Well, this is awkward.

2026-02-21T21:45:36Z

You have a special interest.

Since you were a kid, outer space was cool. Or maybe it was collecting Pokemon cards. Playing basketball. Trains. Crochet. Drawing. Historical reenactment.

Whatever it is, everybody knows about your love for it. Your parents, your siblings, your friends. When the topic comes up, everyone turns to you. You're expected to have a comment or reaction.

It's that type of childhood interest. The kind that never truly goes away.

Imagine: you're an adult now and one of your friends mentions wanting to regularly meet up to do something involving your interest. It's a casual astronomy club, a local Pokemon TCG tournament, an hour where your friends sit and crochet silently together. Either way -— you're excited. Your interest isn't weird, but it isn't something you get to gush about with like-minded people very often.

How are you meant to feel after you learn that the Special Interest Meet-up was planned, organized, put together, and had been in motion for weeks and an invitation was never extended to you? There was no, "I know you would've loved to participate but there's no more space for extra people", no excuse about schedules conflicting, or claims of last minute changes that meant you couldn't even be a silent observer.
Nothing. The entire friend group knows about your half-interest-half-obsession and there was radio silence. Zero communication. Zero interest check. Nothing at all.

How are you meant to feel when a mutual friend excitedly telling you about what happened at the last meet-up was how you found out?

I've been sitting on this for a few months now. Struggling to see this friend the same way, to talk to them like normal. I've been pretending to be excited whenever our mutual friend shares things with me, even though I just feel crushed the more fun details I learn I'm missing out on.

I have nobody to talk to about this who isn't connected to those friends.

I thought I'd gotten over it, for a while... but I'm realizing every time I have a low moment, a bad mental health day, or a spell of sadness that lasts a few moments too long, it all rushes back: "Someone you thought was a friend had no desire to include you in something they've known for over a decade is a love of yours." All the implications of that exclusion overrun my thoughts and reinforce my inability to see this friend in the same light.

I really don't know how I'm meant to understand this and feel about it.

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Inspiring blogs, essays, and websites

2025-06-16T19:04:20Z

My mental health has been gradually improving since stepping back from social media. Longstanding struggles with anger and irritation improved dramatically since leaving Tumblr (pre-2019) and Twitter (mid-2020s). I thought the Fediverse, specifically Mastodon, would be different, and for a time it was, when I originally joined between 2017 and 2018. But then wave after wave of Twitter users began to migrate en masse, and then the Tumblr users came a few years later, and before I knew it an Eternal September had arrived. It didn't take long for the Fediverse to attract bad actors and, as I'd feared, the site culture began to slide closer to the Twitter status quo. I was once again getting angry and irritated all the time.

I have a (re)growing fondness for blog posts and essays now, and Twitterlike is a Bad Shape by Coyote (osteophage) is a big reason why. I came across this essay at the right time; it described what I was observing and what I'd been feeling but had been unable to put into words.

Since then, I've come across a few more interesting things:

[Webring] Verbosity: I was very pleased to stumble across this webring as someone who is trying to get back into reading more and browsing outside of social media. It is focused on verbose websites with a lot of text, though the content of that text can be anything. One such website is Aristasian Reminiscence. It's about Aristasia, which I'd never heard of in my entire life, from a person who lurked in those spaces as a teenager. According to the webmaster, Claire, Aristasia "was a group of women who abandoned men and the modern world. Instead, they made their own country, just for ladies, with an elaborate belief system and mythology."

[Article] Rolling Stone: AI-Fueled Spiritual Delusions Are Destroying Human Relationships: Miles Klee explores several cases of spouses "losing" their loved ones to conspiracy theories and delusions due to large language models like ChatGPT returning output that is uncritically agreeable, encouraging, or downright hallucinating falsehoods.

[Website] Shorpy: Shorpy calls itself a "historic American photo archive". If you have an interest in history, especially American history, and you prefer to see what average life was like, you'll enjoy scrolling through this site's photographs as much as I did. And if, like me, you're wondering "What the hell is a Shorpy?", they have an explanation of their name here.

I'm trying to get into the habit of immediately reading the interesting things I find instead of throwing them into the bookmarks folder that has become a glorified TBR (to be read) list. It's a work in progress.

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𝚋𝚒𝚝𝚜 & 𝚋𝚢𝚝𝚎𝚜

Well, this is awkward.

Inspiring blogs, essays, and websites