“Don’t ever fight with Lisbeth Salander. Her attitude towards the rest of the world is that if someone threatens her with a gun, she’ll get a bigger gun.”
learning more about the world we live in, so I can help shape and change it.
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Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
Seventeen Magazine Falls Short In Not Being Assholes Again
“Enter Now To Be The Next Pretty Amazing Cover Star!”
For a magazine that has touted such ongoing columns as “Seventeen’s Body Peace Project”, this contest seems to be destroying any progress made for the magazine in the “not shitting on girls’ self esteem” area.
“The rules are the same—yes, you have to be pretty to be on the cover, but even more important, you have to have an amazing story to tell.”
” yes, you have to be pretty to be on the cover ”
”you have to be pretty”
This contest is apparently 50% appearance and 50% having an “amazing” story. So in other words, you have to have an amazing story… But also be pretty enough to be plastered on their front cover. This shouldn’t be surprising considering the track record Hearst Magazines has with all of it’s publications aimed at women and girls in general.
Fuck this Seventeen, you don’t deserve to hear the amazing stories the readers of your magazine have to tell. The linked article has a comments section, let them know how you feel.
EDIT: From the official contest rules:
Finalists/Winner Selection: All eligible entries received will be judged by a qualified panel consisting of Seventeen’s editors who will select a group of semi-finalists based on the following criteria: appearance (50%); passion (50%). In the event of a tie, the person among the tied entrants with the highest score in passion (Editor’s Note: OH okay that makes up for it right?) will be the winner.
Perhaps we don’t like what we see: our hips, our loss of hair, our shoe size, our dimples, our knuckles too big, our eating habits, our disposition. We have disclosed these things in secret, likes and dislikes, behind doors with locks, our lonely rooms, our messy desks, our empty hearts, our sudden bursts of energy, our sudden bouts of depression. Don’t worry. Put away your mirrors and your beauty magazines and your books on tape. There is someone right here who knows you more than you do, who is making room on the couch, who is fixing a meal, who is putting on your favorite record, who is listening intently to what you have to say, who is standing there with you, face to face, hand to hand, eye to eye, mouth to mouth. There is no space left uncovered. This is where you belong.
Sufjan Stevens
10 Ways to Love Others
Some guidelines for loving:
1. Tell them about their brilliance. They likely can’t see it and they don’t know its immensity, but you can see it, and you can illuminate it for them.
2. Be authentic, and give others the gift of the real you and a real relationship. Ask your real questions. Share your real beliefs. Go for your real dreams. Tell your truth.
3. Don’t confuse “authenticity” with sharing every complaint, resentment, or petty reaction in the name of “being yourself.” Meditate, write, or do yoga to work through anxiety, resentment, and stress on your own so you don’t hand off those negative moods to everyone around you. Sure, share sadness, honest dilemmas, and fears, but be mindful: don’t pollute.
4. Listen, listen, listen. Don’t listen to determine if you agree or disagree. Listen to get to know what is true for the person in front of you. Get to know an inner landscape that is different from your own, and enjoy the journey. Remember that if, in any conversation, nothing piqued your curiosity and nothing surprised you, you weren’t really listening.
5. Don’t waste your time or energy thinking about how they need to be different. Really. Chuck that whole thing. Their habits are their habits. Their personalities are their personalities. Let them be, and work on what you want to change about you—not what you think would be good to change about them.
6. Remember that you don’t have to understand their choices to respect or accept them.
7. Don’t conflate accepting with being a doormat or betraying yourself. Let them be who they are, entirely. Then, you decide what you need, in light of who they are. Do you need to make a direct request that they change their behavior in some way? Do you need to take care of yourself better? Do you need to set a boundary or to change the relationship? Take care of yourself well, without holding anyone else in contempt.
8. Give of yourself, but never sacrifice or compromise yourself. Stop if resentment is building and retool. Don’t do the martyr thing. It helps no one and nothing.
9. Remember that everyone you encounter has an important role to play in the universe. Treat them as such.
10. If you want to keep growing emotionally and spiritually for the rest of your life, accept this as your mantra and try to live as if it were true: Everything that I experience from another human being is either love, or a call for love.
Guidelines to love yourself, too, sorta.
(Source: ohapoeticsoul)
In middle school, someone told me I looked like Miss Piggy.
We forget the compliments. We remember the insults.
I wish someone would call me Miss Piggy, she is a fabulous, sassy pig! I’m sorry about that though, I got bullied throughout school for being fat too. I know how you feel.
I like your optimism. I wish I could be more like that.
It takes a lot of work some days, but it’s worth it. :) I try to like myself every day, and if I have to work to impress someone to get them to like me, they were never worth my effort to begin with.
Especially with bullying, it takes a lot of self love to begin to heal from those scars. Just know what they said wasn’t true. They are hurting inside, take pity on them.
