Pagan Tropers Unite!

...It couldn't have been Steve Irwin, apotheosis-ized or euhemerism-ized into a pop culture pantheon right alongside Space Mom, huh? (Because you mentioned Australia too! And crocs, all the time!) It had to be Sobek and that specific otherworld-multiverse aspect manifestation of Sobek.

But Steve Irwin is nice, and I feel like he'd NOT barge into someone's house, roaring in broken English (he was a native speaker, after all). Especially not with a crocodile's head on a human body.

Also, "His Lordship, Pointed Of Teeth" is indeed one of Sobek's classical titles, which I got from the Other Wiki. Sobek kept yelling it at me, and I assume he was happy because once he calmed down, he kept repeating something like, "POINTED-OF-TEETH. YES. I AM SOBEK, AND MY TEETH ARE MANY AND GLEAMING. BABAYLAN, WHO MY COUSIN LOVES. YOU CALLED ME FOR THIS DEED. YOU CALLED ME BY MY NAME. YES???"

They're not literally related. I asked him today what he meant by "my cousin" and he went "YOU NAMED HAIK THE CROCODILE-GOD. YES. I TOLERATED IT. YOU ARE NOT OF MY PEOPLE. YOU HAVE DIFFERENT LAWS. IF I HAD BEEN MAD, I WOULD MAKE YOU STOP. YES. I LIKE HIM NOW. HE IS STRONG. SO WE ARE COUSINS NOW. AND SO ARE YOU. YES."

I'm guessing he meant that since crocodile-deities are pretty rare, Haik and Sobek now call themselves cousins through their very distinct sacred animals.

edited 12th Apr '18 12:52:50 AM by Sharysa

Mulling over the potential for fictional reconstruction around Terry Pratchett's Nation by paralleling that specific Pelagic civilization more with archipelago Southeast Asia than Where the Hell Is Springfield? (okay but more obviously Oceania).

Spoilers for Nation and inchoate ramblings about random archaeological findings with no timeline, ahead.

Archaeology and history in Real Life have theorists Bellwood and Solheim disagree with Austronesian migration theories—except on the point that Madagascar and Polynesian peoples were descended from archipelago Southeast Asians.

Pratchett was big on gender binary, which I find more consistent with gender constructs in Polynesia than archipelago Southeast Asia (see: Bugis tribe of Sulawesi, pre-colonial bayoguin in Luzon and asog more in the Visayas) but, I haven't looked in much with how people in Madagascar developed gender constructs since Southeast Asian migration. (Makes note to look into that.)

Because I also think the portrayal of ancestral veneration of Grandmothers set apart from Grandfathers probably stems more from Pratchett's own Proto Indo European descended vestigial ideas about binary gender and spirituality than early and more original forms maybe of Austronesian—which, I would like to claim, structured queerer and more gender-egalitarian cultures.

Nation mentions pigs and dogs, two archaeological domesticates of Neolithic archipelago Southeast Asia (but I don't know if dogs in that context were domesticated as pets, like Pratchett wrote of them being, because it might be just as likely historically that dogs were food.) (Hey, pigs can be very clever and affectionate animals, too, so—no judging!) Chickens are another prominent domesticate in archipelago Southeast Asia and Oceania—not mentioned so much in Nation.

And I compare that to neolithic Southeast Asian findings as though liths had much to do with it all, but according to my roommate's lecture notes that I'm stealing—early Southeast Asian archipelago people seemed to go, "Why are we doing this with the stones again? Seashells are right there..." So seashell tech was generally the thing besides a massive Lapita pottery/plainware trade, and bone carvings (of porpoise bones or ivory pig tusks), before metalsmithing became a thing. So there would be tridachna-shell adzes, used for agriculture and hunting, that were often buried with the dead.

The Bronze Age of archipelago Southeast Asia (not only trade to get the finished products, because there were metalsmithing crucibles found here) seemed to coincide with a more fashionable "stone age" returning less in terms of axeheads and more in terms of jade and carnelian from mainland Southeast Asia. Vietnam has swirly pottery designs by tradition that Manunggul pottery seems to also have, attesting to the reach of the trade at the time, as well as Thai blackware pottery.

Ritual items as opposed to ordinary use items were still extrapolated from the decorative aspect of any given item.

The Bronze Age seems to also coincide with a heightened interest in weaponry, so trade seemed to come mano-a-mano with warfare.

Agriculture—well, foraging might be closer to it—included sago palm, taro yam, several kinds of gourds, and...breadfruit? (Makes a note to cross-check cultivation history of breadfruit.)

