you were raised in comparison.
it wasn't always obvious (well. except for the times that it was), but you internalized it young. you had to eat what you didn't like, other people are going hungry, and you should be grateful. you had to suck it up and walk on the twisted ankle, it wasn't broken, you were just being a baby. you were never actually suffering, people obviously had it worse than you did.
you had a roof over your head - imagine! with the way you behaved, with how you talked back to your parents? you're lucky they didn't kick you out on your ass. they had friends who had to deal with that. hell, you have friends who had to deal with that. and how dare you imply your father isn't there for you - just because he doesn't ever actually talk to you and just because he's completely emotionally checked out of your life doesn't mean you're not fucking lucky. think about your cousins, who don't even get to speak to their dad. so what if yours has a mean streak; is aggressive and rude. at least you have a father to be rude to you.
you really think you're hurting? you were raised in a home! you had access to clean water! you never so much as came close to experiencing a real problem. sure, okay. you have this "mental illness" thing, but teenagers are always depressed, right. it's a phase, you'll move on with your life.
what do you mean you feel burnt out at work. what do you mean you mean you never "formed healthy coping mechanisms?" we raised you better than that. you were supposed to just shoulder through things. to hold yourself to high expectations. "burning out" is for people with real jobs and real stress. burnout is for people who have sick kids and people who have high-paying jobs and people who are actually experiencing something difficult. recently you almost cried because you couldn't find your fucking car keys. you just have lost your sense of gratitude, and honestly, we're kind of hurt. we tell you we love you, isn't that enough? if you want us to stick around, you need to be better about proving it. you need to shut up about how your mental health is ruined.
it could be worse! what if you were actually experiencing executive dysfunction. if you were really actually sick, would you even be able to look at things on the internet about it? you just spend too much time on webMD. you just like to freak yourself out and feel like you belong to something. you just like playing the victim. this is always how you have been - you've always been so fucking dramatic. you have no idea how good you have it - you're too fucking sensitive.
you were like, maybe too good of a kid. unwilling to make a real fuss. and the whole time - the little points, the little validations - they went unnoticed. it isn't that you were looking for love, specifically - more like you'd just wanted any one person to actually listen. that was all you'd really need. you just needed to be witnessed. it wasn't that you couldn't withstand the burden, but you did want to know that anyone was watching. these days, you are so accustomed to the idea of comparison - you don't even think you belong in your own communities. someone always fits better than you do. you're always the outlier. they made these places safe, and then you go in, and you are just not... quite the same way that would actually-fit.
you watch the little white ocean of your numbness lap at your ankles. the tide has been coming in for a while, you need to do something about it. what you want to do is take a nap. what you want to do is develop some kind of time machine - it's not like you want your life to stop, not completely, but it would really nice if you could just get everything to freeze, just for a little while, just until you're finished resting. but at least you're not the worst you've been. at least you have anything. you're so fucking lucky. do you have any concept of the amount of global suffering?
a little ant dies at the side of your kitchen sink. you look at its strange chitinous body and think - if you could just somehow convince yourself it is enough, it will finally be enough and you can be happy. no changes will have to be made. you just need to remember what you could lose. what is still precious to you.
you can't stop staring at the ant. you could be an ant instead of a person, that is how lucky you are. it's just - you didn't know the name of the ant, did you. it's just - ants spend their whole life working, and never complain. never pull the car over to weep.
it's just - when it died, it curled up into a tight little ball.
something kind of uncomfortable: you do that when you sleep.
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🎨 at last… my final riddle..
Can I request a muichiro x father figure! reader where the father is washing his hair for the first time… scrub scrub scrub
WAAAAAAAAAAAAA WAAAAAAAAAAAAAA Hey Dolly! I am going To kill you with a Bat! /a
Muichiro and a father figure; washing his hair for the first time!
contains; brief implications of Mui dissociating (it's one line), reader has a good knowledge of hair care, your honour they are found family
word count; 514
Mui… oh my baby boy Mui… My son whom I adore so
as a Hashira, Muichiro’s mind is often far too preoccupied to think too hard about self care, when he’s not spaced out of course.
however, no one grows their hair out that long without learning to take care of it at some point! Giyuu and Mitsuru have given him the hair care shakedown in the past and as a result his hair is for the post part fine — clean, but not particularly shiny or silky.
