I saw a post today talking about how difficult making friends can be, as well as maintaining friendships, and as someone who has spent the last few years learning how to maintain friendships while moving a couple times and some big life events. One of the best things you can do for a friendship is organise to do THINGS.
Not just meet and talk or chat over message. Arrange to go swimming, or for a row boat ride, cook dinner together, try making clay creatures and laugh at how bad they are. Go to see a play or a singer or a waterfall.
Sit on a call together in silence while you crochet or watch something at the same time in different locations.
Or while you both draw or do dishes and say the random questions that come to mind 'do you think aliens could exist?' 'How can you tell when you're in love?' 'There’s a really cool bird out the window I think you'd like it, it's all blue and green!'
The key is to not try to keep the friendship for the sake of it, but enjoy the Person and their company
Maintaining of a friendship over time requires effort, but also acceptance that you won't speak or see each other all the time. My 3 best friends are all from different phases of life and I have had periods of months or years where I didn’t speak to them just because we had shifted how much we saw each other.
You see them when you see them, you speak when you speak, but you'll find people who with even a tiny amount of effort (a birthday gift, a card, a meme sent, a message or a gif) you can hold onto. People who mean the world to you even though you only see them a could times a year.
I once heard the phrase that friends are like stars, even when you don't see them, they're still there.
Friendships that truly mean something aren't like sitcoms or movies. Life is more complicated and people are too, don't feel bad if your friendships don't match up to what you expect, or if you can't be there all the time.
All things considered, I'm a pretty shit friend sometimes, I forget birthdays and I'm useless to get hold of sometimes. But on either side of friendships that I have, we both make enough of an effort that they're still there.
I'm going to the cinema tomorrow with a friend I've had since I was 11 (or 13 depending how we've decided to measure it that day) and I haven't seen in person in nearly a year. We're still going to have a great time.
Your friendship takes whatever form works for you, don't lose sight of the people you love cos the way you love them doens’t look like 'it's supposed to'
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If you have friends, please answer these 3 questions:
1. Where did you go to find that friend (which place)?
2. What did you do that they became your friend? Which interaction lead to the friendship?
3. How did you know that you can trust them and they are not dangerous for you?
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Any Shawol, or other K-Pop fan that has been through something similar, YOU DO NOT NEED TO PROVE THAT YOU ARE A BIG FAN OF A GROUP/IDOL FOR RANDOM STRANGERS ON THE INTERNET! If they don’t believe you or they’re accusing you of something you’re not, do not destroy your self worth just to stay with them.
Better people will come through when you least expect it, and I’m living proof that this exists. I left social media for months due to cyber bullying for being a Blinger (a SHINee fan that is Jonghyun biased) and decided to go to cupsleeve events to find K-Pop fans. By chance, I met two K-Pop fans on the streets of Piccadilly Circus/Oxford Circus that are super into K-Pop and love me for who I am without changing or removing any aspect of my identity. Pretty much, I feel comfortable talking about SHINee and Jonghyun with them without feeling awkward or judged. Everything is two-sided, authentic and this is the first time I ever felt like I wasn’t second priority in a friendship. I met other great Shawols too, but I just had to show my latest win.
If finding friends online isn’t working for you, then you can take a break and find friends elsewhere. Just because we’re living in the 21st century, doesn’t mean EVERYONE is looking for friends online. You got to try and find a place that makes you feel welcome and comfortable. There’s plenty of places that you could find, or you could just be lucky and bumped into the right person at the right time. Just get yourself out there and you could find someone without realising it.
I wish you all good luck on your journey!
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hi people of tumblr,
suche irgendwie nach neuen friendships, female friendships also bitte keine dudes. Also falls jemand Interesse hat bitte melden. Hab keine Ahnung wie man freunde findet mit 26😅✨
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I wanna find good friends like my mom-friend does. She's really good at this and I'm socially awkward pigeon
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Annabeth: I, a child, had to earn Thalia’s love, that’s how the world works! I have to earn my moms love. Love is transactional, you gotta be worthy of it first silly :)
Percy, listening to this on the train
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I was hanging out at the karaoke bar, chatting with a beautiful woman, and we were really hitting it off. I threw a couple of flirtatious comments her way. She giggled nervously, but abruptly stopped and looked at the floor.
