there’s very few things that drive me up the wall in fandom as much as this weird new assumption that fandom is primarily a space for younger people that older folks are only accepted into in a trial basis if they promise to centralize and accommodate younger fans, and further, anything else is creepy and predatory. IT’S OKAY FOR ADULTS TO PRODUCE CONTENT FOR OTHER ADULTS.
if I have to read “women in their 30s” used as an insult one more time I swear I’ll – step away from that user and just hang out with the other grownups who consistently create good content because I’m also an adult and too busy comparing car insurance to fight with teenagers on the internet, but goddAMMIT I’ll be annoyed
People adding Nazi apologist shit onto my posts like “but nazis invented cell phones and space rockets so without them we’d be less technologically advanced VuV” like buddy, if you think for one second we wouldn’t have eventually made it to the moon or made instant communication devices without mass genocide then I dunno what to tell you except to get the fuck away from me.
Your kind aren’t welcome here.
Also would I “trade” my cell phone for a world with no Nazis?
Are. You. Fucking. Kidding. Me?!?!
I’d trade my own life for a world without nazis. Fuck my phone. Fuck going to the moon. Human life should not be the cost of societal and technological progress.
– false confidence goes a LONG way towards becoming actual confidence.
– but this doesn’t mean being cocky and arrogant. Be open to criticism. Be self-aware.
– nothing will ever come out exactly the way you wanted it to. Just making it is reason enough to be proud.
– the way you are now isn’t the way you’ll always be. You WILL grow, especially if you make the effort to do so. And by doing that, you’ll already be doing more than most people ever will.
– it’s okay to suck. A bad drawing doesn’t define your worth, as an artist or a person. A bad drawing is still a drawing, and you still learned something from doing it.
– be honest with yourself about what you did right and ways in which you can improve. Don’t compare your progress to others. Their journey is theirs – yours is yours.
– no matter how insecure you are about your own art, learn how to say something nice about it, and don’t say “I know this sucks” in the caption.
No, you don’t understand, this literally works.
It worked for me.
I realized that when I posted stuff I’d made, I would say a lot of shit like “ohhhh, I got this off-center” and “uhhh, I know that the texture is a little off” and “eh, I had trouble controlling the depth here and as a result I almost punched through the carving.”
And I realized how upset I would be if someone else pointed those things out about me in comments to my post. And I thought to myself, then why am I saying this shit to me?
So I quit. I just cold-turkey quit. I would WRITE the criticisms I had and then delete them right before posting. And I would make myself find the things about the piece that were actually good and I would point those out instead.
And at first it felt uncomfortable and raw and anxiety-inducing.
But after a while, I realized that I could acknowledge the things that I wanted to change and do not like privately, and didn’t have to air it to the world. So I focused on articulating to myself and myself only what I could have done differently, and I did it in a positive way: “I learned not to use paint that was too thick.” “I learned that yellow doesn’t cover darker colors very well.” “I learned that I need to wait longer between coats.”
I learned. I succeeded at learning.
Not “I failed.”
See, what I was doing when I audibly or in print criticized myself and said bad things was sort of softening the punch: if I said these things, then someone else couldn’t come along and make me look and feel stupid by pointing them out.
Joke’s on me. I nearly always already knew where the flaws were. All I was doing was drawing attention to the parts that were not successful. I was hurting myself just as much as anyone else could.
So I just decided that I wouldn’t accept negativity or nonconstructive criticism. Not from others, not from myself.
And I started saying good things about my own work.
And I started feeling a lot better about it.
A lot.
I still get frustrated, and I still produce work I do not like. At all.
Just, now I focus on what I learned, and if I still can’t figure out what I did wrong, I set it aside and I wait while I work on other things, and eventually I will advance enough that I realize where I took a wrong turn.
So pay equal attention to your good qualities, and to anything you can learn from your mistakes, do not draw attention to your mistakes because you will see those mean words every time you go back and look at the work you posted. Work as much as you can, and know that by doing so, you are improving all the time, even when it doesn’t feel like it.
And yes, never ever compare yourself to others. It’s okay to look at stuff and say “I like how they did X thing. I would like my things to look like X thing in that particular way. How can I go about doing that?” Do not criticize yourself for not being as good as they are.
