Call me Girl. Weird Girl.

itstimetomotivate:

phoenixyfriend:

I feel like a good shorthand for a lot of economics arguments is “if you want people to work minimum wage jobs in your city, you need to allow minimum wage apartments for them to live in.”

“These jobs are just for teenagers on the weekends.” Okay, so you’ll use minimum wage services only on the weekends and after school. No McDonald’s or Starbucks on your lunch break.

“They can get a roommate.” For a one bedroom? A roommate for a one bedroom? Or a studio? Do you have a roommate to get a middle-wage apartment for your middle-wage job? No? Why should they?

“They can live farther from city center and just commute.” Are there ways for them to commute that don’t equate to that rent? Living in an outer borough might work in NYC, where public transport is a flat rate, but a city in Texas requires a car. Does the money saved in rent equal the money spent on the car loan, the insurance, the gas? Remember, if you want people to take the bus or a bike, the bus needs to be reliable and the bike lanes survivable.

If you want minimum wage workers to be around for you to rely on, then those minimum wage workers need a place to stay.

You either raise the minimum wage, or you drop the rent. There’s only so long you can keep rents high and wages low before your workforce leaves for cheaper pastures.

“Nobody wants to work anymore” doesn’t hold water if the reason nobody applies is because the commute is impossible at the wage you provide.

hazel2468:

fierceawakening:

toleranza-zero:

fierceawakening:

roach-works:

ktempestbradford:

amuseoffyre:

elfwreck:

portraitoftheoddity:

respected-demon:

aphony-cree:

sonicrainbooms:

bloodyl1ps:

this post hasn’t left my mind since i’ve first saw it

people jest but this is literally how i worked out i was gaslit for like 15 years of my life

People who “want trauma” are recognizing, on some level, that they were traumatized but in a way that’s not “socially recognized” as trauma. What they really want is for people to see that they’ve been traumatized and be on their side

Hold up

I think it’s also important to talk about mental illness, and how the pain and trauma of being mentally ill as a kid is often diminished because of the lack of outside actors. If you spent your childhood being suicidally depressed because your wee little kiddo brain decided to be a chemical shitshow, it doesn’t matter how much mom and dad loved you, that kinda thing fucks you up. And having people only look at your external surroundings and argue that “nothing bad happened” ignores all the pain you went through internally. So wishing you could have something external you could point to in order to justify that pain and enduring stress – just so people could understand – makes sense. 

It’s not so much “I wish I had been traumatized” as “I wish I had a name, an event, an explanation for my trauma that other people would understand and accept.”

Also, just because a home seems happy and healthy to an external observer does not mean that it was.

One thing I’ve noticed about the questionnaires that are used to identify if you’ve experienced trauma ignore major areas of child life where trauma happens. The ones I’ve taken always ask about home and family. That’s not where I was most traumatized. It happened at school.

And even if you have a loving, supportive family, you still have to leave them for several hours a day and be at the whim of bullies, terrible teachers, administrators who treat you like trash, and more. No questions about any of those people or experiences come up in those questionnaires.

I have spent YEARS going: why do I have so many trauma responses? I haven’t experienced trauma.

welp

And this is not even to get into how Western society low key constantly traumatizes everyone who isn’t white or neurotypical or abled or cisgender or straight.

i used to wish, regularly and shamefully, that i had cancer. i knew cancer was bad. i knew no one should want cancer. but i fantasized that doctors could reach into me–into my brain, or my breasts, or my guts–and cut away some enormous hairy stinking tumor and everyone would say ‘oh wow, so that’s what was in you, so that’s what was making you so sick and unhappy’ and then i would be sewn back up and get an I Survived t-shirt and everyone would be so proud of me.

i didn’t really want to have cancer. i don’t want anyone to have cancer. what i really wanted was to have a problem that i could trust someone else to fix.

