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pooma-education · 2 years

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Teacher motivation

Purely motivational.....

Extrinsic and Intrinsic Teacher and student motivation in Government state board schools in India.

J O B....Joy Of Being.

Being a Job holder is a blessing. Above which the best of you are blessed with Govt Jobs. People say, Govt work is God's work.

Generally, People prefer to work in Govt institutions, but don't prefer for studies.

People prefer to travel in private sojourners, but never in Govt transports.

People prefer to study in Govt professional institutions for higher studies, but prefer not for school studies.

People prefer to open an account in Govt banks, but prefer to deposit funds in private banks.

People prefer to refer Govt laws and orders, but prefer to follow their own laws.

People prefer private hospitals for treatment, but not Govt hospitals.

What we pay for quality products in private, much better than this a Govt can give you with less price.....still we don't prefer.

Well I wonder! A private limited can offer their services in a better way, then why not Govt.

150 Cr peoples, 150 Cr working brains, 300 Cr working hands in one nation. But are we behind its growth and development?

Please think over it!!!!

Providing a quality education for all lies at the heart of the NEP Agenda.

Achieving this goal will require ‘well-qualified, trained, adequately remunerated, and above all motivated teachers’

Mere qualification may not serve the purpose.. Experience may serve a little. And Motivation may serve its full purpose.

Our quest is that who and how can a teacher be motivated. A teacher knows well how to teach and how to motivate/prepare someone to learn. But a motivated teacher know apart from how to teach to how to learn and make them to learn. Please do remember: Which is important? Learning or Teaching. Both are processes. Learning takes first.

However, global trends indicate that teacher motivation has been falling in recent years, leading to teacher shortages.

With motivation playing an important role in teacher performance, reversing this trend is critical to maintaining quality teaching and thus positively impacting student learning outcomes.

We know it...Both high-and low-income countries around the world face issues in both attracting and retaining quality teachers, due largely to poor motivation and incentive structures.

Data show that teacher salaries have fallen compared to other occupations with similar educational requirements, leading the profession to suffer a drop in prestige.

In many low-income countries, teachers are facing rising pupil/teacher ratios (PTRs) and deteriorating working conditions due to increased student enrolment rates

Additional factors contributing to lowered teacher motivation include lack of support from leadership, poor accountability, inadequate living conditions, or violence in schools.

Such issues may lead to increased teacher absenteeism and attrition, meaning students receive fewer hours of instruction.

With teacher motivation driven by a combination of intrinsic and extrinsic factors, finding the proper incentives to influence them is complex and multifaceted.

While many systems have experimented with motivating teachers through bonus pay for meeting specific targets, results have been mixed for such direct extrinsic motivation.

Instead, research shows that allowing teachers more agency to work towards different promotion opportunities can offer a strong incentive to remain in the profession.

Measures that improve teachers’ professionalism, such as collaboration and continuous professional development, have also been shown to improve motivation.

School leaders can play a vital role in inspiring teachers, by offering support, consistent standards, and effective evaluation and accountability structures. Such support from school leaders can further improve professionalism and reduce rates of teacher absenteeism.

¶ In short by points:

1. Financial shortage or resources demotivate teachers:

In countries where salaries place teachers at or below the poverty line, or where a teacher’s salary is well below that of professions requiring similar levels of qualifications, research shows that few other policy options can improve motivation among teachers without low pay being addressed first.

2. Inadequate teaching-learning environment:

Poor working conditions also affect teacher motivation. Limited education budgets may also lead to insufficient resources for school infrastructure or teaching materials.

3. Weak teacher management:

School leaders often do not have suitable training or background experience to provide teachers with proper support or oversight. This can lead to teachers losing trust in their leadership and the established system, lowering expectations and motivation.

4. Career flexibility

Career structures offering more options and choice can improve teacher motivation, but such structures are complicated to implement and typically lead to upheaval in established systems.

5. Gender:

While women make up the majority of the global teaching force, they are underrepresented at the primary school level, as well as in school assistant leadership and management positions because of gender.

This lack of opportunity for career progression can have demotivating effects on women teachers seeking professional growth and advancement.

6. Collobration:

Teacher networks have been found to increase the amount of time teachers spend in the classroom, leading to gains in actual teaching time.

Collaboration can lead directly to senior teachers providing important professional development for their junior colleagues.

Professional development should include relevant topics that teachers can use, otherwise it could have a demotivating effect by seeming to teachers to be a waste of time and resources.

7. Include teacher's inputs in decision making:

To better encourage teachers to feel they have a stake in the education system, they should be involved in decision-making processes whenever possible.

Seeking teacher input at both the school and system level can lead to higher feelings of agency and improve overall motivation.

8. Societal and cultural perceptions:

In many parts of our country, teaching is considered a profession of last resort and does not enjoy the same esteem as other occupations requiring similar levels of education.

This makes recruiting and retaining quality candidates especially difficult. Young teachers often leave the profession after only a few years to seek opportunities in other fields offering higher pay or more prestige.

Improving incentives to attract and retain teachers that are better qualified can shift these views, but changing perceptions can take a long time and requires ongoing effort.

9. Accountabilty and feedback:

School heads cannot expect to have motivated and high-performing teachers without setting out proper guidance and expectations.

Written standards with indicators of success to strive towards can provide teachers with direction and motivation.

¶ Conclusion:

Above all give due respect and response and defined responsibilities to teachers to refrain our society from all sorts of pollutions.

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writemywaytoyourheart · 2 years

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Thank you for your kind words ❤️❤️

Awww that’s great ! Working with kids must be so interesting they’re so cute but weird at the same time sometimes I really wonder what goes through their mind hahahaha but that’s what makes them so loveable. It’s great that you’ve decided to work in this field, I feel like nobody wants to be a teacher or anything related to education nowadays, or at least I had this feeling when I was living in france, those jobs are so underrated and it’s honestly sad because they’re essential. But you really gotta be passionate too, kids require a lot of attention and patience and kindness!

I totally understand why you stopped working and going to school full time, it’s si exhausting you literally have time for nothing else, you don’t even have enough time to sleep lol… I’m glad that you took time for you I hope you got some rest bc life is already stressful so when you add studies and a job it’s even more stressful.

And yes I’m trying to get some rest it’s just that this week is really hectic but yeah it’s so important to take for ourselves, I’ve just started embroidery to relax and it’s doing a good job !!!

Also I don’t even know if I wrote everything properly it’s just that English is not my first language so sometimes I struggle to express my thoughts I want to say more but it’s getting difficult bc I have no one to talk to in English 😒😒

Love u 🫶🏻❤️

Sorry I'm answering this so late!!

I absolutely love my job even though it does get crazy sometimes! I agree, there's a huge shortage of teachers 😞 the kiddos really need people that care, and teachers need to be appreciated!

It does get to be too much with school and work all the time, I took that break I needed and I hope you can do the same!!!! Don't let yourself get burnt out 💜💜💜 embroidery sounds like so much fun! I've always wanted to try, was just intimidated by how beautiful it is and how hard it seemed haha, you should show me some of your work sometime if you're comfortable 😊

Btw, your English is amazing. I wish my Korean was even HALF as good as your English, I would be set for life 😔

ILY ❤

-chip

#asks #sopikooo

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woosansang · 2 years

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so my day went like this: school goes for six hours, i taught basically five of those hours today since i worked through lunch, spent nearly two hours after school finished doing work, went to dance for three hours, then returned home and spent two hours doing work again.

and then people wonder why there is a worldwide shortage of teachers bc everyone keeps quitting the profession bc they are sick of being overworked, unappreciated and underpaid 🙃

#jazzy talks #it's midnight goodnight

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cinaja · 3 years

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Before the Wall Epilogue

Masterlist

----

Ten years after the Wall

The crops have been coming along well this year, just the right balance of sun and rain and wind promising a rich harvest. It leads to a good mood throughout the human parts of the Continent. In the aftermath of the war, they have all made their experiences with food shortages, and so everyone is relieved that they seem to have moved past these times. All the bigger is the shock when, only a week before the grain was meant to be brough in, heavy thunderstorms with rain and hail ruin most of the harvest in one of Angolere’s northern provinces.

Andromache spends two mildly exhausting days visiting the region, travelling from city to city and offering reassurances that everything is under control, there are no risks of food shortages. Her presence has no practical purpose, the local authorities are more than capable of handling the situation, but everyone is nervous enough that they need someone to reassure them that all will be well.

