Radical Self-Love for Everybody and Every Body
“No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.” This is as true for groups as it is for individuals. Anyone seeking to hold you back or down is not your friend. Every individual and every facet of humanity has the right to be heard.
…When do I become queer enough to claim queerness? Is it just a matter of saying it? Is it only true and real once it’s been said? If I don’t “speak it into existence,” am I doing a disservice to myself and to a whole community?
Siempre tendrían que estar teniendo que cuidarme. El cuidado a uno mismo no empieza en el agotamiento. Es una práctica evitarlo. Y cuidarme a mi misma no debería ser en absoluto un incentivo. Es necesario. No puedo evitar escuchar a mi cuerpo cinco días, darle un descanso y cuidarlo por dos, y entonces llamar a eso cuidarme a mi misma. Eso es prepararme para estar quemada antes de los 30.
It was a gift that they never owned themselves. Their legacy — and my inheritance — is the fact that I always think of myself first. And that is revolutionary.
Many of us who are non-black have fallen into thinking that Black history is relevant only to African Americans and school kids. But that’s not true at all…
If the body positivity movement is seeking to truly be a radical movement that changes the way we think about our bodies and ourselves, then we need to truly be radical and deconstruct and shift the ways that we are currently thinking about bodies. We can’t just modify current beauty standards to include apparently able-bodied, fat, cisgender white women and then think our job is done. There is a lot more work to do.
Here are my top ten tips for raising kids who can lift themselves above the fray, and stand grounded in their own sexual self-determination.
For me, BPD is intense and often uncontrollable emotions, feelings that consume my entire being. It is wild and overwhelming mood swings – intense mania and paralyzing depression. It is recurrent suicidal ideation, self-harm and three suicide attempts to date – the most recent being in January of 2015.
In so many ways, the dominant images and stories around mixed race identities in the U.S. revolve around folks who are half white, and/or whose mixed race identity gives them a proximity to whiteness that other mixed race folks and people of color don’t have. And while it’s important to talk about the complexities of being mixed race in a white supremacist society, it’s also important that we don’t default to re-centering whiteness in those conversations.
For the past two years, I have been taking anti-depressants as well as practicing the Alexander Technique. Through this technique, I have learned about a soft gaze and a light awareness. It has been two years of unlearning the habits of zooming in. It has been two years of expanding out, seeing more.
The decision for each airport on a journey is to risk walking to keep my autonomy, my perceived ability, and my normalcy, or to risk that I will reach a point of no return of pain and simply not be able to keep going. I’d like to say I’m immune to all the shade, that it doesn’t weigh into my decision-making. I’m perfectly clear I’m not sexy or cute or someone people would chat up, but I could do without the scowls, the down-the-nose stares, and the odd jealousy that comes off people like a bad scent.
But there is a difference between expressing oppressive relationship dynamics in order to expose privilege and incite self-reflection, and manipulating the language of social justice to win a fight with your partner.
Friends and family of folks with C-PTSD don’t always have the same level of education and understanding that survivors do. That’s why I wanted to create this quick resource – to serve as a jumping off point to how to better support trauma survivors.
If you aren’t sure how to support a loved one with complex PTSD, here are some suggestions to start with.
Colorblindness erases the beautiful rainbow of diversity in the world. It is not an altruistic goal. At best it is misguided. At worst it is a covert fuel for racist agendas.
Prefiero no jugar. No quiero ser más la “muestra” o esforzarme para ser válida dentro de los espacios etnocéntricos y hetero normales de los blancos. Estos espacios estrechos no me representan a mi o mis valores.
