Ten's Collection Of Stuff

Hey followers Tenander here! I’m going to be making a new tumblr (same old name though don’t worry). I want to try being more confident in my creative activities and my own tastes and there’s a lot of baggage in this one that weighs me down. I need to do some emotional and mental house cleaning. 

I’m not gonna delete this one, because it’s also full of good things, but I will stop using or regularly checking it, and I’ve renamed it. Link to the new one: https://tenander.tumblr.com/ for those of you who want to continue to follow me. 

Hey followers Tenander here! I’m going to be making a new tumblr (same old name though don’t worry). I want to try being more confident in my creative activities and my own tastes and there’s a lot of baggage in this one that weighs me down. I need to do some emotional and mental house cleaning. 

A lot of the advice I got about learning to enforce my boundaries was framed as an adversarial thing. Like, ‘yes, it might upset and disappoint the people around you, but you have to learn to tell them ‘no’ anyway.’ At best, ‘good people will still like you if you enforce your boundaries’.

What I wish I’d been told is that good people will think it's awesome that you enforce your boundaries, that there are people who will respect the hell out of you for it, that there are people who will admire you not despite you telling them no, but because of it. That most people don’t want to make you do something you don’t enjoy,and so they’ll actively be happier and more relaxed around you if they know they can trust you to decline to do things you don’t enjoy and to ask them to stop things that bother you.

It helped me a lot, personally, to stop thinking of ‘enforcing my boundaries’ as something I did for me and more as something I did to empower the people I was close with, to build a situation where they and I felt sure everything that was going on was something we all wanted.

In an hour it’ll be 2:15. 

The hour I am in right now does not exist. 

  American, trying to illustrate just how tiny her...

:o how does it go in germany? (also what does it explain)

Our schools are generally for no more than a couple hundred students, with class room sizes generally between 10 to 20! (Or at least they were when I went to school.) I knew every single student who graduated with me by first and last name, and more than half of them on a personal basis, and that’s perfectly normal. 

Husband: Yeah, America has schools with thousands of students. 

Me: