I’ve been doing archiving again today, downloading local copies of things that previously existed (in versions accessible to me) only on the Internet.
The thing about archiving is that it *hurts*. Not having done it–the moment when you want to remind yourself how something went and find it isn’t there to tell you, will never be there again–hurts a lot more, so I keep doing this. My past is valuable to me and I want to keep hold of it, have it available, and yet it always hurts to immerse myself in it.
(Today I’m saving works of fiction, works I think I would miss if their links rotted. (Some of them have already rotted. Most were salvageable through the Internet Archive. But only most.) I didn’t think that would hurt, but it turns out that it does, that they evoke the time periods I read them in.)
I know a lot of people hate their past selves, for their ignorance and foolishness. I think this is another version of that impulse, but I don’t hate past-me.
I don’t hate *her*. I hate the people who did this to her.
I think that’s a lot of the problem. I think maybe a lot of the pain of archiving isn’t inherent to the task in general, but because most of the stuff I’m archiving–this project and previous projects–is from around my late teens, give or take, and I was in a lot of pain then. A lot of it I hardly acknowledged at the time, or if I acknowledged it I shrugged and figured that was just how things were.
Maybe it’s good for me to immerse myself in the past, sometimes, if only to show myself how far I’ve come.
aaaaaaaahhhhh
I have reached a series that–while it has many good parts, and I still have plans to finish reading it someday–also brings up a whole lot of baggage
and a large part of the baggage is feeling like I’m not allowed to complain about it
aaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh
#I can’t even really get angry at anyone involved, #the worst part is knowing they weren’t even wrong to do it, #knowing I really *didn’t* deserve consideration,
no, you know what? that’s not quite true
yeah, I didn’t deserve *full* consideration, and yeah even if they’d done everything right I’d probably still have felt subjectively (unreasonably) betrayed, but I deserved more consideration than I got
everyone deserved it
because you know what? even if they didn’t recognise it as erotic, even if they didn’t even recognise it as *trance*, they still sprung a “““vicarious relaxation exercise””” on people without content warnings
honestly in some ways that’s *worse* for other people than it is for me, *I* realised what they were doing three paragraphs in, most people straight up *don’t have* “this story is attempting to hypnotise the reader” alarms in their brain and so it couldn’t have set those alarms off
@injygo replied:
“that’s horrible and i am really upset that anyone would write that now
people should warn for hypno type things
i once went to a concert thing where they did a “relaxation exercise” and it triggered the fuck out of me and caused a meltdown
and this could have been alleviated by providing a content warning“
The good news is, I went back and checked and they’ve since added a content warning to the beginning of the fic (continuing to refer to it as a “vicarious relaxation exercise”, but I suppose that’s probably enough to be getting on with). It looks like they added that in response to the comment I left when I first read it.
I hope that reassures you. I know *I* find it reassuring, that my comment actually accomplished something useful and wasn’t just me barging in somewhere and making people uncomfortable.
Tags:
#(I don’t know how uncomfortable they actually found it) #(it’s partly the anxiety talking) #replies #sexuality and lack thereof #amnesia cw? #(for first post in chain) #vagueblogging
Brinens and Things 
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