#i don't think people realize how dehumanizing it feels to be Assigned Moral and Social Weight and Value like that | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

butts-bouncing-on-the-beltway · 3 months

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I feel like the post I just reblogged pointing out the all-or-nothing in how many people interact with their deconstruction of systems of oppression is resonating for me right now with so many different moments in my life where someone decides that because some part of myself has access to some of the levers of control/influence/etc that come with the relationship to power, and decides what that must mean about all the other parts of me that might be explicitly refused access to those same levers.

It has happened in so many spaces/aspects of my life, and it can be so hard to feel safe and seen and trusting of others when that's my chronic relationship to being perceived - half truths and obfuscation.

It doesn't really change regardless of who's doing the assuming either. Like, where they land in relation to systems of power may influence which direction they lean in their assumptions about me, but even that is often inconsistent. Both sides of the equation (those who share my marginalizations and those who exist in spaces of closer proximity to power) will still do it nonetheless.

When I was doing my liminal social identities work in undergrad, this was actually a big part of the conceptualization we explored of traumtic alienation of self as individual from self as collective, and what it can do to people to exist in this liminal relationship with your environment and the people in it. As I'm starting to gather my thoughts about my stress modeling, this conceptualization is bubbling back to the surface. I'm finding myself meandering through it on both a path specifically my own, and in an effort to better understand what other paths may be available to people during their version of the process/experience.

Selfhood is so fragile, and so in need of balance between self-construction and co-construction for us humans, and that gives us so many beautiful, even spiritual, experiences of meaning making and generativity of self. It also createa many pivot points where we may find room in our path for vulnerability or blurring of self. As much as these pivot points can be distressing, I think they also sometimes become our foundations of change/personal evolution, when we find that through the distress of existing in shift, something meaningful is occurring or observable in our experience of self-in-transition.

I think something I've valued especially about my own relationship with self is its transience. It doesn't always end up somewhere I would be happy to sustain, but it always allows me a degree of comfort in complexity that I think has made my body-mind a safer place for me overall.

#one day i will understand how to convey self in a way that is Mine and also Effective Communication #but lord knows it ain't today #it's always so interesting to me the way people decide to position me in their social/power schema #the funny thing i think is that even as a toddler people seemed to assign me a seriousness and gravity of social value that was both #irrational and inexplicable and in many cases wildly inappropriate #apparently one of my auntie's got in a bad way of 'consulting' me like her personal spiritual guide when I was like #two years old????#and she had to be like #you can't keep talking to my toddler about this stuff #that's an extreme one but like #it's also in line with the trend #i don't think people realize how dehumanizing it feels to be Assigned Moral and Social Weight and Value like that #it makes it so painfully clear to me that i am expected to manage to accommodate everyone's needs while never having #or at least never expressing or acknowledging in the presence of others #any needs of my own regardless of their impact on me #sometimes I think people assume that I went into the fields I did as like. a white knight type motivation #or like #that going into the field is what's made me the way I am #and like.#not really. it's more that I knew my role in life was 'other people's emotional regulation/go-to anchor' as long as I've had self-concept #and at a certain point you've been playing that role long enough that your options are either #become a subject matter expert and contributer to the field #or fucking kill yourself #because you certainly can't keep doing what you're doing #i dunno. i guess i just wished there was anyone in my life i trusted to see me as the fully complexified and messy human I am #i might feel a little less like i'm the only real thing in my life #anyway i think i'm gonna go. dissociate out of existence for a while before i get the kind of suicidal that's going to worry wifey #i don't think i can cope with needing to regulate her out of an anxiety response right now and i understand that means i can't need care atm #you ever just get the feeling that you're drowning under the weight of the needs you just can never seem to meet? i do.

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