girl help i’m being forced to work @ my job

message to all bitches

please survive

OP being deactivated is like a dying war general sending out her one final message to her loyal battalion before succumbing to her numerous wounds

you’re going to love again, find a job again, create art again, do what you love again, feel powerful again. you’re going to be back on track. i don’t know when, but you are going to feel like yourself again, eventually. this isn’t the end. hang in there.

There are so many things I love about social media but the unhealthy cultural stuff and evangelizing immaturity in life and relationships is getting to a point where I’m questioning if it’s even worth the tradeoff

You just can’t be on tumblr or twitter without being exposed to it and it gets more and more irritating and off-putting and frustrating to witness the deeply unhealthy harmful delusional and fundamentally selfish things that get treated as normal or held up as Goals

Parasocial relationships are corrosive to actual relationships. They acclimate you to a way of seeing and relating to others that is fundamentally unseeing and unknowing and based entirely on your own fantasies. It’s why healthy crushes in adults are mild and often not acted upon because as you mature you recognize that your fantasies about people are just projections - you can’t love someone you don’t know, you can only love the desires that you’ve projected onto them and from which they have nowhere to go but down. 

No one can ever live up to your imaginary relationship with them and while it’s normal to be invested in those fantasies as a kid, once you’re an adult the healthy thing is to mature and grow up and learn that indulging those fantasies isn’t harmless because it leaves you comparing your real relationships and people as they really are to the elaborate fantasies you’ve built up in your head. Your current partner is never going to be as interesting or exciting as the fantasy partner you’ve projected onto some crush you don’t know who you’ve built into the ideal person in your head. Even their flaws are endearing because you’ve chosen flaws for them that are compatible with you and you’ve fantasized about problems you might run into that are problems you’d feel perfectly comfortable navigating, that wouldn’t challenge your ego or push you into unfamiliar and difficult territory.

Which is all part of the Perfect Life fantasy peddled on these sites that is just so deeply destructive and self-sabotaging at best, and externally destructive at worst. 

“You should be obsessed with your partner and they should be obsessed with you”

That’s called being codependent and it is a wildly mutually destructive dynamic and that does not exist in any healthy lasting relationship. Anywhere. Period.

But social media makes it seem like you’re settling if you accept that fact. That you’re settling for mediocre love or compromised relationships or comfort over True Love and True Romance. 

Having a few close friends who you lean on and can turn to outside of your partner, having a wider circle of casual friends who you can party and visit and hang out with, and then having your partner be someone you trust and love and feel safe and good building a life with, but who doesn’t meet all your needs or wants and who has a different personality than you which is sometimes great and sometimes difficult, isn’t a compromise or settling - it’s what healthy mature love looks like. Making any one person the center of your world isn’t a good thing, there simply is no version of that that can go well or serve as a foundation for healthy love. 

And when you grow up and mature, you come to recognize that as a basic truth about life the same way you learn to let go of other black and white thinking and other extreme ways of seeing the world. 

But social media glorifies immaturity. It glorifies fantasy and delusion and self-interest and treating people as tools for your personal growth. “People come into your life for a reason and leave for a reason and they’re there to teach you” NOOOOO They’re not! They don’t exist for you! They’re not characters in your life story, they’re real human beings with as rich an internal life as you who are impacted by your choices and actions and to whom you have a series of basic obligations as a fellow living being on Earth. People don’t exist for your convenience or consumption or to fill in roles in your daydreamed life and they don’t vanish off the Earth the moment they leave your sight.

These are not easy things to learn or face, but they’re real and it’s part of growing up to realize you have more responsibilities to others than you maybe wanted or thought you would, and to realize that life is about something more complex and nuanced than just pursuing your own happiness no matter what it takes. 

And politically that means accepting there isn’t a good team and a bad team, that it’s complicated and messy and that liberation is nonlinear and you can’t just write people off who do things that upset you and you can’t just write people in who share your identity. 

And interpersonally it means accepting that you have flaws and shortcomings and that the things you like and want may not be things that are healthy or good to want or like and that maturing means learning to prioritize your well being and the well being of your community over the things you want when those things aren’t healthy or good. 

