#been reading tons of Palestinian prison literature lately

[trans-axolotl]

getting arrested brought up a lot of psych trauma for me and there's so many things from years ago that are just playing on repeat in my mind right now. i haven't been this fucked up about solitary confinement for a long time. I've spent the first two weeks after getting arrested sleeping on the floor of my friends rooms because I can't be alone in a room without freaking out. and getting arrested wasn't anywhere near as bad as solitary in the psych institution or getting brutalized by the cops when they sectioned me. But it was just close enough to remind me of how fucking scared i was back then. how many fucking times i lost my mind. how the worst part wasn't even the assaults but that knowledge that by getting those diagnoses on my chart, i would never be seen as credible again. I had to lie there, understanding that psychiatric authority could rewrite my every action into a symptom that justified increased confinement. It didn't matter that parts of my madness were in response to the carceral violence i was surviving and that i had been placed in a situation where self-destruction was my only path for demanding autonomy. it did not fucking matter, because i had become a "patient" and that meant i would never be believed again in a system that prioritized social control over any real safety, care, or healing.

last week when they got me alone in a cell with five cops i started to feel that same type of fear that i felt all those years ago when i had to prepare myself to survive some pretty fucking unspeakable things. the moment it sunk in i would be there alone, with no witnesses, i started to feel that same type of powerlessness again. those labels of patient and criminal are weaponized in the same way to create a situation where your words, your protests, your actions are not legible or believed in any way (civil death is how the philosophers would probably describe it. "world-destroying world" is how they refer to solitary confinement.) Sitting in court for hours this week feels the same--seeing dozens of cases each day where the judge is just destroying people's lives and doesn't even fucking care.

i am so angry. i am so fucking angry. i've known all this shit for years, i've joined programs to learn to copwatch and courtwatch and inside-outside organizing and hours and hours of anti carceral suicide support training, harm reduction organizing, trying to build similar stuff for my institutionalized comrades. but i am just so fucking angry every day about the amount of people whose lives are destroyed, who are murdered by the state in these fucking places. it's the same fucking shit over and over again and like, this time i had comrades and community and knowledge and had that type of support I could rely on even when I was in there alone. but I want to scream when I think about how many people don't have any of that shit going through the same fucking thing day after day, who are as alone as I was four years ago, who disappear and are cut out of our communities day after day and we don't always even know whose missing. i want to scream and just keep screaming. i want to tear all this shit down, i don't want the world where I live in to be one where prisons and jails and institutions and any fucking form of confinement still stands.