Autonomy - Tumblr Posts
... I would say this is the final cause the blue was a meant to be thing but like... It makes it look like a draft work 😔😔 ughh-
I drew so many skates recently cause I got into studying the autonomy of figure skates. So there were a bunch of boots from different brands to rigidness and blades. So so so many blades. But it was fun, honestly. I wondered how I never got into learning the autonomy of a skate until so late into my career HAHAHAAA
Though, I still prefer traditional art and still (after so long) have not gotten used to the lack of scratchy feeling from pencil to paper 🫠
You are allowed to be flawed. You are allowed to be vulnerable. You are allowed to be a complex individual with many layers beneath the surface. You are allowed to have opinions that don't agree with the status quo. You are allowed to live & take up space however you need to. You are allowed to speak your mind. You are allowed to keep your peace of mind protected. You are allowed to cultivate a definition of life you can agree with.
Wether its the right to bear arms in California
or the right to medical privacy and bodily autonomy in Texes.
We can count on our politicians and civil servants to
screw us over.
It's like some Satanic baby eating cult gave both of these guys (Ted Cruz, Gavin Newsome) the mission of taking self autonomy rights away from citizens.
Pro-forced-birth is never "Pro-Life".
It is instead a form of moral and political masturbation, which denies and ignores the realities that confront women, families, and, ESPECIALLY, the children who have to live with the poor choices that conservatives presume to make for OTHER people who know their own lives and their own needs far better.
I don't know who needs to hear this, but especially with the end of the school year coming up soon, and a bunch of people about to leave high school or about to leave college, I just wanted to say:
Being an adult can be really nice, actually!!!
Like, okay, yeah, life can be fucking stressful sometimes, and there's definitely an annoying amount of paperwork.
But me and just about every single adult I know will agree: I would never choose to go back to being a teenager, even if I somehow could.
Insert obvious disclaimer that nothing is universal. But for people worried about aging or graduating into the next chapter of life, here's some words of reassurance:
When you're a teenager, your brain is extra mean to you. Like, neurologically. All of the changes it's undergoing really, really increase rates of depression/anxiety/etc. A lot of the time, literally just not being a teenager anymore is really good for your mental health
Less than five months out of high school, everyone I knew my age was like "Thank fuck we're no longer in high school." Once you leave high school and adolescence there's really just such a dramatic drop in petty bullshit. Shit that would have been a huge social humiliation or gossip in high school is really often just like, "Hate that for you, man." Boom, done.
When you're a teenager or a brand new adult, you're encountering so many problems for the first time ever. When you're older, you just. Have learned how to handle a lot more things. You know what to do way more often and that builds confidence
When you're an adult, other people generally don't care if you don't do things perfectly, because jobs and life don't work like grades. This was such a trip to learn, honestly? But when you are an adult or have a job the bar for success is usually just "Did you do the thing?" or "Did you do the thing well enough that it works?" or "Did you show up to work for your whole shift and look like you were doing things?"
Similarly, if you're about to graduate college and you're really stressed about it, fyi just about everyone I knew in college ended up very quickly going "wow, 'real life' is way easier." Admittedly I went to a school full of very stressed out perfectionists and the like, so I can't promise this is universal, but there's a very real chance that life will in many ways get easier when you graduate
WAY MORE CONTROL OF YOUR OWN LIFE
Literally I cannot overstate that last point. As an adult, you are (barring certain disabilities or shitty circumstances like abusive family/the criminal justice system/etc.) able to make most of your own decisions. If you want to rearrange your furniture, you can. If you want to eat tater tots at midnight, you can. If you want to get yourself a little treat, you can. You can sign contracts and make your own legal and medical decisions and not need a parent or guardian signature for just about anything ever again
You generally learn how to give fewer fucks
The people around you have also generally learned how to give fewer fucks
Even when things are shitty, being able to choose what kind of shitty a lot of the time can really be worth an awful lot
here’s my new video, the Top 8 Beauty Trends Men Hate! :- D
I'm going to go off on a little rant. I don't claim to know what I'm talking about and what I'm about to say is purely out of my own experience with the topic at hand. I do encourage people who read this to add anything, whether that be an opposing point or simply an add on to my topic. Remember be nice.
Now, I don't know about you guys, but growing up I don't remember having a lot of autonomy. Even when I was 15 did I not have enough autonomy, at least in the way that I wanted it to be. It wasn't till I was 19 and taking myself to school and work that I realized that I DID IN FACT have autonomy.
I'm not going to lie it felt freeing to know that I could go wherever I wanted, that I could do whatever I wanted, it was freeing to buy something younger me thought would be questionable for me to have and simply purchase it.
