The Turn of a Friendly Card

Well I’ve never actually tried to DO that, so Im on my way home from work and I stop by a gallery and walk in

And like. The… boss? Curator? Who looks like a very polished and professional Real Adult is there, and she says i can look round. And I do, and there’s a bunch of cool stuf

And then finally I nut up and go over to her like “Hi. Don’t know anything about anything. Would you please tell me me what gallery is please. Like how do I gallery like real artist”

And she tells me where I can go to start getting my work out there and meet other artists, and she’s being very kid and supportive and adds me to their newsletter mailing list and it’s finally feeling like I’m not the most shrimplike loser as human being alive, and I’m getting ready to leave so she can s lose shop so I thank her for her time

And then as I’m about to go I add, “I’ll have to come back to see more”, gesture to a particularly enjoyable piece and say, “I have no idea who (insert name here) is but I like her stuff, I’ll have to look her up and did out who she is”

And she sort of looks at me for a beat, inscrutable, blank, just a FRACTION of silence longer than I was expecting, at which point my anxiety medication wears off, and I hear her go “That is… me, actually”

And

I

My hair is black and red, my hair is yellow My eyes are brown and green and blue

My name is Jack and Fred, my name's Amanda Sue I'm called Kareem Abdul, my name is you

My kiddo was born in 2013 and we got the Dolly Parton Imagination Library books delivered for about three years before our local library was unable to keep participating due to funding cuts.

Many of the early board books were photo books that showed diverse babies/toddlers and families.

I'm certain it was meant to normalize young kids seeing a variety of people, even if they lived in communities that aren't super diverse, and to be sure every kid that got the books saw themselves and their family represented.

There were also bilingual books in English and Spanish.

Idk if this graphic is just the DPIL books, but I know we had many of these and got some from our local library too. That Global Babies series is just gorgeous!

"A marriage ending isn't a failure at all. I spent eleven years with her. We were so in love that we couldn't image life apart from each other. We got our own place, adopted a dog, and supported each other through school. I thought if tow people loved each other enough the rest would fall into place, except... love isn't everything.

And I didn't want to believe that, but we were sitting in counseling one day, talking about our future and I realized we were describing two completely different lives. Where we'd live, what kind of life we wanted, what made us happy. And it hit me that- I love this woman and this woman loved me. And after eleven years of loss, grief, career changes, we were so deeply in love... but we weren't aligned. And I kept thinking 'We just need to try harder. We can find some compromise to make this work,' because that's what you're supposed to do when you love someone, right?

But the reality was, we had just become different people. Her trade school took her in one direction, my graduate degree in another and trying to force us back into who we were five years ago wasn't coming from a place of love. It was coming from a place of fear. Fear that, if this ended, it meant we wasted eleven years. But sitting there across from her, I realized: That's not how love works.

Those eleven years happened. They were real. The dog, our home, showing up for each other through grad school and trade school. I wouldn't change a single thing because loving someone doesn't mean you're meant to stay with them forever. And letting go doesn't erase what you had. We measure marriage by whether it lasts forever or not, but what if we measured it by whether it mattered?

What if we measured it by the love we gave, the life we built, and the people we became? Because love's job isn't to last forever, it's to help you become fully completely yourself, and sometimes the most loving thing you can do is give each other permission to be yourselves, separately. But the dog doesn't know were' divorced. He just gets two Christmases now."

My stepmother did NOT like the way her Libertarian Viking Neighbor framed pregnancy as the fetus "attacking the woman". She incredulously told him this was extremely disrespectful to expectant mothers to portray pregnancy as so violent and negative.

Libertarian Viking Neighbor's response was that people consensually hurt each other all the time, and "there's like a whole community about that, with the acronym the one that starts with a B" And his reasoning was that if the mother was consenting to bring attacked by the baby, it in fact wasn't violent and negative because there was consent.

[BOOTSY COLLINS SPACEBASS AND WARWICK GUITARS: TRANSPARENT PNGS]

PLS CREDIT if you use

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oh what a pleasure of a question! thank you!

something that has helped me immensely, and that I'd guess would help other people, is learning to understand that people who do cruel, horrific, and even unforgivable things inhabit complex social and emotional realities that you can often (though not always) learn about simply by asking them about their experiences in a non-judgmental tone of voice.

some questions that are helpful to understand why something terrible has happened, asked to the person or people who caused harm:

what was that like for you?

what were you thinking during that time?

what were you feeling during that time?

what did you expect to happen?

what do you think about that now? what do you feel about it now?

the important next step is asking yourself – especially when the answers are patently untrue in consensus reality – what social/emotional/psychological reality that person has to inhabit in order for their answers to be true (at least some of the time) from their own perspective. in the rarer cases that someone is obviously and consciously lying, it is helpful to ask what social/emotional/psychological reality they are living in that necessitates the lie.

this is not itself restorative justice - that involves a lot more work. but it has helped me come to terms with the circumstances under which much extreme harm happens, including much harm that I cannot address because it, for example, has been perpetrated by my country, or harm in my own life for which I will never be able to seek restorative processes.