Today my therapist introduced me to a concept surrounding disability that she called "hLep".
Which is when you - in this case, you are a disabled person - ask someone for help ("I can't drink almond milk so can you get me some whole milk?", or "Please call Donna and ask her to pick up the car for me."), and they say yes, and then they do something that is not what you asked for but is what they think you should have asked for ("I know you said you wanted whole, but I got you skim milk because it's better for you!", "I didn't want to ruin Donna's day by asking her that, so I spent your money on an expensive towing service!") And then if you get annoyed at them for ignoring what you actually asked for - and often it has already happened repeatedly - they get angry because they "were just helping you! You should be grateful!!"
And my therapist pointed out that this is not "help", it's "hLep".
Sure, it looks like help; it kind of sounds like help too; and if it was adjusted just a little bit, it could be help. But it's not help. It's hLep.
At its best, it is patronizing and makes a person feel unvalued and un-listened-to. Always, it reinforces the false idea that disabled people can't be trusted with our own care. And at its worst, it results in disabled people losing our freedom and control over our lives, and also being unable to actually access what we need to survive.
So please, when a disabled person asks you for help on something, don't be a hLeper, be a helper! In other words: they know better than you what they need, and the best way you can honor the trust they've put in you is to believe that!
Also, I want to be very clear that the "getting angry at a disabled person's attempts to point out harmful behavior" part of this makes the whole thing WAY worse. Like it'd be one thing if my roommate bought me some passive-aggressive skim milk, but then they heard what I had to say, and they apologized and did better in the future - our relationship could bounce back from that. But it is very much another thing to have a crying shouting match with someone who is furious at you for saying something they did was ableist. Like, Christ, Jessica, remind me to never ask for your support ever again! You make me feel like if I asked you to call 911, you'd order a pizza because you know I'll feel better once I eat something!!
Edit: crediting my therapist by name with her permission - this term was coined by Nahime Aguirre Mtanous!
Edit again: I made an optional follow-up to this post after seeing the responses. Might help somebody. CW for me frankly talking about how dangerous hLep really is.
It's been a while since I posted anything but I couldn't let THAT DRAWING go by any longer and not do anything about it. Honestly, I'm surprised at how confident I was when I posted it, so I redrew it.
so, i hit 1k sometime in the beginning of June ✨🥳. Which means my incessant yapping about absolutely nothing on every post I make and multiple months-long unannounced hiatuses didn't scare all of you off yet, so thanks for that y'all.
No, but for real tho, I genuinely want to express my gratitude to each and every one of you for putting up with me and all my BS, so my 1k+ gift exclusively consists of hairs requested by YOU! Which is totally about giving back to the community that has supported me and NOT just an excuse to dump all the requests that have been sitting here piling up for months.
there are only 7 hairs in the preview image but a bunch of these are from sets, so all-in-all you're getting 17 female hairs!
INFORMATION:
None of this is my original work! All mesh credit goes to @sheabuttyr, @ebonixsims, @daylifesims, @simstrouble!
Set contains 17 hairs for for Teen ➤ Elder Females
due to how the meshes where made the Poloma Passion Twists and Monae Beads don't have root/tip controls so they’re only 2 channels the rest are 4 like normal.
credits, preview pictures, links to originals, poly counts and individual download links for every hair is under the cut.
polycounts are ALL over the place. Lowest hair is +10k, Highest one is +32k. Please reference the list under the cut before downloading!
Files comes in two flavors: Merged and Unmerged
Both types contain the exact same type of stuff (package file and preview images) except version one is one big merged file and the version has individual files.
