I Love People.

"There's no thought crimes and no thought heroisms" is honestly such a good piece of life advice.

You could be having the most fucked up problematic thoughts 24/7 but if you treat people with kindness, the good you do is the only thing that matters. But if you have only the purest thoughts and all the correct beliefs, it doesn't matter one bit if you spend most of your time being an asshole to people.

One of the characters in our D&D party is an orc named Brick.  We’ve established that orcs get their names through tests of strength and that his name is Brick because it’s the strongest thing he was able to break with his bare hands.

By profession, Brick is a therapist.  His ultimate ambition is to one day do therapy so good that he can change his name to Depression.

you haven’t met all the people that’ll love you yet

Mental Crop Rotation

When farmers grow the same crop too many years in a row, it can leave their soil depleted of minerals and other nutrients that are vital to the health of their fields.

To avoid this, farmers will often alternate the crops that they grow because some plants will use up different minerals (such as nitrogen) while other plants replenish those minerals. This process is known as “crop rotation.”

So the next time you find that you need to step away from a project to work on something else for a while, don’t beat yourself up for “quitting” that project. Give yourself permission to practice “mental crop rotation” to maintain a healthy brain field.

Because I’ve found that when that unnecessary guilt and pressure are removed from the process, a good mental crop rotation can help you feel more energized and invigorated than ever once you’re ready to rotate back to that project.

Hello! Can I ask about your "children shouldn't be given adult responsibility" post? (genuine question) Instinctively I agree as I believe children should be treated like human beings but not like adults, but I am confused on what you mean by adult responsability. Could you clarify? Thank you for your time, and have a nice day!

When I was younger, folks seemed pretty comfortable with telling me I was "an old soul", or, "acted like an adult". I was a sharp kid with a large vocabulary who spent a lot of time reading quietly, so I guess the perception was that I was therefore more "grown up" than other kids my age.

Which, you know, made an otherwise lonely and isolated child feel pretty important and special, so it was easy for me to feel flattered when it signed me up for extra responsibilities.

I was six when I was first left alone to take care of the baby. I was seven when I got my first summer job. I was eight when I was put in charge of my own chicken coop; feeding, cleaning, buying feed and all.

I was special, I was different, I was "treated like a grown up". I was proud of that.

Then I got older, and more tired, and the limitations stayed the same while the responsibilities and expectations kept piling up.

No, I couldn't stay home while my family went on an overnight trip, I was too young for that.

But the adults were both out somewhere overnight? Sure, I could take care of two younger kids, cook dinner, put them to bed by 8 and have them off to school in the morning.

I remember, once things began to decline, repeating rather often: 

"Either give me adult responsibilities and adult privileges, or child responsibilities and child privileges. Don't give me child privileges and adult responsibilities- either I'm an adult or a kid. Make up your mind."

It turns out that "adult responsibilities" isn't quite the same thing as "adult respect".

But even if it was, though- even if I was treated with all the benefits and freedoms of adulthood alongside all the work, I was still a kid. 

Kids need free time. Kids need sleep. Kids need to *not* have to lay awake at night wondering what they're going to make for school lunches, or how they're going to cook dinner for six when the stovetop burners went out.

And it's not necessarily because they can't handle the pressure, but because there should be Actual Adults in their life doing those things. If not for the labour aspect, but for the respect and security of it.

My parent says I can't wear shoes in the house? Why do they care? I'm the one who mops the floors.

I'm not allowed to stay home alone? What, you trust me with your baby but you don't trust me with your house?

The family pet died and I'm tasked with burying it? Cool, grief is isolated and nobody cares, and when I'm scared or in pain, the authority figures in my life will be distant and emotionally unavailable. I have no reason to believe anyone will support me through emotional hardship in the future.

When it comes to responsibility, its not so much a question of, "can the child handle the work?", but, "what precedent is this setting for their perception of the future?", and, "What is this teaching them about actual adults?"

A child who sits quietly and draws is no more an adult than a child who eats glue and sticks pens up their nose, but both deserve to be respected as people, and both deserve to feel as though the adults in their lives are stable, reliable, secure, and have their best interests in mind.

Responsibility is not the same as respect, and there is a mile of difference between "can" and "should". 

People keep searching for ways to argue that JK Rowling has always been a horrible person deep down as a way of explaining her recent behaviour.

But here’s the thing: that’s probably not true at all.

Pretending it is discounts the harsher, scarier truth: that even decent, well-meaning people can be radicalised by dangerous, hateful, predatory groups, and given enough time they can become truly hideous versions of their former selves.

It can happen to me. It can happen to you. It can happen to any of us, given the right mix of circumstances. And over the past few years, we’ve seen it happen to one of the most famous children’s authors of our age.

Nobody is immune.

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Don’t feel forced to come out, regardless of the day.