hello, dear friends.

But guess what, I don’t have a problem finding clothes that fit me. There aren’t companies that refuse to make clothes for my size. There is no shortage of messages telling me that despite the harassment of some, I am still beautiful and ideal even if I’m unhealthy. Despite being thin-shamed, I still PANICKED when I started a medicine that made me gain weight, and I had to really analyze that, because no matter what my culture will still say that “fat is unideal” “fat is bad” and “honestly its fine to starve yourself / but shameful and bad to overeat.”

My mom is also a nurse and she has both witnessed AND personally experienced bullying from her fellow nurses. My dad is a nurse as well and has had his own coworkers try to sabatoge him.

“One of the students in my school’s nursing program got kicked out because she was bullying her own patient.” Yeah, that’s the fucking issue right there. It’s not that they backstab each other, it’s that they abuse the patients and they do it constantly. It is not a rare occurrence and rarely are they even reprimanded for it let alone kicked out of a program.

Do you know how viscerally upsetting it is to have been subjected to years and years of ableist abuse from someone just to hear that they’re entering patient care? Do you know what it’s like to have a high school bully walk into your hospital room with a big fake smile on her face? I do.

My cousin used to “play” with me when she was 16 and I was newly diagnosed with POTS at 11 years old by triggering fainting episodes and then laughing about it. She is an RN now and at every holiday she shit talks her patients, often outright breaking HIPPA to do it. She calls them liars and exaggerators. She did it every year until we got disowned. I’m sure she still does. I used to have to leave early because I knew that if I had to endure one more second of it and I would rip her throat out.

The peers that mocked and abused me daily, calling me a faker and a liar for having an invisible disability, going into nursing is way more upsetting to me as a potential patient than them being catty with each other. It’s way more scary to me to have someone who never believed that I was ill in charge of my care than thinking about them fighting over a promotion does.

And of course that type is not suddenly going to turn into nice people dealing with colleagues. Maybe especially the other staff who are not down with mistreating patients. Or anyone else who tries to make complaints.

(Very relevant examples, which did get some attention here several years back: Systemic medical discrimation and abuse, pt. 1: Public scandals. Including at our local hospital 😵)

It’s not about abortion. It’s not about babies. It’s about control of women and their bodies. IMO.

My dad is almost 70 and always says he’s still growing, changing, and learning. That’s what life is, an ongoing experience that you gotta be open for change in.

me:

Infinity War Bloopers (x)

I call bullshit. Abuse didnt shape you. You arent some angellic survivor that needs to have books and poetry written because of. You survived because you had to. You didnt have any choice but to survive or die. Abuse didnt shape you, you did. You saved yourself. You pushed through for yourself. You are you because of you. YOU are why you are who you are today. Abuse fucked you up.

Yes, abuse fucked you to pieces. But guess who glued those pieces together and continues to hold them together every single day? Guess who.

Well one day this asshole who had been kind of tagging along with us asks her why she talks like that because it makes her sound dumb and I still remember her response word for word.

“In Russian I am so intelligent and clear. In English I am like [an] idiot”

They’re speaking your language because you don’t know theirs. That’s not something they should be made fun of, it’s something that should be commended because learning a language is hard fucking work.