from The Courtesy Rules Of Blindness
“When you meet me don’t be ill at ease. It will help both of us if you remember these simple points of courtesy:
- I’m an ordinary person, just blind. You don’t need to raise your voice or address me as if I were a child. Don’t ask my spouse what I want–“Cream in the coffee?”–ask me.
- I may use a long white cane or a guide dog to walk independently; or I may ask to take your arm. Let me decide, and please don’t grab my arm; let me take yours. I’ll keep a half-step behind to anticipate curbs and steps.
- I want to know who’s in the room with me. Speak when you enter. Introduce me to the others including children, and tell me if there’s a cat or dog.
- The door to a room or cabinet or to a car that is left partially open is a hazard to me.
- At dinner I will not have trouble with ordinary table skills.
- Don’t avoid words like “see.” I use them too. I’m always glad to see you.
- I don’t want pity, but don’t talk about the “wonderful compensations” of blindness. My sense of smell, taste, touch or hearing did not improve when I became blind, I rely on them more and, therefore, may get more information through those senses than you do–that’s all.
- If I’m your houseguest, show me the bathroom, closet, dresser, window–the light switch too. I like to know whether the lights are on or off.
- I’ll discuss blindness with you if you’re curious, but it’s an old story to me. I have as many other interests as you do.
- Don’t think of me as just a blind person. I’m just a person who happens to be blind.
- You don’t need to remember some “politically correct” term, “visually impaired”, “sight challenged” etc. Keep it simple and honest, just say blind.
In all 50 states the law requires drivers to yield the right of way when they see my extended white cane. Only the blind may carry white canes. You see more blind persons today walking alone, not because there are more of us, but because we have learned to make our own way.”
Tag: important
This post was triggered by something that @roachpatrol said over here about the expectation for girls to be sweet and clean and harmless:
Holy shit, if I was eight years younger and wandering into fandom for the first time, I can guarantee that the culture right now would’ve fucked me up and ground me down and taken away all my healthy outlets.
Picture: you are a girl at the tender young age of mumbledyteen. Up until this point you have been taught that all dark thoughts are literally hand-delivered into your head by the devil, and that the only correct method of dealing with negativity is to ignore them and pray harder. Concentrate on what is good and righteous and pure to the exclusion of all else, this is how you be a good person.
You are also a fully-functioning human being, one who can feel stressed or lonely or angry or any number of bad things. Mostly, with emotions that are still working themselves out, you feel this rumbling, white-hot white noise under everything, all the time. Sometimes it rolls in like a thunderstorm and everything else gets drowned out, and sometimes it’s only quietly muttering in the distance. Either way it’s always there, and the sound shreds uncomfortably at the inside of your brain.
When you were younger, before you were in charge of your own media consumption, your brain would shred up a myriad of saccharine stories to try and match the noise of the shredder in your head. Bad things happening, people getting hurt, characters trapped in unhealthy relationships of all kinds.
Fanfiction, the product of a hundred thousand other mumbledyteens whose brains are all screaming the same way, makes something in your brain go ping.
Unfortunately, if the planet had ever been united on any single message, it was probably that no matter how you feel: 1) your feelings weren’t unique 2) they didn’t matter 3) they didn’t matter because they weren’t unique, they were shared among millions of hysterical, worthless teenaged girls just like you.
Fandom was confirmation of the first, but (with some hiccups along the way) outright rejection of the last two. Fuck you, our feelings do matter, and this is a story just for us.
A disclaimer: these aren’t good stories, otherwise they wouldn’t have to be defended. Their flavor of topic is not within societally acceptable bounds. Fictional characters have sex and get tortured and raped and abused, but their screaming harmonizes with the pitch of the shredder when it’s burrowing deepest.
As a teenager I never thought that my feelings were important enough to deal with, but these stories let me look at them sideways. Audience catharsis is the whole point of tragedy, after all.
