#and I am that person

[cookinguptales]

Do me a favor, okay? Next time you have a chance, close your eyes for a minute and take a deep breath and imagine someone loving you.

Imagine someone who gets excited just thinking about you. Imagine someone who loves the things you say and do and who genuinely enjoys spending time with you. Imagine someone who feels lucky every moment they get to be around you.

It can be a real person or someone you just made up. You can imagine them praising you or laughing with you or touching you or whatever love means to you. It can be romantic or otherwise. Take your pick.

And if you had a hard time doing it?

Do it again. And again. And again.

I read once that it’s important for us to visualize being loved. That your brain needs to be trained like a muscle, and like a muscle, it can become weak from disuse. Your brain can only do the things that you practice doing, and if you never, ever visualize someone loving you, it becomes difficult to even imagine someone loving you. You get stuck in a rut. And once it’s impossible to imagine someone loving you, it becomes impossible to believe you will ever be loved.

I think… sometimes it can become easy to stop believing that we’re worthy of love. And I think sometimes we have this fantasy of someone making us believe that we’re worthy of it again. Or that somehow we’ll just — earn it, one day. Being worthy of love and desire, respect and affection.

But I think the truth is that we can only start believing that we’re worthy of love if we’re capable of imagining it. And it becomes much, much easier to imagine it if you practice doing so.

It may feel awkward at first. Embarrassing. Silly. Maybe even painful. But think about it like this, maybe: your first day in a dance class, you’ll fall. You’ll look ridiculous. It’ll feel like your body will never be able to do this fluidly. But by the end of the class, you’ll be able to move in a whole new way. Maybe not perfectly, but… better, y’know?

Learn to waltz with your own mind, and try not to cringe too hard at your first awkward movements. Start small and work your way up if you have to. Someone liking you, then someone liking your conversations, then someone liking your presence, then someone purposefully seeking you out. Someone putting time aside for you. Someone thinking about you when you’re not there. Someone being with you because there’s nowhere they’d rather be.

It may feel self-indulgent, but… I mean, we all deserve to be indulged sometimes. And we all deserve to feel worthy of love.

So… indulge yourself. Take a moment and have a silly little fantasy. Get into the habit of imagining love, and imagining it for the you that exists right now, not the you that you wish you were.

Learn to speak the language of love as it applies to you, even if you think that it doesn’t, and one day you’ll realize how to use those syllables to say your own name.

It’ll come one day. In the meantime, let’s learn to dance together, okay?

#personally... #I mean I am disabled and I am not conventionally attractive #I have PTSD now from the kind of childhood abuse that makes you feel... broken I guess #so I have spent an awful lot of my life finding it difficult to imagine truly being loved #when there are so many 'easier' choices in this world it is hard to imagine someone picking me #so believe me when I say I know it's hard #but I also know that I closed myself off to love once I stopped being able to imagine people doing it #I lost the vocabulary for people loving me so when people did it I could no longer describe it #I didn't notice or worse - it stressed me out #but... I have started doing this visualization exercise and it does help #sometimes I have a spark of... well yes this person in this fantasy does deserve to be loved #and I am that person #so there's a spark of hope to it #hope can be good and hope can be bad but... I guess it's necessary too isn't it? #so let's do our best to make our brains stfu when they're being mean and instead focus on self-love

[etakeh]

#humans #population #Robert Evans #I am not a ZPG person necessarily #but I do like the idea of taking care of the people we have before we worry about adding more #but rich people have other priorities #Elon musk

[lazylittledragon]

can't believe we're all adults being forced into the club penguin level of censorship in 2024

#ramble #if you say unalive in front of me i will personally kill you with my hands #you just can't muffle and censor and hold someone's hand through some things #some things are horrible. and they should be spoken aloud and they should upset you. because they are horrible #the second we started kidzbopifying the world was the end of taking anything seriously i think #i'm not even joking i've spoken to people older than me who won't even say the world sex #this isn't the playground you're not going to get in trouble just let us say the word!!!!!! #how am i supposed to listen to you when you won't even say the thing you're supposed to be talking about #yes this is the fault of the platforms with their censorship rules but the fact that we all just go along with it like it's not dystopian #you do know it doesn't stop with cursing right. people are already having to censor queer terms because they get flagged as inappropriate

[trans-cuchulainn]

i do think there is a degree to which certain kinds of Instagram activists have convinced themselves that traumatising themselves in solidarity is a useful form of activism. "I'm having nightmares and crying so much I want to be sick because of all these videos of dying children but I can't look away while people are getting hurt" I mean don't you think you'd be able to help more if you weren't having nightmares and crying all the time?? don't you think this is a one-way trip to burnout? don't you think maybe increasing the amount of trauma going around is counterproductive? I dunno bro there's something to be said for bearing witness but there comes a point where you gotta look hard at yourself and go "am I helping, or am I just making myself suffer so I don't feel guilty for not suffering while somebody else is experiencing bad shit"

