Certain breast shapes will never allow your breasts to appear “perky” and that’s normal/natural and okay.
“Cellulite” on the skin is a genetic aspect to how a female’s body stores fat. Since the fat cells are round, they appear indented in the skin. This is normal/natural and okay – every girl/woman has it.
Thigh gaps are genetic, too. Some women’s/girls leg/pelvic bones do not allow for a thigh gaps. Depending on weight distribution, genetics, and bone structure/density, it is normal/natural to have or not have one. Please don’t do something drastic to achieve one, your body may not be designed that way.
Your weight fluctuates as you grow and throughout the year. Often times your weight will go up when you are preparing for a growth spurt, or before your period (due to water weight retention). This is normal/natural and okay.
You will be hungry during your period due to the massive amount of calories burned due to shedding your uterine lining. This is natural/normal and okay, and your body is going through a natural process and increasing your diet in order to compromise for it (and keep you fed and healthy).
Finding a significant other is not important and not necessary for you to live a full young life. There is no time constraint to find someone, and you will be ten times happier when you allow yourself to have the freedom to be a kid and not worry about impressing people.
It’s okay to speak up and ask for what you want (or inform someone of something you don’t want). Ask that teacher a clarifying question, tell that boy to stop picking on you – find your voice and never let anyone take that away from you. Future you will thank you.
It’s time to stop worrying about being a girl, and start allowing yourself to be a kid. Be bold, be strong, be outspoken, be opinionated, be smart, be brave – be powerful!
Don’t forget to love yourself through all of the things life has to throw at you 💜
Friendly reminder to not punish yourself for creating.
Can you elaborate on what you mean by this?
I have a tendency to beat myself up whenever something I make doesn’t meet my expectations (which is always). The result is that finishing something = bad feelings: I am effectively punishing myself for having created something. The natural reaction to this punishment is an aversion to creation, meaning that my perfectionism is harming me, not only by causing me to despise what I do make and by impeding the creative process, but by attacking even my desire to create.
ultimately i think kindness is the most radical thing you can do with your pain and your anger. it’s like, you take everything awful that’s ever been done to you, and you throw it back in the world’s teeth, and you say no, fuck you, i’m not going to take this. you say this is unacceptable. you say that shit stops with me.
humans are fucking terrible and this awful world we live in will fucking kill you but if you are kind, if you are brave and clever and try really hard, you can defy it. you can impose on this bleak and monstrous structure something beautiful. even if it’s temporary. even if it doesn’t heal anything inside you that’s been hurt.
i’m gonna sleep and i’m gonna wake up and i swear by everything in this deadly horrible universe i’m gonna make someone happy.
i’ve seen a number of comments and tags where people feel that they must swallow or repress their anger in order to engage in kindness. that is not at all what i am recommending here. radical kindness is an expression of anger. it is not passive. it is not repressive. it does not require you, in any way, to forgive those that have fucked you up. it does not require you to be quiet.
it just requires that you be kind. viciously. vengefully. you fight back. you plant flowers. give to charity. play games. pet someone’s dog. scream into the dark. paint and write and dance, tell jokes, sing songs, bake cookies. you have been hurt and you don’t have to deny that hurt. you just have to recognize it in other people, and take their hand, and say: no more. enough. fuck this. no more.
have a cookie.
i will say this again: we are all going to die. the universe is enormous and almost entirely empty. to be kind to each other is the most incredible act of defiance against the dark that i can imagine.
it just requires that you be kind. viciously. vengefully.
Bolding for emphasis. Because I am angry at the state of the world right now, so very angry. And I am trying to channel that anger into helpful, kind actions.
It’s not about whether a character is trans or gay. Gay characters make sense. People have been gay for millennia. Trans however. Not the case. In a high fantasy setting, how in the balls are they going to perform surgery where they change the sex of the character??? It makes no sense at all. They’d have to explain it. And remember, this is high fantasy, Game of Thrones is also in that category. This is a time where they would reach into your body with an object strikingly similar to a salad tossing spoon to yank out a small piece of arrowhead. Pretty sure they hadn’t figured out a surgery as complex as a sex change…
The people complaining that there aren’t enough gay/trans people in stuff like this are just as bad if not moreso than the people who complain about gay/trans people being in stuff like this.
Create your own fantasy world filled with nothing but gay/trans people. Make it so that being heterosexual is the minority. All the power to you. Good luck trying to create it.
