#radical vulnerability

[sweetarmoredbeast]

The point is to get your work done, and your work is to change the world. But the world will only be changed by the mind and the heart that is not afraid of its own desire.

- James Baldwin

[jameshurleyhateblog]

This is mostly a note to myself, but I'm posting it for radical vulnerability reasons and am open to kind advice from anyone who has any to give. Content warning for mention of weed (in the context of sobriety).

----

I need to learn how to sit with myself. To be bored, without reaching for something to escape through. I've been sober for a month and the escapism during that time has helped, but now I need to shift away from distraction.

It's tough, because my therapist and I have discovered that my brain has its own little schedule that tends to cause me to shutdown in the evenings (which makes sense for Trauma Reasons), and getting high used to distract from that. Since getting sober, it's been a time for mindless scrolling, video games, and trying to excessively plan little details of my life -- anything to keep myself from shutting down, or my thoughts from bubbling up.

But it's not sustainable. I'm always doing three or four things, which means I'm basically never present. I can't... think, anymore. I don't feel much. It's like I'm on autopilot, all the time, even when I really don't want to be.

I miss having feelings. Even the bad ones, because at least I could use those for art or writing or whatever. Now, everything is just kinda leveled out. Flat.

I imagine eventually it will get easier to not be constantly distracting myself from, uh, myself... But I have to get through the hard parts first.

Basically: ugh.

[demonicintegrity]

Re: the whole discussion of radical vulnerability and what information you choose to disclose about yourself

You don’t have to disclose your mental illness/disabilities.

I mean it. I truly do.

I know theres a big wave of neurodivergent folk disclosing their journey and experiences and reaching out to other ND folk who relate, and that’s great! I totally understand the reason and value of sharing experiences but you don’t have to. I 100% get the appeal of telling these things about yourself so you can hopefully reach other people who also know what you’re struggling with. I also 1000% understand how invaluable talking/drawing/writing about your experience can be to those who are scared/confused about these parts about themselves. But you don’t have to do any of that.

You don’t have to tell people you struggle with suicidal thoughts and severe depression, you don’t have to advertise on your blog you have this or that disorder. You can simply just say your neurodivergent, or don’t even disclose that.

Hell, esp on other platforms like Facebook or Twitter, advertising that stuff while starting your career out might actually harm prospects. I wish it wasn’t the case but ableism and it’s shitty judgement is real and has consequences.

All in all, like I’ve been saying, you don’t owe anyone any information about yourself. It’s is entirely okay (and honestly probably safer) to be a blog/account that people don’t really know a whole lot about the person who’s running it.

[anarchist-caravan]

There is a big difference between being vulnerable as a ways of bonding and going through the most gritty trauma details of One's past.

Tact, time and place together with trust mediates it. For some it is easier to open up directly, such as myself, but it is not a default of being vulnerable.

[jupitertouchedher]

[radicaltransfeminismzine]

Nat Raha - Transfeminine Brokenness, Radical Transfeminism

An essay published in the South Atlantic Quarterly (116.3), July 2017.

The affects of transfeminine life and their relationship to the material conditions undergirding such life are undertheorized in transgender studies and queer studies. This creative and critical essay conceptualizes transfeminine brokenness through negative experiences and emotions, drawing connections between such negative states to transmisogyny and material precarity. The essay intends to politicize transfeminine brokenness for a radical transfeminism. It argues that the material basis of transfeminine brokenness involves the marginalization of the labor of trans women and trans feminine people within a radicalized and gendered division of labor under capitalism alongside transmisogyny within queer, trans, and feminist spaces and communities.

“To (at best) be bearers of civil rights and socially or micropolitically disqualified as bearers of knowledge is nothing new. It is nothing new for trans femmes as it is nothing new for people of color as it is nothing new for women as it is nothing new for migrants as it is nothing new for people with disabilities as it is nothing new for intersex people of various genders. The difference is when we are organizing with fellow queers, fellow trans people, fellow feminists, fellow disabled people; sometimes we hold up the moments when we all get the issue – one person points to it as us all getting the issue that maybe next time only two people in the room will get. But the structure is such that sometimes we’re not even in the room (when there are no trans women at your party) or near the politics (when there are no trans women in your feminist community). The disavowal of not only the knowledge of trans women and trans femmes, as Stryker suggests, but also the exclusion of our bodies and the disregarding of the work we undertake, materially and psychically affects those excluded from and included within these rooms. This is the separation of our bodies and work and lives from queer, feminist, and trans world-making projects, which itself is a basic fracturing of such worlds...” If you don’t have access to the journal, you can read the essay here.

[thebittercripple]

My softness is radical politics; is brave vulnerability, vulnerable bravery; is fist filled with seed, and soil, and tenderness; is chin raised defiant to a world determined to bury words I know have meaning.

I know my words have meaning.

I've found them in hearts I look to for guidance - hearts bleeding beating their way through moments too ready to cut the palms of hands trying to tend to desert gardens - hearts that tend to this desert garden heart.

I was raised by a disabled, ill, trans woman - 6 years my senior, more a girl still learning the stutter of her steps, of her tongue, of her heart. She taught me what it means to be soft, to sit in that softness and find its value, to hold space for all of it and what it brings - all my broken, all my sad, all my try and fail and give up and try again. She gave me space to find love for all my broken, all my sad, all my try and fail and give up and try again.

My softness is radical politics; is this body - this disabled, ill, trans body; is loving bodies like and unlike this one; is learning the ways we are broken under this world determined to bury our meaning.

I know these broken bodies have meaning.

We are told we are too much to be enough, too messy to find our place, too whole to know this pain. We are told not to seek comfort in the ways our ancestors survived - the ways our brethren are still surviving - through our messy, painful, broken wholeness.

I am not always soft, but I have learned to find my softness in everything I grow - in my bitterness, my anger, my frustration - there is still soft, still broken, still brave vulnerability, vulnerable bravery.

My softness is radical politics; is learning this world is rarely kind to softness; is funerals and memorials and celebrations of life and refusing to go to any of them; is passing on words found in hearts buried by a world scared to learn their meaning.

[byrdiegrey]