Cosmo

then a woman knocked on the door and said "oh I'm so sorry he's a therapy dog he's trained to seek out people in severe distress"

Human beings have inherent worth. 

You matter because you exist. Your life matters simply because you are alive. Your existence alone is the only requirement for you to have value and rights. 

Your worth is not dependent on your gender, sexuality, race, health, abilities, achievements, productivity, income, job status, procreation or anything else, it’s inherent. You were born with it. You don’t need to earn or prove it. As long as you’re alive, your life is worth living and your existence matters. 

That’s a core belief of mine. It’s one of my biggest guiding values in life - and if you enjoy this blog, you may feel a similar way as it’s woven in my writing. 

And yet, if you feel similar to me, you may also struggle to include yourself in this belief system. Even if it’s not a conscious thought, you may fall for the thinking trap of „Except for me“. Everyone has value and rights - except for you. You need to prove you’re good enough. You need to fight hard to earn them. You are actually worthless or at least only have conditional worth (you are worthless if you don’t do X or achieve X or hide X…). You’d find it not only false but also cruel to tell a friend or even stranger this and yet you tell yourself this. 

It’s actually a very common trap to fall into. Many people hold themselves to higher standards than anyone else or are much more critical of themselves than of others. That’s not unique to us - but it can be especially amplified in people who are „othered“ by society in any way, people who do not fit in the picture sold as a „normal life“. 

I am not going to deny that external validation does matter. Of course the ideal solution to this problem would be to create a more inclusive society where nobody grows up internalizing that the fact that they were born gay or trans or disabled etc takes away from their inherent worth. But in the meantime, while we are fighting for that, there are a few things we can tell ourselves to teach our brain ways out of that trap: 

„Except for me“ is logically inconsistent. Let’s exclude all emotions and ideologies here for a moment: If you accept „Human beings have inherent worth“ as true, that’s a pretty basic mathematical concept. Human beings = worthy. The only way „I am not worthy“ could be true then is if you could reliably prove that „you = not human“. I don’t think you can do that. 

It may sound very silly (or maybe just very autistic of me) but it’s surprisingly effective. Let’s say you find yourself thinking „I’m worthless because I am trans“. Let’s apply the math here: Human beings = worthy. You = a human being. So, the only way this exception to the rule could be true is if you add on: trans people = not human. Do you truly believe this? If not, then your belief that you are worthless can not be logically true. 

Even if it may feel emotionally coherent, it doesn’t hold up to logic - and brains like logic. So, if yours is being mean to you, you can use that to your advantage. 

With all my love, 

1) Search for: watch TITLE OF WORK free online

2) Scroll to the bottom of results. Click any of the "Complaint" links

3) You will be taken to a long list of links that were removed for copyright infringement. Use the 'find' function to search for the name of the show/movie you were originally searching for. You will get something like this (specifics removed because if you love an illegal streaming site you don't post its url on social media)

4) each of these links is to a website where you can stream shit for free. go to the individual websites and search for your show/movie. you might have to copy-paste a few before you find exactly what you're looking, but the whole process only takes a minute. the speed/quality is usually the same as on netflix/whatever, and they even have subtitles! (make sure to use an adblocker though, these sites are funded by annoying popups)

In conclusion, if you do this often enough you will start recognizing the most dependable websites, and you can just bookmark those instead. (note: this is completely separate from torrenting, which is also a beautiful thing but requires different software and a vpn)

Option 1: try the DuckDuckGo search engine instead (bonus: dedicated to privacy! doesn't track your data!)

2026 UPDATE: