#kabby mom's advice corner

[kane-and-griffin]

Can you think of anything that we as a fandom can do for Jo? I feel really bad that all of this has happened to her :(

[NOTE: this is the only anon about this I’ll be answering and I’m not taking any more, whether of the “ooh what drama did i miss” variety or the “fuck you for liking someone i don’t like” variety, so if you’re hunting for scoop you’ll need to get the notes from a classmate, Mom’s tapping out.]

You are a kind and sweet person for asking this!  I think sending positive messages to her on Twitter is nice. It’s really wearying to see “kill yourself” and “die, bitch” in your mentions over and over, and drowning it out with positivity helps a little.  I imagine she’ll be taking a step back from social media for a little bit, but if you send a nice tweet or message, she’ll get it and she’ll appreciate it.

But honestly I think the most important thing we can do - not just to make one person feel better, but to make the fandom a better place - is to start being really, deeply honest with ourselves about whether the words we use and the way we treat others contribute to making this fandom a kinder, or a crueler, place.  There’s always a lot of finger-pointing when an episode of bullying or harassment or drama erupts - “that was a different ship,” “we don’t claim those people,” “my friends weren’t part of that” - which can be really convenient ways to dodge complicity in the overall culture we may well be part of helping to create.

It is perfectly okay to disagree.  It is perfectly okay not to like people.  There are certainly people in this fandom I disagree with and that I don’t like.  No one is saying we all have to feel the same way about everything, or that your opinions aren’t valid.  My opinion is that I fucking love Jo Garfein.  I’ve hung out with her.  I’ve had drinks with her.  I’ve dished with her.  I’ve had long off-the-record conversations with her about some of the things she’s done to make this fandom better, and this show better, that people will never know about, because she didn’t do them to get the credit, she did them because she has a good heart. 

If people don’t want to like Jo, they don’t have to.  I’m not their mother, and I don’t get to choose their friends.  But it’s one thing to disagree with someone - about ships, about characters, about something they said that you didn’t like - and it’s another to wish them active harm, or to perpetuate it. 

So if you, sweet Anon, or anyone reading this, feel badly about Jo getting hate today and want to know how to help, here’s the big question: what are you doing right now, right here, right where you are, to stop it happening to the next person in this fandom who will get hate for something? Or the one after that, or the one after that? 

How are you stepping up in the corner of the fandom that belongs to you, that’s within your sphere of influence, and trying to make the world a little better? 

When it’s your friends, your ship, your fandom doing the attacking do you step in, or sit on the sidelines? 

Do you laugh when your friends drag people? 

Do you reblog or retweet mean-spirited subtweets so the person they’re about will see them? 

Are your words kind? 

Do you communicate on Twitter and Tumblr with a clear knowledge that behind every one of those profiles is a real human being who can be hurt by your words (yes, even people you can’t stand)? 

Do you “defend” your fave or show how hard you stan by how forcefully you can attack antis and how much praise from your own fandom you get for it? 

Is there a part of you that believes, deep down, that people from different ships are “the enemy” or even just “the other side,” even if you’re all fans of the same TV show? 

If someone fucks up - which they will do, because they’re human, because maybe they’re young, because maybe they’re learning, because maybe they had a terrible day, because fucking up is something that every single one of us does on the regular, even me, even you - do you call them out with patience and respect, the way you’d want to be called out if it was you who made the mistake? Or do you get excited about the chance to show someone just how wrong they were, so you feel powerful, so you feel right? 

Do you ever ever use “kill yourself” or “kick the chair” or “die” as casual insults, perpetuating violent language that is deeply triggering to people who are survivors of suicide or self-harm (their own or someone else’s)? 

As someone who is proud to call Jo a friend, I can say with one hundred percent certainty that the thing she wants is for this entire fandom to be a kinder place.  It is shitty that Jo has to deal with the level of negativity she gets on a regular basis, but when she tells people to choose kindness, she’s not just saying “don’t hurt my personal feelings.”  She’s talking about a shift in culture.  She understands how that kind of toxicity poisons the well for the entire fandom.  It creates fear and anxiety among the cast about spending time with fans, because they don’t know how people will react.  It causes them to vanish from social media, because none of them want to accidentally say the wrong thing and have a hundred people yelling in their mentions.  It takes the joy out of being able to geek out about a thing that we love because we all spend so much time trying to avoid the drama, or we can’t resist being sucked into it, and then it takes over our lives.  It makes us all anxious.  It makes us all meaner.  It makes us all look at the fandom as divided into an “us” and a “them,” which shapes our every single interaction.

So for anyone wondering how to help, that’s how to help.  We could all be a little more honest with ourselves - and I say “we” here because I do this too, we all do this - about what kind of fandom we’re creating with the words we say and the way we treat people.

I’m not directing these comments at you, Anon; you asked a simple question but it has a more complicated answer.  You are kind and you asked a kind question and that, in itself, means a lot.  It means a lot that you see a person who is feeling like crap because they had to deal with internet hate today and that your first response is to ask if there’s anything you can do to make that person feel better.  And there definitely is, but we all have to jump in and pull our weight.  We all have to choose, every day, with every interaction, whether we want to be kind, or not.  So let’s choose kindness.  Not just right now, not just because there was drama today and we feel bad about it in this one particular instance, not just for the sake of one person, but for the sake of how the hell we’re going to get through hiatus when it’s only day eight and we’re already eating each other alive.  Let’s choose kindness for the sake of making this fandom a better place to exist, for everybody. 

[kane-and-griffin]

I'm really sad about something I don't understand and was hoping you could explain. Why do people block without giving a reason to? I don't why it first seems like it's all going so well then the next you're blocked and you don't know why or what you did or said wrong? It's happened twice now and to say it hurts is an understatement.

Oh, my precious Kabby babies.  Circle up, it’s time for some firm butgentle life advice from Mom. 

First of all, unless I personally am the person who blocked you (whichI’m obviously not since we’re having this conversation!), in a very real sensethe short answer to this question is that you know I can’t actually answer thisquestion.  You’re asking me to tell youwhy a person I don’t know did a thing for which I have no context, and forwhich there could be a thousand reasons. So in a concrete, specific sense, my answer is: I do not know.

However.

(You knew there was going to be a however.)

Social media is a deeply personal avenue for self-expression and it’s also aworld where many of us spend a great deal of our time, which means that we havethe full and free right to customize it into exactly what we want it tobe.  The things that you post are personal reflections of you, which is  why it bums you out when someone mutes or blocks or doesn’t followback; it feels on some level like a personalrejection.  But the space you curate is also a personal reflection of you.  You have the rightto post anything you want and other people have the right to choose not to seeit.  Both of those rights are equal, eventhough you’re only on one side so naturally the other one feels like it’s insome way “wrong.”  

I’m speaking with zero context for what your preexisting relationship withthese people was beforehand (like obviously if it was a close friend and theyblocked you out of nowhere, you’re going to have to sort that out with themdirectly, I can’t advise you there), but it’s important to remember that theremay be no “right” and wrong” in this scenario.  It’s fully possible forboth of these things to peacefully coexist at the same time:

1) your absolute right to feel a little bit rejected and hurt that astranger on the internet made the choice that they didn’t want your socialmedia sphere to overlap with their social media sphere,

and

2) that other person’s absolute right to say “if something or someone makesme feel even the tiniest bit ‘nope’ I am purging it out of this space so it isexactly what I want and need it to be.” 

They don’t need to have a reason.  That sucks, when you’re on the receiving end of it, which all of us have been - it truly and genuinely sucks - but it’s also reality.  One of the hard truths that incidents like this make us sometimes have toface - and we don’t want to face these things, because they can feel reallyicky and vulnerable and ping all the little gremlins in our brain  - is this:

nobody on the internet owes you their time or attention foranything you do or say.

This sounds mean and brutal, and I don’t mean it to be, because you know mom loves you, but it’s incrediblyimportant, so I’m going to say it again to make sure that if nothing else, thisgets through:

nobody on the internet owes you their time or attention foranything you do or say.

The celebs you stan don’t owe you a response to your tweet, justbecause you want one.  The people you tag in meta don’t owe you rebloggingit to continue having that conversation with you forever, just because you wantto prove you’re right.  The fans of the fic you write for your mostpopular ship don’t owe you crossing over to give you hits on yourrare-pair fic if they don’t feel like it.  Nobody owes you a certainnumber of followers, nobody owes you a response to every anon you send them,nobody owes you finishing that fic you like in time for them to read it whenthey feel like reading it.  We owe each other one thing and one thingonly: basic human decency.  That’s it.  Everything else is freelyoffered to the world, and freely taken by the people who want it.  It’snot a transactional exchange.  If you make art or write fic and you put itout there into the world, you’ve done a cool thing, and whether it gets tenhits or thousands it was still worth doing.  There will be people whoaren’t interested, but if you get hung up on feeling rejected by that, it willparalyze you.

