Say Every Dumb Nice Thing That Pops Into Your Head. Let Every Bit Of Kindness You Feel Flow Into Those

eat delicious things in every sense. savor novels that unravel slowly, like decadent meals for the mind. let sunlight kiss ur skin, bask in its warmth like an endless summer. hold close the people who make you feel alive, kiss them tenderly, love them fiercely. laugh at bad jokes, the kind that make you roll ur eyes but secretly smile. plant basil on your windowsill, water it with care, breathe in its fragrance as you stir it into your meals. be unafraid to indulge in beauty, to notice it everywhere and to consume it greedily. there is no virtue in starving yourself of joy, no wisdom in rationing delight.

I realise there is only so much advice you can follow. Ultimately, you have to live. That means making mistakes. You can’t go through life expecting that wise words will be enough. Sometimes you have to suffer to learn the lesson.

a big lesson for me was learning that most things are not as fragile as I’d believed. missing a class, or turning in a bad assignment, won’t instantly destroy your professor’s opinion of you. accidentally saying something harsh won’t make your friend want to end the friendship. it takes work to repair these things - it takes effort and research and sometimes a sincere apology - but you can do that because they’re not irreparably broken. what you’ve worked to build, in academia and in relationships and in life, is stronger and more enduring that your mind may teach you to believe. don’t let imagined fragility lead you to giving up

So a free tool called GLAZE has been developed that allows artists to cloak their artwork so it can't be mimicked by AI art tools.

AI art bros are big mad about it.

Abusers are generally great at something called “manufacturing insecurity”. It means, even if you’ve never been insecure about something, abuser will create an insecurity about it, solely for the purpose of emotionally manipulating you. Meaning, when you’re not doing, saying, or thinking what they want, they have a go at your “insecurity”, triggering your pain, fear, guilt, shame, everything they taught you to feel, as a way to teach you that this pain is what you’re going to get if you fail to obey them.

It’s not exactly hard to manufacture an insecurity (provided you are cruel and vicious), all you have to do is take a social norm and convince a person they aren’t good enough in one or all departments. You convince a person they’re too loud, too fat, too ugly, slow, naive, gullible, stupid, lazy, selfish, sexual, provocative, demanding, and that this is the reason why they will always fail, it’s a reason why they keep getting hurt, it’s a reason why nobody will ever love or care for them. It’s utterly cruel, and an absolute lie. Deviating from the “norm” in any way is not a reason of any of those things, if you’re getting hurt it’s because people are hurting you, if you’re unloved it’s because people around you refuse to show affection and care. These things cannot be the individual’s fault, it’s always the environment setting person up for pain. And abusers already know this. But they make a step to convince a victim it’s all their fault, everything others do to them, their fault. And even worse, that they deserved being hurt.

This kind of nonsense blaming everything on unrelated trait of individual can lead to a person getting terrified they could have somehow caused horrible things just by being themselves, that it’s impossible to even predict what might happen to them just because they’re “this way” or another. It creates an atmosphere of panic and confusion, and they find themselves seeing no way forward but to accept guidance from abuser. Abuser then pretends to know what victim is to do in order to avoid pain and failure - of course, only up to the point when abuser decides to inflict pain on purpose, to control and manipulate.

You’re not stupid if you fall for this kind of trap, it’s designed to work on people who are self-aware, who work on getting themselves better, who are trying their hardest. You don’t even have to lack confidence, abusers will take a confident person and eat their confidence away. And once caught in this situation, it might be hard to believe that someone would stoop that that kind of cruelty and lie to you while knowing perfectly well that you are good, that there’s no reason on earth to criticize your traits, that you have nothing to be ashamed of. That you haven’t deserved any of it.

kill the imposter syndrome in your head because not only is there someone out there doing it worse than you, they’re also using chat gpt to do it

I'd like to ask for some help from any intersex followers I have (or any intersex folks who come across this post!)

I've been struggling a lot to find proper terminology for intersex issues in my research because Google is all gunked up and Tumblr is just as hard to parse through.

So, if anyone could point me in the direction of any good literature by intersex authors or any good online resources (especially that define terminology) that would be incredibly helpful!! I'm still doing work myself but any sort of direction would be wonderful!

(tl;dr I want to be a better ally to intersex folks in trans feminist conversations about sex/gender and approach my own theory with intersex experiences in mind better! So, any and all resources would be appreciated!)