Get up, Coward

The heart is an arrow. It demands to land true. She clung to the wall, but it was purpose she grasped at long last, and that carried her upwards. She was not a lynx or a spider or even the Wraith. She was Inej Ghafa, and her future was waiting above.

I'd be willing and able

She'd laughed, and if he could have bottled the sound and gotten drunk on it every night, he would have. It terrified him.

ENTOMOLOGY

Actively seek out things that inspire wonder

Look for the good parts. There are good parts. There are interesting parts. There will always be good and interesting parts.

Treat yourself kindly. This one is difficult.

Do things out of ridiculous whimsy.

Practice cog itive behavioural exercises to self-examine and address beliefs and behaviors that are causing suffering.

Don't argue when people compliment you.

Don't rush yourself, and don't assume it'll be like this forever when you have a backslide. These things happen. Over time, they happen less.

Be honest with the people you love and trust.

Tell people how much they mean to you and what you like about them.

Help others and find satisfaction in being the stranger that did something good

Consider speaking to a medical professional, my antidepressants and anti-anxiety medical took some time to figure out but life is WAY better.

Have a silly little craft or hobby.

Let yourself be bored sometimes. Stand outside in the rain and let yourself get wet. Go on a walk. Put your phone in a different room and wander off. Meet up with a friend and go on a long walk together to nowhere in particular

Start doing things because you want to and it feels good, not just because you think it's something you should say yes to.

Say yes to things.

Take a random day of the week and go into a store or a business you've never been in before.

Compliment strangers when something about them is striking.

Read books and watch movies that make you feel the exact right amount of ecstatic and embarrassed, and make all the silly noises about it.

Collect scraps of fabric and little trinkets and all the little textures and colours you love and stash them in a shoebox or something like a tiny dragon's hoard.

Start a collection of something small and inexpensive. Like corks.

Make food with ingredients you've never used before

Make long lists of all your favorite things- flowers, bugs, songs, foods, places

Start a trash-book to fill with scraps of neat wrappers and bits of paper and colored fabric from old ruined clothes

Imagine yourself as a alien from a dead and barren world who has just arrived on this planet for the very first time and imagine how excited you would be by every little thing

Look, Eden gave me a tattoo. The COI made me burn it off. I didn't choose either of them. I still get a scar.

By which I actually DON’T mean that the average white would call me a nigger to my face outside the lofty confines of a reasonably anonymous account or an anon ask in my inbox. They find themselves too vulnerable and me far too scary for that in most situations. And after all, they’re a GOOD person, who has evolved past racism! In fact, I bet they’re fixing their mouths to say that I’m ACTUALLY racist towards whites, no matter how well spoken I may be (and then to slap on anon to call me a spearchucker, pedophile, and whatever else they can reach for to make themselves feel better).

No, the average white finds themselves beyond such base defoulments of their mouths such as “the n word”, such things that leave them open to the potential of losing jobs, social standing, a few teeth if they get punched out, and more (if caught in 4k, anyway). And yet,

The average white is racist.

The average white will avert their eyes and walk faster as cops harass us, the average white gets uncomfortable when we don’t know our place, the average white would’ve voted for Obama a third time, the average white ignores resumes with “ethnic” names, the average white gets the same jobs with a high school degree as a Black person does with a master’s, the average white just thinks that Black woman was being a bit aggressive, the average white person just thought that group of Black kids were thugs scoping out their neighborhood, the average white votes against ending slavery in California, the average white is very concerned about the Black jogger caught on camera looking around an open construction site, the average white actually votes overwhelmingly Republican, the average white says they aren’t racist because they haven’t called anyone a nigger since they were 12, the average white just thinks that Black trans woman dressed to go out might’ve been a prostitute soliciting in their neighborhood, the average white trans person just thinks that Black trans woman might be a danger to her siblings, the average white doesn’t know why only one Black person attended this 30 person meeting in a 50% Black city, the average white is attending a very very sad vigil for us while making sure to intimidate the Black girl they hate who showed up, the average white is very offended that you brought up Emmett Till because they’re an antiracist from Mississippi, the average white isnt sure about the details but reblogged the third harassment campaign this week like their grandmama took picnics at lynchings, the average white thinks the police serve a needed function in society beyond “slave catcher”, the average white thinks they’re one of the GOOD ones who might’ve done a bad thing here and there, the average white thinks they don’t benefit from the structures of white supremacy that have subsumed the world and are choking the life out of everyone else,

The average white is REAL fucking racist and too terrified of what that means for them to do jack shit about it. Too scared of the ostracization, the potential loss of even a fraction of privilege, the fear of experiencing even a modicum of what the rest of us go through if they betray white solidarity, white supremacy.

The “teachable moment” is to get off your ass and start doing shit. If you can’t be the new John Brown, fucking copwatch, read abolitionist/womanist/transfeminist literature and figure out how to apply it to STOP JOINING FUCKING DIGITAL LYNCH MOBS YOU FREAKS, do you have any idea how much WE could do if we didn’t have to deal with you LITERALLY CONSTANTLY doxxing us, harassing us, trying to SWAT us, driving us to literal insanity? Fuck, sending a racialized disabled and/or trans person other than me $10-$20 to eat a real meal or get meds is more praxis than like 90% of what y’all do.

And no most of y’all ain’t any lower on the list than white benefit, don’t play now.

However.

If you are reading this while white and looking for the best category you can find yourself in, I think it's also important that we check back up at the other categories, double and triple check, and also ask ourselves "ok, but if I were in this other category, then what would I need to do to improve?" and then do that.

You know, just in case. Because confirmation bias is one hell of a drug, and it's easy to think happily "yeah, I remember that time I [whatever]", but it'd be considerable hubris to think we have no room for improvement, let alone that we are incapable of fucking up.