If you are a monster, stand up

In Life's name, and for Life's sake, I say that I will employ the Art which is its gift in Life's service alone, rejecting all other usages. I will guard growth and ease pain. I will fight to preserve what grows and lives well in its own way; and I will...

[gailynovelry]

The fastest way to accomplish The Project is to cease being afraid of The Project. The Project cannot maim you. The Project cannot kill you. The Project is more afraid of you than you are of it. It is okay if The Project turns out differently from how it was in your head, and it is okay if it has flaws. You are capable of engaging with The Project.

[caspercryptid]

I would actually go as far as to say that MOST abuse is unintentional. I think most people will go through their lives without ever experiencing intentional abuse. People are abusive because they're selfish, because they're stressed, because they care more about what society thinks they should do than the impacts of their actions on their children and partners, because they think what they're doing is correct, because they've made it make sense in their own heads, because they think they can fix their victims, they think they can fix their relationships, they think they can stop you from leaving, they think they can make you a better partner to them, they think that means you need to do what they want. We've sort of constructed mental illness in a way that doing this shit to other people counts as a form of mental illness because it is anti social behavior in the literal sense— it is behavior that causes social harm.

I don't say any of this to excuse it. I think everyone needs to be more aware of this because if you think abuse has to be intentional you will never realize you are capable of abusive behavior. You will never realize you are being shitty to the people you love, because YOU know what you mean, YOU know you don't mean any harm. But you're doing harm. You need to pay attention to the impact you have on other people, and you need to do it all the time, Especially when you feel least capable of doing so. Sorry! You live in a society. Get your head out of your ass.

[wolfsteax]

I humbly offer this contribution.

[mumblingsage]

Speaking of book recommendations after I just shared a post of them...one of the ladies I volunteered with had a shit year a few years back, losing her son and other family members. With my sympathy card I sent her a typed list of books on grief and grieving that had helped me after losing Theriac (Joanne Cacciatore's Bearing the Unbearable, Louis LaGrande's Healing Grief, Finding Peace: 101 Ways to Cope with the Death of Your Loved One, and Raymond Moody's Life After Loss are all pretty short, accessible, and offer a board first aid kit. Also, you could do worse than to grab some of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's lectures.). Apparently it really helped her, and this past weekend she told me she still had the list and passed it on to a relative of hers who lost her husband this year.

Not all of the advice in every book is going to help; there are some aspects of grief I doubt any book can actually help with. But the recommendations are successful, I'd guess, because a) reading can occupy your mind when you're grieving (and you might as well read about grief because you're not going to be distracted from it), b) learning something new helps people feel more in control of their life & environment and can offer a sense of hope, c) even if the recipient never reads any of the books, being given a book list is a way to say "I care about you and want to help" which is a good message to send. From my own grief experience I also think it's especially powerful to hear "I went through something similar to you and this is what helped me" - it's proof there's life on the other side.

Anyway, 2 more book recs for 2 quite different end-of-life outcomes, which I think you should ideally read before any of your loved ones die so you can actually use the information (also, honestly? Very helpful writing research):

Final Journeys and Final Gifts by Maggie Callanan -- a hospice nurse's guide to the kinds of decisions, conflicts, and sometimes puzzling behavior and experiences encountered when a loved one is in palliative care. Journeys is the more broadly practical book (from the 'writing research' perspective, it also offers some great examples of conflict, memorable scenes, and psychology insights); Gifts looks particularly at spiritual experiences at the end of life, including end of life visions (which happen to all kinds of people and can be a good thing to be prepared for regardless of your own spiritual beliefs). If Gifts proves fascinating, a more recent book on the subject of end of life experiences is Death is But a Dream.

