A day at a time, I suppose

Reasons to vote for The Greens:

A vote for The Greens is a vote for a better future for our environment. It’s an investment in the education of our nation. It’s a vote for progress and to stand up against discrimination. It’s a vote for the security of our nation. It’s a vote for accessibility for all - not just those rich enough to get ahead in life. It’s a vote for combining economic policy with environmental.

That’s why I personally will be voting 1 for The Greens in the Senate and House of Reps this election and why I hope you do too.

the president of nigeria is about to fuck boko haram up and cut his own salary in half and criminalized female genital mutilation

the president of guinea built/is building infrastructure and school and wells all over the country and is decreasing youth unemployment exponentially

the president of cote d’ivoire made school mandatory of children ages 6-16 and banned plastic bags while also building ultra modern trasportation infrastructure

the future is for real in africa 

I think this should have a hell of a lot more notes on it than it does. This is what good news looks like folk, and the continent of Africa surely deserves a shed load of it.

Today (April 7th) is Remembrance Day for the Rwandan genocide. While Rwanda still faces challenges, their recovery has been incredible. They now have the highest percentage of women in parliament around the world (one of only two countries to have over 50% women), their gross national income has risen each year, and life expectancy has risen from  48 in 1990 to 65 in 2013.

“as someone who related to Zari being a lesbian (even tho that’s 1000% fandom decided and has no actual canon basis) I feel like I was betrayed by her hooking up with a man, like I was baited, and like I’ve had my rep taken away.”

cool cause as someone who is Muslim I felt hella betrayed by them advertising their season around the first live action Muslim hero only to slam her with Islamophobia and then sideline her for a basic white bitch who was only a recurring character at the time and for fandom not to care because they were too busy getting off on the idea of women fucking

whats wild about the “everyones a little bit bi! XD” thing is like yeah it is INCREDIBLY homophobic to tell gay men and lesbians that secretly they ARE attracted to women/men, and the only reason they dont identify as bi is because they are repressed and havent unlocked their True Self yet and Someday Will Meet The Right Person

but its also super invalidating to bi people?? like no, everyone is NOT bi, if everyone WAS bi, why would biphobia exist? why would bi people face such high rates of domestic violence? why would bi people experience ANY sort of oppression if “everyone was bi”???

like i know you have to have literally zero (absolutely none) critical thinking skills to say “everyone is a little bi” and like. believe that. but damn i just wish people would think before they speak

+ marry me - excuse me? + Seriously, marry me, please.

WHAT’S HER NAME?!

Her name is Sky Brown! She’s a Japanese skater and surfer who’s been skating since she was 3 years old and got her first sponsorship at age 7 for surfing. She’s already kicked adult pro skaters’ butts in competitions all over the world and has raised money for disadvantaged kids in a couple of different countries. Sky wants to compete for Japan in skateboarding at the first Olympics to host the event (Tokyo 2020, when she’ll only be TWELVE!) because “I wanna be young and show every girl that you can do it, just go for it — even though you’re little!”

Tan France on being a gay Muslim

hot take: there need to be more butch women in media that are explicitly both butch and attracted to men. 

not at the expense of writing butch lesbian characters, it shouldn’t be one or the other. (hell, it’d be interesting to have both a butch lesbian and a butch straight woman in the same cast.) but i keep seeing people say “make this butch character a lesbian! if you make her straight that’s boring and cowardly!”

and… i don’t know what fucking planet those people are living on where media is full of butch women, like actually butch women, not just Furiosa and Gwendolyn Christie’s oeuvre. I don’t know on what fucking planet media regularly has women who don’t perform femininity shown in loving relationships with men, and their lack of femininity isn’t A Thing. 

 how many girls are growing up and seeing that if they want to be A Woman who Loves Men they have to be femme? seeing that the only people who are dressing and acting and existing the way they want to are lesbians and trans men? while… you know, not being lesbian or transmasc, or not knowing that they’re lesbian or transmasc. 

like most people are still straight??? 

A straight butch woman and a gay butch woman as best friends! They bond over their shared love of sports and auto-repair. They could be like the show’s “Those Two Guys”.

Oh my god, yes. 

“We play for different teams.”

“Oh, so you’re straight and she’s….” 

“What? Well, yeah, but she’s on $RIVAL_SPORTS_TEAM and we’re going up against them in the playoffs.” 

this post cleared my pores and sorted my laundry

Sorry for the rant but people who overuse terms around trauma genuinely have no concept of the impact it has on people who’ve experienced the real thing. 

Something that makes you uncomfortable is not a trigger. Someone disagreeing with you is not gaslighting. A fight is not abuse. Emotional/verbal harm isn’t violence. 

I’ve been in therapy for PTSD for over a year and still can’t put names to things my ex did to me. Seeing people throw around these terms for the slightest things only makes it harder. It just minimises my experience and reminds me that no one fucking understands or believes me or takes what happened seriously. 

Agree! (Unless the emotional/ verbal harm is emotional abuse because that is violence)

Can you please explain how/why? 

Emotional abuse is super harmful but on it’s own it isn’t violent. My ex was very emotionally abusive but I’d never tell someone who was getting hit by their partner every day “oh I totally get it, I was in a violent relationship too”. And as someone who has been physically attacked by homophobes, I always feel so belittled when someone says “yeah homophobic violence is horrible, I get it all the time when I hear people use slurs”. 

These things are both damaging, but they’re not the same. I’m not saying one’s necessarily worse than the other, I’m just saying they’re different. They have different driving factors, impacts and outcomes so let’s not conflate them. 

I don’t know how to explain how. It just is. I grew up in an emotionally abusive situation. And it was very violent. Also there has been studies that show that physical abuse and emotional abuse often have the same outcomes and impacts. It’s really society that invalidates emotional abuse and pretends it’s “not as bad” when the actual evidence once looked into shows that they aren’t much different

I’m really sorry you were in that situation. Emotional abuse definitely has harmful outcomes and is never OK.

But still, I disagree. Once again I’m not using this distinction to say emotional abuse isn’t as bad as physical harm. Obviously that depends on the case. I’m just saying that they are different. This is always what I’ve found not just in my lived experience but also in my work. I wrote my thesis on DV and just published three studies on hate crime. I now work in prisons in rehabilitation programs for offenders as well as in the community with survivors, and tbh I’ve never had a client (offender or survivor) not draw this distinction themselves at some point. I can’t tell you how many women have told me “the bruises can heal but i’ll never forget what he said to me”, or hate crime complainants who’ve said “I don’t care that much that they smashed my windows, what really hurt were the words they spraypainted on the door”.

They’re different. The impacts certainly overlap but they’re not identical, and we shouldn’t treat them that way, in research or in practice. 

I guess that’s my intellectual brain answer. My emotional brain answer, as someone who’s experienced both emotional abuse and physical violence, is that it genuinely makes me start fucking shaking when people lump these two together. I’ve been catcalled and I’ve been sexually assaulted - both sexist, but not both violent. I’ve been verbally abused and I’ve been hit - both abusive and intimidating, but not both violent. The 3 years of sustained emotional abuse by my ex definitely had impacts on me that the few occasions of sexual assault didn’t, and vice versa. And to me at least, it does a disservice to both of those experiences to not acknowledge that and call them what they are. 

Them being different doesn’t really explain why one is violent and the other isn’t though. Two situations can be violent but in different ways. I just think it puts emotional abuse into question and invalidates it. To say it isn’t violent diminishes the harm to me. Plus it just feels wrong. Like how can it not be violent to torture someone just because you don’t physically touch them? It just is problematic having this hierarchy of what’s violent “enough” to even be considered violent.

You seem to be equating violence with severity. Like I said, that’s not always the case - emotional abuse can leave greater negative impacts than physical violence in plenty of cases, even in some of my own. I just want to acknowledge that two acts can be abusive/harmful/intimidating/dehumanising but one uses emotional tactics rather than physical tactics. The non-violent aspect of emotional abuse is a huge part of why it’s so dangerous and damaging - it’s a deliberate choice by offenders who want to mask and minimise their own behaviour, and it’s perfect gaslighting material for victims and others who equate abuse with only violent acts, when it is in fact a spectrum of both. The distinction is actually significant and plays into the specific harms that violent and non-violent forms of abuse can generate.

