I want to write/talk about recovery in an encouraging way but right now I have zero energy. I have to focus on my own recovery right now and I want to talk about it, but I need rest. But I'm going to do it later of course. I know I can't fix things, or help in the extent that I wish to, but I can try to make something that makes other people feel a little better while giving me a creative outlet. Isn't that what creating is about? It makes me feel very wholesome when I think about all the different ways we move each other through what we create.

happy valentines to the deleted scene in arthur's bane when merlin and arthur argue about which side of the "bed" they sleep on.

License to Kitty.

local ladies man’s signature move totally useless against autistic monster enthusiast. more on Kabru’s fumble era at 6

I think we're too harsh on medieval painters because this is legitimately what some poodle mixes look like

this is what everyone has been saying!! no one is looking at celebrities for political statements, but they should and must use their platform to amplify the voices of those who need and most importantly be against this genocide!!

when u go to write a mentally ill person in ur story you are presented two options. the first option is to write your mental illness realistically as you actually experience it with all the ups and downs and people who are like you will resonate with it and feel seen. except every person who reads instagram infographics on mental health that uses the phrase narcicisst for anyone who does anything that crosses them and unironically call themself a dark empath will call you scary and tell you that youre demonizing mentally ill people

the second option is to lie and write inspiration porn for those people to get hard to

Love the contrast between the Americans’ “Apollo” and the Soviets’ “Sputnik.” You got the Americans naming their rocket after a Greek god trying to communicate the grandness and importance of this rocket. And you got the Soviets naming their rocket “fellow traveler.” Like a friend you go on an  adventure with together. This rocket is our little friend lol 

I was meeting a client at a famous museum’s lounge for lunch (fancy, I know) and had an hour to kill afterwards so I joined the first random docent tour I could find. The woman who took us around was a great-grandmother from the Bronx “back when that was nothing to brag about” and she was doing a talk on alternative mediums within art.

What I thought that meant: telling us about unique sculpture materials and paint mixtures.

What that actually meant: an 84yo woman gingerly holding a beautifully beaded and embroidered dress (apparently from Ukraine and at least 200 years old) and, with tears in her eyes, showing how each individual thread was spun by hand and weaved into place on a cottage floor loom, with bright blue silk embroidery thread and hand-blown beads intricately piercing the work of other labor for days upon days, as the labor of a dozen talented people came together to make something so beautiful for a village girl’s wedding day.

What it also meant: in 1948, a young girl lived in a cramped tenement-like third floor apartment in Manhattan, with a father who had just joined them after not having been allowed to escape through Poland with his pregnant wife nine years earlier. She sits in her father’s lap and watches with wide, quiet eyes as her mother’s deft hands fly across fabric with bright blue silk thread (echoing hands from over a century years earlier). Thread that her mother had salvaged from white embroidery scraps at the tailor’s shop where she worked and spent the last few days carefully dying in the kitchen sink and drying on the roof.

The dress is in the traditional Hungarian fashion and is folded across her mother’s lap: her mother doesn’t had a pattern, but she doesn’t need one to make her daughter’s dress for the fifth grade dance. The dress would end up differing significantly from the pure white, petticoated first communion dresses worn by her daughter’s majority-Catholic classmates, but the young girl would love it all the more for its uniqueness and bright blue thread.

And now, that same young girl (and maybe also the villager from 19th century Ukraine) stands in front of us, trying not to clutch the old fabric too hard as her voice shakes with the emotion of all the love and humanity that is poured into the labor of art. The village girl and the girl in the Bronx were very different people: different centuries, different religions, different ages, and different continents. But the love in the stitches and beads on their dresses was the same. And she tells us that when we look at the labor of art, we don’t just see the work to create that piece - we see the labor of our own creations and the creations of others for us, and the value in something so seemingly frivolous.

But, maybe more importantly, she says that we only admire this piece in a museum because it happened to survive the love of the wearer and those who owned it afterwards, but there have been quite literally billions of small, quiet works of art in billions of small, quiet homes all over the world, for millennia. That your grandmother’s quilt is used as a picnic blanket just as Van Gogh’s works hung in his poor friends’ hallways. That your father’s hand-painted model plane sets are displayed in your parents’ livingroom as Grecian vases are displayed in museums. That your older sister’s engineering drawings in a steady, fine-lined hand are akin to Da Vinci’s scribbles of flying machines.

I don’t think there’s any dramatic conclusions to be drawn from these thoughts - they’ve been echoed by thousands of other people across the centuries. However, if you ever feel bad for spending all of your time sewing, knitting, drawing, building lego sets, or whatever else - especially if you feel like you have to somehow monetize or show off your work online to justify your labor - please know that there’s an 84yo museum docent in the Bronx who would cry simply at the thought of you spending so much effort to quietly create something that’s beautiful to you.

I wanna ask something. I fight for my humanity, I've always fought for my humanity, yet I'll never be able to be human. Just because I have humanity I can't see myself as human.

A friend pointed it out, I cry, at any form of human decency, I hate sympathy and empathy because it makes me cry; because I don't see myself as deserving of it. I was raised as a doll, and then raised as glass. So is it just that I'm always a doll? Is there anyway I can prove to myself that I'm human? Am I scared of being human, because I never was human?

You know I thought about this message and the only answer I can possibly give you in my honest opinion is that I think feeling all these things is what makes you human in the first place and the thing you are actually scared of is being so so so human that it is painful. Sometimes you just have to sit a little with those feelings and feel that instead of thinking about how you feel. Even if it's bad. If you censor yourself too much, if you feel so much judgement about it, you're just going to try to repel those feelings instead of acknowledging them. They are not always fact, or a reflection of who you are or reality. Try to feel those things instead of automatically reacting to them. To put it bluntly, maybe you are feeling very vulnerable while trying to be so strong that you are a bit numb. It doesn't make you less human, it makes you someone who is overwhelmed by their very common human feelings, fears and doubts and is a little lost. Sometimes you feel so much you go numb and get confused. It doesn't make you weak. It's okay. In my opinion, talking about those feelings will help, especially if you can go to therapy to help processing all of that.

Expertise can't help you here.

no no. you don't get it. the reason I injure my blorbos until they can't walk is because that's the only way they'll ever let someone else carry them. the reason I curse them to be sick and feverish is so that they'll finally open up about their emotions while delirious. the reason I force them to overexert themselves to the point of exhaustion is so that when they pass out they can finally rest.

I'm doing this for their own good.