Weekly thread July 06, 2020

Her writing about her childhood (the Enoigh version of her childhood) sounds so much like a post an angsty teen would write on the teenagers sub. Every once in a while a post from that sub makes it to the front page and even though the titles are generally about being victimized by mean parents, they always make me smile because I remember being a teen and feeling like (& I think another poster wrote about this so much more eloquently than I will...) the things I was upset about didn't seem serious enough to match my feelings of outrage, so I would exaggerate them to my friends. Like being upset that my parents wouldn't let me do something after school sounded silly when I said it out loud, so I had to say they 'locked me in my room with a deadbolt' and yelled at me that I couldn't leave, deprived me of food and water, or some other exaggerated version that matched my feelings more. My friends would be outraged and tell me that was abusive, and it made me feel validated because not being able to do something I wanted to actually felt abusive in my immature mind.

Shauna sounds just like that to me, like a teen who can't quite get people to feel outraged for her, but when she tries to add to the outrage she adds these really "stock terrible parent" elements that sound two dimensional. Like she's a literal teenager who hasn't developed the emotional maturity to reflect on feelings and express them, so she just keeps stringing those conventional bad parent tropes to each other like a train. And I'm sure if she was capable of self reflection, she'd have plenty of childhood issues to complain about. But this story she's flogging is so 'first draft' that it's impossible to feel for her.

/r/InTheGloaming Thread Parent