ID: a statue of george Washington with a Palestinian flag taped to it. A tent with a sign that says “all eyes on Palestine” taped on it.

all out for Palestine!!!! find a protest/encampment in your city!!!!!

columbia administration is threatening to call in the national guard tonight

On that note, I want to spotlight the fundraiser for an Afro-Palestinian journalist, and Lama Jamous' uncle. He has less of a following amongst allies because he posts almost entirely in Arabic, so I'm going to spotlight him on my blog and put him on the fundraiser list as well.

And please follow him on IG as well, even if you only speak English he has small captions on the videos he posts that translate his Arabic.

columbia administration is threatening to call in the national guard tonight

Image description: [Screenshots of pages from Brilliant Imperfection by Eli Clare. Text reads:

Your Suicide Haunts me.

Bear, it’s been over a decade since you killed yourself, and still I want to howl. I feel anguish and rage rattling down at the bottom of my lungs, pressing against my rib cage. If ever my howling erupts, I will take it to schoolyards and churches, classrooms and prisons, homes where physical and sexual violence lurk as common as mealtime. I know many of us need to wail. Together we could shatter windows, bring bullies and perpetrators to their knees, stop shame in its tracks.

Once a week, maybe once a month, I learn of another suicide. They’re friends of friends, writers and dancers who have bolstered me, activists I’ve sat in meetings with, kids from the high school down the road, coworkers and acquaintances, news stories and Facebook posts. They’re queer, trans, disabled, chronically ill, youth, people of color, poor, survivors of abuse and violence, homeless. They’re too many to count.

Bear, will you call their names with me? It’s become a queer ritual, this calling of the names—all those dead of AIDS and breast cancer, car accidents and suicide, hate violence and shame, overdoses and hearts that just stop beating. The names always begin wave upon wave, names filling conference halls, church basements, city parks. Voices call one after another, overlapping, clustering, then coming apart, a great flock of songbirds, gathering to fly south, wheeling and diving—this cloud of remembrance. Then quiet. I think we’re done, only to have another voice call, then two, then twenty. We fill the air for thirty minutes, an hour, a great flock of names. Tonight, will you sit with me? Because, Bear, I can’t sleep.

I remember your smile, your kindness, your compassionate and fierce politics. I remember our long e-mail conversations about being disabled and trans. I remember a brilliant speech you gave at True Spirit, a trans gathering in Washington, DC. I remember you telling me about how you’d disappear for months at a time when your life became grim, how you’d do anything not to go to a psych hospital again. I remember your handsome Black queer trans disabled working-class self. And then, you were gone.

The details of your death haunt me. You had checked yourself in. You were on suicide watch. I imagine your desperation and suffering. I know racism, transphobia, classism colluded. The nurses and aides didn’t follow their own protocols, not bothering to check on you every fifteen minutes. You were alive and sleeping at 5:00 a.m. and dead at 7:00 a.m.; at least that’s what their records say. Did despair clog your throat, panic coil in your intestines? In those last moments, what lingered on your tongue? I know about your death as fleetingly as your life.

Bear, I’d do almost anything to have you alive here and now, anything to stave off your death. But what did you need then? Drugs that worked? A shrink who listened and was willing to negotiate the terms of your confinement with you? A stronger support system? An end to shame and secrecy? As suffering and injustice twisted together through your body-mind, what did you need?

I could almost embrace cure without ambivalence if it would have sustained your life. But what do I know? Maybe your demons, the roller coaster of your emotional and spiritual self, were so much part of you that cure would have made no sense. You wrote not long before your death, “In a world that separates gender, I have found the ability to balance the blending of supposed opposites. In a world that demonizes non-conformity, I have found the purest spiritual expression in celebrating my otherness.”

Yes, Bear. I know that truth. Your otherness was a beautiful braid— your hard-earned trans manhood looping into your Black self, wrapped in working-class smarts and resilience, woven into disability, threaded with queerness. I saw you last in an elevator at True Spirit. You told me that you were spending the weekend hanging out with trans men of color. I can still see your gleeful smile, sparkling eyes.

