“However, more often than not, people will liberally share artists’ work without attribution. (Just ask any self-employed artist online about this.)“By doing this, they are making it more difficult for people interested in our work to find us, and therefore, losing chances of getting a job,” López explained.“For someone who lives [off] occasional commissions, it’s vital that every work we share has a proper credit.“In late October, López received an email from a Spanish editorial company asking if they’d be interested testing for a position as an illustrator.”
Today my professor told me every cell in our entire body is destroyed and replaced every seven years. How comforting it is to know that one day I will have a body that you will have never touched.
This just made me feel so warm.
thank you.
Important especially for victims of abuse, remember your body is yours and it heals in more ways than you realize.
Okay, so I just want to say that this isn’t necessarily true. Most of your cells have died and regrown several times in seven years, but some haven’t, and some have died and won’t return. The seven year cell renewal is a myth perpetuated by popsci in magazines everywhere.
That being said, anywhere they may have touched you, your skin, your hair, your nails and so on, was changing the moment they departed your life, even before that. Your skin became skin they’ve never touched within 27 days. Your hair grows (on average) six inches per year, so depending on how long yours is, you were rid of their touch there within a few years tops. Your nails will completely regrow within six months tops. You were a body they never touched within three or four years. You will be a body they never touched within three or four years.
You have been rewriting your body, you are your own, you are constantly changing, and you are the only one who owns your body 100% of the time.
I’m here for correcting science myths in supportive ways.
You don’t have to be grateful that it isn’t worse.
read that.
read it again, and again, and again.
somebody, somewhere, always has it worse than you. there is one person on this planet that has it the worst of all, and that person is NOT the only person allowed to be unhappy with their lot.
if things are bad for you, they are bad for you. period.
This goes for trauma as well. A lot of times survivors get trapped in a cycle of minimizing/diminishing their trauma because “other people have it worse” – but there is no hierarchy of trauma. There is no ranking system for which traumas are “better” or “worse.” Your trauma is valid. Period.
IMPORTANT TRUTHS.
As a therapist, lemme just say: almost every trauma survivor I’ve ever had has at some point said “But I didn’t have it as bad as some people” and then talked about how other types of trauma are worse. Even my most-traumatized, most-abused, most psychologically-injured clients say this.
The ones who were cheated on, abandoned, and neglected say this. The ones who were in dangerous accidents/disasters say this. The ones who were horrifyingly sexually abused say this. The ones who were brutally beaten say this. The ones who were psychologically tortured for decades say this. What does that tell you? That one of the typicalside-effects of trauma is to make you believe that you are unworthy of care.
Don’t buy into it, because it’s nonsense. It doesn’t matter if someone else had it “worse.” Every person who experiences a trauma deserves to get the attention and care they need to heal from it.
“one of the typicalside-effects of trauma is to make you believe that you are unworthy of care.”
SO true.
@strangerdarkerbetter Not sure if you’ve seen this, but I thought of you when I read this. Don’t forget to take care of yourself today. 🙂 ❤
Cure promises wholeness even as the world pokes and prods, reverberating beneath our skin, a broken world giving rise to broken selves.
All my life, I’ve rebelled against the endless assumptions that my body-mind is broken. I’ve resisted. I’ve ranted. I’ve turned my back on brokenness. Occasionally I’ve tried redefining wholeness to include that which is collapsed, crushed, or shattered. But mostly I’ve just flat-out refused brokenness and the perceptions of weakness, vulnerability, and tragedy that come with it.
I dream of a big pottery bowl painted in intricate patterns.
But however much I refuse and, in those refusals, tell an important truth, I have to say: I am also profoundly broken. My father and the cell of perpetrators to which he belonged shattered my body-mind. The violence they inflicted winds through me. I could quibble over words and call myself damaged. But the starker, blunter broken calls to me. It speaks of fragments and shards, an irrevocable fracturing. And fracture me they did, using sexual violence, physical violence, and mind control that I can only describe as torture. I won’t write the details or try to capture the terror and pain in words. But believe me: what they did broke my body-mind. It shaped every part of my life. This is not hyperbole, not a claim to perpetual victimhood nor a ploy for sympathy, but rather an enraging truth.
I turn the bowl in my hands, lose myself in its patterns.
