#but I don’t like being cliquey.. as someone who constantly feels like an outsider I avoid that

[littlemisssunshineshair]

i don’t understand how people form friendships with other people, become really close to them, and then don’t know how to talk to them when they are going through a hard time. i understand that not everyone is comfortable with dealing with vulnerability but it is very painful and difficult to deal with when you are the one struggling. it also is painful when you show your shadow side to someone (because everyone has a shadow) and they judge you for it. i think that’s especially painful because i love people so unconditionally and i sadly discovered that my friends don’t love me in that way. i treat my friends like family and i have seen their flaws, their demons, their lies, and i still loved them despite all of it. i never judged them for it and i always encouraged them to be better. i always listened to their feelings with an open heart and mind when they had a problem, and they stab me in the back. for example, J going to K and L after i poured my heart out to him and made it into drama. i poured out my heart to K and L about Lucifer so many times only for them to go to his party.

I loved them despite all the horrible stuff they did to me. I forgave all the lies, the shittalking, the cliquey attitudes. I created an instagram community where people in our class could uplift and support each other by submitting their creative work. it was my idea and i shared it with them out of love. i wanted to collaborate and then they don’t put any effort in the community and as soon as i removed the account, they make another one. different name but with my idea. they never asked permission to use my idea and they never bothered to include me in it either. i gave them so much only for them to take from me. i loved them at their worst and they couldn’t bother to do the same for me. i gave and i gave and i gave, and barely received anything. no wonder i felt myself spiraling before i understood what the problem was.

negative energies and lack of reciprocation in any kind of relationship can really drain your energy and leave you feeling depleted and anxious. for most of this semester, i found myself feeling anxious or depressed for no reason. i didn’t normally feel like my happy self and i thought maybe it was just the stress of school getting to me. i was starting to have mental breakdowns and i just couldn’t understand what was wrong until everything came to a head and i went back to therapy. my body knew these people were toxic way before my mind did, and i realized that just how much i was ignoring and dealing with when i started living at home again. i was constantly around the negative energy and i no longer had any peace. i forgot what peace was until i took a breather from that group. i’m not saying that they are bad people, it’s just that they are not at a phase in their life where they can honestly look at themselves and see what they need to change, and that’s okay, they will grow in their own time, but i do not have to bear the brunt of most of it anymore. i guess i’m just moving on to somewhere else and letting go of what i thought our friendship was. for so long, i wanted to believe these people were my soul family, but you can’t force something to fit when it doesn’t. maybe this is for the best. maybe this is a lesson i need to learn, that i should be more discerning and not so trusting. i guess i just wear my heart outside of my body and i get emotionally attached to people quickly and in the past i have over shared when it comes to my personal life and that has gotten me in some trouble. not everyone can be trusted.

i love being friends with everyone. i love people, but trust is earned. not given, and i think i have given people my trust too quickly (in friendships at least) in the past. i love to give love to people and i wont stop being friendly and open to others, but i definitely could have better boundaries about who i let into my heart because a lot of people have mishandled it.

#journal

[letmetellyouaboutmyfeels]

Unpopular opinion: everyone around here seems really cliquey! Not here as in you, but fandoms in general? Only responding to their mutuals’ asks, only reading things their friends wrote. Idk, maybe it’s just the fandoms I’ve been in?

Oh honey, um, I think you misunderstood the post. It means you send me a flame emoji and I give an unpopular opinion about something. But, having said that, you are more than welcome to come into my inbox and talk about this! *hugs you*

I completely understand where you’re coming from. I’ve often felt like an outsider and like for some reason I couldn’t interact with people, or that people didn’t want to interact with me. And I have seen very cliquey behavior from people in various fandoms over the years, and it always angers me. Not for me personally, because I’m an introvert who doesn’t give a shit what 90% of other people think of her (shocking, I know), but because I’ve seen how it’s hurt other people, and because I honestly don’t understand how people can be so vapid and shallow. Like... I genuinely wonder how they function in the real world.

I’m sorry that you’ve felt lonely or on the outside. It’s really not fun. In my experience, forming friendships online takes more work than people expect. Bonds can form so quickly and deeply on here, that people forget it can take work, sometimes more work than an in person friendship because you have to remember to send texts, or messages, and things like that rather than at work or school where you automatically see that person every day.

In my experience, these things have helped:

1. Patience. Yeah, I know, it fucking sucks. But patience as you sort through the bad apples, patience as you reply to a person’s posts.