You don’t have to have surgery to be transgender. Lots of transgender people don’t. Transgender people, people who identify with the gender not corresponding with their birth sex, have existed before the surgery. And the existence of and recognition of a third sex or dual sex existed in pre-modern times in lots of places are the world.
So, for one, your “how in the balls are they going to perform surgery“ question doesn’t actually matter. They don’t need to in order for transgender people to exist.
But if they did want to include transgender people who undergo physical changes to reflect their gender/sexual identity, in a HIGH FANTASY world, there’s actually a really easy answer to that:
*ahem*
“How are you going to make someone trans in a fantasy setting full of magic spells, potions, and artifacts?”
shout out to the elixir of sex shift for covering more than just a gender binary.
also lets not forget that in ye old days (aka time of the ancient greeks (aka the bc years)) that people drank the urine of pregnant mares to feminize themselves. like, trans people find a way 😉
…the fucking Sumerians had trans people, brosky.
Sumerians.
They didn’t even have fucking iron, but they had trans women.
also there is a person named John/Eleanor Rykener who was a prostitute in medieval Europe and dressed as a woman and went by Eleanor when having sex with men. We have transcripts from the interrogation they underwent after being accused of sodomy, but we don’t know how John/Eleanor saw themself, and if they were trans or something close to bisexual? Because medieval ideas of sex say that men are active and women are passive and that’s why it doesn’t work for men to have sex with men (or women with women) because one has to take on the role of the other gender to do it. So did they see themself as a woman in a man’s body, or did they think their attraction to men meant that they were female when having sex with men? It’s a really interesting case even if there are very few concrete answers.
@mitch-turn getting dragged through the rainbow of truth
I’m pretending all the time to be, kinder, stronger, funnier, more sociable than I am. I guess we’re all like that but it just feels so inadequate.
What’s the difference?
I know it sounds flippant but… certain things are fundamentally performative. And other things are so close as makes no difference.
Kindness is performative. Actions are kind, and people are kind by performing those actions. You can’t “pretend” to be kinder than you are, you can only perform kindness or not perform kindness, and choosing to perform kindness is always worthwhile, no matter how much you may second-guess your motivations.
Strength is so many things. It takes strength to pretend a strength you don’t feel. And the way to achieve strength is to exercise it, so long as you do it in enough moderation to not strain or break anything. Being able to affect strength when necessary while being able to put it down again when that in turn is necessary is healthy. Everyone starts weight training with the littlest weights. It’s not fake or pretending to do what you gotta do in any given situation.
Funniness lives in the interlocutor, not in the speaker. It doesn’t matter how funny you think you are (or think you are pretending to be) – that’s not how it’s measured. At what point are you “pretending” to be a musician if the music still gets made? And often what it’s tempting to describe in first person as “pretending” is more accurately described in the third person as “practicing” – which is of course the way you cause things to Be.
Sociability is also performative. Pretending to be sociable is just…being sociable, despite a disinclination towards it. It’s making an effort towards something you value. So long as the effort is not so great that it backfires into resentment, there’s no practical difference.
Qualities or activities or whatever are no less worthy because you have to actively choose to perform them. If anything, the worthiness lies in the act of choosing. It’s not “pretending” – it’s agency.
tl;dr: ain’t nothing wrong with “fake it till you make it.” A plastic spoon* holds just as much soup as a “real” one
* I keep wanting to talk about semantic domains! Artifacts are defined by their utility, whereas living things are defined by their identity. So plastic forks are still forks, but plastic flowers aren’t flowers. So there’s two pep-talk messages to take away from this: (1) for certain things, the distinction between “fake” and “real” isn’t a relevant one so long as they still get the job done, and (2) the purpose of a living thing is to be the thing that it is. The idea of a “useless person” is as semantically nonsensical as the idea of “pretend kindness” (or fake cutlery).
I love this post. It illustrates what I think is maybe the key difference between a developing self-identity and a formed self-identity, which is, like…confidence? If you are BEING kind, consistently, if you are prioritizing that over your own comfort or fatigue or even, occasionally, your emotional inclination (because OH MY GOD FUCK THIS GUY, I HAVE HAD IT UP TO HERE–uuughhh, but no, I’m not gonna lash out at him, that won’t accomplish anything, and besides, he’s probably had a bad day, he’s under a lot of stress, I don’t have to be an asshole about this…), guess what? That makes you kind. That is literally what kindness is. Same for patience, same for strength, same for all of this stuff. You got it. You’re doing it. You’re not faking anything. Stop second-guessing yourself and cutting yourself down. Give yourself enough credit to look at your actions and confidently assert to yourself that you are no longer just making things up as you go.
