getting really pissed off at this fic about tony getting hit by howard this one time as a kid and turning into a woobie and bruce and steve and clint all seem to have no experience with anything short of the most perfect childhood and phil is an automaton and just

no


(edit: ugh that came across as probably a lot more dismissive of child abuse that doesn’t happen on a regular basis than i intended

any questionable feelings i have about how abuse is portrayed in fic stem from how badly fucked up my childhood was and are personal self-esteem issues and not me judging other people)

bogglelovesyou: Okay…you know what, this doesn’t get an owl. And this message goes to the anon who wrote in about her neighbor’s kids who are being abused, too: the kids who you can see screaming and sobbing and desperately trying to get away from their junkie father? And the anon who babysits the kid who is being abused, who screams whenever she’s touched. In fact, anybody reading this who knows someone who is being abused, this is for you:SHAME ON YOU FOR WRITING IN TO ME ABOUT THIS.You are writing in to a cartoon owl when somebody else’s PHYSICAL SAFETY IS IN DANGER. You know right from wrong, don’t you? You don’t need guidance about this! Call social services! I don’t care if your girlfriend would be upset with you for it! I don’t care if it ruins your whole relationship! You are in a position to PROTECT ANOTHER HUMAN BEING FROM ACTUAL, PHYSICAL HARM, and you are writing in to somebody’s blog instead of ALERTING THE AUTHORITIES. There is no acceptable excuse for allowing something like this to continue. For God’s sake, at least try to stop it.Sorry for breaking the Boggle fourth wall, guys, but messages like this make me so angry I can’t see straight. Think about what a better world we might live in if everybody who knew someone was being abused actually did something about it. I know my childhood would have been different. Cannot be said enough. Now I’m clarifying here. If you know abuse is happening, not if you kinda think that person’s dad is a little dodgy or something, do this. I know the lines are muddier in real life. But if there’s enough evidence for the abuser to get chucked in jail, by all means escalate it. During a period when I and several friends were abused daily on the bus home from school, the bus driver never intervened. Wasn’t in his job description. A teacher who had access to my younger self’s journal never did anything but to write “Maybe you should get some help?” in the margin. Both of them should have taken action. This is the sort of thing Boggle means, I believe. If there’s someone - especially if they’re a child unable to take action themselves - in a situation where your voice could make a difference, keeping mum is condoning the status quo. It is, quite possibly, condemning that person to a life with much more hardship than they would have otherwise endured. I later heard that one of the children who shared my predicament had committed suicide. And while it’s taken me years to stop blaming myself, I still can’t help but feel a seething resentment the blind eye that teacher turned, when she could have saved a life and spared the rest of us from further trauma. Please, for the love of all that is good in this world, don’t be that person.
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bogglelovesyou:

Okay…you know what, this doesn’t get an owl. And this message goes to the anon who wrote in about her neighbor’s kids who are being abused, too: the kids who you can see screaming and sobbing and desperately trying to get away from their junkie father? And the anon who babysits the kid who is being abused, who screams whenever she’s touched. In fact, anybody reading this who knows someone who is being abused, this is for you:

SHAME ON YOU FOR WRITING IN TO ME ABOUT THIS.

You are writing in to a cartoon owl when somebody else’s PHYSICAL SAFETY IS IN DANGER. You know right from wrong, don’t you? You don’t need guidance about this! Call social services! I don’t care if your girlfriend would be upset with you for it! I don’t care if it ruins your whole relationship! You are in a position to PROTECT ANOTHER HUMAN BEING FROM ACTUAL, PHYSICAL HARM, and you are writing in to somebody’s blog instead of ALERTING THE AUTHORITIES.

There is no acceptable excuse for allowing something like this to continue. For God’s sake, at least try to stop it.

Sorry for breaking the Boggle fourth wall, guys, but messages like this make me so angry I can’t see straight. Think about what a better world we might live in if everybody who knew someone was being abused actually did something about it. I know my childhood would have been different.

Cannot be said enough.

Now I’m clarifying here. If you know abuse is happening, not if you kinda think that person’s dad is a little dodgy or something, do this. I know the lines are muddier in real life. But if there’s enough evidence for the abuser to get chucked in jail, by all means escalate it.

