#climate trauma

[rodwhite]

In the world's dark night of the soul: Do these three old things

In the Woods by Lourdes Bernard. https://www.lourdesbernard.com/ I began my psalm last Sunday like this: The world is inconsolable, on constant alert for the next trauma, perpetually waiting for the other shoe to drop. I can feel it in my old bones, too. A lot of us feel dragged down. Poor Joe Biden has an administration doing amazing things and everyone hates him. The economy is the best in the…

[dhyzenmedia]

California fires leave lasting mental health issues for survivors

In November 2018, the Camp Fire burned a total of 239 square miles, destroyed 18,804 structures and killed 85 people, making it the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California history. Three years later, researchers at University of California San Diego, published a novel study that looked at the…

[burr-ell]

What I love about Spy x Family's recent chapters concerning Martha and Henry—two secondary characters with little direct connection to the plot as we've known it—is that Endo's taking the opportunity to once again hammer home what the story's actual stakes are. The idea of potential conflict between Ostania and Westalis isn't just window dressing for a wacky wholesome badass family gimmick—the previous wars are real events that various characters lived through, and all of them are in some way affected by it and have good reasons to want to avoid another one. This is primarily an action-adventure/slice-of-life manga with a lot of sendups to spy movies and pop culture of the 60s, but I think those things hold much more weight with the thematic underpinning of the horrors of war and the ruin it leaves behind.

[thepeacefulgarden]

[greensaplinggrace]

the darkling says “fine, make me your villain” because he is. what’s not clicking

[bacchuschucklefuck]

this whole thing being abt rage is also really interesting. I feel like it comes up so much in fiction as a motive because it's the one emotion that's unifyingly restless while everything else can be petrifying, and just personally nothing hits like impotent rage for me, esp. with teen characters, esp. with characters whose rage is stoked by Someone Else to further that Someone Else's cause. like you'll have done all that in a bout of passion and when you're done you look around you and nothing has changed. those sentiments don't get quelled by being satisfied. righteousness withdrawal is a horrible thing to intentionally drag someone into, least of all just some kids.

[local-redhead-bookworm]

If you somehow managed to watch any of Mobile Suit Gundam and think it was apolitical, I am going to tape your eyes open and force you to rewatch it

[gxlden-angels]

Doomsday Cult Christians when the Doomsday Cult ideology causes Doomsday anxiety in their kids:

[balestrem]

Quiet quitting is one of the most bizarre things to me to be discussed in 2022. 

It’s mostly bizarre to me, because of the entitlement older generations have towards younger generations and the ignorance they enforce upon my generation, especially in Germany, where I grew up.

You have older generations, usually the generation of my parents, calling us lazy, unable to work well under pressure, etc. I’d like to give insight into the fact that our school system was designed to recreate a work-like state from the age of six. You go to school, learn stuff, go home, do unpaid labor, called “homework”, which has to be good, otherwise you’re labeled as stupid and unable to keep up and have to repeat a year in school. I partially had a workload of 12 hours per day, not because I was poorly structured, but because I had four school subjects per day, with four different kinds of homework which all required at least 30, if not 90 minutes of investment, to do homework properly. Add to that my dyslexia and you get at least 30 minutes more than others. But even non dyslexic students sat there for hours doing homework. I even had my mother do my homework for me, because the work load was too much. Let that sink in.

Then you have a system that rewards pupils who are never sick, by pointing out how there is one kid in class with the most sick days, as though it is their fault that they get sick. Meanwhile you have underpaid and overworked school staff who cannot handle instances of bullying accordingly, resulting in pupils being more sick, especially mentally due to continuous bullying. You create a place that is literally designed to be hostile to human nature, by forcing people to sit still for multiple hours a day, move during breaks to „prevent health problems“ in the future, but give so much homework that hobbies and personal interests can barely be done, and usually if one performs bad at school they have to quit their hobbies because they need to focus more on school or they have their parents cancel their hobbies for them (if they could afford a hobby to begin with), resulting in more stress, because of less possibilities to destress. Then you have heavy school bags that literally fuck up people‘s backs for life, because they have to carry like 10-20kgs of books and folders per day (this was my reality, I kid you not). Then we had no proper food at our cafeteria (for the first four years we had no cafeteria at all, but had to go to school until 3 or 4pm, with no proper food). 

Then you have weird power dynamics with teachers who bully you and abuse their power and give you bad grades, just because they think a person with dyslexia should not get the chance to go to university, thereby giving them bad grades, by not answering any of their questions during exams (also something that happened to me and other students as well). And if it’s not dyslexia there is another aspect that a teacher will hate about you and mock you for and treat you like you’re less than a human being than others.

