AnarchoNinaWrites
TAM when you're yelling at the wrong people because you have zero desire to even speak to the people that keep doing shit to deserve it.
Being the one targeted group it's okay to unload on during the middle of a fascist pogrom, BECAUSE of that fascist pogrom and the attitudes it's normalized about you in the broader culture, is an obnoxiously painful and emotionally destabilizing thing. Makes it hard to differentiate friend from foe to some degrees.
AnarchoNinaWrites
You're constantly trying to figure out which of four basic buckets everyone talking to you about the subject, which to some degree is always your existence and lived experience, falls into:
- ppl who are hateful and want to get you
- ppl who don't want to get you but have internalized the narrative
- ppl who don't hate you and haven't internalized the narrative but resent their peace being disturbed
- ppl who understand what you're going through but express it differently than you would
AnarchoNinaWrites
And you're freaking out because this is very real, it's happening all around you, it might even be what ends up perishing you some day soon, so you have to get figuring out which of those four buckets anyone talking to you fits into, right the first time, under a tremendous amount of pressure and in a limited span of time; since your response to each bucket is going to be vastly different as a matter of self preservation and maintaining emotional cohesion.
AnarchoNinaWrites
If they hate you and they're in on the pogrom, you get hard and you fight. No emotional openings; just hostility and war. If they've bought the narrative, you get prosecutorial; you deconstruct it and demonstrate why it's false. If they don't care but object to the disruption, you have to trigger their humanity and demonstrate why your survival/wellbeing guarantee theirs. If they empathize from a different lived experience, you have to find common language.
AnarchoNinaWrites
tl;dr it's no fun being the thin end of the nazi wedge in a society that honestly doesn't really give a shit, for the most part.
AnarchoNinaWrites
It works fine when everything matches; but if you guess wrong, the end result is always pain/confusion/revulsion and/or aggression. You have to fit the technique/response to type, and you have to get it right every time; and this interaction happens over and over and over every time you're targeted by some aspect of again, a society-wide pogrom against your existence justified by a propaganda machine so much bigger and pervasive than you yourself, can ever be.
AnarchoNinaWrites
And perhaps the worst aspect of all is the way that machine, that propaganda system that exists to justify the pogrom changes the people around you as you go through this process. You can't entirely be sure a person you put in the right bucket last time, will still be in that bucket the next time, or the time after that. You can reach understanding and have them still go out into that propaganda stream and have their mind changed later. Only one of you; but infinite voices justifying the pogrom.
AnarchoNinaWrites
In some ways, it's better to have them in the hate bucket, agreeing with the pogrom; because you know where you stand, and you can rely on *those* people never changing.
But of course if you approach every relationship and interaction as if that's already true, you isolate yourself and become easy pickings; you push people into the hate bucket even faster.
AnarchoNinaWrites
I guess there's a fifth bucket too, but that fifth bucket is pretty much "other targets of the pogrom" and doesn't really require you to match response to type since you don't really have to explain the situation to them or develop a strategy for coexisting - they already know what's happening, how it's happening, and usually how it's fucking with you psychologically. You can reach understanding/peace sometimes with only a glance. The fifth bucket is no bucket; it's shared experience.
AnthonyJK-Admin
I suppose that puts me as in that fifth bucket, because even as a totally cis-queer Black man who has experienced being on the bad side of both race and anti-gay hate, I understand all too well the need for social(ist) solidarity and defending even those you don't see or know. Doesn't enrage me any less seeing it IRT.
AnarchoNinaWrites
Give the number of calculations involved, the skills necessary to navigate the choices you have, the constant pressure and effectiveness of the propaganda justifying the pogrom, the constant possibility of solving the equation wrong, you can understand why people check out. Either they lack the emotional skill to navigate the problem, or they wear down, or they snap and eventually withdraw entirely from interactions except with that 5th bucket. Which means the pogrom wins automatically.
AnarchoNinaWrites
Maybe you live, maybe you die, but either way you are not in public life, you are not living as your authentic self, you are removed from the equation - which is the purpose of the pogrom in the first place.
AnarchoNinaWrites
It's a dark and frustrating thing to understand the precise contours of the train heading right for you, breathing down your neck, and still be largely unable to do anything about it except hope it runs out of gas before you do.
AnthonyJK-Admin
Appreciate it. Given all you've taught me, and all the 💩💩💩 you've taken to tell us about ourselves, can't help but defend to the end.
AnarchoNinaWrites
@AnthonyJK Thanks for being there my friend; I mean that. I wish more marginalized people whose lived experience should allow them to understand, actually did understand - but as I'm sure you know, they don't, not always. I appreciate having some friends who do, and I count you among those friends.
Jae
@AnarchoNinaWrites The constant hypervigilance as you sort people, conversation by conversation, into one bucket or another is exhausting in itself. Like, is this “nice but clueless” cis friend burbling about “women’s fears” and “irreversible changes” because they are in bucket 4 but being crass and (educatably) ignorant, or because they are secretly in bucket 2 (or worse) but keeping it civil? (A situation I often call, “last Thursday evening”)
AnarchoNinaWrites
@considermycat yeah, absolutely. I didn't really get into people who look like they're in one bucket, but are actually in another; but that is a thing ofc, as you have so clearly articulated. And yes, it's exhausting doing the calculations, always, over and over, even from moment to moment.
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