"Help Rejecting Complainers" and/or the "Karpmann Drama Triangle" : Boo Boo and Tani must die

I read a blurb of advice-column style trash this morning on the Atlantic’s Instagram app that made me so mad I unsubscribed to the Atlantic on Instagram. (It has begun to suck so much in the last ten years that this was a long time coming anyway, but it’s SO MUCH worse on Instagram, for reasons. Comments-sections full of idiots reasons.)

The advice-column trash was about a thing that some bullshit-baloney psychology-type dubbed a “help rejecting complainer.”

So, here’s the thing. She was talking about a facet of a behavior model called the Karpmann Drama Triangle that has been around since the 1960’s, but has been largely phased out by the psychological community, who I have (by the way) decided are almost entirely FULL. Of. SHIT. I’m done with all of it, forever.

(Probably.)

I mean, this isn’t new. I go back and forth on it all the time. But today, right now, I believe that from here on out, I officially declare my opposition to the entire “psychology” machine. I know this is a bold and insane stance, coming from a person who has been in and out of therapy since I was about 15 or 16, but on the other hand, it’s kind of a natural stance to come from such a person, and at least one reason is because I am a help-rejecting complainer, however the psychologist-type who was writing for the Atlantic utterly oversimplified the matter, and ignored some of the most important aspects of what this means, and what people “should” do about it.

In the Atlantic trash-blurb, the problem was described as “the sister who won’t stop complaining, and rejects all the advice she is given.” The other sister, the one giving the advice, finally seems to have blown up at the complaining-sister following this kind of dynamic during a long car ride.

(A shiver of hideous rage passes through me as I imagine this exact scenario playing out between myself and one of my sisters. Bile. I taste it.)

So, the advice that was given to the non-complaining sister was that she needed to “over-validate” the complaining. In essence, treat her sister like all of her problems are terrible and there is no possible solution. And I half -agree with this advice. The trouble with the advice was that it fostered the idea that the complaining sister is a spoiled brat of a human being who refuses to take help when it is freely offered to her; the sister, according to this psychology-person giving the Atlantic-advice, thinks her problems are worse than everyone else’s, and she seems to complain just for the sport of it.

The crux of the advice offered was to practically condescend to the sister with the so-called “over-validation,” i.e., “You’re right, your problems are definitely worse than everyone else’s,” which…

…struck me as curious, to put it in the friendliest possible terms. Like…an actual educated psychology-type person gave this advice? Where in the everloving fuck did she get her degree? Has she read any fucking research, like…ever?

Soooo as stated, this all sloppily references a phased-out behavior model, which is called “The Karpmann Drama Triangle.” That phased-out behavior model is a longtime fascinating favorite of mine, because it describes a truncated, incomplete part of a dumb dynamic that some friends of mine came up with a long time ago, which was based on a very stupid cartoon that, full disclosure, makes me kind of angry. The cartoon was called “Boo Boo and Tani.” The reason it makes me angry is because I felt that it was a comic about a bad passive-aggressive behavior dynamic, which was drawn passive aggressively in order to illustrate a bad passive-aggressive dynamic that was horribly familiar to me because I was part of it, and thus I took it extremely personally. And I still do.

THERE, that’s an entire chapter of my memoir-thing that I’m never going to publish! But allow me to elaborate, please!

First of all, my writing that memoir-thing was largely related to a hugely misunderstood facet of why some people actually complain. Lemme just add that this was the first thing I wrote about on my “old blog,” that is “Bitter INFP,” which was the blog that followed a blog called “What I learned today” which was my third blog, actually, but, uh sorry for that diversion—my point is, this is a topic that I’ve been really interested in for a long time. I’ve written about complaining/the Karpmann Drama Triangle multiple times, and I noted, all the way back in that Bitter INFP post, that nobody seems to get it.

The memoir-thing was, in part, just a big long complaint. That’s what a lot of memoir-things are, my friends. That’s what a lot of personal essays are, especially in this day-and-age. They are big long written complaints. But they are complaints with a very specific aim, and that aim is something like, “understand me!” One of the key reasons people write personal essays is to explain this is how I got here, this is how everything got this way in my life, this is why I’m so mad/sad/complicated/otherwise fucked up with the hopes of other people nodding and going “Ohh!” and commiserating, or at least, understanding.

