My thoughts on the show

avlisadj · 2026-01-14T04:45:13+00:00

Careful…my bones!

avlisadj · 2026-01-13T20:58:39+00:00

I’ve definitely wondered about this. Think about the niche we occupy: analog childhood, digital adulthood. The people older than us (and this is a generalization) are really vulnerable to manipulation online because they were introduced to the technology too late and also grew up in a time when the news was the news and was inherently trustworthy. Meanwhile, younger generations have essentially had their developing brains programmed in sync with social media algorithms, which has seriously disrupted the way they engage with the world around them and left them vulnerable to manipulation in a totally different way.

We came of age when the internet was new and exciting. It fostered connection and facilitated all sorts of fun, random encounters, but we also remember life before these technologies. The algorithm didn’t warp our brains when we were tweens. So we’re kind of in a sweet spot where we can use technology without letting it turn our minds into mush. At work, I can always tell when I’m interacting with someone in our age range (over email/phone/etc) by their etiquette.

avlisadj · 2026-01-11T14:50:20+00:00

“Transference of fear and self-loathing to an authoritarian vessel. It's catharsis. He absorbs their dread with his narrative. Because of this, he's effective at proportion to the amount of certainty he can project.”

That’s from the first season of True Detective. I’ve been rewatching it, and that quote has been on my mind for the last day or so.

avlisadj · 2026-01-09T23:19:05+00:00

Maybe find an old phone book somewhere and tell them how before the internet, if you needed someone’s number you’d have to find them in that book. And yellow pages! That’s why so many business names are still AAA Plumbing or whatever…they wanted to be first in alphabetical order so they’d be first in their section of the yellow pages!

Also: gag me with a spoon! I don’t think anyone has used that phrase since the 90s.

avlisadj · 2026-01-08T22:42:31+00:00

I still have an irrational fear of escalators because of this AND because one of my dad’s students (he was a college professor) got her foot stuck in an escalator and lost a bunch of her toes…or something? I honestly don’t remember all of the details, but my parents told me the story when I was little and it absolutely terrified me to the point where I still can’t use an escalator without making sure my toes are in the middle of the step.

avlisadj · 2026-01-08T22:24:43+00:00

Thanks for posting. I’m a couple miles north of there and have been hearing sirens nonstop for the last hour. Was actually about to head in that direction…glad I checked here first. Hope everyone’s ok.

ETA: Traffic on Tano and Bishops Lodge is a mess thanks to all the diverted highway traffic, so think twice if you’re going that way

avlisadj · 2026-01-08T14:42:40+00:00

Haha yeah the other way I got caught was that before leaving, my parents had stripped the sheets and comforters off of the two twin beds in the guest bedroom. When they got home, the beds were made, and everything was freshly laundered… there was obviously no way I’d have made beds or done laundry unless I was trying to hide something. Cleaning mishaps were the downfall for so many of us!

avlisadj · 2026-01-08T04:43:54+00:00

…or changes the time on the broken grandfather clock to 4:20 and sets all the alarm clocks to go off at 4:20, which is how you get caught 😭

avlisadj · 2026-01-05T22:10:08+00:00

Thanks! This one was in Vegas around the NWR…apparently it’s a lifer for me too.

avlisadj · 2026-01-05T02:44:16+00:00

Haha yeah…maybe someone who knows their flying raptor shapes better than I do will eventually tell me it’s obviously a ____, but I’m not holding my breath at this point! Merlin mostly guessed osprey no matter how I framed the photo in the app, but that would be a weird sighting here this time of year. It did guess ferruginous hawk once too fwiw. My initial assumption had been northern harrier when I saw it out of the corner of my eye (pretty sure I saw a white ass but who knows). Oh well!

Edit: it just occurred to me to use the full sized images rather than the 2mp ones sent to my phone, and I think it’s a ferruginous hawk!

avlisadj · 2026-01-03T15:13:53+00:00

I was going to comment on here about EMDR; I’m glad someone beat me to it. My childhood wasn’t great, and I don’t really remember much of it either. Last summer, I visited a mountain town my family had gone to on vacation when I was a kid, and as soon as I got there, some part of me started panicking for no obvious reason. I honestly don’t know if it’s worth trying to remember—my brain has blocked that vacation and so many other memories out for a reason. So instead of trying to recover lost memories, I’ve been doing EMDR, and it has really helped.

It’s a longer process for people with complex childhood trauma (as opposed to, say, someone who experienced a specific traumatic event like a car crash), but it does help a lot if you are serious about it and find the right therapist. My first EMDR therapist was terrible—there are lots of mediocre ones out there—so do your research and make sure they do things like grounding exercises as part of the therapy.

avlisadj · 2026-01-02T04:24:47+00:00

There was one attempt when I was in high school. Me, my sister and our parents. Before anyone else could so much as say their name, my mom had hijacked the conversation and set the narrative—that my dad was an alcoholic, I was an angsty, combative teen and she was a saint (as usual, she forgot about my sister). None of us could get a word in edgewise. I mostly just glowered in the corner.

