when you find someone who's equally unwell about The Character
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"

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Claire Keane
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
ojovivo

roma★
Not today Justin

Janaina Medeiros
taylor price

izzy's playlists!
i don't do bad sauce passes
Show & Tell
Game of Thrones Daily
$LAYYYTER
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shark vs the universe
Misplaced Lens Cap
Today's Document

Origami Around
hello vonnie

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@idiotcat-affectionate
when you find someone who's equally unwell about The Character
the notion of saving lives at all costs prevents suicidal people from speaking about their experiences in a candid way, knowing they will be decentered (e.g. “your family/friends will be devastated if you die”), subject to moral arguments (e.g. “suicide is a selfish act”), referred to someone else, often someone who has a hefty paywall behind their listening ear (e.g. “are you seeing a therapist about this?”), or incarcerated against their will. because of this, voices of suicidal people are left out from conversations about suicide, even paradoxically in campaigns encouraging suicidal people to reach out for support.
in order to break the stigma around suicidality, we have to break away from the prevention-no-matter-what script and honor suicidal people’s autonomy, allowing them to speak freely about their lived experience even in the face of personal discomfort for nonsuicidal people. in our current society, nonsuicidal people wield power/privilege over suicidal people. if your immediate reaction to hearing about a marginalized person’s pain is to shut them down in some way, you need to evaluate why you are centering your own comfort above another person who is confiding in you.
Before coming out I used to work at a mental health crisis line. There were so many problems with this place, that I will probably talk about some other time, but generally stemming from issues relating to social class and demographics more broadly.
90% of the volunteers were wealthy retired neurotypical cishet white women. That meant that for basically every call these people received there was a pre-existing power dynamic where the caller was well below the call-handler, and the call was consequently handled totally paternalistically, never with any sense that the volunteer might actually have something to learn from the caller. The similarity to the typical patient-GP/PCP dynamic was really striking.
Most of the callers were prisoners, homeless, or people who had recently stopped taking anti-psychotic meds. I think many of the volunteers enjoyed the feeling of the power dynamic that was obvious in these calls. If you spend most of your social time with people of the same high social class as you, I guess you might find it refreshing to encounter people who remind you that you've actually done well out of life, only from a safe distance and through a phone ofc.
We also got a lot of trans callers. Hearing how the volunteers talked to these callers was a really radicalising experience. "Why do you think you're a woman?" "Why do you think you enjoy wearing women's clothing?" "Is there a sexual component to it? Maybe something that happened in your childhood?" "What do the other girls at school think about you calling yourself a boy?", plus the obvious constant misgendering and pronoun "mix-ups", saying, "Oh sorry, miss, your voice sounds like a man's so it's confusing."
People would say this stuff during training too, and the people training us would say it was correct. It's not like they were letting their bigotry cause them to deviate from policy, bigotry was the policy. I remember there was one senior volunteer who was a retired cis lesbian police officer, and I asked her about handling trans callers and she just repeated back all the same bigoted nonsense everyone else thought (at the time I put that down to her being a cop, not being aware back then that being a cis lesbian is no guarantee at all of an absence of transphobic views.)
It didn't take long for me to start getting reprimanded for having too much empathy for the callers. I was an unusual volunteer in that I had actually been in the same position as a lot of the callers. I was trans (albeit not out yet), I was frequently suicidal, I had been on anti-depressants (incredibly I was the only volunteer out of around 150 with that experience), I had experienced CSA and domestic abuse, I had lived through times when I had a zero bank balance, I had eaten food out of a bin because I had no money, I had been heavily addicted to alcohol and nicotine.
It meant I normally had some commonality with all the callers that I could use to make sure I was talking to them in the way I would've wanted to be talked to, i.e. as an equal. I would actually let the caller direct the conversation rather than directing it myself (which was the policy), I would show genuine interest in their story, I wouldn't tell them to hurry up because there were other callers with "real problems". After a while, I couldn't handle it and I just left, not because of the stress of dealing with the callers, but the stress of dealing with the other volunteers.
And now many years later I often see queer groups near me directing people to this crisis hotline in case of emergency, and I always have to make a fuss to get them to remove it as a categorically non-safe institution. But it's so well-known and respected where I live (by people who have never used it, but they are typically the ones in positions of power ofc) that it can be really hard to get people to believe it is actually that bad.
do you ever think about how sometimes it just... takes one random message? and suddenly you find yourself with a best friend or in constant conversation with someone who lives on the other side of the world but is just as much of a freak as you are or maybe you find yourself in love with someone without a last name but with so much kindness and affection in their words and presence. crazy how life and love and friendship just happen
♡ gay + trans public transport | source
theres a new villain roaming around new york that has all the powers of a tapir. give me an hour or two im gonna go google what the fuck tapirs do ill let you know if we need to be scared
OK it seems if you are fruits or berries this is really really bad news for you otherwise youre fine
Happy Pride Month to those two women dancing together in the foreground of the boat scene in Godzilla (1954).
I’m sorry your romantic foibles were overshadowed by a big ass atomic lizard thing.
source
hey friends where is that picture of boromir with the gondor flag except its a pride flag?
Couldn’t find it so I made another because you’re right that it’s a crime and it’s definitely my duty to remedy it
if you build “community” around hating other people, just know that the second you step out of line—regardless of your moral uprightness or the hypocrisy on their part—you’re the next person they’re going to tear to pieces.
This is Tie, she is going to eat all of the notes
reblog to feed her notes
How is she doing this
Hey, hey, look me in the eyes when I tell you this okay? The whole "do trans women or trans men have it worse?" debate going on right now is the most obvious CIA bullshit on earth cause honestly we've both got it pretty shitty and fighting each other isn't helping anyone
"it's just stress" oh thank god, it's just the silent killer that slowly kills you, perfectly harmless, no need to worry
everything is changing and maybe that’s okay
as you get older you realise that anything that helps you stop feeling stuck is welcome even if it hurts at first
they FeeF us BeeF. so we 𝐁𝐔𝐁. their ᵇᵘʳᵇᵘʳᵇᵘʳ
shark seg
shark seg