Heya!

What helped me write trauma better is remembering that the nervous system learns predictions. If danger used to come after quiet, calm can feel threatening. If kindness used to come with a price, kindness can feel suspicious. So healing is not just “they know they’re safe now.” Healing is the slow, annoying, deeply unfair process of teaching the body that the old prediction is not always the present truth.

The backlash was a major lawsuit from 9 tribes alongside other lawsuits from advocacy groups like NDN Collective. You can support NDN Collective by donating to them here.

Genuinely, one of the measures that's stopped book banning the most when districts implement it, is having the would-be banners fill out a form that demonstrates if they've read the book or not. Like where they have the summarize the plot and characters and do a mini book report and give a review. It stops them in their tracks. This is why in my high school, every time someone wanted to ban a book it ended up going nowhere. There was one where a conservative student wanted to ban the manga "Legal Drug" for having a marijuana leaf on the cover, then got the form that required them to actually read and either balked, or read it and realized it was not pro-drug at all. (The other one that reduces book bans even further is "requiring the would-be banner to be affiliated with this actual school in some way, either by being a student, faculty/staff or a parent of a child at the school" because the vast majority of bans are "activists" with no affiliation with the school who just travel around trying to do this in districts all over the U.S. IIRC a few years ago someone crunched the numbers and just 51 parents were responsible for all the book bans that year nationally. 51! In a country with 50 states, with over 300 million people total!)

Laws like this indeed do a lot to stop fascist book censorship. They can also help legally protect librarians from getting fired or harassed for keeping books on the shelves! Some states like Rhode Island have already passed these laws. If you're in a blue state, look up whether you have laws like this on the books. MAYBE your state is trying to get one passed right now, like New York's Freedom to Read bill. call your state elected officials to voice support for it.

“everyone is mad at me and they just won’t tell me” —> “no one has said anything about being mad at me and i haven’t done anything to warrant being mad at so if someone is silently fuming about me and not saying anything that’s their problem and actually quite weird of them and i can effortlessly move on with my life”

this took SUCH a huge deal of unlearning because, like so many of you, i came out of a home where being quietly in trouble WAS the default state, and i DID grow up not just with the assumption but borderline religious conviction that Everyone Is Mad At Me, I Am Bad, I Must Exist In A Constant State of Attempting to Pacify The Natural Rage I Inspire In Everyone. and no it actually turns out that my family are the freaks . and yours are too

The shortest most basic form of the lesson here is just: don’t be mad at yourself on someone else’s behalf. It’s a waste of your time. If they wanna be mad they can do it themselves.

Not gonna lie, as much as I want to be helpful and comprehensible, I am very proud of provoking that reaction image.

College should be free and you should be able to study “useless” degrees just for the love of learning

whenever i find a good world heritage post i do my best to carefully remove unnecessary "why is this so funny!!" or "i cant believe i found the original" reblog comments. sometimes it takes a bit of work digging back through the reblog graph to accomplish this but fine art restoration is tedious but important work

Whenever they gave us one of those "read through ALL the instructions before you begin!" trick assignments in school where the steps lead you on an increasingly ridiculous goose chase until the final one tells you to just put your name on the paper and turn it in without doing anything else, I was always like, "Okay, but what's the point? Surely the REAL world won't be anything like this." And then I grew up and discovered that not only is the real world often exactly like that, some people won't even read the first line of the instructions even if they make perfect sense. And these people are called "co-workers"