you know, that luceno quote from labyrinth of evil gets posted all the time, but my favorite part is the bit that usually gets cut off.
“And you, Master. What does your heart tell you you’re meant for?”
“Infinite sadness,” Obi-Wan said, even while smiling.
even
while
smiling.
[aka: don’t ever come talk to me about obi-wan if you’re not ready to talk about hope and faith, because that is his essential core; hope on the days when he can look up and still see Light, and faith for the days when he can’t. faith carries him across the clouded patches, to starry skies and potential, possibility – dizzying promises of rebirth. he is able to smile, even in his grief, because he accepts this for what it is, that the new world will not be for him, does not need to be for him – it is enough that the new world will be.
force knows none of them were created for a life of ease. to be bereft of all his mortal loves is a burden, maybe, but to be still in the Light – that is enough, for a jedi.]
something that I feel a lot of neurotypicals don’t understand is that mental illness isn’t logical. “there’s no reason to be stressed, why are you anxious?” I don’t know. “why are you sad if you had a good day?” I don’t know. “why are you so irritable today?” I don’t know. “what are you feeling?” I DON’T KNOW.
Sometimes I stare at the computer screen when the words don’t want to come and I think, “Fuck, who am I kidding? This is terrible writing, and this story is shit, and no one cares, anyway.“ And I close the window and go do something else.
But every now and then I get an amazing, heartfelt, beautiful comment from someone who loved something I wrote, and it reminds me that, at least for that one person, I did write something worthwhile. And so I open the window again and I write one sentence, and then another, and then I start to find my way again.
So on behalf of all fanfic writers everywhere, I want to say thank you, thank you so much, to all of the readers who take the time to leave a comment and tell us that something we wrote mattered to you, that it brightened your day or made you laugh or cry or get horny or whatever.
Please don’t think we’re ever bothered by your comment, or that we don’t want to hear it, or that what you have to say isn’t important enough. It means so, so much. And on some days, it’s what keeps us going.
I have no idea how this post got so many notes, but I’m really happy about it!
Can I just say, uh, I’m pretty sure noticing you’re asexual is harder than noticing you’re gay, straight, pan or otherwise. Like, I just read someone’s desciption of hitting puberty and, like, there’s nothing like that. There’s no sudden ‘boob’ moment, no sudden ‘fuck, I’d fuck that’ moment, not sudden anything. You just, like, plod on through life as usual going ‘oooh, that’s pretty, I’d like that hair’ or ‘oooooh, they’re nice, I’d like to be close to them’ but there’s no like, ‘oh, someone would want to fuck that but I don’t’, you know? You just- you don’t notice, you don’t realise everyone else has ‘had a moment’ but you haven’t, you just- keep going as you always have.
And then, much much later, you start to wonder why people are getting so caught up in drama for romance or sex, like, why bother? It’s not worth it, they’re not worth it, why are you doing stupid things for something that’s so- and then you wonder if there’s something wrong with you, start mentally over compensating. Like ‘uh, okay, um, who should I date? Who can I stand to date? Who could I stand to fuck?’ like- it’s not, it’s not something you want, but you want to fit in, to be normal.
Sometimes you don’t even know that you’re doing it.
Sometimes you don’t even know asexual’s a thing.
I dunno, I guess, I just feel like, uh, people should understand more?
idk sorry thank you for listening to me
Thank you for perfectly describing it.
It’s way more difficult to notice the absence of something, especially when you’ve never had it in the first place??
It’s like being born without a nose and then being expected to understand what things smell like because everyone ELSE has a nose.
Honestly I think one of the things that I find so heartening about Les Mis is the idea that you can be useful to The Cause even if your skillset is not ostensibly one that lends itself to fighting. Often when you have a ragtag team they all have complementary useful skills, whereas Les Mis encourages me to believe that you can be a helpful political activist even if you:
– would really like to do everything gradually and peacefully and are not sure if this is even the right way to be fighting this fight but can’t bear to sit around and do nothing
– are a stammering gentle willothewisp who keeps pot plants and can’t always talk to people
– have to fit your activism around actually working for a living, unlike seemingly everyone else
– are embarrassingly posh and give people the impression you just want to fuck around and have fun
– have poor impulse control and can’t even make a budget
– just have the worst luck in the world and can barely manage your own life and would be homeless if it weren’t for your friends
– are extremely anxious and frequently distracted by your own health concerns
– are a colossal fuckup and human disaster whose mental health problems have led them to let people down again and again
– are the Pontmercy friend, even, and can’t help Pontmercying around and embarrassing everyone
Not everyone has to be Enjolras. You just have to turn up and do your actual best. That’s a really good message to internalise. I think it’s actually helping me to think about doing more activisty stuff, even though I almost never feel like The Best Person for the job.
