Comrade Salem

I was heartbroken and felt tossed aside. I didn't understand why our friendship wasn't worth anything to him if he couldn't have me romantically or sexually. I felt betrayed and dehumanised, like I didn't matter to him as a person but only as a romantic prospect.

When I told other friends about it, to my surprise they all sided with him. "He is heartbroken, it's hard to get rejected" even my THERAPIST said this. It's not like I didn't empathize with him, but wasn't I rejected too? No one else could see that but me, they placed me as some sort of villain that had power over him in that situation, when all I did was set a boundary between friendship and romance. All I did was not consent to the terms he wanted for our relationship, I rejected them, my terms were different and he rejected those.

I've had my heart broken by friends over and over and it hurt the same, if not more, than any romantic heartbreak. Why is friendship undervalued next to romantic feelings?

i desperately need people to stop avoiding what this post is actually about. stop derailing and trying to make it be about something else instead.

THIS POST IS ABOUT ROMANTIC CONSENT.

even if the person in question didn't want to fuck them, even if he just wanted a wholesome, purely romantic, nothing sexual at all relationship, it would STILL be fucked up to BLAME someone for rejecting that.

similarly, if someone really wanted to just fuck, but they were honest and clear about that, and handled rejection gracefully, there would be literally no issue with that.

you'll never believe. whose main blog that post was from. hi, it's me, tumblr user radioactive-yuri, formerly known as thermodynamic-comedian. this is my side blog. and a good few years ago, i made that very post on my main blog.

How it feels to realize that’s how the light gets in

The kid was picked up by an ambulance 30 minutes later.

Now as an adult working in security I get SO MANY folks- upper-middle aged mostly- coming to me to 'rat out' people they think are faking it.

I was once sent into a bathroom because a client demanded that the "fucker won't get out, so go drag them out"- I was NEVER going to do that, so I did a wellness check instead. You know who it was? A person recently released from the hospital after a car accident. They had a hole in their skull and major hearing loss. They couldn't answer the owner because they couldn't HEAR the owner.

Another time about a homeless man who got around town by kicking the ground from his wheelchair. "You know he doesn't actually need that thing, his legs work fine, it's just for pity points"- Oh, so he's not paralyzed, his wheelchair is performative? Funny story Dale, I actually know that guy, he was backed over by a truck and has chronic pain from his shattered pelvis. But sure, let's make him stand up and walk everywhere so nobody feels too bad for him and tries to help him or something.

"She doesn't need that scooter, I've seen her get out of it."

"Look how fat he is, because he just rides around and refuses to get up."

"She doesn't really need that cane- she comes here without it all the time"

People used to tut-tut at us for calling the occupation's treatment of Palestinians a genocide, for comparing the zionist occupiers to the Nazis, for talking about Western Jewish institutions' overwhelming participation and complicity in our oppression, for talking about how Holocaust education was primarily a zionist propaganda tool. We were called antisemites for describing the dynamics of power that enabled the escalation of the genocide of Palestine to happen. The one you witnessed livestreamed to you for years. The one with the images you cannot erase from your mind if you tried. The one that started making you wish Hell was real because justice was not going to be served on Earth.

Stop mincing words. Stop tone policing yourself and others. We have a genuine fucking problem on our hands and it's not saying the words "Jewish supremacy" to describe the system occupying Palestine and trying to erase every country in South West Asia off the map.

This acceleration of the genocide was enabled by our silencing because of the discomfort of Westerners.

You can choose where you want to sit in that dynamic.

it's not fair that twitter's phm tag has a rocky emoji so i stole him for you all