There's a line here that says "red slip pottery boat building" but I doubt that boats were made out of pottery.

The balangay boats took form concurrent with the kingdom of Butuan connecting Zamboanga people with Tausug people. (Makes a note to cross-check development of the vinta.)

Oh no no, I wasn't saying you were mistaken, I was attempting levity in the vein of Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?

edited 14th Apr '18 5:54:01 PM by Faemon

Oh, that makes a lot more sense. Lack of voice tones on the internet, lol.

I had been planning to follow-up on the fictional reconstruction of Nation by comparing the archaeology notes of societies in Oceania. (I haven't forgotten Madagascar, I just don't find it mentioned as much in passing as maritime Southeast Asia.)

But then I found these print-outs of Multidisciplinary Perspectives on the Origins and Migrations of Austronesian-Speaking Peoples Prior to 1000 BC by Peter Bellwood et al (roommate is an anthropologist) and, while my roommate reminded me that Bellwood's single-origin tracing of Austronesian is only Bellwood's theory and I should read Solheim's argument sometime too...I did consider it very interesting.

The languages spoken in Polynesia and even Indonesia were, in the above-cited paper, stated to have formed too recently to be of interest in a paper about the origins of Austronesian. Bellwood puts it at around 3500 BC to 2800 BC when Proto-Austronesian language speakers were migrating from Taiwan to Northern Philippines, and the origin point (or origin area) of Austronesian proper was during the exploration of what is now the Philippine Islands—of course intermingling with the people who were there before the 3500 BC wave of Taiwanese migration, those were basically the dawdlers who declined to go all the way to Australia back during one of the earlier Ice Ages' migrations (Bellwood puts that at 25,000 years ago. Or was it 25,000 BC? I need to check, although that Ice Age migration would be at a time depth that doesn't make much difference. My roommate says it was between 40,000 years ago and 25,000 years ago anyway.)

The multiple disciplines that Bellwood, Geoffrey Chambers, and Hsiao-chun Hung put together for this paper, are: linguistic comparisons, archaeological conjecture extensively focused on the forms and designs of pottery (as in...they mention stonecraft weights for fishing nets and I lean into the paper a little because it's something that isn't pottery...and then they go back to textwalls about the pottery and I'm sitting there with a sad face going sort of "nuuuuu tell me how they fished..." because it feels like pottery analysis takes up twenty pages of a 30-page paper), and DNA testing of pigs and humans. Apparently there are people in New Guinea who are less closely related to other people in New Guinea, than maritime Southeast Asian people are to Oceanian people. Nobody mentions Madagascar.

And then I found this video about the history of the Philippines, which covers the classical age of rajahnates:

• Ifugoa 500 BC to 1601 AD, I can only guess were highlanders, and the videomaker described it as that they basically had a senate so maybe this doesn't count as a rajahnate.
• Tondo 900 AD to 1589 AD, (Mance Rayder sigh.) Everybody hated Tondo.
• Ma-i 971 AD to 1339 AD, vassal state of the Song dynasty in the Middle Kingdom, so I am not entirely sure that they called the leader there a "rajah" either.
• Butuan 1001 AD to 1521 AD
• Madja-as 1200 AD to 1569 AD, vassal state of the Empire of Srivijaya
• Sugbu 1200 AD to 1565 AD, vassal state of the Chola dynasty until Rajamuda Sri Lumay whose father sent him to establish a vassal state in the first place went "lol no dad this mine now"
• Caboloan 1406 AD to 1578 AD, a tributary state of the Ming Dynasty in the Middle Kingdom, and I don't understand the distinction between a vassal or tributary but anyway
• Manila 1500 AD to 1543 AD, didn't last long except/unless considering that it was the Bruneian Empire that established this rajahnate, and that Empire had either itself been established since, or Made Its Presence Known in the Philippine islands since, 1368 AD. They finally set up Manila right across the river from Tondo, because it was a literal passive-aggressive turf war apparently.

