“In One Aspect, Yes, I Believe In Ghosts, But We Create Them. We Haunt Ourselves.”

“Some truths do nothing but destroy and decay what they do not obliterate. Truths do not always set one free. Only a fool who has spent their entire life being fed lies believes that.”

~ Jennifer L. Armentrout, From Blood and Ash

We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace. In the norms and notions of what just is isn’t always justice. And yet, the dawn is ours before we knew it. Somehow we do it. Somehow we’ve weathered and witnessed a nation that isn’t broken, but simply unfinished.

~ The Hill We Climb, Amanda Gorman

“Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia... You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.”

~ John Green, Looking for Alaska

executive dysfunction is legitimately physically uncomfortable. i’ll be trapped between two things, weirdly caught on how-much-time-it-might-take-me. i take hours worried im going to take hours doing things. i’ll sit on the floor for the entire day, caught up in the middle of not-doing the chores i actually do want to be doing.

& the amount of mental energy that goes into it. & the legitimate amount of anger and discomfort and self-hate. is not “being lazy”.  it’d be a lot less work if i didn’t have to fight myself to just get up and do it. 

i just need you to understand it’s not effortless. it’s never effortless. it’s not “okay let me just get up and finally start doing this.” it’s more like. i am slamming my foot on the pedal but the car is in neutral and nothing is moving. it’s more like shouting instructions into a dying telephone. it’s more like being trapped in a small electric box, and someone who hates me is administering shocks. 

im trying. im trying. please help me get up.

genuinely so fucking tired of people leveraging the "groomer" argument against people who support sex ed because scientific literature over decades shows that comprehensive sex education starting around kindergarten actually prevents children from being sexually abused and groomed because it teaches children the correct words for their body parts and also teaches them concepts of privacy, personal space, bodily autonomy, the difference between appropriate and inappropriate touching, and the fact that sex is something that only adults do. children with this knowledge are not only better equipped to identify abuse and predatory behavior and communicate that its happening to a trusted adult, but also prevent it from happening in the first place by recognizing when something is happening that shouldn't.

sex education does not sexualize children, it prevents children from being sexualized. anyone who is against early foundational sex education and claims they are doing it to protect children is a fucking liar.

“Stories have power. Gleemen’s tales, and bards’ epics, and rumors in the street alike. They stir passions, and change the way men see the world.”

~ Robert Jordan, Winter’s Heart

“Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.”

~ Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy

Love Lies

Love latches onto my heart like a leech

Wriggling into every hidden space

Do not take all of me, I beseech

This parasite within, tightens its embrace

Love takes my words and twists them

Spewing lines that make no sense

My own mouth I do condemn

I stumble to describe feelings so immense

Love grows up my spine like a rose bush

Beauty hiding the thorns

Against my lungs exquisite flowers push

But when the plant dies, it’s the thorns my love mourns

I ask love not to take too much of me when it dies

Love said it would take nothing from me,

love lies

~ A.L. Heart

“Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.”

~ Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky

“There’s no Hogwarts without you, Hagrid.”

R.I.P. Robbie Coltrane (March 30, 1950 - October 14, 2022)