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A little cat with some big hopes. ♡

i HATE self-censorship for a lot of reasons, but being in crisis work makes it even more frustrating. who are you censoring for? like i am being so fr, WHO are you censoring for? have you even thought it through? people who have been raped know that they have been raped. if someone attempts suicide or is grieving someone who did, saying "sewer slide" isn't going to protect them from any of the feelings. a murder victim's family isn't going to feel better bc you said "unalived" instead of murdered. if anything, it's just extremely invalidating and othering. it's saying "what happened to you is so bad that i won't even say the word," which is NOT trauma-informed care. you are not protecting survivors/victims when you self-censor. the ONLY things you protect when you self-censor are the puritanical ideologies that are being encouraged by rich fascists who want your money and obedience

I am PRO-WOOL

I am PRO-LEATHER

I am PRO-BEES

Fuck the idea of replacing durable, sustainable animal products with cheap, flimsy plastic that doesn’t bio-degrade. Agave nectar and other artificial sweeteners are expensive, labor-intensive, and destroy the environment to be farmed.

Leather - one cow makes SO MUCH leather. One deer makes SO MUCH leather. Well-treated leather lasts almost FOREVER. Even animals with small skins like rabbits, a pair of well oiled rabbit leather gloves will last decades. Every animal usually made into leather is also a meat animal, so it’s more sustainable to get more than one product from a single ethically butchered animal (humane kills make less punctures in the hide!) Leather can be tanned with natural resources like brains and doesn’t require treatment with chemicals that seep into the groundwater!

Cotton: Cotton is a fucking plant, it burns. The growing and harvesting of cotton is rather water intensive but it IS possible to sustainably harvest and reuse the water spent in the cleaning process to reduce the ecological footprint of the crop. It burns clean, it cuts clean, it’s sturdy, and there are 1000 ways to weave it to change its properties.

I live by my to-do list.  It’s a habit I picked up in college when I started to get overwhelmed between multiple classes, papers, tests, events and the like, and a to-do list makes sense for something like that.  Personally, I prefer a simple text file or the like for mine; I like the convenience of having a digital to-do list with me being able to move tasks around, and the satisfaction of…

We would regularly have guest speakers on a variety of topics - an anorexia patient, a person who’d studied abroad in the USA, a person who freestyled their further education (this was about to be abolished so not an option for us, but still an inspiring talk), a person who’d refused their military service and was instead doing community service (and why), and so on and so forth.

At one point we had a guest speaker come talk about it his work with juvenile delinquents.

He was the overseer of a house where these kids (our age! Some younger!) lived - not a prison - and where they would receive schooling to complete their mandatory primary education in a setting where social workers were on hand to assist and basically the whole point was to nurture the kids in an attempt to prevent them from choosing a life of crime and/or become dependent on the welfare system due to inability to work. They had support, teachers, people who believed in them, etc.

And yet these kids were failing. They were unruly, anxious, restless, spent their breaks smoking or going to the corner shop for soft drinks or snacks and were too wired to settle down at night to sleep so would often wind up sneaking out and causing trouble - even if the trouble was only some half asses graffiti on a bus stop .and in the morning they would be too exhausted to get up and would take half a day - until lunch, when they would be going on their corner shop lunch break - to wake up.

The problem was: these kids weren’t eating proper food. They were subsisting on nicotine, sugary snacks, and Coca Cola. So this guy, who’d heard of our school, got in touch and requested meal plans and then introduced mandatory breakfast and lunch, with dinner still optional, all following our school’s carefully designed meal plans (vegetable frontloaded with only 100g meat per person, one vegetarian day, one fish day, all bread made with whole meal flour. And since this was Denmark, dinner was a “cold table” i.e. rye bread with various topping choices, salads, and any lunch leftovers reheated as a side). And he made it mandatory for all the staff too, and assigned seating groups with a staff member (we had this at our school too), so that each meal resembled a family meal.

And suddenly these kids were having complete breakfasts with oatmeal porridge and yogurt and toast and some fruit and milk and orange juice, which gave them a solid source of energy to start the day, and they had a hot meal for lunch, and after a about a week of this dinner attendance skyrocketed. The kids weren’t restless and anxious anymore. Most of them voluntarily quit smoking and most of them stopped getting a soft drink from the corner shop too - they weren’t hungry anymore, so the sugary craving went away. These kids, just because they were getting three solid meals every day, flourished. They could concentrate in class. They were awake in the morning. They didn’t stay up late wired and restless. They all graduated and went back home and didn’t see the inside of any system, welfare or criminal, again. These kids didn’t want to be troublemakers - they just (for whatever reason) didn’t have the foundation they needed to succeed and that foundation, it turned out, was proper nutrition.