some stuff you won’t be good at. i don’t think i have the patience to raise a parrot; they’re a big responsibility that i’m not ready for yet. i’m scared of hermit crabs. i’ve made my stance vis-à-vis crabs a very vocal one, in that i truly believe they should either be eaten or destroyed before they destroy us.
it took me a long time to figure out sometimes i’m other people’s idea of a parrot, but that doesn’t make me a bad person. just because i’m too high-energy for them doesn’t mean i’m too high-energy always. i am hard to get to know, and i am flighty, and i sometimes have mood swings so sudden and fierce that even i’m shocked by them.
that doesn’t mean that i can never find a home. sometimes the home is a nest i have to make myself, is all. sometimes i have to expect less from other people because they have different boundaries, sometimes i have to just honestly chill.
i think we all have a tendency to feel rejection deeper than we feel love. when someone doesn’t want to speak to us, when someone sees our flaws, those flaws swell up in our eyes and devour us. i spend hours going over and over the details of small interactions, trying to figure out why that person just doesn’t like me. i somehow always take it personally.
but i just don’t like crabs. that doesn’t mean they don’t play an important part in the ecosystem, even if they are highly weaponized versions of spiders.
it’s hard not to turn how others see us around on ourselves. we look in the mirror and think: burden. useless. bad at everything. untalented. below average.
it’s hard. it takes a lot of practice. but see yourself as just needing to find a better home. sometimes people - a lot of people - won’t have a place for you in their heart. and that hurts.
but it doesn’t change you. it doesn’t speak to who you are. it only talks about them, and what they expect. and i promise if you start looking inside yourself and looking for people like you, you’ll find… well, parrots live in groups. and i know you’ll find somebody who is the same kind of feather as you.