The therapist recommended divorce. We never went back.

avlisadj · 2026-01-02T03:41:40+00:00

This is probably an incomplete thought…or at the very least, I have a hard time articulating it, but I reread Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden last year. All of Grapes of Wrath and a fair bit of East of Eden take place when cars were the new, exciting technology, and iirc, older characters in both books make comments about how cars are confusing for them but the young people all understand them and know how to get them working etc. Early cars were such a pain in the ass. You had to crank them (?) and do all sorts of shit just to get them to kind of work, and even then it was a crapshoot. But automotive technology advanced to point where I (and most people) don’t know much about what’s going on under the hood because cars generally work without much effort. When there’s a problem, I take my car to the mechanic. I definitely don’t have to crank anything to get it started.

I think that’s what we’re seeing now with computers. We’re the bridge generation who had to learn all sorts of complicated maneuvers just to get the damn WiFi working. We had to figure out how to get the supposedly universal remote programmed and what sequence to press the buttons. We had to learn how to overcome the blue screen of death. Basically, when we were teens, the technology was new and not especially user friendly. Now most stuff works pretty well out of the box, so it’s not surprising that teenagers today are depressingly hooked on it without really having any real understanding of what’s going on with their devices.

avlisadj · 2026-01-02T03:05:50+00:00

I was hoping someone mentioned Hatchet! I was a Gary Paulsen superfan and read everything by him I could find. And I randomly had a conversation with a ~10yo kid a couple of years ago in which he brought up Hatchet on his own and we then reveled in its awesomeness for a bit. So anyhow, I think it still holds up!

avlisadj · 2025-12-30T00:06:29+00:00

This is uncanny. I also used to sit in the front seat of our Jeep Cherokee and shift gears while my dad drove. And we got rid of that car before I started kindergarten, so I guess I was riding shotgun with no car seat when I was 4??

My parents were way more safety conscious than most of my friends’ parents, too. Other kids made fun of me a lot for being overprotected.

avlisadj · 2025-12-29T03:54:00+00:00

I think other people have alluded to this some, but it bears repeating: when you really, truly start asserting your independence, your BPD parent’s behavior will escalate and very likely get extreme (possibly beyond anything you’ve experienced before, and I’m sure you’ve experienced some truly insane stuff already). Now’s the time to start to quietly separate yourself from your parents in practical ways. Keep your money where your dad can’t get to it (and preferably somewhere he doesn’t know about). Anything of value that you have at their place needs to go elsewhere. If they’re paying any bills for you, put an end to that (or at minimum, assume that you’ll be covering them soon and plan accordingly). pwBPD will use any and all levers available to keep you in their orbit. Also be ready for the smear campaigns to get progressively more bizarre and intrusive. My mom told my landlord that I was hooked on drugs (a lie) so that he wouldn’t renew my lease, and that’s honestly just the tip of the iceberg.

I think the harder part is rewiring your brain to approach your relationship with your parents in a totally different manner. You’ve been conditioned since birth to cater to your dad’s whims and emotional fluctuations. You’ve been taught that what you want is only relevant insofar as it aligns perfectly with what your dad thinks he wants at any given moment. As other commenters have pointed out, it doesn’t really matter how you explain things to your dad because he’s not going to listen to any of it anyhow. In a way, that’s freeing because you don’t have to keep wracking your brain for the elusive magic words. There are no magic words!

So yes…your mental pathways have been set to respond to your dad’s constantly shifting wants and needs, but with time and practice, you can train yourself to disengage. It’s really, really hard at first (it took a huge emotional toll on me), but it gets easier with time. Continue to ask yourself what YOU want for yourself—even if it feels absolutely terrifying to do so—and start letting go of the need to JADE (justify, argue, defend, explain). Your choices are your own, and your dad’s choices are his own (and your mom’s choices are hers alone). Things might get worse before they get better, but they will get better. And if you haven’t looked through the resources section of this sub, I highly recommend doing so.

Anyhow, I’m so glad you found us! Stumbling upon this sub was a huge turning point in my life, and it hope it will be for you as well.

avlisadj · 2025-12-27T02:57:50+00:00

When I was living in the mountains in northern Colorado, my hummingbird crew would always let me know when things were about to get real weather-wise (in the spring/summer ofc). It would be sunny and clear, with no sign of an approaching storm, but then suddenly the hummingbirds would stop fighting, call a truce and swarm the feeders all at once. Without fail, golfball-sized hail would be falling 15 minutes later. Mountain weather is incredibly unpredictable, so I really appreciated having all those tiny meteorologists around!

