had the sweetest moment this weekend with my 18-month-old baby cousin. my aunt and uncle were kicking a tennis ball back and forth and encouraging him to play. I was, as always, silently watching from my wheelchair (I’m not much for athletics anyway lol). he pointed at me while my aunt was holding him. she put him down and my uncle kicked the ball to him. instead of kicking it right back like earlier in the day, he picked up the ball and carried it to me, placing it down very emphatically in front of me. I was worried and anxious that he’d get frustrated when I didn’t kick the ball and become upset because I “refused” to kick it and he obviously wouldn’t understand why. I looked at him for a split second apologetically, expecting him to start fussing or cry when I wouldn’t do what I thought he was asking. but suddenly, he just got behind the ball so that he was in front of me and kicked the ball to my uncle on my behalf.
I teared up. he wasn’t demanding I kick the ball – he was putting it down dramatically to make sure I’d be watching and so I’d know he was helping me with my “turn.” at 18 months old, he not only noticed I was being excluded on his own, but actively brainstormed ways to include me with zero prompting from adults. It was the sweetest and most empathetic gesture towards me in months. I love him so much. my heart is melting.
i’m still smiling about this 🙂 even the tiniest children are way more perceptive than people give them credit for!
I wonder if she was Turkish? I was pregnant in Turkey, and my neighbors brought me a small plate of food every time they cooked something strong-smelling. They said it was customary.
If you’re in need of ‘faith in humanity: restored’ news, a duck suddenly appeared on a remote island in the Pacific and no one’s sure how he even made it (the closest landmass, New Zealand, is about 1700 miles away) but, like, the entire population is now devoted to the duck’s wellbeing and that’s the first duck they’ve ever seen so they named him and Googled what he eats (not bread!) and built him an artificial pond and now ‘there are concerns he might be lonely’, so there’s talk of importing other ducks to keep him company and yeah, the world is still batshit insane but isn’t this the sweetest thing?
When I was 18 I took a ballet class at college and every morning our beginner adult class started just as the Ballet Majors in the studio next door took a mid-class break.
Many mornings they would gather in the doorway of my classroom and watch us struggle through our bar warmups or jumble up a new technique while they smiled and whispered to each other.
And every morning I dreaded seeing them there because I knew they were making fun of me.
I had other classes with some of them, and I was always embarrassed when ballet came up, and it always did, them being ballet majors, because I loved to talk about it but knew they’d seen me dance, and I was sure they thought I didn’t belong in the conversation.
At the end of the semester, our instructor announced that she’d like to invite the dancers from the next door studio to sit in on our final performance as an audience, and everyone in my class hesitated. We’d worked so hard, we wanted to celebrate our progress during our final without being judged. Most of us left class that day suddenly more anxious about the final than we’d ever been.
The next morning, in one of my other classes I had with the ballet majors, one of them approached me, and as if she’d been reading our minds the entire semester, she said
“Hey. I just wanted to say that I know we watch you guys dance a lot, and I wanted to make sure you know we’re never laughing at you. When we watch you guys learn the basics…..it reminds us of when we first started when we were younger. It’s like…looking at ourselves when we first fell in love with dancing. That’s why we love watching you guys.”
It shocked me. I felt awash with relief and utterly stupid all at once.
Here I had spent an entire semester assuming the worst of people who had otherwise been nothing but nice to me in every other setting, and I had no one to blame for that but my own insecurities that I’d allowed to rule me for months.
I’d been so unfair to these girls, because I was self conscious. I was so worried about being judged that I’d judged all of them.
Here I was worried they were laughing at me, and all along they were looking at me with nothing but absolute delight, even envy for what I was getting to experience.
This encounter changed my entire attitude, permanently.
It made me realize that, yeah sometimes people are jerks for no reason, but more often than not, people really are just….Good.
Since that day, I’ve started giving everyone the benefit of the doubt until they prove me wrong, for their sake and for my own.
And I’ve learned that the world becomes a lot better and life becomes a lot easier when you accept that maybe not everyone is judging you. Maybe you’re the one who’s hardest on yourself.
Let yourself be. Let yourself exist and breathe and be happy.
In the Italian city of Verona, local street artist Cibo paints colorful wall art full of appetizing food over neo-nazi graffiti (x)
“It’s my civic duty, and my right … honestly I feel like have a right to cover [erase] these kinds of things. Since I’m doing a public form of art, I have to take care of my city and … it’s like my own art gallery. How do you explain a swastika to a child? How do you do it? It’s impossible. It’s a racist message. And it’s not okay .”
“I want to be a hematologist. That’s a blood doctor. Well not a blood doctor, exactly. But a doctor that finds cures for blood diseases.” “How’d you decide on that?” “We were dissecting frogs in class and learning about how the blood flows through the body. And I went home that night and wrote an essay. And it wasn’t like any other essay I’d ever done. Normally when I write essays, it takes me a long time, but this was the fastest essay I ever wrote. So the next day I was asking the teacher mad questions, and she was like, ‘You know you can get a job in this.’ And she pulled it up on the internet, and was showing me all about hematologists.”
SUPPORT THIS BOY
I love it when someone gets that thunderbolt “I wanna do this forever” moment. It’s amazing to see that change in them once they’ve got an actual concrete dream to work towards.
Steel Phoenix Studios 