I hate the misconception that introverts don’t like talking. If you’re the right person, we’ll talk to you for hours on end about pretty much anything. However, it’s incredibly difficult to find the right people, so for the most part we’ll probably just stay quiet.
A lot of pets will ignore you, but only a cat will follow you from room to room and check your lines of vision to make absolutely certain that you can see them ignoring you.
theyre not ignoring you! this is actually just a cats way of saying they want to keep you company without infringing on your personal space. its the equivalent of going to a friends house while you both separately scroll through tumblr, even though youre glad to be together. alternatively the cat could be curious about what you are doing, but shy to make its presence known. either way the cat is paying very close attention to you!
this made me feel better
😺
I don’t understand why cats will have everything they do demonized no matter how innocent it is
It’s because they are hypersensitive introverts, and humans are mostly social extroverts.
Hypersensitive, introverted humans are often mistaken for antisocial, and as a species, we are myopic and anthropomorphize EVERYTHING.
Semi-social animals are not naturally intuitive to humans.
Dog packs very closely mirror a nuclear human family, made up of a mother and father and their pups, who leave to find their own mates and start their own packs as they mature beyond young adult hood.
Pigeon flocks are like a villiage comprized of one big, extended family, where children mostly stay close and new birds marry in.
Cats don’t work that way. There is no firmly set social structure for more social domestic cats to fall back on. None of the species they are thought to come from are naturally social. They mate, have kittens, and those families disperse to the four winds as soon as the young become self sufficient.
We have selected for higher tolerance to crowding and confinement, but that does not a social structure make.
A group of cats is more like random collage dorm or house mates. Whether or not they get along and how many the group can support long term depends on how well their individual personalities mesh, regardless of blood relation.
Kittens are more out going and have more energy than adult cats, but as they age, being playful and taking the risk of being friendly takes more energy than they have, so they go from being willing to play with every one to prefering the company of favorite familiar entities that have taken the time to learn about that individuals needs and preferences.
Humans, who naturally form close knit pack bonds, are generally out going, and do their very damnedest to form life long bonds of friendship see a cat’s intense curiosity and wary shyness of approach as stalkerish, and its need for quiet solitude when overstimulated (coupled with just *how* fast they become overstimulated) as fickleness, and are completely heartbroken when a friendly, out going kitten grows into a relatively shy, reserved cat.
With no effort to understand, what the average human sees is a sly, untrustwothy animal that is friendly one second, and warninglessly aggressive the next, not because there actually was no warning, but because feline body language is very subtle.
Once again, due to a cat’s sensitivity.
To a cat, humans are VERY loud, over the top dramatic, and socially dense as a fucking brick.
They have to scream EVERYTHING to get across to most of us, and that shit is exhausting.
The fact that they do make that stressful and exhausting effort proves that the ones who like us actually love us VERY much! Just not in a way that big, loud, oblivious drama queens easily pick up on.
Reblogging to the pet blog because animal behavior.
Time for me to fall over, even if I’m still not sure I want to go to bed. Today has been a weird brain day, but also a generally (and unexpectedly) social one for me. Not brick-space social, but virtual-space social. Which is as much a crap-shoot sometimes as brick-space social, so a win. 🙂
Hugs for everyone, and I hope y’all sleep well when you get there!
Thinky thoughts for the evening – really, for the last week or so – that I’m to the point of going “fuck if someone else has said it, or if it pisses anyone off”.
There has been, since I started writing, this concept of the Mary Sue. The “badly written authorial insert”, nominally. Always female. Often young. Always the protagonist of the fic.
And you know what? That discourages people from seeing themselves as the protagonist. It says that only certain types of people are allowed to be protagonists, and certainly not anyone who identifies as female.
That probably has been said more eloquently by people who have more time and faster fingers on the keyboard. I’ve probably even seen it float past on my dash. Still needed to articulate it anyway.
But that definition of Mary Sue has made it incredibly hard for me to be confident of OCs, especially non-male OCs, until recently. Left me wary of shaping characters who in any way resembled me that were meant for anything other than throw-away fic. Stuff meant to be self-deprecating and laughed at. Not with. At.
It’s that which made the post about doing a self-indulgent self-insert thing in January make me stop and think and go… “yes, yes I want to do this, even if no one reads.” And honestly, I don’t think the intrusive, niggling thought that no one wants to see a protagonist who is agender, aro-ace*, with invisible disabilities and mental health issues, deeply introverted, sometimes non-verbal, sometimes can’t be brief to save their life, both badly touch-starved and averse to physical contact (especially with strangers and/or without knowing it’s coming), and prone to severe bouts of anxiety when in unfamiliar non-emergency situations (and sometimes in emergency situations, too, the mess in my head keeps getting worse) will go away.
In short, I keep having this niggling fear that no one is going to want to see me in a story. Especially if I’m doing me from a first-person POV, as I am with the one. And may well do with the other. And doing the “gonna save as many as I can” thing, provided someone believes me, and doesn’t just think I’m crazy.
Anyway. I keep telling myself that this fear is my brain lying to me, and I’ll be fine, but it won’t shut up, because it’s winter and there’s not enough sun and it’s been a crap year for brain chemistry anyway, and yeah. I’m going to go back to attempting to write myself into my favorite universes, and see if I can’t keep my favorites alive because what else is writing self-indulgent fluff for?
(Do not tell me for getting into the pants of favorite characters, unless you mean that literally in the “their letting me borrow their clothes because I only have what I showed up in” sense. For others, yes, it may be. See also aromantic asexual*. I’ll be fine without sex or romance.)
*Asexual spectrum, because seriously, there’s flexibility and fluctuation in there for me, and it’s just easier to say ace and be done with it than try to explain further.
shoutout to depressed and anxious people who often isolate themselves because they don’t have the energy to socialize, they’re scared, don’t believe anyone genuinely wants them around, etc.
There's a Mirror on the Wall 