This isn’t realistic for adults. I’m sorry it’s just not.
Don’t fall into believing that, “if they’re a true friend they’ll drop everything and run to be by your side!” crap.
As a responsible adult there will be times that your friends are hurting and you won’t be able to go to them.
There are times that you will have to go to work, or take your sick kid to the doctor, or do many other things that will prevent you from being there for your friend.
When your friend calls you and they’re falling apart and it’s ten minutes until you have to leave for work, you’re not a bad friend for saying, “Look, I love you. I’m sorry this is happening, but I have to go. I’ll call you back tonight when the kids are asleep.” Or “I’m so sorry this is happening. I love you and I want to be here for you but I’ve got to get to work. I’ll call and check on you during my lunch.”
Adult life is hectic and busy with important things all the time and unfortunately it’s also full of shitty things happening to people we love.
Do your best to be there for the people you love and ask for support when you need it but be understanding when being a responsible adult comes before helping you.
The idea that people need to be there any time you need them is really damaging and unhealthy, too. You can’t place value on a person or a relationship based solely on whether or not they’re available, no questions asked, whenever you need them.
In addition to the above: sometimes, someone simply does not have the energy to help. Maybe they’re coming out of a rough patch themself, maybe they have been busy all day,maybe a chronic illness is flaring up. There are a myriad of reasons someone may not be able to be there.
Obviously, if someone is taking you for granted, and never seems to care how you’re doing, that’s an issue. But to write someone off because their life and your life didn’t line up quite right at a given point in time, or maybe even on more than one occasion, is not a healthy way to handle things.
In my experience, people who have the OP’s attitude rarely reciprocate when the shoe is on the other foot.
When I was a teenager, my best friend acted like that. I would drop everything to “be there” for him during every teenage crisis. I would stay up until 4 am, IMing with him, comforting him over every bruise to his ego.
When I grew a little older and a little wiser, I began setting some boundaries. It wasn’t because I didn’t care about him, but because I began to realise that it was unhealthy. I was also dealing with mono, which eventually turned into a two years of me literally spending 90% of my time on the couch because I didn’t have the stamina to do basic human things. Even getting dressed was a struggle. Not surprisingly, my mental health took a dive off a cliff as well. It was hell.
Funnily enough, when I needed help, he wasn’t there.
He decided that because I was going through my own shit and I literally couldn’t do anything, that meant that I didn’t care. He was a fan of dramatically unfriending people on FB, while making a status along the lines of “I just unfriended a bunch of people whom I’ve come to realize don’t care about me. If you’re still here it’s because you’re one of my few, true friends”- which he did to me, and another spoonie friend of ours at our high school.
He came crawling back a few times, but I’d gotten very, very tired of his behavior. Around this time I reconnected the aforementioned spoonie, and she’s now been my best friend for 10 years. One of the reason that our relationship has stayed strong is we have no problem saying to the other, “I’m sorry, but I need to raincheck. Low spoon day.” And we know that the other has our back, even if we can’t spend hours texting or drop everything for the other.
Tumblr has made and official statement on twitter about what’s going on:
We’re committed to helping build a safe online environment for all users, and we have a zero tolerance policy when it comes to media featuring child sexual exploitation and abuse. As this is an industry-wide problem, we work collaboratively with our industry peers and partners like NCMEC to actively monitor content uploaded to the platform. Every image uploaded to Tumblr is scanned against an industry database of known child sexual abuse material, and images that are detected never reach the platform. A routine audit discovered content on our platform that had not yet been included in the industry database. We immediately removed this content. Content safeguards are a challenging aspect of operating scaled platforms. We’re continuously assessing further steps we can take to improve and there is no higher priority for our team.
Please please please, for the love of everything, stop spreading fear in our community. They are not purging your blogs for having NSFW content. If your blog gets deleted and you didn’t have any of the above mentioned content, or something that could be percived as such, then please contact Tumblr Support to regain your blog. They can be contacted via the form here.
Please reblog so people stop spreading false information and cause unnecesary fear.
Ah, yes, the great Banana Famine. Dark, dark days indeed. Gather round my children, I am going to tell you a story of great tragedy.
Eons back, in a strange far away land, in a world now long gone (circa 1950), the Gros Michel reigned supreme. It was the one Banana to rule All bananas. Gros Michel (literally Fat Michael in French, also known as “Big Mike”) was the main banana cultivar grown in Central America and sold around the globe. A noble specimen, it’s thick peel and dense bunches made it resilient, easy to ship, and yes also fat. Look. Look at it. This banana is thiiiiiiiicc
hard to find good photos. it would have also resembled the goldfinger banana. looooook et it, it so thicc
so thicc.
Ahem.
And all was well and good and peaceful.
Everything changed when the Panama disease attacked.
Ah, the Panama disease. The great banana plague. The Banana Blight, if you will. Songs were written in elegy to the terrible destruction it wrought. Like, actually. Here’s the “Yes we have no bananas” song:
It was Chaos.
Vast tracts of plantation banana trees, noble warriors, slaughtered, cut down in their prime. Ah! the grief. Ah! the loss.
But, amid the havoc of what wikipedia and I refer to as the Gros Michel Devastation Era, an unlikely hero arose. You know it as simply a humble banana. But our hero has a name:
cavendish, it’s named cavendish.
The Cavendish banana, a cultivar that had been mass produced since the turn of the century, but only just then got it’s Time to Shine. For whatever reason, Cavendish bananas grew just fine in the same Panama disease-ridden soil that destroyed Gros Michel trees. So yeah, we planted them, fought the blight, won the war, got bananas back.
But every war has casualties.
Never again were bananas so tasty. Never again, were bananas so thicc.
I warned you this was the story of a tragedy. A moment of silence for our fallen comrade, please. Raise your wands to our late, great hero, Gros Michel.
