Stop policing our masculinity
This quickly became a video I cannot scroll past. đ
Tag Archives: advice
Jim Morrison
(December 8, 1943 â July 3, 1971)Â
âPeople are afraid of themselves, of their own reality; their feelings most of all. People talk about how great love is, but thatâs bullshit. Love hurts. Feelings are disturbing. People are taught that pain is evil and dangerous. How can they deal with love if theyâre afraid to feel? Pain is meant to wake us up. People try to hide their pain. But theyâre wrong. Pain is something to carry, like a radio. You feel your strength in the experience of pain. Itâs all in how you carry it. Thatâs what matters. Pain is a feeling. Your feelings are a part of you. Your own reality. If you feel ashamed of them, and hide them, youâre letting society destroy your reality. You should stand up for your right to feel your pain.â
Feels like your interaction with anons goes YOU: *produces art because you enjoy it* ANON: Have some unsolicited advice. You should do the art I want you to do. Because that would get you more followers/be more respectable/be more worthwhile. YOU: I’m good. I enjoy my art. I’m not doing it for *outcome they offered* ANON: You!! Enjoy your own art!! You create it without me in mind!! How dare!! Here are reasons you shouldn’t!!!
This is accurate, but it isnât just anons. Itâs virtually everyone to some degree.Â
I donât mean offense by that. Most of the time, people just want to help. Or theyâre excited. I even do it to other girls myself sometimes. We give unsolicited advice, suggestions, âyou shouldâs and so on.
We try to control, even in the most well meaning way, what women do with their talents. We want to have a say in a womanâs behavior.
Itâs a cynical way to think, but in my experience, itâs not a big step all to go from âYou should try thisâ to âI was just trying to helpâ to âWow youâre a bitch for not letting me control you.â Itâs breathtaking to me sometimes how quickly and willingly people turn on you this way because of the expectation that you exist for them rather than for yourself. And itâs a very strong expectation, one you probably donât think you have.
But itâs there when people tell me to turn off anons or say nasty things because Iâm not dealing with hate the way they want me to. Itâs there when people tell me who I should draw. Itâs there when people say, under their breath, âI wish she wouldnât copy photos.â âI wish you would behave according to me.âÂ
And weâre not shy about it, especially when we think weâre being helpful. The need to rescue (and the expectation that women need to be rescued, even if from no one else but their own inherent bad judgment or âsinâ) is deeply ingrained in our society. Itâs in our laws, our religion, our commerce.
Think about all the ways, even the ways you believe to be harmless or helpful or barely there, that you feel youâre allowed, entitled, or even expected to take personal sovereignty from a woman. â¤
ME
Sorry for inconveniencing you. But I’m been I honestly not sure how to say this, Louis and Lestat. But basically my dad keeps trying to contact me and just when I thought he changed he hasn’t, I don’t know what I should do. I’m lucky to have a had full of friends and a great mother (she’s fabulous like you Lestat). I just feel like my voice isn’t being heard but I don’t want to go off on him. What should I do? Si vous plait, and thank you. ⥠lots of love
âItâs no inconvenience, Louis and I have both experienced our share of bad parenting, and done some of it ourselves, so weâre glad to reach out and help when we can.
We read your message many times and canât quite unravel what the issue is, but the fact that you have a mother who you feel is fabulous (and I assume you mean in her personality, more than just the contents of her closet *winks), and some friends for support, thatâs a good start.Â
Some people really shouldnât be parents, others are wonderful at it⌠it took Louis and I plenty of trial and error to figure it out ourselves. It sounds like your parents may not be working together on it themselves.
As badly as my father treated me, I took him in when the roles were reversed. He needed care, and only then, with his defenses down, were we able to have some of the communication I never got to have with him as a child. Perhaps he didnât like children, didnât see them as people, but as animals that needed taming. Louisâ mother seemed perpetually disappointed in Louis, no matter how hard he tried to please her. Perhaps she was disappointed with her lot in life and scapegoated her misery onto him.
It may be that your father doesnât deserve to be part of your life. It may be that you still have something to resolve with him, like I did with my father. Follow your instincts, and seek advice from your mother. She knew him before you were born, she may have the guidance you seek.
Itâs a sad truth that your father will be dead, and there will come a time when you wonât have the chance to try to communicate with him ever again. If itâs too painful to be alone with him, have it be in a setting with others involved, or at least nearby.Â
Any advice for the lonely people of the world today Lestat..?
âPardon the delay in reply, anonyme. I received this on Valentineâs Day but I was very busy with⌠romantic activities. Not to brag about it, Iâve spent many Valentineâs nights alone, and Iâm⌠taken aback and more touched now for the nights Iâm fortunate enough to spend with a loved one, whether itâs Valentineâs or any night of the week. Thereâs nothing all that inherently magical about holidays, only that we make them special by honoring them together.
[X by @gifsfortc]
There are times when yes, the loneliness overtakes me. I do feel emptiness at times. Sometimes solitude is needed, just to get to know myself once again, so that I can return to my loved ones. I canât advise you about your own loneliness because I feel that it has healing properties. And there are times when I need to be quarantined, when itâs better for everyone if weâre not together.
