[anxietyfroggo]

Dance in your room!!! Sing along to the music as you do your chores!!! Eat that chocolate!!! Let yourself feel sad!!! Try to smile even when you are alone!!! Make stupid faces at the camera and laugh at your reflection!!! Do things that make you feel alive!!! We have all been through crap and life might have more in store for us, but we got this!!!

[withnailrules]

Eartha Kitt performing in Las Vegas, Nevada, in 1955

[victusinveritas]

[thesirensense]

Your self respect has to be greater than your desire to be loved.

[recoverr-deactivated20250621]

i don't know who needs to hear this, but guilt, self-hatred and shame are not sustainable sources of growth and healing. you can't hate yourself into feeling better, or being better. you can't repeatedly punish yourself for your flawed humanity and expect wholesome results.

[fforsythiaaa]

Once when I was in undergrad, someone described something as “problematic” in class and our professor was like, “That’s cool, but ‘problematic’ doesn’t really mean anything. It means that the thing you’re describing has a problem, and in and of itself that’s not bad. Art, especially, should always have problems, or else it’s not interesting and not art, either. It sounds like you’re trying to say that this is bad, but you don’t want to say ‘bad.’ Is that right?”

So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”

Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.

Anyway. Whenever I see the word problematic, I can’t help but think of this professor being like, “Good starting point, now let’s get specific.” I think when we have to commit to saying “that’s ___” it requires a lot more careful thought about the truth and impact and complexities of whatever we’re claiming. Sometimes there really is some bullshit afoot, and also sometimes it’s art, and it should be full of problems, because that’s what art is.

[succubusboyfriend]

practicing self care less out of self love and more for the sheer logical reasoning of it’d be kinda stupid of me to expect myself to be able to function without proper maintenance

[succubusboyfriend]

“oh i don’t deserve rest and relaxation, i haven’t done enough, i haven’t earned it” and my car’s breaks don’t deserve break fluid because they aren’t breaking well enough to earn it. that’s what you sound like!!!!!

[februarytrash]

[asneakyfox]

what "death of the author" means:

a lot of people think the only point of engagement with art is just to decode exactly what the author was trying to say, and their intent is the "real meaning," and once you've figured out the real meaning you're done you've solved it. that's dumb and boring. don't do that.

things death of the author does not mean:

every interpretation is equally valid

you are forbidden to treat what we can know or reasonably guess about the author's intentions as something that matters to your interpretation at all

the only valid way to interpret fiction is to treat it like it's a documentary of events that really happened and never think about it in terms of "why would the creator, a human person, choose to present it this way"

authors shouldn't get to have opinions about what they intended to say through their work, they should shut up and let me tell them what it means because i know better

actually i, the person reading or watching or viewing this art, am the infallible source of real meaning, and everybody who disagrees with me is wrong including but not limited to the author

the audience is the infallible source of real meaning, not the author, and that's why they committed a war crime by not treating my own headcanons as authoritative

[tabris-the-seventeenth-angel]

HEARTBREAKING: friends who i should be going to the movies and playing dnd and watching anime and cosplaying and going to the mall and having sleepovers and exploring the woods with live one hundred trillion miles away

[lucydacusgirl]

And like I genuinely am loath to negatively discuss women’s bodies online and I think the way that famous women’s bodies are up for discussion online and in the press is upsetting and dehumanising and I feel a lot of compassion for women who are struggling with eating disorders and body image issues in the public eye however the fucking mass weight loss happening to all famous women either through eating disorders or weight loss medication cannot just go uncommented on. Nearly every single famous woman got skeletal overnight and it is so incredibly worrying both for them and for what it signals to other women and girls about how they should look.