I think he has pretty thick hair too, so oftentimes washing it can feel like a bit of a chore…
is he going to cut it though? no, he actually quite likes his hair. it helps to have something to fiddle with when he’s looking in the mirror to remind him that the boy looking back at him is himself.
so when you, a fellow Hashira he’s found himself in a strange familial situation with, offer to wash his hair? he stares for a second in shock, then quite readily agrees.
(he gets excited to spend time together like he does with Tanjiro 🥺)
since joining the corps, he’s been the only one washing his hair — his mother always seemed to know what to do and she enjoyed doing it, so he would always just sit back and relax while she washed his hair… and he can’t help but think back to that time when the memories come back to him in a wave.
he sits in the bath almost limp as you gently rub his scalp and run the shampoo through his long hair, sat on a stool behind him with everything you need on the floor by your feet. it feels more like you’re talking at him than to him, but that’s only because he’s just so relaxed that he can’t think of much in the way of a response other than an occasional “mm…”
if his skull wasn’t in the way, he’d think you and your magic hands had turned his brain to mush.
once he’s out of the bath, you help him dry his hair and joke that you could use him as a mop with how long it was. he doesn’t say anything, but you do see a tiny smile in the mirror.
then, just before bed, you braid his hair to keep it safe while he sleeps and give him a cuddle before you leave to get ready for bed yourself. he hasn’t said much all evening, but you have a feeling he wouldn’t complain about doing this again.
Muichiro basically passes out as soon as his head hits the pillow. the second you’re out the door, bang.
the next day, he notices just how many people compliment his hair and how nice it looks, how shiny it is. when he sees you again, he doesn’t mention it, but he does go to you for hair care advice from then on out — if you offer to wash his hair for him again when he does, he counts that as an absolute win!
please do not repost
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OMG, COULD EVERYONE PLEASE STOP IMMEDIATELY BELIEVING AND REPEATING DISINFORMATION?!
Sorry, I just. Was just on Twitter, and I snapped.
I literally haven't seen one true statement about Israel on social media in MONTHS.
It's gotten to the point that I'm seriously considering starting a sideblog fact-checking all of it.
PLEASE STOP BEING GARFIELD I AM BEGGING ALL OF YOU
BE NERMAL FOR FUCK'S SAKE.
I've written at least one really long post about fact-checking things before. I have another saved as a draft somewhere.
But all you really have to do at this point is GO LOOK AT AN ACTUAL NEWS SOURCE.
What do I mean by an Actual News Source?
An actual news source will tell you where it's getting its information.
Basically: Wikipedia rules apply at all times. Citation. Fucking. Needed.
Except with news articles, I don't mean a detailed footnote.
I mean, if they say, "Rosco Flubberish reported seeing a pig fly across Whatever Place. 'It was a flying pig,' he said," they're fine.
If they say, "Sources close to the President reported that the Department of Farmland Creatures launched a pig into the air this afternoon," they're fine.
If they say, "There have also been reports that pigs flew," they are purely making shit up.
Just check CNN or something. CNN checks their shit, and they're very quick on the draw.
NBC has been very reliable too, in my experience. So have ABC, Newsweek, the Jerusalem Post, the Guardian, the New York Times, the AP, PBS, the Washington Post, and Reuters.
You can break through most paywalls by putting archive.is or 12ft.io before the https:// of the URL. Or just go to either of those sites and paste the URL in the box.
Nobody is perfect. I've seen some articles from all of the above that were accurate, but left things out that I personally thought were important.
Journalists are humans, humans fuck up.
