Good Lord, how delicious! I wanna do that! The next time I’m in a cathedral, I’m doing it.
As she stood inside an ancient and empty church in Montefrío, Spain, Malinda Kathleen Reese belted out one of the best Christmas carols of all time-“O Come, O Come Emmanuel” and the end result was just heavenly.
I’m obsessed with this because A. Victorian Christmas Carols B. European Cathedrals C. It’s gorgeous and fuckin choristers are my favorite
a gentle reminder that you did well this year. you met new people, learned new things and felt new feelings. you did so many things that made you scared. you picked yourself up off the floor after feeling completely defeated or heartbroken. there were some really tough nights but you survived them all. you made people happy just by existing. you accepted many goodbyes but the serendipitous meetings made up for them. it was your own hard work that paid off but you always downplay it or compare yourself to others. that’s not fair on yourself. you’ve come so far from the first day of this year. you have more wisdom and strength now. yes, other people seem more “successful” but does that even matter? please don’t think so lowly of yourself to only think about your failures. 2018 was your year of growth. I hope you take a moment to be kind to yourself, and believe that 2019 will be even better.
We should always be mindful of echo chambers. I’ve learned a lot on Tumblr and it has shaped my understanding of the world and opened me up to new ideas and understandings about ableism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, and how they intersect with our lives. But I’ve been on here a long time and I’ve seen how an echo chamber has encouraged a certain zeal in people’s desires to be socially progressive has lead to a toxic call out culture and an increasingly intense scrutiny trying to sniff out every vague nuance of a micro-aggression to the point where if something even sounds like it’s not pure SJW Approved™ it must be ruined and there’s no redemption arc. I’ve seen people tear celebrities to shreds over perceived slights that, upon further investigation, are not the problematic behaviours they appeared to be. It was like someone read a misleading headline and decided they knew the whole news story.
No one is pure. That’s not a defence against bad behaviour or excuse, that is merely a fundamental truth we must deal with when navigating our lives. The quest for social justice must be a self-aware one if it is to achieve anything. We can’t have progress if our end-goals become divorced from the realities of the world that no one who isn’t in the echo-chamber can connect with us.
Tumblr encouraged a generation of socially progressive and inclusive thinkers, and then some of them just they stayed here and festered in an echo chamber until the reasonable beliefs got churned around so much the only way to go was more and more extreme. Because that’s what echo chambers do. They amplify something, warp it, and then make you utterly convinced of it’s normalcy through gradual reinforcement, even though to an outsider it has become so unrecognisable that it’s bizarre and hostile.
Stop for a moment. Think. Examine things from a different perspective. I hope to always be a socially progressive and inclusive person who is mindful and aware of the struggles of others and the different ways privilege affects peoples’ lives… but I also want to make sure that the way I go about that is a logical, reasonable, and inclusive manner. I want to see my generation understand the trappings of social media and the environment we live in so that we can avoid becoming the outlandish parodies of ourselves that the right portrays us as.
