#so many of us have to actively stop ourselves from self harming or fucking everything up on purpose because that's all we're told to do by

[ablednt]

For real though I hate how removed from our own discussions CSA survivors really are honestly.

The only representation I can think of in ANY media are think pieces "exploring the issue" made by non-survivors. The only times in which the character being groomed/abused aren't also sexualized for the audience's enjoyment are when it's being understated because the media is kid friendly (think, series of unfortunate events, or a surprising amount of "forced marriage" tropes in childrens movies like barbie)

Half the time like in fuckin Six the musical it's made into some "feminist" critique that couldn't be fucked to do a single sensitivity check that's like "hey maybe don't sexualize a historical figure who really fucking went through these traumas to make fucking pedophile jokes about them maybe"

Like sometimes I fucking hate y'all non survivors because you will literally never shut the fuck up long enough for us to talk about our own goddamn experiences? Like y'all don't fucking KNOW what it FEELS like to be abused in that way and throwing hypersexual people under the bus every time you want to make an edgy oc isn't doing a goddamn fucking thing for us actually.

Not to mention in a case where the pedophilia is actually addressed as an issue and called out I have literally only seen one fucking piece of media that allows the character to progress past the trauma itself and to show any kind of recovery. Literally every other media either kills the character off immediately to show how "gritty" the setting is or ends the story before they can move on or even more hilariously just never mentions it again and suddenly they're unaffected by it like it never happened.

Like I'm actually tired of the way y'all metaphorically cosplay our traumas long enough to put out the exact same shit that's always been done and being like woww this is so subversive and new!!!

Like shut the fuck up I am going to hit you with my car actually

[theawakenedstate]

The facade of Growth.

When a flower blooms, does it ever force itself to be a flower? Does it ever try so hard that it recites affirmations of ‘i am a beautiful flower, i am a beautiful flower’ – No.

The affirmations may serve the flower for a time as it awaits change – but what is happening underneath the surface?

It simply. naturally. accepts its evolution of change. and blooms.

the facade of Growth, Why do we simply resist our Acceptance of Truth of What is in the present moment?

Acceptance that we’re in lack.

Acceptance that we have an emotion.

Acceptance that we’re afraid.

Acceptance that we want to change but we’re afraid to change at the same time.

What if you don’t need a laundry list of things to heal yourself and actually what you need to do Is Accept yourself just as you are?

How much would that illusion of growth shatter and what would you DO in that space of VOID?

In that space of holy shit – my ego is now shattered, I can simply accept me as me?

How many in the spiritual community are put under this spell of forced growth through a set of dogmatic rules or an illusion of Struggle all for the sake of being “Higher Vibrational”

and often to reach the state of pure enlightenment.

And the dangerous or often troubling thing about this is it really isn’t that different than saying:

I have a laundry list of things to do, to feel, to be so I can now be a spiritual badass and NOW I am good enough. But until then…I’m out of luck. I suck. I need to do more work on myself. I need to heal. I’m not enough as I am.

And I see it as a trap that actually denies change and true growth – because what they aren’t really telling you is you’re just perpetuating the RESISTANCE and looping it through your nervous system on repeat.

And what if the illusion is the healing is simply part of the evolution of change, of growth and in your refusal to accept it – you resist your own alignment.

as a spiritual teacher it drives me a bit crazy – how harmful some of the teachings are when we say high vibe only, let’s bypass our right to be human and in doing so LETS MAKE THE RESISTANCE EVEN BIGGER – and give a full on ILLUSION that I healed it.

But it’s like a unconscious HIGH, let me consume more and more and more so I can be high vibe all the way floating up into space consuming more and more and more – while I suddenly step away from that external thing and realize,

SHOCKED – nothing has actually changed, I haven’t healed anything, and i am STILL pushing away with full on resistance towards what i actually desire – thinking poof

if i magically change things externally and focusing on changing what is outside of me things will magically shift without doing any mofo Internal work that idk makes up the core components of reality.

and then they preach that, make it harder for others and give an illusion of healing that isn’t actually capable of quantum leaps, true emotional liberation of self or any of the above.

But its cool, substitute your coffee – its what is destroying your manifesting,

Are you meditating enough? because if you’re not your vibration obviously isn’t good enough to receive what you want. Be more high vibe okay?

Let me sniff some more oils and see if that works LOL

It’s always about changing the inner to influence the outer – everything else is a facade of noise –

If you want real change, change the Internal environment,

understand your own Alignment

and watch the quantum leap happen as you are NOW –

no longer resisting yourself.

In today’s vlog, I share WHY it’s important to Release the Struggle so you step into your natural evolution of self- growth.

This conversation is sooo soo needed in the spiritual community space.

Enjoy

I want you to think about, 

Where are you making things overly hard or striving with a pushing energy in your life? 

What area is this completely taking over your mind?  We often make things harder than necessary, 

We often are striving to prove a point to ourselves. 

And More times than not, we DO justify the struggle to feel validated in our pain rather than give ourselves permission to feel full on pleasure. 

It was never  about Striving to Be More. Do More. Have more. 

It was always about following your path of least resistance so you naturally Accept  You already CAN Have more. 

Do more. 

Be more. 

And allow it to be more fun, easy, flow and Do it in the way that makes YOU happy, 

In a way that feels Fuck yes in your body, 

In a way that feels Good to You.  It was always about releasing the complications so you activate your power.  Because all of the above, was you just forgetting 

you had the power inside you the entire time, 

to make it easier for yourself.  It’s time to Activate what you know inside of you is already REAL and true. 

It’s time to Access your Alignment. 

__ THE ALIGNMENT RESET CHALLENGE IS NOW ENROLLING  This for those of you who are feeling:

Are you Over Being constantly in “do mode” over-working, over-achieving & sacrificing as a result?

Are you feeling stuck, frozen or letting fear keep you in inaction?

Do you find yourself being more reactive emotionally and seeking approval in your relationships?

Are you obsessing about those damn hows and getting stopped on what to do next?

Most importantly are you not following through and putting yourself last?

And are you ready to end the self-sabotage for good? If I am hearing a hell yes – then it’s time for an Alignment Reset 

This Challenge is designed to get you out of Misalignment and teach you over the course of 21 days the unique ways we can access our personal energetic alignment.

The challenge will also teach you some powerful techniques to Shift your Mindset & reprogram your mind so you can stop letting fear run the show.

This will be a 21 day Journey together with mini-coaching Lessons each day  where you will learn:

+ How to Cultivate More Awareness to Remove Resistance Patterns 

+ Manage your Energy to Shift your Mindset & environments 

+ Raise your Vibrations Naturally to Re-align with Higher Truth & work with your body 

And

+ Manifest with more ease by exercising your Co-creative Power from a place of Alignment.

BONUS 2021 UPGRADE LIVE TRAININGS HOT SEAT Q&A COACHING CALLS ADDED on top of everything.

We start July 19th,

Join us below: https://theawakenedstate.net/alignment-reset-challenge/

https://theawakenedstate.net/how-to-grow-naturally-release-the-struggle/

How to Grow Naturally & Release the Struggle

The facade of Growth. When a flower blooms, does it ever force itself to be a flower? Does it ever try so hard that it recites affirmations of ‘i am a beautiful flower, i am a beautiful flower’ – No. The affirmations may serve the flower for a time as it awaits change – but what is happening underneath the […]

[pumpacti0n]

I’m a pacifist, but being dogmatic about non-violence is a very bourgeois take and its proof that the training by our corporate masters to be passive and fearful is complete.

morally speaking I’d argue self defense is exempt from being at odds with pacifist ideals given that you cant be peaceful if you’re fucking dead. there will be no peace as long as the wealthy white warlords (and #girlboss warlords/warlords of color) and their schemes go unchallenged.

every conscious living creature that’s aware of a threat will attempt to defend themselves and avoid harm if possible, so why should we expect otherwise for ourselves and fellow humans? liberals love to fret about antifa and rioters and anarchists and whatnot but the alternative to direct action is laying down and dying. and no one has earned that sacrifice from us.

it’s too big of a price to pay to let fascists live in “peace” while they’re destroying everything in their path. I think we must get past this purely fictitious delusion that we can love our enemies to death and by inflicting violence on them we degrade ourselves. this isn’t the same as a scorched earth policy and wanton execution of everyone deemed “counterrevolutionary” or whatever in an endless quest for vengeance.

appeals to non-violent dogmatism has been weaponized to stifle socially progressive movements and justify even more violence directed at the people who challenge authorities. to me, “revolutions are always violent” doesn’t mean that we seek out conflict (because that’s not strategic and guerilla warfare is the only legitimate method of defeating the forces in question,) but only recognizes that the current state of the world is already violent to begin with, and the owner class will reflexively increase the violence whenever the process of exploitation is threatened (or believed to be threatened).

The reason why the state doesn’t (often) deploy legions of stormtroopers and tanks to attack legal protests and voters is because they don’t constitute a major threat to the hegemony and the power structure. if you’re marching with cops and resist only in the approved methods by following the law to the letter, you can bet that you aren’t effectively challenging their supremacy in any meaningful way... it’s purely spectacle!

non-violence presumes that there is a possibility to create peace, but if the conditions aren’t there, then it’s simply waiting to die. you can’t have a nice dinner party in the middle of an active war zone unless you’re fully insulated from the terror that war brings. and this is class war. that’s why you’ll only find this kind of rhetoric coming from people more invested in preserving the already violent status quo and Not people who live the violent conditions daily.

You’d have no love lost for the destruction of an oppressive system unless you benefit from that system or find it more preferable to surrender fully than to resist. there’s no way that a violent system will allow for a peaceful resolution especially as the violence it inflicts is uninterrupted, and the perpetrators or their defenders show no interest in relenting for even a moment.

The Black Panthers wrote “on self defense” back in 1969 and they made many keen observations about the hypocrisy of so-called “peacekeepers” and their assertion that fascists have more of a right to safety than we do. It’s so wild how the talking points haven’t changed much, still lacking substance, still appealing to broken ethical standards and relying on the same bunk ass eye-for-an-eye fallacy that’s been thoroughly dissected and read for filth almost a century ago

keep this all in mind next time you see people conflating the next series of riots with terrorism and perpetuating this myth of anarchists causing trouble because they just want to drink the blood of innocents and burn down your grandmothers house while the victims of drone strikes and ICE and economic genocide are swept under the rug.

when they ask: “but must they be so violent?” you might answer: “because “kaboom!” is understood universally, but “stop killing us” apparently isn’t.”

[whitehotharlots]

The triumph of lunacy

There’s a trend in the social justice sphere that encapsulates the self-defeating idiocy of our present moment. During official meetings meant to address or raise awareness of issues of racial justice, all the white people present are expected to call themselves racist, provide examples of their racism, and explain what they’re doing to avoid being racist in the future. 

I am not exaggerating, and this is as cult-like as it sounds: to enter into the discussion, you must start by saying “My name is Mark, and I’m a racist.” 

This is not a fringe activity. It’s a completely mainstream part of racial justice programming. A student in Nevada is suing his school after administrators threatened to deny him graduation because he refused to call himself racist. A quick twitter search reveals dozens of examples (which I am omitting to avoid accusations of “generating death threats” or whatever), and this has been covered extensively in right wing media. This is mainstream, even if we want to pretend that it’s not.

Now, looking at this just in the abstract, a few seconds of scrutiny shows us how idiotic and self-defeating this practice is. I accept the notion that everyone is prejudiced to some degree and that most white Americans receive some structural advantages in some spaces. In this very obscure sense, you can argue that all white people are racist. Fine. But if a term is applied to literally everyone and everything, it loses its utility. If everyone is racist, then “racist” is a meaningless designation. 

In practice, however, this is even more insane than it sounds. Because of course the purveyors and participants in these ritualistic humiliation sessions don’t really think that everyone is racist. If they did, they wouldn’t go through the ritual. Obviously, the people calling themselves racist are being coerced into doing so. Every person who says “My name is Mary, and I’m a racist” is thinking in the back of their head that they’re not really racist, that this confession serves as an act of ablution. And, in a truly lunatic twist of irony, the people who are regarded as racist after these sessions are the ones who did not call themselves racist. 

Madness. Absolute madness. 

This is precipitated, of course, by guilt. White liberals realize, correctly, the the world is fucked. The politicians and organizations that putatively represent their views have done the opposite and accelerated widespread brutality. The man who invented mass incarceration was sold as the only way to avoid “fascism.” There’s no hope of a more decent future. They feel like shit and will do anything, even self-flagellation, to glimpse the feeling that maybe they’re kind of sort of partway making the world less horrible. They’re not--objectively, this type of gross bullshit is alienating, makes non-insane people disengage with the movement, and has been empirically proven to reduce empathy and make people more hateful. But they feel a little better for doing it. 

