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[An older Jimmy Doohan recounts the story told below. He has tears in his eyes.]

“I got a fan letter from a young lady. It was a suicide note.

So I called her, and I said, “Hey, this is Jimmy Doohan. Scotty, from Star Trek.” I said, “I’m doing a convention in Indianapolis. I wanna see you there.”

I saw her — boy, I’m telling you, I couldn’t believe what I saw. It was definitely suicide. Somebody had to help her, somehow. And obviously she wasn’t going to the right people.

I said to her, “I’m doing a convention two weeks from now in St. Louis.” And two weeks from then, in somewhere else, you know? She also came to New York - she was able to afford to got to these places. That went on for two or three years, maybe eighteen times. And all I did was talk positive things to her.

And then all of the sudden — nothing. I didn’t hear anything. I had no idea what had happened to her because I never really saved her address.

Eight years later, I get a letter saying, “I do want to thank you so much for what you did for me, because I just got my Master’s degree in electronic engineering.”

That’s…to me, the best thing I’ve ever done in my life.”

(Source: lesliecrusher)

dimpleforyourthoughts:

here sam winchester is around 26 years old, and has just been told to lose bobby’s number

now imagine what this face looked like at seventeen years old, hearing the words “If you go to stanford, don’t come back” from his own dad

imagine what is face looked like when Dean said he would drive him to the bus station, didn’t even stick up for Sam or argue with Dad

imagine

[A judge on a singing contest says “You can’t just sit there and cry.” A middle-aged man sitting cross-legged on the stage disagrees, “OH, I CAN SO JUST SIT HERE AND CRY.”]

(Source: heathermorris)

I have no mercy or compassion in me for a society that will crush people and then penalize them for not being able to stand up under the weight. —Malcolm X  (via thenewwomensmovement)

(Source: loudrevolution)

thepensivebrony:

“you shouldn’t be depressed, people have it worse than you”

finally, after years of searching, the person with the worst life ever is found. formally, they are granted permission to be sad. but only them. only they have earned it. no sads for anyone else at all ever

…Having their pain recognized and legitimized for the first time in their life, they are, in some small way, validated and understood. A small kernel of light is kindled in their soul at the possibility that their pain is real and their responses normal. This is too much like happiness. The committee revokes their permission and the search continues.

fuckyeahretailrobin:

[Image Description: Background is several triangles in a circle like a pie alternating from true red, scarlet and black. A robin is sitting on his perch looking to the right.

Top Text: “CUSTOMER IS AN INTERIOR DESIGNER”

Bottom Text: “’I NEED EIGHT MORE OF THESE FOR A CLIENT IN AN HOUR.’”]

I get at least several customers a week who absolutely need eight more of these obscurely patterned pillows, it’s for a client, we’re meeting in an hour! could you check in the back a third time just in case??

I need customers to understand that if I tell them we don’t have something, there has been a warehouse problem with it and we are not expecting it before mid-next week (or another clearly well-informed answer) and they tell me to go check in the back, I am going to go sit down for two minutes and come back. You needing it does not make it appear.

if there is one thing radicals/progressives/liberals have failed to get right in the new age

navigatethestream:

its the notion of boycotts

you wanna know why the bus boycotts of the civil rights movement were so successful?

because an alternative black run transportation system was created for those who couldn’t walk to work or whatever they had to go

they didn’t just tell people “oh the bus enforces racist policies so don’t take it and FUCK if you can’t get to work on time or where you need to be!” 

they said “hey you’re paying to get on the bus and not even being given a seat let alone being ejected if a white passenger needs your seat. here’s a potentially better alternative where you pay to sit down and get to where you need to go” 

all this “boycott Target, Walmart, Monsanto owned companies” comes from a notion of boycott located in the politic of privileged white people

and that’s why they are largely unsuccessful

its why Obama just gave Monsanto the green light to commit even more fuckery to your food

its the reason why cooperation are considered people

its the reason why Walmart is allowed to usurp safety and labor regulations in their factories, and underpay their American workers

because you say “don’t spend your money there” and that’s the end of the story 

you expect people to locate their survival in a politic of “abstaining from unethical choices”

and then from there those unethical choices are somehow supposed to magically disappear. when really only a small percentage of people are able to boycott so many things

there wouldn’t be a movement located around the “99%” if 99% of people could really afford to stop shopping at the unethical places and stop buying the unethical brands

good luck with your hocus pocus activist logic 

To add:

