Always place yourself in an environment where you are listened to, never settle for just being heard. Words are our primary means of communication; don’t waste your time speaking to walls, that’s just crazy.
Took me many years to come to this realization myself, but it’s a game changer. Submerse your soul in those that can see it.
Just one thing missing…
First set: Pyramid Rock, Oahu
Second set: Hanalei Bay, Kauai
Thanks for all the love followers! Still relevant!
Tag: this is important
1500 cases from 1990-2016 (that we know of). And to clarify, this lists comprises of brown and black lives.. there’s so many names I could add to this, we are far from this post-racial utopian society people try to paint us as. In some areas in the UK, black people are 17x more likely to be stopped and searched. Black bodies mysteriously die in cells while the IPCC torments the families with biased investigations that they were never here to seek justice for them. Just this February Sarah Reed a black British woman died under mysterious circumstances in her cell. Tell me how a black woman who was sexually assaulted in the psychiatric hospital she was put in ended up in prison? She was also a victim of police brutality a couple of years ago. In 2012, police broke the neck of science student Julian Cole leaving him brain dead while the family still awaits his justice in 2016!
We need to know why our lives are seen as so disposable. We need to know why black people are over represented in the custodial system and why such racial prejudices exist in the criminal system in the first place. They purposely hide the history and achievements of black people in the UK so we remain ignorant and forget about our own movements in the 60s – our fights to bring in “no discrimination” laws. Our fights to be treated as equal. Many Brits don’t even know the origin of the biggest festival in Europe – Notting Hill carnival, which was political, created as a means to celebrate our heritage and culture in the face of adversity. Gangs of police have been terrorising us since the majority of our grand parents came during the windrush era in the 40s. Police brutality is nothing new. Ask your grand parents how they used to try to intimidate black folks minding their business, kidnap and beat them up only to drop them off somewhere far from home. How they’d ignore evidence pointing to members of white hate groups who would murder us, harass us and vandalise our property/businesses. This isn’t anything new. And history continues to repeat itself as the list of brown and black lives continue to be taken away/brutalised. The media may try to hide it but it’s happening.
Let’s not pretend that the UK hasn’t played a huge role in propagating the false belief that whiteness is superior. Let’s not pretend that they have not spread this through violence, pillaging countries, colonisation and slavery. Do not wipe away the history of this country and what they continue to do, to paint some utopic fantasy which you can use to compare to America. What can Britain teach America about valuing black lives? We aren’t above them at all.
The UK has a higher incarceration rate of blacks than America does
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2010/oct/11/black-prison-population-increase-england
^ This is true.
“
Black people are more disproportionately represented in U.K. prisons than in the U.S. The proportion of black people in jail in the U.K. is almost seven times their share of the population, whereas in the U.S. the proportion of black prisoners is four times greater than their population share” (x)
So can we like…start normalizing the idea that not everyone dates or has their first boyfriend/girlfriend in junior high or high school?
There are plenty of people who go into college with little to no dating experience. There are tons of people who go into college having not had their first kiss yet. It’s not wrong; everyone experiences things at a different pace, and that’s okay. Don’t feel pressured into doing things you’re not comfortable with at the time just because you feel like you have to fill some sort of “quota.”
You are the only person you need to be good enough for.
a daily reminder (via misjudgments)
you don’t “beat” depression. you don’t “defeat” eating disorders. you survive them. stop making severe mental illnesses sound like something you can overcome just by throwing the right punch.
“beating” and “defeating” language also implies that you’re never gonna have to deal with it again. many of us struggle with our mental illnesses even after we’ve gotten a hold of our symptoms. it’s really much more of a continuing act of survival. like i haven’t starved myself or made myself vomit after a meal in years but that doesn’t mean i don’t have the odd day where i consider it anymore.
am i the only person not affected by generalized positivity… like post it notes in bathrooms that say ‘you’re beautiful’ or posts that are like ‘smile! you are a beautiful sunshine flower!’ i’m just like … okay…
I just heard a psychologist (Guy Winch) say that the people that positive affirmations help most are actually the people who have high or at least normal self-esteem. They really do cheer those people up!
But for the rest of us they run so counter to our general worldview (we’re fundamentally bad and deserve nothing) that our brain rejects them immediately as lies and uses that moment to remind us of how terrible and abnormal we actually are.
