When I was 18 I took a ballet class at college and every morning our beginner adult class started just as the Ballet Majors in the studio next door took a mid-class break.
Many mornings they would gather in the doorway of my classroom and watch us struggle through our bar warmups or jumble up a new technique while they smiled and whispered to each other.
And every morning I dreaded seeing them there because I knew they were making fun of me.
I had other classes with some of them, and I was always embarrassed when ballet came up, and it always did, them being ballet majors, because I loved to talk about it but knew they’d seen me dance, and I was sure they thought I didn’t belong in the conversation.
At the end of the semester, our instructor announced that she’d like to invite the dancers from the next door studio to sit in on our final performance as an audience, and everyone in my class hesitated. We’d worked so hard, we wanted to celebrate our progress during our final without being judged. Most of us left class that day suddenly more anxious about the final than we’d ever been.
The next morning, in one of my other classes I had with the ballet majors, one of them approached me, and as if she’d been reading our minds the entire semester, she said
“Hey. I just wanted to say that I know we watch you guys dance a lot, and I wanted to make sure you know we’re never laughing at you. When we watch you guys learn the basics…..it reminds us of when we first started when we were younger. It’s like…looking at ourselves when we first fell in love with dancing. That’s why we love watching you guys.”
It shocked me. I felt awash with relief and utterly stupid all at once.
Here I had spent an entire semester assuming the worst of people who had otherwise been nothing but nice to me in every other setting, and I had no one to blame for that but my own insecurities that I’d allowed to rule me for months.
I’d been so unfair to these girls, because I was self conscious. I was so worried about being judged that I’d judged all of them.
Here I was worried they were laughing at me, and all along they were looking at me with nothing but absolute delight, even envy for what I was getting to experience.
This encounter changed my entire attitude, permanently.
It made me realize that, yeah sometimes people are jerks for no reason, but more often than not, people really are just….Good.
Since that day, I’ve started giving everyone the benefit of the doubt until they prove me wrong, for their sake and for my own.
And I’ve learned that the world becomes a lot better and life becomes a lot easier when you accept that maybe not everyone is judging you. Maybe you’re the one who’s hardest on yourself.
Let yourself be. Let yourself exist and breathe and be happy.
Warnings: reader is a spirit, general AHS level creepiness.
Summary: Reader is a spirit living in the murder house who befriended Tate when he was still living. Now Violet is caught between Her, Tate and a cataclysmic event.
This is sort of experimental…I’ve never done an AHS series before and I may do it if you guy want one but this is kind of a trial run to gage your responses to it.
the worst beauty misconception dark girls are fed is that they can’t experiment with their look
you can go as loud as you want
or keep it simple
stick to the neutrals
or go on all out galaxy chic
go out sultry
or go out sweet
cause your skin is so versatile
that there’s no such thing as “the right colour”
be a goddamn mermaid if you like
dress down
or up
go natural
or not
you’ll still look flawless
so go ahead and shower in gold
or do nothing at all
cause at the end of the day
you’re still a queen
You wanna talk representation? Before Tumblr, I never experimented with color, hair or makeup-wise. I’d heard too many people correlate black women and bright colors as ‘ghetto’. Posts like these are So important. So incredibly important.
European accents (and in general white people accents) are commonly perceived as attractive and endearing, while accents from basically any other part of the world are considered to be signs of laziness and disrespect and get routinely made fun of.
My whole family is Korean. My sister and I have grown up in the US so we can pretty much speak English. However, our parents speak very broken English. It makes me mad though because my mother has taken ESL classes at our local university and my father graduated from the University of Washington with a PhD in mechanical engineering, yet I constantly see them being made fun of by their coworkers or other people in general because “they’re too lazy to try to understand English.” My mom has spent countless nights crying whilst taking her classes because of the stress wishing she could speak half as fluently as I can. If you don’t know what it’s like trying to learn English as a second language, then you have no room to talk.
NEVER MAKE FUN OF SOMEONE WHO SPEAKS BROKEN ENGLISH. IT MEANS THEY SPEAK ONE MORE LANGUAGE THAN YOU DO.
