lesson to be taken from the second half of 2025 i think is just. falling flat on my ass and dropping the ball and falling short of my goals in a major way is actually recoverable as long as i don't make an identity out of it
#like God do i have a lot to glean from the past 6 months and things to work on integrating into myself and improving on bc i cannnnot go on#like this and it is impacting my life and relationships in a big way#and also i can only do that if i refuse to lead with fear and shame cuz. those are never actually going to take me where i need to go
i dropped out of middle school because i was too autistic to cope and because i became extremely fixated on turning in perfect papers that i actually stood by* but had zero capacity to actually write up to my own standards especially while um being physically and psychologically abused and kicked back and forth across the continent repeatedly in a game of hot potato between two parents who really did not want to deal with me SO. it feels good to have struck out and given college a shot and to have done as well as i did EVEN THOUGH i ultimately like. stopped showing up halfway through the quarter. and somehow my professor has enough faith in me to allow me to finish all my work months after the quarter ended and to not knock off any credits for my many absences bc he's just like bro you rock and you care so much about the material and you clearly have been going through it. and i feel very lucky
#*believe it or not i used to think i would be a writer professionally one day and i was writing like. entire novel length stories and stuff#by the time i was 8. but i have avoided writing like the plague since i was about 15 and have a thousand hangups about even just like#how i word a tumblr post#let alone an email or anything of real substance#so this is big for me...
oh god sweet relief
#basically i had to drop out of school last quarter (my first quarter of college... ever)#but my professor offered to let me finish my assignments This quarter at full credit#and we finally spoke just now for like 40 mins straight after i avoided him for a solid month bc i've been so freaked out and overwhelmed#and it was great. lowkey i am definitely one of his favorite students despite my utter insanity and absences so that's nice for my ego. Lol#i am sooooooo sooooooo so relieved...
Snowdrops - Maarten 't Hart , 1992.
Dutch , b. 1950 -
Oil on panel , 19 x 16 cm.
#snowdrops have been such a symbol of like. renewal and resilience to me for ever and ever some of my earliest memories of early spring were#finding them poking out of the snow#followed by the skunk cabbage horns poking out of the frozen creeks#they're the most precious beautiful flower in the world to me#maybe i'll finally do that snowdrop tat on myself this spring. we'll see
Reblogged discworldwitches
the author’s poorly disguised unchallenged ideas about how the world works, what is natural, what should go without saying
Reblogged lew-basnight
The Richmond Item, Indiana, August 19, 1922
Reblogged kollapstradixionales
Hundreds of people detained at the Alligator Alcatraz immigration processing center west of Miami, Florida, appear to have vanished. They have disappeared from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) online database, and their lawyers and families have been unable to locate them, according to immigrant advocacy groups.
“When searching for people detained there, the ICE locator now says, ‘Call the Florida Department of Corrections for details,’” says Luis Sorto of Sanctuary of the South, a network that offers legal services and participated in a lawsuit against the government over restrictions on access to lawyers for detainees at the infamous immigration jail.
All of the plaintiffs who were being held at the center were transferred to another location after a new lawsuit was filed in August challenging Florida’s authority to detain people there, Sorto added. That lawsuit also noted that the detainees did not appear in ICE’s tracking system.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which filed the lawsuit, described Alligator Alcatraz as a “black hole,” noting that some people were “missing,” effectively “off the radar” of the immigration system, and “their lawyers and families often don’t know where they are or how to contact them.”
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On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs by Renée Nicole Macklin
Renée Nicole Macklin was a poet, writer, wife, and mother of three. She was killed on January 7, 2026, in Minneapolis after being shot by an ICE agent.
Born and raised in Colorado, Renée described herself on social media simply as a poet and writer and wife and mom. She studied creative writing at Old Dominion University and, in 2020, received the Academy of American Poets University & College Poetry Prize recognition that helped her work reach readers beyond her immediate community.