Social media is personal. That’s unavoidable.  It’s an extension of ourselves.  When someone is cruel to you or to one ofyour friends on the internet, even if it’s an anonymous stranger, it feelsshitty.  When you express an opinionabout something and a ton of people reblog it and the tags are full of “OMG YESTHISSSSS”, it feels great.  We all experiencethat in different ways.  Society has always selected arbitrary measures for young girls and women tolive up to in order to feel like they’re popular or they’re approved by thecool kids, and right now it’s things like “how many followers do you have” and “didyou get an RT from a celebrity” and “how many likes on your posts”.  So ona primal level, maybe having someone you thought was a friend block you on Twitter or Tumblr hits you in the same deep coreplace as having the cool kids not come to your birthday party.  That feeling is super real!  It brings upalllllll that deep stuff we try to hide and pretend that we’re aboveexperiencing, but we all have those squishy vulnerable inner selves that justneed the cool kids to like us and we feel bad when they don’t.  

I had this exact conversation with my therapist a few weeks ago when she wasgiving me a hard time because my book has 60 reviews on Amazon, of which likethe majority are 5 stars with two negative ones, and I have both the negativeones like memorized.  And she was like “CLAIRE.  WHAT THE HELL.  WHY DO YOU DO THIS?  58 POSITIVE AND YOU CANNOT QUOTE A SINGLEONE.  TWO SHITTY ONES AND YOU KNOW THEMVERBATIM.  THAT IS NOT HEALTHY BEHAVIOR.”  And I was like “… . okay fine when youput it that way, yes I do sound like a crazy person.”  So like my advice to you – advice which I havejust proven I am absolute garbage at taking myself, so like I may have justeroded my own credibility in my efforts to help – is to remember that you probablyhave a lot more than two followers so honestly this is probably not a badcollective ratio, and there may be lots of people who are very interested inwhat you have to say but you’ve focused a lot of your energy on these two people andit’s worth giving some thought as to why that is.

My question for you is this: what is the net negative impact of having thesetwo people block you on social media? Like in an actual, concrete way, separate from those sort of core gut “Ifeel unloved in this moment” feelings, what is the effect on your life?  You might be surprised.  It might be zero.  In which case, let yourself feel thosefeelings, experience them as valid, and then breathe through them and move onand keep on doin’ you. 

I’m pushing backon you a little bit here very gently because it feels, reading this anon, likeyou’ve made a determination of hurtful intent on the part of the person whoblocked you, or at the very least a certainty that this choice that made wasabout you and not about them.  That the fact that things seemed to be going fine and then they blocked you means you were somehow intentionally misled or mistreated.  Be really, really, really carefulabout deciding the cool girl didn’t come to your birthday party because she’s abitch who wanted to make you feel terrible and is sitting somewhere cackling atthe thought of your sad lil’ face waiting by the front door; maybe she didn’tcome to your birthday party because she has depression and it’s hard for her toleave the house sometimes and she knew your party would be loud and wild and crazyand too much for her brain to handle right now. Be careful about presuming negative intent with no proof it exists.  The internet makes this so easy, the internetconditions us for this, and itconditions us to respond in kind. The worst thing you could do here is to, like,make a callout post or subtweet in the hopes that it will get back to them andthey’ll feel bad, or to sic your other followers onto them, because that turnsthis into a situation that really doeshave a right and wrong; and since you don’t know if they were trying to makeyou feel shitty, or just went on a big block/mute purge to whittle their listdown for mental health reasons that are totally their own, once things escalateyou can’t put the horse back in the barn. It’s too late.  Now it’s A Thing,when maybe it never really needed to be A Thing.  And in almost all situations for almost allpeople in almost all ways, Kabby Mom’s advice is going to be, “please thinkcarefully before you make this A Thing.”

This got long, I’ve been having a lot of thoughts lately about theconversations I’m always having with fandom folks the way we let social mediapermeate and shape our sense of self, in good ways and bad, so I apologize formy verbosity but also not really because that’s how things roll over in KabbyMom’s Advice Corner.  But I will sum upin bullet points for those of you who have been skimming, to bring you up tospeed:

Everyone has the right to curate their own social media spacehowever they see fit, and they don’t have to explain their reasons.

They aren’t obligated to include you in that space even if you want themto.

None of that is an objective measure of your worth as a person or a signthat you should stop being you on the internet.

Your feelings of rejection come from a real place and you get to feelthem, as long as

You are striving to move through them without permitting them to paralyzeyou, and finally

You never use someone else’s choice to curate their social media sphere as ajustification for treating them like crap.

Focus on your positive interactions instead of negative ones – your friends,creating stuff and putting it out into the universe – whether it be art, fic,opinions, a podcast, gifsets, crackposts, whatever – and your social mediaworld will be a better place.

In the immortal words of the great Michael J. Fox, “What other people thinkof me is none of my business.”

[kane-and-griffin]

Kabby mom, I don't know what to do. I just found out someone I thought was a friend has been talking trash and saying horrible things about me and some other friends on a private account. I feel so hurt and betrayed that they pretended to be my friend and then did those. What do I do?

COME HERE, BABIES, MOM’S GOT YOU

It’s unusual enough for me to get two such similar anons in a 24-hour periodthat I decided to take them both together, since it seems like you’re very muchin the same boat.  Maybe you both gothurt by the same person; you might even know each other and not have realizedanother one of your friends was hurting too.  Maybe you’re total strangerswho both just had a very very similar bad day.  I am sending you both somuch love right now.

It is devastating when you learn that someone you trusted wasn’t worthy ofthat trust.  I’m thirty-five and I’ve gone through this recently too -this isn’t something we age out of, unfortunately; this isn’t something thatstops when you’re an adult - and there is no worse feeling.  It makes yougo back through every interaction you ever had and wonder if any of it wasreal.  Was I being played?  Am I stupid?  Do they think I’mstupid?  Did they think I wouldn’t find out?  Did everyone else knowbut me?  Did they mean any of those kind things or was the wholerelationship a complete fabrication?  It’s terrible.  It just is. There is no way around it.  Youlet your guard down, and someone took advantage of that.  You told yourself someone was safe, and theyweren’t.  Everything you’re feeling isvalid and right and real. 

You both asked me what you should do, and the most important thing I cantell you is that right now you need to take shelter with your ride-or-die friends.  The ones who make you feel absolutely andunquestionably safe.  The ones you knowmean what they say.  Let them wrap theirarms around you and remind you that there are people you trust who are worthyof that trust.  Do not, do not, do notlet this dishonest friend’s terrible behavior erode your ability to trust thepeople who are worth trusting.  Do notshut down because of this.  When you letyourself be vulnerable, the risk of getting hurt is the cost of doingbusiness.  It’s still better than thealternative of never being vulnerable at all. Please do not let the assholes win.

I’m feeling a lot of feels about both of these asks because it’s pinging alot of really painful similar memories from my life, where I’ve been on bothsides of this exact situation.  I cantell you right now, there are no winners. What your friend did was unquestionably shitty, but I actually have a lot ofcompassion for them too.  This kind oftwo-faced behavior is a pretty textbook case of insecurity, though I suspect ifyour friend heard that they would deny it. That level of self-loathing runs pretty fucking deep.  I know this from personal experience, becauseI used to be that asshole too.  I would absolutely have denied that it came from insecurity.  So thepainful reality is that even if you call them out on their behavior, they maynot be ready to stop. 

I was a lonely, introverted, self-isolating kid who grew up in the 80′s and90′s before the cultural legitimizing of geekdom or the invention ofeasily-accessible fandom communities.  Igrew up back when the other kids would mock you until you cried for coming toschool on Halloween dressed as Counselor Troi, or for reading fantasy novels onthe bench during recess instead of playing kickball.  I didn’t feel safeanywhere that wasn’t in my own house, and I hated school. And when you’rethat miserable, that lonely, that desperate to fit in, you develop survivalmechanisms.  I learned that being theperson who always had the juicy gossip and was willing to dish, and being meanin a way that made people laugh, let me navigate among all the groups ofbullies and mean girls in relative safety.  It’s like camouflage in theanimal kingdom; look just enough like one of them that they leave you alone, sothey know you aren’t prey.  Maybe you won’t fit in, but at the very leastthey won’t attack you. 

So I was kind of an asshole.  Whichmeans sometimes I got caught being an asshole. Every once in awhile I could maneuver my way out of it by lying, but notalways. Sometimes I had to look someone in the eye who was crying becausethey’d heard me shit-talk them when I didn’t know they were listening, and Ihated myself for it. 

It would be really nice if the next sentence was “So then I realized mybehavior was hurtful, and I stopped,” but that is not always how it works.  I wasn’t shit-talking my roommate behind herback because I hated my roommate so much; I was shit-talking my roommate behindher back because it made my other, more popular friend laugh and then for a minute I feltcool.  Just knowing I’d hurt my roommatedidn’t fix the bigger problem, which was why it was so fucking important to feel “cool” in the first place.  I wouldn’t have felt like Ihad to be a hundred different people depending on who I was talking to if I hadrealized then what I know now, which is that I am only one person and that one person is enough.  That one person is worthy of love andbelonging.  I had to learn that I’m surroundedby people who love me, respect me, value my talents, and believe in my intrinsicworth without me having to win my place in the social hierarchy by beingtwo-faced and mean.

In terms of the social media angle specifically, a lot of people whose social media is tied to their public identity do needa space that is restricted for only their most trusted friends - whether it’sto hide politics posts from your conservative family, let your freak flag flywhen sharing smut fic, or yell about your coworkers when you’ve had a badday.  So the mere existence of a second, secret/locked account isn’tinherently a friendship dealbreaker.  Thequestion is: is its sole purpose to bitch about people they treat like friendsin public?  Because if so, then sure theyhave a right to have it, but you also have a right to exit this relationshipbecause of it.  Freedom of expression does notexempt you from the consequences of people finding out you’re a terriblefriend. 

So.  What do you do?  Where do you go from here?  This is where it gets sticky.  Is this a close personal friend, classmate,someone you know well?  Is it a relationship you want to preserve if youcan?  Do you think this person has the heart and the humility to listen toan honest accounting of how hurtful their behavior is and maybe learn somethingand change, or do you think they’d just, like, screencap your DM and post it ontheir secret tumblr?  Is vulnerability and openness more potentiallyhelpful here, or potentially dangerous?  You both know your friends betterthan I do, and more importantly, you know in your gut the most importantquestion here, which is - do you want to preserve this friendship, ornot?  

Some people are desperate to be seen, to feel important, to be the center ofsomething, to feel “in” with the cool kids, because secretly they’re afraidthat they will never actually belong on their own merits, and their petty ormalicious behavior is driven by fear.

Other people are just assholes who are not worth your time.  You deserve better. 

For now, take shelter with your bestest, safest,lovingest, most supportive BFF squad and let them remind you that the world isfull of good and true and honest people who always mean what they say when theylook you in the eye.

Stay strong, babies.  Mom lovesyou. 

[kane-and-griffin]

dear kabby mom, how do I make my broken heart stop hurting? I fell in love with a girl who I thought was falling back for me too....but now I don't think so anymore. this sucks.

Oh, my sweetsad baby.  

It does suck. 

It absolutely sucks. 

There is nothing I can say that will makethat not true.  There is nothing anyonecan say or do that will make it suck any less except time.

 And I know that’s not the answer you want tohear, that’s not the answer anyone wants to hear, because it doesn’t fixanything right now.  It doesn’t save youfrom having to go through the thing you have to go through right now.  It doesn’t make any of the things that hurtright now any less painful to know that in ten years (or five years) (or sixmonths) this will all feel different. It’s the truest thing that I have to tell you, but I also know thatit is in some degree useless to you right now.

You say thatyou think she doesn’t have feelings for you. Have you talked to her?  Have youdone the excruciating and mortifying and emotionally naked thingwhere you open up your heart to someone without any idea what will happennext?  Maybe you don’t need to ask; maybeyou know already.  Maybe she likessomeone else.  Maybe her feelings aboutyou are platonic and she’s made that clear. But if there’s gray area – if there’s a piece of your heart or mind that’sstill whispering, “But maybe, but maybe …” – maybe with a little time,maybe she’ll change her mind, maybe she’ll see you differently in a year, maybeit won’t work out with the girl she’s dating now – then it might be helpful tosay it out loud, to stop the “But Maybe” train in its tracks before it derails you.  Sometimes you can’t let go andput it behind you until you’ve heard the real “No.”  Until the bubble has been burst.  I don’t know your situation, but I know morethan once in my life that’s been true for me. I knew I’d hold onto unreasonably stubborn optimism, willfullymisinterpreting whatever they said as a “sign,” until I finally got up thecourage to just say it out loud, get my heart smashed into a hundred tiny pieces, pick them up, and keep walking.  It was miserable but it was also the only way forward. 

And you, baby, need to figure out what youneed to move forward.

You’re feeling big things right now, and you need to use whateverhealthy outlets are available to you to start processing them.  Cry to your friends.  Write, draw, sing.  Make sad playlists, watch sad movies.  Swap stories with the peoplein your life about their heartbreaks, to remind yourself that you’re notexperiencing this alone.  Eat goodchocolate.  Go for walks.  Breathe fresh air.  Stay busy. Spend time with as many good dogs and adorable non-annoying children asyou can find.  Dogs and children do notlet you get away with wallowing.  They will absolutely force you to remember that you are alive.

What youabsolutely must under no circumstances do is let heartbreak feed intoobsession.  Don’t check her social mediaa hundred times a day to think about all the other people she might choose whenshe didn’t choose you, or how much fun she’s having doing things you wish shewas doing with you instead, but isn’t.  Don’t useher to process the emotions you need to process, even if she’s yourfriend.  Do not make her responsible foryour broken heart.  Do not punish her, orany future person she dates, for the fact that she didn’t choose you.  If you need to vent these feelings do them quietlyand privately with your closest most trustworthy friends.  Never publicly, and never to her.  Do not vagueblog or subtweet in a forum whereshe might see it, and know, and feel terrible. You have every right to process every inch of the feelings that you’refeeling but you owe it to her to make sure you do it in a respectful way. 

She has not done anything wrong. 

No one here has done anything wrong.  

The first timeI realized I had feelings for someone who didn’t have them back I wastwelve.  The first time I told someone Ihad feelings for them and they didn’t say it back to me, I was twenty.  The most recent time was just last year.  

Once I showedup at a girl’s house for a brunch date and her drunken hookup from the night before answered the door, but I was too polite to bolt so we just satthere eating our eggs and pretending it wasn’t awkward and I was just there because the girl and I were just friends.

Once in highschool I told the tall beautiful blonde star of the basketball team who satnext to me in algebra and with whom I had been silently smitten all year thatshe had beautiful eyes, and when she gave me a weird look I got up and ran outof the room and pretended like I just needed to get something from mylocker.  

Once I didn’trealize that the date I was on wasn’t a date and that the girl was straightuntil I tried to kiss her, at which point she backed away in horror and neithershe nor her friends ever spoke to me again. She lives in my city now and once six years ago we were at a partytogether and even though at that point it had been close to a decade since theincident, she still never came anywhere near me.

I’ve hadfriendships end over this.  I’ve hadfriendships grow ten times as strong over this. I’m thirty-five and I’ve been in the place you’re currently in moretimes than I can count, and the only thing I can tell you from where I’msitting right now which might be in any way helpful is that the thing you areexperiencing is universal. 

Everyone thatyou know has been through this at least once. Some people have been on both sides of it.  All of us have been there.  All of us have been there.  Everyone you love and admire, everyone youthink is tough and strong, everyone you think never lets their feelings get tothem or who you’ve never seen cry, everyone who’s in a relationship of whichyou’re secretly envious because you assume the fact that they’re happy nowmeans they’ve never known what it’s like to be unhappy.  All of us. All of us.  We’re all right herewith you.  And what that means is that weall survived it. 

And you will too.  I promise, baby.  You will too. You’re experiencing one of those things that poets write about.  You’ll listen to melancholy love songs andwatch sad movies differently from now on. You know a thing now about your heart that you didn’t know before, andit’s beautiful and terrible and there will be times that you will probably wishfor it to disappear.

But please don’t.  

Let me tellyou why.

When I was akid, I was quiet and awkward and introverted and shy, and kept everythinginside.  I began to come out of my shella little bit in high school, but I didn’t really blossom until college, when Ifinally found my people, and suddenly it was like I was Dorothy moving from ablack-and-white world to a Technicolor one. I was in love with everything and everyone.  I was in love with the pretentious gayphilosophy major who lived downstairs and I was in love with the blondesorority girl down the hall who is now a major writer for Buzzfeed and I was inlove with anyone who would stay up with me until the sun rose, sitting in thedorm lounge and talking about books.  Ihad this big colorful soft squishy heart that I’d kept hidden my whole life and I justwanted to give it to someone, but every experience was new, so I gave it toeveryone, and because it was all new to me, I had no defense mechanisms to protect myself or avoid getting hurt.  I was forever falling forpeople who didn’t want me back and breaking my own heart and crying and feelingdevastated and writing terrible poetry and being afraid I’d never feel anythingever again.  But hearts are elastic, they bounce back when we let them, they’re made for love and if you just give them alittle time they’ll heal and move on to somebody else.

