I Hope The Next Months Bring You The Courage To Do Something You Have Been Dreading To Do, That You Recover

It's officially Banned Books Week, so now is as good a time as any to remind everyone that libraries still get frequent challenges to books on our shelves. Books continue to be challenged, banned, and even burned. I'm a librarian in a blue state, yet one of my neighboring libraries has recently been the target of book bannings and threats of violence (they had to shut down an all-ages LGBTQ event due to these threats too).

Please support your local libraries. If you want more books by queer and disabled authors and authors of color, TELL US. Give us recommendations. Check out books and ebooks when we get them in. Tell us when you write books too. We're here to make information and stories accessible.

P.S. And if you notice patrons or staff acting like assholes (particularly managers) please let someone know. Library government is weird, so a lot of libraries aren't union and also don't have any sort of HR. Trust me, if you frequently notice someone being a jerk, chances are good everyone else has to and has been stonewalled.

👀 ...... do u have an OC u would like to show and tell......??? 👀👀👀

Buddy I am going to make you regret asking that.

Since I don't really post original story stuff on this account, my main squeeze OC is this guy, Adrien. He's primarily a DC rogue, but I've been having fun expanding on his backstory lately to include some potentially unrelated stuff.

Also don't worry about all those missing kid posters--they're all him. He's been in the crime business for most of his life thanks to his father, a wannabe gangster who decided that the best fuck-you to his wife would be to kidnap their toddler and go on the lam before she could finish getting over that catholic guilt concerning divorce. Adrien went back and forth between ages and genders regularly, repeating or skipping grades as needed to fit whichever social security card his dad had snatched that month. His current identity is the longest-running one he's had, taken up after his dad disappeared under mysterious circumstances.

As a criminal, Adrien mostly deals in sabotage, either for corporations or for the mob. He prefers to be on retainer rather than causing trouble for his own sake. That can mean anything from destruction of property to taking a party hostage inside of a burning building. He puts the engineering skills to good use by quietly dismantling structures from the inside. A few crossed wires here and a few blocked doors there can cause a surprising amount of mayhem in just a couple of minutes. It pays pretty well too, if you don't count all the medical bills for getting his ass kicked and/or threatened with a torturous death by the Penguin for trying to burn down his club.

So yeah, this asshole is where I dump all my niche interests as of late. Thanks for letting me rant about him a bit <3

Neglect is abuse. It has the same effect on you. Being last on the priority list of people “have other things to worry about” is not how you grow up into an emotionally healthy person. You will accept being ignored and neglected because it’s whats expected of you. You will be grateful for crumbs of attention and seek for no more, no matter what. You will grow up dealing with every problem alone and learning to not reach out, not ask for help, not take away a second of someone’s precious time for your problems that surely couldn’t matter.

You learn to be quiet and invisible and to not show signs of pain. You learn to blame yourself for not speaking out, for suffering alone, as if you’re doing it on purpose. You learn to cope with being insignificant, because when you’re neglected, that’s a given. Surely, if you were of any importance, someone would care enough to notice, to talk to you, to see if anything’s wrong. To see if you’re drowning in depression and dissociating from the amount of pain you’re in. Surely, what you’re going thru would matter to someone.  

People who don’t care to give you attention are not people who love you and care for you. They don’t raise you, they don’t even learn who you are. And it’s only a matter of time before you fall into resignation and learn that being ignored and sent to the gates of hell to deal with demons all by yourself, is how your life will be. And the more dangerous part – if someone gives you predatory attention, if someone finds something they can use within you, something they can tear away for their own purposes – it will feel welcome, it will make you feel like finally, you’re good for something. Finally, someone is looking at you. You’ll welcome people who use and hurt you, because even that is better than to be completely and utterly abandoned and ignored by the world. Neglect will make you welcome abusers in your life, not only without caution, but with gratitude that even for a moment, you’re not feeling neglected anymore.

Amen, amen, amen.

For victims of abuse, it’s almost essential to gain ability to stop empathising with our abusers, not only because it’s keeping us trapped in their manipulations, but because we deserve to know that we don’t have to prioritize the feelings of a person who is actively doing harm to us.

Empathy for victims of abuse is almost mandatory, to the point where we’re punished for every moment we’re not displaying extreme and unconditional empathy for the abusers. We can get called out and berated for simply going about our business and not thinking of what the abuser might want of us in the particular second. We get shamed for ‘not knowing better’ and 'failing our role’ if we take a minute to consider our own needs.

