Bazelon Center (one of the few anti-institutionalization law centers that does Olmstead litigation) giving an award to a zionist politician (John Fetterman) is so fucking enraging and also really showcases how the nonprofit disability world is actually exploitative and dangerous in so many ways.
if you also feel pissed off that a "mental health law advocacy" group that supposedly cares about civil rights for disabled people is honoring a genocidal politician this Tuesday, feel free to comment on their instagram and also email
[email protected] and let them know how you feel!
Sample email script:
"I am deeply disappointed/enraged/heartbroken/etc about your choice to honor Senator John Fetterman with the 2024 Congressional Champion award. Fetterman's has publicly refused to call for a ceasefire and continues to support the ongoing genocide, frequently making racist and inflammatory public comments. As an organization that claims to value civil rights and equality for all disabled people, it is shameful that you refuse to act in solidarity with disabled Palestinians, instead choosing to award a politician who is celebrating genocide. I demand that you retract the award from Fetterman and do not honor a genocidal politician this Tuesday."
If you can, changing up the wording to make it your own would be best.
Key points for commenting/emailing:
Express your rage/sadness that they are honoring John Fetterman.
Explain that Fetterman openly supports genocide.
Demand that they retract the award.
as mad/disabled/mentally ill people, we have a responsibility to call out our community organizations when they do bullshit like this and to actively act in solidarity!
please share, comment, and email!
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The more time goes on, the more I think we (= westerners, especially white westerners) are just so fucking bad at guilt. I feel like guilt is among the most pernicious and dangerous emotions out there --not because guilt is literally deadly in isolation, it is an excruciating emotion but it will not kill you in itself, but because we have been trained to associate guilt with worthlessness (I partially blame christian values, the idea of impurity and sin --not to downplay, of course, the danger of a community judging you or being expelled from that community on the basis of being considered a danger to its other members due to the thing you've done that has been generating this guilt), and so we must, absolutely must, protect ourselves from simply feeling that guilt and processing its cold indifference washing over us, and we must do so through any means necessary. This can involve defensiveness, denial or reject of that guilt altogether so we are mentally protected from having to reevaluate ourselves and our place in the world, or can involve wallowing in and using it to self-harm --focusing on the pain and on self-hate rather than on what the guilt is telling us about ourselves and our heritage; blinding ourselves to it still in a twisted way.
I think it's also complicated to know how to manage guilt in a world where we're generally (as a whole) deeply powerless. It feels unfair to be called out about not doing enough when you know that pulling even mediocre heroics on your own will most definitively do almost nothing, hurt you, and be buried in a way that might be extremely unhelpul --not to mention, that it would actually hurt you in a very real and final way and lead to entirely thankless results, even if it was the morally correct thing to do. I do not want to pretend that it's not, very often, the results that awaits even serious and well-practiced activism --or even mild activism, major shoutout to everybody who got maimed or arrested or even killed on zero basis simply because they happened to be at or even near a protest, when they were not brutally attacked for no reason even outside of activism because an officer was racist or sexist or queerphobic or simply bored that day. There are genuinely good reasons to be scared.
So we feel guilt because of this fear, because of our isolation from any serious movement and the fact that we privilege our comfort over letting action taking over whatever else we have going on, and because fear and comfort knowingly keep us into inaction --or action that doesn't feel like enough, or that we feel doesn't achieve much of anything (which I think is never true: even giving someone a glimpse of hope for a second because we made an effort towards them is always always worth it in my opinion, it's not nothing and it's not a cop-out --of course it's not enough and we collectively need to find ways to do more, but it's not nothing and it should never discourage people from taking action --but I digress). But I think we start making a mistake when we point at this very real powerlessness as a shield from the guilt. Both can coexist. Both have to coexist. It isn't fair that some people are being forced to be courageous when we can afford to remain cowards. It is not even a moral judgement that condemn our souls forever, weakness is human and lack of individual reach against an overwhelmingly powerful and removed system even more so; it is a simple fact that we *have* to acknowledge if we want to take a clear look at the actual situation instead of camouflaging it behind self-justifying walls to give ourselves temporarily relief from that awful feeling. And I'm not saying it's not a constant effort, to keep those instincts of self-preservation at bay, or that some people don't have really good reasons that they cannot act more than through social media or miniscule donations or by talking about it around them, or being powerless to even do that without putting themselves into real and concrete danger --or that letting guilt in will be pleasant or even healing. It won't be. But it's also not the point.
