Being abused can seriously affect your ability to distinguish between “not obviously pleased” and “obviously displeased” because abusers go from Neutral to Hostile for absolutely no discernible reason, and eventually you start worrying that everyone is going to be like that and you start feeling this urge to make absolutely sure that the people you actually care about aren’t mad or upset, because to you, “there’s no evidence that they’re not angry” is the same as “there’s evidence that they are angry”
I have never heard this put into words before but it explains so much. Even as a kid I was constantly scared my mom was mad just when she was making a neutral expression cause she could go from 0 to 60 with no other warning.
Omg I didn’t realise. I do this. I’m constantly checking that people are ok and not mad.
Because that’s what my dad did. 0-rage monster in a second.
Hyper vigilance over other people’s emotional state because of previous / repeated / continuous exposure to volatile people is seriously just…the most exhausting, fucked up, draining, relationship-fucking, driving-yourself-mad thing and it is so rarely explained well or talked about at all and I’m SO GLAD this post is going around.
If someone is even slightly less than being 100% positive/happy/approving of me I pick up on it right away, even if it has absolutely nothing to do with me, and I fret and stress and am on edge. Which is so unfair because other people are allowed to have feelings and they’re allowed to express those feelings and it’s almost never about me anyway.
And then trying to explain that you expect them to be volatile assholes when they’ve never shown any evidence of being that way, and trying to say that it’s not personal, is almost impossible. Because it’s always taken personally and how can they not, really?
there’s this guy on twitter who floods the timelines of women who are getting rape threats from the alt-right with pictures of his very cute dog tucker
he calls it the ‘daily tucker service’ & ppl who are looking to drown out hate in their timelines can subscribe to it.
I just thought that you should know, in case you were losing faith in humanity.
The whole Pepsi commercial thing reminded me that people always mis-remember the famous flower in the gun barrel photo as being a young woman. It wasn’t. The photo, taken by Bernie Boston, is of George Edgerly Harris III better known by his stage name Hibiscus. He was a member of the San Francisco based radical gay liberation theater troupe the Cockettes. He died of AIDS in 1982 at the time AIDS was still referred to by the name GRID which stood for Gay Related Immuno-Deficiency. The photo was taken at a protest at the Pentagon.
I had no idea who he was, thank you.
This is one example of the Mandela Effect phenomena, where an iconic moment is reenacted with a hippy woman so many times that people think that’s the story and thus another gay man is written out of history. Thanks for the photo.
I had no idea. Wow.
This photo was taken by Bernie Boston, a black/native man who willingly stood up to a chapter of the KKK and earned their respect among other things
I get the subject is important, but please dont erase Bernie. I knew him personally and he deserves to be remembered and by only remembering the subject, a white man, you erase a black man.
@vaspider could you reblog this version too, please? I am deeply upset by Bernie’s erasure from his own work.
Reblogging for credit to the photographer, and so I can look up his work on desktop later.
We are fractious, and argumentative, and stubborn. We will argue about almost anything, passionately and at length, because if we stop we might forget to breathe.
Our hospitality is warm, and we will feed guests until they think they will pop. And then we’ll get them another plate, just to be safe.
We are practical, tied to the cycles of nature by our festivals.
Our stories and our art celebrate life, not to deny the darkness but
because it makes our candles’ light brighter by contrast.
We may not have invented dark humor, but we’ve elevated it to an art.
We have been crushed by poverty, but we are rich with traditions.
Our music is in minor keys, because we have a deep longing. We long for the home we were forced to leave, we long for the voices taken from us throughout history, and we long for the better days to come. We will help those days to come.
But somehow, it’s always the arguments that remind me how grateful I am to be a Jew and to be part of our community.
ForLoveFromFear 