are you living for yourself?

one of the most amazing things that has been said to me in therapy is that self esteem doesn’t exist.

and that floored people and the psych went onto say that what she meant was that self esteem is a concept that actually includes a vast array of things and labelling them all as one thing is really limiting and prevents actual improvement

you could have real strong pride in the things you create and hate your body

you could hate your creations but also want to share them with people

you could not hate yourself at all but not take care of yourself, engage in reckless self endangerment

thats all bundled under ‘self esteem’ but saying ‘i need better self esteem’ doesn’t mean anything

whereas if you say ‘i need to work on ways to keeping myself safe, refusing to act on destructive urges’ or ‘i want to be in a place where i believe compliments trusted people give me’

thats concrete, thats a goal.

having it said in therapy helped a lot of people in my group stop saying ‘i have low self esteem’ and start specifying about the actual issue they have

Wow, that is so, so helpful.

its particularly insidious how the beauty industry has repackaged their products as being like, about self care and empowerment and loving your body. like YES girl! you are loving yourself by taking an hour and a half every day to shave your entire body, do a 12 step ‘skincare’ routine to make your face look as smooth as a doll’s, and then covering it in makeup until you look indistinguishable from what is currently trendy and conventionally attractive! the reason you feel ugly and disgusting when you dont do that isnt because youre brutally conditioned to hate your face, its just bc you arent loving yourself by spending a thousand dollars a month on beauty products! dont think too hard about why men dont have to do this

i love showering it's literally like... im clean now! lol. and i no longer have mental illnesses

me when i reblog something which appears on my dash at around 2k notes and later see it with 20k+ notes: this is great. i made a good investment in tumblr post, something which is both normal to want and possible to achieve,

jsyak, im measuring this post like "hmm. steady development. notes are going up. the economy of this post is slowly rising" you guys better make this work if for nothing but the joke of this getting notes

It was kind of interesting to me that out of all the people in our training group, the ones that were the quickest to form social bonds were the people from way out in the country and the city people just kind of quietly kept to themselves.

But I was definitely accepted as one of the bumpkins.

Oh! This is actually an example of Rural vs Urban manners.

In rural/less densely populated areas, the polite thing is to offer people your time and social energy which is why country people will talk your ear off at the slightest acquaintence- it's kind of lonely when you have to make an effort to see people, so you Make An Effort (TM)

In Urban/Densely populated areas, you're meeting people whether you want to or not, because you are physically close to each other constantly. So the Polite Thing there is to kind of ignore other people and keep strictly to business, so you're not imposing upon thier (probably already drained) soical spoons.

The city folks will warm right up to you once they get to know you well enough to know that talking to you won't piss you off.

man, I have very little sympathy for people who’re like “I gotta let them play in traffic, my cat WAILS and acts MISERABLE unless I let them outside!” 

because like……….so does mine? at a certain point each day Grim decides she wants out, and until that happens she a) follows me about SCREAMING, and b) sits atop whatever I’m doing and bites my hands. this is not an exageration

wanna know what I do? I take her out. either supervised in my backyard or on leash in the front

she naps in the sunlight, eats copious amounts of grass, rolls in dirt, and murders butterflies. after 15-30 minutes (equivalent to the time you’d spend on a neighbourhood dog walk) I take Grim back in, and she happily sleeps/plays/cuddles indoors for the remainder of the day

it’s legitimately low-effort

the UK literally had so many pet cats killed by cars and dismembered by wildlife between 2014 – 2018 that the country thought there was a cat serial killer on the loose.  

and that wasn’t the first time, either – the EXACT same situation played out in the UK in 1990 because so many pet cats were dying in “safe neighbourhoods”

you want more information on your “culture”? cats kill 55 million birds per year in the UK.

do you understand the significance of that? the average background extinction rate is 1 per million species year, and cats have caused SIXTY-THREE extinctions of small animals in the last century. we’re currently in the midst of a mass-extinction crisis occurring at a speed we haven’t seen on this planet before……like, Iove your cat, love your planet, or get the fuck off my post.

my friend Alicia made this video to show you the correct way to pronounce "axolotl"! it's a Nahuatl word that gets mispronounced so often, often for puns right here on tumblr dot com, so I wanted to share this with you all because it's important to respect Indigenous languages. you can find her artwork here!

Also even like. Economically. It’s better to give money to poor people. That’s basic Keynesian economics.

Give $600 to someone with no money and they will put it back into the economy, buying groceries, clothes, accommodations, maybe some small luxuries. Give $600 to a rich person and it goes into their bank accounts and just stays there being useless.

If you give a poor person $20, that same $20 will be spent easily 10x over, by 10 different people, in 10 different businesses- within a week.

1- poor guy buys groceries at a local bodega.

2- the bodega owner pays his employees from the cash in the register.

3- bodega employee goes to Starbucks and tips the barista in cash.

4- the barista owes their roommate from lunch last week and pays them back

5- roommate buys something from an indie creator on Etsy

6- Etsy creator splurges on takeout & tips in cash

7- the takeout delivery driver fills up on gas

8- gas station manager (who got paid from the register) takes their kid to the ice cream truck

9- Ice cream truck driver buys a new tire and gets an oil change

10- mechanic gets lunch on a shift

....and so on.

Giving money to poor people is the single best way to stimulate and energize the economy... because poor people do something with money that rich people don’t- THEY FUCKING SPEND IT.

Re: the last post, the article mentions that some places use clams to test the toxicity of the water. It’s like that in Warsaw- we get our water from the river, and the main water pump has 8 clams that have triggers attached to their shells. If the water gets too toxic, they close, and the triggers shut off the city water supply automatically.  

The clams are just better at measuring the water quality than any man-made sensors.

Edit: check out this documentary trailer : https://vimeo.com/408820791

God Bless Our Troops

They hot glued a spring to a clam and gave it full control over the water supply

olympics pictograms come to life | tokyo 2020 opening ceremony

+ pictogram-san at the post-ceremony presser 🥺

I am obsessed with this.

So because parkour is such a ridiculously male dominated sport, the "correct technique" for a lot of these movements that you're taught when you become an instructor plays to a male body's strengths: upper body strength, higher center of gravity, etc.

She demolishes this course by moving in ways that make sense for her body. She doesn't muscle her way up to her over a wall, she just throws a leg up over the wall. She doesn't use upper body strength to do the salmon ladder, she uses her hips!!! And it's fucking incredible.

So many girls and young women walk away from parkour because every movement caters to the strengths of men, because doing what makes sense for their bodies is seen as "bad technique" to be trained away.

If pre-transition me had seen this I would have cried tears of joy.

The cognitive dissonance caused by a society that tells its children to “follow their dreams” through messages in films, literature, etc. and then punishes them for not choosing safe, money making careers in adulthood is fascinating, to say the least.

CAPITALISM