if you dont believe in god thats fine but when extremely horrible things have happened and people are praying for the lost souls of children, it is not the time to speak up. it is not just “stating your opinion” it’s being an asshole
I reblog this as an atheist who really wishes other atheists would shut the fuck up and let people deal with tragedy in their own way that hurts no one.
Aaaaand the opposite is also true. If a horrible tragedy befalls an atheist, don’t try to use it as an opportunity to lead them to Jesus.
BOTH OF THESE ARE SOOOO IMPORTANT JUST LET PEOPLE GRIEVE !!!
!!!!!!
Just a friendly note about the second one: I’m religious, I have friends who are not. When tragedy strikes I have found the best way to broach the subject, if you do believe in the power of prayer, is to ask:
“Would you be comfortable if I prayed for you, given the circumstances?”
And regardless of the answer, that is where you let it drop. Pray if they say yes, refrain if they say no, but don’t bring it up again unless it’s like “I’m sorry this is so ongoing. You’re still in my prayers.”
And yes, I have had atheists say yes and even thank me when I ask this question, because they know it means I’m thinking of them and want things to get better without demanding they kowtow to my beliefs.
Obviously the way someone handles something with their friends is between them, and I suspect an offer of prayer is received as a sort of ‘I’ll be thinking of you’ combined with “I feel helpless and this will make me feel better.”
I’m not Christian or from a Christian culture, but growing up in the US means I’m familiar with it. Most people who make a point of calling themselves Atheists come from a Christian heritage, or at least have grown up in the mainstream culture which is really quite heavily influenced by Christian worldviews. Some of these people feel injured or damaged by some aspects of Christian culture, and of course there are people out there who are actively other-than-Christian.
I would recommend the opposite (except, of course, if it’s someone you know well). Pray for whoever, whatever you want – but unless you have active reason to believe it’ll influence the person you’re talking about well, keep it to yourself. Remember, people who are atheists don’t believe there’s anything to prayer except for the comfort of the person praying. People who are religiously other-than-christian might appreciate your religious impulse, or might feel imposed on or threatened by it. It’s really hard to tell, especially since disagreeing with Christianity/Christian impulses is so strongly disapproved of that admitting it is seriously taboo.
Again, it comes down to the specific situation. Someone who knows you well, who knows the role religion has in your life, will probably be unsurprised by your request and ready to deal with it. Someone from a similar sort of cultural/religious heritage might find comfort in the familiar ritual, even though it doesn’t mean to them what it means to you.
I think that you, in making sure to ask first, are assuming that your private prayers are actions which will definitely affect the other person, so you feel it’s necessary to get permission. But to the other person, your prayers might be understood as private meditations which will help only you to feel better about whatever horrible thing is happening in someone else’s life. When you ask someone whether you can pray for them, it may be that they will feel that you’re making their trauma all about your feelings, pulling them out of their lives to caretake for you when they’re in a situation when they require caretaking themselves.
Which, yanno, different people, different situations. But I’d recommend that, instead of asking whether you can pray for someone, ask if there’s something you can do that will help. Say it just like that – “Can I help in any way?” And then follow through.
Or, if you don’t think you’ll be able to do that, food is always good. “I was thinking of you, so I made an extra batch.” Keep your prayers private, share cookies.
@ceruleanteacup
….okay, I agree with those last two paragraphs. Two thumbs up for practical help and/or food.
However, please do not pray for me without my permission. Chances are that I am not of the same faith that you are (assuming you are of a faith), and asking a deity that I do not follow to meddle in my life is Rude.
I’m with @dogmatix about not praying for me without my permission. And I’ll ask before I pray for someone, because dude, my deities are all death or chaos/conflict related. It’s really rude to invite that sort of thing into someone’s life without their knowledge and permission. And if I’m going to do that, I probably have very strong negative feelings about that person that have been around for years.
does anyone else have those moments where they just fall in love with being alive? like, maybe you’re in art class with soft music and you realize that this peaceful feeling is a part of life that you love and you want to just keep forever, and there are so many other parts of life too that are so wonderful and maybe existing isnt so bad after all
is this what being not depressed is like
no, this is what recovery is like. this is what being depressed is like, and it’s why we stay. because even when we’re sure this is it, this is the last day we can put up with it, this is the last hour, the last second – some part of us remembers these moments, and thinks – what if tomorrow has one of them.
i used to joke i have bad days and worse days. i almost never do well. i feel like i keep barely a nose above the water.
but in those rare, rare, rare seconds where the waves stop for one second and i catch sight of something other than dark, i see it. the way a rose looks after a rain. how my mother smiles when she knows it’s my favorite meal that’s cooking. my best friend looking over his shoulder to flip me off again. the bike i rode at 7 and crashed at 17. a little bug struggling with five little legs – but walking, walking.
