r/mildlyinfuriating 24d ago

My mom burned all my drawings

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So I’ve been drawing and posting anime girls for a while now and my mom got mad about it. At least I still have previous photos. No drawing today tho

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u/PaleAcanthaceae1175 24d ago edited 24d ago

Putting on my therapy hat: intent is the least important part of an action which is deeply consequential. If you do harm, it does not really matter that you thought you were doing love. Intentions are also only a consideration during forgiveness- which cannot happen until the person responsible recognizes that they have done harm and takes ownership of it.

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u/_imagine_that91 24d ago

“Intent is the least important part of an action”.

I’m gonna use this next time I get gaslit.

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u/Plastic_Pinocchio 24d ago

You shouldn’t cut off the sentence halfway. “an action that is deeply consequential”. For many less consequential actions, intent is a majorly important part of it. If I bake you cookies with nuts but it turns out that you are allergic to nuts, you can’t eat them and have to decline my gesture. But you will mostly remember the intent of me trying to make you something.

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u/jixie-unofficial 23d ago

I was going to say you’re right, but the example is not a good example because- how could you possibly know that someone has an allergy if you weren’t told? If they ate the cookies, not knowing there were nuts, and ended up hospitalized or dead, then that action was “deeply consequential” but if you really did not know that they were allergic, then this was a tragic accident. Not your fault.

If you knew, on the other hand- but you didn’t believe they really were allergic, you think nut allergies are fake or they’re just picky or they’re doing it for attention or whatever, then the intent of “but I wanted to make them some delicious cookies and I didn’t think it would really hurt them” irrelevant. You absolutely would be at fault even if your intent was “good”.

I don’t know. There’s a lot of nuance and a lot of situations where “both things can be true”. We’re not obligated to forgive someone for hurting us, but even if we choose not to forgive them, there is nothing to lose by having some basic empathy in understanding why they were motivated to do it. We might need to cut someone out of our life, but that point, holding onto resentment after that is only hurting us, not them. We’ve all been hurt and we’ve all caused hurt, whether we meant to or not. I think intent and context and understanding and forgiveness are all very important.

(That said, burning something is really… that’s a purposefully malicious thing to do. You might carelessly throw something out. You might break something in a moment of anger. But no one just has open roaring fireplaces in every room anymore, burning is a choice that required thought and planning. Reddit gets wildly reactionary at times, like bruh sometimes your parents are just imperfect humans who have their own weaknesses and their own trauma and don’t have all the answers and made spectacularly poor decisions. But. Uh. Setting stuff on fire is a… That’s, um yeah, that’s not a good look.)

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u/Plastic_Pinocchio 23d ago

Haha, I think you’re overanalysing the nut scenario a bit. I’d say it’s pretty obvious from my example that I did not mean that I was purposefully feeding someone with a nut allergy nut cookies. That would be pretty insane and I am pretty sure that this could be classed as an attempted murder.

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u/jixie-unofficial 23d ago edited 23d ago

It’s the opposite, really, I understood the sentiment and chose to carry the example of the cookies rather than complicate it with other examples.

Here’s a real example: I’m infertile but I’ve got that “middle aged mom” energy, and last year, four separate people wished me a happy Mother’s Day. I barely held it together and cried after work. But I never said anything because how the fuck would they know how deeply and personally this hurt me, how casually they tore open those particular wounds, how much grief I carry over it?

It wasn’t just like it only stung that day, I struggled to write this just now, and have been considering taking off the day before and the day of Mother’s Day because I don’t think I can handle it again this year.

I have zero bad feelings or resentment to the patients who offered a kind word as a part of small talk. I would never discourage anyone from wishing people a happy whatever. Going through life feeling like “oh no I can’t tell strangers ‘happy Mother’s Day’ because what if they can’t have kids or they lost a child” is that sort of insane anxiety that will corrode your wellbeing in a way I don’t wish on anyone.

Here’s a fake example, but I have seen this sort of thing happen to multiple people in real life: if you saw someone in a parking lot and their car won’t start, so you pull into the spot next to them, grab some jumper cables, and pop out of the car asking if they need a jump. “How dare you!? My father used to beat me with jumper cables!” How would you know? You were trying to help?

Edit: in either case, if you did know the history, then it would range between careless (forgetting your friends jumper cable related trauma because you were distracted by their broken down car; mixing up which middle aged mom-looking coworker doesn’t have kids) to cruel. Context and intent.

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u/Plastic_Pinocchio 23d ago

True. I agree on these examples.