evangelion

in which i summarize neon genesis without spoilers

i promise i’ll think about something else soon sorry for writing three consecutive posts on similar subject matter

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man, what a ridiculous, grotesque anime. i wouldn’t call it a good show in the sense that the plot doesn’t really hold up to scrutiny and often feels quite contrived or heavy-handed, with everything happening a bit too conveniently to be believable. that being said i still think it’s an incredible watch experience, the epitome of “this show will never belong on my favorites list but i highly recommend seeing it”. it reaches into the deepest, darkest regions of your mind and pokes and prods at them until something raw comes up - what effect have bad role models had on your psyche? do you end things because they’ve run their course, or to escape from your own problems? do people value you beyond your skills and intellect? how much are you willing to open up to others?

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in high school i had a music director who picked favorites and neglected everyone else. i remember sitting in class with my cello, watching as the teacher joked with my friends and ignored me, feeling jealousy, resentment, self-loathing. how much of my drive to practice came from wanting that attention? years later, when those same emotions bubbled up as i lived in a house with a founder who valued people based on their ability to write software - how much of my resolve to build came from wanting that respect?

i recognize now that i am prone to seeking out the validation of toxic father figures, which is a bit surprising given that i don’t actually feel this way about my real dad. i wonder how much of my desire to learn and grow is left when you take all the validation-seeking away. in the last few years i’ve made a lot of progress in finding healthier sources of motivation and working on things because i actually enjoy them, but still - i can’t help but wonder what years of validation-seeking-as-motivation does to the mind of an adolescent

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broke up with someone recently and felt so fucking guilty about everything afterwards because i caused a lot of pain and think almost all of it was my fault. never resonated harder with “i’m a pit that good things fall into”. i can’t stop questioning - was it the right thing to do? should i have tried harder to fix things? do i blow things up because they deserve to be blown up or because i’m running away from my problems? or because i’m afraid of closeness, or commitment, or something else?

i… think i have generally been a good influence on my friends and a net positive in their lives? but how can i be sure? how do you decide whether some amount of pain inflicted is worth some other amount of joy created? it’s not a surprise or anything, given that closeness means more exposure in general, but i find it really sad that i have more unambiguously positive interactions with people i keep at arm’s length and a more mixed bag of interactions with people i’m closer to. have i done anything other than hurt people who get too close to me? how do i stop?

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a few weeks ago i talked to my former boss at a part-time job i’d held for the past ~2 years. i told him that over time i’d gotten the impression that he disliked me, and then he told me that, no, he actually liked me, but he’d also gotten the impression that i disliked him. it was kind of bizarre to realize that all our problems had been an escalating series of miscommunications and misinterpretations, and that things could’ve been fine this whole time if i’d simply reached out earlier or been less defensive or sensitive or whatever

i think i tend to make up narratives of other people hating me and i am not really sure why. i suppose it’s because i find it hard to trust that people actually like me. i fabricate stories about how people are friends with me because i possess knowledge about technology or math or because they like my blog or whatever, though i don’t really have any evidence for or against these claims. somewhere along the line it became deeply ingrained in me that people value each other for the utility they bring - maybe because that was how i viewed other people? maybe because that was how i viewed myself? - and that has been a really difficult thing to try to unlearn

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in some sense the whole point of neon genesis evangelion is that shinji, the protagonist, is forced to interact with people for the first time in his life; some terrible traumatic stuff happens that causes him to hurt the people around him while being hurt in return, and then at the end he needs to decide if he wants to continue living with other people or retreat back into himself (different viewers will tell you he chose differently). of course it’s all hyperbolic - people are rarely as reclusive as shinji, and they rarely hurt each other as severely as the characters do in this show - but i think it’s an apt representation of the kinds of struggles most people go through at various points in socialization, and that’s why i find this show so compelling

i think i want to become a drastically different person - someone who puts up less barriers and doesn’t hurt people as often and has more secure relationships with friends. i don’t really know how to get there yet, but this is the clearest my vision has been in a while. god i have so much work to do