[ID: A twitter thread from Tess Sharpe (@sharpegirl).
“A few months ago, I put myself between a man of color and two police officers who were harassing him. I was able to do this calmly and automatically because my mother trained me how to do it and I’ve spent years thinking about how to react if I had to use my whiteness this way.
The first thing I did: I pulled out my phone. I made sure the officers SAW me pull out my phone. I made sure they saw me turn on the voice recording.
The next thing: I calmly but firmly contradicted the officers. They insisted that they had gotten a call saying that this man was following people trying to get them to sign petitions. I told them I had been there for a half hour and he had not done anything of the sort.
The officers then tried to get me to be quiet. I said that I would be quiet, but that their reports were wrong, they were not listening to an eyewitness, and I was not moving from this spot until they left this man alone.
I then made a VERY BIG SHOW of taking down these officers names and badge numbers on my phone. I made sure the one next to me could see that I had texted this information to someone (my mom). I’m talking craning my neck to look at their badges, tilting my phone to show the screen
Then, I just fixed the one across with me with a stare. The bitchiest, don’t fuck with me, I’m a femme white lady stare I could summon. And I did not stop staring or move from that spot until they left. And they did leave.
And then I gave the guy my phone number just in case and I called activist friends up in the community and made sure people were in the parking lot in case the cops came back so he could continue his petition work in peace.
You’ve got to be prepared. Keep your phone charged and in easy access. Know where your recording apps are. Who will you text badge numbers to so there’s a record? Go through it in your head until it feels as natural as holding your keys between your fingers in a parking lot.
This is the work we must do. Those officers never would’ve touched me. I was never in danger for a moment. Use the enormous privilege you have for good if a time comes where you need to step up and be an actual shield.
And a final thing, remember: this is not about YOUR anger. Your anger has no place here. Your job is to be calm and never escalate a situation the officers are looking for a chance to escalate. Because you won’t be the one they will escalate on. The person of color will be.
Your job is to remind the officers that white ladies can be a damn nuisance. And a lot of paperwork. And what if this one is related to somebody important? What if this one writes letters to the editor? She’s texting someone my badge number, is this really worth it?”
the one problem i have with people my age and younger is that a lot of us do not have hands on hobbies. like i have spoken to so many people my age who go to work, go to school and then fuck around on their phone/computer for hours and then ???????? like no wonder ur depressed and have low confidence in urself. u need to get ur hands on something, feed those dopamine receptors! learn how to play guitar, garden, scrapbook, fucking make model trains. i don’t give a shit, MAKE SOMETHING!!
it feels better than drugs when i finish making a thing—and then show it off or gift it.
and then so people my age say to me ‘well—i can’t draw/paint/knit/etc. like you can. my stuff would be terrible.’ yeah, well duh—a part of developing skill is sucking at something and then practicing it over and over and over again until you suck less. u’ll have a hard time feeling lonely or bored when you can’t stop thinking abt a technique you want to try or something you want to make for someone else. making things has SAVED MY LIFE. it gave me a reason to keep living day after day when i wanted to die.
making things improved my generational relationships (when i worked for the newspaper i would talk to customers abt jamming recipes or cross-stitch, one of my grandmas always gives me pattern books and tell me abt when she knitted things for mom, my other grandma is giving me a wedding quilt that HER grandma gave her 50 years ago because she knows i will appreciate it). it also got me likeminded friends who also make things.
take a ceramics class! pick up water colors, bake cakes! learn to work on cars! make soap. DO SOMETHING THAT DOESN’T INVOLVE STARING AT A SCREEN.
she snapped!!!!!
You’re right and you should say it! Also, just be bad at stuff. Just, make the wonkiest scarf. Learn needle felting but no one knows what the shape is supposed to be. Make things for the sake of making, not for the sake of perfection. Enjoying making something and being good at something are not the same thing.
my favourite bizarre arthurian facts to drop on unsuspecting people:
lancelot was very literally raised in a lake
gawain has a talking fox sidekick who shows him how to cross the river of the dead
morgan le fay’s best frenemy/gf is an ancient greek oracle who slept with alexander the great
gawain has to investigate his own murder not once but THREE times because people just will not stop faking his death
arthur has a pet parrot
one time mordred ate a dead body
gawain said he wanted to be turned into a maiden to be able to love lancelot as a maiden could. he was very high on painkillers at the time
lancelot’s birth name is galahad
and his son’s name is galahad and his ex-boyfriend’s name is galehaut and his grandfather’s name is lancelot and his uncle’s name is bors and his cousin’s name is also bors.
there are upwards of ten characters named yvain
gawain was kidnapped by pirates as a child. this explains a lot about him i think
look i know its a basic one but the absolute shock that ppl go through when i say lancelot was raised in a lake? like IN a lake? classic. timeless. theres a reason i listed it first and it bears repeating. the man is aquatic
The idea of english as a mother tongue is so strange to me, in my head english is how ppl communicate when there’s no way in common to communicate, so english as a mother tongue sounds a bit like idk email as a mother tongue ykwim? Like english to me feels like the stuff that’s used to fill the empty spaces between languages
Ok English is my native language and unfortunatly the only one I know yet, but this reminds me so much of that passage in Flights by Olga Tokarczuk
It would be a real shame if instead of being covered by paint, which can be removed, bronze statues of racists were to come into contact with saltwater or tomatoes and be destroyed by irreversible bronze disease.
my singing voice is good for showers and mornings in the kitchen and drunken nights and lullabies for babies who need sleep and im okay with this
i think it’s silly to be ashamed of your art because it’s not in a museum and of your voice because it’s not selling out stadiums. there will always be people who enjoy and appreciate what you can do.
