#because the national health emergency ended in May
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Hey Americans, it’s fall 2023 and the adult Covid vaccines are STILL FREE at certain pharmacies. Even if you have no health insurance. Even if you have health insurance but the insurance company likes to whine about CVS being “out of network” for vaccinations.
Find out more FAQ stuff from the CDC here:
And find your local locations with free vaccines below. Once you’ve put in your zip code and hit “go”, on the next page, make sure to click the checkbox that says “BRIDGE Access Participant” so you know these locations have the free shots.
#text post#Covid#covid19#covid 19#covid vaccine#covid pandemic#pandemic#vaccine#signal boost#boost#please boost#vaccination#covid-19#I am just putting as many tags that I can think of on this post to help it get to people#because I was unaware that the government was continuing to fund free vaccines#because the national health emergency ended in May#so finding out I could still get it for free even if my insurance wanted to be annoying was a relief#and I want to make sure others know it too
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(CNN) - In new clarifying guidance announced Monday, the Biden Administration said that federal law preempts state abortion bans when emergency care is needed, and that the federal government can penalize institutions or providers that fail to provide necessary abortions to treat medical emergencies.
"Under the law, no matter where you live, women have the right to emergency care — including abortion care," HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra said in a news release Monday. "Today, in no uncertain terms, we are reinforcing that we expect providers to continue offering these services, and that federal law preempts state abortion bans when needed for emergency care."
In more than a dozen states, legal fights are underway over abortion bans and other laws that strictly limit the procedure after the US Supreme Court ended a constitutional right to an abortion on June 24.
In a letter to the nation's health care providers on Monday, Becerra said a federal statute called the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) protects providers' clinical judgement and the actions they take to provide stabilizing treatment to pregnant patients who are experiencing emergency medical conditions, regardless of restrictions in any given state.
EMTALA has been on the books since 1986. It specifically requires all patients get the appropriate medical screening, examination, stabilizing treatment and transfer to an appropriate facility if necessary.
The administration said examples of emergency medical conditions may include, but are not limited to, ectopic pregnancy -- when the fertilized egg grows outside a woman's uterus -- and complications of miscarriages. Stabilizing treatment could include abortion.
Becerra said if a state law bans abortion and does not include an exception for the life and health of the pregnant person, that state law is preempted by the federal statute.
"We heard a lot from physicians that we needed to be clearer on these points because people were still too scared to treat people," a senior adviser with HHS said in a background briefing with the media. The guidance today is "meant to try to provide that reassurance here on the clinical judgment of these physicians and hospitals."
HHS said it will do everything within its authority to ensure patients get the care they need.
The statute applies to emergency departments and other specific clinical settings. Providers also will not have to wait for a patient's condition to worsen to be protected by this statute.
If a hospital is found in violation of this statute, a hospital could lose its Medicare and Medicaid provider agreements and could face civil penalties. An individual physician could also face civil penalties if they are found in violation.
Under the statute HHS may impose a $119,942 fine per violation for hospitals with over 100 beds, $59,973 for hospitals under 100 beds. A physician could face a $119,942 fine per violation.
"We are making enforcement a priority," a senior HHS official said.
A memo from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said that hospitals should ensure that all staff who may encounter an emergency situation with a pregnant person be aware of the hospital's obligation under EMTALA.
The statute also contains a whistleblower provision that prevents retaliation by the hospital against its employee who refuses to transfer a patient with an emergency medical condition that has not been stabilized by the hospital. A link on the CMS website allows people to file an EMTALA complaint.
The enforcement of EMTALA depends on people making a complaint to the government. An investigation can only follow if a complaint is made.
"Health care must be between a patient and their doctor, not a politician," said Becerra in a news release. "We will continue to leverage all available resources at HHS to make sure women can access the life-saving care they need."
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A social worker turned interior designer is tackling furniture poverty by transforming the homes of social housing tenants through her charity.
Emily Wheeler, founder of Furnishing Futures, says the need for her charity is not just cosmetic design - domestic abuse survivors are often driven back to their perpetrators after being given empty social housing with no beds for their children.
When families escaping domestic violence are rehoused by their local council, properties are often stripped of all white goods, furniture, and flooring for health and safety reasons.
Having left their old homes suddenly without any of their belongings, families often end up in a flat or house with nowhere to cook or store food and no beds to sleep in, Emily Wheeler, founder of the charity Furnishing Futures, tells Sky News.
"There are no curtains at the windows, there's no oven, no fridge, no washing machine," she says. "Children are expected to sleep on concrete floors with no beds or bedding.
"Mothers may have experienced economic abuse or coercion and might not have access to their money and find themselves having to start again.
"So you can understand why some women think 'this is actually no better for my children than going back to my previous situation'."
Emily has been a frontline social worker in east London for more than 20 years. During a career break, during which she had her two children, she retrained as an interior designer.
When she returned to social work in 2014, she says austerity meant council budgets were being cut and previously available grants for social housing tenants were no longer funded.
"I've always seen furniture poverty throughout my career, but it had got worse," she says.
"I was meeting families living in these conditions without furniture and without access to support.
"When you look at the amount of stuff councils have to spend money on just to keep people safe, furniture isn't the priority."
Moved into empty flat two days after giving birth
Laura, not her real name, moved between different emergency accommodations while she was pregnant with her first child after being abused by her ex-partner.
She says she was offered a council flat two days after giving birth.
"When I first moved in it was all dirty, there was no furniture, no carpet, no cooker, fridge, or washing machine.
"I had to take out an emergency loan from Universal Credit to get away from my partner, so I didn't have any money left when my baby was born. The first couple of nights I could only eat takeaway food because there was nothing to cook with.
"It had concrete floors. I'd get up in the middle of the night to make my baby a bottle and it would be freezing, so I had to put blankets all over the floor."
Chief executive of the National Housing Federation Kate Henderson says: "In social housing, carpets have historically been removed as standard practice for practical reasons, to ensure hygiene between lets and to prevent any possible contamination.
"In some cases, housing associations provide new flooring as standard when a home is re-let, or in other cases they may provide decorating vouchers to new tenants, which can be used for flooring of their choice."
According to a 2021 study by the campaign group End Furniture Poverty, only 1% of social housing properties are furnished.
Councils under 'no legal obligation'
The Housing Act 1985 states that a local authority "may fit out, furnish and supply a house provided by them with all requisite furniture, fittings and conveniences".
But Emily says this means there is no legal obligation to do so.
"Councils are fulfilling their duty by providing housing, so in the eyes of the law they're not doing anything wrong.
"But having an empty shell of concrete is not a home - just because you're not on the streets."
Having seen the problem on a wider scale when she began chairing multi-agency child protection conferences, she decided to combine her skills as a designer and social worker - and create a charity to help bridge the gap.
Furnishing Futures was set up in 2019. Emily and her team refloor, paint, and furnish empty properties given to trauma and domestic abuse survivors by councils.
She uses her industry connections, which include Soho House, DFS, Dunelm, and others, to source donated furniture, and fundraises for the rest.
She believes it is the only charity of its kind in the UK.
So far they have furnished more than 80 homes across east London, and a pilot scheme with Waltham Forest council and housing association Peabody will see another three completed there.
But with thousands of families on social housing waiting lists in each of the capital's 32 boroughs alone, she wants to expand nationally.
"The hardest thing about my job is having to say no to people because we don't have the capacity," she says.
"Every day we get inquiries from women, midwives, health visitors, other local authorities, domestic abuse agencies - but we're just a small team and the demand is huge."
The charity has a 4,000-square-foot warehouse, a team of five full-time staff, and a group of regular volunteers who help with flooring, painting, and assembling furniture.
As situations are often urgent, work is usually done in just one day.
Empty homes are form of 'revictimisation'
Jen Cirone, director of services at Solace Women's Aid, one of the charity's partners, says being housed in an empty home and having to start again is a form of "revictimisation".
But she says of the charity: "It's not only the practicalities of having a beautiful space to live in but also demonstrates that others care.
"Together, Furnishing Futures is able to complete the road to recovery that work with Solace has put them on."
Hannah, not her real name, is another of Emily's clients.
She was homeless after leaving her ex-partner and given emergency accommodation a day before she was due to give birth to her first child.
"I felt extremely stressed and vulnerable," she says. "As a victim of domestic violence and heavily pregnant, I already felt alone and unsupported.
"This empty space didn't feel like 'home' and it certainly wasn't suitable for baby."
As a type one diabetic she also had nowhere to store her insulin injections, she adds.
"I ended up staying in hospital for some time due to an emergency C-section and during that time Emily turned my empty, scary space into a home for me and my child."
Emily says that although COVID and the cost-of-living crisis have opened the conversation about poverty and how it affects domestic abuse survivors, the situation is "worse than ever".
"We're not just talking about poverty now, we're talking about destitution," she says.
"People need safe and comfortable homes. You won't be able to recover from trauma, rebuild your life, and be a productive part of society if you don't have your basic needs met."
A Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities spokesperson said: "Domestic abuse survivors deserve a safe home and we are grateful to Furnishing Futures for the work they do to help these families rebuild their lives.
"We expect social housing providers to play their part and provide homes that are of a decent quality, if tenants are unhappy, we encourage them to speak to their landlords.
"Our Social Housing Regulation Act is also driving up standards and strengthened the role of the Ombudsman so that it is easier for tenants to raise complaints."
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THERE WAS THIS BOY | STRAY KIDS.
genre | fluff with brief angst
synopsis | have you ever been in love? do you want to talk about this boy?
word count | 13.2k+
warning | mentions of bullying, injury, blood / brief mention of health (skin) issues / brief allusion to sex
note | follow me for a tutorial on how to make the most uncoordinated moodboard / wanted to practice writing fluff so here is something short and sweet
There was this boy who lived in the apartment complex you always deliver food to.
Seeing you after soccer practice has become a weekly routine for him, courtesy to his next-door neighbor for ordering takeout dinner from the restaurant you worked at least once a week. Sometimes he would only see you once; other times, if he was lucky, he would see you more than once a week, and you would have more than one order to deliver. He noticed your constant presence around the apartment complex before he began mustering the courage to talk to you, which he ended up not needing to do so because you accidentally bumped into him when you turned a corner, which led to an introduction.
Because of your flashing silhouette, Chan could usually tell if you were present around the area. You were constantly running, the scorch of your sneakers a familiar sound to his ears, and somehow the food and drinks in your hands never ran out of place despite your hyperactive movements. The first time you bumped into him was because you hadn't anticipated his presence, and you had been running across the hallways at full speed. But, as he looked upon the open halls of the apartment building from the ground floor, he saw no signs of you anywhere.
Clutching the shoelaces of his practice sneakers and letting them hit as they dangled from his grip, Chan tried to mask the disappointment from his face just as the elevator door opened. When he saw nobody waiting outside, he resumed the saddened pout that lingered on his face from realizing you may not be around today. He hasn't seen you all week, and he has missed you dearly! Looking on the bright side, which Chan was good at doing, he's got a lot of stories to tell you, as well as a big surprise he has kept from you for a while. But he couldn't do any of that if you weren't here!
With dejection at his feet, he stumbled out of the elevator and into the apartment hall. The silence in the air, matched with the slowing steps of his feet that sounded like a ticking clock, made him feel ridiculous that he was praying for your miraculous emergence. But Chan liked to hold onto the last stand of hope, he was good at doing that, and to him, you were good at answering that hope, usually with the rapid screeching of your sneakers. Perking up, he turned around at the pitter-patter sounds of your steps just in time to catch you pop out from around the corner.
You recognized his faraway figure and did not attempt to decrease your speed. You ran towards him, a plastic bag of food in one hand—you have a job to do! The soft grin on your face widened when, after Chan realized you planned to get past him, he playfully got into a goalkeeper stance. His eyes were serious, though; he had seen you move before, and he wasn't exaggerating when he told his friends he could only catch sight of your shadows sometimes. Maybe it was your fantastic work ethic or phenomenal laziness, but the constant, high athletism your body could perform made it such a waste that you were focused on making food deliveries instead of joining a national sports team.
Staring at your increasingly approaching figure, Chan was ready to grab onto your shoulders when you hopped up to kick the wall to the side. It gave you momentum to jump over his head, which he dodged to avoid being hit by the heel of your shoes, but it only served as an opportunity for you to step feathery light on the back of his neck and land on the ground behind. He rubbed the spot where your shoes landed and immediately turned to find you standing in front of an apartment, ringing the doorbell. He chuckled lowly, watching your polite smile as you handed the customer their food.
"Are you sure you don't want to join the track team?" Chan asked lightheartedly when you began approaching him, shoving money inside your pocket.
You scrunched your nose up and shook your head. Fishing your phone out of your pocket, you typed something into the notes app before showing it to him.
"Doing sports is for high school. I gotta focus on studying and working to pay for my tuition."
He pulled away from the screen with a vague frown, then he held up his dirty practice sneakers and waved them at your face. "I'm still doing sports.”
You pursed your lips into a smile, but your shoulders moved like you were laughing. Chan watched you. An endless hunger rumbled inside the seams of his chest; he wanted to hear what your voice sounded like. He wouldn't force you to talk to him, though, especially after you told him that your body tended to refrain from verbally communicating with anyone you didn't feel close to. It was less of a conscious choice but a law your mind imposed.
"Oh! Also, I want to tell you,” he began moving his hands hesitantly to sign out words that matched his voice, "I have been taking sign language classes for over two months now.”
It took you a long beat to register that Chan was signing the words to you. He was a little slow with the words, perhaps nervous about making mistakes, but you understood him with no problem. Your eyes widened in excitement as you clapped with your phone in your hand. Then, as you were about to type your reaction with your phone, he stopped you by gently moving your phone away from before your face.
"You don't have to keep typing," he said. "I can read what you say. If I don't know something, I'll ask!”
Suspiciously, you rubbed the tip of your nose and squinted at him. This came as a complete surprise to you. You have been chatting with Chan through texts and papers. You never thought he was taking sign language classes under your nose. He has not once spoken of it, and he never mentioned having relatives who used it either.
Bringing your hands down to your chin, your chest hummed with low anticipation before you, slowly to accommodate him, signed, "You know I can still hear you, right? You don't have to do it.”
"Oh! Yeah, I–well, sometimes I don't remember." He laughed with his heart full. "It's okay, though. Doing it helps me practice!”
"That's true." You nodded in agreement. "Why did you suddenly want to learn sign language?”
Chan shifted his weight. He wasn't thinking too deeply about your question. Hence he gave a straightforward answer. "I wanted to talk to you.”
You let out a huff of hair in replacement for a chuckle. "You didn't have to learn a new language to do that.”
"Yeah," he signed. "But I want to know what you know.”
He wanted to know what you know, to learn what you learn, and to talk how you talk. He would even call himself infatuated with how much he wanted to consume himself through your teeth and drown himself in your existence. Chan wanted to see what you see, to think what you think, to feel what you feel, and to stand where you stand. The first step to do that, he thought, was to utilize communication the way you use it, so he did. He found a way to talk to you. He was always going to learn how to understand you.
When you didn't reply, Chan was left feeling stoic and awkward. He rubbed the back of his neck at your furrowed brows and asked, "Did I say something?”
You almost looked angry when you ignored him and stomped away, but really, you just weren't used to someone committing so much of their time and effort just to be able to talk to you. You could feel a door inside you opening—it has been opened for a while with Chan. He even held it open for you these months, waiting patiently for you to take the first step.
"Hey! I'm sorry if I said something weird!" Chan yelled down the hall, hoping his apologetic voice would reach you.
You stopped in your tracks and looked ahead. The door was opening. It was opening wide, and it may never close again. Spinning on your heels, you couldn't help but smile when you saw Chan standing timidly at his spot. Your legs jogged into a sprint, your body bolting toward him at high speed before you abruptly stopped. Chan shot his arms out to catch you by the waist, but you prevented your fake fall by clamping your hands on his shoulders.
He didn't register it when you moved your head to his ears. For the first time, you spoke to him with a voice he could never forget.
"Goodnight, Chan.”
There was this boy who lived in the apartment complex you always deliver food to, and you let him hear your voice for the first time.
There was this boy you've been dating for two and a half years.
The train announced its arrival in ten minutes. Minho listened to the static in the station speakers, and as he stared at you with his chin hidden under his scarf, he realized for the first time how much he didn't want you to move out of the city. He hadn’t said anything when you told him about it. At that time, he genuinely did not think ill of you moving away to finish off the remaining two years of college. Two years felt measly to him, and you planned to visit each other during the holidays, so there was nothing to worry about.
Until now—the speakers announced the train’s arrival in ten minutes, which would feel like seconds to him. Your hand luggage was trapped between two pairs of shoes so Minho could hold both of your hands as you waited for departure.
“You don’t look very excited,” you mumbled with a faint giggle after you observed the increasing furrow of his brows every time he felt the train tracks rumble.
He shifted his gaze from the rail to you. “You know me very well.”
