can I be honest? I was so pissed off by friends and family criticizing my soap choice that, for half a year, I did an experiment where I washed one hand with Palmolive and one with handsoap, to prove that it didn't make your skin any rougher. and do you know what the result is? it does make your skin rougher. and now I'm even more pissed off.
I love this. This is the beauty of the honest scientific process. You had an idea, you tested it and you still reported the results even though the results disproved your idea.
It's ok to be mad at it, you're an honest scientist.
Yesterday I almost cried because my baby cousin ran up to my grandmother and was like. “Ha! Buhbuh ba ha.” And she said okay you want to show me something? And he led her over to the garden patch and crouched down and pointed at rocks and plants and was like. “Ah. Habah ba ah” as she listened attentively.
And I was like that happened 1,000 years ago. Probably 10,000 years ago. Maybe 100,000. The youngest human in a group went to the oldest one and said to the best of their ability “come see.” And the adult went.
this is such a beautiful post it doesn't need my dumb addition, but i can't fit this in the tags. at the archaeological site Dolni Vestonice in the Czech Republic there are a bunch of really really fascinating finds and I'm only going to tell you about one tiny detail of one of the most interesting sites in the world.
at this settlement 20-30,000 years ago there lived a person who appears to have been a sort of sorcerer-grandmother-ceramics artist and her workshop was preserved very well in the sedimentary layers. her hut where she had her kilns was full of little sculptures of animals and people that seem to have been made to explode in the kiln on purpose, we're not sure why but nevermind. the relevant detail is that when you sculpt something with your hands and then fire it, your fingerprints can be preserved in the surface of the clay forever, so we have fingerprints of ancient ceramics artists that have survived for tens of thousands of years. and one of the major artifacts from Dolni Vestonice has a fingerprint on it that is so small it could only have belonged to a child
so this shaman-grandmother-sculptor, who was buried with her pet fox by the way, had children running through her workshop and touching everything she made while she was at her mysterious work of creating the world's oldest ceramics, none of which appear to be bowls, bottles, pots, or any "useful" items at all, but rather a collection of animal and human and sometimes anthropomorphic figures, some of which appear to be self portraits. exactly the same as sandersstudios' grandmother being led to the garden by an excited baby. we've all been the same for 30,000 years.
sometimes people experiencing psychosis and/or mania will come up to you on the street and talk in confusing or upsetting ways. your job is to either have a regular human-to-human conversation with that person or politely leave. your job is not to call 911. do not call 911. you might kill that person if you call 911.
I don't even have the energy to screenshot and respond to your tags- what the actual fuck is wrong with you? "the cops are scared and rightfully so" "mental health calls are the scariest for cops" OH so this isn't about the safety of psychotic & manic people this is about piggy feelings?
and no, actually, this is not USA specific and no, actually, people from other countries should not ignore this post. police violence and sanism weren't invented in the US and they are certainly not unique to here. if you (or anyone) thinks that this bullshit doesn't happen elsewhere then you are not listening.
This is legitimately useful reframing. A while ago I started replacing the word "cop" in my vocabulary with "a man with a gun." It really puts things into perspective.
This homeless person is making me uncomfortable. Should I call [a man with a gun]?
My neighbor is having a loud party. Should I get [a man with a gun] involved?
There are some teenagers skateboarding. Do you think [a man with a gun] would get rid of them for me?
It makes it very clear what you're saying. I can call a man with a gun to threaten or hurt someone mildly inconveniencing me. You're not calling the cops, you're calling A MAN WITH A GUN into a situation that does not warrant a firearm handled by a volatile lunatic who will not be held accountable for his actions.
everyone loves to hate terfs until they realise that it actually entails rejecting bioessentialism entirely and then suddenly you’re “taking things too seriously” and you “don’t have a sense of humour” like i’m sorry but saying protect the dolls doesn’t make you immune to terfism it has seeped into every corner of mainstream feminism and unless you’re actively searching it out and checking your own biases you will always be at risk of sharing a space with terfs
“Only women can—” nope. “But all men—” nah. “The divine femininity of—” gonna stop you right there. “Everyone born ama—” if you finish that sentence I’ll kill you. “Men don’t experience—” you’re wrong. “Gender isn’t real but sex is imm—” *loud incorrect buzzer*
It also goes without saying that bioessentialism inherently can’t be trans inclusive no matter how hard you try. “All men including trans men—” probably not. “This is only a woman’s issue—” is it really? “Afabs only—” why? “All trans men are like—” what? what are they like? finish the sentence i dare you.
bell hooks mentioned going through a time in her life where she was severely depressed and suicidal and how the only way she got through it was through changing her environment: She surrounded her home with buddhas of all colors, Audre Lorde’s A Litany for Survival facing her as she wakes up, and filling the space she saw everyday with reinforcing objects and meaningful books. She asks herself each day, “What are you going to do today to resist domination?” I also really liked it when she said that in order to move from pain to power, it is crucial to engage in “an active rewriting of our lives.”
