Links: Compassionate truths

DSM Etiquette by Cal Montgomery.

If all you know about someone is that the nursing staff says they have paranoid schizophrenia, Floyd told us — the rules around confidentiality back then were different — then here’s what you know about them: they get told they are wrong an awful lot. Everybody is always telling them that things they see, or things they hear, aren’t real, or that things they are certain of aren’t true.
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It would interfere with the way you felt, the way you got along with the people around you, whether you felt supported or as if there was nobody whom you could count on.

A dirty secret: you can only be a writer if you can afford it by Lynn Steger Strong.

Let’s start with me: I’m not sure how or if I’d still be a writer without the help of other people’s money. I have zero undergrad debt. Of my three years of grad school, two of them were funded through a teaching fellowship; my parents helped pay for the first. The last two years my stipend barely covered the childcare I needed to travel uptown three days a week to teach and go to class and my husband’s job is what kept us afloat.

The Case For Reverse Racism by Tori Douglass.

Liberation is going to feel very bad to people who benefit from inequality. Do you want to know why? Because your nervous system codes privilege as safety. A hard lesson but one worth learning.

So yes, your body is going to be telling you that the loss of privilege you are experiencing is not the creation of equity but in the infliction of harm.

The good news is that feelings are information, not instructions.