Lasting Lessons And The Impermanence Of Memory

One of the things my parents taught me when I was young was that anything you saw was in your mind forever. This phrase was always part of a moral lesson since the idea behind it, at least as they (and their incredibly conversative religious beliefs) intended it, was that sin and temptation was best avoided entirely because once it had gotten into you, you couldn’t entirely get it out. The only way to stay entirely free of those things was to avoid them entirely. It was a core aspect of why I wasn’t allowed to watch a lot of TV shows on public broadcast television (even one glimpse of a swimsuit or bra, or even two people making out was enough to get it banned in our household the entire time I lived there), why I was only allowed to play video games that didn’t include Suggestive Themes (even though they were apparently just fine and dandy with violence of any kind), and of my complete failure of even an abstinence-only sex education (the perks of being home schooled is that your parents get to fail three times at teaching you about the birds and the bees, call it a complete education, tell you to Just Say No to touching women who aren’t related to you, and then never speak about it again). It even came up a bunch when I finally escaped the isolation of my home schooling and started asking questions about things I didn’t understand in high school. Better to avoid something entirely than to encounter it at all, since that’s how the devil slowly worked sin and evil into your once-pure mind (all of which is a pretty big contradiction of the orthodoxy behind the sacrament of confession in Catholicism).

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The Line Between Naivety and Forgiveness

Trust, once lost, is not easily regained. The process of losing trust can be anything from drawn out and complex to instaneous and simple, but regaining it is always a time-consuming and difficult affair. We’re seeing a lot of that play out in the world these days, on a lot of different scales. Perhaps the biggest and most difficult to define example is people losing faith in government instituions. A much smaller but still impactful example is the recent loss of trust in Wizards of the Coast. It will take decades to restore trust in government instutions, especially given how every day seems to bring more evidence that the institutions we thought were safeguarding our government are actually just there to serve and protect the most powerful and wealthy among us (not that we needed more evidence to believe that). Likewise, it will take Wizards of the Coast a long time and some pretty extreme conscessions for people to trust that they’re not simply kicking the can down the road with this latest backpedaling they’ve been doing.

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Intentionally Past Tense

Content Warning: This poem references loss of parents, grief, mourning, and also non-specific references to childhood trauma.

I speak about my parents in the past tense.
It is an old habit,
Hard-won as the only measure
I could take to build the distance
I needed to feel alright,
But this years-long practice
Of linguistic intentionality
Has served me well
In more ways than this.

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