name change!
so i'm changing my artist name from N I K K I to amymartin!
why? cause i think amy's cool lol
here’s a new link to my stuff for pinning purposes
i feel like Jean tatlock
I think that me overestimating how much I mean to someone based on how much they mean to me is why I’ve let myself be steamrolled so many times. At this point, even if I expanded back to shape the way a foam plushie does after you squish it, I feel like I would not come back at full volume. Plus, it makes me feel alone when I inevitably become one of their lower priority relationships even when they mean the world to me, it sucks.
P.S. - I think I should ask my psychiatrist when I finally get to meet him if I have some sort of disorder that makes me theatrical or very intense very quick.
damn, the amptp really wants to try to get money from the top of the fridge even when their stool of clay is about to collapse
shaking six year old me by the shoulders YOU WERE RIGHT. YOU WERE RIGHT ABOUT LOVE AND ABOUT FAIRNESS AND ABOUT SHARING IS CARING. YOU WERE RIGHT. THE ADULTS DON’T KNOW ANY MORE ABOUT TRUTH THAN YOU DO. KEEP BELIEVING IN THE FAIRIES AT THE BOTTOM OF THE GARDEN. NOTHING IS “JUST THE WAY IT IS”. I AM SORRY THEY EVER CONVINCED YOU TO FEEL SHAME. YOU ARE REAL AND A PART OF THIS WORLD. YOU WERE RIGHT.
I need a “how to talk after month(s) of silence for dummies” book, how do you socialise and not feel awkward about leaving a person for like a while in between ;~;
cis man with gynecomastia scars: hi
the smartest transphobes in the world: kys tranny
and people wonder why I say that transphobia is a danger to everyone.
I wish I was fucking joking
but sure "we can always tell" crowd telling a cis man to kill himself because they think he's trans. that totally normal behavior. terfs are totally just normal average members of society who want what's best for everyone. they totally aren't genocidal fascists who want to kill everyone who disagrees with them or anyone they simply don't like.
That's the reality of intersexism! Any bodily traits that can be deemed intersex are deemed a medical condition that needs to be dealt with, rather than a natural human variation.
Sex as a binary system is entirely a social construct just as much as gender is. It's fairly normal for people born with penises to develop breast tissue, just as it's normal for people born with vulvas to grow facial hair. But if we called those things normal human variations, we'd have to change how sex and gender are seen entirely in our society. A lot of people would lose a lot of money and control.
Oh I was just talking to a follower about this because they were wondering if some of their own variations were intersex traits and the problem is that there is no clearcut answer. There are so many intersex people that do not know they're intersex that, as a result, will go "well I have [trait] and I am not intersex" but then years later on life discover they are, in fact, intersex. If you'd asked me 10 years ago I would have said the same, well I have this trait and that trait and I'm not intersex and it's just variation of traits. 8 months ago I discovered I am actually intersex.
Cis men can grow breasts and even lactate without taking any form of HRT. Cis women can grow facial hair and have large clitori without taking any form of HRT. It's normal. It's natural. And it happens to more people than [general] you might realize.
legit just had this conversation last weekend with a 45 year old cis man who JUST got diagnosed with gynecomastia. man is afraid to have it corrected because our state is amongst the worst for trans safety and in his words, "i'd never be able to go topless in public again without some conservative shitstains calling me a tranny and telling me to kill myself or there's still time for jesus to save me. but as it is now i can't take my shirt off anyway because then they'll see the tits and guess what i'm still a fucking tranny to them! so i guess i'll just wear baggy clothes and hunch over for the rest of my goddamn life."
like. congrats to all the terfs, transphobes, and conservatives in general you've made it next to impossible for cis people to get the help they need.
they don't even realize they're doing this to their own people too. do they live in some fantasy world where hating trans people makes you immune to gynecomastia? erectile dysfunction? balding? hirsutism? pcos? literally any extremely common condition that affects one's appearance and is pretty much tied directly to how much of a man or woman you are to the status quo???? i literally do not understand this level of thinking. they're so fucking backwards they'd rather do themselves and others not even involved in any way harm than just accept everyone deserves gender affirming care.
i don't know why i'm even a little surprised. these are the same people that would rather let pregnant people die from complications or be forced to give birth to rape and incest babies than allow abortions. they've never given a single shit about anyone's wellbeing other than their own.
So let’s talk about the Lost Generation.
This is the generation that came of age during WWI and the 1918 flu pandemic. They witnessed their world collapse in the first war that spread around the globe, and they – in retrospect, optimistically – called it the “war to end all wars”. And that war was a quagmire. The trenches on the Western Front were notoriously awful, unsanitary and cold and wet and teeming with sickness, and bloody battles were fought to gain or lose a few feet of territory, and all because a series of alliances caused one assassination in one unstable area to spiral into a brutal large-scale war fought on the ground by people who mostly had no personal stake in the outcomes and gained nothing from winning.
On some of the worst-hit battlefields, the land is still too toxic for plant growth.