And personally, it means not taking the easy way out anymore. Not investing in fantasies cause it’s safer than investing in reality. Not indulging in the most seductive or easiest option when you know in your heart it isn’t right or fair or kind or loving to do so. Not basing your happiness around getting what you want and not feeling cheated when things don’t go your way.

Growing up is good. Maturing is good. You’re not becoming a depressing boring surrendered adult just because you embrace a more subtle nuanced responsible view of life. Having healthy boundaries to strangers, not daydreaming all the time about a life devoid of obligations or responsibilities to others, being accountable to your values and learning to do the work of growing up and being patient and recognizing the value of compromise are fundamental parts of building a healthy good life.

The fact that being a person and having good relationships and being politically conscientious all take work is not a bad thing or something to try and avoid. It IS what life’s about - the journey not the destination, the process not the outcome, the knowledge and growth that comes from facing the world as it is, not resenting it for what it’s not.

Happiness isn’t about that person you’ve been obsessing over liking you back or a spontaneous offer for the perfect job or having your dream home. That person will have flaws you didn’t foresee and they’ll be boring some days and you’ll have fights and you’ll have doubts. And that job will take effort you didn’t expect and have demands you’ll wish it didn’t. And that dream home will have pipes burst and neighbors that piss you off and maintenance you’re tired of doing and structural flaws you didn’t notice when you first moved in.

If you want to be happy, you’ve got to learn how to appreciate being alive - for all the ups and downs - and accept that an enduringly good life won’t fall into your lap, you’ve gotta build it and you’ve gotta find joys in the building - the joys in overcoming a fight with your partner, the joys in finally being able to repair that problem in your house, the joys in a job well done even if the job itself isn’t one you love. 

Otherwise, you’ll spend your life on a rollercoaster, forever chasing those highs and forever resentful and disappointed and unsatisfied by the reality of gravity.

During my first month with my therapist, I was given this worksheet to read and work on. She noticed that while I was talking with her, that my thoughts followed a lot of these. I wasn’t aware that my anxiety had brought me down paths of low self-worth and stinky thinking.  After a couple of weeks of talking with her, she gave me this worksheet to work on. 

While, at first, I thought these weren’t going to work out, I was very surprised to see just how easy they were to use . My homework at that time was to identify which sort of thinking I used on the regular and which ones would best challenge them for me. So, what do you think? Do any of the maladaptive thinking patterns sound like you? which ways would you like to untwist your thinking? 

A lot of people ask me what my biggest fear is, or what scares me most. And I know they expect an answer like heights, or closed spaces, or people dressed like animals, but how do I tell them that when I was 17 I took a class called Relationships For Life and I learned that most people fall out of love for the same reasons they fell in it. That their lover’s once endearing stubbornness has now become refusal to compromise and their one track mind is now immaturity and their bad habits that you once adored is now money down the drain. Their spontaneity becomes reckless and irresponsible and their feet up on your dash is no longer sexy, just another distraction in your busy life. Nothing saddens and scares me like the thought that I can become ugly to someone who once thought all the stars were in my eyes.

this fucks me up every single time

I never expected this to be my most popular poem out of the hundreds I’ve written. I was extremely bitter and sad when I wrote this and I left out the most beautiful part of that class.

After my teacher introduced us to this theory, she asked us, “is love a feeling? Or is it a choice?” We were all a bunch of teenagers. Naturally we said it was a feeling. She said that if we clung to that belief, we’d never have a lasting relationship of any sort.

She made us interview a dozen adults who were or had been married and we asked them about their marriages and why it lasted or why it failed. At the end, I asked every single person if love was an emotion or a choice.

Everybody said that it was a choice. It was a conscious commitment. It was something you choose to make work every day with a person who has chosen the same thing. They all said that at one point in their marriage, the “feeling of love” had vanished or faded and they weren’t happy. They said feelings are always changing and you cannot build something that will last on such a shaky foundation.

The married ones said that when things were bad, they chose to open the communication, chose to identify what broke and how to fix it, and chose to recreate something worth falling in love with.

The divorced ones said they chose to walk away.

