you wanted to be a good friend, because you loved your friends, but the truth was that everyone else somehow had a pamphlet on being normal that you never received. most of the time you learn by trial-and-error. you are terrified of the next big mistake you make, because it seems like the rules are completely arbitrary.
you've learned to keep the prickly parts of your personality in a stormcloud under your bed - as if they're a second version of you; one that will make your friends hate you. it feels feral, burning, ugly.
instead, you have assembled habits based on the statistical likelihood of pleasing others. you're a good listener, which is to say - if you do speak up, you might end up saying the wrong thing and scaring off someone, but people tend to like someone-who-listens. or you've got no true desires or goals, because people like it when you're passive, mutable. you're "not easy to fluster" which is to say - your emotions are fundamentally uninteresting to others around you; so you've learned to control them to a degree that you can no longer really feel them happening.
you have long suspected something is wrong with you, but most of the time, googling doesn't help. you are so-used to helping-yourself, alone and with no handbook. the reek of your real self feels more like a horrible joke - you wake up, and, despite all your preparations, suddenly the whole house is full of smoke. the real you is someone waiting to ruin your other-life, the one where you're normal and happy. the real-self is unpredictable, angry.
your real self snarls when people infantilize the whole situation. because if you were really suffering, everyone seems to think you'd be completely unable to cope. but you already learned the rules, so you do know how to cope, and you have fucking been coping. it's not black-and-white. it's not that you are healed during the other times - it's just that you're able to fucking try. and honestly, whenever you show symptoms, it's a really fucking bad sign.
because the symptoms you have are ugly and unmanageable for others. your symptoms aren't waifish white girl things. they're annoying and complicated. they will be the subject of so many pretentious instagram reels. if they cared about you, they'd just show up on time. you care, a lot, so deeply it burns you. you like to picture a world where the comments read if they loved you, they'd never need glasses to see. but since that's a rule you've seen repeated - "one must never be late or you are a bad friend" - you constantly worry about being late and leave agonizingly early. there are no words for how you feel when you're still late; no matter how hard you were trying.
so you have to make up for it. you have to make up for that little horrible real you that you keep locked in a cabinet. you are bad at answering emails so every project you make has to be perfect. you are weird and sensitive so you have to learn to be funny and interesting. you are an inconvenience to others, so you become as smooth as possible, buffing out all the rough parts.
all this. all this. so people can pass their hands over you and just tell you just the once -how good you are. you're a good friend. you're loveable.
5K notes
·
View notes
As a queer, neurodivergent, disabled goy, I have to say, it really takes a monumentally callous level of ignorance and misunderstanding of history to speak over Jews about and attempt to co opt the deep, generational trauma of the fucking HOLOCAUST.
These groups were targeted, yes, but it shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the evils of Nazism to not talk about *why.* ALL of these groups were targeted because of the Nazi belief in a huge, overarching, degenerate, worldwide Jewish conspiracy to bring down “normal” Aryan society. Jew hatred was at the root of literally every single belief and action the Nazis ever took. It was the air they breathed. Every single action they took, they took as a means to their end of eradicating Jewish existence and “influence” as they saw it, from the face of the world.
Any discussion of the Holocaust that doesn’t centre Jewish suffering as the *point* of it all is woefully inadequate and incomplete.
It is NOT about us.
88 notes
·
View notes
The changes were as gradual as gaining new extremities overnight could be.
First came the ears, tufted in fur the same brown as Pearl’s hair, pricked upright upon her head. The morning they appeared, Pearl’s waking thought was how much louder the birds’ chirping tune seemed to be, how she was able to pinpoint exactly where they perched, along the roof of her tower and in the boughs of the highest treetops below. She tried not to think about the whispered remarks made behind her retreating back she could hear all the clearer now.
The tail appeared next, and Pearl almost crushed it rolling out of bed. Though it was often hidden by the drape of her scarlet cloak, Pearl liked her new tail, and petting the long, coarse fur soon became as natural to her as idly playing with the strands of hair that fell loose around her face.
On the third day, Pearl awoke with a bleeding mouth, pierced by long, pointed canines she wasn’t used to having. Those took the longest to adjust to, weeks of bruises along her bottom lip as Pearl learned how to hold herself, how to rest, in harmony with her new traits. The teeth felt most natural bared in a snarl. Their sharpness didn’t quite fit into her soft, human mouth. Pearl made it work.
The other differences weren’t as initially noticeable. At night, Pearl’s vision seemed sharper, and with the moon shining above her, she could see just as clearly as she could during the day. When running together, Tilly didn’t have to slow her stride to keep pace with Pearl, and leaping over a fallen trunk or puddle hardly became a feat at all.
Pearl’s favorite change of them all was her newfound ability to howl.
She’d always responded to Tilly’s call in kind, but Pearl’s vocal cords could only mimic so much. Now, between them, under a clear night sky filled with more stars than Pearl had ever seen, they created a choir, two voices pitched to sound like ten.
Pearl had howled to an empty, half-built tower the night Tilly lost her first life, before she’d found her way back to Pearl.
Perhaps it was her new wolfishness, perhaps they were the desires Pearl hadn’t allowed herself to feel, that made the pangs of loneliness worse.
She had Tilly! She’d always have Tilly, Pearl would make sure of it. Her beloved wolf was her true soulbound, the tail and the ears and the teeth said as much. Tilly protected her and Pearl defended her fiercely in kind. Pearl wouldn’t be alone ever again. It was fine. Pearl was fine.
In the quietest cracks of the day, between the time the moon set and dawn colored the sky, Pearl admitted to herself that she wasn’t fine.
The yearning ached in her chest, next to the invisible spool of thread that connected Pearl to a partner who never wanted her. She’d never be invited to the fireside circle, accepted into the band of safety and trust the other pairs had found in each other, in their alliances, however unsteady those tended to be in a place like this. At least there was ground to shake beneath their feet, purchase Pearl had never felt so high up in her tower.
Even with Tilly at her side, Pearl was a lone wolf, and she knew, like every abandoned dog did, how badly she longed for a pack.
—
An excerpt from a piece I’m never going to finish, but liked enough to toss onto Tumblr away. Reblogs do more than likes and all that
84 notes
·
View notes