1) The first non-vowel letter of your last name
2) The last non-vowel letter of your last name
3) Your age
4) The number of siblings you have
5) The number of pets you have
Prompt request! Sorry, I'm in love with time travel stories, so I'd really love something with Laurent time traveling. Maybe he could somehow prevent Auguste's death? Or you could go the angstier route of him being too late to save his brother. Or you could straight up dump him back to when he gets Damen as a slave. I'm just really interested in what kind of political machinations could come out of this. Bonus if you write it from Damen's POV!
Only the fact that Laurent has spent a long time ruthlessly training himself to hide his inner workings allows him to remain still and silent, as he opens his eyes and realises where, when, he has ended up.
His shoulder twinges, as it often does when he’s worried, but it’s a phantom ache. This body is unmarked. This body has never ridden into action against his uncle’s troops, or drilled men to the point of collapse. It has no scar from the agonising twist of a blade, a pain that should have been unbearable and yet, somehow, had to be borne. This body has never been touched as Damen touches him, with such tenderness and teasing and love.
Laurent presses his lips together, then releases them.
This is where you are, he tells himself. Now bear it.
Looking at Damen in front of him, clad in the brief, brutal garb of a slave, makes Laurent’s stomach churn. It’s only half distaste, with perhaps a dash of horrified sympathy. The other half of it is remembering how pleased he was, how vindicated he felt, when he first saw Damianos of Akielos, Prince-Killer, the target on which Laurent had pinned all the blame for his life’s miseries–if not, if this, if only–forced to his knees and entirely at Laurent’s mercy.
If only. The irony of it grabs at Laurent’s mouth, and he feels his lips start to twist.
“Leave us,” he says, disguising it.
One of the guards frowns. He says, uneasily, “Your Highness–”
“I do not believe,” says Laurent, “that my direction was at all unclear.”
He has more than a year’s experience commanding soldiers, and a lifetime’s experience controlling his voice. Soon the room is empty but for the two of them, and Laurent is exhaling slowly enough to force his pulse into something like normality. He feels at itch at his wrist, an oddness that makes him want to touch, and realises he misses the weight of gold there.
Damen, wearing both cuffs and heavy chains, is silent. His eyes are downcast in the calculated feigning of submission, but tense muscles stand out on his neck and bent shoulders, and the twin creases on either side of his nose shout the contempt he doesn’t know he’s showing. Laurent remembers. That contempt made his blood seethe, and his careful plans turn to so much steam inside his skull. Now he looks at Damen’s smooth back–unmarked–and his breath catches. For the first time he believes in the benefit of this kind of second chance. Actions, once made, that can be unmade.
He should release Damen immediately. That would be the right thing to do.
But if Laurent helps Damen to escape, then Damen will simply rush back to Ios at the first opportunity: headlong, unthinking. Unprepared. And if Laurent knows anything, he knows that neither of them can do this without the other.
Or…is that fair? Could they? Now that Laurent has the advantage and knows his uncle’s game from start to finish, could he play his way to victory on his own?
Perhaps he could. But Damen would be nothing to him–no, be fair, be precise. He would be nothing to Damen. And Damen would be one man in the face of Kastor’s hatred and the Regent’s machinations; Jokaste can’t be relied upon to save him twice.
Laurent’s mind is a child’s toy, spinning in the dust, or an okton course busy with the thunder of hooves and the whistling danger of spears. Aimeric. Govart. Pascal. He knows everything; he could do it, he could–oh gods, Nicaise, he could keep Nicaise intact and alive, he could reach into the morass of his uncle’s web and pluck out the innocent. The possibilities swirl and threaten to consume him.
Damen has raised his head. No doubt Laurent has been silent for long enough that Damen suspects a trick, or is simply becoming impatient.
Laurent’s head aches. He needs two nights by lamplight and endless sheafs of paper to sketch out all the ways he could play this; he needs to follow each thread ruthlessly to its end, and snip the tapestry down to its bones. He could, he is now fairly certain, do it alone.
He doesn’t want to.
He wants Damen across the table from him, giving him strategy, talking him down from anger, being the best half of Laurent’s soul and the only partner he could ever need. He wants Damen in this with him.
Laurent moves. He kneels down, suddenly, in front of Damen. He meets Damen’s startled gaze and compels it to hold.
