Drawing for you

getting older can be so amazing? you get more familiar with yourself. learn tips & tricks for troubleshooting your own brain. trial & error helps you build routines that minimize discomfort, maximize reward. your preferences/interests don't get set in stone, but you do find out which ones are going to stay with you in the long-term, and which ones are fun but transient joys to appreciate in the moment.

you learn that the world is so much more complex than you were taught, and that that's okay, and that there's an endless supply of things you can learn or watch or experience or think about if you want to. if you're lucky, you loosen up, stop putting so much pressure on yourself. if you're lucky, you learn to recognize that negative inner voice, and whack it with a baseball bat until it hushes up. if you're lucky, you learn to treat yourself gently, not because you are fragile but because you are worthy of gentleness. (i hope you are lucky.)

and some things will change. some things will get better. some things will get good. and maybe you start to recover from the dehumanizing stress of childhood/education. maybe you learn the power of your own autonomy. maybe you learn how to walk away from bad situations (which is a superpower even if you don't realize it yet). and you get to choose your own clothes. and your own food. and which relationships to pursue! and what you do with your free time. and with your life (but don't worry you get to choose that gradually). and that's crazy! and sometimes scary. and extraordinarily, indescribably precious.

bitches needed to hear this huh ♥ (you're bitches)

I can't help it every time I think about the Voyager Golden Record I start to tear up. We sent into space the things we loved the most about our world. Sounds of the ocean, the wind, friendly greetings, the voice of a child. I hope that when it reaches someone, whoever it is, they know that we are here and that we love

girl WHAT

i get very emotional about the world lore of splatoon primarily bc of what we learned from alterna, what with the majority of humanity being wiped out except for a group who harnessed crystals in order to replicate the sky, which also held their hopes/dreams.

and those desires were later reflected into a world who sees self-expression and culture as their primary focus despite everything that happened to get there. in my opinion, splatoon 3 does a great job subverting that 'dark, grim post-apocalyptic world' genre with a world that's colorful and hopeful. the inhabitants of this world really do continue carrying forth the natural curiosity and determination of humanity through everything they do.

some of you may argue that the kid squid game is NOT that deep but it is to me. love these little squids

sometimes plushies make me cry because it’s like. they’re little guys made to be loved. their only purpose is to be held and hugged and loved. we made them because we love making things and we love loving things. and they’re so cute

Years back, I was working at a specialty store, and we got this HUGE crate of plushy toys. They were all insanely cute and squishy. I knew kids would go nuts for them, as it was the first week of December, so parents and grandparents often had kids with them while shopping for furniture, lamps, cooking equipment, lights, etc.

One night, I was working my last hour of my shift covering the Customer Service desk, which meant when I wasn't busy, I was supposed to help clean up around the cash registers, including taking back items people changed their minds about at the checkout. Earlier, I had witnessed a kid carrying thos cute plushy toy. It was a brown and white hedgehog. The kid, at the checkout, saw a remote control car and he told his dad he qanted it. The dad told him, "The plushy or the car- you can't have both" (by the way, I respect boundaries with kids and parents sticking to their guns about it), and the kid picked the car.

So, I'm cleaning up, have less than an hour left of my shift, and I see the little plushy hedgehog. Somehow, he never got put back nor had anyone else seen him and decided to buy him. He was just sitting there, slumped to the side, unattended.

It's Christmas and I'm a sentimental old sap at heart. My brain starts replaying the scene from RUDOLPH where he's on the Island of Misfot Toys, and is told a toy is never truly happy until it is loved. I picked him up and quickly took him back to the bin with the plushies but... It was empty. He was literally the last plushy toy and my boss was about to wheel the bin out. We weren't getting any more toys till November, so that meant any toys left at this point needed to sell or they'd be sent to the dump.

