to have the courage to be seen as the beautiful weirdo you are first you have to see yourself this can be hard in a culture where you are trained to see weirdness as not beautiful something shameful, to be avoided something to fear those are all lies weirdness is beautiful technically, it isn't even weird that's just what they call it, for now because their idea of "normal" is so unnatural that they have to label everything that doesn't fit into their tiny, silly boxes as "weird" i want to reclaim the word 'weird' as a good thing many won't see you they see through the filtered lenses of what they have ...
I empathize with school shooters
For context about my own school experience, check out this post: Ways school made me depressed I once watched a TED Talk by the mother of one of the Columbine school shooters. It was pretty interesting, and I kept waiting for her to talk about school. It was a school shooting after all. But throughout the whole thing, school was very inconsequential in her talk. She mostly talked about mental illness, guns, how bad she felt about it, and how there are no easy answers and how nobody can possibly be sure why kids would shoot up a school. I was disappointed by ...
Night Owls are not broken and don’t need to be “fixed”
I'm a Night Owl. I like to stay up long after most people have gone to sleep. The night time feels so peaceful and quiet. I hate morning energy - so many stressed people rushing to get to work - I'd much rather sleep through all that chaos. People sometimes comment that I need to "fix" my sleeping pattern - in other words, sleep at a "normal" time, and get up in the morning. Fuck that. It feels wrong to me on some kind of primal level. My body just says No. I've tried to do it many times though. It is ...
Becoming unreliable on purpose
People like reliable people. This makes a lot of sense. People also generally like to be thought of as reliable. This also makes sense. But, is it possible to be too reliable? I've had a lot of difficulty saying no to people, and this has resulted in people thinking of me as very reliable. Good, right? Well, actually no. Because I agreed to many things I didn't actually want to do, people expect me to do more of those things in the future. This causes a number of problems, obviously, because I don't want to keep on doing things I don't ...
Shaming people for something they don’t know about is not okay
This train of thought started because of a Twitter trend that's been bugging me for a while, and also because a friend of mine was venting about it recently. There's this thing where people will go around "informing" people to avoid following or interacting with XYZ Person because XYZ Person has been deemed "problematic" in some way. The way in which XYZ Person is problematic is irrelevant to the point of this post, so I'm not going to cite any examples whatsoever. The way in which these people go about "informing" people is really unkind, though. In some cases they go so ...
It pisses me off how socially acceptable it is to hate kids
It pisses me off how socially acceptable it is to hate kids. People are so casual about it, almost like it's on par with hating broccoli. Except that kids are people. Hating an entire group of people is generally considered Not Okay, but kids? Nah, they don't really matter, right? They'll grow out of it and become likeable when they become adults. I mean, disliking something is valid. On some level I believe that all feelings are valid... but... hating a whole group of people... is that valid? Is that okay? I'm not comfortable with that. On the other hand, there's a ...
How I learned to tolerate kindness
I realized today that I like it when people are kind to me. That sounds weird, right? But, I used to be scared of people being kind to me. Partly because it gave me complicated feelings that I didn't want to deal with, and partly because it felt so alien and strange. I avoided "overly kind" people for a long time. When people were really kind to me I wanted to run away and hide to avoid breaking down crying. I gravitated towards people who were more critical or at least kind of emotionally walled off. They felt more familiar and safer. Somewhere ...
Ways school made me depressed
...as a neurodivergent non-binary lesbian I absolutely hated school with a fiery passion born in the depths of hell. Those were, by far, the worst years of my life. I am glad that I survived them, but there were a few moments where I almost didn't. If my circumstances had been slightly different, and I had access to guns... who knows what I might have done. So, here's a list of ways that school made me depressed and suicidal. My parents not giving a shit about my general well-being This is point #1 for a reason. If my parents had been even slightly emotionally ...
Judgment
Being open-minded is overrated, and judgment is not a bad thing I was subjected to a lot of religious indoctrination over the years, and one of the teachings that stood out was the one about not judging people. I'm not going to quote it here, because I can't be bothered to go look up bible quotes, and even just reading them is triggering for me. This isn't even just a religious thing, I've had other people say similar stuff for different reasons. Like, if I have a strong opinion about something, someone would be like "Don't judge so harshly! Be more open-minded! ...
The Story of Jack
CW: Child abuse This is a true story, but I've changed the names. Once upon a time, there was a boy named Jack. His father, Rick, was a police officer, and his mother, Beth, worked an office job. Jack was 4 years old, full of energy and wanted to play a lot, like a normal healthy kid. I don't know why, but Jack's mother got angry with Jack a lot, and Jack would cry. This, for some reason, made his mother even more angry and she'd yell at him not to cry. Obviously, that would make him more upset, and he'd cry louder, ...