TO THE TEENAGE GIRLS OF TUMBLR:
I see WAY too many negative posts on my dash.
Some examples: Posts about missing a guy who doesn’t miss you back, posts about guys that are jerks, posts about being ugly, being depressed, etc.
Or one that I have been seeing more and more of today: “I wish I was worth fighting for.”
Listen up, because I am only going to say this once: You are.
You deserve happiness, and you ARE worth a fight, worth a damn, and someone is going to love the absolutely hell out of you one day so you need to start learning how to love yourself, too.
This goes out to everybody on Tumblr. People, especially partners, come and go, but at the end of the day you’ve got yourself. You ARE worth fighting for, so fight for YOURSELF! Another person will never fulfill you, especially not if you can’t be happy with yourself. If you have no self worth, you will still have no self esteem and constantly second-guess if your partner even really loves you, and guess what: that’s not fair to them. It’s not their job to “fix” you. A relationship is meant to enhance your life, not to fix your esteem issues.
It all starts with you, and you have to want to change. You have to want to love yourself, to change your way of thinking. Look in the mirror: this is who you are. You are enough. Whatever you see in magazines doesn’t matter, there is someone out there that thinks you are perfect just the way you are (psst - they might be trying to let you know already, too, so give them a chance!). Dare yourself to post a picture of just you and see what happens. No cosmetics. No Photoshop. Whoever you are on the inside is always going to shine through, no matter what you look like.
If you have better self esteem, also, you’ll be more likely to think you’re only worth people that treat you like shit. I’ve been there, I know. You deserve only the best. You deserve someone who will treat you the way you’re supposed to be treated.
You don’t deserve someone that constantly puts you down. You don’t deserve someone that doesn’t consider your needs. You don’t deserve someone that abuses you. You don’t deserve someone that constantly plays with your emotions, because it’s definitely NOT all you can possibly get.
Let’s review:
a.) You’re worth it. You will be loved, but -
b.) You have to love yourself, especially to find the good people,
c.) because you deserve a partner that will treat you well. Really, you do. No buts.
There’s 6 billion people on the Earth, baby. I’m sure there’s just one out there for you.
strange things
So, to further prove my point (on my endocrinologist wrongly marking me as the A-typical closet eater that needs my hand held and told what to eat), I decided to calculate all of the calories of everything I ate today. I was even generous with what I ate, and people that eat with me regularly would know I don’t eat every single thing I take to eat. On the average day, I don’t eat much more than this. Drumroll, please…
It came to:
1293 calories.
I personally don’t think that’s a hell of a lot of things to eat in a day. This is why I’m so infuriated about the insinuation that I cannot feed myself, and I cannot possibly eat healthily without seeing a billion nutritionists. I prefer to eat my calories instead of drinking them, so I usually abstain from coffee, tea, juice and soda (unless it’s a diet brand, still bad but sometimes I just gotta lol). Bread is usually whole wheat or grain, I don’t like to eat a lot of beef (it’s too heavy on my stomach), I usually try to eat at least half of the vegetables presented to me.
The only reason I’m not okay with my body is the masses screaming in my face that it is wrong to be larger than whatever their standard happens to be today, it doesn’t deserve to be covered in fashionable clothes, it defines who I am as a person and it needs to change right now, otherwise I am careless and stupid. As long as others are okay with themselves, that’s as far as worry over a body should go. Do yourself.
If I am ever to lose weight, it will be of my own volition and to make me feel better, not because I believe I will be any more beautiful thinner than I am at this moment in time, and especially not because some asshole in a lab coat says I have to. This is usually a feat because of the fucking PCOS I have and the last time I dropped a lot of weight I was eating ~900 calories a day and working out like 5 days a week. Sometimes I think I should just do that again but I will be a miserable person, and it will go against anything I’ve ever said and therefore make me a hypocrite.
someday I’m gonna be enough.
for everyone.
(but hopefully, mostly myself)
All I’m saying is…
A person isn’t worth it if
- They don’t respect you to begin with
- You are the one putting all the work into your friendship/relationship
- They expect you to change who you are to please them (see first bullet)
- You spend all your time waiting around for them when they’re obviously done with you
- They have a history of being a liar/manipulator
The list goes on. I have many beautiful lady friends and handsome guy friends and sexy non-cis-gendered friends that waste their time on people who aren’t even worth their time to begin with. Let go of the losers and love yourself until someone worthy of your attention comes along. Self confidence is the sexiest thing someone can have.
Seriously, what’s so bad about yourself? You know, people most often say their best feature is their face. That’s because you look at your face in the mirror almost daily, and you’re comfortable with the way it looks. Before you shower every day, check your body out in the mirror too. Get acquainted with it and learn to love it too! You don’t need to change who you are, just work with the body you already have.
