Facing your fears the only way.

30s. Call me Val or Valerie (whichever is fine!). I reblog whatever interests me. Occasionally, I’ll post my thoughts.

[steelyblacksnow]

Hello! This is pretty much my main social media hangout, but if you’re interested, I also have these accounts too:

Instagram: Only use it to follow and I last updated in 2021. Still, I’ll follow any mutual here if you wish to add me:

Welcome back to Instagram. Sign in to check out what your friends, family & interests have been capturing & sharing around the world.

Letterboxd: I like to watch a variety of movies and I keep track of what I see here:

Val’s profile

Val uses Letterboxd to share film reviews and lists. 81 films watched. Bio: Just another account. Will add reviews if I feel like it.

[theshitpostcalligrapher]

req'd by @firiona

okay i was given context for this

text: Don't talk to me until I've finished my morning bean

[miamaimania]

Threads of Transformation ➤ ‘Conversion’ by Kim Westfall, 2016. Vibrant acrylic yarn woven into a tapestry of emotional rebirth.

[azspot]

“Because the truth is, tech doesn’t have an image problem. It doesn’t have a message problem. It has an intention problem. What’s wrong with the axe murderer who broke into my house is not that he hasn’t successfully persuaded me to buy into his narrative. What’s wrong is that he’s trying to kill me with an axe. Similarly, when you launch a product that’s designed to put millions of people out of work, block access to sources of verifiable truth, replace human creativity with slop, and lower the barriers to every sort of atrocity, the problem isn’t that you haven’t told the public a good story about those things. The problem is that you are trying to do them.”

— The 40 Most Rage-Inducing Problems in Tech

[santhipoma]

[uncahier]

Since you don’t respect my opinion anyway, quit pestering me to fill out a survey after every single consumer experience. I keep wondering who looks at these surveys. Is the CEO sitting in his wood-paneled office, reading each individual response on an old-timey stock ticker? If so, you can keep doing this. If not, I rate this experience zero stars out of infinity.

[mariacallous]

Congrats @godlessondheimite

[odetopictorialism]

Dora Maar • Candelabra, 1935

[romanceyourdemons]

people needdddd to wear headphones in public because while on an otherwise very lovely walk in the park today i saw a guy sitting under a tree watching a porn parody of the star wars prequels

[romanceyourdemons]

if nothing else trying to tune out the sounds of anakin and padme going to town as i contemplate the babbling brook gave me a brief but vivid window into what it’s like to be obi wan kenobi

[hometoursandotherstuff]

I'd try one now, if it comes in pink.

[important-cat-pics]

[everythingfox]

DOG

dog dog dog

dog dog dog

dog dog dog

[svlc]

[bettyrightnow]

ever since i was a little girl i knew i wanted to put no effort into my appearance

[yellow-cat]

abandon shame. theres more interesting emotions to be felt

[yellow-cat]

unless its getting you off. in that case keep going

[pokemonarchive]

Snom (2026) - Paradox Drive Illustrator: Shinya Komatsu

[magnetothemagnificent]

franz kafka’s writings are often analyzed in a trans lens the person who wrote that was almost definitely a trans person who related. people who call kafka a trans woman are almost entirely trans women. there is also a huge subset of literature shitposter girls who use kafka and the metamorphosis specifically to talk about their experiences with womanhood. so while i agree that the trope you are talking about is antisemitic i don’t think that applies here. he’s not being called a woman in a disparaging way.

It. Literally. Doesn't. Matter.

Spoiler alert: trans people can be antisemitic!

Franz Kafka was a real person who died not too long ago, and just because a trans person relates to his writings doesn't mean they can claim he's trans. It's not the same as relating to a fictional character. You can't 'headcanon' an actual person. I don't care how much you relate- he wasn't trans, don't call him a woman. He was an actual person, not a fictional character you can project on. An treating Franz Kafka like a fictional character you can project any label onto and separate him from his actual life is dehumanization and *also* antisemitic.

It's no different than queer people co-opting Anne Frank's memory and erasing her story to just herald her as a "bi icon" when she never had the chance to live long enough to label herself. Queer gentiles need to stop dehumanizing Jewish people and turning them into blank slates they can project onto.

Kafka's Metamorphosis and writings about his depression are from the viewpoint of a disabled Jewish man who was watching as antisemitism was slowly escalating around him and Jews were becoming insects in the minds of society. And "he's not being called a woman in a disparaging way" is the dumbest excuse ever- antisemitism is antisemitism. I've seen trans people infantilize Jewish men, calling them "different breed of man" or "scrunkly" and then insist they meant it positively. Intent doesn't matter. Calling a Jewish man, who never ever indicated having any gender identity otherwise, a woman, or implying he's somehow not a full man, is antisemitic.

[obi-waankenobi]

I hope I'm not derailing here (please tell me if I am and I'll delete this), but I'd like to especially call attention to this line (which I love, btw):

I don't care how much you relate- he wasn't trans, don't call him a woman.