I Wasn't Ready to Say Goodbye: Surviving, Coping and Healing After the Sudden Death of a Loved One is for the opposite end of experience, where a loss is abrupt and unexpected. It offers advice, myth-busting, and real-life stories from people who are bereaved through suicide, crime, and accidents. I recommend this for everyone because 1) It could happen to you (speaking as someone it's happened to multiple times) and having some knowledge ahead of time will not make it less painful, but could make it less bewildering, 2) It could happen to your loved ones, friends, and co-workers, and you can be more supportive with some knowledge, 3) Back to writing research: this book's information on myth-busting, how grief affects children at different ages, tips for coping when a loved one's' death is part of a tragedy that brings media attention, and vivid examples of the various ways real people have responded to grief can make you a more accurate writer. And I'll be honest, as someone who's Been There, when I read a book that was clearly written by an author who hasn't Been There and hasn't even tried to figure out what it's like, it's ranges from annoying to offensive to actively painful. [Also, if you want to do better at understanding+ depicting grief, read grief memoirs: Elizabeth McCracken's An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination is about miscarriage but resonated so strongly with my very different grief experiences, so I think it's tapping into something, if not universal, at least very broad; Sonali Deraniyagala's Wave, about the loss of multiple generations of her family in the Boxing Day tsunami, manages to depict events and feelings that verge on the indescribable.]

[lobstabear]

To my 25 - 35 year olds, you've reached the age where people around you are starting to give up on themselves because they think it's too late. Don't let that energy rub off on you. It's not too late.

[knittingontheroad]

I became a tattoo artist at 49.

Married the love of my life at 50.

Got my Class A CDL at 59.

You've got time.

As long as you're breathing, you've got time.

[gatheringbones]

[“Many of us remain in difficult relationships because of the fantasies we have about our gaslighters and about ourselves. We see a gaslighter as our soul mate, the man we can’t live without, the great love of our life. Or we have a romantic notion of “friends forever” and precious memories of a longstanding friendship. Maybe we have fantasies of climbing the career ladder and feel that if we leave an employer gaslighter, we’re selling out our own hopes for professional advancement and growth.

And when it comes to families, our fantasies are especially powerful. Many of us have intense feelings about the parents or siblings who have known us from early days, seeing them as people we owe everything to, should be able to depend on, or can be especially close to. Even after we grow up and move out, we may feel lost because we’ve left them but not the fantasy that we should have an all-powerful person in our lives who can take care of us and love us unconditionally.

For all of us, fantasy plays a powerful role in gaslighting relationships, though we may not recognize it as such. When my patients, friends, and acquaintances make passionate statements about their gaslighters, they believe they’re only stating facts. Here are some examples.

“It started so well. I can’t believe we can’t get back there.”

“He’s my soul mate. No one has ever made me feel the way he does.”

“I think about him all the time. I love him so much. I can’t imagine life without him.”

“She’s my best friend. She’s always been my best friend. She’s always been there.”

“She knows me so well. Nobody knows me the way she does.”

“She can see right through me. I need someone like that in my life.”

“I have so many wonderful memories of her. We’ve been through so much together.”

“This is the best job I ever had. I owe this man everything. I can’t let him down.”

“I’ll never get another job like this one.”

“No one will ever take a chance on me the way he did.”

“He’s so talented, and he’s really going places. I don’t want to lose my chance to benefit.”

“She’s my mother. She’d do anything for me. How can I let her down?”

“I’ve always been able to depend on my father. Even if he does yell at me, he always comes through for me in the end.”

“My sister is like my best friend. Even if we fight all the time, I know I can count on her.”

“I’ve always looked up to my big brother. Even when he seems to belittle me, I know he’s really on my side.”

I believe that my patients and friends are sincere when they make these statements. But I also believe—whether they’re aware of it or not—that they’re not quite telling the whole truth. What is really going on when we cling so hard to relationships that leave us exhausted, miserable, and confused? And why do we give up so much to remain in them?”]

robin stern, the gaslight effect

[ainecdote-remade-deactivated202]

tired of cannibalism as a metaphor for love or sex. can we get into cannibalism as a metaphor for colonization.

[sloppity-bilepiper]

1. Europeans using Egyptian mummies as medicine

2. The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism Within US Slave Culture by Vincent Woodard

3. "Abolitionists turned the tables on Europeans by accusing them of being cannibals when they ate sugar tainted with the flesh and blood of slaves."

