nunmalich

May i present: My beat up waterbottle:

Not my oldest possession, but one that is at least 6 years old and I use quite regularly. I got this waterbottle from my parents and wanted really bad to be a cool leftist kid, so I decorated it with a lot of stickers. It moved four times with me and in some places there are three layers of stickers. I even replaced the cap at some point.

There's this thing called living in the middle east, and it is absolutely not fun. No. No fun.

I live in this fucked up country (the government) called Iran, actually, the Islamic republic of Iran, and I guess we all know what happens when religion gets mixed with the government of a country - bad things happen. And those bad things? Lead to angry, pissed off people. I personally am very angry and pissed off.

What did exactly happen? We were protesting because we want to be treated like people, because we don't want to live like this, we do not wanna be forced to cover, we don't want our people to not have food to eat, we don't wanna worry about a war happening 24/7, and they killed us. They killed a lot of us, they killed people my age, they killed STUDENTS. KIDS. It's not just now, they've done that many many times. And when they do? They simply shut us up. No internet connection, no nothing.

Everything is political and you cannot disagree with that. For a queer, trans teenage boy in the middle east, everything is political. For a queer person? Everything is political. Being a woman/afab person? Everything is political.

I don't know what's going to happen but please pray for us, pray for our freedom. Thank you.

Women, life, freedom

زن، زندگی،‌ آزادی

Lower your expectations, stop trying to make every brief interaction into some big symbol of how accepted you are, and try to have fun with it.

Us socially anxious people tend to be real fucking dour about how we approach socializing even when we think we are trying to seem open and outgoing. The problem is the "trying to seem" part; it reeks of hesitation and discomfort and people respond to that. People do not care what you say or do but the energy with which you say it or do it. They can see when we are uncomfortable and they respect our discomfort by keeping a distance.