This article was originally published on Medium under the title "How Do We Hold Each Other Accountable When We Mess Up?" and is republished with permission. It’s hard work being accountable. It’s even harder holding others accountable. As someone who has been on all sides of accountability: asking for help to stop harm I’m experiencing, needing to be held accountable for harm … [Read more...]
4 Ways White People Can Process Their Emotions Without Hijacking the Conversation on Racial Justice
This article originally appeared in EverydayFeminism.com under the title "4 Ways White People Can Process Their Emotions Without Bringing the White Tears" and is reprinted by permission. If you’re a white person who has been in many activist spaces, then you’ve probably experienced a specific, often unspoken ground rule: There’s no room for white tears in this … [Read more...]
Becoming My Own Best Friend: Finding Self-Love and Healing Through Celibacy
The first time I decided to stop having sex was the summer of 2013. I was 22 and had just begun working through recent body-related traumas with my new therapist. I knew I had been engaging in reckless sexual behavior for over a year, and this was the first time I had really called myself out on it. I had let myself believe I was simply engaging in sex positivity, bodily … [Read more...]
“You Deserve To Heal:” 4 Steps To Move Through Survivor’s Guilt
CN: sexual violence, abuse In many methods of healing from trauma, confronting shame is often central to the process. Free up shame, get out from under the blame placed on survivors, and healing is supposed to get easier. Yet when survivor’s guilt goes unaddressed, it’s easy to fall into the pattern of prioritizing other people’s needs over individual needs. Survivors deserve … [Read more...]
Blood Is Thicker Than Water?: 9 Ways To Save Yourself From Your Parents
“Wait—your parents are still married?” The therapist stared at me, his mouth agape. “To each other?!” I nodded warily at this abrupt shift in the tone of our conversation. I was 24 years old and still new to the mechanics of therapy. Just moments before, this man—himself old enough to be my father—had been explaining how all families, loving or otherwise, could be a … [Read more...]
How I Learned My Abusive Father Is Not a Monster — Just a Rather Sad and Complicated Person
I've always been comically atrocious at mini-golf, and at other sports that require finesse in hand-eye coordination and the action of aiming a ball into a hole, hoop, or goal. Captain J's Mini-Golf Course is a particularly malicious 18-hole booby trap perched on the tip of Lake Superior, and is where I have some of the best memories of my father. Us laughing as I sink my fifth … [Read more...]
How Harm Reduction Helps Me Heal: Moving Beyond Traditional Ideas of Recovery
writer's note: i write in lower case, it's my small rebellion. trigger warning: this article discusses cutting, mental health, and drug use. september is national recovery month, and as a harm reductionist for life and active drug user, that has me thinking a lot about my own relationship to recovery. traditional definitions of recovery still solely focus on complete … [Read more...]
5 Reasons To Celebrate Interdependence Day
The myth of independence is one of the foundational and corrosive myths of American life. On July 4th, 1776, when the US declared “independence” from its colonizer, it did so on the backs of the Indigenous people whose lands they’d stolen and the African people whose enslavement and labor would build the US into the ‘prosperous’ ‘superpower’ that forms the cornerstone of the … [Read more...]
“Do I Know How to Comfort Myself?”: How to Move Through a (Not-so-Sober) Mourning
I loved someone deeply. When she passed away, I drank excessively. My grief-logic was simple. She drank vodka. We drank vodka together. She’s dead. I’m not. She’s gone. Vodka’s not. The act of drinking vodka became entangled in a trippy continuum that made me feel connected to her. In my head, I could drink all the vodka I wanted because it was in her name – and God … [Read more...]
More Than My Scars: Radical Self-love and the Self-injured Body
I have never forgotten the first time I cut into my own flesh deliberately: the motes of dust in the air lit by a late afternoon sunbeam; the threadbare sofa in my dorm room where I sat; the blue-handled scissors that I held open for what seemed an eternity; the expanse of pale, clear skin on the inside of my forearm before I brought the scissors down against it. My skin has … [Read more...]
“Restoration is Necessary:” Internationally Acclaimed Percussionist & Healer Talks Pathways to Radical Self-Care
When I dialed into my interview with Afia, I was struggling with my own levels of trauma and depression, due to the recent viewings of Black men killed by police and other onslaughts of violence spread across the nation. My head still grainy, my heart still weighted and within just the first 30 minutes of our call we both shed tears. We both allowed ourselves to be moved, … [Read more...]
