5 things

i met my new therapist last week. she has the same name as my old one and she's very nice. i'll call her L2. last week we just talked about what i want out of therapy and all. that was hard to define because i got on the wait list months ago when i actually was pretty unhappy. now things are okay. but i talked about anxiety and such.
this week she had a bunch of notecards with different concepts on them, like "friendliness" or "conformity", and she had me sort them into piles based on how important they were to me. after that she had me take the cards from the most important pile and choose 5 to focus on for now. i picked "forgiveness", "flexibility", "romance", "assertiveness", and something else i can't remember. ("memory and retention"?) forgiveness is meant to be about how i suck at it, flexibility is to help me deal with my fear of change and ambiguity, romance is about my anxiety around dating and such, and assertiveness is about me getting better at boundaries. i'll get back to those last two things in a sec, but anyway, i like working with L2 and i think i'll learn a lot from her.

last thursday was the panel and it went really, really well. i was very anxious about that, but something good came out of it. i recently made friends with a guy that i see a lot but didn't talk to much. he was the moderator of the panel. before it started thursday, i was sitting in the back trying to calm myself down. he came up to me and told me he was anxious and i said i was too and asked if he wanted to platonically hold hands with me for a minute. he said yes and we held hands and i felt a lot better. that part was nice.

the girl i like was there. here's the romance part. my friendship with her doesn't seem to have changed since i told her about my feelings. or, well, it has, but i feel like i'm much closer to her now than i was before. i don't feel awkward around her or anything. i think it might be because i know she doesn't actually dislike me, because she goes out of her way to spend time with me, and also because i don't have to try to hide how i feel anymore. when i see her, i can tell her how happy i am to be able to walk with her, and it's not weird. i'm trying not to have any expectations about the situation, so i'll leave it as that.

earlier today a friend of mine did something that made me really angry. i don't know if i've talked about him before but i'll call him Z. i like Z and all but he stresses me out a lot because he's always dumping his anxiety on me but he absolutely can't deal with anyone else who needs emotional support. recently this has come in the form of Z asking me what i think about things and what i think he should do about it. the thing is, these are always things he needs to deal with himself.

here's an example. we both go to a queer people of color discussion group. this group is heavily dominated by white queer people who do most of the talking and it sucks. Z is white and i'm not, so when we complain about it afterward, Z asks what i want him to do about it or if he should talk to this or that person and what he should say. but my opinion is that if you see something racist happening, you should say something about it yourself. i think this is extra true if you're white. instead Z tries to make it my problem to figure out what he should say, and i have to soothe his feelings around the situation, and listen to him talk on and on about it even though i know he's probably not going to do anything, even though he totally could. i just don't feel like it's my job to help white people deal with racism.

so, this morning Z sent me a screenshot of a facebook post. some dude i sort of know and don't especially like had posted a picture of a black woman with a colorful afro, along with my name. (our hair is different colors and we don't look anything alike.) i asked Z why he sent me the picture and he said he thought it was funny. i said i thought it was racist and he agreed and i said he should say something to this person. he asked me what i should say and i sent him a long text about how this isn't my responsibility, i hardly know the guy who posted the image, i don't even have facebook, Z knows that this is racist and needs to figure out for himself how to deal with it or ask some other white person because i've told him multiple times not to bring this stuff to me because it stresses me out and he keeps doing it anyway, and also, unless i'm friends with the offender or my safety is at risk, i never want to hear about some racist shit that some other person has said. he apologized and said it wouldn't happen again, but he's said that about other stuff in the past so i don't even a little bit believe him.

so. assertiveness.

also today i went to ulta. i started using a new body butter recently, it's c. booth's honey almond one. it smells great and i love everything about it but i want one with lighter or no scent. also i've been using a body wash my mom got me for christmas that also has a strong scent that i don't particularly like. i don't hate it but i don't want to smell like it either. so i got c. booth's egyptian argan oil body butter, which according to the reviews doesn't smell like much at all, and their milk body wash. i wanted the mint and rosemary one but ulta didn't have it.
anyway, that's exciting, but here's something better. last night i was painting my nails and when i went to bed i dreamed about a nail polish that was blueish-green with gold glittery bits. when i went to ulta today i found that exact color. it's china glaze's moonlight the night, if you want to know, and it's less pigmented than you'd think, so i'm wearing it over zoya nori which already has glitter in it but it's silver and much smaller than moonlight the night. i always use too many coats with glitter polishes, because i love glitter and i get greedy, so we'll see if these nails last a whole day before they start popping off, which is what happened with the polish i was wearing today. i just tell myself i'm learning to cope with impermanence, and let it go.