4. Zombies (which I would class as cannibals, since they were human and need to eat humans to live) have a root in Haitian folklore and represented enslavement.

[vintagedean]

adding that, if you can find it, cannibal culture by deborah root is about exactly this. the way the white western world is a hungry, destructive force that cannibalizes non-white cultures and creates wealth and status through the cannibal colonization of those cultures.

here's the intro

i almost think there's an essay in bell hooks' black looks about this too? yes! just checked, there's an essay called "eating the other"

[i-survived-that]

ID: A youtube comment with 11 likes by Niceone, it says "I've lived 46 years without knowing this. How nice of life to save some of the best bites for later." End ID.

Normally, people tend to get frustrated, even jokingly, if they miss out on something. This comment was on a song from 1974 and it made me smile quite much. Simply appreciative. Like a dessert after dinner.

[phinarei]

It is genuinely mind blowing to me just how many Tumblr posts have changed my life for the better and taught me to be happier. Not all of the thoughts originate on Tumblr, but the way people collect and frame them has literally changed my brain chemistry.

[folklorespring]

Amazing

[jvoljvolizka]

Lomochrome color ‘92 Sun-kissed

[gatheringbones]

susan kresge, from naming the violence: speaking out about lesbian battering, edited by Kerry lobel, 1986

[gatheringbones]

[“Each step that I take towards loving myself is a step towards loving my sisters; each step that I take towards loving my sisters is a step towards loving myself.

What we as lesbians believe does not guarantee that we will act in accordance with those beliefs and ideals. As visionaries of a world where women are safe and in control of their own lives, it is too easy to dismiss the distance between our vision and our pasts as insignificant. And yet, the very test of our vision is our ability to straddle that distance by acknowledging all of the pain and horrors it raises in our lives, in ways that heal the old wounds and prepare for that world that we so clearly see.

I stand on the fringes of our women's community watching with horror and sadness the self- hate we act out on ourselves and each other. I do not condone our violence. And I know that confronting our violence by embracing us all those who abuse, those who continue to allow themselves to be abused, those of us who are party to either side of the violence— is to wage our own war, with love, against a society that would have us be different.”]

[life-on-our-planet]

eepy mourning dove cupping its wings under its belly for cushion ©Ella

[queeranarchism]

To everyone hating the US today: I love you, but don't forget to hate the EU too.

[gatheringbones]

[“Despite adults’ attempts to explain love, it remained elusive and incomprehensible. Its nature was undefined, with the promise that one day, we would grasp its meaning. In this system, families are tasked with guiding children toward achieving dominant ideals of success, love, and happiness. How can parents teach love to their children? I don’t believe it can be directly taught. Love is something that must be experienced. However, in our society, adhering to certain markers or “bullet points” of love seems to guide us toward our perceived life goals—our partners, families, and careers.

However, reconciling these ideals with the realities of family life can be challenging, particularly when the notion of enduring romance clashes with the complexities of everyday existence. Romantic love is often viewed as the cornerstone of a legitimate family structure, adhering to heterosexual norms. Yet the presence or absence of this love can significantly impact the family’s perceived success. Shifting the focus from tangible concepts like survival to fleeting emotions like romance places a heavy burden on individuals, as the success or failure of the family becomes contingent on personal choices rather than broader institutions.

Notions such as “I’m bad at love” or “I’m no good at relationships” highlight the shift toward personal responsibility for the family’s success. Divorce or single parenthood are shamed and discouraged at any cost. Gendered roles further complicate matters, with social expectations dictating how individuals should navigate romantic relationships to fulfill hegemonic norms. Think “men are from Mars; women are from Venus.” These deeply ingrained ideas often lead individuals to strive for inclusion within systems that may not fully acknowledge or represent them. Once integrated into these systems, individuals may inadvertently adopt characteristics perpetuating a cycle of conformity.

