i. how big is your grief today? how soft do her little grey fingers push against your spine? can you breathe past it, or is she deep in your mouth now; crushing the bird in your windpipe.
ii. how funny - emily dickinson writes hope is a thing with feathers. on a tuesday, i turn to you and say - this makes sense. grief has always felt feathered, too. gentle cat paws on an august afternoon.
iii. where is your grief today? does she nap in the tender of your breast, or is she plunging through the floor of your hips? is she holding your hand through the shower. is she dragging you in a perfect tango - down, down through the floor.
iv. someone asks me how i’m doing in that way. like grief is holding her hands over my eyes. i tell my therapist i feel lost. it is another way of saying - the grief is leading, and i must follow.
v. when will you be able to let go? and, my love, what would you even hold on to instead?
Hey shout out to all the low-empathy people out there who had to deliberately learn how to comfort people
Everything I know about how to make people feel better I learned from books and magazines. I took diligent notes, marking down when to offer advice and when to just say “that sucks”. I built scripts and tested them until they worked. I learned where my limits were and how to help people without crossing them.
None of this just “developed naturally” as I grew up. I did it consciously and with purpose, because even before I knew I had low empathy I knew there was something different about me, and I knew I’d have to go about it differently if I wanted to fill in the gaps.
Just because you use scripts and deliberate methods to help people doesn’t mean you don’t really care or that all your soothing words are empty. You just learned in a different way and that’s okay.
On the contrary, that shows how much we cared, ‘cause we took the deliberate effort to learn that in order to comfort our friends
I think many of y’all need to be educated about the concept of lateral aggression because too many of y’all think that being marginalized yourself gives you a free pass to act completely fucked up towards other marginalized people, even ones in your own community that you share marginalization with, because you’re under the false impression that your behavior isn’t harmful on any meaningful level and that’s not true. Not in the slightest.
Too many of y’all wield your marginalized identity like a shield to try to minimize and justify your behavior and that is causing active harm to the rest of us while simultaneously making it easier for our oppressors to continue oppressing us. Knock it off and get over your bully complexes. The world is not your playground and your behavior is causing tangible harm to those you come in contact with.
The lack of self awareness of some of the people reblogging this is so fucking wild, holy shit.
So let me make this clear:
• If you’re a queer/lgbt person who is exclusionary towards people on the ace and aro spectrums, bi people, pansexual people, nonbinary people, people who use neopronouns or xenogender labels, etc, this is about you.
• Going with the point above, if you’re a queer/lgbt person who engages in transmisogyny (looking at you terfs) or any other form of transphobia, this is about you.
• If you’re a non black poc who regularly shits on black people while trying to bring attention to issues your community faces, this is about you.
• If you’re black and think you can say whatever the fuck you want about other non black races just because you’re not white, this is about you.
• If you’re a neurodivergent person who shits on physically disabled people or vice versa, this is about you.
• If you’re a radfem, especially of the swerf variety, this is about you.
• Non Christians who engage in antisemetism, this is about you.
The list could go on. The point is that regardless of your own marginalization, you still have the ability to contribute to the marginalization of others. Your marginalized identity doesn’t make you immune to needing to check yourself for whatever privilege you do have. Literally every single one of us has work to do on ourselves when it comes to tearing down systems of oppression. The responsibility is not only on our oppressors and those with privilege over us.
