"forcing their way of life onto us".

If someone says "I am a X" and a dweller responds with "no, you are not a X, and here's why I am so certain about that as a third party", that is an act of forcing their worldview/lifestyle onto other people.

So about five years ago I was an extremely depressed teenager. I remember crying for hours on hours one night, and then after that, I kind of turned off my intense emotions as a defense mechanism. I could still laugh or be annoyed, but I couldn't cry or see beauty or be angry at the world.

This winter was the most difficult of my life. I've messed up, I've lost friendships, I've failed in college, I've been addicted to weed, I've not been the person I want to be. But I was also able to cry for the first time in five years. Not just sniffles and a tear, proper bawling my head off ugly crying. And since then, I have been able to cry at bad things and good things. I got rejected by someone I liked and I cried - last time that happened, and the time before, I felt nothing. I watched the final episode of Mob Psycho and I cried a lot. I didn't cry when it first came out, and I already knew what was going to happen. I'd seen it before, but I cried this time. I also sat on a bench with my friends and looked at the Irish coast and saw the light and the colours and movement and it was beautiful.

Growing is hard and painful. Its one thing to know this intellectually, and another entirely to experience it. You also don't get to choose when you grow. It just happens out of necessity. I'm about to turn 22 and I've only just realized how much time I could have ahead of me, and I need to decide how I'm going to live.

I like analyzing media and looking at characters. I criticize bad character arcs and appreciate strong characterisation. But I've just begun trying in earnest to write a novel, and I've realized how little I actually understand about the human experience. How can I write about things I've never gone through? I don't know, but I'll try.

I'm becoming an adult, for real, actually this time. When I started college I was only an adult in technicality. Now I'm soon leaving college and I've been forced to change. It makes me want to change myself on purpose, and control who I am. When I started college I felt sad, because I felt like I was closing the chapter of my life that was childhood, which I never wanted to end. Now I'm leaving college and I feel like the training wheels have come off, and I can be so much faster and freer. Living is a strange thing, and I'd like to find out more about it.

Sometimes I separate the art from the artist like I have a cheap copy of the road and Cormac Mccarthy is dead, so him being a nonce as we found out last year feels different.

But Neil Gaiman is alive and his crimes are pretty bad. I don't really feel I could ever read these again and enjoy them. Or recommend them.

Also the specific details of his abuse are very similar to a case I dealt with years ago in my old work and it's brought up some bad memories there.

I probably should donate them but I'm tempted to toss them. The 0.5 is good omens but I'm sure Terry Pratchett would be fine with my fisbee-ing it into a skip if he was alive.

Health insurance at work is also starting to be a nightmare. The HR system allows you not to disclose gender/sex, but that's fake because you have to pick a binary sex for the health insurance. The HR representative also used transphobic language in the email letting me know about this, so that's pretty bad as well. I put it down as female, and then updated my gender identity info as well to make it clear. Not adding pronouns yet since that pops up without digging into the profile, so at least I can avoid that involuntary outing, but it really sucks overall.

I am now worried that the insurance company is going to ask for proof of sex at some point, and until I get my passport I don't have any IDs that have the correct gender marker (updating state ID is out of the question).