Simple Reminders

Dear reader: thank you in advance for allowing me to express my frustrations about a relatively simple event in my life.

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Hey, familia, I didn’t like the movie you dragged me to go watch with you.

Hey, family, just because I didn’t like it, doesn’t make it okay for you to bash my opinion, call me sexist, tell me “you walked into the theater and didn’t have an open mind; because if you had, you would’ve liked it” (way to disregard my emotions like that).

I’m not going to degrade your opinion. If I hadn’t gone, I would’ve rolled my eyes and said “good for you” when you said you enjoyed it. But you dragged me along, and I feel the need to defend why I didn’t like it.

It wasn’t due to my having a closed mind about it. It was due to the exposition-heavy dialogue, how the female characters started and ended with stereotypes and statements (“love interest,” “woman in a man’s role”), and how the whole conflict could’ve been solved in a much simpler way.

I only went with you to avoid making a scene, since I know how this goes between us:

“You should come, you might like it” escalates into “this is family time, you really should participate” escalates into “and what about everything we do for you, you should compromise and try to be selfless for once” escalates into “don’t get mad at us, we’re just trying to agree on something” escalates into…

I didn’t want to deal with that.

simple reminders, a day late:

I am allowed to respectfully disagree with someone’s opinion.

I am allowed to have an opinion only one other person in the room agrees with, when the rest of the room doesn’t respect it.

I am allowed to be assertive.

If other people blow me off when I’m assertive, maybe that means they care less about me, and more about what I do for them.

Like let them drag me to movies I hate in the name of “family bonding time.”

But I can learn to be assertive.

And I can learn to care about myself.