I’m not using the term “violence” to describe the severity/validity of these acts - i’m using it to describe the nature. And by their nature, they’re fundamentally not the same. 

I know you weren’t saying it’s less severe or valid by the way. I was just saying it does seem to imply that. I just wanted to say that to clarify that I’m not villainsing you for not agreeing with me and I’m not trying to twist your words :P I do disagree with you there on your last point. I think by nature all types of abuse ARE the same. There are differences. That’s something we can agree on. I mean really when you get down to it all abuse incidents are different. Two people experiencing emotional abuse for example will not experience it the same way. But I do think the nature of abuse is the same. It’s to deliberately hurt and/ or dehumanise someone for whatever reason whether that’s power or entitlement or just being evil. I don’t see how what type of abuse it is changes the nature of the abuse.

(chiming in @sunshine-ink here because you both commented and I can only reblog one)

Tbh this whole discussion is really setting me off so this will be my last post before I lose my cool. 

If you’re both going to define violence as something that deliberately causes any type of harm, then that’s a ridiculously broad definition. I don’t know how to explain without repeating myself that violent and non-violent forms of abuse do not have the same causes or impacts or patterns, even if their intentions are both abusive. But if deliberate harm is the only criteria for a definition, what are we going to start calling violence now? Hacking someone’s Facebook? Excluding them from a group of friends? Stealing someone’s backpack when they leave it behind in a library? Calling a retail worker useless because they don’t have my size of jeans? These all cause harm, so why not? Even in terms of abuse more specifically, are we really going to pretend that financial control, social isolation, harassing phone calls, monitoring someone's communications and physical abuse aren’t separate but inter-connected tactics under the abuse umbrella? That they don’t have different patterns and outcomes, and that the non-violence of these other behaviours is a big part of why they’re so effective?

Again, as someone who has experienced both (and works in the field), I find the conflation of these terms to be a disservice to both the emotional abuse and the violence I’m dealing with. Broadening terms to the point where they can mean literally anything doesn’t help people to accurately describe or meaningfully come to terms with what happened. A big part of the reason I’m finding it difficult in therapy to accept language that’s used (e.g. trigger, gaslighting, violence) is because I constantly see people, especially online, water them down to include the vastest range of harms to the point where they hardly seem to describe mine even though i’m a textbook case. At the end of the day people can call their experiences what they want, but i’m still going to feel like it’s a copout when I’m deciding whether or not to report my sexual assault and I hear someone say they understand violence because they’ve been verbally sexually harassed. 

(Also, an “i’m sorry you went through that” would have really helped this conversation along. Thanks.)

Sorry for the rant but people who overuse terms around trauma genuinely have no concept of the impact it has on people who’ve experienced the real thing. 

Something that makes you uncomfortable is not a trigger. Someone disagreeing with you is not gaslighting. A fight is not abuse. Emotional/verbal harm isn’t violence. 

I’ve been in therapy for PTSD for over a year and still can’t put names to things my ex did to me. Seeing people throw around these terms for the slightest things only makes it harder. It just minimises my experience and reminds me that no one fucking understands or believes me or takes what happened seriously. 

Agree! (Unless the emotional/ verbal harm is emotional abuse because that is violence)

Can you please explain how/why? 

Emotional abuse is super harmful but on it’s own it isn’t violent. My ex was very emotionally abusive but I’d never tell someone who was getting hit by their partner every day “oh I totally get it, I was in a violent relationship too”. And as someone who has been physically attacked by homophobes, I always feel so belittled when someone says “yeah homophobic violence is horrible, I get it all the time when I hear people use slurs”. 

These things are both damaging, but they’re not the same. I’m not saying one’s necessarily worse than the other, I’m just saying they’re different. They have different driving factors, impacts and outcomes so let’s not conflate them. 

