Romanticizing your own loneliness and turning it into a cool girl thing only works for like a few months and then it just becomes a throbbing black hole i think. Not that ive ever experienced anything like that
I know I’ve been over this but man HRT is good stuff. I wanna shake the hand of whoever invented it. It’s a crime that I don’t know who that is actually. They’re more important than Einstein
id also been really curious about the history of hrt so i had some tabs open:
The first hrt treatments were mostly estrogen extracted during pregnancies to be used for menopause symptoms, but the first usage of those medicines for trans women is credited to the world’s first Trans Clinic, opened in pre-WW2 Germany by Magnus Hirschfield, a gay jewish man.
Oh he looks delightful
Thank you grandpa
The comparasion to Einstein was actually made at the time too! He was commonly refered to as “the Einstein of sex”, to which he supposedly once replied that he would rather Einstein be called “the Hirschfeld of physics” lmao
*turns a perfect 180 degrees so that my cutting board-flat ass is facing you* *i walk away with feminine swagger but masculine contempt*
you see. a lot of people on this site have started to use “broke containment” when any post gets popular outside of their circle of friends, but its original use was when it was a vague fandom post (usually supernatural) gets reblogged by people outside the fandom
anway I got whiplash noticing op’s url and realizing this was about gabriel agreste from miraculous ladybug
some times i see people talking about the Earth and climate change saying things like “now i know it is difficult to deal with utter hopelessness, terror, and visiting the thoughts of death”
and it’s like wow I am so deeply sorry about the suffering. but…concern. Concern. Tell me, am I missing something important? Why do I feel a sense of hope for our planet? Am I a lonely fool? Have I been consumed by naïveté and misguided optimism?
That would be weird. It feels weird. It feels like I would be well suited to despair. My natural temperament is Mortal Terror making my body crushed for a thousand years at the bottom of the deepest trenches of the ocean. I’ve thought before “I can’t live any more. This exceeds the tensile strength of the human spirit.”
And then? After irreversible catastrophic failure of the soul, there is…what?
We try to imagine the future where we fight to save our home and it is very painful. The resistance feels so small and the machine of death feels so vast. But something’s missing.
Everyone else is missing—the plants, trees, bugs, beasts, and creatures. Hello? Are the other humans seeing this? Nature wants you to know that she is not a princess in a tower. Look! Look at the chaos moving through every cell! Iterating! Adapting! Becoming! Thriving! Watch the pollinators tirelessly at work, observe the mycorrhizal network in the forest floor distributing the rich fruits of decay and photosynthesis for every inhabitant! Pay attention! We belong here too. They feed and shelter us, give us the very air we breathe, and in return we plant and propagate, cull, thin, and burn, shape, trample, till, shepherd and sprout seeds. Our species can look toward the future, to the world of our descendants. We can call every plant and animal by name and teach our children to use and care for them responsibly. We can feel this anger, pain, and grief on behalf of the family of Life, OUR family, and we can love the smallest beetle and the humblest moss.
Look at it! This thing is nothing like me, it does not benefit me, it has no use or purpose for me, but LOOK at it! Look at its intricate structure! Look at the marvelousness of its behaviors and biological functions! Look at its uniqueness throughout the whole universe! Look at it, and see its infinite value!
I saved a baby tree from the scorching hot gravel of a parking lot. I watched it grow and thrive in the hands of its caretaker. Many more followed, trees and herbs and flowers, rescued and carefully placed in cups and old tubs that once held yogurt and sour cream. This is so strange, I thought. They’re everywhere, offering themselves for free, and no one thinks to take them. Everyone thinks transplanting a tree is hard and that nothing grows on the edge of the pavement but weeds. But it’s so easy??? This is weird. Plant Nurseries Hate Her: Get Free Plants With This One Weird Trick.
I protected an old barren garden patch where nothing had thrived from being mowed and weed-whacked, and transplanted little plants that I found. I marveled at the bees that came. Chicory bloomed, then asters and goldenrod. I shed actual tears over a spicebush swallowtail. I ordered some milkweed from the internet, and the monarchs came for them. Less then twenty-five bucks for a divine experience like this. Wow, everyone else really needs to know!
I started volunteering at a nature center, and was allowed to transplant flowers where they sprouted in inopportune locations. I collected tons of seeds all fall and winter long.
There is much, much more, all of it bigger than I ever would have imagined. But this spring there were more birds, in number and in species, than I’d ever seen in my back yard before. Chickadees, swallows, finches, nuthatches, jays, cardinals, warblers, sparrows, woodpeckers of every kind…I remembered just a couple years prior when all I ever saw out there was a couple grackles or starlings or robins, with the occasional sparrow. Those birds come in flocks rather than couples now. And then the bumblebee arrived. An American bumblebee, endangered now, a queen. For a few days she was always out there, would fly out and buzz around me when I came out to tend to my now-innumerable plants. It’s nesting time for them. She chose this place I was creating. She saw that this place would take care of her.