When I took a conflict resolution course, which was an expensive but fairly dopey communications course that was designed for people who wanted to become mediators, one of the first things we learned was that all complaints are actually requests. That was one of the most useful things I took away from that otherwise grueling and pop-psychology-laden waste of my time and dollars, but this was and still is a golden truth. People who complain want something. The trick is trying to figure out what they want.

One of the second (admittedly also useful) things we learned was that, if people just want understanding, or an apology, or some sort of emotional validation, then the problem cannot be mediated. And then, (also useful) we learned how to determine between problems where the complaining people want a thing of some sort, versus problems where the people just want to be heard.

(Okay so maybe the course was more useful than I originally let on.)

In many cases, it’s because the complainers—those who just want to be heard—feel defensive for some reason, and they might feel like they owe the world some kind of an explanation—or it could be just because they feel powerless and there seems to be nothing left to do but vent. Sometimes, in the latter cases, venting is just a sort of an effort for connection. It’s something like, “I feel really bad about all this, do you ever feel bad like this too? Does it make me abnormal to be this upset—is this thing really as bad as I think it is, or am I just being a baby?”

“Am I okay? Will I be okay?”

It turns out, a lot of complainers just want to be heard, and/or understood. They want to be told, “Of COURSE you’re upset, because YES, this thing actually is as bad as you think it is!”

There was a whole bunch of research done over 20 years ago which noted that when women complain to each other, they’re often not looking for advice or solutions at all, they’re more often looking for validation. Sometimes, as stated above, they just want this in the realm of “Do I have a right to be angry/upset about this?” or something along those lines. This is, to me, an “old” and “obvious” reality that “everyone knows” by now, but actually no, everyone does not know this.

It’s not only women who might want that or who might do that, but it is largely more often women than it is men. Now, listen—I have worked in various sorts of factory-type places with mostly dudez as my co-workers, and I have frequently heard groups of men complain to each other, believe-you-me. But—they do it kind of differently than women do it. This is in no small part because men have been largely and heavily socialized to not be vulnerable in front of each other, so they resist anything that might make them look “whiny.” Man-complaining is more angry complaining, (or sometimes it’s more “funny” complaining), and woman complaining is more sad heavy-sigh kind of complaining, which is at least part of why women get clocked as being “victimy,” even though they might complain about the exact same kinds of shit that men complain about—yet, they still often look “whinier” than men. Or at least—they look whiny to men. To other women, they might not look whiny. Depending on the woman, of course.

The reason this is “gendered” is because of hormones, which was a subject I also spent a lot of time writing about in my will-never-see-the-light-of-day memoir-thing. But hormones are tricky, because most known hormones are present in both sexes—just to a greater or lesser extent in one sex or the other. It’s very true that some women have a lot more testosterone than others and some men have a lot more oxytocin than others, but in general, men have more of the former than women and women have more of the latter than men. Okay? Got it?

I know that biologically “gendering” things is dangerous territory, and I know this as the mom of a trans kid. But can we talk “in general” kinds of terms, pleaze? Thnx.

Now, in addition to oxytocin, men also have some estrogen and progesterone, which are probably the more well-known female hormones, but I’m not talking about that shit, right now I’m talking about oxytocin. And an interesting thing about oxytocin is that men seem to experience it differently than women do. (I can’t link to the study that explains this, because it was bookmarked on my now-dead computer and there’s no way in hell I’m going to be able to find it again. Arggh. Sorry.)

OHMYGod I lied I found one study. Yay. It turns out, there are several such studies, in fact.

The short-version gist of the studies indicates that certain behaviors are perceived as positive/supportive to women, whereas those same behaviors appear negative to men. Also, women are way more inclined to want to resolve certain types of conflict, which men will just walk away from. So that, all by itself, does help me to kind-of sort-of forgive my terrible, terrible male friends who reacted to things in ways that I thought were “Fucking Weird” all the way back when I was a teenager, and still sometimes react to those same things in those same ways.