Twenty years ago I walked through the world detached from body-mind and emotion, skittish, fearful of human touch, hearing voices and seeing shadows, plotting suicide. When it became clear that I had to deal with this damage or end up dead, all I wanted was to be cured.
The ideology of cure would have us believe that whole and broken are opposites and that the latter has no value.
I spent years in therapy and bodywork. I practiced self-care and built a support network. I found community. I dug into shame. I helped organize Take Back the Night marches, put together rape prevention trainings, wrote about child abuse. I never spoke directly about my desire for a cure, but really I felt desperate to fix my broken self, to emerge into a place where the twenty-four years of torture I experienced as a child and young adult simply no longer existed. I spent nearly a decade working hard at recovery—recovering lost years, memories, selves—before I knew that I’d never be cured.
Slowly, slowly the bowl reveals itself—
shattered and pieced back together.
My relationship to that violence is different now—my sense of self less fractured; my ability to stay in my body-mind and in the present, stronger. Yet I am nowhere near finished with its aftermath. Not long ago, paper skeletons hanging in the window of a local restaurant triggered an old memory of torture, catapulting me into a week-long dissociative fugue. Three summers ago, suicide gripped me hard, voices filling my head, seductive and terrifying. I didn’t leave the house for a month.
Those intricate patterns—a spider web of fractures, cracks, seams.
I’m grateful that triggers and hallucinations don’t grab me in their vice grip nearly as often as they used to. Even so, I know the past will again pound through my body-mind. The voices will again scream in my head, owning me, commanding me to kill myself, self-loathing carved into my synapses. I’ve come to know that there will be no cure. I claim brokenness to make this irrevocable shattering visible.
Splashes of sunlight filter through the cracks.
There will be no return to the moment before my father first grabbed my body-mind.
Cure dismisses resilience, survival, the spider web of fractures, cracks, and seams. Its promise holds power precisely because none of us want to be broken. But I’m curious: what might happen if we were to accept, claim, embrace our brokenness?
[Source: Eli Clare, Brilliant Imperfections: Grappling With Cure]
Broken.
I am broken.
These words pulse in my mind like the beating of my heart.
Broken body. Broken mind.
Broken sense of safety.
Violation.
I have been shattered like a bowl slipped through loose fingers crashing to the ground.
Six years ago, I was a pile of broken shards scattered at the feet of the men who had harmed me.
Slowly, through the help of other broken people, I have began to piece the shards back together.
My pieces no longer lay scattered.
I have pieced myself back together.
But the cracks still show.
I have not been made whole but rather am a jigsaw puzzle pieced together. Clear lines showing between the pieces.
The traumas of my past live on in me. The damage is still visible.
Broken.
I am broken.
Words that once carried shame and agony.
Now these words pulse with a different energy.
I am broken, yes. This is undeniable. Yet, in my brokenness, I have grown stronger. In my brokenness, I have found new purpose and meaning.
When the pieces of my shattered self came back together, they formed not what I was before, but something new.
There is no going back to who I was before, nor do I wish to do so.
I am better than I was, cracks and brokenness and all.
It is from that brokenness that I have crafted a self that I can be proud of.
@invadernav , since you asked, this is how i turned it off. this is for Mobile only. i cant find it on my desktop so im currently running on the assumption my desktop version hasnt updated yet.
Reblogging to save a goddamn life
My app finally updated and I immediately turned this off.
My friend told me a story he hadn’t told anyone for years. When he used to tell it years ago people would laugh and say, ‘Who’d believe that? How can that be true? That’s daft.’ So he didn’t tell it again for ages. But for some reason, last night, he knew it would be just the kind of story I would love.
When he was a kid, he said, they didn’t use the word autism, they just said ‘shy’, or ‘isn’t very good at being around strangers or lots of people.’ But that’s what he was, and is, and he doesn’t mind telling anyone. It’s just a matter of fact with him, and sometimes it makes him sound a little and act different, but that’s okay.
Anyway, when he was a kid it was the middle of the 1980s and they were still saying ‘shy’ or ‘withdrawn’ rather than ‘autistic’. He went to London with his mother to see a special screening of a new film he really loved. He must have won a competition or something, I think. Some of the details he can’t quite remember, but he thinks it must have been London they went to, and the film…! Well, the film is one of my all-time favourites, too. It’s a dark, mysterious fantasy movie. Every single frame is crammed with puppets and goblins. There are silly songs and a goblin king who wears clingy silver tights and who kidnaps a baby and this is what kickstarts the whole adventure.
