something good for you: the feeling that you are not alone in your misery, that there are others, all going through the same thing.
something bad for you: the feeling that it is normal to be miserable. or worse, that it is okay to be miserable.
something that everyone does: compare their behavior to what they think is normal, subconsciously tends towards normalcy.
the good thing and the bad thing can be hard to separate. in acquiring one, you often don’t realize you are being given both. they are separate, or at least separable, but only in specific types of media. the most common separators are the retrospectives, the ones that say 'and then i got better.' but there's something harmful, too, about only consuming the retrospective.
in creating: the struggle is to be able to discuss pain without glorifying it, to normalize it without accepting it.
in consuming, the struggle is to see the windows, to know when they are shifting.