completely free to use and distribute, no credit needed
Variants and explanation below
Symbolism:
- Black: trauma and rupture
- Grey: uncertainty and letting go of black and white thinking
- White: hope, openness, and kindness
- Turquoise: exploration and movement
- Orange: joy, self-acceptance, solidarity and community
- Red on white: accepting one's own impurity, sexual positivity
- The sun: life and new beginnings
- Tapir: ex-mormons (per request)
- Bird: freedom/liberation, moving into light
This flag is meant for anyone who has deconstructed from a religion or spirituality. This includes anyone who used to be in one religion, but is now atheist or agnostic, or reconverted to a different religion or spirituality, or renounced a large part of their own religion or spirituality while still hanging onto other parts.
Apostates are often heavily ostracized and persecuted. In some places renouncing your religion can be punishable by torture and death. Many people who deconstruct experience being disowned, violated, and put into religious therapies and programs.
Even when you are safe, leaving your religion can be an extremely lonely experience.
This flag is meant to be used by apostates and deconstructing people to cheer themselves up and feel pride, while also signaling support and solidarity towards others with similar experiences. This flag is meant to unify all apostates and deconstructing people through their experience.
If you live in a place where identifying as an apostate/ex-religious openly might put you in danger, please prioritize your safety and anonymity!!!
Another kind of diversity we need in writing is protagonists without love interests. Give me adults with full-fledged stories that don't include falling in love.
I am so tired of short-attention-span, trim-the-fat culture.
All writing advice these days is for how to write like Chuck Palahniuk. "Cut 'think', cut 'feel', cut 'wonder' - only action, only pushing forward, show and move and move and move." What if I could emulate this style, and still don't want to? What if I want to write like Henry James, with three paragraphs of introspective musings between each dialogue line?
The music advice is, "make it shortform, make it Tik-Tok compatible, make it punchy, hit the refrain as soon as possible." What if I want that 10-minute prog rock piece? What if I want that symphony? What if I want it slow and luxurious and lazy?
Movies. Series. Poetry. Bodies. Everything is "trimmed trimmed trimmed trimmed, stripped bare, you have three seconds to win me over, make it airport chic." I don't want to win you over, then, I guess.
I want the fat left it.
I want the pleasure and the indolence and the indulgence.
Fuck this art-advice that's always "your art needs Ozempic."
I genuinely cannot explain to a non-writer what it feels like when a chapter suddenly clicks. it's not satisfaction. it's not relief. it's this horrible specific feeling like you just remembered something you never knew. like the story was already there and you finally stopped being in the way of it. i don't know what to do with that feeling. i just close the laptop and stare at the wall for a bit.
Me at the same goddamn time: feeling physically ill at the things i hear, unable to believe a human person could genuinely stand behind the type of ideology i'm hearing, succeeding at looking calm and pleasant and not tearing nearby objects into pieces