#the defining decade

[frommyfavoritebooks]

To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time.

Leonard Bernstein

[anxsity]

"Things get better only when we let new and better people in. Things get better when we let new and better people care about us or love us, or when we at least listen to - and believe - what they have to say."

Meg Jay, PhD, "The Defining Decade"

[i-miss-music-247]

I've been getting into the habit of listening to audiobooks. First I listened to the Creative Habit by Rick Rubin. SO good. Next, The Defining Decade by Meg Jay. 📚 🎧

Give me some recommendations!

[roncy89]

3 Books Every Twenty-Something Should Read (By a Twenty-Something)

(In no particular order)

The Defining Decade by Dr. Meg Jay

This book has been my go-to for various points of my college (and now post-grad) career. Whenever I felt that I was "lost" or had a "mid-life crisis", this book always came to the rescue.

In this book, Meg Jay goes through how to best use your 20s. Whether that be through relationships, hobbies, education and career choices. She also expands on the concept of developing identity capital which is a collection of things that make you, you. One of my favourite quotes by Meg is, "“Twentysomething is like airplanes, planes just leaving New York City-bound somewhere west. Right after takeoff, a slight course change is a difference between landing in either Seattle or San Diego. But once a plane is nearly in San Diego, only a big detour will redirect it to the northwest.”

2. Quit Like a Millionaire by Bryce Leung and Kristy Shen

This is a personal finance book that details how a Canadian couple, Bryce and Kristy, retired in their thirties. Both working as software engineers, they sought to buy a home in Toronto but found that getting into the housing market was out of reach. Instead, they opted to use the money that could have gone towards a house into the stock market where they were both able to retire and travel the world.

Reading this opened my eyes to the various possibilities and routes to financial independence. One that isn't defeatist about the current housing market, but rather optimistic about other possibilities!

3. The Almanack of Naval Ravikant

The writer, Naval Ravikant, is the founder of various companies in Silicon Valley and wrote a guide to building wealth and emotional well-being unlike anything else I've seen. Most books I read surrounding generating wealth are pretty redundant, but what I found by reading this book was that everything written was unique yet so simple.

[sunscreenstudies]

The Defining Decade by Meg Jay || Book Review

[katabay]

trains :)

this is a very rough and scribbly comic, but sometimes that's all a comic is going to end up being lmao. the guy with the jacket is darren, glasses is andy. not featured, andy's dead brother who nevertheless insists on haunting the subtext

the main thing I wanted to draw was the train tho

bsky ⭐ pixiv ⭐ pillowfort ⭐ cohost ⭐ cara.app

[t4transsexual]

"when they find your bones theyll know youre really a [sex assignment]" thats not true actually im gonna get buried beside my wife and our headstones are gonna read "evan" and "caspian" and our shared last name and im gonna be buried in a suit and shes gonna be buried in a dress and maybe we'll throw in a trans flag for funsies and they may learn we were trans but more importantly they will know that we were in love

[aalt-ctrl-del]

people on the "Stella did nothing wrong train" often argue that Stella too, is vulnerable and traumatized by the situation she was placed, same as Stolas. And they make grievance that "fans are wrong for supporting Stolas in his time, and adoring bird prince, but condemn Stella even tho she's in the same sitch"

y'all are forgetting Exhibit A!

Teh reason why fan are loving and supporting Stolas, and condemn Stella as the toxic bitch, is because Stolas - despite his circumstances - has tried to make this arrangement he has with his (ex)-former wife as comfortable and pleasant as possible. He has been nothing but kind, if not distance and perhaps respectful of her needs and desires - it is implied in the first episode and the childhood one, that he was tolerant and patient with Stella, despite her broadcasted hate for him, and her boastful claims that he was worthless as a Goitia.

A person can be hurt, traumatized, resentful, damaged by the circumstances of their birth and the legacy they are meant to inherit - it never gives them the right to torment and destroy someone else. It is never excusable for that person to hate and continue hurting someone who has done nothing but the best that could be done, in those situations. Stolas might have inherited a broken, preprogrammed hate monger, but he made the effort to extend compassion and kindness and make a home for that person; the response of one who is given the opportunity to do better, recover, or even reevaluate who they are and where they come from was squandered and destroyed - which seems to be Stella's go to method of internalizing her spite and anger for the world. She destroys everything good. She strangled a bunch of hellhound pups, or whatever those crechures were in the picture of her as a child.