But I donât let loneliness destroy me. I donât let it take over. I canât. Iâm not built that way.Â
I never give up. I never despair for long. I canât. Iâm always spinning straw into gold. And this is why I survive, more than anything. I am in my unfolding stories what the world calls a comic character, rather than a tragic character, because I am never permanently undone by anything, never finished or ruined, never permanently destroyed, no matter how great are my own flaws. I always come back. Always. [X, from Fan Questions for Lestat]
If I had your talent and I was wasting it on fanart where all I did was copy photos I would seriously kill myself. You’re basically a plagiarist in visual form. This is all just appalling to me, and the sheer amount of life wasted here is mindblowing. How do you live with yourself? I feel so bad for you that you think this is art. I sincerely hope when realization sinks in that you’ve done so much nothing that you have people who care because it’s going to be a rough awakening. Damn this is sad.
Uggggggghhhhh
The jealous cruelty of this anon aside⌠thereâs such a weird expectation that artists need to be creating some kind of socially-valuable âartâ at all times⌠or that whatâs created needs to be for the consumption of others. Artists are allowed to make things for their own pleasure, things that are meaningless to anyone other than themselves, things that are practice, things that are ugly.
Happiness is valuable. Itâs like, y’know, how much time do people âwasteâ making themselves happy? Why is it better to spend your free time watching football or playing video games or reading articles on Reddit? Why is it that as soon as youâre making something, the thing itself needs to be valuable, rather than the joy of making it?
Fanworks are valuable too, particularly for women. Theyâre empowering to create because you are usually taking male-created, male-marketed media and recreating for female consumption. Itâs validating to consume because it gives women a place to enjoy media spaces. Its also a way to network and form communities in empty places. Itâs not âwastefulâ to spend time on fanworks for this reason as well.
Ugh. I wonder if guys drawing Black Widow getting nailed by aliens get these sorts of âwhat are you doing with your lifeâ/âwhy are wasting your talentâ messages. Prolly not, because this sort of hyperbolic go-kill-yourself missive is pretty much tailored to female recipients.
This is important. When I dabbled in art classes in college I had one teacher who was deadest that all our projects had to have a âmeaningâ and be âsocially relevantâ. If you were me, and just wanted to make a faerie house full of miniature food because that sounded like a fun way to fulfill her architecture assignment, this teacher would berate you. She spent a lot of time calling me unoriginal and uncreative. She made me cry in front of the class after a particularly nasty insult suggesting what I wanted to make was meaningless drivel and that she ‘expected better of meâ.
It feels shameful to admit now, but I seriously considered leaving the art field all together because of this teachers insistence that the things I enjoyed, and enjoyed making, werenât worthwhile. And looking back now, I think that teacher did a real disservice to countless young artists. Creation itself is valuable. Every act of creation has social significance and is a product of its time. You donât have to be political for your art to matter. You just have to love making what you make. Thatâs it. That what makes it art, thatâs what gives it value. Anyone who tells you otherwise has bought into the bizarre status-based BS I see sometimes in the fine art world.
And if my old professor from community college happens to see this: making life-size animal sculptures out of recycled plastic in order to send a message about the environment isnât any more unique than the faeries I wanted to make in your class. Iâm glad it makes you happy, Iâm glad that message resonates with you and your collectors. But try to look outside yourself and recognize putting others down when you can tell they are passionate about creating is not the right way to teach. Ever. Encourage and nurture more young artists in the world. This isnât a race to find out who can ‘make itâ by putting people through tests. There is enough room for all of us to shine.
Look at these smart babes who follow me though
 /beams with pride
I think this is beautiful
Questions that I fear, chapter one. The point of the song is that we are fairly well damaged by the legacy of the romantic poets. We think of love as this thing that is accompanied by strings, and itâs a force for good, and if something bad happens, then thatâs not love. And the therapeutic tradition I come from, I used to work in therapy, also says itâs not love if it feels bad. I donât know so much about that. I donât know that the Greeks werenât right. I think they were: that love can eat a path through everything. That it can destroy a lot of things on the way to itâs own objective which is just itâs expression of itself. My step-father loved his family. Now, he mistreated us terribly quite often. But he loved us. Well, that, to me, is something worth commenting on in the hopes of undoing what I see as terrible damage in the way that people talk about love as this benign, comfortable force. Itâs not that. Itâs wild.
You are the only person who is in charge of how you feel about yourself. Nobody else can possibly do that. You get to decide if you believe you are beautiful or not, and nobody can take it away from you. If someone suggests that you arenât beautiful, you can consider how sad it is that they have such a limited view of beauty. You can consider how unfortunate it is that they have such an exaggerated sense of self-importance that they think you should care about what they think. You can also choose to realize that it has nothing at all to do with your beauty and everything to do with their limitations.
Ragen Chastain (via onlinecounsellingcollege)
I-want-my-IWTV 