Being diagnosed with depression has been strangely liberating.

thanks, crippling anxiety, for simultaneously making it impossible to do write my thesis and making me dread the fact that it’s not done yet

wendy’s doesn’t play around.

The Imperative to Tell

I’m taking a class on Memory and Violence. This course details how memory has not just a personal context, but also a cultural one. It talks about the Holocaust and White Supremacy in America. One of the things that has really stuck out to me is Dori Laub’s thoughts on what he termed the imperative to tell and the inability to articulate what needs to be told. Laub, a psychiatrist and child-survivor of the Holocaust, argues that sufferers of trauma, even in a cultural scope, have some part of their identity buried by said trauma. In order to heal this trauma and reclaim their identity, victims have to be able to articulate (i.e. rationalize) what happened to them. The problem, as Laub identifies, is that often victims of trauma lack the ability to fully articulate the circumstances, suffering, reasons their trauma occurred. However, instances of rape, genocide, and other such violence are so brutal that they cannot be rationalized. Events like the Holocaust demand their victims submit to the same delusional ideology that Nazis used to justify their actions. In other words, Jews were coerced into accepting their alleged sub-humanness as others (neighbors, businesses, outside clergy, etc.) failed to defend them from the Nazis. 

Atrocities like those above taint victims’ identities with the most vicious parts of their racist, sexist, or otherwise hateful beliefs in an effort to subsume all other parts of their humanity.

Starting a politics blog

yet another bleeding heart white liberal thinking he can change the world :P