One thing that MASSIVELY pisses me off is how fainting is shown in media. It’s always the person sways a little, collapses in one movement, and then is unconscious for like… fucking ages??? They wake up hours later tucked under a blanket and it’s acted like that’s normal. It’s NOT. A person that’s fainted should be back with you pretty quickly, actually:
(From NHS website)
I had an experience in my last work place where I fainted, but because it looks so different to how it’s shown in film and TV my managers had no idea what had happened. Here’s a comparison of usual media vs my actual fainting that they were all confused by-
Films, TV shows, plays etc:
1) Person goes “oh goodness” or something similar whilst holding hand to chest
2) eyes roll back, gracefully falls to the floor
3) nearby people see the poor fainted person, pick them up, put them on a bed or sofa
4) person comes to hours or even days later with no idea what happened and everyone else is just like “oh good you’ve woken up 🙂”
My usual fainting experience:
1) Everything starts spinning. Incapable of making words as my sole focus is on trying to get myself to the ground ASAP
2) Stumble to floor/chair/ anything I can lean against
3) Quick violent slump as actual faint occurs. There is no dainty falling- the whole body has hit shut down. Usually smack my head on the floor if I haven’t managed to get myself somewhere soft
4) Aware of surroundings almost immediately, but takes a few seconds to fully come back round
5) Carefully sit back up and explain to everyone going “what the fuck happened” that I fainted, and no, I do not need smelling salts actually.
This is like the heart attack discourse… much needed.
100% how fainting looks and feels, from both sides.
My experience of fainting is that everything goes fzzmfpfosidfkssfdksljfjsjdf and then less than a second later I am like, “Oh. A floor.” The time this happened, I was already processing again (if only at the level of, “Oh. A floor,” and “so where the fuck did my toothbrush go”) before other people could address questions like Why Was There A Loud Thump In The Bathroom and Are You All Right.
My last thought before passing out was “what happened to the light?” and then I hit the floor
I’ve fainted a few times from dehydration, hunger/blood sugar, and orthostatic hypotension (AKA being too tall for an ordinary human heart). My whole visual field turns into TV static (if you’re a Young'un, your vision is slowly washed out by random tiny pixels of color and when I’m really about to pass out it covers everything), I get a weird warm pressurized feeling in my face like it’s been inflated from the inside, and then I wake up on the floor. The best ways I’ve found to combat this are, in order:
1. Fucking eat and drink regularly and get at least Some Sleep
2. Take a deep breath when I stand up if I’ve been sitting or crouching for a long time
3. Tense my abdominal muscles if I get the face feeling
4. Immediately crouch down if the Colors start taking over so my skull isn’t carrying all the momentum of falling from six feet in the air
5. If I haven’t eaten all day, don’t take a bunch of huge bong rips and then immediately stand up
6. If at all possible, collapse towards the nearest couch and not onto hardwood or concrete
Using these simple tricks, you, too can prevent your local buff-ass sweetheart ex-Gangster Disciple IHOP server from smacking you in the face as hard as he can and giving you a really awkward but comforting hug when you wake up because you scared him so bad HE was having a panic attack. You can also save yourself from having to go to the ER while you’re tripping balls on shrooms (THAT was a Time, lemme tell ya. Weirdly I was never in any pain at all, despite needing seven stitches because I split my eyebrow so bad I could actually see my skull)
This is the same thing over and over again. Palestinians die every day, but it gets a lukewarm headline from mainstream media because death and destruction is inherent to Arabness. Then an aid convoy with white workers is obliterated, and now both the president of the United States and the president of Israel are making statements apologizing for “the poor protection of aid workers.” At one point we were seeing multiple reports a day of paramedics from the Palestine Red Crescent Society dying, but nothing. Crickets. Because they don’t care. And even in these “remorseful statements” there is a strategic reminder that white lives hold more weight than brown lives.
