Her Majesty

For the longest time, I’d constantly see this phrase, but I’d thought it was some isolated saying that originated on some tumblr shit post or ao3 tag and then floated around the internet. I found out around an hour ago that it’s actually half of the last sentence of a New York Times article from over a decade ago. Of course, I had to read this article immediately, and from my understanding, Tim Kreider is essentially saying that you exist, you are constantly perceived by everyone around you all the people that love you and they can see you when you're being ridiculous, when you do wrong things, when you say stupid things and sometimes they are going to perceive you in negative ways and even though people would prefer if all the time everyone around them always saw them in the most positive way and never talked bad about them ever, there will be times when people talk behind your back, or where people you love are going to say less than positive things about you, or when you will overhear someone saying something negative about you because you always exist. You are always perceived and when people love you, they love you even though you have less than positive qualities and they sometimes think of you in less than positive ways. It isn’t necessarily ‘negative,’ either. Sometimes people will just think of you in a way you didn’t want to think about yourself in. There are times when people you love will express completely good intentioned opinions and observations about you that made you feel horrible. Even though no one wants to accept that people that they care about don't always think about them in a way they like, that's simply how it works, because you always exist. People always see you, and you have to be known to be loved. You have to be able to exist in a way that allows people to think less than stellar things about you because if you don't exist in that way then people won’t have the opportunity to love you in the first place.

-Joshua Tree, Send this to someone who makes you gentle