Lucy

im sorry but i actually like the term guyliner not as a gendered term though just as a style like if a guy is wearing clean neat winged eyeliner thats not guyliner even if hes a guy but if a girl is wearing shitty smudged $1 drugstore eyeliner thats guyliner even though shes a girl

an unfortunate side effect of growing up autistic is that everyone always mistook my bluntness for rudeness n now whenever I do any sort business communication I overcompensate for my default absence of tact by speaking like a late 19th century dandy. this appears to be something I am unable to turn off despite my many efforts

"if i was orpheus i would simply not turn around" yes you would. if you were orpheus and you loved eurydice, you would. to love someone is to turn around. to love someone is to look at them. whichever version of the myth — he hears her stumble, he can't hear her at all, he thinks he's been tricked — he turns around because he loves her. that's why it's a tragedy. because he loves her enough to save her. because he loves her so much he can't save her. because he will always, always turn around. "if i was orpheus i would simply —" you wouldn't be orpheus. you wouldn't be brave enough to walk into the underworld and save the person you love. be serious

That's my take on them

That said, you know, the character of Nadia– whose name is based on my love of Nadia Comăneci, the great gymnast from the ‘80s, so I always make her my kind of character name in anything I write. And I think I sort of thought of her as this genderless person, which is something we see with men often; like the character was based a lot on the famous detective character Philip Marlowe– who Elliott Gould plays beautifully in the movie The Long Goodbye– which is a lot of the reason Nadia mumbles to herself and stuff, and is always the detective on the case a little bit, trying to crack her own case. And you know, Jack Nicholson who played Philip Marlowe in Chinatown. I always sort of identified with those male characters or even the way Martin Sheen would stare up at the fan in Apocalypse Now and just be thinking to himself.

And I think that even like if I was sort of a millennial, I don’t know if I would even identify as female. I think that at this point I do and I love women so much that I’m definitely proud to be a woman and it feels true to who I am, but in some way when I look back at my life and certainly when I look forward at the kind of characters I wanna build and what I see a woman as meaning, it’s a much more genderless quality than I think historically the word woman has been imbued with. I don’t think I see my womanhood as this architected idea of like Doris Day or Marilyn Monroe or something. I see it as much closer to like a Harry Dean Stanton or a Dennis Hopper type-of-thing, you know?

-- Natasha Lyonne in Ladygunn

listens to the mountain goats while lifting weights to make sure everyone knows there are multiple things wrong with me & are not improving

“why are you so tired all the time” God is killing me! thanks for asking

harry du bois: *doing something fucking stupid and is about to die from a heart attack*

kim kitsuragi:

i dont want to be recommended anything by ALGORITHM i want to see my friends being insane about something and go "woah,, i wanna be insane too. like that"

Whenever a mountain goats song includes the specific name of a place -a town, a street, a highway- it's a desperate act. The act of an unreliable narrator who cannot trust either memory or present experience, grasping at the one thing they know for certain: the name on the sign that is staring them down

street names are my favorite. so specific so irrelevant so unrelated to the story except. except except. they are integral to the story because they're vital information to the person telling the story. maybe they're a memory device, maybe they're a warning sign. maybe they're all our narrator trusts

Why is it that when you start eating eggs you also have to suffer a race against time before your brain decides to make eating eggs unbearable

A thought, from seeing ideological turf wars over whether certain diagnoses or phenomena are "real", and if so, who "owns" them:

Tumblr is a great nuance reducer but I'd love for more people to get that mental illnesses are social constructs and not biological disorders, and AT THE SAME TIME, there are forms of human experience and neurodiversity that benefit immensely from being identified, named, talked about, treated, and sometimes medicated.

What that means is, "depression" is about as accurate a medical diagnosis as "headache". It's definitely true that the person's head hurts! Aspirin will probably make most people's headaches hurt less!

But "headache" isn't really a useful biological condition to diagnose someone with because you don't know what caused it or what will make it go away. "Headache" refers to an enormous variety of underlying conditions: it could be a tension headache, sunstroke, hangover, migraine, or brain tumour.

In the mental health field, we know that if someone appears to have depression, it could quite possibly be a distinct medical disorder—hypothyroidism, vitamin D deficiency, Lyme disease, malnutrition, or others. Or it could be a natural response to stress that will go away when the stressor is removed.

And even when those are ruled out, it's incredibly hard to tell depression apart from Bipolar II Disorder, ADHD, Borderline Personality Disorder, PTSD, anxiety, or any of a dozen other diagnoses. SSRIs and SNRIs seem to help, so we're pretty sure serotonin and dopamine must have something to do with it, and the evidence says that on average, depressed people's brain activity does tend to be different from that of nondepressed people in particular ways.

But as you might notice, we don't currently use brain scans or brain chemistry to diagnose mental illness. The science quite simply isn't there yet, and when it gets there, we'll have to completely break apart our diagnostic categories so we can tell "hangover" depression and "brain tumour" depression apart.

I absolutely viscerally get the fear that "mental illness is a social construct" can strike into the neurodiverse heart. After all, this illness construct is way better than previous views many of us have lived under, like being lazy, immoral, self-indulgent, stupid, or worthless. Turning the clock back to those old understandings is absolutely not an okay answer. Neither is giving up access to the powers the current diagnostic system gives us to explain our experiences, look for solutions, find other people like us, and advocate for better social conditions.

We can't go back; I for one would not give up an inch of the well-being I have earned, for myself or anyone else, in the current system. But we are inevitably going to have to move forward.

So it's going to be useful to remember that DSM and ICD classifications are like the borders on maps: They're how humans assign values and meanings to territory. They're not the territory itself. There is a lot we don't know about current diagnostic categories, and absolute oceans unfathomed when it comes to how they relate to each other.

In conclusion, Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria is a kind of moss that was first noticed in ADHDland, and some folk claim it grows only there, and is its sign and signifier. But in the light of a tavern fire, folk in far-off kingdoms will whisper that they have seen it growing outside their own doors, and it may be true. A Great Dane and a Chihuahua are both Canis lupus familiaris, and the flower we call a "dandelion" may be any of over 250 nearly-identical species. Indeed, RSD is quite likely the same moss that grows so abundantly in the lands of Borderline Personality Disorder that cottagefolk stuff their mattresses with it. We do not yet know if folk rituals to lessen the agony of RSD are true magic, or if naming the demon strengthens its hold; in some far-off time, some peer-reviewed meta-analysis may reveal the truth.

In the meantime, don't let doctors tell the entire story of who you are because there's so much that only you can say; use your heart and brain and friends and healthcare professionals to figure out what helps you in particular; remember neurodiverse solidarity; do no harm but take no shit; and vote for taxpayer-funded scientific research and mental health parity whenever you get the chance.

— Joanna Russ, “Aesthetics,” How to Suppress Women’s Writing (1983).  (via warmlove)

nail polish is goblincore bc you can make your fingernails colorful and sparkly and also you can hoard the bottles which are colorful and make good clacking sounds