Sara > Recent Status Updates

"egoless, mirroring witness, mourning. And is that not so very true of real life, that we simply need to be seen and heard in order to move on, that we don't want someone to sedate us or fix us. First we just want them to listen and not just that are we not right to want this. Do we not so often have something valuable that should be witnessed?:

"suffering cannont abate until it has been deeply seen and heard"

..... If a system is broken, no matter how broken she is, what is most needed is for her to say no. Especially, if she has even a scrap of freedom and power because there are so many people in the world who have no freedom, no power and no way to repair their broken systems."

"if a system is broken, our injured protagonist being nice and kind and generous and compliant at the expense of being fierce and honest and brave and just, doesn't do anyone any good in the long run.....

"They want pain to be fixable. They want her to be fixable. They don't want hear that they too might need a little fixing."

"It is the reality, it is what's happening and that means she has to claim this. She has to claim that her reality is the truth. No matter what anyone else says. Which will probably be one of the hardest things she will ever do. An illness of the shadow is largely generated by the culture itself and so it upsets people when she brings what she knows up from the root system and into the light."

"that is once you begin to work in the dark, see in the dark, without being quite so afraid of and antagonistic towards the dark what so often begins to happen slowly, down there, deep in the dirt you begin to grow. Rather you begin to grow down, you begin to have stronger, healthier roots and therefore a more solid foundation; physical, emotional and culture on which to stand."

"A profound lack of anger is no gold star achievement. In fact it occurred to me as a thousand lightening bolts blew around the room, and the wind howled, and the rain went sideways, my profound lack of anger was profoundly damaging me."

"My problem was that the medical system was really and truly not set up for illnesses like mine, which intentionally or not resulted in extremely bad and often explicitly abusive medical care.

"as insurance companies buckle under the weight of unprecedented levels of chronic illness, families buckle under the weight of medical bills, and the economy groans while trying to support a healthcare system that in many ways encourages us to stay sick."

"If we are smart, instead of disowning our bodies, disowning our femininity, disowning the very things that make us special and valuable, the very aspects that are being so mistreated in medicine and in the workplace and making us so sick, this is the area where we need to lean in. Into our difference into what is dissimilar but powerful about us. Into what we need, which a male may not need."

“It doesn’t seem like much. But sometimes just being yourself - really, truly yourself - can be the most difficult thing to be.”

“I mean what I love about Bengali culture is much more than henna or the food, but those are things we can share here meaningfully.”

“Something I made into reality because I gave too much weight to my heart?”

"If Ammu and Abbu aren't going to accept me, that's fine. If the girl I have a crush on is going to compete against me using my own culture, that's fine too. But I'm tired of being ashamed. My choice is clearly laid out in front of me. I'm going to choose me."

“Northern California had few African Americans before migrants like Frank Stevenson arrived during World War II in search of jobs. The government was not following preexisting racial patterns; it was imposing segregation where it hadn’t previously taken root.”

“We have created a caste system in this country, with African Americans kept exploited and geographically separate by racially explicitly government policies. Although most of those policies are now off the books, they have never been remedied and their effects endure.”

“Private discrimination also played a role, but it would have been considerably less effective had it not been embraced and reinforced by government.
Half a century ago, the truth of de jure segregation was well known, but since then we have suppressed our historical memory and soothed ourselves into believe it that it all happened by accident or by misguided private prejudice.”

“There is generally no judicial remedy for a policy that the Supreme Court wrongheadedly approved. B this does not mean that there is no constitutionally required remedy for such violations. It’s up to the people, through our elected representatives, to enforce our Constitution by implementing the remedy.”

"The choice she wants me to make isn't between being gay and straight, its between them and me. Who do I choose?"

When in fact, we might very well be better served by making the case for our powers without apology. We might be better served by making the case for sensitive and the need to be sensei to a poor environment before things get out of control."

"this posturing has simply caused us to attack ourselves, to demonize our own natural menstrual cycles and poo poo our own natural tears, to snip at the idea that we really are, on the whole, a little bit more collaborative. ...

"Thanks to our hormones, we gently wax and wane every single month, exactly like the moon, exactly like the earth itself. A healthy relationship with darkness runs right through our reproductive system and that should not be a problem at all."

"When we have said too many times, 'I'll sleep when I'm dead', the blackfish says, 'As you wish.'"

"Don't we have the best medical care in the whole world? Put simply, no. Our medicine puts simply is missing its other half, the darker half, the slower half, the more compassionate half, the half that is willing to descend, to search and figure out what is truly going on, no matter how inconvenient it is, so the patient can finally, genuinely ascend."

"She has the absolute right to be feminine to be sensitive to her underworld's signals. There are no systems in place to support this right and if the environment she is living in is a bad one, partly by her own creation but mostly driven unconsciously by the culture at large, well then she's going to override this critical message. Instead of going down and in, she will brush her shoulders off and soldier on."

"Add to this a culture of sexual assault and discrimination that simmers below the surface. That is routinely and institutionally disappeared, papered over, and made to look as if everything is fine. Just fine. Nothing to see here. We've become a people who live increasingly for the solar aspects of our lives, we strive for this at all costs. Even if this means burning out or burning up in the sun."

"So the basic idea is that health exists when there is a cultivated balance between the positive side of both; for example a robust military and a robust safety net. But that concept 'healthy tension' is where we get into trouble because we don't consider these two ledgers to be coequal, complimentary balancing partners. We arrange them in a hierarchy. Masculine over feminine."

“It’s funny that Flavia and I are from such different parts of the world but our parents have the same philosophy. They shifted us halfway across the world, risking our culture, putting us in the middle of two nations and giving us an identity crisis, all because they believe it gives us more opportunities.”

“It’s just that I’m not sure I would want to go back to Bangladesh permanently, or even semi-permanently. Aside from the fact that being gay there is punishable by death, I’m also not sure where I would even fit in. I don’t fit in here, but would I fit in there any better? I don’t think so.”