Me: [sees everyone talking about how Assad Zaman was "literally" coming up with RPF about himself and Eric Bogosian in an interview]
Me: ah, fandom's doing its little "interpret an innocent comment in Some Kind Of Way" thing again, let's go find the video and do our own critical thinking about what was actually said here--
Assad: What would happen if I said-- [words that cannot be interpreted as anything but RPF fanfic]
i want buck being wooed - flowers and being taken out and a little protective hand on the small of his back
i want to hear all the soft ways tommy can say evan and the look on buck's face when he does
i want to see them at tommy's karaoke trivia place because holy shit buck would love it (and didnt oliver say that we're getting buck singing this season cause uhhhhh)
i love that this is such a fling, such a happy thing for buck - he is finally feeling that puzzle piece click into place and it is freeing
and i cant wait to see all the small ways we see that play out!!!
Ok so I have been stewing this crossover au in my brain nonstop for the past few days and. I am nothing if not committed to the bit, so. Volume cover redraws :)
Here are the originals:
If you want to read more about my one piece spy x family crossover, keep reading!
So the idea is simple! Crossover reincarnation au where ASL is reborn in Spy x Family. They’re each born separately and none of them are born with the same names as their previous lives, and with no way of finding each other, they each find their own thing to do in the world.
Sabo, too used to the dangers of being a spy, eventually finds a cause to devote himself to again, in preventing war from engulfing the country he was reborn in. Ace, drawn to fire as he was in his previous life, used arson as a means to rob rich people for sustenance and survival, and is eventually scouted and hired by Garden as a fire specialist and assassin. And Luffy, though born in perhaps the poorest condition, grows up happily and takes whatever part time jobs he wants to do.
The thing about Sabo is that, as much as he seems like a young man of good repute and high standing within society, everyone in WISE knows that he is a massive nuisance. Nobody knew in the beginning how a child less than half the age of most of their veteran agents could have the same skills and knowledge in their profession. Sabo was— and still is— hyper competent, and by the time WISE figured out just how much of a menace to society he was, it was too late.
Ace forgot for the first few years of his new life that he wasn’t made of fire, and consequently, received multiple accidental burns. This did not deter him, however, from growing up to be a very skilled arsonist, well-practiced in every which way to start a dumpster fire or house fire. As a teenage he would use this often to draw attention as he robbed rich people blind. When he was caught, he was given an ultimatum by Garden: join them and receive payment for starting fires and causing problems under contract, or face the government and authorities for his crimes. Begrudgingly, he joined Garden, but eventually comes to appreciate that he can make substantial money in his element.
Luffy is Luffy. No telepathy or experimentation, no fancy schools, no gimmicks or secret identities. But he has still lived an extremely colorful life in this world, full of fascinating and kind individuals who have helped him grow up healthy and relatively happy. He goes where he is free, and he takes whatever part time jobs he wants in order to make the minimum he needs to survive.
Ace and Sabo find each other first, in their late teens, and neither of them realize that the other remembers their previous life, but both refuse to separate. (Sabo thinks Ace doesn’t remember, because Ace didn’t recognize him. Ace never saw Sabo grow up past 10, however, so he doesn’t recognize older Sabo immediately. By the time he does realize who exactly Sabo is, Sabo has backtracked and pretends to know Ace from a dream, or from somewhere else.)
Sabo’s attachment to Ace, predictably, causes problems between Sabo and WISE, but by then, Sabo is indispensable to the organization, and they make an exception for Sabo to be able to remain with Ace, so long as Ace never finds out what Sabo’s actual job is. Ace, on the other hand, hides his job because he doesn’t want his brother, who he has just found and who does not know Ace well enough yet, to know that he makes a living from killing people.
And they find Luffy sometime afterwards, prior to the beginning of the Spy x Family canon. Luffy figures out, not long after moving in with his brothers, both of his brothers’ secret occupations and the fact that both of them remember their past memories. He thinks it is common knowledge, however, and so he never brings it up.
