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Like honeycomb holding the bee in the folds

[kdlanguishing]

[kdlanguishing]

If you already feel like you might be set up for blame-shifting or narrative distortion, that process will likely become political instead of constructive.

[thekimonogallery]

This woodblock print by the Shin-hanga (New Print) virtuoso Shiro Kasamatsu (1898–1991), is titled "Shinshu Shirahone Onsen" (Shirahone Hot Spring in Shinshū)., 1935, Japan. The artwork captures the historic, hidden mountain onsen (hot spring) of Shirahone, nestled deep in the Japanese Alps of Nagano Prefecture (historically Shinshū). Famed for its opaque, milky-white thermal waters rich in calcium and magnesium, the spring is presented here as an idyllic, secret sanctuary.

[bookofknives]

my style? INCONSISTENT. but my commitment to womens art will never waver

[redlipstickresurrected]

Laura Findlay (Canadian, b. 1984, Montreal, QC, Canada, based Toronto, Canada) - Gulper, 2026, Paintings: Oil on Panel

[mistressaccost]

googling how to slip into a huge beautiful life meant for me

[kdlanguishing]

Exercises to understand your family of origin:

What are some good memories of your extended family from your childhood? How did your grandparent’s house smell

What are some stories your family tells from before you remember that strike you as somewhat revealing/disturbing?

What were your grandparents’ parents like? Before them? What patterns do you see through to their grandchildren?

What’s something you’ve wanted from your family that you know you won’t have?

What are you currently grateful for about your family culture?

What were your grandparents trying to achieve in their life/for their family? What mistakes of their parents were they trying to fix? Were they successful?

What about their parents and children?

[steelycunt]

im a supervillain in a spy film and i spin around in my leather chair to reveal that the thing i am stroking villainishly is my own bush

[mycotrophicghost]

I want to fall in and out of love in my lifetime, and I don't want the falling out to turn me bitter.

[mycotrophicghost]

I want to honor the end of the cycle as much as the beginning, even if it hurts.

[larchcoin]

what’s your masturbating process

what are the tools and the ways

Hammer and nails

[radfemtextandart]

x

[kdlanguishing]

You may not be primarily afraid of failure. You may be afraid of the experience that could come with failure: overwhelm, anxiety, uncertainty, pressure, emotional pain, exhaustion, or feeling trapped.

[kdlanguishing]

[kdlanguishing]

do you think if I hit a woman’s strap with a hammer she would flinch

[saintfur]

'You really wanted a baby,' people who have had no trouble conceiving sometimes say to me, thinking themselves supportive, affirming. And while I've tried many times to pinpoint why this offends me, there's an element I always have trouble explaining. It's not that it's trivializing; it's not that they have underestimated my grief. These people know very well that I was in deep grief, and I think they empathize with this and respect it. Rather, it's that they don't get the particular nature of this grief, how it's less about the loss of a potential child than it is about the endless possibility that there may yet be an actual child. For Freud, mourning is about a lost object; the grieving person has a type of hole in them, in the shape of the lost thing - their work in healing is to fill that hole with something else. I think that's still the standard understanding of grief: the person with their heart punched out, a woman with a baby-shaped hole in her head. But that pattern never resonated with me, or with the other infertile women I've discussed this with. If you drew me at the point of my most brutal need, I'd look less like a woman with a hole in me than I would like multiple identical women, a chain of paper dolls that had been cut but not yet pulled apart. Each of these dolls, these women, is living a separate life: some in which I went on as I was, childless, and others in which this or that procedure had worked and I had a baby. The women overlap; they are all me. But the edges where they diverge are paper-cut sharp. In all of my reading about grief, I never found an account that described this sensation better than the ones about dissociation - a near-psychotic awareness of myself as being multiple places, multiple women, at the same time. Infertility doesn't just isolate women from each other, it isolates us from ourselves.

—Alexandra Kimball, The Seed: Infertility is a Feminist Issue

[saintfur]

Because, in a sense, there are many of each infertile woman - she is multiplied by her unique, acute sense of possibility and desire. The next procedure might work, the fallopian tube could always clear, the next fetus might not miscarry. In the words of our moms, miracles happen. It's not that motherhood is out of reach, it's that it's just out of reach. It's not that motherhood didn't happen, it's that it almost did and, in fact, still could. The difference between the grief of infertility and other reasons for mourning - the loss of a spouse, for example - is in that promise of 'just', in 'almost', in 'still could'. This does not make it more or less livable than other forms of grief, but it goes a long way toward explaining why it is expressed in ways that seem so desperate and even alien to the casual onlooker, why a woman might put herself under the knife ten, twelve, twenty times to get pregnant, why she might spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in the effort. The end to her grief is just so near. The tragedy of infertility is one of proximity, and the thing about this proximity is that it is partly created - and potentially solved - by technology.

—Alexandra Kimball, The Seed: Infertility is a Feminist Issue

[fillejondrette]

today on the train I saw a woman with a tattoo that said “god(l)ess”