→ Comparing Yourself To Other Survivors

strugglingtobeheard:

communityandresistance:

When you meet or read about other survivors whose assault seems much worse than yours, you might decide that you should forget about recovery and count your blessings instead. According to Johnathan Shay “Placing one’s self in a ‘hierarchy of suffering’ to one’s disadvantage is widespread among trauma survivors” (2002, 79). Even if another person suffered more injuries than you did, you are entitled to grieve for your own pain, every bit of it. You are important, too, and you owe it to yourself to recover as much as possible. 

Jealousy is another feeling you may encounter. “Why are they recovering so much faster than I am?” or “How did they recover without any help but I need as much help as I can get?”

Stop! Comparing yourself unfavorably to others is a form of self-violence. Some people have a more emotionally or physically reactive central nervous system than do others. Therefore, they respond more intensely to emotional and physical pain, which can prolong their recovery. Such emotional reactivity may be the combined result of genetic inheritance, upbringing, background, or prior life experiences. Yet in our society, where myths like “nobody can hurt you unless you let them,” are widespread, emotional sensitivity is often viewed as a personal failing. Myths and stereotypes about “strong women of color” can serve to make it physically and emotionally difficult to connect with pain from these experiences. Emotionally sensitive and emotionally expressive people are often devalued. Assure yourself that you are worthy of healing, that your emotions matter and are not a burden, and that it is ok and often necessary to put yourself first and make yourself your number one priority.

Its also important to remember that a survivor with progress in one area may have problems in another. The one who seems “normal” may be hurting in ways you cannot see, may be in denial about some issues, or may not want to expose her issues for fear for burdening others. Futhermore, the degree of a woman’s recovery is highly dependent on factors outside of herself that are part of her recovery environment: her financial status, her access to good medical and physiological care, the amount of emotional support in their life, and the severity of current stress in their life.

azurea:

(by leonhard.kätzel)

“We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.” – Charles Bukowski (via troubled)

→ The trans asterisk

artoftransliness:

life-in-neon:

Lately I’ve seen people explaining this simply as “it’s a more inclusive term” and leaving it at that. But there’s a reason it’s seen as more inclusive: the asterisk. And that asterisk makes an important change to the meaning.

An asterisk is a wildcard character in computing. It means “in place of this asterisk, what follows can be any number of other characters or nothing”.

Most often it’s used in search functions within documents or for files on a PC. Any time you hit Ctrl+F and don’t choose “search for complete word only”, you’re telling the computer to search for *whateveryoutyped*. In english, you’re searching for (any characters)whateveryoutyped(any characters).

It’s also used frequently in programming for text input form validation using something called regular expressions(which is a mind-bending syntax for a beginner and I recommend not googling it unless you’re big on autodidactism(which you SHOULD google)).

As it relates to trans*, if you were to search for “trans” in a system that defaults to not including wildcards (in other words, you checked “Search for complete word only”), it would only find:

trans

But if you searched trans*, it would recognize:

trans
transgender
transsexual
transportation
transducer
transformation
transhuman 

You get the idea.

It started as a somewhat-geeky way of being inclusive of multiple identities at once without listing them individually. For the identities typically included, I think “trans” works pretty well without the asterisk, but for those who do use it, now you know.

Really cool explanation of “trans*,” how it came about, and why it is used. 

Christ the Redeemer

“If a man has an apartment stacked to the ceiling with newspapers, we call him crazy. If a woman has a trailer house full of cats, we call her nuts. But when people pathologically hoard so much cash that they impoverish an entire nation, we put them on the cover of Forbes magazine and pretend that they are heroes.” – B. Lester (via dank-potion)

WTF campaign launch last night so much fun for a great cause =D

The organisation I work for Rainbow Youth launched an amazing campaign last night called WTF to raise the awareness of inequality and discrimination of people due to their sexuality or gender identity.
Check out the  WTF website and the awesome video for more info =]