Ever since that class, since that project, I never looked at relationships the same way. I understood why arranged marriages were successful. I discovered the difference in feelings and commitments. I’ve never gone for the person who makes my heart flutter or my head spin. I’ve chosen the people who were committed to choosing me, dedicated to finding something to adore even on the ugliest days.

I no longer fear the day someone who swore I was their universe can no longer see the stars in my eyes as long as they still choose to look until they find them again.

me, killing my idealized self so I can finally thrive instead of just survive

Having Tumblr in my 20s helped me learn so much more about sexuality than I ever could have on my own. Game-changing. Learning to love my body, seeing different bodies, bodies that looked like mine, bodies I desired. No place else on the internet was as encouraging about it.

It was really special to grow alongside friends who were learning the same lessons as well.

— Kimberle Crenshaw (via ahistoryofanxietyandanxietyand)

Isolation on autopilot?

Oh damn, this is super interesting. Relatable, too. From the Coping book:

You’re not stuck. You’re just committed to certain patterns of behavior because they helped you in the past. Now those behaviors have become more harmful than helpful. The reason why you can’t move forward is because you keep applying an old formula to a new level of your life. Change the formula to get different results. Stop being committed to your own bullshit and self-sabotage. You can expect to keep repeating the same things over and over and still wonder why nothing changes. Shift your focus!

I told my friend I wanted to get back with my ex a couple years ago and she told me “like a dog to it’s own vomit 😔” and theres still a patch in my scalp

Claiming your $125 from Equifax is a "moral duty"

If you fill in this form, Equifax will send you $125 as part of its settlement with the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, the FTC, and 48 out of 50 states.

Equifax doxed the nation and profited handsomely from it. $125 is a laughably small sum given how much damage the data they hemorrhaged all over the internet could cause you. Equifax should have faced the corporate death penalty, the execs who oversaw the disaster should have had their assets seized and diverted to anti-identity-theft measures and charities.

Instead, the FTC et al are hitting the company for a maximum of $700m (how much they pay depends in part on whether you fill in this form.  Equifax’s market cap stands today at $16.6B, and it posted $3.412B in earnings in 2018, up 1.48% increase from 2017.

As meaningless as the $125 is, as piddling as the $700m is, you should still do this. As Josephine Wolff writes for Slate, breaches should be as expensive as possible. Anything you can do to make them more expensive will help people inside companies who are arguing against data-collection and retention, making the world safer for everyone else. Anything you can do to make breaches more expensive will hit the share price of companies that overcollect our data.

Go on, do it.

https://boingboing.net/2019/07/26/soak-em.html

I just did this and I unfortunately fortunately qualified. Took 5 minutes no additional paperwork necessary.

Y’all better get your money. Some cents is better than no cents.

So many arrested because people are OPENING THE DOORS and trying to play Sensible Citizens with these MAGA Gestapo Agents.

It’s pumpkin season guise.

FEED THE PUMPKINS

Advantageous (2015)| directed by Jennifer Phang & written by Jennifer Phang and Jacqueline Kim

Though a thousand words

Have never been spoken,

They’ll fly to you

Crossing over the time

And distance holding you

Suspended on silver wings

“Perhaps the most important lesson I’ve learned is that I must be gentle with all victims including myself—whether they were raped, almost raped, sexually assaulted or got away. I’ve imagined in my head all the different scenarios that could have played out, and no matter what happened I survived. No action I took was right or wrong, all that mattered is I survived. No warning signs, danger signs could have stopped someone from harming me if that’s what they wanted to do. Only those who caused harm can carry the shame for harming.

If not healed, those who are harmed can also harm others. We must be careful who is surviving us while we are surviving. Learning about consent, healthy sex and love is important to creating a rape free society. The body remembers even when the mind has forgotten. It’s important for all victims and survivors to love themselves and forgive themselves in order to heal. Healing is more than just deepening our analyses. We must also take care of our bodies, so that it too has new memories.” - Kabzuag Vaj

This is an amazing cover of “Chandelier” by Sia covered by Fatai. She is an amazing artist who was on The Voice Australia! Definitely check her out, she’s awesome!!!