qthewetsprocket

When I was in first grade, he took me shopping for new school clothes — which was huge because, as the youngest of six kids, I lived in hand-me-downs.

He bought me a little navy blue, polka dot dress with a Peter Pan collar and red alphabet buttons. But on picture day, I lost one of the buttons on the playground. I had a total meltdown because my brother spent his own money to make sure I had this new dress and I ruined it. I was a mess, totally inconsolable.

My teacher was also the mom of one of my brother’s best friends. She told him, and he, my brother and the entire football team searched the playground after practice for my lost button. Which they actually found.

My brother sewed the button back on himself in the car all while trying to explain that he wouldn’t have been mad even if I did lose it.

It was just a button and a dress.

Found this in the original post tags and I just... SIGH

Here’s the thing, anon. Squick isn’t just ‘I don’t like this’, it’s ‘I think this is gross and it makes me deeply uncomfortable but I pass no judgement on those who enjoy it, because I acknowledge that everyone is different and those same people may have the same visceral reaction some of the things I enjoy’ and was originally made popular in the kink community.

So yeah, if you want to say that every time you come across a trope or whatever you find icky then go ahead, say that every time.

Squicks are things I find personally gross but may not be gross to someone else. They don’t upset me or provoke my PTSD, they simply do not pop my corn. Example: Omegaverse. I don’t like it, it makes me uncomfortable and I’m not going to read it, but if you like it, you do you.

Triggers are things which directly provoke my PTSD. This means that my triggers may seem completely normal and innocuous to someone else, because my triggers are so personal and intrinsically linked to a specific event in my life. My reactions to these triggers can include panic attacks and flashbacks to this traumatic event. Sometimes being triggered can affect me for several hours or even days.

If we encourage everyone to lump things that just make them slightly uncomfortable or simply aren’t to their taste in under the word “trigger”, it actually dilutes the meaning of the word. It makes it harder for us all to, for the most part, collectively agree on and understand what exactly is being described when the word gets used.

And that destruction of shared precise definitions is a problem! It is really useful to have the communal language to be able to clearly and quickly delineate between “this grosses me out, no thanks” and “this is going to set off a trauma episode, rattle my brain, and probably throw off the rest of my day/week as a result” while also maintaining your privacy, and to know that you will be understood in what you are saying. Not having it is actually detrimental to the effort of making our communities safe and navigable for people living with trauma. Which is a goal that is much more important to me, personally, than the idea of not being “cutesy” (a word which in this case which sounds a lot like it’s being used as a euphemism for “cringe”).

I said, "That's just not true. Sometimes what doesn't kill you leaves you brittle and injured or traumatized."

He stopped and thought about that for a while. He came back later, and said, "It's like wood glue."

He pointed to my bookshelf, which he helped me salvage a while ago. He said, "Do you remember how I explained that, once we used the wood glue on them, the shelves would actually be stronger than they were before they broke?"

I did.

"But before we used the wood glue, those shelves were broken. They couldn't hold up shit. If you had put books on them, they would have collapsed. And that wood glue had to set awhile. If we put anything on them too early, they would have collapsed just the same as if we'd never fixed them at all. You've got to give these things time to set."

It sounded like a pretty good metaphor to me, but one thing I did pick up on was that whatever broke those shelves, that's not the thing that made them stronger. That just broke them. It was being fixed that made them stronger. It was the glue.

and another one is like ”wait so you’re saying humans don’t have stripes.”

”actually they do, but the stripes are invisible. There’s genetic code that’d give them stripes but they’re just the same colour as the rest of the skin. So the visible stripes are not real stripes and the real stripes are invisible.”

I WENT THROUGH THE SAME THOUGHT PROCESS

BECAUSE WE DO APPARENTLY

SO ITS ACTUALLY A VERY DISTRESSED “MY CAT THINKS I KNOW I HAVE STRIPES?!?!?!”

I remember reading somehwre the human eye can see more shades of green than any other colour. I just googled it and the human eye can see 10 Million different shades of green.

So human could see stripes and patterns on, say, a reptillian race who maybe can’t see as many colours as we do, and think they’re just one boring shade of green.

Human: We have stripes?! I wish I could see them. I hope they look like yours.

Reptile Alien: Wait, I HAVE STRIPES!

To everyone that's confused, the planet Venus rotates very very slowly, with a single revolution taking about 243 Earth days, and Mercury rotates slowly, but not as slow as Venus.

chilly weather 

halloween 

sweaters 

pumpkins 

literally everything 

I redid this older comic I made for my storytelling class based on this post. Have some cute wlw love in your day.

Thank you

Here you go: