greenfiredragonfly

the book is better

Hello!
You can call me Dragonfly, Phoenix, or Cats. (she/they, well over 18, queer, fanfic writer)
I'm just some guy. I try my best to be a kind and conscientious person every day, but if I fuck up or say or do something insensitive, please tell me! I won't start anything or be offended. I want to be better!! Ty!
This blog is mostly just reblogs, since I'm only on here intermittently; my free time is usually spent reading or writing fanfic instead. If you're interested, you can find me on:
AO3 as Phoenix_of_Athena or FFN as Athena's Phoenix. I'm also on Pillowfort!
DND campaign tags: cordiform, conspiracy, counterfeit, conation

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phantomrose96

Tumblr can never be my main means of engaging in politics and it comes down almost entirely to Tumblr's pathological need to distill The Right Opinion:tm: from any complicated issue.

It's always the most important thing. Not because it helps solve the issue or helps the people impacted, but because The Right Opinion:tm: is a proxy for you, morally, as a person. And every issue needs to be broken into the language that sets the stances of Make You Good or Make You Bad.

And I don't mean this in any generic statement about echo chambers or virtue signaling. Those are separate but related concepts. What I'm talking about is how people are nervous about a topic until one doctrine is crafted which defines the Sports Team Color of our Sports Team, so we can be identified as being on the Us Sports Team, and absolutely not on the Them Sports Team. Because this issue is actually about you and the proxy for you as a person and how people should perceive you so, really, the sooner we figure out the Home Sports Team Colors the sooner you can stop feeling worried.

The moment something new happens is usually the first and last time you'll actually see a range of opinions on it. And some of that is fueled by misinformation! Some in bad faith! When dust settles and clarity is achieved, this helps combat those things, but it's also the moment when the Loudest and most Articulate voices craft the Zeitgeist Opinion and everyone comes to roost around it.

You get people on this site pissed off at AI models that can diagnose cancer from a research paper in 2019 because The Right Opinion is that AI is bad. If you even see a post trying to articulate good uses of AI, well that's someone wearing Packers colors at a Vikings home game, and if you wanna make a point in the "wrong" direction you better be damn articulate about it.

A well-defined set of actions are transphobic. Another set are actually not transphobic, and you'd be transphobic for thinking so. Are you trans and actually your lived experiences differ? Get articulate real fast or shut up. You might be able to eek an exception for yourself, but it's going to require a 10-paragraph post justifying your claim. If you're REALLY good at it though, you might be able to rewrite the Zeitgeist and now anyone who disagrees with you is transphobic. Teams switch uniform styles every now and then, after all.

And it's such a farce because so often it's not actually about the topic at hand. It's about why you should be allowed to be perceived as a good person while toeing outside the fringes of The Right Opinion, why you aren't actually quitting the faith or committing blasphemy or deserving of exile for going off the written word. Or if someone really IS trying to make it about the topic at hand, the ensuing slapfight in the comments needs to be about whether OP has sinned against the covenant.

It's not helpful.

phantomrose96

It's like. Is the conversation about assessing the topic or is it about assessing the people speaking about the topic?

Way too often it's the second. Way too often a topic which impacts real people, who aren't you is actually just a proxy tool that you and the people around you use to evaluate each other.

That's weird, isn't it? That feels slimy, doesn't it? To use someone else's strife as a useful little metric to scan your ingroup? And in the process, to not dare evaluate it further (in a way that might be necessary, in a way that might crack open surface-level simplifications and get into the uncomfortable pieces that need dissection to ever change) because doing so risks setting off your nice little in-group Geiger Counter.

lesliecrusher:
“ lesliecrusher:
“ “I got a fan letter from a young lady. It was a suicide note. So I called her, and I said, “Hey, this is Jimmy Doohan. Scotty, from Star Trek.” I said, “I’m doing a convention in Indianapolis. I wanna see you...
lesliecrusher:
“ lesliecrusher:
“ “I got a fan letter from a young lady. It was a suicide note. So I called her, and I said, “Hey, this is Jimmy Doohan. Scotty, from Star Trek.” I said, “I’m doing a convention in Indianapolis. I wanna see you...
lesliecrusher:
“ lesliecrusher:
“ “I got a fan letter from a young lady. It was a suicide note. So I called her, and I said, “Hey, this is Jimmy Doohan. Scotty, from Star Trek.” I said, “I’m doing a convention in Indianapolis. I wanna see you...
lesliecrusher:
“ lesliecrusher:
“ “I got a fan letter from a young lady. It was a suicide note. So I called her, and I said, “Hey, this is Jimmy Doohan. Scotty, from Star Trek.” I said, “I’m doing a convention in Indianapolis. I wanna see you...
lesliecrusher:
“ lesliecrusher:
“ “I got a fan letter from a young lady. It was a suicide note. So I called her, and I said, “Hey, this is Jimmy Doohan. Scotty, from Star Trek.” I said, “I’m doing a convention in Indianapolis. I wanna see you...
lesliecrusher:
“ lesliecrusher:
“ “I got a fan letter from a young lady. It was a suicide note. So I called her, and I said, “Hey, this is Jimmy Doohan. Scotty, from Star Trek.” I said, “I’m doing a convention in Indianapolis. I wanna see you...
lesliecrusher

“I got a fan letter from a young lady. It was a suicide note.

So I called her, and I said, “Hey, this is Jimmy Doohan. Scotty, from Star Trek.” I said, “I’m doing a convention in Indianapolis. I wanna see you there.”

I saw her – boy, I’m telling you, I couldn’t believe what I saw. It was definitely suicide. Somebody had to help her, somehow. And obviously she wasn’t going to the right people.

I said to her, “I’m doing a convention two weeks from now in St. Louis.” And two weeks from then, in somewhere else, you know? She also came to New York - she was able to afford to got to these places. That went on for two or three years, maybe eighteen times. And all I did was talk positive things to her.

And then all of the sudden – nothing. I didn’t hear anything. I had no idea what had happened to her because I never really saved her address.

Eight years later, I get a letter saying, “I do want to thank you so much for what you did for me, because I just got my Master’s degree in electronic engineering.”

That’s…to me, the best thing I’ve ever done in my life.“

wholeheartedsuggestions

alternatives to “i want to die”:

  • i want things to change
  • i want a different life
  • today was a shitty day/week
  • i don’t want to live like this
  • i want to be somewhere else in life
  • i’m not where i want to be yet
  • + much more
aheartofdawn

going from "I want to die" to "I want to live, just not like this" has really helped me keep going at some of the darkest and shittiest times in my life.

And it's really hard, so fucking hard to figure how to change things when you are dealing with so much trauma. But slow steps, taking it one day at a time, listening to the body's needs, and reaching out for support all add up to make a massive difference, and things do slowly get better.

Stay with us. It will pass if you do. Promise.