This is the same dialogue that surrounded Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation. These people’s efforts shouldn’t be disregarded simply because they were white—but at the same time there always has to be a saintly white figure involved to get the general public to care. Why isn’t there this much outrage surrounding the 32k+ deaths, the shooting of aid seekers, the ongoing famine. What about all the Gazans dying. What about them. What about them
ngl I keep forgetting that Hobby Lobby is a real store that people go to. That people actually think of it as a craft store and not as a crazy Christian mass artifact smuggler. I google “Hobby Lobby” and get a page full of results that make me go “wtf is this craft supplies and operating hours shit, I thought we all knew this place for smuggling looted cuneiform tablets out of Iraq”
They are also that! And it comes from the same place.
Since 2009, the billionaire owners of Hobby Lobby started taking advantage of the wars in Iraq to buy stolen and looted cuneiform tablets and clay artifacts from ancient Mesopotamia. A lot of them were suspected to have been stolen from the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad in the chaos of the US invasion in 2003. The Hobby Lobby owners used HL profits to smuggle these artifacts into the US (taking them out of Iraq is illegal so they listed them as tile samples from Turkey and Israel, more friendly nations to the US). Eventually the customs officials seized them, and the US Department of Justice filed a lawsuit in 2017 when the news really broke about just how many ancient Middle Eastern artifacts were smuggled into the country. They were doing this to stock their “Museum of the Bible” that purports to prove the literal truth of the Bible… using stolen Mesopotamian cuneiform tablets, somehow. Idk.
They also had sixteen Dead Sea Scrolls that turned out to be forgeries but that’s only tangentially related.
ngl I keep forgetting that Hobby Lobby is a real store that people go to. That people actually think of it as a craft store and not as a crazy Christian mass artifact smuggler. I google “Hobby Lobby” and get a page full of results that make me go “wtf is this craft supplies and operating hours shit, I thought we all knew this place for smuggling looted cuneiform tablets out of Iraq”
They are also that! And it comes from the same place.
Since 2009, the billionaire owners of Hobby Lobby started taking advantage of the wars in Iraq to buy stolen and looted cuneiform tablets and clay artifacts from ancient Mesopotamia. A lot of them were suspected to have been stolen from the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad in the chaos of the US invasion in 2003. The Hobby Lobby owners used HL profits to smuggle these artifacts into the US (taking them out of Iraq is illegal so they listed them as tile samples from Turkey and Israel, more friendly nations to the US). Eventually the customs officials seized them, and the US Department of Justice filed a lawsuit in 2017 when the news really broke about just how many ancient Middle Eastern artifacts were smuggled into the country. They were doing this to stock their “Museum of the Bible” that purports to prove the literal truth of the Bible… using stolen Mesopotamian cuneiform tablets, somehow. Idk.
They also had sixteen Dead Sea Scrolls that turned out to be forgeries but that’s only tangentially related.
shoutout to anthropomorphic snakes in animated movies doing poses that would normally require arms by creatively using their coils as arms instead. gotta be one of my favorite genders
To any trans man who needs to hear this: When they say they “hate all men” or want to “kill all men,” you don’t have to just accept that. It’s okay to feel hurt, it’s okay to feel unsafe. It’s okay to recognize that they are either othering your manhood or demonizing you for it, and to call them out for it if you’re in a position to. If they have trauma around men, they can work on that in private instead of expressing harmful sentiments around their marginalized male friends. You deserve love and safety. I love you and I hope I can help you feel safe.
Hey, I’m one of the people on the other side who struggles with these feelings thanks to trauma. I don’t think I’ve ever actually gone far enough with my speech in public or private spaces to make anyone feel bad for being or identifying as masculine, but if I have then I’m sorry.
I just caught a post saying that transandrophobia is a real thing, and the same post was calling out my fear of men in other ways, so I decided to click on the transandrophobia tag to educate myself and I have definitely seen a lot of real examples of a very real thing. Stuff like being wrongly perceived as more angry because of T, or being perceived as dangerous. The biggest one for me was the tendency for queer spaces and friends to disconnect from or even ostracize transmascs that they used to welcome because they’re perceived more as predators the more comfortable they get in their masculinity. That one, I hadn’t really thought about, but it is so extremely easy for me to believe at face value because I have gotten weird and I have drifted so extremely close to becoming one of the people who perpetuate that exact problem. And that breaks my heart.
It’s hard sometimes, because I’m so used to being treated poorly by masculinity. The men I’ve gotten to know so far in my life have had a habit of dehumanizing me, whether they saw me, a transfem, as a pleasure drone to manipulate and control or as a fellow man to bully and be rowdy with, and at this point both of those forms of treatment send me straight to a very dark place where I want one of us to die.
But in some ways I’ve allowed that trauma to narrow and crystallize my views on masculinity, including trans men. And that’s not OK of me. That’s weird of me. I got jarred by that post calling me out because I’ve literally said to another transfem (who is probably reading this reblog, hi) in conversation that transmisandry isn’t really a thing. And now that kinda makes me cringe to hear from my past self. That was not OK of me.
So I’m gonna think harder about all this before I say anything about masculinity again in a way that could hurt someone or ripple out negatively. I’m sorry if I’ve already made a mistake in that way that’s done any damage, though I hope I haven’t.
The issue of men and masculinity being ostracized out of queer and feminine spaces, or just not let in in the first place, is something I really want to help work on, because it hurts women too.
It’s why I had to teach myself my first lessons in femininity from scratch for most of my life in order to finally become equivalent in gender maturity to a 10 year old and hatch as transfem at age 27. Because for a very long time, literally zero feminine or queer people had given me the tiniest chance to be let into their world and taught their ways. To be let into my own world and taught my own ways. I had to observe from a distance and teach myself enough to speak the secret codes that convince only the most open minded of women and queer folks that I’m one of us and not a predator, when the burden of proof should never have been placed on me in the first place because I was a child. To this day there is so much trauma and behavior that I completely don’t want that I’m having to manually unlearn that I would’ve never had if I’d been let in back when I was physically a child.
All of the same things that will protect future generations of transfems from the pain and trauma I suffered will also protect transmascs from this ostracization as they become their authentic selves. It’s divine work for all trans people. I’ve already been practicing it in my own life just by continuing to push myself to be open, but it’s time to preach it now.
It’s time to welcome men who have not specifically and individually proven themselves to be abusive into queer and feminine spaces so that they can be in community with us and learn more about themselves. Stop the ostracization!
You have no idea what it means to me that you’re working on your relationship to masculinity and masculine people. Many folks are blinded by their pain and put it all on people who may look like those who have hurt them, and don’t realize how many people they’re hurting in turn. I hope your story is able to resonate with people. Thank you so much.
Those cis women who are only ‘inclusive’ to trans men when it comes to hating them are the worst. They say “I hate all men - and yes that includes trans men 💖✨ they are still men💖✨.” but then throw a fit when they are asked to stop calling menstrual products feminine products and to include trans men in their reproductive care activism….
Really beating the “you’ve built a concentration camp” accusations about gaza threatening to send inconvenient political dissidents there as a form of punishment aren’t'cha?
Something that made hygiene-related things easier to do was to say “fuck it” to the concept of doing the thing at the Right time. My teeth do not understand that it is currently 02:00 or 15:00 and they’re getting brushed. The skin on my face doesn’t hold up a timepiece and say, “why haven’t you washed me, twelve hours have elapsed and you haven’t bothered to wash me!”.
As someone who has had very intense experiences with my ability to do things at the Right time, throwing out those rules has been a game-changer. I used to shame myself because I didn’t do something at the Right Time, so I just didn’t do it, which would make me feel even worse. That’s not a healthy way to go about anything. Accommodate for yourself. Throw out those rules.