“Your mother’s favourite place was her summer palace, outside of Ios,” he says. “There is a marble carving of a bird there, set just above the main entrance. Your brother gave you the scar on your thigh when you were thirteen, and it has only just occurred to you to wonder how deadly his intention was, when he came at you with the blade. Nikandros warned you about Jokaste, and he was right to do so; he would warn you about me, for the colour of my hair and eyes, and he’d be right to do that as well.”
Damen’s eyes are wide and shocked. He is showing everything on his face. This is the old Damen, before he learned from Laurent and Laurent’s treatment of him how to shutter and manoeuvre and dissemble. The bruise of betrayal is still vivid on his face.
“Damianos,” Laurent says; the name like a knife, like a gift, like a flame between them. “Damianos. Listen to me. I am going to tell you the truth.”
like i will see people apologize for making a lot of them and i’m just
dude
a) it’s YOUR blog, you can recite the greek alphabet one post at a time if you really want to
b) you don’t owe your followers shit
c) personal posts are fucking interesting, man. if i am following a blog i am okay! with knowing about the person behind that blog! nobody’s gonna begrudge you having a life outside the intermajig and talking about it.
Ok so it’s the classic story of a young maiden wants a thing and a witch is like “promise me your first born child” and the maidens like “k” and that should be enough but no the witch keeps coming around like “yo where’s my first born child pls” and the maiden is like “bitch I don’t even have a boyfriend” and the witch keeps coming back and being like “how’s the bf search?” And just being generally annoying. then she just keeps coming round and hanging out and they fall in love and the first born child is already the witches and everyone lives happily ever after
don’t get it twisted like i respect bugs for being the best they can be in spite of their specific assigned flesh prisons and their ecological significance but they need to stay the fuck away from me
Not enough people talk about the fact that Leonardo da Vinci was gay. Like, he’s literally the father of modern technology and one of the smartest human beings to ever live and I never ever learned in school that he was gay.
If all the LGBT people are as “DOOMED” as the bible thumpers think we are, hell, at least we’re in good company.
I was about to say I can’t believe I didn’t know this
and then I remembered the American education system
Yes, I can fucking believe I didn’t know this.
But yeah. Leonardo da Vinci was gay. Pass it on.
Leo painted a picture of his lover as Jesus and that’s the image we use today
Oh man that is sad. I’m sorry your teachers are failing you.
Some Leonardo facts you should tattoo on your heart:
He was actually convicted for sodomy at age 24, but the allegations were dropped for lack of testimony. The charges affected him immensely, as he was by all means, a very private person.
Da Vinci’s models for Christ are unknown. The claim that he depicted his lover as Jesus most likely arose from the bullshit about Cesare Borgia being the inspiration for White Jesus™ combined with the allegations that Leonardo and Cesare were lovers…There is little to no support for these claims. However, it’s speculated his lover Gian Giacomo Caprotti was the model for his St. John the Baptist.
He was universally beloved (minus Michelangelo lollll), like the nicest, funniest, gentlest, handsomest man you’d ever meet. He was generous beyond words, treated everyone equally, and loved to play pranks.
He was also fuckin’ ripped. It was rumored he could bend a horseshoe in half with his bare hands.
Often wore pink and other vibrant colors.
Rumored to sleep approx. 2 hours a night.
Was left-handed and ambidextrous. He was dyslexic, possibly had ADD, and suffered from frequent paranoia.
He was his own worst critic and often destroyed his work. He still left behind over 13k journal pages, filled with sketches and so many dick jokes.
His last words were: “I have offended God and mankind because my work did not reach the quality it should have.”
Would buy caged animals from the market just to set them free. He was allegedly a vegetarian.
For a time he kept a pet lizard and made him a custom set of wings and horns. He would routinely scare the shit out of people with his ‘dragon.’
My all time fave: While staying in the Vatican he would invite guests into a residential room which had been filled with cleaned/dried animal intestines that he had sewn together. He fastened a bellows to the end of the intestines and proceeded to inflate them. Onlookers were so excited to see DaVinci’s new ”invention” that they didn’t even realize this asshole was just blowing up a giant balloon and pinning them to the wall holy shit I love him so much.