Capitalism, colonialism, and heteropatriarchy have long depended on the idea of romantic heterosexual love and marriage. First, marriage acts as a way to control society, enforcing traditional gender roles and ensuring a steady supply of workers. Women take on unpaid household chores and childcare, freeing men to work in the capitalist economy. Second, marriage helps maintain economic stability by consolidating wealth and property within families and across generations. It also fuels consumerism, with weddings and related industries driving spending. Third, colonialism imposed Western ideas of love and marriage on colonized peoples, erasing Indigenous values and ways of life. These myths and violent systems uphold power structures, reinforce gender norms, and fuel economic exploitation, all while promoting the idea that romantic love is essential for happiness and success.

In addition to romantic love, society primes everyone to pedestal white childbirth as a way to perpetuate patriarchy. This hyper-valorized version of childbirth does not match the material experiences of a birthing body who is Black, brown, queer, or poor, which often exposes structural failures around bodily autonomy, reproduction, or care. This tension between rhetoric and reality breeds feelings of failure or inadequacy. Children born out of wedlock or conceived through violence or casual encounters often face stigma and societal judgment, generating feelings of worthlessness or self-hatred among parents and children. These structural failings lead to and perpetuate real interpersonal harm.

Within this settler-colonial construct, the role of children is primarily viewed as preparatory. Parents are told to guide them through socialization processes to navigate educational systems, pursue higher education, enter the workforce, marry, and have children, perpetuating a cycle of dominant norms and expectations. Actions align with the structures, and therefore children are often treated as possessions or territories to be colonized by parents. This mindset leads to surveillance, control, punishment, and even disownment, all under the guise of ensuring the child’s well-being and success in life. The pressure to conform to traditional roles and the lack of recognition for children’s rights contribute to a culture in which abuse can be hidden and unaddressed, ultimately supporting the cycle of abuse within the family structure.

The family policing system says that it intervenes on behalf of children. However, it is the building block of surveillance. Judges oversee parents and literally assume a parental authority of children and parents via legal doctrines. Caseworkers, social workers, and the web of mandated reporters are told to ignore what the children want, and instead do what they think is best. In sum, the very people who conceptualize themselves as child savers abandon the children they purport to protect. They not only adopt the narrative of authoritarianism, they are the authority. They are a part of the cycle of control.”]

Ignacio G. Hutía Xeiti Rivera from abolish the family, from how to end family policing: from outrage to action, edited by erin miles cloud, erica r. meiners, and shannon perez darby, 2025

[andhumanslovedstories]

"A Brief for the Defense"/"Good Bones": Two poems I am posting together because I think there is something interesting about that

A Brief for the Defense

By Jack Gilbert

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies are not starving someplace, they are starving somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils. But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants. Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women at the fountain are laughing together between the suffering they have known and the awfulness in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody in the village is very sick. There is laughter every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta, and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay. If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction, we lessen the importance of their deprivation. We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure, but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world. To make injustice the only measure of our attention is to praise the Devil. If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down, we should give thanks that the end had magnitude. We must admit there will be music despite everything. We stand at the prow again of a small ship anchored late at night in the tiny port looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning. To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth all the years of sorrow that are to come.

Good Bones

By Maggie Smith

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.

Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine

in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,

a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways

I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least

fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative

estimate, though I keep this from my children.

For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.

For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,

sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world

is at least half terrible, and for every kind

stranger, there is one who would break you,

though I keep this from my children. I am trying

to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,

walking you through a real shithole, chirps on

about good bones: This place could be beautiful,

right? You could make this place beautiful.

