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You drop a self-hatred/suicide/depression/whatever "joke" into a completely unrelated conversation

The other person/people involved in that conversation have only two choices a) they agree to derail the conversation, and try to comfort/help you. Then, when you do it again in a later conversation, they feel like they must be bad friends because they weren't able to help. People who think they're bad friends will, because they care and want you to have good friends, start spending less time with you. Your depression uses this to ~*prove~* that no one likes you and everyone will leave you eventually. b) they do not derail the conversation. Your depression uses this to *~prove*~ that no one cares about you.

PROFIT! (In the sense that you now have 10% more depression than you had before)

Me: minding my own damn business in the grocery store

One of my students and a few of his teammates enter the dairy aisle. 

My student is holding hands with one of his teammates. 

My student: Oh hey, Professor X!

Me, who has both my student and his girlfriend in my class: …Hello

My student, looking at his hand-holding partner: Oh! Don’t worry. My girlfriend knows. Not that I’m cheating! I’m not cheating. I’m not gay.

Hand Holding boy: Not that being gay is a bad thing! It’s a good thing!

My student: Right! But no, listen. We aren’t together, we just hold hands in public sometimes.

Hand Holding Boy: Especially on Friday nights. And weekends. And at away games.

My student: Because sometimes people will say shit and then we can punch them! And if the fight started because someone was being homophobic, coach won’t get mad at us.

like 99% of the time there’s a real reason I get “stuck”, maybe my next task has too many steps for my current energy level, or there are multiple things that need doing and I can’t decide which to do first, or I’m trying to think through the multi-step task but there’s an unknown factor that could throw everything off (like, ok I will go to the kitchen, I will get eggs out of the fridge, I will turn on the stove and crack eggs into a pan… but I can’t remember if that pan is clean, what if I have to wash it? better start over. I will go to the kitchen, I will wash the pan, I will get eggs out of the fridge… do we have enough eggs? etc) 

but lately I say to my partner “I’m stuck” and he says “how can I help” and I can say “I need to shift the laundry and cook dinner but I only have energy for one of those so it should be the laundry because that’s already started but I was really looking forward to cooking” and he will just quietly go shift the laundry so I can cook. Or one time I wanted to drink the iced coffee I had in the fridge because it was summer, but the AC was on and I felt cold, so I should just make hot coffee, only I had already made the cold coffee and it wouldn’t keep forever, only I was too cold to enjoy it… and eventually I told my my partner this and he just, turned off the AC?? which never would have occurred to me lol. 

and I’m writing this not to be all like “ooooh my boyfwiend uwu” but mostly because… his approach is so opposite how my parents ever responded to Can’t Do Task Mode in myself or my siblings. I remember my mom yelling at my brother “You’re stuck! GET UNSTUCK! GET UNSTUCK!” so that’s what my brain does when I’m stuck. I just yell at myself to move and don’t move and asking for help feels unbelievably shameful because I SHOULD just be able to Not Be Like This. But I’m not, and I can’t. I need help sometimes and that’s ok. Just because my brain has decided something is a Massive Obstacle doesn’t mean that it’s a proportionately Massive Burden to anyone I might ask for help. If you’re beating yourself up because you can’t handle something tiny, why shouldn’t you pass it off to someone for whom it IS tiny?

Castle In The Sky (1986) Grave of the Fireflies (1988) My Neighbor Totoro (1988) Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989) Only Yesterday (1991) Porco Rosso (1992) Pom Poko (1994) Whisper of the Heart (1995) Princess Mononoke (1997) My Neighbors the Yamadas (1999) Spirited Away (2001) The Cat Returns (2002) Howl’s Moving Castle (2004) Tales from Earthsea (2006) Ponyo On A Cliff From The Sea (2008) The Secret World of Arrietty/The Borrower Arrietty (2010) From Up on Poppy Hill (2011)

If any of the links stop working, please let me know so I can fix it.

A friend of mine posted this and tagged my old instagram account, asking me to share it. I figured sharing it here where I actually have a following, would be far better.

Please remember that just because the government is giving into pressure and greed, that doesn’t mean that any of this is getting any better, in a lot of ways it’s getting worse. And even if you yourself aren’t being as heavily affected anymore, there are people and communities that are.

But I opened the door.

