“I… I’m sorry for my behavior, Master. It’s not my place to disagree with you about the boy. And I am grateful you think I’m ready to take the Trials.
“You’ve been a good Apprentice, Obi-Wan. And you’re a much wiser man than I am. I foresee you will become a great Jedi Knight.”
The Phantom Menace (1999)
I’ll make you all a deal. This will be one of the last posts that I make on the matter. But you all need to signal boost this. This one needs to be heard by everyone.
–
I’m at a really good place in my life right now. I just turned 22. I just finished my fourth year of college with a 3.7 GPA, I moved into my first apartment, I’m doing an awesome internship, I’m doing a ton of advocacy work. I’m genuinely happy.
I’m at a really great place.
I wasn’t always.
I’ve been disabled all my life but about ten years ago, I walked into an operating room and came out in a wheelchair. (Well, technically I came out on a stretcher, but you get the point.)
And it took me a while to realize that my life was completely different. In fact, it wasn’t until about three years later, when I was about fifteen, that I really realized it. I don’t know if I was in shock all that time, if I was numb, if the medications that I was on limited any conscious thought, let alone emotion. But it was around the age of fifteen that everything came crashing down and I fell apart. I became extremely depressed. And let me tell you, no matter how hard you try, you never forget that feeling. It’s one of the worst feelings in the world. Depression is like being in a room where everything is pitch black. And people are screaming at you to turn on the light switch, but you can’t find it, you can’t see it, even though everyone else seems to know exactly where it is, you’re completely lost in this dark room with no way out. Depression is horrible. I would never wish it on my worst enemy. Even now, there are days when I struggle, though those days are nowhere as bad as the weeks, months, that I battled depression as a teenager. As a fifteen-year-old, too weak to put up a fight.
Now, I should mention that I never tried anything.
But believe me when I say that I know what it’s like to want to.
And believe me when I say that if you built a time machine, if you took Jojo Moyes’ infamous book, if you sent it back to 2009, and if fifteen-year-old me had read it…
I probably wouldn’t be here right now.
I’d be dead.
I would have lost my battle.
Because I would have picked up a book wherein the main character kills themselves because they think that their life isn’t worth living now that they’re disabled.
And I would have related all too well, and I would have done something that’s genuinely terrifying to think about. I know I would have. I was not in a good place at that time, I was not strong, and while I did survive, it wouldn’t have taken much for the scales to tip in the other direction.
And I keep going into the Me Before You tags on different websites and I keep seeing teenagers who are in the same place that I once was, who are saying that they were sobbing in the movie theaters because they didn’t expect the ending and they genuinely don’t know what to do.
I would have been one of those teenagers.
I dodged a bullet.
Literally.
And I know that the author probably didn’t mean for any of this to happen, she didn’t expect the huge backlash from the disabled community, she didn’t expect a very tired college student to be revealing something very personal at 1:06 AM.
She just wanted to tell a story.
I can respect that.
I read an interview a few days ago where she talked about how she had seen a few debates over assisted suicide and she felt compelled to write a story, to give a perspective, to give a voice.
And whether she meant to or not, that voice is a single mantra:
“It’s okay to die.”
And I keep seeing people defend the book, defend the author, defend that voice, by saying that it’s just one perspective, it’s just one voice.
But it’s not.
It’s not okay.
And it’s not just one voice.
You see, we didn’t need Jojo Moyes to be that voice. She thinks we did. But we didn’t.
We hear that voice every single day.
We hear that voice every single day.
Every single day.
We hear people talking about how it’s okay for the disabled to die.
Every. Single. Day.
(Note: I was actually going to make this a video but at this point, I started crying and couldn’t finish, so I’m typing it all out instead.)
And we hear our own inner voice, whispering to us at night, urging us that it’s okay to die.
We hear the voices. We hear them. We hear them every single day. The voices that say that it’s okay to die.
We hear them.
I heard them when I was fifteen. I heard them loud and clear. And I believed them. And had I read Me Before You, it would have been the voice to break the camel’s back. It would have been the voice that I listened to.
This book would have killed me.
This book is going to end up killing someone else.
And I don’t think Jojo Moyes understands, I don’t think that the abled community understands, I think they have the privilege of not understanding just how loud that voice can be and how damaging that voice can be. They don’t hear those voices every day.
But we do.
Whether we want to or not.
And you know what?
For the amount of people who say, “It’s okay to die.” there are very few people out there who say, “It’s okay to live.”
They’re the voices that we need to hear. They’re the voices that are so few and far between.
And I’m here tonight to try to be one of those voices.
For those of you who are constantly hearing the various voices that are telling you that it’s okay to die, please, please know that those voices are lying to you. I know that it’s hard. I know what it’s like to be in that dark room. I also know what it’s like to open the door and to escape.
And I know there are others that have escaped as well. And now, we have to help the others who haven’t. We have to help the others who keep hearing these voices. We have to put an end to them.
Boycott the voice.
Boycott the author.
Boycott the book.
Boycott the movie.
Boycott Me Before You.
Signal Boost!
“How could she do this to him? How could he? In the Force, the whole apartment stank of Obi-Wan.
His finger traced the curving back of Padmé’s couch. Here. Obi-Wan sit here.Perhaps it’s simply a question of whether you love Obi-Wan Kenobi more than you love your wife.“
John Oliver gets into the debt-buying business, makes TV history
Last night, Last Week Tonight With John Oliver devoted about two-thirds of the show to debt buyers, who are in the unenviable position of making regular old debt collectors look good.
