YOU WILL FIND A WAY!!!! YOU WILL FIND A WAY . You Will Find A WAY ….. You WILL Find A Way . You Will

there is always tomorrow

you worry the cardboard sleeve around the coffee and think about landfills and the future without straws. you are worried about prion disease and deer. you are worried about the rising temperature of mushrooms. you are worried about teflon and microplastics and carcinogens and whatever else you're being quietly lied to about.

your mother used to jokingly say you are "a worrier," which always kind of oddly hurt your feelings. you feel like a person. and besides, you've been told one-million-times that this is normal. examples get trotted out in a pony show each time: everyone gets nervous sometimes. they talk about public speaking and picturing people naked and how when they get nervous they just-get-over-it.

you run your hands down the grater of your life and feel the sharpness. you started holding your breath in tunnels as a kid, worried that if you relax, the ceiling would cave in. like years of architects and engineers weren't responsible - you, and your faith, you were responsible for the success of infrastructure. if you slipped for a moment, your whole family would be swept away under the ocean. and the problem is that it worked - no tunnel collapsed.

you once broke a coffee carafe and even though you didn't drink from it after, you worried that there had been some previous invisible micro-break that had made you drink glass particles. you stayed awake for 24 hours, constantly dreading each swallow, waiting to taste blood.

you hate being late, you worry about it. you go to grab literally just lunch with a friend - no pressure, no emergency - and you still park the car an hour early and just sit there scrolling on your phone aimlessly. maybe you just don't like surprises or change. you triple-check you locked the doors, and then go to bed, and then get up out of bed to check twice again.

a worrier. like a strange and dreadful bingo card, you collect weekly experiences. someone tells you that you're overthinking, that's 2 points. you have to physically turn around and go back in your house to check you unplugged everything, that's 1 point. spiraling about climate change or politics or the state of the world is a free space, that's basically every evening.

you worry you're being selfish and not a good person because how come you're worried about your dog's health and the itch in your eye when you know people who are really very ill or who have it worse or who are genuinely struggling. then you worry that you're being annoying by infantilizing them. then you worry that your priorities are wrong, that you should be infinitely more worried about the state of a dying planet.

you wanted to be a person, is all. you wanted to go through life in a softness, to hold the world gently and have it whisper past you. and instead you are a worrier. everything that touches you is hard and raw and sharp like diamonds.

So OPs intent here is to highlight biphobia and gate keeping, which I applaud. I do want to talk about this:

"straight-passing" includes 90% of queer people, unless you really know what youre looking for (hets dont), in which case "straight-passing" only includes about 60% of us instead.

Hello. I disagree with the wording here very much. There is no 90% or 60% of queers passing as straight, because your sexuality is not determined by how you look.

There is no "when you know what to look for". No "hets don't". You might get a feeling for when someone you're meeting might be queer, but can we PLEASE let go of this gatekeeping fuckery. Please don't put down heterosexuals in a side sentence for no reason.

Don't feel bound by how you think a queer person should look.

I know I did, and if someone had told me this when I was 14 it would have spared me a lot of insecurity.

shout-out to the person in the tag last night calling hbomb "straight-passing". what does that mean here? "white-passing" is a useful term because you can usually tell what race someone is visually. "straight-passing" includes 90% of queer people, unless you really know what youre looking for (hets dont), in which case "straight-passing" only includes about 60% of us instead. do you mean he can pass as het by not showing us any male partners? hes a youtuber. are all youtubers straight unless their partners (mandatory both male and female for bisexuals) show up in the background of their shots? or do you mean he never talks about it? because he does. repeatedly. in other videos.

you have 30 seconds to explain how the term "straight-passing" is useful when discussing whether or not hbombs claims are out of his lane before i shove the biphobia L into your hands

This. Is. Epic. You win the internet.

My family is not very religious most of the time.  We pray at Christmas and Easter and Thanksgiving dinners, and my mom’s entire side of the family excluding her parents and siblings is hardcore religious so whenever we do anything with them it’s kind of religious.

But the point is, most of the time we aren’t, but every year at Christmas time, a church in the next town over puts on a Bethlehem and it’s kind of a tradition to go.  They go all out.  The building is massive, and they’ve got it all decked out.  There’s animals and stalls and everyone is in costume and in character.  When you get there, they give you some pennies and you can go and barter for cool little trinkets, and there’s other more expensive things you can buy with your own money.  And they have the best apple cider.  All in all, it’s pretty cool.

But anyway.  We go every year, bundled up in hats and scarves and mittens, and have a good time.  We’ve been doing it for as long as I can remember, and my mom talks about going when she was a kid.

I’m going to mention again that everyone is massively in character, especially the really super hardcore religious adults.  Because this is an important fact.

