The Unit of Caring

you gave me wings when you showed me birds

I’m becoming more okay with unprincipled exceptions.

They can be bad. I first developed my allergy to them when I saw people say “Muslims are terrorists - but [friend’s] okay, she’s normal” or “Other people get abortion like birth control and should be stopped, but I had a good reason.” They seemed like an excuse to avoid confronting your own mistakes.

But then I realized that “Gays are bad, but my child is my child and I’ll always support them” is a lot better than “gays are bad, and I’m not going to let my beliefs waver just because it’s my own child”

- and, y’know, maybe actually unprincipled exceptions are just a way people start to change their minds, and people, being people, change their minds for the better or for the worse. And sometimes the push for consistency undermines the conversations it’s trying to foster.

Like - there’s no principled way to say “I want a community that has people who believe that the best thing to do isn’t GiveWell-approved, but I don’t want a community that has people who give to MIRI”. But just saying that is much better than trying to say “Because MIRI is bad, we have to, on principle, define EA to only mean GiveWell-approved.”

Or - I wrote about how I think spaces to say angry nasty things about religion are really important, and someone asked me 

If a space where people dismiss and mock ideas is a safe space, how far does this go? Is a place that discourages anything but hate for a group of people a safe space for those who can’t stand anything but hate for said people due to having been hurt or whatever reason? I’m asking this because I’m thinking of the reddit red pill community of a few years ago and whether it falls under your definition of a safe space.

There’s no principled answer. /r/exmormon is the sort of space I want to cultivate and support and preserve; /r/theredpill is not. This has something to do with whether the spaces make you stronger. It has something to do with whether they make the world better. But all of that’s going to be case-by-case. Sometimes spaces for dismissal and mockery are absolutely part of safety. Sometimes they’re bad. We can look at spaces and decide, and that’ll work a lot better than trying to design a principle. 

Sometimes you have to step down a level. You have to say “I cannot articulate a consistent, universally-considered-reasonable, low-collateral-damage rule against this thing, but I want !thing”. Sometimes doing that is much wiser, and much less hurtful, than saying “if you think /r/exmormon is a safe space then you have to consider /r/theredpill one also” or “if you think MIRI isn’t EA, then you have to say EA is only about approved charities”. 

I don’t like doing this, because it feels inconsistent, but inconsistency is better for in-progress beliefs than forcing a sort of ripple-consistency where you commit to whole new worldviews every time you change your mind. And I think that sort of principledness can make it harder to change your mind. So at this point, I’d rather hear “this is unprincipled, but I think you shouldn’t X” than “here’s the universal rule that precludes X”.

As for why I find it harder to be charitable to the left than to the right: I suspect less than 1% of my followers are rural, gun-owning, hunting conservatives. I suspect more than 50% of my followers are students or middle class college-educated city- and suburb-dwelling liberals. Criticizing rural gun owners changes literally nothing; none of them are reading this. Criticizing the way leftism abandons the chance to talk about shared principles as soon as there’s a ‘redneck’ in front of them to bash stands a chance of making people more careful about that.

So that’s part of it. The other part of it is that, like, my default Red Tribe association is my grandfather and my default Blue Tribe association is people whose company I deeply dislike (they keep gendering my experiences, all our conversations feel like they’re waiting for the chance to call me out, they would hate me if they knew what I really believe, they don’t care about the things I’m passionate about, they occasionally make jokes about killing me and everyone I care about except perhaps Alison, etc.).

This is, obviously, a bias. I would like to reduce or work around it. But I think even if the bias didn’t exist at all, I’d criticize the left a lot more than the right on this blog (and when I criticized the right, it’d be, like, libertarians and College Republicans, not hunting- and shotgun- people).

And then there’s that, where I do vehemently disagree with the right, it’s a disagreement I’d feel odd hashing out in front of a left-leaning audience; like, I am not particularly charitable to right-wing Orthodox Judaism but if I wrote a rant against literal young-earth creationists on this blog everyone would go “yes, those young earth creationists are wrong the world is not 6000 years old!” and nothing would be accomplished. And if I wrote a rant about anything other than that no one would even understand me (the recent Crosscurrents kerfuffle about yoatzot was an ignorant, embarrassing, appallingly reactionary reductio of all requests YCT, etc. work within the system. There, that was uncharitable to the right.)

Anonymous asked: So the position you're going for is that everyone who doesn't agree with you is insufficiently capable of rational though and can/must be convinced by their intellectual superiors, unless they're being actively malicious. And you don't see how this could be interpreted as derogatory and dismissive?

