yonahsienna

[yonahsienna]

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[yonahsienna]

On the Unforeseen Difficulty of Doing the Dishes

Everyone wants to save the world, but nobody wants to do the dishes.

At least, that’s what they say. Personally, I don’t really mind doing the dishes. It’s almost meditative, a cleansing of the soul as well as the schmutz on the plates. Saving the world, on the other hand? I’ve seen enough Marvel movies to know that that sounds pretty dangerous.

So when I joined my synagogue, I had a clear idea of how I wanted to serve my community. I didn’t want to be on the board–let someone else take on power and handle the political decisions. I’m not good with people anyway. I just wanted to do the dishes.

There was just one problem, which is that my synagogue used disposable plates. (Yes, I am always this literal.) I wanted to change that–not only because I wanted to do the dishes, but also because, even if I don’t actually feel capable of saving the world, I also don’t want to witness it being destroyed in front of my eyes.

I have a lot of anxiety about climate change. People often tell me to calm down about this, but in my opinion, I’m the one who’s reasonable and everyone else is crazy. Did you know, that when you ask people what they’re afraid of, the most common answer is public speaking? I am not at all afraid of public speaking. I do it all the time. That’s not because I’m brave–not at all. It’s because I know that the worst thing that could possibly happen when I give a speech is that everyone will think I’m an idiot. But I am an idiot, and the people deserve to know the truth. Climate change on the other hand, which is predicted to lead to a billion deaths over the next century, doesn’t even crack the top ten common fears.

I can’t save the world. But I can do the dishes.

At least, I thought I could.

I’m not totally naïve. I knew that introducing reusables to an organization would require some political maneuvering. I decided it was only right that I should get involved with other volunteering tasks, lest the kitchen volunteers resent me for only caring about the dishes and never helping with anything else. Besides, the other kitchen tasks were also the sort of broader, metaphorical “doing the dishes” that I wanted to be doing with my life.

So I helped. I did this for about a year. I swept the floor. I washed tablecloths and set them out, along with salt and pepper, food, and dishes. I brewed coffee. I poured hot water for tea. I poured out innumerable little plastic cups of wine and felt my environmentalist heart break with each one. (I briefly tried putting them out in shot glasses instead, though that did not go over well, to put it mildly.)

I could not possibly have imagined the level of controversy that would arise over those dishes. Someone swore at me. I walked in on someone complaining about me at least once (the other incident was probably mostly about another volunteer, but I think it was a little bit about me too.) It was made clear to me by both my fellow volunteers and the rabbi that my help in the kitchen was no longer wanted. 

I did not react well to this emotionally. I lashed out and said some things I regret in an awful fight that ballooned out to involve the rabbi, the board, and all my closest friends at the shul. (In my defense, even in my most unhinged emails I was still a lot nicer than any of the prophets, even though in my case there is an actual apocalypse that is literally coming.) I got psychosomatic back pain, I sunk into a depressive slump that left me barely able to get out of bed for a couple of weeks, and I seriously considered leaving the shul altogether.

Of course, it wasn’t all about the dishes. Let’s just say that my high school superlative was not “most emotionally stable,” to put it mildly. But the dishes were a pretty big part of it.

I can somewhat understand the anti-reusables perspective. I live in Los Angeles, which has hard water that doesn’t exactly leave glass dishes sparkling. (Our synagogue has glass dishes because it’s easier to keep them kosher.) I was also never able to get to the dishes as quickly as my fellow volunteers wanted me to, because I always wanted to participate in the communal Grace After Meals and by the time I managed to get to the kitchen, someone else had almost always started them first. In my defense, I did stick around doing other clean-up tasks until we closed up, but the fact that I wasn’t specifically doing the dishes made my insistence on reusables unpopular.

But I don’t think the antagonism toward the dishes really had much to do with these challenges. I think that trying to do something good often provokes this response in people. I got a lot of defensive remarks about how people using disposables doesn’t make them bad people, although I don’t believe that and certainly never said it.

I’m not totally trying to defend myself. Look: there’s a reason I said I never wanted to join the board, I’m awkward and everything comes out wrong when I try to communicate with people. But I can say this seriously: I really was never trying to criticize anyone. I was trying to wash dishes.

But it never seemed to be about the dishes. When I said that reusables were important to me because I care a lot about the environment, one of the other volunteers told me that she has problems with electric cars because they contain lithium batteries. This did not seem particularly relevant to me, because dishes do not contain lithium batteries, and anyway, I don’t own an electric car. (I usually try to walk, bike, or take transit.) The response wasn’t about the dishes; it was about the negative feelings people had about environmentalism in general. It then felt impossible to solve this one, concrete problem that actually felt actionable.

Shortly after the fallout from the dishes, I decided to go to Quaker meeting for worship. If you’re not familiar with meeting for worship, it involves sitting in silence together for an hour. Sometimes people speak as they feel called to, but it’s mostly silent. This is an ideal form of worship for me, because I like to think that I like people, but the truth is that I like them a whole lot better when they shut up. 

This wasn’t my first time in a Quaker meeting, but it was my first time back for a while. Part of what pushed me back to the meeting was my deep disappointment with my Jewish community and my desire to find fellowship somewhere else. 

If you know anything about Quakers, you know they’re the kind of people who do the dishes. But still, you can’t imagine how thrilled I was when I stayed for their monthly potluck and found out that they literally did the dishes. Yes, they offered reusable plates–and even reusable mugs, which I never even dreamed of pushing for at my synagogue. I was ecstatic. I told that to the guy washing the dishes afterwards.

“I’m so glad you use reusables here,” I told him. “The environment is really important to me.”

“Well, we use both,” he said, kind of awkwardly–and maybe a little annoyed at how happy I was about dishes when he was currently elbows deep in dishwater. “We offer both reusables and disposables. There’s a controversy because a lot of people don’t want to do the dishes.”

This sounded a little familiar.

I offered to help with the dishes, but he said he was good. So I collapsed tables, wiped down counters, and did a little drying when he had clean dishes ready for me. After a while, the guy doing dishes got tired and then I jumped in to take a turn. It was finally happening! I finally succeeded in doing the dishes!

My jubilation lasted for about ten minutes before I found it.

As I was fishing dirty dishes out of the murky water in the sink, I found a knife. A sharp one.

If you’re reading this, there’s a decent chance you’re thinking, “So? What’s the matter with that?” And if you take nothing else away from this essay, I am begging you to take away this one thing: please do not leave sharp knives to soak in the sink. It is not safe, because you cannot see the knives under the dishwater and it is very easy to cut yourself that way. It’s also a great way to get an infected cut because the dishwater is not clean. There’s a meaningful possibility you could lose a finger doing this.

“Okay,” I thought. “Someone wasn’t very safe.” I breathed a little and moved on. And then about ten minutes later, someone else put an even bigger knife into that sink, plopping this one down into the water just inches away from my hand. I was too shocked to respond. Later I fished a third one out, too. It became clear to me that this was just the way the meeting house did dishes.

I called my friend Rebecca later that day to ask her how I should handle the situation.

“You’re not going to like this,” she told me, “but the Quaker answer is that if you want to change how things are done at the meeting house, then you should join the relevant committee.”

I was not particularly happy with this answer. First of all, as I think I have made clear, I have neither the talent nor the interest for the politics. I am not good with people. That’s the whole reason why, instead of joining Meeting for Business, I stayed behind in the kitchen to do the damn dishes.

“I can’t go to Meeting for Business,” I told Rebecca. “It happens during the time right after the potluck and I want to be helping wash the dishes during that time.”

“It’s more important for you as a newcomer to be in Meeting for Business than it is for you to be doing dishes,” Rebecca told me. “My recommendation would be to go to Meeting for Business for about six months to get an idea of how the meeting handles conflicts, and then you can start making changes to the organization.”

I did not want to sit in meetings for six months just to ask this group of people not to commit OSHA violations. I did not want to start over with yet another months-long process of gathering political goodwill just to earn the right to do the dishes. I thought about how the man washing dishes in the first hour had told me that there was a controversy over whether to have reusables at all, and I wondered if my priggish insistence on knife safety might kill the reusable project altogether. 

I thought about that first knife I fished out of the dishwater. There was a label stuck on the handle: “HAND WASH AND DRY RIGHT AWAY.” That message felt like a love letter to me from the past, like a hint that someone had been in my place before me and had also tried to help. But I had fished that very knife out of the sink. Someone didn’t read the label, maybe, or they didn’t really understand. 

I thought about the number of people who had stood up in meeting for worship that day to announce it was their first visit. I thought of how more and more newcomers were likely to come to the meeting in the months and years to come, and how every single one of those new people would need to be trained on knife safety if I didn’t want a surprise knife in the sink.

I decided to take Rebecca’s advice and stop doing the dishes.

This is where a reasonable person would laugh it off and let it go, but that’s not so easy for me. I worry that anyone who does the dishes at that meeting house might seriously hurt themselves. And there were so many feelings that came up with that knife when I fished it out of the water. I thought of my mother: how she would always leave sharp knives to soak in the sink. I asked her not to do that because I was afraid I would cut myself, and she just brushed me off. I thought of how eventually she cut her own hand that way, but she still couldn’t acknowledge that I was right. I thought of how she and my father would always make fun of me as a kid for being afraid of knives. I thought of how they normalized it so much that when my ex-boyfriend taunted me by waving knives around me and pointing one at my throat, I didn’t realize it wasn’t okay. 

I thought about how badly I wanted to tell everyone at that meeting house that knives really are dangerous and I’m not just overreacting the way my mom and dad and my ex-boyfriend always said I was. I imagined telling them and then watching them put the knives in the sink anyway, because nobody ever sees the dangers I see–because they’re fine with it as long as they don’t have to look at it. As long as it’s someone else’s trauma they can cope with by telling them to move on, as long as it’s an undefined climate crisis happening at some point in the future, as long as it’s only a knife lurking somewhere underneath the surface of the water.

It wasn’t about the knives.

Why was I even so worried about the possibility of accidentally cutting myself with a knife when I spend so many nights fighting off the urge to cut myself? Why did I get so worked up about this? The truth is that if you asked me to name my greatest fears, death wouldn’t even crack the top ten. In my darkest moments, which come more frequently than I’d like, I find myself wishing for it. My greatest fear is feeling terrified while everyone around me tells me that I’m just overreacting. That’s why I get so worked out about plastic knives and sharp knives in the dishwasher. I just feel like nobody cares.

Maybe I’m not quite as reasonable as I’d like to think.

Maybe it wasn’t about the dishes for me either. Not really. Maybe it was about wanting to do something that felt achievable in a world where everything feels so hard. This was the year I gave up on my dream of being a teacher because of how broken the school system is. I can’t fix that problem, so I at least wanted to do the dishes. I failed at that too, and then I shut down.

The truth (and this is a lesson I keep failing to learn) is that absolutely everything in life is impossibly hard. Well, not everything. Actually, Biblical Hebrew grammar and differential equations are pretty doable for me. But everything worth doing is hard, because I’m not happy sitting alone in a room forever with my books. I want to make a difference in a community full of people that I love, and everything that involves other people is impossibly hard for me.

A lot of that is me. I’m not good at relationships. I’m weird and intense and I get really worked up about things that most people do not care about.

But if I were the only intense person, then people would have just let me wash the dishes. Other people got just as worked up over wanting disposables as I did over wanting reusables.

How could I possibly have deluded myself that this would be easy? I know how quickly my mind jumps to assume that other people hate everything about me. Why would I be surprised when other people jumped to assume that I was judging them about the disposable plates? Aren’t they entitled to all the same neuroses that I have?

This is why human beings can never get things done on an organizational level. Nobody can just do the dishes.

This year I read the novel An Absolutely Remarkable Thing by Hank Green. It’s a sci-fi allegory for climate change, and its conclusion optimistically suggests that humanity will learn to work together to save itself. It brought me to tears, but I’m not convinced Green’s right. For what it’s worth, when I recommended the book to my Torah study group, the only person who read it immediately cancelled Green for being “pro-Palestine” after he defended a Palestinian-American activist who was deported. I believe that humanity is capable of doing something–and that even a single life saved is worth it–but I no longer believe that we as a species are capable of the kind of massive coordination that would be necessary to prevent massive atrocity.

A billion people will die from climate change in the next century. I used to think that was a preventable possibility. I now see it as an unavoidable fact.

My fellow volunteers are not bad people. They are good people who devote their Saturday mornings to setting up a lunch for their faith community. One of them–the one most adamantly opposed to fighting for recycling in our synagogue–recently lost her home in the wildfires. If that group of people can’t come together to support reusables, then our world has no chance. And I’m not just basing this off this small group of people, but on my experience living in a blue state. If even Angelenos have no interest in building a functioning transit system, then what hope is there for the rest of America? 

I recently attended a bat mitzvah at which the girl gave a drash about how she lost her home in the fires. There was plastic cutlery at the kiddush.

It’s a small thing. Of course I’m not blaming that girl or her family. But if they aren’t going to take the time to wash some forks, will anyone?