Then we entered a school system that was changed by graduating one year earlier to go to university sooner in Germany, but the school books were not ready for that so we had to carry two books per subject at times, because the subjects we discussed required two books of two school grades. We had no coherent teachings and had to read a lot of stuff at home, by our selves, because the curriculum to teach us properly was not yet developed. And we were asked to understand it all and there was never time for any questions.

Then we finish with a degree, have terrible payments, cannot afford a reasonable lifestyle and are forced to suck it up. Then we have shortages in almost every area, a pandemic we went through a financial crisis, a war that effects the economy and destabilizes a lot in other countries, we have a climate crisis which no politican seems to take seriously enough to do proper change, basically my generaiton in Germany will not have any rent and no positive prospects for the future. Far right extremism seems to be on the rise world wide.

I had my first burn-out in fourth grade and had to go to therapy, because school life was so tough and nobody did anything. I had a parent at home who created immense pressure and guilt if I failed, who regularly assaulted me verbally.

And now our “generation is just lazy”? That shoe just doesn’t fit.

[faithfromanewperspective]

i'm gonna say this. to the people, and that's many of us, facing the consequences of climate change right now: you have been wronged and had your accommodations for the land you live in taken away in order for you to be feeling its impacts. it's not inevitable and it never was, we've had the technology to prevent all but the most unexpected accidents for decades (as shown by the fact that deaths to natural disasters have been decreasing for the last century or so) and if you haven't been protected by that, that is an injustice in of itself, on top of the injustice that is climate change itself. which if you've been adversely impacted by that, i don't care if you drive a car or can't afford solar panels or eat meat, it wasn't your fault. you're not the one who put these systems in place and you didn't deserve to face the consequences of other people's careless decisions.

[brandyschillace]

The Fury of Job

A new understanding of an old myth has made me feel a little better this morning about being tired and furious.

“Absent the book’s likely tacked-on epilogue, the Book of Job teaches that there is no final victory, no ultimate divine deliverance. As I think about how to respond to the concurrent cataclysms threatening the nation and the globe, I at least want to be Job—not a person with divine patience, but one who cares so much for his fellow mortals that he will spit acidic truth into the face of the Lord to the very end.”

“Maybe the moral of Job is this: If God won’t create just circumstances, then we have to. As we do, Job’s honesty—in the face of both a harsh, collapsing world and the kinds of ignorant devotion that worsen it—must be our guiding force.”

“the other lesson of Job, the implicit one: This is all we’ve got, and it has to be worth it. Crucially, Job doesn’t kill himself. He curses the day he was born, but he doesn’t bring about the day of his death. He chooses to believe that continued existence is preferable to its opposite.”

[nabaath-areng]

Other thing that happened today was that one of the red kites that hang around in the pastures flew RIGHT above us while tending to the hives, the WING SPAN is absolutely incredible at that close distance!!!

And the blue tits and woodpeckers that live in our garden also kept us company just watching as we worked while munching their food...

Usually birds can pose a risk to bees by trying to break into the hives, but here everyone just co-exist peacefully.

... Except for last year when the blue tits and flugsnappare (idk english name) fought about WHO should get to claim the bird houses. Which was funny cause there's room for all of you here!!! This year they've reconciled and are just chilling...

I feel so blessed honestly to have been born into this life? Modernization and industrialization made traditional farms nearly impossible to run, but I love to feel so connected to it and my family even though it runs differently now. Centuries of farmers leading up to this and I wouldn't trade it for the world.

We had to give up on the cows and chickens when I was very young, but maybe one day it will be possible to do small scale farming like this again in general.

[queerbrownvegan]

For many of us the natural response to respond in witnessing or seeing a disaster is calling it a natural disaster. Why? Because we’ve been taught to process climate disasters as natural or more so like a phenomenon that happens occasionally. But over the last few decades, these climate disasters have been unfolding at rapid rates in which species do not have time to process, survive, and strategize. Trauma has a way of hindering our minds and also how we show up in our activities.

Trauma freezes us in a place where our brain decides to protect us from the pain, as a mechanism of how much our soul is trying to protect us, but it also hinders our ability to heal at times. We are seeing high rates of environmental land trauma, whether from displacement from colonial forces, the death of living systems, or the disappearance of culture. What was once a sacred space for joy is now a desecrated area that has been damaged. We absorb that as beings, we feel it, see it, smell it, and change the way we move from that point on.