And hell, these days I’m a happy, healthy adult who barely even has the urge to go looking for whump fic when I’ve had a bad week. I’m not going to forget just how much bad stuff that fic helped me air out, though, not ever. (Not to mention that thanks to all of those abuse!fics, I can recognize an unhealthy relationship at 500 paces, even if the fictional abuse was depicted as something loving and romantic. Abusers in real life don’t go around with helpful warning tags on their sleeves anyway.)
But holy shit, can you imagine if I’d found fandom as it is today.
Yes, your church is right, your family is right. Horrible things in stories are only there because they were written by horrible people, and they’re only popular because horrible people read them. The very concepts they address corrupt everything they touch.
That shredder in your head, the one that takes innocent cartoons but then shits out sadness and mayhem? That’s disgusting, you’re disgusting. How dare you think about minors having underaged sex, you minor? How dare you consider another person getting hurt? Your feelings don’t matter, they aren’t unique, they’re shared with all kinds of worthless shitbags just like you.
Every ounce of what you read and write and enjoy is going to be weighed for sin and tested for purity. You know, just like the rest of your life, except this time there’s no deity who’s handing out second chances.
Maybe that’s what bothers me most about all of this. It’s the same petty fandom bullshit as always, but “you’re wrong for liking a ship because IT WILL NEVER BE CANON” is a hell of a lot easier to laugh off when you’re young than “you’re wrong for liking a ship because YOU’RE AN ABUSIVE PEDOPHILE AND IF SOMETHING BAD HAPPENS IT’S YOUR FAULT FOR PERPETUATING IT.”
My fault, my bad thoughts, no outlet for any of them. The message to repress all the bad things so I can look like a good person, but my brain is so full of unprocessed shit that it’s solidified. Nobody actually saved any real children, but my brain sure is getting a second dose of fucked-up.
Are the people getting attacked going to be okay, will they be able to go and address their braingremlins somewhere else? I’d also ask if the people doing the attacking are okay, with all of the denial and repression they must deal with, but it seems like they’ve got venting pretty well handled by taking it out on strangers.
Hey, c’mon, calm down friends. I bet I’ve read a story that’s got a character screaming at just the same pitch you are.
It helps to read one of those and harmonize your voices, I promise.
holy shit, dude, this is powerful. i’ll delete this reblog if you don’t want the extra attention, but thank you for your thoughts.
Roachpatrol speaks my mind on this matter.
Posting because I know so many traumatized people, and so many of them just really need to see this, right now, for so many reasons.
“Audience catharsis is the whole point of tragedy, after all.”
A thousand times yes. This, some scholars believe, WAS the point of Greek tragedy. It wasn’t for teaching specific lessons (don’t do this or that will happen), it was for creating pity and fear. Pity is, of course, feeling badly for the characters you’re watching/reading. Fear is the understanding that these things can happen to you, or things like them, and that you may not necessarily be able to protect yourself from it. You may never accidentally kill your father and marry your mother, but you can watch Oedipus do it, see his downfall, and empathize with the kind of human frailty that caused him to try to outrun fate in the first place. Empathizing with him doesn’t mean you want to off your dad, it means you have made and will make mistakes too, that were based on consequences you hadn’t foreseen, and his distress resonates with yours. This pity and fear is what causes the emotional purging we know as catharsis.
Furthermore, Nietzsche (yes we’re citing Nietzsche too) basically considered tragedy a dress rehearsal for real-life suffering; if we see, say, a fictional character in great pain, when we are faced with great pain it’s easier to see that we can survive it too, that we have survived bad things and we are capable of surviving more of them. Even if it doesn’t end well. Because suffering is human, and we are humans, and human life can go on in the face of great suffering.
So yes, I read and created dark horrible fic, that is not directly related to the horrible things I have experienced (I have never been abducted by strexcorp or forcibly reeducated or kept in a lab with abusive creators), and I feel pity and fear for the characters and I recognize that I have seen some shit, and that they have too, and that all people have. Was Sophocles a sick incest creeper for writing Oedipus Rex? Or was he just giving us a chance to purge intense, and intensely human, emotions?
(source: my primary partner, who has been teaching Greek drama at NYU for more years than he’d care to admit; any remaining mistakes are my own but if you come at me with “hubris is just pride” i will fight you.)