Beyond guilt, however, lies coercion. I’ll bet the vast, vast majority of people who have subjected themselves to these struggle sessions didn’t believe a word they were saying but were just going along to avoid getting in trouble. Personally, I’m not going to lose my job and my healthcare just to avoid a few moments of cynical embarrassment. Very few people would.

It was just today that I realized how commonplace this type of dishonesty has become. If you live or work in a liberal space, ask yourself this question: how many times in the last few years have you professed a belief in something you knew was crazy? How many times have you been made to signal approval for ideas that you knew to be harmful, impossible, or reactionary in order to avoid being branded an Enemy of Social Justice? How many times have you stayed silent and let yourself be bullied into feigning support for policies and procedures that contradict your beliefs?

More than a few, I’ll bet. Now ask yourself: what has been gained from this? Is the world more just or safe or equal than it was before this type of shit was made commonplace? Do you have more hope for the future, or less? 

The only political effect of this normalization of dishonesty has been the ascendance of the most reactionary faction of the Democrat party. A left that had not been trained to hate itself would not have voted for Joe Biden. 

This is what happens when a movement places zero value upon honesty and decency. When all conflict becomes understood as abuse, when all criticism is regarded as violence, the most sociopathic and violent members of a community are the ones who get to set the agenda. No one can push back. No one can dissent. The demand for absolute uniformity cripples the movement’s ability to accomplish anything beyond enriching a handful of the very worst people on earth. 

We did this to ourselves, and I worry we might be past the point of no return. Just a few months ago I still held some hope that we might see a turn around, that saner and more decent voices might take control and actualize our widespread disgust and discontent toward policies that would actually help people. That’s not going to happen. The sociopaths have won. Their candidate is president, their ideology is mandatory, and their ability to hurt anyone who crosses them is stronger than ever.

Joe Biden will be the most austerity-minded president since Herbert Hoover. His reign is going to be disastrous for everyone, especially those who are already vulnerable. His supporters, secure in their positions within media and NGOs and academe, will need to fabricate more scapegoats to explain away the failures and brutalities of their leader--to convince everyone that they deserve the punishment they are receiving. They’re going to demand and receive more intrusive means of ensuring ideological uniformity. And there’s nothing we can do to stop them.

[hellomynameisbisexual]

I’d go so far as to say that the nomination probably saved the site, in fact. For those who need a little background: despite being a small voluntary project the site was nominated for the 2014 Publication of the Year award by Stonewall, the UK’s largest LGBT charity, just nine months after its inception. This was a landmark step in Stonewall’s positive new direction on bi issues. To the best of my knowledge, this was the first time Stonewall had specifically nominated a specifically bi publication or organisation for an award. At this point my co-founder, who was taking care of the business side of things, had recently jumped ship and I was seriously considering packing the whole thing in. I won’t lie, I was astonished to read the email.

I’d worked on a publication which won the award under my editorship a few years previously. Unlike Biscuit, however, g3 magazine – at the time one of the two leading print mags for lesbian and bi women in the UK – had an estimated readership of 140,000, had been going for eight years and boasted full-time paid office staff and regular paid freelancers. Biscuit, by contrast, was being dragged along by one weary unpaid editor and a bunch of unpaid writers who understandably, for the most part, couldn’t commit to regularly submitting work.

Little Biscuit’s enormous competition for the award consisted of Buzzfeed, Attitude.co.uk, iNewspaper and Property Week. We didn’t win – that accolade went to iNewspaper – but the nomination was nevertheless, as I say, a huge catalyst to continue with the site. I launched a crowdfunder, which finished way off target. I sold one ad space, for two months. Then nothing. I attempted in vain to recruit a sales manager but nobody wanted to work on commission. Some wonderful writers came and went. There were periods of tumbleweed when I frantically had to fill the site with my own writing, thereby completely defeating the object of providing a platform for a wide range of bi voices.

The Stonewall Award nomination persuaded me to keep going with the site

The departure of the webmaster was another blow. Thankfully by this point I had a co-editor on board – the amazing Libby – so I was persuaded to stick with it. And here we are now. I don’t actually know where the next article is coming from. That’s not a good feeling. But, apart from for Biscuit, I try not to write for free anymore myself, so I understand exactly why that is. As a freelance journo trying to make a living I’ve had to be strict with myself about that. I regularly post on the “Stop Working For Free” Facebook group and often feel a pang of misplaced guilt because I ask my writers to write for free, even though I’m working on the site for free myself, and losing valuable time I could be spending on looking for paid work.

Biscuit hasn’t exactly been a stranger to controversy, in addition to its financial and staffing issues. Its original tagline – “for girls who like girls and boys” – was considered cis-centric by some, leading to accusations that the site had some kind of trans/genderqueer*-phobic agenda. Which was amusing, as at the height of this a) we’d just had two articles about non-binary issues published and b) I was actually engaged to a genderqueer partner, a fact they were clearly unaware of. Now the site is under fire from various pansexual activists who object to the term “bisexual”. To clarify – “girl and boys” was supposed to imply a spectrum and, no, we don’t think “bi” applies only to an attraction to binary folk. The site aims the main part of its content at female-spectrum readers attracted to more than one gender because this group does have specific needs. But there is something here for EVERYONE bisexual. Anyway, it’s a shame all of this gossip was relayed secondhand, and the people in question didn’t think to confront me about it (which at least the pan activists have bothered to do). We damage our community immeasurably with these kinds of Chinese whispers.

Biscuit ed Libby, being amazing

Whilst trying to keep the site afloat, I’ve also been building on the work I started right back when I edited g3, and trying to improve bi visibility in other media outlets. I’ve recently had articles published by Cosmopolitan, SheWired, The F-Word, GayStar News and Women Make Waves and I’m constantly emailing other sites which I’ve not yet written for with bi pitches. Unfortunately, although I am over the moon to be writing for mainstream outlets such as Cosmo about bi issues, it’s been an uphill struggle trying to persuade some editors out there that they have more readers to whom bi-interest stories apply than they might think. It’s an incredibly exhausting and frustrating process.

Libby and I are doing our best with Biscuit. I can’t guarantee that I would be doing anything at all with it if Libby hadn’t arrived on the scene, so once again I would like to mention how fabulous she is. But we desperately need more writers. We need some help with site design and tech issues. We need a hand with the business and sales side of things. We can’t do it without you. And if you know any rich bisexual heiresses who read Biscuit, please do send them our way. 😉

Grant Denkinson’s story

denkinsonpanel

Grant speaks on a panel chaired by Biscuit’s Lottie at a Bi Visibility Day event

So first of all, explain a little about the activism you’re involved/have been involved in. 


“I’ve been involved with bisexual community organising for a bit over 20 years. Some has been within community: writing for and editing our national newsletter, organising events for bisexuals and helping others with their events by running workshop sessions or offering services such as 1st aid. I’ve spoken to the media about bisexuality and organised bi contingents at LGBT Pride events (sometimes just me in a bi T-shirt!). I’ve helped organise and participated in bi activist weekends and trainings. I’ve help train professionals about bisexuality. I’ve also piped up about bisexuality a lot when organising within wider LGBT and gender and sexuality and relationship diversity umbrellas. I’ve been a supportive bi person on-line and in person for other bi folks. I’ve been out and visibly bi for some time. I’ve helped fund bi activists to meet, publish and travel. I’ve funded advertising for bi events. I’ve set up companies and charities for or including bi people. I’ve personally supported other bi activists.”


What made you get involved?

“
In some ways I was looking for a way to be outside the norm and to make a difference and coming out as bi gave me something to push against. I’ve been less down on myself when feeling attacked. I’ve also found the bi community very welcoming and where I can be myself and so wanted to organise with friends and to give others a similar experience. There weren’t too many others already doing everything better than I could.”

How do you feel about the state of bi activism worldwide (esp UK and USA) at the moment?

“There have been great changes for same-sex attracted people legally and socially and these have happened quickly. Bi people have been involved with making that happen and benefit from it. We can also be hidden by gay advances or actively erased. We still have bi people not knowing many or any other local bi people, not seeing other bisexuals in the mainstream or LGT worlds and not knowing or being able to access community things with other bis. We are little represented in books or the media and people don’t know about the books and zines and magazines already available. The internet has made it easy to find like-minded people but also limited privacy and I think is really fragmented and siloed. It is hard to find bisexuals who aren’t women actors, harmful or fucked up men or women in pornography designed for straight men. We have persistent and high quality bi events but they are sparse and small.”

What’s causing you to feel disillusioned?

“I’m fed up of bi things just not happening if I don’t do them. Not everything should be in my style and voice and I shouldn’t be doing it all. I and other activists campaign for bi people to be more OK and don’t take care of ourselves enough while doing so. People are so convinced we don’t exist they don’t bother with a simple search that would find us. We have little resources while having some of the worst outcomes of any group. I don’t want to spend my entire life being the one person who reminds people about bisexuals, including our so-called allies. I’m not impressed with the problem resolution skills in our communities and while we talk about being welcoming I’m not sure we’re very effective at it. I’m fed up with mouthing the very basics and never getting into depth about bi lives and being one who supports but who is not supported. I’m all for lowering barriers but at a certain point if people don’t actively want to do bi community volunteering it won’t happen. Some people are great critics but build little.”

What do you want to say to other activists about this?

“Why are we doing this personally? I’m not sure we know. How long will we hope rather than do? Honestly, are there so few who care? Alternatively should we stop the trying to do bi stuff and either do some self-analysis, be happy to accept being what we are now as a community, chill out and just let stuff happen or give up and go and do something else instead.”

Patrick Richards-Fink’s story

085d4de So first of all, explain a little about the activism you’re involved/have been involved in.

“Mostly internet – I am a Label Warrior, a theorist and educator. Here’s how I described it on my blog: “One of the reasons that I am a bisexual activist rather than a more general queer activist is because I see every day people just like me being told they don’t belong. It doesn’t mean I don’t work on the basic issues that we all struggle against — homophobia, heterosexism, classism, out-of-control oligarchy, racism, misogyny, this list in in no particular order and is by no means comprehensive. But I have found that I can be most effective if I focus, work towards understanding the deep issues that drive the problems that affect people who identify the same way that I have ever since I started to understand who I am. I find that I’m not a community organizer type of activist or a storm the capitol with a petition in one hand and a bullhorn in the other activist — I’m much better at poring over studies and writing long wall-o’-text articles and occasionally presenting what I’ve gleaned to groups of students until my voice is so hoarse that I can barely do more than croak.” So internet, and when I was still in school, a lot of on-campus stuff. Now I’m moving into a new phase where my activism is more subtle – I’m working as a therapist, and so my social justice lens informs my treatment, especially of bi and trans people.”

What made you get involved?

“I can’t not be.”

How do you feel about the state of bi activism worldwide (esp UK and USA) at the moment?

“I feel like we made a couple strides, and every time that happens the attacks renewed. I hionestly think the constant attempts to divide the bisexual community into ‘good pansexuals’ and ‘bad bisexuals’ and ‘holy no-labels’ is the thing that’s most likely to screw us.”

What’s causing you to feel disillusioned?



“It is literally everywhere I turn – colleges redefining bisexuality on their LGBT Center pages, news articles quoting how ‘Bi=2 and pan=all therefore pan=better’, everybloodywhere I turn I see it every day. The word bi is being taken out of the names of organisations now, by the next group of up-and-comers who haven’t bothered to learn their history and understand that if you erase our past, you take away our present. Celebrities come out as No Label, wtf is that. Don’t they make kids read 1984 anymore? It’s gotten to the point now that even seeing the word pansexual in print triggers me. I’m reaching the point now that if someone really wants to be offended when all I am trying to do is welcome them on board, then I don’t have time for it.”

What do you want to say to other activists about this?

“Stay strong, and don’t give them a goddamned inch. I honestly think that the bi organizations – even, truth be told, the one I am with – are enabling this level of bullshit by attempting to be conciliatory, saying things that end up reinforcing the idea that bi and pan are separate communities. We try to be too careful not to offend anyone. Like the thing about Freddie Mercury. Gay people say ‘He was gay.’ Bi people say ‘Um, begging your pardon, good sirs and madams and gentlefolk of other genders, but Freddie was bi.’ And they respond ‘DON’T GIVE HIM A LABEL HE DIDN’T CLAIM WAAHHH WAAHHH!’ And yet… Freddie Mercury never used the label ‘gay’, but it’s OK when they do it. And he WAS bisexual by any measure you want to use. But we back down. And 2.5% of the bisexual population decides pansexual is a better word, and instead of educating them, we add ‘pan’ to our organisation names and descriptions. Now, this is clearly a dissenting view – I will always be part of a united front where my organization is concerned. But everyone knows how I feel, and I think it’s totally valid to be loyal and in dissent at the same time. Not exactly a typically American viewpoint, but everyone says I’d be a lot more at home in Britain than I am here anyway.”