Where is the musical. Lin-Manuel Miranda, fix this.
be sure to understand ur s/o’s way of showing affection and make them aware of yours.. some ppl show affection by buying u things and some ppl will say I love u a million times and some will make u breakfast some will leave u the last ice cream, but it’s really important to know about these things bc u could not notice them and feel unloved while your s/o feels taken for granted and it’s just all a big misunderstanding so please talk about these things
Hi these are called love languages and there are five of them and you can take a quiz to find out which one is yours and like your secondary one and so can your partner and they’re really useful
wait until it gets dark and make tea or coffee or hot chocolate, or if it’s too hot outside make yourself a healthy smoothie with your favorite things in it at any point during the day
put on your favorite underwear, it helps, trust me, it’s an old family secret (i’m not kidding)
if you have a pet, play the “how many things can i stick on you until you move or get mad” game (bonus points if they fall asleep, extra bonus points if a family member sees you and tells you to quit it, extra double ultra points if they join in)
rip a peice of paper into as many little pieces as you can
go to animeseason.com and click “random anime” until you see one that looks completely ridiculous (or actually good) and watch the first episode. repeat if it sucked or if you get bored halfway through
spend at least an hour making a music playlist for how you feel right now and save it for now or when you feel a bad mood rise again
curl up in bed and cover yourself with blankets and pillows and put in music and just lay there for a while (sleeping is also good)
eat everything
drink lots of water
it’s okay bad moods don’t last forever!!!!!! i promise!!! you will be yourself soon and there are people who love you very much, don’t be afraid to reach out to them
you are lovely
eat lots of bananas
here are some more friends
i bet there is still a box of crayons in your house somewhere (if not you can get them cheap during back-to-school sales); find them and use them (maybe while watching ridiculous anime)
sunshine if you can manage it or just a sun lamp trust me it matters more than you think especially in winter
hugs even if they are stuffed animals or your pet or your pillow whatever is on hand
if you’ve got a favorite lotion/soap/thing that is scented use it liberally
cry if you need, if it doesn’t start by itself or if you don’t want to attract attention put on a sad movie so you have an excuse
write this down to pull out on future bad days:
it is okay to have a day where you don’t get things done
it is okay not to have a reason for feeling bad
taking care of yourself is a worthwhile use of time
if you still don’t feel better it is not your fault (and it is okay to ask for help)
^ Important for self care, and self care is important. When drama happens in the community, it can have a negative effect on everyone. Look after yourself, take time to care for yourself. We’re here.
here are some cute links that are super helpful to me
The Comfort Spot- anon venting, it’s like a community based thing
1. They know that automatic doors open by themselves, ut when they walk towards them they slow down just in case. Sometimes they hold out their hands and pretend it’s magic.
2. They adopt smaller animals and live with them in their homes, sometimes imitating noises and sounds in attempts to communicate.
3. When they see something funny on TV, they immediately repeat it, sometimes to other people who were already in the room watching to begin with.
4. When they like being around someone very much, some humans will take clothing items from the person to have their smell around when they’re gone.
5. Many humans will take their favorite foods away from their regular feeding areas and hold off on eating them until they are sufficiently comfortable and entertained, to maximize on the experience.
6. Sometimes, a human will associate a particular song with an individual or event, and the song will invoke deep emotional reactions.
7. While many humans prefer to sleep alone, a large number of them sleep better when in close contact with another human who they trust and enjoy the company of.
8. When a human is particularly engaged by an enjoyable task or hobby, sometimes they simply forget that their bodies require basic care to survive.
9. Sometimes the urge for them to sneeze suddenly disappears, and they become frustrated with their automatic immune responses
10. Some humans talk in their sleep, or make funny noises or breathing patterns.
11. When a human likes another human, they begin to imitate vocal patterns and mannerisms.
12. Humans come in a wide range of shapes and colors, and many humans will decorate themselves with flashy dyes or fabrics.
13. They will collect random objects with no set objectives in mind- they will gather items such as paper squares, lengths of fabric, puzzle games, and pleasantly-shaped rocks, which they will excitedly show off to other humans.
the most human postive post that could ever exist, I hope aliens find this post
Wayne Enterprises board member:
Mr. Wayne, it has come to our attention that SOMEBODY has been taking business dinners at local restaurants and simply writing "insert student loan debt here" in the "tip" portion of the receipt. Is this you?
Bruce:
[intently attempting to open a bag of skittles without making eye contact]
Bruce:
yeaaup.