You’re really, really stretching here. 

The ‘position I’m going for’ is that, in fiction, I find it emotionally moving when the characters’ flaws stem from their idealism and from their (mistaken, misguided) conviction that they can just win everyone to their side with reason.

That’s an impulse that can obviously lead you astray, but we’re talking about fiction, where flaws are interesting anyway, and it’s a flaw I really do cherish in characters. Believing that everyone is good and you just have to somehow convince them stems from more interesting mistakes, and has more interesting failure modes, than cynicism or selfishness or impulsivity. Stories with characters who act and think that way tend to be stories that stick with me and inspire me. 

I don’t think I need to defend or apologize for the kinds of narratives that I find moving. And I get why those narratives can come across as derogatory to you, but I don’t think that makes it okay to attack people who find them meaningful. 

Anonymous asked: Apologies if this is something you've already been bombarded over, since you did say that was a post from last year: As someone who really enjoys your blog, it's distressing to see you endorse the Yudkowskite PC/NPC distinction. Saying that some people don't have agency and don't matter seems fundamentally at odds with everything else you post and profess to believe.

So I know that Eliezer’s writing is love-it-or-hate-it, but I personally got a lot out of it. Morally and emotionally in particular. When I found his work the main reason it resonated with me was that it shook with how anguished the author was over the suffering in the world, over the magnitude of what is lost with every single human death. It was fiction written by someone who felt the same hurt that I did and the same fundamental sense that it fell to us to fix it and to let everyone know that they could fix it. 

Eliezer is wrong about a lot of stuff, much of it stupid stuff that he should know better about, some of it stuff that actively interferes with his ability to fix the world. But his approach to fiction is meaningful to me precisely because the arrogance and obnoxiousness and cluelessness of all his characters is so clearly derived from their values, from their commitment to human flourishing, their conviction that everyone who doesn’t value every single human life and isn’t fighting like mad to save the world can be talked into doing so with rationality and logic and science(!). They’re idfic but they’re idfic with the premise “every single life is so important, and every single death is such a tragedy, that you personally need to tear the stars apart to make sure we never lose anyone ever again. And I can talk you into doing that with this work of fiction

So, even knowing how divisive and infuriating and mileage-may-vary Eliezer is, I am honestly super confused that you think he’s “saying that some people don’t have agency and don’t matter”. He’s saying something entirely unrelated to mattering and only partially about agency. PC/NPC is a bad word for the concept because it invites the derogatory implications and is easy to read as being about automatons vs “real”/significant/valuable people. 

But I think the concept is real, and has nothing to do with thinking some people are more important than others: there is a real difference between Alison and me, such that her reaction to a stranger pulling up in a nice car and saying “get in, the fate of the world is at stake” would be different than mine and also such that she applied to grad school in a foreign country at 17 because it seemed like a plot hook.

And there is a real difference between me of a year ago and me now, a difference that might be usefully talked about as ‘agentiness’, something about risk-aversion and about the range of options I explore and also about the degree to which I believe myself to be the architect of my own life. There are contexts where it’s useful to be able to challenge yourself to switch mindsets, or at least know which one you’re working in. 

I think it’s important to be able to talk about those differences in a value-neutral way, and important to choose terms for them which don’t imply a moral judgment, and therefore PC/NPC isn’t helpful. But I do endorse conversations about this trait, because they are interesting and useful and not only fundamentally compatible with everything I write on this blog but actually a big part of how I found a community where those convictions were shared and celebrated. 

Couldn’t make it to the Bay? Hate the company of other humans? You can watch the live feed here. edit: now that’s it’s over, you can watch the whole thing!

Anonymous asked: as seen from your blog, you are the kind of person i want to be (more) like. Any tips on how to achieve this?

I am not really a believer in self-improvement through willpower. This might just be because I can’t do it, personally. Trying really hard to become a better person makes me a sad person who is resentful of happy people and of all of the things I’m supposed to be doing.

I am a big believer in self-improvement through selecting a social circle that values and affirms the traits you want to cultivate in yourself, though. The thing that makes this great is that it takes one major effort up front - to decide what traits you value and decide you want to give those traits space to flourish, and to find people who value them - and then it’s nearly effortless. We’re wired to care about the things our friends care about, and to improve at the things we’re admired for and admire others for. 

When I want to be more action-oriented, I find people (organizing and labor groups are often excellent at this; the CFAR-style rationality community is good) who are really good at translating their ideas into immediate action, people who do that reflexively, and people who expect it of the people around them. My brain falls into line without any apparent exertion of willpower.