[gatheringbones]

shannon perez-darby, from the secret joy of accountability: self-accountability as a building block for change, from the revolution starts at home, edited by ching-in chen, jai dulani, & leah lakshmi piepzna-samarasinha, 2011

[ixlander]

transcript: It’s easier to tell you what he did and harder to tell you what I did. It’s harder to tell you about the times I lied to him. It’s harder to tell you about the panic attacks or moments when I just couldn’t fight anymore. I’m afraid that if I tell you the whole story, the extent of the devastation will, paradoxically, get lost. I’m afraid I’ll tell the wrong story. I’m afraid that I can never explain just what it was like; that if I do a bad job of sharing my whole truth, then it’ll be like I’m lying and all of this healing work will have been for nothing. I’m afraid my story isn’t the story you want to hear. I’m afraid to say that my healing means taking responsibility for the fucked-up things I did because then I’m not the survivor everyone wants me to be. In the years since this relationship ended I’ve dramatically changed the way I talk about it. I used to tell the story over and over again to anyone who would listen, the story of all of the things he did to me. This story was important but it was also devastating. Every time I told the story it was self-soothing and restimulating; it allowed me to constantly relive all of the pain and drama I experienced. This story of the horrible ex served me in so many ways: it helped me rally support, it helped me feel sorry for myself, it helped me break up with him, and it helped me move him out of my life bit by bit. But what that story never did was help me heal. The old story kept me stuck, trapped in old patterns that weren’t serving me anymore. I had to change the story I told. Gradually, I took some distance from dramatic stories of the horrible things he did to me and started looking at ways I could take responsibility for my actions. This was hard at first because I had surrounded myself with people who told me that I was justified in my actions. His dramatic ups and downs served me in that I didn’t have to examine the ways that I was afraid all of the time; I didn’t have to look at the ways that intimacy deeply frightened me. All of the drama kept us just far enough away from each other that we never had to be truly intimate with one another. Focusing on him kept me trapped and made me feel like there was nothing different I could have done to change what happened in our relationship. When I started focusing on the things I did in the course of surviving that weren’t in line with who I want to be, the part of me that was obsessed with our relationship, and closed off in that way, started to open up and I began figuring out who I was outside of this relationship. In the course of surviving, I cried a lot. In the course of surviving, I lied, manipulated, invaded my partner’s privacy. In the course of surviving, I hurt and put in harm’s way my friends, my communities, my partner, myself. In the course of surviving, I hurt my family connections. In the course of surviving, I drank. In the course of surviving, I dated, kissed, and slept with people I did not treat very well. In my process of healing, the question I keep coming back to is this: What would it look like to take responsibility for the complex choices I made in a grounded, centered, and accountable way? Where are the places I can talk about choices in a manner that contextualizes them within systems of violence? It’s not enough to tell me that I had no choice. Time after time, survivors are told you had no choice; you did what you needed to do to survive. Survival is resiliency, and it is necessary. But survival is not without cost. We make choices within a system that’s meant to turn a powerful person who can act and make choices on their own behalf into someone who becomes an object and is acted upon. People are always resisting objectification. They are fighting, pushing, screaming to be people who can act for themselves. Sometimes we fight and we scream and we push against the edges of the things that are holding us, and sometimes in the course of trying to be who we are in the world, we do things we never thought we would.

[mulchmouth]

Im going to hold your hand when I say this. It is not realistic to expect yourself or your family to be able to survive solely off of food you have foraged or grown in a garden. People with more knowledge and experience have tried and failed. What do you think happened to all of those communes in the 60s? Most of them failed. Famine and malnutrition have been constant companions to humanity until industrialized farming and food supply lines came along.

It feels like a uniquely American capitalist take to assume these traditions will make you completely self sufficient. You need a lot of people, a lot of time, a lot of knowledge across a lot of subjects, and a lot of luck to provide for everyone's nutritional needs.

So should you even bother trying to be more self sufficient with your food? I argue yes. Foraging and gardening are fun and will teach you so much about many things. They are deeply rewarding activities that can supplement your diet. There are herbs I haven't bought in years because I grow my own. There are dishes I can only make with foraged ingredients because I can't get them in stores.

You may not have the power to do everything, but that doesn't mean your efforts are wasted. Getting 5% of your nutritional needs from food you have grown or foraged, even for a season, is a massive accomplishment.

[anxeious]

bathe in your own sunlight !!!!!!