#lived experience

[kiitoskiitos]

confusing comic about existing as a trans person during confusing times of trans visibility.

[dontforgetukraine]

"My grandfather had sheep, oxen, and a cow. People in masks came, knocked down the wall, and took everything: furniture, clothes, oil, flour, cattle. When they wanted to take the cow, the grandmother refused, and they struck her. The grandfather grabbed a pitchfork and did not allow them to take it. But he was threatened that they would take it anyway. The cow lived with us in the house. One day, while we were sleeping, I heard a cow being taken out so I called my father. When we went into the yard, we saw a butchered cow with hooves wrapped so that it wouldn't make noise while being taken out. My father gave the meat to hungry people. In 1932, we planted a lot of potatoes, and they grew well. We put the harvested potatoes in a hole and covered them with a layer of straw. In the morning, we got up, but there was no straw or potatoes, and just the ones that were in the house remained. When the potatoes were boiled, our neighbour came and asked to give her potato shells for her children. My grandfather was a fisherman. He would catch fish and give it to people. Once, they wanted to take the fish from him, but the people stood up to protect him, saying the words: "Come to the boat, we will strangle you with our bare hands." I remember my mother and I going to visit my godmother. We arrived there, came into the house, and saw her sitting at the table, swollen and dead."

These memories from the National Book of Memory of the Kherson region belong to Mariia Pidvorok (née Kudas), born in 1921. She survived the Holodomor in the village of Kozachi Laheri of the Oleshky community. Today, the village located near the long-suffering Krynky is under occupation. It suffered significant destruction: a three-story school designed for a thousand students, a kindergarten, a dispensary, a pharmacy, a church, residential and social infrastructure were damaged. In June 2023, as a result of Russians undermining the Kakhovka HPP, Kozachi Laheri was partially flooded. "Another prosperous village in the Kherson region is disappearing. Before the war, it had a population of about 3,722 people. Today, it is a wasteland where the Russian military wanders and robs the property of local residents," states the Telegram channel "Ukrainian South".

Source: Holodomor Museum Photo: The first threshing with a grain of the state farm "Kahovka" of the Kherson district, 1930, TsDAEA

[the-transgenda-agenda]

So far, the only "male privilege" I've managed to unlock as a transgender man is that anyone who attempts violence against me is automatically seen as the victim unless I have a video recording to prove otherwise. So that's nice, I guess.

[ddeck]

me and my friend went to get boba tea and i was wearing my boba fett tshirt and the person at the counter asked "IS THAT BOBA FETT" and i said "YEA :D". and then they shot me 15 times and threw me in the sarlacc pit

[parasocial-work]

Want to read, download, or distribute the zine?

Read online on my website -> https://parasocial.work/#zine

Printable copies on Google Drive -> https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/14w1DNiJ7N2538bZgAR3FB9_r_LXJVKqM?usp=drive_link

Narrated and accessible audio version is on Youtube -> https://youtu.be/kJGNs_ddbQc?si=v2IulQRpdNjNG9lG

[honey-crypt]

in a weird gender space mood thingy rn so imma rant about it ᕦ(ò_óˇ)ᕤ

i’m non-binary. yes, i lean towards the masculine side of my gender, but at the end of the day?? i’m nonbinary.

i’ve been with people who swing two different ways, people who treat as a cis woman and people who treat me as a trans man. i’m not a trans man and i’m not a cis woman, i’m a non-binary person.

i recently met (and formed a queerplatonic relationship with) another non-binary person and the intimacy of just being seen, to have someone understand your experiences??

of course, our experiences aren’t identical: i’m a fat, medically complex person who can’t go on testosterone to make myself more androgynous because of my autoinflammatory disease while they’re a thin, ablebodied person who is on estrogen and is able to “pass” as androgynous.

we’ve talked about our experiences and it’s interesting to dig into the intersectionality and nuances of it all. their non-binary identity is more respected because they meet the “standards” of what it means to be non-binary: androgynous, gender neutral, pretty but you can’t tell who they are. most non-binary people don’t meet the “standards” of non-binary placed by society and when non-binary people don’t meet that, they get separated by sex assigned at birth, such as women & non-binary only spaces rejecting “non-passing” AMAB non-binary people or dismissing AFAB non-binary people as “fembys” and hopping on the “trend”.

it’s frustrating. we as people always categorize stuff, we implement a black and white system… and the world isn’t black and white. the world is a spectrum, existence is a spectrum! and this applies to all social constructs! disability, race, gender, sex, law, crime, etc. and so forth! we can’t meant to follow or adhere to these binary systems!

at the end of the day, all i gotta say is… i’m trans and non-binary. my non-binary self is beautiful. i’m no man, i’m no woman, i’m me. i exist perfectly as is.

-sincerely an exhausted enby with a 3-in-1 bachelors (related to human existence and society) having a gender 4:34am

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

"One must have the nerve to assert that, while people are entitled to their illusions, they are not entitled to a limitless enjoyment of them and they are not entitled to impose them upon others." -- Christopher Hitchens

There is an objective reality, and nobody is obliged to participate in the denial of it, no matter deeply felt anyone's need to deny it might be, or how hurt they might be for others to decline that participation.