And what fell out and crashed to the ground was not me. They weren’t my dishes.

They were other people’s dishes.

Put inside we without my permission, when I was too young to know that I could not hold them all.

I opened the door, and I’m still here.

I learned to hate myself for being transgender before I knew I was transgender. I laughed at the jokes in stand up comedy routines, and prime time sitcoms, and animated comedy shows, and in the movies, and in books, and in games, laughing at trans women for existing, about “men in dresses”, about people who “got their dicks chopped off”, and I learned to think that was worthy of ridicule.

And then a day came when I felt a pang of envy at what my female classmates were wearing and I repressed it, and felt guilty, and a day where I felt incomplete because I had no breasts and I repressed it and I felt disgusting And a day when I realized the only images of romance that made me feel anything showed two women together and I repressed it and I felt like a monster And a day when I realized I felt sick when I looked at myself in the mirror after every shower before work and couldn’t bear to look at my own face, and I hated myself. And then there came a day when I hated myself so much, and I thought I could never understand why, and so I just wanted it all to end. And it was just a miracle that I swerved my car back into my lane in time.

And all of it started with a joke that I heard on TV, and then kept hearing from all the voices from the ether, over and over and over, worming an idea into my mind before I was old enough to realize I was absorbing it, the idea that a man in a dress is funny, and that changing your body parts makes you a freak, and that women who have penises instead of vaginas are liars and hurt men. And they’re still making these jokes. And somewhere out there right now, just like all those years ago, there is a little girl in a t-shirt and cargo shorts with buzzed off hair watching the TV, hearing that joke and absorbing it without knowing it, who will someday have to pry herself apart to tear it out of her head, just like I did.

Exxon knew.

They knew, 50 years ago, that they were going to murder the planet and our species with their oil.

And they acted.

Oh, how they acted!

They created a campaign of lies to distort the public perception of climate change.

https://exxonknew.org/

Exxon knew.

They knew in ‘73, when their researchers told them: plastics would never be recycled. There would not be a cost effective way to recycle plastic.

And they acted.

They created a disinformation campaign to convince us plastic COULD be recycled.

https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-the-public-into-believing-plastic-would-be-recycled

That campaign - the little recycling logos on our plastics, the upbeat videos about a future where plastic was part of a circular economy of use and recycling - convinced us to buy, wash, and sort plastic.

90% of that plastic was never recycled. It never will be.

NONE of those splashy campaigns - the announcement that all NYC school plastics would be recycled, the recycling in national parks - ever worked. They all lasted long enough to get some upbeat press, and then they quietly shut down.

This week’s NPR/Planet Money investigation by Laura Sullivan doesn’t just talk to the ex-chief lobbyists, now serving as belated Oppenheimers, lamenting the impending destruction of our planet.

It also talks to the current round of executives who have announced a fresh round of plans to recycle plastics - completely disingenuous, insultingly obvious distraction tactics to convince us that their projections of TRIPLING production by 2050 isn’t a form of mass murder.

Then Sullivan circles back to those retired executives, the ones who oversaw the first disinformation campaign, and they confirm that this latest round of promises are literally the same tactic, barely updated for a world on fire.

The world is on fire. My sky has been orange all week. Our family’s socially distanced meetings with friends in parks or back yards have been cancelled because we cannot breathe outside.

Exxon - and Chevron, and the rest of Big Oil - knows.

In a secret recording released to the New York Times, oil execs meet to cheerfully discuss how they will burn the world and murder us all but make a buck in the process.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/12/climate/methane-natural-gas-flaring.html

Their plans for climate change don’t involve reducing emissions - they’re building bunkers and hiring mercenaries to keep us at bay when we come for them. They know what they’ve done.

Exxon knows.

Exxon knows.

When I searched for the “Exxon Knew” campaign to find a link for this piece, the top of Google’s search results included a blisteringly expensive ad for a disinformation site, paid for by Exxon.

The sky is orange. The oceans are choking. The air is unbreathable. Your body is full of microplastics.

Exxon.

Fucking.

From Olympus

Photo: Ana Martinez 

Styling and Creative Direction: Mario Ville (Kattaca) 

Makeup design and make up artist: Lewis Amarante for Kryolan and Pankr0 

Makeup and hairdressing: Sergio Jiménez