Glowing Heads are my favourites.

(Kandinsky)

You cannot "well but I'M not referring to that kind of art, I only mean Dirty Pictures" your way out of this. You are being harmful and need to stop, not rationalise why it's okay for YOU to be doing it. You need to understand

censorship violates the universal human right of free expression and freedom of speech.

fiction is not reality. Fictional characters are not real people.

if someone SAYS a work of fiction inspired them to do bad things, that is not the work of fiction's fault. The person who did bad things is STILL at fault, because they have free will and must be assumed to understand the consequences of their actions.

discomfort is not harm. If a piece of art makes you uncomfortable, that's actually fine. That's the POINT of certain pieces of art. You need to learn to tolerate discomfort.

It is not in fact the government's job to enforce a set of morals on people. That violates people's universal human right to freedom of religion and creed.

Actively seek out things that inspire wonder

Look for the good parts. There are good parts. There are interesting parts. There will always be good and interesting parts.

Treat yourself kindly. This one is difficult.

Do things out of ridiculous whimsy.

Practice cog itive behavioural exercises to self-examine and address beliefs and behaviors that are causing suffering.

Don't argue when people compliment you.

Don't rush yourself, and don't assume it'll be like this forever when you have a backslide. These things happen. Over time, they happen less.

Be honest with the people you love and trust.

Tell people how much they mean to you and what you like about them.

Help others and find satisfaction in being the stranger that did something good

Consider speaking to a medical professional, my antidepressants and anti-anxiety medical took some time to figure out but life is WAY better.

Have a silly little craft or hobby.

Let yourself be bored sometimes. Stand outside in the rain and let yourself get wet. Go on a walk. Put your phone in a different room and wander off. Meet up with a friend and go on a long walk together to nowhere in particular

Start doing things because you want to and it feels good, not just because you think it's something you should say yes to.

Say yes to things.

Take a random day of the week and go into a store or a business you've never been in before.

Compliment strangers when something about them is striking.

Read books and watch movies that make you feel the exact right amount of ecstatic and embarrassed, and make all the silly noises about it.

Collect scraps of fabric and little trinkets and all the little textures and colours you love and stash them in a shoebox or something like a tiny dragon's hoard.

Start a collection of something small and inexpensive. Like corks.

Make food with ingredients you've never used before

Make long lists of all your favorite things- flowers, bugs, songs, foods, places

Start a trash-book to fill with scraps of neat wrappers and bits of paper and colored fabric from old ruined clothes

Imagine yourself as a alien from a dead and barren world who has just arrived on this planet for the very first time and imagine how excited you would be by every little thing

i had tried everything. everything on earth i could think of to try. distractions and burnout and medication and all of it. i integrated with my community and practiced my hobbies and tried to make smart choices and exercised regularly and kept putting it off until tomorrow. i would wake up and think - what if i am just like this, forever? three years into the worst depressive spiral of your adult life, the sensation of it becomes almost smooth, like a worrystone. nothing matters. it is almost a bone that never healed correctly. i was never quite mentally healthy, this was just the crystallization process.

i genuinely thought i was never going to recover, ever. that it would just be an eon of that experience, forever and ever.

my happiness did not come back like a bolt of light. i saw one very-small flicker and i snatched that moth out of the sky with my teeth, held her pinned against me. i worked so hard it felt stupid; i faltered; i continued.

on saturday, i had the best day of my life. it didn't start out that way. it just unrolled into one beautiful moment after another, even though i expected nothing from it. i spent the entire ride home grinning so widely that my cheeks hurt. i watched the sunset in silence. all i could think was holy fuck i'm glad i didn't kill myself.

in the bad place, i couldn't see the happiness coming for me. it wasn't like i wasn't aware good things could theoretically happen (and did sometimes happen even to me), it was that i just genuinely believed joy was no longer a possibility. i had tried to fix joy against my ceiling, after all, and it had bled down and spoiled in the air above me. i assumed that i had simply run out of the opportunity - that if i did experience joy, it would be difficult to parse, muted. a mumble instead of a shout.

