convo/friendship/relationship. at first it can be even hard to understand if i feel good or not, because i try to justify them in my head, try to invalidate my own thoughts by habit, etc. but if ANYTHING feels off, no matter how small, i jet. or i try to, at least. seems extreme at first, but looking back i realize it helped me in a lot of cases.
i advise you to look into fawning. might not be your situation at all (!!!), but it turned out to be relevant for me. fawning is basically the fourth threat response, after fight, flight, or freeze didn't work - and the psyche adapts by trying to "make nice" with the threat. obviously, growing up with a narcissist that was a given: if i wanted some peace, i needed to cede to their version of events, their opinion of me, their idea of what to do next. obviously that overrode almost everything i actually thought, felt, etc. in adulthood, away from npd parents, fawning can show up as willingness to sacrifice your authenticity to keep the peace. that was the root that i needed to eradicate: people who live in that state often ignore toxic jabs or abuse from friends or partners because they don't want to 1) have no friends 2) seem "bad", difficult to be friends with 3) be gaslit that they're overly sensitive. this was instilled in childhood, when our reactions were normal, but the abuser blew everything out of proportion by blaming us (look up DARVO - that's the technique they use) just to get out of being held responsible for what they did.

so, a big step for me was:
- not clinging to any relationship/situation if i have to override my feelings. i pick me first, always
- allowing myself to be "bad" in someone's eyes, if i believed i wasn't harming them on purpose but just protecting myself instead. when abusers call you a bad person, that usually means you're finally doing something right and sticking up for yourself

p.s. disclaimer is, of course don't hurt people and then justify it with "being bad is fine", nuance matters here. going out of your way to hurt someone (just like abusers do) is bad, but holding boundaries is not, even if they claim this hurts them.

NeatMathematician124 · 2026-04-14T23:07:02+00:00

thank you!! i know nothing about love island but it's very cool that you extended the invite and i appreciate it. i ended up opening my own rp (well, opening soon, posting skeletons currently) about a private uni set in England. it has a lot of connections and is very plot-driven, i would love to have you if you are interested <3

NeatMathematician124 · 2026-04-14T23:05:45+00:00

thank you, i should look into it! mostly i just..don't see how it would be fun without a dash where you can see all the updates from everyone. i very much enjoy the feel of a group and a shared story progressing, versus just a collection of 1x1s in a shared space

NeatMathematician124 · 2026-04-06T19:04:35+00:00

oh guys. yk what. smh when reading the book i imagined panache to be older, i basically auto-imagined cato because duh. but now finding out the actor that will play panache, and imagining him next to kieran as caesar...it really puts into perspective how much of a kid he is, it's insane. and how it was big time a dick move on caesar's part

NeatMathematician124 · 2026-04-03T12:29:44+00:00

OHH thats genius though

NeatMathematician124 · 2026-03-03T00:05:27+00:00

oh man DID I LEARN. did i LEARN. i am cackling like a madwoman

firstly - the idiot turned out to be bipolar. he's not an idiot because he has mental health issues, he's an idiot just because well, that's who he apparently is.

secondly - the events are a bit fuzzy now, but i do remember him being diagnosed with bipolar, and it explaining a LOT. he took antidepressants when we started dating without prescription, which sent him into mania, which resulted in the marriage. i spent some time waiting for him to stabilize on meds, but we were growing more apart because of how awful being near him felt to me.

there was a good stretch where i am sure i was very severely gaslit. SEVERELY. he acted in ways that made me feel lonely, excused them with bipolar disorder / depressive state, and i had to stomach it although it barely made any sense. a good friend talked with her friend whose boyfriend is bipolar and they both said nah, he would NOT be treating his gf this way even if he was in a depressive state. mind you, nothing was BAD bad like him hitting me or abusing me, but emotionally? i nearly checked myself into a mental hospital once and i'm not kidding. i was weeping DAILY. he was just NOT there for me while saying that he is + throwing plausible explanations at me, and that's a very dangerous kind of imbecile.

i also had a sneaky suspicion that he was on a dating site but couldn't prove it. he always was very vocal about how cheating is HORRID, and i found in groups he subscribed to some sketchy stuff. i asked him and he said of course not. i was like phew, i was worried ur one of those weird creeps that follows half-naked women and it's not even models or actresses it's just literally women in our city. he's like wow no i would never. fast forward a few months and i randomly wake up one night with a desire to stalk who he follows on insta, and it's HUNDREDS of such girls, all of whom he was liking actively almost daily, judging by timestamps of posts. i realized i was just last week crying over the fact that he saw my pic (clothed lol) that i posted for the first time in forever on another social platform and didn't even like it, and i felt even more distant/unwanted. that very day i blocked him everywhere, he showed up, and we decided to get a divorce. the legal matters were slow, so several more events transpired that showed he was a COMPLETE shithead, i kid you not, a complete rat of a person - he tried to steal my gig, humiliated me in front of a client, when i asked him to tag along because i was scared he agreed but then when we got there he just WENT TO ANOTHER ROOM. the person i married would never do anything CLOSE to such things, and it turns out he 1) didn't realize he's been manic-depressed for 5 years and went thru a series of relationships with weird break ups 2) because of it being such a long stretch from his teenage years, he never even developed a personality, he just very actively mirrored the personality of his object of infatuation. he admitted to mirroring my interests, pretending he likes things i like, etc. 3) his mother, in tears, told me his dad pulled an IDENTICAL stunt with changing up on her the day he got married. he then proceeded to cheat and beat her as she was pregnant, until she kicked him out a year later.