I don’t entirely buy into the whole “Men are from Mars Women are from Venus” rhetoric by the way, except yes, I do buy into it, in some ways. Because I have experienced it, and because I inexplicably read hormone studies for fun. I believe that pop psychology has hideously oversimplified this kind of thing, and ignores that it is made more nuanced and complex by the thing I said above: that some men have more or less testosterone than others and some men have more estrogen than others and stuff—but do you see what I’m sayin’? Yes, it is dangerous territory to try to characterize “the sexes” via biology, but it is also something that I do buy into and I think it’s necessary to buy into it. You know, to help us goddamn understand each other so we’ll be less goddamn ragy at each other all the fuckin’ time!

GrAARGHH!

So, this is a little-bitty taste of a thing I wrote about at least one or two posts ago: i.e., some of the reasons I’m kind of permanently fucked-up from having a lot of boy-friends in my youth. Because boys and girls are biologically different. It meant that I might have been fighting with nature/nurture within my own self over a lot of things for a lot of years, and I could present many, many examples. That might be a post in and of itself, but I guess you might possibly understand my point enough from just this explanation. Maybe.

Okay but here’s my real point: women like to complain to each other because the very act of validation/support, i.e., hearing expressions like, “Oh that’s awful” or “That’s happened to me before too!” or “Tsk, awwwhhh,” or being the recipient of wordless hugging, produces oxytocin. Which, to women, is nice and pleasant and comforting. Being given advice does not produce comforting oxytocin to women, it perhaps feels like the other person is being “bossy,” or it can even be perceived as a threat, because it feels like a kind of rejection, i.e., it sends the message “you’re obviously not even trying to help yourself” or “you obviously haven’t even thought of what you need to do to fix this,” which is especially galling when the advice offered is completely junior-league unhelpful fortune-cookie crap that the complainer has obviously already tried, because it’s what literally anyone with at least two brain cells would try.

So that, my friends, is part of what “mansplaining” actually is. I mean to say, it’s explaining something incredibly basic and obvious to someone who has every reason to already know what is being explained. I didn’t used to understand what “masnplaining” meant exactly, in part because I have been in the business of writing training materials for a while—and in my line of work, the trainings have to be “dumbed-down” in order to work for even the very lowest common denominator; thus, I used to defend the idea of mansplaining. I still kind of do, in a way, in a convoluted sense, but in cases where you actually know the mansplainer and you recognize that he either hasn’t been listening to you at all, or apparently thinks you’re generally very dumb, as illustrated by how he’s talking to you like you’re a literal moron.

If you’ll excuse the word “moron.” I’m sure it’s falling out of favor. Same with the word “idiot.” Too bad, those are words I like. Goddamn Millennials and Zoomers, ruining all the best insults with their whole “let’s be nice to each other” agenda.

So hanyway, my two friends from Salt Lake whom I seem to love to bitch about on this very platform, they both fall into the worst possible examples of mansplaining in that exact way. Yet, over the years I was stuck in Salt Lake, I noted that at least one of them seemed to really want me to give him advice whenever he would complain about something. When I would try to “commiserate,” in terms of “Oh that’s happened to me before,” he would accuse me of “making it all about me.” In one such case—which happened before I took conflict resolution—he responded to my “here’s my similar story,” with, “But that’s all about you. What should I do?” And I was struck by how weird it was to be asked that. How the fuck should I know what you should do? I’m just trying to validate your feelings, isn’t that what complaining people want??

The trouble was, in some cases there was no advice that was going to work for him, because the main advice-looking-problem he kept presenting was, “How can I get young and pretty girls to want to fuck me again like they did when I was young and cute, since I’m now aged and boorish, and I refuse to even consider fucking a girl who is not young and pretty?”

This same gentlemen once told me that he did not want to be an “emotional cum rag” to excessive complainers. Thankfully, he wasn’t talking about me, because by that time I had since learned to stop complaining to him. It took me too long to learn it, though.

