be good to yourself

the inherent pain of wanting to start again but also the inherent joy of getting to start again

literally these two

I love when information revealed at the end of a story recontextualizes something said or done at the beginning. Like yes queen make the story a loop let the story keep developing even though the book is closed and the credits are rolling. The story never ends it just starts over.

one thing you won't know until you experience it for yourself when you create art out of love is how it feels when people receive it with love. when you post a doodle and someone keeps it as their lockscreen, or when you write a story and someone tells you they were thinking about it all day, or when you post a poem and someone shares it with a touching caption. doesn't matter if it was objectively good or not. matters that someone spent time with it, that someone really, really liked it, and you made it. this kind of interaction, i think, it can really sustain you for weeks. it can sustain you through a lot of terrible things. its confirmation that you exist, and that (however briefly) your existence was appreciated by someone else through your art.

i think to find things that can make you smile and to try to be kind despite it all… thats my little way of rebelling

i used to pour my anger and pain into self destruction, i would batter myself and not eat and not sleep and hope my body would break so i wouldnt have to endure it anymore but

in a life where so many people insist to be unhappy is the default, where it angers people if you pursue what makes you happy and the people/things you love for no other reason than you love them…. is that not a rebellion?

ive been unhappy for so long. for my own sake no matter what happens i will find something to smile about, because i deserve it. and so i can better take care of the people i love too. that is the kind of life i want to live

trust dog

it fucking sucks how you can do all the therapy and self healing in the world and you still have to wake up living under a capitalist death cult that's killed community and crushes your soul

congrats you want to live and be happy

bad news the world doesn't want that for you

I'll still love fully and crawl to hope until my body gives out anyway I guess

i think queer people should be more confusing actually. i think we should make everyone as confused as possible until they give up and realize that total understanding of other people isnt the gateway to respect and compassion

stop believing that you ran out of time to shape yourself into who you want to be! stop believing that its ruined! stop believing you don’t have potential! you are not a fixed being! you have endless opportunities to grow.

Any time I feel the grip of anxiety that I’m too old or don’t have time to do something with my limited hours after work, I just remember the wisdom of the ancients:

Look. My mom is 65. She just divorced my shitty dad, is in therapy, wearing what she actually wants, cutting her hair how how she likes, and is exploring her gender and sexual identity. She went from being stuck in the middle of nowhere watching fox news 24/7 to a guest house in the city where she paints and reads, goes to dance classes and botanical gardens, and has started playing D&D with her kids and our friends. She says this is the life she always wanted and she has never been happier.

It’s never too late!

@fairycosmos / Comic by @shhhitsfine / Comic by @incendavery

@ryebreadgf / alison zai / phillip roth / unknown / @archbudzar

being trans is a beautiful experience actually and if you're not having fun w your gender you should shake things up a widdle bit. try out some weird pronouns, blend masculinity and femininity in ways that make cis people uncomfortable. break boundaries in ways that they wouldn't dream of. it's all fucking fake anyway so if it feels right then why not go crazy with your beards and your tits and your hairy legs and wild hair y'know

being trans is being free to do whatever you want whenever you want and if people are confused, good

I heard so many people talk about romanticizing your life and at first it was annoying but then I was eating an apple and it was red and sweet and I was making an effort to conciously and slowly enjoy my apple because that's what my therapist told me to try to be more in the moment and it was the best apple I ever ate. I ate it slow and really payed attention to the sweetness and the sourness and I was sitting outside under some trees and there was a breeze and I thought: This is a perfect moment, and one day I will wish I had the opportunity to sit here and conciously eat this apple and be happy. Anyways. Try making a big deal out of small things.

my dad likes to call the stretches of time where you’re not creating “dreaming periods” and says that they’re meant to allow you to absorb all of the beauty, life, and inspiration from the things around you so that when you’re able to create again, you will have fanned your spark back into a flame. sometimes its hard to see those moments as anything but stagnation, but he always says that they’re natural and healthy and needed—things that should be embraced rather than feared.

For anyone who needs it. Use in good health.

here's my hot take about my generation and people younger than me (I'm 22 years old)

The reason current teenagers and people in their really early 20s are conservative on accident and have such shitty takes on the internet is because our generation was much more sheltered than previous generations and because we were raised to be ok with orwellian servailence and that is 100% the fault of our parents, Reagan Era kidnapping panics, and the rise of technology all coming together to prevent us from doing the sketchy shit that sends parents into panic mode but which is also completely fundemental to childhood development. If your parents had even a crumb of money to their name and even a shred of free time they started tracking your phone as soon as it was possible to. I did not experience this because my parents are actively trying to live like it's the 1990s and still have not gotten cell phones of their own, and did not let me have one until I was 18 years old and it was no longer their choice, but literally over half of my friends in middle and high school had their phones tracked by their parents at some point or other, and we would occasionally find this out, not because their parents told them, but when we were trying to do the aforementioned sketchy shit and their parent's car would pull up. And I would, like a reasonable person after finding this out, encourage my friends to just leave their phones at home, and their response would be "What if I get kidnapped" or "My parents are just trying to keep me safe"

