one of devotion's casualties

We Have Enough Dead Friends By LENA OLEANDERSON Come over. The doors are open, my flat's a mess and so is my heart but the doors are always open. Come over. I will make soup probably from frozen but the important thing is we will both eat. You don't have to be dying, but if you are, or you feel like you are, or if living's been hard, call me, and I will show up. It doesn't have to be that bad, it doesn't have to be bad at all, but if it is, please call. Do you want me to do the groceries? Do you want me to mop the floors? Do you need to be held; you don't have to be dying to be held. If you want me to be there, I want to. I'm on the bathroom floor again, and breathing is hard, and eating's been hard, and sleeping, the world is a laden thing rolling around on my chest lately. Just being alive is heavy tonight, but we have enough dead friends. Come over.

i HATE self-censorship for a lot of reasons, but being in crisis work makes it even more frustrating. who are you censoring for? like i am being so fr, WHO are you censoring for? have you even thought it through? people who have been raped know that they have been raped. if someone attempts suicide or is grieving someone who did, saying "sewer slide" isn't going to protect them from any of the feelings. a murder victim's family isn't going to feel better bc you said "unalived" instead of murdered. if anything, it's just extremely invalidating and othering. it's saying "what happened to you is so bad that i won't even say the word," which is NOT trauma-informed care. you are not protecting survivors/victims when you self-censor. the ONLY things you protect when you self-censor are the puritanical ideologies that are being encouraged by rich fascists who want your money and obedience

(also, side note, mb it's different elsewhere, but i pretty much never hear "sa" said aloud. written, yes, but not spoken. i had no idea wtf she was even talking about at first, that's just not something we tend to shorten when speaking)

the thing is, there is a difference between the type of self-censorship i'm referring to, and being able to read the room and know when softer language is needed. english has plenty of euphemistic language built into it already, that softens things without censoring it. like saying to someone, "i heard your mother died" vs "i heard your mother passed away," or "he took his life" rather than "he killed himself"

it works with triggers, too. at work, we might ask a survivor, "did they harm you," or, "did they ever make you perform sex acts you were uncomfortable with" instead of "were you abused" or "were you raped," bc those terms carry a lot of connotation and weight that survivors might not be ready to accept yet. but there's still a directness there that doesn't lessen the impact or shame the survivor

the dumbass algorithm terms are not like this. they aren't the natural evolution of language, as i've seen some people claim. if a term is conceived to first and foremost appease advertisers and corporations, it is not a term that exists to help someone. "unalived" is not compassionate and direct. "sewer slide" "grape" "pdf" whatever the fuck--these are not compassionate or direct. putting a weird slant rhyme on a word so an algorithm doesn't flag it is not "protecting survivors." you're using those terms because you think you're not allowed to say the real ones. that is, by definition, censorship. and when this happens to the point that the terms enter people's every day lexicon, you get people like my trainee, who are so used to thinking they're not allowed to say certain things, that they get uncomfortable and embarrassed saying the thing in a place that exists specifically to deal with that thing

Do I think it's good storytelling? No, absolutely not. It was all over the place, introducing plot points that would have been better left alone and failing to tie up dangling threads that should have been addressed.

Do I think it was the most entertaining two and a half hours I've had in ages? Hell, yeah! The absurdity was half the fun for me, even though the storytelling was unsatisfying.

At the end of the day, this was a popcorn season to me (similar to a popcorn flick: you watch it because it's wildly entertaining, not because it's great cinema). This was a guy and his friends having the the best time RPing a system they weren't familiar with and just doing whatever felt funnest in the moment, and that made it so much fun. Breannan and the Intrepid Heroes laughed so much through the entire season, they were clearly having an absolute blast.