One thing that MASSIVELY pisses me off is how fainting is shown in media. It’s always the person sways a little, collapses in one movement, and then is unconscious for like… fucking ages??? They wake up hours later tucked under a blanket and it’s acted like that’s normal. It’s NOT. A person that’s fainted should be back with you pretty quickly, actually:
(From NHS website)
I had an experience in my last work place where I fainted, but because it looks so different to how it’s shown in film and TV my managers had no idea what had happened. Here’s a comparison of usual media vs my actual fainting that they were all confused by-
Films, TV shows, plays etc:
1) Person goes “oh goodness” or something similar whilst holding hand to chest
2) eyes roll back, gracefully falls to the floor
3) nearby people see the poor fainted person, pick them up, put them on a bed or sofa
4) person comes to hours or even days later with no idea what happened and everyone else is just like “oh good you’ve woken up 🙂”
My usual fainting experience:
1) Everything starts spinning. Incapable of making words as my sole focus is on trying to get myself to the ground ASAP
2) Stumble to floor/chair/ anything I can lean against
3) Quick violent slump as actual faint occurs. There is no dainty falling- the whole body has hit shut down. Usually smack my head on the floor if I haven’t managed to get myself somewhere soft
4) Aware of surroundings almost immediately, but takes a few seconds to fully come back round
5) Carefully sit back up and explain to everyone going “what the fuck happened” that I fainted, and no, I do not need smelling salts actually.
This is like the heart attack discourse… much needed.
100% how fainting looks and feels, from both sides.
My experience of fainting is that everything goes fzzmfpfosidfkssfdksljfjsjdf and then less than a second later I am like, “Oh. A floor.” The time this happened, I was already processing again (if only at the level of, “Oh. A floor,” and “so where the fuck did my toothbrush go”) before other people could address questions like Why Was There A Loud Thump In The Bathroom and Are You All Right.
My last thought before passing out was “what happened to the light?” and then I hit the floor
I’ve fainted a few times from dehydration, hunger/blood sugar, and orthostatic hypotension (AKA being too tall for an ordinary human heart). My whole visual field turns into TV static (if you’re a Young'un, your vision is slowly washed out by random tiny pixels of color and when I’m really about to pass out it covers everything), I get a weird warm pressurized feeling in my face like it’s been inflated from the inside, and then I wake up on the floor. The best ways I’ve found to combat this are, in order:
1. Fucking eat and drink regularly and get at least Some Sleep
2. Take a deep breath when I stand up if I’ve been sitting or crouching for a long time
3. Tense my abdominal muscles if I get the face feeling
4. Immediately crouch down if the Colors start taking over so my skull isn’t carrying all the momentum of falling from six feet in the air
5. If I haven’t eaten all day, don’t take a bunch of huge bong rips and then immediately stand up
6. If at all possible, collapse towards the nearest couch and not onto hardwood or concrete
Using these simple tricks, you, too can prevent your local buff-ass sweetheart ex-Gangster Disciple IHOP server from smacking you in the face as hard as he can and giving you a really awkward but comforting hug when you wake up because you scared him so bad HE was having a panic attack. You can also save yourself from having to go to the ER while you’re tripping balls on shrooms (THAT was a Time, lemme tell ya. Weirdly I was never in any pain at all, despite needing seven stitches because I split my eyebrow so bad I could actually see my skull)
One thing that MASSIVELY pisses me off is how fainting is shown in media. It’s always the person sways a little, collapses in one movement, and then is unconscious for like… fucking ages??? They wake up hours later tucked under a blanket and it’s acted like that’s normal. It’s NOT. A person that’s fainted should be back with you pretty quickly, actually:
(From NHS website)
I had an experience in my last work place where I fainted, but because it looks so different to how it’s shown in film and TV my managers had no idea what had happened. Here’s a comparison of usual media vs my actual fainting that they were all confused by-
Films, TV shows, plays etc:
1) Person goes “oh goodness” or something similar whilst holding hand to chest
2) eyes roll back, gracefully falls to the floor
3) nearby people see the poor fainted person, pick them up, put them on a bed or sofa
4) person comes to hours or even days later with no idea what happened and everyone else is just like “oh good you’ve woken up 🙂”
My usual fainting experience:
1) Everything starts spinning. Incapable of making words as my sole focus is on trying to get myself to the ground ASAP
2) Stumble to floor/chair/ anything I can lean against
3) Quick violent slump as actual faint occurs. There is no dainty falling- the whole body has hit shut down. Usually smack my head on the floor if I haven’t managed to get myself somewhere soft
4) Aware of surroundings almost immediately, but takes a few seconds to fully come back round
5) Carefully sit back up and explain to everyone going “what the fuck happened” that I fainted, and no, I do not need smelling salts actually.