“Just admit it,” you rolled your eyes at his monotonous voice, “you’re going to miss me.”
He pulled a face; the corner of his lips stretched into a sneer, and his eyes rolled back briefly. The mere idea of displaying such an emotion appalled him, not because he was against it but because cheesy, affectionate things made him uncomfortable. He was never a fanatic of verbal confessions, physical intimacy, or grand romantic gestures. Honking his car when a high school couple, holding hands, was walking across the road as his favorite pastime, and he visibly mimics a barfing motion if he ever witnesses public proposals.
You always thought it was ironic. It could be hypocrisy or ignorance that led to his opinion, but the truth remained that as much as he hated romance, he was also filled to the brim with it.
“Never,” Minho said, swinging your joint hands. "It’s not like you’re going to be gone forever. We are literally seeing each other again during spring break, which is only a few months later.”
“I bet you circled the date on your calendar and everything.”
“Please worry about getting your degree,” he said with squinted eyes as he playfully pulled you toward him. You stumbled, your face coming in close to his as he smiled. “Study hard. Don’t forget to take breaks. Talk to me if you need anything, and don’t let anyone make fun of you.”
Not being around you was going to be a hassle for Minho. Even though you could take good care of yourself, he often interfered with your daily routine with his own snippets of kindness. Bringing you food, restocking your shampoos, gossiping about your family, driving you home, calling the administration office after they messed up your transfer applications, and almost kicking the door of your landlord’s apartment because they skimped on maintenance. You didn’t have to ask for them; he was your boyfriend, after all. And it would be hard not being able to do those for you anymore conveniently.
“I’m serious. Don’t let people push you around,” he repeated firmly after you laughed at his final advice. He searched for your eyes when you nodded, and a smile gradually grew on his face. “Bite them if they won’t listen. You’re good at that.”
You giggled as you shoved his chest. Minho thought he would miss that too—being shoved around with the company of your laughter. Sometimes you would startle him after showering by drawing pictures on the fogged mirrors; he still has pictures of them in his gallery. He remembered bumping his head on the sink because he was scrambling to grab his phone outside the bathroom, and you had to treat the wound on his forehead while he sat stupidly on the covered toilet seat. Sometimes you would bite him, which he heard was a partner thing to do, but he couldn’t do the biting because he had to play the role of being eaten. He never entirely understood that one.
The station speaker rang, signaling the arrival of the train. You looked behind you as the wind picked up. When you saw the headlights of the moving car, you whipped your head back to look at Minho. You brought his hand up to your chin and began pushing at the sleeve of his jacket. He let you, still unsure of what you were planning to do.
“I’ll call you when I get there!” you said hastily. “I love you. I’ll miss you.”
“I expect you to–ow!”
He pulled his hand to his chest after flipping it a few times. You giggled as you grabbed your luggage and hurried into the opened doors. You dropped the luggage on the floor near it, standing despite the rows of vacant seats around. Minho widened his eyes as the automated doors began to slide shut. He managed a short wave when he saw you do the same from behind the misty window. They were misty, or maybe his eyes were. He wasn’t sure. His head was in the clouds when the train moved with you in it, and his thumb rubbed the sore spot on the side of his palm.
When he looked down, he saw that you had bitten him. You had bitten hard, enough to leave marks of your teeth on his skin. A gentle laughter escaped his lips in the form of a shaky shiver as he traced the juncture of them, still faintly wet with your saliva, and each touch of his finger was a hapless scream into the void about how he would miss you dearly and that you did well not allowing him a verbal farewell. But most importantly, he was right. You were good at biting.
There was this boy you've been dating for two and a half years, and you were good at leaving yourself places he couldn’t forget.
There was this boy you have been hooking up with, he broke up with his previous partner not too long ago.
You made a mental note that you wouldn’t let Changbin convince you to stay for breakfast the next time. Next time you wake up before the sun could fully rise, you will forget the warmth of his bare chest and take your leave. It was a promise you have been serving to yourself on a platter you ignored, but not next time! No matter how delicious his sunny-side-up eggs were, how well he could make a cup of morning coffee, or how delightful you always felt eating breakfast with him in his shabby apartment—next time, you leave his home to save yourself.
“Can you get me eggs from the fridge?” he asked over the stove, his hand moving to crank the fire out. A sudden grimace glossed over his face after a thought, and then he tapped his head. “Actually, I don’t know if I have any left. If there isn’t any, then just grab whatever we can eat.”
You rubbed your nose with a yawn as you made your way to the old refrigerator left behind by the last tenant. A bunch of messy documents remained stuck to its surface with a middle school magnet he got from attending his niece’s graduation ceremony; you remembered asking him about them once, and he could be telling the truth when he said he had no idea how he planned to deal with them. Opening the fridge, you pulled a face at the leftover parade happening in every small cabinet before snatching two eggs off the side rack. You slammed the door shut, earning a stern whine from Changbin.
“That fridge is on its last breath, and I can’t afford to buy a new one, so please be so gentle with it,” he said when you were near to drop the eggs on the counter carefully. He thanked you as he reached out to grab one. Before he turned toward the pan being heated on the stove, he stepped back to peck your lips. “Thank you.”
You meekly returned his smile. The second he turned his back on you, your shoulders slumped into a distrusting frenzy. You were good at avoiding these affectionate gestures, which he loved to do. By moving around all the time, always having something happening with your hands, and constantly snacking or drinking, you were more or less able to avoid lighthearted intimacy with him. And you had to avoid them because you cannot delude this fleeting relationship into commitment.
You were a rebound. That was all there was.
It was ridiculous to let a despicable, loud-mouthed cashier working at the supermarket you frequented gossip about you to yourself enough that he convinced you to start worrying about your relationship with Changbin. But that cashier was potent, your starvation for love was impressionable, and as much as it hurt to admit, gossips tend to hold some amount of truth, which was that Changbin recently broke up with a partner of his caliber, and you were just someone he met at a college party.
You were the rebound; the middle point between a past and a true love; the scapegoat used for self-improvement; the experimental medicine a few steps behind the successful cure. Changbin was never going to love you. That was all there was, so you shouldn’t let yourself dive too far into the ocean in case the water starts running dry.
“My niece has been asking for you,” Changbin mentioned fondly after he cracked the eggs into the pan. It began sizzling moments later. “She has not stopped whining about seeing you since last Christmas.”
You hopped onto the kitchen counter next to the stove, carefully keeping a distance from the fire. Kicking your legs, you smiled and responded, “You should have never told me what she wanted as presents.”
“Well, someone has to buy something for me to slap my name on it,” he joked. “I have a reputation to uphold in case she grows up to earn big bucks. I plan that she grows so appreciative of my presence in her childhood that she pardons all my student loans.”
“That,” you rolled your eyes and scoffed incredulously into a chuckle, “that’s not a plausible plan at all.”
He laughed over the sizzling noises. It sounded familiar and heartbreaking; you loved the way he laughed, and you would not have it conveniently forever. Turning away from his face, you glanced at the floor, where your feet obstructed the view by playing around the sliding cabinet. You opened it, pushed it close with the heel, and pried it open again with the sole of your feet. The drawer was wobbly and old; it was another piece of furniture the last tenant left behind that Changbin gladly took ownership of.
“Really, though, she is never gonna stop whining until she sees you again,” he said after a moment of silence. “I can’t keep telling her you’ve just been extremely busy with school and work, and that we didn’t break up.”
Your feet slipped from the edge of the sliding drawer just as you pulled it open. It was partially the fault of the drawer, but your shock from processing what he said also caused you to double over. Noticing the uncontrollable lean of your torso, Changbin immediately let go of the handle and gripped his hand over your thigh, steadying you back on the kitchen counter. He glared at you with confusion, which turned clueless when you returned to him eyes with unreadable fright.
“What was that?” he asked, his hand unconsciously squeezing your thigh as an attempt to calm you down.
“I–I don’t know, I was just–“ you cleared your throat and shook your head–“I’m sorry. What do you mean we didn’t break up?”
There was a suspicious squint in his eyes, and then a hesitant smirk showed up on his rosy lips. “What do you mean ‘what do you mean?’ Did we break up without me knowing?”
“No, we didn’t. I was just…” You pursed your lips together before placing a hand on his, holding it. “I didn’t know we were dating.”
He stared at you, his thoughts crashing into loopholes in a self-inflicted maze that had no exit. He must have been moving too fast. He definitely was! He never even asked you to label this relationship officially; he has been unconsciously introducing himself as your boyfriend to everyone that he convinced himself it was true. It was a terrible, outrageous mistake; he must have scared you.
“Oh god, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to–“
“No, it’s fine! It’s okay! I never thought otherwise, anyway!”
“What?”
Changbin was staring at you again, but this time, he looked more dissatisfied and disappointed than clueless and confused. If you watched the way the lines of his forehead formed, you could even consider him an angry man for a second. He turned off the stove, ridding the air of the comfortable white noises, and moved to stand before you. His hands supported his weight on the edge of the kitchen counter on either side of your knees, effectively trapping you between his body.
“What do you mean you never thought otherwise?” he asked, brows furrowed and voice low with a scruffy croak hidden somewhere in the corner. “Actually, what are we, exactly?”
You didn’t know what to say, but you forced an answer out of your mouth. “We’re hooking up, aren’t we?”
His breath hitched. For the same thing, he would argue that you two shared something much more significant. For the same reason—the fact that his skin remembers the taste of your nails and your body visible with stains of his saliva—he would argue that you two were much more than you said to be. He never thought you thought this way. He didn’t know where it went wrong.
Removing himself from the kitchen counter, he turned around with a hand in his hair. “I didn’t know you think so lightly of me.”
“I don’t!” you exclaimed within a blink of an eye. “Changbin, I don’t! I didn’t think that would hurt you, considering I’m just a rebound!”
“What rebound?”
You jumped at his sharp tone. Pulling at your fingers, you nudged your shoulder up to your cheek in a poor attempt to shrink into yourself. “Me. Someone told me you broke up with someone a while ago and how much that gutted you, so I should watch out.”
“Who–“ He took a deep breath with closed eyes. Curling his fists by his side, he raised his brows and opened his eyes, which were much more gentle than before. “Who told you that?”
“This boy at the supermarket I go to. You might know him. His name is Han Ji–“
“I do know him. Thank you for telling me.” Changbin held up a hand to stop you from continuing. There was humor in this situation; no wonder his friend acted avoidant after he talked about you. Slowly moving closer to you again, he placed his hands on his hips, then shifted to put them on your knees reluctantly instead. He looked honest when he spoke. “[Name], you’re not a rebound.”
“But he said the breakup destroyed you.”
“It did, which is why it happened a while ago. I needed time to move on from it.” He nodded with a soft smile. He squeezed your knees, scrunching his nose to appear less tense. “I wouldn’t kiss you if I didn’t love you.”
He wouldn’t have let you sleep with him if he didn’t love you either. He wouldn’t have brought you to see his family during the holidays, and be so restless and fidgety when he misunderstood your perception of this relationship, and miss you first thing in the morning after he woke up, and yearned to perfect the art of cooking a sunny-side up egg if he didn’t love you. He wouldn’t be standing here, vulnerable and maybe a little lost, telling you he loves you if he didn’t.
You played with your fingers still, flicking your nails against each other. “What if you change your mind?”
He tapped the tip of your nose. “What if I don’t?”
What if all that would happen was that he searches for your silhouette everywhere? What if he saw your shadow in every corner of his usual streets? What if he just yearned for a glimpse of you in the sun’s shadow, cascading over his kitchen through the opened window, almost as if you lived in his home with him? This was a bet you ought to be willing to take. You must insert the coin before the slot machine starts moving because love is not a promise. Love is not a guarantee. You ought to be brave, be bold, and take a leap of faith. It may be a fall to your death, or it may be a soar to the sky. But sometimes, taking a leap of faith may just be hopping off the kitchen counter into the arms of a boy in love with you.
“There, I got you,” Changbin beamed with his arms around your body. He set you on the floor carefully, his eyes not once leaving your face. “I always got you.”
There was this boy you have been hooking up with, and you could never imagine how much he loves you.
There was this boy in your art class.
Hyunjin has always been in full support of your in-progress fashion career despite the fact that you were taking art classes in college to learn how to draw. From helping you fix your design drafts to standing in for you as a life-sized mannequin, even to strutting on the makeshift runaway set out by the theater students for the annual student fashion show wearing the clothes you specifically made for him, Hyunjin has always been in full support of your dream to become a fashion designer.
"Do you mind?”
Hyunjin snapped out of his trance to squint his eyes at you holding out a measuring tape across your chest. You took his measurements once in a while, sometimes even after you had already sewed your designs for him to try on because you liked to double-check and to have everything in record. It wasn't the most thorough thing to do. It would even be pointless, to put it harshly. But he never particularly minded. He liked having you near him.
He faked a grimace and carried an unserious complaint in his voice when he spoke, "Actually, I do mind. I have minded over the last two years, but I never said anything.”
You ignored him. The second you heard the whiny tone roll out the tip of his tongue like the red carpet he was used to walking over, you dove in and began leveling him with the measuring tape. Hyunjin scoffed through a smile flattened from his previously humorous grimace, and he relaxed his limbs to let you do as you wish. Words flew out your lips in mutters of numbers, reminding yourself of his size and comparing the data to what you have recorded in the past while Hyunjin stood there in silence.
He watched you carefully, but not without an affectionate haze that blinded him enough to grin through the pins and needles you occasionally stab him through the fabrics. You paid no attention to him, just as he preferred it, and there a facade of vague disinterest was propped just beneath his chin in preparation for your direct gaze. More than reciprocation, he was afraid of being seen, being known, being broken out of the distant pedestal his peers put on his fortunate features and being rejected for it.
"Your shoulders have gotten broader," you whispered near his neck, causing him to freeze.
Hyunjin hadn't realized you had moved to stand behind him until you removed the tape draped over his shoulder and walked to stand before him again. You were frowning in thought, allowing him to let out the breath he sucked in when he felt yours stranded on the back of his neck, chilling a soft finger trail down his spine. That was the closest anybody had gotten to touching his skin with their lips, and ironically, he didn't think he could handle it well if you kissed him, even though he had reserved that experience for you and nobody else.
"Can you try this on?" you asked as you moved over to a tall chair where you placed a paper bag. You reached inside and pulled out a jacket, holding it out to him. "I wanna see if it fits.”
Hyunjin received it gladly. He would be grateful for any opportunity to occupy his mind, turn it away from the gruesome feeling of his body being unraveled by a mere shard of your breath. Putting both his arms through the sleeves of the jacket, as he tried to shake it in place, he frowned at the faint tightness surrounding his shoulders. He could still wear the jacket, but it felt uncomfortable and restricting.
You rubbed your knuckles nervously with a palm, observing Hyunjin's unspoken reaction. He has always been too nice to tell you the truth, which was ironic as someone whose academic career involved receiving and providing critique to improve.
But just between him and his mind, it has never been about his kindness and only that he cherished everything you made for the world, yourself, or for him. To Hyunjin, your original vision was already the best version of anything. Abominations woven by your fingertips would have special meanings—there must be a reason why such mistakes exist; make him a shirt cut full of holes, and he'd thank you for a beautiful monstrosity.
"It's a bit small, isn't it?" you pointed out as you reached in to fix the collar.
"Yeah, but I can still wear it," Hyunjin said.
You grabbed the two flaps under the jacket collar and attempted to button it up. The buttons smacked open once you managed to clasp them together, to which Hyunjin breathed out a lighthearted chuckle in response to your sullen state. He let you attempt it a few more times, not bringing up the shrinking of his shoulders to accommodate your exerted force, before you gave up after the third failed attempt.
"Hmm..." you slid your hands from the button to under the jacket, stopping at his chest where you pressed your palms flat against him, "let me think..."
The shape of your hands and the warmth of it against his chest, over the thin fabric of his white shirt, Hyunjin got tattooed right where they currently resided. He wondered how your hands would feel on his naked chest. He wondered if he could keep you there, and he was aware of what his desire for this to be permanent meant. He has always known, and he felt like a jagged breath being drawn into your lungs when you looked up to ask him a muffled question.
He grabbed you by your elbows and pulled you close to him, his actions a needed contradiction to his thoughts. He leaned his face down—kiss them, he thought. Kiss them good; kiss them like how everyone wanted him to kiss them; kiss them to tattoo their lips in your brain; just kiss them.
"Hyunjin...?"
He stopped. A space in his brain got shoved aside to savor the print of your palm against his cheek, and you asked him, with concerned eyes, if he was feeling okay. He wasn't, but he was. He felt like turning into one of the gleaming specks in your eyes. He felt like experiencing how your eyes shift when he tells you he loves you.
"I..." he gulped, clearing his senses. You would never. You and your gentle creativity would never return his feelings. "I'm okay, just feeling a little light-headed. Thanks for catching me.”