Firefighter demonstrates how to put out a kitchen fire
Reblog to actually save a life
To explain. The latter works because you’re cutting off the supply of oxygen to the fire and suffocating it
as opposed to slapping oxygen inside the pan with the downward motion
Reblogging, because this is so important. When I was learning how to cook for myself in my tweens, I had at least a five years of fire safety seminars from school drilling this into my head, and I STILL had that instinctive put-the-fire-out-with-water reflex. Didn’t even think. I saw our oily burner catch fire after frying eggs, whipped around towards the sink for water, and my brain immediately screamed NO!!! NO WATER!
I mean that fire safety stuff straight up bitchslapped me out of REFLEXIVELY setting my house on fire. I found a pot lid and inched it over the burner before turning off the heat. Even if you think you know this stuff, panic is powerful shit. Make knowledge more powerful.
Cannot overstate how important this is. Baking soda also does a good trick, but this is still just so, so important!!
My boyfriend is triggered by Christmas and Christmas music. We were in a restaurant, and Christmas music was playing, and he started panicking so he went outside for a cigarette. The manager of the restaurant overheard him saying he had to get out, and changed the music over for the rest of the time we were there. There are safe spaces in the real world. People are nicer than you think. And bullshit people who try to tell you to get over your triggers, ain’t shit.
Honestly “the world is cruel get over it” is pretty easily translated to “I’m a complete asshole who doesn’t want to be held responsible for my sh*tty behavior”
I was at a hacker conference a few months ago and someone had a panic attack because of the noise levels.
Guess how many rowdy drunk hackers quieted down to make sure the person having the problem was okay because it was all of them, all of the hackers. (500 at this particular party)
So there’s this experiment where researchers take a bunch of preschoolers and give them a marshmallow and they say, “ok, you can eat this now, or you can wait thirty minutes and then we’ll give you two marshmallows.”
And they leave them alone with hidden cameras and watch the struggle of willpower and it’s supposed to say something about delayed gratification.
And this thing gets used to explain why some people are better with money than others, or make various other better life choices. The Aesop here is if you can delay your satisfaction, you’ll get ahead.
But here’s a proposed version of that experiment that’s more realistic.
Give the kid the marshmallow and explain it all as above. Then come back 30 minutes later and say, “Sorry, actually we ran out of marshmallows, so even though you didn’t eat yours, you’re not getting a second one. Other kids got two, but you don’t. Also, every kid with fewer than two marshmallows has to give back their original marshmallow. Sorry we didn’t tell you that earlier now hand it over.”
Then call them back for a repeat experiment where you give them the same offer. See how many kids scarf that marshmallow down in two seconds flat because like hell they’ll trust you again.
If it’s the experiment I’m thinking of they did run the experiment again, and this time did take into account something they didn’t before: the socio-economic level of the children involved and if there had been broken promises made before to them. Children from lower socio-economic circumstances who had been let down in the past were far more likely to eat the marshmallow the first time around. The experimenters then showed the kids they had the two marshmallows to give them and let them out.
Then comes the fun part: they ran the experiment again.
This time, those kids who ate the marshmallow before waited. Without any further prompting than keeping their word, the scientists destroyed the notion that children in poverty are more prone to poor impulse control or are more likely to scarf down sugar than rich kids.
Oh now that is interesting! I’d never heard that follow-up before.
When I first learned about this case study in college, something about it felt incomplete, but I could never really put my finger on it. It seemed overly simplistic, but I couldn’t see the missing piece because in was in one of my cognitive blind spots.
Knowing about this follow up is incredibly valuable and insightful!
And this is why it’s vital for human beings to check our assumptions and always be on the lookout for cognitive blind spots. Because even one missing variable can mean the difference between transformative insight and generations of deeply embedded misconceptions.
This is also why it’s important for the scientific community to actively seek out scientists with diverse backgrounds and perspectives. It’s not about arbitrary “diversity quotas,” it’s about pursuing a diversity of insight.
someone: so what do you think is the solution to homelessness?
me, socialist:
Let homeless people occupy peopleless homes, build houses for use rather than exchange, 3D print comfortable houses in a day, convert corporate skyscrapers into housing and commercial malls into publicly-accessible community centers with living commons and entertainment
When you say it to people and they break
“But the money? … we can’t just? But, Money? We can’t just… help… people? Can we? The Money. We can’t just help people? Like that? We can’t just? Money?”
Pass Through Fire 