I'm always left wondering how much of her behaviour is influenced by the all meat diet or of course, the full advil bottle of pharmaceuticals. Guesses are leaning to the latter.
To be entirely straightforward when I hear about an emotionally dead woman who slams pills like tiktaks then posts thottery on tiktok after shoving her mouth full of meat... I, uh, dont think "guru".
I've suspected for a long while now that suffering from severe chronic illness throughout her childhood, spending a lot of time in and out of hospitals, and being doped up on pain meds for years on end ended up seriously stunting her emotional development. It would have been hard, if not impossible, for her to carry on a normal social life with other kids. She was always going to be the kid who couldn't participate at all, or had to cancel at last minute, or needed special accommodations. And in adolescence, you know that had to impinge on her sense of her own attractiveness and desirability, at a time when most girls start yearning for boys and relationships. All of that would have pushed her into deeper reliance on, and unhealthy enmeshment with, her family, and in adolescence that would have intensified in her relationship with her father.
On top of that, Peterson has said, after describing all the suffering Mikhaila went through as a kid, that she wasn't allowed to feel sorry for herself.
Like, WTF mate? No, you don't want your kid to get stuck in self-pity, and let them make "poor sick me" part of their identity, or use it to stir others' pity so they can get away with whatever they please. You want them to build the best and most meaningful life they can with the flawed materials they've been given. But telling them they're not allowed to look at the pain and wretched unfairness of their situation--one that, at the time, had no resolution in sight--and occasionally just let all those feelings of grief, anger, loneliness, resentment, etc. rise up as they naturally will and overflow? What the
hell was he thinking?
Sometimes, when things are shit, you really do need to be able to wallow in self-pity, even if only for an hour or so. You've got to get way down into the "Fuck this shit," and "Why me?!" and "Why am I even here, and why do I stay?" so you can discharge all that tension, get some relief, and be able to pick up and move on again. I think a kid whose childhood has been a pain-filled nightmare, and who sees no end in sight, is totally justified in melting down and feeling really fucking sorry for herself on occasion. But Mikhaila wasn't allowed to do that.
So what do people usually do when they're not allowed to feel something, despite having every reason to? What do they do when they feel those forbidden emotions? They learn to shut them down. They learn to push down those feelings, wall them off, and numb themselves against them. And in the process, they become robotic, to a certain degree. I've known some pretty dead-eyed, non-reactive people in my own life--and plenty of others who seem to be perfectly normal until it's appropriate to express a certain (usually negative) emotion, and then they just check out; it's like they go into low-power mode until the situation changes and the expected emotional response is one that's permissible. And I look at Mikhaila Peterson, and I see somebody who has become so accustomed to shutting down, she's just stayed that way. Shit, she probably has come to consider it a virtue; a lot of people like that pride themselves on not feeling certain emotions.
As for her thottery, it's very common behavior in women who didn't get to take part in the normal rituals of teenage sexual development here in the West, which includes experimenting with one's image in order to be seen as more sexually desirable, and trying it out among their fellow teenagers. It doesn't have to be chronic illness that keeps them from doing so; being a fat girl, or the one with very conservative parents, or an "ugly duckling" also serve as barriers. So if, through weight loss, plastic surgery, leaving home--or, in Mikhaila's case, finally finding the solution to her chronic health issues--they find themselves suddenly attractive, and in a position to perform that kind of adolescent sexual display, they try to make up for lost time. But the delayed version also has an element of, "Look at me, all of you people who ignored or made fun of me in high school! I'm hot now!" which makes it even more pathetic.
tl;dr: Mikhaila Peterson went through some really heavy shit as a kid and teenager which messed with her head, and she's acting from that. And her father, the great psychological "genius" worshipped by so many, is, in part, responsible for it.
