#years of learning to love real me

[pastafossa]

SO. Let's do a GOOD NEWS thing regarding the fiberglass. With Ulta's Black Friday sale, AND mom and sis quietly using my rewards card when shopping to build up my points, I got two new palettes in the mail. These will FINALLY fill in the last major gap in my replacement eyeshadow collection, one I've rebuilt a bit with help from friends.

I love makeup, ok? Specifically eye makeup. I love doing bright colors, seasonal looks, movie colors, tv show colors, holiday looks, etc. It's become a thing for me, because I was very depressed and lonely as a teen and and tried very hard to fit the Good Christian Girl mold at church to make friends, which meant very low key makeup and conservative colors in the area I lived. But then I started to make fandom friends online, went to cons with them, and slowly became both more confident and more comfortable being me because they helped show me that Real Me was actually a perfectly likeable person, bright colors and all. Which means shiny sunglasses. Bright colors! Shirts with fandom things, and cool eyeshadow to match! Over the years I picked up a ton of it - collector's editions, gifts, sales on palettes too pricey to buy otherwise. I had maybe 50 individual colors and 20 or so palletes that covered the entire spectrum of the rainbow.

And I lost all of it in a single day to fiberglass.

If I hadn't had some of my basic makeup and two older palettes still packed away in my zipped up backpack , I'd literally have been forced to start back at square one. As it was, I was at... square three, maybe. I'm still not all the way there - it'll take years to build it all back up fully and a lot of those palettes were irreplaceable. But I've got all that I need to feel like me again, and I think that's what counts.

[andthebeanstalk]

Today my therapist introduced me to a concept surrounding disability that she called "hLep".

Which is when you - in this case, you are a disabled person - ask someone for help ("I can't drink almond milk so can you get me some whole milk?", or "Please call Donna and ask her to pick up the car for me."), and they say yes, and then they do something that is not what you asked for but is what they think you should have asked for ("I know you said you wanted whole, but I got you skim milk because it's better for you!", "I didn't want to ruin Donna's day by asking her that, so I spent your money on an expensive towing service!") And then if you get annoyed at them for ignoring what you actually asked for - and often it has already happened repeatedly - they get angry because they "were just helping you! You should be grateful!!"

And my therapist pointed out that this is not "help", it's "hLep".

Sure, it looks like help; it kind of sounds like help too; and if it was adjusted just a little bit, it could be help. But it's not help. It's hLep.

At its best, it is patronizing and makes a person feel unvalued and un-listened-to. Always, it reinforces the false idea that disabled people can't be trusted with our own care. And at its worst, it results in disabled people losing our freedom and control over our lives, and also being unable to actually access what we need to survive.

So please, when a disabled person asks you for help on something, don't be a hLeper, be a helper! In other words: they know better than you what they need, and the best way you can honor the trust they've put in you is to believe that!

Also, I want to be very clear that the "getting angry at a disabled person's attempts to point out harmful behavior" part of this makes the whole thing WAY worse. Like it'd be one thing if my roommate bought me some passive-aggressive skim milk, but then they heard what I had to say, and they apologized and did better in the future - our relationship could bounce back from that. But it is very much another thing to have a crying shouting match with someone who is furious at you for saying something they did was ableist. Like, Christ, Jessica, remind me to never ask for your support ever again! You make me feel like if I asked you to call 911, you'd order a pizza because you know I'll feel better once I eat something!!

Edit: crediting my therapist by name with her permission - this term was coined by Nahime Aguirre Mtanous!

Edit again: I made an optional follow-up to this post after seeing the responses. Might help somebody. CW for me frankly talking about how dangerous hLep really is.

[bold-embrace]

We better get a much needed morales family hug at the end of the next movie OR ELSE (btw read this fic. bless)

Bonus messy doodle below but it’s got major spider verse spoilers!‼️‼️‼️

Earth 42 miles better get a hug and a kiss from his mom too

[pierog]

tiny comic about eating toast with friends

[lemon-wedges]

[puppyeared]

Jitterbug

[horrorshow]

"when did destiel sex happen for the first time?" i love that i'm living so far in my own obscure deluded doomed by the narrative canon-compliant version of surprisingly wholesome but tragic destiel that the only right answer isn't even an option on polls: stanford era.

