Safe

I want to say something very serious...well I'm usually serious, so more serious than usual.  This post is for anyone who finds it and needs it.  I want you to know that this will always be a safe place for you.  I will always be a safe place for you.

I am like you.  I know depression.  I know the taste of a gun barrel and the feel of a blade on my wrists.  I have carved my pain in my arms and chest.  I know about the masks.  I know about good days and bad.  I know decades...literally decades of only nightmares at night.  I know the hollowness.  I know the terror of lonely places, dark corners.  I know the desire to simply cease being.

I know trances and psychic attack.  I know the evil that can make you forget your own name.  I know what it is to have my senses coopted by things that feed on pain and fear, to lose touch with reality for a time, to approach the gates of hell.

I know rage.  I know the overwhelming desire to kill and destroy.  I know what it is to look out of burning eyes and calculate the animal rending of someone before me.

I know rejection.  I know false acceptance.  I know the taunts and insults.  I know the subtle but clear lack of understanding from people who want to care.  I know how that look of alienation cuts more deeply because it comes from those who obviously don't want to wound.  It just tells us how strange we are.

So if you understand this.  If you know me or if you stumble across this late one night.  Know that I am here and you are there.  And you are not alone.  Look at my picture.  Read my words.  Do I not seem like someone who knows?

You don't need to be anything other than what you are around me.  And if you need me, I will be there in whatever way I can.  This is my promise.  Test me and see if I don't mean it.  I don't come with programs and easy answers.  But I come.  I am the living dead, sent for the dead living.  I gave up my life and it has been given back for you.

I am Cavvvp.  I am real.  And I am here.

Colors

Every once in a while the media frenzy of the day gets to me in a way that I want to add my two cents to the conversation.  So that's what this is.  But I will start by telling you what this is not.

This is not the extent of my opinions.  You should never assume you have me pegged based on what I say here.  This is not an assessment of current events.  I am not commenting on something I have no direct knowledge of.  That would be ignorant foolishness.

So I want to talk about how this does affect me: colors.  Namely skin colors as a means of defining ourselves and others.  Has anyone else noticed that this whole controversy has tacitly accepted the distinction of "black" and "white"?  It's a given in the argument.  It's an unstated assumption.  The two groups exist and are different.

I emphatically disagree with that.  I am calling the assumptions into question. 

Let alone the stupid nature of the terms which don't accurately reflect reality.  I know very few people who are actually white or black in color.  We're all a greater or lesser degree of tanish brown.  Where do we draw the line?  I know "blacks" who are paler than me and "whites" who are far darker.  And I don't mean people of one ethnicity who identify culturally with the other.  I mean actual African genomed people with pale skin and the reverse.

But even accepting the words as cultural markers, they are nothing more than something we assume.  We all know examples of the "crossovers" who identify more with the culture of the color they are not.  But then there's those in the middle, of various ethnic descents, etc. who don't fit in either.  For many of us, the cultural lines are not drawn based on color, they just aren't.  There's multiple colors in the same culture.  So it's not nearly as fixed as some would have it seem.

But to go a step further in denouncing the differences, I know many people who identify themselves as distinctly "white" even wearing the racist history as a badge of honor, and many "blacks" who are all chip-on-their-shoulder types.  But you know what?  They eat similar foods.  They view things in similar ways, only with a color swap. Soul Food and Southern Cooking are EXACTLY THE SAME THING!  The only difference is the cut of meat...and sometimes not even that.  A poor ignorant "white" says the same things about "blacks" that a poor ignorant "black" is saying about "whites".  I've experienced this first hand, each oblivious that they were saying the same things about the other group.  But they're sooo different!  It's ridiculous!

People are people.  We have different cultures.  We have different styles and different ways of talking.  But at the root, we all care about the same things.  We are not that different.  To draw a line based on some hazy definition of skin color is to establish a lie around which many evils spring up...as we're seeing right now.

So I refuse to accept the assumption.  I grant that many people do.  But that is the only reason it exists.  And every time we tacitly accept it, we reinforce it.  But every time we refuse it, we tear a bit of that lie down.  So I'm telling you that for me and my house, we will not, do not, use color as an identifying characteristic.  Not even culturally.

And I'm asking you to do the same.  Strike it from your vocabulary!  It will be stilted until you get used to it.  People around you will still use it.  But YOU don't.  Don't let your kids.  Don't fill it out on forms.  Erase it.  Insist on it.  Play dumb when people try to use it with you. "White?  That girl in the white shirt?  Oh you mean the guy with lighter skin up there? Is that who you mean?"  Decide on it right now.  And if you feel those tendencies of your past way of thinking creeping in, reject them and consciously look on people with fresh eyes.  This is the only way it will go away.  Take the power out from under it.  You'll have to think about people in new ways.  You'll find it gets easier with time until you truly don't see the distinctions you once did.

Don't perpetuate this evil.  End it now as far as your sphere of influence reaches.