At some point relatively recently, people seem to have come to the conclusion that you can't empathize with a character (or real fucking person, in this case, and I cannot stress how gross that is) unless you're just like them. "Oh, I, a nonbinary person can identify with this cishet man? He must actually be nonbinary!" "Oh, I, an autistic person, can identify with this Ambiguously Quirky™ person? She must actually be autistic!"

Being able to relate to a person--real or fictional--who isn't just like you is a good thing. It's good that you see yourself in the writings of a cisgender man! Maybe it will teach you that cis people aren't the enemy. It's good that an autistic character resonates with NT people! Maybe they'll gain new insight into their autistic friends and family!

It's called empathy, and it's so important to understand that you are going to see your experiences reflected in people who are unlike you. Those connections are important. Deciding that Kafka must be a trans woman because you're a trans woman is missing the entire fucking point. It means that you do, in fact, have some things in common with a cisgender man, and conversely, it means that cisgender men have things in common with you. To flatten them out so they're just like you is missing out on so much of what they have to say.

People are beautiful and rich and layered and the fact that we can connect with other people and share experiences despite how different we are? That's the whole fucking point. That's what makes life worth living.

OP, I'm sorry I only spoke on being transgender and autistic. Those are the only two points that I could speak on from experience. Talking about real people like they're fictional pisses me off, and I sort of... got off on a thing.

[terulakimban]

I'm not OP, but one thing that's frightening about this from a Jewish perspective (especially in the context of discussing someone who was alive in the interwar period) is the recurring idea that Jews only matter as lenses for other people's stories. That we can be empathized with, but only if our narratives can be twisted to someone else's.

Because we've seen that before. We see it very often because it's a fundamental premise of some incredibly antisemitic forms of Christianity, and when it turns out that we're real people with real opinions and real beliefs and real feelings who don't just exist to validate someone else's perception of who and how we could be, people don't just abandon their pretense at allyship, they get violent.

It's also a common failing in how the Holocaust is taught. People like to present this lens of "it was random violence that came out of nowhere and could've happened to anyone. It could've happened to you! Imagine if you'd been one of the victims! That would've been a tragedy wouldn't it?" And the thing is, that's bullshit. If you were just a random German citizen at the time? You would've been one of the perpetrators. And it was a tragedy in and of itself; it doesn't become a tragedy by imaging a scenario in which people who were perfectly safe would've actually been potentially in danger (never killed, of course, because Holocaust education is also commonly sanitized, which is a different rant).

Edited to take out a rant that was in drafts and got added to this by mistake, but. Well, the Tl;dr, since that's been reblogged

Well. I'm a cis woman. GNC, perhaps, but cis. And I get misgendered (and degendered) a lot because of how people read Jewish features. And... when friends insist that any discomfort I have with feminine stuff is because I'm an egg... I get that they're trying to be helpful for a journey of self-discovery. But I've done that introspection. I check in with myself periodically just in case. And "oh, you're really nonbinary/a trans man because you're [insert list of stereotypically Jewish features//personality traits commonly ascribed to Jews [whether or not I have them]" -it hurts. Because not only are they minimizing my actual identity and my self-knowledge, and deciding that they're the experts on my life, rather than me, they're doing it in a way that's constantly used to hurt me.

[theres-a-hole-in-my-wall]

another thing! Jewish men are (pretty often) seen as feminine/unmasculine and like they could never be 'true men'. In a lot of media they're the awkward nerds, the virgins, the weirdos. Point is this is not just misgendering anybody (which would be awful enough), this is misgendering a group that's known to be seen as less masculine than a white man for example

*this is a bit of derailing but it reminds me of how black men face the opposite issue of being seen as hyper masculine & in turn hyper violent. None of us can win in this racist ass society my g-d

[littledoggy-girlcollar]

“he’s not being called a woman in a disparaging way.”

No, but everything in his writing that gets commented on is something that speaks to feeling out of place in society, or something that conveys emotional or social vulnerability.

So for someone to say “because of these things I think she was a trans woman teehee!” they are implicitly 1) denying that any other aspect of identity might cause these feelings, and 2) asserting that if someone feels these things, they must be a woman.

Ignoring his Judaism AND implying that men can’t feel alienated or vulnerable and if they do they must actually have been a woman. Doesn’t seem very respectful or deconstructing of gendered norms to me.

People need to either start recognizing that you can empathize and identify with jews on our own terms or you can stop fucking talking about us.

[sonyaheaneyauthor]

Ukraine. A Girl with Geese. By Nikolai Bodarevsky, 1892.

[sovietpostcards]

"By the Samovar. Tea Drinking" by Tatyana Tolstaya (1950)

[cyanolov3]

Let’s go lesbians I survived finals week….

Carmilla book cover :-) prints in my shop, link in pinned post!