This is like the heart attack discourse… much needed.
100% how fainting looks and feels, from both sides.
My experience of fainting is that everything goes fzzmfpfosidfkssfdksljfjsjdf and then less than a second later I am like, “Oh. A floor.” The time this happened, I was already processing again (if only at the level of, “Oh. A floor,” and “so where the fuck did my toothbrush go”) before other people could address questions like Why Was There A Loud Thump In The Bathroom and Are You All Right.
My last thought before passing out was “what happened to the light?” and then I hit the floor
I’ve fainted a few times from dehydration, hunger/blood sugar, and orthostatic hypotension (AKA being too tall for an ordinary human heart). My whole visual field turns into TV static (if you’re a Young'un, your vision is slowly washed out by random tiny pixels of color and when I’m really about to pass out it covers everything), I get a weird warm pressurized feeling in my face like it’s been inflated from the inside, and then I wake up on the floor. The best ways I’ve found to combat this are, in order:
1. Fucking eat and drink regularly and get at least Some Sleep
2. Take a deep breath when I stand up if I’ve been sitting or crouching for a long time
3. Tense my abdominal muscles if I get the face feeling
4. Immediately crouch down if the Colors start taking over so my skull isn’t carrying all the momentum of falling from six feet in the air
5. If I haven’t eaten all day, don’t take a bunch of huge bong rips and then immediately stand up
6. If at all possible, collapse towards the nearest couch and not onto hardwood or concrete
Using these simple tricks, you, too can prevent your local buff-ass sweetheart ex-Gangster Disciple IHOP server from smacking you in the face as hard as he can and giving you a really awkward but comforting hug when you wake up because you scared him so bad HE was having a panic attack. You can also save yourself from having to go to the ER while you’re tripping balls on shrooms (THAT was a Time, lemme tell ya. Weirdly I was never in any pain at all, despite needing seven stitches because I split my eyebrow so bad I could actually see my skull)
The song and its lyrics are composed by John Lowrie (the Sniper), who alongside Robin Atkin Downes (Medic) is on guitar and vocals. Also on vocals we have Gary Schwartz (Heavy, Demoman) and Dennis Bateman (Spy), while on piano is Ellen McLain (the Administrator). The song details, in Lowrie’s words, “the TF2 Mercs’ struggle to find the Sandvich for Heavy.”
LET me on the bed i promise i wont lay on top of you and squish u under my big dog weight please ple please please let me up i promise i’ll lay only on a fair amount of bed for me and not take up all the space :3 please pleas (lying)
Hey I’m really sorry if this is weird and you can delete it if it is but I had a dream last night that you were like going through a divorce??? Like in real life??? (Idk if you’re even married in real life???) So all your cat drawings stopped being cute and fun and you started only posting like pics of sad little cats going “NO MORE LOVE!!” and “BROKEN-ASS MARRIAGE!!”
I’m laughing, but there’s a super useful corollary, which my husband calls “the Red Balloon.” He was a defense lawyer and had a fair number of drug addicts come through, and there is a thing where if you’re like, on your first offense, they’ll do a thing where you can go to treatment and if you complete it they’ll take the conviction off your record.
And he would tell his clients, “Look, everyone’s going to tell you not to do drugs. They’re going to say it over and over again. And it’s like, if people tell you not to think of a white elephant, you’re going to think of a white elephant. But the trick to not thinking about a white elephant is to think of a red balloon. So you need to find your red balloon. For some people it’s yoga. For others it’s woodworking. For some people it’s scrapbooking or gardening or any of a long list of things to do. They focus on that, it’s a lot easier to succeed in ignoring the white elephant.”
So yeah, “watch yourself” is one thing… but the better idea is to watch something else. (Even if it’s fanfic about werewolves fucking.)
It’s a form of productive dissociation, and is super, super helpful.
It’s easy for me to get bogged down in how much pain I’m in… but some of the most painful periods of my life have also been the most productive, writing-wise, because writing is one of my red balloons.
There is a phrase I use A LOT in my parenting and my son gets very sick of it, but it’s true:
The thing you practise is the thing you get good at.