Friend, what would have made your life possible with all its aches and sorrows? I ask as someone who has gripped the sheer cliff face of suicide more than once. Calling the names exhausts me. Your death exhausts me. The threat, reality, fact of suicide exhausts me. Its arrival on the back of shame and isolation exhausts me. Bear, will you come sit beside me tonight? I’m too exhausted to sleep.]

From Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure by Eli Clare, pages 63-64.

This passage has stuck with me since I first read it and I find myself returning over and over, especially in the times I want to be gentle to my grief.

Thought I'd share it with you all right now <3

content note: discussion of suicide.

this next monday will be the six year anniversary of losing one of my friends to suicide.

when he died, my high school barely mentioned his death, even though for other students who died by things like car crashes or illness, there were so many public expressions of grief. they believed that having any memorials for a student who died by suicide would encourage other people to die the same way. in their rush to erase the circumstances of his death, they erased the memory of his life.

there are so many things i am angry at that high school about in terms of how they treated mental health (mandatory reporting and collaborating with cops, their refusal to recognize the ways in which that system led to peer-to-peer crisis support, their refusal to recognize the ways that trying to keep each other alive through trial and error was scary and exhausting, carceral disciplinary policies, etc etc etc). but i think one of the things i am still angriest about is the way they enforced shame around his death. it felt like they were retroactively blaming him for the constellation of circumstances that made suicide an option in his life. it felt like they were blaming those of us who missed him and cared about him and wanted to grieve him. it made those of us still there who were actively suicidal feel even more scared about the reaction if we did reach out for help from one of those mythical safe adults.

as an adult now involved in psych abolition/mad liberation work, it makes me so fucking mad to see the ways in which he was discarded by people in authority positions. and the older i get, the more options i have found in my life for making sense of the world and finding healing and community and support which were never available to him because he died when he was 16 and the only things offered to him were a carceral psychiatric system that blamed him for his own fucking death. it feels so incredibly unfair.

i miss him and i think i always will; i can't remember his laugh or the sound of his voice or his favorite color any more and that aches. this grief is so heavy and it feels harder in a new way each year, when i become older than he will ever be. sometimes meeting new comrades or seeing new anticarceral suicide support models hurts because i wish so fucking bad that we had that back then. i remember how close we came to losing even more people that year and i know it is simple fucking luck that i'm still here when he's not.

i remember another letter (never sent) that i wrote to a friend while they were in an ICU bed after a suicide attempt when i didn't know if they would live or not. i have spent so much time in the past 10 years begging for anything to keep me and my friends alive, but even in that letter i knew that there is so much fucking violence that is hidden beneath psychiatric logics of cure and safety that promise a "solution" to suicide. I knew that institutionalization, coercion, and shame would not have helped build a life more liveable for him or **** or any of the people i've loved and lost since.

there needs to be more fucking options for care and support that aren't so incredibly cruel to suicidal people. i know so many people doing incredible work in alternatives, peer respite, a million different frameworks for healing and liberation. but it makes me so mad every day i have to live in a world where there are still people restrained, locked up in psych wards, having all autonomy and personhood taken away from them. knowing there are dozens of people every day getting blamed for their deaths the same way he was blamed for his.

i miss him. i cared so fucking much for him. and he died by suicide, and all of those things are true. he has been dead for 6 years and he lived before that and the people who loved him want to remember all of him; our celebrations of his life should not require hiding the way that he died.

Image description: [1000 origami cranes in all different colors and patterns that are tied together in strings of 25]

(these were the 1000 cranes we made to give to his parents, in memorial and recognition of how much he meant to us.)

It’s really heartening how much people on this site came together to help Ahmed @90-ghost. He’s in Egypt now with his younger brother waiting on his mom and older brother to join them. The issue now is living expenses. Life is extremely difficult for displaced people, and the future is uncertain. If you’ve ever wondered how you can help a Palestinian displaced by the genocide, here’s one way to do so.

Please help if you can! Onika is a black trans woman who needs support with survival and HIV meds after being assaulted in a transphobic attack!

CA: $onikathepretty123

VM: faithisme36

I got accepted onto long-term disability through my employer/the state, but that doesn’t take effect until August 1st because it’s based off of my resignation date with the district.

