If you experienced trauma in childhood or had a rough childhood, dude listen to me. Offer yourself play. You were deprived of it.
Keep bubbles in the house, blow bubbles in the yard, blow them in your room, get a coloring book that doesn’t have to be an adult one with mandalas, watch cartoons, laugh at stupid things, dress up as a superhero for Halloween, wear a Santa hat on Christmas and big light up snowflake earrings, lay down on the floor, lay down in the grass, eat eggos for dinner sometimes. It’s not stupid. You’re not childish. You’re giving your inner child what they had taken from them. They deserve it.
I don’t want to derail this post because it’s an important message, and OP has addressed it to the people who most need to hear it. But… can i just add, for people who don’t feel like they can give themselves permission to do this, that you can give yourself these things even if you didn’t overtly experience trauma in childhood?
Even if you never thought of your upbringing as painful or malicious, you can and should still give yourself things you missed out on. Take that class! Learn that skill! Eat the foods you like, or branch out into new ones! Jump in piles of leaves and decorate your walls the way you want them.
Give yourself the things you couldnt have as a kid, especially if you didn’t really get to have a childhood, but even if you didn’t have the childhood you wanted. Go for a bike ride with friends. Go stargazing. Whatever it was that you feel like you missed, it’s important to seek those things and remember that play and joy aren’t exclusive to childhood.
I don’t think you derailed this at all and think this was a really thoughtful addition. So thank you!
I worked a cash register in a crappy grocery store on Friday the 13th, the day the schools got word that they were going remote because of the virus.
There were horrible people. I don’t need to go into details because we’ve all heard them or read about them or experienced them firsthand.
But most people were just scared and anxious and trying to take care of their families in spite of bad local and state and national leadership and terrible messaging and limited personal resources. They were intense, but understandably so.
My bosses weren’t great, not on any level, from CEO to shift managers, but that’s not news, most of us have been exploited and abused in our jobs before and during Covid.
We weren’t allowed to wear masks because the store thought it would freak out the customers. Some people quit on the spot, but precious few because it’s not the kind of job you work if you have a ton of options. A woman came through my line and she was wearing a cloth mask with a pretty botanical print. I complimented the design and we bonded over love of fabrics and crafts. She asked about the store mask situation, I explained store policy, she shook her head, left with her groceries, and I kept working the endless line. She was back four hours later with a mask for me. She’d gone home, put away her perishables, sat down at her sewing machine, made a mask for a stranger, and then gone back out into crazy traffic and crowds, just to find me and give it to me. She gave it to me in front of the floor manager, and explained to the manager that she was worried about the employees, and my boss had to let me wear it (out of a weird mental loophole of ‘customer is always right’ even though no other employees were allowed to wear one that day and for a few weeks afterward, which sounds insane, but it’s true).
Another woman had come through with a ton of cheese, really cool fancy stuff. I’m in the cheese fandom so we had a good time chatting. She left with her groceries and I kept working the line. About an hour later, she was back in my line again with more fancy cheeses. I rang her up, bagged her food, handed it to her, and she handed the bag to me and said “This is yours, I’m grateful for all the essential workers but I don’t know how to tell you guys or keep you safe, so I’m just doing this.” She’d put her groceries in her car, gone back into a madhouse, picked out cheese for an anonymous cashier, and WAITED IN LINE FOR AN HOUR so she could give it to me personally.
Toward the end of day, after credit card machines had gone down five times in as many hours (do you know what it’s like a for an entire grocery store to go cash-only for overlong periods of time on March 13 with a building full of scared customers? Do you know how funny or charming or lighthearted you have to be with that many intense people on the verge of freaking out? Sometimes being a cashier is like being a goddamm standup comedienne or therapist or surrogate mom I swear). Anyway, a guy came in toward the very end of my overtime and the card reader went down again and this customer didn’t freak out. He started SINGING. He stood there and sang to me until the computers came back online. I’ll never forget him or his sweet voice or that moment in time, ever.
I know things are bleak right now. I know they’re going to get worse. But I see acts of bravery and kindness all day, every day. Every. Day. People are channeling their despair into personal outreach that doesn’t get witnessed by many people because it’s usually one-on-one type stuff. I do a ton of climate & political stuff, as well as all my odd jobs, so I see a lot of different demographics in a lot of different situations, all of them stressful, and yes, there are sociopathic assholes in all of those settings, but there are ALWAYS always people being good and brave and looking for ways to connect or care for or support other people in a myriad of ways.
I don’t believe in very many things at this age but I will go to my grave defending the goodness of humanity. We may be isolated, we may be headfucked and heartbroken, but we are still fighting the good fight. That’s as real as all the bad stuff.
Beneath his white banner marched the Vanyar, the Fair-elves, the people of Ingwë; and among them were also those of the Noldor of old who had never departed from Valinor, and Ingwion son of Ingwë was their chief.
arguably the best russingon take is that long before the Revolt of the Noldor and all that followed, long even before Fëanor drew a sword on Fingolfin in the king’s hall, Fingon, alone out of everyone, saw in Maedhros the sparking potential for the ruthless killer we know by the end of the First Age…and, “valiant” being a rough synonym for “adrenaline junkie”, was like, “I can’t believe I’m going to sleep with him.”(Turgon: “You don’t have to.” Fingon: “No, I’m gonna.”)
the second-best russingon take (still Tirion era) is that they were both perfectly aware that their close friendship was a key component of the decreasingly sticky glue holding together the Noldor royal house, so even if they’d only gotten along moderately well, they each would’ve sought the other out driven by sheer social/political calculation—and this shared determination to hold their extended family and their people together is exactly what made them so genuinely close.
The ironic thing is that Boromir was right, one does not simply just walk into Mordor. You need to defeat a giant spider first. But then after that, you do just walk in, yes.
In the meantime, I have a collection of the greatest singers of Arda:) Finrod isn’t really about music himself, but I can’t leave him out of it. People like to compareDaeron and Maglor, but I think it’s an absolutely pointless exercise, they’re all about completely different things, and each of them is the greatest, in their own musical theme. Daeron is about the Hidden Realm, not touched by the darkness and distortion, about that magical world where the nightingale trills, the redolent fragrance of night herbs, and the ancient tribe life in harmony with the Forest. Maglor is about greatness and drama of Valinorian Noldor. And Finrod is about creating bridges across the gulfs that divide people, not without some help of his songs)… It’s my opinion, I see it this way!
I realized that the queue was empty like three hours before today’s post was supposed to go up and I was like “Oh geez I gotta come up with something quick” so I started drawing some loose lines to see if any drawings showed themselves, and nothing was, at least nothing that made sense. So here’s a deformed Morgoth because that’s what I decided I was going to turn the snarl of scribbles into. Slightly inspired by various Dark Souls monsters since I think those are kinda neat.