By the time she reaches the last village, she is drained, although she is too well-trained to show it. As patiently as in the first village she visited yesterday, she listens to the town spokeswoman describe their situation, allows her to show her the village and the mostly-ruined regions.

“We will send grain from other regions,” she promises, as she did in every place she visited so far. The south of Angolere had rich harvests these years, and the other queens have already promised to send food as well should we not get by after all.”

She accepts an invitation for dinner and spends a few hours sitting in the townhall together with most of the village, making pleasant conversation, before she excuses herself. When she steps outside, she expected to be greeted by one of her guards. Instead, Yanis is waiting for her, leaning against a fence.

When he sees Andromache, he offers an exaggerated bow, grinning broadly as he straightens. “Good evening Your Majesty. May I be your escort for the evening?”

Andromache grins back. “I don’t know. You see, I have a husband who is waiting for me at home with our children.”

“I hear those children are sleeping already, and your husband missed you terribly these last few days and thought he’d pick you up.”

Andromache laughs and leans over to kiss him.

“How did it go?” he asks, wrapping an arm around her middle.

“All good,” Andromache says. “I barely needed to do anything, just reassure people a bit.”

These days, all problems she has to deal with seem easy. There is still a lot of work – drafting laws, dealing with arising problems, day-to-day governing work – but it only ever seems pleasant. What is a disagreement over a new law compared to the horror of war? Or to the initial years afterwards, when there were millions of displaced, traumatized people to deal with and they came close to starvation almost every year. Six years ago, a loss of harvest like this would have meant famine and deaths. Now, all she has to do is organize for food to be sent over from different provinces.

Things are good.

“I’m sure you were brilliant,” Yanis says with a broad smile. “Meanwhile, I have won a significant victory in the never-ending battle of convincing Leli that when her teachers tell her something, it is not a suggestion but an order, and I managed to keep Tano from breaking any priceless artifacts while running through the palace.”

Andromache laughs. “You’re my hero,” she says, half-teasing and half-sincere.

Yanis quit his work in the palace guard when Andromache got pregnant with Leli six years ago and has been staying at home to raise her and – three years later – Tano ever since. He could have kept his job had they hired someone to look after their children, but for Yanis, there was never even a question in that regard: He wanted to be there for their children as they grew up. It makes it easier for Andromache to know that even when she is busy at work, sometimes for days at a time, he is home with their children.

“My first meeting tomorrow is at eleven,” she says. “That ought to leave plenty of time for a nice family breakfast.”

----

Mor spends her days travelling the Continent, dealing with anyone her uncle currently wishes to improve relationships with. She has yet to decide whether she loves or hates her new position. Both, perhaps. She loves that it allows her to travel far and wide, to leave the Night Court and its restrictions behind, if only for a few weeks at a time. She loves the protection it gives her.

She hates the memories it brings up, though. For her, the Continent is full of memories of happier times. (No, that is not right. She shouldn’t think back to the years of war and wish herself back into that time. But then, to go back would mean getting Andromache back, and for that, she would accept a hundred years of war. But Andromache is on the other side of the Wall, married now and forever lost to her.)

Sometimes, Mor also hates the people she has to deal with. Today, it is Shey, who has been loosely allied with the Night Court ever since the war ended. Mor doesn’t know exactly how that came about, but her uncle exports iron for weapons and armour to Shey and he sends Mor to visit the emperor at least once a year.

Today is the first day of that annual visit and Shey is holding a welcome-celebration for her. It is a huge honour – Shey is easily the most important person on the Continent now, and him holding a celebration in honour of the emissary from a tiny Prythianian court is very unusual.

If Mor had been stupid enough to think it is for her sake, she might have actually felt honoured. But this celebration isn’t because of her, none of this is because of her at all. It’s all about Miryam and the fact that everyone knows that Mor was friends with her. That is why there are no doors locked to her on the Continent, why everyone so readily meets with her. Because Miryam and Drakon were her friends, and so to host her is to flaunt some sort of connection to them.

No, Mor does not enjoy the party at all, even if the music is brilliant, as is the food. She just makes conversation because it is what is expected of her and downs glass after glass of the clear, sparkling wine favoured here in the north to make it bearable.

She wonders what they would all say if they knew how things ended between Miryam and her, that she abandoned her before the end and left her to die. If they knew that she was so terrible that Andromache could no longer bear to so much as be around her anymore. If they knew about the charmed necklace that still lies unused at the bottom of some drawer in her rooms in Velaris.

No one knows about any of that, though. And no one ever will. Maybe one day, Mor will even be able to fool herself into believing that the sole reason her and Andromache split up was the Wall, that she never argued with Miryam and the only reason she isn’t visiting her is out of worry for her safety. It is not today, though, and so she downs another glass of wine and smiles at the nearest dignitary and allows him to pull her to the dance floor.

----

No one is coming for him.

Jurian fought against that truth for years, but he has given up on denying it for a while now. What use is it to lie to himself? No one is coming to save him. His allies, his friends, seem to have forgotten entirely about him. They moved on with their lives and likely never thought of him again, didn’t care enough to bother freeing him from that terrible nightmare his life turned into.

Jurian hates all of them. Andromache and Nakia and all the others for leaving him behind. Drakon for pretending to be his friend and then betraying him and making Miryam turn away from him. Miryam for turning against him. For not saving him. For dying. Her, he hates most of all.

----

Drakon puts down his quill and scans the contents of the text he just finished once more before putting the paper on the stack with the other usable results. That stack is the only tidy part of the table he was working on, the rest is a mess of books, most of them lying open on the relevant pages, and crumbled papers filled with ideas he dismissed as useless already. A few of those even ended up on the floor.

Well, that ought to be enough for now. He’s done with his edits on the draft for the new tax law they will be discussing later today. He still wants to show his edits to Miryam before then, but he still has plenty of time left for that.

Rising to his feet, he sets about cleaning up his mess. The papers he doesn’t need anymore go into the fire, he closes the books he used for reference and puts them on a second stack next to the one with the finished edits. He will be taking them with him, just to be sure.

Carrying the eight books as well as the stack of papers is a difficult task, given that he still doesn’t have proper use of his right arm. He has to carry the books with his left hand, the papers stuck between his useless right arm and his body. That movement alone hurts, but he is used to it by now. (There are magical prosthetics that function almost as well as an actual limb. But… well, Drakon hasn’t decided yet.)

A look at the clock reveals that it is almost seven. Drakon was in the library for the last four hours, and by now, Miryam should probably be awake. (Their sleeping schedules do not align very well lately. They usually go to bed together, but Miryam rarely manages to sleep more than half an hour before waking up again and then spends most of the night working, going to bed only in the early hour of the morning, while Drakon generally manages to sleep for a few hours but then cannot go back to sleeping when he wakes up. Miryam sometimes jokes that at least their inability to ever sleep through the night makes them both very productive rulers.)

Books balancing on his left hand, he walks through the halls of the library and out into the city. They founded their new capital nine years ago, and everything about the city still screams new. Many houses are only half-finished, as are all government buildings. Right now, their government meets in an improvised city hall and most of the high-ranking government members (including Miryam and Drakon) live in nearby houses. The council insisted that they start building a palace sometime, but that hasn’t been a priority yet.

The city Drakon is walking through now is nothing like Sajeo or any of the other cities in Erithia, all of whom were old, each building full of history. Drakon does miss Erithia, but he doesn’t think that difference is necessarily a bad thing, at least for their purposes. Not all history is good, after all, and in their situation, it certainly isn’t helpful. As it is, they all get a fresh start. There are human houses being build next to faerie ones, and all of them are equally new. They are all starting over together, and in a few centuries when this city has matured a bit, that will be the history the people living here will be able to look back upon. It will be one of unity, Drakon hopes.

----

Miryam frowns at her reflection in the mirror. Hair mussed from sleep and still wearing her long nightdress, she doesn’t look particularly dignified, but that is not what she has a problem with right now. No, the problem is that she looks young. It’s like she hasn’t aged at all in the last ten years. If she is being honest, the years of peace actually make her look far younger than she did at the end of the War. Then, at twenty-five, she looked more like thirty-five than she does now.

“Would you say,” she asks, turning to look over at Daín who is floating over her bed, “that I look my age?”

Daín is silent for a moment, cocking his head to the side to study her. “Now?” He asks. “You want to talk about that now?”

Miryam shrugs.

“Mortal ages are terribly hard to tell just by looks, really. There is no telling how old anyone truly is, as evidenced by you now looking younger than you did when we first met,” Daín says. When Miryam gives him a flat look, he quickly adds, “But in your case, I would say that you look twenty-five, for the simply reason that you haven’t aged a day since you were resurrected. Which is what you were getting at, isn’t it?”

Miryam glares at him, trying to ignore the sting of the words. “You knew the entire time,” she says, more statement than question. “And you never thought to tell us? Even when we spent the last five years trying to figure out if I was aging or not?”

“And yet, through all that time, you never thought to ask me,” Daín says with a sharp smile. He has been getting better at mimicking precise expressions lately. “You ask about everything – history, human culture, magic, the other worlds. Yet this one thing, you never brought up, not once in the four years since you decided to talk to me again. Neither did Drakon.” He shrugs. “I figured you didn’t want to know.”

Like it or not, he might have a point. Miryam didn’t want to know. If she is entirely honest, she still doesn’t. She never wanted to be immortal, not even in the not-actually-immortal way the Fae are. She always thought that having a limited number of years made those years more precious.

“Resurrections are a tricky matter,” Daín offers. He actually manages to sound comforting. “There is no telling what side-effects there might be. Even I still cannot tell exactly how it works.”

“Well.” Miryam wraps her arms around herself. “I suppose the alternative was to be dead.”

She doesn’t like the idea of being immortal. Not at all. But if there is one thing she knows for sure, it’s that she prefers it to having died and stayed dead at the end of the war. These last ten years certainly weren’t easy, but they were good. The best ones of Miryam’s life, probably. She wouldn’t have wanted to trade them for the world.

“So you’re alright with it?” Daín asks.

“I guess I’ll have to be,” Miryam says with a shrug. At least it doesn’t bother her as much as she thought it might. It isn’t ideal, but she would rather have a too-long life than a too-short one. She smiles at Daín in a way that is hopefully reassuring. “And now, I need to get dressed. So, you know.”

“I’m already gone,” Daín says, winks at her and vanishes.

Miryam glances at her reflection once more before turning to her wardrobe. She sincerely hopes that she is at least only “immortal” in the way the Fae are, which isn’t so immortal at all. But well, that is a question for later. For now, she has other things to worry about, and for those, she needs to dress.

Drakon barges into the room just as she buttons up her jacket. He doesn’t look at Miryam – cannot, because he is balancing a stack of books on his left hand, it swaying dangerously with each step.

Miryam picks up the four books at the top and stands up on her toes to kiss him over the now-smaller stack of books he is still holding. “Busy morning?” She asks, smiling softly.

Drakon smiles back and manages to place the rest of his books as well as the stack of papers he was holding under his right arm on the nightstand without any incidents.

“Yes,” he says, turning back to Miryam and wrapping an arm around her. “Very productive, though. I reviewed the new tax law we were drafting, and I think it should probably work out. Maybe you could read over it once more before the meeting later, though. And I brough along the books I used for reference, just to be sure.”

Miryam’s smile deepens. Of course be brought the books, as if there will be anyone but him at the meeting who read all of them.

“Sure,” she says, although she doesn’t think her reading over it will accomplish anything but making Drakon feel more secure about it. “I’ll read them right after breakfast.”

That way, they will still have time for small changes before the meeting, even if Miryam doubts she will find anything of note. She learned a lot about law-making in the last years and she would say that she is decent, but especially when it comes to the small details (which is what they are dealing with at this stage), she’s nowhere near as good as Drakon.

They go have breakfast on the small balcony belonging to the set of rooms they share. It is Miryam’s favourite place in the entire city, high enough that she can overlook the square below as well as some of the nearby streets. As her and Drakon eat and discuss the things they both worked on during the night (the tax laws for Drakon and a logistic issue with distributing food for Miryam), Miryam looks out over the city.

By now, the city has awoken and the square is full with people rushing about, going about their daily activities. Humans and faeries, all living together in peace. A woman is hurrying along, trailing two small children behind her. A young Seraphim girl and a human boy are playing together by the fountain. Next to them, a group of adults sits and eats a quick lunch, likely before going to work.

Miryam could spend hours watching them. On bad days, when her nightmares are worse than usual and the shadows of what happened chase her, she sometimes does. Watching the people down there go about their lives, happy and free and at peace, always makes the guilt and pain easier to bear. These people will have good lives, they and their children will be free, and that alone makes all that it took to get them here worth it. It makes everything worth it.

----

A/N: So, this is the final chapter. After over a year and 370k words written, I can't quite belive that this story is actually over. Writing this story has been lots of fun (and I might revisit it for a few oneshots sometime), and I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.

At this point, I'd also like to thank everyone who read this story and left comments or likes - all of you have really made my day every time. A special thanks goes (once again) to @croissantcitysucks for all the wonderful conversations we had about this story, for all the great feedback and help when I had problems, and, of course, for all of the backstory surrounding Daín and the Mother (also, I'm looking forward to you acotar rewrite so much and I can only recomment everyone read it when it comes out!) It's really been so much fun!

Tags: @femtopulsed @aileywrites

#this is it guys #the last chapter #i can't believe this story is over #i will miss these characters #might write smth with them again if I have time #i hope you liked this (hopeful - like I promised) ending #and ofc the story in general (although if you stuck around through the last 370k words i hope you did lmao)#before the wall #THE LAST CHAPTER!!!#miryam #jurian #drakon

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photogirl894 · 3 years

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Hey everyone! So I know about a month and a half back, I made a few posts about my job, my terrible work situation and how stressed I was. Well, I want to give you guys an update on that and also give some additional clarification on what my situation had been before, since not everyone knows. If you do know, you can skip to the part about the update. It's gonna be a long post ahead, but if you're interested, you can read it below the cut:

To start off, I work in the special education department at my old high school. I'm a para/an aid and I work in the Extended Resource Room, which in case anyone doesn't know, I work with students with both mental and physical disabilities. It's a wonderful job and I've done work like this for years. This will be my 5th year working at the school, but my 2nd year in this particular classroom.

I already had some issues prior and that's why I switched classrooms. That's another can of worms that I won't get into, but essentially I had an ugly experience with another coworker and was forced to switch rooms to get away from them.

The issue with last year was my teacher that I worked for. She's been at the school for years, but has been reported for issues with her behavior in the past and sadly, nothing has been done about it. She was very unprofessional in how she ran things. She blamed almost any student behaviors on us paras and then wouldn't talk to or discipline the students in any way. After school, when the kids were on the busses, she would call meetings where we would discuss incidents that maybe happened during the day, but then she would openly call us out in front of everyone for how we handled certain situations, especially if we handled things in a way she wouldn't have. But she would sit at her computer all day, looking up where to buy puppies for her teenage daughter or flights to Japan for her son in college, and would never work with the kids!! It got so bad that she reduced a few of us to tears, myself included. And she did it all with this sweet, almost innocent demeanor; she was never harsh or yelled at us or anything like that. I suggested to my fellow paras at one point that we go to the principal and report her, but most of them were flaky and didn't want to. Only one coworker ended up reporting her at the end of the year and that was cuz she had gotten another job and was leaving. She was told by the principal that he would talk to the rest of the paras and get our side of the story, but he never talked to any of us. Needless to say, it got so bad to where I just hated going to work every day. I'd be going in wondering, "What unnecessary hell is my teacher going to give me today?"

There was a new high school being built that I thought I could transfer to and just get out of the hellhole I was in. I knew some of the other staff that were going to go there and I also knew a couple people in the administration that I had talked to about transferring prior to applying, plus there's a huge para shortage in our district, so I figured I had a pretty good shot of getting in.

Sadly, I was wrong.

I don't know why my application didn't get accepted. They wouldn't tell me. Which made no sense cuz I applied the day the position was posted! I found this out on my birthday, no less, during the summer, while at lunch with my mom. After that, I tried applying to other schools before the school year started, but no school ever got back to me. That's what had me so stressed before: I was just so desperate to get another job at another school, didn't matter where, before the school year started just so I wouldn't have to go back to my current one.

When I say I was dreading going to work, I literally meant it. I was having emotional breakdowns thinking about going back and enduring all that again. There were other people around me, friends and family, that were all getting new jobs (even some that were hardly even trying) and yet I couldn't get one school to get back to me even though I was more than qualified for the positions. It was really discouraging. For the first few days of the school year going back, I was just on edge.

