I Don’t Want To Date. I Just Want To Magically End Up In A Long-term And Emotionally-secure Relationship

I adore this, I adore this so much.

that arm’s gonna get covered in stickers, just u wait

also:

it wasn’t designed w mabel’s artistic genius in mind

Abusive parents are the only ones who go convincing their children they don’t deserve basic resources and need to be grateful for being allowed to have any. First, you have to be grateful for having a roof under your head, then you have to be grateful that you get to eat food, then you have to express gratitude for being able to own clothing, then for being allowed basic resources like books and a bag so you can go to school, you have to be grateful for a ride, for a bed to sleep in, for being allowed to live.

These are not things that should require any gratitude. Every child brought in this world has every right to food, shelter, comfort, clothing and any other resource they need to feel safe and happy and to develop all the interests and hobbies they want to. Anything else is unacceptable. Do we bring children in this world just to have them fear for their own lives? Do we have children so we could starve them, have them hurt or killed with cold and heat, to deny them living space and right to comfort? Do we bring children in the world so we could torture them? If not, then there’s no fucking reason they should be grateful they aren’t being killed on purpose.

What abusive parents are trying to do is make the child feel it’s not allowed to exist anywhere past the boundaries the parents set. If they can convince a child they don’t have a right to living space, next thing they can convince the child is that having their personal living space is selfish, that they’re taking living space from someone else, who actually deserves it,  and acting out of bounds when they want to move out. It makes sure children don’t ask for money, so they can’t accumulate money and escape. Hell, it even makes sure that when children are offered money they don’t feel they’ve earned, they’ll refuse it, and it will make it a lot harder for children to get financially safe and independent if they come into adulthood strongly believing they deserve nothing. They will work for next to no wages. They will struggle so hard. Survival will become something terrifying and out of bounds and will force them to come back to parents.

You take your living space as you please. You eat and spend all you can. You take everything and live wherever you want. The assholes don’t get to tell you what you deserve or not. The monsters don’t get to define where or how you’re allowed to exist. Those who would force gratitude for things you have every right to, actually have nothing on you. You do not owe them shit. You were in fact, entitled to the living space the second you were born. You were entitled to food and clothes and any resource you needed. What’s more, you were entitled to loving parents who would make sure you grow up unharmed, healthy and with the best start in life they could have possibly given you. You were entitled to more than they ever gave you. It’s them who owe you a childhood. It’s them who owe you a home and a family. Not you who owes them because sometimes they would remember they in fact had a kid, and it was in fact, illegal not to feed and clothe them. Fuck the guilt tripping. You deserve more than they gave you. 

Hello all! I have learned that a website called Live Heroes has multiple versions of my Princess Mononoke illustration available for purchase. The kicker is that I had no knowledge that the image was being sold and I do not give them my consent to have it on their website. The image was uploaded by a user going by Coffeecatsandcigaretts.  Please help me get this image off of this site!!! This is completely disrespectful/illegal! You can help me by following the link provided below and completely then bomb the comments section with aggression. Here is the link: DESTROY THE EVIL And it would also help if you Reblogged this post!! I’m glad people like my art, but this isn’t flattering to me. It just makes me feel cheap. Unfortunately, I am I one of thousands of victims of this situation. If you see someone’s art being sold and you think it’s being done without their consent please notify the artist!  In addition, if you do want to purchase this image, and love Princess Mononoke as much as I do, then you can purchase a print of it on my printshop: Princess Mononoke Print For Purchase I’ll look into selling other versions of this image since it seems to be so popular! Thanks so much for you support!! In the meantime I have emailed the website, and hopefully will have this issue resolved. It looks like the user made a pretty big profit off of my image. Hope it can be given to it’s rightful owner.  Thanks! :) www.daniel-shaffer.com danielh.shaffer@gmail.com

uh so i never do this but maui is quite literally on fire and there isn't nearly enough care or consideration for. you know. Native Hawaiians who live here being displaced and the land (and cultural relevance) that's being eaten up by the fire. so if ya'll wanna help, here's some links:

maui food bank: https://mauifoodbank.org/

maui humane society: https://www.mauihumanesociety.org/

center for native hawaiian advancement: https://www.memberplanet.com/campaign/cnhamembers/kakoomaui

hawai'i red cross: https://www.redcross.org/local/hawaii/ways-to-donate.html

please reblog and spread the word if you can't donate.

i’m sorry for the phone video but prime won’t let me record. but i’m falling apart at the seams over this i really am

Still bothered by the US cultural idea that men can only be non-romantically intimate with one another in war-like or competitive circumstances.

Amen, amen, amen.

For victims of abuse, it’s almost essential to gain ability to stop empathising with our abusers, not only because it’s keeping us trapped in their manipulations, but because we deserve to know that we don’t have to prioritize the feelings of a person who is actively doing harm to us.

Empathy for victims of abuse is almost mandatory, to the point where we’re punished for every moment we’re not displaying extreme and unconditional empathy for the abusers. We can get called out and berated for simply going about our business and not thinking of what the abuser might want of us in the particular second. We get shamed for ‘not knowing better’ and 'failing our role’ if we take a minute to consider our own needs.