What usually works for people with low self-esteem is stuff like writing out a list of very specific things we know we’re good at, and revisiting it every day to write a paragraph elaborating on one of those things (i.e. “I’m a compassionate person and here are five examples”) to try to set our brain on a different track long term.
That makes so much sense.
the psychology behind the “ok that sounds fake but ok” meme
Holy crap
Actionable Useful Thing I Use: I keep a jar on my desk. Every time someone compliments me or my work, I write it down or print it out, fold it, and put it in the jar. Being able to see those things fill up the jar in physical form forces me to recognize that there are people I care about who like me.
A lot of people ask me what my biggest fear is, or what scares me most. And I know they expect an answer like heights, or closed spaces, or people dressed like animals, but how do I tell them that when I was 17 I took a class called Relationships For Life and I learned that most people fall out of love for the same reasons they fell in it. That their lover’s once endearing stubbornness has now become refusal to compromise and their one track mind is now immaturity and their bad habits that you once adored is now money down the drain. Their spontaneity becomes reckless and irresponsible and their feet up on your dash is no longer sexy, just another distraction in your busy life.
Nothing saddens and scares me like the thought that I can become ugly to someone who once thought all the stars were in my eyes.this fucks me up every single time
I never expected this to be my most popular poem out of the hundreds I’ve written. I was extremely bitter and sad when I wrote this and I left out the most beautiful part of that class.
After my teacher introduced us to this theory, she asked us, “is love a feeling? Or is it a choice?” We were all a bunch of teenagers. Naturally we said it was a feeling. She said that if we clung to that belief, we’d never have a lasting relationship of any sort.
She made us interview a dozen adults who were or had been married and we asked them about their marriages and why it lasted or why it failed. At the end, I asked every single person if love was an emotion or a choice.
Everybody said that it was a choice. It was a conscious commitment. It was something you choose to make work every day with a person who has chosen the same thing. They all said that at one point in their marriage, the “feeling of love” had vanished or faded and they weren’t happy. They said feelings are always changing and you cannot build something that will last on such a shaky foundation.
The married ones said that when things were bad, they chose to open the communication, chose to identify what broke and how to fix it, and chose to recreate something worth falling in love with.
The divorced ones said they chose to walk away.
Ever since that class, since that project, I never looked at relationships the same way. I understood why arranged marriages were successful. I discovered the difference in feelings and commitments. I’ve never gone for the person who makes my heart flutter or my head spin. I’ve chosen the people who were committed to choosing me, dedicated to finding something to adore even on the ugliest days.
I no longer fear the day someone who swore I was their universe can no longer see the stars in my eyes as long as they still choose to look until they find them again.
This is so fucking important and I think it’s something I needed right now
why do people always pull hip-hop and rap as a misogynist area of music? yes, many rappers are misogynistic, but it’s not the only genre. let’s talk about country music, about the preacher’s daughter trope, the cutoff jeans, the get-her-drunk mentality; let’s talk about pop music, about the drugs and the clubs and the possessive “love songs”; let’s talk about alternative music, about “she’s not like other girls” and the manic pixie dream girl; let’s talk about classical music, about the exclusion of women now and in history.
let’s talk about how everyone’s first reaction is to villainize a primarily black genre before criticizing literally anyone else.
Of course you don’t. Free college might hinder the school-to-prison pipeline your prison owning donors depend on
👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆
welp;
Actual quote, in context:
“I believe that we should make community college free. We should have debt-free college if you got to a public college or university. You should not have to borrow a dime to pay tuition… I disagree with free college for everybody. I don’t think taxpayers should be paying to send Donald Trump’s kids to college.“
Don’t spread misinformation just to fit a narrative, Clinton is advocating for there to be a cap on who gets free college so that the government doesn’t have to subsidize the education of people with enough disposable income to pay for it themselves. The plan she’s proposing would have a better chance of being passed, is more cost-effective, and still opens up higher education to low-income individuals who previously couldn’t afford it.
Two men kissing is not porn. Claiming any PDA between men (or between women) no matter how minor (hand holding, kissing, hugging) is NSFW or porn is homophobic because no one would consider a straight couple kissing or holding hands porn or NSFW
shealwaysreads 