namrekeya:

What they don’t tell you about prolonged periods of introspection and careful observation is the harm that can come from being totally alone in that process, with no one to remind you that feeling, learning, watching, and healing are communal. When lonesome thought is fetishized, you feel obligated to suffer in silence, to see all struggles as individual rather than collective. You tell yourself that maybe you’re just growing apart from things you thought you knew, that you’re not doing healing right, and this must mean you’re just inadequate. And at some point, you obsess over this cultivated lifestyle of being quiet, small, and invisible as a means of personal protection that you feel forgotten about and in the end, you have no one but yourself to blame.

Sometimes I wish I could speak and write like I used to. But the more I see and interpret, the less I speak because I become increasingly aware of my own mental boundaries as well as the structural limitations I didn’t want to know existed. And the less I speak, the more I simply think myself into non-existence – or at least, what feels the closest to thinking but not really living.

What does it mean to be seen without desiring all of the accompanying narcissism that attaches itself to forms of recognition? I’ve been thinking and re-thinking the politics of recognition for almost exactly half of a year. Recognition is something so paradoxical to me, and thinking about it is bound to drive you to a point in your mental health where any mention of soap-bathing, bubble-blowing “self-care” rituals make you want to disappear a little more with each passing day. I wonder what it does to a person to ponder alienation in alienation for this long, in addition to all of the recognition rituals that compensate for it. My heart hurts just trying to wrap my mind around that.

I grabbed coffee with a friend I admire so much yesterday, and I asked her if she was feeling this way, too. She said something I knew to be true, but so desperately needed to hear and be reassured by: “Everyone is feeling this way. This feeling is political, not just personal. It permeates daily life and it’s only getting worse and worse.” And I can feel it all the way from Egypt to the United States, the two places I keep escaping for each other only to find myself retreating again for the other. The current global crisis in capital that is building up is wreaking havoc on so many of us in the most insidious ways imaginable. But even attempting to communicate this is difficult and frightening because alienation is so often strategically pathologized, misdiagnosed as “depression”, and written off as individual suffering. And so, we all suffer in silence.

Honestly the thing i (and probably other ppl who follow for ur posts) admire is you’re a really fundamentally kind person and it’s probably the same thing making young leftists suck so much to be around (from your post), cause……….emotional empathy among 18-29 is hard to come by whether they’re in politics or not. Like where is the compassion lmao ugh. Sorry if this is weird on anon but none of my followers would get it and you Said That and. Yeah. Real damn post. Kinda drnnk rn sorry

writhe:

(-,; thank you. i’m not saying i’m, like, a shining star or anything but i try to be kind at all times to the very best of my ability 

my Big Issue is yeah, that: I feel like people think that being a leftist is what makes them a good person (and while I believe that your politics definitely DO reflect your quality as a person, and yeah i do believe you need to be a leftist to be a good person unless you have a legitimate way to claim ignorance about politics (you’re young, etc)), and do absolutely zero self-crit in the ways they treat people. 

like, i’ve seen people asking questions in attempt to learn and people responding so fucking rudely- like, yes, the role of an educator gets tiring or even patronizing, but it takes literally 10 seconds to send someone an article or to explain that it’s very easy for a person to do their own research. you had to learn once, too! 

also, i feel like a lot of younger leftists absorb ideas and spit them back out without actually understanding WHY, and then feeling superior for having these views they can’t even explain or fully understand (like, example being people threatening violence/ harm against women they don’t like without understanding why it’s bad to perpetuate violence against women in any form even if that woman is, like, a bad person)

and I’ve ALSO noticed this trend where people will just Have Certain Convictions that they will not budge on no matter the information offered (like, people getting mad if you say that you don’t want to be called ‘queer’, people saying that ‘afab privilege’ is a thing, people, like, defending really disgusting kinks to the death, because a lot of leftists also seem to think that having kinks is, like, an axis of oppression???) 

ANOTHER EXAMPLE was this post that was like ‘protect bi/pan/ace kids!’ and like the comment on it was something along the lines of how bi/pan identities are a lot different than ace identities and then the said commenter was getting hate for saying something that was just very objectively true?? 

a LOT of false equivalencies, esp. in lgbt discourses. but that’s sort of unrelated. 

And i mean beyond a lot of what i see on the internet (which is still real and important, because you’re lying if you say the internet didn’t play a large role in your radicalization/ the radicalization of youth!), i’ve interacted with people IRL who are leftists but just manage….to somehow have the worst views (ex, sexualization as a form of ‘empowerment’, people regularly using misogynistic language, fucking call out culture as a whole, people refusing to address the shitty things they did because they feel they’re somehow above criticism, and so on!!) 

fdsafofjdsaadsdk thanks for reading! this is super disjointed, sorry!