it's like a baby sling for my legs? but the weight is spread out over my whole back with the nice gentle pressure of a good pair of leggings and it's deshrimping my shoulders back is this the first time I sat like a normal human? maybe
these are really great it sort of gently pulls your back and shoulders into stable positions like... exotendons or something. it literally feels so restful to sit up straight when youve got this thing on
my friend w hypermobile EDS insisted i try this thing and the first time i wore it, it was so restful i cried so hard i threw up. because i realized how much tension i was holding in my body and how tired i really was
Actually you SHOULD make problematic content. You SHOULD explore dark or taboo topics. You SHOULD have a space where you can cope with your traumas or explore sensitive topics in a way that doesn't hurt anyone.
Also you should make problematic content for funsies. You don't need to have had trauma or need to be coping in order to explore dark creativity. You can just be a human who wants to explore dark and taboo topics because you want to. That's completely normal, btw.
Every single person on this planet thinks about dark and taboo things. It's literally the most normal thing in the world.
while the spineless democrat jokes are funny, it's worth acknowledging these people don't actually have some sort of personality flaw preventing them from taking action but rather that they see themselves benefiting more when not taking action. as long as they're still holding office, they can afford to ignore concerns of their voter base (especially with the whole "vote blue no matter who" attitude persisting).
on the surface the trump administration may seem detrimental to "world order", but in reality it's more of a gloves-off look at long existing problems with US hegemony, and the fact that many respected leaders are using a cost-benefit analysis when it comes to giving a fuck about anyone
"Artists do however have a degree of freedom. A writer has little power, but he does have freedom... Think very carefully about this. Do you want to be merely the spokesman for accomplished power movers? The more power, the less freedom. A politician has almost no freedom at all. I am frequently asked, 'What would you do if you were President? What would you do if you were the dictator of America? What would you do if you had a billion dollars?â In the words of my friend Ahmed Jacoubi, 'This question is not personal opinion.' A prior question must be asked: 'How did you get to be the President, a dictator, a billionaire?' The answers to these questions will condition what you will do. For one is not magically teleported into these positions; one gets there by a series of discrete steps, each step hedged with conditions and prices.â
William S. Burroughs, The Adding Machine: Collected Essays
intersex tmes are so willfully ignorant when they whine about tme/tma not applying to them. if you can go "no no i'm not ACTUALLY a tranny" then you have the privilege of exempting yourself from transmisogyny. this isn't fucking rocket science. the racialized cis girls you keep masculinizing to use them for this argument also have this privilege. not only does tme/tma apply to you but you are living proof of why these terms need to exist đđŸ
and if you were assigned female at birth, aka. you were institutionally coerced into femininity, then you are not transfem. you by definition cannot and will never be transfem. and therefore there will always be an escape from transmisogyny for you.
i was gonna say that y'all are like nonblack women of color who claim to be affected by misogynoir. but then i realized that y'all would probably agree with that and that it's just not worth talking to you. jfc
i am once again making a silly little zine abt covid safety but this time it is very unserious and not educational at all so if ur new here and dont know what the Heck i am on about. here's a place to start!
id:
slide 1:
a photo of the front cover of a black & white printed zine held up in front of a quilt in the background. top text of the zine cover reads: "reasons I love wearing my mask in public" with bottom text in parentheses: "besides the on-fire garbage can that is public health these days." a cartoon drawing of Maria, a pale genderfluid person with a buzzcut and glasses, is winking and doing a peace sign. she is wearing a boat-style mask with a star mask chain and crayon earrings.
slide 2:
top text: "1: I haven't had a man tell me to smile in 6 years." Below is a drawing of Maria walking down the sidewalk wearing a black mask, a cat cropped t-shirt, patched jeans, & star earrings. They are carrying a Mitski tote bag and look unbothered with their eyes closed as a man who looks a lot like the distracted boyfriend meme holds up a finger as if he was about to speak, but just looks confused as his speech bubble reads "..." Bottom text: "I simply cannot go back."
slide 3:
Top text: "2: I don't have to make facial expressions." Below Maria is waving and wearing a polo shirt, blank face emoji earrings, & an apron that says "JOB" with a name tag attached. Maria stares blankly behind her mask. Bottom text: "autism wins!"
slide 4:
Top text: "3: I can sing to myself on walks without being spotted by traffic." Below is Maria strolling down the sidewalk with cars in the background, wearing a mask, a baseball cap, and a Phantom of the Opera t-shirt. Maria has a speech bubble of floaty text singing "aangel of muuusic" with music notes floating around.
slide 5:
Top text: "4: mask chains!" below is a boat-style mask with a mask chain made of letter beads that spell "yippee." Bottom text: "another layer of accessory-maxxing."