[dafheannaig13-blog]

Dear BioWare: STOP SHITTING ON ANDERS

caught THIS wee gem from WoT, which claims that Anders ‘brings misery to  everyone he encounters.’ i am having a slight rage aneurysm :-)  SO.

BIOWARE

BIOWAAAAARRRRREEEEE

let me tell u a story, bioware.

there’s this thing called mental illness. a lot of people struggle with it every. fucking. day. of their fucking lives. 

IT IS NOT FUN. It is painful and scary and leaves them ostracised by a vast swathe of people. it is in many cases incurable, meaning it can only be managed, meaning that people will be dealing with these difficulties for as long as they fucking live. it is like being a literal alien from out of space stranded on an unfamiliar planet where nobody is like u, nobody knows how to help u, and everything u do just increases the gaping chasm between YOU and ~normal~.

IT’S FUCKING TERRIBLE, is what i’m getting at here.

IT’S FUCKING TERRIBLE, and there are only so many things people like us can do to mitigate our suffering. YES, medication and therapy and meditation and self-soothing methods and a whole bunch of other things exist as treatment. Well done, you accomplished basic logic! :-D  

BUT GUESS WHAT??? SOMETIMES, THAT ISN’T ENOUGH. And we have to come up with our own coping mechanisms to fill in the gaps.

I’m talking about FICTION. Fiction is what many of us turn to. Because we can make sense of those worlds. Because the distance allows us space to address issues that are too stressful in real life. Because the fact that the characters are fictional lets those of us with social issues achieve some MEASURE of emotional fulfillment. Thus, we become attached to those characters. They become our comfort characters, and they help us cope with the world that we do not, will never fit in to the way ~normal people uwu~ do.

FOR A BUNCH OF US??? ANDERS IS ONE OF THOSE CHARACTERS.

KNOW WHY??

It’s because he’s like us.

Anders is like us. He suffers, he fears, he tries, he fails, he lives, he struggles, he survives. He claws his way from the chasm’s edge, day in and day out, weary but unbroken. With bleeding nails and broken fingers, time and again he drags himself to safety, often with other, even more desperate people in tow, because despite all he has to deal with already, he still cares about others, still feels compassion and empathy for his fellow man, proves that even the most broken of people can still do good in the world and matter to someone.

Anders is like us, because he is seen as less by everyone around him. He is called whiny, delusional, ridiculous, crazy. He tries so desperately to do what he believes in despite being constantly fucked over. Every time things seem like they might get better for him, shite happens AGAIN and someone comes along to ruin it! As though he can’t catch a fucking break!! As though the world itself is trying to do away with him.

That is what mental illness feels like.

It feels like an endless fight. It feels like the fucking world is against you. It feels like nothing you do will ever be enough, like you’ll never be safe or happy or good like everyone else is. It feels like a losing battle, every fucking day of your life.

Because it is a battle. It is a battle that every mentally ill person fights, day after day after fucking day.  Even when it seems like we’re doing nothing, we are fighting.  Because we are fucking brave. We are fucking WARRIORS, and every day we live is another battle won. Some of us fall, it’s true. But we die with honour because we fucking tried. So EXCUSE US if we’re a bit ‘whiny.’ If we’re ~unpleasant~ to be around. If we come off as ridiculous or crazy. I’m sure it’s ever so difficult to have to be around someone like that. But consider for a moment how it might feel to live that way. To be that way always, and not be able to escape yourself.  It’s not a pleasant thought, I’m sure. It’s certainly not a pleasant experience. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, because nobody deserves to feel this way. We deserve better.

We deserve to be able to see ourselves reflected in fiction in a positive, uplifting way. We deserve characters like us having good stories, satisfying arcs, and happy endings. And we want that for Anders, because Anders is like us. When u say that Anders brings misery to everyone he encounters? We hear you telling us that WE bring misery to everyone we encounter. When u tell us that Anders is universally despised, we hear that WE are universally despised. When u call Anders a monster, we hear u calling all of US monsters right alongside him.

Because when you create characters that everyone can see? THERE. ARE. CONSEQUENCES.

So DO be a BIT more CAREFUL in future, BioWare. Bc u have a platform, and with that platform comes influence. Every time you push your harmful stereotypes about Anders the ~Crazy Terrorist~, you make life that much harder for people with mental illness to get through the day alive. You make it that much harder for people like us to be shown the compassion and understanding we DESERVE, even when we make mistakes because of our mental illnesses. (WHICH! DOES! NOT! EXCUSE THEM! BUT JUSTICE APPLIED WITHOUT TEMPERANCE IS NOT JUSTICE. IT IS TYRANNY.)

You make it that much harder for people like ME to have courage enough to even speak to others, because I’m too afraid that they’ll notice how ‘wrong’ and ‘weird’ i am and decide to hurt me because of it. Think about that, the next time u create a character who is coded as mentally ill. Think about how u treat that character, and what ur treatment of that character will tell EVERYONE WHO PERCEIVES THEM. Think about what YOU would feel, if someone made a character JUST LIKE YOU, and then proceeded to shit ALL OVER THEM in a myriad of ways while actively fostering hatred of them in the FAN COMMUNITY as well as the GAME ITSELF.  

Because THAT is how we feel.  We love Anders. We love him because he’s like us, and we are NOT going to blindly accept your shite about how he’s ~a monster~ when all you’ve shown us is that he’s a flawed but compassionate person who, despite every fucking thing against him, still tried to save the lives of others. He is selfless and tragic and wonderful, and you can’t take that from us via authorial fiat.

edit: I would like to make clear that personally, I don’t see Anders as being mentally ill. (I give no credence to Hepler; she’s proven her own ignorance D-:<)  His behaviour is all consistent with being a deeply traumatised member of a minority population, who has been the victim of extreme prejudice at the hands of the powerful in a system of injustice and abuse. I certainly won’t police the head-canons of others! BUT this is my belief personally, and I don’t think it makes ANY of Anders’s character or suffering OR ANY of my rant less valid. We relate to him because we have suffered, not because the source of our suffering was the same.

tl;dr: Anders belongs to US now. Stop shitting on him, or GET TAE FUCK.

[aquarianlights]

Unpopular opinion, but the “Treat Yoself” self care ideal is EXTREMELY HARMFUL to people with BPD and actually dangerous to us.

As someone with the most extreme case of borderline you can possibly imagine in the impulsivity category, the “Treat Yoself” ideal has made me a much happier person these past few years. . .but it has also p much ruined my life. If I didn’t have an insane amount of help from a million different angles supporting me at all times, I’d be a goner.

Example: I signed a lease to a new apartment just a week or so ago, maybe not even that long ago. I have to pay the first month rent before I move in on the 1st of next month otherwise I cannot move in. I had 5k, almost 6k dollars to my name a mere 2 or 3 days ago. I now have less than 2k to my name. How? Who knows. Certainly not me! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Someone who is uneducated on what BPD is about would say that’s just a normal human being irresponsible or not knowing how to manage money, etc etc etc. They usually fall on the “no self control” shtick that we should all know by heart by now. There’s a million things that everyone with BPD has heard before, but we all know very well none of the things these people say are even close to the core of the issue.

There’s a H U G E difference between people who have no self control and people with borderline. People who have no self control are just kind of starting to wade into the shallow end of the pool without testing how cold or hot the water was first with their issues and then they can sometimes get to the point of *safely* falling off the side of the pool deck and into the shallow end again where they are in no danger of drowning. . .while people with borderline have just rock-climbed a waterfall cliff in the middle of a forest by themselves with no harness and then *immediately* proceeded to jump off of the cliff backwards and blindfolded into the lake full of water below without ever having checked to see if there were rocks in the water or how deep the water was.

That is how significantly different those two categories of people are and that is why it is *SO* frustrating when the layman diminishes BPD and says, “Oh, you’re just being irresponsible with money. It’s okay! Everyone does it.” No, good sir. Everyone does NOT do these kinds of things. NORMAL. HEALTHY. PEOPLE. WOULD NEVER DO SOMETHING LIKE THIS! If they did, it would be a CONSCIOUS DECISION to do it and it would be controlled and they would have fail-safes and back-up plans galore in place in case something went wrong! Normal, healthy people would never live like borderline people are forced to live.

If I could show someone that I am only just now finding permanence for the first time SINCE I TURNED 18 IN 2010 and am just hoping it works out and don’t know if it actually will because, well, BORDERLINE. . .maybe people around the world wouldn’t recite those lines like they were reading from a script.

There’s a million things I could list and that one tiny run on sentence is not even close to scraping the tip of the iceberg. That’s like...uh, getting close enough to feel how cold that iceberg must be so you can say “Wow that must be cold to touch!” without even having touched the iceberg yet, nevertheless having scraped it. If you catch my drift.

People just think that when we mention we’re impulsive as a sort of warning to them, it’s a cute flirting thing or an adorable personality quirk. Like, “Oh, you’re spontaneous? That’s wonderful! I love spontaneous people. I love to go on wild adventures! Hanging out with you will be so fun!” No, my dude. My pal. My buddy. My friend. That is not what we mean at all. When someone with borderline says “impulsive”, they *DO* *NOT* mean “spontaneous”. Ever. We do not group the word impulsive with spontaneous in these warnings.

The impulsivity issues will ruin our lives over and over again unless we actively fight it every single second of every single waking moment. There is no resting. There are no breaks. There is no escape. It is a constant battle between that “DO THE THING”/”TREAT YOSELF” mindset that we have a natural tendency to do without a second thought like it is second nature...AND that other side of having to FORCE ourselves to stop immediately when we are about to engage in the thing that we have already started doing/saying/whatever as soon as the thought entered our mind (it happens that fast, yes) and force a corrective thought/behaviour into place so that we can think about what we are about to do first and actually weigh the pros and cons and THEN decide whether or not to do the thing like a NORMAL PERSON would.

I don’t like to say we act on emotion. . .because I don’t feel like I do. I’m not sure if others with borderline feel they do, but I certainly don’t because there simply isn’t enough time for there to be any emotion and I know this will sound so stereotypical, but. . .I’m an Aquarius. I just don’t experience emotions like others do, honestly. Hahaha. #onlyaquariankidswillunderstand

When you’re borderline, your actions practically coincide with your thoughts. The second you think about doing a thing, there is no question about whether it’s going to be done or not: It’s already been done by the time one could even inquire as to whether it should be or not.

We have *NO* impulse control. None. Nada. Negative. Less than none. ZERO. We exist without it. I can’t remember a time in which I existed with any ounce of impulse control that wasn’t enforced by me in a way in which I was hyper-cognizant of my enforcing it at all times. I have always existed without it. Every day is a struggle to enforce something that we do not have and never have had. Every day is a constant struggle to enforce something that we have never experienced in a natural state.

Every day is a constant struggle to try to find that middle balance between the two extremes of Treat Yoself and You Don’t Deserve Anything At All, since those seem to be our only two settings.

We either feel we deserve the world and should have all the things. . .or we should rid ourselves of everything and never have anything, nevertheless buy anything for ourselves or accept anything offered.

Being borderline is living in a world of extremes and having to force your way into some parallel universe that doesn’t really exist to find a middle ground and then having to fight every single day you wake up for the rest of your life for your right to stay in that parallel universe.

It is exhausting. Being at one extreme or the other constantly while desperately wanting to be at a middle ground all the time or even at a straight, chill, nothing for once in your life is fucking exhausting.

Being borderline is exhausting and having all these people who really don’t know anything try to disparage the issue by saying we are spontaneous (in a flirty or quirky way) and just have no self control (”which is just a human thing! don’t worry, you’re young! you’ll get there!”) is just SO exhausting.

Treat Yoself is a GREAT concept for just about everyone!...except for the small portion of the population that is borderline.

I only wish I had known this from the beginning.

Feel like you can relate? I basically wrote this because I’ve been thinking about this for a VERY long time and I actually have talked about this aloud with one of my roommates TWICE now (maybe more than twice, Idk) because of so many reasons.

I figured it was about time to finally write up the text post that went along with the conversations I’ve been having irl.

I really hope someone can relate and that I’m not just rambling fucking crazy things over here. I don’t think I am. I think this is #relatable af. I really do. But I won’t know until I post it and tag it and see if anyone else can relate.

Obviously, I know the BPD section will be filled with people who don’t actually have BPD (aka self-dxers who have given themselves BPD and who knows what other millions of things who most likely do not actually have BPD), so if you actually have a BPD diagnosis, I’d love some feedback. Coz I really hope I’m not just rambling into the void here. This is relatable, yeah? Other people feel this in their very soul like I do, yeah? This is a PROBLEM, yeah??? Sure is for me, fam.

😶😶😶 Idk, bruh. I’m just gonna stop now and hope for the best. Whatever “best” is. Lololol.

-KQR

((Hope there’s no spelling/grammar/whatever mistakes. Need to proofread...later...if I ever get around to it. I probably won’t tbh. Just ignore mistakes. I’m fucking tired. Fall semester starts Monday and I’m just not readyyyy......))

[premakalidasi]

thepurelands reblogged your post:Listen, I’m up to here with “spiritual” men and...

I love this SO much… All else to say, which is not in contradiction to your words but a qualifier, is that we as women...

#so much YES#sexuality

Well, I would be very careful with your terminology there (even though I believe your basic intent was benevolent, don’t worry). Saying women “aren’t victims of the patriarchy” edges far too close to basically telling women, bluntly in their faces, that they’re just imagining it all. Which is bollocks--and what I’ve been trying to get at in my post; that there are issues in the way of healing and liberation and becoming whole. It’s exactly because women are victimised as fuck and abused and beaten up all the time that it’s more difficult for them to even start handling sexuality. 

Women are victimised and abused left, right and centre by a fucked-up, patriarchal system that values the male and “masculine” values over “feminine” ones, and that fucks men up as well as it goes. The whole system is based on violence and power-over and it’s 100% real. And we absolutely need to acknowledge that before we can move on. Not tell women, like far too many self-help guides (who’ve never had PTSD themselves) that hey, just think positive sparkly New Age thoughts and be ~open~ and ~forgiving~ (and forget about these silly BDSM things as therapy) and everything will be fine. Women are fucked over in this world 24/7, end of story.

But.

But.

There’s a difference, a massive difference between being victimised, being on the receiving end of violence and abuse and adopting a victim identity. That’s the key; that’s what I hope you were after, too. I don’t believe in victim-blaming, but I do believe in shaking people out of the *internalised* victimisation part, the internalised self-hatred and passivity and weakness. I would never have said this pre-Tumblr, but I am honestly starting to wonder if women wouldn’t be so badly off right now if it weren’t for their own fetish for fucking themselves over.

My dear, dear sisters: whenever you feel hopeless and useless and act accordingly (or, rather, remain passive because you’ve accepted you’re shit), feel like you don’t have the right to do X (act that doesn’t harm anyone), don’t have the right to say Y (thing that doesn’t harm anyone), that this thing is rude and that thing is being a spoilsport, circle your sentences with “hehe” and don’t use full stops because that’s too stompy and yadda yadda, that’s a big-ass part of what keeps you down. You. You keep yourself down because once you’ve been put down by someone else, you copy them and start doing it to yourself, too.

Every time you call yourself a victim (instead of someone else victimising you that very moment), every time you think you’re weak, every time you’re being a nice girl and not making a fuss (when you absolutely should), every time you put yourself down and remain passive, someone benefits from that. Every time you fuck yourself over typing a Tumblr tag saying “but I feel like there’s nothing I can do” or “im shit lol”, someone’s going to benefit from that, usually the dudebros who are having fun somewhere else celebrating violence and other tough-guy crap (while trying to pretend they aren’t soft and squishy human beings underneath all that). Every time you define yourself through something you are Against, you let yourself be defined by the thing you think is your enemy; by focusing on resistance you’re forgetting about the part where you should be exploring and actively building alternative ways of handling things. You have a choice as to whether you’ll type that Tumblr tag or not, but you’ve forgotten you have it. You’re not being yourself--you’re being what The Man wants you to be. Miserable and malleable and useable because you don’t believe in yourself, believe you have any rights, any power, any divinity in yourself.

So I just want to clarify that. There’s a difference between being abused and *abusing yourself,* putting yourself down. There’s something you can’t help--if someone’s kicking you in the face with a combat boot, it’s pretty damn difficult to start manifesting your innate divinity. And I don’t want anyone to belittle that. It’s incredibly difficult to handle sex if the penalty for that is humiliation and physical violence. But those times you are on your own, self-governed (for example, on your own blog on the Internet, or in your own bed with a vibrator)--if you choose to put yourself down *there* as well, then, yes, that’s a problem. And that’s where you’ve got to start, because if you don’t believe that you have any value, you can be used over and over. That’s candy for abusers; that’s candy for narcissists--they see they can walk all over you. 

These self-defeating structures have been programmed into us for millennia exactly to uphold the system as it is, so that we remain home as passive housekeepers and baby machines. It all goes back to that; every time you say “I should put my feelings and hurt aside and put others above myself at all times even if it literally kills me,” it goes back to being an efficient homemaker while the guys (in turn brainwashed into being good cannon fodder, efficient killing machines) go off to wage war. All gender bullshit boils down to that: either making someone into an efficient home/kid management system or a killing/moneymaking system, and all the divine potential inside of us, regardless of genitalia, gets destroyed and burned on the altar of that system. It’s madness. 

But we’ve come so far from that. We’ve now got the technology and civilisation and brains to be far more than just homemakers or soldiers. We already know we can use these skills for building hospitals--transcending the homemaker and the warrior and channeling that into medical science and the engineering and power needed to build that hospital (and that these skills exist cross-sex, so gendering them is too limiting). We should be able to articulate our feelings and use them wisely by now, and to respect each other by now. But we have to respect ourselves first (and the same goes for guys respecting their “girly” parts). If you start saying “no, actually, this is how it works for me”--which is why I was explaining all those things about the female orgasm in my post, because nobody fucking talks about it on that level, especially in spiritual contexts--then we have a beginning. It’s a defiant act, a hella radical act and it’s exactly when we realise what such women are up against that we understand just how revolutionary it is. 

Even now, I have to try and stop myself from saying “TL;DR” here because that’s one of those many forms of self-belittling, ways of saying “hehhehe, what I just said isn’t that important” because it bloody well is. I struggle with that shit, too. (I’m not even going to go into the list of the shit I’ve been through, even if this kind of Discourse often demands people show their hand--because I don’t believe in cred through victimhood. I almost started to list that shit, but stopped myself, because that’s what awareness is all about--not just vomiting out what you feel, but trying to at least have some consideration over what your output’s gonna be. And I don’t want anyone to feel they somehow have less cred than me because they haven’t been on the receiving end of X, because that’s inhuman and also insane). But all you folks need to know that I’ve been There, and over and over. And sick of it. And it’s exactly because people still self-perpetuate all this crap that I can’t keep quiet about it any more, having been through all this myself. Twenty years ago, I hoped things would be better in 2018, but they just seem to be getting worse, so we’ve got to talk about this stuff, start talking about it as much as people talked about this stuff in the 60s and 70s, and as critically as they did then (but that’s a whole different rant).

We’ve all got to start somewhere--but let’s just be careful about the terminology and not taunt people with broken legs into running when they’re still recuperating, or in any way imply they fell over themselves when someone else tripped them over. 

There’s a difference between sabotage and self-sabotage. Being victimised=/=victim identity.  

Now, can we talk about the glory of uterine orgasms? 

[risuave]

Blog #8: Voices in my Head Again

Today’s shout out goes to Jay Shetty & Dr. Daniel Amen for their discussion on the brain and for this particular exercise.

Special shout out to Kristina on her special day. Get those gifts like you’re looting a boss in a DnD campaign!!

So over the past few weeks, I’ve been talking about a great many different aspects. And sure, from a “high minded” perspective, things sound so easy. Of course, I should live in truth! Self-love? Hell yeah, sign me up! Accepting my own toxicity and slowing down my ego? Yes PLEASE!

Of course, it’s all great on paper. But as every person who is breathing knows: such ideals, such things are so much easier said than done. There’s just one problem: our brains and our minds. The voices are actually real: we may not actually physically hear them as some do, but that nagging self-doubt is real. That voice making excuses is real. That ultra-critical asshole telling you all the things you did wrong is real. And guess what? It’s not just you: even when you feel like it is, that’s just not true. Everyone has them. Everyone gets to deal with them.

The thing is that as humans, we’ve sort of had it engrained from us from the very beginning that we’re supposed to shut that stuff down. We’re supposed to “control” our humanity. Men are told to “be cool” because “men are always stoic and not the ones that can let shit bother them.” Women are told to “act like a lady.” 

So we clamp down, we control, we keep that shit locked down. And the result is that things just always feel HARDER. We become hunters, always looking for something to go wrong so that we can stop it from going wrong. Fun thing about that is that when you’re always looking for a problem, everything becomes a problem, and then you’re ACTUALLY going to have a problem. 

 One of the things this leads to the most is what I call the “self-sabotage of the easy.” Hear a thousand songs about the hustle, hear about a million successful people who went through hard times and it becomes ingrained in your brain that easy is wrong. Easy is bad. For some, if their job is easy the voices say that CLEARLY, something is just wrong: they feel they need to walk because it’s not ‘fulfilling’ or they’re clearly messing up somehow. If a relationship just feels easy; if communication is easy and the worst of fights are tampered by healthy boundaries and communication, then that voice tells you that something is just fucking WRONG and the other shoe is sure to drop. People are inherently TERRIFIED of easy. But you know what makes things easy? Being GOOD at them. Learning good communication. Learning self-love and self-control. When people walk away from healthy relationships or good work, it’s usually because, without evidence, they fear a problem. The world in your mind I talked about last week starts to imprint on the physical world, and before you know it you’ve ruined something really great. Take it from a guy with a lot of experience: self-sabotage is a bitch.

Embracing the contradictions and the chaos of humanity helps address all of that. Things are easy BECAUSE things were hard, you put in the work to learn and to grow, and you made it easier: not because it changed, but because you did (no matter WHAT that self-critical voice is telling you.) Trying to fight that, to control it, is foolish and harmful. True control doesn’t come from trying to squeeze something tight and control the outcome: those are a fool's ideas of control. You show me a good and healthy relationship, whether it’s with the self or with another, that’s full of restrictions on what you can and can’t do, who you can’t and can’t be around (unless they’re dangerous, obviously) and I’ll call you a liar. True control of self comes from knowing that things are good, are natural, without you needed to exert any force. Even when things are “bad,” actively focusing on it and trying to “control” it makes it worse: ESPECIALLY when the ego we talked about last week kicks in and we try to control someone else’s self. When you let that shit go, when you don’t focus on it with all your might and try and work it like a problem, you gain control over those voices. 

Contradictory, I know.

Through control, we can better our relationships. We can better rise above our demons without needing to resort to using things to try and “tamp them down” or to “not feel:” they don’t get smaller and you can’t stop yourself from feeling. In finding an environment where we can embrace these things, in creating a space for ourselves where we can do this work, we benefit not only our higher selves but those around us. Trust me, you’ll tell the difference between someone who’s actually mature and in control and someone trying to exert control from a place of fear and insecurity. Generally speaking, that second group is going to cause you a great deal of unintentional harm: not because they’re cruel and they want to, but because they cannot help themselves. Love them, understand them, but love yourself more and take the space so that you don’t become that same level of toxic.

But again, all of this is great on paper but these are just words. Great as something to consider, not practical in application. Because even knowing all of that doesn’t actually silence the voices. It doesn’t make you beat yourself up any less. So let’s take this to the practical world and actually DO something!

Fortunately, there are practices to help you get there. One exercise I discovered in quarantine that I’ve particularly enjoyed comes from Dr. Daniel Amen: a renowned psychiatrist and brain disorder specialist. The next time you find yourself wrestling with a negative thought, a self-critical doubt, a depressing sadness, pause. Take a breath and write down what you’re thinking. Yes, I know, I’m asking you to use a pen and paper, but just go with me on this one. Write the thought down. Let’s go with one of my classics.

“That person looked at me funny when I said something; they must be judging me.” Or, to make it simpler: “This person is judging me.”

Ok, so now you have the thought out of your head. Now we can work on it. Look at that statement and ask yourself: is it true? Yes, I know you originally THOUGHT it was true but now that it’s out on the paper ask yourself the question again.

Is it true? Answer: Well…you’re not them, so you don’t know. Could be. Could not be.

Next question: Is it absolutely true? Is it 100%? Since we just established that you don’t know, the answer is no.

Now look at that thought again; a thought that is not absolutely true. How do you feel when you have that thought? How does it feel when that voice is telling you you’re being judged? Answer: awful. Sad. Alone. Like an outsider.