I’m making monthly $672.01 COBRA payments to keep my insurance until then, which I need for 100% of my nutrition and hydration through feeding tube and central line.

I’ll need $2016.03 to make it via COBRA alone until August. That’s on top of all of our other bills and my spouse working full-time.

If you can’t donate, please support me by reblogging and following my other socials so I can monetize my content on other platforms.

@ paralyzedguts on TikTok and Instagram, I make educational content about disability and other social justice topics. I’ve been featured on NowThis Impact and work with organizations like The Oley Foundation and G-PACT.

$0 / $2016.03

Cash.app: $forcewielder

Message for PayPal and Venmo

LinkTree

Amazon Wishlist (medical supplies)

Feeding tubes and port under the cut!

Have u heard about the flotillas departing now/soon for palestine

yes!!! i think everyone should learn about the freedom flotilla, which is setting sail for gaza very soon and needs to have eyes and ears on it, as israel has a long history of attacking, raiding and occaisonally killing humanitarian workers on aid ships to gaza, as they did in 2010 with the first freedom flotilla (because that's how long Gaza has been under siege)

here's an interview with journalist and lawyer dylan saba, who is setting sail on it and is a good person to follow to learn more about it:

and this is their website:

remember to follow and check #freedomflotilla on twitter in the coming days.

Palestinians were still suffering and dying by the thousands long before October 2023 so it makes absolutely no sense for you to bend over backwards to defend bigoted behavior towards us under the excuse that it “happened years ago” - Palestinians didn’t start suffering once you personally became aware of it. What xyz did and said in 2021, 2018, 2014, 2009, 2008, etc. still is bigoted and genocidal. Supporting Palestinian suffering is not excusable after a certain date, assholes.

accidentally crashed into a congressman with my wheelchair today i wish i had done it on purpose 😔

Guattari’s idea is both refreshing and profound. He suggests that when a person experiences psychosis, her psychosis changes according to her surroundings, and, therefore, treating her with fear by locking her up, keeping her in restraints, overmedicating her, and exposing her to other methods of suppression only serves to change her psychosis to a psychosis of fear and paranoia. Who, psychotic or not, in the same situation wouldn’t also feel terror and paranoia? Indeed, there is a legitimate reason to be paranoid and afraid. Further, the shock of being treated inhumanly, the sense of alienation and of betrayal, and, perhaps paramountly, the realization that humans can and do treat other humans in this way, is itself shocking and traumatizing. It is a shock and trauma that alters the psyche, changing the personality of the person who undergoes it.

Cynthia Cruz, Disquieting: Essays on Silence

listening to the columbia student radio show covering the ongoing situation around student arrests and protests, something easy to put on to feel less disconnected right now

(A fundraiser I trust. Please spread the word.)

This fundraiser is for my cousin, Ahmed Abdeen; I am a Palestinian living in the US. Here is Ahmed's story in his own words.

”I life in Rafah where I have lived my whole life. I am asking you for support today to be able to buy basic things such as canned food, flour and materials for tents when available. I need these supplies for myself and my family and also everyone in Gaza is my family so as long as I can I need to support everyone else who needs support. I am distributing goods to people who are displaced and living in tents around us. We are living in unimaginable conditions as I am sure that you are aware and we are asking for support.”

Thank you for taking the time to read this and please consider contributing even if its is only a small amount. This money will be wired directly via our personal bank accounts.

"It sickens me that it is the spectacle that has finally moved the people of the world to listen to Palestinians about our struggle. Somehow, we needed to have our guts on display, disemboweled on the ground, before our humanity can be proven by vivisection." -Sonia Sulaiman

A black trans woman was on her way to a gender affirming care appointment when her at the time boyfriend pushed her onto the subway tracks. She has had the lower parts of both her legs amputated.

There is more info in the fundraiser page and here: https://www.instagram.com/p/C5zL5buP1iN/?igsh=NTF1NmVmYThyNHE=

Please share widely - not sure if this has been posted on tumblr yet but i’m sure it cant hurt to post it again.

(PS - she has chosen anonymity, which is why her name is not mentioned.)