slide 6:
Top text: "5: adds to my aura of being the mysterious and unknowable coworker." Below Maria stands in their job apron with a black mask & mushroom earrings surrounded by question marks. Text around Maria reads "what do they look like??" "we are literally on the clock!!" "wouldn't you like to know weatherboy!!"
slide 7:
Top text: "6: nobody knows I'm eating fruit snacks." Below is Maria with her mask on wearing strawberry earrings looking nonchalant as text points to her saying "maria acting normal." In the bottom left corner we see through the mask like an x-ray showing Maria chewing as she holds a scooby-doo gummy. Text pointing to this drawing reads "the REAL maria."
slide 8:
Back cover of the zine shows Maria shrugging wearing a striped shirt, overalls with a heart patch on the front, and worm earrings. Top text: "of course none of these things are more important than keeping you & your community safe from preventable illnesses but if for some wild reason you don't care about that. this is everything the government doesn't want you to know!!" Below is the instagram logo and Maria's handle: @maria.therese.art
hey did you know??? that if you stop stretching and maintaining mobility in your body then it goes away?? things get tight and you can't move the way that you used to??? and when you decide to try getting a stretch routine going that the first week fucking sucks because you keep going 'damn i used to be able to do this no problem' and then you have to switch gears and be kind to yourself and just focus on getting better from here instead of berating yourself for dropping the good habits in the first place??? and your body never stops aging so you gotta keep taking care of it and sometimes you gotta take care of it extra in certain areas because of things that happened when you were younger and it's boring and sometimes hurts but it's so necessary???
i am yelling this at myself right now i am going through An Experience (trying to get into a routine of body maintenance again for my physical and mental health)
I know this is going to make me sound extremely "old man yells at could", but I feel like the concept of "Civic Duty" needs to be brought up in our conversations on the left more often. Like, you do have a responsibility and a duty of care for the world around you. You have a duty to make it a better place, not one you should "get in trouble" for failing, but one you should at the very least strive to uphold.
Okay. All of this is going under a cut because it talks in details about some traumatizing medical stuff, and about feelings and concepts closely related to sexual assault.
If you are a doctor or nurse or work in the medical field at all, I do recommend that you read it, because I desperately wish there was awareness among care providers that experiences like mine even exist.
What I'm getting to with all my posts about The Fear is this:
I realized while journaling yesterday that my "medical fear" is essentially about sexual violation.
What I'm saying is that I have no idea if I ever actually experienced this, but whenever I went to the doctor as a child, I had this anticipation that "something bad" might happen that had to do with being forced to undress and having my genitals and/or anus touched.
I felt certainty that this was a thing doctors do, and that it was eventually going to happen to me, as far back as I can remember.
This certainty was almost...subconscious? Like, the exact nature of the Dread was something I couldn't fully think in my head, and I believe part of that was related to some sort of shame or "forbidden-ness" related to "private parts."
Not all of the medical fear was a fear of being touched in sexual parts of my body. My fear of needles became very severe after I had multiple negative experiences in mid-childhood, probably most importantly non-consensually having blood drawn at age 8 and at age 15. (In both incidents, I was crying and saying "no," and they did it anyway.)
But even in the case of my anxiety about needles, the fear was of having something done to my body forcibly.
It's weird because I've known implicitly the entire time what the nature of the fear was. Like, no new information has emerged in my mind, it's all stuff that was there the entire damn time.
Since, to the best of my knowledge, I have never been sexually abused, I didn't allow myself to identify my feelings as "feelings related to sexual violation."
But recently, I have been getting better at exploring my feelings and observing how "safe" and "unsafe" feel in my body. When I feel that sense of "something bad" lurking or creeping in my mind, I have been able to simply observe it in a way I never could before.
There is a central part of my fear that I struggle to handle and talk about. Contact with it is like being electrocuted: something horrible surges through my body that I cannot control. It is absolutely unreasonable: the terror of a cornered chimp about to rip your face off. This part of the fear is fundamentally "about" violation.
I know that a lot of the fear I felt as a child was connected to sexual violation. Completely independent of anything that "happened" to me, I know that this is what I felt. At the core of almost all of my panic-attack-inducing fears as a child (mostly that I was dying or had some kind of illness) was a fear of going to a doctor/hospital. And a VERY significant part of my fear of going to a doctor/hospital was the knowledge that doctors and nurses will touch and/or stick things in your anus or genitals.
It occurred to me for the first time yesterday that being hauntingly concerned about this as an 8 year old may not be a universal experience.
This part is weird, and I don't know how weird it actually is, but it feels weird: When I was much younger, like 3-5, I was intensely fixated on the fact that doctors touch your "private parts." I remember that made drawings of this and I acted it out in play. Later when I was 6, I had this story I made up and I remember having this vivid image in my head of how my "villain" would kill people by injecting poison into their genitals in his evil lab.