You are your own worst critic. Try to set aside some time to be your own best cheerleader, too. Find nice things to say to yourself. Try very hard to do that every day.
And never say anything to yourself that you would not say to a very dear friend who asked for help. “I think this would have looked better with a warmer blue” is fine. “This background fucking sucks” is not okay. You would not say that to your friend.
And never treat yourself in any way that you wouldn’t treat a pet. Your Artistic Process is a shy little thing that wants you to love it. Desperately. Criticizing it and using a mean tone of voice and telling it that it’s bad and did bad and is a bad Artistic Process, so bad, bad Art, BAD, doesn’t make it grow bigger and stronger. It shrinks it down and makes it cry in the corner and that is very sad. Praising it and saying nice things to it make it better. You don’t train a puppy by beating it. You train a puppy by cleaning up its puppy mistakes and praising it when it succeeds and showing it love when it fails but was trying hard. Your inner artistic critter is the same.
And don’t tell yourself “I should be better than this, I should be BRAVE SOLDIER DOG, not puppy!” We are all, every single one of us, puppies deep down inside. Our artistic process SHOULD be like a puppy, a joyous happy thing, full of energy and potential. And it can be, if you learn to be gentle and kind to yourself.
Good luck. ❤
I am not going to claim universality here, but adopting the maxim “attempt to be as kind to yourself as you would be to someone else” vastly improved my mental health.
it didn’t solve everything magically, yes i’m on meds now, etc etc, but it really, really helped.
And yes. YES YES YES all of this. It took me a long time to learn
this, and it’s one of the most important tools I have. I have a
very loud Inner Critic – not just for my writing and my attempts to
dabble at art, but for everything (yay fucked up relationships. >_<).
One of the things that saves me is that I co-write a fuckton. If
anyone said stuff about my co-author(s) that I say about myself? I’d
punch that asshole and then block them so fast it’d leave a smoking
crater.
I’ve seen another bit of related advice floating around (can’t
find the direct link for the life of me right now, of course) that
helped me. If someone approaches you to tell you that they like a
thing, that’s no reason to tear it down. This is also true of your
own work. If you went up to your favorite author or artist, and
gushed how you love a particular work, and they sat you down and went
through all the things wrong with it
– that’s not cool. Don’t treat yourself that way either.
As folks said: it takes time, and it
feels very uncomfortable at first.
Inspired by this post, I wanted to a separate post about the destruction of the Jedi Order.
Their destruction wasn’t an event, it was a process. A long process that
started generations before Anakin was even born. Yes, Anakin made his terrible
life choices (no one is denying that) but he’s not the one thing that went wrong with Order
or why they fell apart. So I made a list of terrible things the Jedi
Order did that are not Anakin Skywalker’s fault:
The Order’s decision to take little kids from their parents.
The Order’s indoctrination of said kids;
The Order’s decision to keep Yoda in charge for 900 years;
The Order’s lack of action to end slavery;
Their turning a blind to the corruption in the Senate.
Their decision to follow the Senate even when they knew they shouldn’t.
The Order’s growing arrogance;
The Council’s nepotism;
The Council’s decision to not send extra help along with Qui-Gon and Obi-wan right after they were told the Sith was back.
Their decision to hide the truth about Qui-Gon’s death.
Their decision to personally aid the leaders of a planet but not its citizens.
Their decision to help slaver Jabba the Hutt but not his slaves.
The order’s diminishing popularity.
The Council’s decision to fight in the Clone Wars.
Turning children and teenagers into soldiers
Hiding prisoners in secret prisons (without trial).
Their plan to overthrown the Chancellor before they even knew he was a Sith.
Using a slave army.
Hiding the truth about the slave army’s creation.
The Council lying to their own members.
Turning their back on a teenager they raised (and used) to avoid “political complications”
Allowing an older man to have unrestrained access to a little boy.
Sending a little boy to an adult prison.
* Acting like they had All The Answers To Everything when they couldn’t even handle a scared kid who missed his mommy.
* Making the scared kid feel like he was a bad, dangerous person for being scared, despite the fact that he’d just helped their asses out bigtime.