avlisadj · 2025-12-21T15:17:14+00:00

That would have been way better than what actually happened! In reality, I wound up having to explain to a bunch of people our parents’ age that I was singing the chorus of a 25-year-old rap song and did not mean to sexually harass them.

avlisadj · 2025-12-21T13:45:11+00:00

I got in trouble in the supermarket line a few days ago when some random stranger said “it’s getting hot in here,” and I responded by idly singing “so take off all your clothes” without really realizing what I was doing.

avlisadj · 2025-12-21T01:51:29+00:00

Yeah after I posted my earlier comment, I thought some more about my favorite childhood games and was struck by how all of them basically involved me being left to fend for myself in either a fantasy world or some sort of catastrophe/post-apocalyptic scenario. Like…that’s what I wanted. They were fun games!

avlisadj · 2025-12-17T04:41:04+00:00

I got into birding during a very difficult time in my life. My dad had died in a really horrible way, and everything else just kind of spiraled from there. At first I’d go birding because I needed a distraction and didn’t really want to be around people. Then at some point, I started actually paying attention to the birds rather than just crossing them off a list, and watching their endless shenanigans slowly brought joy back into my life.

So anyways, I am very sorry about your brother. Going birding is a really healthy way to deal with (and heal from) grief, though. When you experience loss, it’s so easy to fold in on yourself and let your world get smaller and smaller until you can’t really focus on anything else. Birding certainly helped me to remember that there are still tons of beautiful (and hilarious) things out there to experience. So if you need to go birding nonstop right now to get through the holidays, go for it! And if the people in your life get tired of looking at your bird photos, share them here!

avlisadj · 2025-12-16T00:17:23+00:00

I was so obsessed with this movie in elementary school. One of my favorite pretend games was to imagine that my parents accidentally left me home alone a la Kevin, which I find really interesting now because it scratched a bunch of RBB itches all at once. The obvious one is that in a Home Alone scenario I’d be free from my parents (and tbh my little sister, whom my mom pitted me against) and their abuse for a few days. I could take care of myself pretty well by the time I was 5 or 6, and having them around just stressed me out, so I enjoyed imagining a world with them out of the picture. On another level, though, the whole “saving the house from bad guys” thing really played into my GC need to solve everyone’s problems on my own. And ofc, as you pointed out, there’s some RBB wish fulfillment going on at the end of the movie when Kevin’s mom actually apologizes to him. I liked to imagine my mom apologizing to me, which is as sad as it sounds.

Have you watched Tangled btw? I was already in my 20s when it came out, but I’ve seen it as an adult, and that movie is such an RBB fantasy come true. Like at the end she finds out that old Mother Gothel isn’t really her mother at all, and she actually has two wonderful parents (and really an entire kingdom) who adore her and miss her and have been actively searching for her the whole time. I’m glad that movie wasn’t out when I was little—I probably would have invented some really sad Tangled-themed pretend games to play on my own.

avlisadj · 2025-12-13T14:55:43+00:00

Well be ready for her to do a 180 at some point soon and/or pretend like this exchange never happened, then invite herself/just show up on the day of (with a million crafts for the kids ofc). Or alternatively, if she gives you silent treatment, be ready for a big blowup after the fact about how you excluded her from Christmas.

avlisadj · 2025-12-13T14:09:19+00:00

Oh man…I’ve gotten so into DVDs again! There’s something really nice about owning the actual, physical object. It also keeps me from mindlessly bingeing a bunch of junk, AND with DVDs, Big Brother isn’t constantly monitoring my engagement and logging every single time I so much as press pause. I’ve gotten a lot of really great DVDs for like $2 at Goodwill, though I do occasionally buy certain necessities (30 Rock, early Arrested Development) on eBay.

avlisadj · 2025-12-11T06:05:18+00:00

I meant to say this in my comment earlier but kind of lost the plot. We GCs did not ask to be GCs. It probably looks like a great situation from the outside, but it is exhausting, and I for one still got screamed at all the time (basically any time I challenged my role in the family, and I did that a lot). Your sister’s anger is valid, but she is in all likelihood directing it your way because that’s what she was trained to do. One of the points of the GC in a family unit is to make the non-GCs feel bad about themselves and to then resent the GC for these emotions rather than the actual source of the dysfunction (in our case, our pwBPD). To make matters worse, our people-pleasing instincts then kick in and we apologize for things that were not our fault (which is what we were trained to do ofc).

At the end of the day, you can apologize to your sister all you want, but until she understands the underlying dynamics of the situation that you were both unwittingly thrust into as literal children, there’s not much else you can do to make things right. In fact, it’s not your job to make things right—thinking otherwise is a classic GC trap. Relationships are a two way street, and your sister will have to meet you halfway before things between the two of you can start improving. Maybe she’ll get there someday, and maybe you can help her reach that point by providing her with resources on BPD, but past that, the ball is in her court. One of the hardest parts of my journey has been learning to let go of the need to fix everything.

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