I brought the little hedgehog to the front, figuring someone would see him with the candy, candles, & Christmas brick-a-brack, and fall in love with him. When I finished my shift, I went to ask my manager a question and as I passed the Christmas candle display - there he sat, the sad little slumped over hedgehog plushy. No one had bought him, or even moved him.

My manager, Phillip, saw me and the hedgehog. He asked how the hedgehog got there. I told him how I'd put him there when the bin got sent back, and he was the only plushy left. Philip had kids, I figured he'd probably get sentimental and buy it for his kids. Nope. He shrugged and said he'd send it back to be disposed of.

That night, I came home with a plushy hedgehog in my passenger seat. My mom saw him and just thought he was the cutest little hedgehog and asked what I wanted to do with him. I told her the story, then added I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do with him.

My mom is a child psychiatrist, specializing in children with PTSD and brain damage that results in learning problems/issues with processing their emotions. She asked if she could have the plushy hedgehog (even offered to pay me for him, she didn't expect me to just give him over), so kids could hug him when they were upset in session.

Murphy, the plushy hedgehog that still slumps a little to the left when seated, has been hugged by hundreds of kids. Little girls have held him tight while explaining about bullies, little boys have held him tight while crying over their panic attacks, younger siblings have held him to whisper secrets while elder siblings and parents talk about self-soothing techniques, teenagers have hugged Murphy while talking about the worst day of their lives. Murphy has also been hugged by kids excitedly chatting about a new friend at school, a teen girl excited to be called by her name instead of her dead-name, little kids proudly saying they've mastered their ABCs, and even staff members who just need to come chat over a case they are having trouble with.

Every now and then, my mom brings Murphy home for a weekend. He gets washed (she calls it a Spa Weekend, to her coworkers, all of them laughing), dried, and sits outside with my mom in the sunshine to get aired out, then on Monday, they are back to work. Some kids even just ask to hold Murphy while they talk, no matter their mood or what they want to talk about. They just want to hug Murphy.

So yes. Plushies are made for one purpose. To be hugged and loved. To be a comfort.

MARY OLIVER

believing that good can happen to you after a life of tragedy is the most painful thing you can choose. but it is necessary. because otherwise there is nothing else. you miss it all hiding

For how long can you believe that good things will happen without that ever actually happening? A month? A year? Five years? Ten? Twenty?

Thirty-six.

Thirty-six and it did get better and it was worth it a hundred times over. Imagine a good good enough to make three decades of scrabbling for hope and sometimes having no hope genuinely worth it.

Are things super great? Absolutely not. I spend a lot of time scared or struggling. It's very hard. But the good that I have is so rare to find and so precious and so full of wonder that I will not condemn my life as miserable while I still have what I have. It was worth it all for this.

So your answer is "you can hold out for at least 36 years and have it turn out to be worth it."

If I made it, you can make it. That isn't glib or ignorant, it's the truth. I did it. I believe you have it in you too.

The thing is, perception is a cultivated ability. Or rather, it's a category of cultivated abilities.

Trauma cultivates the ability to perceive threats, danger, badness. That makes spotting more threats, dangers, badness very easy.

And people who have a lot of trauma have often been subjected to a lifetime of unreasonable demands, unattainable perfectionism, such that the sense of threat is directly tied to a sense that things can never be good enough.

What that means is that part of recovering from trauma is cultivating the ability to perceive benevolence, safety, goodness, and stepping away from the fatalistic perfectionism that was used to bludgeon us into submission before.

All the in-between stuff in the world that looked insufficient at best and horrible at worst can instead look lovely at best and inconsequential at worst, once it's not all being held to some abusive asshat's irrational standards.

There's a series of shifts I've watched over and over in the people around me, and to some degree in myself. It starts at scapegoat, believing you deserve all that abuse, and moves through victim, believing the abuse is inevitable, to survivor knowing you can get through it. But the cool thing is that it keeps going after that, past merely surviving all that shit the world can throw at us and into thriving in a life we actually find worth living.