I know that corporations are responsible for a lot of the worst effects of climate change. But I think it’s easy to blame the billionaires and ignore the ways that we are voting for this, both with our ballots and our wallets. Even putting aside the corporations, the lifestyle of the average American is unsustainable, and we will have to make major changes to our lifestyles–though, unfortunately, we will probably only make those changes on a large scale once millions of people have already died. 

But it isn’t because people don’t care. That’s the other side of this: these people who are so hostile to climate action are good and loving people. I wish we lived in a more just world, but you try explaining to a doting grandparent that your middle-class toddler does not need yet another new $50 plastic contraption that will wind up in a landfill, when they could instead give that money to a family that can’t afford diapers. It’s not that people don’t care. It’s just that it doesn’t come naturally to people to be analytical when expressing love. 

One congregant told me that he wanted to use disposable dishes because he didn’t want to create work for me. I think his care was misplaced, but it’s impossible not to see that as care. It’s just that he cared more about the person right in front of him than he did about the exploited laborers on the other side of the world who made the paper plates or the people who might die in a hundred years due to a large number of wasteful habits, of which the plates are only one small part.

The humanity of the privileged is cold comfort to the oppressed. It’s cold comfort to me. But it’s something. I think about the dismissive way people so often respond to my abuse history. It’s not okay. Still, I wonder if they’re keeping it abstract and far away so they can cope with it. I imagine that if they were there with me in the room, I could really feel that care. That isn’t really enough, but it’s something. Maybe it’s even enough for me to learn to love other people so that I can sit patiently with them in a committee and gently advocate for them not to slice their hands open.

I’ve never wanted to be involved in organizational politics. It does not play to any of my strengths. I’m still not coming anywhere near my synagogue board. But I might think about coming to Meeting for Business, since I feel like I should do something for the meeting and I can’t do the dishes.

The ironic thing about all of this is that I almost never ended up doing the dishes at my synagogue. I wasn’t avoiding the dishes, but I would inevitably find that someone else had started in on the dishes before I could get to them. Often, these were people who didn’t otherwise help in the kitchen, but they jumped at a clear chance to make themselves useful by doing the dishes. No matter how many times I emphasized to people that it was my responsibility because I was the one who asked to put them out; no matter how many times I begged them to please just wait for me to say Grace After Meals so that I could do them; somebody else always jumped in and claimed dish duty. For something that everyone supposedly hated, it sure seemed like a lot of people were clamoring to do it. The conflict was finally resolved when one of the kitchen volunteers bought lightweight dishes that she would be able to wash. She was upset because her back problems made her unable to wash glass dishes, and she felt excluded. Once she could wash dishes too, she felt better about it.

It really shouldn't be surprising that people stepped up and did the dishes. Disposables have not existed for most of human history. People have always done the dishes. It's only recently that we've convinced ourselves that they’re an insurmountable obstacle.

I always thought that what made me unique was my ability to step up and do the dishes, but it turns out that wasn’t true. What made me unique was wanting to put them out there in the first place. For better or worse–and I’m still not sure if it was worth all the tsuris–it was an action I took out of strong conviction, and that was what I had to do alone.

As it turned out, in the end, everybody wanted to do the dishes.

Nobody wanted to save the world.

[yonahsienna]

32/32 baby!!!

jumblr folks should collectively make a basic jewish theology quiz that ppl outside the jewish community should have to pass before arguing with us about jewish theology. like what the fuck are these ppl doing arguing with me about the torah when they don't know about the existence of the oral torah.

[yonahsienna]

can we please please please learn to differentiate between things that are good but devalued because of their association with women (caring for children, being compassionate), things that are neutral but seen negatively because of their association with women (the colour pink, having long hair), and things that are bad but associated with women because of misogyny (being materialistic, being stupid) because otherwise we’re gonna keep getting takes like “being gender nonconforming is anti feminist” and “not studying for your classes is feminist”

[yonahsienna]

Did you know you can now play Hey Girlie!! FOR FREE!!

Please help kristen applebees get a date to the spring fling

>link<

I had such a blast getting to work on this doing the art for Kristen <333 Big shout out to the whole team for this game and especially all the mods and programmers who really worked their ass off to get this to where it is , big love to everyone behing @heygirliegame <33

[yonahsienna]

There’s nothing punk about you. Super cute you rebloged that post tho

You don't know me lol

[yonahsienna]

i was seeing all these little blue flowers everywhere and kept thinking "dang what are these bitches, i can't remember..." well guess what. they were fuckin forget-me-nots. can't believe i failed step fucking 1, the hot girls on iNaturalist are going to laugh at me and i'm gonna flunk out of hobby botany school.