(ETA fixed spelling of Nietzsche; autocorrect why are you like this)
This.
This.
A quintilian times this.Well put
i wouldn’t enact gruesome revenge on hospitals and doctors for my recent medical nightmare – for starters, they aren’t actually at fault, shit just happens sometimes, no matter how much my subconscious doesn’t want to accept that – but i can sure as hell read ALL the winter soldier medical torture fic. i can get my catharsis through his torment, and ride his rage out of the dark place as he slaughters his tormentors.
that doesn’t make me a person who, in real life, condones bloody vengeance. it doesn’t make my rage at my doctors anything but the reflex of an animal in pain, and it doesn’t mean i would act on it.
it just makes those feelings easier to bear and to work through, having that vicarious experience to carry me for a while.
and yes, that includes noncon – visiting that level of degradation on the character helps with the catharsis. people who don’t understand seem to think i’m cheering on fictional rape like it’s a great thing. no, it’s an awful thing, and that’s why it’s there.
it’s an awful thing, and that’s why it’s there.
wild idea here but… instead of pushing this idea that teenagers can’t be asexual bc they’re children and not wanting sex is normal, how about “if you identify as ace as a teenager but later realize you just didn’t want sex bc you were a kid and stop identifying that way, that’s okay” and realizing that doesn’t mean no one can know they’re asexual as a teenager and stop maybe telling asexual teenagers that they’re too young to be ace bc that’s really weird given that teenagers are cetainly capable of being non-asexual also you totally can’t decide something like that for someone else
Being white means never having to think about it.
James Baldwin (via intellocgent)
#which is why the term white privilege REALLY angers people #it’s the first time many people hear themselves categorized by race #suddenly they feel burdened by the idea their race defines them #just like the words straight and cis really anger people #because it makes them feel Othered for once #and it’s disconcerting #white privilege (skylikethat)
A lot of the advice I got about learning to enforce my boundaries was framed as an adversarial thing. Like, ‘yes, it might upset and disappoint the people around you, but you have to learn to tell them ‘no’ anyway.’ At best, ‘good people will still like you if you enforce your boundaries’.
What I wish I’d been told is that good people will think it’s awesome that you enforce your boundaries, that there are people who will respect the hell out of you for it, that there are people who will admire you not despite you telling them no, but because of it. That most people don’t want to make you do something you don’t enjoy,and so they’ll actively be happier and more relaxed around you if they know they can trust you to decline to do things you don’t enjoy and to ask them to stop things that bother you.
It helped me a lot, personally, to stop thinking of ‘enforcing my boundaries’ as something I did for me and more as something I did to empower the people I was close with, to build a situation where they and I felt sure everything that was going on was something we all wanted.
Most advice isn’t good for everyone and this advice seems maybe bad for people in abusive situations, because sometimes you do need to learn to enforce boundaries against people who will try to violate them. But if there are other brains like me out there: your partner will be really happy you can say no to them. your friend will be really happy you change the subject when you hate it. your roommate will really appreciate that you tell them to turn down the music. most people will feel safer and more comfortable around you if they know you’ll reliably express your needs, AND they’ll feel better about voicing theirs.
Tru fax.
I had a friend tell me that they really admired me for going “hey, I love you guys, but I need to go sit in a room by myself and read for an hour”. So yes, don’t be afraid of setting your boundaries!
And for people like me, who are very very VERY bad with things like unspoken clues to the fact that someone wants me to do/not do something or whatever? It is such a relief not to have to be constantly worried that I’ll do something that will make them not want to hang out with me anymore.
I’ve lost friends because they never tried to enforce their boundaries and as a result I had no idea I was trampling right over them until they got to a point where they couldn’t handle it anymore, and it is an AWFUL SHITTY FEELING knowing you’ve done that to someone.
Please please please enforce your boundaries with me. I promise I will love you for it.
This is so, so, SO important, people.
I am both bad at enforcing my boundaries and constantly scared of stomping over other peoples. It makes me feel safer if I know you can say No to me.