Who would you be if you didn’t have that thought? Free.

Now take that thought and turn it to its opposite: once you’ve done that work, you’ll realize the opposite is usually true. That look was literally just a look. So why are you torturing yourself over…well…nothing? 

Try to make this a habit. Learn to question your thoughts. Learn to embrace the contradictions of humanity. Start to ask yourself these questions and let the voices just chatter away: things can be easy and life doesn’t need everything to be controlled.

Because guess what? Those voices miss one thing: you, just being you, is already perfect. 

— V

[jujuismental]

this ones for suicide.

ive always wrestled with the idea of killing myself but i hate blood and gory things so ive never cut myself deeply, just atop my skin iv made some scratches to my wrists, again only because i hate blood. instead, i have debated jumping infront of things so many times, and drowning my head under water only to lift my head out gasping for air. sometimes that brief moment just before “killing yourself” takes your pain away.

Back in the day, a couple years ago, it took alot of courage for me to stop actively thinking about suicide. i had a wallpaper on my phone to remind me, and i cried alot during senior year of high school in washrooms and at home. Yes i had friends, no one really knew. it was mostly about my sexuality and not fitting in the universe. i felt like an alien with no hope. no courage to fix to my problems. i thought at the time they had no solution. that was wrong, but i was so weak and living in fear that I thought suicide was the only way out. It’s more like a surrender, a giving up.

Two things that saved my life in the past

1. This quote. trust me its not cliche

Suicide is a permanent decision (*not solution) to a temporary situation. I always tell myself to keep waiting, that someday I will be glad I did. And it’s true. Time and time again I prove this quote to be true. When I am happy once again I tell myself “ See? Its worth it. I am glad I didnt kill myself that day.” And the next time I felt that way I knew better days were coming. I just needed to refer to the good days during the bad days and the bad days during the good days.

2. My dad passing away

When my dad died, i felt undescribable pain firsthand of what it was like to lose someone, and I saw my mom crumble, crying for years. It was on that day I promised myself to never do something like that to her again. It’s shattering. I hang on for her sometimes. I realize what death can do to others. I saw how affected people around me were.

3. Meeting my soulmate and falling in love

Meeting her helped me know that there was someone who was exactly like me. I had thought this was impossible. That I was a fucking alien. She loved me for myself and gave me courage to change my life for the better. She really saved me. She made me feel stable for the first time in forever. I was never suicidal anymore, I saw the light of day. I started imagining a future for myself and her, something I never thought would ever come true. She carried me through.

While I am not actively thinking of suicide everyday anymore, nowadays it only comes seriously to me a few times a year. i am very happy on some days. this is what baffles me. i am either so happy i can breathe in the sunny air or i am in so much pain and dissociated from my life. suddenly i dont want to live anymore and its not all worth it, i have no future to look forward to and i have no hope. navigating these highs and lows is pretty hard for me... it’s like you think youre getting better and then it comes back, and it hits you hard and harder but you somehow make it out again alive and it repeats, the more it repeats, ironically the easier it becomes because you know it will go away on its own. you just need to hang on for the ride.

When i get into one of these lows. it can last weeks, and oh dear is it terrible. i have to listen to podcasts, anti suicide talks, read self help books, cry and cry and finally I see the light again. and I am really glad once I do. Because life can be beautiful sometimes.

You. Ya you reading this.

If youre going to kill yourself, if youre going that far, why not do something crazier instead. You’ve got nothing to lose. Make a crazy decision in your life and change something that is causing you pain. The truth is sometimes we can do a little more than we think, but we live in fear. Before you kill yourself, why not live a little? Do something extreme. *I made some of my craziest decisions when I was angry and depressed because at that point nothing else mattered and I had no fear. When you hit rock bottom use that to your advantage to make some crazy life changing decisions that you couldn’t make on a normal day because you were afraid.

And if you can’t do anything at all, wait for something. Sleep on it. Wait. “Isnt it amazing how the most beautiful days of our lives haven’t happened yet.” If I killed myself in high school I would have never experienced 5 million incredible things I thought I would never even accomplish. Falling inlove. Traveling to Italy!!! If I tell my younger self hiding in a dark room crying that I will be able to live these things she wouldn’t believe me, but it’s true, I did. I found the way out. And sometimes all you can do is wait, and have hope. Hope is incredible, if you can find it. Never lose it. I hope this post gives you a tiny bit of hope.

Everytime you have a good day, reference this day during your bad days. You know this dark period will end eventually and you will bounce back. Ride the wave. It’s literally a wave. Ride it as best as you can.

Remember that what you are feeling is normal, no need to identify yourself with some permanent disorder. Youre human, built from your circumstances and experiences, and sometimes those things can make you sad, and thats okay. You’re not gross and mentally ill, you’re simply human. Don’t pity yourself (in my opinion). You are literally a product of your environment and experiences, not a mental illness.

Recently, when I found myself going down that rabbithole of diagnosing myself and discovering that I had these 2 or 3 mental illnesses I felt even worse. I felt like “it” had a hold on me. Like I was being ruled by a mental illness. And I started acting more and more like that illness. And blaming that illness for my actions. I was like a puppet to that mental illness. So I turned around and instead, I told myself that I’m just a human and some bad things have happened to me and thats why I am the way I am, and there’s no further explanation. Terrible experiences create mental illnesses. Mental illnesses don’t create terrible experiences. Don’t let anything define you. It’s not permanent, it’s just a reaction. I am not saying mental illnesses don’t exist, I just found that thinking of it in a different way or framing it like this helps more than belonging to a mental illness.

If you are really in pain and you feel like self harm right now, my go to is a really hot bath and dipping my head underwater until I cant breathe. It creates the illusion that you are going to kill yourself and the feeling of hot water on your skin kinda numbs your emotions. No blood. (Can you tell yet that I hate blood) Then I take a nap because my eyes are like rocks from crying. Right now in this very moment, it’s important to think about what I said before. You don’t know what you don’t know. “Life must be lived forwards but can only be understood backwards.” You need to hang on, my friend. You will be glad that you did. A future you is cheering you on. You can fight it off, you’ve done it before. I look back on those days and I am very glad I kept going.

Remember we don’t want to actually kill ourselves, we just want to end the pain. Suicide doesn’t end the pain. It ends your life. Black abyss. Emptiness. Nothing. Everything that you are. Everything that you still can be.

And after you’re dead, in those next moments, someone will scream discovering the body you left behind, and your depression will be spread to someone else like your mom, dad, or a friend. Imagine you had to watch that. You’re a good person, you don’t want to hurt others, even if others hurt you.

I know deep down, you want to live, but you want things to be better in your life. You don’t want to live another day like this. You want it all to be different. And it’s not easy. I know trust me. I dont have the solutions to some of my problems (YET), the same problems that make me feel suicidal today. And I might not be able to fix them for a long time, but I know that I have fixed some of my other problems in the past, things I never thought I could get past. For example (so you don’t think i’m bluffing), coming out to my muslim family. I was living in fear my whole life, i never thought i would do that in a million years but i did.. I always had this idea that i’d kill myself and leave a i’m gay note behind. Almost did. But I am glad I didn’t, look at me now, I’ve come so far. Who knew. I didn’t. And neither do you. Why don’t we live another day and find out? You and i, together.

“ I didnt come this far to only come this far.”

I am not speaking to you as a therapist or doctor, I am someone just like you. Believe me.

[empyreal-insights]

So you think you need a reading...?

Obviously I’m not against readings. I’ve been reading professionally for just under ten years, and have been reading for myself since the early 2000s. I still seek divination myself - albeit in a very specific context. And I maintain that readings of any type can be very beneficial at certain stages in your spiritual journey. 

That said, as I continue to reevaluate my work and the manifestation of my purpose - especially considering the times we find ourselves in - I think it’s time for me to step into another role. 

For years, the tone of spiritual workers has shifted from client-centric services to broader, macro-level information sharing. No matter the tradition, those of us closer to the invisible realms have been exhorting folks to do their work. No matter the phrasing, the underlying context is the same: the information is there, has been there for a long time, and there are no more circles for you to walk in. Commit. Resolve. Do the thing you’ve been told to do. 

And now we’re here. 

This is a time of massive upheaval, and extraordinary creativity and opportunity. Too many have been doing too much for too long. Resources have been withheld for arbitrary reasons, or hoarded outright. Interpersonal relationships have deteriorated.  

We should’ve done more to make a practice of sitting down, embracing stillness. Now we’ve been put in that position as a collective. 

In stillness, we often receive answers to questions we think are eluding us. As a reader, I act as a less-distracted vessel or mirror for your answers to manifest through, or reflect clearly back to you. That’s the long and short of it. 

The “answers” below clearly won’t be specific to you, but trust, the questions have been asked.  

I offer this not to dismiss the uniqueness of your situation or your feelings, but to encourage you to dig deeper, and move to a space of actively working with yourself and for yourself, instead of passively consuming information and externalizing the work.

Because... we’re out of time. 

(more on that in a moment) 

You’ve gotta start doing what you’re here to do, so we can all benefit from the gifts God/dess gave you, and only you. 

What’s my purpose? / What should I be doing? 

If you’re to the point of asking this and you’re past your late 20s, you probably already know, but you’re afraid of it, half-stepping it, willfully ignoring it, or some combination of the three. It’s fair to want someone to help you untangle that ball of yarn, only, we’re out of time. 

I don’t mean that in a gloom and doom sense. Funny as the ap*calypse memes can be, I refuse to use that word.* 

I mean: we’re in the middle of a shift the likes of which most of us haven’t experienced in our lifetimes. And: the workshops, books, seminars, therapy, webinars, YouTube videos, Oprah masterclasses... they’ve all been there for years.

We need you in formation. You’ve asked enough questions - it’s time to get to work.  

What to invest in instead 

Life coaching

A healing intensive (example) 

Life purpose specialists, like Turtle Tank

Authors like Marie Forleo. Marie has an entrepreneurial focus, but her interviews or emails may lead you to something that inspires you. 

Specific astrological or numerology charts that map out a path and can help suggest tangible future endeavors. Folks I like: Nichole Lanier, Chani Nicholas, Mecca Woods

What should I do about my relationship / partner / lover / marriage? 

Relationships show up to teach you something, reveal something, and/or stir things up. And they’re always a risk because we’re being asked to be vulnerable, trusting, and revealing to another person. That can apply whether you’ve been together 10 days or 20 years. 

Either that experience is worth it to you, or it’s not. You can’t know everything or anticipate everything because you can’t control that other person. You are only ever in control of yourself. And you’ll rarely get a “no!!” in a reading unless the person is straight up harmful, abusive, or otherwise toxic - which you also probably know, you’re just looking to validate yourself one way or the other.  

Acting on any attraction is a matter of risk vs. reward. Regardless of the message(s) presented to you, you’ll find reasons to jump into relationships you shouldn’t, or ways to fuck up the ones you should be in - humans are weird like that.

Bottom line: are you willing and able to take the “risk” of the relationship, and commit to taking care of yourself within the context of said relationship, no matter what the other person says / does / feels? 

That’s a yes or no question. Stop complicating it.

When people asked some variation of this question, I gave them some version of that speech. Afterwards, most reframed the question, or asked another, more important one that offered a more profound insight.

What to invest in instead

Marriage/couples counseling, or individual therapy 

Learning your love language  

A good self-help book - either about relationships (a friend suggests this one), or one that helps you evaluate your relationship patterns

The Journey of Love deck

The Womb Sauna’s #HealEverything podcast

Work / Job / Career

Jobs are some of the easiest things to influence and control energetically, because we can be so specific. Rules and regulations are clearly drawn at most workplaces, so you can choose one that fits your work style and values. 

Salaries are specific numbers we can easily break down to say what we require daily, weekly, monthly, or annually. We can even specify where we want to work, how we want our space to look and feel, etc.

Write out your ideal job description, and get to conjuring. 

What to invest in instead

Life coaching

Job / skill training - lots of places are offering free or reduced classes in, well, everything. Groupon and Coursera are also excellent resources.  

Creating an “ideal job” Pinterest board

Astrological/Numerology profiles, as noted above. 

Am I ok / On the right track / Doing the right thing?

Are you breathing? Maintaining basic adult things?  Having some fun now and then?

You’re on the right track. 

What to invest in instead

Keep living. 

Feel me?  

A reading is likely to help you feel better, and feeling better is important. But the work beyond that moment will always be up to you. And if you don’t do it, you’re gonna be on someone else’s proverbial mat two months after you talk to me. 

Now. 

Is your issue bigger than these questions? Life sincerely in shambles? You can get more intensive support by consulting a trained priest in your ancestral tradition, or the closest one to it that’s readily available to you. 

For folks of African descent, a full divination complete with offerings/sacrifices and adherence to the corresponding prescriptions will assist in clearing more serious issues. My godparents and my extended spiritual family are available for this kind of work and/or can refer you to others.

It may be that I won’t do readings again until I’m fully trained and vested in my capacity as an Orisa priest - and I’m perfectly ok with that. 

I remain immensely grateful for everyone who has ever extended the privilege of reading for them. It taught me a great deal, I’ve encountered some beautiful souls, and I pray that I’ve been helpful to my clients in that capacity. And: I’m being led in different directions now.

We’ll see what tomorrow brings.

.:.

*adrienne maree brown gets a pass, ‘cause... visionary.

[adventures-in-asexuality]

That previous post from @aceadmiral commented that the narrative of aces being an ‘ultimate radical force’ that will suddenly revolutionise thinking ‘ultimately put[s] a lot on the shoulders of aces regardless of their willingness to forsake their humanity and become an Avatar of Enlightenment’. This is a great description (and the whole post is good), but it got me thinking about the ways this is encouraged, and who it targets.

Coyote wrote a post on a similar topic last year, saying that no one was entitled to demand that we be an informative collage of our scars and experiences with neat labels underneath detachedly explaining what happened, why, and when. We’re allowed to be people and to put our own wellbeing, if not first, then at least not behind trying to rebut people who insist that our lives cannot have existed and who try to attack us.

I’m wondering why this is a thing we keep having to say to each other, and something that it’s so easy to overlook as we throw our bodies and minds into the abyss of other people’s scepticism and malice. It’s certainly something I’ve struggled with - you can see my frankly awful comments on Coyote’s post, and while I really do not endorse being like me, I suspect that they’d resonate with a lot of people here.

I think that a lot of times it can tie into the narratives we, as a society, weave about trauma. For a long time, I felt that, since I was so mysteriously fucked up and damaged and obviously not able to have my own life, the only good that I could accomplish was to strip myself apart again and again in the service of activism (or, really, in service of trying to appease people who insist that aces can’t exist or can’t be queer or can’t be fucked-up or whatever). I obviously wasn’t going to have a safe and happy life, or really any life at all, so all I could hope to do was to use myself as a shield and a sword to protect younger aces from having to grow up with this bullshit.

This is pretty congruent with a lot of narratives about trauma. Either you Magically Recover, possibly with the Healing Power Of Love or whatever, or you... just don’t have a story. If you have any kind of lasting effects (and let’s be real, that’s pretty damn likely), then you’re obviously Too Damaged and Too Broken to live in society, and you just disappear from the narrative. (This is pretty similar to a lot of disability narratives, to no one’s surprise; either you are Magically Cured, or you disappear from the narrative, by suicide because disability is so awful, or by going into an institution, or just by never being mentioned again.)

Given that a lot of these demands are directly targeted at people who are more likely be traumatised - since, a lot of the time, these are people being sceptical or outright disbelieving that aces could ever experience systemic or interpersonal discrimination and abuse for being ace - it’s probably not really surprising that this builds on the narratives that these traumatised people already know. We’re too damaged to have our own lives; we aren’t allowed to put our own wellbeing first (because that’s been abused out of us, and because society reinforces that, although you should be Magically Healed from trauma, actually trying to recover and struggle through this shit is just special snowflake bullshit); all we can do is become a phoenix, sacrificing our own lives in order to try to protect others. (The societal valorisation of self-sacrifice plays a lot into the concept of activism as an all-or-nothing deal and the concept of self-care as being pointlessly indulgent when injustices are still happening - but that’s another post.)

This is a difficult problem to fix, and large parts of it are out of our hands; if we could stop people from attacking us, we would already have done so. I think what we can do is recognise more loudly that this Discourse - the sort that demands that we open ourselves up for other people to check if our trauma is believable - is not only harmful, not only vile, but also utterly invalid. It doesn’t deserve or require a response, any more than any of us are required to respond to strangers asking ‘so how do two guys/girls have sex’ or ‘so what’s in your pants’.

Also, I think we need to keep looking at what we are putting on the most vulnerable members of our communities, and reduce this where we can, whether this is through encouraging friends to take a moment when they seem overwhelmed by everything, stepping in to share the load when we can, educating ourselves on how to support and welcome all our various community members (here’s a post from Queenie on making spaces welcoming for ace survivors!), reiterating that these kinds of demands are ridiculous and do not need answering, or many other things. It’s easy not to notice what’s getting shunted down the road for multiply marginalised and vulnerable people to deal with - so we have to pay attention, to try to see it better, and figure out ways to get it off the road altogether.

[sillyalpacacollection-fan-blog]

2/20/2019

Hi Internet

So, it’s 3:32AM and I still can’t sleep, been trying since 11PM and I have to be up for work at 6AM. Naturally, I’ve decided to write a blog post and start trying to open myself up. This is really just for me, a way for me to deal with all my stuff, but I think the act of writing as if someone is listening will help… make it feel like I’m having a conversation with someone. 

Also, if me sharing this stuff anonymously helps someone else there going through something similar, that would also be lovely.

I’ve realized, well, been told many times… that I am not good with emotions. I am not good with my own emotions particularly. 

Part me thinks, well, this is probably because I was diagnosed with ‘chronic anxiety’ and depression when I was 11, so maybe there is just a genetic, physiological or another factor, maybe a combination, that is now just part me. That part of me thinks, well, I will probably never really ‘get better’ because it’s in my blood, it’s in my skin, to be messed up and self-destructive. It is just who I am now.

Maybe this all has something to do with the fact I was heavily medicated most of my conscious memory of my formative years - SSRIs and various other related medications - up until about 18 when I just stopped. I sometimes wonder if being on man,y many different medications for such a long time as an adolescent permanently fucked my brain chemistry. Maybe I never really learned to feel and experience my emotions, but only how to deaden everything with alcohol, medication and a boarding school timetable. Exercise, study, draw, write, repeat. 

 I never really dealt with my feelings, I just focused on getting into a good University, getting a good career - having enough external indicators to convince myself that I was okay, that I was still succeeding, no matter what voices of self-hatred and doubt and no matter how I felt inside. As long as I had good grades, went to a good school and could surround myself with tangible successes, then I would be able to live, I would be able to get enough to feel okay and justify my existence to myself.

In my final year of schooling, we lost our family home, my mother got into an abusive relationship, and so did my father, and my siblings and I dealt with domestic abuse. My mother couldn’t find work after the divorce, so I paid most of our rent with the money I was making from my retail job. Her partner attacked me a few times, until I got fed up and called the police on him. I organised intervention orders against him on behalf of all my immediate family. I wanted to protect my younger siblings.  

I’d wanted to be a writer or a scientist, so I’d originally enrolled in a double degree in Arts/Science, but I ended up transferring into something else because I needed something more pragmatic; because I thought I would have a clearer trajectory. Seems a lot of people thought that - given how oversupplied the industry is now. 

I work at well respected company in the city but it’s only a temporary contract. I also work for a marketing firm, mostly on a contract basis writing content. That work is mostly dependent on what comes their way. 

I want to be in control of my life but I feel I have no security in my future, no security about where my career is going. I keep interviewing and getting positive feedback but I don’t have a firm commitment and it makes me anxious. 

I feel what I think feeling lonely feels like most of the time. I think I am feeling some sort of lonliness because I am, factually, alone most of the time. and I feel a sense of emptiness. But I don’t actively seek social interaction, except from my partner. 

I am in an amazing relationship with a guy I love. But I don’t know how to trust anyone else, I know subconsciously I often slip into closing myself off to him, too, when I’m not mindful. I don’t know how to open up, or even what there is of myself to show. With other people, I never know what I can show and what I shouldn’t show, what the appropriate conventions are. There are other reasons I don’t trust people, but that’s not something I’d share on this sort of platform.

I think because I’ve spent so long hiding myself, hiding my depression and anxiety most of my life, hiding being gay most of my schooling, hiding self-harm at various points. It always felt like my real feelings stretched into planes of experience that other people just didn’t have access to. I’d see the other people around me, seemingly all carefree, seemingly at peace, and I didn’t know I could possibly be among people like that. 

Like any good cliché, I felt saturated in darkness while everywhere I looked there were people with stable lives, stable emotional lives, stable families. Perhaps many people feel that

I feel like I am empty within myself, that there is a void that I keep pushing down with distractions but when I’m not looking, like late at night, it bubbles up and fills my mind and it’s all I can think about - my future, my career, my relationships, my health, my finances. I know this is normal, but damn it’s inconvenient when now it’s 4AM and I got to start getting ready in 2 hours.  

Anyway, I am so used to protecting myself and keeping to myself, I don’t really know how to form intimate relationships. I moved out of the home when I was 18 and I’ve been looking after myself ever since. When I was in Uni I managed to make a few guys fall for me, I was very fit because exercise helps to keep the demons at bay and I’m at least decently smart but I couldn’t hold many relationships down.

Before my current long-term relationships, I had another long-term relationship, 4 years, with a guy I liked a lot but neither of us could really open up and we were both so focused on trying to make something of ourselves, I don’t think we really knew how to be in a relationship. I don’t think either of us knew how to deal with our emotional lives, so we mostly got blackout drunk, watched TV or *other thinks* when we together… When he went overseas to study that’s when I ended up seeing other guys. By the time he came back I had moved on.

I just needed to be desired to feel valid, I needed enough people to tell me I was desirable to outweigh my own self-hatred. 

Anyway, that’s enough for now.

[biofunmy]

Against Nihilism

Kate Ferro for BuzzFeed News

After a big breakup earlier this year — I was the one who ended things — I gave myself a lot of room to grieve in whatever ways felt good at the time. Ordering takeout for both lunch and dinner? Sure. Downing IPAs while watching women’s soccer at 10 in the morning? No problem. Draining my savings on weird funky clothing and yet another pair of clogs? You bet!!!

According to the tenets of modern pop feminism, I’m entitled to a certain amount of overindulgence because, as a hardworking woman, I’ve earned it. Everything from institutional sexism to harassment to heartbreak can supposedly be assuaged by a couple bottles of wine with a group of good girlfriends. The treacly “Treat yo self” mantra popularized on Parks and Recreation has enabled many a stressed-out woman to place that $800 Anthropologie order (you can always return most of it, right?). Life is hard and the world is on fire; maybe we deserve to indulge in some good old simple pleasures.

So what if wine is a carcinogen and the alcohol industry has actively worked to downplay the link between drinking and cancer? So what if fast fashion is built on exploitative labor and contributes to mass global pollution? So what if the concept of self-care — popularized by Audre Lorde, a black lesbian activist battling breast cancer — has been co-opted to sell us things we don’t need, things which indirectly harm others and might actually harm us in the end? We’ve earned it, ladies!

I’d like to think I don’t actively buy into the capitalist vision of self-care, even as I’ve thrown my money into its maw; at least, I don’t assume any sort of entitlement to feeling good via the accumulation of material things. More so, I just thought…fuck it.

A few months ago, drunk in the middle of the day, I impulse-bought a Juul at a bodega in downtown Manhattan. I’d been taking hits off my friends’ vapes for months, only after I’d had enough to drink that smoking became pleasurable instead of disgusting. That was the rule I’d used for myself previously with cigarettes: I could never buy my own, but if I was drunk, I could bum one or two or five. Actually owning a Juul, as much as I liked to think the vapor or whatever made them safer than my beloved Marlboro Lights, was definitely breaking the rules. But I’d reached a point where I no longer cared.

While other people were having their hot girl summers, I spent mine flirting with a sense of doom I haven’t experienced since I was a hope-starved teen. (Nihilism: It’s back in style, just like denim miniskirts!). And I’m not alone. Twitter offers a daily glut of jokes about the apocalypse; things have gotten so bad we’re begging for vaping or an asteroid or alien overlords to finally put us out of our misery. The novelist Jonathan Franzen published a (much-maligned) essay this past weekend about climate change, arguing that the oncoming disaster is impossible to mitigate and “we” can no longer pretend otherwise. (“Every day, instead of thinking about breakfast,” he wrote, we all “have to think about death.”) Reading recently about presidential candidate Andrew Yang’s dystopian vision of the future, I found myself dismayed, and thoroughly dragged, by Max Read’s description of a “doomer,” the archetypal internet memer who believes we’re all totally fucked: “a depressed, purposeless 20-something usually depicted smoking a cigarette and wearing a beanie.”

