10:26pm November 29, 2013

I really fucking hate

That if something happened to me half of tumblr would explode but stuff IS happening to tons of other people and the same doesn’t happen. It’s not that half of tumblr shouldn’t explode for me, it’s that (if and when it’s safe for that person, to do so, and it’s not always, so that’s super-important) there should be as many people looking out for everyone’s safety.

When I was 14 and totally unknown to anyone except a bunch of assholes, I was in a mental institution and when I got out I had this dream – literally a dream – about a network of safehouses for disabled people and elderly people and foster kids fleeing institutionalization of all kinds. I didn’t even know they were all institutions or that there was a name for any of it, I just knew that there were all these systems that everyone was put in and that if we could all somehow get together the resources we could help each other.

Basically the safehouses were meant until people could get on their feet again, as long as it took. It wasn’t supposed to be the sort of thing where people had to rely on them forever (which can create horrible power dynamics that people aren’t looking for until they form their “intentional communities” too late and by then they can’t get out because they’re relying on them for everything), but people could rely on them as long as they had to, and there were for some reason a lot of powerful people helping us because I thought lots of people would actually give a shit which is probably a useless idea or we wouldn’t have institutions.

(And I don’t mean and never meant one kind of institutions, or institutions for one particular kind of people, or only fully residential institutions, or etc.)

I wish it was possible to implement something like that in real life. Like for real. I know there have been attempts at things to get people out of places but they’ve never gotten off the ground. I spent years looking around at houses and stuff hoping one of them would be like the one in the dream and would get me out of the system, but I never found any. Nor have I found any long-term working widespread network like that. (I’ve heard of some attempts for disabled people to “do it on our own”, and some of them have been great, some have been horrible, and many have taken on institutional qualities, or as people relied on them exclusively they found they couldn’t get away and couldn’t get assistance in any other way and therefore were trapped and it got ugly. I guess reality is different from dreams, but I can still hope people would give enough of a shit to put something together.)

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