2. Proactiveness. Comment on all the fics you read. Reply to people’s posts. Send them asks. After a time, they’ll recognize your username. You can send a polite PM or two. Etc. But if you don’t reach out (even if it’s fucking terrifying I KNOW IT’S TERRIFYING I AM ALWAYS TERRIFIED TRUST ME) then no one can reach back.

3. Go slow. I’ve had some people online who got WAY too overwhelming and jumped WAY too quickly into messaging me constantly, including about really personal things, and I just felt bombarded. I’ve seen people make jokes to other people that aren’t appropriate yet (for example I routinely say “I’M GONNA FUCKING KILL YOU” to @captainofthefallen in response to a fic she’s texted me, but I can do this because she is my very close friend--I would never send that to someone I’m not close friends with).

Steps two and three, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, require step one! And sometimes, even with all that, the person isn’t responsive, which leads to:

4. Persistence. Don’t give up! That person doesn’t want to be your friend, it’s very heartbreaking and come here, dear nonny, let me hug you. I know the feeling. *pets your hair* But if you keep trying, you will find your tribe.

Because the truth is, everyone’s scared. Everyone is unsure. I think a lot of “cliquey” behavior isn’t from assholes. It’s from people being scared of letting new people in, or feeling overwhelmed, or some variation. I love seeing people interacting with their friends on tumblr--it fills me with warm fuzzies to see fandom friendships, to just see people loving each other so openly and enthusiastically.

So yes: there are definitely cliquey people on tumblr and in fandom. But there are people like that everywhere, and in my experience the good people outweigh the bad ones, so hopefully these tips I’ve given you will help? I really do wish you the best nonny. I’m sorry that you’re frustrated and you always have me to vent to. ❤️ 

#mads answers things #I take my big sister duties seriously #I hope this helps you nonny #and I hope it helped you to talk about this #feel free to PM me if you want to talk more #answering asks etc just gets very unwieldy haha

[loudlytransparenttrash]

The Truth About Some Of Feminism’s Most Popular Lies

I know a lot of young women are getting pumped up and becoming one with the whole feminism thing, and I get it, you want to be part of some cool sisterhood and feel empowered by believing there’s an embodiment of evil that you can unite and crush together. I get it. There are two problems here though, it’s not a sisterhood and your enemy doesn’t exist. 

Feminism does promote a cliquey, sisterhood mentality, that part is true but the moment you step out of line, come up with your own opinions or challenge preconceived ideas, you stop being a sister and become the enemy. They despise freedom. They believe women should be protected from most aspects of public life, especially speech as if women are so weak and fragile that they can’t deal with mere words and can’t face adversarial situations and challenging views without the protective arm of feminism around their shoulders. 

Instead of sending the empowering message of “a woman can overcome anything life throws at her”, they rather send the infantile message of “a woman can shut down and censor anything life throws at her”. Women should be encouraged to fight back against opposing views, to engage in political battles on the street and to win the argument, not just scream and insult your way into silencing someone who dares to argue with facts. 

Rather than assuming that all men and every aspect of society are inherently programmed to mistreat women, we need to believe that human interaction should be free from constraint. Believe in unequivocal and uncompromising freedom of speech, and the free exchange of ideas between people in order to reach a more progressive outcome. The only way to do this is through an uncompromising belief in freedom. Freedom is everything you are in the western world. You aren’t a victim and you sure as hell aren’t oppressed. 

I keep hearing these same misconceptions over and over again and as women we need to stop falling for it, we’re only making ourselves look dumb. Let’s start with the wage gap. As I’ve posted many times, if you want to be paid more, then start putting more thought into your college major. The subjects which young feminists are gravitating to in order to be seen as “good, enlightened, educated feminists” only exist to attract those who are too lazy to study a real subject, they were created specifically for young feminists which may seem really awesome at the time but it gets you nowhere in the real world. Men on the other hand, they dominate the majors which lead to the highest paying jobs, not because of sexism but because they love to be challenged and to work hard - something feminism discourages altogether. There’s nothing stopping you from taking education more seriously so let’s make that our first goal, agreed? 

The second part of this wage gap discussion is, well it’s a myth. Feminists still to this day go on about it, complaining that when we enter the workforce we’re inevitably going to be given 23 cents less to our male colleagues just because we have different genitalia. How this hysteria began was by a kindergartener’s calculation of average income between men and women regardless of job position or any other factor, they compare male surgeons to female lunch ladies and scream OMG WAGE GAP! 

