“what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” is a bizarre message
and all the tumblr posts I’ve ever seen satirically riffing on it (“what doesn’t kill you makes you paranoid/suicidal/more likely to burn down a walmart” etc) are equally bizarre
like.
a few things that have not killed me have made me stronger. (exercise. food. oxygen. college. economic privilege. sertraline. public transit.)
a few things that have not killed me have made me weaker. (executive dysfunction. patriarchy. neuropathy. the fact i don’t have teleportation superpowers. smog.)
but most things that don’t kill me have very little detectable effect on me at all. (kangaroos. dwarf planets. the city of Boise Idaho. kite-flying contests. Georges Pierre Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. the dog that played Wishbone. all the atoms in the Andromeda galaxy. all the digits of pi. slime molds on a rock in Bratislava. books that have never been written. the word for “snail” in Italian. parallel universes.)
and nothing has ever actually killed me. yet.
idk. maybe i’m just infinitely strong.
from the infinite number of things that haven’t killed me.
*in perfect Italian*
snail
lol
(is completely unaffected)
(especially bc I actually do not even know what word that is. I am not sure why I chose it for the list. my mind was very much in “let the subconscious pick things the way it does in dreams” mode because I was trying to make a list of the most random unrelated things possible)
(update. After some research i have learned Italian has a whole lot of words for snail. Of course it does. There’s probably a map of them like that map of words for genitals. Which probably includes some of the same words. Why not.)
(one of the words, “chiocciola,” also means the @ symbol. Lovely. It can go with my OC who’s named after the asterisk. It can be Aster’s little pet. A gridbug she tamed. Gridsnail. I already decided those exist, because of that night parade with Tron costumes and also giant snails. Canon.)
(None of that killed me. I think the net effect leaves me slightly stronger. Because knowledge is power. Yay.)