This is probably an instance of "kids being weird", but the fact that the topic became so existentially haunting later in life makes me feel weird about it.
Later when I was 15, I googled what a pelvic exam involved because I was having troubles with my period and my mom said I might have to get one.
...I still have so much violent anger about this topic, it makes me want to Harm People.
The whole procedure seemed intentionally designed to cause as much suffering as possible, and the article I read was incredibly condescending about potential anxiety and kept saying things like "just try to relax, it'll be over soon," which...makes me want to vomit even thinking about it even now. Ew. The article also made it sound as though you were not allowed to refuse a pelvic exam. It also said that the doctor would stick their fingers up your ass??
I really can't talk about it very much, but it basically told me "you are going to be raped, over and over again, forever."
I also knew it would be excruciatingly painful, because even putting in a tampon was excruciatingly painful for me, and I could not imagine a scenario where a doctor would stop doing something to me because it hurt.
Like. I don't think I was capable of comparing it to rape in my head, because I had always had this awareness that "doctors are allowed to do this to you," but I understood it to be rape on a visceral level. That was literally what it was to me, because I don't think I'd had a single consensual medical experience at that point.
I was 19 before I even learned that consent in a medical setting was a THING. I thought that once you go into a doctor's office, they can do whatever they want to you unless you manage to cry/struggle/argue/fawn your way out of it.
I know a lot of this sounds fucked up, and it is, but I honestly thought it was all normal and everyone else was just better at getting used to it than I was.
I'm not posting this to try to get some kind of confirmation that something fucked up happened to me, though. It's mostly just...I'm just processing it.
I keep thinking about how I didn't have the ability to describe what I was feeling. I didn't know objectively how "bad" it was, and I was an anxious kid, and kids are normally scared of the doctor, right...?...and I was more scared than usual, so I had "anxiety," so I had to train myself to ignore fear and replace all my negative thoughts with positive ones, and my fear was of something objectively Good (doctors) which meant it was a "phobia" and "irrational," and I felt like...I was bad. I felt like not being able to "overcome my fear" and "do it scared" meant I was bad.
It's just like, at what point does bodily autonomy become something that matters? I don't know what I'm trying to say. My experience is definitionally Not Traumatic according to the mainstream psychiatric thinking. It's "anxiety." Articles online that purported to help me, wrote me off as "embarrassed" or "nervous" when I was feeling this gaping pit of annihilating dread that seemed to peel me open and turn me inside out.
And I felt RAGE, violent violent rage. Because even though I had never been raped, the certainty that rape, or something very like rape, would happen to me in the future, had had a profound effect on how I experienced the world.
And I felt guilt. I felt that if I got cancer or something, it would be a punishment for not being able to "get over it" and go to the doctor. It would be my fault. I mean, health PSA's and articles and stuff would even frame it in that way, like it would be Your Fault if you didn't get screened and got cancer, because you were Weak and a Whiny Baby
there was an ad campaign a while back telling men to "man up" and get screened for testicular cancer and it bothered the hell out of me. that's just an example
As a child, I couldn't connect my feelings to sexuality; I didn't even know what sex was, and I was embarrassed talking about "private parts," and I knew that Everyone Has to Go To The Doctor and You Just Have To Get Over It.
Do it scared. Everyone has to. You have to push through the fear sometimes. Get over it. Get over it. Get over it.
I used to have a lot of angst over "whether everyone secretly feels this way and I'm just worse at handling it," but I think fanfiction helped confirm this as not true. Even in a literary environment where exploring the feelings related to rape and bodily violation were accepted, medical stuff was not a major nexus for this anxiety.
I am working through the idea that my level of distress was not normal and not something I should have felt guilty about or felt forced to tolerate.
The medical fear (which, as I said, was mostly a fear of being sexually touched/violated without my consent) was a major contributor of my feeling of "the world being an evil place/the nature of the universe being fundamentally bad." This weighed on me relentlessly through my entire life
The medical fear also was a big part of the sense of a Bad Something in my head all the time that I was actively holding back/trying to distract myself from. I mentioned in another post that I couldn't just sit still and think to myself "I exist, and I am okay, in this moment" without the feeling of something evil and nasty immediately leaking in.
I still don't know exactly what I wish was different.
I remember when I was 10-12, I had severe panic attacks (like, a few years later I couldn't even reconstruct in my head how awful they were, the feeling of utter utter helplessness and terror) and it was usually triggered by me thinking I had some kind of symptom that would mean I would have to go to the hospital
I had persistent fears of having all sorts of illnesses and conditions to the point where I "Knew" that I had something medically wrong with me and it wasn't several years afterward for me to realize that wasn't necessarily true.
But looking back, the things I was scared of were often things that were completely treatable. It was *going to the hospital* that scared me, not the illness itself.