I don’t know how to explain how. It just is. I grew up in an emotionally abusive situation. And it was very violent. Also there has been studies that show that physical abuse and emotional abuse often have the same outcomes and impacts. It’s really society that invalidates emotional abuse and pretends it’s “not as bad” when the actual evidence once looked into shows that they aren’t much different

I’m really sorry you were in that situation. Emotional abuse definitely has harmful outcomes and is never OK.

But still, I disagree. Once again I’m not using this distinction to say emotional abuse isn’t as bad as physical harm. Obviously that depends on the case. I’m just saying that they are different. This is always what I’ve found not just in my lived experience but also in my work. I wrote my thesis on DV and just published three studies on hate crime. I now work in prisons in rehabilitation programs for offenders as well as in the community with survivors, and tbh I’ve never had a client (offender or survivor) not draw this distinction themselves at some point. I can’t tell you how many women have told me “the bruises can heal but i’ll never forget what he said to me”, or hate crime complainants who’ve said “I don’t care that much that they smashed my windows, what really hurt were the words they spraypainted on the door”.

They’re different. The impacts certainly overlap but they’re not identical, and we shouldn’t treat them that way, in research or in practice. 

I guess that’s my intellectual brain answer. My emotional brain answer, as someone who’s experienced both emotional abuse and physical violence, is that it genuinely makes me start fucking shaking when people lump these two together. I’ve been catcalled and I’ve been sexually assaulted - both sexist, but not both violent. I’ve been verbally abused and I’ve been hit - both abusive and intimidating, but not both violent. The 3 years of sustained emotional abuse by my ex definitely had impacts on me that the few occasions of sexual assault didn’t, and vice versa. And to me at least, it does a disservice to both of those experiences to not acknowledge that and call them what they are. 

Them being different doesn’t really explain why one is violent and the other isn’t though. Two situations can be violent but in different ways. I just think it puts emotional abuse into question and invalidates it. To say it isn’t violent diminishes the harm to me. Plus it just feels wrong. Like how can it not be violent to torture someone just because you don’t physically touch them? It just is problematic having this hierarchy of what’s violent “enough” to even be considered violent.

You seem to be equating violence with severity. Like I said, that’s not always the case - emotional abuse can leave greater negative impacts than physical violence in plenty of cases, even in some of my own. I just want to acknowledge that two acts can be abusive/harmful/intimidating/dehumanising but one uses emotional tactics rather than physical tactics. The non-violent aspect of emotional abuse is a huge part of why it’s so dangerous and damaging - it's a deliberate choice by offenders who want to mask and minimise their own behaviour, and it’s perfect gaslighting material for victims and others who equate abuse with only violent acts, when it is in fact a spectrum of both. The distinction is actually significant and plays into the specific harms that violent and non-violent forms of abuse can generate.

I’m not using the term “violence” to describe the severity/validity of these acts - i’m using it to describe the nature. And by their nature, they’re fundamentally not the same. 

Sorry for the rant but people who overuse terms around trauma genuinely have no concept of the impact it has on people who’ve experienced the real thing. 

Something that makes you uncomfortable is not a trigger. Someone disagreeing with you is not gaslighting. A fight is not abuse. Emotional/verbal harm isn’t violence. 

I’ve been in therapy for PTSD for over a year and still can’t put names to things my ex did to me. Seeing people throw around these terms for the slightest things only makes it harder. It just minimises my experience and reminds me that no one fucking understands or believes me or takes what happened seriously. 

Agree! (Unless the emotional/ verbal harm is emotional abuse because that is violence)

Can you please explain how/why? 

Emotional abuse is super harmful but on it’s own it isn’t violent. My ex was very emotionally abusive but I’d never tell someone who was getting hit by their partner every day “oh I totally get it, I was in a violent relationship too”. And as someone who has been physically attacked by homophobes, I always feel so belittled when someone says “yeah homophobic violence is horrible, I get it all the time when I hear people use slurs”. 

These things are both damaging, but they’re not the same. I’m not saying one’s necessarily worse than the other, I’m just saying they’re different. They have different driving factors, impacts and outcomes so let’s not conflate them. 

