“Lol I only pole dance I’m not like a whore or anything”

child. honey. darling. SWEETHEART. None of that changes that you’re in the Adult Entertainment Industry and you are doing sex work. Just because it’s not Full Service doesn’t mean that you get to be holier-than-thou about it.

YES it’s athletic, YES it has been turned into a sport, and YES it can be very empowering and uplifting and it’s excellent exercise. That doesn’t mean you get to divorce it from its roots… the Adult Entertainment Industry and the sex workers who created it. Stop erasing their contributions to something you enjoy and attempting to shut them out of the conversation.

Hey so remember that post about how Respect =/= Treating Someone Like An Authority….? Remember that….?

I kinda feel like certain people in the feminist movement need to read it and apply it to broad-stroking stuff like “respect women.” Because treating women like I would any other human being apparently means I don’t “respect” them.

Since, yanno, I don’t prioritize their opinions of me and do my best not to wallow in guilt 24/7 over being male or loving men. *shrug*

What happens when you can’t keep your promises…?

Time; or circumstance; makes liars of us all.

We can try to get around it by clever wordplay, vagueness, doublespeak. We can make only make promises we’re certain of, or have very high chances of success. But what happens when life intervenes? What happens when there’s nothing left; no effort, no energy, no struggle or self-awareness; to fuel the promise and fulfill it? What happens when, despite all your best efforts and time and perhaps even money thrown at the problem, you can’t do what you said you were going to?

These are the questions that have been plaguing me the past few weeks. Since I got back from Minnesota, really. I’ve made quite a number of promises in the past year and there’s a few very sticky ones that I can’t seem to fulfill; and not through lack of trying. See, I promised my boyfriend that I’d be looking for work before I even went to see him in June. I promised him that I’d be looking, and that I would find a job, so I could help him; and Sir; to get out of the mounting money issues that have been threatening on the horizon.

Surgery isn’t cheap. Health isn’t cheap. Rent, food, medical bills, student loans, credit card debt, none of it comes cheaply. Why should I be the only one not pulling my weight in that arena…? Especially when it was; primarily; my poly heart leading the charge to date, and our shared past that led me back into Ry’s arms.

See, being the stay-at-home is one thing when it’s just you and one other partner. It can be balanced pretty well even in this day and age of multiple jobs and double mortgages if your partner has a decent job and you’re not very high maintenance. Well. It turns out that in addition to being “high maintenance” despite my best efforts; *no one plans for a cancer scare or that many surgeries in that short an amount of time!*; a long distance relationship takes quite a bit of time and effort to maintain. And more money than we initially suspected.

So, the easiest option is that I start working. It’s logical, it’s mentally sound, and it’s only reasonable. Except that my cocktail of mental health issues don’t seem to agree. A few good years with the dysphoria and depression might have made me shortsighted. It’s been nearly eighteen months since my last breakdown after all! I shouldn’t live in fear of my triggers or hide in the house. All of this was true, until yesterday. My first breakdown in a year and a half, and it was a depression and dysphoria-induced emotional rant that left two of us in tears and one trying to find the best road out and back to stability.

What happens when you can’t keep your promises?

You can be mad at yourself. Angry, and bitter, that you’re not “normal.” That life, for some reason, seems to have hit the Hard Mode option when it comes to you. You can bitch and complain, and some of that might even be healthy. Bottling your emotions only leads to explosions later on down the line.

You can cry about it. Mourn for everything that could have been, *if only.* But “if only” doesn’t satisfy the creditors, and it certainly doesn’t make that mountain any smaller. But then again, tears are an emotional release valve. All they really are is your body telling you “hey, you’re feeling a lot right now. Release it, and then take a good hard look at what’s going on.” They’re sort of a check-engine light of emotions.

You can try not to be what’s causing the problem. But castigating yourself over an accident of birth or circumstance isn’t going to fix it, and trying not to have PTSD, anxiety, depression, or “not being trans” will actively make it worse.

You can do the thing in spite of every emotional and mental flag waving at you saying “don’t do the thing.” Because you promised, and you hold yourself to be an honorable person. Because you gave your word and you keep it because that’s what honorable men do. Because you’re tired of offering what feel like excuses even though there’s very good medical reasons not to do the thing.

There isn’t a good answer. There isn’t a safe, comfortable, reasonable response when your heart and your brain are at war with each other. When doing the thing you promised to do means forcibly misgendering yourself, dealing with an unkind and uncaring public, and setting you back with regards to dysphoria while you live in a state that doesn’t allow you to amend your paperwork and makes HRT a pain in the ass to get…. even if you had the money to throw at the problem. Which is where this whole mess began in the first place.

What happens when you can’t keep your promises…?

You explain yourself as best you can. You make no excuses and lay everything at the feet of the people you gave your word to. You offer them the truth of you, and you hope they understand. You hope they forgive you, and that eventually you can get the help you require to make all those issues and roadblocks if not go away, lesser.

Like Sir said, you can’t handwave your emotions and you can’t just ignore your mental health when you make promises. You can’t give your word based on an idealized world.