During a period when I and several friends were abused daily on the bus home from school, the bus driver never intervened. Wasn’t in his job description. A teacher who had access to my younger self’s journal never did anything but to write “Maybe you should get some help?” in the margin. Both of them should have taken action. This is the sort of thing Boggle means, I believe. If there’s someone - especially if they’re a child unable to take action themselves - in a situation where your voice could make a difference, keeping mum is condoning the status quo. It is, quite possibly, condemning that person to a life with much more hardship than they would have otherwise endured.

I later heard that one of the children who shared my predicament had committed suicide. And while it’s taken me years to stop blaming myself, I still can’t help but feel a seething resentment the blind eye that teacher turned, when she could have saved a life and spared the rest of us from further trauma.

Please, for the love of all that is good in this world, don’t be that person.

It's all fun and games: The intelligence problem [tw: bullying, abuse, ableism]

secretsofthedisabled:

Stress RS Rating: Yellow

tw: ableism and the concept of intelligence

trafalgarslaw:

I have seen a lot of people claiming that the concept of intelligence is an inherently ableist one.

While I do agree that yes, judging someone’s worth based on his perceived…

Okay, so I’m adding to Trafalgar’s reply, linked. (Over a thousand words; sorry for dashboard spam!)

Trafalgar is absolutely right when they point out that “intelligence”, in the socially perceived form of the word, is a bell curve. The privilege lies, probably, at slightly above the mean; not at either end.

Perceived intelligence is a really arbitrary thing. So someone who’s really good at chess is really smart, but someone who’s really good at Starcraft isn’t; someone who’s good at understanding IQ or multiple-choice tests or writing in florid language is really smart, but someone who has the skills to survive out on the streets alone as a teenager isn’t. But even though intelligence is a fundamentally flawed concept, and not only are different skills devalued or people who enthusiastically apply themselves to learning ‘ranked’ lower than those who are apathetic but already know a lot, it still, of course, exists. And as a social concept, it is highly damaging to everyone but those around the mean.

Sure, people who are ‘highly intelligent’ can “step-down”. Pretend to be average, I guess. But that’s just as frustrating and emotionally wearying as any other form of trying to live as a person you’re not. Sure, many highly intelligent people also come across as highly arrogant and make people feel terrible. (Part of this, often, is autism. For me personally, it’s gotten to the point where I’m absolutely incapable of taking a compliment or being assertive in any way because for years I have tried to fight this impression.)

But…there are often, although of course not always (inb4 people go “but there was this smart kid at my school who never suffered like you said!”, which in itself - how do you know?), real disadvantages to being perceived as being of high intelligence, whatever that means.

We live in a society which is still not tolerant enough of the differently abled. But we try, and at least where I live there are loud voices currently opposing our government’s plans to slash one-on-one tuition for kids who require it and otherwise make primary education even more of a nightmare for these kids. People on the other end of the spectrum are sometimes treated as the opposite though: the ones who will get by regardless what is done to them. And this is the problem.

I have always been regarded, by the conventional definition, as highly intelligent. Unlike Trafalgar, I was the kind of kid who always aced tests because of an innate ability to recognize patterns in test structure and language. I was the stuck-up, aloof, aspie kid who naturally got along with teachers way too well. Streamed into some Gifted Education Program thing. Able to talk my way into doing whatever the fuck I liked at high school because my grades, or at least my knowledge, was above reproach.

But this meant people, especially in the highly academic-oriented Asian country I grew up in, resented me. It meant I repeatedly had my lunch money stolen off me, that my parents had immense pressure placed on them to “parent me right” because everyone was watching me, that I was (not once, nor twice, but repeatedly) attacked, physically and sexually and emotionally, by people closer to the mean and by teachers who thought me a know-it-all and by my relatives who resented that my non-conformist little person got all the accolades in school.

It meant that when I later developed C-PTSD, I was diagnosed then simply told “but you’re bright, you’ll develop coping mechanisms”. It meant that because I was very verbal about everything but unable to speak at all about the periods of abuse, they must not have happened. That because I was an avid writer and reader of fiction, I kept being told - even to this day - to stop making things up, stop being fanciful. It means that when I ask for extensions on schoolwork because “I’m having a hard time”, I’m met with disbelief.

It has meant to this day that people resent me because I seem to effortlessly do well, and somehow my non-conformity - my being openly queer, or gender-non-conforming, or just socially awkward aspie for that matter (let’s not even go into how people react to my multiplicity, which my partner speculates is an expression of a highly complex mind) - adds insult to injury. That I’m somehow unwittingly going “nyaa, I’m a minority, and you all are privileged and it’s so hard for me but I do better than you all at school anyway, sucks to be you lol”.