Wayne Enterprises board member:
Well, obviously you're going to need to stop doing that, it's costing us hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Bruce:
[pops a red skittle into his mouth, also without making eye contact]
“What Bowie was for white kids who didn’t fit in, Prince was for black kids. A beacon in mascara who made it okay to stand up and stand out.”—Marc Bernardin (via wnq-music)
psa: if you’re learning a language on Duolingo you can use it for your resumé on Linkedin, it now gives you a certificate of fluency at different levels depending on how advanced you are in your lessons
please signal boost this, many people don’t realize how important being multilingual can be in regards to you getting a job
There is no way to exploit an animal and love them at the same time (regarding beekeeping)
Let me tell you a story about two beehives.
We’ve all seen a beehive in the wild, yes? If you have not, it’s a small paper thing with very limited space for honey and brood. The bees spend days of labor to build this entire hive with not so much space, which leaves less time to collect precious honey for the winter. “We must hurry!” Say the wild bees. “Soon winter will come and we need to stock up on food!!”
Now let’s move on to the beekeeper’s hive. It’s nice and big, with lots of space and a grid that makes it easy to build honeycomb and fill it with nice sweet honey. “We have lots of space and spare time with this nice big new home!” The bees say, and they fill the whole thing up with food storage and nurseries.
“HA!” Laugh the wild bees. “Your hive is full, and now you have nothing to do!”
“No matter” say the honeybees. “Our beekeeper has added a whole new room to our hive! Now we can collect and store even more honey and brood!” The honeybees and wild bees continue to collect pollen and nectar, when suddenly, an epidemic of mites comes to bee meadow!
“These mites are awful!” Says one wild bee to another.
“They sure are!” The honeybee colony agrees.
The wild worker scoffs and says with a smug tone “Where is your beekeeper now? Surely they cannot save you from this terrible sickness!”
“Our beekeeper came by yesterday, and cured us of our mites!” The honeybee happily replied. “And they’re putting up a fence tomorrow because they heard there are predators in the area!”
Spring and summer passed by as usual. All of the bees collected pollen and nectar at their own pace.
Then, one autumn afternoon, the hive of wild bees discovers that the honeybees had been ROBBED! Robbed by their own beekeeper!
“HA HA!” Laughed the wild bees. “Your beekeeper betrayed you! And now you will never survive the winter! All of that protection and safety for naught!”
“Actually, we have plenty of honey.” The honeybees say. “We have even more than you do!”
It was true. The wild bees were stunned to see that their neighboring hive had plenty of honey to get by on, while their own honey stores would just barely get them through the winter.
“Well I’ll be!” the wild bees exclaim. “Maybe this beekeeping business isn’t as bad as I thought!”
In short, if you buy from a kind local beekeeper, the honey that comes to your kitchen is always going to be EXTRA honey. Honey the bees made way too much of because they had the recourses to do so. When we take honey, we carefully brush each bee off of each frame and take extra special care that nobody gets hurt.
I hope you can understand what I’m trying to say. Also, commercial beekeepers tend to not be quite so good. They take all the bee’s winter supply and feed them sugar water, they have too many hives in one place and exhaust their recourses, etc etc.
In the shortest of short; Support local beekeepers. More safe hives means more safe bees. Plant bee flowers. Be kind. (Bee kind, heehee.)
Sorry for the long post, and please enjoy the rest of your day.
do you ever think about how ron is constantly aware that everyone is such a huge fan of harry potter and he feels so forgotten
but like harry potter is ron weasley’s biggest fan he literally loves him sO MUCH like ron isn’t like super aware of it but one of the most famous guys in the wizarding world thinks he’s the most important person i’m emotional pls excuse me
imagine a crocodile with horse-like legs… unstoppable… i would love to ride one o’ those into battle
are you..high
….carry on
Fun fact these ‘crocodile cousins’ with ‘horse-like legs’ existed and was known as a ‘sabre-toothed cat in armour’ due to it’s speed out of water and long fangs. There was the ‘DogCroc’ ( Araripesuchus wegeneri) and ‘BoarCroc’ (Kaprosuchus). The DogCroc (featured above) was only around the size of a small dog, with its skull easily fitting into the palm of someones hand. It lived during the Lower Cretaceous-Upper Cretaceous period;
*Comparison of a DogCroc’s skull to a Sarcosuchus skull. (Sarcosuchus is the largest known crocodile species and was large enough it could even prey upon a T-Rex and could weigh up to ten tonnes and be over forty feet long.)