Idk why but this hit me really hard and I’ve been staring at it for a couple minutes.
Okay so a production of Hamlet that ends with “Goodnight, sweet prince,” etc. and then Horatio looks up and sees the audience for the first time and is both shocked and furious, because his world is falling apart and you sat there and watched.
This idea would go fantastically well with my director’s idea that Hamlet knows the whole time that he’s in a play. He had me (when I played Hamlet) interact with the audience, exchange looks with people in the front row, deliver my soliloquies to people in the first few rows casually like I was just talking to them, and I even had the idea to not freeze and just walk about the stage when other characters had their little ‘asides,’ which he allowed me to keep in.
Basically, if Hamlet continuously acknowledges the audience unnoticed by all the other characters (almost Fleabag-style) and then suddenly he’s gone, and obviously he knew he’d have to be gone at the end, and then poor Horatio is left all alone to finally realize there was someone else there the entire time, now that would make it all the more devastating.
There’s no difference between the Danish courtiers, who showed up because they wanted to see the Mad Prince get his butt kicked in a staged sword-fight, and us the audience (who… also showed up to watch Hamlet loose a sword fight.)
I want to see a production where Horatio just stares at us, and screams “Now cracks a noble heart!” with the subtext “You fucking fuckers. He was better than all of you, you watched him die, and you just stood there.
Then, he just silently cries over the body. For like FIVE MINUTES. And the courtiers peel away into the wings, one by one, until Horatio is alone on stage with a lot of dead bodies. It starts getting uncomfortable. You’re thinking… is the play over? Am I supposed to go? (hamlet is just about the *only* play where the final scene is cut about 50% time, so use that uncertainty, use that ambiguity.) Maybe some people do get up to go. There’s definitely muttering. And then there’s smashing sounds coming from the direction of the box office, and Horatio looks up, with an expression like something’s gone wrong.
But then he says, “Why do the drums come hither?” Fortinbras enters though the audience, and the play continues.
(I *also* think it would be really cool to cut for intermission right after Claudius freaks out and breaks up the play-within-a-play. Just imagine it: king yells “Lights! Lights! Lights!” And the houselights come up.)
never make a suicide joke again. yes this includes “i wanna die” as a figure of speech. swear off of it. actually make an effort to change how you think about things.
find something to compliment someone for at least 4 times a day. notice the little things about the world that make you happy, and use that to make other people happy.
talk to people. initiate conversation as often as you possibly can. keep your mind busy and you wont have to worry anymore
picture the bad intrusive thoughts in youe head as an edgy 13 year old and tell them to go be emo somewhere else
if someone makes you feel bad most of the time, stop talking to them. making yourself hang out with people who drain you is self harm. stop it.
… 8|
That’s some pretty good advice. I don’t know what’s left of my humor after ‘guess I’ll just die’ jokes but it’s worth a shot.
Personally i went from “guess I’ll die” jokes to “IF I HAVE TO BE HERE FOR 5 MORE MINUTES I PROMISE YOU I WILL BUY JUST, AN ARRAY OF CLOTHES.” and other wild hyperbolic stuff. Just replace the death part with something ridiculous and off topic. Its very entertaining
This also works with calling myself things like stupid, worthless, trash, etc. Even if you do this jokingly to yourself, your brain still believes it, and keeps up the cycle. Seriously, I found that when I stopped saying these things about myself, even jokingly, it made a massive difference.
Here’s a tip I picked up from a friend that’s helped me a lot — replace self deprecating jokes with ironically self aggrandizing jokes
Like every time I trip and fall, instead of saying “l’m just a disaster human” I say “I’m the epitome of grace and beauty”
Or like, when I draw a picture I’m not 100% happy with, instead of saying “my art is trash” I say something like “you know I think it’s time we replaced the Mona Lisa”
When you do that you get to make a joke, but you’re ALSO getting practice building yourself up, y’know?
And eventually it becomes a reflex and you get so used to it that you can say nice stuff about yourself even when you AREN’T joking
This is so important
That self-aggrandizing technique is no joke.
I replaced “I’m stupid” with “I’m a God damn genius.” “Move over newton” “another masterpiece”
I replaced “gross/ disgusting” with “sexy/attractive” “the hight of elegance”
I replaced “I suck/ that sucked/ this is bad” with “fantastic”, “a lovely time”, “ swell/jolly good”
Replace every negative with a positive. Say it so sarcastically. Make it complicated make it entertaining have fun with it.
