oppression isn’t generational and trying to frame politics as “the old people are wrong and the young people are right” erases the fact that there are old people who have been fighting the good fight for decades and the fact that there are young people who are literally nazis
I don’t understand how in movies when there’s some scene about someone sitting on the bus and thinking about life they just have their head rested against the window and it looks so calming and shit like no have you ever put your head against a window while the bus is moving it feels like your cranium is a blender and your brain is becoming a smoothie
Hey I get that compulsive heterosexuality is a thing and all but can we maybe stop trying to convince bi girls that they aren’t actually attracted to guys….I mean can we get rid of the idea that a bi girl who lusts after men is somehow doing a great disservice to the wlw community or being disloyal to who she “really” is…compulsive heterosexuality is real but guess what bisexuality is too and it’s a very valid identity
You may be 98% sure she’s not really bi and you can still keep your damn mouth shut
Hell, you can be absolutely right, and in a year she’s gonna laugh and say ‘haha I thought I liked men, can you believe it?’ And you can still keep your damn mouth shut
Let every girl explore and discover her identity at her own pace in her own way.
Let every girl choose the labels that make her the happiest and most comfortable
I id’ed as pan ace for half a year before I started seeing myself as a lesbian. And honestly, had someone tried to chew me out for that or called it a phase I would’ve been crushed.
I can only imagine how much worse it feels for actual bi and pan girls
Let bi girls be bi girls and let girls-who-you’re-pretty-sure-are-not-actually-bi be bi girls because that’s their label to pick.
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.
Most advice isn’t good for everyone and this advice seems maybe bad for people in abusive situations, because sometimes you do need to learn to enforce boundaries against people who will try to violate them. But if there are other brains like me out there: your partner will be really happy you can say no to them. your friend will be really happy you change the subject when you hate it. your roommate will really appreciate that you tell them to turn down the music. most people will feel safer and more comfortable around you if they know you’ll reliably express your needs, AND they’ll feel better about voicing theirs.
Tru fax.
I had a friend tell me that they really admired me for going “hey, I love you guys, but I need to go sit in a room by myself and read for an hour”. So yes, don’t be afraid of setting your boundaries!
And for people like me, who are very very VERY bad with things like unspoken clues to the fact that someone wants me to do/not do something or whatever? It is such a relief not to have to be constantly worried that I’ll do something that will make them not want to hang out with me anymore.
I’ve lost friends because they never tried to enforce their boundaries and as a result I had no idea I was trampling right over them until they got to a point where they couldn’t handle it anymore, and it is an AWFUL SHITTY FEELING knowing you’ve done that to someone.
Please please please enforce your boundaries with me. I promise I will love you for it.
This is so, so, SO important, people.
I am both bad at enforcing my boundaries and constantly scared of stomping over other peoples. It makes me feel safer if I know you can say No to me. I don’t know why it never occurred to me that others would feel safer if they knew I could say No as well.
This is definitely my experience! I know friends who feel especially comfortable with me because they know I’ll be honest with them (not blunt/mean-honest) and I definitely feel a difference with friends who aren’t good at enforcing their needs. I question myself more knowing my personality can steamroll if I forget myself/go unchecked. I ask them of course, but sometimes asking someone who can’t always say no can be used as an excuse for someone to get their way when they’re not really sure what the needs are of the person who can’t say no. I still very much love those friends, but I’m not as uninhibited.
Trump is notorious for his “filing system”: when he is finished with a
piece of paper, he tears it into tiny pieces and throws it away, which
is fine if you’re a CEO (maybe), but is radioactively illegal under the
Presidential Records Act, because the President works for the public,
and is required by law to archive their official papers and save them
for public scrutiny.
White House staffers gave up on trying to explain this to Trump, who
just kept on tearing up everything, from official letters from Senators
to letters from constituents to notes and other paperwork.
The staffers – paid nearly $70,000 year – ended up with full-time jobs
retrieving scraps of paper from Trump’s trash-can and piecing them back
together with clear tape so they can be filed in the National Archives.
Some of these staffers were eventually fired; they’ve spoken to
Politico about their year in the Trump administration as paper-tapers.
Thoughtfulfangirling 