Stella is actually a very deep and complicated character if you really look at her and her reactions to those around her. She does not appreciate her daughter, she despises Stolas (who she views as weak and pathetic, and a disgrace), and she is shallow as all fuck. Which has made her the person she is. And it is her own choice to behave and react in such a way, despite her privilege, despite her access to help and happiness (Stolas is medicated, and working on himself). But Stella is completely satisfied with who she is, and has no regard for others; which hurts those that would love her, or at the minimal could appreciate her company. If Stolas was a pompous and arrogant monster, like we thought he was in the pilot, STELLA STILL WOULDN'T BE HAPPY. Nothing would make her happy. Because her character type is one that intentionally destroys and hurts those around her, because she has unaddressed resentment for her circumstances.

But no amount of help or love, or extended support will fix her. Because Stella is not interested in fixing herself, or being a better person. Because she is perfectly happy with who she is, hurting others, because that right there is what gives her life purpose.

*yeets the mic*

[t4tails]

The problem with last anon is that sometimes characters really do things they never wpuld do because the writer doesn't know shit. Like Catwoman being the Riddler's bloodthristy murderous attack dog in Killing Time (written by Tom King) Or Riddler being a sadistic killer that was behind the Killing Joke and Batman murdering him in One Bad Day (written by Tom King) . Or Catwoman and Joker being best friends during the Batcat wedding arc (written by Tom King) -

anon when they meet tom king

[tinystepsforward]

ngl it makes me want to die a little bit that it's so often trans people who feel that sex is mutable but oppression is always-forever based on asab in ways that allow them to demand that information from other trans people. like it feels fucking bad. it feels bad when it's people holding up someone who posts a lot of selfies as transition goals to a degree they have to clarify what they have or haven't done or what "direction" they're going in, it feels worse when people are out there like "caster semenya is not tma" or whatever the fuck. i am, as always, not a trans woman, but here's a sentiment echoed by many of the trans women around me who log the fuck off, quoted directly from one: "people who draw a clear line where they say that semenya or khelif are tme and then call me tma are just calling me male at this point".

like i get it. i really do. we seek community and shared experiences, and we feel betrayed when people have less in common with us than we thought they did. [*more on this later.] but that's not those people's faults and my god in the case i'm seeing play out on twitter rn this poor person did absolutely nothing to intentionally mislead people, just posted pictures of their actual kid self. who looks a lot like i did, because shockingly enough "we can always tell" doesn't fucking work for trans people either!

on the one hand i move in intersex circles which are unapologetically welcoming in cis "dyadic" people with pcos, because it serves nobody to draw a clear line where mutilation or genetics or some ineffable childhood suffering are what make somebody intersex, especially when most of us (esp in places like nz) have never been karyotyped and are being treated for symptoms without a pinned-down cause anyway. the more of us there are the stronger we are, the more pressure we can exert on a medical profession which doesn't like to consider how common outliers are, how uneasy sex is at all. and then on the other hand there's dyadic trans people on the internet who've yelled me out of spaces because a couple of traumatised incarcerated trans women i worked with as a prison abolitionist assumed i was also a trans woman and i didn't immediately tell them my entire csa-involved history of being sexed in varying ways as an infant and child and/or exactly how big my phallus was at birth or where in my junk config my urethra lives so they could decide i was tme or whatever.

returning to the * for a related but not identical thought: i think presuming shared experiences leads to some fucked shit in general! "oh we all had a radfem phase" or "oh we all were channers" no we fucking weren't and it's particularly obnoxious when me & mine are trying to build trans community locally to organise and resist the growing wave of far-right backlash against our existence, and there's just white people in there on a spectrum from "straight up being antisemitic and trying to get the n-word pass" through "handwringing about how they need to make space for people who aren't politically correct" to "handwringing about how brown people are right to be mad at them but doing shit fuckall". and then the other fucking brown people in the space are on some identity politics shit where they're like "trans joy inherently excludes those of us who could get deported" or "big city white queers are killing us by being visible instead of going stealth bc it stirs up the discourse" or whatever the fuck i've heard pulled out this year. there's a bunch of reasons i primarily organise outside of trans spaces and that's one of them. i've never felt more alone in spaces where people claim we're all the same than being left as the brownest moderator or organiser in a space full of people to whom "this is a safe trans space" apparently means they get to abdicate all other responsibilities not to lapse into presumed shared patterns that are fucking racist or otherwise alienating. i've never felt more alone than surrounded by exclusively trans people who sort people into boxes and assume everyone in those boxes has the transition goals they have. like i was on cypro until it disagreed with me to the point of endocrine crisis and now i'm on t and at both those points people were so fucking presumptive or entitled to my reasons or journey or personal relationship w my body

literally just submitted on (and was invited to consult on) the nz law commission's review of the human rights act and like. it's straight up fucked how many nz trans people fully do not comprehend that any "sex assigned at birth" type definitions fundamentally exclude migrants who have no way of proving it and many intersex people who happen to have been reassigned later or many times or never assigned at all as a baby. we can't make law with this shit and that's why we have to have symmetrical protections for all genders/sexes/expressions/presentations, bc naming and defining a protected class here often leaves the people who already are left out from those shared experiences of marginalisation out in the cold when they face violence

[wonder-worker]

"[Elizabeth Woodville] was the only member of [Crown Prince Edward of Westminster's] original 1471 council not already on the king’s council and her name headed the list of those appointed as administrators in Wales during Edward’s minority. [She remained on the council after it was expanded in 1473 and granted significant new governing and judicial powers]."

"In 1478 Prince Richard [of Shrewsbury] married the Mowbray heiress. Like his elder brother he had a chancellor, seal, household and council to manage his estates. His council, like that of Prince Edward, comprised the queen [Elizabeth Woodville] and a group of magnates and bishops, few of whom were Woodville supporters [...] It was Elizabeth who mattered, for Richard resided with her and Rivers treated his affairs as their own."

-J.L. Laynesmith, The Last Medieval Queens: English Queenship 1445-1503 / Michael Hicks, Richard III and his Rivals: Magnates and their Motives in the Wars of the Roses

[frommyfavoritebooks]

Most twentysomethings can’t write the last sentence of their lives, but when pressed, they usually can identify things they want in their 30's or 40's or 60's—or things they don’t want—and work backward from there. This is how you have your own multigenerational epic with a happy ending. This is how you live your life in real time.

- The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter--And How to Make the Most of Them Now; Meg Jay

[anxsity]

"There is a certain terror that goes along with saying 'My life is up to me.' It is scary to realize that you can't just wait around, that no one can really rescue you, and that you - and only you - just have to do something."

Meg Jay, PhD, "The Defining Decade"

[voltronposter]

Have been smelling the acrid odor of nostalgia for the mid-2010s on gods own internet as of late. And yes that does include Voltron. The sensation is like the pressure that builds behind your eye when a migraine is imminent. The ip continues to be up in the air but I predict by the end of the decade there will be more Voltron.

[reanimatedmagpie]

immortals whose body did not Quite adapt to the immortality evenly or whose immortality did not take into account everything there is to take.

Immortals with fake teeth, with completely shot sense of taste because tongue cells are fragile and lose sensitivity within a few decades. Immortals whose eyesight's kinda shit. Immortals with bad joints and strain injuries. Immortals with replacement hips. Immortals with so so many surgery scars. Immortals that can't hear as well anymore or at all. Immortals whose immune system hasn't quite held on the entire time, with bone problems, broken noses, worn out or even replaced livers and other organs. immortals subject to time anyway despite being denied the grace of really aging.

Bodies that were not built to go on forever being forced to anyway.

[tuttertime]

the way that if you go in the bikini kill or sleater kinney still so many top posts are about mcr. stop. fucking grow up