Not everyone has had this same experience, but I wager many people regarded as intelligent can identify with the issues around friendship. At various stages in my life, I’ve tried really hard to fit in. And I’ve found that that inevitably entails downplaying my academic intelligence, because that creates, if not resentment, awkwardness. No matter how hard I’ve worked at trying to react in socially appropriate ways or just parse how “normal people” interact, my fundamentally different thinking processes and interests have gotten in the way - and, at school, of course whenever grades were handed back out people either didn’t speak to me for a week or did nothing but wax lyrical about how they wished they were me.

I’m lucky that I’ve grown up with internet access, and I can spend hours discussing the implications of Wikipedia as a cultural phenomenon or god knows what with other people who think like me. I’m lucky to have my intelligence take the form of verbal expressiveness, and to, via one of my alters, have passable social intuition. But that doesn’t mean that I’m playing on, to borrow terminology for privilege, the lowest difficulty level. The lowest difficulty level is that which is assumed to be the default.

Not all people at either end of the curve get severely abused. But it’s obviously true that many face ostracism or hate which they do not fully understand, simply because of who they are. That they definitely are treated differently even if it’s not necessarily obviously “bad-different”. People who are regarded as of low-intelligence have it very, very difficult in a world that only values certain skills, and I don’t deny that. But people who are regarded as highly intelligent often find that they simultaneously have doors shut to them while being expected to pass through them easily. More importantly, academic intelligence absolutely does not imply better coping abilities or social skills or whatever. Doing well at the class part of school doesn’t mean, as often assumed, a child can be assumed to do well at the rest of school - as many a movie has depicted, the geeks get bullied. Somehow their smarts are viewed as compensation for, though often portrayed as comedy, what can’t be anything but hugely emotionally scarring in many cases.

I don’t mean to be standing on a pedestal going “it’s so hard being up here”. We were all plonked into life with different backstories and abilities, and it sucks differently for each of us. I’m just trying to illustrate that the smart kids don’t always have it easy.

That said, being “smart” means I can compensate enough to appear to be doing all right despite the scars, and I guess at least for that I am grateful.

no one speaks of the interim

Once I was embarrassed about how freely I cried.
I said it was allergies, or dust in my eyes,
never that emotions bubbled to the surface
in damp beads.

Now I look back and wish I could remember,
bend double and retch up my rotting fear.
But it is only allergies, or dust in my eyes,
that can bring tears.

I’m coming out of a fairly awful episode. Triggered by a fucking anime I was watching. An animated penknife. This isn’t really a poem, but there we go.

standing on the street corner of your heart

You’d left me in the cold since long before
my teenage years arrived. You never thought
to smile at me, or question what I wore—
it would have been some solace if we’d fought.
No, I was always left to stand alone.
You passed me by with not a single glance.
The way you looked at me cut to the bone.
I found approval in your dark advance,
confused the father-role with what you asked.
(How different could intimacy become
from that in which a younger child would bask?)
I never breathed a word of it to mom.

I should have known you’d one day have your fill.
I gave my all and got a dollar bill.

“it’s all in your head”

I’ve been reading a book titled “out of the well” by Lisa Eskinazi. It’s this young Australian woman’s chronicle of her struggle with extreme bullying and mental illness, and a lack of support from her family, school system, and mental health system.

She sued the department of education for negligence and won.

And… I don’t know. Something about her bravery and complete honesty struck a chord with me, compelling me to share my own thoughts—on her points, but from my story.

These are the points that stuck out to me.

  • Bullying is often minimized in schools, even when the bullied are being physically harmed.
  • Victim-blaming is a ridiculously common syndrome, stemming from denial.
  • Public health systems make mental health help very inaccessible, either due to the cost or the hoops that have to be jumped through to get help. Generally it is after the shit hits the fan well and truly that help is extended.
  • Religious groups have an exceptionally high risk of harming the mentally ill.

There’s absolutely no way I can cover all of that in one post without either seriously upsetting myself or making it completely unreadable. But it’s good fodder for a series of posts on topics I’d probably write about at some point anyway.

So here goes. It may be all in my head, but it doesn’t minimize it. More people need to know that.