[yonahsienna]

After the Fire

The world is equipped

To deal with certain levels of tragedy

The wood ash alkalizes the soil

Weedy plants cover the ground

The cycle keeps turning

Nature knows how to rebuild

But when tipping points are reached

The fire comes too fast

Too hot

Too long

Too all consuming

Things fall apart

So many lives cut short

So many ecosystems annihilated

The fire rages on

The fighters don't have funding

The fuel seems never-ending

The temperature keeps climbing

We start with rain, I think

Let it come

It irrigates the charred remains

Then come the birds and bugs

And soon the flowers grow

And cover the graves in loving embrace

Nature still knows what to do

And everyone plays their part

We do not fight fire with fire

We fight it with our tears

[yonahsienna]

LGBTQI+ Americans - check out this amazing resource from Rainbow Railroad <3

[yonahsienna]

I think this is pretty compatible with the first act of the original Dracula. He is so obviously playing with all of them and having so much fun doing it.

Okay, hear me out.

What if there was a vampire lord, real classical brooding dracula type. And he lives in his estate overlooking the small village below, right? One day one of his loyal ghouls shows up, says that there's a rumour about vampire hunter on his way here right now. And mr. vampire goes "Aww shit, now this is gonna be my whole week, the place is going to end up REEKING of garlic and holy water, this guy is going to be a majour pain in the ass before I drain him like a capri sun." So the vampire goes around setting up his fiendish traps, summoning his most wretched minions, the whole nine yards.

A week passes and the guy finally shows up. In the rain, sopping wet. Gets two metres into the grand foyer, trips on the rug, splats on his face. Comes across his first skeleton, not even one of the ones with a weapon, just turns and runs away. And the vampire is like "Now hold on, let's see where he's going with this." Because the dude's kind of a pathetic moron and the vampire finds this hilarious. And it just keeps happening, this poor guy is just barely evading certain death either through cowardice or sheer stupidity for days on end.

And the minions are looking at each other with raised eyebrows because the vampire is like "yeah nah, put out some food for the guy. I don't want him going hungry." and it's like sir, I get that this guy is doing a one man three stooges act in the east wing, but he is trying to kill you? But who's going to contradict their boss, especially a vampire boss.

And at this point the vampire is hamming it up, confronting the guy every so often with a cape flourish and organ music and that. And the hunter clearly doesn't know what he's doing, but the vampire is like "Damn you! Defeated... by a human! I must retreat for now, but rest assured we will cross paths again!!" And as soon as he's out of earshot of the guy he's laughing his ass off, hasn't had this much fun in centuries. And so everyone eventually gets used to this vampire and his boytoy vampire hunter.

[yonahsienna]

Im gonna be so real can yall actually talk about ways we can support trans women in the UK instead of giving all the attention to fucking JKR. I already know that Harry Poter sucks, I wanna know how to actually HELP people. Something something you have to love the oppressed more than you hate the oppressor

[yonahsienna]

Ashkenazi vegetarian here! I grew up with no kitniyot, and my family always had amazing meals so here are some suggestions!

Breakfasts

My favorite breakfast is Matzah Brei. It's delicious with any topping; some of my favorites are cinnamon sugar, maple syrup, yogurt, jam, fresh fruit, and/or charoset, but feel free to get creative. You can use almond, cashew, or coconut milk/yogurt if you're trying to cut down on dairy

You can also make granola, either with matzah or without

Smoothies are excellent and you may be able to add a non-kitniyot protein powder to them, like whey. You can also use chia seeds in smoothies or as overnight chia seed pudding!

You can't go wrong with eggs any style. If you want to get super fancy with it, you can even make eggs benedict with a potato latke instead of bread.

This may not apply to you, but my family is pescetarian, so matzah with cream cheese and lox was a mainstay for sure. If you don't want to spend a huge amount on store-bought lox, it's pretty easy to salt cure your own salmon, my family has made a tradition of doing this on holidays when we know a lot of people are coming over and it pays to buy a big flank.

