Lillian

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

I’m debating writing a essay on this topic and i’ll admit it’s highly speculative, but lately i’ve been thinking about people’s relationship to mortality in ancient times even up to midevial times before modern medicine. people were constantly faced with their mortality before modern medicine, a simple infected cut or cold could kill you. I believe this close relationship with our own mortality created a deep understanding of time, society, the rise and fall of ages that we can not comprehend today. people feeling and understanding mortality created productive society’s. and oppositely i think people who fear mortality and don’t want to be confronted with it creates destructive societies.

We marvel at ancient megolthic structures today we can’t comprehend how they were built because they likely took so much time and life cycles and generations of people to complete and the people building them likely understood their small part in it all. they understood their small contribution through their short life time and that the generations after them would come to complete it. they understood that was the way life was and how they would achieve milestones was through generations of people.

peoples relationship to death today is almost nonexistent as in no body wants to be faced with our mortality, no one wants to accept how easily humans die, no one wants to think about death until sits at your doorstep and you have to go to a funeral. I think the fact we found so many ways around death like medicines and surgery’s and science, it has created a sense of self-importance in us all. Everyone thinks they are the main character of the movie, everyone thinks they are invincible and we are all shocked when a freak accident results in someone’s death.

Before our time death was such a common occurrence and while it’s obviously always sad i think it resulted in a lack of inherent narcissism we see in society today and was how ancients were able to accomplish such wild things.

This is all very rough-draft type thoughts and i don’t have all my thoughts and opinions in order but i can’t help but see a huge connection between like influencer culture and how social media has made us all feel so self important and further distanced our society from facing our own mortality.

The Mayan’s and Egyptians entire cultures revolved around understanding death and time, and we are unable to comprehend how they came up with their math systems and how they did these crazy complex equations and get perfect results but i think a huge aspect of it was how connected their cultures were to death.