@reaperlight / reaperlight.tumblr.com
“Commander Vimes didn’t like the phrase ‘The innocent have nothing to fear’, believing the innocent had everything to fear, mostly from the guilty but in the longer term even more from those who say things like ‘The innocent have nothing to fear’.”
–Terry Pratchett, Snuff
I had the best time at the Locked Tomb meetup at Holiday Matsuri. Is your favorite character in here?
“surely this will not cause my chronic illness to flare up,” i say, actively doing something that has never failed to flare my chronic illness
I wish there were different words for the different types of forgetting because when I say I forgot something, I don’t mean “I forgot we had plans on Friday.” I almost always mean “I forgot today was Friday.” I know my friend’s birthday is on March 20th, but I won’t wish her happy birthday on time because I won’t know it’s March 20th on March 20th. My forgetfulness has nothing to do with not caring about/remembering events and everything to do with my inability to keep up with the passage of time.
My most common one is being 100% certain I did the thing already because the memory of doing it and the memory of intending to do it are the same mental images.
Changing my belief system from "this is the hill I'll die on" to "this is the hill I'll kill you on" has done absolute wonders for me 10/10 do recommend
"you really gonna die on that hill?"
"someone is."
to you, it's a shitty sentence. to some random bitch 500 miles away, it's a fire line that'll haunt them for the next 17 years.
you don't know how impactful your writing is because it's been in your brain for far too long now. you've stared at it for hours and repeated "this sucks" over and over again to the point that you killed your capacity to feel anything about your work.
but trust me, once you get your shit out there, someone's gonna go over that paragraph you hate and go "jesus fucking christ" and put the book down to have an existential crisis.
sick of hearing about "healing crystals" that "cleanse your mind and body of negative energy" i want to know which rocks can hurt you and fuck up your vibe so bad
everyone suggesting uranium isn't wrong but anyone who said "literally any rock if you're willing to resort to violence" are the only people who can get on my level. you're hired.
caincore
okay which fandom that sprung up out of nowhere overnight like mushrooms after rain is this a reference to i can't keep up anymore
i don’t grow out of my interests they simply become absorbed into me as i get older like tree rings
The transmasculine experience is being held responsible for the sins of cis men despite only having lived as a girl/woman and then as a trans person. Yes, cis men and trans men are (generally) the same gender, but are they treated like that? Look around you and tell me they’re treated like that.
Men* have a responsibility to unpack their experiences of male privilege and use their position to uplift others. But what male privileges does a trans guy whose egg cracked yesterday have to unpack? Or does he not count as a real man yet. How about closeted trans men? Trans men consistently treated as gnc women?
Male privileges are experiences and are conditional. You aren’t suddenly imbued with magical Male Privilege the moment you figure out you’re a guy. I’m not saying transmascs don’t need to watch their misogyny, because they do as does literally everyone. But things are more complicated than man = gender oppressor when you put trans (and intersex) experiences into the equation.
Oh! This is something that’s bugged me for a little bit, so I’m going to use it as a jumping off point to talk about it.
This is another one of those, “we must treat trans men/mascs and trans women/fems as opposites,” which I remember seeing when I was younger that primed me to think that way that I then had to unpack. And there’s also a narrowing of all trans women’s/fems’ experiences going on in the attitude this comment is talking about that should be unpacked as well.
The idea that “transmasc people magically internalize the ‘male socialization’ as children, long before figuring out they’re trans, because they ‘are already men,’” came about, as I saw it anyway, from first people arguing against radfems doing so by accepting the radfem tenet that there is One Coherent Form of ‘male socialization’ and One Coherent Form of ‘female socialization’ which radfems would say prevents trans women from ever truly being women, but flipping the idea on its head almost as a gotcha on radfems to say that actually, trans women do end up with the One Coherent Form of ‘female socialization’, and so by even radfem metrics, trans women are women.
However, I say “almost as a gotcha” specifically because there are trans women and fems who have this set of experiences I described above. That set of experiences does exist, and isn’t solely something made up to use as a gotcha against radfems. Which also means that there probably are trans men and mascs who have the experience of having internalized the sets of roles and behaviours that society has told them that men are supposed to be, and so have ended up with that opposite experience of trans women/fems with how they grew up and internalized things about ‘male socialization’—men and behaviours and gender roles as they were presented to them.
