I enjoy eating late at night, having a Chicago accent, and judging people cruelly. The fact that I do not and will likely never fully understand the sport of cricket haunts me night and day. I know this story is about a princess and I know I am in this story. I have not yet determined whether the princess and I are one and the same. [current home: pdx][bisexual/queer/femme][real lawblr/lawyer]
Do me a favor, okay? Next time you have a chance, close your eyes for a minute and take a deep breath and imagine someone loving you.
Imagine someone who gets excited just thinking about you. Imagine someone who loves the things you say and do and who genuinely enjoys spending time with you. Imagine someone who feels lucky every moment they get to be around you.
It can be a real person or someone you just made up. You can imagine them praising you or laughing with you or touching you or whatever love means to you. It can be romantic or otherwise. Take your pick.
And if you had a hard time doing it?
Do it again. And again. And again.
I read once that it’s important for us to visualize being loved. That your brain needs to be trained like a muscle, and like a muscle, it can become weak from disuse. Your brain can only do the things that you practice doing, and if you never, ever visualize someone loving you, it becomes difficult to even imagine someone loving you. You get stuck in a rut. And once it’s impossible to imagine someone loving you, it becomes impossible to believe you will ever be loved.
I think… sometimes it can become easy to stop believing that we’re worthy of love. And I think sometimes we have this fantasy of someone making us believe that we’re worthy of it again. Or that somehow we’ll just — earn it, one day. Being worthy of love and desire, respect and affection.
But I think the truth is that we can only start believing that we’re worthy of love if we’re capable of imagining it. And it becomes much, much easier to imagine it if you practice doing so.
It may feel awkward at first. Embarrassing. Silly. Maybe even painful. But think about it like this, maybe: your first day in a dance class, you’ll fall. You’ll look ridiculous. It’ll feel like your body will never be able to do this fluidly. But by the end of the class, you’ll be able to move in a whole new way. Maybe not perfectly, but… better, y’know?
Learn to waltz with your own mind, and try not to cringe too hard at your first awkward movements. Start small and work your way up if you have to. Someone liking you, then someone liking your conversations, then someone liking your presence, then someone purposefully seeking you out. Someone putting time aside for you. Someone thinking about you when you’re not there. Someone being with you because there’s nowhere they’d rather be.
It may feel self-indulgent, but… I mean, we all deserve to be indulged sometimes. And we all deserve to feel worthy of love.
So… indulge yourself. Take a moment and have a silly little fantasy. Get into the habit of imagining love, and imagining it for the you that exists right now, not the you that you wish you were.
Learn to speak the language of love as it applies to you, even if you think that it doesn’t, and one day you’ll realize how to use those syllables to say your own name.
It’ll come one day. In the meantime, let’s learn to dance together, okay?
love those old soviet posters that are just advertising like, an activity. not some “go to mike’s hardware for the BEST deals around!” just “hey, you can learn stuff at libraries” or “consider going for a hike in the countryside” big kin
I’d love some examples!!
Caring for birds will increase your fruit harvest!
What are you interested in? The library has many books to match your interests.
Tourism is the best relaxation!
Vitamin C. Vitamins help you to become healthy and strong
Fresh air strengthens health and improves quality of education! (Soviet classroom design, from my personal experience, includes big windows that let in a lot of air and sunshine)
coffee shop by my house hired a new barista who is extraordinarily hot and flirts with me incessantly but she also makes the worst - and i truly mean the worst - coffee i’ve ever paid for. atrociously bad. just another of god’s little jokes
just remembered the barista who worked there last year and treated me with an attitude generally reserved for children and the incompetent to the point where she would frequently adjust my drink order in front of me and every single time it was BANGIN’
The evil stepmother is a fixture in European fairy tales because the stepmother was very much a fixture in early European society–mortality in childbirth was very high, and it wasn’t unusual for a father to suddenly find himself alone with multiple mouths to feed. So he remarried and brought another woman into the house, and eventually they had yet more children, thus changing the power dynamics of inheritance in the household in a way that had very little to do with inherent, archetypal evil and everything to do with social expectation and pressure. What was a woman to do when she remarried into a family and had to act as mother to her husband’s children as well as her own, in a time when economic prosperity was a magical dream for most? Would she think of killing her husband’s children so that her own children might therefore inherit and thrive? […] Perhaps. Perhaps not. But the fear that stepmothers (or stepfathers) might do this kind of thing was very real, and it was that fear–fed by the socioeconomic pressures felt by the growing urban class–that fed the stories.
We see this also with the stories passed around in France–fairies who swoop in to save the day when women themselves can’t do so; romantic tales of young girls who marry beasts as a balm to those young ladies facing arranged marriages to older, distant dukes. We see this with the removal of fairies and insertion of religion into the German tales. Fairy tales, in short, are not created in a vacuum. As with all stories, they change and bend both with and in response to culture.
— Amanda Leduc, Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space
Hello Dr. Tingle! As you've made very clear, you write like crazy. Do you mind if I ask what your writing schedule looks like? I'm trying to bring your style of hard work into my NaNoWriMo project.
good question buckaroo i have very routine schedule (i think this kind of pattern could be part of my autistic way.) most days follow this exactly
WAKE UP AT 6AM
WORK OUT FOR TWO HOURS
first trot around the neighborhood then up the mountain this is about an hour and a half total hike (this is where i think about what art i am making for the day or listen to podcast or audiobook)
kettlebell for half hour
SHOWER AND POKE AROUND ONLINE FOR A BIT
this is just seeing what is happening on way of social media sayin hello to the world maybe having a nice bar for a snack
START WRITING USUALLY AT 9AM
first buckaroo writing session usually goes until 11 or 11:30
BREAK FOR LUNCH
usually trot out for lunch to get my brain sizzling
SECOND WRITING SESSION AT 1PM
this usually goes from 1PM until 4 or 5PM then i am done for the day. i write between 3000 and 4000 words every day, plus make a book cover or some other project like that
EVENING RELAX AT 5PM
spend time with sweet barbara. maybe go see a movie (i like movies a lot for little kernals of inspiration to get excited about art). sometimes go see my buds. maybe go trot for a dinner
late in evening probably take a dang bath every other night while reading magazines or graphic novels (chucks bath bomb budget really is out of control)
EVERY once in a while i will feel very inspired to prove love and write some more before bed
GO TO SLEEP AROUND 10:30PM AND START ALL OVER AGAIN