(Also, NONE OF THIS APPLIES TO OPINION PIECES ON ANY TOPIC. Opinion pieces are exactly that: opinions. They don't seem to be fact-checked anywhere, as far as I can tell. They range from super-accurate and informative to complete nonsense.)
(Surprisingly unreliable sources in my experience: Democracy Now, Jacobin, Workers World Party. The latter two act like news sites but are basically running nothing but opinion pieces; Democracy Now can do important deep dives, but I've also seen news coverage from it that was wildly misinformed in that same way.
On the flip side, Slate and the Atlantic are largely opinion -- the Atlantic more than Slate, maybe -- but they often have really well-researched analysis of political situations. Ditto Teen Vogue, and sometimes Vox.)
You don't have to read CNN or the NYT or whateverfor fun. You don't have to make it one of your news sources.
Just. Do a quick check on Google News before you assume anything is true, and then run it through a bullshit filter as described above.
You are being actively lied to, all the time. So am I. We all are.
And people will believe and repeat literally anything that sounds about right.
That's just human nature.
That is WHY none of us are immune to propaganda.
if you want my personal shortlist of Bad Sources, as in Sources That Consistently Publish Absolute Falsehoods:
Any and all state-owned or state-controlled media. For example:
Al Jazeera is owned by the Qatari government, and so are a bunch of other news sites.
Mehr News, the Tehran Times, Al-Quds TV, and Al-Alam are owned by the dictatorship of Iran.
Oops. Looks like every form of broadcast Iranian news media is owned by the dictatorship of Iran, which has a monopoly.
Palestinian Broadcasting Corporation, Palestinian News and Info Agency, and Al-Hayat Al-Jadida are owned by the government of Palestine (the Palestinian Authority)
Al-Aqsa TV and Felesteen are owned by Hamas.
TASS / Russia News Agency, Russia Today, and a fuckton of others are owned by the Russian government.
State Media Monitor seems to do a pretty great job of tracking and listing these things. Check out your own country there!
I specifically listed those ones because some of them (especially Al Jazeera, Mehr News, and TASS) are sites I've seen come up frequently on Tumblr, or in my attempts to fact-check what people are saying here and on Twitter. The rest are just more examples from the same governments.
Al Jazeera deserves special notice because it's become a very popular leftist news source. Believe me, I used to read it all the time too.
It can be reliable and accurate sometimes. But:
It consistently tweets things that are unsourced, never appear anywhere else, and that would be big news you'd expect it to follow up on if they were true. It seems to be following a strategy of "tweet every rumor you hear in case it's true, so you can get the scoop."
It also does this with its liveblogs of the war. And ALL its coverage of the war at this point is liveblogs. So things that are verifiably true will run right next to things that are complete hearsay, but are too long to just tweet.
This is especially dangerous because as far as I can tell, Al Jazeera doesn't delete anything that turns out to be false.
I've also seen regular news articles in Al Jazeera, on multiple topics, that veer from Absolutely True Statements to Wildly Exaggerated Numbers and Speculation. Stuff you wouldn't expect a source on, like statistics or descriptions. And there's no way to tell the difference unless you already know a topic really well, or are fact-checking them while you read.
One especially terrible example, from Gazan activist Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib:
Al Jazeera has never posted or published a correction.
Alkhatib has also blamed it for destabilizing the region, although he's exaggerating about it being Hamas's official propaganda outlet:
TL;DR: If you see a Tumblr post making any kind of factual news statement without a link, at this point you need to assume it is absolutely not true. And either scroll on past, or go check Google News.
If there IS a link, you need to click through to see what it's from and what it actually says.
(Honestly, you need to do that with Wikipedia too. I've repeatedly clicked through on citations that absolutely did not say what the article implied they did.)
And pro tip: on mobile, you can just smack a button to sort Google's news results by most recent, and it helps A LOT. There's gotta be a way to do the same on desktop, but if there is, it's not immediately visible, which sucks.
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