In a stunt similar to the founding of Our Lady Of Perpetual Exemption, Last Week Tonight formed Central Asset Recovery Professionals Inc., or CARP, which was promptly offered a nearly $16 million portfolio of medical debt in Texas for less than $60,000. Oliver and his staff snapped it up in an effort to show up Oprah Winfrey, among other things. Winfrey’s infamous car giveaway in 2004 was estimated to be worth $8 million, and held the record for biggest TV giveaway until Last Week Tonight forgave about $16 million of debt on air last night.
He didn’t just sing the verses hE WENT TO THE EXACT SPOT WHERE THEY’D BE SUNG AT THE HOUR AND DAY THAT THEY’D BE SUNG AND POSTED IT
LIKE HOW EXTRA
Obi-Wan stood, and this time he walked away. “If I did not…love…him,” he said, his voice unsteady, his back turned, “I would not be here now.”
Obi-Wan Kenobi on Anakin to Padme : Wild Space, Karen Miller (x)
now that donald trump is the actual GOP nominee this is your reminder that voting for a Democrat You Hate is still a useful harm reduction procedure that will cancel out a vote for Trump. please practice harm reduction. please, even more importantly in small/red states, vote all the way down in your local races where the margins of victory can be 100 votes or 10 votes, so your state legislature/governor/etc will be strong, if/when everything on the national level goes to hell
believe what you want about your vote not having the intended or ideal level of power, believe what you want about the electoral college or the modern role of voting in a democratic society, believe what you want about american centrism or flawed systems, but don’t let anyone tell you there’s “no difference” in the general election, please don’t let anyone tell you voting does nothing. your vote CAN and WILL protect vulnerable people and help you stand in for people whose votes are being taken away by a gutted VRA and gerrymandering
please. please vote tuesday november 8th. please.
The date has changed to November 26. We changed it at the end of last year.
Repeat: THERE IS NO ACE DAY ON MAY 8. IT HAS BEEN MOVED TO NOVEMBER 26
27. Things you said through a closed door
“Courfeyrac. Courfeyrac.”
There’s no sound but the shuffling of his feet on the uneven wood floor of the hallway. He tries again.
“Courfeyrac, come on. I didn’t mean it.” And then, because if he can’t be charming and he can’t be good with people and he can’t be naturally kind, at least he can be honest, he adds, “That way.”
“You meant it.” Courfeyrac’s voice is stretched thin and uneven.
“I didn’t mean your family. Courfeyrac.”
“Combeferre, go away. I don’t want you here right now.”
Combeferre has never been able to read people well, but even he knows that this is Courfeyrac’s serious voice. And yet. He can’t bear to walk away, to leave things be when they are so terribly Wrong. Not when it’s Courfeyrac on the other side of that door. “I’m sorry,” he tries. “It was rude and unthinking of me. I didn’t–I’m not like you, Courf, I’m not good with people.”
The door is wrenched open, and Courfeyrac is there. His eyes are wet but Combeferre knows he’s not really crying–he’s just angry. (He knows him that well, God, he knows him so well, how is it that there is one person in the whole world who he actually gets and he’s still managed to hurt him?)
“I’ve heard that–that cowardly excuse from you too many times,” Courfeyrac snaps. “It’s not good enough, Combeferre. There’s a difference between being awkward, and being cruel, and you like to pretend you don’t see it.”
Combeferre ducks his head, heat rising to his cheeks. Courfeyrac runs on, flinging out the words with frighteningly precise ennunciation, even as his tongue’s going a mile a minute. “It doesn’t take any kind of social acumen to recognize when something you want to say might hurt someone–it just takes a little bit of logic and enough caring to actually stop and think about the facts.”
Unspoken: Combeferre literally has a master’s degree in logic. Combeferre is a slave to logic. Combeferre is the one who is constantly pleading with Enjolras and Courfeyrac to stop and think about the facts.
Unspoken: Combeferre doesn’t care about Courfeyrac.
It’s not true, Combeferre’s brain protests–and yet it’s where all the facts are pointing. Given what’s gone down this evening, the logical conclusion is that Combeferre is a selfish bastard who likes people only for how they benefit him and doesn’t actually give a shit about Courfeyrac’s feelings.
And Combeferre is a slave to logic.
He turns away, and the door slams behind him and he can still hear Courfeyrac’s restless pacing around the room. And he knows Courfeyrac well enough to know to text Joly with the suggestion he and Bossuet drop by to channel Courfeyrac’s angry energy into something less destructive than what he’ll come up with on his own. He’s sent the text and received an affirmative reply (bless Joly, he doesn’t ask what happened), and has already let himself out of the apartment before he realizes that he’s once again proved that he knows Courfeyrac so well.
He really has no excuse.
As he turns up his collar against the cold, spitting rain that feels more like November than April, it occurs to him that he might also be being a little overdramatic, about the whole thing. He said something shitty; now, twenty minutes later, he’s come to the conclusion that he’s an inhuman wretch with a rotted-out soul who’s probably going to die alone and deserve it. It pains him to realize that that part of his personality is a fairly recent grafting, courtesy of Courfeyrac.
eirenical17 