I don’t know how to explain how. It just is. I grew up in an emotionally abusive situation. And it was very violent. Also there has been studies that show that physical abuse and emotional abuse often have the same outcomes and impacts. It’s really society that invalidates emotional abuse and pretends it’s “not as bad” when the actual evidence once looked into shows that they aren’t much different

I’m really sorry you were in that situation. Emotional abuse definitely has harmful outcomes and is never OK.

But still, I disagree. Once again I’m not using this distinction to say emotional abuse isn’t as bad as physical harm. Obviously that depends on the case. I’m just saying that they are different. This is always what I’ve found not just in my lived experience but also in my work. I wrote my thesis on DV and just published three studies on hate crime. I now work in prisons in rehabilitation programs for offenders as well as in the community with survivors, and tbh I’ve never had a client (offender or survivor) not draw this distinction themselves at some point. I can’t tell you how many women have told me “the bruises can heal but i’ll never forget what he said to me”, or hate crime complainants who've said “I don't care that much that they smashed my windows, what really hurt were the words they spraypainted on the door”.

They’re different. The impacts certainly overlap but they’re not identical, and we shouldn’t treat them that way, in research or in practice. 

I guess that’s my intellectual brain answer. My emotional brain answer, as someone who’s experienced both emotional abuse and physical violence, is that it genuinely makes me start fucking shaking when people lump these two together. I’ve been catcalled and I’ve been sexually assaulted - both sexist, but not both violent. I’ve been verbally abused and I’ve been hit - both abusive and intimidating, but not both violent. The 3 years of sustained emotional abuse by my ex definitely had impacts on me that the few occasions of sexual assault didn’t, and vice versa. And to me at least, it does a disservice to both of those experiences to not acknowledge that and call them what they are. 

Sorry for the rant but people who overuse terms around trauma genuinely have no concept of the impact it has on people who’ve experienced the real thing. 

Something that makes you uncomfortable is not a trigger. Someone disagreeing with you is not gaslighting. A fight is not abuse. Emotional/verbal harm isn’t violence. 

I’ve been in therapy for PTSD for over a year and still can’t put names to things my ex did to me. Seeing people throw around these terms for the slightest things only makes it harder. It just minimises my experience and reminds me that no one fucking understands or believes me or takes what happened seriously. 

Agree! (Unless the emotional/ verbal harm is emotional abuse because that is violence)

Can you please explain how/why? 

Emotional abuse is super harmful but on it’s own it isn’t violent. My ex was very emotionally abusive but I’d never tell someone who was getting hit by their partner every day “oh I totally get it, I was in a violent relationship too”. And as someone who has been physically attacked by homophobes, I always feel so belittled when someone says “yeah homophobic violence is horrible, I get it all the time when I hear people use slurs”. 

These things are both damaging, but they’re not the same. I’m not saying one’s necessarily worse than the other, I’m just saying they’re different. They have different driving factors, impacts and outcomes so let’s not conflate them. 

Do any other american high schoolers have intense survivor’s guilt and trauma with school shootings even though they weren’t at your school?

Like. A laser tag place opened geared towards teenagers and it got no business, we tried to enjoy it but when someone pointed a laser machine gun at me and I instinctively dropped behind the nearest wall and reached to turn off my phone I cried, I wasn’t the only one. The announcements system turns on at an unexpected time and everyone holds their breath until they say something besides “locks, lights, out of sight,” nobody even jokingly pops chip bags anymore, a door slammed really loud during a class change and everyone dropped and ran. Everyone cries during drills, even the toughest ranch kids. Every drill comes with a full day of teachers crying and telling us that they love us all so much and will die for us, and every kid in every class looking around wondering who would I die for? Who would die for me? You walk to the bathroom and wonder every second if it happens right now, where will I go? You test supply closet doors to see which ones are unlocked, you memorize which furniture in the teachers’ lounge your English teacher says is light enough to barricade a door with. The fire alarm goes off and nobody moves, instead you wait for gunshots—it a trap? You stand with a group of freshmen and realize that you’re the oldest, you know you’ll have to die for them. You forget your ID tag and worry that now the police won’t be able to tell your parents if you’re safe, or not safe. Your stats teacher has a baseball bat by the door, your math teacher keeps a stapler under each desk to throw, your drama teacher asks who will be willing to stand by the non-locking door with the Shakespearean swords. Your yearbook teacher tells you don’t worry about breaking a camera because you heard about the kids who died holding them. You don’t use the bathroom during classes because you don’t want to be the only target to shoot at. You keep your phone on silent 24/7 because you worry the one time you forget will be when you get your whole US History class killed. You have a snap saved with your class schedule and school and full name to send in an instant to your internet friends so they know if you were on that wing, you have a note saved with the things you want your mom to know and the things you’re sorry for. At the age of 12 I was told I needed to know who I would die for and that it was okay if it was nobody, that was my decision to make. School shootings control us more than adults and non-Americans could possibly imagine and nobody moves to change anything unless we’re actively screaming for it. Have you considered we’re too scared?