There was this boy in your art class who modeled for you, and he was afraid you would recognize his love for you.
There was this boy who worked the closing shift with you at the supermarket.
Jisung had his hands clasped together in a praying manner, and he was pouting at you with pleading eyes that would fade the second you agreed to join him on his troublesome rendezvous. He was phenomenal at this—thinking up a weird idea every other shift that would, without fail, get you both into trouble. He always covered for you because none of the disasters that came with were your fault. But at this point, you learned never to let Jisung convince you (and himself) to do anything he wanted to try out. You never listened, though. Your desire to be around him all the time greatly overshadowed your caution to be a good employee.
"What are you planning?" you asked as you eyed the shopping cart before him.
You two were supposed to collect all the shopping carts from the parking lot and line them up outside the supermarket for locking. After pushing the first carts out of the lot, Jisung deviated from the task and brought a shopping cart to the edge of a slope leading to the underground floor. You glanced at the directional words painted on the wall, leading drivers to choose between left and right, then back at the shopping cart stopped just before the tip of the slope. You grimaced, already able to guess what he planned.
"I have a plan!" he exclaimed.
"You're going to sit on the cart and run yourself down the slope?" you asked monotonously, gesturing downward.
Jisung's posture flattened into a straight line, and he deadpanned at you with distaste. "You didn't have to guess it right on the first try.”
"Oh–my bad," you muttered with a chuckle. "Do you want me to ask you again?”
"No," he scoffed as he rocked back and forth on his shoe heel. He let his furrowed brows relax into a friendly smile sooner than he wanted; he seemed incapable of anything other than joy whenever he was around you. "You can make it up to me by getting in the cart!”
You took a hesitant step back, your head shaking in disagreement. You didn't know how badly you could be injured if he pushed the cart down the slope with you in it. The falling wasn't the most significant issue. It was the impact of the front of the cart hitting the wall. You could not anticipate the recoil intensity and would hate risking your currently unharmed body for a split second of thrill.
"This isn't a good idea, Jisung," you told him. "We're gonna get in trouble again, and we already pissed the manager off with the soda cans incident.”
Jisung thought it was a good idea to make a waterfall out of shaken soda cans he didn't buy out of pocket from the supermarket last time. He reasoned that champagne glasses were boring and overdone, and that people needed to understand the real joy in life and make a monument out of those things instead. In that case, the real joy in life was coca cola's fizzling and bubble taste.
He had been so excited about it, yet all he accomplished was make a mess and pop a vein on your manager's forehead. He didn't even manage to create a waterfall because he fell straight into the soda can structure while trying to open the last can on the very top.
Jisung had spent the night feeling sticky all over his skin as you helped him by mopping the floor. But, beyond feeling uncomfortable, he remembered most the way you rubbed the liquid off his drenched body with tissue papers, and while you grumbled under your breath about how stupid he was, you couldn't help but let a few smiles fall on your lips. He may not have impressed you, but at least he made you laugh. He always thought about it. He thought everything he ever did was to make you laugh.
"He was mad at us because of property damage," Jisung argued, waving his hands animatedly. "He can't legally get mad at us this time because the only damage that could happen would be on us!”
"So you know this will injure us?”
"I don't. I'm just saying it could!”
"And we are still doing this," you squinted suspiciously at him, “why?"
He blinked innocently as if he wasn't sure why you asked him such a question. Everything comes with potentially harmful consequences, were you supposed to never do anything? He understood the need to be cautious, but he wasn't asking you to jump off a bridge with him, even if there was an off-chance where you asked him to do it, he would do it with you. This was light-hearted fun. Rolling down a parking lot slope in a shopping cart was the same thing to him as building a waterfall foundation out of soda cans—it was something thrilling to do. It was something memorable to do with you, and years later, if you two no longer exist in each other's daily routine, he would look at a shopping cart and think of you.
"I thought it would be fun," he replied with an honest smile.
Your heart wavered. Even if you didn't harbor the feelings you did for him, you would have caved in with the mere glance into his eyes anyway. Jisung always had this effect on people; he was the entertainer, the jokester, the mood-maker. He has yet to be fired because customers came back for him, either to chat or out of friendly loyalty.
More than that, though, to you, he made time enjoyable to drag through. He stuck his neck out for you to grab onto so he could pull you out of your hollow shell to find that the world was a place made for you to be alive on. Sometimes it was racing each other with a handful of items needed for restocking. Other times, he was twirling you by your hand under the dim lights and surrounded by a ridiculous song blasting through the supermarket speakers. Tonight, it was falling off a slope in a shopping cart.
"Hold onto the cart," you mumbled.
Jisung beamed as he grabbed onto the cart handle. Carefully, you swung your legs over the edge and plopped inside the space. You leaned against the cart's back and pulled your legs to your chest to make space for him. After confirming that you had settled on your seat, Jisung let go of the handle and walked to the side of the shopping cart. You watched him as he placed a leg on the support pole below and hopped up using it. The cart shook at the force, and, unfortunately, its front wheels tipped over the ledge of the slope.
"What–" you paused to register the moving car before whipping your head back to look at Jisung–"oh my god, Ji–“
The cart rolled faster than either of you could react to it. Jisung grabbed the shopping cart edge and doubled forward to lean his weight against it while you shot your hands out, hoping to hold onto his arms to steady him. Before you could even blink, your body jolted at the crashing impact. The cart tipped to the side where Jisung was, making you squeal as you began falling out. He noticed it before you did because he discovered he had lost his footing on the pole. Gathering all his senses, he leaned his torso forward to cage you in his arms before you both fell onto the floor, the shopping cart landing on his legs instead of your curled-up body.
Your heart almost beat out of your chest, and it would have if you retained enough senses to understand the proximity of your faces. Your body shifted along with each heave of his chest; you would never know how he managed to hold onto you bridal style, but his circling his arm under your knees saved you from being crushed under the metal cart. Getting off of him, you first looked at the damage done, and you gasped when you saw Jisung's bleeding knee.
"Jisung, you're bleeding!" you said as you got up to pull the shopping cart off his feet.
He could somehow feel it. The liquid trickling down his skin was a vivid feeling. Pulling himself up with a groan, he held back a faint whine upon seeing the bleeding scratch around his knee. The edge of the shopping cart must have nicked him when you two fell. It all happened so quickly, he barely felt it. All he could remember was the weight of your body pressing down on him, shielded from the ground. Placing his hands around his leg, he applied some pressure to the skin, accidentally forcing more blood out of the wound.
You gasped at the sight and slapped his hands away, to which he responded with an incredulous laugh.
"Why are you hitting me? I'm hurt! I'm injured! I'm bleeding!" he exclaimed, eyes wide.
"I told you this was a bad idea," you said. "I'm going to go get something to help you with. Stay here.”
Jisung was forced into silence by your frustrated tone. He anticipated getting hurt; truthfully, the knee injury didn't bother him that badly. He grew up with clumsy scratches all over his body, after all. It was your public display of dissappointment that guilted him into this shrunken shell. You looked upset, saddened, and even annoyed that his knee was bleeding. Jisung couldn't delude himself with the thought that you cared about him enough to hate his injury to neglect your obvious distaste for what happened. It felt earth-shattering to him.
"Wait!" He stood up, his leg buckling at the spike of pain, but he kept going. "I'm sorry! I really thought this would be fun–ah, oh?”
The itchy sensation present in his nose made him reach a hand up. He smeared blood across his cupid's bow once, and the next second, more rolled down from his nose. Brows furrowing in confusion, he arched his neck and pinched the bridge of his nose. You could only stare at him in shock, your legs stuttering to bring yourself to him while your lips unconsciously began to quirk up.
"Where did this nosebleed even come from?" he yelled with a few stomps of his feet. "My face didn't even touch the floor–ow! My knee!"
You brought your hand up to your lips to fail at covering a fit of giggles. Nothing about this was funny, which made everything about it so. The ridiculous way Jisung acted in response to his injuries made it even more hilarious. What would have been a bratty tantrum was made funny by his presence because that was the kind of boy he was. He was the entertainer, the jokester, the mood-maker.
Jisung lowered his head when he heard your glorious laughter. It was the same one he heard when you wiped the soda stick off his skin or when he held your hands as he guided you to dance across the cashier aisles. This was what he yearned for. This was all anything has been about for him. New sparkles in his eyes birthed through your shivering reflection; in your joy, he existed infinitely. This was all he has ever wanted, and this was all anything has ever been about—him being in love with you.
Letting go of his nose and lowering his head, he stared at you affectionately with fiddling fingers. "[Name]." The blood rolled past his lips, dripping down his chin. He cared not of it. "Can I go out with you someday?”
He smiled honestly at you when you approached him. You tugged at the sleeve of your sweatshirt, pulled it over your palm, and wiped the blood on his face.
"You're ridiculous. Your nose is bleeding," you whispered.
"Sorry," he said. "I just really like you.”
You giggled. Jisung wished he would sew himself into the air you breathe out of your mouth, to become part of the noises you make when you felt happy.
There was this boy who worked the closing shift with you at the supermarket, and you wanted to spend the rest of your life with him.
There was this boy who has been living with you since you started college.
“Get out of here if you’re not going to help! Useless!” Felix exclaimed with flailing arms as he chased the high school students up the stairway. He sneered when they ran up the stairs giggling. Putting a hand on the stair railing, he shouted upward, “That’s what I thought! Get a move on before I change your pronouns to ‘was were’!”
After the sight of those pesky teenagers faded, Felix quickly descended the stairs to where you were and crouched next to you. He collected all the pieces of papers you had scattered on the ground after being bumped into, bumped them together into a straight stack, and positioned them in one arm. He reached out to grab your white cane before shuffling over to you, his free hand tentatively hovering over yours as he moved his head in front of your face. He always made cautious announcements of his presence; he remembered you telling him you could still faintly see lines and colors, and he didn’t want to scare you with his sudden appearance.
“Hey, are you okay?” he asked, letting his palm rest above your hand for an acknowledging second before he held it to pull you up with him. “Here, let’s get back on our feet.”
“Thank you, Felix.” You smiled as you leaned into his support. You steadied yourself by finding a footing on the ground, not afraid of stumbling now that Felix held onto your hand. “I’m sorry for the trouble.”
“Nonsense!” he protested as he carefully tugged you along with him to the estate lobby. Your strides were more confident with him around, but he didn’t notice it because he was busy getting all heated and fussy over the group of high schoolers who waited around your fallen body just now. “The real trouble here is those damn kids. How long have they been bothering you?”
You shook your head at his question. “They haven’t been. They didn’t do anything to me. I fell on my own, and they just happened to be around when that happened.”
Felix scoffed. He knew you were putting a good word for them because you, much like himself, didn’t own a heart capable of tarnishing another. Between you and him, though, he was more willing to give someone a well-deserved kick or two and not feel guilty about it afterward, especially if that particular someone was causing harm to someone he cared deeply about. Whether or not those kids deliberately tripped you, he didn’t like that they stuck around to watch you struggle. They should get out of the way if they had no plans to help you. No matter what you tell him, he will keep harboring a negative impression of them, but he wouldn’t do anything if he saw them again. Not because he was nice, but because you were.
“I have a few friends who also live here,” he said once the elevator arrived at your floor. He held the door open as he guided you outside. “If you don’t mind, I will tell them to keep an eye out just in case they see you around or if you need help with anything.”
You hummed in agreement. Ever since the outreach program helped you get into college and obtain a rental apartment, you have meant to meet some new friends. You figured you would struggle with schoolwork already, so to get the best of this opportunity, you wanted to fulfill the social aspect of the ideal college life. Felix was your roommate and, thereby, your first college friend, or acquaintance. You weren’t sure if he saw you as a friend yet. If he were willing to introduce you to the people he knew, you would gladly take the offer. Considering the kind of person Felix was, you doubted his friends would be anything short of a happy meal.
“Okay, we’re here. Give me a second. I’ll open the door.”
Clutching the white cane in your hand, you waited by the side for him to open the door. He inserted the key into the lock on the first try, much unlike the usual days when it would take him a few seconds of struggling to fit the key in place. You always heard the rustling from outside and knew he was home. The lock clicked, and Felix opened the door before returning to you. He stopped his palm at the small of your back as you walked, hovering carefully, and he squeezed through the small space between you and the doorframe to get inside first.
"There we go," he said, kicking his shoes off to a corner. He giggled quietly in amusement at the aggressive way you shoved your shoes aside with the tip of your white cane, and then you rested the cane against the wall near the door at its usual place. He was going to help you with them. "How was class today? I forgot to ask you!”
"Oh–it was good!" You clapped your hands and turned in his direction. Hopefully, he hasn't moved from where he last spoke. You were proceeding according to where his voice was coming from. "I caught up on some reading at the library. This boy who was going to the fine arts building led me there on his way. He was really nice.”
"That's nice. Did you get his name?" Felix hummed in contentment.
"No, I didn't," you said between soft giggles. "But he was wearing something weird and flashy, I assume. I could feel the fabric.”
He turned on the lights to illuminate the dull living room and frowned at the opened bags of chips and soda cans on the table. He remembered you were catching up on assignments at the table yesterday night. You must have forgotten to throw them out after. Quietly, he moved over to the table, dropped your notes on a clean corner, and began cleaning things up. He slid the soda cans over his arms and crumbled the chip bags. You perked up at the plastic noises, stayed in thought momentarily, then gasped, remembering the mess you made on the table.
"Oh, wait! I can clean it up myself," you urged as you stumbled over to the table. "I can help!"
You stopped when his presence loomed over you, and through an extreme fog, you could make out the blond of his hair and some red of his jacket. Felix watched you stare at his neck before slowly looking up at him, your brows furrowed with a certain plead. You never said anything about your possible grievances over needing care, and he never assumed you had any. You have been picking up after yourself just fine, save for certain moments when you needed help, which everyone would require once in a while. But in case you had grievances, he wished you would know he didn't mind helping you. He didn't want you to think he saw you lightly in any way.
"That would be lovely. My hands are too small to hold anything, I swear," he said with a defeated chuckle. "Can you hold out your hand? I'll give you the chip bags.”
You did so willingly and tried to get a feel of his hands again when he transferred the empty plastic bags to you. You didn't think they were as outstandingly small as he made them out to be, especially not in comparison to yours. Or perhaps your opinion of it was influenced by the fact that whenever he touched you, he was helping you to somewhere, and you wouldn't have cared what his hand felt like as you walked with his voice sounding in your ears.
His voice was where the end of your heartstring sat, not just because his voice was securely deep but also because it was one of the only ways you could confidently know him in. You could barely make him out with your eyes, and it was too awkward to touch or smell him, so the best way to feel him was through his voice and how yours mixed with it in the air.
"Are you going to get fried chicken for takeout again?" he asked as he stepped on the trashcan near the kitchen counter. He waited for you to drop the chip bags in before letting go. "I think we should! I walked by this morning, and I saw a new promotional poster! They are drizzling cheese sauce all over the drumsticks, and they're selling it at a discounted price because it's new on the menu.”
You raised your brows. You were used to ordering the same thing at every restaurant as someone who felt uncomfortable trying new things. Sometimes, even if the new thing was good, you felt inclined to stick with what you knew anyway for, perhaps, nostalgic purpose. But Felix sounded so thrilled over it that you didn't have the heart to let him down, so you agreed.
"Let's order that, then," you said. "I'll treat you. You helped me a lot today.”
He strangled out a protest with his throat and then snorted to dismiss your offer. But you stood your ground, reaching your arms out slightly to wave in disagreement. He might not think a big deal of helping you pick your belongings from the floor, walking you back home, choosing to clean up after you, and defending you to disrespectful high school kids, but it all meant something to you. Every kind gesture meant something.
"How about this–" you snapped your fingers–"you can make it up to me by letting me touch your face.”
"Huh?" Felix broke into clueless laughter. He tilted his head, a finger unconsciously pointing at himself, and he pulled a face even though you couldn't see him. "[Name], if you wanted to touch me, you could've just asked.”
You gasped, embarrassed. His assumption was not your intention, but hearing him joke about it out loud caught you off guard. "I did just ask!" you exclaimed, then you waved your arms in a criss-cross motion before your chest. "Also, no! I didn't mean it like that! I just–I don't know what you look like!”
"I know. I was joking," he muttered with an amused smile. Taking a step closer to you, he reached for your hand and placed it on his cheeks. He hesitated at first; he didn't know if you started from the top of the head or the bottom of his chin when you wanted to get a feel of someone's appearance. "Here. Examine away.”
You scrunched your nose as the only protest to his unfunny joke, and then you began your search for his facial structure.
Being touched so gently was not remarkable to him, but somehow, he felt the amusement fading from his face the more ground your fingers covered. The cushion of your hands touched each crevice of his bones. Your fingertips ran like raindrops over his eyes and his lashes; the back of your knuckles glided smooth and firm over his cheekbones; your thumbs a ghostly whisper as they stripped his lips bare of all its desire for romance; your palms an opened leash he gutted himself to tighten around his neck.
"Your skin..." you dragged your fingers carefully under his eyes, "do you have freckles, Felix?"
He sucked in a nervous breath when you leaned in as if to see better. "I do. Can you feel them on my face?"
"Barely. Freckles are mostly flat, I think. Part of the skin, like blemishes," you replied as you reached around to his ears and down his jaw. "You have a nice bone structure.”
"Thanks," he chuckled. "I wouldn't know anything about that, really.”
You laughed with him, your fingers still trailing. He wondered if you saw him differently than everyone else did, differently than he did. He wondered if touching his face would be more aggravating than observing it. It might be. It should be for him. If he closed his eyes and felt for the upward quirk of your mouth and your laugh lines, instead of watching the way your teeth flashed as you smiled, he would feel a certain kind of cruelty, a kind of sickness, like he would staple his skin to your face to feel its ever-changing joy.
He wanted to laugh. His brain begged him to turn this into something less than what his heart felt—the possibility of being in love. But Felix couldn't stop. His heart pounded in a pattern as muffled as your eyesight—he wasn't sure where his kindness for you began and where his affection for you ended.
Being touched so gently was not remarkable to him, but being touched so intimately was. Being touched to be remembered, being touched to be memorized, being touched to acknowledge the growing affection his skin developed for the shape of your hands were remarkable to him.
"Thank you for helping me today, Felix," you said, your warmth abruptly leaving his features. Giggling, you gestured at him with a wave. "And for letting me invade your privacy like that.”
There was this boy who has been living with you since you started college, and he would let you do to him anything you wanted.
There was a boy who was your childhood best friend.
Seungmin needed to take a breather. He had never been beaten up like this—blood running down his nose, a split wound hidden on his forehead, and a reddened, swollen bottom lip. He thought he was going to die; he knew he was going to die, but he jumped to shield you from the grotesque louts with his fragile body anyway.
Your eyes shifted to the side when you felt his weight fall from on top of your back, and then they widened when you saw how uncharacteristically dirty your best friend's face was. It made you scramble out of your curled position onto your knees, treading past the rocky ground to where he lay catching his breath, and you loomed over him with panicking hands. He flinched when you touched his face, causing you to move away with a hasty apology. That sudden sting served as a wake-up call for him to gather himself and get off the ground.
Seungmin's head hammered with a muffled ring in his ears. He smacked the heel of his palm to his temple, trying to knock the pitchy hum out of his head, but all that for him was a shaky migraine. Groaning inwardly, he pursed his lips at the bitter taste of realization that he, indeed, was out of shape. The odds of winning a street fight were already against him when he first found you in the alleyway, and it stacked up higher when he got pushed on all fours. His muscles hurt all over—not even his father has ever hurt him like this.
"Are you okay?" he asked scruffily, looking at you as he rubbed the back of his neck.
You were, physically. Seungmin may not have defended you from those smelly louts from school, but he did protect you. Most of what was supposed to be done to you was done to him because of his persistent cover of your body. You ran your hands over your body slowly; you didn’t hurt anywhere, which may be a sign of victorious heroism to him. To you, though, it was a burden. His heroism was a burden, a hassle, something that was better off not happening.
It broke you to know that you thought this of him, but he was never supposed to be here. An honor roll student; the student council president; understanding and kind but not without wits and a specific type of humor; tall and well put together—Seungmin was never supposed to meddle in rotten business as such. This was not his place. It was yours.
"Why are you here, Seungmin?" you asked as you reached for your school bag for some tissues, disregarding a need for gratitude.
"I was going to walk home with you," he replied with a shrug. "Why else?"
"Well, I thought you had a student council meeting today," you muttered, handing him the tissue. He rolled it into a semi-stick shape and shoved it in his bleeding nose while you pressed a clean one on the blood from his hair. "I didn't know you were going home on regular hours."
He scoffed. "You did know. I told you yesterday through text.”
"I haven't read it.”
"Well, you should," he said as he eyed you pointedly. He pinched his nose, feeling silly that he was trying to carry a serious conversation when he looked the least from that. "I don't appreciate you avoiding me, [Name].”
You pulled a face in disagreement. "I wasn’t."
Oh, but you were. As someone who has always been the one to make space for you in his schedule, because the truth was that he had more errands to attend to than you did, Seungmin would know you were avoiding him. You have never joined extracurricular activities or enrolled in night tutor classes, so naturally, it didn't make sense not to spend a measly five minutes with him. You also only made friends with him and one mutual friend he introduced you to, meaning you would have no plans outside the ones you made with him, which were getting scarce even now. Seungmin would know if you were avoiding him. The only thing he has to ask you of was the reason.
“I don’t believe you,” he muttered without looking at you. “To think I didn’t even get a thank you.”
“Because you shouldn’t be here!” you exclaimed through gritted teeth, focusing on the unseen injury on his forehead.
"Why? Because this–" he pulled away and gestured to his face–"would have happened to you?"
You sneered. This wasn't rocket science. You were being bullied. In the last year of high school, too, unfortunately. It wasn’t hard to deduce, but your distaste for his ability to voice whatever truth came to mind was especially strong at this moment because you knew the next thing would be an interrogation on why you didn’t ask him for help. As the student council president, he has a level of influence over the student body. You should have asked him for help; he would have stepped on everyone’s daily routine to defend you.
Taking your frustration on him, you shoved your hand against his head and threw the bloodied tissue paper on the ground. You clicked your tongue, glaring at him, and threw a baseless accusation, "You should have left!”
The angrier you got, the easier it was for the frustrated tears to fall.
He has no idea how embarrassing this was! You have spent years living in his shadow, being tended to by him as children. You were the clumsy one; he was the responsible one! You fell off stairs and tripped in the rain; he has band-aids in his mini crossbody bag and a set of coaxing words prepared. He proceeded to grow up to be exactly how it was predicted. He was smart, took up even more significant responsibilities, and was on his way to remarkable things. While you fell off from the generous predictions of your life, kicking your teenage years off with average grades and a complete lack of social skills and ending it by being a punching bag until the last year of high school.
But you were handling it! Seungmin’s increasingly busy schedule made it easier for you to hide such tragedies from him. You never received his help, and you survived these four years, albeit with two black eyes and a limping ego! To you, this was the noble thing to do—to suffer alone and handle it alone. He wouldn’t understand.
Trying to find something to do as a distraction, you grabbed the tissue you threw on the floor and tried to wipe the blood on his face. Your throat let out a teary croak when you saw the black soil stained on top, and you threw it away again. A suppressed screech sounded from the core of your throat, and you rambled with malice, a finger pointing at the mirror of his eyes. "Look at you! You look beaten! You–you look stupid! You’re stupid! You're bleeding, and you smell! You look disgusting!"
It was all supposed to be you; being in pain, dirty, bloody, injured. It was all supposed to be you. Seungmin didn't say anything when you pulled at your uniform sleeve and used it to clean his face. It was even a little hilarious to him that you cared about the dirt on the tissue paper but not much about the snot and tears you were wiping onto the sleeve fabric that was mixed with his dry blood. Your cries echoed in the chamber of his mind, bouncing off the pulled-back walls where his memories hid to keep away from your agony; his mind knew if he made sense of your pain, he would hurt him so badly that he might die.
“You should have left me here,” you said. “You should have left me alone.
“To get beat up? To die?” he argued softly. “Never.”
Seungmin forced a knot down his throat. The metallic taste in his mouth grew into a lump of a tumor, stranded at the tip of his tongue, where he screamed in response to you asking him to let you rot alone. You didn't know how he felt, even though this friendship lasted beyond ten years.
You could not suffer without him. You could not ache without him. There was no more danger in the world than a silly boy in love with his childhood best friend. You cannot die without him; you didn't know how he would distort his body, feeling his bones snap into brutal places to fit inside your coffin. He would lay himself down into Earth's ground with you, his body desiccating next to you, and grow into a tree where its roots were built as one with you. The tree would get cut down centuries later, and your branches turned into papers used to write a magnificent love story, filled with affection he has all once felt and contained for you. You could not die without him. You could not love without him.
"I will never leave you," he repeated.
You saw your reflection in his eyes; when you were drowned in their browns, you became more than who you thought you were. Your hand dropped to your lap; he wanted you to strangle his neck with it. Seungmin would never leave you, and you knew why. You did know why. Because he was the responsible one, because you would do the same for him, because there was no version of this story where he would turn around the corner and leave you with violence as the answer.
There was a boy who was your childhood best friend, and he would fight to die with you.
There was this boy. His name was Yang Jeongin.
The lights were out before midnight struck toward the day of the college entrance exam. It was to prepare for the testing with a whole night's sleep! Instead of sleeping in your own bed, you closed your eyes on a mattress laid out just next to Jeongin's bed on the floor. Unlike what your friend kept arguing about, the mattress wasn't at all uncomfortable to lay atop. What was actually uncomfortable and sleep-eliminating were the hot weather and the skin irritation that suddenly decided to appear.
You have always known Jeongin's parents live a frugal lifestyle, and their ideals bled into how he operated daily despite how financially generous they were willing to be with him. He rarely bought anything he didn't need, like clothes and games. Sometimes, he saved money on things he needed by cheaping out on food and hair conditioners. With that, one frustrating thing Jeongin couldn't bother to spend money on was electricity, specifically the use of air conditioning on a hot and humid summer night.
You heaved a deep exhale and furrowed your brows as you touched your inner thigh under the blanket. There was an itch developing there, which you tried your mightiest not to scratch it gone. When your fingertips made contact with the spot, you flinched away at the light bumps of hives nesting around the area and removed your legs from the blanket warmth. The chill wind blowing from the window helped you relieve the pain momentarily before it was gone.
Your inner thigh was not the only place developing a hive-like itch. The way Jeongin's sleep shirt rubbed against your back as you moved, the pattern printed on the uncovered mattress that sparked friction on your skin, and the humidity snuck between the hair that occasionally tousled across your face were all the causes for an unexplainable itch. You pursed your lips into a thin, silent line and frustratedly kicked off the blanket to keep the fabric away from your legs entirely.
"Are you okay?" Jeongin asked after hearing your soft whine, but he kept his back turned from you.
You were not, but if you told him about your current skin condition, he would close the window and turn on the air-conditioner for you. His parents had already cooked you two decent meals today; you arrived at Jeongin's home during the afternoon for lunch and to study together, then you had dinner before studying more. They also let you use their shower and drink from their fridge, which to you felt like a huge financial sacrifice because you've repeatedly listened to Jeongin complain about how expensive good body wash was these days. You didn't want to make him turn on the air conditioner for you over something a good night's sleep could eliminate.
"Yeah. I'm just nervous about tomorrow," you said.
"We've studied so much. You're going to be fine." Jeongin laughed airily. It hit just below his chin and was almost inaudible. "Just go to sleep. You don't want to doze off in the middle of the exam."
You scoffed. "I'm not going to.”
It would be impossible to fall asleep during a college entrance exam, regardless of how much rest you got the night before. The sheer pressure to pay attention to each question and the constant reminders of each clock tick that this exam determines the rest of your life were too big of a responsibility to run away from, let alone sleeping through it. But, at the rate these itches spread across your body, you thought you might just lay your head on the desk tomorrow and get some shut-eye anyway.
Jeongin could hear the sound of you scratching your skin. They went on and off without a specific pattern, but they happened within quick intervals—you were scratching somewhere, and then suddenly, you were not. He could also hear your quickened breath, paired with the constant shifting of your body across the blanket. He held back an annoyed exhale as he snapped his eyes open to meet the opened window. For the first time, he acknowledged the uncomfortable humidity in the air, mixed with a suffocating heat that would surely trigger your skin irritation.
Your parents speculated it was the result of allergies, and the doctor they took you to see approved that assumption. You never found out your triggers, though, and it was moving like there wasn't anything specific. You were just allergic to atmospheres that made you uncomfortable, be it extreme heat or festering cold, cotton pants or polyester shirts.
Jeongin always knew about it. His parents were the ones who found out over-the-counter allergy pills worked to relieve you of the itch, and since then, he has done in-depth research into anything related to such a health phenomenon. An interesting fact about him that he liked to tell others was that he could, on the fly, answer any questions about allergic reactions. He became obsessed with it because he wanted to help you, but really it was because it caused you a lot of pain. He was restless about it; whenever he recalled how you cried because you began bleeding from the scratches, he ached and scraped his to-do list to take another deep dive into the internet.
He wasn't sure why your pain made him feel such despair that he was running the map of a very niche topic. But he wanted you to feel better, to stop suffering from it.
You stopped itching at your jaw when Jeongin abruptly shot up on his bed. He turned on the night light sitting on his nightstand and peered down at you. You were staring up at him with squinted eyes, not used to the light, but even then, he could tell you were frustrated to the point of tears by the mere shift of your arched brows. He curled his fists lightly, the ache turning into fleeting anger before his chest started to hurt again. Leaving his spot, he went to close the window and turned on the air conditioner.
"Wait, Jeongin–" you got onto your knees in protest–"you don't have to do that.”
He ignored you as he rummaged through his desk drawer. He pulled out a plastic container of allergy pills and a tube of cream he got in a pharmacy some time ago, then he approached you. Kneeling on the floor next to you, he urged you to receive the pills and watched you intently as he waited for you to pop them into your mouth, his water bottle in his free hand. When you were done, he brushed the blanket off to the edge of the mattress and sat near your legs, the tube of cream ready in his hands.
"I bought this cream a while ago. I heard it's good with alleviating rashes," he said as he popped the lid open. He took a brief sniff of the cream. It smelt medicinal and nothing more. "Where do you itch?"
"Jeongin, I can do it myself.”
"Every time you touch it, you end up scratching it," he said softly. "Where do you itch?”
You were speechless. You weren't sure if you wanted to feel annoyed that he ignored all of your protests against helping you out or endeared that he went out of his way to buy you medicine for something you've never asked for help with. You glanced at the desk, where he didn't even close the drawer fully before coming to your aid, and back at Jeongin, who waited patiently with the medicinal cream in his hand. You shivered; he looked exhausted, and he should be after pulling so many all-nighters to study. Yet, he knelt before you, asking for nothing but your permission to help.
"A few places," you muttered.
His touch was soft and made cold through the cream, but your skin remained heated from the tender way he nursed your broken body. He applied the scream on your forearm, under your jaw, and near your collarbones. And then there was a sudden shift in the air, stumped beneath the dim night light, when you told him your chest and your inner thigh were feeling suffocated.
Jeongin tried not to think about it. If he felt too strongly about it—reaching his hand beneath your shirt and pushing at your leg for further access—he thought his feelings for you may unknowingly bleed into the pressure of his fingers. But even with a blank mind and unfocused eyes, he could never rid the sensation of your soft, once private skin. The only thing that kept the endearing butterflies from turning to obsessive parasites was the reminder that you were in pain, that he was applying medicine on your skin to keep you from suffering through the night.
Neither of you spoke a word during. At some point, his touch, plastered with the medicine, became permanent and regular. At some point, him taking care of you became constant and unthinking.
After he was done, he dropped the tub of cream on his nightstand and turned off the light. He laid down next to you instead of returning to his bed, forcing you to make space for him.
"Turn around," he said, pushing at your shoulders lightly.
Your voice strangled with confusion, but you complied. After turning your back to him, you felt his figure inch towards you until his chest hit your back. He snuck his arms around your body and searched for your hands to hold, effectively spooning you. His arms felt stronger than you recognized; he had been working out recently. You just never noticed any physical changes. But they were stronger and more secure as he hugged you to him and imprisoned your triggering hands from worsening your itches.
"Go to sleep," he mumbled. "I'll wake up later to reapply some more cream for you."
You protested, your voice barely a whisper, "But you need sleep."
"[Name]," he dropped his face to the back of your neck and curled up in a spot between you and the pillow, “sleep."
You wanted to tell him not to bother, to go back to his bed, but you found yourself falling asleep in his arms. His chest heaves felt too much like gentle caresses, and instead of on your lap, his head lay atop yours on a single pillow, which meant the same thing to you even with the ghostly touches of his lips on the skin of your neck, hauntingly there. You weren't sure what this was about, but you thought he must be in love with you to do this.
"Thank you, Jeongin," you whispered in a drowsy haze, "for taking care of me."
There was this boy named Yang Jeongin, and you thought he told you he loved you in your sleep.
#stray kids imagines#skz imagines#stray kids x reader#stray kids x gender neutral reader#stray kids x y/n#stray kids x you#skz x you#skz x y/n#skz x reader#stray kids scenarios#skz scenarios#chan imagines#changbin imagines#minho imagines#lee know imagines#hyunjin imagines#felix imagines#jeongin imagines#seungmin imagines#jisung imagines
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Ending the COVID emergency will further harm Black maternal mortality | The Hill
this year’s calls to celebrate Black Maternal Health Week ring hollow because the Biden administration recently ended the COVID-19 national emergency ahead of schedule and will allow the public health emergency to expire on May 11. This means that most Americans, and certainly those from historically excluded groups, will no longer have access to free at-home COVID tests or vaccines and testing services without cost sharing. Hospitals and clinics across the U.S. have ended or are ending mask mandates, which places patients and newborns at higher risk of COVID exposure. These actions have been met with shockingly little public pushback from advocates for Black reproductive health, despite the fact that COVID has disproportionately orphaned Black children.