the shout i am feeling is still echoing inside of me. i am joyful when i touch moss and i am joyful when i stand in the sun and i am joyful when i make my dinner. i am joyful when i text my friends and when i skinny dip and when i sing off-key to my girlfriend. i am joyful and i dance in the rain like a stupid lesbian manic pixie dream girl and i build little forts for mice to hide in and i hug trees without warning and i am joyful about the cringe of it all, about the silly abandon i feel.

i have bad days, but the good outshines them. i cannot fathom that. last year at this time, the bad days were still outnumbering the good by a margin so wide it was the difference between a pond and the ocean.

but the good days were there, which was new. and if they were there, it meant they could exist, and i could multiply them, and i could get out and get through. if the good days were there, laid out in white stars along the black beach of my life - i could pick them up gently and carry them, one at a time. each new one so blisteringly precious.

Your wish is my command, because I'm a Poetry Bitch with exquisite taste:

blud by Rachel McKibbens is pretty much my all-time fave; angry and devastating poetry about child abuse, trauma and recovery. Check the trigger warnings on this one, though - it's pretty brutal

Where I Dry the Flowers by Ollie Schminkey - literally the best book about complex grief I've ever read, poetry or otherwise

Hera Lindsay Bird by Hera Lindsay Bird - unhinged, feral, will reshape your brain, probably into the shape of something like a sandwich or an umbrella

Homie by Danez Smith - I mean, you should read everything Danez Smith has ever written, but this is my personal fave for the way it centres companionship and connectedness in our current hellscape dystopia

All the Men I Never Married by Kim Moore - incredibly cathartic, will have you enraged, 50% because of the content, 50% because you didn't write them

You Better Be Lightning by Andrea Gibson - all hail Andrea Gibson, need I say more

Not Vanishing by Chrystos - rage-filled lesbian poetry from the '90s

Grief's Alphabet by Carrie Etter - incredibly moving poetry about the death of the poet's parents

Vertigo & Ghost by Fiona Benson - poetry about rape culture, told through the lens of Greek myth

Underneath the Roses Where I Remembered Everything by Molly Case - a pamphlet about being a nurse and the connections you do and don't make with patients, more people should read this one (it has an unforgivable 17 ratings on Goodreads, despite actually rewiring my brain and making me sob at a bus stop)

Muse by Dawn Marie Kresan - poetry retelling and reclaiming the life of Lizzie Siddal, the 'muse' of various Pre-Raphaelite painters

If They Come For Us by Fatimah Asghar - interesting and experimental collection about identity and marginalisation, does incredible things with form (who knew that a building blueprint could also be a poem?)

Salt by Nayyirah Waheed - unfairly maligned as 'Instagram poetry', much more complex than the reductive, misogynistic categorising allows (one day I will write my more Complex Thoughts on 'Instagram poetry' in general, but for now: read Nayyirah Waheed!)

Swallowtail by Brenna Twohy - one of the best collections about sexual assault and recovery I've ever read, plus Twohy is now living her best retired poet lesbian life and I genuinely love that for her

Please Do Not Touch This Exhibit by Jen Campbell - about the monstering and Othering of disabled people and bodies, will make you want to start a revolution

Life of the Party by Olivia Gatwood - a dissection of girlhood and true crime, phenomenally inventive, genuinely made me reassess my relationship with true crime content

Dad, Remember You Are Dead by Jacqueline Saphra - a beautiful collection about complex grief, will make you cry and squirm

The Ferguson Report: An Erasure by Nicole Sealey - an erasure poem created from the Ferguson Report after the murder of Michael Brown, and one of the greatest literary achievements I've ever read - this is a must-read for literally everyone with any interest at all in what poetry can do

Constructing a Witch by Helen Ivory - poetry about menopause and Not Giving A Fuck, makes me excited for ageing