Matzah with a nut butter and jam of your choice is a time honored classic

Lunch/Dinner

A lot of dishes can be made with Matzah instead of the grain so look for recipes for things like Matzah Pizza, Matzah Lasagna, Matzah Nachos, etc

Look for vegetables with higher protein content, like broccoli, brussel sprouts, cauliflower, spinach, sweet potatoes, mushrooms etc. Mushroom or cauliflower "wings", or "steak" can easily be a satisfying main dish with a side salad of your choice. Sweet potatoes and regular potatoes can be an excellent starch, or made into a kugel or casserole where they shine as part of the entree. Spinach, raw or cooked, can be thrown into many dishes to boost its protein and nutrients and add more complexity to the flavor and texture.

Many international cuisines have dishes which are naturally vegetarian and gluten-free, and with some hunting you can find many that don't have kitniyot either. Some of our favorites are Saag Paneer and Aloo Gobi from India, Tom Yum Soup and Cashew Coconut Milk Curry from Thailand, and quinoa soup and quinoa atamalada from Peru (the OU has ruled quinoa as kosher for Passover and non kitniyot since 2014!)

Who said eggs were just for breakfast? You can make a frittata, or use matza and/or crushed nuts for the crust of a quiche. You can make a wholesome shakshouka or a tangy egg salad. The world is your egg-ster!

Again, this may not apply to you specifically, but for any pescetarians stumbling across this, there are so many great ways to make fish: tuna or salmon steak, tuna salad, tuna, salmon, and/or mock crab wrapped in vegetables and seaweed for a rice-free sushi roll, the obvious but controversial Gefilte Fish, and much more.

If you're up for a challenge, you can use matzah meal or the KforP flour of your choice to make popovers, a classic Passover recipe that are an excellent vehicle for butter, cheese, or jam, or just a great substitute for a dinner roll.

Happy eating! And remember, it's only 8 days, you can do it 🤩💪🏼

It's my first pesach and I am STRUGGLING. I'm nearly out of matzo ball soup and I don't know what else to eat. As a vegetarian, pretty much all my usual protein sources are kitniyot. I figured I'd just substitute by eating more eggs and dairy, but my stomach is hurting and I think it's the increased dairy that's causing that. I'm about ready to give up and break out the tofu, but I don't want to do that. Ashkenazi Jews, please help! What are you eating?

Reminder for reference: op is underage and in the process of converting

[yonahsienna]

"the best way to screw jkr over is by making her characters queer!" actually. The best way to screw jkr over is to stop engaging with the property she still profits off of and read a different fucking book

[yonahsienna]

Let people grow.

When I was younger I was very right-wing. I mean…very right-wing. I won’t go into detail, because I’m very deeply ashamed of it, but whatever you’re imagining, it’s probably at least that bad. I’ve taken out a lot of pain on others; I’ve acted in ignorance and waved hate like a flag; I’ve said and did things that hurt a lot of people.

There are artefacts of my past selves online – some of which I’ve locked down and keep around to remind me of my past sins, some of which I’ve scrubbed out, some of which are out of my grasp. If I were ever to become famous, people could find shit on me that would turn your stomach.

But that’s not me anymore. I’ve learned so much in the last ten years. I’ve become more open to seeing things through others’ eyes, and reforged my anger to turn on those who harm others rather than on those who simply want to exist. I’ve learned patience and compassion. I’ve learned how to recognise my privileges and listen to others’ perspectives. I’ve learned to stand up for others, how to hear, how to help, how to correct myself. And I learned some startling shit about myself along the way – with all due irony, some of the things I used to lash out at others for are intrinsic parts of myself.

You wouldn’t know what I am now from what I was then. You wouldn’t know what I was then from what I am now.

It distresses me deeply to think of someone dredging up my dark, awful past and treating me as though that furiously hateful person is still me. It distresses me to see others dredging up the past for anyone who has made efforts to become a better person, out of some sick obsession with proving they’re “problematic.”

Purity culture tells you that once someone says or does something, they can never go back on it. That’s a goddamn lie. While it’s true that some remain unrepentant and never change their ways and continue to harm others, it’s important to allow everyone the chance to learn from their mistakes. Saying something ignorant isn’t murder. Please stop treating it that way. Let people grow.

[yonahsienna]

"The world doesn't need heroes, it needs helpers"

men will do literally anything other than engaging in pro-social community-oriented behavior and then get online and complain about how masculinity is vilified and men aren't allowed to be heroes anymore

[yonahsienna]

just wanted to share the National Down Syndrome Society’s message for this year’s World Down Syndrome Day (21st March) 💛💙

[yonahsienna]

We have always existed, and we always will.