It has never been a direct comparison in wages, this isn’t about two people working for the same company in the same position with the same experience and working the same hours. Paying women less simply for being a woman is illegal. If it was really happening, why aren’t millions of women taking their employers to court for gender pay discrimination and ignoring the Equal Pay Act, an enforced law to ensure pay equality? Well probably because it doesn’t happen outside of feminism’s imaginary cruel misogynistic, woman-hating world.

Now this isn’t saying that most men don’t retire with more in their bank accounts because it’s true, men end up with more money, but it’s not because they’re being paid more for doing the same job as a woman, they’re simply being paid for jobs women don’t want to do. A lot of men earn more for that exact reason. They earn it. They dominate the hard, dirty, dangerous jobs that require more hours, later hours and involve higher risks for accident and death. They are also more willing to push themselves and fight for top positions. Again, something feminism discourages as they feel like it’s automatically owed to them. 

This is only talking about men closer to retirement age. When you begin to look at younger people, there’s a funny little fact that feminists love to exclude from their victim narrative: young women earn more than young men. Women are paid more than men until they reach their 40s, according to an official assessment of the gender pay gap by the Office for National Statistics. Women in their 20s have earned more than men in the same age group for the past decade and now women in their 30s are also paid more than males. Whether it’s because far more women are attending and graduating from college than men or whether it’s the direct result of affirmative action where women are being gifted scholarships and job positions for being women, that’s up for you to decide. Either way, you won’t ever hear a feminist talk about it.

That is not an attack on women and that obviously doesn’t include all women but these are the facts. Something else to take into consideration too: not every woman wants this. Not every woman cares about ending up with 23% less than their husband in retirement because they value family life more than their hours worked and how many men they competed with, they care about having children and living a loving, relaxed and homely life and that is their choice. The extra money they miss out on, they gain in a stronger, closer and invaluable bond and relationship with their children and it’s the father who gets 23% less of a bond. It’s all about perspective and personal choices. 

It’s probably why the large majority of women aren’t feminists - in order to be a feminist, you must see your decision to be a housewife or stay at home mom as proof you’re a victim to men and you must always be in competition with men. Most women simply don’t give a fuck lol most of us aren’t batshit crazy and aren’t constantly looking to blame men and see ourselves as victims. Most women just want to do what makes them happy and it’s about time feminists stop shaming these women for wanting a “gender conforming” life. 

Let’s focus on feminism’s next excuse to be lazy and unmotivated: their excuse about it being harder for women to break into typically dominated male fields. I really don’t need to spend much time on this one because as we all know, any woman is just as free to study STEM majors and are just as likely to be employed in STEM fields, even more with a little help from our friend affirmative action where now women have a 2:1 advantage when applying for a STEM job over men. 

Let’s think about why there may be less women in STEM fields, is it sexism or do women just make different choices? According to the US Department of Statistics women in STEM switch majors at a far higher rate than men once they realize that it’s too hard for them, sometimes all females drop out until there are only men left in classrooms and feminists scream sexism. How is this logical? Where is the accountability for women? Feminists also constantly go on about these hostile, sexist environments in math and engineering but you never hear them complain about biology, agriculture, vet medicine or law where women are flourishing. Is it possible that feminism only turns on the victim switch when men outperform women but stays quiet where women succeed? It appears so. 

Women earn more PhDs than men in the humanities, social sciences, education, life sciences. Men prevail in engineering, physics and computer science. Does our social constructed gender stereotypes or the patriarchy explain these differences? Or could it just be in the pursuit of happiness men and women take slightly different paths? When men and women get asked how they like to spend their free time, more men than women say they would enjoy manipulating tools and taking apart and putting together machines. Women are more likely to say they prefer to work with people or living things. The key word here was prefer. Having different preferences which leads to different levels of performance in different fields doesn’t make it sexist, it makes it a part of life. 

Girls do better in school, go to college more, graduate more and with higher grades, and in STEM have a 2:1 advantage when job seeking over men. Yet we are told this is not enough and because there’s still more men in some STEM fields, it has to be sexism. Have we ever considered the possibility that women just aren’t as interested as men? Believing in equality doesn’t mean that we have to force women into something they simply don’t want to do or aren’t as interested in to achieve equal ratios. It isn’t sexism, it is preference. A study asked STEM professors why they believe there aren’t as many women in STEM and almost all agreed it is because differences in interest between men and women. Men aren’t keeping women out of STEM, more women simply would rather be doing something else and there’s nothing wrong with that. 