You may not intentionally be practicing “being grumpy” but if you don’t put effort into practicing “not being grumpy” then I’m afraid that’s what you’re doing. It’s hard! It’s really hard! Sometimes, for some things, it’s pretty much impossible and that sucks!
But being carefully aware that you are going to get good at the things you do most of is a good way to be more careful of what those things are. If that makes sense.
You gotta appreciate sometimes how tumblr works in such a way that everyone who wants to reblog this interesting or useful psychological advice is also forced to reblog the thing about werewolf fucking
I’m laughing, but there’s a super useful corollary, which my husband calls “the Red Balloon.” He was a defense lawyer and had a fair number of drug addicts come through, and there is a thing where if you’re like, on your first offense, they’ll do a thing where you can go to treatment and if you complete it they’ll take the conviction off your record.
And he would tell his clients, “Look, everyone’s going to tell you not to do drugs. They’re going to say it over and over again. And it’s like, if people tell you not to think of a white elephant, you’re going to think of a white elephant. But the trick to not thinking about a white elephant is to think of a red balloon. So you need to find your red balloon. For some people it’s yoga. For others it’s woodworking. For some people it’s scrapbooking or gardening or any of a long list of things to do. They focus on that, it’s a lot easier to succeed in ignoring the white elephant.”
So yeah, “watch yourself” is one thing… but the better idea is to watch something else. (Even if it’s fanfic about werewolves fucking.)
It’s a form of productive dissociation, and is super, super helpful.
It’s easy for me to get bogged down in how much pain I’m in… but some of the most painful periods of my life have also been the most productive, writing-wise, because writing is one of my red balloons.
There is a phrase I use A LOT in my parenting and my son gets very sick of it, but it’s true:
The thing you practise is the thing you get good at.
You may not intentionally be practicing “being grumpy” but if you don’t put effort into practicing “not being grumpy” then I’m afraid that’s what you’re doing. It’s hard! It’s really hard! Sometimes, for some things, it’s pretty much impossible and that sucks!
But being carefully aware that you are going to get good at the things you do most of is a good way to be more careful of what those things are. If that makes sense.
You gotta appreciate sometimes how tumblr works in such a way that everyone who wants to reblog this interesting or useful psychological advice is also forced to reblog the thing about werewolf fucking
I’m laughing, but there’s a super useful corollary, which my husband calls “the Red Balloon.” He was a defense lawyer and had a fair number of drug addicts come through, and there is a thing where if you’re like, on your first offense, they’ll do a thing where you can go to treatment and if you complete it they’ll take the conviction off your record.
And he would tell his clients, “Look, everyone’s going to tell you not to do drugs. They’re going to say it over and over again. And it’s like, if people tell you not to think of a white elephant, you’re going to think of a white elephant. But the trick to not thinking about a white elephant is to think of a red balloon. So you need to find your red balloon. For some people it’s yoga. For others it’s woodworking. For some people it’s scrapbooking or gardening or any of a long list of things to do. They focus on that, it’s a lot easier to succeed in ignoring the white elephant.”
So yeah, “watch yourself” is one thing… but the better idea is to watch something else. (Even if it’s fanfic about werewolves fucking.)
It’s a form of productive dissociation, and is super, super helpful.
It’s easy for me to get bogged down in how much pain I’m in… but some of the most painful periods of my life have also been the most productive, writing-wise, because writing is one of my red balloons.
There is a phrase I use A LOT in my parenting and my son gets very sick of it, but it’s true:
The thing you practise is the thing you get good at.
You may not intentionally be practicing “being grumpy” but if you don’t put effort into practicing “not being grumpy” then I’m afraid that’s what you’re doing. It’s hard! It’s really hard! Sometimes, for some things, it’s pretty much impossible and that sucks!
But being carefully aware that you are going to get good at the things you do most of is a good way to be more careful of what those things are. If that makes sense.
You gotta appreciate sometimes how tumblr works in such a way that everyone who wants to reblog this interesting or useful psychological advice is also forced to reblog the thing about werewolf fucking
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