I’ve been thinking so hard, and in serious agitation, about why I keep rejecting this critical theory way of talking about our emotional fucked-upness that most every literary person my age who I think is cool endorses, and I think it’s this: unchecked critical theory obscures how personal and variable it is which of the oppressive social norms a person deals with go in their ‘a lot of people see the world this way, which fucks me over’ column and which ones become 'this poisonous conceptual machinery runs through the spine of my selfhood’ things.