When I heard the term Tierratrauma from Glenn Albrecht, it stuck with me because we often feel that we overreact when witnessing climate disasters. But the truth is, this expression is valid and our experiences have lasting effects on the brain. How can we protect ourselves when crises continue to plunder our minds and bodies. How do we begin to shift conversations around anxiety to trauma and rage of those who have faced the most harm? Those are questions I'd like to answer. qbv

[poetryforventing]

The Language

You ask me how I am and I tell you I’m fine. It’s a front well practiced, one hammered and honed in the flames of a mind that has burned up and on and on and out so many times that it has forged an entire armory of defences.

But you ask me how I am and I tell you I’m fine and you think me plain, dull, awkward, unkind. Alright. But I don’t know that I have a better answer. The world is dying, and I have no hope left. I don’t believe that there is good in all of us. As we speak we’re spilling blood: foreign blood, poor blood, queer blood, girl blood, black blood, native blood in a genocidal fervour that has persisted millenia. And our violence leaves a gouging slash across our collective chest, staining the human consciousness with ever more eternal, immovable shame. I don’t believe everything will work out just fine in the end. I don’t believe we will all be okay.

I’m uncommunicative. It’s true, I’m sorry. But I don’t care about your sex life. I don’t care about your opinions on influencers. I don’t care about your shitty inherited politics. I don’t care what they said on Insta, or Reddit, or X, or Facebook, or TikTok. I don’t care what the hot topic is. Fuck your hot takes. There is blood flowing in the streets, native bones buried beneath the buildings of white settlers, there are generational stains on our souls and yet we work only to sear more grief into the essence of our very beings. Good god, colonialism really taught us nothing. We are killing every last ‘other’ until we are all that’s left, just so that when we kill our world too and go down with it we can claim that it was ours. In the ash of all that is left, perhaps, finally, earth will be as white as we wanted it to be.

You ask me how I am and I tell you I’m fine. You think me cold but I am an inferno inside. I have carved my life into a shell to surround these lashing flames of thought. I don't act how I feel–my whole existence is an energy shield–but, god, I feel hate like you won’t believe. I dream of ripping out throats with my teeth. Capital rules the world and has us kiss its feet, but even that is a lie. The mechanics of power subjugate us in entirety. Capital is just the tool of choice, the selected construct. It is nothing more than a rotten, violent euphemism that cradles us in its maw, waiting for the order to bite.

You wish I would speak more but I have so little to say if we’re not planning the deaths of the bourgeoisie, the policy-makers, the bigots and the land-lords the world over. Every throat I want to taste. Every drop of blood I want to spill in the sort of ritualistic vengeance we absolutely don’t need. Just, please, let me at them. When I'm done I will jump into the sea and it will all be over. Finally.

I can barely even bring myself to get worked up over our changing climate–though I know it’s another active tragedy and, in the moments I stop to think, it makes me sick–when apocalyptic radioactive annihilation is one bad day away, when women’s rights are those of livestock and POC are institutionalised into modern slaves, when we’re living in a world where autonomy and identity are dangerous things. It’s too much grief to contain in one life. It’s too much pain to even attempt to bear. I hope you are starting to see: it’s not any one of these things, it’s everything.

There’s nowhere even to run away. I flew to North America where Pride is sponsored by Target and they build Wendy’s on sacred native land. I returned to England where we practice monarchy and xenophobia as a matter of course, pine for the British empire and laugh openly at the murder of trans girls. Next I go East, where I am ignorant, but things are every bit as twisted, I just won’t put their particularities in my white words, I refuse to appropriate any more into my British Museum of atrocity. In the end I go to bed, where sadness makes sense.

If you’re not angry, you should be. If you’re like me, I’m sorry.

You ask me how I am and I tell you I’m fine. But really I don’t have the words. Even all of this despair and rage is nothing but the bubbling skin of the witch’s brew. The essence of the thing is a wicked magic, not communicable in words, it is violent and immediate and spanning and intrinsic and awful and consuming.

You ask me how I am and I tell you I’m fine. But the truth is I don’t have the language.

[thedreadvampy]

feels shit tbh watching people you know are fundamentally, as much as anyone is fundamentally anything, good and caring people just fucking go slowly step by tiny step towards reactionary bigotry in ways you can't even. put your finger fully on.

[alexcaninnit]

That stupid fucking genshin ad keeps popping up of the cute lil kiddo saying “It’s hard to stay cool in all this dry heat!! :D” And it’s like!!! no it’s not!!!! It is in fact pretty fuckin easy, seeing as how humans are built for it!!!! And now you, lil video game child that is being shown before every fucking youtube video, are the reason we have dumb fucks everywhere denying climate change and wet bulb temperatures!!