And the really cool thing is, the resulting shift in perspective, howeverlong it takes to cultivate, is retroactive! We can and do backslide when new crap arises, or old crap resurfaces, but once you've seen the way the world CAN look, it's so much easier to remember that the way things look when you're down in the pit is not the way it has to be forever. It's so much easier to follow the path back out of it, and into being okay again.

It's not everything - assholes still exist. Abuse still happens. Systemic problems still have to be addressed.

But it's a lot. And it's worth the effort and the patience. And it's worth getting out of the actual badness in order to acquire it.

And so are you.

“Snoopy, come home”, 1972.

I see. Charlie Brown got a sexual thrill from Lucy pulling the football away. He wasn’t naive, he knew what was going to happen. He wanted to feel that absence every time.

Harrison Wood Hsiang

i call this one “nobody likes you when youre 23”

uploaded this at 1 am thinking ‘oh no one is going to see this, whatever :)’ but reading your thoughts, your heartbreak and ultimately your hope made me feel like the world is one yknow what? We got this

babe are u okay ur crying about closeness lines over time by olivia de recat again

INFORMATION I WAS NOT PREPARED TO LEARN. MAYBE WE *ARE* ALONE. BECAUSE WE ARE SO *EARLY*. IF THERE IS EVER GALACTIC CIVILIZATION THEY WILL NOT REMEMBER US AT ALL. BECAUSE WE ARE NOTHING. CELLS, JUST BEGINNING TO FORM LIFE. SORRY FOR SCREAMING. BUT ARE YOU LISTENING. ARE YOU THINKING ABOUT IT.

The planet was nothing special.

Well, there were some quirks. It was carbon-based, which was mildly interesting, and Arc’s shuttle readouts told her that it was the plants that had developed photosynthesis, weirdly. The atmosphere had a massive amount of oxygen, and there was all that water, too, more than she had ever seen in one place before. And every planet was, as her trainers had told her, its own unique jewel.

But one thing they had not told her was that all the jewels started to blend together after a while, and after a little longer each one became just another assignment. So the planet was just another assignment. A little ball of water and tumbled stone and flora in a cul-de-sac of the galaxy. One more stack of paperwork for Arc to get through before she could go home to her marital partners and offspring.

Arc aimed her shuttle in the middle of one of the larger continents, away from the mountain range and near a smaller body of (oh, gosh, more) water. As she got closer to the ground, though, her shuttle readouts changed. There were irregular smudges of radiation on the surface, and chemical evidence of constructed materials. Arc squinted, and her tertiary limbs started to shiver in frustration. There were ruins down there. Nobody had told her she’d be surveying a formerly inhabited planet. Great, she thought. Now I’m never getting home.

Arc sent a note by ansible to Ecba, her dearest marital partner. A few mins later, as her shuttle settled on the ground, she got back the image of a hand-sculpted message. “My little machine,” it said, Ecba’s sweetheart-name for her, and she could see all the love that went into the lettering. “Does it have to be you?”

Arc put on her enviro-suit and got her surveying monitor. “Maybe not,” she sent. She didn’t have the same skill in sculpting that Ecba had, so she just had to trust that her love was conveyed in the digital lettering. “Wish me luck. I’ll try to come home to you all soon.”

Then she stepped out into the world.

@hellsite-folklore

gay people will romanticize anything. fossilization is an act of love. the earth holds the child that returned to her so tight in hopes that she never has to let go. eventually you'll fall away from her grasp no matter what, but at least you can leave behind an impression that she'll hold onto forever. fuck. hold on bad example. gimme a minute. fuck.

would you still love me if i was a worm?

never gonna stop thinking abt how i drunkenly stumbled over to this 40/50 year old butch lesbian at a gay bar and said “you’re everything i want to be” only for her to give me the warmest hug i’ve ever received in my life and tell me that was the best compliment she’s ever received.

it's not bad art if you had fun making it