anyway it’s super fucked up people treat trigger warnings as slapstick jokes but spoiler warnings as serious and sacrosanct
I was literally in group therapy today and someone said “and we’re triggered- uh, I mean like set off…by stuff” like what the fuck?? people with literal mental illness for whom the term was meant to be used by feel too embarrassed to use the word bc of what these assholes have done !! it costs exactly $0.00 to not make trigger jokes lmao bye
Your periodic reminder that in people who have been subject to threats and punishment for having emotional responses or ‘inappropriate’ facial expressions, panic attacks look different.
They may look like the person has become calmer and less involved, dismissive, even. Some people become intensely subservient and silent. Some become catatonic.
Panic doesn’t always involve screaming, crying, and obvious signs of distress. It involves an extreme form of the person’s fear response – which can be altered by circumstance, ability, and what they’ve learnt to fear.
Which is to say, it’s not your place to decide someone isn’t having a panic attack, when they’ve told you that’s what’s happening.
i’m concerned about boys with mental illnesses and eating disorders and abusive relationships and sexual assault survivor stories and self-harming tendencies who never get the attention or care or help they need because all of those things “don’t happen to men” or because “all men are horrible monsters” and i just wanna say if you’re a boy and you’re struggling with something hard, your gender doesn’t diminish or dismiss your struggles or make them any less significant or difficult and i love you and i’m here for you
If parents teach a child with any method available that the child must be
submissive
extremely obedient
silent about their needs
always content with what they get, even if it’s much less than they need
pleasing to everyone around them
giving others what they want even when it’s harmful and painful to do so
expecting punishment at merely displeasuring someone
expecting pain as soon as they don’t meet someone’s expectations
not good enough unless they make everyone else happy
putting their needs last, or not having needs at all
extremely grateful for every little bit of human decency they get
best in the world in everything, or else they’re worthless
recognizing that people who hurt them most likely do it unintentionally or even worse, out of love
accepting hurtful behaviour without calling it out, complaining about it, or even letting the perpetrator know how much they got hurt
extremely forgiving, to the point where they forgive without even getting an apology, or with the hurtful offense still going on
tolerating insults, humiliation, slurs, and hatred being directed at them
never showing outright anger, rage, resentment, or hold a grudge
never fighting for their rights
never refusing to do what’s asked of them
accepting that they might be unlovable and that nobody will ever want them
then the child is being abused. It doesn’t matter if they use violence, guilt, terror, emotional abuse, brainwashing, threats, psychological abuse, punishment, discipline, harsh language, or if they teach it all to the child politely and with explanations to why they have to be like this if they don’t wish to be a burden on society. To shape a person this way out of convenience and send them off into a world that will abuse, exploit, take advantage and destroy a person like this, is abuse. Nobody needs to be any of these things. And people who aren’t any of these things still aren’t a burden on society. Abusive parents are a burden on society, and on their own children. Children aren’t there to be controlled or used by adults. Children are humans in development. Their boundaries should not be crushed before they even have a chance to develop any.
I recently saw a post where someone commented that the incredibly charged issue they were arguing about followed them home, and they couldn’t escape it. And it reminded me why this pattern I see of people (especially young people) where the majority of their downtime is spent on tumblr, and their tumblr is mostly some form of activism, from thought out long posts to clicking reblog on a petition, is so worrying to me.
Various forms of oppression are background noise to a lot of people’s lives. Fixing that is not likely to occur within your generation. It might get better, but the chances of it completely vanishing are minuscule. Some activists go home after dealing with bigotry all day at work, and talk about oppression on tumblr. And if they sit down and watch a TV show, they think about how it’s bigoted. If they have a musician they love, they feel obliged to think about how they’re problematic.
This is awful for you, your metal health, and the people around you. You burn out, you start blowing up at people for tiny things because you’re so tired of it. It makes you miserable and unpersuasive, it’s emotionally exhausting.
And this isn’t just me saying this. When my grandpa was training to do work with the labour party, he was told that you had to have a hobby to be good at it. Because otherwise it destroys you. You have to have something in your life that is totally disconnected from the horrific things you are seeing everyday.
If you can’t find TV shows to watch because you can’t switch off the social justice analysis part of your brain, do something else your activism can’t creep into. Take up knitting. Build shit out of cans. Play the recorder. Lock yourself in your bedroom and play minecraft. Whatever you do, please, please don’t let activism and fighting oppression take over every aspect of your life.
Have a separate activism tumblr and a cat pics/memes tumblr. Or blacklist activist things on your tumblr. Set aside some time where you don’t think about how shit the world is.
You have a right and an obligation to look after yourself. Please don’t drive yourself into the ground for the sake of social justice. You can’t fight all the time, and you’ll be no good at it if you can’t take a break.
Activists (irl activists) are told to clearly separate their two main tasks which are providing help and making demands. You cannot help anyone in an environment where you are also making demands. You cannot help anyone in an environment where you are also complaining about systematic oppression or asking for change.
Tumblr completely conflates the two. The result of this is:
> Tumblr transgender activists, for instance, tell transgender people they are valid and important, then in the same breath, in the same post and on the same blogs, remind transgender people that they are unloved and unwelcome by society, along with factual proof of transphobic violence.
This is incredibly destructive. I don’t think I even need to explain why. It’s the best way to crush transgender people’s self-esteem, bar none. The message it carries is, “even those on your side know the whole world hates you”. It’s just plain dangerous.
> In so-called LGBT safe spaces on tumblr, for instance, there is near-constant bickering about straight passing privilege versus monosexual privilege versus allosexual privilege. It often escalates to absurd levels of aggressiveness (because it’s the internet, duh) and occurs nearly everywhere, making safe spaces unsafe. The solution tumblr found is to build tiny, microscopic safe spaces for each minority within the LGBT.
Because segregation fixes everything. Spoiler alert: it only makes people more afraid of each other and breeds wariness, misunderstanding and conflict.
When you want to help a marginalized community, you either provide help to individuals, OR you raise awareness about their struggles and make demands for social change. You can have a blog for each, and if you do irl activism you most likely have a separate schedule for each.
The most basic rule for helping minorities is that shelters, help lines and safe spaces should never host debates. The most basic rule of safe spaces is: everyone fitting the requirements to enter is equally welcome, no questions asked, no debate allowed on anyone’s legitimacy or identity or privilege.
Safe spaces, shelters and help lines must be happy, uplifting places where people feel welcome, loved, and important. Otherwise they’re unsafe and toxic. If you can’t provide acceptance and compassion for all members in equal measure regardless of their background, privilege or opinion, you’re not fit for the job, stay away from administrating safe spaces.
Raising awareness and making demands is something tumblr does very well an OP explains well how compassion fatigue works and how destructive activism can be, so I’m not going to dwell on it.
Just remember that not everyone has the emotional strength for it, including those in the community you’re trying to help. Most men who have sex with men, for instance, don’t want to hear about how their community makes up 40% of the french population tested positive for aids. We know, and we also know that nearly 20% of that population has aids, but we also need to think about something less dreadful from time to time. It’s a matter of survival. Also, when you’re staring at your or someone else’s misery 24/7, you become so bitter you lose the ability to help anyone. Self-preservation makes us more useful, as activists.
(Apparently a lot of tumblr activists missed the point of OP’s post, which was compassion fatigue, by a few hundred miles; and assimilated it with something like “hahaha I’m so privileged I can afford not to think about discrimination evar”. I’m not surprised.)
Great posts. I really liked the discussion of safe spaces by the second poster, since there’s an LGBTQ muslim group that I go to and recently we had a facilitator who was very debatey, and at one point cited an academic paper in response to someone’s story.
And it was weird.
Because while I definitely agree that some debate is required (especially behind the scenes) in order to make safe spaces safer for everybody, the way it was done made me feel like I was constantly being tested for how problematic I was, and that the facilitator was assuming I was problematic until proven otherwise—in part because of the contrast between their gentleness with the friends they’d invited to the space (and whose opinions they therefore already knew) and their manner with the rest of us.
Which—I’m happy to question and rethink my assumptions, but I don’t want to go to a safe space and feel like the facilitator is automatically assuming bad faith or unkindness on my part, or that I need to be carefully watched so that I don’t make the space unsafe for other participants. I mean, I’m a woman-liking-woman who wears the hijab; people make those assumptions about me (that I’m a danger to other LGBT people) all the time, even when they know my orientation. I don’t want to also face that in a safe space that’s supposed to be specifically for people like me.
This made me think a lot about safe spaces, communities like tumblr, and the sheer fact that we are all human and aren’t always going to get it rght first time round.
I am so thankful that I was exposed to this post. My training in activism didn’t include separate distinctions between providing help and demanding change. I never thought of those as being separate to begin with. So when I was running an activist space and my number 1 goal was to be as safe for marginalized identities as possible, I was operating under the philosophy that educating people on privilege was the best way to make a safe space. Even when I was personally experiencing conflict between feeling safe and educating I didn’t have the words to describe what was happening or the rift I was watching unfold.
Part of it may be that I don’t feel safe unless I am with people who I know will react out of humility and kindness if I tell them they are doing something to hurt me. I still haven’t figured out if that is a healthy way of experiencing safety or not. But it makes things difficult because people who have the best intentions will still bring societal violence into spaces that are supposed to be safe purely through ignorance that has been fostered and encouraged by society. So it isn’t that I am upset with the person for displaying what they have been taught to display as much as I feel scared when I don’t know how someone will react if I tell them that something they displayed was violent or oppressive towards me.
I definitely am interested in other peoples thoughts on this because these dynamics have been really difficult and painful. And I am also wondering if that means that education is generally not safe or a safe space. Because I would really hope it could be and I want to know if it can’t so I can do what I can to stop perpetuating this issue.
Same. I have had the same experience and issues and am having the same thoughts. Anyone who as more know-how in community building, safe spaces, and social justice education giving guidance would be fantastic.
She was identified Thursday, the same day the death of a Flint Water Treatment Plant foreman who was wanted for questioning in connection with the crisis was announced.
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