[feline-evil]

Dick or no dick confirmation Pickles was always going to be trans to me anyways; if he's swingin' somethin that's phallo babes, if he's not then his t-dick fat. What's not to get.

[robindaydream]

He's catching me up on the characters and story arcs

artfight attack of Ugly Finder (featuring Daydream) for @bananasmores

[canismajorly]

when I was a very impressionable, socially stunted and nerdy gay 14 year old, my high school drama club put on a production of dracula, and I had never read it. i was in the crew, and mostly just sat around the auditorium and watched them rehearse. all the main roles were played by a friend group who had incredibly fun to watch chemistry off stage. the Dracula was this very very VERY tall person with long hair who was in my chorus class and insisted on singing soprano from time to time despite naturally being a bass (... estrogen when, queen?). the Johnathan was this short Flynn-Rider-from-Rapunzel-looking twink who was (in my mind) fought after by women around him. the Jonathan and the Dracula intentionally made their interactions extra homoerotic (I overheard them talking to the English teacher director about it one day) and would spend off time at rehearsal trying to do the dirty dancing "time of my life" lift. because I was 14, I unironically shipped them. the Mina was so beautiful and had a face that, imo, would be cast in one of those terrible BBC/netflix period dramas now. she had been friends with the other two since before I started high school. because I was a polyamorous 14 year old, I also shipped the Jonathan with the Mina. i had a crush on the person who played Lucy in the cast since middle school, they were my age but so cool and likeable they melted into the older drama kid friend circle effortlessly. i had some interesting emotions about the scene where Lucy is covered in blood in a wedding dress. during the final cast and crew party, the Dracula threw a chocolate flower into the group and I caught it then proceeded to hold onto it for years after. then they all graduated, besides the Lucy. anyway, those are the versions of all the characters that live in my head when I read my Dracula daily.

[itspileofgoodthings]

Well, I actually have the most mundane of questions, but it’s been so long since I’ve been in an English class that I feel like I’ve completely forgotten (and I’m curious how you do it): how do you go about reading a book as a class? Do you assign them the chapters to read at home and most of them actually do it? Or do you give them class time to read? Do you have the kids who try to spoil the rest of the book for the class? Basically, how does one teach a book in the year 2024?  😀

And do you have your students annotate inside their books? (I know the English teachers in my school require the students to do that, and I get why, but I inwardly shudder every time I see a student marking up a page.) 

Haha I love this question because I too am always asking myself how DOES one each a book in 2024?

It’s sort of a combination. I absolutely assign reading every night (almost) unless it’s Shakespeare or any play in which case we read it all in class. But for a novel there’s a couple chapters a night. I read aloud to them a lot too. Sometjmes I make them read aloud to the whole class, rotating kids who read. Sometimes I assign a chapter to be read in class silently with questions or quotes due at the end of the reading. Sometimes I put them in groups and make them read aloud to each other. There’s no one way that works for sure and of course ultimately I have no control over how much they read and I’m not naive enough to think that most of the reading assigned for homework doesn’t get skipped most of the time buuuuuut.

My bottom line is that I believe it’s my job to get excited about the actual text itself (easier for me in some cases than others but overall pretty easy because it does fill me with excitement) and then commit to taking them on the journey of the story with me. And my goal—that I’m sure I often don’t reach—is to make that experience so much more fun if you have actually read. And the way that I teach is pretty text heavy which is why I always make sure I’ve read the chapters for the day and am not just relying on my memory because the way I do it is just sort of absorbing it all up like a vacuum-cleaner, schwooooop, and then either pulling stuff out of the reading to look at directly or directing them to do the same thing. So the big thing that I have going for me, if any, is buy-in. Is getting kids excited about actually reading the actual text. I also speak often and passionately about the evils of sparknotes etc. not because they help kids get better grades or whatever but because they present you with the husk and shell of a story, stripped of all that makes it interesting, and that by reading that alone they’re reading something so dry and dull and are not achieving what I always want them to achieve —which is, have an Experience with the Literature.

Again, it never works perfectly by any stretch and there are so many ways I want to explore in my quest to get better at it but overall I think, at my very best, I can create this wave of energy and excitement in the story itself which is the most organic and ultimately most helpful way to get them to want to read.

