Don’t Take Up Spaces That Aren’t Meant For You

When I was training to be a battered women’s advocate, my supervisor said something that really blew my mind:

“You can always assume one thing about your clients; and that is that they are doing their best. Always assume everyone is doing their best. And if they’re having a day where their best just isn’t that great, or their best doesn’t look like your best, you have to be okay with that.”

Any now whenever anyone in my life, either a friend or a client, frustrates me, disappoints me, or pisses me off, I just tell myself They are doing their best. Their best isn’t that great today, but I have days where my best isn’t that great either. 

Please help (urgent)

My boyfriend can’t make rent money for December. Obviously the 1st of the month (rent due) is tomorrow. He’s gonna be upset at me for making this, but I’m extremely worried about him.

He does everything for everyone. He’s beyond giving. He would give up his entire world just because someone asked for it. On top of that, he’s sick (cancer), so he can’t have a job job. BUT, he tutors people in college. This tutoring job doesn’t make him constant money, though. Not only that, but the people don’t pay him what he deserves.

He works his butt off everyday and it breaks my heart to hear him so hurt and sad.

If you can give anything, please please do. Literally if everyone donated a dollar, he can make rent. It’s very urgent. Please please help.

His paypal is: elliotsimmons0@gmail.com

“What it’s Like to be” Masterlist

What it’s Like to be Abrosexual

What it’s Like to be Agender

What it’s Like to be Aroflux

What it’s Like to be Aromantic

What it’s Like to be Asexual

What it’s Like to be Bigender

What it’s Like to be Biromantic

What it’s Like to be Bisexual

What it’s Like to be Demigirl

What it’s Like to be Demiromantic

What it’s Like to be Demisexual

What it’s Like to be Gay

What it’s Like to be Genderfluid

What it’s Like to be Genderflux

What it’s Like to be Genderqueer

What it’s Like to be Gendervoid

What it’s Like to be Lesbian

What it’s Like to be Lithromantic

What it’s Like to be Maverique

What it’s Like to be Nebularomantic

What it’s Like to be Neutrois

What it’s Like to be Nonbinary

What it’s Like to be Panromantic

What it’s Like to be Pansexual

What it’s Like to be Polysexual

What it’s Like to be Queer

What it’s Like to be Quoigender

What it’s LIke to be Quoiromantic

What it’s Like to be Transmasculine

“Potter, what is that?” Draco asks with urgency, his chest constricting in pain as he catches a glimpse of something dark coiling up Harry’s forearm.

Harry shoves his sleeve down and jumps up to meet Draco, his wand clattering to the floor. “Nothing. How did you find – “

“Show me.”

“I don’t – “

“Show me. Now.” Draco demands. He can’t believe this is happening. As if it isn’t horrible enough seeing it on his own arm every day.

Harry pulls up his sleeve slowly to reveal it – The Dark Mark – etched into his flesh. Draco holds back a gag.

“It’s not what you think,” Harry says.

Draco’s eyes dart between the mark and Harry’s face. “It’s – how did – why?”

“I wanted to practice removing it,” Harry says slowly, his meaning clear. It only makes Draco angrier.

“So you gave yourself a Dark Mark? You reckless idiot. What if you can’t remove it? Did you even think about that before you – “ Draco stops himself. Of course he didn’t. He’s Harry fucking Potter. Draco sighs and tries to calm himself. He’s not responsible for Harry’s idiotic antics. “How did you even manage to replicate it?” He asks, his voice measured.

Harry smiles weakly. “Well, a fragment of Voldemort’s soul was inside me for most of my life and his magic left a pretty big trace. I just… accessed it.”

Once again Draco holds back a gag. The thought of Voldemort’s magic, so dark, so cruel, inside of Harry Potter, the Gryffindor Saint, is too much. It’s horrifying.

Draco takes a breath and asks Harry the question he already knows the answer to: “Why do you need to know how to remove a Dark Mark?” He needs to hear the idiot say it.

Sure enough: “So I can remove yours.”

Draco grits his teeth. He’s furious that Harry has put himself in danger for him. Again. “You don’t owe me anything, Potter.”

“I know,” Harry says. But he doesn’t.

“You can’t just go around saving people all the time!” Draco’s raised voice echoes throughout the room.

“Why not?”

“Not everyone wants to be saved,” Draco points out. He doesn’t want Harry risking anything for him. How could he ask that of anyone, after all that he’s done?

“You don’t want the mark removed?” Harry questions, his eyes falling down to Draco’s left arm.

