It doesn't LOOK smart

May I present the best apple:

Thank you to everyone who participated in the inaugural PWHLblr awards during this time of suffering, uncertainty, and sorrow (expansion). We had 500 votes which was amazing! Please enjoy the intentional graphic-design-is-my-passion graphics and the corny text I wrote for each award. They might be shit but at least it's not AI!!!!!!!

Accessibility note: This post is image-heavy but all descriptions of the graphic text are written underneath, alt text contains description of the photographs themselves.

You were the victim, and it wasn’t fair, but it’s over now. Nobody came to save you, and I’m sorry, but it’s too late for anyone to go back and do it different.

You’re suffering over something that cannot be resolved. You’re allowed to feel angry, or outraged, or betrayed, but there will eventually come a time that you don’t feel that so violently anymore, and you’re going to want to have something good left to go back to.

You can’t make anyone love you the way you need to be loved. That’s how a lot of good things end. Not with a clear sign, something blocking the road that says “do not proceed”, just a splitting of the path that’s still moving somewhat in the same direction.

You can’t fix them. Nothing you can do will fix them. And if they fix themselves, they can’t do it for you- they have to do it for themselves as well, because otherwise a day may come when they’re alone, and as long as they live, they are their only true constant. So you can support, and you can encourage, but the hardest part is up to them. And sometimes they can’t do it even with your help.

Sometimes letting go of someone feels like mourning at their funeral before they’ve died, and every time you see them after it’s like talking to a ghost that doesn’t know it’s dead. Sometimes that happens. You’ll both still wake up tomorrow anyways.

I understand that you’re afraid, and that you’re afraid for good reasons. And I understand that being brave isn’t as easy as just turning that fear off, and you would if you could in a heartbeat. But the thing is, as long as that fear is able to dictate your choices, it will have power over you. If you don’t believe you can try to fight it, if you accept that it will always be in charge, you let the frightening thing stay present in your life. It will exist as long as you stay paralyzed. And that sounds cruel, but it isn’t something anyone can fix for you.

The person you may let yourself become after experiencing the terrible thing may very well grow into a much bigger, much more terrible thing, and someday it will swallow the first terrible thing whole. And all that will be left is something far worse for someone else. And you will not be able to shrink it down by explaining where it came from, because terrible things that are dead and gone are never as terrible as terrible things that are alive right now in front of you.

If you read this whole thing and found yourself angry, if you thought to yourself ‘I know that, and it doesn’t help. I know that, and I’m still suffering. I know that, I’ve heard that, I’ve been told that before, over and over and over again, by people who aren’t listening who don’t understand, who don’t get it, and I’m still hurting, still tired, still in pain, still suffering, and this isn’t something a handful of pithy words from some asshole who isn’t here and present and walking in my shoes suffering what I’m suffering from can fix. I know all of this and it changes nothing”, I want you to know:

Yeah. That was me, too. I sat at the bottom of a miserable pit that I didn’t even dig while a bunch of detached, emotionally unavailable jackasses who weren’t helping even a little yelled all this down at me, like just saying it hard enough or making me hear it as though I wasn’t already a hundred percent aware and still hurting anyways would magically solve all my problems and it didn’t. Like I was some whiny little rat with a victim complex looking for the easy way out and not the survivor of something awful doing their goddamn best to keep going, scraping by on the skin of their fucking teeth.

Every single note on this list is something someone told me at the exact wrong time, that made me want to scream and cry and smash a goddamn brick over their head because ‘I already know that, you fucking asshole, and it doesn’t change anything, so fucking help me or piss the hell off.”

That’s why I wrote the list.

It’s everything I needed to know that I already knew, that only made me feel worse, and didn’t help me improve anything at all even a little bit until I experienced the exact right circumstances that made them click the exact right way and allowed me to say it to myself and feel only a sense of, “okay yeah, I get it now.”

It’s not something I would ever directly say to someone in a time of crisis, but it’s all stuff I learned and needed to learn while I was that person.

You get what I mean?

His response: "No, it's my name now."

I went to the pharmacist yesterday, his nametag is my deadname. He informed me he's immigrating and in the process he's changed his first name to my deadname to have an English sounding name. That's why he's now able to get a reprint of his nametag to be my deadname. And repeated, with the intense seriousness of someone who is going to die on this hill: "It's mine now. Not yours. I'm taking." His tone indicated that decision is final.