brightnessrandom - Tumblr blog

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Beaded Frog Purses // Julia Mainwaring

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[ Dungeon Meshi minis 1/2 - the less spoilery one ]

them! :D

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Math dance moves (Unmute !)

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in recognition of World Down Syndrome Day on March 21

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would you mind explaining more about being 'mad'? like, what does it mean to identify that way?

Madness, broadly speaking, is a political identity rooted in reclamation. Like "queer," "Mad" resignifies a word used to dehumanize and oppress a category of people and instead use it as a call to collective action. It has roots in antipsychiatry/patient-survivor-expatient (psx) movements in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, and beyond with foundational texts/orgs forming between the 70s and 90s, particularly in the UK and Canada.

To be Mad is to identify with this history and as part of its legacy. It is also to identify oneself among a diverse group of psychiatric survivors, people whose ability to narrate their own lives has been stolen and twisted by accusations of "unreasonability." Madness is a matter of unapologetic illegibility: it is a willful embrace of the unreasonable, disorganized, compulsive, and delusional. It is the resistance of narratives that demand we "recover," complying with treatments largely designed to desensitize us to neoliberal capitalism and medical/psychiatric hegemony. In my Madness, I am living critique, a window into another way of thinking, feeling, and knowing.

With the development of Mad Studies as an academic discipline (in both the positive and negative senses of the word), the identity of Madness comes to connote a certain way of writing and researching, an analytic framework for looking at the world. Identifying with Mad Studies means identifying with a scholarly practice centering lived experience, prioritizing self-scholarship and challenging the myth of scholarly "objectivity."

Lastly, Madness is how I signify to others, Mad or not, my specific orientation toward mental disability. The language we use to self-describe matters, and when it comes to brain stuff, I have a lot of options: I can all myself mentally ill, psychiatrically disabled, or fucked-in-the-head. I can say I'm neurodivergent, traumatized, brainweird. I've used all of these out of necessity or preference, but the word I keep returning to is Mad: my brain is scrambled, out-of-order, noncompliant. Mad is disobedient. Mad is mad, is angry, is not disordered merely out of illness, but out of necessity, in a world in which "order" is intolerable. As a matter of history/legacy, description, scholarship, and personal preference, Madness is the single best descriptor for how I live, and how I want to continue living.

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Becca Stadtlander, Coral Reef

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imagine you have squirrels in your pants and instead of helping you, a bunch of strangers start spitting absolute bars about it and making your pain into a breakdance. i’d be inconsolable.

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table for one

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falin ✦

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Solar System Planets including Pluto aligned in a planet shape

Credit: Ika Abuladze

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some oranges for thai of the dye variety <3

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ALDIS HODGE as ALEC HARDISON in LEVERAGE, 1.1 THE NIGERIAN JOB

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Caves are weirder and more varied than you think

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What a fun and whimsical show! I sure do hope nothing bad happens-

[ID: fanart from Dungeon Meshi episode eleven in blue and red tones. The viewer looks through the eye sockets of Falin's skull, which are aligned with Laios's eyes. He looks at her skull in terror. End ID]

(ID courtesy of @teatual)

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Showing up to the dungeon all puffed up and scared

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roll credits!