And I was so scared of going to the hospital that I literally could not think about it. I could not picture what would happen there or what I was afraid would happen, and the notion never visited my mind that there would be something "after" i went to the hospital. I could not imagine life after Having Gone To The Hospital, on a level that was so total it didn't even occur to me that "after" could exist.
It doesn't seem necessary for me to feel that way. I can imagine a universe where the fact that doctors exist could have been a comfort to little me, the knowledge that if I became sick, there were people who could help me to feel better.
But instead, I was trapped in this horribly isolating state where going to the doctor was the worst thing I could imagine, so if something was wrong in my body, I would just have to die.
I think my parents thought "being scared of the doctor" was normal, and that I would eventually get over it by being forced to push through it.
I absolutely detest how all sexual health resources deal with this area of human experience.
I literally have "sexual health" blacklisted on tumblr. i can't look at Scarleteen because how they talked about medical exams when i first read their stuff triggers the absolute fuck out of me
There needs to be a sexual health resource that includes some kind of discussion of the following things:
What it means to feel safe with a health care provider. The fact that feeling safe with a health care provider is possible.
Consent exists in medical settings. No one should be touching your body without your consent or against your will. It's okay to be upset about that because it's wrong.
maybe some kind of indication that "nervousness" is fairly normal but if you feel crushing dread and guilt and disgusting horror and violent rage that is not the same emotion as "nervousness," that is in fact a different emotion
and does NOT include
writing off anxiety or apprehension about medical situations as "embarrassment" or "nervousness" that will magically Disappear as soon as you walk in the doctor's office when you realize the doctor is Literally Nice :)
any kind of mocking or belittling people's fears
any phrasing like "it sucks and everyone hates it but you have to suck it up"
any phrasing that comes off as placing "fault" upon the reader for getting cancer/illness if they don't Suck It Up
i wish there were health resources in general that had 1 milligram of sympathy and compassion in them.
like, I couldn't talk about how I was feeling with ANYONE and there was nothing online that didn't make me feel even MORE guilty and ashamed
When 1780 babies in Cuba die due to the measurably heightened effects of the blockade on the medical system, you must understand this as the United States murdering 1780 Cuban babies. Despite having one of the world's most advanced medical systems, and the highest doctors per capita compared to any other country (over 2.5x that of the United States) 10s of 1000s of people are unable to access medical treatment in Cuba because of the strangulation of the Cuban healthcare system. The defense of Cuba is a litmus test for socialists, you must condemn Imperialism, not the revolution, the blockade is an act of genocide
if you keep stepping on somebody's toes for a long time at minimum they're probably going to start really hating you and at maximum you might cause them lasting damage.
if you do it on purpose you're a dick. if it's on accident but you keep doing it that person is still going to be mad at you because you don't care enough to try not to step on their toes
if you give a grovelling begging apology after accidentally stepping on somebody's toes one time you're going to make the whole thing awkward, but not giving a quick "sorry" before moving on is still kind of rude.
âWhat are you waiting forâ there has to be a perfect moment where the door is open and my real life is on the other side waiting for me and if I wait long enough for just the right moment then maybe just maybe no one will hate me for going through that door. Maybe theyâd even understand why had to do what I did to get there.
"that doesn't sound sincere- it sounds rehearsed" is one of the most devastating and fucked-up statements you can make to anyone in the neurodivergent/ADHD/Autistic/Schizophrenic/Disordered Personality sphere. yeah bitch it's rehearsed. because i wanted to get it right when i said it
Iâve recently discovered how much better life can be when we normalize this. My best friend and I have started saying âhang on, Iâm scriptingâ when we need a minute to mentally rehearse during big conversations (and âbear with me, Iâm doing improvâ when weâve reached the end of our script and start to struggle with words lol)
Windows in New Zealand usually don't have flyscreens on them, because they don't have remotely the fly problem Australia does. One bonus is getting New Zealand's heaviest beetle flying into the room.
The beetle and its larvae have various names in te reo MÄori, - the larval form is known as huhu, tunga haere, or tunga rÄkau, the final larval stage after it empties its gut and prepares to pupate as tataka, the pupa as pepe, and the adult pepe-te-muimui or tunga rere.
The adults only live a few weeks, so I was lucky I was in the country over that window. The larvae spend two or three years eating dead gymnosperm timber.
The larvae are highly prized as a traditional food, and very nutritious.
The adult beetles are nocturnal and are attracted to light. George Vernon Hudson wrote in 1892 "this propensity frequently leads it on summer evenings to invade ladies' drawing-rooms, when its sudden and noisy arrival is apt to cause much needless consternation amongst the inmates". Maybe not that needless though - they have powerful mandibles like other Prionine longicorns, and don't hesitate to bite. As I discovered to my cost. The little bastard.
