Photoshoot to inaugurate Chase’s fancy new camera. Also: new haircut! :D
Don’t listen to those people who suggest you should be “over it” by now. The people who squawk the loudest about such things have almost never had to get over anything. Or at least not anything that was genuinely, mind-fuckingly, soul-crushingly life altering. Some of those people believe they’re being helpful by minimizing your pain. Others are scared of the intensity of your hurt and so they use their words to push your grief away. Many of those people love you and are worthy of your love, but they are not the people who will be helpful to you when it comes to healing the pain.
(Source: internal-acceptance-movement, via saehae)
Hey, folks. So I’m now a snarky hipster Instagram person, and you should all go find me because I want to see heavily filtered pictures of your cats on my phone. Username: mysoultokeep.
Confessions of an Uneducated Queer - Lauren Zuniga
I cried.
Me too.
My life has been utterly ridiculous recently (see also: always), and thus my internet presence has been much diminished. Here’s what’s been going on in lieu of online endeavors:
And that’s pretty much it. On the media front, I’ve been making my way slowly but surely through all the seasons of Buffy, rereading Harry Potter, and have been taking The Subtle Power of Spiritual Abuse in small doses. Each are highly recommended. :)
(that doesn’t involve booze or pancakes)
I did more math for my upcoming final year of grad school, and it looks like I won’t be able to get away with paying tuition out of pocket, thus avoiding more loans. Fuuuuuck.
TW MATHS BELOW CUT
My total contributions to Being A Productive Human on my only day off this week:
I REGRET NOTHING.
I just found the most perfect job posting.
It’s a 10-hour-per-week administrative position for a ministry organization partnering with the Lutheran church. They offer support and counseling for LGBT+ folks seeking to integrate the relational and spiritual parts of their lives, while at the same time working with the church on issues of human sexuality and biblical interpretation. In other words, basically everything I’ve been working toward doing for the past two years. And since it’s only 10 hours per week, I can keep working at the bagel shop and going to school at the same time.
Of course, now the self-doubt and “I want it so bad that I’m not even going to try, because then I won’t have to face the possibility of failure” tendency are kicking in. I might need some encouragement to get through this cover letter, guys. D:
(a little too much actually)
And it seems like, for me at least, the mechanism that enables me to be non-judgmental of other people lies in always assuming there is more to the story, and that people always have reasons for doing the things they do.
Sometimes it turns out that the rest of the story reveals the person in question to be the villain, and the reasons they have for doing the things they do are perverted and horrible. But if I begin our interactions with an attitude of curiosity rather than condemnation, I often get to hear their story and their reasons; even if I ultimately decide that nope, this person is actually a terrible menace to the human condition and I need to vacate them from my life ASAP, I will at least have afforded them the dignity of being seen as a person.*
But far more often, the rest of the story reveals the person to be just that: a person, with hopes and dreams and motivations and needs and desires and fears. It reveals a common humanity, which, even if we vehemently disagree on issues dear to my heart and essential to my system of values, is something I must respect (as part of that aforementioned system of values, in fact). People rarely do things without a reason for them, even if that reason is unconscious; seeking to understand others’ motivations gives value to their perspective even if it is one with which I disagree.**
*This has caveats and exceptions, of course; for example, interactions with known child molesters would also begin with a general attitude of “this is not okay and I will not give you any scrap of validation for your disgusting actions.” I haven’t fully explored the limits of this whole perspective yet.
**This is part of why being called irrational riles me up so quickly — it assumes that the outsider perspective (and, in the gendered context of this word, that outsider is generally male) is the only one that matters and that there is no internal logic to one’s thoughts or actions. Which is condescending and, in the vast majority of cases, patently untrue.
biblicalbelief asked: i was angry at mark driscoll and scrolling the tags for more people who hate him and i found you and i consider it the find of the week you have a fantastic blog thank you very much.
*FLAIL* Aw, thank you! Also I just stalked the hell out of you* and you seem pretty neat too! Readyset FOLLOWING PARTY.
*No, there is literally no hell left.** You may proceed to the pearly gates.
**Or no literal hell left FAREWELL ROB BELL
(…The asterisks-to-text ratio in this post is a new record!)