Then when Iwas twenty-four, my mother was diagnosed with a terminal illness, andI shut down.

The only way Icould cope with the panic and the grief was to force myself not to feelit.  I knew my mother was not fine, but Itold myself over and over that she would be. I knew that I was not fine, but I told myself over and over that Iwas.  Sometimes when I was alone at nightI would feel it, this huge dark cloud thing hovering over me, and I would feelmyself, very firmly, very carefully, shoving it back down into a box andlocking it up.  It was an almost physicalsensation.  I can remember it vividly.  It was spectacularly unhealthy, but it wasalso the only way I could survive. 

Shedied when I was twenty-seven, and my clearest memory of that day, and of theperiod immediately after, was that I felt nothing.  I cried when I got the phone call from mydad, because of the shock.  I didn’t cryagain – about her, or about anything – for years.  I went from being someone who would burst into tears at, like, a Verizon commercial about grandparents, to someone who didn’t cry at her own mother’s funeral.  Some switch had flipped inside me, and it waslike the part of me that could feel things was just gone.  I lost three grandparents in the years aftermy mom died, and I sang at all their funerals, and I felt nothing.  I knew that I loved them, and I knew that this thing that was happening was sad, but I felt it in this very muffled, dim, distant, far-off way where ifyou had asked me if I was okay I would have told you that I was fine and Iwould have believed that to be perfectly true.

It wasterrible.

Grief made mysister more emotional – she cried a lot, she was more demonstrative, she wantedto process her feelings out loud – but it shut me down completely.  And it took that big sparkly heart full oflove for everybody with it.  I tried,every once in awhile, half-heartedly, to go out on an internet date, but I feltnothing.  I didn’t know then what “demisexual”meant, and that I’m simply not wired to sit across the table in a bar from atotal stranger and feel the things you’re supposed to feel in that situation; Ineed that emotional connection before any of the other stuff happens.  But I wasn’t able to form that emotionalconnection.  From time to time I mightfeel a fleeting spark of a wistful crush on the cute divorced older lady poetin my writing group, or develop complicated feelings for one of the revolvingdoor of tortured, dramatic, toxic artistic men that seem to be foreverpopulating my life, but it wasn’t the same. I spent ten years convinced that I was broken; that my mom’s death meantthat the part of me that knew how to feel things was dead too.  I would, at that moment, have givenabsolutely anything to be that heartbroken twenty-year-old sobbing over beingrejected by a pretty straight girl, because at least that Claire could feelthings.

It took me ten years for the switch to flip back on, for me to catch feelings for someone and then get my heart broken again, not that long ago, and it was so disorienting to be feeling things again after all that time, but I was really grateful too.  Because it meant that I wasn’t dead inside.  I was a person who could feel things again.

I’m tellingyou all of this because right now you are heartbroken, and in the depths ofyour pain you feel like this is a terrible thing to be, and you want to make itstop.  And I am here to tell you, yourheart will heal, because that is what hearts do when we give them permission;but in the midst of your heartbreak, remember to be grateful for the capacityto be heartbroken.  For the fact that youhave a breakable heart.  For the factthat you are the kind of person who loves big, even when you aren’t sure theother person is going to love you back. That’s the best kind of person to be.

You’re goingto be okay, cupcake.  I promise.  

[kane-and-griffin]

Sorry if this is annoying but I've seen you answer similar questions before so I was wondering if you could give me any advice for not letting the hate for The 100 get to me? I'm a big fan of the show (even though it has its flaws) but I see so many people really vehemently hating it and it makes me really stressed and upset sometimes. I'm a very non-combative person and I'd *never* get involved in arguments online, but it feels horrible to be in the minority like this... (cont.)

(part 2) I feel as if this fandom is small and hated on all sides by all the antis, and even a lot of people who have never watched the show but disapprove of it on principle. I often see negative posts with *thousands* of notes! It makes me feel like a bad person for watching it, especially since I’m bi myself and care a lot about representation in media. I know I should have my own opinions on things, but sometimes I feel like I can’t even admit to still watching and liking The 100! (cont.)

(part 3) I know some fans enjoy the discourse, or like being in the minority and fighting back against the haters, but I’m not one of them - seeing people shitting all over something that brings me a lot of happiness just really upsets me. With other fandoms I can take a few people who just don’t like something I like (everyone is entitled to their opinion!) but The 100 has such a HUGE angry majority of antis who are so open and active in their disgust for the show and its fans…(cont.)

(part 4) Anyway sorry for this incredibly long and rambling ask; you don’t have to answer at all of course – I guess I just needed a sympathetic ear to vent to and your posts about this show always seem really thoughtful and kind. I really appreciate them and the podcast you do with your friend that always really makes me think about the show. And – guess what? – I’m too frightened to post about any of this openly on my own blog, of course.

I have good news and I have badnews. 

The good news is that the solutionto this is profoundly simple.  The bad news is that you will probably notlike it.

My advice is that, if your primaryexperience in this fandom is that of total and overwhelming negativity, you arefollowing the wrong people.

I affirm your feelings of frustration that negativity is upsetting and drains thejoy out of your experience.  But how muchpower you give to that negativity, and how much negativity you permit yourselfto consume, are choices over which you and you alone have agency, so we need totalk about that.

(more below the cut, this got long)

Let’s unpack a couple of the thingsyou mentioned in this post.  First ofall, yes, you’re correct that this show’s fandom is comparatively small next tothat of other shows with larger audiences; but I would push back on you alittle bit on the notion that the fandom is a majority of antis, as yousaid.  I don’t think that’s true.  I think it’s a minority who happen to beannoyingly loud.  But I do not think itis as many people as you think. 

A lot depends on your definition of “anti.” If, for example, the corner of fandom where you hang out tends to defineanyone who doesn’t ship your ship or anyone who voices frustration with how theshow has handled issues of representation as an “anti”, then there’s yourproblem right there.  That’s seeing negativitywhere no negativity needs to be.  If,however, you exist in a social media sphere where really and truly you areseeing an onslaught of actual legit show-attacking anti behavior, you need todo some heavy unfollowing or muting.  Yes, even if it’s your friends.  Even if it’s people in your own ship whoconsistently reblog or retweet negativity just to comment upon how shitty itis.  That’s still putting negativity in front of your eyeballs, and if thatdoesn’t make you feel good, you shouldn’t have to see it.

I’d encourage you to take a look athow you engage in fandom, who you follow, who you surround yourself with, andwhat their attitudes are.  Are peopletalking about the character arcs this season, your favorite fanfics, HogwartsHouse sorting, finale speculation, your faves’ beautiful faces, or who’s goingto be shirtless next week during the black rain episode?  Or is the fun stuff getting drowned out byeither posts from antis, or posts complaining about antis?  One of the things you said that interests meis “I often see negative posts with *thousands* of notes.”  Howdo you see them?  Where do you see them?  Takenote of those sources.  Do they pop up inyour feed from the same few people over and over, and if so, can you mute themand eliminate or reduce the problem? 

The important thing to remember hereis that you are allowed to like this show as much as you want, but other peoplewho don’t like the show are allowed to not like it, and neither one needs toaffect the other.  If someone makes apost about not liking the show, and they tag it properly and stay in theirlane, it’s important to remember that theyhaven’t actually done anything wrong.  Theysimply don’t like a thing that you like, and that’s perfectly fine.  So if any part of your social media behaviorinvolves seeking out that negativity – if you, or others you follow, go scrollthrough your ship’s anti-ship tag just to find stuff and reblog it so peoplecan go yell at the OP, the person who made that anti post and correctly taggedit isn’t the problem.  They’re just aperson expressing an opinion.  Same goesfor quote-tweeting someone who doesn’t @ you and just expresses an opinionabout your fave that you disagree with. If Step 1 is “Curate your feed”, Step 2 is “don’t borrow trouble.”

Of course, sometimes you follow therules and you stay in your lane and you’re just hanging out with your friendsminding your own business, and trouble shows up on your doorstep anyway, andthis is UNBELIEVABLY ANNOYING.  I feelyou on this deeply.  When Meta Stationannounced we were interviewing Jason on the podcast, we spent about a dayplaying whack-a-mole on Twitter and Tumblr, blocking and muting people who werescreaming obscenities at us for wanting to talk to him.  Erin had to take over because it was really gettingunder my skin.  So on the one hand, yes,that’s annoying as hell. On the other hand, here’s how I know that this fandomis not “majority antis” – we blocked/muted maybe 20 people, for a podcastepisode that has over 3,000 listens.  Andbecause a lot of the wank was coming from the same people, by the time weposted the actual interview, the backlash was almost nonexistent, probably becausethe dozen or so people who were going to scream in our faces had been mutedalready.  You’re right that there arepeople in the fandom who enjoy getting into it with antis who try to startshit, but it’s okay if that person isn’t you. You don’t have to be fighty on behalf of this show in order to earn theright to enjoy it.  You get to just enjoyit however you want.  You don’t have todefend your right to be here.  

