cat puppy dog thing I DUNNO

she/they/it, 21

[free-my-mindd]

[manglerosoi]

[patricia-taxxon]

the thing is, if your younger self was a bigot or an abuser, u can't make people forgive you. but you still gotta forgive yourself, like that's non-negotiable, dude. that happens before u can even ask the question of earning forgiveness from anyone lese

[patricia-taxxon]

oops, in your attempt to martyr yourself out of respect for your victims you accidentally sabotaged your own ability to conceptualize yourself as anything but a perpetual evildoer who is always one bad day away from hurting everyone you love, all but guaranteeing history to repeat itself. rookie mistake

[patricia-taxxon]

im gonna try explaining myself, cus im a gambling addict and im waiting for the day that it actually works.

"forgiveness" is personal, that's why I said in the post that you might inflict harm on people for which they can never forgive you, but that's their quest. if you abuse someone, you can't go no-contact with yourself. you actually keep living in your own head indefinitely, and ultimately you need to learn to live with yourself in order to continue living a full life without further harm. this is not necessarily an anti-carceral thought, although i am generally anti-carceral myself. I simply want people to like, fix their heart and atone for real with measured accountability & self love instead of dissociating, self-marking themselves forever and guaranteeing their recidivism.

You and a remorseful abuser would both think I'm giving the easy, coddling path. It's actually the tough pragmatic path in disguise.

[killthelantern-raisetheghost]

here’s a really good article on this topic

What to Do When You Have Been Abusive

Abusers and survivors have never existed in a dichotomy. Here are some ways to confront the abuser in all of us.

[jewishvitya-movingblogs]

Something gets me about the words "yeah let's just allow abusers to remain in society." Like. You can't remove people from society unless you kill them.

How does it remove my abuser from society if he accepts that he abused me, and then... stays convinced he'll only ever be an abuser?

I'm not planning to forgive him, ever, but I do want him to do better and live without hurting the people around him, because even after I removed myself, there will always be people around him.

Society will always include people with harmful behavior patterns, and we need to be able to encourage correcting and doing better. The solution can't be "put yourself in solitary confinement for the rest of your life."

[idhren]

People choosing to live a better life after hate and sticking with those choices is the best possible removal of them as abusers from society, because it shows the other people who are abusing now or risk of starting that they can make better choices too.

It was always a choice. It was never inevitable. They have the power to change and we should hold them to it.

[needabetternamelater]

Of course you can remove people from society without killing them - that's called a prison. As for how it removes him from society even if he's convinced he'll stay an abuser....physically. Though, of course, this is still dodging the question of how a prison abolitionist world would work.

[heydocverdant]

Prison’s still part of society, it’s just a part that’s easier for you to ignore. There are only three ways to truly cut an abuser off from society: execution, solitary confinement for the rest of their life, or allowing them to reform and grow. Only one of those is even remotely humane.

It’s actually safer for everybody in the long run if true redemption isn’t just possible, but encouraged: if any abusive behavior instantly qualified someone for a life sentence, then they suddenly have a strong incentive to cover up all evidence of their actions, including their victims. You could also find situations where abusers force victims into silence or collaboration by threatening to implicate them in abuse as well. (That one actually happened to me: my college had very strict policies concerning sexual misconduct, and the woman who sexually assaulted me convinced me to not report it to administration, or she’d frame it in a way that would get us both expelled.)

It’s impossible to go through life without causing some harm to others, and as such we need to not just face consequences, but to also be able to learn and grow from our mistakes.

[oneheadtoanother]

[damnhotpocket]

Gema.piano on instagram

Why are all music teachers like this 😭😭😭

[communeist]

THEY ARE

[crematedequally]

when i was 8 i had a very intimidating russian woman as a music teacher- she was both my opera instructor and piano teacher. about a month into piano, she sat me down and said to my mother and i "this child- very beautiful voice, good for singing. i will not allow this child to continue piano. god did not want this child to play an instrument. he told me this in dreams. that is all."

my mom had it written down on a slip so we could remember the exact words because it was so funny. i HATED playing piano and i was definitely not good at it (i did end up having a good 5 years of opera training and ended up being a pretty accomplished choir singer though) and the idea of god sending my incredibly severe and serious russian piano teacher a dream begging her to stop teaching me piano was probably the funniest way it could have gone.

[balaclava-trismegistus]

Hm. Interesting. Apparently cortisol production depletes magnesium stores. And I have a lot of symptomatic overlap with magnesium deficiency. And it can apparently help migraine. And ADHD. I think I'm going to try supplementing magnesium glycinate. L-threonate sounds really interesting too as that's magnesium that can cross the blood-brain barrier and apparently is super useful for memory and shit.

[goflowolfog]

[balaclava-trismegistus]

this can't keep happening

[sugarcoatednightshade]

[thepiperatthegatesofdawn1967]

at least the colour green exists

[rumplefuckingstiltzkin]

listen up "bro", if that even is your real name,

[only-cat-memes]

[cocoon2010]

[lizardsister]

for weed ?

[cocoon2010]

[spicebushsartha]

This is a staple of the Discord server I'm in

[muzzlesbian]

this is a staple of the blowjobs i give

[teaboot]

I will forever maintain that genuine fortune-telling and psychic medium junk is a load of bull, but as a person who owns tarot decks and regularly uses them as a tool for self-reflection I also have to admit that it does kind of work for that and it's very very funny when it does

Once I laid out some cards before I left the house and couldn't figure out an interpretation of the symbolism that made sense outside of "stop focusing and pay attention", which was of course absurd, so I was puzzling over that all the way to my bus stop and was so distracted the whole time that I walked face-first into a massive fucking spiderweb

[creature-wizard]

I recently saw an actual news article censor the words "sexual" and "molest." Fucking shit hell fuck shit fuck.

