I wont lie to you. I could try and do this Tumblr alone and have it get lost amongst random searches. But that’s not what this was created for. I want to help as many victims and survivors as possible. To do that I need you all. I wont ask you to follow me. All I ask is that you pass this on. I am here for you. I do know what you’re going through. Lets help each other.
I see a lot of people (especially disabled people) hate themselves for struggling with things that they think of as easy, often along these lines:
Person: I need to do this thing.
Person: It’s not hard. This is so easy. Why don’t I just do it?
Person: I know I need to do the thing. It’s been weeks. What’s wrong with me? This isn’t hard. I need to just do it already.
If you’re having trouble doing something, the thing you’re struggling to do is not actually easy. There is no objective difficulty scale. Tasks aren’t inherently easy or difficult — it depends on the person and the situation. Different people find different things easy and hard. Sometimes you will struggle with things that other people find easy. That doesn’t mean you’re failing to do an easy thing. It means that for you, the task is hard.
Sometimes things that are hard at first become easier with practice, or become easier when you learn new skills. Sometimes things never get any easier. Sometimes solutions that work for people who can do the thing without much trouble will work for you too; sometimes you might need support that other people don’t need.
Sometimes you might need to find an alternative to doing the thing. Sometimes the only solution is to have someone else help you do the thing or do the thing for you. It doesn’t matter if you think it ’should’ be hard or easy, if you’re having trouble doing something, that means the thing you’re trying to do is hard. (And sometimes, it might mean that the thing is impossible.)
Calling something easy does not make it easy, and you can’t make hard things easy by hating yourself. Hard things become much more possible when you accept that they are hard, stop trying to overcome the difficulty through sheer force of will, and seek out solutions that will work for you.
Tl;dr: If you’re saying to yourself “Why haven’t I done this easy thing?!”, the thing is probably not actually easy.
I don’t know what’s going on, but I feel the worst I’ve felt in weeks, possibly months. This week started out with some stuff that upset me, but it wasn’t all that bad. I guess I let it fester and build up, which wasn’t great. And then just when I was going to spend a couple nights packing, work exploded and I pulled an all nighter the night before the day before we moved, which I was supposed to spend packing, and instead spent working send then sleeping. And now I haven’t taken my meds for a day or two.
I just had to leave a little get together because I almost blew up on people. I came out to the car to leave. Instead I basically screamed and cried and punched the seats because I just hate myself so much and I’m feeling incredibly unhappy with my life. I’m so angry and upset and I want to lash out and I don’t know what to do to fix it.
Now I’m sitting here in the car and I don’t know what to do. Reaction Junkie is still at the party and I want to ask him to come here but I don’t want to ruin his fun because I’m always ruining his fun and I just hate myself so much.
I fully expect this to be the one and only post I ever do about Amber Rose.
Occasionally, Amber Rose surfaces in pop-culture as a trending topic. I don’t look into her often, but when I do usually I understand where she’s coming from, if not agree with the point she’s trying to make.
Recently, Kanye West called her into a twitter-fight between himself and Wiz Khalifa–and she shut it down entirely. And as amusing as that is and no matter how much I identify with the things she said and does – there’s one thing about her that bothers me.
Yet she clearly appears to have features heavily associated with blackness: full lips, an olive complexion (relatively common in black people), a thick, very curvy body, and a large round butt. The icing on the cake: she has an African mom. She still says, “I’m not black.”
Many of the descriptors she uses for herself are nationalities that do not define her race. It’s as if stating countries which a possess white populations and/or have substantial European influence is a free pass on blackness – As if black people didn’t live in Portugal, Scotland, Ireland or Cape Verde. As if her mom didn’t wasn’t African.
But rest assured: her mother is African and she is brown-skinned.
Cape Verde, where Amber Rose’s mother is from, is an island off the coast of Western Africa. It’s an African Country. Africans have been there since the Portuguese trafficked African (black) slaves from the African continent in 1456.
And because of the heavy European influence and racial mixing in Cape Verde, they’re considered a mixed people – And According to Amber Rose, she views herself as Creole:
“With my family, they feel like they’re more superior or better than an African American because we’re Creole and we have culture and that’s something I battle with most of my life.” (source)
Amber Rose was born and raised in America. Her mother is a brown-skinned (black) African woman, she has a white father (Irish and Italian descent), and because she has light skin, she has people defending her as non-black.
In the United States (and many other places), any black ancestry easily qualifies a person as black – especially if that person is not white passing and especially if that person has an African mother. Amber Rose is not white passing. Her mother is African. She openly participates in black culture. And still, she hesitates to even use the descriptor “black” in reference to herself. In every interview I’ve found and every quote, she is quick to claim her white ancestry but does not even utter “black” or “African.”
She denies it.
I think it’s wild because one of my best friends @shakotancisco is Cape Verdean. My mans is PROUD of his heritage. How can Amber Rose be of such beautiful heritage and hate herself so much to deny her own blackness?
This is one of the reasons why I can’t ride with Amber Rose. I know a lot of my followers may take issue with this, but aside from her apparent love for her child, nearly everything else she does seems to be nothing more than her making herself feel comfortable about her own delusions and justifying her behavior in the process. To me, it seems like her anti slut-shaming and sexual liberation crusade is less about standing up for (primarily) women (but men too), is a matter of cleaning up her own public perception.
Amber Rose makes herself the “other,” or, “the exception.” It’s as if she’s saying, “I’m not really black, I’m just a perfect mixture of races,” and this further supports the fetishization of mixed women. You mentioned that her reality was that she may not see love first and that using men for her own personal gain was just what she had to do. I can see that and it makes sense. However, in her case, it seems like she revels in it, almost maliciously, until someone calls her on it and she reverts back to the anti slut-shaming argument.
Though problematic, I enjoy her clapbacks and I think she’s hilarious in her pettiness. I liked (past tense) that she was providing a voice to those who own their sexuality. I liked (also past tense) that she was making a point to create her own lane and challenge the notion that she was a ‘creation’ of Kanye West. And I really liked (yup, past tense again) that she handled herself through the nonsense and media slander with grace and dignity.
But then, she goes on to deny her blackness and it immediately makes me distrustful of her. Without her clapbacks, is she much different than Raven or Stacey Dash? Is she even worth taking seriously if she denies who she really is? Is her carefully crafted persona nothing more than armor that she wears to protect her own insecurities about her identity? I just don’t buy it.
As a non-sex worker–I do not critique sex work which includes dancing, stripping, partial and full services.
She has sold/possibly still sells sexual fantasy/services/sexual appeal as a living – and she’s gotten a lot of money for it. If she revels in it, she has a right to. If someone is rewarded with money or items for sex acts/sexual performance/sex appeal, then that becomes a justified connection. In this entire side of the house, it’s incredibly important to note that if she does have a particularly toxic view of using men for money, it did not happen in a vacuum.
“black” is literally a descriptor used to oppress people so it makes sense that some people would distance themselves from it–not to mention that this would have the additional trial of facing anti-blackness in everywhere they went.
You seem to be particularly upset by Amber Roses’s statement about using seductive skills on her significant others for cash, and that’s understandable.
Is it upsetting? Yes. Is it manipulative to seduce a man into financial gain? Also yes. Is it morally unsettling? Sure. Is that the nature of her work as a dancer? As it turns out, yes. Have her former lovers complained about using them? None that I can find.
Starting to realize the reason I find Soraya so relatable is, because I struggled with feeling like I was inherently evil due to my autism and ADHD. Her learning to accept her powers kind of parallels my struggles to accept my neurodiversity, although thankfully without a kingdom at stake.