I want to talk a little about yourimplicit statement that you feel unwelcome in this fandom in part becauseyou’re bi and you’ve been told either directly or indirectly that continuing towatch and support this show is in some way treasonous to the queer community,something I too have been told more than once. There is nothing I can say that makes this not shitty and I’m not evengoing to try, except to say that it isn’t true. I promise you, it isn’t true.  Icould give you the same arguments you’ve heard before about how the show stillhas multiple canon LGBTQ characters who defy stereotypes, including the firstbisexual heroine on this network, but honestly my real point here is thatnobody gets to tell queer people that they’re being queer incorrectly, evenother queer people.  No matter how loudthey yell it.  No matter how sure theyare that they’re right and you’re wrong. If you’re bi, and you see yourself in Clarke Griffin, and that means thisshow continues to be important to you on a personal level, NOBODY GETS TO TELLYOU THOSE FEELINGS ARE WRONG.  And I saythis to you as someone who absolutely feels like shit every time Iget called a traitor because I’m a lesbian whose primary f/f ship on this showis not the one f/f ship that counts as representation. I say this to you as someone who has had atleast three separate experiences just in the past few months where I’ve had tolock down my twitter and go on a mute/block spree because the assholes foundme.  I FEEL YOU.   But it used to get under my skin forlike a week and now it gets under my skin for like an afternoon and I feel likethat’s progress.  And the thing thatmakes a difference is having a supportive community of friends who will sit youdown and put their hands comfortingly on your shoulders and look deep into youreyes and say “that person is an asshole and also they are wrong” as many timesas you need to hear it.  I cannot make people who choose tobe assholes stop being assholes.  But I have RUTHLESSLY curated a socialmedia sphere for myself, on both twitter and tumblr, where my community ishappy and positive and supportive, and when that kind of stuff happens theyflock to my side with hugs and cat gifs, and I do the same for them. 

If the fandom is a city, our littlecorners of the fandom are our neighborhoods.  Who’s living next door toyou?  Who do you see walking their dog past your house everymorning?  Are you chipping in to help sweep the leaves off the street ordumping garbage everywhere?  Would your neighbors describe you as a goodneighbor?  We’re all responsible for being the fandom we wish to see inthe world, and if your experience with the entire fandom so far has been thatit’s dominated by negativity, it might be time to switch neighborhoods. 

My day-to-day experience of thisfandom sounds very different from yours.  I live in a peaceful quietneighborhood with just my friends - which includes people of many differentships, the only qualification is just that you have to be a positive and niceperson - and while we are aware that elsewhere, in other neighborhoods, thereare people throwing molotov cocktails at each other just for funzies,we are hanging out on the back porch drinking margaritas, flailing over fanfic,and talking about our pets and openingour doors to anyone who’s tired of living in a neighborhood that is PERMANENTLY ON FIRE.

Youdon’t owe anyone an explanation for your choice to enjoy a TV show youenjoy.  You can be fully aware of areas where the media you consume is problematic and watch it with a smart, observant, aware eye for those things, and also still enjoy it.  Enjoying a thing and seeing that thing clearly  It is easy to be negative on theinternet.  It is easy to absorbnegativity and respond in kind.  It isharder to block that negativity out, but it’s also the only way to keep other people from ruining your fun.

[kane-and-griffin]

hillary's concession speech was incredible and i felt so proud of her. the bit about telling girls that we are valuable and powerful made me weep. she should be president.

she was a hero. think about how grotesque and mean Trump’s concession speech would have been if it had gone the other direction; if he had conceded at all, he would have been calling for her to be impeached and inciting riots in the streets.  Instead Hillary reminded us that the first woman president of the U.S. is out there somewhere and that no matter what Trump and his supporters try to tell us, women are worthy and deserving of respect. it boggles my mind how many people out there believe that she is as corrupt as Trump the sexual predator, but goddamn if I don’t respect her even more for how gracefully she handled this defeat. Trump only cares about Trump, but Hillary Clinton genuinely cares about the preservation of democratic values, and this loss is just devastating.  I am still very much in my feelings about this.

[kane-and-griffin]

claire i'm so sad and scared. how do we go on after this election? why is there so much hate? :'(

Oh, my loves. 

My sweet, scared, sad, vulnerable, beautiful beloved angels.  Come here.  Snuggle up.  I’ve got you.  I’m right here.

The answer is … we go on bygoing on.

As we alwayshave.  As we always will.  As we must.

Today, we dowhatever we need to do to survive, to keep ourselves from crumbling, and wegive ourselves what we need, whether that is staying home from work or eatingchocolate cake for breakfast or calling a suicide prevention hotline (seeresources below).  Today we let ourselvesfeel whatever we are feeling, without judging it or permitting it to be judgedby others.  

No one gets totell you, today, while you are aching, to get up off the mat to startmobilizing for the 2018 midterm elections. No one gets to tell you, today, that if you had voted differently in theprimaries we would not be here and therefore you are not permitted to feelsad.  No one gets to tell you, today,that your grief and fear are not real.

Later, therewill be things to do, and we can talk about what some of them may be.  But they will keep.  Barack Obama is still the President of theUnited States.  We are still safe fornow, we are still okay for now, we woke up in the same country we have alwayslived in.  So take today.  Take this week.  Take the time you need to feel whatever youare feeling.  Hug your cat and yournephews.  Call your mother.  Say “I love you.”  Eat cake and watch sitcoms.  You are grieving.  The reason this feels like grieving a deathis because it is grieving adeath.  We were in the attic with thedoor closed so we did not know the house was on fire.

But we knowthe house is on fire now.  And that’sbetter than not knowing.

My friendIjeoma Oluo is a brilliant feminist and anti-racism activist in Seattle, andshe posted a video on Facebook last night that made me feel something like . .. not hope, exactly, but the germ of something that might sprout into hope atsome time in the future.  She talkedabout the election like a cancer diagnosis. If you are sick, and you don’t know you’re sick, or you don’t know thename of what you have, you can’t treat it. You will just go on being sick until you die.  Those of us who have lived through thediagnosis of a terminal illness – for ourselves or for a loved one – know firsthandhow terrifying and painful it is to hear those words.  But it’s also where hope resides.  Because once you can give the thing a name, treatingit finally becomes possible.  

So we havebeen given a diagnosis.  We live in awhite supremacist, sexist society.  Andnot just in the United States, but in countries all over the world.  Brexit and Trump are symptoms of the sameillness – the white male patriarchy, who hates anything which is “other,”feeling oppressed and threatened and terrified by a rapidly-changing world whichhas unequivocally declared that it wishes to move forward and leave theirantiquated ways behind.  The fear ofwomen, of immigrants, of LGBTQ people, of nonwhite faces, of non-Christianreligions, is driven by their certain knowledge that women and immigrants andLGBTQ people and people of color and non-Christians are rising and rising andrising, in their own country and all over the world, and clocks cannot beturned all the way back.  

So now we arefreed from the burden of trying to figure out what is wrong with us and why wefeel sick.  We know what it is.  We know that eight years of a black man aspresident and the rise of a movement designed to push police brutality againstblack Americans into the forefront of the national conversation awoke a strainof white nationalism so deep that a silent majority rose up from seeminglynowhere, millions of them, who were never counted in any poll, who we had noidea existed, and they voted into power the single least qualified candidatewho has ever run for President of the United States.  Because that is how much they hate women andpeople of color.

There is a lotof blame being thrown around, already, for whose fault this is.  You could make a compelling case that this isthe fault of James Comey, for example, with his letter to Congress implyingthat the discovery of new emails on Anthony Weiner’s laptop somehow impliedHillary had covered up a crime, even though nine days later he was forced toacknowledge that the whole thing had been bullshit – but only after millions ofpeople had already cast votes.  Andcertainly there is blame to be laid at the feet of the media, who spent morecolumn inches and airtime on Hillary’s emails than on any of the categoricallydisastrous Trump/Pence policy positions, and who made the mistake of nottreating him as a serious threat until it was too late.  I had to stay off Facebook today after I sawa friend who supported Bernie Sanders in the primary blaming Hillary voters forTrump’s win, and that if we had all simply voted for the Jewish socialist inthe primaries, the horrifically anti-Semitic and bigoted Trump campaign would,I guess, not have gone after him as hard. But that’s a wildly inaccurate reading based on the fact that we never hadto watch Bernie on the receiving end of a Trump smear campaign attacking himfor his progressive socialist beliefs. We don’t have any idea what lies they would have come up with.  (And we would have lost Bernie Sanders in theSenate, where we desperately need him more now than ever.  His career would have been shattered by theTrump steamroller, just like hers; the only difference is that hers was alreadyover.)  You can blame third-party votersin Pennsylvania and Florida, whose votes totaled higher than the gap betweenClinton and Trump, meaning that if they had voted for her instead of Stein orJohnson, she would have won both those states and the presidency.  I will fully admit to having felt this anger,but I also know that this is only a tiny piece of the puzzle; the problem isnot simply that third-party voters diverted enough votes to flip the election, theproblem is that it should never havegotten close enough for third-party voters to matter.  