As someone who’s been trained to teach English to non-English speakers, allow me to inform you that English is an eldritch Frankenstein-esque abomination of borrowed words and mismatched grammatical rules.
Structurally, English is as convoluted and obtuse as any aspect of governmental bureaucracy, and it’s similarly societally entrenched in a way that makes people believe, and even insist, that’s just “the way of things.”
Here’s the facts: English is fucking hard. English doesn’t make logical sense. English is weird and horrible and inconsistent and makes common use of unusual phonemes that most adult speakers of other languages have to be mechanically taught to differentiate from similar sounds that are distinct in the English language. Without mechanical introduction and proper instruction, a lot of people cannot actually hear the difference in sounds you are mocking them for.
In some languages, [p] and [b] are indistinguishable. This is why you heard that gentleman say he would like a “can of Coke or Bebsi” with his order. It has nothing to do with laziness.
In some languages, [l] and [r] are indistinguishable. This is why you’re an asshole for going “me rikey” like the substitution is somehow comical. You’re a dick, and also most likely racist.
In the vast majority of languages, [θ] and [ð], known to English speakers as the voiceless (thing) and voiced (there) versions of the th sound, respectively, straight up does not even exist. This is why she says “teef” or “toofbrush,” why he keeps saying “ze” or “de” in place of “the,” and why they said “sank you very much” when you held open the door for them.
There are sounds in English that a hell of a lot of speakers of other languages cannot teach themselves to recognize and recreate without assistance.
And, y’know, even if you get the screwy grammar and troublesome pronounciation down, English is a language in which very slight changes in intonation and word stress can completely change the meaning of a sentence.
Like so:
But how are you doing? (Flamboyant pleasure to see someone, eagerness to catch up.)
But how are you doing? (Deflection from inquiries about self, moving conversation in a new direction.)
But how are you doing? (Concern, request for further or more accurate information.)
These are all totally different statements.
It’s incredibly easy to come across in a way you did not want or intend to when you’re not familiar with the particular ways in which saying something can change what it means to other people.
Don’t you ever give people shit for not achieving or approaching fluency in English.
Repeat after me: English is a terrible fucking language and speaking it does not make me tangibly superior to anyone else in literally any way.
Me: yeah so I just don’t have the energy to get up and make myself a sandwich or wait for something to cook so I just. Don’t
Her: why don’t you just eat the sandwich components without putting them together
Me:
Her: you can just eat a handful of cheese and some sandwich meat. You don’t have to make a sandwich.
Me:
Me: what
Therapists finding loopholes for mental illness things is one of my favorite things about dealing with mental illness because it really helps me understand that just because a reaction is Common doesn’t mean it’s Right. Does doing dishes stress you out a lot? Buy paper plates. Do your obsessive thoughts make you worry about leaving your curling iron on so you drive home from work to check? Just put the curling iron in your purse and bring it to work with you while we work on tackling where this worry comes from. Symptom management doesn’t have to look like drudgery.
i used to go days without showering because seeing my body was so upsetting that i would end up spiraling and then i realized i could simply turn the lights out. it took some getting used to but i’ve been showering with the lights off for years and it’s now one of my favorite parts of my day.
do whatever you want nothing is real and there’s no need to inflict unnecessary suffering on yourself just to try to seem “normal”
I love this post
Hmmm
These kinds of loopholes make life so. Much. Better.
One of my favorite stories is this lady had extremely bad OCD. Every day she’d be late to work because she was convinced that her hair dryer was going to burn down the house so would always have to turn around and check it. Multiple times a day even. A bunch of doctors tied to “fix” her of that fear, until one day she got a doctor that suggested she bring the hair dryer with her. Other doctors were annoyed, saying that wasn’t a the correct way to help, but she gave it a go. When she had that fear, she’d look over and see the hair dryer unplugged in the seat next to her and was able to carry on. I think it’s such a perfect example of actually helping someone instead of forcing them into a neurotypical standard.
Rofl, I know the doctor from the last story. Or at least a behavior socialist with the exact same story, so I assume it’s the same guy. He’s great.
Pansexual Monster Girl 