3p blueberry

painting of joan of arc but she's got a lil carabiner. is this anything.

psychopomp

In biology they told us that the eye doesn't actually see everything in the room, it fills in most of it from memory and assumption. your brain is just confidently making stuff up about what's probably there and you believe it because you have no reason not to. and i thought that was just a vision fact but actually it's the most important thing i know about unreliable narrators. your character isn't lying. they genuinely see the room they expect to see. that's so much scarier.

The single most useful edit you can do before you send anything to anyone: Read it out loud. The whole thing. Every sentence. You will hear every place the rhythm breaks, every word that doesn't belong, every line of dialogue that no human being would actually say. Your eye skips over problems because it already knows what you meant to write. Your ear doesn't lie. It catches everything. It is embarrassing how much a single read-aloud will fix. Do it alone. Do it in a weird voice if it helps. just do it.

"You know what's harder than Getting Better? Living Like That" is just the thesis for my whole shit going on right now honestly. You know what's harder than doing my physical therapy? Hurting All The Time. You know what's harder than addressing my gender dysphoria? Hurting All The Time

I'm Doing The Hard Thing and it's *easier* than how I was living before. If you make yourself feel better you will have more energy to spend on Getting Better. Nice inch nails - the upward spiral. Crawl out of your grave Thursday

has anyone considered that it was probably her house too. where else was she supposed to put her chintz?

just got a call from the american psychiatric association. you old dogs, i said, picking up on the first ring. how many times i gotta tell you to lose this number. i don’t want you coming around here anymore. “listen, toots, we’ve been doing some thinking,” they says, and i says, guess there’s a first time for everything. “you’re a real funny dame, sugardoll. reviewing criticism, we’ve determined that the biggest issue with our previous diagnostic and statistic manuals of mental disorders is the anonymity of it all. we’ve been circling around a vague figure of the mentally well without defining the traits of a mentally well person. there’s no personality. what we need is a cute broad with a couple opinions to model the psychological norm.” so i’m saying back up and give it to me straight: i’m the new standard of sanity? can i get that in writing? and they say, “as the american psychiatric association we hereby state that you are the baseline and any deviations from your personality are deviations from the very concept of sanity, at least in the united states psychiatric system.” they’re making it public tomorrow. it’s a nice gig, if you really want to know. never thought they’d let a woman do it.

I should add - the US government STILL disproportionately targets Indigenous families for child welfare checks. ICWA is supposed to protect against this but is unevenly enforced, and there's even talk of overturning it. Protect ICWA and Indigenous children.

"It doesn't help your credibility to exaggerate, most employers wouldn't literally work you to death" like, I used to work in distribution. If booking a truck driver for back to back shifts until they fall asleep at the wheel, crash, and die counts as being worked to death, I have personally met employers who've worked employees to death and gotten away with a slap on the wrist. It may not be universal, but it's a hell of a lot more common than a lot of us would prefer to think.

Every single labor protection is written in the blood of those who were literally worked to death, and business owners and profiteers would claw those protections back with glee if they could. They will squeeze every red cent from your body if they are allowed, and write off your death for an insurance payout that they'll try to pocket for themselves while hiring your replacement for half the pay they gave to you.

more women whump. more women pushing themselves and passing out from sleep deprivation and exhaustion. more women training until their knuckles bleed and their legs give out from under them. more women being held prisoner and remaining stoic until the very end or perhaps when they’re rescued. more women under truth serum and terrifying hallucinogens. more women waking up in a pool of blood, their own and others’ and not knowing what happened but that something is terribly wrong with them. more women falling apart o ly when rescued. more women pushed to their breaking point. more women whump.

the phrase "but i didn't mean to!" in the context of causing harm is kind of redundant to me, because almost nobody means to cause harm. most of us just want to do the right thing. and i don't mean that in a wishy-washy "oh, we're all good deep down" way, i mean that even people who regularly do the most heinous shit imaginable will have a way of justifying it to themselves. the world is not populated by hollywood sadists and psychopaths.