I can only please one person a day. Today I choose me.

"Keep going out of spite"

RIP Tater Tot 💔

Credits to Catnap Dreaming on Instagram



self-affirmations

˚ 　　　 . ✧　 Self Affirmations ୭ৎ

𓍯𓂃 ⭒ 𓍯𓂃 ⭒ 𓍯𓂃 ⭒ 𓍯𓂃 ⭒ 𓍯𓂃

ᰔ i am so pretty and i love myself so much

ᰔ i love my body and all it does for me

ᰔ i feel confident and at peace with myself

ᰔ i am so full of love because i am love

ᰔ i will not stress over things i cannot control

ᰔ i am a cutie living in my own silly world

ᰔ i radiate confidence and positive energy

ᰔ i attract so so many good things

ᰔ i have kind and positive people in my life

ᰔ my aura is pure, sweet and so pretty 　 　 ˚ . ✧　　 ˚

🌿 Affirmations To Nurture Yourself 🌿

I am here for myself in the most positive and loving way

The more I nurture myself, the more at home I feel.

I’m so happy that I nurture my souls expansion

The way I nurture myself helps me manifest everything with ease and with happiness

Red is telling you to give yourself a hug!

Here’s a fun project I’ve always had in my mind. It’s the season of stress. It may always seem to be. Midterms, deadlines, work duties, taxes?

Remember you are stronger than anything that comes your way, and you deserve happiness and love.

💞💞💞

I thought about making this because my college advisor has been abusive, and a few (like, more than 3) more senior students under her mentorship have had to take a leave of absence due to stress and trauma caused by her. I really want to support them, and I hope I’ve been doing a good job in real life.

So I thought I’ll do something similar in LU fandom. I am thinking about making this into a print matrix (rubber stamp equivalent) and I will pull prints. I haven’t figured out the details, but I think I will be happy to send these prints out as postcards if anyone thinks receiving a self care note from Red can make their day a bit better. Stay tuned for more details.

A few notes on source images and copyright:

The drawing of Red is my own art, and the cover is composited in Canva with licensed stock elements and fonts.

The two quotes, in their original form, are:

"Be faithful to that which exists within yourself." — André Gide

"When admiring other people’s gardens, don’t forget to tend to your own flowers." — Sandbar Khan

Many thanks to @not-freyja for an additional quote (lifted from a rather different context, oof, it still hurts) and for suggesting that Four’s last name is Smith.

Hotel lewds.

(Although flirty in nature, this is not an invitation. I have no interest in sexting with you or seeing your genitalia. Also DON'T call me sexy, it makes my skin crawl. This is simply a woman sharing the love of her body with the world. PLEASE READ MY PINNED POST BEFORE FOLLOWING.)

A li'l bit of love for y'all needing it today and a reminder- from DR4, Mukluk, Chapeau, La Brea, Peso and Kelly. Don't dim your light for people who don't appreciate it anyways. Shine on, just like the wonderful weirdo that you are and the weirdos who love you will shine with you. Big Love, from The Eternal Courtship.

things to remember in 2024

i. more quiet time, more silence. more shavasana, more stillness.

ii. keep promises you make to yourself. everyone else can be disregarded — the promises they make, the promises you make to them.

iii. there is no "should do this" or "should be that way" as a universal rule book. your experiences and lessons teach you what are your values, preferences, and takes on life and people. you don't need to convince others of them, you don't even need to most times articulate them to follow them and do as you please.

iv. things that increase your risk of chronic health (mental and physical) issues: sitting, smoking, and situationships. your legs, lungs, and love life deserve much better.

v. 'the best way to take care of the future is to take care of the present moment'. fight the instant gratification, the fomo, the yolo. do the healthy thing for you in the moment, every moment.

vi. go to the salon, the bookstore, the train station, the beach, the bakery more than you go to the bar, the boy's house, and self doubt/loathing.

vii. travel even if you don't have a big budget and cannot do everything you'd want to in that destination because you do now want some travel experiences and stories while you're still in your 20s. make it a priority now, you don't want to feel bitter later.

viii. stop trying to frustrate and confuse yourself so much. you are both the vivacious, warm, kind, person and the somber, detached, pensive person. it's not one betraying the other. it's both you — the sunflower and the black orchid.

ix. ask people of things, it's no virtue to only give and not take. however, don't be so sensitive or shattered if not given or denied. people don't have as much power over your heart as you believe. your heart is happily vacationing on the moon most months of the year away from this worldly chaos. it's your ego that cannot take it. acknowledge the role of your ego, learn to understand it so that you can work with it.

x. do the cringe things. post a hundred reels on Instagram even if you get five likes on each. cringe at that part of you that cringes when you do the things you want instead of cringing at yourself. when you do that you're viewing yourself as a third-party judging yourself and honestly love aren't there thousands out there to do that job already? so then you stick to your job — support yourself no matter how you decide to live your life.

xi. love and romance are not the centre or purpose of your life. you are. the genre of your life is neither rom com nor tragic passionate romance. it's slice of life. love and romance will happen when it happens and will be one part of your life. but all the other parts? they belong to you — to your art and writing, to your joy and exploration of yourself and this world, to your family and friends, to food and cats, to travel and music, to peace and sleep. live a full life.

xii. set processes for your routine that streamline everything and make it easy. your morning work commute, your night skincare, going over your monthly budget, saving and investing for your goals, how you organize your life and time. and when problems show up, simply problem solve. don't take it personally, try to not feel dejected and doomed. and for the times you do, don't try to fix anything. take a shower, eat a good meal, go to sleep.

xiii. when setting boundaries, and when those boundaries are crossed, you don't have to break your head trying to get the other person to change their behaviour. instead, you should change your behaviour. if they cross a boundary, then that should be your cue for a behaviour change, a decision. don't be at the mercy of another's understanding and compassion to have your life be aligned to your needs and values.

xiv. three steps taken > three hundred steps planned. pausing for three months > abandoning for three years. three people you love and who love you > thirty people who are fluff. idk why three is the magic number here but you get the gist. moderation, my love, and balance. regulation and removal.

xv. cut out the noise. you'll figure out more of what that means as you begin to do it. it's social media, yes. it's societal conditioning, yes. but it's also the things your loved ones say despite having the best intentions at heart for you. it's the things the younger you believed and thought and wrote. it's the friends and lovers who come and go and don't really know you well. it's all of it. you have to cut out the noise. build noise-cancelling headphones for your soul over time and carry them with you everywhere.

I will be cringe and free god damnit

What made you want to recover. I have anorexia and I don't want to recover I just want to get worse and worse until I'm sick enough. I'm in forced recovery but faking it as I just want to starve is there any reason to recover?

Hello anon, this is a difficult question to answer because for me, personally, it wasn't any one thing that made me want to recover. The truth is that when I started, I didn't understand the long-term effects of what I was doing to myself. I sort of knew about them, but the importance of being thin had been stressed to me all of my life and so I was in a self-destructive place where I was willing to make that choice again and again and risk throwing away my health for thinness. That's pretty fucked up, true, but again, I didn't understand the full extent of the damage I might be doing to myself.

I think it's also worth mentioning that I had an undiagnosed chronic illness and some trauma that I was quietly sitting on because I doubted my own perspective and my ability to access real help for these things. Because of this, I didn't have a frame of reference for mental and physical wellness, because I hadn't felt mentally or physically well for a very long time. Even now, looking back at symptoms I was experiencing, it is hard to know if I was experiencing these things due to my eating disorder or something else. I think it was all cumulative damage, to be honest. The eating disorder didn't help.

But looking back, I think I actually had an eating disorder long before I "decided" to start restricting food. I remember going through a growth spurt during puberty around age twelve and being hungry all the time, but we frequently had the kind of foods people call "junk food" in the house because that's what my parents bought. So that's what I ate a lot of, constantly, and my mother was constantly remarking on it in a negative way and trying to stop me. I have a very complicated relationship with my mother, and she raised me with a complicated relationship to food and body image. I remember doing fucked-up things like sneaking food into the bathroom with me so I could eat snacks in the shower unobserved, or hiding snacks under my bed, and just absolutely gorging on food at other times while knowing I was eating way past the point of being full and not knowing why I wanted to. So I officially decided to start restricting when I was fifteen, but the truth is that I had a fucked up relationship with food way earlier than that.

When I was nearing my seventeenth birthday, I experienced a breakdown in health due to chronic illness. I was suffering terribly. At the time I had this hippie friend who believed everything could be cured with the right diet and supplements. As I mentioned before, I was raised in a household where we didn't fully understand proper nutrition, and I had been raised eating a lot of low-nutrition meals. Because I had a stronger relationship with this friend than with my family, I bought into the mindset that if I got the right nutrients, I would be cured. And, in my mind, I had to get as many of those nutrients as possible as quickly as possible, so I immediately turned back to bingeing. But I was bingeing on a lot of high-nutrient hippie foods, so I didn't see a problem with this. I didn't understand that my relationship to the food wasn't fixed. I wasn't enjoying it, I was gorging on it, and between meals I was desperately anticipating the time I could gorge again. And because it was hippie food, I thought that this would cure me.

The thing was, after over a year of severe restriction, my GI system was wildly unprepared to handle the level of food-stuffing I was about to put it through - even though it was super-healthy hippie food. So I actually got sicker, experiencing the symptoms that come along with suddenly eating real portions after restriction. This led to me alternating between not understanding why the food wasn't working to cure me, to not understanding why I felt so addicted to eating. And this kick-started a violent binge-restrict cycle where I'd force myself to go hungry until certain times a day, at which point I'd unleash myself upon food and be unable to stop. Then I'd restrict again the next day to make up for it, get increasingly desperate for food, and you see the pattern. The binge-restrict cycle is so real.

So I was super trapped in that life and I wanted out. I knew I wanted to get out long before I actually started getting out. Because every time I binged, my immediate response was to hate myself and restrict. That was all I knew. By the time I even started to make a bit of progress on breaking that pattern, I had achieved enough real healing to understand that my restriction days had been a part of what led me down this hellish path and I didn't want to go back to that. To tell you the truth, in order to truly stay away from it - because I'll be real, I do get tempted to go back to restriction from time to time - I have to remind myself that while restricting feels like it would save me, it would only be a stepping stone back into that horrible pattern that kept me so sick and felt impossible to break. And I have to choose wanting better for myself.

Now, your story may not look like mine. So I'm not sure your motivation will end up looking like mine. But what do you need for yourself in order to want better for yourself?

You say you want to do this until you are sick enough. Can I just ask you to take a moment to ask yourself, what do you think is "sick enough?" Would you really stop when you got there, or would you just keep moving the goalpost until your body gave out? Because if you're stuck thinking "I have to do this till I'm sick enough" then believe me - you are sick enough. Your struggle counts. You don't have to wait until the damage is irreversible.

Because the thing is, when you start experiencing long-term sickness as a result - GI disorders, internal organ failure, etc - your suffering will be out of your control. Eating disorders feel like you're taking control, but you're not. And as someone who suffered with chronic illness for years, let me tell you, you don't want "sick enough." I can't tell you for sure what you do want, but allow me to take a guess. Maybe you want the validation that comes from being sick enough. Maybe you want to showcase how awful it got because you want people to care, to be concerned, to validate you. You want indisputable proof that you are well and truly fucked up, that you truly were hurt by whatever it is that hurt you.

The fact is, even some people who are sick enough to be on death's door, from some chronic illness or another, never get that validation or support. Our system is fucked up like that. But understanding that also means you don't have to wait for someone else to validate how hard you struggled and how much you've suffered. You're already sick enough. You don't have to wait for it to get worse in order to deserve better. So what do you need? What do you need in order to affirm to yourself that what you've been through is real? What do you need in order to feel you deserve to get better for real? What do you need in order to keep seeking out that desire to heal even when you're triggered as hell and struggling and forget all the breakthroughs you had once made and all you want to do is say "fuck it then, I'll self-destruct" because that's addicting in its own way?

I hope you're able to seek those answers in your treatment, anon. I hope you're able to affirm to yourself that you deserve to be more well than this, and to love yourself enough to fight for it?

I am healthy

I am wealthy

I am strong

I am beautiful

I am elevating

I am enough

I am happy

I love you non-binary people that aren’t androgynous I love you trans people that don’t look like the gender they are I love you people who just change their pronouns I love you fem and masc presenting non-binary people I love you trans women with big muscles and beards I love you trans men with boobs and curves I love you trans people who don’t “look” trans I love you

Reminder you don’t have to change yourself for others if you don’t want to. You’re just as valid as the next nonbinary person if you stay feminine or masculine rather than androgynous. You are valid and I love you.

take care of yourself ✨🍃 x

Beautiful, a fragile doll, but

You don't know me at all and

You wouldn't be so blind

If you knew what was happening in my mind

(Although flirty in nature, this is not an invitation. I have no interest in sexting with you or seeing your genitalia. Also DON'T call me sexy, it makes my skin crawl. This is simply a woman sharing the love of her body with the world. PLEASE READ MY PINNED POST BEFORE FOLLOWING.)