It is now clear that COVID likely drove much of the sizable increases in deaths resulting from pregnancy, including an 18 percent increase from 2019 to 2020 and a nearly 40 percent increase from 2020 to 2021. For Blacks, the data are bleakest: the overall mortality rate is the highest seen in recent history — 69.9 per 100,000 live births. Contracting COVID during pregnancy increases the risk of health complications, including maternal morbidity and within-hospital mortality. COVID is why Atlanta resident Marrisha Kindred Jenkins died before getting to hold her infant son for the first time. This much we know.
But there is much that is unknown. We do not yet have a complete picture of the long-term effects of COVID on reproductive health. Yet, if the past remains prologue, Black people will likely shoulder a disproportionate share of long COVID’s effects on reproduction. While prenatal vaccination can reduce COVID-related risks during pregnancy and pass on protection to babies, vaccination rates for the pregnant remain low, particularly among Blacks.
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also from that 2018 interview with Dr. Ghassan Abu Sitta, some incredibly prescient political analysis:
"It is obvious that this is a societal change, these [demonstrations] are not being driven by anybody in politics. The political parties and factions are following the street. There is a specific age group and a specific agenda ... they may not have had the time yet to articulate that agenda properly or to create a hierarchical structure of leadership, but it is obvious that this is a phase, not just an event. So the end of the PLO, and its elites in all their forms, leaves us at a juncture where these young people are trying to take the struggle somewhere else. Where to, nobody knows. The inability of the West Bank to respond in a meaningful way to what is happening in Gaza is a major obstacle. A major boost is that a similarly aged group to the one in Gaza is now mobilizing inside Israel.
But this is certainly not the end of it. The ending to this transitional phase is not clear. Obviously, the era of the factions is coming to an end: they will, all of them put together, become 'a' player but will no longer be 'the' player. On the Israeli side, and this is the irony, we are also witnessing the end of the political elite that created and has led the state since it was established. The fact that Netanyahu is facing the kind of legal challenges before him now means that the Israeli establishment is no longer worried about replacing him—that there are replacements for him. Those calling for 'transfer' [the wholesale expulsion of Palestinians from Israeli-controlled territory], and those political parties whose ideology is based on the notion of transfer, are now the mainstream, and no longer the fringe as they were in the 1980s and the 1990s.
How quickly this phase comes to an end and in what direction it goes are dependent on many factors: one is the West Bank, and another is the potential for a regional war. I think the Israelis will get to the point where they would rather have a war with Gaza than allow these demonstrations to carry on, because the longer the protests continue, the greater their potential for mobilizing among Palestinians and changing the dynamic within Palestinian society itself. The cause for concern on the Israeli side is that these mobilizing events, these demonstrations, might yield something far worse (for Israel) than what is currently there, whether in terms of leadership or in terms of reshaping Palestinian society.
How different did you find the situation in Gaza compared to the last time you were there?
The behavior of the Ministry of Health was different and I think that is partly a reflection of the change in the leadership of Hamas, with the people like Yahya Sinwar and Ruhi Mushtaha. These men belong more to the First Intifada and to the prisoners’ movement than they do to the Muslim Brotherhood and Mujama’a al-Islami. They emerged from a culture where the value of coalition building is appreciated and they privilege that over the 'go-it-alone' tendency typical of previous Hamas—and Ministry of Health—initiatives. During the 2014 war, the Ministry of Health was convinced that it could treat the injured by itself and that it didn’t have to work with al-Awda, al-Ahli, or anyone else. This 'opening up' is in my opinion based on a different understanding that puts Hamas’s new leadership closer to that of a national movement than of an Islamic movement. I think this dynamic will be an interesting one to watch."
Al-Aqsa Flood became possible because Hamas built a strong coalition with other resistance factions. In 2021 and 22 we saw the emergence in the West Bank of youth-led factionally unaligned militias like the Jenin Brigades and Lions' Den. The resistance has cornered the occupation from multiple sides, while the occupation has cornered itself into an unwinnable regional war. Inshallah this is an inescapable position for the occupation and this genocide in Gaza is the last gasp of the dying genocidal ideology of Zionism. Palestine will be free
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Democratic PR:
Democratic policy:
They argue the deadly fire should never have happened and are placing at least some of the blame on the Biden administration and its expansion of the policy, known as Title 42.
Its use forces the migrants into dangerous, overcrowded conditions in Mexico, they say.
"Exploiting a human tragedy to illustrate the 'risks' of irregular migration ignores the fact that the Guatemalan victims of this fire had no viable legal pathways and the Venezuelan victims were detained as a result of the Biden Admin's expansion of Title 42," Andrea Flores, a former member of Biden's National Security Council who handled border policy said via Twitter.
The Trump-era policy gives border agents the power to turn away migrants without legal process. It's set to end on May 11 when the administration allows the public health emergency for Covid 19 — that is the basis for Title 42 — expires.
How's the meme go? Men can't trust women cuz of makeup and women can't trust men cuz of assault. Well, BIPOC can't trust a single political party in the US government because of systematic abuses.
#this is why i dont look at the news#its always democrats making themselves look good and its always because they finished hiding a body#biden#systematic racism#systematic oppression#abolish ice#acab#kids in cages are still in cages
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On May 11th, 2023, the Biden administration will end the national emergency and public health emergency (PHE) related to COVID-19. The COVID-19 pandemic is not over. Ending the public health emergency will harm many people. Over a million people have died. The number of COVID cases are at record highs, and over 3,000 people in the United States are still dying of COVID every week. Less than 20% of the US has the bivalent booster. This is especially true for marginalized people. For all of these reasons, COVID is continuing to harm our communities.
Ending the public health emergency gives the dangerous impression that the COVID-19 pandemic is over. People need to continue to think about risk and community transmission. People need to continue to mask, people need to ensure that they are up to date with all boosters. People with developmental disabilities are especially vulnerable to COVID-19. Many in our community have additional risk factors, like heart or lung issues. COVID-19 is especially dangerous in congregate settings such as nursing homes, and it will continue to spread. COVID-19 was the leading cause of death for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (I/DD) in 2020. People with disabilities, low income people, and people of color are more likely to have bad outcomes from COVID-19, including death.
Ending the PHE will negatively impact health care and health care coverage, especially for marginalized people who had difficulty accessing care even before the pandemic. During the public health emergency, Medicaid coverage has been more open and flexible than usual in many states. Medicaid has had enhanced federal funding. States could also not take people off of Medicaid. Over 19 million people enrolled in Medicaid since February 2020, whether due to this expansion or people who newly qualified due to changes in disability status, financial status, or age. On April 1, states will be able to reduce coverage and will no longer have the enhanced federal funding for Medicaid. Millions of people will no longer qualify and lose Medicaid coverage. Even more will lose coverage even though they still qualify, because the requirements to keep this coverage will be more demanding. The groups who will lose the most coverage despite qualifying will disproportionately be children and people of color. This is expected to be the biggest increase in uninsured children in the history of the United States.
Hospitals that relied on pandemic-response higher reimbursement rates for Medicare and flexible waivers and eligibility requirements for certain classes of health care will no longer receive these payments. This will result in decreased access to care. Ending these reimbursements will leave hospitals worse-equipped to handle future Covid cases. This is especially bad because COVID-19 is a mass disabling event. Health systems serving hard-hit communities will struggle to meet the additional medical need COVID has brought about. This will mean that many people who need health care because they became disabled from COVID will not have access to it.
Cost sharing provisions for COVID-19 tests for people on private insurance, Medicaid, and Medicare are ending. People on these plans will have to pay more for COVID tests. Tests will become less available as a result, leading to more spread and less-accurate information about COVID risk in communities. Uninsured people used to be covered for COVID-19 tests, treatments, and vaccines, but without additional federal funding for these programs, people without insurance have been left vulnerable since last spring.
Ending the public health emergency also means there will be fewer tools to help people make informed decisions about COVID. States will stop having to report COVID-19 data to the government. ASAN had to end our COVID-19 case tracker for congregate settings in January of this year due to lack of data. This lack of information will make it hard for people to find out how much COVID is circulating in their communities. It also makes it more difficult to see the impact specifically on marginalized communities.
The public health emergency status provided care to many people who need care to survive the pandemic. Ending it harms our communities. COVID-19 is not over.
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By Jessica Corbett
Common Dreams
Dec. 12, 2023
"Humanity has prevailed," said Egyptian Ambassador Osama Abdel Khalek. "The Israeli aggression on Gaza must end. This bloodshed must stop."
The United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday passed a resolution demanding "an immediate humanitarian cease-fire" in Israel's two-month war on Gaza after the U.S. last week used its permanent member status to veto a similar Security Council measure.The resolution also demands "that all parties comply with their obligations under international law, including international humanitarian law, notably with regard to the protection of civilians," as well as "the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages, as well as ensuring humanitarian access."
The final vote during the General Assembly's emergency special session in New York was 153-10 with 23 abstentions.
"Humanity has prevailed," declared Egyptian Ambassador to the U.N. Osama Abdel Khalek after the vote. "This resolution must be implemented immediately. The Israeli aggression on Gaza must end. This bloodshed must stop."
Tuesday's meeting came after Egypt and Mauritania invoked Resolution 377A (V), which states that "if the Security Council, because of lack of unanimity of the permanent members, fails to exercise its primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security in any case where there appears to be a threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression, the General Assembly shall consider the matter immediately."
Last week's U.S. veto came after United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres invoked Article 99, a rarely used section of the U.N. Charter empowering him to bring to the attention of the Security Council "any matter which in his opinion may threaten the maintenance of international peace and security," for the first time in his tenure.
Noting Guterres' message to the council as well as a recent letter from the commissioner-general of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, the General Assembly resolution expresses "grave concern over the catastrophic humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip and the suffering of the Palestinian civilian population," and emphasizes that "the Palestinian and Israeli civilian populations must be protected in accordance with international humanitarian law."
Israeli Ambassador Gilad Erdan on Tuesday had urged member states to oppose the resolution, arguing that it would amount to "voting in favor of a genocidal jihadist organization" and hamper Israel's ongoing operation to destroy Hamas.
"A cease-fire is a death sentence," claimed Erdan, who said the effort to pass the resolution made the United Nations "a moral stain on humanity."
Israel's assault on Gaza has killed at least 18,412 Palestinians and injured over 50,100 more, according to local health officials. The war has also devastated civilian infrastructure and displaced 85% of the besieged enclave's 2.3 million residents.
Urging the assembly to support the resolution, Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories, said Tuesday that "the Israeli army is fighting everyone and everything in Gaza—including the U.N."
U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield told the General Assembly that the United States agrees with some "aspects" of the resolution, including that conditions in Gaza are dire, people in the Palestinian territory need more aid, and hostages must be released. However, she also claimed that "any cease-fire right now would be temporary at the best and dangerous at worst."
The United States—which voted against the resolution on Tuesday— gives Israel $3.8 billion in annual military aid and Congress is now considering a new $14.3 billion package.
"Today the majority of the world stood together to demand an end to this bloodshed and suffering in Gaza. The United States has once again voted to allow the carnage against civilians in Gaza to continue," said Avril Benoît, executive director of Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières USA, after the vote.
"Today the U.S. failed to show compassion or leadership in the face of continued bombardment of human beings who are trapped in Gaza without food, water, shelter, or access to proper medical care," Benoît continued. "The U.S. is increasingly isolated in its steadfast support of a war that seems to have no rules and no limits, a war that Israel claims is focused on rooting out Hamas but that continues to kill large numbers of Palestinian civilians, mostly women, and children."
"The U.S. is increasingly isolated in its steadfast support of a war that seems to have no rules and no limits."
"Israel has continued to indiscriminately attack civilians and civilian structures, impose a siege that amounts to collective punishment for the entire population of Gaza, force mass displacement, and deny access to vital medical care and humanitarian assistance. The U.S. continues to provide political and financial support to Israel as it prosecutes its military operations regardless of the terrible toll on civilians. It is impossible to deliver humanitarian aid at scale in Gaza under current circumstances," she stressed. "For humanitarians to be able to respond to the overwhelming needs, we need a cease-fire now."
In addition to the resolution, the General Assembly on Tuesday considered two amendments—one from the United States condemning "the heinous terrorist attacks by Hamas" on October 7 and the taking of hostages, and another from Austria to add language about Hamas to the line calling for the release of hostages.
Neither amendment got the two-thirds majority support needed to pass. The Austrian amendment vote was 89 in favor and 61 opposed with 20 abstentions while the U.S. amendment vote was 84-62 with 25 abstentions.
The General Assembly's previously approved resolution on Gaza, passed in late October, called for "an immediate, durable, and sustained humanitarian truce leading to a cessation of hostilities."
This post has been updated with comment from Doctors Without Borders.
The work of Common Dreams is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.
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>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
....Message:
Confirmed: Military in training for Implementation of the Emergency Broadcast System
The trigger for the E B S will be
Vaccination mandates worldwide with lockdowns. When this in fact occurs you will know we are right around the corner from a new world folks, do not get angry, and do not panic whatsoever. This is needed. Yes it truly must happen like this so we can transition to a bright future. It is part of the script and last phase of, indeed gut wrenching, awakening movie that was necessary to awaken the masses. This will ensure everyone is safely placed in their home and able to witness the historical moment that reveals all of the truths, cover ups etc. through the E B S which is imminent. There must be a test and then a review of all occurrences and activities. The possible implications on a National and Global level can be quite complicated so things must be in alignment to the protocols. Yes there are many consequences if things aren’t done with precision and perfection. This is the practice run before the real one folks to see responses and accuracy to what is forthcoming which changes humanity. We hear the schedule is now finally firm, but again I’m just the messenger. Be ready to adjust if needed in regards to possible time changes. Only a select few know the moment of exact and precise timing of events. For security and other obvious reasons it must be properly kept private. Again the E B S is going to air playing an 8 hour video. It will be replaying 3 times a day for 10 days, Communication Darkness.
During those 10 Days of Communication Darkness the following things will happen. We will receive 7 "Trumpets " aka E. B. S. text messages on our phones alerting us to tune into our TV at this time. Our phones will only work for 911 and we are informed the Signal App, which is military encrypted will be available. Our TV’s will only show 3 explanatory movies on a continuous loop for the 10 days. It will cover topics of Arrests,, tribunals, fraud corruption , pedophilia etc Our internet will not work during that time. Our ATM’s will not work. After the 10 days of Communication Darkness, we will connect to a new quantum internet.
People are urged to stock up on at least three weeks of food and water. We are promised the new Star-link Internet System by the end of the month.
Again I repeat be prepared with food, water, toilet paper, generators, etc... for this great awakening reveal.
As we speak the teams coordinating this important historic event are revamping the E.B.S to ensure the utmost security for all involved so remain patient as things get finalized. They want to make certain there are not any interferences of any sort at all. Those making the plan want no one to panic whatsoever because it’s simply the release of the truth.
After the E. B. S. and we’ve gone through the 10 day mainstream media blackout and we've sat through all the 24/7, (eight hour long movies), do we go back to normal like business as usual?
Answer is: After the E. B. S. and the 8 hour long 24 - 7 movies, all will change. The, life support, attached to the old and evil systems will be pulled. Humanity, and planet Earth simultaneously move to quantum reality consciousness system (Peace and Prosperity). End of Financial and Human consciousness enslavement. Old systems of Government, Education , Finance, Health, Trade and Commerce etc., will all be dismantled and replaced.
We will have new currency called the USN, US NOTE and will be gold backed.
The time is now to alert as many who will listen. Do not have too much pride. Go warn those you love even though they think you’re crazy. Your goal for others is truly to help absorb the shock of what is coming.
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Live by the 6 - P Rule: Proper Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance. People may think I'm crazy but to be honest, the crazy ones will be the ones who will not be prepared for what is coming. And it is coming. 🤔
#pay attention#educate yourself#educate yourselves#reeducate yourself#knowledge is power#reeducate yourselves#think for yourself#think for yourselves#think about it#do your homework#do your research#do your own research#question everything#ask yourself questions#ask yourself#urgent message#warning#be ready#be prepared
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Mental Health Help
I am going to start this off with- this is not an open invitation for you to come vent to me about this. Or an open invitation to trauma dump on me. I’m sure everyone who has been here since May knows that my life has gone to hell in a hand basket and recovery has been very rough on me. I just don’t have the mental capacity to help every single person. If I could I would- I’d hug you all, kiss your foreheads, rock you and hold you tight. There’d be warm blankets, and comfort food and a big cuddle session if I could handle it. Because I love and adore all of you with all of my heart and I am grateful for the community I have here.
