your writing is a skill, not an inborn talent (unless, yeah, maybe it is). not everyone can do what you do and love
everyone says they want to write a book. everyone has what it takes to write a book. not everyone does it anyway. you be the small percentage of success you read about
your writing will always seem brickshit horrible because you wrote and read it a million times
you love this writing thingy. quitting it will be like cutting off your fingers one by one.
someone out there will want to read what you wrote.
someone out there wants to know what is on your mind.
someone out there appreciates your art. they will share it with their friends. they will share it with their loved ones. they will share it with their future self because maybe what you wrote saved them.
if you give up now, you know you will just come back to it again, whether it’s years from now, months, or next week. you love writing, that’s why you planted the seed of thought that you are going to write this book, and whether you come back to it or not, your unwritten stories will come back to you.
I was doing my Master’s thesis on bullying until the topic triggered me back to my own childhood so badly I dropped out of that degree program. Let me share something I know.
We haven’t quite found anti-bullying programs that stop bullying once it’s started, but we canreduce the harm bullying does. Just a few small changes to classroom culture, like limiting children’s opportunities to exclude each other, or spending time talking about respectful communication, has visible changes. Yeah, there’s still a hierarchy of popularity, but kids at the bottom of the ladder go from having no friends on average to having one or two. And that’s enough to make or break a childhood. (Sources: onetwothreefourfive)
But here’s the other thing.
There is one major factor that mediates the link between childhood bullying and adult mental illnesses (predominantly depression, anxiety, and eating disorders). It’s self-blame.
What really damages children isn’t precisely being bullied; it’s believing that they deserve to be bullied. If children don’t blame themselves for being victims, they are much more resilient and experience fewer long-term negative consequences. (Sources: onetwothreefourfive)
Society blames children for their victimization by bullies all the time. It says, “There is something about you that causes people to bully you.“ Common responses to bullied kids are things like: “Don’t give them a reaction.” (They’re bullying you because you get upset.) “They’re just jealous.” (They’re bullying you because you do well.) “Let’s teach you some social skills.” (They’re bullying you because you act weird.)
If we can just change that one thing, we could prevent a lot of damage. What bullied kids desperately need at the very least is a caring community that says: You are not alone. It’s not your fault. What they’re doing is not okay.
Also extra horrible: if you get counseling for being bullied a lot of the time it is “identifying what rhing about you is causing people to bully you”. In other words, even the “help” you get us often blaming the victim for being bullied and framing is as your fault, even though ime even if you stop doing the thing you get bullied for the bullies won’t acknowledge it. I got bullied over stuff from third grade until I dropped out of school in 10th.
And that’s not even accounting for the fact sometimes bullying is things that end in ism and there is absolutely nothing you can do as you’re being blamed for your own marginalization.
There is nothing that can ever make you deserve emotional abuse.
Telling people, directly or through your actions, that they’re at fault for being abused is, again, emotional abuse.
closetskeleton666
I hate the term “bullying” for this exactly reason.
“Stop bullying” programs don’t work because they treat “bullying” like its a unique, child-specific thing you grow out of once you reach the magic age of 18 and It Gets Better ™.
It’s not. It’s just a fancy word for abuse that people coined because they didn’t want to believe their precious little baby could abuse another child and everyone went along with it because NOBODY wants to believe a six year old can intentionally traumatize another six year old to the point where they want to take their own life. Its “just bullying.” It’s not abuse. Only adults can be abusers. Kids are bullies. And if a child DOES do something evil, they’re either mentally ill or an adult drove them to it. Children can’t be bad!
Except here in the land of reality, it doesn’t work that way. Being abused causes the same amount of trauma whether your abuser is 9 or 90. I don’t care if a child has the biggest, saddest sob story in the world, they don’t get to use that as an excuse to abuse other children. Adults don’t (or shouldn’t) get away with that, so neither should children.
If people really want to “fix” bullying, they need to ditch this useless term and start calling it what it is. Abuse. And then, start actually doing something about abuse besides gaslighting the victim and saying “well maybe the abuser had good reasons uwu”.
My school literally told my mother that I should be removed from school until I could learn to be less of a disruptive influence.
The disruption I was causing was being bullied. Me being targeted by bullies was somehow my fault, my problem.They had me removed from classes rather than dealing with the bullies.
