This post started on the MetaDemon – 💚🐇
If you’ve never been here, hi, I’m Sabi, an Indigenous Latina Multidisciplinary Artist. I have CPTSD and other disabilities.
Because of my complex post traumatic stress ” disorder” one of the main struggles I have in life is self advocacy. This makes surviving from self employment without funds for marketing and counting on mutual aid incredibly challenging, painful and dangerous. I know mutual aid is meant to be reciprocal. I constantly see many who only focus on their needs or the needs of one person and treat it like charity. Mutual Aid is a community effort to give and receive all forms of power, and value it’s not just money, it’s not just platforms and time. It’s an exchange of resources among peoples who have equal worth and all bring something to the table but it doesn’t always look the same.
My entire life I’ve wanted nothing more than to bring life, light and love into the world. When I was working in the death machine to keep my family alive my soul was dying daily – I have no normie non-spiritual way to explain this, atheists have never been able to comprehend my level of spiritual and mental agony in that space, to say it simply I had continual suicidal ideation every single day of my life. Working for pharma, financial institutions, and other companies profiting from need while seeing the unhoused, the poor, the abused locally and globally tore me apart as the machine made me feel powerless.
The truth is no one is powerless and we all have inherent value, we all have something to give and share and we all can take and receive. Even if you’re poor, unhoused or rich and comfortable. Our value doesn’t change due to limitations or disabilities, it doesn’t change with what you have to give. Many of us have things to offer the community that the death machine cannot value because it cannot monetize it. Every second you breathe you can bring life into this world and lean into the fact that we all will die one day but it doesn’t mean we should allow ourselves and others to be consumed like fuel. Fear of starvation or otherwise going without shouldn’t rule our every day decisions. The death machine is ruled and fueled by fear.
I’ve been without in many ways for my entire life – the emotional neglect I lived through until my teens is a huge part of why I am how I am. It was in my teens actually that I was liberated from my first abuser, my father, and later my second abuser, my brother, in my mid 20s. I have been working to heal and find my real self and stop masking because that conditioning no longer served me. Every time I allow myself to be seen my whole system feels danger and not just danger to myself but to everyone I love.
If Mom tried to meet my needs in childhood she would get hurt physically, emotionally, mentally etc. If she wasn’t there to defend me my father would attack me head on and later he indoctrinated my brother to do so.
CPTSD is a result of conditioning for survival – once the abuser or abusive environment is gone these patterns become toxic to the self and others. I literally cannot even say “check out this video I made” or “hey I have this piece of art for sale,” without facing deep rooted pain and self gaslighting that is here for good. It’s built into my neuropathways, it’s not going anywhere. Now the things I listed are basic needs for my self employment as a disabled artist and small business owner. It’s a million times harder to say “I need help to eat and have a place to sleep.” My basic needs were constantly neglected when I was a child. If I was cold and Mom tried to comfort me, a fight broke out. If I couldn’t eat something because of my dietary needs, a fight broke out. If I was sick or in pain, a fight broke out. If for some miraculous reason I was taken to a doctor and something wasn’t perfect (which the one time we went that I remember it wasn’t perfect because… I’m disabled) I got shit for it. It was my fault my body wasn’t able, it was my fault my body had needs.
These 22-23 ish months of not having income from slave labor coporate jobs has had me in a constant trauma response, 24/7 no matter what, even when my needs of food and shelter are met. I shouldn’t have to rehash my trauma to make anyone understand my capacity or lack of capacity but here we are
Poverty itself is trauma, but this whole ordeal has me constantly getting pulled into my 8 yr old self, alone, scared, wishing to be dead so that my mother doesn’t get beat to a pulp in front of my eyes, or told disgusting and deplorable things loud enough for anyone living near us to hear. It has me constantly in emotional flashbacks of when I was too sick to get out of bed and I got verbally abused for it. It has me constantly wishing I were gone for good so no one would ever have to see me or hear me or be bothered with me ever again.
I lived a life of repressed emotions and continually have been gaslighted by many who come along and can’t handle my truth/their reality to treat me as if I am unhinged, too emotional and have no logic or sense at all. The sanism surrounding my emotions is disgusting and I won’t stand for anyone or anything treating me like I should be in an institution simply for standing up for my or standing up for others.
I will never stand for ablism and lately people have been using spiritual bypassing to unload pure abuse from the machine’s label of me. It’s gross, it’s childish and I have no room for such things.
There is nothing wrong with my emotions. There is nothing wrong with how I handle my emotions.
I will not accept this BS under any circumstances.
I have always had control of my emotions – most of my life it was too much control because everyone wants to snub me out instead of facing themselves and their fears.
I’m not here to placate anyone.
I’m here to heal and bring life, even if it hurts. If you can’t handle the flames, don’t play with fire.
I never asked anyone to be here
You’re here by choice. I refuse to change who I am to please someone else. This doesn’t mean I’m a rock and refuse to bend but I chose to bend for those who honor me, who honor my needs and try to see me. I know someone specifically out there who asked that of someone they love, to simply be seen. We are not perfect.
Right to comfort is an anti value for me, this is language I’m learning. I struggle with this in the face of abuse because I refuse to spoon feed an abuser who refuses to look at themselves and where they fail. It’s not my job to overfunction and navigate someone else’s inner world for where they lack and where they’re ruled by fear and toxic behavior patterns. It is not my responsibility to put up with abuse or stay in a toxic environment to hope others catch up. I played that role for my father and my bother and countless other assholes in my 40 years of life. It hurts and furthers my abuse, it fortifies the label placed on me by the death machine. I will not stand for it.
I say no to this label.
No means no, and that’s true in all context. Projecting your weaknesses onto others and then immediately skirting under your disabilities to avoid responsibility is toxic and ablist as fuck and I’m not here to play with that bullshit. I’m not here to watch people try to gain pity for their mistakes – pity is charity, charity is capitalist BS, pity is white supremacy at its best. The people who have crossed these boundaries probably won’t even read this but it’s here for the benefit of anyone in a similar situation and similarly trying to navigate this changing world.
I’m completely for psych abolition as a mental health advocate well aware that the systems of this world are here to demonize those of us who don’t conform to their boxes and those of us who refuse to drug ourselves up enough so as to not care about the death machine just to get another meal and keep shelter or keep hubris. The death machine is full of systems that criminalize those of us who self medicate but it loves to shove drugs in our face to keep us chained to their cubicles of death.
I’m a trauma survivor. I don’t think toxic behavior is okay but I also know that an abuser was also abused and I have dedicated my life to try and break these cycles. I would say this even about someone like Trump or Harris, just fyi…
I don’t have the answers; I don’t know where to even start but all of me wishes my father had, had the capacity to heal and see reality and not the delusion he had to create to keep himself alive. All of me also wishes my brother would have that capacity and it hurts to feel like he’s a lost cause. I wouldn’t say that about anyone but some lines must be drawn to break cycles of abuse.
Only you have the power to wake up and find your light and your voice and overflow with love to bring yourself into the light. I can be here to try and help but to I’m no one’s savior. I’m just some girl in a universe, and our universe is one who has light and life and love to be found.
Your voice matters
Your light matters
You are powerful
Let in the light
A friend gently pushed me to self advocate because of my housing insecurity, if you’ve learned something from what I have to offer as a disabled mental health advocate please keep my family housed and safe. You can find out how to become a Bun Supporter Monthly or give a one time contribution here.
