at the end of everything, hold on to anything

Hawk / Zephyr 24 he/they

[teaboot]

I haven't had a major depressive episode in a good while (thank god/knock on wood) and while I KNOW everybody's experience is different, it's always kinda annoyed me that a lot of people who DON'T have depression try and describe it to each other like "Have you ever lost someone you loved? It's like that but all the time forever"

Because I've definitely heard that analogy more than once from more than one person and again- maybe just MY experience here- but for me, it's less "nail through the heart agony and hopelessness" and more "waking up one day and finding out that loved one never existed in the first place, and in fact you HAVE no loved ones, and nobody loves you, either, nor will they ever"

But hell, maybe that IS just my personal pan hell, because the one and only time I ever actually said that to a psych specialist they said that their analogy made more sense and they themselves had "gone through a period of depression once" so of course they would know

[fricklefracklefloof]

a comic about tattoos

[dragon-in-a-fez]

personally I'm annoyed by the socioeconomic conditions that made words like "unalive" necessary but simultaneously impressed by the linguistic adaptations young people have made to continue talking about important things while subject to those conditions and I think if you can't hold both of those thoughts in your head you might just be old man yelling at cloud

[duckbunny]

fun fact about character development by the way. you can make them develop worse.

[duckbunny]

like I mean this very seriously as writing advice. the character should experience events and make decisions that make them different at the end of the story. they should be changed. they do not have to be improved.

they can get worse. they can make decisions of an increasingly terrible nature. they can stop taking risks on kindness. they can discover how much they can get away with. they can find religion, or abandon it, with negative effects on their moral creed. the character has to develop. the character does not have to grow.

[builtwithapathy]

been sketching murderbot on the clock again. demonstrating a lack of work ethic that it would probably approve of

[crabussy]

when you get crazy enough about The Character you'd think the situations you imagine them in would get more elaborate and lore intensive. but no. imagining my wizard pacing around huffily being slightly peeved at a mild inconvenience. I don’t even know what the inconvenience IS. and it's giving me enough joy to power a city for a month

[omagpies]

things to say when you are not a place of honor

original text by @inkskinned can be found here. I’ve made a comic with it before but wanted to make a mbart version for a while

[heimeldat]

you've seen ONE kind of squigeon...

the European Wood Gryphon, aka European Squigeon or Red Squigeon.

[heimeldat]

This person sees the vision!

[chocolateismynemesis]

@todaysbird

[skellydun]

hey good luck today with whatever u got going on. u got this. and i hope something really nice happens to u today. u deserve it. 

[musashi]

Hey can you guys reblog Cheeseburger so he can take a sunbeam nap on lots of blogs. No other reason I just want you guys to see him.

[jb-blunk]

in this terrifying world you continuously have the power to offer someone else a little relief . why would you withhold that. do you remember what a little relief feels like? it feels like a lot

[meangirlnurse]

i'm trying to save money but oh my god. jesus christ

[purr-in-ink]

[memeuplift]

[mrbrojangles]

[samanddean76]

🥹

[free-my-mindd]

[kingbedlam]

[rainbow-demoness]

"this or that won't fix you" (esp. the kind that's like, followed by "you need to be independently happy before you engage in it", which adds a side of toxic individualism) feels honestly like crab bucket doomerism.

"a partner won't fix you" is a very popular one, and like, partially, sure, but also, hell no. It doesn't have to be a romantic partner, and no partner is better than a bad partner, but I know from experience with friends that the kind of closeness we typically associate with partners would in fact help to fix me. I need to share my living space and I need couch cuddles and quiet gestures of mutual understanding and appreciation.

"money can't buy happiness" is another from this collection, and getting out of poverty can absolutely fix some people.

Often, by the time someone clearly wants to be fixed, there's multiple things going on and any one thing alone won't be enough. But if you're multiple vitamin deficient, getting one Vitamin is still better than none, and pessimism about the fixability of our problems doesn't generally help.

[colacean]

*deep sigh* climate change denialism and doomerism also falls under this. First was "it's not happening" then "its not our fault" and now it's "well it can't be fixed."

The theme of all of these (what did they call it?) "crab bucket doomerism" is apathy and resistance to change, to progress. Remain stagnant, it's safer. Don't bother! If it's not perfect then it's a waste of energy, there's no point in DOing anything otherwise. Just keep your head down and accept your learned helplessness, and continue going along with the status quo.

I wonder what type of people would benefit from this insidious belief system.

[cupandsaucer]

If you think of “fixing” as achieving a perfect and permanent state of being “good” or “right” nothing on Earth is worth doing because there isn’t a single thing that lasts forever.

Sometimes, all you get from something is that it keeps things from getting worse. Sometimes, just hanging on is all the salvation you’ll get on a given moment. Sometimes, the best you can get from a day is that it takes you to next one.

(And sometimes, your action can bear no intention of fixing anything. Just wanting to enjoy your existence is a valid enough reason to do things.)

[directactionforhope]

Every time you catch yourself going, "Fuck, are humans just inherently evil and naturally inclined to selfishness and harm???" you HAVE to remember that that's literally a core ideal of Christianity.

So if it feels inescapable and like evidence of it is everywhere, whether at times or always, that might just because you're in a Western country where you're surrounded by Christians who believe that, fundamentally, in their worldview. And also they talk and make art about it all the time and run the vast majority of news outlets. And spent over a thousand years burning any art or texts that disagreed with them. Etc. etc.

If you're gonna come to as drastic and painful a conclusion as that, at least take the time first to make sure you're not working with biased evidence (surrounded by too many people and cultural products that believe original sin is real)

And if it turns out the feeling WAS partly the result of cultural Christianity, then hey, that's great news, because it means there's that much (and it really is SO MUCH) less evidence that humans inherently suck. Which is good, because we don't

[unwelcome-ozian]