Progressivevalues did not lose this election.  Whitesupremacist patriarchy won it.  That isour diagnosis.  We know what the sicknessis now.  We’ve passed a point beyondwhich we can’t pretend that we aren’t sick. We’ve hit rock bottom.

So now what?

How do we goon?

I had anElection Night party last night.  I had ahouse full of people and 2 dozen homemade brownie cupcakes with differentcut-out pictures of Hillary Clinton’s face on them, and a banner that says “SMASHTHE PATRIARCHY” hanging over the buffet table. We started out the night so hopeful; friends came wearing pantsuits andHillary t-shirts and we had ice cream and champagne to celebrate at the end ofthe night, when we predicted we’d be watching the Oregon returns roll in after tearfullyhugging each other through a jubilant Hillary Clinton acceptance speech.

And I willnever forget for the rest of my life the way it felt to be sitting there on mycouch, feeling physical nausea, as we watched the CNN electoral map changecolor in front of us. As the inevitable, terrible thing we had all dimlybelieved was an impossibility became reality right in front of our faces.

And I don’t want to forget it.  Because this is one of the most importantthings that has ever happened in my lifetime. I want to spend the rest of my life fueled by the horror of that moment,motivated by ensuring that something like this never happens again.  I live in a country that knowingly elected afascist, and it was not even close, and we need to talk about how this happenedand how we all get through it and come out the other side.

I felt sick tomy stomach most of last night, and started crying as soon as my house emptiedout.  I cried for my friend Sam, who isqueer in a small Southern town and is surrounded by Trump supporters who makeher feel afraid to come out, and I cried for the fact that our new VicePresident is a man who diverted HIV/AIDS treatment funding in his state to gotowards conversion therapy for LGBT youth, and for the four trans teens who tooktheir own lives last night.  I cried formy friend Ike, a black man in a red state, who was in my DMs last night drunkand in tears and told me “I feel like I’m surrounded by enemies.”  I cried for my friends who have youngchildren, and who are trying to figure out how to explain what happened.  Kids who don’t know how the Electoral Collegeworks, but who do understand what bullying is, and that it is never supposed tobe rewarded with access to more power and more resources so that you can bullymore people more effectively.

I cried lastnight, until I fell asleep.  I woke upthis morning feeling numb.  Then I talkedto my best friend on the phone, and then my stepmother came by to visit, and myphone was blowing up all day with friends texting me to say “I just want you toknow that we will always be here and we will always be allies.”  The group text of my college roommates wasfull of “What can we do?”  Sarah is organizing a monthly series ofnetworking and mentorship events for women executives in her verymale-dominated field, because there is no system of support in place for them.  Beth is going to talk her theatre companyinto investing more in rural outreach, bringing arts programming and discussioninto the kinds of communities where conservative echo chamber thinking allowsbigotry to fester.   My family has a small private foundation – we investedmy mother’s assets and life insurance after she died, which allows us to makegifts to charitable organizations with it – and the family group chat has beenall about ways we can use those resources to figure out what vulnerablepopulations in our communities are about to become more vulnerable, and what wecan do to help.

How do we goon?

We go on bygoing on.  As we always have.  As we always will.  As we must.

The whitenationalist and anti-immigrant backlash which led to the rise of Trump is not apolitical problem.  It is not evenexclusively an American problem, although America is in many ways the festeringheart of it.  It is bigger than misogyny,bigger than Brexit, bigger than race.  

It is not acrisis of politics.  It is a crisis of empathy.

If you seeimmigrants as a force which has swept into your country and caused economicinstability, making it harder for you to find a job, then you do not see thoseimmigrants as human beings like yourself. You do not understand or care about their lives.  You do not see them as humans equal toyourself.  If you see black men asinherently dangerous, if you see women achieving positions of political andeconomic power as a threat, if you see marriage equality as a threat to thesanctity of the establishment of marriage, if you see Islam as a home forterrorists – what you have lost is empathy. What you have lost is the knowledgethat every one of those people has a humanity which is equal to yours.  You are accustomed to having 100% of theprivilege; now you only have 99%, which feels like oppression, and so it doesnot matter to you how many people out there have had zero all this time.  

How do we goon?

Empathy.

We have tofind it again.  We have to get it back.

We have tostick together, now more than ever.  Wehave to find common ground instead of losing the next two years to liberalinfighting and wasting our shot at taking back the Senate during the 2018midterms, our best shot to limit the damage of a Trump presidency.  We have to find, and unite behind, a trulykickass Democratic presidential candidate, and we have to balance realisticexpectations about electability with a sincere commitment to progressivevalues, and then we have to address the fact that forty-five percent of Americans did not even vote in thiselection.  About a quarter of theelectorate went for Trump and another for Clinton; the difference was just a fewpercentage points (with Clinton ahead, though losing the ElectoralCollege).  And then another few went to third-partycandidates.  But that’s still barely halfof the country.  Decisions are made bythose who show up, and last night we saw what happens when the ones who show upare the white supremacists who hate women.

They hate us.

They havealways hated us.

You were notimagining that.  It is real.  It is ugly and it is awful and it isreal.  And when we avoid it – when westay in New York for Thanksgiving because we can’t stomach flying home toKansas and sitting across the table from our racist grandfather and feelingthat discomfort; when we read only the news sources which validate ourworldview; when we immerse ourselves in the liberal bubble and don’t ever setfoot outside – then we miss the signs, and lose out on opportunities for theconversations that lead to real change.

Those of us atrisk – with less privilege and more danger – need to take care ofthemselves.  Queer people, people ofcolor, young progressives, flee their small towns and move to big cities tomake better lives, to find safety and freedom. That is real.  That is valid.  That may be what you need to do.

But maybethose of us who are progressive and who have more privilege need to askourselves whether, by avoiding our racist grandfathers, by filtering ourpolitical posts on Facebook because we’re too tired to get into a whole bigthing with that girl from high school, by making the red parts of the mapredder by gathering up our Democrat friends and moving out of South Dakota tolive in San Francisco instead, we are choosing things that make us feelcomfortable at the expense of the hard, messy, uncomfortable activist work thatour friends of less privilege really need us to do.

I do not wantanyone putting themselves into a position of danger.  I do not want anyone risking their safety – physical,mental, or emotional.  But this is how wego on.  We look at ourselves, at where wefall on the ladder of privilege, and those of us who are higher – who arewhite, cis, straight, able-bodied, neurotypical, middle class or higher,educated, economically stable – step up as much as we can on behalf of thepeople around us who have less privilege and can’t.  If you’re playing a co-op video game and youhave six lives left but your partner only has one, you take the bullet.  Not all of them – not enough to endangeryourself – no one is asking you to do that – but as many as you safelycan.  Because maybe sitting down acrossthe Thanksgiving table from your racist grandfather and explaining Black LivesMatter to him is the only possible venue where someone he cares about and willlisten to could actually change his mind. And maybe the way you show your love for your friends of color is totake that one bullet for them.

How do we goon?  

We look aroundour communities and we see who needs help, and we ask what we can do.  

Do you pay tosubscribe to a good, real newspaper?  Weare going to need a well-funded free press over the next four years.  The WashingtonPost did vitally important journalism over the course of the Trumpcampaign, breaking a huge number of stories – like the Billy Bush tape and thefraudulent Trump Foundation – before anyone else did.  They have more than earned the couple bucks amonth I pay for this online subscription. They fought hard for our democracy, and we are going to need them.

Can you affordto make a small recurring monthly donation to an organization that supportsvulnerable populations in your community? Women’s reproductive rights and protections for LGBTQ people are aboutto be violently imperiled; Planned Parenthood, Lambda Legal, homeless sheltersthat support queer youth, and organizations that support women’s healthcare inthe U.S. and around the world are going to need your money.  $5 a month over the course of a Trumppresidency is $240.  What if we all didthat?