However...this is where the update comes in!

This year has actually been okay, so far! A couple things to know: (1) We're short-staffed this year in our classroom because not all the positions were able to be filled, and (2) We have 5 kids in wheelchairs this year, 4 of which need help with their mobility and 1 one of which is in a back brace (luckily, only temporarily). Because of all this, my teacher has actually had to help out a lot more with working with the kids. She helps with changing diapers for the kids in wheelchairs, transferring them to and from changing tables, standers or walkers (especially our kid with the back brace cuz they're a heavier kid and my teacher is the only strong person in our room), or working with students if someone is out. So far, she hasn't had a lot of time to sit and do nothing at her computer and she hasn't called out any of us on any child behaviors. There was a day a few weeks ago where she called our first meeting about a small incident that happened with a student in a gen ed class. The para with the student was one my teacher picked on the most last year, so I was worried. However, after the para explained the situation, my teacher said, "I think the student is just overwhelmed and overstimulated being in that gen ed class, so we can see about pulling them out." That was it!! She didn't blame my coworker for the behavior! So far, my teacher has actually been really good about her behavior and how she's been treating us.

I have two thoughts on possibly why this is. Either (1) Because she's had to work a lot more with us this so far this year and maybe she's actually developing some respect for us, or (2) even though he never talked to the rest of us paras, maybe the principal did in fact talk to my teacher about the things my former coworker had reported and that prompted her to change her behavior. I really don't know what it is, but there hasn't been any of her former behavior this year.

It's still only the beginning of the year; we're only a quarter of the way through, so things could still possibly change. I'm not holding my breath that things will stay this way, but at the same time, I'm trying to be positive considering how things have been and I haven't dreaded going to work in weeks. In fact, a couple people I know who went to the new high school's special education department have done nothing but complain about their job there! It's always, "I love my job, but..." and then ranting about how horrible a coworker is or how difficult a certain child is. I honestly haven't had much to complain about so far in terms of my teacher, coworkers or even students! So maybe it was better for me that I didn't end up going to the new high school.

Right now, I can honestly say that I'm happy. I'm okay with where I am right now. My friends at the other school keep telling me, "We're trying to see if we can get you a spot eventually over here" and I just end up thinking, "You know, I think I'm okay right now."

I know in a lot of my posts from over a month ago, I made it seem like I was losing my mind, which I was...but honestly, things are much better now. I'm praying things will stay the way they are and my teacher doesn't end up reverting back to how she used to be. We've still got a ways to go for the year, but I'm feeling positive about things right now.

I want to extend an enormous thank you to @moonstrider9904 , @fantasyproductions , @nimata-beroya , @loth-wolffe , @nahoney22 and @the-sad-batch for all being there for me at different times throughout this last stressful month and a half; for listening to my rants about work and my stress, for giving me advice and for helping me just get through it all. You guys truly are the best and I really can't thank you enough! You guys were my anchor through some really difficult times, more so than any of my friends at home. I have a feeling I may be missing a person or two, so if I am, I extend my thanks to you as well! It's been crazy and well, my brain is just all over the place 🤪

So that's my life update in terms of my job. To put it simply: I'm doing better and I'm okay 😊 Here's hoping it stays that way!!

#photogirlrant #photogirl life update

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paullicino · 3 years

Text

The Run Home

Taken from, and funded by, my Patreon. Content warning: Contains some stories of homophobia.

Well. Writing this was hard.

I began writing it in so many ways, each time knowing I had no way to finish. I meandered through mirrors and hospitals and lip balm and nudes. I had to look at myself, which I’m very tired of doing.

I did indeed say nudes. More on those soon.

I tried to separate all the ideas I had. I tried to pull them apart and I found instead that they stretched like gum. They stuck to me. They stuck to one another. They were only functional as a lumpy, gooey whole, ugly and unappealing. Wet. Endlessly chewed but never reduced.

Imperfect.

I’ll begin with the run home.

---

In my childhood memories, we lived at the bottom of a hill. That’s a more than generous romanticisation. In reality, and with some online topographic maps, it’s easy to see that there’s a seven foot incline gradually leading down the road to my house. Still, that doesn’t change my experience and perspective as a five-year-old. We lived at the bottom of a hill.

The run home was down that hill. Giddy momentum took you past rows of identical houses, the cut-and-paste postwar terraced homes that were sprawled across our town, each fronted with some oversized car from the seventies or eighties. The run home was the conclusion of the walk back from school and I always lost. It didn’t matter who I was with, how I felt or what the weather was doing. I would come last and, to my great upset, I would never understand why. I would try my hardest, feet slapping on the uneven grey pavement, but it was pointless. I was the worst person at running and I always would be.

We were encouraged to run home because there is no age too young to encourage boys to compete, much as there is no shortage of things for them to find competition in. After all, in competition there is victory, in victory there is superiority and in superiority there is one of the cornerstones of Being A Man. To Be A Man, you’ve got to demonstrate skill and mastery somewhere, in something. At the very least.

I wasn’t off to a good start.

---

I have a memory from a year or two later where I’m looking at my mother’s jewelry. I’m looking at necklaces and rings, stones in particular, because the colours are fascinating. They are rich and bright, as exciting to me as fireworks or fairy lights, and I’m going to spend all my life loving beautiful colours in art and in nature. I’m also seeing which rings fit on my tiny fingers. None do, of course, because I’m small, but I stop because my father is furious. He’s furious because he’s worried that my trying on a woman’s jewelry will make me gay. He has also been furious that we’ve been doing needlework at school. He wants that to stop so that I don’t grow up to be a gay person, except he doesn’t use the phrase “gay person.”

These lessons are obvious. The worst thing I can be, worse even than a failure, is gay.

Nobody is gay in the nineteen-eighties. They are gay on TV or in the news or somewhere far away, abstract and unreal, but in our world nobody would dare be gay. It is an insult at school, where Section 28 prevents teachers from portraying it as acceptable, and it is a source of fear, with the spread of HIV/AIDS, which nobody understands. Camp characters are comic characters. LGBTQ people aren’t pushed to the margins of society, they are driven there, where they are kept, mocked and beaten.

If you want to feel part of a group, if you want to be seen as being on the right side of things, you can always join in with some public punishment.

My best friend is gay. We run home down the hill together. I don’t know this and will not know it for many, many years, long after we lose touch. I have no idea if he knew then, or when, but many friends now tell me they knew exactly who they were attracted to at a very young age.

I wonder how he felt. What he thought. Who he talked to.

I grow up attracted to girls. I don’t have to think much about sexuality and homophobia comes easy. There is a joke we have at school. It goes like this:

“Do you have AIDS?”

You say no.

“Are you positive?”

At the end of 1991 the singer in my favourite band declares that he has AIDS and then dies as a result of complications from the disease. It is a bold and blatant declaration from a very famous figure, pioneering, and it becomes one more excuse for school bullies to attack me. I’m at a new school in a new town and I’ve gone from feeling popular in classes full of people I know to having a single friend and no sense of belonging.

It’s all getting worse there. I’m not interested in the right things, I’m not good at handling bullies, I’m not strong and I’m not a brave person. I’m really failing at being a young man but, as I’m reminded several times, at least I’m not gay.

---

There is a camera going down my throat. My throat has been numbed and an IV in my hand is giving me a mixture of fentanyl and midazolam, which keeps me partly sedated. On a screen I can’t see, a doctor is looking at the inside of my duodenum and directing biopsies of the ulcers there. Each sample he takes feels like a tiny tug inside of me. A tap in a haze, a distraction in a dream.

It will be Christmas soon. There are bears painted on the hospital wall and hints of decoration in the halls.

We already expected that I had a duodenal ulcer, that it was leaking blood inside my guts. Now we know that I have three, because my body has decided to really be a drama prince. The specialist who looks at them has told me they have been brought about by a combination of stress, by a bug inside me called h. pylori and by the painkillers I have been taking to deal with frequent migraines. The migraines are a side-effect of the blood loss, so I guess that cycle is my body’s little joke.

The time is now. We’re here, in Vancouver, in Canada. There is no hill to run down. There is a mountain I used to occasionally hike, but the last time I tried my body struggled. That was a year and a half ago. It was one of the first clues.

I don’t recommend duodenal ulcers or leaking blood inside yourself. Your red blood cell count plummets and the resulting anemia gives you those migraines, plus a lack of focus, confusion, exhaustion, chest pains, digestive issues and a heart rate that rockets when you get off the sofa. Walking one block to the shop produced a thunderous pounding behind my rib cage. I used to box. I used to jog. I used to climb that mountain no problem. Now my heart goes crazy when I climb out of a chair.

I also don’t recommend h. pylori. Those ulcers cause me incredible pain when I eat or, sometimes, when I don’t. Curiously, I had some of the same symptoms of h. pylori back when I was a teenager, but they were never investigated. That’s in part because the behaviour of this bug wasn’t understood then and nobody tested for it. It seems there’s still no guarantee in England you’ll be tested for it even now. People are still studying and learning about it. In 2005, two men were awarded the Nobel Prize for their research into this bug.

I was tested for it here, in Canada, because my GP was concerned. We don’t know how long I’ve had it, or how many times. In one of the first conversations I had with this man, a stranger on the other end of a telephone, he very frankly told me first that it can cause cancer, second that we must eliminate it immediately.

I don’t usually have conversations like that. I didn’t know what to think.

The camera comes back out of my mouth. It brings with it tiny pieces of my insides, which will be taken away and tested. We destroyed the h. pylori, the tests will say, and I do not have cancer.

Although this is my own body, I don’t get to see inside it right now, but I do get to review the pictures a few weeks later. Most of the insides of this thing are a mystery to me and always have been. I don’t trust it. I don’t know what it’s doing, or why. I always feel uncertain about how it might respond to instructions that I give.

I still have the pictures of my insides. I have kept them. I have returned to only being able to view the rest of this thing from the outside.

---

I look at my body from the outside now. Here. Today. You look at my body, too, and you let me know what you think of it and in so many ways. Only some are explicit.

---

The first comments I got about my weight were that it was too low. There were amounts that young men were supposed to weigh and I had failed to reach those. I was in my early teens and PE classes had progressed from simple running to the sort of elaborate things that required capital E Equipment, like football shoes with studs. The list of things I couldn’t do had grown substantially since the run home and I was laughed at for not being able to jump hurdles, which I had never practiced before.

I developed a strange, private fantasy where I told myself that, as an adult, I would top out at over six feet and touch around two hundred pounds. Those seemed like cool numbers. Good metrics. We’re all about metrics with our bodies.

I knew by then where I stood in the pecking order. I had failed a lot of the tests, evidenced by my avoiding confrontations, my disinterest in sports and sports culture, and my consistently failing to find the right sorts of women attractive. I was being a boy all wrong.

Still, it didn’t matter quite so much if I was smart, if I was getting good grades and succeeding according to some other metric. As long as I could demonstrate capability in some way, I had validity as a young man. But that validity was not going to come from my body.

---

It occurs to me now that I had such a terrible haircut then. I spent far too much of my time trying to arrange or to manage it, hoping that might make me a little more acceptable. It didn’t, it just made me vain and geeky. I would look in the mirror and see only things I needed to fix.

Maintenance. Repairs.

---

I am writing this paragraph on April twenty-first, twenty twenty-one. I have had two days of constant illness. It’s not so bad, as I can still find ways to enjoy myself when I’m unwell, but the cramps and tiredness are unpredictable. Last year I nuked my insides with antibiotics to get rid of that h. pylori, which was a resounding success, but it also destroyed a great deal of other bacteria that lives in my digestive system. My GP advised me it could be many months or more before that returned to normal. My guess is it still hasn’t, and I’ve heard of some cases taking even longer. The anti-anxiety medication I’ve been taking since the start of the year also turns my guts (and even the world) sideways. It does, however, keep the brain inside this body functioning.

This is how things are lately. Sometimes I go for a walk in the evening and have to rush home because incredible cramps ripple through my insides. Sometimes a food that I was previously happy to eat makes my guts absolutely furious. Recovery is going to take time, but I remind myself that things are improving.

I have energy again. My red blood cell count, one of those vital metrics, has been climbing. The migraines have melted away. I have gone from struggling to walk up a hill to climbing all the stairs to my apartment, just like before. It’s ridiculous to me that so much disruption came from a microscopic bug and the tiny holes it formed.

I want to exercise more, but I’m not sure it’s time. I miss being fit.

One of the medications I am on is called a proton pump inhibitor, which reduces the amount of acid my stomach creates to help my ulcers heal and to prevent them from recurring. My GP suggests I may be on these for months, years, perhaps decades. The other is a drug for anxiety and panic known as escitaloprám. I have moved up from a dosage of five milligrams to ten and then fifteen. Twenty is the highest possible.

The proton pump inhibitor makes me burp a lot. I’m a real catch these days.

I write in short bursts right now. I am not very good at it. I conclude my writing on April twenty-first, twenty twenty-one by making an admission that both shames and scares me: I came back to Canada not as the man I used to be.

---

What man was I?

---

I grew up with two older half-sisters, with their peers, with a lot of older women in my extended family and with school friends who were both girls and boys. I didn’t think much about this until, a year or two after the bullying started, when a friend asked me a question.

“How do you talk to girls?”

He couldn’t ask his father because his father had moved out. He and his mother were telling everyone it was because he needed to live closer to his job, which was what his father had said and which they then all insisted was a very normal thing for anyone to do.

His father stopped talking to his mother and instead communicated with her by leaving notes around the house.

My friend started getting many more gifts and toys. He acted out a lot.

---

I’m glad my friend at least asked this question. It has never been more apparent to me than now, in twenty twenty-one, that many people still never have.

I would always say that I didn’t know, because there was no secret, no formula or no particular method. But we were made to believe that there was and this belief, this certainty that there was some trick, caused so many problems, so much stress and so much stupidity. It also caused so much harm. One of the most unsettling shocks you can experience as an adult man is the discovery that others of your gender, people you may have felt you knew and trusted, believe they knew full well how to talk to a particular kind of person, that they have placed into a particular kind of classification, before going on to perform something that falls somewhere between disastrously offensive and outright harmful.

It’s always the men who think they know.

---

By the time my schoolfriend came to me scrying for all the formulae, passphrases and occult codewords used for communicating with girls, I had long since opted out of the run home and so much that was like it. I didn’t play football, with its capital E Equipment like shoes with studs, and beyond that I didn’t understand the shared language of it, nor the cultural exchanges that developed around it. I couldn’t tell you what a wing-back was, or a cap, or explain the offside rule. I didn’t know which teams were winning or losing. I could barely control my own winning and losing.

One of the first lessons any loser learns is that you can’t lose if you don’t play. When you stop losing, you stop being deficient. You can pretend you never really cared, feel superior and then score your own kind of victory that way, regaining superiority and a sense of control. I think this is what happens to young men and boys who feel isolated or rejected by their peers. They can claim the game is rigged, the rules are unfair, the contest is stupid.

It helps dispel some of the shame you feel when you fail to adequately physically demonstrate yourself in public, or when talking to girls, when you show others how bad you are at being a boy or, worse, a young man. It was a philosophy that I and more than a few others bought into. It became our version of shared teenage cynicism as the school changing rooms became a dangerous place, full of those impatient to grow, brimming with ambition, frustration and aggression. The easiest way to exercise any of these is to punch down and I knew where my underweight body stood in the pecking order.

I had gained more than my fair share of strangeness. I no longer fitted in. I became morose and moody, which only made me stranger and made integrating even more difficult. I was awkward, oversensitive and weird in so many ways. I was out there talking to girls. I was being a young man all wrong.

---

I am writing this paragraph on May twenty-first, twenty twenty-one. My GP has recently referred me for some more surgery. It is unrelated to anything else I will write about here, but another issue that has been present for much of my life. I’m so surprised that I’m emotional. I’m not used to having medical care this responsive. I’m not used to being listened to.

A few years ago, my GP gave a talk in London about how important Britain’s free healthcare is, how overworked the country’s GPs are, how they take on extra work for free to support their colleagues and how other nations, including Canada, are poaching them with better salaries and working conditions.

Like me, my GP is British. And he is now here, in Canada, treating me in a way he might never have been able to in England.

And here I am, getting better.

More on that recovery soon.

---

First, here follows some stories about doctors.

I first saw a doctor about those strange, lifelong issues I’ve had with my guts some time in my mid teens. This began a series of appointments across my life that mostly involved conversations without examination. The conclusion was always that nothing in particular was wrong, that perhaps I needed to change my diet. And I would change my diet, my habits or something else, because all of these professionals were an expert in this body they saw in front of them. Time would pass. The only change was in how I adapted to and mitigated all my body’s behaviours.