Draco’s mark is covered but he tugs on his sleeve regardless. “It reminds me of who I am.”

Harry frowns. “That’s exactly why you need it removed. That’s not who you are, Draco.”

Draco blanches, surprised at the use of his first name and Harry quickly corrects himself. “I mean Malfoy.”

Draco lets his eyes fall back down to Harry’s mark, taking in the harsh lines of the coiling snake and skull, and the red raw skin beneath. He shudders. “Looks like you haven’t had much success anyway,” he says as casually as he can manage. But inside, his heart is tight. Because now Harry will have to live with the Dark Mark the rest of his life. Just like Draco, he’ll be forced to carry the weight of the inescapable dark magic within his skin, forced to feel it crawling through his veins, through his every spell, with no relief and no hope of salvation.

“I’m getting close. Before you came in, I could feel it moving.” Harry retrieves his wand from the floor and points it at his Dark Mark, eyebrows tightening in concentration.

“Go on, then. No other Wizard has been able to do it, but I’m sure even a Dark Mark will be no match for the great Harry Pot – oh.” Draco’s knees buckle. “Oh.”

Against all logic, Harry removes the Dark Mark as if it is nothing more than a muggle tattoo. The head of the snake recoils into a rapidly shrinking skull until all that is left is smooth, untainted skin.

Malfoy yanks up his sleeve and holds out his arm to Harry. Despite all his protesting, he wants to be saved. More than anything.

Harry’s hand wraps under Draco’s arm holding it in place and he raises his wand. Draco screws up his eyes in anticipation - he cannot bear to witness the removal in case it doesn’t work properly. What if his Dark Mark is worse than Harry’s, having come from Voldemort himself? What if – Oh.

Draco doesn’t need to see it happen because he feels it. He feels the darkness extracted from his body, feels strength returning to his limbs. And he feels light. Lighter than he can ever remember. As if he might just float away. He opens his eyes and stares down at his clear, unmarked skin.

There’s a sense of twisted deja vu when Draco looks up from his arm. He remembers looking up into Voldemort’s eyes after he was given the mark, and feeling colder than he’s ever felt before. But now when he looks up into his saviour’s eyes, into Harry Potter eyes, it’s warmth he feels, from the smooth skin on his forearm to the centre of his heart.

He blinks back his tears. “Thank you.” They’re the same words he was forced to say to Voldemort but their meaning couldn’t be any more different this time. Voldemort had stolen his life, and Harry Potter had just restored it.

Omg I love this

Addicted to Addict

LISTEN UP AGAIN KIDS STOP REBLOGGING THIS FUCKING GARBAGE POST. IT IS 100% FUCKING BULLSHIT AND CAN AND MOST DEFINITELY WILL LITERALLY KILL. DO YOU NOT SEE WARNING LABELS THAT SAY “DO NOT INDUCE VOMITING”? THEY AREN’T FUCKING AROUND. YOU CAN FUCKING BURN THEIR ESOPHAGUS BY CAUSING VOMITING, CAUSE CHOKING, DROWNING, OR MAKE IT WORSE! AGAIN DO NOT FORCE ANYTHING DOWN ANYONE’S THROAT. THEY. CAN. DROWN. IF SOMEONE IS LOSING CONCIOUSNESS ALL THE CHIT CHAT IN THE WORLD WILL NOT PREVENT IT AT THAT POINT THEY ARE IN SERIOUS DANGER. “Buuut i don’t wanna take them to the hospital!!!” WELL SUNSHINE GLAD YOU’D RATHER HAVE A DEAD FRIEND THAN A LIVING ONE BUT YOU’RE IN LUCK CALL FUCKING POISON CONTROL. THEY ARE NOT THE COPS. THEY WILL HELP YOU. AND IF THEY SAY GO TO THE FUCKING HOSPITAL YOU GO TO THE FUCKING HOSPITAL. NO EXCUSES. 0. NONE. I have seen this shit cross my dash SO MANY TIMES so PLEASE fucking reblog this and prevent some well meaning idiot from accidentally killing someone they love!

Homophobic Mom.. Turned Supportive?

OH MY GOD Y’ALL 

okay backstory: for those of you who don’t know, my parents are super religious and homophobic. They have told me I’m going to Hell and threatened me… bad stuff. It has been truly an awful experience.  now YESTERDAY: my mom just starts pouring her heart out to me about how she wants me to be happy and trust her. She said she wants me to be around when she’s old and not to push me away. My mom has never really cared about me. This was all weird. Then she hits me with the: I don’t care if you’re gay, straight, bi… whatever you are. (Because she knew I was gay but thought I “fixed” it.)  It took me a lot of talking to her to believe she changed. But I came out to her. And she accepts me. It gets better. I promise. If you’re struggling with your parents not accepting you, remember there is hope. I know. You don’t think there is. I thought she’d never accept my sexuality. She literally wanted to send me to military school because I’m gay. But she changed.  Never give up. 