[angiethewitch]

ooooh, storytime!

for a while, my husband worked as a call handler for the ambulance service. during his training, they had a talk from someone wanting to introduce new policy and he wanted to use my husband's group as a tester group. fun, right?

well, the talk was about how saying suicide was triggering. if a caller says theyre suicidal, the handlers should say "unalive" instead, because saying the word might actually trigger the suicidal person.

if the caller says they were raped and need help, the handler should say "S A" instead, because rape is triggering.

I don't know about you, but if I phoned up the ambulance service to ask for help because I want to die, I wouldn't want them using tiktok speak and trivialising the issue. I think that would make me less likely to ever ask for help. SAY THE WORDS. how are we supposed to address the problem if we can't even name the fucking problem.

luckily, my husbands main instructor literally said "well, that's fucking stupid" to the man wanting to introduce this policy and it hasn't been implemented. but it might. we are watching language be erased. NAME. THE. PROBLEM.

I wish I were making this up, I wish I could say I was exaggerating. I'm not.

[handsaniti]

So fun fact, people who are trained in helping to deescalate suicidal people will always say to put it bluntly.

“Do you want to kill yourself?”

A, it has the benefit of making sure everyone is on the same page. Self-harm and attempting suicide are two different things. You can want to harm yourself without wanting to kill yourself. It can also let you know if the person is passively suicidal or if they’re in the process of killing themselves.

B, stigmatizing suicide leads to more suicides.

C, you will not cause someone to kill themselves by saying the word suicide. It is not a magic word that speaking the name of will cause someone to jump off a roof.

[breelandwalker]

Also, speaking to causation on this trend (separate from issues of censorship), lay people need to learn what "triggering" actually means.

Because way too many people do not understand the difference between "This word is an activating reminder for something traumatic in my brain and it has a rapid and deeply negative impact on my mental health which may result in dissociation, flashbacks, spiraling, panic attacks, or similarly serious reactions" and "ewww that word makes me UNCOMFYYYYY."

[teaboot]

Time to talk about self-harm and abuse again!

When I was working on breaking my self-harm habit, one of the most COMFORTING things was discussing it frankly and openly with a professional. Saying out loud, “I’m doing X to myself” and seeing her just nod like it was no big deal and proceed business as usual with her questions was AMAZING for making myself less shameful im talking about it. The idea that I wasn’t revolting, that my problem was not uncommon, that it was actually a pretty normal response to stress and trauma, made it easier to talk about it and eventually stop doing it.

On the other hand, the WORST therapy session I ever had was with a young man who I presume to have been relatively new and inexperienced in the field because, after confessing I was experiencing symptoms of PTSD related to childhood abuse, instead of asking outright, “were you physically abused?” or “what were typical punishments in your house?”, THIS GUY sort of fumbled over his words to ask, “Were you ever…”, before flicking his hand in a “striking someone with a belt” gesture in my general direction.

And because HE wasn’t comfortable using frank and open language, *I* got to deal with being triggered by that! Because GUESS WHAT: SOMEONE PRETENDING THEY’RE HITTING YOU CAN BE UPSETTING TO PHYSICAL ABUSE SURVIVORS

So yeah. Obviously everyone has different triggers and different things that help or make things worse.

But for the love of god, WE HAVE WORDS FOR A REASON

[lazermcgraw]

A defenseless baby lands in front of you. It is the current DDT Ironman Heavymetalweight Champion. A ref is nearby. Do you pin it and win the belt?

Yes

No

Voting ended on14h

[louisegluckpdf]

they won't tell you this in therapy but sometimes the best way to stop catastrophizing/anxiety is to interrupt your spiraling with "girl what the hell are you talking about"

[ytpreviews]

It's not a cure but you have no idea how many times this image has helped me with my OCD

[notgreatthanks]

This tag has been more effective than any meds I’ve ever taken

[teathattast]

[tunashei]

I love desire paths. There's something so wonderous about seeing an echo of humanity. Depending on it's location, a desire path can mean so many different things.

In a city, like the pic above, they represent rebellion, and efficiency. The messiness of humanity. We like to imagine we're oh so logical and neat so we design our cities to be logical and neat an then real humans literally trample on that idea. The ego required to think you can design something perfect that checks every box. Life is all about compromise and patching stuff when some new problem arises. Though people have certainly tried! Ohio state univeristy let students carve their desire paths, and then paved them over. It looks pretty artsy.

Some people will try to discourage desire paths, but this is almost always going to fail.

Eventually, people just have to accept them. Humans are too dang stubborn.

Certain desire paths are just adorable. A 0.5 second time saver. You just can't design for maximum efficiency, humans will always find shortcuts!

Though on occasion a desire path can actually be the least efficient way...especially if you're superstitious.

In a wilder area, such as below, they show us the curiosity of humans. A desire path somewhere natural often tells you there's something interesting just ahead. (Though remember some ecosystems are fragile and will suffer if trampled! Stick to paths in these sorts of areas)

And how about desire stairs? I always think these look so cool. We get see humans determination to climb, to traverse every kind of terrain.

And for something really crazy...a desire path used for centuries will create a 'holloway'

All of these pics are off the Desirepath subreddit, check them out for more examples! And many thanks to the users who submitted these photos.

[kosmogrl]

get in loser we’re gonna try again despite it all

[baked-fish]

I hate to say "some of you don't go outside," but fucking Christ, dude

[hunbunqueen]

Ouuhh I see the water it’s right there on the post,, I’m so thirsty ouyghhhhhw just one sip for me ooouuuuuu

[baked-fish]

Girl, what are you talking about? Are you feeling alright?