Those who knew her remember Renée as compassionate, loving, and deeply creative. She cared fiercely for her children, her partners, and the people around her. Her mother described her as “one of the kindest people I’ve ever known,” and loved ones say her life was shaped by caregiving, curiosity, and art.
Reblogged sewer-swan
“There is a story my mother told me throughout my childhood. Whether I wanted to hear it or not. It was about what had happened to her when she was a little girl, and I listened with attentiveness and curiosity. But it was never edited for the audience of a child. It was brutal, and when I got older I realized she wasn’t telling it to me, she was telling it because she had to. It served one purpose. The listener should feel bad for her. It was repeated again and again, and still to this day she tells it because it is the excuse for her behavior and the explanation for why she is who she is. It is the story of her victimhood. The story of her abandonment. The story of her life.”
—
An Abbreviated Life: A Memoir
Ariel Leve
Reblogged birdlibrary
A pair of coyotes (Canis latrans) at Parker River National Wildlife Refuge, Massachusetts.
Reblogged rabbit-year
kokoona-deactivated20160520
Images from We Are Still Here, a Photographic Account of the American Indian Movement
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[“Sometimes, the abuse is so subtle that we fail to notice it. Sarcasm, ridicule, teasing, “kidding,” or continual criticism, for instance, starts to feel less like abuse and more like a part of the background noise. Sometimes one partner does not meet the other’s needs, but since he also does not do anything major to upset the apple cart, Adam and Eve go on in the relationship without thinking of options such as change or separation: He will never be so bad that you will leave him but never so good that he will satisfy you. In either case, we may fool ourselves into hoping for change rather than working for it.
If hope doesn’t include a plan for change, it is actually hopelessness and avoidance of change. What we do not change, we choose. Is this the message we get from the partner of our distress: “Stay with me and I won’t give you what you want,” or “Come back and I still won’t give you what you want”? We cannot be fooled forever. One day we allow ourselves to know and then take action.
Emily Dickinson, in her poem “’Tis not that dying hurts us so,” compares two kinds of birds in Massachusetts, those that stay the winter and those that migrate to warmer climes. She then says: “We are the birds that stay.” To be “the birds that stay” in wintry New England when wisdom would send us to Mexico is a cruel fate to impose upon ourselves. We can use it as a metaphor for a relationship in which we stay with someone who does not nurture us: we need a loaf and beg for a crumb from someone who’s afraid to give a loaf and hardly willing to give a crumb. To live in Massachusetts winter after winter and then say, “enough of this,” and move to California takes some pluck and then yields the warmth we hoped for. However, we may be conditioned to accept that our lives are not supposed to be comfortable. Likewise, we may believe that relationships will never work for us, that we are meant to be unhappy and unfulfilled. With that perspective, we may not be able to muster an “enough of this” when we find ourselves in pain. Instead we may ask ourselves, “Why bother?”
To live with abuse is dangerous because it can make our wish to suffer equal in strength to our will to be safe. We think, “Nothing I can do will stop him from hurting me,” or “Nothing I can do will make her love me.” A frightening conclusion can result: “Nothing matters, and I don’t care.” Such deep despair can take the form of poor self-esteem, disease, distortion of the body by overeating, self-abuse, addiction, risky jobs or hobbies, accident-proneness, anorexia, the belief that we can’t improve our lives, and so on. These all boil down to a wish to die. We might even seek relationships that guarantee protection against having to look at or process our issues. A partner may be appealing to us precisely because he implicitly promises that we will never have to confront, process, and resolve any issue very deeply, never have to change an intimacy-defeating style. We may think, “He is superficial and just as scared to confront things as I am, so I am safe here.” In such relationships we forge a tacit bargain to be what Emily Dickinson’s poem calls “Shiverers round Farmers’ doors” awaiting a “reluctant Crumb.”]
david richo, from how to be an adult in relationships: the five keys to mindful loving, 2002
