Hey friends.
It feels uncomfortable writing this post and I know that I don’t owe anyone an explanation or justification for how I use my own blogs, but I feel like I need to say and acknowledge a few things for my own sake.
Before October 7th, 2023, this was one of the official side blogs for my bear blog @bearotonin-international, where I could post more candidly and be silly with my bear posting. After October 7, I started using this blog to post about Palestine and the genocide in Gaza because I felt I needed to. A lot of stuff happened in my real life, and I stopped posting here almost entirely over a year ago for a lot of different personal reasons.
I stopped running bearotonin for the entirety of 2024 as I was barely able to come on tumblr and was focused primarily on trying to survive a lot of terrible things going on in my life. A few months ago, I restarted bearotonin again because I decided that I needed to try to reclaim some of the parts of my identity and my life—like my sense of humor, silliness, joy and whimsy, and choosing to spread kindness—that I had lost.
But until now, I haven’t been able to make myself post to this blog even though I’ve wanted to.
Because I know many of you followed me because I was posting about Palestine and the genocide. Because it feels wrong to not post and talk about those things and the other terrible things going on in the world. But it also feels like I’m drowning most days, barely managing to keep myself alive and I know endlessly posting about unspeakably horrific things online does not help me get back to a stable place and health where I am able to do more in my real life.
I bear witness to and post about Palestine and other social justice issues on intagram. I am politically active and involved in my real life (I will not be elaborating further on details as I have come to take digital security a lot more seriously lately, given the rise of fascist repression and authoritarianism and AI use for digital surveillance— and tumblr is public non secure unencrypted social media site). But right now my health is extremely fragile and I am doing what I can to rebuild it to a place where I can go back to being more active in my real life.
All that’s to say that I have not, nor will I ever forget about Palestine. But I desperately want to reach a point where I am healthy and stable enough to do the things I care about in my real life again. And I cannot do that if I’m constantly and endlessly scrolling through and reading and curating a blog filled with endless doom and horror and suffering and the most terrible things humanity has to show both here and on Instagram. I need tumblr to be an outlet where I can recharge and regain my strength and recover.
So the TLDR of this very long unnecessary ramble: going forward, this blog is going to be a mix of its former pre-October 7th non-current events content as well as some current events content on Palestine and other social justice issues.
If that’s not what you want to see, please unfollow