Until I had read about these classical ages, my image of the early colonial times had been of thatch-hut villages with one family that would produce and then train the town witches, and maybe in the deep South there would be a sort of State Religion with formal customs and advanced enough tech and medicine that nobody really lets the ecstatic spiritualists do anything too important—like the census, taxes, trade with surrounding nations, police/law and military matters beyond a religio-spiritual morale boost. Considering that these ecstatic practices were thriving at the time that colonists came on over, to the point that those doing the documenting were afraid of both the social power wielded by these "witches" and also possibly laserbeams shooting from their eyes (exaggeration), that does suggest to me an adaptation to an unexpectedly sophisticated complex society. I haven't gotten the impression from anything else that I have read, that these rajahnates would have cultivated an entirely separate and organized caste of clergy, unlike in classical Greece and Rome, or in the great city-states of Central America. Perhaps with more influence from Hindu and Muslim Empires—and I have no idea how the vassals and tributaries of China would have dealt with local religion—there would be mystics with the formal customs and aesthetics from those religions but syncretized with animistic beliefs from even earlier before.

I skimmed Faemon's post about Austronesian and its heavily disputed origins, and I will absolutely do a response to that later because Shit is Happening Very Suddenly.

1) I've been feeling like shit for the past week. Moreso than usual depression, because one of my friends has serious dental issues that are fucking up her mouth and ability to work thanks to needing painkillers, and she really needs surgery BUT IT'S FUCKING EXPENSIVE. (Because she needs a full-on reconstruction, as opposed to normal surgery.) Then there's my own eye issue that may not TECHNICALLY be an emergency, but the eye doc specifically warned me "if we just brush this off for ten years because it's not getting worse YET, you may start to lose vision in this eye over the next decade or two and it'll be a lot harder to fix. This happens a LOT with other patients with retina issues."

Plus I've been feeling isolated thanks to "trying to learn Filipino anito religion, but with VERY limited resources" and "my job is emotionally killing me, and it's not very nice to my back, either."

2) A couple days ago I got really weepy and snappish at the gods. Probably because of my period, but yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaah I still have feelings of "y'all haven't done shit to help me except for Haik and Shang (and now Shang feels bad because his help ended up being accidentally shitty), so PLEASE FIND ME A BETTER JOB BEFORE MY SOUL IS GONE AND/OR MY BACK IS THROWN OUT. OR GET ME FIVE MILLION DOLLARS SO I CAN QUIT MY JOB AND WORK ON MY ART."

Then I wrote an angry shamanism / Starving Artist poem to feel better.

And today I went driving by the beach and did my usual "anoint my sea-glass necklace and sea-turtle in the ocean" thing, while also asking the Ocean to PLEASE GET ME A BETTER JOB OR FIVE MILLION DOLLARS BEFORE I TURN INTO A WRECK AT 30. Guess what happened?

1) I finally got a response from a social-media figure that I asked to promote The Crocodile God a month ago (turns out he's the "forgetful" type of depressed person) and now everything's back on track.

2) My sister found a hiring ad for a damn MAGIC SHOP. Just sent a cover letter and my resume to them. I'll be honest, the magic shop sounds pretty New Agey, but one of the staff is a follower of the Morrigan and another is a Latina curandera. I said in the email that 1) I have Tarot cards and a collection of paganism/witchcraft books, and 2) I'm pagan and I'm on a journey to become a Filipino babaylan.

Like this is THE MOST AWESOME JOB I HAVE EVER SEEN and I already applied to two bookstores (which never fucking answered my emails anyway).

I WANT TO FEEL LIKE I'M IN BUFFY, BUT WITHOUT JOSS WHEDON BEING A DOUCHE AND RUINING MY MEMORIES OF IT.

THERE IS LITERALLY A PERSON CALLED WILLOW IN THE STAFF, TOO.

So yeah, thank you to all the gods and ancestors. I'm sorry for being a bitch and yelling at you.

—
As for your daily dose of "weird-ass spirit news:" I may have mentioned before that there's a guy called Dave in my head-space, but I'm not sure if I mentioned that the bro looks, sounds, and most likely acts like, Dave Kuresa. And no, this is not just Haik who adores looking like him.

He's just really fucking NICE and basically harmless with all his positive vibes, but I'm freaking out about him because I don't know if he's a projection of my fan-gushing or some spiritual "piece" of Te Vaka's newest member, who's taking trips across the entire fucking Pacific for some unexplained reason.

So he's encouraging me to talk more to Dave Kuresa about his work if I feel like it, but I'm low-key freaking out because I last messaged him about a week ago, which for my introverted ass is Too Much Talking. And for someone I don't know personally, it's "WHAT IF I SOUND WEIRD AND STALKER-Y???" But Spirit-Dave is assuring me that since I'm probably NOT going to message Other Dave every single day about how sexy and talented he is, and will actually talk to him about things besides his appearance, I won't sound like a Loony Fan or a Stalker with a Crush.

