Hello new followers. You all seem to be real and not bots. I’m not sure why you have all decided to follow me, but thank you. I don’t post a lot, just reblog. I however do go hunting through the tags to find the most interesting takes from the things my mutuals have posted before me.
I’ve seen this before, but it’s been years and it just came across my Twitter in its dying days. The words are from a favorite author of mine, Maggie Stiefvater, and they are the words I most need to hear when it comes to dealing with chronic pain and illness. I didn’t need this the first time I saw it, six years ago. I need it now. Maybe you do, too.
a very wise woman gave me a piece of advice. She told me to start a journal. In the morning, she said, write down the percentage that I felt I was that day. 20% Maggie. 90% Maggie. Then I should write down what I accomplished that day.
I thought at this point she was going to tell me to admire how much I’d gotten done each day despite being ill. I didn’t want that; I didn’t need a pep talk. I needed my brain.
But that wasn’t what she said. She told me: write down what you’ve managed to do on a 20% day, what you’ve managed to do on a 40% day. Eventually you’ll have a guide so when you wake up and you’re at 20%, you won’t try to do the things you do on a 40% day. You’ll know you can just go watch a movie or sit with your goats or whatever and not feel guilty, because you were never going to write words you could keep or be able to exercise or whatever.
And that was the right way.
It meant I no longer labored for 12 hours each day, doing nothing but trying to smash my way through a draft. Instead I slowly began to write bits and bobs in on my good days. A funny thing happened then: once I was not spending every second forcing myself to do things I couldn’t, I found I had enough energy to actually start to work on myself. To look for patterns in my good and bad days. To research healthcare providers and new studies on what was wrong with me still. Slowly I found I was able to chain more of the 60% days together, then 80% days. Slowly I began to realize that although it was taking months, I was improving overall.
Here’s the thing…I understand how difficult it is if you’re not a man to look at men and those who want to be men and think ???? That??? That’s what you want??? You’re allowed to have felt ugly when you were forced to be masc. You’re allowed to look at men and not find them in any way appealing even aesthetically.
But you’ve got to understand that it’s also ok if others have the same feelings you do, but about femininity.
Neither masculinity, femininity or androgyny is inherently beautiful, empowering or freeing. They become those things when a person gets to choose how to express themselves through them. And there are no wrong choices.
So if people are enthusiastic about being masc even in ways you and maybe most of society find ugly, just move on without saying anything negative and vice versa.
one of my favourite conversations with another trans person was early on in my journey sitting with a trans guy comparing our goals and feelings, how aspects of myself I wanted to get away from were mirrored in what he wanted and vice versa. how we’d each assumed the exact opposite of each other, wait doesn’t *everyone* want to be a girl/guy, that we’d each assumed before realising we were trans that our eventual goals would be the obvious “correct” choice if presented the option
that conversation was so eye opening and made me so much more secure in my understanding of myself and where I wanted to be
because if not everyone wants to be what I want to be then I really want this, it’s not just something I ever could’ve slipped into and I know that now
seeing my trans siblings reaching their transition goals in any way fills me with such unrelenting joy its hard to describe
a voice breaking on a trans masc is like the clouds parting so the sun can finally shine, a long awaited goal finally reached
I don’t know why anyone, no matter their own identity, wouldn’t be overjoyed to witness that
I have little desire to be masculine in most ways, but seeing butches, trans mascs, and cis men who DO talk about how they feel gives me second hand gender happiness. Like, you go dude, Im so happy that you want the qualities I dont. Life is fucking beautiful and gender isn’t a competition. Its just a buffet we get to pick and choose from freely. I feel the same way about hyper femmes, like good for you girl, it should be more appreciated to just be yourself and see others doing the same.
i feel like every human should max out at one disability or chronic illness. like when i hit adolescence and my brain chemistry went “bipolar time now?” the response should have been an error message like sorry! this slot can only contain one (1) item and has been filled with childhood asthma. i would even allow the possibility that you can overwrite previous disorders like “you have equipped chronic migraines and so no will no longer display symptoms of bipolar disorder.” i just think it should work that way.