* Wait, so Anakin’s Dangerous, but a fucknut like Pong Krell flies below the radar? Yeah, no.
* Giving Anakin shit about his arm when he lost it in battle against a Sith Lord…who used to be a Jedi himself and left the Order because he finally got fed up with the Jedi and their shit.
* Having a fucked up system that involved sending aspiring Jedi kids off to be farmers if they didn’t get chosen by a master. Wow, glad you guys took them away from their families and fucked up their lives so they could go grow beans for you or some shit, good job.
* Being hypocritical assholes. There is no ignorance…but only Masters can access certain parts of the archives and we’re gonna lie out our asses on a regular basis about pretty much everything we can think of. There is no fear…but we’re afraid of literally everything, including being unpopular, so let’s throw Ahsoka to the wolves so we can keep sitting at the cool kids’ table at lunch.
* Failure to have a basic fucking freshman level psychology textbook in the goddamn archives because then so much of this royal goddamn clusterfuck could have been prevented in the first place!
if you believe in transformative/restorative justice, you need to make room for rehabilitation. 100% of the time.
i’m not saying people need to be friends with, or like, or even forgive the people who’ve wronged them, but they have to get okay with those people’s reintegration into the community, they have to get okay with people having a second chance once they’ve accepted their wrongdoing and taken steps toward reparation.
like, one of the most insidious aspects of carceral logics is that they claim to value rehabilitation without ever seeking it and, if anything, they make it utterly impossible. if you really want a postcarceral concept of justice, you have to work to undo that, and it is work.
it’s not a demand for ‘accountability’ that has no specific meaning, it’s not virally isolating someone from community–in practice, almost always someone from one specific multimarginality–it’s not retribution. it’s good faith. it’s sitting down, face to face, and working through shit. if someone who’s done you wrong refuses to do that, that’s one thing, but they have to be given that chance. if you can’t be the one to give them that chance, if it’s too retraumatizing or too painful even if you’re surrounded by support, that’s okay. it’s still something that needs to happen within your community and it’s your right to have some kind of voice in that.
like, if you’re going to call yourself an anarchist, say you hate cops, say you hate prisons, say you want to commit to community self-sustainability and autonomy–this is part of how you do it. it’s hard. it sucks. it requires way more communication than we’re used to and are comfortable with, let alone proficient at. but if we’re ever going to get past carceral justice, that’s got to be how we do it.
Replies from the OP on another reblog:
do…do people realize there are things someone can do to harm the
community other than abuse? like, uh, thievery, belligerent public
intoxication, drunk driving, negligence, etc etc etc. like how much bad
faith do you have to come in with to read a post about prison abolition
and community justice and react with ‘why is the OP not using the word
abusers…this is sketchy… :/’
that, and that certain folks can’t imagine a community issue beyond interpersonal abuse probably speaks to a degree of shelteredness with respect to class. and then there’s the misreading of macroscopic community, ability to sustain a living, and access community resources as ‘you’ve got to let people who’ve wronged you into your personal life’
Also… I don’t know how I feel about prison abolition, mostly because I don’t feel like I’ve seen enough clear plans laid out for replacing it with something better.
But even for abusers or rapists or murderers… how exactly is throwing them into a tiny box, which is pretty much guaranteed to create stress, with other people who are more likely than the general public to be violent, which is also likely to create stress, supposed to make anything better?
My understanding of rehabilitative justice is EXTREMELY 101 but I understood it to be that prisons were supposed to be used as rehabilitative spaces. Like, instead of going to prison and being systematically made miserable and exploited, we understand that being in prison, even a very nice prison, is punishment enough, and we take advantage of the fact that the criminal in question is safely isolated no only from victims or toxic systems but also the sort of grind of adult responsibilities that make it really hard to break out of them and make sure they can use all that free time they suddenly have to get therapy, and make reparations, and develop good interpersonal/cogntive/educational/vocational/etc skills, so by the time they come out of prison they’re MORE able to interact with society than when they went in, not traumatized by the experience and the experience of reintegration.