Soooooooo yeah, part of my nerves about Spirit-Dave are from "what if I sound crazy if I listen to this bro's advice?" and the other half is plain old "I ALREADY TALKED TO HIM LAST WEEK, WHAT IF HE THINKS I'M A STALKER???"

edited 17th May '18 7:19:38 PM by Sharysa

More of a Zoroastrianism thing, but still:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgbLBAPWFpM&feature=share

Can I hear a Pagan response to the idea of moral nihilism?

I'd say it's way too far on the "intellectual" side of intellectual versus emotional.

For me this page has major vibes of "nothing is right just because we feel like it, but that also means nothing is wrong just because we feel like it," which is completely ignoring our lizard-brain of instincts and our cocktail of physical hormones.

That whole "killing babies is wrong is only a moral because people say so" completely ignores the BIOLOGICAL reason to not want to kill babies. We have an instinct to not want to hurt babies because a) we are a social species that depends on groups to survive, and babies are PHYSICALLY dependent on others to survive, b) it takes at least nine months to make a new baby and at least fifteen to twenty YEARS for that baby to become a reproductive member of society, and c) if too many babies die, we start feeling like "HUMANITY IS DOOOOOOOOMED."

The Childless Dystopia, Harmful to Minors, and Children Are Innocent tropes exist because our biology drives us to want to protect them. I didn't see any of that in the nihilism page, so I'm just rolling my eyes at it for being So Okay, It's Average.

Not that I have ever taken an ethics class, I had just been told "don't do the thing" or "do the thing" while growing up until eventually I did some things that authority figures in my life told me "don't" (because "shouldn't") and then didn't do some things that I was taught should always been prioritized and accomplished by somebody who was good...so, by that standard I'm not. (I frame this phase of life as "accommodation" according to old-school developmental psychology; according to the Jungians at the local psychology society's private library that I work at as a page, adolescents tend to be likely to rebel not because they got possessed by demons or hormones or something, but likelier it's because it's the most common age for a person to have had it up ta here with everyone else telling them what to do, or how to think, or what to be. The mask of civility and niceness-called-goodness breaks, which is a good thing for an individual, because it's like an eggshell of consciousness that breaks. It happens to some much later in life, or with other much sooner but is not to be confused with having an integrated Inner Child or Natural Child. That's the general framework I put this in.)

I'd later picked up on abstract ideas being good guidelines for life (courage, kindness, the pursuit of truth and honesty...and diligence should be in there, but see above paragraph) and should not depend on other people; and, I have also picked up on people who have been granted personhood in society is really the cornerstone of morality, navigating the challenges of that coexistence with those other people, in a world of finite resources. So, in one sense, morality and ethics are pro-social, but on the other hand the hegemony of societal power (such as evidence of patriarchy, Gayle Rubin's "charmed circle" of unacceptable versus acceptable conformity of behavior) has operated by the ruthless exploitation of people who should have personhood in such a society...but do not.

What moral nihilism sounds to me like it's doing, is...working from the premise that morality and ethics are imaginary. Ethics are not made of atoms, they don't impact the clay with the same consistent force like an iron ball dropped from a calculable height in a laboratory: that much is true. So, putting cyanide in the punch bowl at a party can be a thing that physically happens, but the value judgement of that is illusory. Condemning that human act and human behavior might as well be trying to apply condemnation to a tidal wave that wrecks and floods a populated area. The tidal wave won't feel bad, the poisoner won't feel bad, and whoever dies will die and there's nothing that a dead person can do about that.

I disagree with something like that because it's static. I think that it takes a very low intellectual and societal energy to keep that up. With the values that I chose above, they're always in balance: honesty about harboring fugitives in a society that persecutes families unjustly is not kind (it betrays marginalized people to unjust authority figures), or inventiveness can require the courage to act on something that isn't at the moment true, or reassurances might not be true at the moment but they can be kind to say.

With moral nihilism, nothing is wrong or right but it simply is...which, okay, not wrong, but so now what?

I suppose that can be applied to some pagan gods, sometimes, as forces of nature who simply are, and maybe a personification of them is the natural impulse of apprehending those forces. Nothing they do is wrong because they're the "gods" that is, what I project upon the movement of materials that cannot be predicted or controlled. If I had lost loved ones in a tidal wave, or a volcanic eruption, or a wildfire followed by rainfall that caused landslides...then, there can be blame or grief, but ultimately I would consider my faith to be comprised a bit with the moral nihilism in the end: these things happen. Many of my gods are forces of nature, not of will. I am concerned with them because I can't help it, but I wouldn't expect a volcano to hold a handkerchief over her mouth while she burps and vomits at the table: she's not necessarily concerned with not asphyxiating my loved ones to death and burning our homes up, but neither would she be doing that out of spite simply because we haven't made the necessary human sacrifices to appease her in hundreds of years or something like that.