Time passed and some of the problems worsened, while doctors continued to tell me the same things. Sometimes I was a different weight, or living in a different place, or eating different things. Booking an appointment to speak to someone felt like an increasingly pointless exercise and I put less and less effort into seeing doctors. The last doctor I spoke to in England gave me a generic diagnosis of Irritable Bowel Syndrome after ten minutes of conversation and sent me away with a leaflet about vegetables. It was exactly what I expected.

In my late twenties I went to see a doctor about my mental health. I remember a grey day in a grey year with no money and no direction and no ability to connect well enough with those around me. I was having a terrible time, was struggling financially, was feeling isolated and certainly wasn’t the most fun person to be with. I was being morose and moody again. No, let’s be fair: Some days I was being a shit.

The doctor talked to me for a few minutes, looked at this person he saw in front of him, and told me I seemed fine.

---

I put on weight in my late teens and early twenties. I went from being the person who cycled to school every day to an accounts clerk who ate McDonald’s for lunch. Neither of those things are necessarily good or bad, but this was a change I was so unhappy with, during yet another time where I found myself becoming moody and morose. One day, a colleague called me chubby, and it was the first time I’d been described as anything but weedy or insufficient.

I remember feeling stunned. I remember feeling a lot of things. None of them were good.

I was very lucky that I transitioned into adulthood with one of the most valuable and important assets any young man could have, which was healthy male friends. They were all more reasonable than me, more patient and more intelligent, and none of them ever asked me how to talk to girls. They never made comments on my body and they didn’t put me or anyone else in any kind of pecking order.

And we didn’t hate gay people.

None of them invested in the growing male cynicism that was subtly taking root around us, that I now believe has only grown and spread to even more young men. I didn’t hold on to those feelings and I’m ashamed now that I even entertained them.

While the feelings may have long faded, decades later those friends still remain.

---

From the run home, to PE classes, to how we socialised and expressed ourselves as young adults, we new men found new ways to compete. As the eighties faded, so did an image of beer-swilling hard men in suits, replaced instead with the cocky young lads of nineties England. Lads. To these young men and boys, sometimes play was just play, but other times it became another opportunity to assert yourself, to show dominance either physically, in your skills, or with your expertise. As I got to know more boys, there were these unspoken assessments of character where you waited to see if either of you were the competitive sort. A discussion about a favourite TV show could be an arena for sparring. A session of Dungeons & Dragons was a way to show off obscure knowledge. Was what you were doing, right now, a game, a conversation, or an attempt to assert something more? Was that assertion overt, or was it subtle, buried amongst hints and inference?

And as we grew, this competitive and sometimes controlling masculine energy leaked into everything. It leaked into the workplace, into social interactions, into hobbies. Even if we didn’t participate in it ourselves, it was impossible not to be marked by it, to recognise the stains, to smell it when it was close. There it was again, in the expertise of the male customer who knew best, overruling and overreaching, or expressed by another impatient driver roaring his engine with a flex of his ankle. There it was, woven within so many of the hobbies I began to enjoy, from the misogyny that could surface in rock music to the pomposity that manifested in philosophy. “We think with our blood,” wrote the Italian fascist philosopher Giovanni Gentile, who described all the same impulsivity and urgency in nationalism and intolerance that men brought to everything else. What’s a war, if not another way to dominate and to win?

Even in the things I most enjoyed, this masculinity barged in with its tests of knowledge, its expressions of elite opinions. As trends changed, there were new and different ways for men to be competitive, in games as well as sports, in studying as well as dating. The world has continued to morph and, now that we’re all enlightened and progressive, I recognise a new competition to be the most enlightened, the most progressive, as these men are now caught in a woke version of the Hunger Games, knocking one another aside to win some nameless coveted title as they demonstrate the best possible and most authoritative takes on feminism, race and capitalist dystopia. All impatient to grow, brimming with ambition.

If you want to feel part of that group, if you want to be seen as being on the right side of things, you can always join in with some of their public punishment.

The point now isn’t to make the world better, it’s to win at making the world better.

---

I think it was bell hooks who wrote about the first violence men enact as they police one another. We grow up as arbiters of ourselves, keeping one another in check. Not at first, and then not a lot, but gradually. We warm up. Then, we punch in every direction, which can include upwards, but also sideways and also downwards. Downwards is easiest because it both allows you to make an example of someone, but also to pick a fight that’s easy to win. And if you’re punching downwards, that man already deserved it, so swing away.

And then, after a while, that becomes how you are. And how you deal with the world.

Most targets are downward when you’re a man, particularly a straight, Western, white man, so it’s a nice and easy position to be in. The punching is rarely literal and it doesn’t have to be. It’s whatever acts are necessary to ensure perpetuate the right kind of shared culture and ideas, just like with fascism. Those who have dared to be different could be gay, or feminine, or they could be just about anything else. Perhaps it doesn’t matter because, again as with fascism, the sense of unity and brotherhood has to come at the expense of something seen as an external threat.

You could, I suppose, see it as an act of maintenance. Community maintenance. Your masculine duty to keep things in line. To reinforce the pecking order. And whenever that pecking order changes, or whenever the rules around them alter, you get on with the new reinforcement.

Often, very often, these men think that they’re being good.

---

I can’t tell you how many ways we found to punch down and to exclude others as we were growing up. I can’t tell you because I honestly can’t remember and there are likely too many to keep count. I was still able to fit in sometimes, and this was one of the ways that I could, and it could feel so natural and normal that you never thought twice about what you were doing.

One day I was cross-legged on a school chair, watching other children play, when a friend offered a challenge I had no answer to:

“Why are you sitting like a woman?”

I uncrossed my legs.

---

In my teens, I watched a documentary about the singer from my favourite band and his male partner. It featured home movies of them clowning around, drinking champagne and sharing a bath. They looked like two of the happiest and most loving men I had ever seen and I resolved then to stop the homophobic jokes. I was ashamed of what I’d done. I still am.

I don’t want to punch down. I don’t want to punch sideways. I don’t care much for public punishment. We tend to swing first and only calculate the damage much, much later. We think with our blood.

---

I don’t have a terrible haircut these days, but when I look in the mirror, it is still an act of maintenance. It’s akin to someone looking over a car. I’m searching for faults and I’m ready to make repairs. There are surprises to be on the lookout for. There is skin to check. There is new hair to be removed.

That’s why I stand there and that’s what I see. Something that always needs to be fixed. Am I policing myself?

One of my favourite compliments I ever received was from a friend helping me prepare for a nude charity photoshoot. They said I had perhaps the best maintained eyebrows they had ever seen on a man.

It was one of the few times I’d felt proud of that maintenance. Men aren’t supposed to care much about their eyebrows, so I was clearly being a man all wrong.

I don’t usually feel pride in the maintenance. I only feel that it is endlessly necessary.

Like I said before, more on those nudes soon.

---

I’d like to think that, most of the time, I am long past taking assessments of my own image and body. I have been on display to many people for a long time and they have let me know what they think and how they feel in so many ways. Only some are explicit.

Many men let me know by the space they make for me, or do not, as I walk down the street, or how they greet me when we first meet. The internet has let me know with each comment it has left, by the responses to an expression in a picture, even by suggestions that I should smile. A former colleague let me know with the statement “Now that we’re hitting the big time, we’ve got to fix your teeth.” Thanks, everyone, I sure know everything that’s wrong with me now.

I have a relationship to my body that is very similar to my relationship to my gender, which I suppose figures, as they feel inseparably intertwined. Both were given to me by other people, both have been defined by other people and both have, from the start, robbed me of a sense of agency and freedom.

And I trust neither.

Neither entirely makes sense to me, both have let me down many times and both, like many of the circumstances thrust upon us in our lives, I don’t particularly want.

As you can imagine, this poses a few problems.

My problem with not wanting a body is that this is incompatible with many (some might even say most) of the conditions of human existence, which include occupying three-dimensional space, shopping for cereals, arguing about podcasts and looking at dogs. Bodies are compulsory, but so too are our judgements about how they are presented and how they are used. We’ve made it impossible to have one without the other.

And so it is too with our genders.

