Tag: this is important

honourablebravery:

Pictured: Expectation VS Reality. Both photos taken moments apart from each other.

So, this munday I want to do something different. I want to shead some light on a very ignored portion of the RP community.

Chronically Ill RP’ers.

Because folks. I am finding that while not for me PERSONALLY(at the moment, I have had issues in the past with this) there is a sort of lack of understanding and sometimes sympathy and support when it comes to us. And I know damned well that there are many many many of us out there. Even as I type this up, I am heavily medicated for a raging migraine and honestly, will probably go back to bed after posting this. But SOMETHING needs to be said. And I am going to say it.

RP IS A HOBBY.

It is many things, but it is mainly a hobby. It serves as a fun thing for people to do and engage in when the real world is an absolute dumpster fire. It is a chance to have FUN. Which when you are chronically ill and house-bound, can be a remarkably hard thing to accomplish. It is a chance to exercise one’s creativity, ones passion for writing and world building. It is a chance to do something besides focus on how incredibly sick we are. And how awful life is as a result.

RP IS THEREFORE NOT A JOB

Nobody ‘OWES’ anybody anything. A chronically ill roleplayer is sick ALL THE TIME. In fact, lemme plug in a quick definition:

A chronic disease is one lasting 3 months or more, by the definition of the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics. Chronic diseases generally cannot be prevented by vaccines or cured by medication, nor do they just disappear

ALL.THE.TIME

There is NEVER a moment where the person with the chronic illness IS NOT SICK

Ergo, nine times out of ten we are sick, in severe pain and tired. And all we want from roleplay is a chance to escape that reality a little bit. A chance to have FUN. Which many of us are deprived from. (Hell, even today I failed to join my family on an outing, as I felt so damned sick) that’s a daily reality. The reality that when you’re chronically ill your body betrays you on a day-to-day basis.

“So Nate..we get that..what then is the point of this post?”

The point, folks is that every single day is a STRUGGLE. A struggle to be around, and alive. A struggle to be a part of the community. Therefore, the chronically ill roleplayer is going to take some extra time to do things, to reply to things, to be a constant presence. You aren’t going to get replies from the chronically ill roleplayer every single day. And sometimes we DO take a long time. Sometimes we do take a bit of time to just rest. Because sometimes yes, even thinking is too hard. Because most chronically ill people suffer from brain fog.

“But Nate, we don’t care that your slow!”

Why then do I constantly see people harping, becoming impatient? Becoming annoyed when things fail to happen at a pace they are comfortable with?

Nobody has forgotten about you, or your replies.

It’s just a case of it being HARD to be consistent.

“So why bother roleplaying then?”

See what I said above? Because we ENJOY it. But sometimes we are just tired, too tired. All the chronically ill roleplayer is asking for is compassion, and the knowledge that WE ARE TRYING OUR BEST.

“Nate, this soap box of yours is kind of grating don’t you think? Now you’re calling people out! We are compassionate and patient!”

And that is GOOD, but in the community I am starting to see a serious lack of understanding in that regard. I myself recently left a situation where that lack of understanding was a huge deal.

The point of all this is that we are TRYING. When you see a chronically ill roleplayer, you are seeing them as the picture on the left, in a good day, in a good spot. You don’t SEE them as the picture on the right because it is rare for us to show ourselves in those moments. Because we don’t want to be a burden and draw attention to ourselves.

TL;DR: Just please, folks. Keep the chronically ill part of the community in mind. A little compassion and understanding goes a LONG way.

… women make gender visible, but most men do not know they are gendered beings. Courses on gender are still populated mostly by women. Most men don’t see that gender is as central to their lives as it is to women’s. The privilege of privilege is that its terms are rendered invisible. It’s a luxury not to have to think about race, class, or gender. Only those marginalised by some category understand how powerful that category is when deployed against them.

Michael Kimmel, A Black Woman Took My Job  (via kuanios)

skeleweeb:

moody-mango:

homelandsexual:

hellyeahthomassanders:

thatsthat24:

New YouTube Video!! In this video, Lilly Singh and I discuss something I struggle with each day, and I’m sure many of you do too!! I hope the tips we go over can also help you when you need to take on anxiety in your every day life!! 

THIS IS SO IMPORTANT!!!!

i ship anxiety and prince

Okay, I do in fact love this video.

boiiii bless 

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

This advice on how to deal with “racist mouthy twats” has gone viral because it’s good advice

bethanyactually:

amemait:

twodefenestrate:

Good advice on what to do when you find yourself near a racist mouthy twat who is spouting out their crap at some unfortunate person.

NEVER engage the perpetrator. He (and it is usually he) is looking for confrontation. Instead speak to the person he is abusing. Say hello. Introduce yourself. Shake his or her hand. And just stand with them. Keep talking. About anything. Weather. Bus schedules. Football. This kind of bullying never works against a group of people having a conversation. Usually a single person travelling or a mom with a kid or maximum, two women are targeted.

Form a group of people with and around them if you can. Don’t tell them they are not alone. Just don’t let them be alone. I speak from experience. Once, I encountered a young girl wearing a hijab being abused as a terrorist by a drunk man on a train. I just went and sat beside her and started a conversation with her. After a while, the dude lost interest. I had a lovely chat with a young student from Qatar. She wanted to study literature while her dad was only prepared to pay for engineering or commerce as he wanted her to join the family business. It helped her feel safe and it expanded my horizons.

This is known in behavioral psychology as “non-complimentary behavior”; by not fueling the aggression of another person and you can flip the whole script of all their expectations, and without any footholds for their aggression (like direct provocation and confrontation/conflict) to launch into further tirades against, the aggressor can’t continue their angry scene-building. The more people who participate in script-flipping, the more successful it gets, as in this post you see with the advice to form a protective group between the bigot and their target for that very purpose.