(You can still get em in some places tho. Or like hybrids? idk. )
And kiddies, that’s the story of the banana famine as i know it.
Other deets:
BANANAS HAD SEEDS HOLY SHIT LOOK AT THIS
LOOK AT IT
bananas were cultivated over time to be seedless.
Bananas were deboned. dwell on that.
unnfff yeah
feels so wrong but so good
unnnfff
misc stuff
cavendish bananas may or may not be dying. We may or may not see the dark days of plague descend again. idk, look it up.
There’s a story (not proven) that the reason artificial banana flavor tastes weird is b/c it was based on the flavor of the Gros Michel. If so, it might be cause Fat Mike had a stronger taste (due to higher levels of isoamyl acetate). idk.
the “Yes we have no bananas” song was written in 1922 during an earlier outbreak. src. like any good plague, panama disease has a history of hovering over it’s fearful victims, sometimes for years, before striking the final blow.
sources are in the links above, also see the links on thesewikipages
i swear if i get hate mail on a banana post i don’t even know what i’ll do, probably stab a wall with a fork and eat it.
I want to share one more thing with you.
I saw this with my own two eyeballs. now you have too. we never speak of this again. we take this to our graves
shhit I’m tired.
you guys owe me a reblog on this one. Honor system, don’t mooch.
-BGP signing off
this post feels so much bigger than 500 notes
I feel like this is a good time to show you another of my babies
I love banana slugs!!!
I learned things but the seed pictures made me dry heave and then the fish completely wiped clean everything I had read before I think I know less about bananas than I did before
I made a thing.
back in the day, a banana flood happened in Scranton (my dad grew up there) because a banana truck fell over. at least 1 person died
My Cyber Week Sale has begun! 20% off if you buy 2 or more items, I’ll also keep on adding new items during the week (link to my Etsy here)
Also I offer custom orders, there’s jewerly from many different books on my shop but if you’re searching for one title in particular feel free to message me here or on my Etsy shop
tips for surviving this mess (artists ESPECIALLY) :
Export your blog content. If you can reach the site through its desktop version, click the person icon from your dash, click the name of a blog you have you want to export, select “Edit Appearance”. Scroll down and click “export (blog name)”. You will receive a .zip file. If anything ridiculous happens and you aren’t able to secure your account again, you at least should have your image files in one place. You will find in this folder the following (copied from the support article provided by tumblr staff themselves) :
A Posts folder, with an HTML file for each post.
A Media folder, with the media from your posts, plus any media you’ve uploaded (like in messaging). These files will be in the format you uploaded them in (JPG, GIF, PNG, MP4, and so on).
A representation of your blog’s messaging conversations, in XML format.
A representation of your blog’s posts, also in XML format.
If your blog truly is NSFW, or has a significant portion of NSFW content, flag it properly. You can do this from the same page as the Export function ; read the above to do reach this page.
Stop your queue from posting while things are wild. You’ll be drowned out by users helping each other with this glitchfest, and that’s if your post isn’t hidden from users due to links. Use the edit post function to move queued posts into your drafts, and reverse this process when you’re ready to put them back. This is important for art bloggers especially.
If your blog is flagged and taken down, you can e-mail staff or reach them from their contact links.www tumblr com /support – replacing spaces with dots. Several tumblr users who have gone through the process will know better than I do on this particular matter.
Keep an eye on your side blogs. It seems some takedowns are bringing side blogs down with them. There isn’t a great amount of information on the whys or hows – most likely, if a side blog has only one admin and the admin is taken down, the side blog will be taken down with it, but again, these are restorable. Make sure to include the name of any sideblogs you have that may be affected if you have to send a ticket in to staff, it will make your request go through faster.
If you have important information to impart to your followers but it involves links, do your best to avoid using links themselves. Use work-arounds like the one above, create a custom page on your own blog with links on it, or simply phrase it carefully, such as, “you can find me on DeviantArt with the username ____!”
Are you an artist with active commissions? Let your clients know. Send them a message letting them know that you may be unavailable if Tumblr makes your account glitch out. Explain that it will be temporary, but if they need anything, they can reach you through e-mail or on another website. If you don’t have off-site options, tell them you may be down temporarily, but will be back as soon as possible.
hot take: ‘chivalry’ is fine as long as it’s adapted to 21st century values. if you are a male, you SHOULD be aware that your female friends face certain issues that you as a male dont. acting on that awareness in a way that keeps your female friends safe, isn’t a bad thing.
like… opening doors isn’t rly chivalrous when it’s just a thing you ought to do for everyone. but real 21st century chivalry might be, like, standing between your female friend and the guy that’s trying to get her drunk, or offering to walk her home when it’s late.
if the ‘chivalry’ inconveniences everyone involved and you’re just doing it for your over-inflated male ego — ie, “no you’re the girl here, you HAVE to let me hold this door for you and do all these things for you even when you can do it yourself and im just slowing you down” — then it’s just outdated misogyny.
No guys, I need to stop and talk about something in this movie and how fucking revolutionary it was; something that I haven’t seen in a movie before or since.
This is a movie about a kid who leaves her birth family.
Not a kid who find that they have a secret lineage or something that allows them to find their ‘true family’ – this is a movie about a kid whose true birth family is made up of bad people. So she gets out. And that is played as the right thing to do. She isn’t punished for it or made to feel bad about ‘abandoning her family’. There isn’t an underlying ‘but they’re your family and you have to love them’ or ‘they’re your family and they love you even if they don’t show it well or do hurtful things’ message of the kind that I see OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER in media. Matilda gets out and lives happily ever after because of it.
We need a million more movies like this to counter the metric shit ton of movies that directly counter this message.
¯_( ಠ_ಠ)_/¯ 