[ruinedchildhood]

[goldentangerines]

every now and then i have to think of the roman family from two thousand years ago that buried their little daughter in a boy's athletic-themed sarcophagus and i weep a little because that's the softest declaration of love i can possibly imagine

[goldentangerines]

i am once again emotional and sleep deprived so let me elaborate to make myself feel better.

octavia paulina was a six year old girl whose sarcophagus was found in her family's tomb at via triumphalis in rome, dated roughly around the third century a.d. her parents mourned her mors immatura, her premature death, by having the wall behind her sarcophagus painted with the image of a giant meadow with children and a chariot pulled by doves accompanied by hermes leading an unconscious girl into afterlife. (to my knowledge, the doves and the fact that they were led by hermes was a symbol for hope.)

the sarcophagus itself shows athletic competitions between girls and boys alike, and in the most important one on the front, octavia paulina appears as the winner (a palm branch in her hand, which is meant to symbolize her strength and honor, her virtus). her opponent is sitting on the floor, upset. what really stands out is that octavia paulina's parents ordered a common sarcophagus that was usually used to bury boys with athletic interests or futures but then proceeded to have it remodeled — smaller heads and genitalia cut off etc — to include girls in the relief.

i just get very soft when i think about parents ordering a sarcophagus for their little daughter who think it's perfect for her and who remodel it to make it even more accurate for her. the thought of parents more than 1.700 years ago thinking their six year old daughter deserves a sarcophagus that fits her personality (rather than what was expected of her as a young girl of the time) despite none being available and then ordering for it to be altered makes me wanna scream because it's such a human and caring thing to do. maybe octavia paulina even had a say in this because it took weeks to months to make a sarcophagus this detailed.

disclaimer: a lot of this messy little thing was transcribed from what my professor has told us in his sarcophagus class and this article; this is just a rambling post, it isn't detailed or well put or structured properly, and not fit for scientific research.

[louisegluckpdf]

holy quaternity

[queer-as-city-folk]

my predicament

[queer-as-city-folk]

I just want to go to the market or see a local band perform,

[queer-as-city-folk]

[queer-as-city-folk]

are all of you rich river boat owning fucks now????

[queer-as-city-folk]

people don't usually have a private train

[queer-as-city-folk]

the nearest bus stop is 3 miles away as the crow flys, next to a costco and a hospital

[bitchesgetriches]

The number of people who just can't comprehend the reality of travel in rural America is... kind of staggering.

I grew up in The Woods. There was absolutely no form of public transportation aside from the literal school bus. If you wanted to go anywhere besides school (10 miles from my house), you had to drive a car or ride your bike on unpaved, bumpy dirt roads. The center of town (a 2 mile walk) held the library, some churches, town hall, the village store, and the beach for the local lake. And I must've clocked thousands of biking miles just to go to the library, the village store for a snack, and the beach as a kid. Because I could go literally nowhere else.

The closest City Where Stuff Happens was 15 miles away. It might as well have been on the moon before I got a driver's license and begged to borrow my brother's car.

Trust me: people who live in places like this are aware of every single option for traveling. Car ownership is expensive (and unattainable for some), but it's one of the few escapes from these metaphorical desert islands across rural America.

[ferrousferrule]

It doesn't even have to be that rural. I lived in a town 15 miles outside the state capital and had no way to get there until i got a car. It was all highways and we had no intercity public transit.

America is not built for people its built for cars

[homunculus-argument]

Fun fact: if you, as an adult, tell miserable children that their youth is the best that life will ever be, and that it's all just downhill from there, there's a percentage of them who will hear this and think "well, I guess I better kill myself before that happens." And a certain percentage of those will proceed to do that and succeed.

Anyway what I'm saying is that any time you feel tempted to say that, you should instead consider shutting the fuck up. Just because you peaked at 16 doesn't mean anyone else did. Most peoples' lives get better than that.

[atlantus]

I got lunch with my uncle and my neice, who Fifteen(tm) and i was like How Are You?

And she was just like "school sucks, my mom sucks, being fifteen sucks, i just want to grow up"

and so me, a wise and wisened newly fresh thirty year old just replied "yeah it does fucken suck!"

And when i tell you the air physically lightened up and she laughed so hard! And she told me more about why it all sucks and how she feels like no one listened to her, and they tell her to just do it, just get it done, and this girl is tired! She has so much homework and she feels like shes not smart because shes inundated with homework and school and she feels like the people in her life are not hearing her!

Just agree with people when they say something sucks for them! Offer a little sympathy, have some empathy. It does fucking suck being Fifteen.

[snoopylovessoup]