[ Visible Silence ]

I had a breast reduction when I was 16. I was so top heavy that my back had started spasming badly by the time I was 12, if I hadn’t been able to get my reduction, I would’ve been in more extreme pain for much longer. The relief was almost instant. Just one example of medically necessary plastic surgery, in case people aren’t sure what that looks like.

Harold Gillies, now considered to be the father of modern plastic surgery, developed most of his techniques (many of which are still in use today) specifically to reconstruct the faces of men who'd been injured in WW1.

Some of these reblogs are me speaking things into existence

As a society we have benefited so much from successful public health measures that we now have the privilege of declaring that we must not need them anymore

one of the hardest things to learn as a depressed former Gifted Kid™ is that half-assed is better than nothing. take the 50%, 40%, even 20% job. scrubbing your face is better than not taking a shower at all. picking up your clothes is better than never cleaning. nibbling on some bread is better than starving.

One of my college professors used to say “anything worth doing is worth doing poorly.”  I didn’t understand that for years because I didn’t do anything poorly, I couldn’t do anything poorly, I had to Do Everything Perfectly.

The great critic Barbara McClay has written about the "politics creep" in every corner of human life, though really of bourgeois Anglophone human life, where every act from reading a novel to lighting a scented candle can be justified - and in fact, self-consciously needs to be justified in advance - as a bold act of resistance. Pretending that self-care is a brave political act detracts from actual political acts, and it sucks the life out of life itself: turning every moment into a performance for an audience, for an imagined crowd of other people on social media. This is other people not as fellow complicated human beings, but as fearful object, whose inner lives are imaginable only insofar as they might be watching and comparing and judging us for whether we've done enough, whether we're wasting our time. And books and movies and TV shows and every other form of fiction will always be, to some extent, a waste of time, as having friends will be a waste of time, as being in love is a waste of time, as every possible action or thought you may have could be considered a waste of time if every second of your life has to prove its value, and has to get a job.

All the people in the comments saying "unless your doctor recommended it your diet is an eating disorder" listen. Sometimes even if your doctor recommended it, it is still an eating disorder. Your doctors grew up in the same fatphobic culture you did. Your doctors are not immune to diet culture. Intentional weight loss is extremely hard on your body, and the behaviors associated with intentional weight loss are also associated with eating disorders, regardless of whether a doctor prescribed them.

Linktree will be feeding your images with DALL-E, Open AI from 5th July 2026.

Update with some alternatives-

There's this notion that being able to stream professional theater shows will hurt the industry, because people won't go to the effort to support live theater anymore, and this is based on the anxieties of the film industry, but live theater isn't a film. The better analogy is sports.

“When I decided to hit Bush with the shoe, it was a natural reaction, to the killing of a million of my people, the orphaning of five million children, resulting in tens of thousands of handicapped persons, tens of thousands of prisoners in American jails in Iraq, and the everyday scandals caused by the American occupation: rape, Abu Ghraib prison, bringing down roofs on people’s heads with Apache helicopters and F16 planes. Despite all this, Bush was saying the Iraqi people are happy, and the Americans liberated the Iraqi people.”

I feel like I need to share this because idk if Europeans are familiar with the presence of Aldi in the US, but at least especially in my area they’ve been growing a lot recently. Like Aldi bought out some local failing grocery chains where I live (Louisiana) and have opened Aldis in all these somewhat rural communities and small towns, which for the record I’m fine with

You know what I want more of? Non-sexual intimacy. In close moments between friends. The “I can’t do this alone”. The “I need help”. The wounds that need bandaged. The “I can’t change my clothes on my own”. The need for help with simple tasks for different reasons. Maybe a recent injury or disability means they don’t know how to shower yet and they need help.