birdblogwhichisforbirds:

I’m thankful for this blue hellsite. I’m thankful for a lot of things and listing them would probably take too long to list, but I wanted to share this.

I mean it.

There are a bunch of justifiable complaints about this site’s poor functionality and about the bad discourse and misinformation spread by its users. This site has been bad for my mental health in various ways and at various times. I’ve deleted multiple blogs and remade. But I’m thankful.

I am beyond grateful that in the far off days of 2011 I came on this website to post about Sherlock and Doctor Who. I am thankful that when I was throwing up everything I ate and chronically suicidal and convinced I was going to Hell for being bi, I was confronted with the annoying rainbow-spewing of 2011 tumblr. It was cringe and imperfect and fetishizing but it was profoundly healing. And I met my first girlfriend through this website and I gave up Catholicism for Lent.

Despite the absurd pettiness of some of it, I am thankful I engaged in fandom. I am thankful that in a period of my life when I felt utterly hopeless about most things, I was able to be passionate about a mad man in a box. I am thankful that, while my self-confidence and sense of my values was completely shattered and I didn’t know what my life mean without my faith, I was able to be strident about defending my favorite TV show. It wasn’t the healthiest coping mechanism, but it was something and I needed it.

I’m thankful I read disability tumblr. I’m thankful I learned things about myself and others that I otherwise wouldn’t have. I am thankful that it told me that some of the things I had to do in First Ever Job (at a residential school for disabled teenagers) were wrong. I am thankful that I met people who understood chronic suicidality and who helped me crawl out of it. I am thankful that I was able to find techniques to get my brain to Actually Do Stuff. I am thankful that, when I didn’t have access to good mental health care (because NHS mental health is underfunded and I had no money for private therapy) I could get internet advice that kept me alive.

I am beyond grateful for rationalist/EA tumblr. I am beyond grateful for being able to find a way to values that were meaningful to me after God. I am so lucky to have learned about better ways of doing good, and better ways of thinking. I have found a community that loves and accepts me and makes me a better person. I have had issues with this community, I have had one very unpleasant break up inside it and I think some things have fueled my scrupulosity. But this community has given me tools I needed to build  life that has value to me, and I don’t know how I would build that life without it. I have met so many wonderful people, including my husband.

I am so thankful for Rob. I am so thankful for his love an his patience and his kindness. I am so thankful that we “get” each there (most of the time) without it being a constant uphill struggle. I’m gonna quote from the beginning  of the speech at our wedding (I have it saved on my laptop):

Now this is a story all about how my life got flipped, turned upside down, and if you’d like to take a minute just sit right there I’ll tell you how I moved four and a half thousand miles for a boy from the internet.

On 20th June 2014, I was wasting time on tumblr dot com and I saw a long post about ethics. It was by someone with the username nostalgebraist who I’d seen arguing with various friends of mine about Bayes’ theorem and other statistical questions, but I hadn’t followed him because I didn’t know enough Mathematics to make sense of it. But in this post, he said “One can’t build a moral system from hating oneself, because one changes; once one decides “this is Good because it is not what a wretch like me would do,” it thus becomes something a wretch like you would do, and thus it flips back to being Bad again. […] If you mock me for playing around in my academic sandbox when I could be thinking about bigger grander things, you are saying that I should be thinking about how I am fundamentally disgusting scum and how God hates me (I don’t believe in him, but he hates me anyway).” And I thought, oh! A wretch like me! WE CAN BE WRETCH-BUDDIES! So I followed him, and I talked to him sometimes, and we discussed our mutual wretchedness. We chatted with each other on tumblr a lot over the next year or so, and as time went by we got closer and started talking to each other outside of tumblr as well.

And from the end of that speech:

For months and months while we were waiting for me to get my visa, I used to say to Rob “I’m gonna marry you so hard.”  And now I’ve done it and I’m double-marrying him, because once was not enough. I was scared, before I came here, because I knew I was taking a risk. But the alternative to moving halfway across the world was an even bigger risk. I would be risking waiting the rest of my life to find someone as wonderful, and as compatible with me, as my Rob. I don’t think that would have worked out. And now, I am here and I am glad I took this risk. I am glad to be in this beautiful city and to have been welcomed by the lovely community of people I’ve met here. I am glad that people from outside have travelled really long distances to come and support us, and many many others who couldn’t be here have sent their love and good wishes. But most of all I am glad that I found someone to be wretch-buddies with and that over the course of several years, we have stopped being wretches. I am not the wretch I was in 2014 and I think a large part of the credit for that goes to Rob. And he is not the wretch he was in 2014 and I hope that some of the credit goes to me.

Rob is an incredibly careful person. Rob is careful because he is full of care both in the sense of worry and in the sense of compassion. He has treated me with so much care over the last four years, and I cannot thank him enough. But despite his carefulness, despite his natural aversion to risk, he took a chance on me. I am so glad that he did. I am so glad I am here. I am so glad to be getting married.

Also, I know this sounds shallow but I don’t fucking care: I am grateful that I am not (first-world definition of) poor anymore. I am grateful I don’t have to go into debt to buy food. I am grateful that I don’t have to eat expired food I stole from the bins at work (and not tell anyone, because there were people who could have helped me but I was ashamed.) And I think I would have made my way out of that without Rob - I was doing better financially than ever before in the last year or so in England but like… Rob helped. He thinks it is normal to not be in debt. He thinks it is normal to have savings. And not just like, two hundred pounds in savings. He thinks it is normal to have a retirement plan. And if he’d been poor but we had somehow found a way to afford immigration despite that, I still would have married him. But like… if you want to improve your mental health, marrying a tech bro and never having to eat literal garbage again really doesn’t hurt.

I feel like I spent the first half of my 20s digging a hole for myself and the second half crawling laboriously out of that hole, while backsliding frequently. And I think I blamed my overuse of the internet and of this website for that, and there was some truth to that. But I think it was also my way of getting out of that hole.

But I think I had a lot of needs that I couldn’t really get met any other way. And I don’t think there were any other ways that were accessible to me. I think that getting those needs met in ways that were better would have acquired attention span/ money/ energy/ executive function/ proximity to specific meatspace communities/ self-trust I didn’t have then. And now I do have those things, and I don’t need this blue website so much any more (which is a good thing, because one of these days Yahoo! is gonna stop their half-hearted attempts to make money from it and pull the plug, and that could happen in 30 years or it could happen next week.) But I am thankful to people I met here.

Back in 2011 people would say “tumblr teaches me more than school!” (because tumblr would tell them things like “being trans is a thing” or “the clitoris is a thing” or “racism is bad” or “here is a somewhat over-simplified map of native American tribes” or “you should feed your pets good quality pet food and not random garbage” and apparently their schools were failing to impart this extremely basic stuff.) Other people would make fun of this as cringey and bad, especially as this site is full of bad opinions and  misinformation. But this website has taught me things I am genuinely grateful for. And that is thanks to the people I met here. Some of them have left, one of them I fell out with even though I am still incredibly grateful for some of the things they taught me. But all of them helped me.

Thank you, terrible discoursey broken wearing-a-tie-as-a-belt website. Thank you people on here.

<3 may you all have as much to be thankful for as I do.

Eerily, poignantly appropriate that (1) I experienced a tumblr glitch immediately after liking this post and (2) that it was this specific glitch