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The reality, of course, is that being traumatised does make you a difficult person to get along with. Because you suddenly get angry, you suddenly shut down or you space out. But more difficult is to live that life: not being able to trust yourself. And there’s always this internal pressure to step up to the plate and keep functioning. So the next piece is a profound feeling of shame about yourself and your reactions.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/sep/20/trauma-trust-and-triumph-psychiatrist-bessel-van-der-kolk-on-how-to-recover-from-our-deepest-pain

You can’t be responsible for someone else’s inability to grow. So take comfort in the fact that you offered a new perspective of information and you did so with love and respect, and then you walk away." “We have a saying in the movement: Some people you can work with and some people you can work around. But the thing that I want to emphasize is that the calling-in practice means you always keep a seat at the table for them if they come back.

Prof. Loretta J. Ross @ Smith College

'but I don’t want to go among mad people...' 'oh, you can’t help that, we’re all mad here!'

alice in wonderland

every day, just trying to make it through.

having faith in tomorrow and next year.

just trying.

I want to be very clear when I say this: part of advocating for people is not necessarily expecting something in return from them. To expect reward and praise for doing what is morally right, given historical and present understandings around power and oppression, calls into question one’s motivation for getting into the fight for justice. If one is looking to be applauded for drawing attention to disparities and/or inequitable practices that limit the liberation of people, then they may be in the wrong proverbial “lane.” I think about this often; it’s one of the reasons why I struggle with receiving accolades for doing what I feel to be right. However, struggling with receiving support or recognition doesn’t mean that I don’t want or need it from time to time. I say this because I know that I cannot fight for justice every single day on my own; this fight is a collective one.

Tynesha M. McCullers with the Black Youth Project http://blackyouthproject.com/make-sure-you-affirm-and-support-risk-takers-in-public-not-in-private-with-microappreciations/?fbclid=IwAR0p8L6O5hHp8zQ2IjxVMproBYh1L-hMFrcpcwzfgtUSuu44L31R9Ot9xDU

Another important way in which the erotic connection functions is the open and fearless underlining of my capacity for joy, in the way my body stretches to music and opens into response, harkening to its deepest rhythms so every level upon which I sense also opens to the erotically satisfying experience whether it is dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem, or examining an idea. That self-connection shared is a measure of the joy which I know myself to be capable of feeling, a reminder of my capacity for feeling. And that deep and irreplaceable knowledge of my capacity for joy comes to demand from all of my life that it be lived within the knowledge that such satisfaction is possible, and does not have to be called marriage, nor god, nor an afterlife. This is one reason why the erotic is so feared, and so often relegated to the bedroom alone, when it is recognized at all. For once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of. Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives. And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.

Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider

Difference will always be accepted to a degree. As long as the norm is upheld, it will always be good to have a few exceptions, especially when those who enter that space clearly mark themselves as different. But she is not one of those. She doesn’t want to speak in the name of her difference. She doesn’t want to teach you how to know her, how to write about her. She won’t speak for all indigenous people, for all black people, for all queer people, for all autistics. She won’t explain. She will resist citing you. She isn’t interested in “according to.” She won’t be aligned, she won’t be colonized. Not because she is a rebel, but precisely because she operates in another mode, in the mode of the more-than [human] that listens to undercommon ways of cawing. From that perspective of this more-than [human] always yet to be composed, to be speciated, she won’t presume the symmetry rebellion presupposes. She won’t presume neurotypicality.

Erin Manning, “Me Lo Dijo Un Pajarito: Neurodiversity, Black Life, and the University as We Know It“

Mattie wanted something else. It was simple and elusive, as vague and insistent as that. Something else was never listed as one of the reasons why people left home, only the appalling and the verifiable--the boll weevil, lynching, the white mob, the chain gang, rape, servitude, debt peonage; yet the inchoate, what you wanted but couldn't name, the resolute, stubborn desire for an elsewhere and an otherwise that had yet to emerge clearly, a notion of the possible whose outlines were fuzzy and amorphous, exerted a force no less powerful and tenacious. Why else pick up and head off to a place where you were a stranger, tolerated at best, but most often unwanted and reviled?

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments by Saidiya Hartman

“On Whiteness”

By Ken Gonzales-Day

https://kengonzalesday.com/on-whiteness/

To return to love, to get the love we always wanted but never had, to have the love we want but are not prepared to give, we seek romantic relationships. We believe these relationships, more than any other, will rescue and redeem us. True love does have the power to redeem but only if we are ready for redemption. Love saves us only if we want to be saved.

bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

when our parents are the ones who need protection

when we need to protect our parents

from knowing

Whiteness, then, is a political project. It is distinct from, but often acts in concert with, the political projects of making and sustaining nation, ethnicity, and ethnic nationalisms. Whiteness is a political project and it is also a logic, by which I mean it is a calculus, a way of sorting oneself and others into categories of those who must be protected and those who are, or soon will be, expendable.

Christina Sharpe, “Lose your kin” https://thenewinquiry.com/lose-your-kin/

how about “diversity” as a framework

of violence?

In other words, what I am trying to say, why I am taking this single point, is to show the ways in which the issue can be evaded. White society can either say you have had no history or, where they see an element of civilization in their terms, they can say that was not yours, either by saying it outright or ignoring it... But I want to move on from there because I don't feel that we should accept these categories that have been established by European writers. These categories are established simply by looking at European society as it has existed, extracting out the elements which they consider to be meaningful in that society, and then judging the rest of the world with these standards as though these are universal criteria. It is what I call cultural egocentrism. These fellows have no concept of judging any culture by attempting to get out of their own. They base themselves solidly in their own limited perspectives and then you judge everybody else by that.

Walter Rodney

Let's all wear afros, let's put on African clothes. Fine. But that doesn't mean we are not going to struggle. The system still has to be broken before we can express ourselves in any fundamental way.

Walter Rodney, “African History in the Service of the Black Liberation”

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