Caption: “Smoke Test, one of the harassments sit-ins have met ‘on the firing line,’ as students call demonstrations, is administered to Virginius Thornton. His tormentors are David Gunter, an N.A.A.C.P.-student adviser (left), Leroy Hill, high school teacher.” In other words: Thornton is having smoke blown in his face by his friends in order to practice keeping his cool and not reacting to provocation during his upcoming lunch-counter protest.

Participants in sit-ins practiced not coughing when people blew smoke in their faces. They practiced being yelled at and berated and people ashing in their hair and spilling stuff on them and shoving them and calling them the worst sorts of names. People who marched practiced the mechanics of marching. They carefully selected their clothing, wearing shirts and ties and dresses. An article in the Richmond News Leader observed that while Black students wore “coats, white shirts, ties,” the young whites who came to heckle them were “a ragtail rabble, slack-jawed, black jacketed, grinning fit to kill…” (Qtd in In Struggle: NSNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s). There was nothing ragtail about the Black leadership: they made conscious and informed choices, got the word out to participants, trained those participants, and supported them if they were arrested.

(I’m trying to remember a particular anecdote, which I am sure is one of many, where a person was arrested and beaten and they knew that the police would kill him so they instantly started an all-night vigil. They got people out of their beds and down to the police station so that the person who was incarcerated would not be alone and unprotected. The police were disgusted and freed them early in the morning because of the pressure of these protesters.)

In other words, the leadership of the Civil rights movement were immensely politically savvy and while there was a lot of disagreement within the various organizations, and a lot of ways in which these tensions affected the aims and outcomes, they were supporting one another and their communities in ways that were incredibly far reaching (don’t forget the incredible service the Black Panther Party did with free meals, childcare, clothing, education…). Participants understood the choices and sacrifices they were making and the more involved they were, the more they were trained to deal with, and there were support structures in place for community members.

I think a lot of the problem people have now in their various movements is that this is all so diffuse: there are a lot of movements, there is no one to support us if/when we are arrested, there is no one to help us with the planning an considerations of protest. I think a lot of that is because the narratives of leadership from the Black civil rights era have been suppressed. Doing so makes their rights seem less like something that fought and won than something inevitable “we” eventually gave to “them.” By disguising the work and intelligence of the various individuals and organizations involved, white people continue to undercut Black people’s intelligence, ingenuity, autonomy, etc.

When I say that morale is low at my store, I need you to understand that what I mean is half the workforce is intermitantly suicidal.

[Screencap of search history. Searches for “Americans with disabilities act” “self-injury,” ADA cutting Hand signals with your therapist, Desyril, prn anti-depressant, prn, how much ibuprofen can I take really?]

Do you think I can submit my search history instead of doing the Disability paperwork again?

captainmarvel:

btw snape didn’t switch sides during the war because he had an ideological change of heart. he switched sides cause he wanted to stick it to voldemort for not handing lily over to him after killing her whole family (which btw would have been /totally/ against her will, so…that’s gross).

like, he believed as strongly in what voldemort was doing as lucius and bellatrix did? and that didn’t change??? he really only switched sides for revenge??? he’s never actually a good person?????????? unrequited love doesn’t make you magnanimous ?? and he wasn’t actually fighting cause he loved her he was fighting cause he was mad at voldemort??? if he’d been fighting for her he would have been on her side from the beginning????????????????

idk, i’ve been having a lot of harry james potter feelings lately and snape apologists make my skin crawl.

Right?! Snape in the books (like, the Potions-master Snape) can totally be a character you love to hate, but how Snape got there, EG, his actual fucking character, is something that crawled out of the bowels of Reddit. He’s a Nice Guy, bigot, misogynist, creep. He’s an interesting character to think about, but he would be a dangerous person to know and Snape/Lily is so distasteful to me.