Y'know, whenever people want to talk about why aspec people 'count' as an oppressed identity, they tend to go for the big stuff like corrective rape and conversion therapy. And like, we should absolutely talk about that stuff. Obviously those things are terrible and important and we need to raise awareness and deal with them.

But I feel like people often gloss over how… quietly traumatising it is to grow up being told that there is only one way to be happy— and that everybody who doesn't conform to that norm is secretly miserable and just doesn't know it— and then to gradually realise that, for reasons that you cannot help, that is never going to happen for you.

You're not going to find a prince/princess and ride off into the sunset. Or if you do, then it's not going to look exactly the way it does in fairytales. You're not going to get a 'normal' relationship, because you are not 'normal', and everybody and everything around you keeps telling you that that's bad.

You see films where characters are presented as being financially stable, genuinely passionate about their work and surrounded by friends and family, but then spend the rest of the plot realising that the real thing they needed was a (romantic and sexual) partner, to make them 'complete'.

You absorb the idea that any relationships you have with allo people will ultimately be unfulfilling on their side, and that this will be your fault (even if you discussed things with your partner beforehand and they decided that they were a-okay with having those sorts of boundaries in a relationship) unless you deliberately force yourself into situations that you aren't comfortable with, so as to make uo for your 'defects'.

You grow up feeling lowkey gaslighted because all the adults in your life (even in LGBT+ spaces. In fact especially in LGBT+ spaces) are insisting that it's totally normal to not be attracted to anybody at your age, and then you go to school and everybody keeps pressuring you to name somebody you're attracted to because they can't imagine not being attracted to anybody at your age.

And then you get older and realise that one day you're going to be expected to leave home, and that one day all your friends are going to be expected to put aside other relationships and 'settle down' with a primary partner and you don't know what you're going to do after that because you straight up don't have a roadmap for what a 'happy ending' looks like for someone like you.

(And the LGBT+ community is little help, because so many people in there are more than happy to tell you that you're not oppressed at all. That you're like this because you don't want to have sex, and/or you don't want to have any relationships, that your orientation is some sort of choice you made— like not eating bananas— rather than an intrinsic part of you that a lot of us have at some point tried to wish away.)

Even if you're grey or demi, and do experience those feelings, you still have to deal with the fact that you're not experiencing them the 'normal' way and that that's going to effect your relationships and your ability to find one in the first place.

If you're aiming for lifelong singlehood (which is valid af) or looking for a qpp, then you're going to have to spend the rest of your life either letting people make wrong assumptions about your situation (at best that your relationship is of a different nature than it actually is, at worst that the life you've chosen is really just a consolation prize because you 'failed' at finding a romantic/sexual partner) or pulling out a powerpoint and several webpages every time you want to explain it.

This what being aspec looks like for most people, and it is constantly minimised as being unimportant and not worth fighting against— even in aspec spaces— because we've all on some level absorbed the idea that oppression is only worth fighting against if it's big, and dramatic, and immediately obvious. That all the little incidents of suffering that we experience on a daily basis are not enough to be worth bothering about.

I mean, who gives a shit if you feel broken, inherently toxic as a partner, and like you're going to be denied happiness because of your orientation? Shouldn't we all just shut up and thank our lucky stars we don't have to deal with all the stuff some of the other letters in the acronym have to put up with (leaving aside the fact that there are many aspec people who identify with more than one letter)?

So you know what? If you're aspec and you relate to anything I've said above (or can think of other things relating your your aspec-ness that I haven't mentioned) then this is me telling you now that it's enough. Even if we got rid of all the big stuff (which we're unlikely to do any time soon because— Shock! Horror!— the big stuff is actually connected to all the small stuff) we would still be unable to consider our fight 'over' because what you are experiencing is not 'basically okay' and something we should just be expected to 'put up with'.

No matter what anybody tells you, we have the right to demand more from life than this.

wow such struggle much pain no but seriously it’s supposed to be that headcanon where Remus tries to find a cure for his affliction and surprisingly there is one person willing to help him and not trying to poison Severus at the same time :)

People helping people. That’s all this world should be about cuz all we got is each other. Love seeing this kindness from big companies. Needs to happen more often in corporate America.