Come Feed the Rain

After several months of work, I finished this embroidery project yesterday. It's my second ever attempt at embroidery and I'm really, really happy with the result.

being curious about emotions--especially the really Big Painful Stigmatized ones--and getting to the root causes so you can make slow substantial changes, rather than impulsive superficial ones, is pretty much always the way to go whenever possible.

most of the time when people apologize for their emotions (e.g. anger), they should really be apologizing for the behavior they engage in to soothe the emotions. because emotions in and of themselves do not actually harm other people.

people who say they are harmed by emotions are usually either

actually responding to behavior and simply uncritically accepting conflation between the two (e.g. "I'm afraid of your anger" often translates to "whenever you mistreat me you blame it on your anger, so if your anger is the cause of mistreatment, then my fear of mistreatment can only be discussed as a fear of anger"),

or are themselves engaging in a controlling behavior to soothe their own emotions that they are refusing to manage (e.g. "I'm afraid of your anger" often translates to "whenever you're angry I feel panic, and instead of interrogating what I'm afraid of and what I need to remind myself that I'm safe, I'm going to demand you never express feelings around me").

WITH THIS SAID.

a lot of the time what men call ''anger'' is actually just misogynistic resentment.

a lot of people will say ''men are only allowed to feel anger.'' this is just not true, but I believe there is something here that is gendered.

men are incentivized to outsource management of all pain and discomfort to women (and children). managing emotions is not paid productive labor, it is reproductive labor, so men--as a class--do not feel obligated to do it. feminized classes are supposed to do the unpaid labor. so men expect to outsource their emotional management to women and children in their lives.

this is why media often depicts women and children serving the role as "healing" the male protagonist. this is why women and children often are expected to learn how to not "set off" the patriarch. this is why people will say that men will get humiliated at work and "take it out" on their families. it's why men do not openly and by default process emotions with other men. the culturally normative expectation is for men to offload the effort of managing their emotions onto feminized classes.

men feel that it it women's responsibility to manage their emotions. they feel entitled to easy, pleasurable emotions all the time so that they can do good, productive, paid work without interruption. but then they still experience extreme, painful emotions that they don't know how to handle, because they are human beings, and emotions happen.

when faced with the dissonance between unbearable emotional pain, and women simply refusing to set down everything in their own lives to attend to it immediately, men become extremely resentful. they imagine that they are experiencing a painful emotion because women have neglected them, and then interpret their own emotions as cruelty inflicted by women.

I think the whole principle I outlined above (i.e. instead of suppressing emotions as evil and then lashing out impulsively to self-soothe, it is much more fruitful to be curious about emotions, to understanding where they come from, and figure out constructive ways to change your life that address unmet needs) really needs to be applied here.

if you realize you are experiencing this kind of misogynistic resentment, it is not helpful to try to suppress it. emotions grow when suppressed. even if you tell yourself you would never hurt someone, it is extremely likely that eventually you will justify lashing out at women in your life to self-soothe because you are not spending any time figuring out other ways to address the emotion.

instead, you need to really try to deconstruct your beliefs about emotions. you are not responsible for managing other people's emotions, but you are responsible for managing your own. even when they are enormous and debilitating. it is your life. if you are incapacitated by emotion, it means something really needs to change. you need to figure out what needs are not being met, and you need to figure out what can be done to meet them. this is not women's job. this is not the job of children. they have their own enormous debilitating emotions to manage!

there is nothing wrong with feeling negative emotions. there is something wrong with expecting to never feel negative emotions and then blaming them on other people, and using this blame as an excuse to punish them. it is essential that you understand the difference.

also, this goes for women expecting emotional management from children. it goes for cis people expecting it from trans people. it goes for tme people expecting it from tma people. it goes for white people expecting it from racialized people. it goes for nonblack people expecting it from Black people.

if there is a class that is constructed as "there to do unpaid labor for you" then you need to really interrogate any entitlement you feel towards anyone in that class to soothe your emotions for you.

image id under cut bc it wouldnt fit in alt

*can also include those with active libidos who just choose not to sleep with anyone, but theyre a bit more likely to find out via masturbation whereas someone without probably won't feel the need to explore what's going on there as much

@excessive-vampires hey of course<3 i know it fuckin sucks to deal with so anything i can do to help others with it ill do my best

with that i saw your reblog earlier and was working through forming a response so i just wanted to say firstly im really sorry youre stuck in that situation and that your doctors treated you like that, secondly im not sure if you wanted advice on working around that so if not feel free to disregard all of this but if yes:

firstly dilators - if the issue is:

> not knowing what to get - i got the intimate rose dilator set off amazon and my physical therapist made happy noises when i showed her so they get two thumbs up, id estimate the smallest one is abt the size of a pencil

> they would open your mail and get angry - see if you have any friends nearby who would be willing to let you ship it to their house and then pick it up in person

> if they found it in your room they would get angry - try to think as far outside the box as you can on hiding spots. like say an old pair of boots buried in your closet or something, what are the chances of them checking somewhere like that yknow?

