A Passing Storm

Image copyright Wings, 2013; all rights reserved.

At least I hope it's a passing storm.

It's been a rough couple of weeks.  I finally have connectivity again (well, at the moment, anyway).  I also have several hundred (or more?) e-mails backed up.  If you've sent me something in the interim, I'll try to get to it.  Or not.  Nothing personal, but in my current state of mind, I make no promises about any of it.

I've had to have a lot of history dredged up lately.  No reason to go into detail now, although I may try to write some of it out of my system later.  Suffice to say that, among much else, family shit sucks, and it keeps coming back.  And back.  And back.

I've had to be reminded what it felt like to be the childhood me.  A piece of property.  Something to be struck at whim and will.  To be set up to fail, set up to be punished, set up to be abused.  Over.  And over.  And over.

And I've had to be reminded that, no matter what my life experience has been, well, no.  It didn't happen.  Because white people, men, academics say so.  They haven't lived in my skin - or any other like mine.  But because they prefer to think certain things that don't make them uncomfortable, they negate my experience.  Which means they negate my very existence.

Well, fuck your discomfort.  And fuck you, if you can't open your mind enough to admit of lives lived (survived) in ways outside your own.

Read this.  Then substitute "squaw" for "nigger" (although I've been called "nigger," too, among too many other ethnic slurs to list here), and see how it looks.  Then read this.  And imagine how it feels to be bullied not only at school every day, but by your own family. 

Internalize that for a while.

And then come back and tell me again why I should give a flying fuck about anyone else's "misconceptions" about what my daily lived experience has been.

Yeah.  That's what I thought.

I do what I've committed to doing.  Beyond that, I'll get to shit when I get to it.  If I get to it.