[“Poverty is embarrassing, shame inducing. Misery (misère), the French sociologist Eugène Buret once remarked, “is poverty felt morally.”

You feel it in the degradation rituals of the welfare office, where you are made to wait half a day for a ten-minute appointment with a caseworker who seems annoyed you showed up. You feel it when you go home to an apartment with cracked windows and cupboards full of cockroaches, an infestation the landlord blames on you. You feel it in how effortlessly poor people are omitted from movies and television shows and popular music and children’s books, erasures reminding you of your own irrelevance to wider society. You may begin to believe, in the quieter moments, the lies told about you. You avoid public places—parks, beaches, shopping districts, sporting arenas—knowing they weren’t built for you.

Poverty might consume your life, but it’s rarely embraced as an identity. It’s more socially acceptable today to disclose a mental illness than to tell someone you’re broke. When politicians propose antipoverty legislation, they say it will help “the middle class.” When social movement organizers mobilize for higher wages or housing justice, they announce that they are fighting on behalf of “working people” or “families” or “tenants” or “the many.” When the poor take to the streets, it’s usually not under the banner of poverty. There is no flag for poor rights, after all.

Poverty is diminished life and personhood. It changes how you think and prevents you from realizing your full potential. It shrinks the mental energy you can dedicate to decisions, forcing you to focus on the latest stressor—an overdue gas bill, a lost job—at the expense of everything else. When someone is shot dead, the children who live on that block perform much worse on cognitive tests in the days following the murder. The violence captures their minds. Time passes, and the effect fades until someone else is dropped.

Poverty can cause anyone to make decisions that look ill-advised and even downright stupid to those of us unbothered by scarcity. Have you ever sat in a hospital waiting room, watching the clock and praying for good news? You are there, locked on the present emergency, next to which all other concerns and responsibilities feel (and are) trivial. That experience is something like living in poverty. Behavioral scientists Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir call this “the bandwidth tax.” “Being poor,” they write, “reduces a person’s cognitive capacity more than going a full night without sleep.” When we are preoccupied by poverty, “we have less mind to give to the rest of life.” Poverty does not just deprive people of security and comfort; it siphons off their brainpower, too.”]

matthew desmond, from poverty: by america, 2023

Soft

I want someone who is not afraid

To come in and hug my spikes

To find that they're not spikes at all

They're the way my body has learned to protect me

Like some prey in the wild

Who doesn't have a single drop of venom

But who's body has painted it red

Danger

Threats beware

Who's body in the absence of

A safe place to breathe

Found a way to show strength

Even when your mind has betrayed you

And you're dying inside

Damn the infinite number of plots that can spontaneously run through my brain all while having 18 other thoughts and 3 songs playing

lmao he looks so smug about this

[that one part of all-american bitch by Olivia Rodrigo where she just screams.mp3]

What its take to stay cheerfull throughout the journey_\../ \../ ._.

What!?.. ._.

No idea? . . . In space we find matter!! You must never stop searching… 🤖🫀🤖🫀🤖 💎🧠💎🧠💎 . . . #mylifeisafilm #brainspace #digitalart #3danimation #mexicanartist #femalecreator #nftcomunity #artedigitalmutante #augmentedreality #realidad #realidadaumentada #mexico🇲🇽 #canada🇨🇦 AR Filter @wondermilk.beauty (at Montreal, Quebec) https://www.instagram.com/p/Cgzt2iOppxJ/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

Kit sparring flirting being a brat

they are the losing dogs i bet on

[“While my own associations to the word “conservative” are not great ones, this word best describes my attitude toward personal change. Just as we strive for change, we also strive to conserve what is most valuable and familiar in our selves. And in a society where we are constantly being pressured to improve, actualize, and perfect our selves, it is probably wise to question why we should change at all and who is prescribing the changes. Often we wish to get rid of some part of our selves—as we would an inflamed appendix—without recognizing the positive aspects of a particular “negative” trait or behavior. Few things are “all good” or “all bad.”

I recall a meeting of my women’s group many years back when we had a little too much to drink and went around the circle sharing what we liked the very best and the very least about each other. Interestingly, what was labeled “the best” and “the worst” for each person turned out to be one and the same, or more accurately, different variations on the same theme. If least liked was one woman’s tendency to hog the group spotlight, what was most liked was her energetic and entertaining personality. If least liked was another woman’s failure to be straightforward, direct, and spontaneous, what was most liked was her kindness, tact, and respect for the feelings of others. If another’s sense of entitlement and “Me first!” attitude pushed the group’s buttons, it was her ability to identify her own goals and “go for it” that was most admired. And so it went.

That evening I began to have a renewed appreciation for the inseparable nature of our strengths and weaknesses. Far from being opposites, they are woven from the same strands. This experience also reinforced a direction I was moving in professionally. Early on in my career as a therapist, I deemed it my job to help my patients rid themselves of certain qualities—stubbornness, silence, demandingness, oppositionalism, or any other trait or behavior that seemed to make their life (or my work) especially difficult. Or perhaps I wanted them to be closer to their fathers, more independent from their mothers, or more (or less) ambitious, self-seeking, self-disclosing, or assertive. I discovered, however, that I could be far more helpful when I was able to identify and appreciate the positive aspects of what was seemingly most negative. Paradoxically, this appreciation was what left my clients freer to get on with the business of change.”]

harriet lerner, from the dance of intimacy: a woman’s guide to courageous acts of change in key relationships

few mortals ever glimpse what you're about to see. but don't be alarmed—i'm here with you.

her hair dye ran out

quick leo doodle i did at work today!

laura palmer’s bedroom - twin peaks // the last words of a shooting star - mitski

hiiii just wanted 2 say tht i love ur art SO MUCH and it always gives me a smile seeing ur whiterose content especially

aaaahhh thanku!! have a dood (◕.◕

patron saint of relapsing right in front of your chaos goddess wife