When they’re doing their usual play – hurting us, then quickly acting hurt and playing the victim, bringing out their past trauma, crying about how hard they have/had it, how our feelings hurt them, even in the case we don’t fall for it, and refuse to apologize and accept that our feelings are just collateral damage in their personal crusade, we will get attacked immediately for being an emotionless and selfish person. Fail to react empathetic to the abuser’s guilt trip will get us called out for being horrible, for not caring, for being the most vicious demon, the worst person, the most unworthy and ungrateful human being in the world. That kind of thing sticks. We don’t just get over that. It becomes etched in our brains that displaying empathy, even to someone who is walking all over us, is our biggest priority, that showing empathy is the last thing that might protect us against an even bigger outburst, that might help us deserve to not be attacked for our lack of morality. We don’t get to be mad. We don’t get to stand up for ourselves. We have to put up a display of empathy or endure personal attacks that will make us feel like we don’t deserve to live.

To finally be able to cut the empathy and stand up against the abuser, is an act that fights years, maybe decades of brainwashing and conditioning. To not care if the abuser has it bad anymore, means we faced and fought years of trauma, lies, personal attacks, self doubt, self hatred, pain and injustice. Abusers want to take away our ability not to care, not to empathize and not to prioritize them, and seizing that back means seizing ourselves back, existing in a place where our empathy is not mandatory anymore, where we’re not pure compassionate receptacles of trauma anymore. Where empathy isn’t forced and squeezed out of us under the threat of pain. Where our value and personality isn’t dictated by whether we endlessly forgive and accept people who will only continue hurting us and bringing trauma into our life.

It is not a mark of a healthy and normal human being to offer our entire compassion and understanding to a creature who is destroying us in return. If someone proves to be a danger to us, it’s normal to disregard everything except the knowledge that this is a threat, and nothing else to us. To keep away because our well being shouldn’t be put under a fear of a constant threat. We are normal for following our sense of self-preservation and turning away from whatever is damaging us, regardless of how sad or upset this being becomes. We are not to be a collateral damage to someone’s misery or manipulation. Our empathy doesn’t have to be an opening to accept harm. We can save our empathy for those who also feel for us. We’re not bad people if we close up under a threat of abuse, and want to retreat to safety. We’re not evil, cruel or selfish for extending our hearts only to those who also keep ours safe.

To the trans person reading this,

You are worthy, you are valid and you are loved. You matter so so much, and if you are in a enviroment that is not good for your health, I hope you get to be somewhere better soon. I hope you have people that support you, but if you haven’t yet, know that there are people out there who will love and support you. There are people out there with warm hearts and gentle eyes that will welcome you into their lives with open arms and always have a spot for you at the table. You deserve to live a full and authentic life. 🌸

Graffiti in Rockville, Maryland in memory of 23-year old Saudi trans woman Eden Knight.

Eden died after being forcibly detransitioned in Saudi Arabia, after being trafficked from the US by a security contractor named Michael Pocalyko.

Rest in peace Eden

Transphobes will not win

If you ever need to justify traumatizing someone by making them feel bad for you and your sad tragic past just know that this person would be way happier without you in their life and using your past trauma to bring more trauma to others lives doesn’t make you the tragic hero you think you are, it’s unoriginal and boring and they will eventually see thru you and be sickened by it and you will not be forgiven

trauma doesn’t often feel like trauma is ‘supposed’ to feel. it feels like indifferent detachment, watching from outside yourself because nothing can hurt you there. it feels normal, just how people interact, so why are you making a big deal about it?  it feels like a joke – just how kids play, just how adults tease, just how some relationships work.

you wake from nightmares five years later and still wonder if you made it all up.

trauma can look like bad behaviour. like the stubborn refusal to get better, to stop self-destructing. trauma is putting yourself in harm’s way because you don’t really mean it, or because it’s funny, or because you just want to feel something, or because you just want to stop feeling. it’s wanting to destroy and reassemble yourself into another person entirely, so your real life can begin. because this isn’t real. because really bad things don’t happen to people like you.

trauma is the constant feeling of being an impostor. it’s the drive to survive twinned with the impulse to make yourself more sick in more ways. to hurt yourself to prove how bad you feel, or to punish yourself for exaggerating. you want people to believe what you’ve been through, to tell you your feelings are real, that your memories really happened. but when people do take you seriously, you play it off as a joke, apologize for bringing the mood down.

you go on and on about how it wasn’t that bad. you seek permission to still love the ones who hurt you, because it’s the people closest to us who can hurt us most deeply.

you can feel like the people who hurt you are the only ones who really knew you. in low self esteem, you can mistake cruelty for honesty.

there will always be people who have been through worse. that doesn’t make what happened to you okay.

there will always be people who don’t believe you. that doesn’t mean you are lying.

at some point, you have to take yourself seriously. you have to make a life you can stand to live. it’s the only way to survive.