Showing The World That I Draw Hentai
When I was young, I was never a big fan of social media or online communication, but I did love drawing anime porn. For a long, long time this was something I kept entirely to myself, and then one day during my 23rd year I did something extraordinary. I created an Instagram account, and began uploading my pictures to it.
I began riding a small wave of popularity as I uploaded more and more of my art, soon I posted the word “Oppai” on one of my stories and told everyone it meant “boobs” in Japanese. Suddenly they were all repeating it to me.
It took me a while, but suddenly I realized. My friends were not receptive to my love of hentai because they were fans of my art, they were receptive to it because it was something very personal to me, and they were joyous to get to know me better.
An Unrealistic View of Reality
Humans as they exist today are natural drama creators. They use their amazing ability of imagination to simulate all kinds of bizarre and dystopian futures. Creating rules for themselves that they must follow, often under the arbitrary, and quite masochistic, pretense of guilt, (a phenomenon that originates from the mind and nowhere else, mind you). The fear of others looking down upon one, violent scolding and judgmental looks, can break a person, especially a young person, before they have even taken any action. Whatever it was that you wanted to do, whether it was taking a trip, engaging in an obscure hobby or maybe just asking your partner if they’d like to see your collection of green-haired anime girls, some force within you is telling you how bad it will be before you even try.
But what does bad mean? There’s an old Chinese story about a man, his son and his horse. Long story short, the boy fell of his horse and broke his leg, the horse ran off. The government came and conscripted every young man in the town, except for the boy with the broken leg. News came back, the war was lost, every young man died, the boy was still alive and the horse returned all by itself. It was impossible to foresee the boy breaking his leg and the horse running off as a bad thing.
When we sit and really think about the stirs in our imagination that cause us to worry, we find that the sources of our worry come from two main sources; The fear of what will happen to us, and the fear of what may happen to other people.
Of course there are many, many situations where these two fears are valid, but in most circumstances where they arise they stem from a what is a fundamental lack of trust.
You see, it’s obvious when we bring other people into the mix, but somehow evades us when we are the only person who is affected. Whenever we are afraid for what might happen to other people, we are also implicitly holding the belief that they can not deal with the potentially incoming stressors by themselves. And in most situations this is extremely condescending. Now when we look about it from the situation where we are the only one involved in the situation that causes worry, then we find out that the problem, every problem, doesn’t take its root in an imagined threat from the future, where the real problem lies is in the fear of an inability to deal with the present. A fear of our own inability to deal with something dangerous in the present.
People aren’t afraid of a difficult future … they’re struggling to protect a “good enough” present
The nuance lies in that people aren’t afraid of a difficult future, rather they’re struggling to protect a “good enough” present; because, fundamentally, they don’t believe in their ability to handle issues that go beyond their habitual threshold. Fear is a very different emotional journey than the desire to protect something. Fear invigorates us, it brings us closer to the people we love and causes us to act on our feet with sparks of brilliant intelligence whenever the time calls for it. Protection on the other hand, is an insidious and draining emotion. Unlike fear, it is not a feeling which permeates your body for an instant, shifting you to action and then fading away when its time has passed. It is a feeling which demands every second of your attention, it demands that you maintain it, that you always keep up your guard, and it stems from a fundamentally low self-esteem.
It’s Not The Thing, But Where It Comes From
The most insidious part of our imagination is its ability to convince us that it is accurately reflecting reality. Much of what we imagine never comes to pass, and when it does, it was more often than not our conniving self-sabotage that was to blame.
You see, as the Chinese parable taught us, we never really know the future. We can only respond as it beckons us. It would seem then that our response-ability is our responsibility to nurture, but this is also missing the point. The truth is that those actions that cause you to worry, that dread that you’re constantly feeling, can often just be cured by a simple re-assessment of the world around you.
All people are playing a game, a game which could be thought of as the “fitting in” game. They don’t want to attack you, or anyone for that matter, (if they do then it’s another story entirely), instead, all most people want is to feel loved and appreciated. They have no reason to dislike someone else before given a reason to, and, unless slave to some disastrous ideology, tend to have mixed and unpredictable thoughts towards each person they encounter.
You are the main factor in every relationship in your life. You are simply there for all of them. It is via the things you do and the words you say that people will form an opinion of you.
People tend to believe what other people believe, at least within the spectrum of reason. If someone goes around proclaiming that some behavior is wrong and unjust, whilst also participating in that behavior on occasion, people will find it hard to latch on. In the same vein, if you hide away as if you have something to be ashamed of, people will pick up on your sub-communications, and make up their minds that you do, in fact, have something to be ashamed of. In the social world, this is known as Frame Control. In short, people are more likely to view you as weird for having fringe interests as long as you view yourself as weird for having them. In contrast, if you pull out your phone and show your just-met new acquaintances the anime porn you drew last week as if there was nothing at all weird about that, they will follow suit quickly enough.
I know, I’ve tried.
I’ve heard it said that all love begins with self-love, and whilst that is not the point of this article, it is a nice way to get the same point across. When I began showing all my friends my hentai art, no one thought I was weird, because I didn’t think I was weird. In contrast, my younger, less socially capable, self had been afraid of imagined beliefs and prejudices that my peers may have held, and the only reason I thought this way because I had spent far too much time in hateful, fear-mongering crowds during my adolescence. All it took was a re-observation of my surroundings, a little kick in the form of sharing my Instagram profile with a friend, to turn me right round into understanding that the world can be a tolerant place, and that your own thoughts and feelings often dictate how comfortable those around you are in your presence.
