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@neilperrykinnie19

The Divine Feminine.

Your purpose in life is not to love yourself but to love being yourself.

If you goal is to love yourself, then your focus is directed inward toward yourself, and you end up constantly watching yourself from the outside, disconnected, trying to summon the “correct” feelings towards yourself or fashion yourself into something you can approve of.

If your goal is to love being yourself, then your focus is directed outward towards life, on living and making decisions based on what brings you pleasure and fulfillment.

Be the subject, not the object. It doesn’t matter what you think of yourself. You are experiencing life. Life is not experiencing you.

Thank you this is the first post about self love that hasn’t made me want to throw things

and yknow what i also don’t like the idea that abusers are these like. horrible monsters and there’s something ~wrong with them~ cuz no “normal” person could ever do such a thing like. my abusers are normal people. not even particularly bad people, really, aside from… well, yknow. there’s not some special ingredient that makes abusers abusers. they’re just people, doing fucked up things. you wouldn’t know it from looking at them, there’s no one specific reason they do what they do. it’s weird to try and like… explain it all away like that.

and actually yknow what i’ve always hated the dehumanization of abusers or bad people or whatever cuz like. no! they aren’t monsters, they’re people! this is what humans have the capacity to do! there’s nothing special about it! don’t try to distance ‘nice, normal folks’ from ‘monsters’ cuz we’re the same goddamn thing; we all have free will and the ability to choose how we act and some people choose fucked up stuff and that’s human, unfortunately

Saying that abusers are less than human or that there is some inherent pathology to them makes the world less safe. Because if abusers are less than human, you can’t acknowledge that your beloved best friend is neglecting his children. You can’t acknowledge that your mother emotionally abused you. You can’t take the accusation of domestic violence against your role model seriously. You can’t acknowledge that your girlfriend is financially abusing you. Because they are human, and you know them, so they can’t be unhuman abusers. And they aren’t unhuman. But they are abusers.

A woman with no mental illness can come home and hit her children. A man with a perfectly healthy childhood can manipulate his employees into working overtime with no pay. A woman who is respected in her community can commit a rape. A man who treats most patients perfectly can be medically abusive to others.

Abuse is not a pathology. It is not a function of inhumanity. It is not inevitable. If it was any of those things, it would be morally neutral in the way that a hurricane is, something that you just have to get potential victims out of the way of. Instead, abuse is an action or set of actions that the person chooses to take, and could have chosen not to take. That’s the whole reason that abuse is a moral wrong: that abusers could have chosen otherwise.

Most importantly?

There is nothing separating you, the person reading this, from being an abuser, except for the choice to be careful and kind to others. Not if you were abused. Not if you have little societal power. Not if you just really don’t want to be one. There is no immutable fact about you that makes you immune to abusing others. There are only the choices that you make in how you interact with other human beings.

Anyone can choose to be an abuser. Anyone can choose not to be one.

Idk who needs to hear this today, but don't go lurking on ex friends and partners. Nothing you see or read will make you feel better there. All you're doing is hurting your own feelings. Leave them in the past and do your best to move on with your own life, to make what you have now happier rather than dwelling on things that used to be.

I personally wanna see less 'you are not a burden/it's not work to love you' and more 'you are worth the work it takes to love you.' I KNOW I'm a burden sometimes. that isn't such a terrible thing! humans are strong. we can carry burdens. and it is work for me to be there for my friends, but it's work I'm willing to do.

we need to acknowledge this because pretending love isn't work will never make people like me feel less guilty for accepting love. we need to talk about it so people don't feel bad for having boundaries and not always being up to do the work. we need to accept it so we can properly appreciate what others do for us and what we're doing for them.

yes it does take work to love you. but guess what? you still deserve love, and you deserve people who are willing to do the work to love you. it doesn't make you bad. all love take work. and everyone is worth it.

danosaurs-and-philions

im a bad person who thinks bad thoughts like ‘ew what is that girl wearing’ and then remember that im supposed to be positive about all things and then think ‘no she can wear what she wants, fuck what other people say damn girl u look fabulous’ and im just a teeny bit hypocritical tbh

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nikolaecuza

I was always taught by my mother, That the first thought that goes through your mind is what you have been conditioned to think. What you think next defines who you are.

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quadzilla-rising

READ THIS THEN READ IT AGAIN

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i havent seen this post in like 3 years but i was telling the bolded bit to a coworker the other night

this is fate

this is the one post that’s stuck with me through my entire time on this site

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I remind myself of this a lot.

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"mental illnesses can increase the chance of being toxic to oneself and others"

and

"no mental illness makes you inherently abusive"

and

"mental illness is an explanation, not an excuse for toxic behaviours"

are statements that can inductively coexist.

Stop trying to clearly distance yourself from abusers by calling them narcissists or sociopaths or psychos. It's time to face the facts and swallow the harsh truth that literally everyone has the potential to do harm - not just a specific subset of mentally ill people.

not gonna lie, i've always found the comorbidity of personality disorders really interesting. it's like your brain walking into a store during a buy one get x free event and coming out with two PDs from the same cluster, a bunch of traits from others, one you didn't even know existed until about 5 minutes ago, and a discount code for psychosis.

here’s the thing about greta gerwig’s little women. it’s really not just about jo anymore. almost every adaptation of little women has been a version of here’s jo and her sisters who have two dimensional stories. meg marries off, she’s happy. beth dies and nobody is really that sad because we never got to know her well. amy married laurie and everyone is confused. but with gerwig’s telling, she affords every sister real autonomy and story. she showed the struggle and sacrifice and love that meg has. she gives beth one of the most beautiful story arcs ever. she lets beth exists in the movie and grow on us before her death. and she completely translates amy to a character that may have always been right there, but not properly communicated. amy and laurie make sense. you feel beths absence. you understand meg. and you still have jo right there in focus. but they all feel real. the other three don’t feel like accessories anymore but real and important characters of the story. and it’s fucked if gerwig doesn’t get nominated for best adapted screenplay and direction because she took a 150 year old story and made it seem brand new.