With that being said:
I am active in the CoD community- specifically the cosplay- the adults (because I am an adult). Yes even the thirst traps- I’m an adult I’m gonna enjoy my adult privileges. I don’t care if you think it’s cringey. I am almost 30, autistic and I write fanfiction. I am the definition of cringey and I really do not care.
But if any of you are as well deeply apart of the community then I’m sure you know what has happened in the last 24-48 hours.
As a 3xs over suicide attempt survivor- hospitalized 2xs, I feel like I should post something here. For those in that same community and because I care about all of my followers. I love you all very much and your well being does matter to me in full.
Each and every single one of you has made being here on tumblr as a content creator a magical experience. Sometimes with shitty people along the way. But all of you sweethearts who have been here regardless of how much of a mess I am and how supportive and loving you guys are I am eternally grateful.
I think with what happened in the other community, that I spread some love and share some concern here too despite my absence.
I know I missed National Suicide Awareness Month last month. But it is better to be late than never say anything at all:
If you are feeling trapped- mentally, and your passivity starts to look like intent. I very much IMPLORE that you reach out for help. I have reached out to 988 more times than I can count and I am still here, alive and breathing because of their help. I even survived the dubious Club 27 because of them.
I know therapy is a luxury. I know getting professional help is a luxury especially if you live in America. (Speaking from experience.) I know in other places they might be backed up. I can’t say for certain because I don’t live there but I know it can be a problem.
So I am attaching a list of Suicide Hotlines. I personally do not recommend calling 988- the counselor didn’t talk to me about my problems which is how I ended up hospitalized. But I do recommend texting them or using the website.
If you witnessed this happen to this cosplayer, and need someone to talk too, most Suicide Hotlines are also Crisis lines. They help with a multitude of issues- Suicide, Panic Attacks, Witnessing Trauma and experiencing a Crisis from it.
For my LGBTQIA+ people who are young enough for it:
I’m adding an undercut for even more sensitive and triggering information.
For those of you who don’t know and might be new here- if you’ve bravely ventured this far - I am also a CSA/DV survivor. I have NEVER been shy about sharing that with you all. I believe in speaking out about it even if I do not go over the details. Currently I can’t even go over many details if I wanted too.
I have posted openly screenshots of my blog before. So I do not know if my abuser is watching or not. So I have been taking some risks with my PSA’s. Though I am trying to minimize them still.
As you all might be aware from the PSA my abuser is actively trying to pursue contact with me where he can.
I do believe in listening to victims, and taking their allegations into high consideration. Because there are people like me who will never face justice. Who will never see their abusers on the other side of a plexiglass jail wall. Or standing in court before a judge. Because we don’t have evidence- whether they got rid of it or they were careful.
I will NOT comment about whether or not the allegations were false against this cosplayer in particular because there is SO much conflicting information right now that I cannot make a factually accurate statement.
If you are an SA or CSA survivor I recommend contacting any of these:
If you’re in America and Canada then I recommend:
If you have evidence- screenshots and pictures and screen recordings, before you go posting them on the internet I highly recommend that you get into contact with your local authorities. Immediately.
I know a lot of the time- again- we are not believed, and personally I can’t imagine how traumatic it is to go through with approaching the authorities. Because there was no evidence for my CSA- except for ONE video I legitimately do not even know if it exists anymore or has been posted somewhere in some dark corner of the internet. That I do not want to go to jail for trying to find out. And the adults in my life did NOT make it a safe environment to tell them about what had happened to me in the first place.
If you have evidence- that CAN put your abuser away, please get with a friend, a grandparent, a parent, a family friend, a doctor or a counselor (if you have access) SOMEONE YOU TRUST- please do it if you can. I know it is a lot, I know it must be traumatic, I know it must not be easy, but if you have the support and can do it- then I encourage you to do so.
#mental heath support#tw mental health#tw suicide support#tw CSA#tw sa#mental health resources#mental health awareness#mental health help#mental health
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Since 2018, conservative state legislatures across the country have proposed and passed laws targeting young transgender people’s freedom to to play on sports teams and use bathrooms that correspond with their gender, and to obtain gender-affirming health care. Advocates for trans rights argue that the increased interest in the subject has served to galvanize the energies of those who had fought an ultimately losing battle against gay marriage—and have observed how the anti-trans movement has used tactics that have proved successful in limiting abortion. As with much legislation of this type, amid the nationalized, culture-war politics, the effects are felt most acutely by the most vulnerable families and individuals.
In a startling piece of reporting in this week’s issue, Emily Witt follows a mother named Kristen Chapman who moves her family from Tennessee to Virginia, in order for her daughter Willow to continue receiving gender-affirming care. “I genuinely feel we are being run out of town on a rail,” Chapman says. “I am not being dramatic. It is not my imagination.” With nuance and compassionate precision, Witt captures the urgency of the family’s relocation, and the sense, as laws seem to change underfoot, of pursuit. As she writes, “Chapman had chosen Virginia for their new life, she said, because it was still in the South, but there would be ‘multiple avenues of escape.’ ”
On the last morning of July, Kristen Chapman was getting ready to leave Nashville. Chapman, who is in her early fifties and wears her silver hair short, sat on a camp chair next to a fire pit outside the rental duplex where her family had lived for twelve years. She was smoking an American Spirit and swatting at the mosquitoes that kept emerging from the dense green brush behind her. Her husband, Paul, who was wearing a T-shirt with the Guinness logo, carried boxes out to the front lawn. Their daughters, Saoirse and Willow, who were seventeen and fifteen, were inside, still asleep. Chapman looked down at the family’s beagle mix, Obi-Wan Kenobi, who was drinking rainwater out of a plastic bucket. “We got him when we moved in here for the kids,” she said. “He’s never lived anywhere else.”
Paul was planning to stay in town; Chapman was heading to Richmond, Virginia, with Saoirse and Willow. Chapman and Paul’s marriage was ending, but the decision to split their family apart had happened abruptly. Willow is trans, and had been on puberty blockers since 2021. In March, Tennessee’s governor, Bill Lee, had signed a bill that banned gender-transition treatment for minors across the state.
On paper, the law, which went into effect in early July, would allow trans teens like Willow to continue their medical care until March of 2024. But Chapman wasn’t sure they could count on that. Willow was determined to begin taking estrogen when she turned sixteen, in December of 2023, which would allow her to grow into adulthood with feminine characteristics. If she couldn’t continue taking puberty blockers until then, she would begin to go through male puberty, which could mean more surgeries and other procedures later in life.
At first, the family had hoped that the courts would declare the new law unconstitutional. Federal courts had already done so in at least four other states in 2023, finding that such bans violated the First Amendment and the equal-protection and due-process clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment. But that spring the Pediatric Transgender Clinic at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, where Willow had been receiving care, informed its patients that it was ceasing operations. Seeing this as a bad sign, Chapman set up a GoFundMe page in early May and began planning their departure.
Inside, the apartment was filled with abandoned objects—an old Wi-Fi router, trash bags of unwanted clothes. A Homer Simpson doll in a hula skirt lay forgotten on a windowsill. Chapman, an artist who supplements her income with social work, had recently quit her job as a caseworker. She would need their landlord as a reference to get an apartment, especially because she had bad credit, but the family still owed him back rent. She checked Venmo, waiting on a loan from a friend.
At six-thirty that morning, Chapman had gone out to her white Dodge S.U.V. and found her younger daughter asleep in the back seat. Willow had gone over to a friend’s house and stayed out late. When she got home, she realized that she had locked herself out. The Dodge’s window had been stuck open for months, so she got in. “Any other human being would have handled this totally differently,” Chapman said, shaking her head.
Willow had gone back to sleep in her room, which she once shared with her brother. (He was a sophomore in college and had already moved out.) The colorful scarves and lights that used to decorate the space had been taken down. When she woke up, she began sifting through what was left. “I feel like I’m ready to say goodbye to it,” she said, looking around. There were drawings scrawled on the wall, a desk spattered in paint. “Most of the stuff in here I’ve trashed.”
“It’s like getting a new haircut,” Chapman said. “A fresh palette.”
Chapman had chosen Virginia for their new life, she said, because it was still in the South, but there would be “multiple avenues of escape.” Paul worked nights for a large grocery-store chain; Richmond was among the northernmost cities where it had branches, and Chapman thought that at some point he might be able to transfer there. Earlier in the summer, she and Willow had driven to Richmond to see the city, and Chapman had lined up a marketing job. It didn’t pay well, but she knew she wouldn’t get a lease without a job. Willow, who had received her last puberty-blocker shot at the Vanderbilt clinic in late May, was supposed to receive her next one in late August. They didn’t have a lot of time.
Despite having taken puberty blockers for two years, Willow looks her age. She is tall and long-limbed and meticulous about her appearance. That morning, she had on Y2K-revival clothes: wide-legged jeans worn low on the hips with a belt, a patterned tank top, and furry pink Juicy Couture boots. Her blond hair was glossy and straight, her bangs held back with a barrette. She is committed to living her adolescence as a girl regardless of what medical treatment she is allowed to receive. At times she has used silicone prosthetic breasts; attaching them is an onerous process involving spray-on adhesive.
From a very young age, Willow wore dresses and gravitated toward friendships with girls. Her parents thought that she would likely grow up to be a gay man. As Chapman put it, “We knew she was in the fam.” When a homophobic shooter killed forty-nine people at Pulse, the gay night club in Orlando, in 2016, Willow, who was eight at the time, accompanied her mother to a vigil in Nashville. Willow wrote a long message on a banner in solidarity with the survivors. Chapman took a photo of her there. “It was like she was transfixed,” Chapman remembered. In the sixth grade, Willow went to an all-girl sleepover. A parent overheard the kids discussing gender and sexuality, and told Chapman. Willow says that it was around then that she began to think about her identity. “Pretty much as soon as I knew about, like, conceptualized gender, I knew I wanted to be a girl,” she said. She had been an A student, but her grades started going down. Looking back, Willow struggled to articulate what had happened. “It just got complicated, like with all my stuff physically, it just felt like a mess,” she said.
She came out to her friends first; then one day, in the spring of 2020, while she was upstairs on her laptop and Chapman was downstairs working, Willow sent her mother a three-word e-mail that said, “I am trans.” Willow told me, “I realized I have to do this sometime if I want to advocate for myself and get what I need to get.” She left it to her mother to inform the rest of the family. Chapman was accepting; Paul was more skeptical. “That’s him, you know—a man of science,” Chapman said. “It wasn’t overly positive or negative.”
Willow had already decided on her new name before coming out, and began using it with friends. She was again reluctant to tell her family. “I was, like, I’ll keep that secret,” she said—she had been named at birth for a brother of her father’s who had died, and knew the name was important to him. Her mother found out when another mom referred to Willow by her chosen name. Chapman started using it right away; it took Paul another year.
To figure out their next steps, Chapman took Willow, who was then twelve, to her regular pediatrician at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. She was referred to the center’s Pediatric Transgender Clinic. The clinic, which opened in 2018, was part of a broader expansion of gender-affirming care at flagship medical schools in the South that occurred around that time. (Clinics also opened at Duke University, the University of Mississippi, and Emory University, among other schools.) These places “attracted the kind of people who build very trusting relationships with patients and are able to establish not just the clinical competencies but also an inclusive environment,” Jasmine Beach-Ferrara, the executive director of the Campaign for Southern Equality, an advocacy group for L.G.B.T.Q. rights, told me. “All those things are nothing you can take for granted when seeking medical care in the South.” (Federal funding for health care is often funnelled through state governments, some of which have a history of withholding money from providers that offer abortion and other politicized health services.)
Care for patients who are experiencing gender dysphoria is highly individualized: some trans kids opt for a purely social transition, changing their names or pronouns; others, like Willow, seek a medical transition, which can be started at the onset of puberty. In Willow’s case, a diagnosis of gender dysphoria had to be verified before pharmaceutical treatment could begin. A course of psychotherapy was accompanied by a physical assessment at Vanderbilt, which included ultrasounds, X-rays, and blood tests. The clinic was following a protocol supported by the Endocrine Society and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, whereby patients take puberty blockers—which have been used to treat children experiencing early-onset puberty since the nineteen-eighties—to delay the onset of secondary sex characteristics until they are ready to begin taking estrogen or testosterone.
“I’d always explain it to the families as a pause on puberty, allowing the youth to take a deep breath,” Kimberly Herrmann, a pediatrician and internist at Whitman-Walker Health, a provider in the Washington, D.C., area that offers gender-affirming care to patients aged thirteen and over, told me. (Some patients choose to go through their natal puberty.) “All of the data suggests that it is the correct thing to do for a patient with a clear diagnosis,” Izzy Lowell, a doctor who started a telehealth practice for gender-affirming care called QueerMed, said, of taking puberty blockers. “If they are going to develop the body of a grown man, it becomes difficult to undo those changes.”
Paul was worried about the blockers’ long-term effects on Willow’s health. (Studies have shown that they can affect bone density when used long term, and the protocol for hormone therapy advises doctors to discuss potential risks to fertility and options for fertility preservation.) Chapman thought the risks to Willow’s well-being would be worse if she developed male secondary sex characteristics. In one testimony against the Tennessee ban, an adult trans woman described her adolescence, in which she attempted to present as male, as “a disastrous and torturous experience.”
“Paul and I talked about it and came to the belief that we wanted her on them as quickly as possible for safety reasons,” Chapman said. “I hate that that’s true, but we know that’s the world that we live in, and that she is going to be a safer person for the rest of her life if she does not look male.” (A recent analysis of crime statistics from 2017 and 2018 found that transgender people are more than four times as likely as cisgender people to be the victims of a violent crime.)
The evaluation and diagnosis took almost a year. For Willow, the talk therapy was the most taxing part. Willow was insured through the state’s Medicaid program, TennCare, which meant that there were only a limited number of therapists she could see, none of whom were trans, or even queer. She went through three in a year. “We were in the lowest tier of care,” Chapman said, adding that at least one therapist dropped their health insurance. Willow told her mother that she wished she could just be left alone to be a “sad trans girl.”
At the age of thirteen, she was finally able to start puberty blockers. “You have an end goal,” Willow said of the experience. “And all the in-between doesn’t matter.”
In September, 2022, the conservative commentator and anti-trans activist Matt Walsh, who moved to Nashville in 2020 (along with his employer, the conservative news company the Daily Wire), posted a thread on Twitter. “Vanderbilt drugs, chemically castrates, and performs double mastectomies on minors,” it began. “But it gets worse.” Walsh—who is the author of books including “Church of Cowards: A Wake-Up Call to Complacent Christians” and “What Is a Woman?,” a polemic arguing that gender roles are biologically determined—worked in conservative talk radio before being hired by the Daily Wire as a writer, in 2017. Last year, the left-wing watchdog group Media Matters for America mapped Walsh’s origins as an aspiring radio shock jock in the early twenty-tens who once said, “We probably lost our republic after Reconstruction.” In 2022, he was one of several right-wing social-media pundits who began broadcasting misinformation about hospitals that provided gender-transition treatment for minors, which were then overwhelmed with phone and e-mail threats and online harassment. One study found that more than fifteen hospitals modified or took down Web sites about pediatric gender care after being named in these campaigns.
Walsh included in his thread about Vanderbilt a video clip of Shayne Taylor, the medical director of its Transgender Clinic, speaking of top and bottom surgeries as a potential “money-maker” for the hospital. Walsh did not specify that Taylor was mostly speaking about adults. (Vanderbilt never performed genital surgery on underage patients and did an average of five top surgeries a year on minors, with a minimum age of sixteen.) More than sixty Republican state legislators signed a letter to Vanderbilt describing the clinic’s practices “as nothing less than abuse.” In a statement calling for an investigation, Governor Lee, who was up for reëlection, said that “we should not allow permanent, life-altering decisions that hurt children.” Within days, Vanderbilt announced that it would put a pause on surgeries for minors. Jonathan Skrmetti, Tennessee’s Republican attorney general, began an inquiry into whether Vanderbilt had manipulated billing codes to avoid limitations on insurance coverage.
In October, Walsh and other anti-trans advocates held a “Rally to End Child Mutilation” in Nashville’s War Memorial Plaza. The speakers included the Tennessee senator Marsha Blackburn, the former Democratic Presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard, and Chloe Cole, a nineteen-year-old self-described “former trans kid.” After identifying as male from the age of twelve, receiving testosterone, and getting top surgery, Cole de-transitioned to female at sixteen and is now one of the country’s foremost youth advocates of bans on gender-transition treatment for minors. “I was allowed to make an adult decision as a traumatized fifteen-year-old,” she said at the rally.