Naturally my mum told them to fuck off and had me put in a different school, because my mum doesn’t play those fucking games. Neither, fortunately, did the new school I was moved to.
That blame the victim was very explicitly taught to teachers in the ‘70′s and ‘80′s as the appropriate response and pretty much did horrific damage to my generation.
By the time I was learning to teach at the tail end of the ‘90′s it had been replaced with a target the instigator and the instigator’s… I’m going to use the word minions here, though they used kinder words in teacher college. That thing were they kick the back of the kid with the learning disabilities’ chair until ze explodes for the fun of seeing the kid explode and then get in trouble for it? I’d watch for that little asshole and come down like a ton of bricks on the bully first kick. I’d separate that kid from his or her sniggering friends, because they are supporting the bully in the assholery, and the bully would not only have me watching zim like a hawk for as many years as ze had me, I went around to all the teachers in the bullies pod with a list of assholery to look out for. Because, surprise! If you punish the bully hard and keep on that instead of punishing the victims? The bullying nearly disappears in your room. Not 100% but close.
We were getting really good results in my district with a mixed approach with the things
star-anise
was talking about, but also a district wide program that targeted the audience of the bullying. The research was showing that bullies, whether in schools or that adult asshole sexually harassing adult women on public transport, etc.. read silence as approval. So we taught the kids that if they felt comfortable saying something either against what the bully was saying or in defence of the person being harmed, that it was the strongest way to help. If they didn’t feel safe doing that, slip away and get an adult. If they didn’t feel safe doing that? Leave. Because standing and watching strengthens the harasser. on our end, we all made an effort to intervene every single time, and to model how to verbally push back against it, and to use things like classroom geography to prevent isolation and break up clusters of people encouraging each other in asshole behavior.
It helped. It helped so much. I’ve had the instigator’s sniggering sycophants decide they were tired of getting in trouble and it wasn’t worth it to support the bully. I’ve seen groups of girls descend like Amazons to stand up for a kid being picked on before I could cross the room. I’ve had a boy turn to another boy and back me up when I was confronting him on homophobia. I’ve seen two girls and a boy hold a quiet but firm intervention about a certain boy’s bigotry while they were working on a poster project together. I saw the Middle School with the worst school culture in the District turn around in the course of year because of concerted whole school efforts to break up cliques and intervene whenever they saw even the start of something maybe happening.
I’ve also seen it work with street harassment where we stood up for the person being harassed. I think it needs to happen in workplaces and anywhere this sort of thing goes down. We need to have each other’s back, whether adults or children are being harassed, there need to be consequences and intervention. What ever the age of the person doing the asshole thing, people need to not stay silent witnesses, because that will always be a form of approval.
It can change. It can get better, but that only happens if a critical mass of us decide to make it better.
Also? If your school isn’t proactively protecting your kid? Sue them. It’s how we got the rural district a little north of here to go from dangerous as anything for queer kids to the most safe for LGBTQIA+ kids of every stripe and in two decades the whole culture of the town is noticeably changed an improved because the kids we taught they way have kids of their own now.
For those of you that like everything neatly organised, here’s links to EVERY ONE of my first 150how to THINK when you draw TUTORIALS, in ALPHABETICAL ORDER for#SkillUpSunday!Enjoy, link, pin, share! Cheers!
My dad thinks just because I am a women that I am not qualified or not strong enough to do a “mens job”. He still thinks that man can and have to work like man and women have to work like women…in a kitchen or as a assistant. He refuses to help or let me work where I want to. Please reblog, like or comment this to help me make a point clear. WOMEN ARE STRONG AND MORE THAN QUALIFIED.
HI SORRY BUT NET NEUTRALITY IS FOR SURE GOING TO END ON JUNE 11TH IF CONGRESS DOESN’T VOTE FOR IT TO STAY. THAT’S IN THE MIDDLE OF PRIDE. CLOSETED PEOPLE LIKE ME WON’T BE ABLE TO INTERACT WITH OTHERS AND ENJOY BEING PROUD OF OUR SEXUALITIES. CALL YOUR CONGRESS PEOPLE. MAKE IT HAPPEN. STAY WOKE QUEENS.
Small tip to help some of your blind friends: do not put 10,000 emojis in the middle of a text or a post if you continue to put text after the emojis because I will tell you that I will Straight give up if I have to listen to “face with tears of joy, face with tears of joy, face with tears of joy,” 23 times just to hear the rest of your text or post.
