i feel like the most important piece of wisdom i can impart on teenagers is that no one–no one–knows what the fuck they’re doing
my brother is 26 years old, makes $200k a year, and just bought a house with his fiance. he’s the success story you hear about but never actually meet in person, but it all happened by accident. he wanted to go to college for clarinet performance, but he got rejected from all the top schools. so he decided to major in physics instead, and then went on to get a doctorate to put off being an adult for a few more years. but then he ended up dropping out halfway through the program and accepting a job with google as a software engineer. so to reiterate: my brother majored in something he was not interested in, and then he got a job that had nothing to do with his degree.
he isn’t successful because he had some master plan he followed, he just stumbled around blindly until something worked out. and that’s what we’re all doing–i majored in political science and now i do customer service for a company that makes industrial-sized gas detection monitors. the marketing director at my company has a degree in biology, and my mom has an MBA and works at a middle school. no one knows what they’re doing, we’re all just trying different things until something works out.
so if you don’t have a plan, that’s fine. most of us don’t. and even those of us who do, don’t usually end up doing the thing they thought they would. it’s okay to relax and let life carry you wherever it’s gonna carry you. because even though a lot of us don’t end up doing the thing we wanted, most of us end up happy anyway.
I’ve been thinking about this post since I made it a few hours ago, and I realized that I literally don’t know anyone who’s doing what they thought they’d be doing at this point in their life. I know a girl that has a degree in neuroscience and works in a restaurant (and makes quite a bit more money than I do, might I add), and a guy who wanted to be a parole officer but is now a security guard. I know people who wanted to be lawyers but ended up not having the grades for law school. I have a friend who’s 24 and just finished her bachelor’s, and two friends who decided to go to grad school because the idea of joining the adult world terrified them.
When I was seventeen, I was 100% sure that I was going to get a job as a bureaucrat and save the world. When I was a 21-year-old recent college grad, I found out that it’s impossible to get a government job unless you know someone. So I gave up and found something else. I know my teenage self would be disappointed if she could see where I’m at, but you know what? I don’t care. Because teenage me was an idiot. She didn’t know anything about the world or how it worked, and she couldn’t have possibly predicted the curveballs that life would throw at her. And because I don’t know a single person who’s doing the thing they wanted to do when they were teenagers.
I know a thousand people who aren’t where they thought they’d be, and zero people who are following the path they set out for themselves. All of us are confused and all of us are scared, and it’s okay if you are too.
I’m doing a job I love for a good wage, I love my flat and my friends
and London. I spent most of my twenties what felt like going nowhere, not even sure how
to make a start. It’s only in retrospect things I realise I had made a start and done lots of stuff, it just felt like nothing because I couldn’t see where it was going at the time. I
realise now everything I did before this has led to this. In turn, what
I’m doing now is a step towards a future path I don’t know about yet,
but wil understand looking back.
My friend started out studying Creative Writing but dropped out. She went on to studying nursing and became a midwife. She kept on wriitng, and eventually went on a prestigeous writing course in Bath. she’s just had her first book published (it’s Waterstone’s Children’s Book of the Month!). I’d call her a success story, she’s certainly happy and enjoying her life, but she (like all of us) spent her early twenties making what seemed like odd choices and false starts.
What froze me was the idea that I had to choose, had to make the right decision, and I realise now, it doesn’t matter. All you have to do is do stuff. And commit to the stuff. And then when it’s not working for you any more, move on. Not everything will be a vocation, a lot of the stuff you’ll do will be to make rent, but that doesn’t remotely mean it won’t be useful to you down the line. Life offers endless possibililities but you have to be out doing SOMETHING to encounter them.
Your twenties are scary though. If you’ve been to university, you might have found it tough, but post-graduate life is a whole different kind of tough. You at least know what you’re meant to be doing at university. When you graduate you’re expected to suddenly be self-motivating, aged 22-24 (usually) and with zero experience so far in life of setting an independant agenda. It’s super common to be depressed and daunted.
So don’t take it as failure. You’re far too freshly minted an adult to gauge anything yet.
(I’m saying this from the perspective of 33. I’d hope someone ten years ahead of me would have similarly comforting things to say to my age, because uncertainty and fear don’t go away with ‘growing up’ and ‘success’ but I don’t know yet!)
It astounds me how often we fail at being able to comprehend two complex concepts at the same time.
I’ve been seeing this post going around in two forms, about how Rogue One (which I have yet to see, so please NO SPOILERS) has an extreme lack of women (including background characters). That’s a really good, important point to discuss. And then there’s a post bashing that same article, pointing to the fact that the film highlights many non-white men and dismissing the article as white feminism.
No.
Both of these may be correct.
The ability of a film to have great representation for men of different races, creeds, abilities and backgrounds does not for a moment contradict the inability of the film to have adequate representation for women of any race, creed, ability or background.
This is why I hate the “trash fire” all-or-nothing mentality. It cannot cope with the notion that something can be good and bad at the same time, in different corners and contexts. For example: something can be great for racial representation and terrible for LGBTQ+ representation. The former does not automatically make the thing great; the latter does not automatically make the thing terrible. (Key word: automatically.)