Some women tend to learn from an early age that they shouldn’t complain to men, because men will “mansplain” to them, i.e., will offer junior-league unhelpful fortune-cookie crap which is enormously insulting, (“Why don’t you just stop being so depressed?” this same “not yr emotional cum rag” friend once said to me), —so, sensible women usually look for other women to complain to. But sometimes, they encounter some weird “aggressive”-seeming woman who does exactly what a man would do, (ahem MY OLDEST SISTER), maybe such a woman just has extra testosterone or something, (who fuckin’ knows why some women do this), and sometimes, the testosterone-woman does this in a sneering or condescending or otherwise unpleasant-seeming tone of voice, which does not produce oxytocin in the complainer, and the complainer gets ragy. She might harbor pissiness at the other woman, or she might blow up. In that case, the advice-giver gets hurt feelings, and then the complainer has to apologize.

In other words, conflict ensues. “Drama,” if you will.

Victim, Rescuer, Persecutor. Three roles, and usually two people. But these two people switch roles and switch roles and switch roles.

It’s a drama triangle. It’s a Karpmann drama triangle.

And yes, the way to curtail it is to figure out what does the complainer actually want? And then actually address that. In many, many cases the complainer does not want advice. In other cases, maybe she does want advice, but you specifically can’t give the complainer any advice that’s going to help, in which case the only thing to do is declare a sort of boundary—”I can’t help you, because I just don’t know what the solution is. I don’t know what to tell you.” But it’s only wise—for the sake of the relationship—to declare this boundary after you’ve acknowledged what the complainer is actually looking for. Because if you said that to someone who was only looking for validation…then you’d still have a sort of Karpmann drama triangle on your hands. Except it would be worse.

In essence, you’d have more of a kind of Boo-Boo and Tani situation on your hands, which I will explain in a minute.

So, if you’re the complainer, it’s best to pick your audience carefully. Women just kind of have to be careful about “venting” to men, and that’s just the way it fuckin’ goes, because men are dumb about “social problems.” (Sorry but there’s research to back me up here—men are not as good as women when it comes to solving interpersonal relationship problems. Again, I can’t link to the study cuz it was bookmarked on my now-dead computer, and in this case I can’t find the one I want, Grarhrrr)

Most women figure out to NOT vent to men by a pretty young age, but as for me, it just took me too long. Even though my second-ex-husband was ADAMANT that I never vent to him about anything ever, I didn’t entirely chalk it up to his gender; I thought he was just an asshole. (Especially since he vented to me constantly—but he did it in a funny/angry way rather than in a whiny way.)

Turns out, a lot of men are exactly like this. Turns out, yes in fact, most men are like this. They complain in funny/angry ways all the goddamn motherfucking time, —but if a woman complains, she is typically characterized as an incessant whiner.

Well, I’m glad I finally figured this out! Otherwise I guess I’d still think my ex husband was an asshole!

Some women never figure this out, though. Some women keep trying to complain to men, or to women (OLDER SISTERS) who will not stop offering insulting advice, which is an overwhelmingly punishing endeavor. It would seem that the woman who wrote to the advice columnist in The Atlantic was such an older sister, whose sister had not figured out that she needed to stop complaining to an audience who was not going to stop with the sister-splaining, and maybe the advice columnist—allegedly a psychologist! —was such an older sister, too.

So, this was weird to me, given that there has been so much research illustrating that women do tend to complain to each other specifically for catharsis—and another longtime observation of mine is that when someone keeps complaining about the same thing? —It’s often because the other person is not giving them the “right” response. For whatever reason, they haven’t yet learned that they’re probably never going to get the “right” response from their audience, but if you are the audience, you have to just keep trying and feeling around, to “look for” the response that they want. OR JUST ASK THEM. “Are you looking for advice, or are you just frustrated right now?”

In the case illustrated above, maybe the sister did just want a lot of “Tsk, awwhhh,” and I can’t imagine why she wouldn’t want that, since she’d obviously never gotten it from her sister in the past. Because the world, the media, the culture, is rife with examples of women doing this to each other, which means that, in addition to the desire for the oxytocin experience, women sort of inherently expect to get that response from other women, and—it’s honestly weird and jarring to not get it. It makes one think that their older sisters might actually be sociopaths.