My problem with not particularly wanting this gender is that I don’t want any of the other ones, either. Like a collection of poorly-cobbled shoes, none of them fit well enough and I suppose I have already worn in that which I’m using. I’m also in a very fortunate position as being a man has given me all sorts of advantages, which I have to admit I don’t want to lose. I may look sideways at my gender and I roll my eyes at so many of its conventions, but I cannot deny all its privileges. I want to keep those while losing everything else.

I don’t want to be anything else, but don’t want to be this, either.

I have a theory, but it’s ridiculous, presumptive, arrogant and untenable: Maybe very many of us are being men wrong.

---

It is June first, twenty twenty-one as I write this paragraph and I was hoping to finally finish this work today, after months of writing. Perhaps I shall. My anxiety medication has been further adjusted and I can work a little better. Recovery is going to take time, but things are improving.

It’s a warm day and I am sat in my shorts, thinking about how my body has lost both tone and stamina over the last three years. In two days I will have some minor surgery to correct another problem with it and, after a couple of weeks of recovery, my hope is that I can exercise normally again. That it can start behaving the way that it used to. That I can get back to that regular maintenance.

I’m not looking forward to the pain. I also resent the inconvenience.

When I came to Canada six years ago I began exercising more, more than I ever had in my entire life. It was thanks to Valkyrie WMAA that I began to use my body in new, healthy and exciting ways. Valkyrie is a martial arts school that has an extremely diverse student makeup and which openly appeals to the queer community. One of its coaches, Kaja Sadowski, wrote a book on better and more inclusive training techniques and we talked about some of these on a podcast recently. In an environment where I didn’t feel judgement or expectation, I was able to learn things I had never even tried before, not least because nobody expected me to clear a hurdle after never practising.

Not only did I try these things, I became better at them and, for the first time in my life, I saw my body change and improve. I was no longer doing maintenance, I was performing upgrades. I only wish I had started many years sooner.

At the very end of my first period of living in Canada, Valkyrie invited students and coaches to take part in a nude fundraising photoshoot. I joined in, got to be explicit, and I felt about as good about the results as I ever have about any photos of me. I struggle to like photos of me.

It was as we prepared that Kaja gave me that compliment about eyebrows. I was very pleased to hear that. I felt not like I was being a man all wrong, but that I was being me all right.

It seems obvious to me that the way we encourage people to view, to enjoy and to make use of their bodies is directly related to how they will feel about those bodies and how much they will want to celebrate and to take care of them. We are all of us their mirrors and, while self-help gurus can preach all they like about self-love and self-knowledge and self-identity, the self is always outnumbered.

And men, in particular, still like to be experts in the bodies they see in front of them.

---

I don’t take very many pictures of myself lately and I don’t feel great about the ones that I do. My relationship to my body right now is that of a passenger inside something which seems off-course. My brain is wonky. I must constantly add those daily doses of drugs to repair mental and physical damage done and I don’t presently have the freedom to do many of the things I used to. I don’t see the person I want to be when I look in the mirror, only the things that are wrong. I am caught inside a spindly and stalky biological machine that brings me confusion and discomfort. What is it going to do next, I wonder. I don’t feel connected to that reflection.

And I must admit I also dislike that body because, in spite of all the derision I might throw toward so much of masculinity, I am still disappointed in that body for failing to meet many masculine standards. I’m not strong and I’m not a brave person. I feel disqualified.

Yet I know I’m lucky, too. I have never suffered a serious injury, the problems I do have with my body have not stopped me enjoying so many of the things that I want to and, most of all, access to free quality healthcare is helping me so much. Here I am, in Canada, getting better, attending more medical appointments over the last year than I’ve had in the last fifteen. I get to tell my doctors what my body is doing, not the other way around.

Men, who are experts in being men, may continue to label me a man and bless me with so much of the accordant lenience and privilege. I am content to fake my way through this when it suits me, navigating their whims, picking out the best among their gender and discarding the rest. One of my greatest blessings continues to be the presence of so many good men who serve as such fine examples of what masculinity could be, with compassion and consideration, not judgement and public punishment. With them, and with people of many other genders, I get to love beautiful colours in art and in nature, to fulfill my desire to meet every animal, to play games and to gush out my overwrought emotions.

I leave men to rev their engines, to drive their oversized trucks, to corner people in kitchens at parties and explain things to them, to buy gendered water and wear lip balm that was modelled next to a knife and a gun.

Yeah, I’m definitely being a man wrong. You caught me. While I was supposed to grow up looking down on feminine values, I don’t find myself frustrated, disappointed or even disgusted by those in the way I am by so many masculine ones.

And so I find myself adrift. I feel both that I am a man and that I am not. That I’m participating in some kind of illusion. I’ve pulled a trick on you all and I’m so sorry. My true gender is Fraud.

---

I am finishing this on June second. I will go to hospital tomorrow and take another step toward getting better. In a medical context, everything about me will define me as a man and this is fine, I guess, because all I can do is shrug and fail to suggest anything better.

I look forward to not only getting better again, but to feeling better about myself again.

In time, I did end up learning about football, and all its capital E Equipment, capital R Rules and capital T Tactics. I found my own way to enjoy it, most of all for its teamwork, and I like to watch the women’s tournaments. Sometimes I also like old cars or war movies or well-fitted suits. But those suits are for everyone.

Sometimes I think about the run home. And everything else around it, including what we encourage our children to be and what secrets this forces them to keep.

I find homogeneity uncomfortable. I try to appreciate variety and learn about things that are different. I am sceptical about what we are made to believe and more interested in what we can discover for ourselves. I’m still not strong or brave, but I try to push myself and not worry about embarrassment or vulnerability. Or imperfection. I don’t claim to have all the answers. I don’t really have any.

Sorry about that. I hope you didn’t expect to get to the end of this and find all the tricks to gender and to good health and to Being A Man, the secret, the formula, the particular method. The last few years have only left me more alienated from both my gender and my body. Is it possible, alongside an out-of-body experience, to have an out-of-gender one also?

I’ll be sure to let you know, though, when I’ve worked out quite who or what I am.

Thank you for reading.

#gender #fitness #masculinity #health #Patreon #Paul Dean #Kaja Sadowski #Valkyrie WMAA

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theonetheycallhannah · 4 years

Text

The Shape of Her

My first ever one shot for all my lovely Cavillry babes! (I’ve recently edited it to make the actual title the title of the post. It’s the same fic formerly under “New One Shot for the Cavillry.”)

Pairing: Henry Cavill x OFC that is totally not me, the author (except that it is, and I just took out my name so nobody felt weird about it!)

Word count: 2053

Warnings: Rimming and oral (f receiving), slightly rough sex, but not like, violent, language, almost orgasm denial but like, not really, very thirsty OFC and a very hungry Henry, mentions of unemployment, panties are heavily featured…I clearly have no idea what might trigger some people, but if you have concerns, ask me. It’s really just smutty smut for the sake of smut.

A/N: This was unsolicited, but I felt that curvy girls were lacking some representation in the fic community in general, so here is Henry worshipping a thicc queen. (Also, the undies in the fic are from Torrid and amazingly comfy, and the fact that I felt super sexy in them also helped inspire this one shot. I hope y’all enjoy.) Also, it’s not Beta’d. I just did my own triple check for glaring errors. Here’s hoping it’s not untenable gibberish. Lol!

Tags (no one requested tags, but I’m tagging the Cavillry babes I can think of, and if you want me to tag you in future work, just let me know. I don’t want to spam anyone): @littlefreya because she convinced me this was necessary, lol! Also @fishcustardandclintbarton @geralt-of-baevia @princess-of-riviaa @geekycanuck @lareinedususpense @radaofrivia @nothingdear @lunedelorient @sunflowersstan @captainbigdy @laketaj24

She liked to air dry on the bed in just her panties. Scroll her phone, see what was new. When she had time, of course. And lately, she’s had no shortage of time. Henry felt for her. Being between jobs could be scary. But he knew great things were out there for his woman. But the air drying. She did this after every leisurely shower. She made a little nest of pillows and draped herself gracefully over it.

With one hand, she diffused her hair, still damp from the shower. He didn’t know what she was looking at on her phone, nor did he care. His eyes had fallen heavy and hard on her backside. He thought this part of her such a wonder. It was strong, round, and large, and it tapered down to her thick thighs. This morning, she had chosen to wear a fairly unassuming pair of briefs. Unassuming, he thought, only if one had never touched them, or seen them up close. Like he had. He’d even helped her pick them out in the shop. He knew that the silky fabric would look stunning on her.