Not only that, things can have different meanings to different people based on their different experiences. For someone mixed race Asian-white, a main character like Chloe Bennet’s on Agents of SHIELD may be hugely important. For someone black, the show’s troubling history of killing off most of its black characters may be deeply problematic. Neither is wrong.
Personal experiences shape our interpretations of things. Experiences are not universal. The world is not comprised of absolutes. The stunning lack of women in film (at every layer) intersects, of course, with the stunning lack of non-white people in film (at every layer), but neither is more or less important than the other. (Especially since the doubly stunning lack of non-white women in film is something we should talk about more.) It is not “white feminism” to point out that a film with ten character posters had only one devoted to a (white) woman (even if she is the lead), just because the remaining men are non-white. Nor is it misogynistic to appreciate the film’s focus on (male) non-white heroes.
For months, every morning when my daughter was in preschool, I watched her construct an elaborate castle out of blocks, colorful plastic discs, bits of rope, ribbons and feathers, only to have the same little boy gleefully destroy it within seconds of its completion.
No matter how many times he did it, his parents never swooped in BEFORE the morning’s live 3-D reenactment of “Invasion of AstroMonster.” This is what they’d say repeatedly:
“You know! Boys will be boys!”
“He’s just going through a phase!”
“He’s such a boy! He LOVES destroying things!”
“Oh my god! Girls and boys are SO different!”
“He. Just. Can’t. Help himself!”
I tried to teach my daughter how to stop this from happening. She asked him politely not to do it. We talked about some things she might do. She moved where she built. She stood in his way. She built a stronger foundation to the castle, so that, if he did get to it, she wouldn’t have to rebuild the whole thing. In the meantime, I imagine his parents thinking, “What red-blooded boy wouldn’t knock it down?”
Her consent didn’t matter. Besides, it’s not like she made a big fuss when he knocked it down. It wasn’t a “legitimate” knocking over if she didn’t throw a tantrum.
His desire — for power, destruction, control, whatever- – was understandable.
I know it’s a lurid metaphor, but I taught my daughter the preschool block precursor of don’t “get raped” and this child, Boy #1, did not learn the preschool equivalent of “don’t rape.”
Not once did his parents talk to him about invading another person’s space and claiming for his own purposes something that was not his to claim. Respect for her and her work and words was not something he was learning. How much of the boy’s behavior in coming years would be excused in these ways, be calibrated to meet these expectations and enforce the “rules” his parents kept repeating?
There was another boy who, similarly, decided to knock down her castle one day. When he did it his mother took him in hand, explained to him that it was not his to destroy, asked him how he thought my daughter felt after working so hard on her building and walked over with him so he could apologize. That probably wasn’t much fun for him, but he did not do it again.
There was a third child. He was really smart. He asked if he could knock her building down. She, beneficent ruler of all pre-circle-time castle construction, said yes… but only after she was done building it and said it was OK. They worked out a plan together and eventually he started building things with her and they would both knock the thing down with unadulterated joy. You can’t make this stuff up.
Take each of these three boys and consider what he might do when he’s older, say, at college, drunk at a party, mad at an ex-girlfriend who rebuffs him and uses words that she expects will be meaningful and respecte, “No, I don’t want to. Stop. Leave.”
This is so brilliant. We learn things from socialization process. What our parents, friends and peers do, media and all. I think perhaps rape is because parents think boys will be boys, they bully, fight and destroy things, it’s their characteristics so they don’t bother to stop them. But it manifests in them, knowing or unknowingly, they will just think, because I’m a boy and boys tend to do these, so it doesn’t matter even if the girl hates it, says no, because I’m a boy.
Just reblog this, this message is really powerful. For parents and future parents.
What’s also interesting, is if you frame this as about spoiling your children, and about spoiled children, people tend to agree and get it. They’ll agree that children whose parents lay down no boundaries for them when they hurt others, who let them have whatever they want at the expense of others, and justify away the harm they do, will probably grow up thinking they can do this to others (usually weaker than them, or they perceive as weaker) as adults. But if you mention the word “privilege”, “entitlement” or anything relating to gender, everybody freaks the f- out and will deny up, down, back, forth, and sideways that how you raise a child, what you allow them to get away with, or training them that their hurtful behaviour will always be justified, can affect them at all.
If you have queer friends in Russia, do not try to contact them to ask if they’re ok.
Russia has an insidious history of monitoring online communications of its citizens, especially political dissidents, and even though Tumblr/Twitter/Facebook/etc. are owned by American companies, they have to travel through Russian servers to get to your friend, which could get them in a lot of trouble.
If you want to help, I recommend donating to RUSA LGBT, a nonprofit that works to provide sanctuary to queer folks in Russia and Central Asia.
Thank you @tessacrowley for this important information.
(x) from the russian lgbt network’s facebook page. if you’re gonna spread the donation link PLEASE spread this too. they’re saying they already have the necessary resources to evacuate people, but what they really need is this information to reach those who need to see it. direct messaging people is risky, and can put those in need of help and those ready to help in danger. by spreading this publicly we increase the odds of it being seen safely by the people who need to know about this.
You have more followers than I do and are in North America, can you please signal boost,
Boosting it. Also, guys, anything that advertises like this is too good to be true, no matter the intent behind it. If it sounds too good to be true, it’s probably a fuckin’ scam. Or life-endangerment.
Steel Phoenix Studios 