#picturing things was part of my process

[badaxefamily]

When I was younger I was 1-2 but as I've gotten older (currently 40) it's usually 3-4. And that's why leaving stuff like depression and OCD untreated is bad and chronic illnesses are bad! :V Heck the American health care system.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Remember: The burning sensation is part of the process.

[icewindandboringhorror]

I know this is just a silly bad quality random screencap of a screencap that I found on facebook lol, BUT it's a succinct enough image to easily describe the concept in a quick/accessible way hopefully :

-

(and of course, feel free to elaborate in tags, etc.! (especially elaborating about other senses as well.. can you "hear" in your mind just as well as you can "see"? taste? etc.) It's an interesting topic to me, as someone who's like a 4.5 at MOST lol. I'm curious what option will be the most common :0c )

[articskele]

IF I HAD A NICKEL EVERYTIME I WANTED TO BE FRIENDS WITH A DUO OF CHARACTERS FROM A HORROR GAME, ONE BEING HUMANOID AND THE OTHER BEING A MONSTER WITH SHARP TEETH-

[maliciousalice]

Count the ways I've had a fucked up life:

-Shoved my twin sister when we were 3 and saw blood come out of her ears from the knock on her head. From that point on she was half-deaf. -Twin sister and I nearly drowned at age 6 by being pulled into a powerful rip-tide at an unsupervised beach. My parents thought it was cute until we couldn't swim back and they both had to swim out to get us. I remember being really tired, and them being unsure about being able to swim back to shore.

-At age 11 witnessed my mother forgetting to apply the brake to her car. She tried to get back in and tripped, it subsequently rolled over her, crushing her foot and dragging her down the road. She bled profusely. The crimson stained pavement haunted me for a long time. I blamed myself because I arrived home from a friend's house at the same exact same time and believed I distracted her.

-Accidently electrocuted myself when I was bored while watching my siblings play on the computer. Without looking, I fiddled with the back of an old lamp with my finger tips, but I didn't know that fumbling the cables would cause it to surge. The large shock sent my arm numb for about an hour. Didn't seek treatment because the power tripped and I was worried I would get yelled at.

-Deep in the bush, during a particularly dry summer, family friends stupidly made a bonfire, and I saw our campsite get quickly lit up. As the flames surrounded us and the cars, I was yelled at to go get help/manual water pumps as if it was my fault. Somehow we managed to put it all out. We had to try something because the alternative was getting trapped.

-Was on the phone to my grandma when she had a stroke, I had no idea what was going on, to the point I thought it was a prank. I was crying because it wasn't something I was even aware could happen to someone, I continued to listen and her language skills deteriorated the longer I was on the phone. She became convincedly desperate despite her incoherence and somehow I broke away from my fear and got my dad to help her.

-My mother stabbed my older sister in the arm with a kitchen knife and they both just walked off. I remember being around the corner listening to the argument escalate and saw my older sister clutching her arm. (my sister is very violent so I think it was done in self defense???)

-Dad threw that same sister into the drywall multiple times--Not to excuse it but she was a devil, and would attack / lunge at us, and disrespected my parents from a young age. Dull thudding against walls sends me on edge to this day because it was one way to identify a scuffle with her.

-Mum had a cabinet pushed onto her by my older sister. The cabinet had a glass panel that shattered on her leg and sliced it open.

-My twin sister got upset at me and swung a 10kg metal bar stool at my leg, the blunt force tore my leg open, I now have a very sensitive scar on my shin. -My mum ran at me in an anger spell and I blocked it by pushing her away from me (that's legitimately all), she slipped on the slippery cork floors we had and fell over hitting her head hard. She was unconscious for a few minutes. Her tongue was sticking out and her eyes were open. I thought I had killed her. I wanted to call an ambulance. She woke up and I begged to her that she needed to go to hospital but she brushed it off because we had to catch a flight.

-On my way back from a lunch break I saw a woman go under a Truck. Once again I blamed myself because I crossed in front of the driver at a crossing, and nodded to him. As he rolled forward to leave she sprinted across, I turned and saw that she got hit. -My older sister took advantage of my mum and got into large debts by getting her to co-sign loans behind my dad's back. My mum was paying off things like her phone bill and eventually a car loan. This caused a lot of violent contention.

-Older Sister was kicked out of multiple times but my parents never fully cut her out and now she lives scott-free in a brand new granny flat in the backyard because of their guilt.

-lived in relative poverty and mess most of my teenage life because it was too expensive to send 4 kids to school for my parents. They worked full time but didn't really provide us with any emotional security. Both parents were very messy but blamed us for it as we got older. I tried my best to keep things clean but it was often in vain (it is to this day as things have escalated to full hoarding)

[fingertipsmp3]

There are two wolves inside me. One is trying to convince me to do extensive research for the job interview tomorrow and the other is saying “wing it”

[anti-transphobia]

Twitter users have learned the term "weaponized incompetence" and of course are using it wrong and it's pissing me off. The latest example of "weaponized incompetence" is a husband who decided to make crescent rolls but didn't realize he needed to roll them up so he made large crescent chips instead. Literally just a mistake. Y'know. Those things people make?

Another recent example is someone's fiance being asked to clean up hot sauce. Now this could certainly more likely actually be weaponized incompetence! The very slow movements very much says "look at me do this and fail. You should just do it next time, it's easier." But you know what it also very much says, something that is just as likely? The movements are slow because it's more than he expected and he's trying to figure it out. I struggle with this, and have gotten better with practice, but what else are you supposed to do? Sometimes there's a puddle of something and you put a paper towel on it and it absorbs but is not nearly enough. He specifically examines how full of hot sauce it is after the first soak and how much more there is. And when he starts smearing it around...how else are you supposed to avoid that? It's still cleaning it so long as the smears aren't left behind

As I said, weaponized incompetence or someone genuinely trying are both likely there. The thing is, I'm not making assumptions about it. And neither should other people. Those types of slow, unsteady movements as I figure things out are extremely common for me. I am autistic and have struggled to process physical tasks (how to accomplish things that require my body to move in a certain way, including running and jump roping etc. didn't learn how to jump rope until I was 18) my entire life. This is how I figure shit out. If someone assumed me literally doing my best to complete a task was weaponized incompetence, I'd be pissed. In fact, that happens all the time!