#and they try to drag other people down with them #BUDDY I AM NOT USEFUL IF I'M HAVING A PANIC ATTACK #vicarious trauma is not like. a useful form of solidarity. in my opinion #personal

[porcelain-rob0t]

on identity, healing the inner child, fursonas, and cringe culture

#art #digital art #my art #fursona #personal comic #furry #wolf #i had a werewolf phase when i was 8. i would howl at the moon and i would grow my nails out and chew them into claws #comic #webcomic #web comic #comics #comic artist #indie comic #this will probably be included in a zine later #cringe culture is dead #i am cringe but i am free

[caffeinatedopossum]

Me when I remember something I said ages ago that was wrong or my values no longer align with

#my path of self improvement has been less self righteous and personally gainful #and more just. a lot of embarrassment and pain #like i wouldnt change the path i took to get where i am now but i wouldve chosen to travel that path sooner because omg #nothing hits me like the fear that future me will feel the same way about right now me that right now me feels about past tense me

[rat-presenting]

You ever just wake up from an incredibly graphic and realistic nightmare that was a pure psychological horror based on your own personal phobias and trauma and just roll over like “aw shit I got too hot last night I guess.” And then make toast like you didn’t just experience the nine circles of hell before 9 am

#textpost #I am not a morning person I never have been my sleep schedule is 11 pm to 11 am and. man #usually I wake up somewhere in there and fall back asleep whicu is when the nightmares start #it’s been awhile since I had one of those nightmares too I was starting to think I’d grown out of that but. no

[nkogneatho]

#the last person in my gallery is hanma #dawg i am fucked #pasi.txt #my polls

[william-snekspeare]

This is so real

#unbeweevable 😔 #I want to be totally clear I am NOT making fun of this person I think they’re totally right #not snakes #reddit #weevils #bugs #insects

[professor-pants]

Genre of character: submissive like a guard dog is submissive

#very capable of taking care of themselves very eager to take care of someone else #would kill a man for even slightly offending their partner #does what they're told #am i on to anything here? #these people come to mind: #crowley #bucky barnes #izzy hands #the doctor #mostly when it comes to clara oswald #ronan lynch #pearl #from steven universe #romeo #except his person is mercutio not juliet #riza hawkeye

[give-soup-please]

raise a glass to the posts you love that end up deleted. to the fanart and fanfics you lose track of and can't locate. to the blogs you used to look through that ended up unexpectedly disappearing. to the things you didn't archive because you always assumed they'd be there.

#personal #i am having feelings about not being able to find everything i set out to find #or in my case- rediscover #i'm locating and reblogging a few GO posts that might otherwise be lost to time and other forces

[feluka]

oh god shut up. you didn't even know the damn kid.

"The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe, and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality." — James Baldwin

#i am honestly not even sure who you're referring to #the most recent child deaths i've reblogged are #nex benedict (the nonbinary kid murdered at school) and hind rajab #if you can't see why either of these should shatter your heart without personally knowing them #then you're entirely beyond any hope #asks #edit: this was about hind.

[phantomrose96]

I think we should have a turn of phrase for "I'm not in the right, but I AM annoyed with this situation, so I just need to go bitch to a friend about this before I suck it up and go do the right thing" because more and more I'm finding this is a critical element of functional adulthood.

#the person who's re-emailed me asking for help with something: yes I should get back to you. yes I will get back to you #but in the meantime I will look at the email like 'I am busy right now! I have deadlines! do not bother me about this unrelated thing!' #and like in 15 minutes when I'm ready to be an adult again I'll get back to them

[megafaunatic]

gay people on the bus

#featuring zoë with whom i am a gay person on the bus #my art

[theharlotofferelden]

Genuinely loved the experience of being at camp for the first time and seeing all the companions with their tits out like they're all gonna go clubbin or some shit

Then there’s Gale

Who's just. So utterly swagless that his clothes smell like dusty old books. My man doesn't give a fuck about the drip he's getting his ass ready for bed

#baldur's gate 3 #bg3 #baldur's gate iii #gale dekarios #bg3 gale #gale of waterdeep #baldur's gate gale #game: baldur's gate 3 #c: gale #i am once again shitposting about gale #he's just a guy #just a silly lil guy #personal: my posts #dragon age #personal: shitpost #post so good it was stolen by a popular blogger #pinning this post until i make a new art piece #i made that work of eufemia back in 2021 it's been like 3 years lmao

[oliviawebsite]

(after misunderstanding what someone said and embarrassing myself) oh great now they hate me and want to kill me with rocks

#realizing im awful at comprehending speech and intention from other people #am i autistic or just a bad person who knows