PERSONAL PHOTOWORKS AND OTHER THINGS

🩵Mutual aid

Reach out to your neighbors – especially if you know they are staying home right now – and ask if they need groceries or toiletry items. Offer to pick up prescriptions, give rides, or shovel their driveway. If you know them well, bring them a treat that you know they'll enjoy. Or just ask them how they're doing and let them know you are there to support.

Connect with any of the orgs above and see if they are looking for volunteers.

Connect with a church or mosque in your area. From u/MuddieMaeSuggins: "I know a lot of regular Redditors are not religious (myself included) but like it or not this is a where a lot of community organizing happens, especially in immigrant communities."

Connect with your local school's admin office and/or their PTA. It's ok to reach out even if you don't have kids at the school. PTAs are organizing mutual aid for school families, safe rides, school observers.

🩵Activism

Find an official protest or other event via Indivisible, 50501, FREE AMERICA, or MIRAC. Students at many high schools are staging walk-outs; if your local school is doing this, reach out to school leadership or the PTA and ask how you can support as a community member.

Join the effort to stop Hilton from housing ICE by booking hotel rooms and then cancelling at the last minute. This action can be done from home! The effort is being organized by Sunrise Movement, who are telling activists to target specific hotels one-by-one. More info: SHUT DOWN HILTON

Find people in your area who are actively monitoring ICE and/or stationing themselves in high-traffic areas and ask how you can help. Check for local FB events where people are organizing and just show up.

At minimum, read the COPAL Handbook before you go out to observe. The DFL, Monarca, and other orgs have been hosting online trainings for constitutional observers (though these fill up quickly).

When you see ICE in action, start recording. Be as loud and as disruptive as possible: honk your horn, set off your car alarm, blow your whistle. Let people know that ICE is in the area. If you see someone being detained, try to get their name and a phone number to call their emergency contact.

If you do not feel comfortable observing ICE in person, there are ways you can support from home. Just ask the people who are organizing in your area. I have social anxiety, and I had never participated in any kind of political action before this past Saturday. If I can do it, you can!

Local organizers are requesting that people who help monitor ICE DO NOT participate in 1-to-1 mutual aid efforts, as these can put the families you are helping at risk.

One thing I refused to do now that I acquired this new and quite powerful mental health struggle: isolate. To me, I was overdue on death for several months. Yet my family kept being impacted with grief.

It seemed selfish to deem my importance as something so trivial as grief, especially grief of others. Yet as I stood at my grandma's interment in a country she didn’t even want to be buried in, all I thought was, my grandma wouldn’t want it to be now. Truly, she wouldn’t want it to be soon whatsoever. Yet that didn’t matter to a girl who couldn’t even tell her parents what she was feeling, what she kept contemplating and even attempted.

Death for catholics is almost always an intimate affair that is aesthetically pleasing to the eye until you realize how doomful it is. Though lapsed catholic myself, there is still an intrinsic characteristic to all of those who had the privilege of now suffering catholic guilt: you’re baptized catholic, you die catholic.

So instead of isolation, I didn’t change anything about me. If anything I over-exaggerated my purpose just for the ones I loved to not miss me too much. I’d once in a while go out, then go home and wonder how many Tylenols would it take to kill me. Want to go shopping? Sure. Want to try to live to see another year? Still deciding on that, maybe I’ll know next month.

— end of excerpt.

so yes, it’s the extended gestures and pangs in your chest (ie. when robby saw the plaque). more importantly, it’s the escapism. when i was fully enthralled with the looming idea that i wasn’t okay, i traveled a lot. i tried to fill my cup as MUCH as possible, see everything i wanted to see just to see if that would “heal” me, tell my brain that life is beautiful… it didn’t but i am still breathing & alive, therefore it might of helped.

NOW i do give a lot credit to the mental healthcare providers & healthcare workers in general (esp. my papa who immediately referred me to an amazing therapist).