Every year since I was about thirteen or so, there’s been this one lady who worked at a stall selling ponchos (I have, like, three.  They’re really cool).  She was probably there before that, but I was thirteen when she started trying to barter for me to marry her son, who was also about thirteen.

“What a pretty little thing.  I think you’d make a very good wife for my son.  These are your parents?  I’ll give you six goats for your daughter’s marriage to my son.”

Her son, meanwhile, is in the “shop” behind her looking absolutely mortified and like he’d rather be anywhere else than there, and I’m pretty sure I probably looked just as embarrassed.

My parents gave her some sort of excuse, like it wasn’t enough goats or they weren’t ready to marry me off yet or something, and we moved on.

The next year we’re back again, and come up near to the same stall.

“Ah!  You’re back again!  Have you married your daughter off yet?  I can up my offer to nine goats and three chickens for your daughter to marry my son.”

Somehow she remembered the exact people she’d tried to buy their daughter off of for an entire year?  So my parents are refusing her offers again and me and the son are trading embarrassed looks and we go on our way.

And then it happens again.  And again.  And again.  Each and every one of the last six years this lady has tried to buy me in goats to be her son’s wife. 

 A couple years ago when we were waiting in line to get inside my mom jokingly said that they should accept this year and see what she’d do and I completely refused because it was mortifying enough as it was.

One year we brought my friend with us and we’re waiting outside and my sister was like “Are you gonna sell Kee this year?” and my dad was like “Maybe if there’s enough goats” and my friend was confused as heck and I was like “This lady tries to buy me to marry her son every year.  I told you that” and she’s like “Yeah but I didn’t think this was a thing that actually happened” and she was still skeptical and by the time my parents had finished refusing the lady’s offer, she’s killing herself laughing and then spent the next few months telling me I couldn’t look at guys because I already had a fiancée.

Anyway, it happened again this Christmas and the son has somehow gotten almost ridiculously attractive since last year.  The speech this year had something to do with how I was far too old to not have a husband yet, and the son and I just rolled our eyes at each other as his mom tried to barter with my parents for me.

This year’s offer was twenty six goats and nine chickens.  My sister looked up how much goats are worth, and was mad our parents didn’t sell me so she could have sold the goats and gotten $2000-$8000 for them.  My dad says they’re waiting out on an offer of a camel.  My brother thinks they should have it more than once a year so he can get more apple cider.

Now I’m back at uni, and in my first psych class of the semester the guy sitting beside me looked really familiar.  

As in his-mom-tries-to-buy-me-with-goats-every-Christmas familiar.

That kind of familiar.

We introduced ourselves before class started and I sat there for a couple minutes readying to make a total fool of myself in case I was wrong before turning to him again.

“This is going to sound really weird if you aren’t who I think you are, but by any chance does your mom try to buy you a wife with goats every Christmas?”

His friend gives me a weird look as he walks past me to sit on the other side of him, but he’s definitely putting the pieces together.

“That’s you?  Bethlehem in [city name], right?  God, my mom is so mortifying.”

And we both kinda laugh and meanwhile his friend is giving us both weird looks now because apparently he didn’t know that his friend’s mom was trying to buy him a wife using livestock.

So he turns to his friend and is like

“Oh, I forgot to introduce you.  Danny, this is my fiancée, Kee.”

And I kinda rolled my eyes and was like

“I’m not actually your fiancée.  Your mom hasn’t offered my parents enough goats yet.  But apparently my dad will sell me for a camel.”

And he laughed and shook his head like

“I am not telling my mom that.  I don’t want to see what she has planned for if your parents ever accept.”

So yeah.  His friend was really confused by that point and we explained it to him and it turns out he’s pretty cool and we’re Facebook friends now and hang out in psych classes.  Apparently his mom only ever tries to buy me for him and she and my mom had gone to the same church growing up which is why she can always pick us out.

So yeah.  That’s the story of how some lady tries to use goats to buy me to be her ridiculously attractive son’s wife every Christmas, and how he’s in my class and we’re friends now.

childhood was so crazy. my parents were kind of young. a meal seemed to last forever. i could run for ages. everyone was alive

it was never gonna work out but i experienced all these seemingly profound unreplicable moments that were romantic and moving and made me feel alive and still none of it actually means anything in the long run. but thats okay. sometimes a beautiful moment is just that. a moment. and you have to leave it alone and just be grateful that it happened. woooow

But honey, I was born with the world crumbling around my mother's hospital bed

I grew up stepping around the shards with childish innocence

If you didn't want me to take up weapons,

you shouldn't have shattered the world with yours.

ya gotta stop caring what people think and start being extremely weird. but never cruel. i think that might save you

I wondered why green is so associated with hope and then I remembered being 8 and seeing a little plant sprout after a few days of waiting and. Yeah. I get it now.

IM SO FUCKING HAPPY !!!!!!