a title 👍

it was an amicable split. yeah, it still hurt, but it was just a small temporary hurt. and it took a bit to adjust to life like that while still living together, but we did! we rearranged our portion of the house so that the office could become my own bedroom and slowly worked through divvying up most of our things and deciding on we'll share expenses on and all that good stuff.

and honestly? nothing much really changed, except that neither of us were so pissy about things anymore. even walking around naked didn't change, cause why should it? like, we spent all those years having already seen each other naked countless times. the fact our relationship status changed didn't make that any more or less true. and it's just nakedness anyway, so who gives a shit. about the only thing that did change was physical affection being lessened.

to both of us, this way of splitting up seemed perfectly fine and normal. and yet, quite literally every single person we've talked to about it has reacted the same way. bewildered, confused, uncomfortable, borderline disgusted. even my brother who is like one of the chillest dudes out there made a comment like "I don't think i've ever even spoken to a single one of my exes." and i'm just??? i stayed friends with all but one of mine until life inevitably carried us apart. every comment made started off so negative by friends and coworkers and family and it was honestly just... fucking weird to us the way everyone was behaving. and then we got to talking about it a bit and realized like, no one we know has ever ended a relationship on good terms, or even at bare minimum neutral terms.

and isn't that fucking tragic? that this is the acceptable norm in our society, to just fucking suffer each other until you're full of bitterness, rage, and resentment and it all comes to a destructive end? isn't it so legitimately sad that the status quo doesn't value love enough to try and salvage it?

like, i very much believe this chick and her man do actually love each other, but it hasn't even occurred to them that they can simply love each other in a different way, from a distance, in a way that means they can still keep being friends and look back at what they had fondly.

and this isn't just conservatives. this isn't just the cishets. our circle of friends are quite the opposite. but the idea that a romantic relationship MUST end like the most gruesome trainwreck imaginable is so fundamentally ingrained that even they gave us the same weirded out and shocked reaction. its so disgustingly default to nurture hatred and smother the thing that made people fall in love to begin with that it's almost instinctual it seems like. of all of our friends combined, rowan was the only one who was just like, fucking normal about it. one person. that's tremendously fucked up, yall.

like, fucking hell i know things have come a long way in the last 50 years or so as far as, yknow, marriage counseling and therapy and whatnot goes but there's still a massive ocean of things left unsaid and emotions being repressed and needs not being addressed when it comes to relationships. and idk just maybe if folks weren't harboring so much animosity and vitriol and hostility, especially during the most formative years of their lives, they'd be more well-adjusted. maybe if our default was to respect and cherish the love and fondness that brought people together enough to keep it in tact at the end, we might just be a kinder people. (the nerd in me is suddenly reminded of the bajoran rite of separation from star trek ds9 and how actually lovely a thing it is to celebrate the ending of a relationship as a joyous thing. star trek stays winning.)

i was working at a little cafe where I could deny service over bad behavior, harassment etc. & mask mandates had just ended a week before & already people were being weird about me still wearing mine—an N95, the kind shaped kinda like a duckbill.

so this man walked in, looked at me sooo scathingly, laughed at me, and said “damn. never known a woman to choose…practicality over looks.”

And I just said, “oh. you can go, you’re not getting a drink.” And he said, “what???”

I said, “sir, you just walked in at 6 am & called women impractical and me ugly in one sentence.”

You were the victim, and it wasn’t fair, but it’s over now. Nobody came to save you, and I’m sorry, but it’s too late for anyone to go back and do it different.

You’re suffering over something that cannot be resolved. You’re allowed to feel angry, or outraged, or betrayed, but there will eventually come a time that you don’t feel that so violently anymore, and you’re going to want to have something good left to go back to.

You can’t make anyone love you the way you need to be loved. That’s how a lot of good things end. Not with a clear sign, something blocking the road that says “do not proceed”, just a splitting of the path that’s still moving somewhat in the same direction.

You can’t fix them. Nothing you can do will fix them. And if they fix themselves, they can’t do it for you- they have to do it for themselves as well, because otherwise a day may come when they’re alone, and as long as they live, they are their only true constant. So you can support, and you can encourage, but the hardest part is up to them. And sometimes they can’t do it even with your help.

Sometimes letting go of someone feels like mourning at their funeral before they’ve died, and every time you see them after it’s like talking to a ghost that doesn’t know it’s dead. Sometimes that happens. You’ll both still wake up tomorrow anyways.

I understand that you’re afraid, and that you’re afraid for good reasons. And I understand that being brave isn’t as easy as just turning that fear off, and you would if you could in a heartbeat. But the thing is, as long as that fear is able to dictate your choices, it will have power over you. If you don’t believe you can try to fight it, if you accept that it will always be in charge, you let the frightening thing stay present in your life. It will exist as long as you stay paralyzed. And that sounds cruel, but it isn’t something anyone can fix for you.

The person you may let yourself become after experiencing the terrible thing may very well grow into a much bigger, much more terrible thing, and someday it will swallow the first terrible thing whole. And all that will be left is something far worse for someone else. And you will not be able to shrink it down by explaining where it came from, because terrible things that are dead and gone are never as terrible as terrible things that are alive right now in front of you.

If you read this whole thing and found yourself angry, if you thought to yourself ‘I know that, and it doesn’t help. I know that, and I’m still suffering. I know that, I’ve heard that, I’ve been told that before, over and over and over again, by people who aren’t listening who don’t understand, who don’t get it, and I’m still hurting, still tired, still in pain, still suffering, and this isn’t something a handful of pithy words from some asshole who isn’t here and present and walking in my shoes suffering what I’m suffering from can fix. I know all of this and it changes nothing”, I want you to know:

Yeah. That was me, too. I sat at the bottom of a miserable pit that I didn’t even dig while a bunch of detached, emotionally unavailable jackasses who weren’t helping even a little yelled all this down at me, like just saying it hard enough or making me hear it as though I wasn’t already a hundred percent aware and still hurting anyways would magically solve all my problems and it didn’t. Like I was some whiny little rat with a victim complex looking for the easy way out and not the survivor of something awful doing their goddamn best to keep going, scraping by on the skin of their fucking teeth.

Every single note on this list is something someone told me at the exact wrong time, that made me want to scream and cry and smash a goddamn brick over their head because ‘I already know that, you fucking asshole, and it doesn’t change anything, so fucking help me or piss the hell off.”

That’s why I wrote the list.

It’s everything I needed to know that I already knew, that only made me feel worse, and didn’t help me improve anything at all even a little bit until I experienced the exact right circumstances that made them click the exact right way and allowed me to say it to myself and feel only a sense of, “okay yeah, I get it now.”

It’s not something I would ever directly say to someone in a time of crisis, but it’s all stuff I learned and needed to learn while I was that person.

You get what I mean?

which results in cases like this, where tumblr as a website may be hostile to trans women, but the majority of the people you try to talk to about it are NOT, and the company isn't on paper, so it becomes much, much harder to address the problem. if you call someone and say 'hey tumblr's sexist,' and that person, as the current voice of tumblr, goes 'well hang on, i'm not sexist, so i think the company probably isn't either,' then no one will get anywhere.

the point is that reform needs to keep all this in mind to be successful, it's a very difficult beast to combat, and mostly requires a lot of very slow and boring victories. a lot of 'this specific process fucking sucks, can we replace it with a better one,' one at a time, until the aggregate is less bad.

That text post that's been making the rounds that goes something like "Omg you made it to the same red light as everyone else but faster and more dangerously and recklessly, should we call nascar? Do you want a medal?" summarizes exactly what I'm trying to talk about.

It's like when I have to change buses at one of the bigger and busier bus stops, and the people who get off the same bus as me shove and elbow past me to get off before me, and then shove and elbow past anyone even slightly in their way on the way to the bus they're switching, only to end up on the same bus as all the people they shoved and elbowed with several minutes to spare before it leaves and plenty of open seats left.

I think this unnecessary urgency a lot of people feel in their day to day lives drives a lot of bad behavior. I'm not saying I'm innocent of this, I've felt it too in plenty of situations that didn't call for it, and regrettably was less kind than I should have been as a result. But I try to be aware of it, and always try to ask myself it it's really as urgent as my lizard brain is trying to tell me it is, and even if it was that urgent, does that still justify unkind behavior?

Is shoving or elbowing another person aside going to make the difference between whether or not you make it to the bus before it pulls away? (hint: at least where I live, most of the time that's a no because the drivers usually won't leave if they see people from another bus heading towards their bus). Is shoving and elbowing people aside in a crowded grocery store going to make any noticeable difference in how quickly you get your shopping done?

That fully rewired my brain.

Thanks for these tags @disability-etiquette, because this unnecessary urgency (in situations that aren't actually urgent) really is a massive driving factor for ableism, and that needs to be addressed and discussed.

So many strangers have been so cruel to my elderly and disabled family members for being "too slow" in public.