In the horrid, horrid comments section on that Atlantic blurb, people kept saying yes but if you validate her complaints, then she’ll just keep complaining. It was similar to the old-school advice to new mothers: if you pick up your crying baby, it will just encourage the baby to keep crying. Thankfully, that new mother advice was found to be uh entirely incorrect. In fact, the baby is probably just seeking comfort. Yet, there was no possible indication in this Atlantic blurb thing that if you validate a complaint, it might make the person feel better about this thing that is troubling them, which can actually pacify/nullify their need to complain about it at all.

I mean, to be fair, if you do not want to hold space for a person who complains all the time, then you shouldn’t have to. But…that’s kind of a different conversation, because it depends largely on your relationship with the person.

Well, I shouldn’t say that I denounce the ENTIRE BUSINESS OF PSYCHOLOGY because meanwhile, check out this dumb little blurby thing here, wherein some psychologist-lady describes the whole “help rejecting complainer” thing, but she at least has the wherewithal to include a paragraph explaining that yeah, when groups of women do this together, they are in fact often just looking for commiseration. So, yes, it’s not like this is unknown to the psychiatric fucking community! I don’t know why the Atlantic advice-column psychologist lady would think that condescendingly over-validating, which would almost certain come off as insincere, would be in any way a smart thing to do. Either genuinely commiserate, or ask the sister— “what do you want me to say? I mean, really, what do you need from me, here, advice, or support?”

So, also in that loathsome comments section were some folks who were saying that the “over-validating” was a bad idea, (because of the crying baby thing), and really the person just needs to set a boundary. This must be done by saying something along the lines of what I said way above: something like, “I don’t know how to help you, I can’t help you with this.” HOWEVER, like I said—this would not be a good solution if the person in question really was just seeking validation, and wasn’t looking for advice in the first place.

So, now bear with me while I mansplain the Boo-Boo and Tani dynamic, just as a matter of contrast. Here’s the truncated version, which isn’t so truncated because it’s a short comic:

One of these figures complains, (I think it was originally Tani, who was the quasi-“female” figure, though they were both sort of genderless), and the other figure—instead of offering advice or commiserating, says “I don’t want to hear about it.” The complainer gets ragy in response, the other figure cruelly laughs at the rage, and then, homicidal violence. I can’t actually remember who kills who, but in essence, a stabbing. There’s a stabbing.

So, this truncated interaction is a truncated/curtailed version of a Karpmann drama triangle, because there is no “rescuer.” It goes straight from victim to persecutor back to persecutor.

And this is, yeah, kind of what would happen if someone complains in an effort to find catharsis and then the other person automatically “sets a boundary” and says, “I can’t help you.” If the person was seeking advice then fine, I guess, but…if the person was seeking validation…well, it would be interpreted as practically the equivalent of saying, “I don’t want to hear about it.”

I will not validate you. Your problems aren’t bad, you have no right to be upset.

See, only a testosterone-laden teenage boy would draw a thing like this, and to an oxytocin-drenched girl who was maybe in a bad way, this was bound to be offensive. Because here’s the thing: there are two times in a female person’s life when she becomes saturated with oxytocin. 1. puberty and 2. pregnancy.

I just so happened to have been a pregnant teenager, and some bad stuff had recently happened in my life that I was complaining about, a lot, when this “I don’t want to hear about it” tableau was presented to me.

So, my friends who still refer to things via using this terminology, i.e., calling people “Boo Boo” or “Tani” are buying into some version of this curtailed Karpmann drama triangle, which honestly, uh, bugs me. It bugs me in the sense that, when a friend calls someone an “uber Tani,” he, like most men, doesn’t get it that the person in question is possibly just looking for some form of validation or commiseration. (I’m saying this based on one particular woman we know in common, who is on my mind for some inexplicable reason. I never actually talk to her, but she’s still too prime an example for her not to be on my mind. She complains a lot, and it has long been obvious to me that all she wants is for someone to say OH MY HOW AWFUL!)

