Ahead of curve?

 Or, "I was doing it before it was cool, or even before it was seen as 'okay'"

 

CNN: Adults can sleep with stuffed animals, and in fact, it might even be a good thing 

I admit this was something I downplayed/pretended not to do for years (in college, I kept the couple I had stuffed under the pillow) because when I was growing up, it was seen as "abnormal." "Normal" people gave up stuffed toys somewhere before adolescence, and if they kept one around it was "I might give it to my kid some day" or "I keep it ironically"

But more and more we are learning that a lot of us are anxious people, and there are a number of little things we can do that relieve that anxiety and *don't hurt anyone else*

Stuffed animals are this. I have a lot. I've always had them. The low point in having them around was college/first-time grad school when I wanted to seem adult and sophisticated and thought "I don't want people to laugh at me if they come to my apartment" (almost no one ever DID come to my apartment)

Eventually, I just gave up. Realized I'd always be alone, realized few people ever come to visit, so I put more out and especially now I've bought and made a lot more. They're *everywhere* in my house now - I have a lot lined up on the back of the sofa and I have a chair with a number of them (including a couple of the iterations of Garfield - the vintage 80s-style plushie I bought from an Etsy seller when I couldn't find the one I had had and figured I had disposed of it, the "Gorf" that is a bootleggy version of one of the recent movie Garfields, and now a "Baby Garf" that was apparently from a poorly-received CGI movie that had his origin story. I know nothing about the movie in question but the baby Garf is awfully cute.)

I also have a lot on my bed - mostly Ponies, yes, I am still a fan, but also some of the Bluey dogs now (including the Bluey I crocheted) and a few other random animals (including Francisco, the maned wolf I ordered as a "symbolic adoption" from WWF a couple years ago). 

I have a couple big ones - I still have Pfred the horse and the big polar bear I bought (and perhaps, I should try running at least that one through a gentle cycle on the machine; I do worry about dust mites and what they might do to my allergies).  The big ones serve almost like "crib bumpers" (back in the day, people used to put padded things up around the edge of cribs so the kid wouldn't bonk their head on the wood or something) and it does make me feel less alone. 

But yeah. When I finally gave up trying to be so "adult" and said to myself "where's the harm in hugging a stuffed animal to your chest when you sleep?" it did make things better. I dare say having them around helped me make it through the pandemic - for a while I was doing a little "stuffie of the day" post on Twitter - I'd get one of the animals and just hold it while I wrote stuff or graded stuff or whatever in my wfh set up. 

I do hope, as we seem to be going backwards as a society in compassion to one another (I have read many stories on how people seem to feel empowered again to use what we now sometimes call the "r-slur" (an old word for an intellectually challenged person) again, and that hits like a slap, because I remember kids calling me and others that in grade school and it was unpleasant), that we don't decide to once again mock coping mechanisms that, as I said, hurt no one and help the person using them.