There’s an NPR podcast called Invisibilia which goes into detail about how it works and what sort of people rely on it everyday professionally and for survival alike, in their Flipping the Script episode.

Ooohhhh

In light of the many posts I’ve already seen about people being attacked with racial and xenophobic slurs in our (ugh) president-elect’s name, it seems like a good time to reblog this post. 

If you see someone being abused or attacked, and you feel you can SAFELY do so, ignore the perpetrator and speak to the person they’re abusing. Just go stand by them, say hello, tell them you like their shirt, ask what they have planned for the day, anything to let them know they’re not alone. Even better if you can get other people to do this with you. 

Remember: talk to the person being abused; do NOT engage the bully. And stay safe, everyone. ❤

This advice on how to deal with “racist mouthy twats” has gone viral because it’s good advice

naamahdarling:

jeffreymarsh:

take care of you while you fight back💛💛💛

Transcript:

What are we going to do?

There are a couple of things I want to tell you about today, and give you some encouragement with.

This is not the end.  This is a beginning.  And we’ve been fighting for a long time.  We’ll keep doing that.  

But if you’re weary, if you’re sad, take time for you.  Take time to be weary. Take time to feel whatever you feel.

So my main point today is that self-care is not different than world care.

A lot of people get angry right away and wanna fight right away, and that’s good, we need those people.  Some people feel crushed under the weight of it all and they feel afraid and they feel sad and maybe you feel all of those things.  But allowing yourself to feel does not detract from changing the world for the better.

Regardless of what happens next, you are allowed to feel whatever there is to feel! And feeling it does not take away from your activism or your ability to change things.  

Feeling what you feel actually is essential in being able to move on, motivate, and activate.  Give yourself space over these few days.  Give yourself time.  While you’re doing whatever you’re doing: volunteering or jumping in or making videos, posting things online … while you’re doing those things don’t shy away from how complicated your feelings are and how complicated your feelings are allowed to be.

Take very good care of yourself.

it-is-bugs:

giandujakiss:

skywalkingintheair:

It’s hard to remember these days, but just a few years ago, everybody loved Hillary Rodham Clinton. When she stepped down as US secretary of state in January 2013 after four years in office, her approval rating stood at what the Wall Street Journal described as an “eye-popping” 69%. That made her not only the most popular politician in the country, but the second-most popular secretary of state since 1948.

The 2012 “Texts from Hillary” meme, which featured a sunglasses-clad Clinton scrolling through her Blackberry aboard a military flight to Libya, had given rise to a flood of think pieces hailing her “badass cool.” The Washington Post wanted president Barack Obama to give vice president Joe Biden the boot andreplace him with Clinton. Taking stock of Clinton’s approval ratings, Nate Silver noted in a 2012 piece for the New York Times that she currently held “remarkably high numbers for a politician in an era when many public officials are distrusted or disliked.”

How times have changed. “The FBI And 67 Percent of Americans Distrust Hillary Clinton,” booms a recent headline in the Huffington Post. Clinton’s favorability ratings currently hoveraround 40.8%. Bob Woodward complains that “there is something unrelaxed about the way she is communicating.” “Hillary’s personality repels me,” Walker Bragman writes in Salon.

How can we reconcile the “unlikable” Democratic presidential candidate of today with the adored politician of recent history? It’s simple: Public opinion of Clinton has followed a fixed pattern throughout her career. Her public approval plummets whenever she applies for a new position. Then it soars when she gets the job. The wild difference between the way we talk about Clinton when she campaigns and the way we talk about her when she’s in office can’t be explained as ordinary political mud-slinging. Rather, the predictable swings of public opinion reveal Americans’ continued prejudice against women caught in the act of asking for power.

We beg Clinton to run, and then accuse her of feeling “entitled” to win. Several feminist writers have analyzed the Clinton yo-yo. Melissa McEwan sees a deliberate pattern of humiliation, which involves “building [Clinton] up and pressuring her to take on increasingly prominent public challenges, only to immediately turn on her and unleash breathtaking misogyny against her when she steps up to the plate.”

If you find this hypothesis unlikely, there’s Ann Friedman’s explanation: Clinton makes people uncomfortable by succeeding too visibly. Clinton is trapped in “the catch-22 of female ambition,” Friedman writes: “To succeed, she needs to be liked, but to be liked, she needs to temper her success.”

Yet it seems odd that even when Clinton ascends to ever-greater positions of power—from first lady to senator, from senator to secretary of state—we start liking her again once she’s landed the job. It’s not her success that seems to arouse ire, but the act of campaigning itself.

This issue is not specific to Clinton. As Slate writer Jamelle Bouie has pointed out on Twitter, even progressive demigod Elizabeth Warren was seen as “unlikable” when she ran for the Massachusetts senate seat. Local outlets published op-eds about how women were being “turned off” by Warren’s “know-it-all style”—a framing that’s indistinguishable from 2016 Clinton coverage. “I’m asking her to be more authentic,” a Democratic analyst for Boston radio station WBUR said of Warren. “I want her to just sound like a human being, not read the script that makes her sound like some angry, hectoring school marm.”

–Sady Doyle: America loves women like Hillary Clinton–as long as they’re not asking for a promotion

i think i need to reblog this at least 5 times a day

I’d been wondering about this.  

traumasuggestion:

i feel like i need an exorcism to cleanse myself of my mistakes. because i let you imprison me. because i opened the door and gave you the key. this blame should rest on your shoulders. i don’t want to carry it. it isn’t mine. it’s not fair. you show up my nightmares. you’re nothing more than a symptom of sickness i will always live with. been hiding from the ghosts for a long time and i am so tired of fighting. i am going to make friends with them instead.