Okay, I’m not a doomer, but I have become somewhat fatalistic lately. With talk of another recession and the continued possibility of dying in a mass shooting or some sort of natural disaster, the scarcity mindset I’d developed as the child of a parent living paycheck to paycheck kicked back in again. Thanks to a few greedy corporations and crisis-denying national governments, climate catastrophe seems inevitable — no matter what personal choices I make about things like food or travel or children.

So why bother saving for the future if there isn’t even going to be a future? Why bother being kind to my body by taking it easy on the beer and potato skins when all the crap I consume might not catch up with me by the time that not-future comes to pass? No matter how I treated myself — and no matter what infinitesimal steps I took to be a better human citizen — we’d all end up in the same place in the end.

For a while during my “fuck it” summer, it felt great to be a mess, if only because of its implicit rejection of corporatized self-care’s evil twin: self-optimization. Since diets have become passé, we’ve entered a new era defined by “wellness,” but women are still expected to meet Eurocentric and patriarchal beauty standards — only, unlike with dieting, we’re now supposed to feel good about attempting to contort ourselves into socially acceptable bodies.

Fuck other people’s narrow ideas about the only right ways to live a good and happy life.

“Wellness” conjures images of Gwyneth Paltrow peddling hundreds of dollars’ worth of Goop vitamins and oils and crystals and juices to customers who, because they are not wealthy celebrities, will never look like Gwyneth Paltrow. Organic vegetables and private Pilates instructors are the provinces of rich people who have the time and money to optimize their bodies as if it’s their job (because it is). Fuck wellness! I thought, ordering chips and queso for the third time in a week. Fuck other people’s narrow ideas about the only right ways to live a good and happy life.

But was my life really better, or happier? I loved taking shots with my sister at my favorite dive bar, bonding in a way we sometimes struggle to when sober. But I hated that by the time we got home I was sobbing on the couch about our fraught relationship with our mother, some deep dark part of me ripped open and exposed to the unforgiving light. I loved the dopamine rush of confirming yet another online shopping order, but I hated having to return half the crap once it piled up in my bedroom. I hated hangovers, mountains of takeout containers, and the point at which my Juul would stop giving me a stream of little highs and instead just start making me sick.

Amazon Studios / Courtesy Everett Collection

Jillian Bell in Brittany Runs a Marathon.

Last weekend, I took myself on a date to the movies. I saw Brittany Runs a Marathon, which is the exact kind of movie I’ve been seeking out lately: funny, uplifting, and you know going in exactly what you’re getting. Keep your twist endings, Quentin Tarantino! I’ll watch the movie where the ending is literally spoiled by the film title.

Paul Downs Colaizzo’s indie movie, which won the Audience Award in the US Drama category at Sundance, stars Jillian Bell as the titular Brittany, a goofy twentysomething in a major life rut. A doctor tells her she has an unhealthy BMI (proven to be a bogus measure of a person’s health) and that she needs to lose 50 pounds. This leads Brittany — and Bell herself — to attempt to shed the weight of a “small Siberian husky” over the next year, at the end of which Brittany plans to run the New York City Marathon.

A movie about a woman trying to find fulfillment through weight loss sounds pretty out of step with our current cultural moment, when fat acceptance and body positivity have been gaining significant ground. Kate Browne in Runner’s World argues that the movie functions as “fitspo” by conveying to viewers that if you lose weight, you, too, can achieve your dreams. “The story we’re too often told about fatness and running,” she wrote, “is that body size is an obstacle to overcome in our quest for glory.” Madison Malone Kircher, in a piece for Vulture, made similar points: “In Brittany Runs a Marathon, being fat is portrayed as a starting point instead of just a state of being.”

I, too, would have preferred a movie in which Brittany ran a marathon after gaining back all the weight she initially lost while training — proving to herself, and to viewers, that she could do remarkable things at any size. Still, I think the film does complicate more straightforward and more explicitly anti-fat weight loss narratives in popular culture by making clear that personal fulfillment and a small waist aren’t inextricably intertwined.

Soon before she’s set to run her first marathon (spoilers ahead), Brittany pushes herself too hard in her attempt to lose her final 10 pounds; she deprives herself of food and ends up in the hospital with a stress fracture. She has to miss the race. While recovering, she’s much thinner but more miserable than ever. In the film’s cringiest scene, Brittany gets drunk and heckles a fat woman at her brother-in-law’s birthday party, refusing to believe that the woman’s “average” size partner could actually love and desire a fat person. At other moments, she makes jealous assumptions about a (thin) neighbor she doesn’t actually know; she begrudges a married friend his happy domesticity with his husband and children. The film suggests that Brittany’s main problem has never been her weight — it’s that she’s convinced all her woes have nothing to do with her own actions and that other people, in turn, don’t deserve their happiness.

Amazon Studios / Courtesy Everett Collection

Patch Darragh and Jillian Bell in Brittany Runs a Marathon.

At the end of the movie, when Brittany signs up for the marathon again the next year and actually makes it to the race — cheered on by friends she’d previously spurned — I cried. I cried because it was, yes, inspirational, but I was also moved by the way the story managed to explore personal autonomy and desire in a self-improvement narrative without discounting the significant role played by larger systemic forces.

No, Brittany shouldn’t have to lose weight to be treated with respect — but the material reality of her life is that, when she’s thinner, she’s actually “treated like a woman,” as she tells her soon-to-be boyfriend: People smile at her; they hold the door for her on the subway. No, it isn’t fair that the fancy gym she tries to join when she first decides to lose weight is cost prohibitive to so many people — but that doesn’t discount the fact that running, and other ways of moving one’s body, are completely free.

I cried because I’ve long resented all the pressure I feel to work out and eat “well” and drink less and sleep more. So much of that pressure comes from a world hellbent on optimizing our bodies and brains for workplace efficiency, for social acceptance, for conventional beauty standards, for “normalcy.” It’s pressure designed to make us believe the world will become less of a hellscape through mere personal effort, rather than structural change.

But what if we don’t make those choices (just) to make ourselves more palatable to the world around us? Yes, living “well” — if we’re financially and physically able — benefits The Man. That doesn’t change the fact that treating our bodies with respect and care might benefit us too.

When I first thought about quitting drinking, about a month ago, I read Sarah Hepola’s 2015 recovery memoir, Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget. I sobbed through the last 50 pages. (Yes, I’ve been crying a lot lately.) She talks about how, even after she got sober, she still wasn’t taking care of herself: lots of takeout, not a lot of making the bed or hanging up her laundry.

I told myself this was OK, because our society was beyond warped in its expectations of women, who were tsunamied by messages of self-improvement, from teeth whiteners to self-tanners … I wanted to kick the whole world in the nuts and live the rest of my years in sweatpants that smelled vaguely like salami, because who really cares?

But then, after a while, Hepola realized: She cared. She realized she didn’t need to make her body and home feel and look better to please men, or because it was what she was “supposed” to do. “I should take care of myself because it made me happy,” she wrote.

After finishing the book, I wondered if, angry at the propagandist sham of American individualism and bootstraps meritocracy, I’d course-corrected a little too hard — giving up on trying to improve myself or the world around me.

Eddy Chen / HBO

Zendaya as Rue on Euphoria.

My nihilism was both political and personal. Politically, I’d become Chidi, the philosophy scholar on The Good Place, who ends up in Hell because of his ethical indecision. At one point, after grasping so desperately for moral purity and failing to find it, he gives up. “The world is empty,” he yells. “There is no point to anything. And you’re just gonna die. So do whatever!” Personally, I saw myself as Euphoria’s Rue (minus the hard drug-taking), who returns to her life of debauchery after getting clean in rehab because she doesn’t see the point in trying to get better. “The world’s coming to an end,” she says in the first episode, “and I haven’t even finished high school yet.”

It’s a lot easier to believe that you can’t do much to improve your moods, your relationships, and the way your body feels while simultaneously believing you can’t do much to improve those things for other people, either. Abdicating that sense of any responsibility let me avoid a deeper, darker worry: that prioritizing the self is, by nature, saying to hell with everyone else.

My obsession with that particular quandary led me to Trisha Low’s new book-length essay, Socialist Realism, in which she attempts to reconcile her desire for the comforts of love and home with her desire for a socialist utopia. Is it even possible to pursue personal happiness and fulfillment while prioritizing The Greater Good at the same time?

“Home,” she writes. “It’s just something to contain our misplaced desires for a better world. How can we willingly long for that?” Her work is built upon that of her teacher, the academic José Esteban Muñoz, who famously theorized that queerness is, by its very nature, not-yet-here — “that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough.”

In Megan Milks’s review of Socialist Realism for Bookforum, she notes that a decade ago “many queers were enamored with the alluring radicality of queer negativity” — think Lee Edelman’s 2004 polemic No Future, about the queer death drive — but “in the Trump era such grandiose nihilism seems puerile.”

I loved Low’s book for its messiness, its sense of struggle — a perfect depiction of the constant tugging I feel within myself every day, between my desire to deal with the realities of my own life and my desire to think on bigger, more ambitious scales. “Whatever,” Low eventually concludes. “You can make utopia out of almost anything.”

Since last month, I’ve stopped consuming alcohol (for now, though maybe also for longer). I threw away my Juul, then got jealous that I didn’t get rid of it more dramatically when I saw somebody smash theirs with a hammer on Instagram. Even King Princess, the Gen Z queen of Juuls, recently quit — a harbinger of change if I’ve ever seen one.

I’m trying to whittle away at my nihilism (both the personal and the political) in other small ways. I signed up for a trial at a rental clothing company, with the hopes that I’ll spend less money on shopping and contribute less waste. I’ve stopped eating beef, hopefully en route to full-fledged vegetarianism. And I joined a powerlifting gym after my friend Katie, who is basically a lifting influencer, extolled its many virtues. I’m hoping the sport’s focus on strength and power, rather than weight loss, will help me stop punishing my body for the way it looks and start celebrating it for what it can do.

I’ve had these little bursts of self-improvement projects before, but in the past I’ve always gotten bored and given up eventually. I’d start drinking again. I’d order a bunch of crap I didn’t need from companies that mistreat their workers and actively make the world worse. Whatever, who cares, nothing matters.

Just last week I caved and ordered six different white T-shirts and a $200 pair of boots. (“Basics!” I told myself. “Just the basics!”) I know I’m still going to have nights where I eat only popcorn for dinner and watch six straight episodes of Love Island and bum hits from my friends’ Juuls. I think what’s most important is that I’m at least trying to train myself to rely on more than just instant gratification. To have faith that, if I’m lucky, there’s a lot more life I’ve yet to live.

Critics of Franzen’s New Yorker piece on the climate apocalypse pointed out that the author’s climate projections are seriously flawed and his conclusions perhaps even more so. After taking swipes at everyone, from the evil science-deniers on the right to the overly optimistic peddlers of the Green New Deal on the left, Franzen sees hopeful futures for community gardens and CSA programs, but not much else.

“If your hope for the future depends on a wildly optimistic scenario,” he wrote, “what will you do ten years from now, when the scenario becomes unworkable even in theory? Give up on the planet entirely?”

What a patronizing way to address anyone who dares to dream. Teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg hasn’t documented her climate depression or dared adults to consider the impact of their personal choices just to piss off a bunch of man-baby conservatives. As a young person, she’s more than justified in fearing for her future, but despite her anger and her sadness — because of her anger and her sadness — she still believes in something better. Why bother even trying otherwise?

Yes, living “well” — if we’re financially and physically able — benefits The Man. That doesn’t change the fact that treating our bodies with respect and care might benefit us too.

Corrupt corporations and governments do hold the most blame, and the most significant obligations, when it comes to righting our course. But there is no easier way to shirk consumer responsibility — whether you’re eating beef, or flying a lot, or holding onto that unholy Amazon Prime subscription — than by self-soothing with the leftist adage that “there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism.”

As Charlotte Shane recently wrote in a piece about Jonathan Safran Foer’s We Are the Weather (yet another collection of Big Climate Thoughts by yet another underqualified white guy), holding institutions accountable “can’t be a ploy to deflect attention from our own culpability … No matter how otherwise constrained our circumstances, we can always choose each other, choose solidarity, choose effort. Every time we do, we’re making headway toward a new habit, a self-reinforcing orientation that alters the fabric of who we are and how we live.”

Is there anything in this world harder than trying to be both happy and good?

I’ve been listening to Lana Del Rey’s Norman Fucking Rockwell on repeat since the album dropped, which has put me in the perfect mood for my sad girl fall. But as much as Lana sings her beautiful, dreamy way through the depressing fog that is modern living, she still ends the album on somewhat of a high note. “Hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have,” she croons on the very last song. “But I have it.”