A week ago, I discovered wild strawberries growing in my Mamaw’s driveway. I found lyreleaf sage growing beside a gravel road. I’ve become a master of transplanting; I took several of each home. Yesterday, I saw a tiny, metallic blue bee, an Osmia mason bee. Today, I saw an oriole and a strange, very fancy fly. I see something new almost every day. Every day I am being irreversibly changed as a person. How did I ever fail to see how much this matters?
I said I feel hope…do I feel it? I don’t think it’s a feeling, I think it’s a practice. It’s being part of our communities and our ecosystems. Nature’s interconnectedness is both reality and example: to survive, we take care of one another. And when one member of the community helps another thrive, it creates a cascade that increases the thriving of all. Just by existing, you help us all survive.
You can only take care of so many plants before you have to give some away. You can only hold so much knowledge before you have to give it away. I gave seeds to a dozen different flowers to my next-door neighbor and she invited me inside and wouldn’t let me leave without food, and we talked about plants and trees. A family friend lets me have goats’ milk and heirloom vegetables in exchange for help around the farm, and I listen to him talk about trees, bugs, and soil and learn so much I feel like I’m about to explode from knowledge.
Being a caretaker is unavoidably a community-oriented, community-forming thing. You can’t grow plants all by yourself. Your garden will make too many tomatoes. Share them. Your milkweed will make hundreds and hundreds of seeds. Spread them. Wild blackberries invite you to take and eat. Your lonely retired neighbor invites you to talk and keep her company. Once you grow delicious fruits or little oak trees, you always have a reason to greet someone and say, “Look, it is a gift!”
We’re not alone. We are not separate. We take care of each other. Every species, every individual. A single action of caretaking creates a cascade effect of thriving. A single unapologetic love for a creature creates a blossom of curiosity and fascination in everyone surrounding. It’s so powerful.
As my chemical romance says “I am not afraid to keep on living”
It’s interesting how diseases rip through schools at incredible speeds despite being in an arguably modern, clean(ish) environment. I wonder if it has something to do with the whole “you need a doctor’s note to excuse your absence of even one day” combined with the average price of going to a doctor, the lack of education on things like “you’re still contagious even after the fever goes away”, and the overwhelming message of “if you don’t struggle through it, you’re a failure!”
On my campus there tends to be a problem where even I you have the doctors note professors will still take points off of your final grade regardless of how sick you are. I’ve seen people show up to class with the stomach flu, pneumonia, respiratory infections and all sorts of other contagious ailments.
Here’s a fun story:
The school system I grew up in put an absolutely ungodly amount of pressure on kids to Show Up Every Day No Matter What. Many schools are like this, but looking back, my town’s was borderlinefuckingdystopian. They asked me why I didn’t just “postpone” a surgery at one point— when I was fifteen— to give you an idea of how monumentally obtuse these people were.
So, in elementary school, I started having chicken pox symptoms, right? They were mild because I was vaccinated (yay!) but my mom recognized them quickly and took me to the doctor, because my mom is a reasonable human being with standards. The doctor said “yup, you’ve got those pox, it may seem mild but please for the love of god DO NOT take her to school, she is very contagious even though she may FEEL okay.”
So I had to stay home from school until I got clearance from my doctor to go back. I was an angry little gremlin the whole time, because I wanted to go to the school library and read books about the human skull, but my mother said, “no, you cannot leave this house, and do not scratch the bumps please.” So I sat at home and tried not to scratch the bumps, like a good little gremlin.
A few days into my Chicken Pox Related House Arrest, we got a letter from the school. I was far from the only person with chicken pox, as it so happened. Like… a tenth of my second grade class had Confirmed Pox. We all fell ill within DAYS of each other.
So how did this happen, you ask? Well, a kid had chicken pox, and he came to school anyway. “Ah, well perhaps they didn’t know,” you may very well say. “Maybe his parents didn’t notice!” No. No, they noticed. In fact they KNEW it was CHICKEN POX. They sent him to school anyway.
The kid’s parents…….. were, in fact, teachers at the school. And they KNOWINGLY made him go to school sick, because they didn’t want to risk hurting his precious “perfect attendance” record. They figured that since he wasn’t, like, Literally Dying, it was better for him not to miss school. Never mind the fact that they were actively endangering hundreds of little kids.
Fast forward to my freshman year of college. A kid came to class with mumps because he ‘couldn’t afford to miss’. Guess what happened? Mumps outbreak! Diseases are, as it turns out, good at being diseases! Vaccinations are phenomenal, but they can only do so much, and some people rely on herd immunity to not be killed by preventable illness.
This entire attitude needs to die. It’s dangerous. Food service workers are forced to show up sick, little kids are forced to show up sick, college students show up sick because they’re afraid of flunking out.
And on top of it all, misinformation campaigns are encouraging people not to get vaccinations! It’s 2019 and we’re flirting with the plague! Next thing you know some blogger is gonna be like “actually we should all be fucking rats and eating our meat raw, death to all science and god bless america”
Many kids at my school will show up really sick because we only get like three days of excused absences without a doctor’s note.
this is what those in literary academia call “foreshadowing”
