Important Reminder - Tumblr Posts
Quick reminder that you don't need a solid sexuality! You can just be in love! Or not be in love! Or have a gender! Labels are a choice, not a requirement. All you need to do is be someone you like being! If labels help with that, great! But they are not required. You don't owe it to anyone, so don't feel pressured to choose labels if they aren't your thing!
You know what the most frustrating thing about the vegans throwing a fit over my “Humans aren’t Parasites” post is? I really wasn’t trying to make a point about animal agriculture. Honestly, the example about subsistence hunting isn’t the main point. That post was actually inspired by thoughts I’ve been having about the National Park system and environmentalist groups.
See, I LOVE the National Parks. I always have a pass. I got to multiple parks a year. I LOVE them, and always viewed them as this unambiguously GOOD thing. Like, the best thing America has done.
BUT, I just finished reading this book called “I am the Grand Canyon” all about the native Havasupai people and their fight to gain back their rights to the lands above the canyon rim. Historically, they spent the summer months farming in the canyon, and then the winter months hunter-gathering up above the rim. When their reservation was made though, they lost basically all rights to the rim land (They had limited grazing rights to some of it, but it was renewed year to year and always threatened, and it was a whole thing), leading to a century long fight to get it back.
And in that book there are a couple of really poignant anecdotes- one man talks about how park rangers would come harass them if they tried to collect pinon nuts too close to park land- worried that they would take too many pinon nuts that the squirrels wanted. Despite the fact that the Havasupai had harvested pinon nuts for thousands and thousands of years without ever…like…starving the squirrels.
There’s another anecdote of them seeing the park rangers hauling away the bodies of dozens of deer- killed in the park because of overpopulation- while the Havasupai had been banned from hunting. (Making them more and more reliant on government aid just to survive the winter months.)
They talk about how they would traditionally carve out these natural cisterns above the rim to catch rainwater, and how all the animals benefitted from this, but it was difficult to maintain those cisterns when their “ownership” of the land was so disputed.
So here you have examples of when people are forcibly separated from their ecosystem and how it hurts both those people and the ecosystem.
And then when the Havasupai finally got legislation before Congress to give them ownership of the rim land back- their biggest opponent was the Parks system and the Sierra Club. The Sierra Club (a big conservation group here in the US) ran a huge smear campaign against these people on the belief that any humans owning this land other than the park system (which aims at conservation, even while developing for recreation) was unacceptable.
And it all got me thinking about how, as much as I love the National Parks, there are times when its insistence that nature be left “untouched” (except, ya know, for recreation) can actually harm both the native people who have traditionally been part of those ecosystems AND potentially the ecosystems themselves. And I just think there’s a lot of nuance there about recognizing that there are ways for us to be in balance with nature, and that our environmentalism should respect that and push for sustainability over preserving “pristine” human-less landscapes. Removing ourselves from nature isn’t the answer.
But apparently the idea that subsistence hunting might actually not be a moral catastrophe really set the vegans off. Woopie.
(via Saturday Morning Cartoons: Baopu #15) by Yao Xiao
words to remember
im going to come out and say it: isolating is a self-destructive behavior. it might not be as obvious and immediately self-destructive as say, impulsive spending, drug use or risky behaviors, but it gradually decays relationships and can deepen your mental health issues. often, our impulse is to retreat from others and responsibilities for “self care” or to “work on ourselves” and obviously sometimes we need mental health breaks, but there’s a line you cross from “taking a break” to full on neglecting your relationships with others and your social needs that can be incredibly damaging to yourself and others over time
but anyway!!!!! if you’re tired of period dramas about white lesbians in forbidden love, just watch more movies about wlwoc!!! our movies exist! our stories exist!!! just because they don’t get as much hype as carol/poalof/ammonite doesn’t mean they don’t exist!!! do your research and support more lesbian/bi/trans women filmmakers of colour! support dee rees! support cheryl dunye! support desiree akhavan, maryam keshavarz, sydney freeland, alice wu, tracey choi, shamim sarif, gazal dhaliwal, isabel sandoval, vera egito, vicky du, nisha ganatra, nahnatchka khan, zero chou, just to name a few!! yes it sucks that white stories are given precendence over theirs, but complaining about it while doing nothing to support them isn’t going to fix the problem. we shouldn’t just wait for the content we want to be spoonfed to us. it’s important to seek it out.
no one wants to hear it but love is earned after the initial infatuation. commitment is something u both mutually agree to and then from there it’s work. it’s not work like it’s a chore it’s jus work like it takes effort. to get good at these things takes practice. it takes practice to learn to communicate better and it takes practice to learn to love each other in the ways u need to be loved.
self-care isn't always the romanticized version that social media preaches. sometimes you reach a point where watching movies and taking naps and staying home from school / work is just going to make things worse. and when you get there, you need to take responsibility.
sometimes taking care of yourself means waking up half an hour earlier to make sure you can eat a good breakfast. sometimes it's going to that job interview that's making you anxious. sometimes it's spending an extra hour studying, instead of watching netflix.
i'm not trying to downplay the value that days off and movie nights hold, because they're so important. but sometimes you need to do the hard stuff to truly take care of yourself and enjoy your life. and that's okay !! you can still do a facemask and light a candle when you get home. but make that phone call first. answer that email. clean your room. start that homework. you'll feel better for it.