But I don't consider that nihilism to apply if, say, disaster relief efforts were negligent in the bad part of town because of people in power having a lousy attitude and thoughtless policy. That's something I hope people wouldn't go, "oh, well, that's just the way it is and who am I to judge that as wrong or right when it's all just social constructs anyway?" I will make a value judgement on that situation, although whether I have the power to change that situation is another story. I believe in gods of justice, even though at this point I have no idea which of those are sillier to believe in: polytheistic gods, or justice?

But I don't know about lightningbolts from the sky striking down harmful people. Lightningbolts of inspiration, maybe, like Marduk to Hammurabi (not that Hammurabi's code is perfect or applicable to modern life.) I can at least believe that people who do indeed have the power to change an unfair situation, won't take action to do so if they don't recognize that it's wrong in the first place.

Aiming to co-exist makes sense....

And good that you linked to that Qualia Soup -video! There's just so much to digest there. I'm gonna take a while.

I saw an advertisement for this magic course called INFLUENCE on Facebook and got curious about it, so I went to the creator's website to learn more about her style of practical magic, as it helpfully said to those who were hesitant.

THIS GODDAMN ESSAY IS AMAZING, BRUH.

The anito and especially Dionysus started laughing their asses off at me. Dionysus has been telling me bits and pieces of this type of thing for a long time now, ever since he dropped in and started mooching off my offerings, but half the time he was in Seer Mode and I couldn't really understand it.

I just realized I've been asking the gods for help in a REALLY passive way such as "I want/need five million dollars" or "I need a better job," so according to the "7 insane keys" essay, all I had to do was switch to goddamn present tense. "I have five million dollars," and "I have a better job."

And this is one of the situations where it's VERY appropriate for the gods to note that they couldn't just tell me to "ask for things more actively" because their own methods of explaining things already weren't working, but the essay made everything click in about five minutes. The synchronicity between my (thankfully minor) eye issues and the author's SERIOUS eye-issues was also a damn big bonus. Plus, it's not very proactive for me to change how I say prayers just because someone TELLS ME "take out the 'I want/need,' you're leaving things too open."

edited 5th Jun '18 5:35:27 PM by Sharysa

I don't know if I already complained about that here, but I have been reading up on Carl Jung, his writings about Alchemy...and, there's this thing where every alchemist's ultimate goal is to cook up a Philosopher's Stone by doing all these chemical treatments to the main ingredient.

They never say what the main ingredient is. They detail what all the other ingredients are, and they detail all the crucibles and ovens and stuff that you need, to do the thing in/with, but it's like this big running joke that they don't outright state what you're doing the thing to.

But Jung's Psychology and Alchemy dispelled that generalization saying that they several alchemical texts have outright stated what the main ingredient was...but each of those several alchemists stated it was something completely different than the other several alchemists. But Jung claimed to have figured it out...

...and...

...and...

...h-he...

...wrote it. He wrote it out, in the book, on paper, in words, what it actually was!

And now I'm annoyed because I feel that his take on what the thing was is true but I realize now that I needed to figure it out myself! I was complaining all this time that alchemists didn't just spit it out already, and now I know why they didn't, precisely because it's now too late! It's in my head, not because I made it myself, but because somebody else made sense of it for me. Wah.

Silly Faemon, the last ingredient to the Philosopher's Stone is people.

But seriously, what IS the last ingredient?

Okayyyyyy so the Magic Epiphany is working, even with my nervous-ass self slipping back into my old habits of "I want" and then correcting myself to use "I have/am" half the time.

Sure, my sister probably got her license because she's been working on fixing the mistakes she made the first time, but Ocean was laughing his ass off when I was freaking out going "MOTHERFUCKER, DID USING PRESENT-TENSE FOR "MY SISTER HAS HER LICENSE" WORK??? OR WAS IT JUST NORMAL EFFORT, OR SOMETHING???"