> worried theyll catch you doing it / no lock on door - i usually wait until my housemates are entirely gone or 100% certainly asleep before dilating, its not a noisy activity on its own you go really slow. and even if that means you can only do it once a month, thats ok, like i said any progress is good progress. when i first started out working on it p young i literally couldnt fit much of anything at all and would just occasionally toe the line like every few months, and even that slowly got me to the point where i think shortly after graduating highschool when i ordered the dilators i was able to do the first size after like a week

if none of those solve it and dilatings not a possibility thats def unfortunate but not the end of the road. as for the rest of the exercises none of them involve material stuff so they should be pretty easy to do discreetly if you want (except the massage thing but theyd have no reason to suspect its pelvis involved as the tools used are used for regular massages too lol, and failing that you can still do it with your hands its just not as ideal). so with that here's a rough breakdown of the exercises im supposed to do, and again this is just the general stuff so i cant tell you how many days a week you would do these. and also disclaimer that i very much am not a medical professional, just regurgitating what i remember of the instructions from my doctor. anyways!

kegels:

breathe in through nose 2 seconds, out through pursed lips 2 seconds while squeezing, release and repeat 5 times

then

take slow steady breaths drawing them down into your stomach rather than your chest, do these continuously independent of kegels. pattern is squeeze for 5 seconds, release 10 seconds, and repeat that 5 times

do one set of each of these standing, sitting, and laying down flat on your back with pillows under your knees to elevate your pelvis. originally i was supposed to do all of that eight to ten times a day but that rapidly evolved to "whenever i can remember to in whatever position i happen to be in right now" lol

the abdominal/inner thigh massages are primarily intended as a cupping exercise but you can also use a Gua Sha tool if the cups hurt (like me, they pull my stomach hair so i got one also off amazon, its the shiny metal rock shaped like a paint pallette. for the cups this one looks closest to what she had and you just squeeze it then place on your skin so it creates a seal, release the bulb to create suction, and then slide it around as described below), or she told me the thigh part can also be done with a massage gun. but essentially you just make sweeping motions around your abdominal region, if you start at the bottom on one side you sweep up around your bellybutton on that side to the top and vice versa, if you imagine your stomach in quadrants you wanna spend abt 3 mins going over each corner. then you also wanna do the cardinal directions and just sweep from the outside towards your bellybutton, also 3 mins each (i do not do these in any particular order truth be told im truly just rubbing a slimy rock around on my stomach lol). inner thighs are similar, you just sweep up towards your pelvis. and use massage oil/lotion/something otherwise itll get uncomfortable and chafey, ESPECIALLY the silicon cups my skin hurts just thinking abt that lol

for stretches she told me -

1 minute daily: priformis figure 4 stretch, deep squat stretch, half kneeling hip flexor side bending stretch, supine hamstring stretch with strap, happy baby pose, and adductor butterfly stretch

10x pushup-y things daily: prone on elbows stretch

i googled all of those real quick to make sure those keywords lead to diagrams or guides that looked mostly right so those should be a p good rough guide

the breathing exercises are just more of the stomach breathing thing, you lay down with one hand on your stomach and one on your chest and just concentrate on taking deep breaths without the chest hand moving for a couple minutes

if you had to pick just one of these though i would primarily go for the kegels, for the first month that was the only thing i remembered to do every now and then and id still made a fuckload of progress by the second appointment, theyre entirely undetectable by anyone around you so you can do them whenever and wherever you want, and as far as i know theres not really any way to do them wrong or like. overdo them? worst thatll happen is youll get too tired to keep doing them and the result will be ... you relaxing, so thats also a win lol

another tip is if you cant get dilators but still want to go that route and can fit your pinky: put it in until it starts to hurt and no further, even if thats only a single centimeter and just chill there until it relaxes, focusing on deep breaths and releasing tension in the area (also make sure youve gone to the bathroom prior so you wont get scared of relaxing too much and tense up bc that can hurt a lot w something in you if youre not prepared). itll feel like it never will but i promise eventually it will chill, even if that time is another day youll still have made progress. if you do get it relaxed though then you can try for a little deeper, again stopping as soon as it hurts and waiting for it to adjust. one thing that can help is directing sustained pressure down towards the bottom of your pelvic floor, it will hurt some but in a different way like a really intense backbreaking massage does, and as such will also steadily drive the tension out. vaginismus is lowkey your pelvic floor being one big muscle knot anyways so yknow lol. also if its not going well dont force yourself to continue forever, like give yourself a 15 minute timer as a goal but allow yourself to tap out whenever you need. and conversely if you make it to 15 mins and find youre still feeling fine you can choose to bump that up, the world is your oyster

for bowel health she recommended i get a magnesium supplement, the brand she recc'd is CALM specifically the raspberry lemon flavor, you just mix i think a teaspoon of it with however much warm water you want so if you dont like the taste you can just take it as a shot like i do, or she said adding it to tea and stuff is fine too, and you just drink that before bed every night. its not prescription or anything you can get it at costco or again amazon (all of these companies certainly have their own websites you can order direct from but i am broke as fuck so we do what we can lol)

"But can you feel it?" Post-phalloplasty sensation explained.

Either it's a regional thing or a modification since yesterday, but this at least needs to be updated.

No parts of it extended beyond the lines, and the paper ticket was clearly displayed, impaled on a horn.