The Emerald Citadel

*pinches nose*

Fellas, is it cultural appropriation to inherit your family's culture but you don't pass the blood quantum test?

This reminded me of a post I saw about someone theorizing what MCU Morgan Stark's middle name was because we just knew her middle initial was "H" and they considered that the namesake might be Yinsen Ho but they didn't want to believe that because it would be, quote, "cultural appropriation".

Cultural appropriation. To name your child after someone you personally knew and was very important to you.

Don't you know it's unnatural for someone of a different race to be important to you? The races are not supposed to mix!

"I feel dead inside all the time and nothing helps!" - character who does like, regular introspective thinking and is aware of the concept of mental health.

"Leave me the fuck alone I'll be fine once I get over my stupid shit." - repressed character.

If my time as an EMT and instructor taught me anything it is that the body is both impossibly resilient and impossibly fragile, and almost any traumatic injury you can think of could either be fine or fatal depending on the whims of the universe.

everything can kill you, and nothing can kill you.

I read a story about a 13 year old girl who's plane exploded over the amazon. She stayed buckled in her seat, which they theorize spun like a seed pod slowing her decent, and landed her on the jungle floor uninjured enough to walk out like a month later.

When you are having a hard time, and you say to a friend things like “You’re gonna leave me anyway” or “You don’t really like me, you’re just being nice”—

They do not hear what you mean, which is “I feel like I am not good enough to keep people around, and anybody with sense would leave.” Because, to them, of course you are. They’re friends with you; they have stayed around. They do not exist inside your head; they exist inside their own head, wherein they love and care about you.

What your friends hear when you say “You’re gonna leave me anyway” is “I do not trust you not to betray me.”

What they hear when you say “You’re just being nice” is “You are a faker and a liar, and I think all of the gestures you made and work you did to demonstrate your love for me are insincere.”

That is very hard to hear from someone you care about.

When you push people away again and again in anticipation of being hurt, eventually they will get the (often false) message that they are not wanted or trusted, and leave.

This, of course, hurts you both.

This is what people mean when they say “Nobody can love you until you learn to love yourself.” It’s not that people who struggle with self-loathing don’t deserve love. Of course you deserve love! It’s that if you believe deep down that you are not worth loving, it is very very hard for the people who love you to throw themselves at a brick wall again and again trying to convince you otherwise.

And if the brick wall stays up, none of that feeling of love gets through to you, and you keep suffering.

This is not, of course, to say that people who struggle with trust in relationships, or with feeling loved, are bad people, or inherently hurtful.

It’s to say that the old coping mechanisms that end up hurting you also end up hurting your loved ones, because they care about you.

The next time somebody says that they love you, do them the courtesy of assuming they are being honest.