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This is the wrong building. She could have sworn the RA said "take a left at Emily, first on your right", and Bella did exactly that, and here she is and the rooms in this place don't even seem to be numbered, it's all letters and names. She's not going to find Intro to Subtle Therapy in Room 206 like that. Maybe the RA meant take a left after Emily, not before Emily? Maybe she was supposed to go the other way around the quad and approach Emily from the other direction? She's going to be late.
Bella tries to get out of the letter-named-rooms building to go ask Emily for directions, but that's not a stairwell after all, and there's someone shouting at her not to come in and she flinches back and clonks her elbow on the door and boots or no boots she's down and she -
- is falling -
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subtly_artistic
"The silliest thing you said was that your universe would kill me if I went in to go to a bookstore and buy books even if I didn't do anything else at all."
subtly_artistic
"I don't know for sure that it would. But it tends not to like people who are cocky, even if they're very passively cocky."
"Cocky? That's a new word."
subtly_artistic
"Arrogant. Hubristic," she says, bouncing translations. "Sure that they can handle whatever happens."
"It's not that I'm sure I can, it's that I have to or I'm worthless so I might as well try even if it kills me because a chance of being worthless isn't as bad as a guarantee."
"But would your universe kill me for it?"
subtly_artistic
"It might. For the ambition, the attitude, the determination to oppose it, even if that particular sentiment didn't make any sense."
"I think I can explain it in a way that makes sense, it's just - hard.
The things that make life feel good? Like being proud of an accomplishment or enjoying some food or smiling at someone or learning something? They only feel good if I feel like I'm not worthless, and I feel like I'm worthless whenever I haven't done enough. And some things are so big and so important that I know if I didn't try as hard as I could on them I'd feel worthless, even if I had good reasons not to try and they were hard and trying was't really reasonable.
And feeling worthless like that is really really bad."
The things that make life feel good? Like being proud of an accomplishment or enjoying some food or smiling at someone or learning something? They only feel good if I feel like I'm not worthless, and I feel like I'm worthless whenever I haven't done enough. And some things are so big and so important that I know if I didn't try as hard as I could on them I'd feel worthless, even if I had good reasons not to try and they were hard and trying was't really reasonable.
And feeling worthless like that is really really bad."
subtly_artistic
She squeezes him. "It sounds really bad," she murmurs. "I hope one day you learn to feel worthwhile independent of all that."
"I'm just going to do enough things so it doesn't come up."
subtly_artistic
"That is a very admirable impulse, but I think it would be better if you did things because you wanted them done and not because you felt like you had to."
"But that just adds even more things I have to do. Now instead of just having to do enough things I also have to want them and not just because they make me not worthless."
"It's okay. You didn't know."
subtly_artistic
"You've noticed that your mother isn't dying anymore, right, doesn't that even help a little?"
"Yeah, but she doesn't love me. And it wasn't just part of being dying, now she's not dying and still doesn't love me."
"I'm not fixing everything wrong with the world because it'll make her proud of me. I don't know if it will."
"Impressing most people isn't even hard."
subtly_artistic
"That is because most people's expectations are calibrated so they can be impressed more often than they would if they expected every toddler to learn new languages in days."
"But it means that impressing them doesn't really mean anything."
He's wiggling again. "So I can't be happy just with impressing everyone, it's not enough to really feel like I deserve to be alive."