I don’t know why it never occurred to me that others would feel safer if they knew I could say No as well.
‘I was stunned by the business’: Fast food CEO says profits soared after minimum wage hike
And then something amazing happened…
surprising everyone, except for people who make at or near minimum wage and anyone who understands economics
Literally what every millennial has been asking for for years
Of course your fucking business does better when everyone has more money in their pockets
When we have don’t have the money to spend, we can’t fucking spend it, who’d have thunk?More money flowing means more money flowing. Surprising.
Economically, the most useless people are the ones who have money and won’t spend it, not the ones who don’t have it and MUST spend it.
reblogging again for that last important fact
This is one of those articles where I want to be like “water is fucking wet” but I know there are so many people who will not acknowledge this shit until they hear it from the people they’ve been trained to trust by capitalism.
So it’s entirely a necessary article. It really is. There’s a huge audience for whom these kinds of articles are necessary. It’s good to have them, and to spread them. The writers were right to write it and the publishers right to publish it. Information is power, and having more easy and accessible stories like this from people that broad audiences find immediately trustworthy or authoritative.
But also WATER IS FUCKING WET.
just wanted to say again: When we have don’t have the money to spend, we can’t fucking spend it, who’d have thunk?
‘I was stunned by the business’: Fast food CEO says profits soared after minimum wage hike
If someone comes to you and asks your help, you shall not turn him off with pious words, saying, “Have faith and take your troubles to God!” You shall act as if there were no God, as if there were only one person in all the world who could help this man–only yourself.
—Rabbi Moshe Leib of Sassov (via shiraglassman)
You don’t expect to hear a rabbi say “act as if there were no God” and mean not “do whatever you feel like doing” but “recognize that the ultimate responsibility for doing good in the world lies with you.” I kind of love this.
(via animatedamerican)
#religion #… I mean if anyone were going to say ‘act as if there were no god’ to mean ‘it’s all on you mate’ #it would be a rabbi (via thetrollingchaos)
“Pray as if everything depended on God, and act as if everything depended on yourself.”
or as my mom says, “God has no hands but ours.”
(via libhobn)
All [that’s to happen] is known, and permission [for human persons to change that] is given. Judaism’s really not big on waiting for God to show up – we expect Them to, but it’s the way your mom expects you for dinner. God’d better show up – He promised – but in the meantime, we have work to do.
(via hagar-972)
So I just did a post about how I manage my time and my daily schedule and such, and I felt like this part is really important and was getting lost in the minutiae of my day, so I made it a separate post. I was talking about various ways in which my life is not necessarily “normal”, like how I go to bed at 7:30, which people treat as one of my eccentricities, and rightly so. But while it is weird it speaks to the crux of my life philosophy, which I’ve spoken about before as regards dealing with anon hate:
My time and attention are finite resources and they have a value I can bestow where I wish. If something is not necessary to survive, does not solve a problem, or does not provide joy, I stop doing it.
I pay my bills and do my dishes and wash my clothes because you have to do those things. I engage in activism and try to stay current on the news because I believe I have a moral duty to contribute to society, and I run because it’s good for my heart and my body. I have friendships, engage in fandom, play the ukulele, write, go to concerts and movies and art galleries because it brings me joy to do so.
Going to bed early solves a problem for me: I wasn’t doing anything useful with that time anyway, I wasn’t enjoying myself or feeling happy. If I wasn’t getting any benefit from that time, how could I put it to better use? Sleeping is beneficial, so I tried that, and it worked; I get more sleep and I don’t miss anything I can’t catch up with. Work doesn’t make me especially happy or fulfill me in ways we could all wish, but that’s okay. Work is necessary to survive, so I do it. I don’t date much because I tried dating semi-recently and the promise of future joy did not outweigh the lack of joy that dating itself brought to my life; it was painful, ugly, and boring, and so I stopped doing it.
