#that i’m literally in debt because of something that has a whole different and shittier insurance than ‘health insurance’

[onpyre]

sobering to realize i will have spent $4k+ on my teeth this year

[fluffehluff]

I don’t post much about myself, or post a lot of my own content typically, but..

I wanted to kind of touch a topic. I’ve been on this godforsaken hellsite for AGES. Literally years of my life.

Name all the dorky memes, and all that. I went through or whatever.

But also, I went through - experienced secondhand the loss or learned, rather learned, from these people about the suffering that has went on that never seemed real to me when I was younger. Because, at least in my experience, I saw the news and went “that was a secular incident” and just lived like that. I didn’t think about it much, I was younger and didn’t think about it due to whatever reason I felt at the time. 

Tumblr wasn’t like any other site I had joined prior, so I’ve learned a lot from the user base. 

First hand wisdom, the innate choices people make to spread news, college tips, or whatever it may be as a grand scale because they related to it and passed it on. 

I feel like it made me grow as a person over the years. I knew racism existed, I knew all kinds of things existed but..

In a very grand way they’ve taught things in “feminism counts in men AND women because X” for example. That wasn’t something I knew initially. That feminism affected both. I learned from people tearing down the tiers, the way it effects people as a whole and one on one accounts people talk about of how it changes the game. 

I remember seeing a post once about a woman who worked for some government office, and the representative of the state (if I remember correctly) didn’t think periods/menstrual cycles were a real thing. For someone who has those - it kind of..boggled my mind? 

So while people crack jokes about how tumblr is shit (and it is sometimes, really.) I think I would’ve been a shittier person without it. I grew more accepting of things I didn’t particularly know about, it helped me feel not so broken about my own sexuality, as learn about more gender spectrums that I wasn’t even taught in gender study classes, and I kind of learned in the aspect of “general respect”. 

Now that last line may sound funny but, we get taught as kids that respect is just like.. “respect your elders” and more of sit down, shut up, and listen. At least for me, anyway. 

So getting taught people’s preferred pronouns, genders, or names, I was taught very quickly while other people didn’t want to do this, (I did it, but I never saw it as a respect scenerio) but it was. 

You respect the person enough to do as they ask about themselves. 

I learned about how I feel about relationships and how I want to be with them - with my partners. I grew up in a household that initially didn’t give me good standards for relationships. They were skewed at best of times, and terrible in the worse times. 

In this scenerio, it taught me a ground foundation of, relationships do not OWN you. You don’t owe anybody anything when you get in a relationship, HOWEVER you are saying ‘yes’ to this person everyday, with being with them, and if you have respect for them you will give yourself to them as they do to you. So instead of feeling a moral debt to them, loving them properly and realizing while your views may ultimately clash, compromise and communication really is vital. 

And in all of this, I bring it up because it really helped me move forward in a way, because I learned these things and now my partner I’m with (been with for a while, but I don’t talk much.) praises me for the things I’ve learned like this, and I really feel a lot of it has to be given to the things the people on here have posted as a whole and I garnered a bit of knowledge and wordly insight. While grounding your entire self to this methodology would be terrible, I think learning a bit from the people - from different lifestyles and different points of view as really grounded a different person for me originally before I joined this hellish broken website. I didn’t touch on everything, but, I kind of felt like I needed to touch on this for some reason?

-Fluff