Free Palestine 🇵🇸

Healthy love wants to see a loved one accept love with gladness and confidence, not shame and feelings of unworthiness. Healthy love wants the loved one to truly know deep down that they are worthy of love and care and respect, and to respond with reciprocation, not gratitude.

The people who love you in a healthy way do not need or want for you to make yourself as small as possible. They don’t want or need you to minimize your own needs and desires, they don’t need or want you to act like they’re doing you a giant favour by treating you with love and respect. The people who love you in a healthy way will be so glad if you accept their love as something you deserve. They won’t think you’re being selfish or self-centred or full of yourself if you accept love with reciprocation and not self-effacing gratitude - in fact, they will be glad!

Because healthy love wants to see YOU healthy and happy, and you aren’t either while you’re letting poisonous self-hatred fester in you. Whoever planted those seeds, you aren’t obligated to tend the plant yourself. You do not have to be a shrine to those who have treated you badly. You can tear out self-hatred wherever you find it, and the people who love you will not only agree you are entitled to do so, they will rejoice with you with each victory!

You deserve care and respect. The people who love you in a healthy way believe you deserve care and respect, and their belief doesn’t hinge on you cowering and acting self-effacing and denying your needs. Instead, their belief that you deserve care and respect means they don’t want you to act like you’re less than them, they don’t want you to constantly defer to their needs and desires, they want to be total equals! They want to just be asked for reassurance when you need it - people who love you in a healthy way don’t need to be manipulated into giving you bits of reassurance!

The people who love you in a healthy way do not need power over you in order to love you fully - they can love you even better the more you participate in the process of sharing your true self, what you actually need and want, who you actually are. Love is work that has to be tended together - that includes letting the people who love you do kindnesses for you instead of you always being the giver.

"Read Banned Books" a new full page cartoon essay published in The New York Times Arts & Leisure section today.

"but i don't need friends and i don't care about community!" okay, lone ranger, what about the people in your community who need you? "but i have social anxiety!" me too, bud! we simply must soldier on. making up lists of questions to ask people helps. and people are predisposed to be generous, i've found. even if you make some kind of mistake, what is this but the natural give and take of human interaction? nobody is perfect.

A Muslim woman plays with a child next to the Dome of the Rock, East Jerusalem, Palestine.

Ramadan 1443.

Here is a list of resources for Gaza and Falasteen. Here is an even bigger list. Here’s a much smaller one. Here is one with resources for both Gaza and Sudan.

Here is the link to a GFM that is very important to me. Here is the link to a GFM for a family in urgent need of evacuation out of Gaza.

Here is a way to help out Sudan. Here are links for donations, Sudanese businesses to support, and brief education about Sudan. Here is a post with resources for education and updates about what's happening in Sudan.

Here is a post with resources for Tigray.

Here is a post with important information on boycotting for Congo. Here is a post with links to support Congo.

Here is a list of resources for education on various issues around the world, including but not limited to West Papau, Hawai'i, Kashmir, and Armenia.

You can check my resources tag for more. I know tumblr's searching system isn't the best, though, so I tried to put as many as I could from that tag here.

And I had to think about my safety as a passenger and a woman, but I decided to just tell him: “I was visiting my girlfriend in New York.” And he went quiet, and I was briefly terrified, and then he said, “It’s good here in Canada, for people like us.” AND THEN I FUCKING CRIED OBVIOUSLY.