If you can’tafford to donate, can you volunteer?  Doyou live in a district with a Republican House or Senate member coming up forreelection in 2018?  Can you contact yourDemocratic precinct to get on their mailing list so the second they’ve nominateda Democrat to run against them, you can get on board to start knocking ondoors?  Do you have a few hours a monthto help stock the food pantry at your church or volunteer to help withchildcare at a domestic violence shelter?

Do youregularly watch or support any of the reality television shows produced by MarkBurnett, whose media empire singlehandedly turned Trump from the failed realestate mogul who was treated mostly as a joke in the 80’s and 90’s into a brandsynonymous with business success which led voters to believe he was capable offixing the economy?  Or any of the othershows, like Jimmy Fallon or SNL who helped Trump brand himself as a lovablestraight-shooter, your quirky uncle with the weird hair instead of a genuinethreat to the stability of the entire world? Turn them off.  All of them.  Right now. And tell them why.  There needs tobe a reckoning.

Is your socialmedia world an echo chamber, where you mostly hang out in communities whereeveryone mirrors your same beliefs, and spends most of their time talking abouthow everyone who has different sets of beliefs is wrong?  Can you expand that circle in a way that doesnot threaten your safety or emotional well-being in order to consume media fromsources you disagree with, so that you are better armed and equipped for thereal, difficult, substantive conversations we are all going to need to behaving with that 25% of the American populace who knowingly voted for this manas President?  Can you have thoseconversations in a way that facilitates real change, through listening andeducating and explaining, rather than attacking or dismissing incounterproductive ways?  

You do nothave to do any of these things today.

You do nothave to do them tomorrow, or the next day.

Today, we goon by letting ourselves grieve the promise of Obama’s America, of the country wethought we had become.  It feels like afuneral because it is.  You get to feelthat.  No one gets to tell you that youdon’t.

Today we go onby telling other hurting people we love that we love them.  By telling our scared friends that they haveour support and that we will fight to keep them safe.  By checking in with the people of color,immigrants, Muslims, queer and trans people we know and love, who feel theirsafety directly threatened by the results of this election, and we do not “notall white people” them – we do not dismiss their anger and betrayal no matterhow uncomfortable it makes us feel – but instead we remind them that they areseen and they are valued and that we intend to show up.  

Today we go onby celebrating women.  

Women areamazing.  

Women watcheda man rise to power and become the President-Elect of this country after harassing,abusing, belittling and insulting us over and over and over again.  By sexually assaulting us and then braggingabout it.  By empowering an army ofmisogynists online and in person to dismiss the woman running against him noton the basis of her policies (of which many Trump voters could not name one ifyou asked them), but on the basis of her womanhood.  For daring to be a woman with an opinion whostood up to the absolute pinnacle of toxic masculinity and said, out loud, “Youare a toxic man.”

Hillary motherfucking Clinton.

You don’t haveto agree with her policies.  You can havereal questions about what the potential challenges might have been had shebecome president, and still look at what she did and feel that, as a woman.  How fucking brave that was.  She stood there next to a man who was lessqualified for her job than anyone who has ever run for that job in the historyof the republic, and she smiled like we told her to because she would be calleda bitch if she didn’t, and while he foamed at the mouth spouting lie after lie,she never once cracked.  And then afterthe first woman major-party presidential candidate was forced to concede to arapist, she gave a concession speech that kept the dream alive for the next generationsof women and girls coming after her.

Women are amazing.

Feminism is amazing.

We are goingto need each other over these next four years. We are going to need to rally behind the women in our government (somegood news last night, there are more women and especially women of color inCongress than there were before, and my home state of Oregon elected KateBrown, a bisexual woman as the country’s first-ever openly LGBTQ governor) andour future women candidates.  We aregoing to need to speak up about the right to control our own bodies which maybe back on the chopping block, again.  Weare going to be up against a culture of toxic masculinity that has justreceived an unprecedented stamp of approval, as though Gamergate itself hasbeen elected to the presidency.  

We need eachother.

We need tostand by women – queer women and women of color and trans women andaltered-ability women and low-income women and immigrant women and Muslimwomen.  55% of all white women voters pickedTrump, and 45% of all Americans – including millions of women – didn’t vote atall.  

Let’s make that our work over the next four years.  

Today wegrieve and we watch Parks & Recor The West Wing and we eat browniesfor dinner and we call our moms and we cry and we do what needs to be done.

Tomorrow – or wheneverit is that tomorrow comes for you, however long you need to take to feel likeyou can pick yourself up off the mat and lace up your boots and get back in thegame – we raise up a feminist army.

We go onbecause we always have.  Because thewhite male patriarchy has always been here, stomping us into the dirt, tellingus that we deserve nothing and we are greedy bitches for asking for more.  Telling us to shut up, to stay in the kitchenwhere we belong.  Telling us that ourmost important job is motherhood and that the person best fit to decide what wedo with our uterus is Mike Pence. Telling us that we are too fat or too black or too loud or too ugly ortoo poor or too gay or too weird or too shrill or too old or too young for ouropinions to matter.  

You never,ever have to apologize for the fact that this hurts you.  You never, ever have to feel guilty for thefact that it feels terrible to know how many people in this country – in thisworld – insist that you do not have a place here.

But you dohave a place.  This is your countrytoo.  

How do we goon?  How do we survive this hate?

With love.

You don’t haveto love the people actively trying to destroy you.  You don’t have to turn the other cheek whensomeone hurls racial slurs at you or jokes about grabbing you by the pussy orcalls you “objectively disordered.”  Butwe have to love each other.  We have to model for all the kids andyoung people in our lives what real masculinity looks like – good men who aren’tafraid to show emotions or parent their kids or use their privilege to speak upfor women – and that no one can go through life alone.  That being the king in your lonely goldentower is not a fate to aspire to, even if you can get elected president thatway.  We have to remember that anytime wecall a woman a bitch for speaking up too loudly, every time we roll our eyes ata celebrity on a magazine cover who gained 15 pounds after she had a baby andwe call her gross, every time we use “kick the chair” or “kill yourself” as aninsult, every time we believe lies about someone we don’t like without checkingbecause it’s more satisfying to believe the shocking lie is true, we arecomplicit in the system that elected a vicious, superficial and cruel reality televisionstar to the presidency.  And that wasonly possible because we made him a celebrity and gleefully enjoyed the trainwreck because it made good television for YEARS before it finally became clearwhat its devastating consequences would be. How do we go on?  We never fucking call another woman “fat” ora “bitch” ever again.  We turn offthe reality television shows that provide an enjoyable trainwreck, createabusive environments for our entertainment, and pour money into the pockets ofgenuinely terrible people.  We stop beingthe kind of people who find other people’s suffering funny or empowering, wholet the bully say terrible shit to other people because then at least he isn’tsaying it to us.  

We built thekind of culture where a Trump could thrive long, long before he declared he wasrunning for President, and we cannot prevent another Trump until we havedismantled it from the penthouse down to the foundations.

Crytoday.  Take care of yourself today.  Put on your own oxygen mask before you helpthe person next to you.

But tomorrow –when you’re ready – there are vulnerable people who need you.  

We go on bygoing on.  As we always have.  As we always will.  As we must. Because there is simply no other way.

Thanks to @reblogginhood for the tips and resources below, which I copied directly from her Facebook post; please share with anyone you think may need these.

CRISIS HOTLINES:-National Suicide Prevention Hotline: 1-800-273-8255, chat: http://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/#-for LGBTQ+ youth: 1-866-488-7386, text/chat http://www.thetrevorproject.org/pages/get-help-now-Trans Lifeline: (877) 565-8860, http://www.translifeline.org/-Crisis Textline (any crisis): http://www.crisistextline.org/textline/-Substance abuse hotline: http://www.samhsa.gov/find-help/national-helpline-Alcohol abuse hotline: 1-800-662-HELP (4357)

CALMING/SOOTHING RESOURCES:-guided mindfulness meditation (also available as an app): https://www.calm.com/-more guided meditations: http://www.chopra.com/articles/guided-meditations-tips for managing anxiety symptoms and attacks: http://www.wikihow.com/Calm-Yourself-During-an-Anxiety-Atta…-take deep breaths in sync with this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wdbbtgf05Ek&feature=youtu.be-If you can, talk to someone you love in person, or at least on the phone,rather than via text or chat. Physical contact is important to combat feelingsof isolation and fear.-When push comes to shove, better out than in. Cry if you’ve gotta cry. Screamif you’ve gotta scream. Write it out, in a public space or in a privatejournal. -If you need to disconnect, disconnect. There is no shame in stepping back totake care of yourself right now.

[kane-and-griffin]

What do you think about the fact that Eliza sais "the bellarke shit", I don't really ship Bellarke or Clexa even though I like both pairing, but I'd like to know what you think because I don't know what she meant exactly but I know other actors that play a character that people ship with different characters but they always respected that and never said anything against those ships you know (never heard SwanQueen shit from Lana or Jennifer...)

