It’s so healing to wake up in a silent house and silently make your own coffee or tea and enjoy the beautifully intricate fullness of the morning silence while remaining calm and collected and unbothered by all outer and inner noise and it’s so low-key elevating and pacifying to rejoice in the silent atmosphere of your own house and just silently block the rest of the world…it’s a slice of heaven
salem was very trully representative of the gays. Like i watched my fair share of lgbt movie but this cat held more of my identity and culture than any gay character on tv
“I was working as a prep cook at a BBQ joint in Harlem. I got off work early one day, and I discovered my wife with another man. That was the beginning of all this. I’d been with her for twenty-one years. I was devastated. I got right back on the bus and headed back to the city. I went straight to the bars on 42nd Street. I got wasted every day. I lost my wallet, my phone, my contacts. I didn’t want to do nothing. I just said ‘F it.’ I’ve been out on the streets for eight months. When it’s time to rest, I find a place to sleep. But I spend most of my time here on this block. These are the best people on this block. I’ve never experienced so many good people in my life. Some of them help me out every single day. They say: ‘What are you doing out here? We’ve never met anyone like you.’ Lily and her daughter brought the whole family to meet me on Thanksgiving. I felt like a celebrity. Then there’s Cheryl with the glasses who just walked by a couple minutes ago. Love her. John and his wife, love them too. David and Michael are the best. And what’s up to my man Sean from the beauty parlor. Shout out to T and Marianne. So many good friends on this block. But they aren’t going to see me much longer because I found a program that’s going to give me a place to stay, and a job cleaning the streets. I’m done with this life. I don’t belong here. And I know my grandkids miss Grandpa. So if you don’t see me here soon, you can say: ‘He’s done it! He’s gone!’ But I’m going to shock everybody. Cause I’m coming back with Christmas cards.”
“I’m on the way to buy soft drinks for my mother. I also fetch water, and sweep, and help her wash clothes. She calls me ‘boss’ because I work so hard, but I love to help her because she cares for me so much. She buys me clothes. She reads me storybooks. She sings me gospel songs. She helps me with my homework. She gives me medicine when I’m sick. One time she baked my friend a cake because his parents couldn’t afford any presents. I’m going to buy her a house one day. She’s very dark and beautiful. I really have a wonderful mother.” (Accra, Ghana)
the older i get the more disgusted by diet culture i become.
there’s a reason it targets young girls. there’s a reason it hinges on making grown women look tiny and helpless and weak. there’s a reason that it is normalized to the extent that what is ostensibly not a healthy act is seen as being a “good” choice and something to be proud of.
young people are just completely submerged in it. adults forget that kids pick up on fucking everything and they hear their parents and their teachers and everyone on this planet not eating red meat this week or on juice cleanses or denying denying denying themselves (”oh good for you! i’d never be able to be so well-behaved”). they learn really, really fast that “fat” is a funny, not-good, close-to-a-swear word - to the extent that my usually well-behaved five year olds will devolve into crazy giggles because i asked “pass me one of the fat markers please”. they don’t react like that to anything else, just “fat” which they know is bad/off-limits/terrible.
and we pretend we’re so confused by obesity and by the skyrocketing eating disorder rate - a rate of diagnosed eating disorders, mind you, since disordered eating is now essential to many american eating traditions - and we blame millenials or GMOs or whatever won’t make us look a multi-billion dollar industry in the eye and realize. they literally teach us from a young age what is essentially a restriction/denial cycle that is very close to a binge cycle. they teach us “good” and “bad” and “safe” foods but don’t supply the money for us to obtain those foods (and god forbid you live in a food desert) while also selling us Magical Cures For Magical Transformations.
