relative hospitalised w/ ascites from terminal liver cancer, main tendon in hip totally fucked, nerve damage getting worse in my dominant hand & nightmare GP refusing to refer me to neuro bc I’m black so can’t be in real pain/have nerve damage.
All in one week.
I am so tired of being alive.
A poem in black text on a white background. It reads; Today, like every day, the body politic hurts. The political is never just political, after all. The body politic will pick up the phone. The body politic will make an appointment, knowing politics Is in it’s voice, it’s turn of tone. The body politic will sit in a physician’s office, Politics in it’s melanocytes, it’s pathophysiology, it’s origins, in the doctor’s diagnosis (or lack thereof). The body politic will continue to ache. The doctor will continue to have sympathy in her voice, and apathy in her eyes, and melanocytes unburdened by politics. The body politic will continue to ache. To sicken, to bend, to suffer. (The body politic Would like not to be politic. It would like to just be a body.)
[through gritted teeth, obviously lying] I love being African and trying to get treatment for my this untreated nerve damage and chronic back pain.
The ultimate diaspora nightmare scenario is when a white man from Surrey
a) starts dropping peanut stew & stiff pap recommendations
b) blows up my spot and suddenly auntie is charging me £20 for one plate or
c) starts his own spot and charges £30 for a shite, white small plates version of it.
I’ve seen five white influencers named like. Rupert/Henry/Throckmorton/whatever-the-fuck drop their jollof restaurant recommendations and/or their spots for gentrified white ppl jollof.
With everything video, I’ve been like “thank god Botswana has such a tiny diaspora & relatively unknown food.”
the one benefit of being from a small diaspora population is that it’s a lot harder for white people to gentrify the cuisine
great-aunt’s biopsy & PET scan are back. It’s liver cancer & it’s metastatic to the bones, so incurable and terminal. doctors say 9 months to a year. fuck this year man
A belated but entirely heartfelt CONGRATULATIONS!!!! 🎉
May you and Markus’ marriage be filled with love, laughter and every possible blessing the world has to offer. I’m so happy for you both!!!
This Non-Violent Stuff’ll Get You Killed - Charles E. Cobb Jr, The Wretched of The Earth - Frantz Fanon, Starting Somewhere: Community Organising For Socially Awkward People - Roderick Douglass, Are Prisons Obsolete? - Angela Davis, Orientalism - Edward Saïd, Revolutionary Suicide - Huey P. Newton
and, for the love of god;
DO NOT SWAT ME/TRY & GET A WELFARE CHECK.
I am in a good place mentally and of sound mind, none of which will be the case if one of yous gets me sectioned, for reasons Clearly Stated In Above Thread.
anyway. Marlowe Hates Psychiatry Hour is over bc I’m sad and angry.
Read everything @chantalalive.blacksky.app has written about sanism & support her writing, watch @theabigailthorn.bsky.social ‘s video on conversion therapy & donate to Anne Healthcare.
except the state, which seeks to marginalise & scapegoat, and those who stand to make a profit from it (pharma companies, private secure units & private NHS contractors etc.)
AND A LOT OF THE TIME, EVEN *IF* YOU’RE RICH WHITE AND CISHET! psychiatric care, as it currently functions, is a vice with institutionalisation one side & social control on the other, lined w/ the razor wire of racism, misogyny, transphobia, abuse & systems that protect abusers. It serves no one—
you’re told that these frameworks and systems are there to help you. In reality, if you’re not white, rich & cishet, they open the floodgates to experiencing abuses that will worsen your mental health unfathomably.
how could I, if I needed to, ask for psychiatric intervention, when I know a not insignificant number of the people I’d see would pathologise my transness and put EVEN MORE barriers to transition in place for me?
and institutionalised in a framework that has proven itself to be heinously abusive of BAME people, trans people and sick people time and time and time again.
fuck, the ENTIRE psychiatric framework is based on racism! just look at how ODD is diagnosed & who is most frequently diagnosed with it!
CW‼️sui ideation
—
it’s all very well & good my (cis, white, middle class, safe upbringing) GP telling me that the normal amount of ideation is zero.
That’s not my lived reality. However, I cannot properly articulate my particular circumstances without immediately being sectioned —
CW‼️sui ideation, sui attempts, cPTSD, sanism, institutional racism & institutional transphobia
—
Do you know what going to the GP about your mental health, especially if it’s acute/at crisis point as a trans person gets you?
Sectioned and conversion therapy, or it’s NHS equivalent.
CW‼️sui ideation, sui attempts, cPTSD, sanism & institutional racism
—
The thing is, as a person of colour and a transgender person, I cannot seek the intervention I need. Do you know what saying “only the normal amount” to the ideation q., gets you if you’re black? arrested & sectioned.
CW‼️sui ideation, sui attempts, cPTSD, sanism & institutional racism
—
I’ve been living with this as just A Thing Going On In The Background that I’m now able to intuit when things are moving from my baseline to Uh Oh, Intervention Needed territory.
CW‼️sui ideation, sui attempts, cPTSD, sanism & institutional racism
—
for every day of my life since exiting the circumstances that triggered it, I’ve been suicidal. Since adolescence, it’s gone from acute to passive, but it is an ever present facet of my life.
CW‼️sui ideation, sui attempts, cPTSD, sanism & institutional racism
—
I had an Eventful Childhood™️ which has resulted in ~17 years of cPTSD. this has, perhaps unsurprisingly, resulted in lifelong Interesting Mental Mental Health, an iteration of which was a first sui attempt at age 10
the frustrating thing about psychiatric care as it currently functions is that it discourages anyone who does genuinely need psychiatric help from seeking it
youse are so full of hate & ableism. high support needs autistic people are reliant on disability for care, and that one of the fairly common presentations of anxiety disorders is extreme agoraphobia. baiting al l the worst Yer Da types at the cost of people’s lives & dignity. Sickening.
she, and everyone else in her situation, deserve someone with the relevant clinical experience & expertise to properly walk them through, not some guy whose dissertation was a) in infection science and b) mediocre
it’s not fair to my great aunt to have me (a non-practicing, not HCPC registered biomed guy) explaining why she’s having scans and procedures done, when I am So Completely Not The Guy to do it
I am BEGGING physicians to actually start ensuring that their patients understand the life-changing diagnoses and associated procedures they’re being given. This is the bare minimum duty of care
currently having to explain information pertaining to whether or not my great aunt has metastatic breast cancer to the whole of my family
I hope you enjoy 60+ min video essays on niche narrative art books!
Here is my latest on 'Sunset At Zero Point' the new book from Simon Stahlenhag, the mind behind 'The Electric State' & 'Tales From The Loop'.
