Far too tired to fall asleep

If we need someone to do a job, that job is a role in the community and deserves not just a salary but cultural respect for the role.

"high" ambition jobs are all jobs that involve domineering and controlling others. "low" ambition jobs are all jobs that involve service to others. Have you noticed? Because I have noticed.

is actually more needed

than controlling them.

Anyway apparently Mr. Eclipse made 5000 years' worth of solar eclipse graphics, which you can find the simpler versions of here

The eclipse: (goes on)

The birds: (go quiet)

The Hamlet group instead had Claudius place hidden cameras in potted plants and pat the leaves saying, "I'll call you 'Rosenplantz' and you 'Guildenfern.'"

It was very clever wordplay and my favorite part of all the productions, so now and then I doodle them bc it makes me giggle.

But what if they don’t. They’ve spent god knows how long in their own personal hell, captivity, torture, isolation. For what felt like an eternity, they held onto the idea of finally being freed, rescued, released. And one day it just happens. Political pressure, a hostage exchange, a rescue. Whatever happens, one day they’re just free.

But they come home and everything’s different. They never had a huge network to begin with, and now the people who still care just don’t know how to deal with them and their trauma. It’s all too much. They’re not the person they used to be, the person their friends used to love.

Sure, they’ve been given medical treatment for their obvious wounds but the doctors just don’t seem to understand them when they say that there’s a pain that never quite goes away. They’ve had the mandatory counselling, but the therapist’s empty platitudes made them feel all the more disconnected from their reality.

The world they're in now doesn't match the one they just survived.

Actual recovery is slow. And grinding, and grey, and hollow. It doesn't happen overnight. Sometimes it feels like it will never will.

But eventually it does. In little moments, alone in the kitchen at 6am watching birds outside the window. In the quiet company of strangers on the bus. In little gleams of laughter that, for only a moment, feel like flashes of something you had before you were hurt. In conversations that gradually become more effortless and more comfortable, until you realize that for a few minutes, you weren't faking your interest.

Recovery isn't always walking out into the sunlight. Sometimes it's being awake through the night, and slowly watching the dawn turn the sky into shades of silver and pink until at last— at last— you feel the very first gleams of daylight on your skin. It's ups and downs that make you feel like you're slipping back into the grey and darkness. But then the sunlight starts coming out more often. Inconsistent, unpredictable, until one day you look back and realize that it hasn't been dark for days.

A Meditation : 68 Capybaras