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If my partner is in the next room over and hasn’t spoken to me in 15 minutes, I can easily convince myself that it’s not just because he’s reading but because the last thing I said to him was wrong somehow, and he’s stewing and ready to scream at me any second now about how awful I am. This belief, though, is wrong. He doesn’t get upset about infinitesimal things, and when he is upset, that isn’t how he handles it. He’s not my father.

It absolutely makes sense for me to process information this way ��� in many situations I’ve been in, that instinct would have been correct, and helped me stay safe. But it isn’t correct anymore, and it would be unhealthy — and unfair — to act as if it were. I’m not wrong for feeling the way I do, but if I forced my partner to treat my feelings as reality — if I called him five times a day while he was at work to have him reassure me he wasn’t mad at me, if I forbade him from ever taking time to himself without reminding me it wasn’t about me, or ever being outwardly upset about things like having a bad day at work because it makes me anxious — that would be a terrible relationship for him to be in. I’m not wrong for feeling how I do, but it’s on me to make a plan for how to cope with it: to remind myself to look at the evidence and ask whether there’s any suggestion that I’m actually about to be harmed, to develop my own coping strategies, to be self-aware of my own history and the way I map it onto my present. I can certainly ask my partner for support in this, or to make some concessions to my history that he agrees are both fair and healthy for him, but I can’t ask him to bend over backwards for me because I’m not willing to do the work at all. We can’t justify harmful things we do to others by pointing to the ways they’re related to how we ourselves were harmed — a reason isn’t a justification.

Rachel at Autostraddle (in an agony aunt column that’s actually about biphobia, but took this excellent turn into Why You Don’t Have To Grovel To People’s Neuroses)

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"smart appliances" fuck u i want them dumb as a brick and incidentally as sturdy and enduring

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as a child I wondered why adults were so stupid (doing things out of habit/routine/heuristics rather than reasoning explicitly about what to do based on their goals) and the answer is that adults are unimaginably fucking tired all the time

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if u feel the first cramp and think "i dont need a painkiller yet, itll pass" ? that the devil speaking, take that painkiller immediately

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Worst part of living with animals is the night time sloppy licking cleaning noises I'm sorry but I cannot sleep . Please fhcking stop please please olease

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macklemore really just said walk into the club like what up I got a big cock and we just accepted that. what was going on in 2012

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No matter how progressive or well-read you are, there are always going to be moments in your life where somebody pushes back against something that's so culturally ingrained you never even considered it before. And you'll say "Huh, it never occurred to me to challenge this but you're right" and that doesn't mean you were "morally toxic" before, it means you're a non-omniscient human capable of growth.

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best movie of 2023 so far

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this is mostly for me more than anything

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╎< -> = O

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okay tumblr olds. tell me in the tags what piece(s) of media you've never seen/read/played despite them dominating your dash for months or years