For the past four years, the number of anti-trans bills proposed throughout the United States has dramatically risen. The A.C.L.U. has counted some four hundred and ninety-six proposals in state legislatures in 2023, eighty-four of which have been signed into law. The first state ban on gender-transition treatment for minors was passed in Arkansas in 2021. It was permanently blocked by a federal judge this year, but more than twenty states have passed similar laws since then. As lawsuits filed by the A.C.L.U., Lambda Legal, and other organizations make their way through the courts, trans people are left to navigate a shifting legal landscape that activists say has affected clinical and pharmaceutical access. Lowell told me that she consults with six lawyers (including one she keeps on retainer) to best advise patients, who must frequently drive across state borders to receive care. “It’s literally a daily task to figure out what’s legal where,” she said.
In Tennessee, the Human Rights Campaign has counted the passage of at least nineteen anti-L.G.B.T.Q. laws since 2015, among the most in the nation. Some of these laws have been found unconstitutional, such as a ban on drag shows in public spaces and a law that would have required any business to post a warning if it let transgender people use their preferred rest room. But many others have gone into effect, such as laws that censor school curricula and ban transgender youth from playing on the sports teams that align with their identity.
Proposals to ban gender-transition treatment for minors were the first bills introduced in the opening legislative sessions of the Tennessee House and Senate in November, 2022. “It was Matt Walsh who lit a fire under the ultraconservative wing of the Republican Party this year,” Chris Sanders, the director of a Nashville-based L.G.B.T.Q. advocacy group called Tennessee Equality Project, told me. “It was lightning speed the way it all unfolded.” At hearings throughout the winter, parents of trans kids, trans adults, trans youth, and a Memphis pediatrician who provides gender-affirming care testified against the ban. Those who spoke in support of it included Walsh, Cole (who is from California), and a right-wing Tennessee physician named Omar Hamada, who compared such treatment to letting a minor who wanted to become a pirate get a limb and one eye removed.
L.G.B.T.Q. activists who attended described feeling disregarded by the Republican majority. Molly Quinn, the executive director of OUTMemphis, a nonprofit that helps trans youth navigate their health care, likened the experience to “being the only queer kid at a frat party.”
Three months after Governor Lee signed the ban, Vanderbilt University Medical Center informed patients that the previous November, at the attorney general’s request, it had shared non-anonymized patient records from the Pediatric Transgender Clinic, including photographic documentation and mental-health assessments. “I immediately started hearing from parents,” Sanders said. Their fear stemmed in part from attempts in states like Texas to have the parents of trans kids investigated by child-protective services. (The attorney general’s office said in a statement that it is “legally bound to maintain the medical records in the strictest confidence, which it does.”) Former patients have sued Vanderbilt, and a federal investigation by the Department of Health and Human Services is also under way. (A spokesperson for Vanderbilt declined to comment for this article.)
In July, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals became the first federal court in the country to allow a ban on gender-transition treatment for minors to take effect, with a final ruling planned for September. Chapman, who had spoken out for trans rights through local media outlets, and had been targeted with online threats and menacing phone calls in return, understood that Tennessee, where she had lived for most of the past thirty-five years, had become a hostile environment for her family. “I genuinely feel we are being run out of town on a rail,” she said. “I am not being dramatic. It is not my imagination.”
It was dusk by the time Paul had loaded the last of the boxes into three storage pods. Everything was ready, but the family was having trouble leaving. Someone would walk out of the house and get into the car, only to go back into the house five minutes later. Chapman suddenly remembered that she had forgotten to buy padlocks for the storage pods, which were scheduled to be picked up by U-Haul the next day. As she drove off to get them, Paul sat on the back steps and stared out at the lawn. Fireflies were winking on and off over the grass.
“Bollocks,” he said to himself, then stood up and went inside.
Although comprehensive demographic data on transgender youth are scarce, the American Academy of Pediatrics has reported that “research increasingly suggests that familial acceptance or rejection ultimately has little influence on the gender identity of youth.” But without parental consent most kids in America who wish to transition medically are legally unable to do so until they turn eighteen. Having a supportive parent or guardian as a trans child is more than a legal or practical advantage, though. A study of eighty-four youth in Ontario, aged sixteen to twenty-four, who identified as trans and had come out to their parents found that the rate of attempted suicide was four per cent among those whose parents were strongly supportive but that nearly sixty per cent of respondents who described their parents as not supportive had attempted suicide in the previous year.
Chapman’s decision to support her daughter grew in part out of her own experience as a black sheep in a deeply religious family. She was born in East Tennessee to a Baptist minister and his wife and had an itinerant upbringing, moving around the South. The last words her grandfather, who was also a Baptist minister, said to her were “I’m so sorry I’m not gonna see you in Heaven.”
Paul was raised in Dublin, Ireland, as the youngest of twelve children in a Catholic family. “We both came from communities that were super fundamentalist,” Chapman said. They agreed that they would raise their children outside of any religious tradition. If they had a doctrine, Chapman said, it was “critical thinking.” They brought their kids to Black Lives Matter demonstrations, and took them to hear the Georgia congressman and civil-rights activist John Lewis speak. But Paul and Kristen would also listen to the far-right radio host Rush Limbaugh, to know what the other side was saying. As the children got older, Paul and Kristen started to have different visions of the future—Kristen wanted to buy an R.V. and travel the country, and Paul wanted to buy a house. In 2019, they decided to separate, but they couldn’t afford to split their family into two households.
Paul at first had trouble understanding how Willow could decide about her gender so young. Kristen would argue, “If a person presents and says, ‘This is who I am,’ it is not your job to unpack that.” In the end, it was by talking to two trans women—a co-worker in her fifties and a twentysomething bartender at the pub he frequented—that Paul came to understand his daughter better. “Reading online was too much right-wing or left-wing,” he said. “I needed something more grounded.” The bartender told him that her father had rejected her, and that she had scars on her arms from self-harm. “I said, no matter what, I wasn’t doing that,” Paul recalled.
Willow had told me that one of the hardest parts of leaving town was doing so while her relationship to her father was still evolving. “I feel like my biggest unfinished business is that relationship,” she said the day before the move, over boba tea in a strip mall called Plaza Mariachi. “I think I’ve dealt with it. We’ll talk on the phone. Even if we don’t have an in-person connection, I think we’ll be O.K.”
Once they all managed to leave the house for the last time, Paul gave Chapman and each daughter a hundred dollars in cash as a parting gift. The family had dinner at Panera Bread, then sat for a while at a nearby park. Paul cancelled two Lyfts before finally getting in one and heading to the pub, where he would try to process the day. Chapman and the girls got in the white Dodge and took I-24 out of Nashville.
L.G.B.T.Q.-rights activists around the country have seen the sudden uptick in bills targeting transgender identity as a strategy to rally conservative voters after the legalization of gay marriage and the criminalization of abortion. “There was an inordinate amount of money and attention and huge far-right groups, many of which have been deemed hate groups, focussed on keeping us as L.G.B.T.Q. people from getting married, right?” Simone Chriss, a Florida-based lawyer, told me. Chriss is representing trans people in several lawsuits against the state over its restrictions on gender-affirming care. She observed that, after the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage, in 2015, “all of the people singularly focussed on that needed something else to focus on.”
She recalled watching as model legislation propagated by groups such as the Alliance Defending Freedom and the Family Research Council targeted trans people’s freedom to use bathrooms of their choice, and to play on their preferred sports teams. Health care came next. “All of a sudden, you see this surge in gender-affirming-care bills,” Chriss said. “And what’s bananas is there was not a single bill introduced in a single state legislature prior to 2018.”
The anti-trans rhetoric about protecting children mirrored that of the anti-gay-marriage movement, she continued, and new rules mandating waiting periods, for example, were familiar from the anti-abortion movement. “It’s like dipping a toe in by making it about trans children,” she said. “I think the goal is the erasure of trans people, in part by erasing the health care that allows them to live authentically.”
Beach-Ferrara, of the Campaign for Southern Equality, said her organization estimates that more than ninety per cent of transgender youth in the South live in states where bans have passed or will soon be in effect, and that between three and five thousand young people in the South will have ongoing medical care disrupted by the bans. (The Williams Institute at U.C.L.A. estimates that there are more than a hundred thousand thirteen-to-seventeen-year-olds who identify as trans living in the South, more than in any other region in the country.) Already, university hospitals such as the University of Mississippi Medical Center and the Medical University of South Carolina have discontinued their pediatric gender services before being legally required to do so.
Had Chapman stayed in Tennessee, Willow’s closest option for getting puberty-blocker shots would likely have required a four-hundred-and-fifty-mile trip to Peoria, Illinois. Willow’s TennCare insurance would not easily travel, and a single shot can cost twelve hundred dollars out of pocket. Paul had told Chapman not to be ashamed if the move didn’t work out and she changed her mind, but she already knew she would never go back to Nashville.
On their way east, the family stopped for a few days in Seneca, South Carolina, where Chapman has relatives. Back on the road, she tried not to focus on the uncertainty that awaited her and her daughters, but she had to pull over at least twice to breathe her way through anxiety attacks. There was a heat wave, and by the time they arrived in Richmond the back speakers of the S.U.V. were blown out, and everyone was in a bad mood. Willow had snapped at her mother and Saoirse for trying to sing along to the Cranberries; she had even yelled at the dog. “It was difficult?” Willow told me afterward, when I asked how the trip had been; then she added, “I’m still excited.” (Saoirse declined to be interviewed.)
Chapman had booked an Airbnb, a dusty-blue bungalow outside Richmond. It had good air-conditioning and a small back yard for the dog. She could afford only a week there before they would have to move to a motel. That night, Willow zoned out to old episodes of “RuPaul’s Drag Race” in the living room, while Chapman scrolled through real-estate listings on her phone. She asked for advice on the social-media feeds of local L.G.B.T.Q. groups, and the responses were heartening. She decided that, if she was able to find a place to live by the end of the week, she would not take the marketing job she had lined up. School wouldn’t start for a few weeks, and it was not the right moment to leave her daughters alone all day.
At eight the next morning, Chapman was sitting in an otherwise empty waiting room at the Southside Community Services Center, filling out forms to get the family food stamps and health insurance. She had put on makeup for the first time in days and was wearing wide-legged leopard-print pants and a black shirt. She had forgotten her reading glasses, however. “Do you have a spouse who does not live at home?” she read out loud, squinting her way through the questions. “Yes,” she answered to herself, checking a box. (She and Paul are not yet divorced.)
Chapman kept mistakenly writing “Willow” on the government forms—she had never officially changed her daughter’s name. (A 1977 Tennessee state law that prohibits amending one’s gender on a birth certificate will apply to Willow no matter where she moves; another Tennessee law, which went into effect this past July, bans people from changing the gender on their driver’s license.) Chapman picked up the next batch of forms, for Medicaid. “One down, one to go,” she said.
Later in the day, Chapman and her daughters went to see a house that was advertised on Craigslist, an affordable three-bedroom in the suburbs of Richmond. As they were driving, the owner texted Chapman that he had a flat tire and couldn’t meet them. But the place looked ideal from the outside, so she filled out an application and sent the landlord a thousand-dollar deposit. At five the next morning, she woke up and saw a text from the owner claiming that the money transfer had not gone through. She quickly realized she’d been scammed.
Chapman became weepy. She posted on social media about the con, then drove Saoirse to a thrift store she wanted to visit. At first, only one shopper noticed the woman crying uncontrollably in the furniture section. Then someone went to find some tissues, and someone else brought water. Soon, Chapman recalled, she was surrounded by women murmuring words of sympathy.
That evening at the Airbnb, Chapman and Willow sat at the kitchen table. “The emotional impact of the scam hit me way more than the money,” Chapman said, still tearing up at the thought of it. Willow nodded in sympathy. But for Chapman the experience was also a reminder of the advantages of talking about their situation—the women had told her that the schools near the house were not very good, anyway. “Thrift-store people will help you when you’re down and out. They’re used to broken shit,” she said, shaking her head. “If I had broke down in a Macy’s? Think how different the reaction would be.”
The next morning, Chapman was feeling a little less pessimistic. The humidity had broken, and the weather was good. People had responded to the news of the scam by donating money to replace what she had lost, and a local Facebook group had led her to a property-management company that was flexible toward tenants with bad credit.
She drove to see a three-bedroom apartment in a centrally situated part of Richmond. Though one of the bedrooms was windowless, the place was newly painted, and it had a wooden landing out back that could serve as a deck. It was also in a school district that people had recommended. “I can see this working,” Chapman said tentatively. Most of the utilities were included in the sixteen-hundred-and-fifty-dollar rent. Chapman didn’t have time to overthink it. She wrote the real-estate agent saying she would apply.
That afternoon, Chapman drove Willow to see the apartment. The door was locked, but Willow climbed through a window and opened the door so they could consider the space together. “We were, like, ‘Oh, this is nice,’ ” Willow said. She loved the neighborhood, which had vintage stores and coffee shops. “You can walk anywhere, you don’t need transportation—that’s really cool.”
The next day, Willow was sitting on a couch in the Airbnb watching a slasher film called “Terrifier.” Chapman was next to her, getting ready for a Zoom call with someone from a local trans-rights organization called He She Ze and We.
In the weeks leading up to the move, Chapman had taken time to research which schools were friendly to trans people. Willow estimated that maybe half the students in her middle school in Nashville were transphobic, and twenty per cent were explicit about it. She was bullied, but she says that it didn’t bother her. Her teachers were more supportive, such as the one who gave her an entire Lilith Fair-era wardrobe. “She was, like, ‘Do you want some of my old clothes? Because you’re so fashion,’ ” Willow said. “I had that black little bob.”
“She had Siouxsie Sioux hair for a while,” Chapman said, looking at her fondly.
The two of them agree that Willow’s personality shifted after transitioning. Once withdrawn and nonconfrontational, she began to develop a defiant attitude. “It was kind of fun to just mess with them,” she recalled of the bullies, who she said were not vicious but more into trying to get a laugh—“like, childish, immature stuff.” She would be coy; she would tell them to give her a kiss. “My only weapon, I guess, was how I chose to respond,” she said.
“She’s not a shrinking violet,” her mother added.
“I just don’t like the traditional way that you’re taught to stand up for yourself,” Willow said. “I think absurdism is the best way.” If she lets someone misgender her, she said, “it’s not because I don’t want to be the annoying trans person, it’s more like . . . you’re not gonna get to those people.”
In her freshman year, she attended a public arts high school, and began skipping class and smoking. She says there were at least ten other students who identified as trans, but she remained something of an outsider. When she was in school, she says, she almost thought of herself as a kind of character expected to perform.
Chapman is not a disciplinarian—she had enough of that growing up. But she had a conversation with her daughter after watching a video of an incident in which Willow was voguing in a school hallway, attempted to do a death drop, and ended up with a concussion. The students around Willow were clapping and egging her on even after she fell. “It’s great that you’re the kind of person who will do crazy things,” Chapman remembered saying, “but you need people around you who are not like that.” Both Chapman and Paul worry about Willow’s safety, in part because she is not easily scared herself.
“Will you turn that off?” Chapman said now about the horror film, as she logged on to Zoom. Willow took that as a cue to leave the room.
“You’re going to want to be on this thing,” Chapman said, calling her back.
Willow, who wore blue eyeshadow, a purple baby tee with a peace sign and the word “Smile!” on it, and magenta-pink shorts, plopped back down on the couch, then got up to retrieve supplies to disinfect her belly-button piercing, which she began to do with studiousness.
On Zoom, Chapman introduced herself to Shannon McKay, the co-founder of He She Ze and We, and gave a summary of their situation.
“Have you gotten connected with the medical piece yet?” McKay asked. She explained that, in Virginia, Willow might not have to wait until she turned sixteen to start estrogen. At this news, Willow looked up and made eye contact with her mother, who nodded back.
The conversation turned to politics. Earlier in the week, Glenn Youngkin, the Republican governor of Virginia, had held a town hall on parents’ rights at a school in Henrico County. A parent there had urged Youngkin to introduce a ban on gender-transition treatment for minors.
“Our governor, just to let you know, has not taken a stance,” McKay, who also has a trans daughter, explained to Chapman. “And I think he’s not conservative enough for the folks that wish he would be.”
In July, Youngkin had issued a series of rules that direct trans kids to use pronouns and bathrooms that accord with the gender they were assigned at birth, unless they have parental permission to do otherwise. Chapman asked McKay if that gave her some control over how Willow would be treated at school.
“The clincher here is, even if all parents involved do fill out the form and say, ‘We’re all on board,’ school personnel can still say, ‘I don’t believe in that. I’m not going to do it,’ ” McKay said. She did have some good news, however: if Willow learned to drive, she could determine the name and gender on her identification card.
“I’m not ready for it,” Chapman said, referring to the driving.
“Well, before this governor messes it up, I encourage people to go ahead and get these documents lined up,” McKay said.