But also? The internalizing of ‘female socialization’ before realizing they’re girls/women isn’t a universal experience of trans women and fems. Collapsing every trans woman’s and fem’s experiences to a singular experience doesn’t actually do anything to promote acceptance of trans women and fems. Because when someone does encounter a trans women/fem who loudly does not conform to that singular experience… what then? If their acceptance of trans women/fems as women/fems hinges on them all sharing this one singular experience, how does that actually help trans women/fems considering the diverse experiences they have as a group?
Anyway. From all of that, the people who centred their trans women/fem activism around, “trans women are women because they internalized female socialization,” who were interested in flattening experiences into easily digestible (but ultimately less realistic) beliefs to spread were also quite ready to reduce trans experiences down to a binary, and so the, “and so then trans men are men because they internalized male socialization.” Was born.
And it bothers me so much that, while this is an issue I definitely see most commonly among cis allies, there’s also trans people who buy this rhetoric—often because the flattened experiences presented to them happen to actually match their own, and so it’s easier to think that that must be everyone else’s experience too.
(And that’s before even getting into how, regardless of what you’ve internalized, the world may treat you differently than that as a trans person.)
And then, as a transmasc who very much did internalize the ‘female socialization’ I was fed and worked hard to fit that because I was already fat and neurodivergent and had an uphill battle to be respected as a person so I thought those rules could save me (even though they only hurt me more)…
Where does that leave my gender now that I’ve realized I’m transmasc?
Lying—at least according to the people who require my experiences to fit the box they drew.
"im joking"
- the joker
“Emotional abuse is the systematic diminishment of another. It is always a course of conduct, not a single event. It is designed to reduce a child’s self-concept to the point where the victim considers himself unworthy — unworthy of respect, unworthy of friendship, unworthy of the natural birthright of all children: love and protection. Emotional abuse can be verbal or behavioral, active or passive, frequent or occasional. Regardless, it is often as painful as physical assault. And, with rare exceptions, the pain lasts much longer.”
Why do abusive parents turn housekeeping into a torture
I work in other people's houses and I love doing housekeeping in their house. Sometimes I'm bored and I'll just fold the laundry or sweep the floor. I never leave the sink full or dirty. I am not required to do this, I do it because I want to be nice to my boss and I find it genuinely relaxing. I know she'll be happy I took a couple chores off her shoulders and that I won't be criticized for it.
My own house is always clean and tidy when my relatives aren't around. When I'm left alone to do things and I know no one will criticize me I do it gleefully.
But when my mother's home I vacuum the floor and I get tense because I know that she'll come home and yell because I haven't done it. She admitted to hiding socks in remote corners of the house to prove I hadn't vacuumed and mopped the floor. But missing a corner in one room of the house doesn't mean I haven't cleaned the floor, and she's perfectly capable of recognizing a clean floor. I don't cook around her or do the dishes or mop because she'll just start hovering around me offering criticism but no advice. I tried several ways of doing the same chore. Nothing was ever enough, nothing was every right, there was always something lacking. Every time I do a chore all I can think about is how she's going to yell at me because the chore hasn't been done or it wasn't done right. I started recording myself doing chores to prove that I did them. She always complained I hadn't mopped the floor so I started mopping it right before she came home. Then she started turning into a purple faced monster because when I mopped the floor there was always "too much water" and if I hadn't mopped the floor "at least then times" then "it didn't count". Once I was 11 and I had been left alone at home for the entire day. I did every single chore except the laundry. She came home, looked at every single clean room, went straight to the balcony and said: why isn't the laundry done?
So it was never about the chores. It was always about finding a little excuse to terrorize me. It was always about seeing me cry in frustration after doing several time consuming chores and being accused of not doing it right or straight up not having done it. It was always about seeing me upset and taking her anger out on me.
Guys. I can feel it already. THIS is the year. This is the year that Jonathan Harker will go on his business trip with no issue. Just a lovely train ride through Europe where he collects paprika recipies for Mina, meets some friendly, living people looking to buy properties in England, and then returns home safely.
Free him from the time loop.
Sheba and her three kittens, Butch, Brenda and Charcoal from the book April’s Kittens
Clare Turlay Newberry, 1940