[unwelcome-ozian]

[healingwgabs]

“Talk to a therapist” “go to the psych ward” are ableist statements and r not supportive to the psychotic communities who experience delusions of persecution and extreme paranoia who wont trust their therapist or the psych ward staff?? and are likely to get traumatized if they go to therapy or the psych ward in a state like that

Seen posts on here that recommend that psychotics (Doesn’t specify what kind) speak to therapists? And from personal experience I don’t agree (depends on what kind) and think it can be harmful. I was lucky enough to be given a few free sessions-my mom had something set up (like 3-the country I live in offers that to some ppl 🇨🇦 but my therapist) but it was during my psychotic depression (w chronic paranoia) and now I feel ways about seeing a therapist.. idk don’t recommend seeing one if ur like that, it was kinda traumatizing and it wasn’t the therapists fault

Everything is traumatizing when ur in a state like that :( still learning what triggers I got while like that esp having experienced things for as long as I have

I also never told my therapist about the psychotic symptoms I was experiencing during things, didn’t trust being honest about them with a professional at the time, just had to mask a lot. Didn’t tell my family either. I was rlly scared about the terrifying things I was going through internally

[jazzikayz]

Therapy is conditioning, usually social control. That's it. They'll find new ways to do it that hurt less but as long as you meet the goals set by a room of fancy psychiatrists with a lot of power, you're "healthy"

[lureithleon]

I cannot take this anymore:

stolas not telling octavia about the abuse is actually the right decision, according to child psychology and child welfare ministries

[kpopwerewolf]

I decided to make my own hyperspecific poll! All the options are true to the body's lived experience!

*Don't worry: I wouldn't include this one if it were dangerous to the person to do so **They were okay

I'm mostly curious because when I was talking to an offline friend, they said that we had an interesting life/knew interesting people, so I'm curious how many others can relate to this stuff!

Please reblog for greater sample size!

[dontforgetukraine]

The Holodomor Museum commemorated Eugenia Sakevych Dallas, a witness to the Holodomor, on the anniversary of her passing September 12, 2014.

This is from her memoirs.

"...Mother was arrested for collecting frozen ears of grain. The potbellied NKVD officer contemptuously accused my mother: "You collected the people's goods, stole from the state." After that, they took my mother away from me. She was officially charged with theft of state property and sentenced to three years of hard labour in Siberia near Lake Baikal. I remember her sitting on the porch of the police house, which they had taken from one of the farmers earlier. I could feel the way she was looking at me. She wasn't crying; she was only looking, and I obviously could read her thoughts - there was such pain, there was such sadness. She was looking at me as if she would never see me again. My mother was not sent to Siberia right away. For some time, they kept her in prison near Odesa. She managed to write a letter to Nataliia, informing her that she had no food at all. We also had nothing to eat,but Nataliia had some beets and decided to send my mother a parcel. We also had nothing to eat, but Nataliia had some beets and decided to send a parcel to my mother. But we did not know at all whether those beets reached the mother. Finally, we found out that they sent my mother to Siberia. She never returned from there. Every time I see raw beets, I recall my mother," Sakevych-Dallas wrote in her memoirs.

---

Eugenia was born in 1925 in a wealthy family with many children in the Kamyana Balka in the Mykolaiv region. First, the Soviet authorities took her father away from her - they arrested him in 1929 and confiscated all his property for refusing to join a collective farm. Later, her mother was also arrested and sentenced to imprisonment in the camps, and she never returned from there. Then, her older sister Nataliia, the only relative nearby at that time, died of illness and exhaustion. The Red Moloch, one way or another, destroyed the entire large Sakevych family, which included six children. Zhenia was the youngest of them all. During the Second World War, she ended up in forced labour. Afterwards, she decided to stay abroad. She made a career as a model and had a happy marriage. "... I wanted to forget everything and enjoy life after everything I had experienced. Time passed, but my mental pain could not be erased from my heart." That inspired her to write a memoir titled "Our Soul Does Not Die: The Fate of an Orphan from the Ukrainian Holodomor," as well as a series of drawings dedicated to the Holodomor. Ms Eugenia also became the character of the documentary "Witness Zhenya" (director Serhiy Zabolotny) and the animated film "My name is Eugenia Sakevych Dallas" (author Yuliya Fedorovych). Both films can be viewed freely.

[areadersquoteslibrary]

A BACKWARDS WAY OF WORKING OUT THE VALUE A 'SOCIAL CONSTRUCT' HAS IN ARGUMENT, this quote following a subjective account of Marx's theory of labor-worth: "The reader needn’t accept this account. The point is that it is neither a vulgarly objective account nor a vague and subjective one. It admits that value is a mental construct, but one that is ‘real’ because it has a real social basis and real social effects. Value, for Marx, is neither a thing nor an essence, neither quality nor spirit. It is a social reality because of what humans actually do. (This argument applies to most things leftists call social constructs—a phrase that does not mean “nebulous and unreal,” but rather “best understood in terms of lived experience than in woolly metaphysics.”)

- Elizabeth Sandifer, with Jack Graham,

'No Law for the Lions and Many Laws for the Oxen is Liberty: A Subjective Calculation of the Value of the Austrian School',

From the Book 'Neo-Reaction: A Basilisk'

[the-concrete-sage]

Acknowledging lived/living experience

I would like to take the time to acknowledge those of us with lived and living experience. To acknowledge what we’ve been through and also what we may be going through.

I want to acknowledge the fact that we’re still here and in saying this, acknowledge the fact that every single challenge life has put you up against, you’ve won! If we look at that mathematical, it translates to a 100% victory rate.

You should feel so proud of this accomplishment. It’s fucking HUGE!! You should feel honoured and humbled by the very real achievement that YOU ARE STILL ALIVE TO TELL YOUR PERSONAL STORY! Your story may alleviate the weight of what others may be carrying. Your story is powerful and it has the potential to SAVE LIVES!!

Congratulations. You are so much more than just a survivor. You are a champion of life.

Thank you.