However the BoarCroc (Kaprosuchus) was twenty-foot long and could gallop across land and preyed upon dinosaurs.
wanted: a friend to exclusively sit in the car with me while it rains. you dont have to talk and can choose the music some days. ill pick you up any time the sky starts to turn grey.
there’s always a white boy in every class that just talks and talks and talks like timothy stop just write it down!! make a mental note!!! wait till after class and tell ya friends on reddit!!
More vampires who 300 years later can’t remember what was the truth and what was the lie they told to get out of trouble.
More vampires who are like, “I don’t know, man, I spent most of that decade in an opium den.”
More vampires who weren’t paying attention because they didn’t think it would be important.
More vampires who don’t know because there was lot of conflicting gossip and they don’t want to point any fingers.
More vampires who are just bad at dates. “Back in 1620, or was it 1645, wait, what year is it now?”
More vampires who were on a totally different continent when it happened, so get off their back and stop asking them questions already.
YES to all of this but also consider: vampires who only remember the most trivial stuff.
“Oh yeah, the only thing I remember about the American Revolution was this nice candlemaker I met sometime, and she was wearing this really cute red shawl…”
“Uhhh I don’t remember much about the fall of Rome but there was this one fucking cobblestone right outside the coliseum…”
Also consider: vampires who realize three or four hundred years after the fact that they knew someone famous.
Just sits up in bed one night screaming “THAT WAS GEORGE GODDAMN WASHINGTON”
i just realized i have a real actual story that easily sounds like some crazy made up 2012 tumblr post
so about two weekends ago i was hopping on a plane to get back from an out-of-state convention. because i like to keep a tighter budget on con travel, i got a seat almost at the back of the plane where all the people with kids usually get seated because it’s near the toilets and far from the vip class.
anyways i lug my carry-on bags to the 28th row where im supposed to sit my ass the fuck down for about 4 hours and get placed next to a lady and her 2 year old son who is mega energetic. thankfully i actually like kids, so i struck up conversation with her and started playing with her son. the little dude and i got along swimmingly and he even fed me animal crackers while we were up in the air and it was chill.
this totally scored me some points with mom and so when the boy got busy on the tablet, i got to talk to her too. turns out she was roughly my age and working in the marketing department of an all-natural medicine research group. i’m a business student, so i decided to actually try networking for once in my life and ask her about her life and her interests. of all the things she could have listed she says to me:
video games.
and i’m like cool awesome i like video games what kind of games do you play? she lists off a couple, including kingdom hearts, which i was super big on in like high school, when i was a huge fucking axel/roxas (akuroku) and sora/riku (soriku) shipper (like obsessed shipping trash with omg yaoi squee and all holy hot damn). i was trying to establish common ground so i say oh hey i love kingdom hearts
and i swear to god she looks straight at me IN PUBLIC with her TWO YEAR OLD SON SITTING BETWEEN US and said “do you ship akuroku and soriku? they’re so cute together.”
the story ends with me being totally mortified and also admitting that i totally do and us adding each other on facebook and now she and her son are gonna come up and hang out with me this weekend and is also trying to help me get a job at the company she’s currently working at?? i successfully networked?? on a professional level?? because of gay ships and nerd culture?? anime wasn’t a mistake??
can we stop with this “[abuse] builds character” shit? im not a better person because i was abused. im not a more interesting person because i was abused. im fucked up and paranoid because i was abused. stop romanticizing abuse you assholes
Hate vocal fry? Bothered by the use of “like” and “just”? Think uptalk makes people sound less confident? If so, you may find yourself growing increasingly unpopular—there’s a newwave of peoplepointingoutthat criticizing young women’s speech is just old-fashioned sexism.
I agree, but I think we can go even further: young women’s speech isn’t just acceptable—it’s revolutionary. And if we value disruptors and innovation, we shouldn’t just be tolerating young women’s speech—we should be celebrating it. To use a modern metaphor, young women are the Uber of language.
What does it mean to disrupt language? Let’s start with the great English disruptor: William Shakespeare.
Shakespeare is celebrated to this day not just because he wrote a mean soliloquy but because of what he added to our language—he’s said to have brought in over 1,700 words. But recent scholars have called that number of words into question. As Katherine Martin, head of US Dictionaries at Oxford University Press, has pointed out, if Shakespeare was inventing dozens of new words per play, how would his audience have understood him? Rather, it’s likely that Shakespeare had an excellent grasp of the vernacular and was merely writing down words that his audience was already using.
