As A Child, When You Reached Out To Connect Emotionally (as All Children Naturally Do), The Lack Of Response

As a child, when you reached out to connect emotionally (as all children naturally do), the lack of response sent you an unspoken message, loud and clear: Don’t reach out. So now deep down, when you need help or connection, you are stopped from making connections by a block inside of you. Somehow, it just feels needy or wrong to ask for help or even want to connect.

{Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath/ Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney, The Nest/ Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life/ Susan Sontag/ Liv Ullmann, from Changing (Knopf, 1976)/ Katherine Mansfield, in a letter to J.M. Murry, dated December 14, 1919, Letters and Journals of Katherine Mansfield (Penguin Classics, 1977)/ Anne Sexton,A Self-Portrait in Letters/ Anne Sexton,A Self-Portrait in Letters/ Richard Siken/ Papi/ Anais Nin/ Ghada Al-Samman/ Mary Oliver, A Thousand Mornings}

when li young lee said "childhood? which childhood? the one that didn't last? the one in which you learnt to be afraid?" and when amy dunne said "I will never forget the loneliness I knew as a child. for a period of my life I had hid behind a mask. did not want to acknowledge any longing. now it is a part of me, something I can share. both the loneliness and the longing" and when osamu dazai wrote "... that from long ago, even as a child, I seemed to lack the qualifications of a human being"

#The way they physically cannot get close enough as they kiss even though there is literally no space between them already and how Lydia stands on her tiptoes even though she’s already taller than Cynthia and how she wraps her whole arm around Cynthia’s neck to try to get as close to her as possible

(And yes I felt obligated to gif all three angles because they’re all amazing and I couldnt settle for just one)

musings on motherhood

Kyung-Sook Shin (“Please Look After Mom”), Nguyen Thanh Binh, Ocean Vuong (“Headfirst”), Ritika Jyala (excerpt from “The Flesh I Burned”), Gustav Klimt “Mother and Child” (detail from The Three Ages of Woman), Sue Zhao (“My mother texts me instructions to cook silken tofu”)

buy me a coffee

How to ‘private’ fics on ao3

Given Musky E has decided his new favourite thing to do is use an AI to trawl ao3 for content to create AI-written fanfic, a lot of us may want to make our fanfics only visible to registered archive users. This adds a layer of protection to our fics, meaning the AI cannot use them without somehow getting an ao3 account. If you want to keep your fics public, I suggest adding in notes and possibly a header, something like ‘I do not support the use of my writing by AI’ or similar. *source: https://twitter.com/AngFdz/status/1598440293103460352 *ao3 have confirmed they’re aware and working on it I have a quick guide on how to edit all your fics at once to have the ‘visible to ao3 users only’ setting, below the cut (with badly edited screenshots!):

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