grady-lee

[grady-lee]

i’m gonna say something that doesn’t feel good but you might need to hear it: bending over backwards being a people-pleaser, being conflict averse and not telling anyone your needs, and then being resentful and upset when your needs aren’t met is a You problem first

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Pearl Bailey photographed by Carl Van Vechten.

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Brittany Adeline King at digestivo, Madrid

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Larry W. Cook

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[grady-lee]

There is a standard media depiction of a "healed" person. Someone who has Gone To Therapy. I've noticed this in a few works recently. We often see them at the end of a story, maybe in a "ten years later" epilogue. They speak in a soft, serene voice. They have Accepted what they cannot change. They have let go of a lot, including most of what we see them actually care about in the story itself. They are Happy, At Peace, in some non-descript way. They bare little resemble to the person we were actually shown. They bare little resemblance to any person. We were shown, as we usually are in stories, an agent, a desirer, someone becoming. Now they have Become. And they look back on all that silly becoming as something childish that they have moved past. Fire, you know, fire is for children who don't know any better. To be Healed is to have your fire rightly extinguished; to not even miss it.

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i think about this every day

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Martin Carter, Letter 1 [from Poems of Resistance from British Guiana, Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1954, then Poems of Resistance, University of Guyana, Georgetown, 1964], in Poems of Succession, New Beacon Books, London and Port of Spain, 1977, p. 44

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Louisiana Creole woman, Lousiana, southeast USA

Photographer: Mike Perry

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"It's so fucked up women have to do sex work to survive" so trueee it's so fucked up we live in a capitalist society where you need to do work you don't want to do just to be alive. I'm so glad we're talking about ALL the jobs that are forced onto people, especially women, that are full of harassment. Thank God we're not just focusing on jobs that are already heavily stigmatized and shaming women for doing what's necessary to survive, even though every single person has to do that but for some reason it's immoral when it's a stripper instead of a fast food employee

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[grady-lee]

agonizing over all the time you wasted or lost is useless. it’s gone now. you survived in the only way you knew how. doesn’t your survival deserve some recognition too?

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Peter Irungu, Untitled (1990/2000)

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Nellie Mae Rowe and her playhouse <3

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Akuol Deng by Desiree Mattson for Costume Magazine July 2025

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Alice Coltrane