So if Shakespeare wasn’t disrupting the English language, who was? And how did we get from Shakespearean English to the version we speak now? That’s right: young women.
A pair of linguists, Terttu Nevalainen and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg at the University of Helsinki, conducted a study that combed through 6,000 personal letters written between 1417 and 1681. The pair looked at fourteen language changes that occurred during this period, things like the eradication of ye, the switch from “mine eyes” to “my eyes,” and the change from hath, doth, maketh to has, does, makes.
In 11 out of the 14 changes, they found that female letter-writers were changing the way they wrote faster than male letter-writers. In the three exceptional cases where the men were ahead of the women, those particular changes were linked to men’s greater access to education at the time. In other words, women are reliably ahead of the game when it comes to word-of-mouth linguistic changes.
This trend hasn’t changed much. While young people have long driven innovation, it’s not just an age thing—it’s also a gender thing. During the decades that sociolinguists have been researching the question, they’ve continually found evidence that women lead linguistic change.
Plus, young women are on the bleeding edge of those linguistic changes that periodically sweep through the media’s trend sections, from uptalk to “selfie” to the quotative like to vocal fry.
The role that young women play as language disruptors is so well-established at this point it’s practically boring to sociolinguists. The founder of modern sociolinguistics, William Labov, observed that women lead 90% of linguistic change—in a paper he wrote 25 years ago. Researchers continue to confirm his findings.
It takes about a generation for the language patterns started among young women to jump over to men. Uptalk, for example, which is associated with Valley Girls in the 1970s, is found among young men today. In other words, women learn language from their peers; men learn it from their mothers.
While the pattern is well-established, we still don’t know for sure yet why young women reliably lead linguistic innovation. Maybe it’s nature, maybe it’s nurture; but we do know that young women tend to be more socially aware, more empathetic, and more concerned about how their peers perceive them. This may translate into a greater facility for linguistic disruption. Women also tend to have larger social networks, which means they’re more likely to be exposed to a greater diversity of language innovations.
And of course, women are still likely to spend more time caring for children than men—even if a particular woman works outside the home, daycare workers and elementary school teachers are disproportionately female. This means that even if young men were disrupting language as much as women, they would be hard-pressed to pass it along.
All of this leads us to the biggest question: if women are such natural linguistic innovators, why do they get criticized for the same thing that we praise Shakespeare for? Plain old-fashioned sexism.
Our society takes middle-aged men more seriously than young women for a whole host of reasons, so it’s only logical that we have also been conditioned to automatically respect the tone and cadence of the typical male voice, as well as their word choices.
Sure, let’s encourage young women to speak with confidence, but not by avoiding vocal fry or “like” or whatever the next linguistic disruption is. Let’s tell them to speak with confidence because they’re participating in a millennia-old cycle of linguistic innovation—and one that generations of powerful men still haven’t figured out how to crack.
“The role that young women play as language disruptors is so well-established at this point it’s practically boring to sociolinguists” *weeps with joy*
THIS IS SO FUCKING COOL
also @loveandfolly I feel like this thing with sensitivity to/ disruption of language describes our high school circles
Current annoyance: I keep clicking kudos button on AO3 and then that fucker announces:
I don’t care. Some things just deserve more kudos.
Comments are also effective…
I just thought of something.
A lot of people say they don’t leave comments because they can’t think of anything to say other than “I liked this” and they think it’s dumb or something.
So how about… You leave a comment that says “This is an extra kudos” because you can leave as many comments as you like, but you can only leave a max of two kudos (one logged in, one logged out). You can do this on every chapter if you want! “Extra kudos in comment form!” You get to express your extra love in an introvert-friendly way! :D
This is an amazing idea, and this post needs ten thousand notes.
You don’t have to be grateful that it isn’t worse.
read that.
read it again, and again, and again.
somebody, somewhere, always has it worse than you. there is one person on this planet that has it the worst of all, and that person is NOT the only person allowed to be unhappy with their lot.
if things are bad for you, they are bad for you. period.
This goes for trauma as well. A lot of times survivors get trapped in a cycle of minimizing/diminishing their trauma because “other people have it worse” - but there is no hierarchy of trauma. There is no ranking system for which traumas are “better” or “worse.” Your trauma is valid. Period.