And there's no logical explanation for "the job at my favorite cafe that I reallyreallyreally want" is potentially offering a full-time position besides "the Universe is obliging with my newfound magic skillz." Ocean is especially obliging, since I was asking him to get me this job because in addition to this being my favorite cafe and offering better pay for less physical work, it's also a ten-minute walk from the beach. I mentioned that I wanted at least 3 days and full-time would be great, but I would have absolutely taken the three-day minimum just because it pays better and IT DOESN'T WRECK MY BACK.

Like

I suddenly have a list of these things that I thought were never going to happen, because I always thought good shit doesn't happen to ME—just to the people around me. But now things are happening and I'm just going "MOTHERFUCKER, WHAT SORCERY IS THIS??? THE KIND THAT FUCKING WORKS???"

So right now I'm just keeping things low-key, like "my work is successful and I can work with all my favorite artists" and "I have an old-fashioned cottage by the sea with very few neighbors"—more ambitious things like "I have five million dollars" is pretty tentative for me right now, because people who win the lottery have a 50/50 chance of getting shanked or losing it all through partying or whatnot.

That's awesome! Reminds me of Deepak Chopra's The Way of the Wizard I think was where I found that thing about how...Merlin is able to do magic because he remembers the future and speculates about the past (whereas most people speculate about the future and remember the past.)

...and yes technically the secret ingredient to the Philosopher's Stone is People We have to tell someonnnneeeee !!!

edited 9th Jun '18 5:26:48 AM by Faemon

Wow, I didn't expect that to be the serious answer. So does this mean FMA was RIGHT???

Damn, Sharysa, you stole the easy Soylent Green -joke right from under my nose!

But....what was the main ingredient, then? People?

Okay, so I got the full-time position at the cafe annnnnnnd that's one of my "present-tense magick intentions" down. (Technically I have two down, but my sister getting her license wasn't DIRECTLY for me.) Gonna give my two-week's notice to my grocery job tomorrow so I can see what next week's schedule is.

Technically, the main ingredient to make a Philosopher's Stone is people. Not literally. Not metaphorically either, but technically.

The ingredient is in all things, it's the foundation of existence, but it can't be extracted from one thing so the Alchemist has to be able to find it in its natural form when it's everywhere and can't be refined. Another qualifying trait is that everybody absolutely despises the thing.

So...when Carl Jung points out that, while it is very common for alchemists to say that they wish they could tell you that one detail but can't, whereas several other alchemists say exactly what it is but it's not the same thing as all the other alchemists thing that they say is exactly what it is...

That's a clue. Alchemists are people, and the ingredient is technically people, but it's not the alchemist nor is it the non-alchemist(s), it's not body parts. It's life parts.

I put it in spoilers because I'm usually more than okay with spoilers, I can't get enough of spoilers. But this is one of two spoilers in my lifetime that I wish I didn't know. The other is the twist in the Broadway musical Next To Normal.

Basically, what the thing is going to be is going to depend on the person doing the thing, but you can't outright tell the person that or else they lose the lateral approach that makes the thing their thing.

Motherfucker, that's deep.

Recent woo-woo business: Spirit-Dave tends to let me know what's happening on his physical counterpart's social media, along with the spirit-stuff he's doing (which mainly consists of hanging out during meditations, and sneaking some offerings now and then). Yay for him being active in meat-space as well as the spirit-world?

Edited by Sharysa on Jun 26th 2018 at 8:18:04 AM

So, I have had the great good fortune of becoming acquainted with another trans witch who is part of this small community of awesome freaks and weirdos who live really close to me. Apparently she's got everyone really excited to meet me and get to know me. I feel kinda scared because I fear I will prove unworthy of their interest.

It's like I can't really fathom why someone would be so keen on me, especially when I haven't "done" anything to "deserve" it. She invited me to this rave they were hosting at their warehouse and I wasn't able to get in because the door people told me there was an entrance fee or something and I wasn't able to get in touch with her quickly, so I just went back home, and I wasn't all that bothered but apparently everyone in the motley decided that it was unacceptable for me to not be able to get into an event they invited me to, and now they're giving me a hundred bucks as an apology, and I'm lowkey freaking out because I feel way too important.

Apparently the ones I've met and had a chance to chat with think I'm insightful or some shyt and I'm just trying to find a way to keep them feeling that way without being disingenuous because I really really want them to like me.

Yaaaaaay you found a crew of people to hang out with!

I sometimes still find it mindblowing that people think I'm interesting/fun to hang out with, lol. You're not alone.

Internalized conditional-but-innate-but-conditional worth is awful to have. I hope those feels find a way to mellow, and that the people you've found do genuinely have and keep that baseline of human decency.

More confused than ever....