Do me a favor, okay? Next time you have a chance, close your eyes for a minute and take a deep breath and imagine someone loving you.
Imagine someone who gets excited just thinking about you. Imagine someone who loves the things you say and do and who genuinely enjoys spending time with you. Imagine someone who feels lucky every moment they get to be around you.
It can be a real person or someone you just made up. You can imagine them praising you or laughing with you or touching you or whatever love means to you. It can be romantic or otherwise. Take your pick.
And if you had a hard time doing it?
Do it again. And again. And again.
I read once that it’s important for us to visualize being loved. That your brain needs to be trained like a muscle, and like a muscle, it can become weak from disuse. Your brain can only do the things that you practice doing, and if you never, ever visualize someone loving you, it becomes difficult to even imagine someone loving you. You get stuck in a rut. And once it’s impossible to imagine someone loving you, it becomes impossible to believe you will ever be loved.
I think… sometimes it can become easy to stop believing that we’re worthy of love. And I think sometimes we have this fantasy of someone making us believe that we’re worthy of it again. Or that somehow we’ll just — earn it, one day. Being worthy of love and desire, respect and affection.
But I think the truth is that we can only start believing that we’re worthy of love if we’re capable of imagining it. And it becomes much, much easier to imagine it if you practice doing so.
It may feel awkward at first. Embarrassing. Silly. Maybe even painful. But think about it like this, maybe: your first day in a dance class, you’ll fall. You’ll look ridiculous. It’ll feel like your body will never be able to do this fluidly. But by the end of the class, you’ll be able to move in a whole new way. Maybe not perfectly, but… better, y’know?
Learn to waltz with your own mind, and try not to cringe too hard at your first awkward movements. Start small and work your way up if you have to. Someone liking you, then someone liking your conversations, then someone liking your presence, then someone purposefully seeking you out. Someone putting time aside for you. Someone thinking about you when you’re not there. Someone being with you because there’s nowhere they’d rather be.
It may feel self-indulgent, but… I mean, we all deserve to be indulged sometimes. And we all deserve to feel worthy of love.
So… indulge yourself. Take a moment and have a silly little fantasy. Get into the habit of imagining love, and imagining it for the you that exists right now, not the you that you wish you were.
Learn to speak the language of love as it applies to you, even if you think that it doesn’t, and one day you’ll realize how to use those syllables to say your own name.
It’ll come one day. In the meantime, let’s learn to dance together, okay?
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i dont like making art tutorials, not just bc my way of drawing and my knowledge about it changes daily but mostly bc i know saying sth wrong can do quite a bit of damage too, even if it was well meant
its been many years by now but i once saw an art tutorial that said characters CANNOT have a certain body shape bc its unnatural (false) and will inevitably make them look bloated/pregnant and its put fear in my head that still lingers in my mind whenever i draw fat characters even tho i know better by now
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Biting the bars of my enclosure about autistic ford tonight. There's something about him using vocabulary and turns of phrase that seem "outdated" or "pretentious" that feels so painfully genuine to me. When people say he talks like that just to "try to sound smart" I wish I could explain what it's like to be so ostracized from your peers growing up that you spend all your time reading instead, to the point where you pick up your way of speaking from books instead of from people. And then what it's like for people to call you out for "talking weird" over and over again, not able to wrap their heads around why the fuck you would choose more archaic or technical or formal words than the simpler ones that surely come to everyone's minds first. What it's like to have to dedicate a sizable chunk of attention to filtering through every single word you say out loud in real time before you say it, to make absolutely sure that it isn't a word people will judge you for using or make fun of you for using, just so you'll have a chance of being taken seriously. Learning through trial and error how to filter out the words that other people don't think are normal or casual enough for the conversation, even though for you, the word choice that's "natural-sounding" enough for them is the third or fourth word you came up with when searching for the right way to phrase something in your head. I wish I could explain just how long it takes to say fucking anything after spending a lifetime doing that during every single conversation, and how repetitive and long-winded you end up being when you spend so long coming up with alternative ways of saying every little thing you ever think. And I wish people realized that, at the very least for autistic people and autistic-coded characters, speech that's seen as pretentious is really just the way they talk when they're not putting in the extra effort to filter through every word they say just so others will take the time to listen.
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ok imagine you're an mi6 agent who's been on an undercover mission for the last 2 years and then you're meant to interrogate some guy but instead you free him and you have a moment and then you meet again in vienna when you're both sent there to kill someone but you both have the same strategy of wounding not killing and then you give him something to make he finds you again because you have to leave soon and when he finds you again in your safe house you notice that he has drawn you and he's smart and keeps up with you and you go on a mission together and you have to revive him after he died and saved his life again and then you have to betray him and THEN he follows you into the mountains on a motorcycle but rather hurts himself than hurting you when given the choice and when you meet again after that whole thing you ask him to come away with you and he says nothing and he pretty much rejects you. how do you deal with that. also after that your evil boss says that you have to kill him and his friend so you can keep the trust of your evil boss and your even eviler boss :)) bc something similar happened to my friend ilsa faust.
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