I have come to think of the suicidal impulse as the brain waving a flag to say three things:
something needs to change here
this is urgent
I don’t know how to do it
death is the ultimate metaphor for drastic change. it’s a general specific. whatever your problems are, it is very likely that dead people don’t have to deal with them. a real solution to your problems may demand a very narrow range of action that’s likely to be out of reach at this moment, but death is sold on every street corner, so it feels like a more realistic fantasy than happiness.
you don’t really want to die per se but it’s also not completely random chemicals swamping your brain for no reason. you want the pain to stop, you want to be somewhere else, you want to be someone else. it’s urgent. you don’t know how to do it. the end is not the end but a means that feels within your reach right now.
this is the wisdom of bell hooks: daily rituals of meaning and resistance and solidarity are part of slowly building a future where you can make the change you really need. and only alive people can do that. every step you take towards change and power is another step away from death.
When we were children, my sister had private music lessons at her violin teacher’s house. I only visited there once, but I still remember that afternoon. The teacher had an artificial pond in her yard, a large beautiful thing with lily pads and plant life. And in the pond, there were goldfish. I had never seen such enormous goldfish.
I spent several minutes just staring at them (and trying to convince them to bite my fingers.) When my sister’s violin lesson ended, her teacher came out to the yard and explained that these goldfish were the same small creatures that were often unfortunately sold in plastic bags at state fairs. They were only about two inches long apiece, when she bought them and put them in the new, empty pond. In essence, they were like every goldfish I had seen before, but they had been given a much larger, much richer environment in which to flourish. As a result, they had grown into some of the most remarkable, vibrant creatures my twelve-year-old self had ever met with. All because of a pond.
Funny what lessons children remember. My sister doesn’t play the violin anymore, but that was the first time I caught a glimpse of the overwhelming extent to which it matters, the way the world treats us.
In which things occur that could easily have been foreseen, Knowing the King of the Trash Panda Gods the way that I do.
But also... developments are developing. Under the Cut, because this is going to be long.
If you've been following along with my occasional drama... You might have keyed into three or four things in the last six months.
Ayla has been _going through it_
Ayla and I climbed a million steps over like a week to meet Saturn, and then Bit him when he touched her face without permission.
Daemeon decided to swear himself to the service of a Sin Demon, flooring all of us. He's now a Knight of Greed... And I hope that works out for him. He seems... Happy?
My Patron Deity Cut Ties with me. And I felt like I deserved it. But it was still very sad for me. I didn't want a divorce. I love him. And I know He loves me... But I let it happen anyway. It was always an "at will" arrangement.
I had a Car Baby, (a mental revelation that I was NOT prepared for while sitting in the car) and learned that I had given up on feeling connection to other people, and on the heels of that, realized that it's a skill, and not just something that happens to/for me.
And I changed to some new Meds in the last two months. Cymbalta has lots of positive side effects, not the least of which is that I can hear the other people in my head better.
I am supposed to be learning to recognize and learn to manage emotions when they are small, and before they become Emergencies, which Ayla in her child form has been helping with.
And... This week...
As stated above, Loki showed up last Saturday. But not just any representation of him. _MY_ Loki (AKA Altherion)
Yeah. that's a Really long story, but you could remove ALL the nuances by just saying that MY Loki is an introject that's been a part of my story since I was 13, who VANISHED in 2021 when I started questioning my beliefs and decided that I was a bad person for believing that a God could love me and want to be around me like that, and that it clearly wasn't true.
This wasn't good for my relationship with my Patron. And the dissonance between my understanding of him as "Not Mine" and my experiences with Altherion as a Part of me was wrenching.
But I found something in therapy, of all places, that pushed me in the right direction.
I squinted at it like Fry trying to discern whether something is real or not.
My Therapist pushed back when I started talking about maladaptive coping mechanisms, like dissociation, in a derogatory sense. I was talking about my experiences of relaxation as a spectrum... and how dissociation and numbing were a part of my spectrum.