And on the heels of this horrific war, a pandemic struck. It’s often referred to as “the Spanish flu” because Spain was neutral in the war, and so was the first country to admit that their people were dropping like flies. By the time the warring countries were willing to face the disease, it was far too late to contain it.
Anywhere from 50 to 100 million people worldwide would die from it. 675,000 were in the US.
But once it was finally contained – anywhere from a year to a year and a half later – the 20s had begun, and they began roaring.
Hedonism abounded. Alcohol flowed like water in spite of Prohibition. Music and dance and art fluorished. It was the age of Dadaism, an artistic movement of surrealism, absurdism, and abstraction. Women’s skirts rose and haircuts shortened in a flamboyant rejection of the social norms of the previous decades. It was a time of glitter and glamour and jazz and flash, and (save for the art that was made) it was mostly skin deep.
Everyone stumbled out of the war and pandemic desperate to forget the horrific things they’d seen and done and all that they’d lost, and lost for nothing.
Reality seemed so pointless. It’s not a coincidence that the two codifiers of the fantasy genre – J.R.R. Tolkein and C.S. Lewis – both fought in WWI. In fact, they were school friends before the war, and were the only two of their group to return home. Tolkein wanted to rewrite the history of Europe, while Lewis wanted to rebuild faith in the escape from the world.
(There’s a reason Frodo goes into the West: physically, he returned to the Shire, but mentally, he never came back from Mordor, and he couldn’t live his whole life there. There’s a reason three of the Pevensies can never let go of Narnia: in Narnia, unlike reality, the things they did and fought for and believed in actually mattered, were actually worth the price they paid.)
It’s also no coincidence that many of the famous artists of the time either killed themselves outright or let their vices do them in. The 20s roared both in spite of and because of the despair of the Lost Generation.
It was also the era of the Harlem Renaissance, which came to the feelings of alienation and disillusionment from a different direction: there was a large migration of Black people from the South, many of whom moved to the Harlem neighborhood of New York City. Obviously, the sense of alienation wasn’t new to Black people in America, but the cultural shift allowed for them to publicly express it in the arts and literature in ways that hadn’t been open to them before.
There was also horrific – and state-sanctioned – violence perpetrated against Black communities in this time, furthering the anger and despair and sense that society had not only failed them but had never even given them a chance. The term at the time was shell-shock, but now we know it as PTSD, and the vast majority of the people who came of age between 1910 and 1920 suffered from it, from one source or another.
It was an entire generation of trauma, and then the stock market crashed in 1929. Helpless, angry, impotent in the face of all that had seemingly destroyed the world for them, on the verge of utter despair, it was also a generation vulnerable to despotism. In the wake of all this chaos – god, please, someone just take control of all this mess and set it right.
Sometimes the person who took over was decent and played by the rules and at least attempted to do the right thing. Other times, they were self-serving and hateful and committed to subjugating anyone who didn’t fit their mold.
There are a lot of parallels to now, but we have something they didn’t, and that’s the fact that they did it first.
We know what their mistakes and sins were. We have the gift of history to see the whole picture and what worked and what failed. We as a species have walked this road before, and we weren’t any happier or stronger or smarter about it the first time.
I think I want to reiterate that point: the Lost Generation were no stronger or weaker than Millennials and Gen Z are today. Plenty of both have risen up and fought back, and plenty have stumbled and been crushed under the weight. Plenty have been horribly abused by the people who were supposed to lead them, and plenty have done the abusing. Plenty of great art has been made by both, and plenty of it is escapist fantasy or scathing criticism or inspiring optimism or despairing pessimism.
We find humor in much the same things, because when reality is a mess, both the absurd and the self-deprecating become hilarious in comparison. There’s a reason modern audiences don’t find Seinfeld as funny as Gen X does, and many older audiences find modern comedy impenetrable and baffling – they’re different kinds of humor from different realities.
I think my point accumulates into this: in spite of how awful and hopeless and pointless everything feels, we do have a guide. We’ve been through this before, as a culture, and even though all of them are gone now, we have their words and art and memory to help us. We know now what they didn’t then: there is a future.
The path forward is a hard one, and the only thing that makes it easier is human connection. Art – in the most base sense, anything that is an expression of emotion and thought into a medium that allows it to be shared – is the best and most enduring vehicle for that connection, to reach not just loved ones but people a thousand miles or a hundred years away.
So don’t bottle it up. Don’t pretend to be okay when you’re not. Paint it, sculpt it, write it, play it, sing it, scream it, hell, you can even meme it out into the void. Whatever it takes to reach someone else – not just for yourself but for others, both present and future.
Because, to quote the inimitable Terry Pratchett, “in a hundred years we’ll all be dead, but here and now, we are alive.”
happy pride month by t4t transfem sapphic pavitr and gayatri🇮🇳💙💜
ALTnow a PRINT
also these doodles because they didn't end up i the final drawing
ALTedit: made a typo in the doodle, it's hrt***.
omg I love this
redhaireddeadite