OH MY GD, WHAT IS THIS SHOW DOING TO ME. THERE’S A BEAUTIFUL BABY AND MY FRIEND IS DEAD AND I DIDN’T EVEN BELIEVE THAT MY OTHER FRIEND COULD BE DYING?!??!

thatqueerchick:

toxicteardrops:

l-ovelynialler:

from left to right;

I am afraid to hold my boyfriend’s hand.

My friend’s parents sent her away.

I found death threats in my locker.

I submitted to electroshock therapy.

I lost half my friends after coming out.

My grandmother sends me hate mail.

My school won’t let me take my date to prom.

I am not here anymore.

My dad tried to beat it out of me.

No one is proud of me.

This showed up on my blog again. Forever reblog.

The “I am not here anymore.” 

Oh my. This hit hard.

Could never not reblog. Long lasting, traumatising fear is being a closeted queer kid in a very straight conservative school, in a Tory-run area. You are out to maybe a few friends, but they’re not that supportive and say stuff like ‘you shouldn’t be so angry all the time’ and ‘try not to let it affect you.’

You are obsessed day and night with policing yourself-just enough makeup to look straight, wear the skirt today, did I look at that girl’s legs, and fnally and most terrifying of all, do my parents know?

You watch and carefully listen to people whom you plan to come out to, trying to figure out their reaction. The first time you come out, you are so scared you won’t even say it on school grounds.

You have no queer friends and your only support system is online. You come home exhausted from hearing homophobia and the fear of hearing it. You are never not tense at school. At home, you think you’re safe but you’re not.

You are always listening and watching people, trying to gauge if they are gay. You know that you look straight, so by the law of statistics there are others here. You wonder if they are as frightened as you are. Probably. You wish you could help them. you wonder if they watch you in the same hope. Years later, you will find out via Facebook (which you didn’t have then because you feared it would out you) that some people you knew well were gay.

On top of all this, you must always look happy, and working hard to pass your A-levels which will get you into university and away from here. You have to pass, because otherwise you will be stuck here.

The trauma of this experience will give you five different mental illnesses, and your first year at university is spent recovering from the last two years of school.

Yes. I think this is why “no one is proud of me” hurts so much more than “I am not here anymore.” Because they aren’t here, and that is sad and terrible, but I am still here, and what does it mean to still be here when you know there are so many people who would prefer you were not? What does it mean to keep going every day when (it feels like) no one is proud of you?

I was talking today about what it means to keep living when there are no models that tell you that you will be okay in the end. Where are the old queers? Where are the old trans people? Where are the old people who have been sad and in pain their whole long lives? Normally, I would talk about “older people” and about “elders,” but that’s not what I want. What I want is old people. What I want is something simple, a simple word, I want people who show me that it can be done. I want grown-ups. I want parents. I want a culture and society that raises and nurtures rather than quiets up.

Audre Lorde talked in an interview about how “it would have saved a lot of time” if she had known that there were other people with her identities struggling with the same things she struggled with. In Sisterhood and Survival, she talks about discovering the work of Angelina Weld Grimke, another Black lesbian poet who had lived in New York when Audre was growing up. “I often think of her, dying alone in an apartment in New York City in 1958, while I was a young black lesbian, in isolation not too far away, and I think of what it could have meant in terms of sisterhood and survival for each one of us to have known of the other’s existence, for me to have had her words, and for her to have known I needed them. That we are not alone.”

These were the thoughts somewhere beneath the surface when I was asking where are they? Where are my people? Why, in my life, do I always seem to do it for the first time? To be the first trans person you have met, the first person with slippery pronouns, the first to explain to you words other than gay and straight (and, growing up, to have done that!), the first willing to give you their language about how sick all of this has made them? I know that other people are doing this work, but where are they? How can I find them? And can they help me?

(Source: lui19h)

someonecalledmefamous:

mu5icliz:

germansam:

tokyosluts:

Sleeping is nice because youre not actually dead and youre not awake so its a win-win situation

It’s like being dead without the commitment.

an open relationship with death

death with benefits

Sending this to my therapist.

[A man, a baby, and a dog all lay together with their faces squished with sleep.]

superlen:

fierce-x:

xxx

CUTE.

Can i live my entire life from the bathtub? My life seems almost manageable in the bath.

Science, please work on this.

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