When I want to be better - to find it easier to live my values, and easier to make hard scary decisions because I’ve decided that they’re right - I hang out with people who are doing those things. Around people who admire me for being good, goodness feels obvious - ‘this person is hurting, I shall fix that’. ‘this ought to happen, of course I will do it’. ‘This is important, getting it done requires sacrifice, of course I’m capable of making that sacrifice’ (and of seeking out the support and affirmation and resources to make it as small a sacrifice as possible).

When I want to be happier I hang out with  - not happy people, actually, but people who are committed to prioritizing their own happiness. People who say things like “hey, the sun just came out and sun reliably boosts my mood, let’s continue this conversation outside” or “I feel closer to people when I cuddle with them, want to cuddle?” or “I tracked my internet usage with RescueTime and cut out all the websites that didn’t actually improve my mood”. Being around people who do this cements in my brain that it is natural to do this, that happiness is an acceptable thing to strategize for and to ask for and to plan for. It also exposes me to lots of peoples’ happiness strategies, some of which work. 

This is often financially impossible, but I think people should try really hard to have the chance to live around a community that supports the things in you which you’re most proud of. Barring that, I highly recommend starting a blog or joining an online community that will reward and value those traits in you. Barring that, even asking “what do I want to be? when am I most like that? which things I do make me feel most valued and supported in becoming the things I want to be?” seems like a step lots of people never take. 

Anonymous asked: My point isn't that Scott's opinions have no value. It's that he is quite likely to suffer from unknown unknowns. Giving a talk about RCTs is assuming and presuming expertise that he doesn't have. By his own admission in several blog posts,he doesn't know how to do mathematical stats, and experiment design is tricky. Why not take advice from a statistician with experience? Rationalists seem to disdain actual expertise, and I don't get it. 1/2

The only statistical analysis I’ve ever seen from Scott is pointing out the typical flaws of social science research. When he does his own blog research, you get posts like the digit ratio post or the LW survey data. I don’t think Scott is really quantitatively oriented, which in no way diminishes his knowledge of medicine. It does make his advice on statistical study design very suspect. 2/2

…right, i agree that Scott is not quantitatively inclined, and that it’s a good idea for him to take advice from statisticians with expertise, which is probably why he does it regularly. It seems like in your last ask you were criticizing him for the fact he had a statistician do an ANOVA for his blog post, and now you are criticizing him for seeming to “disdain actual expertise” and being insufficiently willing to have statisticians do his statistics? 

 Also, the unknown-unknowns thing is probably mediated by the fact he blogs publicly? If there is something he doesn’t know you can just tell him about it, and people frequently do.

I disagree that statisticians are the only people who have useful insights to communicate about study design. I think it is part of a mindset in which people think that their subfield has unique access to competence and that people who are not in that subfield don’t have insights worth communicating even about topics that are of concern to lots of people across lots of subfields. (For example, both M.D.s and statisticians care about ways RCTs can go wrong). Take your phrasing, “actual expertise”. Scott definitely has actual expertise. It is in different fields than you, but it’s odd to suggest that inviting Scott to speak reflects disdain for actual expertise. 

I think you can avoid this mindset and its failure modes by criticizing actual things Scott says that you think are mistaken/insufficiently nuanced/misleading, instead of arguing in the abstract about who gets to have opinions about RCT designs.

Anonymous asked: Would you trust someone who has never designed a randomized controlled trial, who can't do an ANOVA to give a talk called How To Ruin A Perfectly Good Randomized Controlled Trial? Why does the rationalist movement encourage such things?

(There was an event at Yale today at which @slatestarscratchpad spoke on this topic.)

First thing, I am pretty sure Scott does do research, because he’s complained about IRB bureaucratic loopholes a bunch. It’s possible none of that research involves RCTs, because psychiatrists have to worry about ethics and stuff, but I am sure it involved many of the same methodological questions.  

Second thing, have you read any of Scott’s blog posts that discuss statistics? They are both interesting and valuable; they draw on the things he learned while getting a medical degree, things he’s noticed in residency, and math questions for whom he consults math experts. They attract lots of comments, many from professional statisticians. To my knowledge people often suggest additional, more mathematically rigorous ways of examining a question Scott raises, and occasionally catch errors, which he corrects with credit.

This seems like a great way to make science more accessible to a lay audience, and a great way to familiarize people with a highly technical (PhD or M.D.) background in a subject other than statistics with some of the nuances and complexities of the statistical tools that they use, but possibly without deep understanding, in their day to day research.

