Amica Italia July 1994 - Monica Bellucci & Shana Zadrick by Ellen Von Unwerth

One day in 2019, I had pain so bad I went to the ER.

My gut felt like there were red hot needles and knifes being stabbed into it. I felt nauseous. I felt faint. I very nearly threw up.

It was not the first time I felt this way but it was the worst I’d ever felt. I’d been getting increasingly bad pain for over a year and I had gone to countless doctors trying to determine what it was.

The doctors at the ER — thankfully — took me seriously. They determined I had a severely infected gallbladder and the only way to save my life was to have surgery to remove it.

I still had to give consent before the surgery.

I remember being terrified. I was alone. There was no one to help me. And somehow, even though the only course of action I could take was to consent to the surgery the fact that I had to before they could take action made it all the more terrifying. The consequences of the surgery would mean I would live, but I’d never quite be the same. I felt cheated by my own body. Why was it this way? Why couldn’t I be healthy? Functional? Why wasn’t my body working with me?

The nurses, doctors, and surgeons there were all incredibly kind to me.

One surgeon in particular — the one who ended up operating on me — said something that will stick with me for the rest of my life. “Your body is there to help you. Sometimes, when part of the body is no longer helping you, the best thing to do is cut it away. You’ll be so much happier after the surgery. You won’t be in pain anymore.”

I think about that a lot.

I think about it a lot when I see trans men begging for help to get top surgery and are met with resistance or well meaning but ignorant messages begging back to not “mutilate” their body.

I think about my surgeon, who was so kind to me and knew what to say when I was scared and crying and alone in my hospital bed.

Your body is there to help you.

Sometimes, when part of the body is no longer helping you, the best thing to do is cut it away.

You’ll be so much happier after the surgery.

You won’t be in pain anymore.

I hope you get your top surgery.

I hope you will be so much happier.

And I hope the pain will end.

You know, I don't think I've ever held as unpopular an opinion as asking people to still care about covid, mask in public, and take more mitigation measures than just being vaccinated. And that's pretty depressing

Where I live people aren’t even getting vaccinated. Like at all. Not Covid shots, not anything else. We had an anti vax movement start ramping up 25 or so years ago here that’s spread like wildfire to the rest of the population.

And now measles is back!

Anyways, stop the spread. Stay home if you’re sick and wear a mask when leaving the house!

Unmute !

Oh my goodness, that's a lot of opinions.

Rolling AND crispy meows.

"SURVIVING"

I love the message and artstyle but did they have to give the cute lovable gator depression? T^T carry on lil buddy, this too shall pass

The gator is the whole point. It's a stand-in for the author that has felt the need to suppress the aspects of themself that others find unappealing, their anger, their sadness, the things people find abrasive or just "weird" in order to make themself more digestible for the people around them because the alternative is to be alone. The gator is only "cute" and "lovable" because it was not allowed to be anything else.

A tribute to my sister’s cat

alright trans ppl we're returning to the fucking sea until shit gets better lets go everyone

this is awesome

gays be loving plants

gays be like “god i wish i could photosynthesize and grow moss and flowers on my flesh like an ancient stone statue brought to life to be a druidic guardian of nature and wildlife”

I'm not gonna tell americans how to vote because it's your business, but as someone from a country that went through an actual right wing dictatorship my approach to voting was never "which candidate meets my standards for them to earn my precious vote", but rather "what's the worse that can happen and how do I keep it from happening"

Sometimes you meet someone, and it’s so clear so immediately that the two of you, on some level, belong together. As lovers, or as friends, or as family, or as something entirely different. You just work, whether you’re in love or creating things together or foxhole buddies or partners in crime. It’s so clear, right off the bat, that this is what you’re supposed to be doing, that this is what you’re for. You meet these people throughout your life, out of nowhere, under the strangest of circumstances, and they help you make a life. I don’t know if that makes me believe in coincidence, or fate, or sheer blind luck, but. It definitely makes me believe in something.

sound on, obviously

This is what we did before cellphones

To anyone who believes fairy tale romances never happen in real life, may I remind you that JRR and Edith Tolkien met and experienced a forbidden love in their youth, and then were separated for five whole years because of his guardian’s rules that he could not date till he was 21, and she got engaged to someone else only because she assumed he’d forgotten her and lost hope that she could ever be with him, but then on his 21st birthday, he wrote her a letter saying he still loved her and wanted to marry her, she responded basically saying ‘if I’d known you hadn’t left me on the shelf, I would never have said yes to anyone else,’ then a week later she greeted him at the train station and then immediately dumped her fiancé, and they got married and she converted to his religion and danced for him in a flowering field far away from the trenches into which he was drafted, which left such an impression that he crafted an entire story about the most beautiful maiden in the world who danced in the woods and made enormous sacrifices to be with the man she loved, and they had four kids and remained faithful to each other and blissfully grew old together and their gravestones are now marked with the names of that same fictional couple that he created, who broke every rule and overcame every possible obstacle to be together and get a happy ending, who only did all that because he based it all on their own real love story.

Knowing all this has always made this bit of Beren’s song instantly reduce me to tears:

Tolkien straight up wrote a poem that said “the world could end, but it wouldn’t have all been pointless, because she was in this world, however briefly, and that justified all the rest.” Kills me.

Who can outdo Wife Guy Tolkien? Dude was writing elaborate AUs where his wife is an impossibly beautiful magic-wielding immortal elf princess who fights Satan and wins to rescue her human boyfriend from Satan’s doom fortress. Flawless.

Final note: while they were dating, a favorite activity was to go to a local cafe with a balcony and throw sugar cubes into people's hats.