Starfall Haven

here’s my piece from the anniversary zine!! please go check it out as it’s full of amazing artworks and fics!!

#one of the otters at the local aquarium sleeps with his tail in his mouth. It's very cute and charming #but when there was a stressful time (introduction to a new otter) he started chomping down on his tail and got an injury #and I think about that as like. The things that become chewing-on-yourself behaviors often start as something you do to self-soothe. #You get more stressed you do the soothing thing more frantically it starts to hurt you and you don't necessarily notice. #If you like to reassure yourself by thinking through outcomes and possibilities. The chomped-down version is a spiral of overthinking. #and you think maybe it isn't calming you down because you haven't thought through everything yet - ! #stop chomping. (via @screambirdscreaming)

#this is a good way to put what I’ve identified as pacing your cage thoughts #your friends don’t hate you. you are pacing your cage #you’re not boring or stupid. you’re gnawing at the bars of your enclosure (via @saintaurum)

#something that helped me a lot was a psych lecture that said that thoughts are supposed to be innovative #so if you're going in circles something's wrong (via @your-url-is-problematic)

#it takes some practice but you can learn to recognise when your brain is making grindy trash compactor noises (via @scholarsscribbles)

Not everyone would want to live like that, of course, but I'll bet you that a lot of people would. It's a great living situation for single people, young people just starting out, and people who are in a city on a temporary basis. Cooking at scale is significantly more time- and cost-efficient than each individual cooking or getting takeout. Cleaning kitchen facilities scales similarly well. Employ a few people who know what they're doing and are paid well to do it, and they'll keep that kitchen running safely, efficiently, and cleanly in a way that a few hundred pressed-for-time 20-somethings never could. And a lot of people simply do not care enough about what they eat to want anything else.

Moreover, not putting a full kitchen in each unit means that the units can be smaller without cutting into living space, cheaper to build, and safer. Lots of people who live alone don't cook a lot, since cooking for one is not very time-efficient, which means that for all those people the kitchen is practically just dead space. You could replace its function with a microwave and a minifridge, and if you do, you've given that person a whole extra room.

The idea that one body = one self is not a self-evident reality. It's still a dogmatic belief plainly contradicted by evidence to the contrary and not rooted in materialist thought or analysis. If we WERE being materialist about this, we would understand that a cohesive sense of self is an illusion created by some emergent property of the brain, at least from what we understand about it right now. Your sense of self is determined by your brain, which can be damaged and your sense of self changed. If someone can lose or change their sense of self, and we understand it for what it is--a result of processes and cultural understanding, because culture also plays a role in how one understands who they are--then why on god's green earth do we think that you can't have more than one? It's a construct, of course you can have more than one!

The idea that the only possible way for anyone to exist as plural being with a specific disorder that forms this highly specific way is dogma, not material reality. If we really wanted to get spicy we could understand that the diagnosis or mental illness itself is also socially constructed, as is everything deemed 'normal' or 'abnormal'.

sometimes a trans woman wins against a cis woman. sometimes a cis woman wins against another cis woman too. yet only one of them is allowed to win without facing consequences.

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