I have other examples and I’m not going to use them because they will involve shit talking other friends and I am MIGHTILY STRUGGLING to not do that right now urgh urgh urgh but okay one such example happened when a (male) friend called a (female) friend “manipulative,” specifically because she complained on her facebook all the time, and I, who was still a dumb naive moron, was shocked. How was it manipulative, I wondered? People who complain all the time are literally just reaching out for a “wow that sucks!” or maybe, like, a fucking hug, for crying out loud.

So, women are more likely to understand this about each other, but that female understanding is not hard-and-fast, obviously, as evidenced by people like…older sisters, and Atlantic magazine advice-column psychology ladies.

Again, I can offer the caveat that some people within the quote-unquote “psychological community” do understand that women typically complain to each other for therapeutic reasons, because there has been quite a lot of research about it. Yet, these awful, “Tumblr-style” buzzphrases continue to circulate my world and penetrate my early-morning eyesight via 4 AM Instagram doomscrolling and piss me the fuck off, you know, stuff like “help-rejecting complainer.” which is, JESUS CHRIST, a kind of “victim blaming” that is especially offensive to me because it denies the person their right to be a victim at all.

My god.

Well, it has LONG driven me crazy when the phrase “being a victim” is used as a kind of criticism, when one considers that SOME PEOPLE ARE ACTUALLY VICTIMS OF BAD THINGS THAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED. Some of the bad things are lesser things, and some of the bad things are greater things, but either way the person can still be construed as a victim. And they are allowed to seek validation by complaining, or venting.

Perhaps relevant here: my own post from some months back about “venting” versus “ruminating.”

Well this, my friends, is a large part of what frankly “offends” me about the old fake-religion wielding friends wanting to make this fake religion something “real.”

Because not only is it not “real,” a lot of it is also not actually useful. Some of it is in fact, potentially harmful. Like, for example, that Boo Boo and Tani dynamic, which is an incomplete and extremely un-nuanced one-sided outdated and uninformed description of a very unhealthy situation, and honestly…it needs to fucking die forever.

I was trying to write that in a “nice” way in the memoir-thing, and I failed. I mean, I failed to really illustrate it, but I’m illustrating it now, because of what I said in my “venting” versus “ruminating” post—my writing has long been dishonest; when I read an older, unedited version of the book, it was so much better before I smoothed it over and took the teeth out of it, and despite the reality that I really don’t want to pursue “real” writing anymore…I’m sick of being dishonest when I do write, or otherwise express myself. It’s never done me any good.

(I prefer expressing myself via writing specifically because when I talk, I just trip all over my words. I talk too much, and I’m also bad at talking. It’s an ongoing problem. Another thing I’m bad at is listening. I would rather just read peoples’ thoughts than listen to them. This is a big-big-large-giant part of why I have definitively decided that I don’t want anymore friends, at all, ever. Because for me, it’s emotional labor—genuine hard work to make friends, and it’s work that I do not enjoy.)

So, this sort of swings me back around to my ongoing conundrum, which is that my only close friends are still my old Zii-Catcherist friends. I don’t want to make new friends, but my old friends chafe me on various levels, and much of the chafing is directly related to stuff about Zii-Catcherism. So, this is a thing I’ve got to figure out how to compromise with, or…something.

Part of why I wrote the book was because I was trying to figure out how to express to Matt that I didn’t like what he was doing with his “new” version of Zia, but I had to…write it all out, to be able to even...figure out exactly what I didn’t like, or why I didn’t like it.

Ugh but here’s part of the problem, in a sort of….philosophical Immanual-Kant kind of interpretation…I mean, to think of Zia/Zii-Catcherism as a “thing in itself” is dumb, because…it was a collective. Even all the people involved in the collective can’t agree on what any of it was, or what any of it meant, obviously, because of course, each person was experiencing it in his or her own way, because of course they were. I’m sure I’m underestimating Matt to presume that he doesn’t “get” this, I’m sure he does “get” it, but—I guess this is why I feel it’s just a bad idea for any one member of something like a collective to try to “take” it and declare “what it is.”

There can be NO AGREEMENT in such a situation!