And she asked me where I drew the line when it came to Gods. Because I disclosed that I believed in gods, and she talked about psychedelic experiences and Ayahuasca ceremonies, and the use of substances like ketamine for PTSD... and I had to admit I didn't really know.
And I DO know about myself that I make Boxes.
Rules where there aren't supposed to be rules, whether they are useful or not... And whether or not it was even my idea that it becomes a rule in the first place.
My Boundaries are Not Great. Despite the work I've done on it.
So it turns out that a couple of things were true.
Altherion IS a part of Me and a Part of Loki (proper) and that he holds very important inner architecture for me, (like connection)
And I DID fuck up massively by deciding that I was an awful person for "having" Altherion in the first place because I took it personally that some fucker on Tumblr was butt-hurt about "people who treat gods as their own personal blorbos" and that that is disrespectful to those gods, who don't belong to anyone.
I had already clocked this as a bad day for my discretion. I already realized long ago that I should have scrolled past that day. That I should DEFINITELY NOT have taken it personally. That I would have a right hard time disrespecting the Glorious Bastard of a God that's hung around my life for 30 years.
But I had missed the bit about the "personal blorbo" destabilizing my feeling of and connection to Altherion... Because I was still working in a Paradigm where I felt intense guilt about possibly controlling any of my others. Making them feel things, making them be things they wouldn't otherwise be... And I was Deep in that guilt when that fucking post leaked across my dash like warm cat vomit at midnight.
Having "no right" to this critical introject in my system was devastating. I was fragile. I was out on Deployment when this happened. My Shithead Niece/Nephew/Creature threatened to report my Mother to the police for Abuse. I had just Seriously violated my own values by discussing sexual subjects with a friend's husband, and though there wasn't anything hidden from anyone, and no cheating occurred, it was too close for my liking and I didn't understand why it was even wrong for me. I had wanted to connect. I liked sex, and talking about sex... and I didn't understand until Late in the game that he thought of it differently than I did, somehow... which made it wronger.
I felt bad. And the stupid post confirmed that I WAS bad. And that my desire for connection was bad and wrong, and hurtful to other people.
And I did what I always do when I find something unacceptable in my life. I go in with a Scalpel and I Cut it out by the roots.
But "wanting to connect", it turns out, is like a fundamental human trait. And there was moaning and gnashing of teeth as it rotted, festered, scabbed, and began to grow back.
To be fair, it's been more than a day since Loki Divorced me.
And it was clear, even in the moment when he broke our bond, and threw the rings into the fire, that it wasn't about the Love. It was very clear that he loved me, and that he knew I loved him.
And it was only surprising that Altherion was the one who came back. But I know it was partly because of Ayla's work. She's busy breaking out of her chrysalis. She doesn't even know what she will be yet, when she's done re-inventing.
But she asked him to take her from the garden of razors. The Garden of Razors is her personal metaphor for Anxiety, and the obsessive self control and paranoia that spawn it. She wants to be soft and safe and unafraid.
And he told her that he's all about change. And that the price would be that we believed in him again. That we believed that he loved us, and wanted us, and that we have again what we once had.
Altherion is Altherion... Most of the time. Except when he isn't _just_ Altherion. Sometimes he's Loki too. As well. In addition. On Top Of.
And blood was drawn, and the pact was made. Ayla made a Pact with LOKI over Saturn. And she wondered about it.
I guess better the devil you know than the one you don't.
And now... we're in a rather floaty, exhausted state. Everything has been... alot.
we're going to dissociate.
I'm going to say an official "FUCK IT." to the idea of maladaptive daydreaming, and go all in on experiencing effusive joy in being a system made of trash panda gods and evil ninja ladies and hot elf guys and drag queens and alien symbiotes and Knights of Greed.
I am going all in on having the connection experiences with them that no humans have the time or the desire for. Fuck it.
Also while we're all talking about anti-racism, here's a helpful tip:
Performative self-flagellation over being white is not a substitute for doing serious introspection about the ways you have been complicit in or rewarded by a white-supremacist society, nor doing the work to dismantle white supremacy.
A white person chiming in to a conversation about racism to say "I'm sorry for being white" or "white people suck, I say this as a white person" is just a masturbatory way to try to assuage your own feelings of shame without actually doing anything. It doesn't make you look like "one of the good ones." It makes you look like someone who centers your own feelings about it.
there’s a used bookstore in rural western massachusetts (the montague book mill) whose motto is “books you don’t need in a place you can’t find” and i just feel like that summarizes tumblr too