“I’ve come to believe that […] loneliness is by no means a wholly worthless experience, but rather one that cuts right to the heart of what we value and what we need.”
— Olivia Laing, from The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone (Picador, 2016) (via antigonick)
sometimes u just have to stand over the sink and eat fruit that is perfectly ripe and know that each person is a world you cannot ever know the depth of and that each fruit and each life deserves a moment of quiet
One real benefit of reading I rarely hear anybody mention is how much more interesting life becomes when you read a lot. It depends what you’re reading, of course, but most (good) books will teach you something you didn’t already know, and even if you have to give the book back to the library, you get to take that much with you. A lot of people talk about things they wish they’d studied in school–I’ve done it, too–but it’s a nice consolation prize that you can always pick up a book and learn something new. And as that library in your brain collects more volumes, everything around you gains new resonances, new context, and new connections which make your lived experience richer. In quarantine alone I’ve read about religion and politics and history and evolution and computer science and astrophysics without even leaving my house and it’s already a more interesting world.
if you're a student at all, please take care of yourself. you don't need to compete with your classmates for who slept the least or who drank the most coffee. eat breakfast and go to sleep a little earlier. lay off studying for a night and do something nice for yourself. your body and brain will thank you.
sometimes u just do things that ppl will never forgive you for and there just isn't anything u can do to make up for it. it's not bc you're a bad person, it's very human to do things that hurt. this is one of the crueler things abt the world but also in a way it's one of the best things too. you don't have to forgive someone who's wronged you just because they're sorry, or even if they're a good person otherwise. the very same thing that might be hurting you can also be the thing that's protecting you
Just because your feelings are valid, this doesn't mean that every possible reaction to them is. Yes, it's okay to be angry - but it's not okay to take it out on someone by breaking their stuff. Yes, it's okay to be jealous - but it's not okay to sabotage relationships. Yes, it's okay to want attention - but it's not okay to lie to get it. And so on. Your feelings are always valid, but you still have a responsibility for how you choose to express them.
it can be tempting to live your life like a prequel. to live as if you’re setting up your own story.and once you lose the weight, once you have the money, once you graduate school, once you’re in a real relationship, once, once, once. then finally, you’ll begin to live, and everything you do up until that point is some kind of half-life, some unimportant foreword you can skip. don’t do this. inhabit your life completely. sink fully into the wealth of your existence. the power to manifest is in the fearless owning of who you are, so that you can shape where you’re going.
“Matriarchy is no less heterosexual than patriarchy: it is only the sex of the oppressor that changes. Furthermore, not only is this conception still imprisoned in the categories of sex (woman and man), but it holds onto the idea that the capacity to give birth (biology) is what defines a woman. Although practical facts and ways of living contradict this theory in lesbian society, there are lesbians who affirm that “women and men are different species or races (the words are used interchangeably): men are biologically inferior to women; male violence is a biological inevitability…” By doing this, by admitting that there is a “natural” division between women and men, we naturalize history, we assume that “men” and “women” have always existed and will always exist. Not only do we naturalize history, but also consequently we naturalize the social phenomena which express our oppression, making change impossible.”
— Monique Wittig, One is Not Born A Woman (via heteroglossia)
black lesbians honestly deserve so much more. they are constantly an afterthought in the lgbtq community despite having so much history in building it. it really hurts seeing other lgbtq members brush off black lesbians struggles to them “overreacting” or being “too emotional” over being constantly erased from their own community. listen to black lesbians. if a black lesbian tells you that you are making your lgbtq space unsafe or uncomfortable for them then you listen and make changes. it shouldn’t be controversial to say that black lesbians deserve to feel safe and accepted in the lgbtq community.
I don’t know if anyone needs to hear this but “we all respond to trauma in different ways, not just pretty palatable ways” and “we are accountable for our own actions, even actions born from trauma” are not contradictory statements
“Another myth that is firmly upheld is that disabled people are dependent and non-disabled people are independent. No one is actually independent. This is a myth perpetuated by disablism and driven by capitalism - we are all actually interdependent. Chances are, disabled or not, you don’t grow all of your food. Chances are, you didn’t build the car, bike, wheelchair, subway, shoes, or bus that transports you. Chances are you didn’t construct your home. Chances are you didn’t sew your clothing (or make the fabric and thread used to sew it). The difference between the needs that many disabled people have and the needs of people who are not labelled as disabled is that non-disabled people have had their dependencies normalized. The world has been built to accommodate certain needs and call the people who need those things independent, while other needs are considered exceptional. Each of us relies on others every day. We all rely on one another for support, resources, and to meet our needs. We are all interdependent. This interdependence is not weakness; rather, it is a part of our humanity.”
— AJ Withers Disability Politics and Theory p109