I mean, part of what fueled my thinking was the understanding that Jeff and Dan, who came from one camp, since they had known each other since Junior high and some of the Zia stuff was filtered down through bullshit they had been tossing back and forth since then—they thought of it all in completely different ways than how the rest of us, who wound up at the bad kid school, came to think of it, when neither Jeff nor Dan had any more “daily” input. Jeff has indicated that at that point—the point when several of us were kicked out of school—he practically forgot about it as anything more than just a joke. It meant nothing more to him than an inside joke; one that was something to continue to fuel silly art.

That’s similar to how I thought of it, but it seemed to me that Stefan and Matt took it so much more seriously, which…is something that could be discussed almost endlessly.

I was not “around” in the early-early days of it, but I was bothered that Matt was not ever…”around,” for the timeperiod before the bad kid school, because inevitably his interpretation of the entire thing was missing a huge piece of what it was.

But again, in an Immanual Kant kind of way, that’s…a meaningless thing to say. What was it, in itself?

It was a device to keep people talking to each other when they couldn’t think of anything else to talk about? It was a container to classify and hold literally anything that came to our minds?

I did write in the book-thing that I think it’s impressive that my friends were able to identify and talk about all these interesting dynamics—like a curtailed bit of a Karpmann drama triangle, for example. They were able to identify and talk about weird political and social interactions that most teenagers are beyond oblivious about; I think my friends were and still are really super-smart, they all had several characteristics in common that made them really super-smart, (like a high need for cognition and unusually high creativity, which I wrote about at length), —and that was a large part of what I devoted a lot of my writing to—trying to build up why Zii-Catcherism was a cool thing. But I also don’t think it was such a cool or useful thing that the thing-in-itself—whatever that is—needs to be perpetuated; what needs to be perpetuated is “It’s good for alienated fucked-up lonely teenagers to find creative outlets like this, but not specifically this.”

Or, something like that.

(EDIT: I especially feel this way now that I’m trying to figure out if I could “get through” to my 15-year-old nephew, who desperately needs something like Zii-Catcherism. But not specifically Zii-Catcherism, which would not help him at all, because someone else made it. He needs to…create something that will help shift his paradigm, which is what Zii-Catcherism was for me, and for several of us. Oh that’s a post all by itself! I mean—alienated teenagers, and creating things…not jumping on someone else’s outdated bandwagon, get it? CReating it themselves.)

I also spent a lot of time writing about all the reasons why I—specifically me, identified as an alienated fucked-up lonely teenager, and a lot of that was very time-and-place specific. I don’t think that most of the stuff we encountered or talked about as teenagers could or should be transferred to other people via the iconography and terminology that we used, because—it was/is dated, it was/is specific to us, and it would require an incredible amount of over-explaining a bunch of inside jokes, which were not actually all that funny.

Some of them were worse than unfunny. Some of them were so dumb as to be embarrassing. And some of them were actually harmful. So there have been many times in my life that I did genuinely want to be away from it, because, uh,

I didn’t want to hear about it.

I should have written these things more clearly in the book, probably?

Listen: I’ve always just been too much of a “Tani,” or a Karpmann-Drama-Triangle victim. I mean, in a dishonest way. Much like the help-rejecting complainer sister, who is clearly not being “honest” about why she’s complaining—or at least, she’s not being direct enough about why she’s complaining, because her advice-giving sister obviously doesn’t fucking “get” why she’s doing it. If her sister keeps offering advice that gets repeatedly rejected, the sister clearly doesn’t know what the “requests” of the complaints actually are. But the complaining sister definitely does not want advice. I don’t know for sure what the sister wants (because I didn’t read the entire article), but I can tell you, it ain’t advice.

At any rate, my book wound up being over 700 pages in the end, and too much of it just…failed to get to the point. The point was, I’m sort of mad and/or freaked out that Matt is doing this, but I needed to write at least 700 pages to even begin to approach why I’m mad, because that’s how I process complicated emotional stuff—writing.

And you know…maybe I still don’t even know exactly why I’m mad. So maybe I need to write 700 more pages!

(Well I’m sure I’ll write that many more pages whether its useful or not. Because…vent-writing? It’s what I do.)