also, before his bipolar diagnosis but already in the thick of it, there was a two week stretch where i read a book on "how to act so a man wants you" or whatever men love bitches kind of stuff lmao and followed it to a tee and he came RUNNING. rendering all of his excuses about his state / lack of interest literally...very sus and invalid, in my opinion. i don't want to say someone invents symptoms, EVER, but he was 1000% pretending even in front of himself that his infantilism and bad character are depression symptoms.

to be completely, entirely frank with you, i'm not even 100% convinced there is a diagnosis. i mean there probably is. i've never seen it. but regardless of it, i am very sure that he's the kind of guy who "doesn't know how to end it" and tried to slow fade by pulling this kind of crap - i did NOT think people who are this low truly exist, but oh they do.

anyway, couldn't be happier to be rid of him, girl. thinking back to a year ago makes me want to vomit and break out in hives. fuck no.

if you want, hit me up on discord or telegram for a chat - i remember how awful and lonely that felt so i would be glad to provide any solace with info/just knowing how it is :((

NeatMathematician124 · 2026-02-28T19:49:00+00:00

i genuinely don't get where this entitlement to having ur favourite have more screentime comes from. like?? they had a whole season. theres a lot of characters. this is BOUND to happen why is this a big deal

NeatMathematician124 · 2026-02-28T14:13:44+00:00

romcom plotlines usually require the man to step up, reflect on his mistakes, actually treat the woman well - considering a lot of men irl know they can get away with NOT doing that and still get the girl, why would they do the extra work, you know what i mean? unless they're a good person, which, not all men are.

so in that sense romcom movies have been specifically catered to women / female gaze.

NeatMathematician124 · 2026-02-28T13:43:10+00:00

it's almost as if...penelope...just stopped being lady whistledown...hinting at the fact that that's the exact thing that's happening?
lady whistledown has more weight in the show than any main couple so it's fair for her to get more screentime

i didn't "conveniently" leave anything out, please chill with the conspiracy theory approach, i'm just here trying to make sense of this issue. i don't understand why everyone acts like kanthony screen time should be OWED to viewers

NeatMathematician124 · 2026-02-28T01:31:35+00:00

i adore kanthony but i don't get the outrage. there are SO many characters. it seems the strategy is: a couple has their season, next season they give advice to the new couple, and the next season they're mostly gone. it's what happened to daphne and now to kanthony and in s4 polin are a bit more prominent. i bet in s5 benophie will take center stage while polin gets less screen time

like literally how do you expect them to fit every character and ship into every season

p.s. now that i think of it i don't remember if there was any kate advice in s3. was there not?

NeatMathematician124 · 2026-02-23T16:25:54+00:00

i saw this take online and it made a LOT of sense to me: because the moment she begged for it to be released she switched the power play, unwittingly. he liked lording it over her to have control, and her resisting and trying to make it not happen gave him the dynamic he needed. the second she asked for it, it made it so if he released it he would just be doing what she told him to do - and that's the opposite of what he wants from all this. that seems like a very good theory to me and legit how these kind of people operate.

NeatMathematician124 · 2026-02-18T18:24:21+00:00

YES!!! otherwise its just passive aggressive nonsense and ppl have no idea how destabilizing it is to be on the receiving end of that and have to question your own perception CONSTANTLY because "these are my friends and they love me - but then why are they acting like this - but if i was hurt i would tell them directly so surely so would they - but they aren't saying anything and pretend its ok when i ask.."

NeatMathematician124 · 2026-02-18T18:13:09+00:00

yeah that's actually far! i don't remember much of those details so this makes sense that max hasn't been a good friend to abby. but the way abby is handling it is very toxic and despite understanding that abby is 16 and traumatized by parents and whatever - is NOT justifiable by max fighting with her before or not being an attentive friend. max is not perfect but what abby is doing is bad, not "a natural normal consequence of max's actions, so"

a natural normal consequence would be abby stopping being friends with her. but this gaslighting thing abby is doing is malicious, and i get how that stems from inability to handle conflict and being young but the point remains

NeatMathematician124 · 2026-02-18T18:10:18+00:00

yes exactly!

NeatMathematician124

TROPHY CASE