recovery isn’t smashing into these moments and realizing it’s finally happened, what those people said is true and it “all gets better”. recovery is remembering those moments and deciding – i want them back. it’s looking for them. sometimes it takes hours. sometimes days. sometimes months without any sight of them. but you look, you search even when you’re too tired to keep your eyes open, because you promised yourself … tomorrow. tomorrow will be the day we find one. a four leaf clover we know is our sign, the rainbow, the wishing well – the way out.
and when you find one, they get easier. four leaf clovers always grow in the same patch, after all. and your eyes get sharper. you figure out what makes any small part of you happy. you figure out that you might not be happy, but it’s good enough to stick around to watch the way oil looks in puddles and how she always cries at new year’s. and it might not be blisteringly, soul-crushingly happy in the way other people seem to feel things – in that mind-numbing wordless joy that shines in them, that glow i’m so envious of, that effortlessness – but it will be like this, just quiet, a moment of rest, of the shouts dimming for a minute, a peace.
it’s easy to say “i’m depressed, i’ll never be happy.” maybe. i hope not, because i’m still looking. and in these moments i’ve rediscovered that i am funny, that i like the color pink, that kittens and puppies never fail me. in these moments i’m still depressed, still me, still fighting an illness that wants to end me. but i’m fighting. i seek these moments in every second i get because i’m here and breathing and after all this i’m going to be pissed if this gets the better of me.
maybe i’ll never figure out how to feel effortless and free. but i know that i feel love when the music is blaring and my hands are out the window and i feel love somewhere on the beach and i feel love watching salamanders wake up in the mornings. it’s not other people’s love, it’s far-off and it’s distant and it might not be “normal”, but it’s goddamn important to me.
i didn’t wake up better. i forced better to come fight me. i’ve been walking towards recovery since i was 19. five years later and no, i’m not cured, but i see a lot more of these moments. or maybe they were always there, and only now am i realizing what i got in front of me.
and when it’s been bad again? when i’m not even breathing? when it’s been months since i felt anything, when the stress is too much and the sky is dark and the moon in me has fallen silent? i say: hang on. tomorrow might be the day we find it. tomorrow might be worth the fight.
PTSD is your brain trying to make sure you DON’T DIE.
Humans are really good at adapting so that we don’t die. That’s kind of our whole *THING*. We adapt.
If something BAD and SCARY and DANGEROUS happens, your brain tries to teach you to react better next time. If the Bad Scary Dangerous thing happens a lot, that’s reinforcing it. With CPTSD, the Bad Scary Dangerous thing happened often enough and frequently enough that your whole psyche developed around it.
You learn to notice the tiny things that signal the Bad Scary Dangerous Thing might happen – even if you don’t consciously know that you know that – so that you are braced to react and defend yourself. They become triggers so that you are primed to respond.
Hypervigilance? Better to panic unnecessarily than to get dead because you didn’t recognize a threat in time, right? It’s uncomfortable and a waste of energy but you’re not dead.
Nightmares about the Bad Thing? Dreams are PRACTICE. You are trying to learn how to react better or faster or more effectively next time.
Avoidance? Dissociating is better than just completely breaking and shutting down entirely.
The thing is, even if you are not in that situation anymore, your brain did not get the memo. It is trying! But it takes a lot of work to convince it that “No really, it is safe now!”
I guess what I’m saying is cut yourself some slack. You are doing your best and you’re not dead. ❤
The realization that PTSD is a survival response helped me be less angry at my brain for the way it was behaving.
When my PTSD was pervasive and controlled my whole life, I didn’t understand that in situations of abuse, it can be difficult for even an outside observer to determine which things were dangerous. So your brain just labels anything or everything involved in the situation as dangerous. That’s how you wind up having fight/flight/fawn/play dead responses to innocuous things like telephones or shoes or the word “sweetheart” – because part of your brain figures that maybe they were part of what hurt you and thus should be interpreted as dangers. It’s the same survival-related pattern-recognition that allows us to spot camoflaged snakes in the grass, only in recovering from abuse, your brain is trying to spot snakes in the interpersonal relationship.
The process of recovering from PTSD often involves unpairing neutral simuli from survival responses. So you’re retraining your brain to understand that telephones and shoes and the word “sweetheart” do not signal imminent danger, and to instead recognize which interpersonal behaviors actually are dangerous.
Full offense but if someone wants you and your kind eradicated violence against them is always justified
“Violence Doesn’t solve anything” but sometimes it does actually
Don’t ever tell Jewish people, poc, LGBT people, disabled people not to express anger at the forces who want them gone. Don’t ever try and silence marginalized voices.
We’ve had to have WARS to stop some people and their horrible ideologies. Sometimes, violence is the ONLY thing that solves a problem.
When you tell people who are under attack that “Violence doesn’t solve anything,” what you’re actually saying is, “Stop fighting and let yourselves be killed.”
Fact: Deaf babies, when exposed to ASL, start to babble with their hands and learn to produce handshapes just as hearing babies do. They proceed through a similar linguistic acquisition process.
Fact: When children have early language input of any type, they later develop better reading skills (in English) then children prohibited from learning language. Children who learn ASL early learn to read better.
