we get a lot of questions like “am i allowed to do this if i’m butch”, “can i be femme and do that”, “is it okay for me to do this as a lesbian”, etc. i’ve been trying to understand why these messages bother me. i think i’m worried about y’all clinging to labels instead of being yourselves. i’m worried that y’all are more concerned with the validation of strangers on the internet that you are with being true to yourselves and loving yourselves.
what i’m saying is there isn’t a set of rules you have to follow. and your priority shouldn’t be to follow rules anyway, it should be to be yourself! aso i think the important questions are questions you should ask yourself. ask, do i identify with butches/femmes/lesbians? am i being true to myself by calling myself butch/femme/a lesbian?
does it accurately describe my experiences?
do i feel that it hinders my self expression or more freely enables it? does this make me happy?
do i feel like myself when i call myself this?
do i feel restricted or freed when i call myself a butch/femme/a lesbian? is this what i want to be?
sometimes you need to do the hard thing. study for your test even if it’s boring and you want to avoid it. get up an hour early to exercise even if you feel like death. go out of your way to help someone else even if it’s inconvenient. do something alone even though you’re afraid of being judged. go somewhere new even if it’s scary and disorientating at first. confess to the person who makes u blush even if it means risking rejection. let go of your old habits even though it feels like you can’t live without them. it’s supposed to be hard. life isn’t going to have amazing rewards if you’re always feeling comfortable.
I’m going paddleboarding this weekend and I invited 4 of my friends. 3 of them bailed and one of them still hasn’t answered. Guess what bitch is still going paddleboarding even if it means going alone?
Give yourself enough time to get ready before you have to leave in the morning. For me this means setting my alarm about an hour before the time that I have to get my foot out the door. Eat a proper breakfast, do a little stretching, figure out your plan for the day. Having a slower paced morning is a lot more relaxing, and you can get your day started correctly.
Drink water first thing. I used to be a pretty heavy coffee drinker in the mornings in high school, but I realized that I could get away with a lot less caffeine if I started my morning off with a nice glass of cold water. You’re probably dehydrated after sleeping and water helps wake you up.
Make your bed. Making your bed is a visual reminder that sleeping time is over and that it’s time to get up! If I have a messy bed, I want to climb in and snuggle back into my blankets. This is especially true in the winters when it’s cold and dark. The movement also helps you wake up, which brings me to my next point:
Move! Your! Body! You don’t necessarily have to run through an entire yoga routine or go for a run (but hey, props to you if you do), but getting some movement in your mornings will help you wake up. I like to stretch a little bit, warm up my joints, maybe loosen up my limbs. It helps to get your blood flowing.
Open your curtains. In the winter it might be kind of dark and depressing where you live, so this isn’t always something recommended. I like to open my curtains when it’s sunny out so I can get some natural light, which helps your circadian rhythm so you wake up better – and fall asleep at night better.
Do something productive before your class begins. If your first class is super early, this might not apply. But I find it tremendously helpful to get something done, whether it be a flash card set, a work out, or a load of laundry, before my first class. It’ll get you into a productive mood for the rest of the day, and even if you aren’t productive for whatever reason, you can go to sleep knowing that at least you got something done that day!
Now that I’ve been directly involved in the hiring process at two tech companies, I can confirm you should definitely ignore the “must have 73 years of BlahBlah experience” in job postings you see online.
A lot of shit is put into that description arbitrarily.
Your interviewer will reveal what they really want from you, just follow what they inquire about and tell them what you think they want to hear.
And let me clarify this in case someone decides to be extra af and take my words out of context.
Don’t apply for a Director level job if you fresh out of college. Be realistic.
I’m just saying, if you do have experience but you don’t exactly meet the requirements, pull up from 30 and try it anyway.
Example:
The job I’m working at right now was asking for 5-10 years of work experience + a bachelor’s degree.
I don’t have a degree and only had 3 years of experience when they hired me.
Interview process was me asking questions that would translate into them identifying what they were looking for and then plugging in my experience so it fit the description.
King’s right, all it takes is knowing how to interview and giving them what they want to hear.
It is making a spreadsheet of your debt and enforcing a morning routine and cooking yourself healthy meals and no longer just running from your problems and calling the distraction a solution.
It is often doing the ugliest thing that you have to do, like sweat through another workout or tell a toxic friend you don’t want to see them anymore or get a second job so you can have a savings account or figure out a way to accept yourself so that you’re not constantly exhausted from trying to be everything, all the time and then needing to take deliberate, mandated breaks from living to do basic things like drop some oil into a bath and read Marie Claire and turn your phone off for the day.
A world in which self-care has to be such a trendy topic is a world that is sick. Self-care should not be something we resort to because we are so absolutely exhausted that we need some reprieve from our own relentless internal pressure.
True self-care is not salt baths and chocolate cake, it is making the choice to build a life you don’t need to regularly escape from.
And that often takes doing the thing you least want to do.
It often means looking your failures and disappointments square in the eye and re-strategizing. It is not satiating your immediate desires. It is letting go. It is choosing new. It is disappointing some people. It is making sacrifices for others. It is living a way that other people won’t, so maybe you can live in a way that other people can’t.
It is letting yourself be normal. Regular. Unexceptional. It is sometimes having a dirty kitchen and deciding your ultimate goal in life isn’t going to be having abs and keeping up with your fake friends. It is deciding how much of your anxiety comes from not actualizing your latent potential, and how much comes from the way you were being trained to think before you even knew what was happening.
If you find yourself having to regularly indulge in consumer self-care, it’s because you are disconnected from actual self-care, which has very little to do with “treating yourself” and a whole lot do with parenting yourself and making choices for your long-term wellness.
It is no longer using your hectic and unreasonable life as justification for self-sabotage in the form of liquor and procrastination. It is learning how to stop trying to “fix yourself” and start trying to take care of yourself… and maybe finding that taking care lovingly attends to a lot of the problems you were trying to fix in the first place.
It means being the hero of your life, not the victim. It means rewiring what you have until your everyday life isn’t something you need therapy to recover from. It is no longer choosing a life that looks good over a life that feels good. It is giving the hell up on some goals so you can care about others. It is being honest even if that means you aren’t universally liked. It is meeting your own needs so you aren’t anxious and dependent on other people.
It is becoming the person you know you want and are meant to be. Someone who knows that salt baths and chocolate cake are ways to enjoy life – not escape from it.”
love galore 