He was right. The slate grey sheen of the fabric covering her ass caught the pure morning light filtering in through the window. With his eyes he followed the narrow lace bands around her thighs right under her ass. He started then at the wider lace band around her waist --yes, waist, not hips-- and was stopped in his tracks in the center of her back. He’d missed entirely, or perhaps he’d forgotten, that little v-shaped corset cutout just below the waist band.

This could no longer be a mission of observation it must become a more exploratory, manual endeavor. He tiptoed toward her, not wanting to startle her before it was time, or for her to turn over before he’d had his fun.

“Mornin’ Hank.” She said sweetly over her shoulder with a smile. She didn’t flip to her front. Good.

“Good morning, love! Sleep well? Nice shower?” He queried as he maneuvered himself between her legs. Just sitting, but with one leg thrown over the back of one of her thighs. He started working her calves which were always tight. He loved her shapely legs, though. He loved every curve of her.

“What are you doing?” She demanded with a slight start.

“I have to get the tension out while the muscle is still warm. You should know that, teach!” He loved teasing her like this for being clever. He loved calling her the teacher in the bedroom, even if he was the more experienced lover.

He increased the pressure as he went, but wanted to go further.

“Have any lotion handy?” He asked. She did, and she handed it right to him. He put a bit of the amber and vanilla-scented cream on his hands, worked it up until it was warm, and then started again. She was moaning now. That was always his goal. Then he switched legs, applying more warmed lotion and going as deep as he dared.

“Henry, I’m not gonna be able to walk when you’re done.”

“Well, I was gonna make that threat, but you’ve saved me the trouble.” He said as he turned around and playfully snapped her waistband making her jump and arch her gorgeous ass up into it.

“Mmmm, you bad man! How did I know from the moment I met you that you only wanted me for my body?” She teased.

“Because of the way I unwrapped and devoured you whole with my lecherous gaze, no doubt. You’re actually the first girl I’ve ever taken into a side room and fooled around with at an event.” He reminisced as he kissed her back, across her shoulders and down her spine until he got to that cutout.

“Fine then,” she said, mock surrender in her voice. “Take what you will. Have your spoils.”she hitched her hips up and put a pillow under them so he could explore every inch of her ass.

He relished the sensory experience of simply running his hands over the silky fabric covering her firm rump. He ran his nails over it, causing her to shiver. He ran his lips over it too, unable to resist that curiosity.

“Henry, I’m dying here!” She moaned.

“And you’re killing me with these knickers, we all have our problems.”

He ran a hand down between her legs to tease her sex. She ground her hips into it, needing the friction. He’d give her friction.

He slid the panties aside, and started circling her clit at first, then he penetrated her one finger at a time. She was so wet already. Drenched for him. This got him so hard. He didn’t want to wait to fuck her. A part of him really and truly wanted to skip her gratification and just plow directly into her getting his own rocks off. Spill himself messily all over her pussy, ass, and those gorgeous panties.

But he restrained himself. He wanted to make her come. Wanted to delay his gratification to hear and see her come apart under his touch. He kept working her, listening and feeling for her reactions. She was moaning into her pillow. And he could feel the tension building inside her. He thought one more element would send her over. He hadn’t used his tongue yet. And he had the perfect place for it. He kissed along her more exposed ass cheek until he got to her opening. He’d wanted to do this for so long. And now he finally was. He ran his tongue all around her tight hole. Experimenting with strokes, textures, and pressures. He got the tip in just a bit once, considering it progress. And she was breathing infinitely heavier, about to reach her pinnacle.

When she did, she lost all control of her limbs and her body. She said nonsense. He adored it. But he’d have time to adore her later. Right now he was about to burst and the sight of her cunt trembling and dripping was too much for his cock to resist. He thrust into her slowly at first so he could feel every spasm of her waning orgasm around him. She always squeezed him in all the right places, but he couldn’t recall entering her so quickly after making her come. Why hadn’t he done this before?

His thrusts were hard and they got faster as he chased his pleasure. He appreciated anew the fabric covering her ass. It made her feel almost as delicious on the outside as she did on the inside. He growled as he got closer.

“Where you want me to finish, baby girl?” He asked, as he tended to do.

“Don’t you fucking think about pulling out, Cavill. I want your hot come inside me.” Her filth sent him to new levels of lust and he went harder and faster. This was one of the many things he loved about her body. He knew it was sturdy enough for the unbridled pounding he could give without bruising or pain. She could take him at his most violent without harm or even complaint.

“I’m gonna come again. Henry. Oh fuck!” And when her body began to contract and contort again, it was all Henry needed to tip him into his own oblivion. His release was hot, fast, and glorious inside his goddess. He fell over the top of her still moving his hips, relishing the feel of her panties against his sensitive hips and pelvis. It was heavenly.

Their breathing was rapid, but slowing in tandem with one another.

“Fuck me!” She exclaimed.

“Isn’t that what I just did?” He teased bitting her ear and inciting a giggle.

“Oh you certainly did, sir. Most thoroughly.” She turned as much as she could with him pinning most of her body to the bed, reaching enough of him to pull on his hair. “Kiss me, you villain.”

He obliged, roughly, as she liked. A full mouthed kiss with plenty of tongue. He loved these hungry, wild kisses, too. He broke apart from her just long enough to flip her onto her back and prop her up with some pillows. He wanted her to be comfortable for what came next. Now that both of their thirsts were sated for a while, he could take his time in pleasuring her and not be bothered by his own need…at least not immediately.

“God, if I had my way, you’d never be fully clothed, do you know that?” She blushed furiously whenever he mentioned how sexy she was to him. He knew she’d never felt so and had rarely been told so. And certainly few had ever shown their appreciation for her voluptuous beauty. He’d show her at every turn. Her body begged to be touched. It was so soft and succulent.

He descended her body slowly and thoroughly, not missing the best bits of real estate, like her neck, clavicle, and her nipples, and further down where he found her hips. She loved to be teased here. And he did so. Over her panties that were rapidly becoming his new favorite article of her clothing. He worked his mouth over the layer of fabric for a few moments. Teased her mound with nips and hot breath.

“Henryyyyy!” She squirmed under him and grabbed a handful of his hair. He looked up to find her breathless and staring at the ceiling instead of him. That wouldn’t do.

He slid her panties all the way off, a bittersweet moment. He loved that they were soaked with her arousal and his seed. It got him half hard again, but he had other things to do.

He spread her legs wide and parted her lips. She was still drenched with arousal and his come. Good. He placed one feather light kiss right over her clit and she bucked. Her body was so responsive to his touch.

“Oh, I like that honey. What does this do for you?” And he latched his mouth to her flesh to lay mercilessly soft flicks over her bead. She couldn’t seem to form words, just sounds. But they were pleased sounds, so Henry continued. He descended, sliding the back of his tongue down to her entrance where he thrust into her gently and began undulating and moaning. Their combined flavors made him yearn. He couldn’t figure out why. But he loved tasting himself on her body. Especially here where her own flavor was most potent.

He added his saliva to the mixture there, and then brought his hand in. He slid two fingers into her, stirring her up and pressing firmly against her g-spot. As he worked his hand in her, he worked his mouth over her again, and he felt her losing control and heard her pleading for him not to stop. But she was still looking away from him.

He paused. And she cried out!

“No!” She looked at him, on the verge of tears.

“I won’t do it. Unless you look at me. Watch me, kitten. Look into my eyes while I make you come.”

“Argh, do it! Do it! I’ll never take my eyes off you again as long as you just don’t stop!”

He continued. Fingering her. Devouring her. Watching her. Watching her watch him. He moaned into her body. Growled. Like the hungry beast that he was.

She bucked and writhed and seized as he finished her. He loved being able to give her this. This unfiltered raw pleasure. He crawled up next to her, wanting only to lie next to her as she came down in the afterglow. But she took his face in her hand and brought him to her for a slow, languid, breathtaking kiss. He loved that she didn’t care about the state of his face. Apparently, the wetness there comprised of his semen, sweat, and saliva, paired with her sex was collectively her favorite flavor.

“How is it that after all this time together, you still shock me, Mr. Cavill?” She said in breathless wonder. She flattered him.

“Darling, we’ve barely scratched the surface of the pleasure I can give you.”

And with that promise, he buried her in the pillows behind her as she squealed and giggled with delight.

#cavillry #henry cavill #henry cavill x ofc #henry cavill fanfic #henry cavill smut

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