i don’t think jimmy’s broken his canary curse. i think it’s just been evolving, slowly, and he’s figuring out how to work with it instead of trying to fight it. hear me out:
3rd life - flower husbands. jimmy dies first. scott is 10th out in the series, the only time he places outside of the top 5
last life - the southlanders. jimmy is first out. mumbo is out next in quick succession. impulse dies shortly after. the only southlanders to make it into the top 10 are grian, who killed jimmy and mumbo (and still only ranks 7) and martyn, who left the southlanders for the shadow alliance
double life - ranchers. jimmy dies first, and takes tango out with him. tango is the one responsible for their first death, though
limited life - bad boys. joel wants to sacrifice himself for jimmy, but jimmy dies first before he can. joel still dies shortly after, and grian becomes a nosy neighbour, surviving to 6th
secret life - big dogs. jimmy dies second, but lizzie might be falling forever in the end so maybe he does die first. martyn is the first to yellow and red, and he dies 11th. the worst he’s ever placed. (also, mumbo dies only moments after jimmy again*)
real life - (do they have a name??). jimmy and ren’s groups get into a fight in the mines. jimmy is the only one who makes it out without dying at all. his allies are out of the series.
the canary curse isn’t about jimmy dying first. or at least, it isn’t really anymore. at first he was used to signify it, the canary dying first to warn everyone of danger ahead. but the canary has learned how to escape the coalmine now, and his friends are still stuck inside. they might survive if they have friends on the surface or they’re willing to betray their allies, but if it’s just been them and their canary to warn them of danger? then they’ve doomed themselves.
*mumbo might also have his own unique “killed ten seconds after jimmy by the same person/thing” curse, which is different from the general jimmy “bad luck charm” solidarity curse
there’s a great write up by someone on here that i will have to search for in which they discuss how the ultimate evil for david lynch is sexual violence against women (even more severe than murder, which is often auxiliary to that type of specific violence); twin peaks is incredibly soapy—on purpose! lynch and frost are playing with form and content on purpose to examine incredibly difficult subject matter through a (for lack of a better word) more palatable format—which most of the time i think works to its advantage and makes those moments of visible horror so much more effective (i use “visible” rather than “true” or other similar adjectives because the horror is always there, it’s embedded in the entire town, shows up in every generation we see in screen and we watch them grapple with it in different ways, but that’s a separate post)
however—and i’ve talked about this before—i find that once you’ve watched fire walk with me it is so much harder to watch the show because the ignorance of nearly every single member of the town (yes, including cooper) pervades the way the action unfolds. twin peaks viewers knew the premise of the show going in and we get to discover details and information alongside the characters. when albert rosenfield comes in as the only voice of reason and reality, it’s set up to be jarring to both the townspeople and to the viewer. why?
sheryl lee said in an interview, “fire walk with me was very difficult for me to watch… and, emotionally it’s a reminder: this is a movie, but this continues to happen every day and how can we stop it? when i watch fire walk with me now, as a mother, i watch it and i think look at all those signs that were being exhibited. this girl was in danger, and look at all these people that were in her life. what would have happened if someone, somewhere, somehow could have helped or stopped it? that’s hard to watch.”
much has been discussed critically about fire walk with me and whether or not it’s exploitative in the ways that it portrays sexual violence against women. while lynch does not shy away from making that violence visible, it is done so in an attempt to make the viewer examine their own relationship to that violence and how it shows up in their own lives. the audience is forced to think about the ways that they are complicit in how and why these violent acts occur and what they can do to stop it, which is why for many it is an uncomfortable watch. for others, it is a painful (and speaking from my own perspective) necessary watch because lynch didn’t make a horror movie, he made a documentary.
fire walk with me is necessary (in my humblest of opinions) to understand why the pieces that lynch and frost put into twin peaks work. there’s so much backstory to how they weren’t originally going to reveal who laura palmer’s killer was until ABC made them, lynch wasn’t around during much of the second season so things got a little off the rails storytelling-wise, etc. etc. but fire walk with me allows them to tie difficult, often horrifying threads (ben horne unknowingly attempting to have sex with his daughter, the townspeople’s distancing of albert, the hands of random townspeople trembling as BOB attempts to claw back into the material world, the list goes on and on) back to the central thesis of “sexual violence is the ultimate evil, it is completely avoidable, and you have a responsibility to recognize the signs and stop being complicit”