Literally Part Of The Plot Of His Dark Materials Season 2

The way I see it, there are two kinds of shame:

Shame for doing something actually bad

Shame for doing something others/society has told you is bad

The first includes things that actually cause harm to someone, like a thoughtless comment or stepping on your dog's paw, etc. These are actions which require acknowledgement and amends.

The second is much broader, and includes everything from liking bad movies to being queer. These are things that may be unusual but are ultimately harmless. Someone or something in your life has just treated that oddity as a transgression, and one way or another you've internalized that perspective.

In my opinion it is crucially important for your well-being to be able to separate the two. If you don't, and you're treating the shame of having punched someone identically to liking a critically-panned movie, you're going to be a anxious wreck. You'll be constantly over-analyzing and policing yourself, feeling like a bad person who's just been really good at hiding it so far.

In the worst cases you might lash out at other people enjoying harmless things, redirecting your shame outward and becoming unable to distinguish truly harmful actions from those you’ve just been taught are bad.

Shame is a feeling that can really eat away at you if you let it. It's best to know when it's appropriate. If it is, you can act on it to resolve what's happened. If it's not, you can let that feeling go so it doesn't take any more from you.

not sure if this will make sense to anyone besides me but: the antidote to negativity is not positivity, its warmth

By Wealthy Loser on Instagram

my other controversial take for the day is that anger, sadness, shame and fear are seen as inherently negative emotions and because of that the second you express them you are deemed as 'not good' because of experiencing the full breadth of the human experience. so instead of not experiencing these feelings (impossible challenge) everyone just hides them and we develop weirder and weirder complexes about them until we wind up finding new ways to psychologically torment each other.

you've got to learn how to express these feelings, earnestly, when to express them and how to process them yourself. you are going to make mistakes in doing so. but simply denying you have them or WORSE, denying yourself the experience of them by bottling them away... there is no crueler fate and you will never understand why you keep hurting yourself and others regardless.

holy shit y’all should watch this one, what an admirable person

"It doesn't have to be like this. We could have it so much better"

Calligraffiti in Chicago, Illinois

Humpback whales breaching: gorgeous, majestic, graceful, embodies all the strength and beauty of the ocean

Minke whales breaching: I will launch myself out of this ocean like a f***ing surface-to-air missile to seek and destroy my enemies

I feel that you summarized in a single sentence everything I want to do with my writing, and pretty much what I want to do with my life the most. Thank you so much for that.

And cheers to all people who already do exactly that, and the ones who want to join. Let's have a guild.

My contribution, I hope, is to find the ideas that matter the most and connect them in a way that is highly actionable.

Hope is resilience, and it is fucking tough. I was talking with a friend about how if you expect the worst, don't let yourself be hopeful, you feel protected and strong, but it is fake. My friend was telling me that he tends to think: "If I know in advance that it was going to be shitty and horrible, I'm no fool, I was right." But then he realized: "Wait, why am I happy to be right about that? This is shitty and horrible!"

Being negative and in a "I'm no fool" mindset feels safe but actually does not protect from harm. It comes from fear. As my friend concluded: "Being hopeful and open is actually the brave thing to do. And I don't want to be a wimp."

don't give up

“When a flower doesn’t bloom, you fix the environment in which it grows, not the flower.”

— Alexander den Heijer