Also no haha. I don’t let them annotate! Though occasionally kids DO of course. But sometimes they bring in their own copies in order to do that. The spoilers absolutely happen and are annoying but I sort of get by it by moving on very quickly and/or talking about how it’s often not the ending but how you get there that makes it interesting. Because that’s just true!

[gifti3]

another thing I enjoy about asmos character is that we get hints about some of his past romantic relationships

Im sure the other brothers have engaged with others in the past but actually getting to read about it is interesting to me

[judicent]

Yeah, I did fill 4 sketchbooks in 4 months so far this year. Huh? Am I gonna post even an ounce of it? Well, you see, I am allergic to my phone, so you will have to come CATCH ME

[sevencolorspasserby]

∆ Silver, you're very good at helping other silver's - how come you're so mean to yourself? Yourself. Not the other versions of you.

I’m not mean to myself. I’m hard on myself, but I’m not mean to myself. I have to be to be the strongest trainer. If I don’t have some sort of self discipline, I’m not reaching my goals.

I know that’s not what you mean.

I don’t know. I know, but I also don’t. Why I’m so abrasive, that’s just who I am, but I also care too much. Why do I care so much? I couldn’t tell you. I can’t piece together why I care for others sometimes. I couldn’t tell you why I get so worked up over it. Repeating things that are in the past in my head so I know that I shouldn’t do worse like that. But beating myself up? That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard but people have told me that I don’t and shouldn’t have to? So clearly I do that and I’m stuck in my own head about my attitude all over again.

Changing isn’t easy at all. I hate that. And yet I have to grin and bear it. Shoulders apparently I can cry on but that doesn’t fix the problem with me.

You can guess the rating yourself.

[smimon]

Something something hope confirmed something something I had no faith but kept going only to succeed in the most unexpected moment something something I was about to continue anyway but if I lose both the faith and the hope in the future, I should remember this one time it worked

This is a post about my creative process and it is very personal to me but it might be difficult to understand because I am not good with words and it is basically the very point here

So yeah many of the comics I make come from my need to communicate certain messages, and I am very bad at communication so it usually doesn't work.

I look at the "failed" stories and save them for later, hoping to perfect them when I have more skill, but in the meantime I recycle the same motif in a new story.

New fandom, new characters, new setting, new tone, new genre, same heart, same me.

And I keep adding them, rows of iterations of the same message dressed in new clothes like character skins in video games. And I keep thinking: I will return to you all and complete you all in the future, and this way my message will be heard, it will be heard in many voices until it maybe gets to someone.

Then something unexpected happened with giant K series. I explained it somewhere, this series is based on a kind of motif I have been using for years, every few years a new retelling, new layout, new skin, but at core always the same.

(How to explain it? It is a silly comedy series, but at the same time it can be a reflection of a strained mind, silenced heart, confused soul. I don't have the right words yet.)

And this time, for the first time ever, it worked. I managed to start posting it, I managed to complete the plot, I managed to make it consistent, whole, harmonic.

And I almost dropped the series soon after it started, ready to put it among its ancestors to wait forever for a revival. But a friend encouraged me to keep going, and after The Post I managed to regain faith in it myself. And then, just recently, I realized that I did in fact manage to tell the story. I alreay told it. This did not change much in the world, but it changed a lot in myself.

And I started to think that maybe I couldn't complete the message before because I didn't have the right material, not enough building bricks that could fit together to form the shape of my thought. And maybe I will never get to complete the other variants of this motif, because the tools I have used constructing them were not the right ones. It was always trial and error, and I am lucky to have somehow landed a way that worked.

(I can still use the plots built around the older takes to tell stories to entertain so it's not like they are useless or something. Also I love them dearly and will never leave them)

I don't know, I am just so happy this lil series got to exist, and that it brings people joy. It brings something else to me too, something I cannot exactly express with words. I might make another comic about it one day lol

[cdfreak]

im so glad i have such positive feelings towards aging ... im so excited for the rest of my life 🫶 i truly believe every new year is going to bring new things to love about myself and my body and the world around me and new oppurtunities and new perspective and im so excited to experience all of it.. and im so grateful to have avoided the anxiety over getting older i see a lot of people of all ages experiencing