Everything about the structure of trying to get medical care had filtered me through assumptions of my incompetence. There it was, what I had always been afraid of, what I must have known since I was a child I needed to prepare to defend myself against, and what it would take me years to accept was beyond my control. Like millions of women of color, especially black women, the healthcare machine could not imagine me as competent and so it neglected and ignored me until I was incompetent. Pain short-circuits rational thought. It can change all of your perceptions of reality. If you are in enough physical pain, your brain can see what isn’t there. Pain, like pregnancy, is inconvenient for bureaucratic efficiency and has little use in a capitalist regime. When the medical profession systematically denies the existence of black women’s pain, underdiagnoses our pain, refuses to alleviate or treat our pain, healthcare marks us as incompetent bureaucratic subjects. Then it serves us accordingly.
The assumption of black women’s incompetence —we cannot know ourselves or express ourselves in a way that prompts people with power to respond to us as agentic beings—supersedes even the most powerful status cultures in all of neoliberal capitalism: wealth and fame.In a 2017 interview, Serena Williams describes how she had to bring to bear the full force of her authority as a global superstar to convince a nurse that she needed a treatment after the birth of her daughter. The treatment likely saved Serena’s life.
no matter how ‘mature’ u think u are when ur under 18….like u will have a fkn revelation in ur 20s about how naive and different you were………….even if ur like the most experienced teenager it doesnt matter……………its bizarre to me that Anyone in their early 20s could ever be attracted to someone younger than them…those few years r packed full of the most formative shit in establishing ur personality and identity and its fkn gross that anyone could see someone in that vulnerable process and think yeah this is my equal despite me being at a completely different stage of life than you. like what the fuck. its always guys who feel so inadequate so are seeking 2 be idolised by someone younger who doesnt have enough experience to know just how pathetic that person is
and especially cos when ur in highschool/just fresh out of there ur still in that ‘adults have authority over me’ childlike state of mind that has been drilled into you and u havent had a chance 2 dismantle that thru experiences such as uni or tafe or jobz (or just simply losing ur status as a highschool student) which allows u to feel like ur own person and an adult in society etccc
If my future s/o doesn’t stare at me like I’m their whole world while I stand like a crackhead in the candle section of target smelling every single candle before buying one then whats the point
learning that most trees do not derive from a single lineage but actually only look and function superficially similarly due to convergent evolution is one of the most fucked up things i’ve ever learned and i will never be the same person as i was before i learned that
Oak trees are quite a bit more closely related to roses than they are to pine trees.
