ella--writes - Tumblr blog

[ella--writes]

Israel isn't just breaking international law. It's creating precedent and changing it to make this violence permissible. What happens to Palestinians matters for everyone, everywhere. It sets a precedent that means no where else in the globe is safe. What more do we need to act?

– Noura Erakat

[ella--writes]

Reckoning

Sometimes I listen to a podcast from 2020 or 2021 and I am overcome with a strange nostalgia and sadness for a small part of the pandemic that is now over. During the time when it was common for those who had the privilege to stay home to practice some kind of quarantine, there was an acceptance that everyone was struggling to reckon with the pandemic in some way shape or form.

I remember joining Zoom calls and checking in with people, and the expectation being that none of us were okay. None of us were okay, and we could hold space for that experience. Now, I’m pretending to be okay again. It’s not socially acceptable in the way that it once was (in my circles at least) to talk about the fact that there is an ongoing pandemic that MILLIONS of people have died from COVID-19. So many of those were preventable deaths. The weight of this tragedy is hard for me to comprehend, or at least to comprehend alone. In 2020, it felt like we were trying to comprehend it. To combat it.

Now, even people on the left who I had previously thought myself to be sociopolitically aligned with, are acting as if the pandemic is over. It isn’t. I’m still wearing a mask, when most of the people I know aren’t. To not acknowledge the ongoing pandemic as an active threat to our health and safety, and one that is disproportionately impacting already marginalized communities, especially immunocompromised people, feels dystopically callous to me. It is a strange feeling to be living in a different reality with different facts than the people who I had previously shared so much of my reality with.

I feel this less acutely than many. While I’m still masking in public places and avoiding crowds, I’ve been seeing friends indoors unmasked and even spending occasional time in coffee shops. I don’t feel like the level of social distancing I am doing detracts in any meaningful way from my mental health, especially in comparison to the more severe quarantining I did at the beginning of the pandemic. However, I have family and friends who still, many of them out of the necessity of their health risks, are practicing social distancing that includes seeing no one but close family indoors unmasked without testing, always wearing N95 masks when they have to be in proximity with unmasked people, etc.

I remember what that felt like and it was hard. And it is a privilege for me now to even be able to make the choices of how much I want to social distance without the knowledge that a COVID case would likely kill or disable me. Still, I remember how that isolation felt. I remember what it was like to spend every day so deeply trapped in dark corners of my mind that it was difficult to feel fully engaged with the physical world.

I remember the intimacy inherent in the few social interactions I would have. In the virtual conversations I had with my best friend in those gray days we would exchange the daily mundanities that brought marginal interest to our days. We had a lot of conversations about what kinds of toast we were into that week, and what was the best way to prepare it. Those small connections in that time were magnified in their intensity to me, and I didn’t take them for granted.

I was 18 in spring of 2020. I think that time forever changed the way I relate to the world and to other people. For a while, it felt like that was a collective experience. Now, it feels like a rare, more individual one. I’m not alone in this feeling, but the people who experience and share about it are often overshadowed by the vast majority who have come to terms with this normalization of mass death. This isn’t the only issue that I think breeds this kind of isolation. But it is a pressing one, and I think some of what shocked me about the shift from caring to not caring is that it happened so quickly. I hope that, eventually, more people will realize that there is no normal, and that we are not okay.

[ella--writes]

"To romanticize the mundane is to recognize its inherent beauty, and to actively seek and imagine it. In the context of social media especially, this can be dangerous in that it obscures reality, creates unrealistic beauty standards for life, and can even romanticize aspects of our lives that are harmful (e.g. mental illness). But in obscuring reality, romanticization also brings us closer to a world of fantasy. Is it possible to use the instinct to romanticize our own lives to create fantasy worlds instead?"

#worldbuilding #writing #fantasy #writersoftumblr

[ella--writes]

“Passing Extraordinary”: Beatrix Potter

“Passing Extraordinary”: Beatrix Potter

“On the Germination of the Spores of Agaricineae.”

That was the title of the scientific paper that Beatrix Potter submitted to the Linnean Societyin 1897. The society is the “world’s oldest active biological society” and, at the time that Potter was working in mycology (the study of fungi), not open to women members. Nowadays, we don’t think first of Potter’s scientific work or the way that her…

[ella--writes]

"Restorative justice is focused on the importance of relationships. It is focused on the importance of repair when those relationships are broken, when violations occur in our relationships. It is very much interested in community, because it asks whose responsibility is it to actually meet the obligations and needs that are created through violation? It asks the community to step in fully, to be less of a bystander and more of an actor in trying to repair harm. And finally, it's very much a framework and an ideology and a way of living that is interested in making sure that we remain in right relationship with each other, with the land, with the environment. So that's an expansive view of restorative justice. [...]

Transformative justice takes as a starting point the idea that what happens in our interpersonal relationships is mirrored and reinforced by the larger systems. If you can't think all the time about the interplay between those spheres, you end up too focused on the interpersonal, and therefore you cannot transform the conditions that led to the interpersonal harm and violence that you're dealing with at the moment. I like it because it feels like a more expansive framework and ideology than restorative justice as it's currently being practiced. The histories of both frameworks are just different. They come from different places. They come out of different communities, even if there are overlaps. And I think it's important always to think about where things come from and where things are rooted in order to understand what they are.

For me, transformative justice is about trying to figure out how we respond to violence and harm in a way that doesn't cause more violence and harm. It's asking us to respond in ways that don't rely on the state or social services necessarily if people don't want it. It is focusing on the things that we have to cultivate so that we can prevent future harm. Transformative justice is militantly against the dichotomies between victims and perpetrators, because the world is more complex than that: in a particular situation we're victimized, and in other situations we're the people that perpetrate harm. We have to be able to hold all these things together."

Mariame Kaba, "Moving Past Punishment: Interview by Ayana Young" in We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice

Original talk was on episode 151 of the For the Wild podcast, December 27, 2019