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sherlock holmes deduces you are trans before you've figured it out yourself and refers to you with those pronouns and then when you look confused is like "ah...had you not arrived at that conclusion yet?" and wafts away in his dressing gown to smoke seventeen pipes, leaving you in a gender crisis

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“In a 1994 Harvard study that examined people who had radically changed their lives, for instance, researchers found that some people had remade their habits after a personal tragedy, such as a divorce or a life-threatening illness. Others changed after they saw a friend go through something awful, the same way that Dungy’s players watched him struggle.

Just as frequently, however, there was no tragedy that preceded people’s transformations. Rather, they changed because they were embedded in social groups that made change easier. One woman said her entire life shifted when she signed up for a psychology class and met a wonderful group. “It opened a Pandora’s box,” the woman told researchers. “I could not tolerate the status quo any longer. I had changed in my core.” Another man said that he found new friends among whom he could practice being gregarious. “When I do make the effort to overcome my shyness, I feel that it is not really me acting, that it’s someone else,” he said. But by practicing with his new group, it stopped feeling like acting. He started to believe he wasn’t shy, and then, eventually, he wasn’t anymore. When people join groups where change seems possible, the potential for that change to occur becomes more real. For most people who overhaul their lives, there are no seminal moments or life-altering disasters. There are simply communities⏤sometimes of just one other person⏤who make change believable.

One woman told researchers her life transformed after a day spent cleaning toilets⏤and after weeks of discussing with the rest of the cleaning crew whether she should leave her husband.

“Change occurs among other people,” one of the psychologists involved in the study, Todd Heatherton, told me. “It seems real when we can see it in other people’s eyes.”

The precise mechanisms of belief are little understood. No one is certain why a group encountered in a psychology class can convince a woman that everything is different, or why Dungy’s team came together after their coach’s son passed away. Plenty of people talk to friends about unhappy marriages and never leave their spouse; lots of teams watch their coaches experience adversity and never gel. 

But we do know that for habits to permanently change, people must believe that change is feasible. The same process that makes AA so effective⏤the power of a group to teach individuals how to believe⏤happens whenever people come together to help one another change. Belief is easier when it occurs within a community.”

⏤ The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg

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i honestly cant believe the normal amount of wanting to be another gender is zero. like arent you sick of yours yet lol

#i would say a couple times a year #but i like my gender

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hey i know i asked for constructive criticism but what i actually wanted was for you to tell me i'm extremely talented. and also pretty. sorry if that was unclear

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no more blorbo questions what was the first music album that changed you fundamentally

#a messenger by colton dixon #it did not change me for the better #most recently the rise and fall of a midwest princess by chappel roan #look how far ive come :)

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nothing in the world makes me more evil than just being kind of annoyed

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It puzzles me when people cite LOTR as the standard of “simple” or “predictable” or “black and white” fantasy. Because in my copy, the hero fails. Frodo chooses the Ring, and it’s only Gollum’s own desperation for it that inadvertently saves the day. The fate of the world, this whole blood-soaked war, all the millennia-old machinations of elves and gods, comes down to two addicts squabbling over their Precious, and that is precisely and powerfully Tolkien’s point. 

And then the hero goes home, and finds home a smoking desolation, his neighbors turned on one another, that secondary villain no one finished off having destroyed Frodo’s last oasis not even out of evil so much as spite, and then that villain dies pointlessly, and then his killer dies pointlessly. The hero is left not with a cathartic homecoming, the story come full circle in another party; he is left to pick up the pieces of what was and what shall never be again. 

And it’s not enough. The hero cannot heal, and so departs for the fabled western shores in what remains a blunt and bracing metaphor for death (especially given his aged companions). When Sam tells his family, “Well, I’m back” at the very end, it is an earned triumph, but the very fact that someone making it back qualifies as a triumph tells you what kind of story this is: one that is too honest to allow its characters to claim a clean victory over entropy, let alone evil. 

“I can’t recall the taste of food, nor the sound of water, nor the touch of grass. I’m naked in the dark. There’s nothing–no veil between me and the wheel of fire. I can see him with my waking eyes.”

So where’s this silly shallow hippie fever-dream I’ve heard so much about? It sounds like a much lesser story than the one that actually exists.

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If you have Spotify reblog this and tag what your number one song on your “on repeat” playlist is.

#too sweet #yeah that tracks

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#oh to be this crab

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the bond between a girl and her room is stronger than the gravitational force of the earth

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Feeling an incredibly weird specific nostalgia but what piece of media defined 2020 for you (as in you spent that year with it) mine is mtv's catfish

#got

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so I got into grad school today with my shitty 2.8 gpa and the moral of the story is reblog those good luck posts for the love of god

#not usually a fan of these #but i could really use a little luck rn

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since mrs, ms, and mr are all descended from the latin word magister, i propose the gender neutral version should be mg, short for "mage"

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As a wheelchair user I'm trying to reframe my language for "being in the way."

"I'm in the way," "I can't fit," and "I can't go there," is becoming "there's not enough space," "the walkway is too narrow," and "that place isn't accessible."

It's a small change, but to me it feels as if I'm redirecting blame from myself to the people that made these places inaccessible in the first place. I don't want people to just think that they're helping me, I want them to think that they're making up for someone else's wrongdoing. I want them to remember every time I've needed help as something someone else caused.

#yes! #ive found this SUPER helpful in my own acceptance of my weight/size #the ride doesn’t fit me #the clothes don't fit me #the cheap plastic chair isn't strong enough for me #not the other way around #it's really had a profound impact on the way i view myself and the world

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Draco’s chocolate frog card

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Harry’s chocolate frog card