you can and should copy tags onto the body of the post if you think they’re cool! the only rule for doing this is you should @ the person you got the tags from to give credit. this is polite! do this!!
but I’m persnickety so here are some lesser rules, which are not essential but which I think you should also follow bc they make the site experience nicer
1. if you can, copy-paste the tags directly, don’t screenshot. this makes the tags accessible for everyone using e-readers! I say “if you can” bc I’m given to understand this is basically impossible on tumblr mobile. rip everyone using the mobile app, braver than any us marine
2. the format™ for tags is to have a # in front of every line. sometimes you will copy-paste the tags and they won’t look that way, for mysterious reasons knowable only to software devs. you should tidy them up so they do, bc if there’s nothing clearly demarcating the start of a tag, it’s all just a weird river of words. it’s like removing all the periods from a paragraph.
3. it’s common practice to just paste the whole thing as a block of text, but in my opinion it’s nice sometimes to break it up into paragraphs, especially if it’s a lot of tags. improves readability, you know? more pleasant than reading a massive block of text
4. it is good and right to add image descriptions to screenshotted tags if you encounter them in the wild, to make the post accessible for everyone using e-readers. good samaritan behavior, we love you
5. don’t screenshot and then add an image description in the same reblog?? just paste the tags in directly?? why would you take up twice the space you need to and make everyone read the thing twice??? clown behavior, this baffles me
I will add my voice to the chorus that chronological feed is at this point one of Tumblr’s biggest selling points, because chronological is a default form of ownership. I can edit my feed to match exactly my expectations by following & unfollowing who I want, because chronology as a concept is completely scrutable to me. Algorithms are fine as everything is an algorithm; its the lack of comprehensibility and agency most platforms inflict on you that makes them so hostile to users who actively curate what they engage with.
I in fact think Tumblr would benefit from more feed options! I would absolutely enable deviations from the chronology based on the people I follow and the moods I am in - but they again would need to be under my control.
The discoverability problem is real, and I do in fact think that there should be better ways. I don’t object to the “you may also like” in the corner for example. In reality Tumblr’s search functions are the place to do this; they aren’t as bad as many claim but they aren’t great, they are exactly the choice-focused place to surface new blogs. Make that tool better and I will find others like me and give them a shot.
But. Another thing that makes tumblr great is the fact that it is ‘community’ based over 'content’ based. I follow the people I follow, and they follow me, because we interacted with each other over time. It is a facsimile of actual socializing; you make a few comments on a post, you build up the courage for a reblog or two, you are discoursing, you tag them on a meme, now you are mutuals. Content creators are not community members - that is a hierarchical relationship, the 'lead’ and the 'fan’, and is defined by parasocial and weak connections. Tumblr can be more than one thing ofc, I follow some art blogs who never talk to their followers, that is a content-follow. But in the main I don’t think most people want their community-based feed structure to be disrupted by attempts to content-itize it.
This is again one of Tumblr’s strengths - every other site (besides partially Facebook) has pivoted to content-style models over community-style models due to inherent winner-take-all dynamics and greater monetization applications. But Tumblr cannot chase YouTube, it is going to lose, YouTube already exists. I don’t see much of anything in that post that recognizes that, and that is imo a huge mistake.
im much more intrigued by the potential for use of this passage (out of context) to excuse literally any behavior for a christian. they are not thinking big enough
Hey. Why isn’t the moon landing a national holiday in the US. Isn’t that fucked up? Does anyone else think that’s absurd?
It was a huge milestone of scientific and technological advancement. (Plus, at the time, politically significant). Humanity went to space! We set foot on a celestial body that was not earth for the first time in human history! That’s a big deal! I’ve never thought about it before but now that I have, it’s ridiculous to me that that’s not part of our everyday lives and the public consciousness anymore. Why don’t we have a public holiday and a family barbecue about it. Why have I never seen the original broadcast of the moon landing? It should be all over the news every year!
It’s July 20th. That’s the day of the moon landing. Next year is going to be the 54th anniversary. I’m ordering astronaut shaped cookie cutters on Etsy and I’m going to have a goddamn potluck. You’re all invited.
Hey. Hey. Tumblr. Ides of March ppl. We can do this
ALT
