as soon as the internet decided depression and anxiety were the everyman mental illnesses and therefore not to be taken seriously we were all fucked tbh bc the fact that i have to feel embarrassed to admit i have debilitating anxiety because people will think im just an uwu dont call me out coward is ridiculous. its insane that i have to clarify that my depressive episodes are like life threatening and not whatever dipshit dumbed down idea of depression people seem to have like oh yeah i just wanna watch netflix and eat ice cream and not text people back. like bro i think im the devil

like maybe depression and anxiety are household names now but they do still kill people. like. theres a reason they fucking kill people.

hate it when I call myself a girl and then someone goes "you're not a girl you're nonbinary/agender" and it's like. I am whatever I say I am. freak. I am a girl I am a little guy I am the man of the owl. I am nothing. I am everything. do not presume to know me in anyway I do not know myself

Strange that it never occured to me. There are times I've been so upset that I've stamped around while cussing, that I've lain flat on the floor and groaned for as long as I had breath, that I've ranted my frustration aloud in an unhinged monologue, that I've swung my limbs about in a fury. All until I'd vented enough to just ... resume my normal life.

And if I'd had not the privacy of my home, I'd either have had to bottle that all up ... or open it all up where the public could scrutinize my every move. It really is a privilege to not be constantly on display like that.

There's a phase that small kids go through, when they've just learned how to talk enough to have something sembling an intelligent, intellectual argument. They like to practice this by wanting to disagree about anything - mainly general statements that were not 100% perfectly waterproof. If you tell a 4-year-old that bananas are green when they're raw, and they turn yellow when they're ripe, there's a good chance that they'll give you that "well that can't be right" frown, and start to argue. Surely not all bananas that are yellow are always ripe.

Unfortunately humouring them about these arguments is very important for their development and a great opportunity to teach them more about how the world works, so you'll sometimes end up arguing about things like these, and every single time when you explain that's not how something works, they'll come up with another argument starting with "but what if-", until you are forced to admit that yes, if someone did for some reason take one single green banana, spray-paint it yellow and then expertly textured it to look just like a ripe banana, and then break into a grocery store in the middle of the night to slip that one painted banana into the display of ripe, edible bananas, then that one specific yellow banana would not be ripe and ready to eat.

As far as the child is concerned, this means that your entire initial statement was false, and you were wrong and they were right. Their need to be correct about something has been satisfied. Fortunately, most children grow out of this phase eventually.

The ones that manage to survive into adulthood without growing out of it end up on Twitter.

"Ah, but you can't prove that it's not a fetish thing" well, yes, but so what? You can't prove that anything isn't a fetish thing. When a dude in an action movie gets kicked in the face, sure, that might be fetishising violence – but it might also be fetishising feet, or acts of dominance, or the style of trousers the person doing the kicking is wearing, or any of about a dozen other things. This post might be fetishising argumentation, or verbosity, or the sound of the word "fetish", and if you think those are ridiculous examples because no real person derives sexual gratification from the sounds of specific words, that's adorable. If you wanna have a conversation about fetishisation in media, you've gotta bring more to the table than "well, you can't prove that it isn't".

#this is unrelated but #I used to run a porn blog with a theme #i mean i guess the theme was a fetish but it didn't really have a name like there wasn't a specific tag i could browse #which was the whole reason i made the blog so i could reblog and collect #anyway the point is sometimes I'd go look at who also reblogged the post #and I'd find it on a porn blog for a DIFFERENT fetish bc it also happened to feature whatever that fetish was targeting #and I'd be surprised bc it just wouldn't occur to me that that post would be part of that fetish #because i was so focussed on the part of the post that adhered to the theme of my blog #anyway that's what the kick in the face part reminded me of (via ionchy)

the "perfect" apology as taught in a libleft social justice context is bullshit — it's an etiquette ritual designed to prove your loyalty to a community, and isn't any better than any other way to apologize.

it's also invoked in contexts where expecting it is deranged (i.e demanding someone profess full culpability and acknowledge harm without providing an explanation or trying to defend themself, immediately, the moment they've done something which might be wrong? is a cruel burden to place on someone's shoulders)

i cannot stand how much of a cultural expectation people place on it and how weird people get when the etiquette ritual is violated

@roselessthorns Seconding this from the (autistic) kid's perspective, as a kid you get told to apologize a lot for things you don't understand. Sometimes it's because your sense of compassion is underdeveloped, and that's where explaining it to a kid will work. And sometimes you don't understand why what you did is wrong, and due to the fact they're not sociologists- the adults around you can't tell you either. "Wow you're really big" upon seeing a fat person for the first time (I'm talking single digit kids here) isn't an insult if you haven't had fatphobia heavily drilled into you yet.

This makes apologizing going from expressing legitimate remorse and trying to lessen the hurt you caused to someone you care about into a social ritual to end a conflict. What OP is talking about is just the grown up version of a kid being made to recite that they're sorry when they don't understand why what they've done is wrong.

I think this standard of complete debasement is also because the culturally Christian idea of forgiveness. If you do the right thing, apologize correctly, the person hurt has to forgive you. But in a social justice context, the individual act that is being apologized for is usually just a single small piece of a whole society of injustice- of course the persons hurt are still angry. And the person who messed up can't fix it the way you can replace carelessly damaged property. I've only really got apologies when I learned more about the Jewish concept of t'shuvah- where the most important part is your future actions and making restitution and the forgiveness of the person hurt isn't mandatory.

posting this over here too!

Yeah but you're a citizen, you exist in a society, in a wider world, and part of that is having a duty of being informed. Avoiding the news makes you vulnerable to disinformation and propaganda. It's also extremely privileged to be able to treat "the news" as something optional; those are people's lives, and yeah, maybe we can't solve it, but we have duty to bear witness and remember.

I'm sorry, but being informed is part of being a grown up.

huh? Listen, being informed is good, I try to be, but there's a difference between "I am aware of things around me" and "I am exposing myself to terrible things all time because I have to". Suffering isn't noble, and if we want to make a kind world, the first place we have to start with is ourselves. Feeling like shit is not activism, it is not your noble duty, and I can guarantee feeling terrible actively hinders any real work you're trying to do.

activism is not meant to ruin your mental health. of course there always are times in life where you have to hurt a little for others- friends will need you to put yourself second now and then. but it shouldn't get to a point where you're seeking out things that will mentally drain you every day because you think sacrificing every ounce of your joy in pursuit of social change is noble. you are far more helpful doing a moderate amount for a few causes you can passionately and comfortably aid in, than over-working yourself, trying hopelessly to help with every single problem in the world.

Also, and i will scream this from the rooftops forever: NOT EVERYONE IS CUT OUT TO BE AN ACTIVIST. Activism, real activism that sees results because it isnt just yelling about the current discourse online, takes fucking WORK. It takes effort and self awareness and theres this weird push for everybody to do an activism when not everybody CAN. Sometimes its best to just. Be friends with the activists and mind your own busniess.

hey don’t cry. endless fluctuations of self forgiveness offering new flavors of relief ok?