Then I started to question why I had felt that way for so long. Autonomy by definition means independence and freedom, as of the will or one's own action. By definition all my life I knew I was free, but I always felt like I wasn't. But now I know why it's because I was never really given a choice in the matter.
I'm not saying I had helicopter parents or that I was in bad situation where I was extremely limited with decisions because I wasn't. No what made me feel like I had no autonomy was that I always had be to looked after and I don't mean where safety was a huge concern or anything like that.
Let me give an example, you tell your parents that you'll be going out with a few friends to the park, they say okay but they your sibling to watch you. You respond with but I'm only going to the park next door??? They tell you I don't care there's dangerous people everywhere take your sibling.
See? And what's worse is that your sibling didn't even want to go so is just begrudgingly following you and your friends from a distance and ruining the overall mood.
This is what I mean. And I'm sorry if I sound like a little kid complaining about simply being taken care off, but I'm not complaining about my parents giving a shit about me. It just kinda made me wonder why I didn't feel like autonomy that's it.
Now back to the topic, when I was growing up my mom would take me everywhere which is fine, but on my way back home from work I saw 4 - 8 gradeders taking the public bus home. (We live in America school busses are a thing) I for so long thought that shit was illegal not for the kid but for the parent.
As far as I'm concerned only advanced countries like Central Europe, and eastern Asia could have that luxury. You hardly see kids much less under the age of 10 taking the bus to go home.
And it made me realize that we do have a choice even as kids, but we aren't really allowed to do any of it because to our parents it's better to be driven than go on a bus.
Let's go back in time a bit to the 1960s America, this is a time in the world where people want peace, weed was the new tobacco, and the Beatles were the hottest thing. Kids of all ages were encouraged to explore their surroundings. Stranger danger wasn't yet a concept but instead it was up to the parents to protect and educate their child. Sadly it was also an age in time where serial killers and child predators ran loose 1.5 million children went missing from just those 2 decades.
All this to say that those 2 eras would be last and final time (at least in America) where the kids would ever go out on their own. While it benefited us in the long run, it has slowly taken from us our autonomy as growing individuals. Because having autonomy means having a right to choose where you go and what you do. And you might be thinking well why not just go outside in your neighborhood or ask your mom if you can go to a friend's house and hangout? Let me tell you, I grew up in the ghetto the neighborhood was quiet but never safe and if I wanted to go to my friends house her mom would have be there and in a low-income neighborhood no one can afford being a stay at home mom.
I could not go anywhere without being watched or do a lot of the things I wanted to because we were poor and hobbies take investments.
And so I grew up thinking I couldn't do what I wanted because of where I was or who my friends parents thought I was or simply because were poor. It was so bad that when I finally did start earning money I didn't spend any of it at first at least not on me. I'm still trying to get used to the fact that I CAN IN FACT do whatever the hell I want and that it isn't impossible to have a cheap hobby.
Thank you for reading my very long and quite frankly stupid rant up this far and do remember that YOU CAN IN FACT DO THAT WEIRD THING YOU WANTED TO DO FOR SO LONG no will stop you trust me. I've learned that the hard way.
I think so many people are so deeply alienated from themselves that they have no clue how to exercise their free will and autonomy. For some, this alienation runs so deep that they are afraid of their own autonomy and humanity. It is completely understandable why one would have those feelings, but it can be worrisome.
I want to help others who feel this way, so here are small things I have done to exercise my free will:
Add "guilty pleasure" songs to playlists and actually listen to them (I have a ton of late 1990s-early 2000s music I listen to now proudly that I never listened to in the past out of shame)
Getting the décor item, bath set, bed spread, ect. in the patterns you like, even if it's "childish" (I got a dinosaur-themed wastebasket from the kids' décor section and I adore it)
Taking a new route to get to a place you go to often
Eat dessert first
Celebrate well, and often
Collect things that are "odd" or don't seem like an "acceptable" thing to collect (somebody on my "for you" page collects dandelion crayola crayons and it was so cool!!!!!!)
Incorporate one new piece in an outfit you wear frequently (e.g., a new chain, a necklace, ribbons, bracelets, ect.). Challenge yourself to add onto the outfits if you feel up for it.
Sing along to songs without worrying that you sound "good" or your intonation is completely accurate
Read a book from a genre you weren't allowed to read as a kid (comics, thrillers, mysteries, anything!)
Walk without having a specific destination or goal
Pick up a new craft without expecting yourself to master it or to ever be "good" enough. Get your hands messy.
I don't want to shame anybody for not feeling as though they have free will or that they are exempt from exercising it. However, I wanted to give ideas so that you might read this list and find your own ways to express your intrinsic autonomy and will. You deserve to be a person, to feel alive, not just living. That is what our lives are for.