This weekend I was told a story which, although I’m kind of ashamed to admit it, because holy shit is it ever obvious, is kind of blowing my mind.
A friend of a friend won a free consultation with Clinton Kelly of What Not To Wear, and she was very excited, because she has a plus-size body, and wanted some tips on how to make the most of her wardrobe in a fashion culture which deliberately puts her body at a disadvantage.
Her first question for him was this: how do celebrities make a plain white t-shirt and a pair of weekend jeans look chic? She always assumed it was because so many celebrities have, by nature or by design, very slender frames, and because they can afford very expensive clothing. But when she watched What Not To Wear, she noticed that women of all sizes ended up in cute clothes that really fit their bodies and looked great. She had tried to apply some guidelines from the show into her own wardrobe, but with only mixed success. So – what gives?
His answer was that everything you will ever see on a celebrity’s body, including their outfits when they’re out and about and they just get caught by a paparazzo, has been tailored, and the same goes for everything on What Not To Wear. Jeans, blazers, dresses – everything right down to plain t-shirts and camisoles. He pointed out that historically, up until the last few generations, the vast majority of people either made their own clothing or had their clothing made by tailors and seamstresses. You had your clothing made to accommodate the measurements of your individual body, and then you moved the fuck on. Nothing on the show or in People magazine is off the rack and unaltered. He said that what they do is ignore the actual size numbers on the tags, find something that fits an individual’s widest place, and then have it completely altered to fit. That’s how celebrities have jeans that magically fit them all over, and the rest of us chumps can’t ever find a pair that doesn’t gape here or ride up or slouch down or have about four yards of extra fabric here and there.
I knew that having dresses and blazers altered was probably something they were doing, but to me, having alterations done generally means having my jeans hemmed and then simply living with the fact that I will always be adjusting my clothing while I’m wearing it because I have curves from here to ya-ya, some things don’t fit right, and the world is just unfair that way. I didn’t think that having everything tailored was something that people did.
It’s so obvious, I can’t believe I didn’t know this. But no one ever told me. I was told about bikini season and dieting and targeting your “problem areas” and avoiding horizontal stripes. No one told me that Jennifer Aniston is out there wearing a bigger size of Ralph Lauren t-shirt and having it altered to fit her.
I sat there after I was told this story, and I really thought about how hard I have worked not to care about the number or the letter on the tag of my clothes, how hard I have tried to just love my body the way it is, and where I’ve succeeded and failed. I thought about all the times I’ve stood in a fitting room and stared up at the lights and bit my lip so hard it bled, just to keep myself from crying about how nothing fits the way it’s supposed to. No one told me that it wasn’t supposed to. I guess I just didn’t know. I was too busy thinking that I was the one that didn’t fit.
I thought about that, and about all the other girls and women out there whose proportions are “wrong,” who can’t find a good pair of work trousers, who can’t fill a sweater, who feel excluded and freakish and sad and frustrated because they have to go up a size, when really the size doesn’t mean anything and it never, ever did, and this is just another bullshit thing thrown in your path to make you feel shitty about yourself.
I thought about all of that, and then I thought that in elementary school, there should be a class for girls where they sit you down and tell you this stuff before you waste years of your life feeling like someone put you together wrong.
So, I have to take that and sit with it for a while. But in the meantime, I thought perhaps I should post this, because maybe my friend, her friend, and I are the only clueless people who did not realise this, but maybe we’re not. Maybe some of you have tried to embrace the arbitrary size you are, but still couldn’t find a cute pair of jeans, and didn’t know why.
This post is one of those things that I will reblog every time it appears on my dash. This is so important, and no one ever tells you about it.
I almost didn’t read this but then I did and I’m really glad that I did.
Reminder
that it’s ok if you don’t know exactly what kind of attraction you’re
feeling. I’ve noticed within the ace and aro communities we like to
split attraction up into neat categories of
aesthetic/sexual/romantic/sensual/qslurplatonic/etc. But feelings are
WEIRD and nebulous and fluid and sometimes impossible to define clearly.
And that’s ok.
eirenical17 