I've Been Trying And Trying And Trying To Get Back Into Fandom Shitposting And Metas And Writing—escaping

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Resisting the urge to make even more bitter posts about people I expected to be better

friendly fall walk

I have a Patreon

i don't want to be making this post, i know none of you probably want to have to read this post, but i feel like i need to embed it into the establishing of this blog, and why, despite everything i built and created and shared there, the sense of community i thought i had, my previous one became unsafe.

if you are here, i am making the baseline assumption that you understand that the slaughter and torture of innocent people is wrong, will always be wrong, should never be celebrated, justified, or upheld as righteous, no matter who they are or where they come from or who's murdering them. i assume, even if you don't understand an entire complex situation or thousands of years of history (something you can do some cursory research on if you feel so inclined and would rather not spread harmful misinformation and outright bigotry about anyone), that you would not suggest that infant children deserve to be eradicated because of the country they were born, that women being brutalized don't deserve it because of actions committed by their government (a government many of them oppose). i assume that you understand that a terrorist organization that has written in their charter that their entire goal is the elimination of a specific people - regionally and worldwide - and causes active oppression, harm, and death to their own innocent people because they are more hellbent on killing and destruction than advocating for anyone (much less human rights), is not a bastion of freedom and dignity, and that conflating them is not only detrimental, but racist. i assume you understand that a right wing authoritarian government does not mean its people deserve to be massacred in their homes.

i assume you would not advocate for more violent death under the guise of progressive values. i assume you would not think that myself and half of my own family, unconnected to this by anything but shared ancient ethnicity, deserve to be exterminated. i assume you would find that inhumane and distressing to suggest.

i assume. but this is no longer something i know.

there have been people - mutuals, friends, i communicated with - who, over the past two weeks proved that none of this holds true for them. there were people instantly celebrating these deaths (that, in fact, was how the news was broken to me - by mutuals' jubilation over mass murder on my dash). there were people immediately justifying that, calling it necessary, saying that even the brutal assault of women "just has to happen" (or didn't happen at all, this from proclaimed "believe women" feminists). there were people spreading openly genocidal rhetoric about how a specific group of people "deserves to be erased" or "i hope they're wiped off the earth," using slurs, praising or mocking or denying the holocaust, and this website's terms of service wouldn't classify that as hate speech worthy of termination. there were people intentionally sharing debunked infographics or misinformed headlines which were later corrected (but never reading the corrections) or outright lies that come directly from n*zi propaganda (wish i was kidding) to call for more violence. vive la revolucion! was used to defend people chanting things like "gas the jews!" right in front of me, every day. there were mutuals reblogging the most vile, hateful people on this website without vetting what they were saying at all (i have a list of them, if you ever need it. did you know, for example, that her*tageposts is a n*zi sympathizer and north korean regime defender under the guise of being "communist"? yeah). the dehumanization and bloodlust and hatred on my dash was unlike anything i've ever experienced online, and what's WORSE, what made it such an agonizing betrayal, was it came from people i thought were allies, people i'd stand beside, who i thought understood and cared about human rights enough to not lust for murder and harm and destruction. i was, it turns out, wrong. all they needed was a reason.

on the surface, i know i am very disconnected from the horrors of this - i have no family in the region, by strict definition this is only half of my heritage. though as my dad would say, whether to g-d or the n*zis and their ilk, "half" doesn't matter. you are who you are, enfolded all the same. i have always loved and been proud of that. even when i was harassed and bullied and threatened and assaulted in my first two years of high-school about it. i always thought it was a beautiful thing to be a part of. i never felt terror around it until these past two weeks. i was consciously aware, but never felt it viscerally in my bones and like a weight on my chest, that people would want me dead. or if they did, they would be condemned as terrible, as fringe extremists, as far-right agitators. except that's not where this was coming from - this was coming from my own ideological side. this was coming from "friends." i don't think i can describe what that betrayal feels like or how profoundly wounding it is. people far more affected than i, far more connected and impacted, reached out to me in their hurt and anxiety, afraid of their mutuals, afraid of saying anything even remotely empathetic out loud, afraid of being attacked.

i have had tough things going on in my direct daily life for the past two weeks, but because of all this, i've barely slept. i can't remember the last day i got more than a few hours. i haven't cried this much since angel died. i have never felt such a pervasive sense of fear and despair. i never had panic attacks simply logging into my blog.

so again i say, if you're here, i assume you wouldn't participate in this. i assume you'd understand why it's dangerous and painful. i assume if i expressed grief or concern over the horrific loss of any human life, you wouldn't tell me i deserved it too. but this is not a certainty. this is not something i'll ever again know for sure. and if you're not, if you disagree with me that quantifying innocent lives' value *anywhere* with, "yes, but-," you don't have to stay, and i won't hold it against you. and if you're here, i love you, and i can only hope you're a safe person for me to interact with and love. but thats's what these past days and this rhetoric has done to me. and it's going to take me some time to not feel like the walls are closing in and to heal from that, though i know i won't forget it. so i hope you understand if i'm a little sad and a little skittish. i hope you don't mind that my most basic principle is that living beings of all kinds have sanctity, and no one deserves to die.

trouble is, idk what to do with the fear that we're going to wake up to seeing people dragged out of their homes and shot in the streets around the world, like that feasibly feels like a thing that is coming. and that will be justified by the left when it does

eta: i am not being overdramatic, as an example:

the brutality is incomparable. i don’t want to even acknowledge the details just released. this was done not by hamas, but by palestinian civilians. they strangled BABIES to death and threw rocks at them to stimulate an air strike. no trigger warnings. you don’t get that privilege. you all must read this and absorb this barbarity, for yarden bibas — for shiri, who is still missing. read it and understand the evil israel and the jewish people are up against.

“Without ever wanting to become reserved and shy, she had spent so long alone, with no one to love, that it was difficult for her to talk, even casually, to another person without self-consciousness and an awkward inability to find words.”

— Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

(art sources: 1, 2)

Happy Birthday, Hersh z”l. your spirit will be a part of the Jewish people forever.

*does everything possible other than deleting herself from existence to feel safer and better*

*it doesn’t work because she is caught in a seemingly unending fight or flight response*

my mom’s suffering so much from her arm and there’s nothing i can do to make it better, and she started having a reaction to the antibiotics, so she had to cut back to only taking one each day, and i am very worried that she’s been taking them for a week and is still in this much pain. we have to take the car back in tomorrow and leave it there, so we’ll have to figure out how’s safest to get home. meanwhile i just can’t sleep and am getting really close to the edge of not being able to handle it

happy halloween