PTSD very often comes with a feeling that you’re tainted inside, fundamentally corrupted in a way that you can’t undo. Feelings that you wish you could be purified are pretty common. I had them all the time for most of my life, and when things get bad I still do. I was innocent and beautiful. Now I’m a snarky cyborg weirdo. Clearly this will never be as good as an innocent child without shrapnel in her thigh bones.

It takes a lot to fight those feelings. If you have them, and you need help to do it… there’s no shame in getting that help. How and when and why is your choice, but… you don’t have to be alone.

If you have these kinds of feelings, I’m not saying trauma is necessarily why. But they’re a sign something is Wrong… and the Wrong is not you.

It’s something that happened, or something that you’re wrestling with, that feels too big for you to handle.

as a person who is currently writing a huge fic about trauma and its repercussions on one’s life, thus studying my own past trauma response, i feel so seen by this post

💜 keep on keepin’ on

I would also like to add on my personal theory about people who say shit like the tweet that was being responded to- “Why do people who grew up in healthy, stable homes want trauma so bad?”

And my theory is that people who say that ALSO grew up with trauma. Boatloads of it. Trauma that, at the time, was even LESS recognized that it is today (which imo is saying something). And so when they see us “fragile snowflakes” talking about the trauma of growing up in homes where we were emotionally neglected, where our emotional needs weren’t met, where we were verbally and emotionally abused (and sometimes physically or sexually), where our psyches were damaged in ways that leave us floundering decades later.

They feel like we’re absurd. Because if THAT is abuse, then well. I was abused too! If you’re saying that you were abused, I had it worse, so I must have been abused!

And they say it so mockingly but like… YES! Yea you WERE abused! But instead of recognizing that (and in a lot of cases like my parents, instead of recognizing that you have abused your own kids despite being “nicer than your parents ever were”), they make fun of us. And idk how much of it is not wanting to accept that they were also abused, how much of it is anger that “younger people” (i say, 28 years old and an adult yet somehow they always talk about teens) are daring to speak up about how we feel, how much of it is fear that their parents weren’t as great as they say and that they themselves are shitty parents…

Idk what it is. But it all strikes me as SUPER similar to how my mom refuses to admit that my dad abused me because if what he did to me was abuse, then he abused her, too.

(via the-great-spirit-of-hoole)

anxietyproblem:

(via aceperjay)

lilalilan:

On the topic of feeding your friends it’s crazy to me how bad people are at accommodating their friends who have allergies.

I don’t have any allergies but I have a friend who’s allergic to both gluten and eggs and it makes me sad to see how surprised they get when I offer to bring snacks they can have to an event we’re going to, or when I invited them over for dinner. And just how they’re already prepared to not be accommodated and will preemptively say it’s okay to not make food for them when it’s actually not that hard to work around their allergies.

And I have another friend who is allergic to onions (except for garlic) and we became friends because they’d never had ranch and my partner made them a thing of ranch without onion powder in it. Like even coming from a culinary background that is so based in onions my family has a running joke about it I’m able to modify recipes to just not have onions in it.

Idk it just makes me sad to see people who are so used to being told their allergies are a problem that they are genuinely surprised and happy when people are able and willing to accommodate them, even when accommodating them is not that difficult. If you don’t have allergies but you have friends that do just accommodate for them and don’t make a big deal out of it because people don’t deserve to feel like an inconvenience because of dietary restrictions they have no control over

(via the-great-spirit-of-hoole)

catchymemes:

Pontoon road in China that floats on and follows the river.

anneemay:

(via gingerethereal)

slightly-ethereal:

quasi-normalcy:

quasi-normalcy:

Healthy relationships are clearly better in real-life but fucked-up ones are way more dramatically interesting in fiction. In much the same way–indeed, in exactly the same way–that feudal monarchy is a hell of a lot of fun in fantasy and historical fiction novels, but complete shit to actually live under.

Feudal monarchy is so hilarious because it’s just like: “What if we based our entire sociopolitical structure on fucked-up family dynamics?”

(via gingerethereal)

catchymemes: