what are you gonna do about it?

i learned very quickly that if i said "im tired all the time and cant find the motivation to do schoolwork" theyd say "no ur just lazy, stop making excuses" and if i said "my ritalin makes me feel uncomfortable and itchy all day" theyd say "stop being difficult and just take the pills" and theyre the adults and im just a lying lazy kid so what they say goes

so since correctly identifying and expressing my feelings was punished i focused instead on making excuses that adults would accept. "i cant bear to spend another day doing busywork in that awful windowless building where all the students and faculty hate me" turned into "i just threw up". until i learned to skip the step where i ask myself why i feel so awful, bc that information sure isnt going to help me

Sigyn's Bowl 💧 seið-painting

I remember my dad picking me up to sit on his shoulders (possibly one of the last times he did that because I was getting too big to hold there for long) so I could be close to it's flipper because he wanted to show me something. He had me hold up my arm parallel to the whale's, and explained that we had the same bones, pointing to it's scapula and humerus and radius and ulna and so on while poking the same bones in my skinny little arm, all they way down to the tips of my fingers and it's own.

And in that moment, I could suddenly see how the whale and I were the same animal, just stretched and shrunk into different proportions by nature. There was an entire exhibit with skeletons of different animals and we went through all of them, picking out the hands and faces of all of them on myself.

I had never felt such a profound connection to the world around me before as I realized on a visceral level that not only was I related to all these creatures, they were very literally my distant cousins, and that in a way, they were me from back then and I was them from now, and we all were others still from the future.

Every living thing on earth is your cousin. The most distantly related humans are your 50th cousins. Chimps are your several thousandth cousins. An octopus is your 25 millionth cousin. Trees are your billionth cousins. You and I are surrounded by family. And that makes me feel profoundly loved.