It was ‘Labyrinth’, of course, and the star was David Bowie, and he was there to meet the children who had come to see this special screening.
‘I met David Bowie once,’ was the thing that my friend said, that caught my attention.
‘You did? When was this?’ I was amazed, and surprised, too, at the casual way he brought this revelation out. Almost anyone else I know would have told the tale a million times already.
He seemed surprised I would want to know, and he told me the whole thing, all out of order, and I eked the details out of him.
He told the story as if it was he’d been on an adventure back then, and he wasn’t quite allowed to tell the story. Like there was a pact, or a magic spell surrounding it. As if something profound and peculiar would occur if he broke the confidence.
It was thirty years ago and all us kids who’d loved Labyrinth then, and who still love it now, are all middle-aged. Saddest of all, the Goblin King is dead. Does the magic still exist?
I asked him what happened on his adventure.
‘I was withdrawn, more withdrawn than the other kids. We all got a signed poster. Because I was so shy, they put me in a separate room, to one side, and so I got to meet him alone. He’d heard I was shy and it was his idea. He spent thirty minutes with me.
‘He gave me this mask. This one. Look.
‘He said: ‘This is an invisible mask, you see?
‘He took it off his own face and looked around like he was scared and uncomfortable all of a sudden. He passed me his invisible mask. ‘Put it on,’ he told me. ‘It’s magic.’
‘And so I did.
‘Then he told me, ‘I always feel afraid, just the same as you. But I wear this mask every single day. And it doesn’t take the fear away, but it makes it feel a bit better. I feel brave enough then to face the whole world and all the people. And now you will, too.
‘I sat there in his magic mask, looking through the eyes at David Bowie and it was true, I did feel better.
‘Then I watched as he made another magic mask. He spun it out of thin air, out of nothing at all. He finished it and smiled and then he put it on. And he looked so relieved and pleased. He smiled at me.
‘’Now we’ve both got invisible masks. We can both see through them perfectly well and no one would know we’re even wearing them,’ he said.
‘So, I felt incredibly comfortable. It was the first time I felt safe in my whole life.
‘It was magic. He was a wizard. He was a goblin king, grinning at me.
‘I still keep the mask, of course. This is it, now. Look.’
I kept asking my friend questions, amazed by his story. I loved it and wanted all the details. How many other kids? Did they have puppets from the film there, as well? What was David Bowie wearing? I imagined him in his lilac suit from Live Aid. Or maybe he was dressed as the Goblin King in lacy ruffles and cobwebs and glitter.
What was the last thing he said to you, when you had to say goodbye?
‘David Bowie said, ‘I’m always afraid as well. But this is how you can feel brave in the world.’ And then it was over. I’ve never forgotten it. And years later I cried when I heard he had passed.’
My friend was surprised I was delighted by this tale.
‘The normal reaction is: that’s just a stupid story. Fancy believing in an invisible mask.’
I’m watching a livestream of President [Obama]’s ADA address in which he remembers his father-in-law, who had MS, and wonders what more he would have been able to achieve and experience in his life if he had
-been able to use a powerchair sooner
-not been hesitant to go places and do things due to his fear of getting in people’s way by being slow, or burdening his family members in certain situations
this is one of those nuances that nondisabled people, even if they broadly say all the right things, almost never get? Like, President Obama was reminiscing about how his father-in-law always went to events early so he could take his seat before everyone else came in, to avoid getting in their way – but he wasn’t saying this to like, show that as an example of how everyone should think/act about their disability – he was saying, this is a thought pattern that ultimately needlessly limited the life of a wonderful man. Essentially he was saying that ableism, internal and external, makes people’s lives smaller, and being accommodated makes people’s lives bigger, owning their disabilities and having pride makes people’s lives bigger.
so many people just say “look at the heroic lengths this person went to in order to get around the barriers imposed on them as a person with a disability. that is so inspirational.” and I was worried that’s where this speech was going but no, the message was “look at the lengths this person went to in order to get around these barriers. he never should have had to do that. Let’s make a world that doesn’t do this to people.”
knitting in the dark 