When they’re doing their usual play – hurting us, then quickly acting hurt and playing the victim, bringing out their past trauma, crying about how hard they have/had it, how our feelings hurt them, even in the case we don’t fall for it, and refuse to apologize and accept that our feelings are just collateral damage in their personal crusade, we will get attacked immediately for being an emotionless and selfish person. Fail to react empathetic to the abuser’s guilt trip will get us called out for being horrible, for not caring, for being the most vicious demon, the worst person, the most unworthy and ungrateful human being in the world. That kind of thing sticks. We don’t just get over that. It becomes etched in our brains that displaying empathy, even to someone who is walking all over us, is our biggest priority, that showing empathy is the last thing that might protect us against an even bigger outburst, that might help us deserve to not be attacked for our lack of morality. We don’t get to be mad. We don’t get to stand up for ourselves. We have to put up a display of empathy or endure personal attacks that will make us feel like we don’t deserve to live.

To finally be able to cut the empathy and stand up against the abuser, is an act that fights years, maybe decades of brainwashing and conditioning. To not care if the abuser has it bad anymore, means we faced and fought years of trauma, lies, personal attacks, self doubt, self hatred, pain and injustice. Abusers want to take away our ability not to care, not to empathize and not to prioritize them, and seizing that back means seizing ourselves back, existing in a place where our empathy is not mandatory anymore, where we’re not pure compassionate receptacles of trauma anymore. Where empathy isn’t forced and squeezed out of us under the threat of pain. Where our value and personality isn’t dictated by whether we endlessly forgive and accept people who will only continue hurting us and bringing trauma into our life.

It is not a mark of a healthy and normal human being to offer our entire compassion and understanding to a creature who is destroying us in return. If someone proves to be a danger to us, it’s normal to disregard everything except the knowledge that this is a threat, and nothing else to us. To keep away because our well being shouldn’t be put under a fear of a constant threat. We are normal for following our sense of self-preservation and turning away from whatever is damaging us, regardless of how sad or upset this being becomes. We are not to be a collateral damage to someone’s misery or manipulation. Our empathy doesn’t have to be an opening to accept harm. We can save our empathy for those who also feel for us. We’re not bad people if we close up under a threat of abuse, and want to retreat to safety. We’re not evil, cruel or selfish for extending our hearts only to those who also keep ours safe.

To live, and live safely.

My heart aches for our community and what we've all been facing lately. Please hang in there, everybody.

Reblog if you genuinely support asexuals

It terrifies me that there’s so much raging passion in the lgbt+ community that insist on marginalizing asexuals and implying that asexuals don’t deserve to have safe spaces. There’s still so much acephobia so I just wanna know which blogs are genuinely supportive and a safe space for asexuals

Abusers don’t come with warning labels.  Abusers don’t hit you on the first date. They don’t write “I will humiliate and belittle you” on their Tinder profiles. They don’t wear “I break things to intimidate my partner” t-shirts. People don’t get trapped in damaging relationships because they saw an abuser coming from 20 yards away and decided “I’m going to date that person anyway”. That’s not how any of this works.  In the beginning, abusers can be some of the most thoughtful, attentive people you’ll ever meet. They’re obsessed with you; that’s what makes them so toxic and deadly as time goes on. Abusers buy you flowers. They remember your birthday. They remember to text you “good morning” and “good night”. They listen to your problems, confide in you and share silly inside jokes. They can keep that “loving, doting partner and best friend” mask in place for months or years if they have to.  So the first time they scream at you or hit you, you don’t see an abuser. You see your best friend, your confidante, the person who brought you soup when you were sick and always laughs at your stories about your nutty coworker. You tell yourself they just had a bad day. Maybe they were tired, sick, hungry, or under a lot of stress. You know them. You’ve made a life with them. And they’re so sorry and so ashamed of what they did. This isn’t who they are.  And so things go back to back to normal for a while. Wonderful, even. This is still one of the best relationships you’ve ever been in, even counting that one incident. You go back to date nights, cozy nights in and 5-hour-long conversations that feel effortless. And then it happens again.  And you still don’t see an abuser. You see the person who means the most to you in the whole world. You decide that maybe they’re just struggling. Maybe they have mental health issues. They’ve told you every horrible thing that’s ever happened to them as a child, and maybe it has something to do with that. But either way, they’re not an abuser. Not yet. They’re just a person who needs you more than ever.  Then things are good for a while. Then something bad happens. Then it’s good again. Then it’s bad. Good. Bad. Good. Bad. And every time it happens, it gets a little harder to get out. The time you’ve invested in the relationship goes up, and your self-esteem goes down. By the time you realize that, yes, the person you thought you knew is an Abuser with a capital A, you’re in deep. You’re a frog that stood in a pot of water so long it turned you into soup before you even noticed it was getting a little warm. But you didn’t ask for this. And you certainly didn’t know it was coming.  We have this image in our heads of what abusers must look like. We picture brawny men with low foreheads and stained white tank tops, screaming at their wives while they drink beer in front of the TV. We think they’re like wildlife, as if we could spot them with the help of a guidebook and know to stay far away from them. But they’re not. Abusers can be anyone. They can be female. They can be accomplished. They can be well-groomed. Queer. Politically far-left. Politically far-right. Artists. Athletic. Charitable. Intelligent. They can come from any walk of life, any spot on the gender spectrum, any religion, any background. It’s not the abused person’s fault for not spotting them - they can’t always be spotted. It’s the abuser’s fault for abusing.