She told me that she was too nervous to hit on people because she's trans and worries that people will view her as a predator and that she might get hurt.
My heart sank. I let her know that she could hit on me in whatever way she wanted and I would LOVE it. We spent the rest of the night hanging out and flirting. We ended up making out. It was great.
But I can't stop thinking about how that wasn't the first time a trans woman has said that to me. About how unsafe it is for some women that they feel the need to give out fucking disclaimers to have normal interactions with people.
We have GOT to make the world a safer place for trans women. It pisses me off that there are men at the bar who are openly predatory towards me without fear of consequence, yet a trans woman is too scared to even fucking call me pretty. And that's because she IS more likely to face worse consequences for lesser things! Like what the fuck!
You need to always check on your internalized biases. Being queer yourself doesn't absolve you of transmisogynistic thoughts and behaviors. Being bi/pansexual doesn't mean you don't hold those biases either! If you feel differently about a trans woman hitting on you than you feel about a cis woman or a man hitting on you, you need to evaluate that.
Trans women, I love you so fucking much. You should be able to express attraction and love as freely as everyone else. I hope you can always feel safe around me. And I'll never stop fighting until you can feel safe period.
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at some point it's just like. do they even fucking like the thing they're asking AI to make? "oh we'll just use AI for all the scripts" "we'll just use AI for art" "no worries AI can write this book" "oh, AI could easily design this"
like... it's so clear they've never stood in the middle of an art museum and felt like crying, looking at a piece that somehow cuts into your marrow even though the artist and you are separated by space and time. they've never looked at a poem - once, twice, three times - just because the words feel like a fired gun, something too-close, clanging behind your eyes. they've never gotten to the end of the movie and had to arrive, blinking, back into their body, laughing a little because they were holding their breath without realizing.
"oh AI can mimic style" "AI can mimic emotion" "AI can mimic you and your job is almost gone, kid."
... how do i explain to you - you can make AI that does a perfect job of imitating me. you could disseminate it through the entire world and make so much money, using my works and my ideas and my everything.
and i'd still keep writing.
i don't know there's a word for it. in high school, we become aware that the way we feel about our artform is a cliche - it's like breathing. over and over, artists all feel the same thing. "i write because i need to" and "my music is how i speak" and "i make art because it's either that or i stop existing." it is such a common experience, the violence and immediacy we mean behind it is like breathing to me - comes out like a useless understatement. it's a cliche because we all feel it, not because the experience isn't actually persistent. so many of us have this ... fluttering urgency behind our ribs.
i'm not doing it for the money. for a star on the ground in some city i've never visited. i am doing it because when i was seven i started taking notebooks with me on walks. i am doing it because in second grade i wrote a poem and stood up in front of my whole class to read it out while i shook with nerves. i am doing it because i spent high school scribbling all my feelings down. i am doing it for the 16 year old me and the 18 year old me and the today-me, how we can never put the pen down. you can take me down to a subatomic layer, eviscerate me - and never find the source of it; it is of me. when i was 19 i named this blog inkskinned because i was dramatic and lonely and it felt like the only thing that was actually permanently-true about me was that this is what is inside of me, that the words come up over everything, coat everything, bloom their little twilight arias into every nook and corner and alley
"we're gonna replace you". that is okay. you think that i am writing to fill a space. that someone said JOB OPENING: Writer Needed, and i wrote to answer. you think one raindrop replaces another, and i think they're both just falling. you think art has a place, that is simply arrives on walls when it is needed, that is only ever on demand, perfect, easily requested. you see "audience spending" and "marketability" and "multi-line merch opportunity"
and i see a kid drowning. i am writing to make her a boat. i am writing because what used to be a river raft has long become a fully-rigged ship. i am writing because you can fucking rip this out of my cold dead clammy hands and i will still come back as a ghost and i will still be penning poems about it.
