minna

bossymarmalade:

sanaa-tamir:

nezua:

being hit as a child teaches you many things, i’d guess. mostly, it teaches you that might makes right. and as a child, you will have no argument against that. and so it is likely that you will learn it well.

being hit as a child may teach other things. but below and beyond intellect and language, it teaches you rage. because as a child, in the context of physical autonomy, your sense of justice is fully developed. it is perfect, like a little sun shining in your center. nobody needs to specifically teach you that it is unjust for a larger person to deal violence to someone so unfairly matched to defend themselves. your rage will spring from your natural born sense of injustice, and no lesson or lecture will mitigate that. and neither will anyone need to explain to you what happens, eventually, to trust spent foolishly—such as on a rain of blows launched in a few moments of dis-ease. 

and even if you cannot articulate that with your yet-limited vocabulary, being corrected or punished with physical force places violence in your mix; on your map; in your bones. sows it within you. stores it in so many still-burgeoning cells to blossom one fine day, dotting the body then with splashes of karma…like a time-bomb harvest under the skin of a new planet. whether that body self destructs later in some way, or aims the blasts outward is yet to be seen. but a harvest will be realized.

violence is radioactive, as my old professor put it.

This. And for those of you who are all, “I got beat and I turned out just fine!” here’s a fucking cookie for you:

Charming.  Clearly, you missed the ENTIRE point of what we’re saying, which is that it wasn’t ”special”, it was not some experience that was dysfunctional enough to stand out years later in a negative fashion.  And that’s why some of us don’t consider the licks and spankings we got as children to be abuse.

Also, who the fuck are you to dictate how I deal with my own childhood experiences?  I turned out fine because my context was different from other people who suffered physical abuse.  I’m not advocating corporal punishment; I’m not saying they need to “toughen up” or that I’m “better” because I don’t consider my own past experiences to be abuse.  Their experiences are their own and however they define them is valid and I respect that.

All I want is the same fucking courtesy and not people jumping up and down making pronouncements from on high that because my mom took the belt to me I’m some kind of karmic timebomb, or am de facto invalidating the very real and traumatising experiences of others.  So you can keep your goddamn judgemental cookie and try understanding that your paradigm cannot be wholesale applied to everybody the fuck else.

FUCKING

EXACTLY