In one of those posts, Scott mentions that he asked a statistician to do an sequential ANOVA on a few sets of data of interest to him. I bet Scott knows “how to do an ANOVA” - we learned that in my high school bio class. We also learned it in a way that involved no nuance whatsoever - it was entirely about repeatedly applying a formula given in the textbook. I would feel uncomfortable doing an ANOVA and reporting the results to people who might act on them, not because I don’t know how but because I’m aware that a lot of assumptions go into statistical tools and that applying them blindly can be misleading. 

I think asking professional statisticians to apply tools you’re familiar with but don’t trust yourself to consistently apply correctly is an admirable way to blog about statistics.

And more broadly - this question reflects a common failure mode among some of the smarter-than-thou people I know which I find really frustrating. What these people do is they assume that the standards of practice in their highly specific subfield are things known by All People Who Are Worthy of Respect. They’ll claim that the only experience that could possibly qualify you is the one that would be most relevant in their subfield. Sometimes they take this to the point of sneering at people who don’t recognize technical subfield acronyms and suggesting that anyone who doesn’t follow the subfield standards of practice (maybe because they’re following the standards of a different subfield!)  is categorically unqualified to talk at all.

I encountered this for the first time and thought “oh, maybe everyone I know actually is dumb”, until I met a person with a math PhD from an elite school who was like “nope, that guy is using terminology I wouldn’t be familiar with, and acting like anyone with any intellectually serious background would know it, and as a result they’re able to get away with being actively misleading. Always be careful when you see someone implying-but-not-outright-saying that all intellectually serious people have worked with [X]; science is too big for that to be true for most things.”

You are seriously underestimating how many people (even people with PhDs! doing important research!) have a limited understanding of the statistical tools they work with. You are seriously underestimating what interesting perspectives an M.D. might give someone on best statistical practices and problems with RCTs. You are seriously overestimating the availability of basic resources for college undergraduates on how to think statistically. For all of these reasons, you are completely incapable of seeing why this talk could be of value, and you are so certain it’s not of value that you decide the fact it is happening at all is proof of something pathologically wrong with “the rationalist movement”. 

This failure mode is easily avoided. If you think that Scott’s perspectives on statistics are not useful, read one of them and then write something explaining what he gets wrong that someone with a statistics background would get right. All you have to do is avoid declaring people categorically not capable of having interesting insights on the grounds that they’re not in your field, and you’re all set. All you have to do is attack them for a mistake they actually made when they spoke, rather than for having the nerve to speak at all. 

If you can’t do that, it’s possible the problem here isn’t that people like Scott are incapable of delivering value: it’s that outlooks like yours are incapable of recognizing it. 

Anonymous asked: What do we do about this problem where Bob sees himself as "GAY, white, male" and Tina sees herself as "straight, white, FEMALE" while George sees himself as "straight, HISPANIC, male" and everyone sees themselves as oppressed while forgetting that on most axis they are the privileged class?

If we talk about this in terms of ‘the privileged class’, then the answer is easy - people don’t like thinking about themselves as part of the privileged class, because the concept has negative affect and people think it means “they expect people will be meaner to them if they are perceived as privileged (which is, entertainingly, different from being perceived as straight, white, etc.) 

Some people I talk to believe this is the whole problem; the only reason anyone emphasizes their marginalization and refuses to acknowledge their advantages is that activism has made them feel guilt over privilege. 

But if we reframe from “the privileged class” in favor of my preferred “why do people mostly think of themselves in terms of the traits that have been barriers to their leading a fulfilling life, while not thinking about the barriers they don’t face?”

then that sounds less like a problem invented by toxic activism! It’s the same reason you don’t think about how nice it is not having a cold when you’re healthy, or how nice running water is if you live in a city that always has it. (This is, ironically, the exact problem the concept of privilege was developed to describe.) People mostly think about problems that affect them! Stop the presses!

Which isn’t to say that we don’t often make it worse. When you have communities that are set up to protect people who are marginalized, you often implicitly build in“whoever has the most barriers to accessing security, respect, and support is the best person, or at a minimum the person most deserving of our compassion” and from there you get the incentives to go (explicitly or implicitly) “homophobia is worse than sexism!” “says a MAN. a sexist man. benefitting from male privilege.” “I’m pretty sick of straight girls talking about how nbd homophobia is.” “oh cute look at the white feminists.” until your three characters all hate each other.