This in my estimation has lead to a combination of kids being terminally online because they do have internet access and are better at deleting search history than their parents think they are, but don't have the freedom to go out and do shit without their parents' knowledge or consent, so they have the most privacy from the people who control their lives while they're on the internet, and kids not having the real world experiences they should have, not knowing how to connect with other people irl, not feeling comfortable leaving the house because of the horror story lies their parents told them to make them ok with the surveillance they were inflicting on their kids. Kids these days are growing up in the fucking panopticon when they should be out in the woods playing with knives or stealing cigarettes from their older sibling and going out to an empty parking lot to smoke them or whatever and that shit is sticking with them into adulthood. Things that were "tee hee we could get in trouble isn't this so fun and daring" in the 1990s and 2000s have become in the 2010s and 2020s things that are "If I do that without texting my parents some sort of lie to excuse where my location is my parent's car will pull up and I will get grounded for the next two weeks."

Like even when I was 19 I had a 16 year old friend who would volunteer their time at a food shelf and that's how we knew each other. We would talk about dungeons and dragons together, and the game store was 4 blocks from the food shelf. One day we left the food shelf earlier than they had told their parents they would and they got punished for that. We were literally just going to look at dungeons and dragons miniatures and dice, which was self evident if you could see where we started and how far we walked and where too. I have to assume that this isn't uncommon. It's wrong, but it's not uncommon.

Ok it has become apparent to me that people do not understand what I mean by conservative on accident.

Nobody my age is voting republican. Let's be clear on that. With the exception of a small minority of gamer gaters and people who were raised in actual cults most people my age are either commies or good liberals who votes straight blue down the ticket. This is because of the greta thunberg effect. We're all afraid of dying of thirst because there's no water anymore at the age of 35. Wealthy white children are no longer safe with the republican party which has become less of a political party and more of a death cult, and white children are less wealthy than they used to be (I specify white because POC by in large never voted for the party of the southern strategy for obvious reasons). We as a generation are so insanely blue that they're trying to raise the voting age to 25 about it.

This liberalism and party affiliation doesn't preclude them from being conservative on accident. What I mean by that is... Well

No kink at pride is a great example. The assumption that pride should exist at all makes them think that they're immune to conservative logic but they're still trying to enforce a dominant ideology onto a minority group. That person who made the tweet about how you shouldn't have sex in houses where there are children in the other room and if you can't avoid it you're a sex addict. That's a great example of like straight up puritanism coming out of the mouth of someone who proports themselves to be a leftist

If you ever see a discourse that feels like an obvious psyop as an adult and you can't understand why these supposed leftist youths are falling for it it's because that kid has never had sex in the woods and had to try to buy plan b under their parent's nose. My generation is dumb about sex. We're dumb about drugs. We're dumb about theft. We moralize literally everything. We're so dumb about stranger danger that we never learned how to community organize so while the vast vast majority of us are crushed by existential dread about debt and climate change but we never do anything about it because we just don't know how to organize because we're raised to see everyone else as a threat and we never went to or organized parties as teens because our parents would always know and stop us.

They managed to invent a generation that hates capitalism but fully buys into individualism and who is supportive of queer people and way less monogamous than previous generations but who still buys into the base assumptions of the nuclear family and thinks sex is evil. The levels of politics going on here are way weirder and stupider and more complicated than "young people vote republican and watch Fox news"

I've never seen anybody explain it so well

I feel like a somewhat disregarded aspect of modern internet callout culture is the impact on people with anxiety or paranoia or intrusive thoughts and how the general sentiment of "bad things will only happen to you if you're bad, so just be good all the time" just exacerbates obsessive self flagellation

For once I'm actually happy about one of my posts blowing up because I so rarely see discussions about OCD and OCD-flavored anxiety and paranoia as they relate to social media, which leads to things like posts with major OCD triggers blowing up like crazy ("if you don't rb this I don't trust you" type shit). Every so often posts go around with good information but that are worded in an extremely triggering way meant to guilt trip you into sharing it and it makes me really sad because you could've just left that off!!

“She began to understand why lovers baby talk to one another. There was no other socially acceptable circumstance in which the children inside her were permitted to come out. If the one-year-old, the five-year-old, the twelve-year-old, and the twenty-year-old all find compatible personalities in the beloved, there is a real chance to keep all of those sub-personas happy. Love ends their long loneliness. Perhaps the depth of love can be calibrated by the number of different selves that are actively involved in a given relationship.”

–Carl Sagan, ”Contact”, 1985

when i was post op after top surgery i had a good friend there with me to help recover. but the nurse didnt get the memo and when i woke up she was like “ok i’m gonna go get your girlfriend and bring her in to see you!” and i remember being so zonked on anesthesia and so disoriented i just laid there thinking wow…… all that an they’re bringing me a girlfriend too this place is amazing

FAG/TRANSFAG: written by Paul Davis (1998) for FTM newsletter issue. 40