What are you so afraid of?

Sympathy has an expiration date. 

If you’re hurting because you broke your leg, people can sympathize with you, because there’s an end-date. Eventually your leg will heal and you’ll be okay again. People will coo and coddle and bring you chocolates and sign your cast because they know that’s emotional labor that they will only have to perform temporarily. 

But if you have a chronic condition that causes you daily pain, after awhile, people get annoyed with having to deal with you. They ask you what’s wrong, and when you reply with the same thing that was wrong last week, or the week before, or the month before, you eventually get an incredulous, “Still?” 

Or maybe they’re not that overt. Maybe instead they go, “Oh, just that. Okay.” As if today’s pain should somehow be fine for them to ignore because it’s nothing new. No need to worry: it’s just the same old same old. 

Let me tell you: Pain never gets easy to handle. It’s not like people with chronic pain develop an immunity to it, or that we stop feeling it. Sure, some of us get better at ignoring it, or better at living around it, but honestly? Most of us just get better at hiding it, because we get tired of feeling like an emotional burden to everyone around us.

But that doesn’t mean that we’re not hurting, and it sort of sucks that long-term pain, in addition to all the other fun things it entails, also eventually comes with a revoked right to be sympathized with, or even just treated like something other than a whiny attention-grabbing faker (or worse: a drug-seeker).

Chronic pain is real. And it sucks. And one of the worst parts about it is knowing it’s never going to end. 

Sources: 🌱 🌱

ok so now think of one native american cartoon character you know of or a sports team relating to native americans whether it’s their actual name or their team logo, or a town you live in or near with a “native” name bet a lot of these things came to you right away i bet you didn’t even have to think 

Because I don’t remember a time in my life when I wasn’t terrified of swastika’s, including when I was so young that I didn’t even know what a swastika was.

Because it’s such a strangely specific feeling to be born in the wake of a tragedy so massive that you can still feel it’s reverberations and were born with a weird sense of survivors guilt that will shadow you forever

Because when we were younger and our parents refused to tell us exactly what the holocaust was, we would trade our grandparents horrific experiences like they were scary stories across the camp fire, repeating them over and over to ourselves and eachother so we could figure out what it all meant.

Because I’d see those books with grey photos of Auschtwitz prisoners on the cover and feel like they were looking straight fucking at me.

Because every single Yom HaShoah you’d hear grade school children get up and say “my grandmother was the only one left of her family” or “they barely got out before it started” or “they managed to hide in an attic for months on end” or “my great grandmother managed to jump off one of the trains with her daughter in her arms” or “my grandfather has numbers on his arms but he won’t talk about it” or “my great aunt was shot just before the liberation so she couldn’t get out,” like it was normal.

Because we were always taught to run if we were in a group of non-jews that started making nazi jokes, to laugh along and then take the fuck off to stay safe.

Because the question always lingered over our heads, “what if it happens again? what if it happens to us?”

.... and them some stupid fucking college age white trash dickhead stands up and says “it didn’t happen” or “it wasn’t that bad” and I just can’t... fathom that? Like how the fuck wasn’t this part of your life? How is this not etched into your bones?

And its because it’s not. Like people didn’t grow up with this shit, some people can afford to deny the holocaust and deny antisemitism because it won’t hurt them.

It’s just... fucking wild.

Rich (white) people my (white) father works with eat the same bison they hunted for sport to starve us to death, the same holiday they celebrate that celebrated the attempted ethnic cleansing of that half of their own daughter, neice, granddaughter.

My mom’s mother’s side of the family came from Belarus. The Jewish family she knew all escaped during the pogroms just before WWI, and there were countless others who never left Belarus. Their town doesn’t exist anymore. Every seen the movie “Everything Is Illuminated”? It was like that.

My mom’s father was from Canada, near the border with New York. He spoke French as his first language, but he wasn’t French. He was Mohawk and Mi’kmaq. He grew up in a Catholic boarding school and was fundamentally “broken” because of it, and he never dealt with the trauma. Instead he cheated on his wife, abused her and her kids both physically and mentally, and when my Mimi was finally able to leave, he disappeared from their lives, refusing to pay child support and never telling them himself about their ancestry. My mom had to learn herself, as an adult.

These are both things that happened only TWO GENERATIONS ago. My grandfather is still alive. This was within LIVING MEMORY. And yet when I bring up either, the response is either “you Jews are always making such a big deal about the Holocaust, it wasn’t even the worst genocide in history, people only care about your genocide because you’re WHITE” (which by the way, I have some definite opinions about how “white” we are but that’s another rant for another day), or “that was hundreds of years ago, you can’t expect to hold people responsible for stuff that happened hundreds of years ago, it can’t be that bad, it can’t possibly still affect you directly.” Meanwhile I experience the echoes of that trauma every day. Growing up without whole branches of my family tree on my Mimi’s side because they died in a mass unmarked grave somewhere in Belarus. Having to deal with the fallout of being raised by a survivor of abuse who in turn didn’t know how to regulate her own emotions, and who felt guilt every time she connected to her Native ancestry because of the trauma she experienced at the hands of the man who that ancestry came through.