It will stop your self deprecating and build confidence. And people are more easygoing around you.
Saw an op-ed that was on the surface a complaint about kids not wanting to take on family heirlooms but read like an elegy to dying traditions. The hardest part was the anxiety without recognizing that they didn’t pave the way for the decisions they assumed their kids would make.
(This is written entirely within the dominant white/western culture - about traditions that have neglectful stewardship rather than those actively suppressed)
The anxiety makes sense. You’re seeing, too late to do anything about it, that there’s no foundation - no space - for the traditions you expected to pass on. Your kids _can’t_ take your mom’s fine china. So now instead of enjoying what you have you worry about its future.
I see a pattern in these op-eds though - a pattern in what’s left unsaid. There were responsibilities tied to these traditions. You collectively assumed they _would_ be passed along. So collectively, what did you do to ensure those traditions _could_ be passed along?
Op-eds never speak for everyone, but it’s worth acknowledging the pattern in what speech is deemed worth sharing widely. And in this particular pattern, there’s an answer: that answer looks like “nothing.”
You want the china passed down but your kids have no room in their rentals. You want grandkids but your kids don’t have the financial stability. You want that cross-country RV neverending road trip but you’ve had decades of wanting lower taxes more than you wanted infrastructure.
The bleak outlook for traditions is a direct result of the unmaintained foundations for them.
The second best time is always now - if it’s important enough to op-ed about, what are you willing to change to get it back? What will you give up or re-prioritize?
I kinda think that world-defining assumptions are always gonna break without maintenance. So rather than getting mad at whoever’s next for not carrying on the norms we didn’t do upkeep on, when it’s my turn, I hope I’m introspective enough to help instead of externalize & blame.
This.
The bleak outlook for traditions is a direct result of the unmaintained
foundations for them.
The second best time is always now - if it’s important enough to op-ed
about, what are you willing to change to get it back? What will you give
up or re-prioritize?
I follow a Facebook group of “Memories of …” for my hometown - a rustbelt community that has gone from a thriving hub of industry to a much-less-thriving place.
The group is a collective lament. Decades-old pictures of well-kept churches. Aerial shots of the main intersection downtown, lined with big cars. Scanned advertisemetns from local stores featuring pictures of their interiors. These alternate with the drumbeat of news: the Catholic diocese is closing churches. Selling them. Tearing them down. STores downtown are closing. The traffic light has been replaced with a four-way-stop.
“That’s the church my parents were married in!” “How could they tear down that beautiful building. Such memories!” “All the businesses are closing. It must be the taxes.” ”They’ve sold the old lodge downtown.” “They’re not opening the skating rink this year. We always used to go.”
And sometimes I chime in.
“Do you attend that church? Do you give? Or do you just want the building to look pretty for you? “ “Do you volunteer at that park? Why not?” “Did you vote for that recreation bond issue?” “Are you a member of that Lodge? Why not?” “Do you shop downtown? Or did you start shopping at Walmart and Amazon to save a few bucks?”
If you feel something is worth preserving, why do you not participate in its preservation?
With that in mind, we’re all gonna remember that JKR is a terf who has literally been cited by legislators engaged in legislation that actively harms trans people, and we’re not gonna give her any more money.
That means not streaming the new show on Netflix, because regardless of how much influence she has on the production, she gets paid for it.
We’re gonna make the show flop. We’re gonna show Warner Brothers that we don’t forget (of course, how would we forget, it isn’t as if she’s stopped), and that their business association with terfs is no longer profitable.
It is NOT like Lovecraft, because Lovecraft is very dead and his works are in the public domain. By consuming Lovecraft media, you are not giving any money to old Howard.
everyone posting that “my generation lost hobbies” post is so stupid like no you fuckwits hobbies were stolen from you by a system that demands you work 8 hours a day to earn a tiny percentage of the profit you generate, leaving you too exhausted and brainwashed to enjoy exercising passion without financial incentive
Not to mention if you DO somehow have that energy to create, people put pressure on you to monetize it. You can’t draw for the sake of drawing, your family and friends think you’re good enough that you need to sell it. You can’t sing for the sake of singing, you have to turn that into a career or shut up. You can’t write fanfiction for your own enjoyment, you’re wasting time when you could be working on your OWN novel.
These are sentiments that have been told to me over the years. That people think you are ‘wasting your talents’ if everything you do isn’t for the sake of profit. And I’m here to tell you folks… that’s SAD.
yeah theres no way to stop using amazon completely because they own so many things and many websites use them for hosting, but audible is something we really dont need. amazon is already trying to replace public libraries with “audible amazon libraries” and we cant let that happen. your libraries are already payed for with taxes ((though normally way underfunded because politicians normally dont care enough))
use libby or overdrive for audiobooks or ebooks, support libraries and buy from their used books sale (ive scored so many awesome books, and old books! as well as some great cds and movies) , and many libraries also mail out books!! theres so many options and libraries are always changing to make themselves more accessible for everyone, so support them! theyre such an important part of your community.