The dating thing may change in the future, if eventually the promise of a relationship becomes more enticing, but it’s an example of how the pursuit of happiness is non-standard, and you are allowed to weigh the cost against the payoff based on your own personal feelings, not on society’s dictates. Because it turns out when you are doing what makes you happy, when you feel joy, you could give two shits about what everyone else thinks should make you happy.
Sometimes, what brings me joy is sitting on the couch listening to a podcast I’ve already heard ten times and playing a stupid mindless flash game; I often catch myself thinking “I could be doing something more useful, something cooler, something more active” and remind myself “But this is making me happy, and it’s what I’m capable of doing right now.”
“Does this make me happy” or, if you’re struggling with happiness, “Does this calm and soothe me” is a great metric for what you should be doing in life when you are on your own time. It’s a good way to check in with yourself and lead yourself towards a more fulfilling life on your own terms.
If you are out at a bar with friends, stop and ask, does this make me happy? Because there is no way in which asking that does not help. If being at a bar doesn’t make you happy and if it’s the only time you see your friends, maybe it’s time for a change; you are now free to pursue something that will make you happy. If being at a bar doesn’t make you happy but your friends do, and this is one way to bond with them of many, then it’s a cost with a later benefit, and you’ve now become conscious that while you aren’t happy right this minute, you are paying into future joy. And if you like being out at a bar with friends and are having a good time, then you’ve reaffirmed to yourself that you are happy and this is where you want to be. And affirming that you are feeling joy is a great thing to do.
You don’t have to be happy all the time – but on your own time, when work and chores and the duties of the day are done, you should devote yourself to finding joy in whatever form that takes, be it a nap or a party or a date or your kids or, I don’t know, watching people make fake food on YouTube.
Believing that your time and attention have value and should only be bestowed on the worthy means coming to believe that you have value, which is so hard to do that I’ll take any shortcut I can get. Devoting your time time and attention only to what is necessary or what is pleasurable means learning a great deal about what you value, and I truly believe leads you to a more fulfilled life.
So when people ask me about time management, I have real tips and tricks to offer – but I think the most important think I can offer is the suggestion that whatever time you have, you should believe it has value because it is yours, and you should direct it appropriately.
Stop Assuming People Don’t Care About Things Because They Don’t Blog About Them 2017
That shit is stressful. Sometimes people just need to get away from it all. Nothing wrong with that.
It’s always interesting when I see notes going past over my dash pertaining to my original work, and the comment is “wow what a neat idea, someone should write this I may just steal this” like yes, hello, you are commenting on a post that says clearly in bold that I the author, am writing this. There’s even a pre-order link to my patreon page there. It’s the thing underlined and in bold.
Plz do not steal the thing thnk u.
Tbh this is why my fanfiction posting has died a death. I keep getting things stolen and it makes me not want to put any of my words out there for free.
Which is bullshit tbh because I love fandom. I love interacting with fandom and writing stories for friends, but honestly I can see why writers just, stop engaging with fandom.
It’s just so easy for someone to copy paste your work verbatim and claim it as their own and create sockpuppets to hype up their work and ensure they get hits and crawl their way up the ranking system. At worst it gets put up on iTunes or elsewhere as original work and try to make a pretty penny from your hard work and effort. And sure if you find out about it you can protest and have it taken down—provided you can prove you wrote it first—but I shouldn’t fucking have to. I shouldn’t have to say “hey, please, as one writer to another, please don’t take my words” and yet…and yet and yet.
Thankfully the most I have ever had to do was type the phrase “look, I’d really prefer not to go public with this on my blog” before the person deleted the work and all their accounts, presumably out of sheer terror of what would happen if the tumblr fam got hold of them. But I shouldn’t have even had to do that. It’s just sheer basic fucking common decency not to steal the work of others.
Writing is how I survive. My words quite literally put food on my table and keep the roof over my head. Please don’t take them from me.
And God help anyone who tries to steal the work of my friends—or if I ever find Hunger Pangs being hocked on iTunes under another name—because I will render the bones from your body and put them back in the wrong order, but not before I cram the court citation for theft of intellectual property into your chest cavity where your sense of moral decency ought to be.
There's a Mirror on the Wall 