There are countries which handle this kind of thing much better, with much better results. Hell, we’ve seen individual programs here that were AMAZING at preventing recidivism. My husband is a defense attorney, and he spends a hell of a lot of his time working to advocate for his clients who will not be able to avoid prison to get a sentence that maximizes their chance of succeeding in the long run, but the system makes it VERY hard.
There are a lot of things that are completely incompatible with rehabilitation models:
1. There cannot be an incentive to the system to keep people in jail. That means no prison slave labor, no forced donation of organs for capital cases (there’s a huge amount of discussion available elsewhere about this.) No for-profit privately run prisons.
2. There MUST be attention to the root problems for why people end up in prison. That means doing the hard work of making sure people have housing, food, education, health care, a sense of security and opportunities to do meaningful work. (I am not making any judgments about what constitutes meaningful work.)
3. Drug treatment and sensible, evidence-based drug policies are a MUST. Legalizing drugs but making sure that they’re being provided safely can go a long way toward stopping both addiction and the criminal activities that surround drugs when they are outlawed.
4. The justice system has to become focused on actual justice, and not the current “grind enough points to move up a level in the DA’s office” mentality. Hubby has some hair-raising tales to tell about people who were charged with serious crimes in order to persuade them to testify against people they were understandably terrified of. Of people charged for many felonies for a series of things that involved less than $1000 total worth of economic damages because it looked better on the DA’s record to have prosecuted more felonies… and because they could technically pass off 13 low grade bad checks as identity theft felonies, they did.
Anyway. There’s more but those are some of the big ones. You have to knock down all the problems at once or they just keep reinventing themselves.
using them interchangeably is right-wing rhetoric left over from the cold war. they’re not the same. i know, when you’re angry at the grotesque excesses of unchecked capitalism, it’s easy to think the farther away you go from it the better. but communism – as in, abolition of private property, communism – is an extreme that has not yet been put into play without being fatal to its citizens on a massive scale. think of it like this:
what you want is democratic socialism – that’s what bernie sanders was offering to bring to the table last election. that’s what we see in really happy and stable countries like norway and denmark. it’s a system where freedom and safety are balanced, where the government has the power to keep people from being exploited but doesn’t mess with their lives other than that.
socialism without the democratic aspect is a mixed bag, just like capitalism. the government decides what’s best for you on a lot of topics. there’s a lot of collective ownership going on, and while it can lead to a flourishing of the arts and/or sciences if the government wants to fund that, in general stuff kinda breaks down over time. have you waited in line at the DMV lately? imagine that atmosphere applied to every big industry and institution. you would not like it.
communism is the extreme. you own nothing. the state claims you own everything. the state owns you. the glorious workers’ paradise lasts for a decade or so, maybe, and then enough people don’t remember starving under the tsars and start asking why Enough Cabbage is the best they’re allowed to aspire to. and that’s when the crackdowns start. you would not survive it.
i would like us to reclaim democratic socialism as a valid option in american politics. part of that is not letting people confuse it with the “i don’t care if you were a dentist before the revolution, you’re a turnip farmer now” types of government that are, honestly, pretty awful.
can we have ‘classicists against white supremacy’// ‘classicists against patriarchy’ // ‘classicists against eurocentrism’ // patches
because we’re actually at the ground of what the hate groups and right parties are trying to claim as their own and use as a weapon against others – so it’s time to take back that narrative.
Okay, I thought I was going to wake up for like five seconds and then go back to sleep but I started fucking around with this and I really got into it so now I’ve been working on this for an hour and I’m not done.
First, I want to talk a little bit about the symbol I chose, and of course I’m open to suggestions. While the owl is often known because of its connection to Athena and is thus often seen as a symbol of wisdom, in this case I also picked it because of its dual – and much wider – association with death. This is a worldwide association; though not every culture associates the owl with death and destruction, many more associate it with death than associate it with wisdom. I thought that was a very potent symbol for what’s being expressed here: what ‘classical’/white thought has expressed as wisdom is often death and destruction to other cultures, as well as the fact that what is being expressed here is a death or destruction to a supremacist way of thinking.