(When you’re treating compassion as a limited resource, of course people are going to start defining themselves in terms of whatever traits make them worthy of compassion in your eyes. And of course they’re going to start trying to demonstrate why others are less worthy.)

There’s something else going on here, too, though I’m not sure how to fix it. Like..the problem isn’t that Tina and Bob and George are forgetting how good they have it, that’s human nature. If they were happily working together on tearing down the remaining barriers to fulfilling lives for everyone, I wouldn’t care at all if they mistakenly thought themselves to be the most oppressed people in the world. The problem is when they won’t listen to each other, or keep attributing other peoples’ failures to character instead of barriers, or contribute to the barriers because they don’t know that they exist. The problem is when they can’t tackle harms that don’t fit their model.

What’s the failure? Where are they causing harm because of mistaken beliefs? Start there, and then see how you can use a privilege/barrier/insulation/forces/whatever model to describe to them what went wrong. Trying to fix mistaken beliefs about relative privilege, before you’ve figured out where the downstream mistakes are, feels too far divorced from the things that make those beliefs bad. I worry that if we spend too much time explaining why someone is wrong about their relative privilege, we lose track of the point, which is a secure and fulfilling life for everyone.

A Letter To My 10-Year-Old Self

sinesalvatorem:

Hi, honey! You’re a girl! No, I’m not making fun of you, I mean that literally. I know you’ve always been wondering about it, and flinching away from the idea whenever it came near you, but it’s true. You’re a girl, and there’s nothing wrong with that. You’re aren’t broken, even though you think you are. Eventually you’ll have friends - yes, actual friends - who’ll call you by a female name, and you’ll feel good about it.

You’ll probably name yourself after Teacher Alison, because she is That Great. Seriously. Grade 6 will be so much better just for being in her class. And Grade 7 will be better for being out of this shit school altogether. Your life is heading up from here, sweetie. Your future is bright. One day, you’ll wake up and be glad you’re alive. I mean, nothing will be happening; you’ll just be existing while having a preference to continue existing. The fog will be gone. And, better yet, one day the fact that you like living will stop being a surprise!

Now, I’m not going to lie to you and say that school will ever be good - I’m sorry, it won’t. But I can tell you it will be better. Your classmates won’t hate you. Your teacher won’t hate you. There will be people other than your parents who care about your well-being. You won’t hide under a tree at lunch hoping that no one sees you. You won’t fantasise about jumping out the car and killing yourself when you’re driven to school. You won’t induce yourself to vomiting to get out of going. You’ll be… Content. School will just be a thing that happens, instead of deliberate malice on the part of the gods. You’ll have classes you like attending, classmates you like speaking to, teachers you’re eager to listen to. It’ll be OK. Oh, and eventually no one will call you a faggot. No, seriously, you’ll go years without hearing that - instead of hours. You have no idea how great that’ll be.

Your brother grows up to not be a complete shit. You won’t hate each other’s guts. You’ll become friends. When you leave the country to study abroad, he’ll cry at the airport. You’ll miss him too.

Oh, one bad thing, your voice will break. Sorry. You’ll go from singing higher than anyone of any gender in your class, to mostly singing baritone. Well, “”“singing”“”, since you’ll stop singing to avoid your voice. Don’t worry! It actually won’t be as bad as you’ll think it is. One day you’ll record yourself reciting some Shakespeare and someone will tell you you sound like “a sexy Disney villainess”. You’ll feel good about yourself. So, to skip right past the self-hate: You are a sexy Disney villainess. Don’t ever worry that you aren’t.

You should probably start reading something called “fan fiction”. Specifically, I want you to read Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. Yes, I know it sounds like a dumb name, but trust me: You’ll appreciate it. For one thing, in my time-line, you convert back to Christianity at 11 because the idea of ceasing to exist terrifies you and you want to believe a heaven exists. You end up Christian for three months, but the post-re-de-conversion embarrassment will last a lifetime. Don’t do that. Read this book and 1) you’ll find it harder to convince yourself to believe things because they’re safe, and 2) death won’t be as scary, because it’ll seem conquerable. Remember that time you beat the shit out of a bully? And how the day before that seemed impossible? Well, someday you’ll see death the same way you saw that bully the day you kicked his ass: An obstacle, but not an insurmountable one.

Oh, and there’s a community of people connected to the author of that book. Check them out. Don’t feel too intimidated by them, either. They’re nice people and, more importantly, they’re relatable. You’ll feel at home speaking to them in a way that you’ve never felt comfortable around anyone ever before. They’ll be the type of people you’d show a letter-to-your-past-self to, in fact. That’s how much you’ll trust them. You will literally cross oceans and continents to be with them. They are your people in a way you don’t understand and won’t understand until you meet them. When you first see them off in the distance, they will terrify you with their brilliance, but keep going and, eventually, you’ll be enveloped by their warmth.