The Green Hollow by Owen Sheers - a poetry retelling and excavation of the 1966 Aberfan disaster, based on survivor and witness testimony

Blessing the Boats by Lucille Clifton - I mean, technically everything that Lucille Clifton ever wrote, but this is a great anthology as it encompasses her entire poetry career

bone by Yrsa Daley-Ward - a really generous autobiographical collection about growing up as one of the few Black women in a Northern British town, made me immediately read the poet's memoir

Other Women's Kitchens by Alison Binney - the most lesbian pamphlet you'll ever read (complimentary)

An eye for an eye for an eye by Ellen Renton - a fantastic collection about disability and ableism

Poūkahangatus by Tayi Tibble - incredibly cool girl poetry about Māori girlhood, simultaneously hilarious and heartbreaking

I Hope This Finds You Well by Kate Baer - erasure poetry made from misogynistic hatemail, what's not to love

hold on let me look something up

Keepin it cool! Experimenting with some more painterly backgrounds for her, gouache on wood panel.

[ID in alt text]

"Tutorial" on how to draw an OC with dwarfism (well, some of it).

Boring tired disclaimer: Keep in mind that this is an introductory "drawing" "tutorial" and has some generalizations in it, so not every “X is Z” statement will be true for Actual People. Which happens to be true for everything in general.

You are heavily encouraged to do your own research because this does not contain everything you should know before making a character with any type of dwarfism.

Consider supporting me on ko-fi if you find this to be helpful.

In a landmark two-year review, the Health Council of the Netherlands—the country’s highest scientific advisory body—has delivered its verdict on gender affirming care for transgender youth. The council’s conclusions were universally positive for gender-affirming care: it endorsed the treatments as careful, lawful, and effective, framed quick access as a matter of the right to health, warned that “doing nothing” is harmful, cast aside the Cass Review as not applicable to Dutch care, reported zero cases of regret among trans youth patients, and called the reduction of the country’s years-long wait times “morally urgent.” In doing so, the Netherlands becomes the latest in a series of European countries to reaffirm and strengthen care for transgender youth, refuting a right-wing talking point in the United States that Europe is “pulling back.” The review was commissioned in May 2024 in the wake of the Cass Review. The Health Council’s committee ran systematic literature searches and consulted outside clinical experts chosen for their differing perspectives on the care—a list that included Hilary Cass herself. The panel was chaired by Olaf Dekkers, a Leiden University Medical Center professor of internal medicine whose academic specialty is research methodology, and seated professors of health law and medical ethics alongside practicing physicians and psychiatrists. From that foundation, the committee dismantled the argument at the center of the American campaign against this care—that the evidence is too weak to justify treatment—answering that the evidence quality for trans youth care is in line with the norm across pediatric medicine, and that doing nothing carries documented harms of its own, pointing specifically to harms produced by America’s own care bans. The committee concluded that the care is lawful and careful, and that it works as intended, stating in its summary: "The committee concludes that somatic treatment for young people with gender dysphoria fits within the health law framework. It further finds that scientific research shows the intended physical effects are achieved, that there are indications of some improvement in mental outcomes, and that the number of cases of regret is low. In the committee's view, the current data on unintended physical and mental effects are not cause for concern." The advisory also rejected the framing that treating transgender youth is a risky intervention while not treating them is a neutral default. Delaying care, the review found, carries its own harms: youth develop unwanted and often irreversible physical changes—some of which can only be undone later with surgery—while mental health suffers in the meantime, and some young people locked out of careful care turn to unregulated hormones on their own. The committee's answer, in a passage aimed directly at that framing, calls the reduction of wait times a moral imperative: "Non-treatment is therefore not a neutral option. In the public debate, treating is often presented as intervening, while waiting is treated as self-evident. From the perspective of autonomy it becomes clear that delaying or withholding care also has consequences for young people's lives and their developmental possibilities—and that those consequences are morally relevant. From that perspective, shortening the waiting times is morally urgent."