and of course it works. you teach people to crash diet and lo and behold their metabolism becomes entirely dependent on your cycle of starvation/refeeding. the statistic that most people gain back the weight they lost isn’t because people are these terrible people have no self control (but they sell that idea to you, don’t they), it’s that their metabolism was trashed and the way they look at food cannot change in the span of a crash diet - if it takes someone with an eating disorder seven years to recover, we understand that, but if someone overweight gains back their lost weight it’s “a shame”. and the diet culture wins both sides, i want you to understand that. they make money of of you either way. they know that you’re gaining the weight back but fucking scrambling - they know you’ll try to buy their product because last time it worked to buy atkins or weight watchers, and they know that when you’re losing the weight, well, goddamn, you’re going to be an advertising board for them because we teach each other that this is coffee-break material, isn’t it.
and we sell each other on it. we say, “oh this worked for me, you’ve gotta try it.” none of the people we speak to are nutritionists, but everyone on the internet has a degree in medicine, so don’t worry, if you step outside in a bikini and are not unhealthy levels of skinny (oh but it’s healthy if it’s the right kind of skinny), you will be reminded to lose weight. we keep our women running on such low levels of carbs/calories/fats that they’re permanently exhausted, weak, emotionally drained - and then we crow women are just crazy. meanwhile men get the opposite treatment that is unhealthy in a different way – the obsession with masculinity through food, of all things, that salad is “rabbit food” and that a real “man’s meal” is red meat and beer.
and god forbid you say, “this shit is fucking predatory, it’s evil, it’s controlling people’s bodies” because you’ll get fifty-seven “okay, fatty” comments that miss the point completely, because the companies are really, really smart and they learned: if you call someone fat, you can ignore them completely. and anyone who isn’t “into dieting” is therefore fat and incapable of healthy eating. healthy eating, is of course, defined by the company - but hey! you can help that person realize they’re just a stupid/dumb/ignorant fatty. or if they’re somehow magically not fat, you can tell them, “well, one day you will be.”
and i just know. i know. this shit will continue. it always does.
“Usually, trauma is seen as something that needs to be healed. Something to be “processed” - to be dealt with privately, in therapy or among a circle of close friends, to be addressed as a problem and solved. To be neatly and tidily compartmentalized, separated from oneself, shrunk smaller and smaller until it no longer affects one directly, until it is altogether stored away. “Your trauma should not define you,” clinicians will say.
If an event or circumstance is harmful to or painful for a trauma victim or survivor, it is framed as “triggering.” It couldn’t possibly be that the event or circumstance is in of itself harmful, and that an individual’s trauma has provided them with insight into the event’s harmfulness. No, the issue is that the victim has not dealt with their trauma effectively enough, that their trauma is still affecting them.
In this sense, trauma is framed as a singular and isolated incident, as an exception to the rule. The world is a generally safe, just place, but victims and survivors have been falsely convinced by their traumatic incident that the world is unjust and unsafe. It is not possible that trauma could be an ever-present constant, perpetually occurring in every sphere of life.
Not only are experiences of victimization not seen as expertise, but they are seen as pathology. As something that causes victims to see the world less clearly, to think less rationally.
Yet for me personally, my victimhood has only allowed me to see the world more clearly. I grew up in a fairly conservative, capitalist family and shared and embodied those values for a large part of my life. I had been taught, and so it seemed to me, that the world was a fair place, and people who were economically marginalized (for example) were just not working hard enough. My victimhood fundamentally rattled my trust in the safety or justice of the world, and as a result I increasingly developed empathy for other victimized populations. My victimhood did not cloud my judgment or get in the way of my thinking clearly; rather, it radicalized me.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not advocating for victimization or attempting to justify victimizing people because it gives them expertise.
But I wonder how our communities and contexts might change if, instead of always asking people how they plan to treat or heal from their trauma, we gave them more opportunities to share what they have learned about the world, about the human condition, about power structures, about the impact of ongoing and pervasive systemic issues. What if, instead of asking, “What happened to you [as an individual]?” we gave victims more chances to situate their traumatic experiences within a broader framework of systemic injustice and contextual power imbalances that they now have insight into?”