it isn't even love. the word we use the most i think is "passion". devotion, obsession, necessity. my favorite little fact about the magic of artists - "abracadabra" means i create as i speak. we make because it sluices out of us. because we look down and our hands are somehow already busy. because it was the first thing we knew and it is our backbone and heartbreak and everything. because we have given up well-paying jobs and a "real life" and the approval of our parents. we create because - the cliche again. it's like breathing. we create because we must.
you create because you're greedy.
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Today my therapist introduced me to a concept surrounding disability that she called "hLep".
Which is when you - in this case, you are a disabled person - ask someone for help ("I can't drink almond milk so can you get me some whole milk?", or "Please call Donna and ask her to pick up the car for me."), and they say yes, and then they do something that is not what you asked for but is what they think you should have asked for ("I know you said you wanted whole, but I got you skim milk because it's better for you!", "I didn't want to ruin Donna's day by asking her that, so I spent your money on an expensive towing service!") And then if you get annoyed at them for ignoring what you actually asked for - and often it has already happened repeatedly - they get angry because they "were just helping you! You should be grateful!!"
And my therapist pointed out that this is not "help", it's "hLep".
Sure, it looks like help; it kind of sounds like help too; and if it was adjusted just a little bit, it could be help. But it's not help. It's hLep.
At its best, it is patronizing and makes a person feel unvalued and un-listened-to. Always, it reinforces the false idea that disabled people can't be trusted with our own care. And at its worst, it results in disabled people losing our freedom and control over our lives, and also being unable to actually access what we need to survive.
So please, when a disabled person asks you for help on something, don't be a hLeper, be a helper! In other words: they know better than you what they need, and the best way you can honor the trust they've put in you is to believe that!
Also, I want to be very clear that the "getting angry at a disabled person's attempts to point out harmful behavior" part of this makes the whole thing WAY worse. Like it'd be one thing if my roommate bought me some passive-aggressive skim milk, but then they heard what I had to say, and they apologized and did better in the future - our relationship could bounce back from that. But it is very much another thing to have a crying shouting match with someone who is furious at you for saying something they did was ableist. Like, Christ, Jessica, remind me to never ask for your support ever again! You make me feel like if I asked you to call 911, you'd order a pizza because you know I'll feel better once I eat something!!
Edit: crediting my therapist by name with her permission - this term was coined by Nahime Aguirre Mtanous!
Edit again: I made an optional follow-up to this post after seeing the responses. Might help somebody. CW for me frankly talking about how dangerous hLep really is.
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Zelda goes mushroom girl
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i love seeing out of context posts about long-running stories with deep lore because it's always shit like "MAJOR SPOILER WARNING!! i can't believe that the metallic athenaeum's envoy actually used never-ending dance of the 57th universe on rionne as if she's not LITERALLY the incarnate of august?!?!" it's like buddy boy thank you for the spoiler tag but all of those words are incomprehensible without at least 5 years of foreshadowed knowledge, 7 different fan theories, and 21 wiki entries
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so much happened in this whole episode but i’m still on fig infiltrating ruben’s dream, making it look like the place where his friend was murdered, and then disguising herself as kipperlilly & repeatedly saying different variants of “somebody needs to take the fall for this, and it’s not going to be me. it’s going to be you.” while adaine as the elven oracle shows up next to her. can you imagine waking up from that, the idea of a horrible truth being pinned on you by your friend to save her own skin while the personification of fate and destiny stands there, almost as a promise that this is GOING to happen to you. we don’t even know if this kid is guilty. my god.
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Hello people, how do i find friends?😬
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the manga: facing marcille. arm raised. open and willing, but shy
the anime: facing away. arm lowered. closed off. reluctant. no steam
conclusion: yuri failure
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