Yeah, I get that it's hard to truly reckon with the fact that almost everything that made us (= westerners, especially white ones) is soaked with blood, imperialism, white supremacy, sexism, queerphobia, and a whole sweve of truly rancid ideologies that we cannot afford to passively accept as our lot. We were not given a choice in that legacy, and we don't have a ton of leverage over reorienting our haunted civilizations into something that isn't a horrible nightmare; but it is a fight that is happening right the fuck now.
I genuinely think guilt is a feeling we are not taught to handle in a healthy way; and because we have essentialist, pseudo-religious and punitive justice concepts terminally untangled with that feeling, guilt governs our politics and our private lives in the most rabid and unchecked way imaginable. But guilt will not kill us, unless we allow it to, and it will help literally nobody if it does. Guilt isn't evil in its soul-crushing pain as much as it is informative. Guilt is unbearable, unfliching clarity. But fever boils us alive because there is an infection that needs to be destroyed.
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How it feels to be let out of the crisis center (knowing good and well they put me back on the road to recovery. And while it will still be very hard sometimes, I've been given the coping skills and medication I need to help myself build a foundation for my own emotional stability, but also, if worst comes to worst, I can always come back and I am always welcome to ask them for help 🩶 I had a great experience)
(I've also had bad experiences as well, and those aren't discounted by this one good experience! Abuse and the revoking of autonomy and human rights of mental health patients, is a common and systemic issue! Ask around before going to one if you can I am so serious)
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i almost lost access to this because i graduated college so now here it is on sheets. big ol list of supernatural actor crossover between like idk a lot of shows. 70+ shows??? initially an excel sheet so sorry if she's a lil ugly lol
(smallville has the most- 540- for those who r curious. what the fuck was wb doing)
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okay jumping off of the tags in the ballerina/PT novel (💀) — do you have a your ballet media reclist? signed, former dancer and struggling 🩰
from one former dancer to another, let me tell you. the prospects are grim. (at least if you’re picky. which I definitely am.) (also after I reblogged that post I was already combing over my goodreads to see what ballet books I rated recently to see if they were as bad as I remember lol)
wordy meander below where I try to gather some thoughts coherently🩰:
my preferred type of fiction/writing style is more literary fiction as opposed to quippable “chick lit” (god I hate that term but I feel it gets the point across unfortunately) fiction - so I feel like that’s already a big ask of ballet fiction.
I also (as a former dancer) like there to be some depth to the ballet knowledge presented because I feel that most authors that take on ballet in fiction do it for the “expose the gritty underside of ballet” perspective and they just want to have a female lead that can be cute/little/girly/submissive/etc without even trying to understand that that simply isn’t what all dancers are like. that being said, I do find works where ballerinas just go off being fully unhinged is fun from time to time. ballet and perfectionism can make you do crazy things and the glass in pointe shoes myth didn’t stem from nothing.
furthermore, while I understand that people want to read romance, for some reason if a book is about ballet I want romance to be very inconsequential? maybe it’s because for me ballet is a kind of love that personally never mixed with romance or that there is so much to relationships between dancers that can be so much more engaging than some romance plot about choosing between love and dance or something but most authors don’t feel this way.
all that being said, it’s no small wonder that my rec list of good things is a bit hodge podge. (and sometimes I’ll read things regardless of how bad just because sometimes it’s soooo bad all I can do is laugh)
memoirs are always accurate and enjoyable, albeit obviously not fiction. although! Dancer by Columbia McCann is a fictionalized take on Rudolf Nureyev that reads quite nicely.
fiction really is a mixed bag and often there are ports of stories that’ll be okay even if on the whole it’s not quite up to snuff. like, the last ballet book I read a few weeks ago was The Turnout by Megan Abbott and while I wanted to strangle each of the main characters repeatedly and shake them and ask them why are you like this??? the author had an atmospheric quality to their writing about ballet studios that transported me back to the smells and groans and quirks of old buildings repurposed as dance studios so acutely that I felt more empathy towards the ballet studio in the book as a character more than anything else.
so anyways. according to goodreads some ballet fiction that I did enjoy includes Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild, Swing Time by Zadie Smith, Up to This Pointe by Jennifer Longo as well as Filthy Animals and The Late Americans by Brandon Taylor, both of which aren’t ballet centric but have genuinely realistic dancer characters.
as for other media…I feel like most things I watch, unless it’s really captivating, go in one eyeball and out the other. that and I’m really bad at watching movies. as for ones I have seen and appreciated though - And Then We Danced is a top one that I can recall, Suspiria is insane but a romp nonetheless, Bird of Paradise is also a bit of a romp.
all this to say if you’ve made it this far I am always always open to recs and suggestions silly and serious because it really is a struggle out there for content like this and we’ve got to stick together.
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