YES. That is one of my least favorite emojis because it’s LONG. It also says skin tone on some, and while that’s AWESOME, if you put 30 prayer hands, I have to hear “hands clasped in celebration with medium dark skin tone” 30 times in full. And even if I use a braille display, it still writes it out in full because there’s no real way to represent them any other way yet, so until someone invents a Braille display with like 10 lines that isn’t astronomically expensive, there’s no easy way to skip over them.
Now, at least with some screen readers, punctuation is a little different and if there are multiple of the same thing it’ll say like “17 exclamation points” instead of saying them all individually, and I wish that update would be made to screen readers to speak emojis in multiples that way… That would be a good solution.
Is it okay to use emojis sparingly? I don’t ever use a million like that, the most I’d put in a row is probably two different emojis, lol. But I do feel the need to use either emojis or ASCII faces in order to get emotion across in my writing. Which is better for you, a traditional ASCII face like :-) or a newfangled emoji like ☺️? Can your screen reader “translate” things like :-) into “smiling face” or do you just hear “colon dash right parentheses”?
Oh yeah, of course! If you only use one or two in a row that’s totally fine! Don’t feel like you have to just stop using them. They are fun and lots of people like them.
As for emoji versus traditional typed out faces, it doesn’t really matter. It can’t translate most of those faces except for a general smiley face, but I know what the symbols put together mean, though this may be difficult for somebody who is not very well versed in print reading. Most blind kids get taught to recognize both though.
But how do screen readers translate GIFS? Does the OP know that the above post is a gif of a shooting star with the words “the more you know” riding it?
Nope. All I know is that that is an image. Screen readers cannot interpret with the pixels on an image mean. The only reason it can tell me an emoji is because the developers of those emojis programmed them in some way that included alt text, though I cannot tell you how because I am not a programmer or a coder.
Thankfully, somebody noticed the irony in that addition and reblogged it with a description.
the reason that emojis have text associated with them is because emojis were designed not to act as pictures but as a language keyboard and since every one is a pictograph there needs to be a closely associated definition.
that’s also why apple, samsung, or any other company can’t copyright “face with tears of joy” just the art that their operating systems use to express thos pictographs. The art of a set of emojis used by a phone company is essentially a font used for a language.
Also, y’all, in iOS 11, I think somebody somehow saw our nice little thread here and fucking fixed the problem of many emojis because I can remember three (3) distinct times in the past few days that I have come across something like “5 face with tears of joy” and at first been like “what the fuck?? What did that say?“ and then used the rotor to navigate by individual word and character to realize what it was and I was like “OMG!!! My desires have been realized!”
So like I think someone at Apple saw this and answered our prayers guys
Tumblr’s at it again, thanks to the new European Privacy Laws. There’s probably nobody who will read this, but it pissed me off so much that I decided to make a post about it. (Ignore the weird language mish-mash, depending on your country the language might differ.)
OK, so many of us get this screen when we try to access our dash:
Realise how the ‘OK’ button is a nice, attention-grabbing blue? If you’re like me, you’re not exactly into reading a 100 pages document and tend to just click it.
My tip? DONT. Instead click on ‘Manage Options’ right next to it:
Now you’ll see this page:
Still pretty harmless, right? That ‘Accept’ button is looking really attractive right now. Instead, click on Verwalten (Probably something like ‘Manage Options’ or something in english) and you’ll get to this page:
Now that’s not too bad, right? I just switched all the buttons to ‘off’, because I’m jealously guarding my personal information and don’t want Tumblr to go off and do who knows what with it. Looks like we’re done! But wait: There’s a SHOW option.
When we click on that one, what we will get is this:
A HUGE list with OVER 300 ENTRIES of companies that can use your data by default if you’d just clicked ‘OK’ on that very first page. Coincidence that this list is hidden that much? Me thinks not. They’re all switched on by default, but I am still a petty bitch that doesn’t want to give out her data, so I switched them all off. All 300+ of them. There is no option to switch them all off at once, and even if you disable all the options above, the companies are still switched on.
(If you wonder how i got that number, I copied the list into excel and looked at the cell number. No way am I actually counting all those entries)
anderdidnotdeservethis