The absolute fuck. The fuck did I just read. This sounds like dystopian fiction. The fucking fuck.

It isn’t. This is 100% the reality of all American children - not the ones that live in bad neighborhoods, not the ones that make bad choices, ALL OF THEM.

Welcome to America.

I just realized it’s not normal to go through “if anything life-threatening were to happen how would i react” scenarios on the daily.

Like I had this one creative writing class, and we did little warm-ups each day, right? And I forget what the prompt was, but I just scrawled out a scenario where a shooter busted into church and someone (in first-person) had to smack ‘em upside the head with a frying pan from the nearby kitchen before they could shoot up the entire congregation.

I got a perfect score for something I’ve run through in my head a thousand times, tweaking little details here and there on occasion. What if I’m at school? What if I’m going to the bathroom? What if I’m helping my brother to the bathroom? What if they’ve already shot people? What if they’ve already shot me?

But At Least People Can Keep Their Guns, Right?

And the doors that lock and the teachers that get locked out and we aren’t supposed to let anyone in but that guy SAYS they’re a teacher and LOOKS like a teacher and might get mad if you don’t open the door for them. But if you do what if they AREN’T, and you just got those kids in the chemistry room next to the door killed? And you have to size the guy up like “COULD he be carrying a gun” and if you let him in you spend the rest of the school day terrified that you were the one who caused the next school shooting. And if you DON’T let him in you see him in the halls later and someone says “Hi Mr. ______!” and it’s time to avoid him for the rest of your four years in high school because YOU LEFT HIM LOCKED OUT BECAUSE YOU THOUGHT HE COULD KILL YOU.

And the woman at the lonely desk in the front lobby who checks everyone in, everyone, except at the beginning of the day when everyone all comes in at once. And you have to live with the fact that you’ve seen her miss people while checking in others, because we’re kids and impatient to get to class one time and sometimes we just walk past - and are we setting a precedent that’s going to get us all killed? Is this teacher or secretary or hall monitor just going to get shot anyway, before the rest of us, so the killer can come in? Does she KNOW, for SURE, that that kid who walked past is a student? And anyway, it won’t save us, because they don’t check the bags or anything, so if the shooter IS a student they can just check right in!

And you used to be friends with the weird kid because he liked the same music as you, and now you have to careful weigh whether that makes YOU responsible. Do you have to keep being his friend so maybe you all graduate alive, even if he has a camouflage hat and his dad was probably in the military and he listens to edgy music and he talks about weapons all the time and you know he has a gun at home? Will being friends with him save you, or if you slip up once, make him mad, don’t sit with him at lunch, say something teenagers say about each other when you think he isn’t listening, are you a walking ghost? Are your days numbered? If you’re a girl (I am), you’re even more terrified, because WHAT IF HE ASKS YOU OUT? You don’t like him that way. Will he kill you if you say no?

You stop sitting with the weird kid. You live with the guilt of knowing maybe this was the last straw. He doesn’t shoot up the school. He was okay in the end, and you’re still guilty… and you’re still scared.

You go over to a friend’s house. At one point, everyone takes a break and plays with bb guns. It’s the first time you’ve seen a gun in real life. You’re the first to get shot. It hurts more than you thought it would - they shot you on the side of the neck. You wonder if they were lucky, or if they know how to aim. You don’t know if there’s a real gun somewhere in the house. Later, weeks, months later, you two have a falling out. You’re terrified for the rest of high school.

And instead of the anti-bullying talks from middle school you have lockout-lockdown drills, and they come and pound on the doors to see if anyone opens them, and in some schools they have the good courtesy to tell you it’s a drill so you aren’t crying, except then… then you have to wonder if your sobs would have given you away. Except they wouldn’t have - you’re a quiet crier, but what about the kid next to you who screamed at a physics demonstration last week, what if it wasn’t a drill and you heard pounding at the door, would she scream?

Can you fit under that closet shelf? Can you fit into that chemistry cabinet, if you move the scales out, first? You can’t try in class. The teacher doesn’t have time for that. You want to, though. You want to KNOW if you could close yourself into that tiny space that locks when it shuts all the way and wait. Maybe you wouldn’t suffocate, it has cracks at the edges after all. You don’t think you’re claustrophobic. You don’t think you’ll scream.

Nobody shoots up your school. You graduate. You go to college. Someone sets off a firework near one of the dorms - not yours, but a friends - and the groupchat is alive with the not-so-fun, never-fun game of “fireworks or gunshots” with the stakes being your lives. You all decide, “fireworks.” If you were wrong…

A friend breaks up with someone and you spend a little time wondering what you would do if they broke into the dorm while you were hanging out. Would you die for them? Sometimes you decide no, sometimes you decide yes. You aren’t sure which turns your stomach inside out the most. You had a dream about a school shooter asking who would be the first to die. You didn’t volunteer. They picked you anyway.

Two years after you graduate, your school gets a threat. Police search it. The kids are locked in rooms for hours. Four hours, five. You imagine it. They wouldn’t have said it was a drill on the loudspeakers, that time. Police WOULD have opened the door to your classroom, because they were searching room-by-room. Would you have screamed? Five hours without food or water or being able to go to the bathroom. Some people had to pee in the trash cans. In a dark room in front of their classmates. Your friend’s school has cops with guns in it now. It didn’t when they graduated, and you weren’t there for the not-a-drill… but they were fears both of you had, two fears out of hundreds. Just because you weren’t there when they happened doesn’t mean they didn’t feel like a rope around your neck.

The newspaper article interviews a student and you find out the kids thought it was an active shooter. They didn’t know it was a note. Doors slammed. Lockers slammed. The police were searching the school, there was a lot of slamming. How many of those slams sounded like gunshots?

Do you have a right to feel this way, since it didn’t ever happen to you? Every lockdown was a drill for you. Does that matter? You know the part of your brain asking isn’t a part you should listen to, but it doesn’t matter. Half the adults say you’re overreacting, or that it isn’t being caused by guns, but by bullying or just teenagers being teenagers or mental health or something, ANYTHING, that’s YOUR FAULT instead of theirs.

Let me reiterate that.

HALF THE ADULTS ARE SAYING SCHOOL SHOOTINGS ARE YOUR FAULT.

And you remember that you stopped sitting with the weird kid, and you wonder if that’s true. And then you remember not letting that one teacher in once, and you wonder if they blame you, if they were the half of adults that would never understand the fear you felt in that instant.

And it follows you, this fear and these events and the news from home and the flinch when someone slams a door. But you’re the adult now, you’re out of high school, and so the kids are yelling at YOU when they say “DO SOMETHING, WE’RE DYING!” At least, in your mind, they are. Even though you aren’t out of college, even though it’s the older people who did this, you feel like you are to blame BECAUSE YOU DIDN’T DIE. Because the weird kid DIDN’T shoot up the school. Because the teacher WASN’T a murderer, because the lady at the front desk DIDN’T get killed, because you never sat for five hours in a dark classroom thinking you were about to die. It’s your fault now, because you graduated, that part of your brain says. And it takes a tumblr post to tell you that that’s survivor’s guilt. That it’s trauma.

