inktvlekken:

“Sometimes you’re 23 and standing in the kitchen of your house making breakfast and brewing coffee and listening to music that for some reason is really getting to your heart. You’re just standing there thinking about going to work and picking up your dry cleaning. And also more exciting things like books you’re reading and trips you plan on taking and relationships that are springing into existence. Or fading from your memory, which is far less exciting. And suddenly you just don’t feel at home in your skin or in your house and you just want home but ‘Mom’s’ probably wouldn’t feel like home anymore either. There used to be the comfort of a number in your phone and ears that listened everyday and arms that were never for anyone else. But just to calm you down when you started feeling trapped in a five-minute period where nostalgia is too much and thoughts of this person you are feel foreign. When you realize that you’ll never be this young again but this is the first time you’ve ever been this old. When you can’t remember how you got from sixteen to here and all the same feel like sixteen is just as much of a stranger to you now. The song is over. The coffee’s done. You’re going to breathe in and out. You’re going to be fine in about five minutes.”

— Kalyn RoseAnne (via extramadness)

(via eldritchscreech)

jasonhorton:

ALT

Pass the gravy

(via eldritchscreech)

star-anise:

hater-of-terfs:

This is something we as radicals don’t talk about much but which has come up a lot in my experience:

You deserve mutual aid. You’re not too privileged for it, you’re not stealing it from people who need it more - you have a right to use community resources just as much as anyone else

I’ve seen food rot, clothes and books be forgotten in storage, because the people volunteering at or supporting these projects don’t think the resources are for them. Then those same volunteers will go out and put money they don’t have into the capitalist system to buy the resources they could’ve gotten for free

You’re thinking like a charity. You’re drawing a line between the people giving resources and the people taking them, which inevitably leads to a feeling of separation and eventually superiority, unconsciously seeing yourself as a savior coming in and helping the less fortunate. That alienates the people you’re helping from you, and results in neither side fully recognizing the other as human and the same as them

There’s a reason we say “solidarity not charity”. There’s a reason mutual aid is called mutual. Because by lifting each other up, we all become stronger. In solidarity and mutual aid, there is no separation between giver and receiver, because everyone involved is benefited by it

But that doesn’t happen if the resources aren’t used! Get out of the capitalist scarcity mindset - give freely and take freely, because by being lifted up you help us all

And I mean, this is largely because the charity mindset is so entrenched in our society. In the neoliberal world, our major mental map for “how to help poor or marginalized people” is for a rich person to appear, hand out largesse, and go home again. People literally think that the “best charities” are the ones with the lowest overhead costs, because we assume that people who work for charities are wealthy and can afford to volunteer or accept a pittance. It’s not like people who work to make the world better need actual substantive help to feed themselves; they’re just wealthy people practicing noblesse oblige. (Oh god, the trouble I’ve had getting organizations I’ve worked at, which have the explicit goal of helping disabled and mentally ill people, to accommodate my disability and mental illness as an employee…)

A very basic part of how we maintain class distinctions is to get people to sort themselves into “haves” and “have nots” and shaming people who transgress and admit they need help while also aspiring to prosperity and stability. The conservative hatred of “accepting handouts” is based on the idea that accepting help is inherently degrading. That we can pity those people and give them our hand-me-downs, but we don’t ever want to join them. No, we’re better than that.

A lot of liberal guilt is based in anxiety over the have/have not boundary. “I’m so guilty I’ve been privileged I’m given so much, how dare I say I have it bad, I must atone for my needs and vulnerabilities.” It focuses you entirely on yourself and your difference from the people you want to help, not on your position inside a larger network of people who all have needs, and on how we can engineer systems to meet those needs in various ways.

(via eldritchscreech)