listen to me, really. I am holding your two hands tenderly in mine. being part of a privileged group and benefitting from systemic exploitation without meaning to is not the same thing as being an inherently trash person who makes the world worse by living it in. that's not what that means. I'm telling you this for two reasons, 1) so you can chill the fuck out and be at peace with yourself without feeling like you're draining the universe of value, and 2) so you don't go onto oppressed people's posts about systemic privilege and exploitation and react like they've just told you that you, personally, should not exist because you're a man who lives within the vicinity of a supermarket that sells chiquita bananas. you're just gonna have to put some trust into your own brain and hold on to both the ideas that you're on one of the dominant sides of a set of global scales of injustice and that you don't have to shrivel out of existence about it. it can be difficult to reconcile those ideas at first, but it's completely possible and worth doing. if you don't, then you start constructing a worldview where you believe that either you have a civic duty to self destruct or you start vehemently denying that these systems of oppression exist, both of which are Bad and Not Good. peace and love x