You still have the school shooter dreams. You think you always will.

They’re nothing next to reality.

My friend and I were in a chemical closet with a few other kids during a lock down due to a nearby shooter. The girl next to me was laying against my chest and having a panic attack, the kid in the corner was hurrdily texting his mother how much he loves her and how he’s sorry he forgot to rinse off his dishes that morning. My friend and I silently looked at each other and nodded, promising silently that we would protect each other until the last bullets fell if they even did at all.

When the staff came over the loudspeakers and said the nearby shooter had been apprehended, everyone fell out of cabinets and from under tables and out of lockers sobbing and grabbing eachother….it was surreal and haunts me until this day.

We were fucking /scared/. We are fucking scared to this day, because shootings don’t end in high schools. Shootings happen on college campuses, in libraries, in churches, synagogues, mosques, in people’s childhood neighborhoods.

We had a lockdown once in my freshman year. We sat on the floor for an hour, one of my friends crying, two of us telling him it was just a drill, telling ourselves it was just a drill. We looked at the teachers, they didn’t know. We knew it wasn’t just a drill. The teachers finally tell us we can use our phones. We all get on social media. It wasn’t a drill. There was an active shooter at the University a couple blocks down. We sat, we waited. We told ourselves the shooter couldn’t have gotten here before the lockdown. He could have. It took another hour before he was caught. Another hour of sitting on the floor, another hour of crying, another hour of not knowing. There wasn’t a shooting at my school.

My junior year, my last year, we heard a banging noise. It didn’t quite sound like a gunshot, but we weren’t sure. Then the lockdown announcement came over the intercom. The banging kept happening. Our teacher left the room to tell the substitute a floor above us what to do. We we’re quiet, waiting for him to come back. Or not. The banging kept happening. He came back. The banging stopped. The lockdown stopped. Some kids were messing with a metal door. There wasn’t a shooting at my school.

The school hosted a party after graduation. Some of us were too scared to go. We didn’t want to be scared any more. I went. Nothing happened.

I used to love storms, now I’m scared of thunder. It sounds too much like gunshots. My brothers who were homeschooled don’t understand why I hate even looking at guns. I’m in University now, and I still look in my classrooms. What would I do if it happened now? Some of my friends are still in high school. I can’t say goodbye to them anymore. I don’t want it to be the last time.

I have PTSD from my brother trying to kill me, but the trauma I experienced in the American school system hurts me more. Because when you go through it daily for years, everything reminds you of the times you thought you were going to die.

I graduated a while ago, just when these things were starting to, unfortunately, become more common. For me, drills were always a boring moment during homeroom and a time to try and sit close to your crush. We were all totally desensitized to the situation we were supposed to be preparing for. Even the teachers would get annoyed about the disruption sometimes.

It is absolutely heartbreaking that this isn’t the case anymore. Reading these reactions to drills just shows how quickly this changed. I graduated 3 years ago. In 3 years, this has become so common and reoccurring that even drills are traumatic. It also pisses me off because something should’ve been done about this shit already. But no. El boboso naranjo is stuck in the fucking NRA’s pocket.

I hope this suffering will end with the next administration and I would say go out and vote, but the thousand people who have already put their name in the basket need to figure their shit out and stand behind a single, strong candidate before that happens.

I want this carved into the face of every executive of the NRA, and every politician they’ve bought.

This is fucking heartbreaking,

I was in high school when the Columbine shooting happened, I went to public school in Colorado.  I knew people who lost friends in the shooting.  The social fall out right after was bizarre for all us kids who were designated “other”.  Bullies tearfully (fearfully) apologized to trench coat wearing friends, begging them to not kill them.  While at the same time, incidents bullying INCREASED because we all-black wearing weirdos were seen as compatriots of the shooters. I graduated before what was described above became the norm.  I never had to experience the DAILY fear in school described above.  Back then we thought this was going to be a one-off incident.  That it was so bad, no one would ever do it again.  But there were circulating worries that copy cat killers would emulate what they saw.  That it would start happening more and more.  I hate that those worries proved to be right….