Second, the layouts here use a font called Norse. There are a LOT of other fonts that I can choose, and I am going to do a few more mock-ups with those in a bit. I really like Norse, it stitches very cleanly, and it has the added benefit of looking a) ‘generic classical, like it was cut in rock,’ and b) also looking pretty Norse if you realize that yeah I’m probably thumbing my nose at the people ruining Norse mythology and symbolism. (I’m open to font suggestions.)
I’ve listed this in the shop; it should stitch without an issue, but I’ll be testing it once the current run finishes. (Yes, my machine’s been running all night, the DE Punk Rock Flea Market is in a week, I’m busy!)
Thanks for tagging me in on this, I hope this is something people like. As always I am a one-person shop manned by a queer Jewish disabled person, so if you do choose to pick one up, thanks for supporting independent artists. 🙂
😀 😀 😀
A medievalist friend of mine requested an additional one and so I am adding:
😀
wow 💖💖💖
Image is a drawing of three awards. One on the left with a medal with ribbons, one on the upper right that is a rectangle with a straight border, and one on the lower right that is round with a bumpy border. Artist’s signature is in the middle.
Left award: Tried to be cool and was absolutely not
Right top: Felt like mental health stuff was going to kick your ass but you kept on fighting
Right bottom: Faced emotions even though they suck but you did it anyway
Queer is actually different word with a different history than some words in a similar category. It’s been used politically as well as personally and it a word with a militantly inclusive and affirming background – whatever it may or may not have had in other countries years ago.
The ‘queer is a slur’ crap was started by TERFs, apparently in the 70s and 80s – although I can only find examples in the 90s and 00s. I had to learn about its history too – because in Australia, it’s not a slur at all! It only surfaced as ‘a slur’ and something to demand people tag and to attack people over about a year ago on Tumblr. I will not buy into that loaded rhetoric.
Please think critically about why you are asking ACTUAL QUEER PEOPLE to slur-tag their own identities because it’s a really transparent power-play and logical fallacy. Why? Because Xkit and a couple of the other add-ons with blacklist etc remove posts with key words in them ALREADY. WITHOUT you needing to tag them. If someone is hiding ‘queer’, there is NO REASON for them to ask a blogger to ALSO tag ‘q slur’, unless their reason has nothing to do with being protected from triggers at all.
it’s a powerplay. It’s coming to someone’s blog to subtly let them know that you don’t like the fact they use the word. It’s a subtle move to make the word less acceptable. To make someone else feel ashamed of a word YOU don’t like and YOU don’t have good associations with. For some people it’s, “My pain and experiences are more important than anyone elses, and everyone is required to change their lexicon for ME.”
Nope. Just nope. This is a queer blog, I am queer, and I’m not tagging ‘q slur’ for someone who doesn’t want to research their history, think critically, and would rather be a mindless attack mob for TERFs, aphobes, truscum, and other exclusionist groups of people that benefit from an inclusive word like ‘queer’ becoming a no-no in our community.
This is exactly why I won’t tag it – if you need the word to be tagged, that BY DEFAULT means that you are using a blacklisting service, which means YOU CAN JUST BLACKLIST THE WHOLE WORD.
Like, I blacklist the word “diet” because I need a little buffer between myself and the concept sometimes when my eating disorder is acting up. I blacklist things like ‘fitness’ and ‘weight loss’ – because that’s what I need to avoid to keep myself healthy. I don’t ask people not to post about their fitness goals when there is a perfectly easy way for me to avoid it.
There’s even! a browser extension! that replaces certain words! You may have seen people jokingly using it to replace “Millennials” with “Snake People,” for example. You could also use it to replace “queer” with “gay” or some other word if you needed to.
There are lots of ways that people use every day to protect themselves from easily avoidable words and topics – so coming onto someone’s post, when they are using the word as self-identification, especially, and calling it a slur? That’s fucking RUDE. The first time I self-ID’d as queer in the mid-00s, do you know what happened? A straight TERF came onto my LJ post comments and told me I couldn’t use it because it was a slur.
You know what I did? I fucking blocked her. My sentiment has not changed in 12 years. It’s my word, the only one that really fits me, and if you don’t like it, I’m all right with you leaving to protect yourself. You do you. But I’m gonna do me.
There's a Mirror on the Wall 