Almost every day I think about that first post I saw a few years ago where someone decided that people enjoying the cuteness of otters needed to be destroyed for the sake of ‘reality’ and ‘facts’. The post was open from start to finish that they were telling you that otters did ‘horrible things’ because they wanted to ‘break the illusion’ or whatever. It was full of language and tone that implied or outright said that people were ‘stupid’ or ‘foolish’ for liking otters, and that they should be punished with this information. This fact. This fact that was a twisted form of humans applying their moral concepts on to wild animals, to begin with, but was also simply being put out in to the world to hurt people for liking that animal. And then I think about how everyone started sharing this ‘fact’, post after post sharing the same tone and language of punishment, of implied ‘stupidity’ for ‘not knowing’. People gleefully commented this ‘fact’ on thousands of otter picture posts, they posted it a million times on the otter fan facebooks, they made tiktoks, they hammered it in over and over again. Don’t like otters. Don’t think they’re cute. They’re Bad™️. You’re a Bad™️ person if you like them. And people genuinely believed that. I saw so many people genuinely hurt by this, who thought they were a bad person and needed to stop liking or sharing otter pictures. Or they’d add a little note at the bottom, ‘I know otters are Bad™️ but I still think they’re cute.’ And I can’t not think about how pointlessly fucked up and cruel that entire thing was from the start, and how manipulative and shitty it was. And how it spun out into the universe until even now, on an otter video posted earlier this year, there’s dozens of comments about how otters are Bad™️ because one person decided that this wild animal doing something that is repugnant to humans, the animal with no knowledge that this is Bad™️ or with malicious intent (because it’s a wild fucking animal), meant they needed to hurt and punish anyone who liked that animal. And, finally, that people were so afraid of being seen as morally wrong/Bad™️ that they destroyed their love for this animal on the word of some fucking rando online without stopping to look internally at their own moral compass and understanding of animal behavior.

i’ve been pretty quiet on here and avoiding my activity and dms these last few weeks because october was easily one of the worst months i’ve had in a very long time and i lost my family dog of seventeen years and had a medical scare for not only myself but my cat and just all these things happened at once that felt incredibly hard to bounce back from mentally… but aside from being sick atm things are starting to get better for me and my family so hopefully i can actually start being. normal. again soon 🧎

..

It’s almost worse knowing they hurt me unintentionally because I don’t have any right to hate them. It was an accident, they didn’t know, but still I have breakdowns at the mention of them and they don’t even know.

Kinda pissy bc in my return to work interview (my line manager is on leave so my senior manager did it) she said oooh you've had 7 absences this year that's kind of a lot

but I just looked back through my calendar and I would say actually it's 5 1/2. Cause one I had a PTSD episode at lunchtime and called my boss in tears from my kitchen floor and I was gonna take the remaining 2.5 hours of my day off and work them back later and she was like nah man shut up you're off sick you don't owe anyone that time back. so that was not even a whole day it was like. A longish meeting's worth of time.

but also one illness is recorded as two absences because. and this'll teach me. I had flu but we had a tight deadline so I was off for a day, then came on to work for a day to meet that deadline, then I was off the next day, still with flu. so that's two separate absences. because I came into work when I should have been resting.

so like. Fuck me for trying I guess.

(it's not super relevant cause there's no real unifying condition that needs action. MH episode, migraine, flu, food poisoning, migraine, COVID. and we know about the migraines and have stuff in place to minimise them. It just seems fucked up to me that it counts more against me that I came in in the middle of 2 days of sick leave than that I've been off for a solid week.)

eeuuaghh i would like everyone to know that i apologise if i have not responded to your reblogs/mentions/posts on tumblr, i have really terrible social anxiety and for some reason people talking to me makes my nervous system think i'm being hunted for sport by a resident evil boss. sorry if i havent responded i'm not being rude i'm just having a panic attack :P

additionally: social anxiety is actually the reason why a lot of my old posts from late 2022 had weird spacing and spelling mistakes. i was too anxious to type properly

i hate writing cvs and teachers r useless at help i love them and i appreciate it but "i have no skills to put on my cv what should i put" - "aww no everyone has skills just think of something"

One of the only things I like about mocks is the desk graffiti.

frequently I will say to myself, especially in tourist-heavy times, i would like a more serious job at a more serious museum where members of the public do not keep touching me inappropriately

but, unfortunately, my coworkers are so fun and kind and have created such a positive little pocket of queer community that idk if i could bear to leave unless something big changes

Queued posts that aged horribly:

Ahaha...

These guys are my Sandra...

X

why does texting people send me into a blind panic

I'm sorry, i feel the need to vague post.

My emotions have been getting very raw lately. Very very raw and very constantly upsetting.

I keep trying to make calls for help. I just want to be understood but I'm so deeply afraid of my trauma(?) being seen and being heard and... Being dismissed.

I just want to be nice and i want to make people happy. Despite it all i just want to do the right thing. Even if it hurts. I have to do the right thing. I have to be compassionate.

I'm terrified. I've been terrified for a long time. It's been three long void-filled years, i need to finally feel ok. I need to heal, dear god i need to fucking heal.

I'm sorry to distress anyone. I just am trying really hard to be ok and brave. An audience of old friends and virtual strangers don't deserve to feel led on to pity me. I'm not ok but it's going to be ok because I'll do what's right even if it hurts. I don't deserve pity just because someone likes my art. I deserve to be understood. Even if they don't agree. Even if they hate it, i fucking deserve to finally tell someone that they hurt me back then. They thought they were in the right. And its still a raw wound.

I'm alive when I shouldn't be. Not that I've been revived or someone took the bullet tor me. I just... shouldn't have survived a specific event, and now it follows me everywhere I go.

Got to explain to our cishet sister that she probably shouldn't be tossing around the word fruity like it's a casual harmless word to use and she took it super well thank fucking god

She didnt know the origins of it because tiktok is a fucking nightmare and once we explained it to her she seemed to internally experience a lightbulb moment of "oh maybe I shouldn't mindlessly repeat words I find on the internet" (not that we are judging her for it because god knows we and most other people do that to some extent, but this seems to be her first exposure to that kind of thing going not well) so perhaps we have helped her learn and grow before she gets punched in the face by some stranger lmao

I'm shit at dating apps i try once every x weeks, realise I'm shit at dating apps, "forget" x weeks later and repeat the cycle