Chapman got the apartment she and Willow had visited, and a few days later the family moved in. Willow started at her new school on Tuesday, August 22nd. She made friends with another trans girl in the first week. But, despite a letter from Chapman specifying Willow’s name and pronouns, school administrators told her they had to use the name on her registration. She was also told she should use the nurse’s bathroom instead of the girls’ bathroom, even though it was on a different floor and might cause her to be late to class. Willow ignored that rule, and asked her mother not to intervene on her behalf.
Before the school year had begun, Chapman told me that if school didn’t work out she would be fine with her daughter getting a G.E.D. When I asked Willow about the future, she said that she wants to move to New York City. She wants to go to the balls, “maybe be a model, I don’t know,” she continued. “I like doing art. I like meeting people. I don’t know how to connect all of those things and get paid.”
“You care more about personal freedom than hitting a milestone,” Chapman said. “You care less about the traditional high-school things, the traditional college things.”
“I feel like I should care about them,” Willow said.
“Oh!” Chapman said, looking surprised. “I like hearing that.”
“I’m open—like, I could potentially care about them, but if it’s not welcoming me then I won’t,” Willow said.
The day in August when Willow needed her puberty-blocker shot came and went. The family’s insurance still had not come through, and the earliest appointment Chapman could get at a clinic with tiered pricing was in mid-September. An administrator at the clinic assured her that there was a window with puberty blockers, and that Willow’s voice would not drop overnight.
I talked to Chapman the evening after the appointment. “We thought we were just going in for an intake, but they started Willow on estrogen today,” Chapman told me over the phone. “The doctor was in shock that Willow had been on puberty blockers for two years and that she was almost sixteen.” (“It’s really hard for cis people to fully appreciate the deep destabilizing physical betrayal that these kids are navigating on a day-to-day basis,” the doctor, Stephanie Arnold, told me. “It’s a period where you should be establishing confidence in yourself and your ability to interact with the outside world.”) Willow, Chapman added, “is over the moon.” They called Paul to let him know. “After every fucking thing . . . it just happened,” she said.
The following Monday, Chapman started a new job, counselling people on signing up for Medicaid. She was earning less than she had in Nashville, but hoped to rebuild her career as an artist and a community organizer.
The family was getting to know Richmond, with its restored Victorian row houses and stately parks. Using the hundred dollars from her father, Willow had bought herself a skateboard to get around town. Paul was planning a visit for October. “This city is just dang cute, let’s be honest,” Chapman said. They had found a leftist bookstore where she had bought Willow a book of poetry by trans writers. When I asked Willow how she felt on estrogen, she said that it was too early to discern any changes with clarity; what she felt, she said, was more vulnerable. A little more than a month in, Willow said that she was liking her new school and had even attended the homecoming dance. “And my grades are O.K.,” she added. “So that’s something.”
On September 28th, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the ban on gender-transition treatment for minors in Tennessee. The court found, among other things, that state legislatures can determine whether the risks of gender dysphoria are less significant than the risks of treating it before a patient turns eighteen. A dissenting opinion stated, “The statutes we consider today discriminate based on sex and gender conformity and intrude on the well-established province of parents to make medical decisions for their minor children.” Because the federal appeals courts have split in their findings, with other circuits finding such bans unconstitutional, the issue has the potential to proceed to the Supreme Court.
“I know what’s going on,” Willow had said, when I asked her about politics. She doesn’t see herself as an activist, though; she prefers to let the news filter through her mother rather than to consume it herself: “She’s my person on the inside.”
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By Danielle Friedman
Published Sept. 11, 2023Updated Sept. 19, 2023
In recent years, the concept of caring for one’s fascia — the tough, flexible tissue that surrounds and connects muscles, bones and organs like cling wrap — has permeated fitness and wellness culture. Pilates instructors and massage therapists offer to make fascia more supple, and products like foam rollers, massage guns and “fascia blasters” claim to help you improve your fascia health at home.
“Fascia as a buzzword has really exponentially taken off,” said Christopher DaPrato, a physical therapist at the University of California, San Francisco, who studies the connection between fascia and athletic performance.
Until the early 2000s, doctors believed fascia was just packaging for more important body parts. Since then, researchers have discovered that the connective tissue plays a vital role in how we function and is key to flexibility and range of motion.
Emerging research suggests that caring for your fascia may help treat chronic pain and improve exercise performance and overall well-being.
“We’re still at the very, very beginning” of understanding fascia, said Helene Langevin, the director of the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health at the National Institutes of Health. “This is a part of the body which we have neglected for so long.”
What is fascia?
Your body has two forms of fascia: dense and loose. Each type is key to facilitating movement. Dense fascia, made of sturdy collagen fibers, helps give your body its shape. It holds muscles, organs, blood vessels and nerve fibers in place. It helps your muscles contract and stretch, and stabilizes your joints. The more slippery loose fascia allows your muscles, joints and organs to slide and glide against one another like a well-oiled machine.
How does fascia get damaged?
In 2007, an anatomy professor named Carla Stecco at the University of Padova in Italy found that fascia is alive with nerve endings. This means it can be a source of pain. The longer it is damaged or inflamed, the more sensitive it becomes.
When you’re sedentary for a long time, fascia can shorten, become overly rigid and congeal into place, forming adhesions that limit mobility, said David Krause, a physical therapist at the Mayo Clinic. Over time, inactivity can also lead fascia to reshape itself. If you spend most days hunched over a computer, the fascia surrounding your neck and shoulder muscles may change so that your posture becomes curved.
Fascia can also become damaged from repetitive movements, chronic stress, injury or surgery — becoming inflamed, overly rigid or stuck together. And it stiffens with age.
Finally, because it consists of a matrix of fibers, fascia that is too short, stiff or sticky in one part of the body can lead to pain and dysfunction elsewhere, by pinching or pulling in the wrong direction, Dr. Stecco said. The body can also compensate by changing the way it moves, causing other issues.
It can be tricky to determine whether pain is coming from your fascia or your muscles and joints. Generally, muscle and joint problems tend to feel worse the more you move, while fascia pain lessens with movement.
How can you care for your fascia?
The most effective way to keep your fascia sturdy and elastic is to stay active. Experts also recommend a few things in particular.
Resistance training keeps fascia strong, Dr. Langevin said. “A weak muscle is not going to do a great job at moving and mobilizing the fascia,” she said, nor will stiff and congealed fascia help the muscle do its job. “They need each other,” she said. “Once one starts improving, it helps the other.”
Exercises that involve a range of movements — like dancing, jumping jacks, tennis and swimming — also help keep the fascia lubricated, Dr. DaPrato said. Movements that involve bouncing are particularly effective at keeping fascia healthy.
“Skipping, for example, is such a wonderful movement,” said Robert Schleip, director of the Fascia Research Group at Ulm University in Germany.
For those who haven’t been active recently, it’s important to “be gentle with our fascia and to go slowly and try to reestablish the movement that has been lost,” Dr. Langevin said. Dynamic stretching, which contracts the muscle while elongating it, will benefit healthy and damaged fascia alike. Try trunk twists, squats or forward lunges. Consider seeing a physical therapist who can offer hands-on treatment and guide you toward the best program.
Along with moving, experts recommend sipping water throughout the day, which can help fascia glide with ease.
Despite the popularity of tools and treatments that involve applying pressure to fascia, research hasn’t yet proved their long-term effectiveness. Foam rollers and percussion guns can temporarily alleviate fascial soreness and improve flexibility by “changing some of the fluid dynamics in that local area,” Dr. DaPrato said. If you choose to use a self-massaging device, don’t overdo it: No evidence supports the recent trend of “fascia blasting,” or aggressively manipulating fascia through the skin, which can lead to bruising.
The same may be true for treatments like myofascial massage and cupping. If these treatments make you feel and move better, that’s great, experts said — but simply staying active is the best medicine.
Danielle Friedman is a journalist in New York and the author of “Let’s Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World.” More about Danielle Friedman
#fascia#connective tissue#bodywork#massage therapy#movement#exercise#Structural Integration Atlanta#body alive
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Sharing Women's March open letters and petitions. Please sign and share!
14 states have already banned abortion, and more restrictions are on the way. Here are a few of the latest GOP proposals:
⚫ A 12-week abortion ban in Nebraska
⚫ A 6-week ban (because GOP attempts at a full ban failed three times) in South Carolina
⚫ A bill that charges abortion patients with MURDER in Alabama
We HAVE to fight back.
Our state-level mobilizations *are working.* We helped elect a pro-choice state Supreme Court justice in WI and brought national attention to the abortion pill case that started in TX. But we CANNOT stop now.
TY! -Women's March
SIGN ON: TELL THE COURTS TO STAY OUT OF FDA APPROVAL OF ABORTION MEDICATION
Medication abortion is safe and effective, and it should be readily available everywhere.
Add your name right now to DEMAND the courts stay out of FDA approvals >>>
SIGN ON: TELL THE JUDICIAL SYSTEM TO STAY OUT OF FOOD & DRUG ADMINISTRATION APPROVALS!
A Trump-appointed judge may strike down the FDA’s approval of a critical abortion medication later this month.
The ruling would set a dangerous precedent that radical right-wingers can challenge the approval of ANY medication they don’t approve of — like the birth control pill or emergency contraception (aka Plan B).
We need you to take action to tell the courts to stay OUT of FDA approvals!
ATTN: SOUTH CAROLINA LEGISLATIVE REPUBLICANS
Check out our letter to the South Carolina GOP below, then sign it as is or add your own spin:
Make your voice heard
As you well know, abortion bans will not end abortion.
Instead, you propose penalties so extreme – so draconian – that they will terrify women into compliance.
Your goal was never to “protect life.” It is to control our bodies.
You should know: We won’t go back. We’ll fight back.
I’m signing this letter to voice my ongoing commitment to opposing any rollback of our human right to reproductive freedom.
ATTN: RON DESANTIS, FLORIDA REPUBLICANS, & THE STATE BOARD OF EDUCATION
Sign our open letter condemning the Don’t Say Gay law in Florida!
Make your voice heard
The cruel “Don’t Say Gay” law is harming Florida students, teachers, and families. Instead of expanding it, you should be repealing this attack on LGBTQ+ Floridians!
Despite your fear and hate-mongering, LGBTQ+ people — including kids — always have existed and always will. We will keep fighting for them to be treated with the respect and dignity they deserve.
We know that more of us are in solidarity with the LGBTQ+ community than agree with your regressive and cruel legislation.
Women’s Marchers and our allies WON’T stop fighting for a world where all of us can be safe as our authentic selves. We WON’T let your hateful legislation stop us from supporting LGBTQ+ Floridians, and we condemn the “Don’t Say Gay” law.
ADD YOUR NAME TO OUR DEMANDS TO PROTECT REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH CARE ACCESS!
We demand reform of our broken judicial system. We demand that state and local leaders defend access to mifepristone despite this illegitimate ruling. We demand the FDA issue guidance to disregard the decision. We demand the Biden administration implement a whole-of-government response to this public health crisis. We demand pharmacies execute their mandate faithfully and with the health of their patients rather than the personal ideologies of a few politicians in mind.
Sign on to sponsor our demands >>>
REMOVE CLARENCE THOMAS FROM THE SUPREME COURT
Congress must impeach Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas now!
Justice Clarence Thomas has violated his oath and broken the law by failing to disclose decades of luxury vacations and private jet travel from billionaire and GOP megadonor Harlan Crow. Crow also paid the private school tuition for a Thomas family member.
Sign our petition, stating loud and clear: No one is above the law, and Justice Thomas must be held accountable and removed from his position of power.
#womens healthcare#womens rights#womens march#feminists; asemble!#reproductive rights#reproductive health#fertility#abortion#FDA#medical abortion#abortion medication#south carolina#republicans#republican#gop#petitions#open letter#reproductive freedom#florida#ron desantis#dont say gay#LGBTQ+#clarence clemons#impeach#impeach clarence thomas#politics#us politics#intersectional feminism#intersectional social justice#intersectional activism
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Thousands of hospital appointments have been cancelled because of Queen Elizabeth II's funeral on 19 September, which has been declared a bank holiday.
Several NHS trusts have urged all "non-urgent procedures and appointments" to be postponed, including replacement surgeries, eye surgery, maternity checks and cancer treatments, according to the independent global media platform openDemocracy.
Several patients waiting months for their surgery had their appointment cancelled due to "unforeseen circumstances".
Doctors at one of the London hospitals were told the day of the state funeral would be treated as a bank holiday "so please go ahead and start rescheduling patients".
However, COVID-19 vaccination services and emergency appointments would reportedly continue.
The Queen died at Balmoral, Scotland, on 8 September, aged 96, after serving for 70 years as Britain’s head of the state — the longest-reigning monarch in the country’s history. The British government announced that the day of her funeral will be marked as a national bank holiday.
A text message from the NHS informed a pregnant woman that due to “unforeseen circumstances” her appointment has been cancelled and a new date “will be rescheduled shortly.”
When she tried to reschedule her appointment, she was placed on hold for hours, according to openDemocracy.
“I’m really disappointed,” she said.
“Yes, it’s a routine scan, but that’s another week or two until I’m seen and wondering whether my baby is healthy – which means quite a lot of anxiety, sitting and waiting,” she said.
Bedfordshire Hospitals Foundation Trust told patients on Monday evening; “Following the announcement of the plans for the late Her Majesty The Queen’s state funeral on Monday 19 September 2022, some non-urgent planned care appointments/procedures across Bedfordshire Hospitals will be postponed. We will contact all relevant patients if their appointment or procedure is to be re-scheduled.”
The Liverpool Women’s Hospital has warned patients that there will be changes on the day of the Queen’s funeral.
“We understand patients with appointments on 19.09.22 will be awaiting updates in light of the Queen’s funeral and national holiday announcement,” a spokesperson for the hospital said in a statement.
“The Trust will be continuing with clinical activity but some changes to appointments may occur, please wait to be contacted directly.”
In a letter signed by Ursula Montgomery, the director of primary care of NHS England, general practitioners were told they would contractually be allowed to close for their core services. But it added that local health boards would need to “urgently work to ensure sufficient out-of-hours services capacity is in place.”
The cancellations come at a time when a record high of nearly 6.8 million people were waiting to start treatment at the end of July.
Of those waiting for NHS treatment following a referral, 377,689 patients had waited more than 52 weeks in July, and 2,885 patients had waited more than 104 weeks.
#politics#news#world politics#world news#european politics#europe#united kingdom#great britain#queen elizabeth ii#the independent#nhs#national health service#operation london bridge#NHS England
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Consumption — ethical or not — is a one-sided category that’s mostly unfit for Marxist use because it isolates one moment in our social circuits, mystifying the connection between that moment and all the others: production, reproduction, extraction, waste. A Marxist analysis of the local Starbucks would see it first of all as a site of labor struggle between workers and owners, a view that’s more readily available now thanks to the efforts of Starbucks Workers United. We would also want to understand the chain’s position as a winner in a consolidating, globalizing market, and the particulars of how the firm has raised the level of exploitation in coffee-producing areas and its effects on migration. “Capitalism is always bad” may have been good enough to keep the fire alive, but with anti-capitalism blazing away, it’s not good enough now.
If we are engaged in a collective liberation project, then we can end the debates about the individual ethics of consumption and instead begin to develop a strategic, shared analysis of our movement’s needs. We should eschew super-exploitative gig platforms not because they’re morally dirtying but because a bunch of people who are psychically dependent on underpaid delivery workers for their basic needs are not going to overthrow capitalism. (Only a philosopher could believe the words on the package in which we’ve been sold cheap abundance are a bigger obstacle to revolutionary anti-capitalist consciousness than the cheap abundance itself!) We should avoid ultra-processed foods not because they don’t have the right certification labels — sometimes they do anyway — but because they make us sick and our health is important. If we approach our needs as a strategic, collective concern, it’s not an objection to these “shoulds” to say, for instance, “Life under capitalism is so brutal that workers depend on consumer indulgences to get through the month,” or “Disabled workers have been forced to rely on capitalist products and services to survive in a hostile society.” On the contrary, that’s simply to reiterate the immediate need for different ways to live.
We shouldn’t take that Hawaiian vacation, not because it’s unethical by whatever philosophical standard, but because it undermines the struggle of Kānaka Maoli organizers who are in a specific and urgent fight for the future of their nation, which is part of the world struggle in which the “we” to whom this essay is addressed consider ourselves participants. We need to go see left-wing music and movies (and subscribe to small magazines, of course) not because otherwise we’re lamestream sellouts but because cultural products can ennoble or stultify and the ruling class would rather have us stultified. And we need left-wing cafes not so we can show off our unnecessarily expensive Veblen goods but because we need places where workers can read behind the counter and sneak free stuff to their comrades, where we can meet on purpose or by accident, where we can find help in an emergency.
#reading#it’s unfortunate I’m cutting right to the conclusion when this has a whole big preamble about coffee and the emergence of ‘fair trade’ and#zizek but therm’s the brakes you can read the rest
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