me after watching Matilda as a child and waiting and waiting for my own Miss Honey to notice i was miserable and come save me and be proud of me and then realizing that doesnt happen and also that i cant move stuff with my mind i can just read books really well & be mentally ill
The stories of women in my family who were forced into lives they didn’t want and didn’t utilize their passions breaks my heart. My grandma wanted to be a journalist and write about the injustices she saw inflicted on disabled ppl while she was volunteering at a state run institution as a teen. Her father decided that she was “too fat and stupid” for college and forced her to get married at 17 or else he’d make her homeless. As a kid she told me that she wished people believed that she had meaningful opinions on events around her. One of my great grandmothers wanted to be an artist but was pressured into marrying a man who beat her. She stayed up late each night when her children were in bed writing poetry and pasting it over elaborate collages she mad herself. We still have stacks of these notebooks she created but was never allowed to do anything with. My mother wanted to be an operatic singer and was considered a musical prodigy in her town because she taught herself three seperate instruments by 13. When she was 18 she met my then 30 year old father who emotionally manipulated her into giving up her dreams to start a family with him. As a kid I would hear her up at night playing the violin or doing vocal exercises until she became too depressed to practice anymore. Like idk y’all there’s a quiet type of violence in the way women’s talents are devalued and brushed aside in favor of bullying them into “traditional” roles that ultimately don’t fulfill what they wanted for their lives. We’ve lost so much art, music, writing, science, and happiness to misogyny.
hey so I’m not giving JKR any credit whatsoever for accidentally writing a nonbinary icon (bc if she’d meant to do it she’d never have shut up about it) but Tonks refuses to use even shortened forms of her heavily feminine given name with anyone except close family members and has The Classic Genderweird Dream Power of at-will minor shapeshifting and uses it to look punkishly androgynous with Cool Hair thank you for coming to my TED talk
A shepherd leads his herd back from grassland in the Talesh mountain area, close to the Caspian Sea, in Iran on December 19, 2016. (Ebrahim Noroozi/AP)