Mostly, what happens when you can’t keep your promises I’ve found, is that the other honorable people in your life pull you in closer instead of pushing you away, and do their best to help you do better in the future. They let you put the effort down for a little while, go through all that emotional release, and pick it up again when you’re ready. And, in the meantime, do their best to figure out how to help. Whether that’s not asking the impossible, or being realistic themselves in what’s really possible in our non-idealized world.

We’re only human. Even honorable men forget that sometimes.

lenyberry:

fierceawakening:

candidlyautistic:

adult-female-with-aspergers:

I was complaining to my mom (yes I still do that at 32) how it seems like therapist want me to change for the sake of other people and how I hate that. How I don’t think I’m the one who needs to change because it’s other people who are the problem with misinterpreting me. She said ‘yeah, but you’re the one who has to face the negative consequences.’ I didn’t think of it like that. I go about thinking that if people are uncomfortable with me then that’s their problem, I shouldn’t have to change for their comfort. But I’m suffering for it. People are the worst.

I think this is one of the hardest things we have to have come to terms with as autistic adults.

Other people should be the ones changing. Other people should be the ones that stop putting words in mouth and adding emotions to our words that we didn’t put in there ourselves.

Other people should be responsible for at least meeting us halfway when it comes to communication.

The reality is very few of them actually care enough to make the effort, and we are the ones that struggle because of it.

So here we are, having to decide – do we say screw this, I’m going to be myself and damn the consequences or do we say fine I’m going to force myself to be a different person than I really am even if it harms me every day.

And gosh that’s not fair at all. You shouldn’t have to make the decision. No one should have to make that decision.

But in the end, we’re the one that always has to make it. Whatever you choose in the end, I hope it goes well for you – or at least as well as it can go.

The thing is, you can’t control anyone but yourself. It’s much easier to notice the stupid or hurtful things someone else is doing than to convince them to cut it out.

I had this blowup at my boyfriend a while back, because like most people he didn’t get it, and I was having a crap time of things in general, and I was like “it would be REALLY NICE if JUST ONCE someone would make the effort to meet me halfway instead of expecting me to do ALL the work of bridging this neurological communication gap when all I gain for the effort is a chance at being treated the same as a “normal” person”

…and I had kinda tried to bring it up before, being… less blunt and angry about it. But the time I got bitchy and went ‘fuck this’ and pointed out how shitty it is for me to have to always be the one doing all the work while getting no credit, because if I succeed no one even notices I’m trying and if I fail I get all the blame, and yes you do this too and I hate it… when I said it bluntly and upfront – that’s when he Got It.

And since then he’s actually started making the effort to do some of the work himself instead of making me do it all and blaming me when I don’t Communicate Like A Neurotypical and it causes miscommunications. And it’s such a huge relief having even one person on my side like that.

So what I’m getting at is, of course you can’t expect everyone else to change, but if someone really cares about you and you can point the problem out in a way they’ll understand and get them to see that they’re doing you no favors by pushing you to ‘work harder at it’ or ‘act normal so other people don’t treat you so badly’ – because fuck, we know that but it’s fucking hard – and that they could help more by giving you a respite from that work when you’re around them… if they both really care about you and understand the problem, they’ll make the effort.

(understanding the problem is also key because people who do genuinely care sometimes do things they THINK are for your benefit when it’s actually not, if they don’t understand what you’re dealing with, and the catch-22 of the whole situation is communication barrier causes lack of understanding and the lack of understanding keeps the other person from having any idea how to effectively work on resolving the communication barrier)

*points at the above for the sake of what few followers I have, knowing it’s not the intended reading but whatever it dovetails nicely and today I am The Dysphoric*

So uhm. That’s essentially the Trans Experience in a nutshell, friends. You struggle and scream and do everything in your power to pass pre-HRT/surgery and no one fucking notices and calls you things that you aren’t… and if you don’t, well it’s your fault for not being “X” enough. So do you change and go into debt and scrape up all your everything in order to pass, or do you just drift along in a puddle of disgust and distaste for your own meatsuit doing what little you can to survive in the meantime until you might, potentially, be able to Do The Thing?

We’re not “normal” in the sense that we don’t have to THINK about our gender.
We’re not “normal” in the sense that we get to just tweak our bodies through exercise, diet, and hopefully decent genetics that didn’t fuck us over.
We’re not “normal” in that we can change people’s perception with a haircut, clothing, etc…. or at least, not the way we want to, with consistency.

So…. fuck, what do?

steampunktendencies:

Very cool R2D2 Art Deco ? 50’s?

That’d be mid-50s to 60s yeah. That particular shade of blue with silver trim was very, very popular for kitchens back in the day~

This particular set up is from around 1960-1963 if the cabinets and flooring are anything to go by; and it’s backed up by the color of the tins in the cupboard and the clay tea kettle.

This one, not even my google skills will tell me if it’s a real vintage set, or a modern reproduction; but regardless it’s meant to replicate the same era of Formica, Steel trim, Pastel Everything, Nostalgia, and a very particular American worldview.

“people who won’t donate their organs are selfish” coming from the same people demanding that a woman have the right to choose whether or not to continue a pregnancy is the WEIRDEST form of cognitive dissonance.

bodily autonomy continues even in death. and, if my blood isn’t good enough to donate while i’m alive, no way in fuck are you getting the rest of me after i’m dead. girl, BYE.