May we all, Lana. May we all. ●

Sahred From Source link Science

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[booksbroadwaybbc]

After designing a system to hack my brain into giving myself more credit for accomplishments, I noticed a profound change via /r/selfimprovement

After designing a system to hack my brain into giving myself more credit for accomplishments, I noticed a profound change

I posted this in r/self and some folks there suggested I post elsewhere so that it can reach more people (that was such a flattering bit of advice tbh), so I thought this was the most appropriate place. I hope you find it helpful!

About 1 year ago to the day, I was in the middle of a nasty bout with my bipolar II.

I often got caught in negative thought spirals that usually ended with me convincing myself that I wasn’t worthy of success, kindness, nice things, etc.

When I was on an upswing, I was quick to remind myself that these ruminations were really harmful, so I had an idea:

What if I left myself a note reminding myself of what I accomplished? Like a record?

Since the issue at hand was acknowledging the accomplishments in the moment, I figured it would be smart to “reverse-engineer” the success. I found some Post-It notes and took some time to write out everything I wanted, using some basic parameters:

One Post-It note per thing

Activities count (ex. “go mini-golfing”, “go to a record store”, “finish a book”)

Maintenance of self counts (ex. “pick up meds”, “do laundry”, “end day with a clean room”)

Expectations from work/job DO NOT count

It has to be within reason, which might mean breaking a want down into several wants (ex. “move out of parent’s house” could become “research apartments for rent”, “apply for jobs near the new location”, etc. - it has to be achievable)

When I got done a few hours later, I had a wall FULL of Post-It notes. I was really surprised at how many things I wanted. I had no idea where to start. So, I thought about it a bit:

What’s going to inspire me to commit to this system? How do I prioritize the task?

(Psychology is absolutely fascinating to me, and all the while I was thinking along the lines of operant conditioning and reinforcement and such)

So, I came up with a way to “gamify” the whole thing in order to make it interesting. The fairest way to create a scale would be to find the “lowest-level” task and assign it a point value. Those tasks ended up being the maintenance tasks – the things I need to do anyway but want to acknowledge as “good”.

Examples:

pick up meds (1)

do laundry (1)

end day with a clean room (1)

The next level would be the things I could technically not do or put off, but they would still benefit my life significantly OR the things that require a significant financial investment, like bills or some useful electronic gadget/product valuing over $50.

Examples:

go to doctor appointment (2)

hang out with a friend (2)

pay monthly car payment (2)

buy an external hard-drive (2)

The last easily-identified level would be the “landmark” moments. It’s hard to quantify these kinds of moments with a value but I settled on the 3-5 point range, allowing myself to use discretion.

Examples:

attend a men’s retreat (5)

get a new job (4)

completely fill out wardrobe (3)

Any additional points would be added to suit each individual task’s urgency or value.

This was all well and good, but why even collect points? What’s the purpose? What could possibly be used to reward myself?

As I applied a point value to each Post-It, I noticed a theme – most of my tasks/accomplishments involved the exchange of money for a service OR acquiring something desirable. I decided on the concept of “guilt-free” (GF) dollars. When I’ve amassed enough points, I could redeem them for money at a set exchange rate. The money can be used for anything without shame because I could say that the money was earned. The GF money could even pay for another task, thereby giving me points back and accomplishing even more while still feeling economical. It would be very important to document both the accomplishments and the rewards (descriptions and dates) so that I could have a record.

I was starting to get excited about this since, before taking the time to develop this, I had no strategies for giving myself credit. …wait… giving credit… money is credit… credit is also praise for accomplishment… ohhhhh…

The name of this system became:

GIVE YOURSELF SOME CREDIT

Reeling from the utter genius of this pun, I fully invested myself in the idea.

To begin, I chose the rate of 15 points = $40. It was an overestimation, for sure, but I figured that over-rewarding myself would be easier to recognize than under-rewarding, since the purpose of this whole exercise was to encourage good behavior and habit formation. As I started to understand the relationship of value between points and GF dollars, I refined my exchange rate. After about 2 months of 15pts:$40, I reduced to 15pts:$20. This proved to be a reliable ratio for about 6 months or so (after which I was shocked that I was still maintaining this system), when I reduced to 20pts:$20, effectively setting the value to 1pt:$1.

It was a pretty crazy process.

All throughout, I was watching tasks become habits and they stopped being “worth” points. I was achieving more and at a quicker rate than ever before in my life. I was living an exponentially more fulfilling life. I became intensely focused on my goals. I had all the things I wanted and if I wanted something else, I knew exactly what it was. I started earning more points than I could even remember to document. I constantly felt a profound sense of gratitude, mostly because I could see evidence of my impact on myself and the world. I live an unrecognizable life compared to a year ago.

Since October 2017, I now have my own car, my own apartment in the city of my choosing, I attended several men’s retreats, I got surgery to treat gynecomastia (man boobs), I came out as demisexual, I have a good job with health benefits, I’m involved in several thriving friend groups, I addressed my mental health, I have creative outlets, I have fulfilling hobbies, and so much more.

Today, I looked in the box where I kept all my points and the documentation of the awards, and I can’t stop smiling. There are so many points! So many memories of things I did came flooding back, one after the other. So many rewards that added meaning to my life. It’s evidence of growth and we hardly ever get to see that kind of progress in ourselves.

I actively changed myself. I hacked my brain. I did something that so many people believe to be impossible. It’s not! We have control! Acknowledge your victory. Revel in success. Exist in gratitude. Make yourself a lightning-rod for opportunity. Live the life you actually want to live. You just have to GIVE YOURSELF SOME FUCKING CREDIT.

Submitted October 29, 2018 at 04:19PM by bmanfromct via reddit https://ift.tt/2D9mXN9

[meditationklaus]

I’m Brittany Richard, And This Is How I Yoga

Brittany Richard is a 200hr Certified Yoga Instructor who specializes in teaching curvy, body positive yoga. Since early childhood, Brittany has battled with a binge-eating disorder, obesity, depression, and negative body image issues. In March 2014, then 26-year-old Brittany fell in love with yoga shortly after having her second child. Like many women and mothers, Brittany found herself at a place in life where she knew she needed to become more active and healthy for herself and children.

Through her practice of yoga and meditation, she has learned to accept and love her body and is now helping others find a new way of living life without limitations.

As a larger, curvier woman, Brittany now teaches ‘Body Positive’ Yoga Classes designed with everyBODY in mind—from first-timers and the yoga-curious, to those who have been practicing for a while but are seeking to practice with others who are similar in shape and size.

Name: Brittany Danielle (Faulk) Richard Occupation: Yoga Teacher Location: Charlotte, NC Favorite yoga style: Vinyasa Favorite yoga pose: Adho mukha svanasana and Hanumanasana Yoga is… Therapy. A natural way of healing the body and mind from the inside out. It’s a grounding mechanism that gives you the power and freedom to become your ultimate self. Challenging yet satisfying yoga, if you let it, can change your life in so many ways. From learning to accept and love yourself as a whole to gaining self-confidence that empowers you to live a life without limitations.

What Do You Love Most About Yoga?

Yoga gives me a euphoric feeling that is intoxicating. Like a drug, yoga is my ‘healthy’ addiction that give me the power to fight back.

Whether I’m battling with an ED episode or struggling with my depression, anxiety, body image, and all of life’s ups and downs, yoga saves me from the darkness and from self-destructive behavior that negatively impact my life and overall health.

Yoga is not just a pose. It is a practice and an art, and the freedom of self-cultivation.

How Has Yoga Changed Your Life, Personality And Physique?

Yoga has give me the tools and ability to take control over my life. Three years ago prior to any knowledge of yoga, I never thought I, an obese, depressed, conflicted woman could ever love herself, much less like the reflection in the mirror.

My self-discovery journey started when I began practicing yoga in March of 2014. Honestly, I had no idea what I was doing. All that knew was yoga made me feel good about myself, and that was enough for me to continue practicing despite the physical challenges.

Throughout my practice, I have grown into a confident, open minded, strong woman. I now understand that just because you don’t look like or have the “ideal body” that society says is acceptable does not mean there’s no value in who you are. To me value comes from embarrassing yourself and giving your body the love and respect it deserves, at any size.

Yes, I have lost a great amount of weight practicing yoga, but that is not my personal reason for getting on my mat daily or what I teach to my students. I have come to accept and love my body, and all its imperfections. Because of this, I’ve become happier and healthier, and can now help others move towards their own self-realization.

There is a story behind every stretch mark, dimple, and ounce of cellulite marked on my body, and to me, all that is written is beautiful and unique on any body.

What Everyday Things Did You Get Better At Because Of Yoga?

To be honest, I got better at living life, my life. Yoga has a way of stirring up a lot shit that resides deep within us. Things that are tucked away so deep that in the daily swing of things, we tend to forget they are there.

My practice of yoga began at a crucial time in my life. I was separating from my husband, had just recently had a baby three months prior, and also had a two-year-old. Life for me was anything but normal. Yoga gave me the strength get through all the difficult transitions.

How Do You Keep Your Yoga Practice Interesting And Challenging?

There have been and are still times I get burned out on teaching and maintaining my own practice. It’s hard to always be on repeat and give yourself to others. I feel any yoga teacher or practitioner at some point has, or will, experience that feeling.

So to keep my practice interesting, I like to travel and explore new places that my soul can connect too. Getting outdoors and away from the yoga studio is how I often reconnect myself to my practice and rediscover my purpose.

To keep things challenging, I like to find and create new ways to make yoga more accessible for myself and my students. Doing yoga is like participating in any other sport. You have ups and downs, but the love for the game is what keeps you going.

What Book, Website Or Person Inspires You?

From the beginning, to where I am today, the Instagram Yoga Community has been my inspiration and support system, and at times, my life support. To be able to connect with millions of women all over the world and share our experiences, thoughts, encouragement, and love is rather remarkable.

With all the negativity people encounter daily and see on social media, it’s comforting to know that there is a place that will accept you. I know many people think us “grammers” are here doing what we do for the “likes”—some may be, but for myself, I gain inspiration from seeing other women and men transform into their true selves.

That is the reason I became a yoga teacher; to connect and help heal those who are a lot like and unlike myself.

Daily, I get hundreds of emails and messages from followers who trust and confide in me; sharing their fears, self-doubt, and mostly just what’s going wrong in life. To know their struggles and then witness them overcome years of abuse, eating disorders, self-harm, suicide attempts, and much more, gives me hope.

This is the hope that inspires me daily to continue what I am doing and be an active, positive figure both within my community and social media.

Which Yoga Pose Challenges You the Most?

Any type of arm balances. At one point I considered myself less of a “yogi” because I couldn’t do them. Side Crow, Firefly, and forearm stand, etc. are all still very hard for me.

Accepting that my body isn’t ready for advance poses was tough. However, I found peace in accepting my practice for what it is and what it isn’t, and I think that is what yoga is supposed to teach us—to accept and love ourselves for who we are now.

What are Your Go-To Yoga Poses When You’re Stressed or In Need of an Energy Boost?

Sun Salutations, hip and chest openers, and inversions.

When I’m stressed, I tend to hit my mat hardcore. Pounding through a sweaty, power Vinyasa class and/or emerging myself into deep stretches and inversions helps relieve my stresses and gives me a boost of energy that leaves me feeling grounded, powerful, and refocused.

What Do You Listen To When You Practice Yoga?

A mix of everything. From indie music to rap, hip hop, and rock roll. I love it all.

What’s The Best Advice You’ve Ever Received?

I’ve gotten a lot of great advice over the years but I’ve found that the best advice is usually the simplest and can often come from ourselves. The greatest advice I’ve ever given to myself is, “Follow your dreams and stop caring about what people think of you. Whatever you do, do it for you and because you’re worth it”.

What’s Your #1 Piece of Advice for Those Just Starting Their Yoga Practice?

For anyone who’s looking to get into yoga or is just starting their own practice I’d like to say, Yes, it may be hard in the beginning but don’t stop practicing because you think you can’t do it. Keep fucking going. If you fall, go ahead and fall 3 more times. Laugh at yourself. You are human and allowed to make mistakes.

No one’s practice will be perfect and no individual practice will ever be alike. Don’t get caught up in trying to do fancy poses, it’s the basics that will build you. Never lose sight of why you practice, and if you do take a break, your heart will guide you back.

Trust in yourself that you can do anything, because you really can! And always, always accept where you are, both in life and within your practice, and remember to give yourself and body the daily love and attention it deserves.

Website: crazycurvyyoga.com Facebook: crazycurvyyoga Instagram: @crazycurvy_yoga

The post I’m Brittany Richard, And This Is How I Yoga appeared first on DOYOUYOGA.COM.