Fact: Extended language deprovation causes children to be at risk in other areas of physical and emotional development
Fact: Language development lies at the core of human-emotional and mental development.
Fact: The brain processes signed languages just as spoken language. Signed languages are in no way inferior to spoken languages.
Fact: Just as everyone has the right to speak, everyone has the right to sign.
Somewhere along the way fanart become worth more than fanfic to fandom.
Artists have Patreon accounts where people pay real money to view their art early or to access special pictures like scraps or tutorials.
Whereas writers are expected to produce more and more, faster, for nothing in return. No one wants to see our “scraps” and writers who do provide Tips and Tricks often get crap for “policing” how people write.
And it falls into the prevailing notion that somehow writing is something easy, something anyone can do.
This isn’t an attack on fanartists. You deserve to receive some sort of compensation and accolades for your work. And so do fanauthors.
Writing fic is hard work. Yes, anyone can type out a story, same as anyone can pick up a pencil to draw, but what makes the difference, what makes a good piece is the experience and talent of an author. It’s all the stories no one saw, it’s all the writing books we’ve read, it’s the classes we have attended, all rolled into a package that works weeks, months, years to bring the fandom their fic. Yes we write for ourselves but we also write to contribute to fandom – just like artists do.
We’re just the same – artists and authors – and we deserve the same respect for our work.
Thank you so much, OP. And thank you to everyone who remembered us on Fic Writers Appreciation Day.
Let’s be clear, writing takes for-fucking-ever to do and it’s hard, lonely, strange, isolating, exhausting work. There is no art that is easy to make. NONE. All art is hard and deserves recognition if it has made you feel something or you enjoyed it.
Allll of this
As both an artist and writer, I have to say that I’ve been struggling and asked to write fanfic faster than I can produce, and I’ve been producing more art than fanfics because it is faster and easier to produce and more people come in. It drove me away from writing and honestly it does help when both sides are appreciated. As everyone else said, both take really long to create, and all should be deserved of recognition.
I can say writing is a lot more exhausting than drawing, but that’s my personal opinion.
^^^^^ this for days
I’m not saying artists have it easier, you guys legit blow my mind and I worship the ground you walk on But people pay for fan art while (most) people still don’t consider writing fan fiction to even be a skill. I’ve STOPPED telling people I write fan fiction because they just roll their eyes and ask if I write anything real.
Like, sorry if my 50k, heavily researched fan fiction with an original plot and excellent dialogue isn’t as “real” as the original six page story you wrote in tenth grade
A GODDAMN MEN. I’m so glad you wrote this OP. Something similar has been pinging around my brainspace for ages and ages and I couldn’t figure out how to say it. It’s like, here, take my soul and my heart and my ideas and my creativity and just *have it*, for nothing. Because I want to talk to you, because I want to connect with you, because we share the same fandom language. And somehow, in the last 3 years or so, Fan Authors have become the strange little hobbyists in the world of fandom, quality doesn’t matter, care doesn’t matter, research and talent and learning about writing doesn’t matter.
Which – if a writer writes a story and no one reads it, does it exist in the fandom? One wonders, and it makes it hard to continue screaming into the void if all you get back is the echo of your own voice, sometimes.
Having been around in fandom for a while, I have some theories about this shift–I think part of it is fandom’s migration to tumblr, which is much more friendly to art than text. But I think more than that is the broader acceptance and acknowledgement of fandom by creators, and what parts of fandom they can engage with.
Majority of creators–the overwhelming majority–won’t read fic for their works. Even the most pro-fic creators, the ones who write fic themselves, don’t do it. Because they have to protect themselves legally. If I write a fic that happens to match an idea that an author had, and the author reads my fic before writing down that idea, it looks suspicious when a book comes out that closely resembles my fic. It opens the doors to legal action where a fan could sue an author, if the fan had reason to believe the author stole their ideas.
So I get why majority of creators stay away from it. Fanart and cosplay are safer for creators to engage with. Majority of the time, there isn’t that same fear of stealing ideas. But as a fic writer, yeah, sometimes it really fucking sucks to see creators gushing over fanart and cosplay–works that absolutely deserve that praise, don’t get me wrong–because I know that they will never talk about fic the same way.
When I first got into fandom, eighteen-ish years ago, fic authors were the superstars of fandom. But over the years, yeah, fic has been relegated to second or third tier. And I’m not sure if some kind of balance will ever come back, where art and fic are put on an even keel, because one of those is able to be lauded by creators and one isn’t. I understand the reasoning behind it, I really do, and I don’t fault creators for making decisions to protect themselves. But there are times when it can be kind of demoralizing.
Reblogging this version too, because @rhiannon42 ‘s comment is spot-on. The ability to get “official” sanction and praise is a large part of why fanart is more respected than fanfic, and it’s not anything that will change anytime soon. It’s more than a bit depressing for authors, if you allow yourself to think about it too much.
There's a Mirror on the Wall 