Their final excuse probably bothers me above all and that’s when they say young women aren’t as interested because they don’t have as many women to inspire them or be role models. My question is, why do we need women role models? If we believe in equality so much, why can’t we look to a man who has achieved something great or a man in power and say “wow, he has a lot of characteristics that I could strive to attain and take on board, I should be that, embody that, go for it girl and become a boss just like this guy!” Would feminism ever find it acceptable for a man to say that boys need men as role models instead of women? No. So what’s the difference? Surely this is a better approach to encourage girls to get into male dominated fields than to scream sexism and send the message that young girls can only be inspired by their own gender. It has a bit of a sexist smell about it, if you ask me. 

Honestly, I think there is a lot more equality than we want to recognize because when we recognize that we can do the same things and achieve the same potential as men then we realize it’s really our fault and there’s no patriarchy to blame for our shortcomings and laziness. Are we ready to own our shit and make changes to the way we approach life or are we going to keep blaming men and encouraging victimhood? 

Feminism isn’t setting a good example but we as women need to stay calm and don’t let our emotions get in the way of our goals. Feminism tells us that the only way to crush “the patriarchy” is to be loud and obnoxious, to put men in their place, to walk around with our boobs and ass out and to stop caring about our looks and hygiene - and then they tell us to take them seriously. Sorry ladies, the world doesn’t work that way, you simply don’t get to be a slob and a CEO at the same time whether you’re a man or woman and regardless of where you live, professionalism is the same everywhere you go. That’s something feminism hates. They believe professionalism is the patriarchy, that professionalism is rich white men in the sky controlling our bodies. Give me a break. If you want others to take you seriously, first you have to take yourself seriously, it’s really not that difficult.

Use your voice as a strong woman but please, don’t be a screeching fucking feminist. Stay professional as possible and stay focused. People don’t want to take medical or legal advice or any type of professional advice from someone who isn’t rational or smells and looks like a furry garbage can or talks like a tantrum throwing child, that only sells insecurity and distrust. 

If you want a position of power, if you want to be taken seriously - be strong, be smart, don’t ever think something is owed to you for being a woman and don’t ever believe you are a victim of mythical white men controlling your every move. That is paranoid, borderline psychotic thinking and you need to stay as far away from this mindset as possible. This is why I encourage everyone to be ourselves rather than feeling like we have to be feminists. 

#feminism #feminist #anti feminism #anti feminist #gender #gender studies #gender equality #radical feminism #radfem #SJW #anti sjw #social justice #social justice warrior #Trump

[designgeekery]

I get introverted people can have a tough time in public spaces. It’s difficult for them to open up in large crowds. I tend to flip-flop between introverted and extroverted depending on the day (I’ve taken the Myer-Briggs test and gotten both INFP and ENFP). So I get it the alone time, keep to self nature of being introverted.

I also know that if you want to make friends you have to make conscious effort to do so, regardless of your disposition. So seeing someone who’s introverted get upset at people for being “cliquey” when they’ve made no attempt to even try to be friends is a bit upsetting. Friendship like all relationships is a 2-way street and the most successful friendships are based on mutual understanding (50/50). Sure there will be times where one gives more than the other that’s the nature of relationships. But often times those situations will balance out over time. But if you as part of a relationship are constantly only giving 10% of yourself to it, you can’t expect others to keep giving 90% of themselves all the time. Which was the case with this person. 

I watched them as they would come and go about in our community, often sticking to the outside rarely interacting until someone comes up to them. Constantly blaming their shortcomings on why people aren’t interacting with them, even though many people in my community were doing so, but it was very one way. Not sure what they expected from us, many of opportunities were given for them to be welcomed into our community. We’re very supportive and don’t place pressure on anyone, and will often meet people where they are. It’s something as a community we really worked hard at so that everyone could feel welcomed. 

I’ll admit in every social setting there will always be those who are closer to some than others. This is natural. But these friendships didn’t form overnight, it was serious dedication by bother parties to remain in a form of a relationship. Give and take. So to see someone who made little effort to be apart of our community complain about the cliquey nature of our community seems odd. There are people of all shapes and sizes, ethnicities, orientation, genders, you name it in our community. What started off as just a small group of friends getting together every week grew into this incredible family. But we worked hard to maintain these relationships. 

So anyway it’s sad that this person feels this way, but if you aren’t going to make the effort, then you won’t benefit from the rewards.  

#personal #rant