There are a thousand different mental modifications you’ll make after reading that book and deciding that your brain is yours, and you deserve a chance to program it yourself. The very first thing you should work on is charisma. Seriously. I know you think people are universally terrifying and alien and unpredictable. Well, to tell you the truth, you’re right 2 for 3. They are terrifying and they are aliens but, what’s so so important, is that they aren’t unpredictable. You can learn to interact with them in a way that doesn’t lead to them hating your guts in the first 10 minutes. In fact, one day this will come so naturally to you that you’ll think it normal that anyone who meets you is obviously going to like you. In order of importance, least to most: You’ll win dumb school positions, you’ll win live debates, you’ll win the hearts of some pretty people, and you’ll win the respect of those around you. Someday, people will be scratching their heads at the fact that you’re terrified of being seen as pathetic, instead of being completely sure that you’re completely pathetic. After enough of this, you may even believe you aren’t pathetic. You’ll look in the mirror and see someone of value, and not the shell you currently see. Trust me, it’ll feel pretty great.

Oh, and people other than your mother will call you pretty. I know right? I don’t know what’s up with them either, but it’s a nice thought. Some of these people will want to date you - yes, seriously. I know that this is more shocking than learning a book will prompt you to rewrite you brain, but bear with me. You will date people. You will confess crushes for people and they won’t react by throwing things at you. You will say “I love you” and hear “I love you too”. You will hug people and kiss people and be cared about. You… Will actually probably do this with more than one person at once. Yes, that’s a thing people do. Yes, I know it’s weird, but it’s very nice, so you’ll probably want to do it to.

Oh, and don’t let anyone ever convince you to stop doing something because it’s weird - least of all your dad. One mental modification I regret is that I made myself stop flapping and twisting my hands because of how much he disapproved. Don’t bother. You’ll actually have a better relationship with him when you stop considering him the ultimate judge of how much of a person you are. You hate sports. You don’t like farm work. You like dolls and pretty shoes. So. Fucking. What. These aren’t the things that determine whether you’re a success or a failure. He doesn’t determine that.

He loves you, though. He loves you a lot and wants you to be happy. He just doesn’t understand how different you. But he will, trust me, he will. One day he’ll admit to you - out loud, even! - that he’s proud of you and everything you’ve accomplished. You’ll joke - you’ll be funny and sarcastic - but you will feel like you’ve achieved something important. You’ll feel like, if you somehow managed to make him proud, you can do absolutely anything.

You mother is, and will always be, absolutely amazing. Appreciate her. She is going to always be in your corner and support you. For at least the 17 years I’ve been around, no one has known me better. You’ll see eye to eye. The affinity will only grow as you age. You’ll always know that she’s proud of you - but what will stun you is when she says “I’m proud of my daughter”. The day you come out to her will be a highlight of your life. I suggest you hurry up and tell her. Trust me, as terrified as you are that she’ll be disappointed in you, she really really won’t. She’s better than anyone you’ve met so far, and she’ll prove it over and over again.

So, I don’t know if you’re still reading at this point, because you’re probably crying too hard to see these words. That’s OK. Let it all out. It’s OK to cry - no one can see you and no one will hit you. I know that you associate the two - father hit you if you cried until you were ~8, and then classmates took his place. But if there were one time you could let out all the frustration you’ve had in the last 10 years, it’s here. I’ll wait for you.

Are you OK now? Well here’s the conclusion: Life gets better. Much much much better. Unbelievable better. Good in fact. And, right as I write this, I have hope for my future being even better! Life is great, even when it has rough patches. Living is awesome. You won’t regret it. You will have friends and girlfriends and family members you aren’t terrified of. There will be people who love you and people who admire you and people who respect you. Even when people dislike you, they won’t spit on you. You will be seen as a full person and, slowly but surely, you’ll feel like one too. I don’t know how strongly I can emphasise that “life gets better” isn’t just some dumb slogan said by adults who have no idea what they’re talking about. This is the one time that they’re right.

So, when you go to school tomorrow and are wondering whether anyone knows your name, or if they really think your birth certificate actually says “Faggot”, know that it’s temporary. One day, you’ll live far away, and never see those assholes again. You’ll read that book, you’ll find that community, you will belong, and you will never ever look back. Good night, my dear. You will live forever and prosper.