My mother, while I was growing up, pretty much weaponized weaponized incompetence, without using those words. She would ask me to do something. I, being an autistic child, would try my best. I'd fail or do a poor job because I'm a child. She might try a few more times with me but because I didn't get it instantly or it struggled to click she'd visibly get mad at me and tell me not to bother and that she'd just do it instead. As I got into my teens she accused me of doing things badly on purpose so I wouldn't have to do it, when the reality is she just gave up on me and asked me to do things less and less frequently with age. Then at around 16, and ESPECIALLY 18+, she started expecting me to do ALL kinds of things. Saying "you're an adult, you should know this". How? Adults know the things they do because they have experience. I don't. I've had to play such hard catch up for everything I've missed because people (not just my mom) find it easier to not bother with the disabled child.

I'm not saying the man in that video is autistic, or anything else! But what I said brings another point into play: he's an adult and simply doesn't know how to do it. That's a problem! Now why would he be an adult incapable of doing what should be a simple task he should have already learned? He wasn't taught. It reminds me of the guy who got a ton of shit online because his mom did his laundry for him all his life so when he first lived out of the house (I think with a roommate) he had to learn how to do his laundry. He wasn't refusing to do his laundry, he wasn't whining and complaining about it, he was just texting a friend about it. It would be a problem if he didn't bother to learn. If someone is LITERALLY TRYING TO LEARN HOW TO DO SOMETHING it's not weaponized incompetence! I don't care how old they are!

And honestly it does play into the whole "the patriarchy is bad for men too" situation. If a man doesn't know how to do something, such as laundry or cleaning up spills, as an adult because those jobs were always deferred to women, he is now incapable of caring for himself when alone. And then when with someone else, accused of weaponized incompetence when trying to learn by people learning new words to run into the ground. Or once again, maybe it's not a situation where he didn't learn because the women specifically always did the cleaning, he just generally might not have been taught. I don't know!

The very point I'm trying to make is that you can't make those kind of assumptions based off of a short clip, or a picture, of someone doing something poorly. Even if there's a CHANCE it could be weaponized incompetence, it is so BEYOND horrible to go on and on about how it HAS to be weaponized incompetence because no one could be that stupid. It feels awful to be a disabled person seeing people being mocked and called abusers for making the same kind of mistakes you've made. It feels awful to see something, think "oh I've messed that up too", and then see 50 different comments about how it has to be weaponized incompetence because no one could be THAT stupid

Can we please stop forgetting the existence of disabled people and people with generally different life experiences than you, thanks. There's a huge difference between weaponized incompetence and learning (or someone doing the best they can and being physically unable to do things more efficiently because of being disabled)

[orcelito]

every FUCKING time i tell someone my uncle died there's a moment where im just really casual with it bc it's just a simple fact. and then theyre like "oh my god im so sorry" and im just. caught by surprise by it like. oh yeah. this Is sad. this Is fucked up. it's reasonable for me to be upset by it.

and i just laugh it off like "yeah, that's how things are i guess" & try to push things along bc i deal so badly with being emotionally vulnerable with people

things are... hard.

[needle-rose]

Hi! We seem to have gotten off on the wrong foot. While I’m by no means an expert on German culture either today or historically, I’ve studied fairy tales both in academic and independent contexts for many years and am very familiar with the long and widespread history of certain tale types within the indo-European language group.

If you haven’t read it you might be interested in da Silva and Tehrani’s 2016 paper on phylogenetic analysis of tale types to determine their age! I’m happy to send you a link since it sounds like you are also someone who enjoys this kind of thing.

That was my error to assume you were coming from a place of pop-history without checking—I have a bit of a knee-jerk reaction to some of the more common “myths” around fairy tales and their evolution.

My studies with fairy tales are more comparative than culturally/linguistically specific. I was referring more to the developmental stage of adolescence, rather than the social construct of childhood or teenagers (which, as you pointed out, have not been universal throughout time and place).

I can see where we also may have been talking past each other regarding the specifically German elements of the stories the Grimms collected. As an American I still sometimes fall into the trap of using the Grimm’s stories as shorthand for “old-world-y ‘European’ fairy tales,” especially as they’re often presented as such in our schools with little reference to the context of the nationalist and romantic movements that motivated their collection in the first place.

I enjoy a joke about fucked up German fairy tales as much as the next nerd, but it's genuinely striking how often the source for the really fucked up stuff turns out to be "yeah, this is only in the Brothers Grimm version and doesn't appear in any extant oral tradition, and we're like 80% sure they added it themselves". To a large extent it's not German fairy tales that are fucked up, it's two specific German dudes.

[malachitezmeyka]

I think That Woman is genuinely trying to kill me

[roseband]

...

[zakuryoishi]

thinking about shun and ruri. breaks down and falls to my knees

[soldierandawar]

like imagine me going down a rabbit hole for somebody that i would’ve actively avoided if we were on a college campus lmao.

[elboxitracio]

Ok so the whole butterfly pinning is not for people whose hands tremble as much as mine do. Will that stop me? No<3

[dynamitekansai]

[the-corset-witch]

There is nothing I miss more than tucking the baby girl in for her naps and how she used to wait for me in bed and always want to cuddle, she was (and forever will be) my best girl