scarlettbookworm

[scarlettbookworm]

online communities are so strange because people slip away so easily. you can be on here for years, folding people you've never met into the fabric of your daily life, and then they disappear, leaving only ghost posts scattered across tumblr behind. or their blog stays dormant, for weeks, months, years, until you're only still following them because you remember that they love sunflowers or they were kind to you when they didn't have to be or the last thing they posted was sad and raw and you still worry about them sometimes.

and sometimes they come back when you least expect it, years later, even, and there's this sudden rush of relief like there you are, there you are, even though you barely knew each other.

there's a strange kind of love to it. i don't know you and i want to hold your hand across miles and time zones and oceans. i can still see the imprint of you in this community you left. you don't anyone will notice or care when you're gone, but we notice and we care and we wish you well.

i hope you're all okay out there. i hope the sun is shining on your face and you are breathing deeply. i miss you.

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It's so cruel that if a black schizophrenic person wants any kind of help, they probably have to call 911, a centralized line for all emergency services. Even if they don't intend to call the police, there's a chance of them being sent in place of other emergency services. If you ask for them not to be called, you'll rarely be listened to. Then, the advice for dealing with police is to be in complete control of yourself, not be erratic in the slightest way because it gives ground for your death. So if you are someone who is not in control of yourself, who has a disorder that effects your ability to control your speech, body, mind, etc etc, you cannot call for help without risking death or institutionalization

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yet again bashing my pointer at the enormous sign that says "it's not that [witches/goblins/vampires/motherfucking krampus] are necessarily specifically jew-coded in an antisemitic way - though they may be and in fact often are, but you do have to take that part case by case - so much as it is that the entire european idea of what is monstrous is so deeply intertwined with ideas of jews as inhuman outsiders that some of that is going to leak in from the groundwater no matter what you do".

do not piss on the poor about this post i do not have it in me.

[scarlettbookworm]

Cannot BELIEVE I lived on this earth for 45 years without knowing that Mary Oliver, whose poetry I love, was in a relationship with a woman for 40 years. I have no idea how the hell I never knew about this when it was so central to her life and when she apparently always talked about her. How? How did I not know this?

Her name was Molly Malone Cook, and she was so many things. Molly is on the left, Mary on the right. Look how beautiful they were together.

I wanted to show you some of her work but this is the only one I could find for sure:

It is of Jean Cocteau, a legendary figure in the world of the arts who was openly homosexual in an era when society as a whole was very unfriendly to that. Molly appears in the mirror, taking the photo, both subject and observer.

The bohemian and brilliant Molly was a pioneer, opening what was probably the first East Coast photography gallery at a time when it was largely dismissed as art, she was one of the first staff photographers for the Village Voice, and acted as Mary's agent.

When the photography studio didn't earn enough money to keep them and the gallery afloat she opened a bookshop, too.

She could sail a boat, which I find deeply impressive, and would often take Mary and their friends out for conversation and companionship. She was friends and associates with many fashionable people, and many more unfashionable ones.

She was a steady person with a gruff demeanor and iconic shock of white hair, respected and loved by those who knew her, seen sometimes as a kind of parent. She remained an important figure in the arts even when her lungs began to give out from the darkroom chemicals.

Disabled and eventually in poor health, she still lived to be 80 years old, and though Mary gave very few interviews she never stopped speaking and writing of her love for Molly.

(And yet somehow I MISSED THIS and feel really foolish about it. In my defense, I often don't read much about artists I like from that era; I would rather not learn they were terrible people or friends with terrible people. I can't stomach the idea of rejecting large parts of art and literature history because a lot of important people did awful things, but nor can I quite separate artist from art, so I just....stay mostly ignorant as it is the least exhausting option. Horrible people can make beautiful and important things, and I wish more people could make their peace with that. Separate discussion.)

Interestingly to me, as someone who hates the phone and delegates everything I can, Molly was literally Mary's voice. She would answer the phone as herself, and if the caller asked for Mary, she would walk away and come back pretending to be her with no effort made to disguise her voice. She did this to give Mary the space, unbothered, to do poet things, and pretty much nobody had the nerve to challenge her on it.

I just wanted y'all to know a little about her, as she is part of our history. This is all from just a couple of hours reading, so if I got something wrong, that's why. I'm going to hit the library for her photography books and more about her life.

[scarlettbookworm]

idk what traumatized or mentally ill person needs to hear this but dreams (especially the really disturbing ones you dont want to talk about to anybody) arent some deep peek into your psyche or a sign of your True Desires or whatever theyre quite literally your brain making fruit salad with whatever it can find on the shelf. just putting all that shit in a blender and hitting obliterate. its fine, youre fine, youre not a weirdo for it

[scarlettbookworm]

No but I hate seeing young adults beat themselves up for not having it all at a certain age. Like the person with a career will hate themselves for not having a long education, while the person finishing their degree will hate themselves for not also working. And the person in a committed relationship will judge themselves for not also having a big friend group, while the person with lots of friends feels that they're failing because they're single. And in reality no life ever follows a set time line and it's unfair to expect anyone to have it all at once by 20 or 25 or 30 or literally any arbitrary deadline

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i love you people in my phone i know the seasonal depression is setting in so we need to hold eachother like a litter of kittens in a cardboard box okay...its important

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here's what we know so far

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A Hackfall Folly, North Yorkshire, England.

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The fact that you can’t raise taxes on billionaires even slightly without them pouring money into fascist political movements is, of itself, evidence that billionaires as a class shouldn’t be allowed to exist in the first place.

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lord take all of my pain and sufferig and give it to elon musk

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they should make this a legal requirement everywhere

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50 years ago the Welsh mining village of Aberfan was engulfed by a coal tip landslide. The local primary school was directly in its path

via reddit

Keep reading

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I mean surely we all grew up feeling like there was a wrongness inherently deep inside us that will endure for the rest of our lives

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An early Halloween cartoon for Guardian Books