For me, it’s a quote from a DND session on YouTube, said by a very simple and kind paladin. The series was not serious roleplay, it was just some friends having fun and making entertainment. But the paladin said “why be mean when you can be nice?”. And that immediately rearranged my brain chemistry. I stopped hating people who were happier than me, I stopped assuming the worst of people, I stopped being mean to people who were just having fun. This was in the day when cringe culture was very much on the rise, and bullying people who were a bit weird was the most popular thing to do. I used to watch some shithead youtubers who would just bully others on the internet, and I ate it up because I was 15. But the sentence “why be mean when you can be nice” just changed me. Why spread negativity instead of positivity? Who gains from that.
I’m high this might sound cringe. But this post is a safe space for cringe
Paraphrasing: “That noise and all those wild disjointed hurtful thoughts that your brain produces…did you know that that’s actually NOT you and you can tell it ‘shush’?”
It never occured to me that my brain and my thoughts could be kind of externalized like an annoying roommate i’m stuck with but who doesn’t define me. Also got me into thinking a lot more about how my body and other senses interact with my brain. I used to have crippling anxious episodes but I have some really good coping tactics/practices now.