it ain't you, babe

[metaphortunate]

Okay y'all, L and I did shape each other's personalities to the degree that that's inescapable when you're good friends with someone from the ages of 7 to 17, but come on. I was not a blank slate and she was not my second grade Svengali. I would not be the same person at the age of 36 that I was at the age of 6 whether or not I had ever met L. My parents have just always preferred to blame the bits of my personality that they don't like on my friends. And okay, there's some truth to that, but it's also a chicken and egg question: these are the friends I've had because I chose them, for reasons of my own, because these are the people that I have wanted to know and love and be like. I chose you all, and you chose me, and we shape each other but you are not the cause of me.

Comments

[laurajv]

are you sure L did not time-travel and sith mind whammy you back when you were 7? surely time-traveling sith lords are a possibility?

[metaphortunate]

Waaait, have we ever canonically seen any Sith lords time travel?

[veejane]

No. However, that's just because we haven't yet seen anyone bring a Time Lord over to the Dark Side.

[metaphortunate]

I smell a Christmas special!

[norah]

I am glad we choosed each other.

[metaphortunate]

Me too. <3

[snarp]

That is actually a really, really common thing for over-controlling parents to say. The kid was perfect until they got old enough to start disobeying the parent, or just making decisions the parent didn't understand or pre-approve. At that point, the parent blames this unsettling problem on the kid's friends, who have been a bad influence on the kid. Or in more extreme cases: "brainwashed" the kid, "turned them against me," or "just walked in and taken over their whole life!"

(Though if there's a custody split, the other parent/guardian may get assigned the job of Corrupter instead or in addition. Other sinister explanations for children having their own personalities: teachers, the internet, books/TV/games/etc, or psych/health problems (real or imagined).)

[azurelunatic]

My Terrible Ex BJ blamed me "joining a cult" for me breaking up with him.

While I did in fact meet a bunch of like-minded pagan types, and meeting them was in fact the catalyst for dumping him, the fact that I couldn't trust him with a root login on my laptop had more to do with the dumping than anything else. Particularly when I did the "... wait, I can trust these people who I've known for not even three months more than I can trust the guy I'm planning to marry. CLEARLY THERE IS SOMETHING WRONG HERE WHICH MUCH BE RECTIFIED."

The answer was not, by the way, "seeing the light" and restoring BJ's root access.

[metaphortunate]

Congratulations on your cult! And I am amused at your relationship coal mine canary and yet, that is ABSOLUTELY a deal breaker that must not be ignored.

[azurelunatic]

I can imagine being in a serious relationship with someone who could not be trusted with root access for reasons of technical incompetence or naivete. Not for general untrustworthiness.

(In the weeks prior, he'd done a thing I'd said not to do, so I pulled his account's access and changed all the other passwords. When he called and asked for the main admin account password I knew I had done the right thing.)

[metaphortunate]

Yeah....to be honest it kind of hurts my feelings that this is supposed to have started happening so early.

[snarp]

Maybe you were a particularly independent-minded child? Did you lead any revolutions before middle school.

Or she may not even have actually felt that way at the time, and it's just kind of the narrative of the day. I know my grandmother was constantly retconning her personal history of her kids doing stuff wrong. Did she know Dad had "gotten bad" in grade school, or was he her perfect angel until law school, or... who knows.

[metaphortunate]

Good point. Who even remembers what happened ~30 years ago anyway?