This right here is the essence of why I love this show. It's a makeover show, but it's not just about telling people how they should look or eat or live and making them conform to it. The Fab Five really do focus on what the person needs and what is going to work for their life. Tan doesn't tell Joey that he needs to shower every day, because the fact is, Joey's not going to do that. It's not something that feels good to him and it's not practical for his life. Furthermore, telling someone to shower more isn't actually helpful, it just makes them feel shamed.
Instead, Tan gives Joey ways to stay fresher and cooler without needing to shower more often. He's not trying to change Joey's overall behavior, he's trying to give him clothing that suits that behavior. It's not about dressing how he's "supposed to," it's about dressing in a way that works for him and makes him feel better.
Plus, like, when Joey cares more about taking care of himself, he'll probably shower more often on his own anyway. If you can get him to care, the rest will follow.
Return to Magenta, Vinnoth Krishnan
“It's taboo to admit that you're lonely. You can make jokes about it, of course. You can tell people that you spend most of your time with Netflix or that you haven't left the house today and you might not even go outside tomorrow. But rarely do you ever tell people about the true depths of your loneliness, about how you feel more and more alienated from your friends each passing day and you're not sure how to fix it. It seems like everyone is just better at living than you are. A part of you knew this was going to happen. Growing up, you just had this feeling that you wouldn't transition well to adult life, that you'd fall right through the cracks. And look at you now, it's happening.”
I feel bad responding to a very beautiful, poetically written ventpost with prosaic advice, but I'm going to say this:
Resilience is a skill. Being able to shrug things off is a skill. being able to curb your immediate emotional reaction to something, being able to process your feelings in a way that means you can do something with them rather than being consumed by them, and being able to soothe yourself til you can sit down and process those feelings? that's a skill.
It is a skill that you can learn, and it is a skill you can get better at.
unfortunately, like foreign languages, it is a skill that is easier to learn when you are a child. just like you learn a native language from the people around you, you learn from the people around you- usually your parents/guardians- how to react to things that hurt in the moment, how to soothe yourself until you can process them, and how to process them until they don't hurt anymore.
if you're highly reactive, the odds are good that, for whatever reason, you never learnt resilience as a kid. The people who were supposed to teach you how to handle the weight of the world didn't, or couldn't, or wouldn't.
if you try to learn this skill as an adult, you have to convince your brain to do things that it was never taught how to do, after it thinks it does not need to learn this anymore. in the same way that it's goddamn hard for a native adult English speaker to sit down and learn how to speak Russian like a native, if you never learnt how to be resilient when you were a kid? it's going to be a bitch to pick it up.
if you learnt "the world is scary and out to get you and there's nothing you can do about it, you WILL feel EVERYTHING ALL THE TIME" (or "showing your feelings in the moment will get you hurt, you need to bottle everything up until the bottle breaks and you get hurt with fifteen years of feelings at once", or "minor inconveniences are the prelude to The Adult In Your House Who Shouts coming down on you like a load of bricks, if things aren't going perfectly then you're about to suffer", or any number of other things), trying to learn that the world doesn't work like that any more is hard and it hurts. Unless you're really good at figuring out what you're thinking and why, you will probably need to get professional help.
You're not from the wrong planet. You just never learnt something that's as basic a part of being a human as talking or counting. You were failed, and it's cruel and unjust that no one helped you pick up the slack.
....But adults learn Russian every day. Adults teach themselves Russian every day.
You can learn how to do this. You can learn how to get better at dealing with the stuff that hurts you. You can become more resilient and less reactive.
you are not doomed to get hit by everything that happens to you like it's a truck forever.
Evening Traffic by Andrey Surnov
Yoshitaka Amano: ‘1001 Nights’ (1998)
(via)
In 1944 a kitten named George (short for General Electric) was saved from drowning by a U.S. Navy crew member. George was then photographed and given a liberty card and detailed health record. Source.
i love those blinking red lights they put on top of radio towers and windmills and skyscrapers etc, theyre like electronic flowers or something to me