I think emotions are still running a little high, and the Kabby fandom is more an observer than a participant in this particular clusterfuck, so I don’t necessarily want to get too deeply into fandom drama, but I do have some general thoughts about two things: public relations, and kindness.

First of all I have to admit I am honestly surprised that after a whole day of Jason making public appearances and a huge panel with tons of audience questions, this was honestly the show’s only real PR fail.  (Like. Kudos to whoever was in charge of keeping the panel’s Q&A line free of ship war drama.  It seems to have come at the cost of a hard-and-fast rule about not discussing any characters not currently present on the stage, which made me sad about the lack of Abby, but in this situation I think that rule helped everyone.)

As a general rule, I think it’s wisest for actors to exercise diplomacy in these matters - not to “pander” to one ship or another, but because everyone watching a TV show comes to it from their own unique perspective and the wisest course when you’re in the public eye like that is generally to err on the side of showing respect to everyone’s opinions.  There are a lot of ways to do that.  Chris Larkin is clearly excited about his storyline with Harper next season, but also made a Minty joke.  Richard talked about Murphy’s relationship with Emori being important and transformative, but he’s also (in a joking way) an enthusiastic Murphamy shipper.  And if you haven’t seen the interview video yet where Lindsey Morgan explains the concept of Doctor Mechanic to a baffled Henry Ian Cusick, then you haven’t seen Shakespeare the way it’s meant to be done.  But in all those cases, it was done either in a lighthearted way where the actors were in on the joke (as opposed to making a joke at the expense of shippers), which strikes me as the right tack.  I don’t think Bellarke or Clexa are entitled to more attention or consideration from the cast than the other, or than the smaller fandoms, because that’s saying this particular fan is more important than this other fan just because they happen to ship a different set of characters.  So even though clearly, for example, Lindsey sees Abby and Raven’s relationship as platonic, whenever she encounters Doctor Mechanic shippers she’s gracious and funny and respectful.  She signs DM fan art, she talks about how beautiful Paige Turco is and how much they enjoy working together.  She doesn’t dismiss the ship because that would feel, to the fan, like she was dismissing them, which is how a lot of Bellarke shippers feel right now. 

Hurting people’s feelings is very unlikely to have been Eliza’s intent - she’s certainly not a mean-spirited person, and whatever she said or meant to say about the relationship she plays onscreen, I’m sure she was appalled at how hard and fast this blew up.  But it was the result, and that’s a huge bummer, and I know a lot of people who took what she said very personally.  So I think the big takeaway here should be compassion and kindness.  I don’t think anyone should give Eliza any hate about this, because she’s a young woman in a high-visibility career and she gets attacked from both sides of the ship war which results in people hacking her Instagram and obtaining her private cell phone number and accosting her at airports.  But I also think that anyone who is cackling and rubbing their hands together in evil glee because they don’t like Bellarke should take a step back and think about how unkind that is, and how you would feel if it was your ship.  Shipping is personal to us in a way that it isn’t to actors; Eliza and Alycia and Bob are all friends (yes! even Bob and Alycia! they are friends! they love each other! they are literally only the team captains of opposing fandom armies IN PEOPLE’S HEADS!) and portraying those characters is their job.  But we attach ourselves emotionally to the characters and relationships we care about because they speak to us on some fundamental level, which is why we feel personally attacked when someone criticizes our fave or our ship.  We feel like they’re insulting some deep core part of us.  And often they’re not.  Often they just have different thoughts about that character or that relationship.  But I can imagine how hurt and sad a lot of Bellarke shippers are right now, and I think the kind thing to do is to put aside any “but you started it!” “no YOU started it!” ship war drama and try a little harder to be compassionate to each other.

[kane-and-griffin]

i recently read a beautiful and well-written abby/lexa fic and i was dismayed to see that people had left homophobic, ageist comments in response. i just wanted to say thank you from me and everyone else who has enjoyed your fics, for giving people content they can relate to or enjoy without any sort of prejudices. it's writers like you who continue to put out things without fear and i think it's time we start lifting writers up instead of tearing them down.

Was it the one @joe-the-lion posted? I read that too!  It was so good!  I’m sorry people were being shitty about it.  That makes me sad.

I know how hard writing is, and how vulnerable it can be to put something risky out there, so I’m always on the side of writers and giving them support.  Even if what they’re writing isn’t something that is to my personal taste - if it’s a ship I don’t enjoy or it’s not my particular kink or there’s an interpretation of the character I don’t enjoy, I’m still 100% about supporting that writer.  We all have our personal tastes - like, I’m not into A/B/O or BDSM in my smut for example, but I know TONS of people who love it, there’s clearly a HUGE audience for it, and both that writer and that audience deserve to be respected.  So rather than saying “GET THIS AWAY FROM ME YOU PILE OF HUMAN GARBAGE HOW DARE YOU WRITE A THING I PERSONALLY DO NOT ENJOY”, I just say “okay cool, I’m not who this fic is for, imma tag out, you kids have fun” and then I go about my day.  It’s so much easier than being an asshole! People should try it!  Everybody wins! 

Anyway, even though Kabby is my OTP forever, I am a proud multishipper and I like trying new things and exploring different relationships.  That’s not everyone’s cup of tea, and that’s okay!  Some people just want to read Kabby only and I have no problem with that.  But I also think that for many people, fic - especially the smutty stuff! - can be a safe place that maybe doesn’t exist in the rest of their life to explore sexuality.  Women in particular are shamed a lot in the real world for having sexual desires or fantasies that don’t fit societal molds, and the female-driven world of fanfic is an important counterbalance to that.  It doesn’t necessarily mean that in real life you want to be spanked or have a threesome or sleep with an older woman (or maybe you do! which is also fine!), but knowing what you like and what turns you on is like a big part of coming to understand your own sexuality.  So when I write fic, my approach to it tends to focus on three things that I hope people actually take to heart as real and important:

Active consent is mandatory and is also really hot;

I’m writing for a largely-female audience so female pleasure/agency are always going to be the priority;

Fic is a safe space and none of the things that turn you on are anything to be ashamed of.

I know there are people who haven’t liked particular things I’ve written, and that’s fine, because not everything I write is for everybody. But my favorite kind of comment to get is when somebody says “Oh, I read that fic and I never thought I would be into ______ and now I want more!” because that makes me feel like I’m using my trash powers for good instead of evil by helping people discover something they never thought they’d like.

Anyway, thank you for this message, and I encourage all of you to support fic writers instead of tearing them down. If you don’t like it, quietly walk away.  You probably aren’t who that fic was for.  Instead of making it about yourself and attacking the writer for writing it and the readers for liking it, just acknowledge that it’s not your thing and go find another fic that is.

KABBY MOM LOVES YOU ALL, KEEP BEING NICE TO EACH OTHER

[kane-and-griffin]

I messaged chancellorkabby too, but I also wanted to give you a shout out for being so awesome. I cannot believe you are getting harassed as well. I bet the anon doesn't even care about the story, they just like drama. A part of me wants all the Kabby writers to make "anti-Jake" ficlets in solidarity but I guess that would be too extreme, huh?

Thanks for thinking I’m awesome, and thanks for being such a supportive member of this fandom!  Honestly I think whether that anon was the same one who deleted the work, or a different one, and what their motivations were, it doesn’t matter.  The fact of the matter is that going around asking people to yell at a writer because you don’t like the thing that they wrote isn’t okay.

That said, KABBY MOM DOES NOT ENDORSE ACTS OF REVENGE.  If you have a fic idea you want to write that happens to take a negative view of Jake, you do you!  But let’s not get dragged into something petty.  I think the best way to deal with this is for everyone to just keep doing what they’re doing - being a positive, supportive fandom with a ton of respect for each other’s hard work and creativity. 

If you’re feeling strongly about this and you want an outlet for those emotions, you know what I would recommend?  Make a writer’s day. Go dig through AO3 or Tumblr to find Kabby fic that doesn’t have a lot of notes or kudos, maybe by someone who’s a new writer who needs encouragement, and read their fic and send them a message or a comment about it.  I reblogged a piece the other day that was somebody’s very first fanfic and got a really sweet message from her that I just treasure so hard about how much it meant to her to have people read and share what she wrote.  Or go back to that one fic you love and reread but you never left a comment, and tell the writer how much it means to you.  Or go read something by a writer in the fandom whose work you’ve never read before.  The way to show that we don’t tolerate unfair treatment of writers is to collectively stand up for our writers and show that we support them.

It’s shitty to try and make someone feel bad because they wrote a fic you don’t like, but the Kabby fandom is a place of love and positivity and I am always the most proud of us when we handle negative shit by rising above it.  This is an amazing community and I’m grateful every day to be a part of it.