this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2024
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me_irl
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It is pretty crazy to think that for literally thousands of years, every single ancestral pairing, going all the way back to the first lil mud skippers that flopped up on land, have decided to produce offspring, which is ultimately the only reason you're even alive today.
And when it's your turn to uphold the unbroken tradition dating back millennia, you're just like 'naaaaaaah, fuck that yo'????
Honestly that's fuckin awesome! The point of life is your own personal experience, and you should absolutely do everything you can to push it in the direction of your choosing, tradition be damned. ✌️
Hey. It's like sometimes you don't need to score the goal -- pass the ball and let someone else score with your help. It's a society, man, and as a group we're not in (much) danger of external extinction.
You know what, at least 7 branches of hominids existed from the same line (12 if you count one evolving to the next) and only one of them lead to us.
The way I see it is that tradition is working pretty damn well on the whole. People are producing kids just fine, taking care of them as they grow and become adults is the hard part. That lineage you point to is the only reason I'm alive today, yes, but there are a lot of other "only reasons" I'm alive today that happened after I was born, and many of them were very much not from my biological parents.
Personally there was a lot of generational trauma in my upbringing and I don't wanna pass that on. These days I've taken that parental drive and repurposed it toward the adults in my community whose parents have decided to abandon them, usually due to being queer. It's different than having a parental relationship to a kid, but I'm finding a community guardian role is filling the same emotional need. The people I care for won't carry my name, but I didn't even carry my own name lol.
I used to struggle with the fact that nothing I do will likely outlive me, but now I feel it's just as worthwhile to make the present day better for the people who need it. I'd still love to work with kids, maybe teach or something, but being trans makes many parents less willing to allow their kids to be around me. I might foster someday, it'll be a challenge but I think it's something I'd get a lot more out of.
To be fair a lot of people don’t have the choice