If motherhood is sacred, mothers should have free healthcare, paid leave, affordable childcare, safe housing, and livable wages. Otherwise, you don’t worship mothers. You exploit them.
@Ryan_Daigler People often assume predators target weakness. In many cases, they're reacting to something else entirely: a person whose presence quietly exposes the gap between who they are and who they pretend to be.
One of the most undervalued ideas in psychology is that our perspective on the cause & meaning of suffering will not only dictate how our suffering is understood & managed, but also how it evolves & is *experienced*. The ideology of suffering we embrace transforms its very nature
The reason we think dandelions are weeds is because of a 1950s marketing campaign.
Dandelions, native to Europe and Asia, were brought to North America in the 1600s by European colonists who grew them deliberately.
Every part is edible. The leaves are a salad green, the flowers were made into wine, and the roots were roasted as a coffee substitute and used medicinally for liver and kidney conditions for thousands of years. They were a kitchen-garden staple well into the 1800s.
The shift happened after World War II, when 2,4-D (originally developed for chemical warfare research) was approved as a residential herbicide. Companies like Scotts built the modern lawn-care industry around the idea that a perfect green lawn meant zero broadleaf plants.
Dandelions, being bright yellow and resistant to mowing, became a visible enemy, and the campaign worked. By the 1970s, "dandelion-free" was synonymous with "well-kept."
They aren't native, but they aren't doing significant ecological harm either. The herbicides used to kill them, on the other hand, kill bees, contaminate groundwater, and have been linked to non-Hodgkin lymphoma in humans.
If you hate dandelions, it's most likely due to a marketing campaign that ran before you were born.
Maybe women are not “bad” at prioritizing their health and themselves.
Maybe part of the problem is that many women are carrying too much.
Maybe part of it is overstimulation.
Being a woman today can feel like constant noise from:
-Questions.
-Interruptions.
-Touch.
-Work.
-Demands from work, relationships, caregiving, or daily life.
-Mental tabs open everywhere. -Never fully turning your brain off.
And then somehow you’re still expected to remember to take medications, drink enough water, exercise, schedule appointments, meal prep, and “optimize” your health.
Have you ever….
Forgotten to eat?
Forgotten medications?
Realized you haven’t peed in hours?
Reheated the same coffee three times?
Couldn't remember what you walked into a room for?
This isn’t simply “being bad at self care.” There’s only so much one person can carry.
You cannot optimize health when every moment feels like another demand. Modern life is hard.
So maybe the problem was never women “failing” themselves. Maybe it’s that we keep asking them to carry everything and call it normal.
Apologies: only part of this post was published this morning. Here’s the full version:
Full post: The Hidden Symbolism of Shadows Many People Never Notice.
By Dr Linda Berman
https://t.co/qVXu9vBMEj via @Lindaberman4
“During the darkest days of the AIDS crisis we buried our friends in the morning, we protested in the afternoon, and we danced all night, and it was the dance that kept us in the fight because it was the dance we were fighting for.” – Dan Savage
Happy #Pride, Canada!
Pride season kicks off today, and we can’t wait to join Canadians from coast to coast to coast this summer in celebrating love and inclusion.
It would be pretty cool if billionaires started competing over who could plant the most trees, house the most homeless people, and remove the most pollution from the Earth.
Excerpts from Letters to a young poet, Rainer Maria Rilke.
“Go into yourself. Examine the reason that bids you to write; check whether it reaches its roots into the deepest region of your heart, admit to yourself whether you would die if it should be denied you to write.”