Photo by Khadeeja Yasser on Unsplash

Inspired, of course, by @snowpea’s post, which you can check out here. I also got tagged by @americantraveler!

The Rules:

• List five things you love
• List five things you don't love
• Tag five of your friends to play
• Use the tag loveitshoveit

Love It

• Family. I love my family, both blood and chosen. I don’t always agree with them, it’s true, but I never stop loving them, even when we haven’t spoken in months, because I am absent-minded and do not always initiate contact, or because something has come up in their life and they’ve become overwhelmed, or because they left social media and take forever to respond to messages. I love them even when I am afraid to be my whole self with them, or I find their political opinions distasteful, or our life experiences are so different that I don’t know how to relate to them.

A photo collage of pictures featuring books

• Books. I am a voracious reader, and I love books more than I can fully express. I love old books, and the way they smell. I love new books and the way they smell. I love the feel of pages between my fingers. I love re-reading books and spotting guilty chocolate fingerprints. I love finding dedications inside the covers of second-hand books, and wondering about the lives of both giver and receiver. I love thinking about the structure of the author’s writing, and analyzing their choices to make myself a better writer. I love books that draw you so entirely in that you cry at the death of a beloved character and cheer aloud the protagonist’s triumphs. I love talking to fans of books I love, and reading their fanfiction. I love writing notes in my academic books, digesting new knowledge and fixing it in my mind as I fix it on the page. I love having read and enjoyed a book so thoroughly and repeatedly that the cover falls off and the corners tear away and tea stains the lower edges. I love replacing such books. I love giving copies of my favorite books to friends. I love wandering hushed libraries and bustling bookshops. I love browsing for my next great liaison, hunting out books that I will cherish for years to come. I love escaping grief and woe in fantastic worlds, and I love returning to the books that brought me respite during hard times.

A photo collage demonstrating the significant difference between challah with gluten and challah without

• Baking. I love making food with my own hands. Sometimes from a mix, because my housemate works at an upscale/organic grocery store, and brings me free gluten free items when he can, but sometimes from scratch. I got into cooking from scratch shortly before I discovered I was gluten intolerant, and have spent some of my time in the last couple of years experimenting with recreating some of my favorite foods sans gluten. My ongoing struggle is to produce a delicious, nicely textured challah from my own favorite recipe (adapted from this one on Chabad). Mixed results so far, but I remain undaunted—the challenge is part of the joy of cooking. I love that feeling when you take a pile of ingredients and make something tasty to nourish yourself and your loved ones.

• Loving and Affirming Community. I love communities that are about celebrating and uplifting each other. I love #LinkYourLife. I love #TeamGirlPowa. I love Dave Seah’s Coworking Cafe. I love #GirlsNightIn. I love QT2BIPOC gatherings. I love craft circles. I love fan communities. I love being with nerds like me, with other knitters, other readers, other introverts. I love validating other people, and being validated.

• Tea. Especially when I’m wrapped up in a warm sweater on a chilly day with a book, but also just in general. Like, tea is pretty darn awesome. I love tea, and I drink a lot of it, every single day. Lately, I’ve been obsessed with Good Earth’s Sweet and Spicy Chai, which is delicious, a great balance of sweetness and spice. Basically, tea is the best drink. And with a little bit of evaporated milk and a dab of honey? Perfection.

A delicious cup of tea in my ceramic tea set

Shove It

Warnings for violence and sexual abuse. This section got kind of heavy, so if you’re not in a space for that, feel free to skip it. Take care of yourself, friends.

• Bigots. People who antagonize and assault people who are different from them. People who cling to the Confederate flag and insist that it doesn’t symbolize pride in slaveholding. People who use legal loopholes to fire and evict queer and trans people. People who conflate gender and sex, and use that to advocate for harming people. People who call the cops on Black people and get them murdered. People who advocate for sterilizing disabled people. People who want poor people to starve.

• Trolls. People who play devil’s advocate to get a rise out of others. People who make bigoted jokes “ironically.” People who go into conversations about people’s lived experiences in order to say vile, hateful things. People who wish death and violence on women and femmes with whom they disagree. People who threaten women and femmes with whom they disagree. People who endanger women and femmes by posting their addresses online. People who endanger activists of color by posting their addresses online.

• Creeps. Street harassers. Peeping toms. People who touch other people without asking. People who abuse children. People who abuse seniors. People who abuse disabled people. People who abuse other people. The man who abused me when I was a teen. The boy who abused me when I was not yet a teen. The other man who abused me when I was just barely no longer a teen. The man who sexually harassed and physically assaulted me on a train. The men who pretended not to see it until they felt the white woman sitting next me was in danger. The men who stopped their cars and made lewd comments to me when I was a teen. The men who make lewd comments to me now. Creeps.

Me in sensory isolation mode

• Being overstimulated. I am very sensitive to external stimuli. I am autistic and ADHD, and too many things about the world are too much for me. Sirens. Really loud laughing close to my ear. Shrieking children. The imperceptible-to-most-people flickering of fluorescent lights. Chemical scents. Perfumes. Repetitive and intrusive noises. The vibrations from too-loud bass in passing cars. Itchy tags in my clothing. The blue light of cell phones and computers. Gritty or mushy food textures. Metallic tastes in tap water. I can’t control my exposure to all of these things, and they accumulate. When I have processed enough of them in succession, they all become worse: regular noises become unbearably loud, lights blindingly bright, scents overwhelmingly powerful. The stress of being subjected to all of these things starts to manifest in my body—my jaw gets tight, I get a headache, my joints hurt, every inch of my skin crawls—and I have to retreat from the world. I keep sunglasses, noise-blocking headphones, a soothing noise app on my phone, and a chemical-filtering face mask with me so I can go in a dark room and bring myself back from the overwhelm. If I can’t escape, I will either start to snap at everyone or start to cry. It makes me feel like a toddler, and I really don’t like that.

• Peas. I dunno, they’re gross. Whatever. (Sometimes I am just like a toddler.)

Photo by Devanath on Pixabay

Tags:

I don’t actually like tagging people, because I feel weirdly obligated when I’m tagged, and I don’t like the idea of making other people feel like that. That is maybe part of the point, and I’m still not going to do it. But if you’re inspired, definitely join the challenge!

Pictures by me unless otherwise noted.

Dividers created by @javehimself, and used with thanks.