dear devil, if you can't do better than that, kiss my toe.

“In many Western spaces, good grief is quiet, tame, dry, and controlled. It does not make a scene, it does not scream at the attending physician, and it does not soil its pants in shock. It does not sweat, race, wail, smash, or howl. It does not tell the truth about itself, it does not argue or say no to help. It does not resist pathology or naming, it does not resist ‘expert’ information or referral [… .] Good grief is gendered, staged, linear, white, and bound by privilege and reason.Good grief is productive, never interfering with the business, the family, or the community. It is graceful and always grateful for expert intervention. It is not angry or selfish. It never goes public [… .] Quite simply, good grief never breaks open the bone. But we are not interested in good grief.”

“Prefigurative politics is a fancy term for the idea of imagining and building the world we want to see now. It’s waking up and acting as if the revolution has happened. It’s, for example, building a sliding scale community acupuncture clinic that is affordable and centers disabled and working-class/poor and Black, Indigenous, and people of color instead of writing reports about how the medical-industrial complex is fucking up. (Though that can be important too.) I think of it as akin to the Allied Media Conference principles of ‘We spend more time building than attacking’ and 'We focus on our power, not our powerlessness.’”

“Femmes, I love you when your hands shake too much from meds or stress or disability to put on eyeliner, let alone put it on perfectly. I love you when you don’t wear eyeliner. I love you when you are deeply sad, raging, in despair, not ‘pretty,’ in the same sweats for three days or a month, when you smell like sweat and fear and the deep said. I love you when you cough up phlegm. I love you when you scream and rage and ache. I love you when you don’t wear those five-inch heels because your feet hurt or because it’s a sexier choice as a disabled femme to wear kicks (like the gold glitter ones I am wearing right now). And I want a community where we can be messy, in pain, hurting, imperfect, and we really know that our genders are still seen and cherished.”

Me: *googles ‘autism and pregnancy’*

Reading a remarkable text on psychiatry and schizophrenia which contains an interview with a sangoma (a south african shamanic priest) as well as a case study that involves curative practices from both shamanic and jungian methods.

its so clear that none of the people protesting want themselves to go back to work!! they want OTHER people to go back to work so that THEY can enjoy all the services they think they deserve during a pandemic. they feel safe so they couldnt care less about vulnerable people.

Friend: How’s it going 

me: h-