Emergencies really do crop up more often for poor people. Necessities, like vacuum cleaners or phones or bedding or shoes, need replacement or repair more often when you only buy the cheapest possible option.
Poor people’s health tends to be compromised by cheap, unhealthy food; stress; being around lots of similarly-poor contagious sick people who can’t afford to stay home or get treatment; inadequate healthcare; and often, hazardous and/or demanding work conditions.
So we get sick more. On top of that, many people are poor specifically because of disability. All of that is expensive – even if you just allow your health to deteriorate, eventually you can’t work, which is – say it with me – expensive.
When you’re poor, even the cheapest (most temporary) solution for an emergency often breaks the bank. Unexpected expenses can be devastating. People who aren’t poor don’t realize that an urgent expense of thirty dollars can mean not eating for a week. Poor people who try to save find our savings slipping away as emergency after emergency happens.
I don’t think people who’ve never been poor realise what it’s like. It’s not that we’re terrible at budgeting, it’s that even the most perfect budget breaks under the weight of the basic maths: we do not have enough resources.
Cos we’re fucking poor.
People who aren’t poor also have different ideas of what an emergency constitutes. The AC breaking in the middle of summer isn’t an emergency when it’s in the budget to just go buy a new one the same afternoon without worrying about how it’ll affect your grocery money; having to take two days off from work because you’re running a bad fever isn’t an emergency when you have paid sick leave.
So it’s no wonder the well off people of the world don’t get it when a low income person is stressed over something breaking or a minor illness. I know people for whom a crashed car – as long as no one was hurt – would just be ‘damn it I liked that car and now I gotta borrow my wife’s’ and I know people for whom it would be ‘I can’t afford to have this fixed but I can’t get to work if I don’t get it fixed and I can’t get it fixed if I don’t go to work hahhaha time to indebt myself to family members who I desperately wish I didn’t even have to interact with because they’re the only ones who can give me rides or loan me money.’
Two very different worlds.
This makes abusive situations infinitely more difficult too.
Being poor is isolating as all shit, and you have very little power to choose who you do and don’t interact with. Quite often, in the midst of all these emergencies, the only people who’ll offer a hand up are abusers or toxic friends, and their help will carry invisible conditions, or be contingent on you never speaking up or “acting out” against mistreatment. And where are there any other options, what can you afford to do about it?
Sometimes even good friendships can turn sour and toxic if there’s a major difference in wealth between two or more people. As the poorer friend needs help more and more often and options shrink under the expense of being poor, it becomes scarier and scarier to speak up on the occasions when your better-off friend who helps you out inevitably fucks up and hurts you, like friends do.
It’s a power imbalance that will almost inevitably be abused. Poverty can actively breed toxic situations between friends and partners.
“In an average week, nursing facilities in the United States administer antipsychotic drugs to over 179,000 people who do not have diagnoses for which the drugs are approved. The drugs are often given without free and informed consent, which requires a decision based on a discussion of the purpose, risks, benefits, and alternatives to the medical intervention as well as the absence of pressure or coercion in making the decision. Most of these individuals—like most people in nursing homes—have Alzheimer’s disease or another form of dementia. According to US Government Accountability Office (GAO) analysis, facilities often use the drugs to control common symptoms of the disease.
While these symptoms can be distressing for the people who experience them, their families, and nursing facility staff, evidence from clinical trials of the benefits of treating these symptoms with antipsychotic drugs is weak. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) never approved them for this use and has warned against its use for these symptoms. Studies find that on average, antipsychotic drugs almost double the risk of death in older people with dementia. When the drugs are administered without informed consent, people are not making the choice to take such a risk.
[…]
One facility social worker said that one of the most common “behaviors” leading to antipsychotic drug prescriptions was someone constantly crying out, “help me, help me, help me.” An 87-year-old woman reflected that at her prior facility, which gave her antipsychotic drugs against her will, “they just wanted you to do things just the way they wanted.” A social worker who used to work in a nursing facility said the underlying issue is that “the nursing homes don’t want behaviors. They want docile.” A state surveyor said: “I see way too many people overmedicated…. [Facilities] see it as a cost-effective way to control behaviors.”“
Human Rights Watch, “They Want Docile”: How Nursing Homes in the United States Overmedicate People with Dementia
I had someone tell me that dislike of Umbridge is usually from ingrained sexism toward female villains. I kind of stared in shock – I mean I love my lady villains. I love nasty female villains. I love sneaky and clever female villains. I love female villains that wrap themselves up in what the patriarchy expects of them and uses those expectations to smash someone upside the head.
I tried to explain my hatred of Umbridge isn’t that she’s full of traditionally feminine attributes.
It’s that she’s lawful evil.
If you did an alignment chart, no one would represent lawful evil more than Umbridge. I don’t think there’s ever been a character that better sums up lawful evil.
And, to me, lawful evil is the most terrifying and disturbing evil there is.
To me, lawful evil is the shit that gets thousands of people killed while the person responsible walks away feeling like they did their duty.
Evil forces like Bellatrix and Voldemort are fairy tales. They’re the bad guys a good guy can chase away with a sword or wand.
Umbridge is that evil that really does lurk in the hearts of men (and women). The realness, the plausibility of it, makes her amazingly uncomfortable.
So, yeah, I can’t get as excited about her as a fantasy book creation as easily as some other female villains. Not because she’s a woman, or because of her gender presentation, but because she represents a sort of evil that’s far, far too close to home.
And people hating Umbridge? Also tends to be a hell of a lot more personal. We’ve all had someone in a position of authority abuse their power at some point or another – I literally cannot think of a single person alive who hasn’t had to deal with that at least once.
Facing down a genocidal maniac who murdered your parents and countless others on a quest for blood purity is…not so common.
A teacher who picks on you because they can? A professor grades you horribly because they don’t like you and makes sure you know it? A boss who ‘accidentally’ loses your requests for time off or makes a point to assign you the jobs everyone hates all the time? These things are a dime a dozen.
OK, I’m still annoyed about this, so here’s my partial refutation of a reblog: just because an abuser chooses you as their victim doesn’t mean you’re weak, period.
People who have been ridiculously strong have gotten into abusive relationships. Abuse can happen to anybody, and saying that abusers only choose weak people implies the opposite, and that so long as you’re “strong” you’re “safe” from them. This is not true. Please don’t spread that.
Sometimes abusers target the strong on purpose, because if you think of yourself as a strong person, you’re less likely to see it coming. This very nearly killed a dear friend of mine. We never saw it coming.
I drew this comic about a year ago. Looking back on it, (because I’m a student/learning artist,) there’s a lot of nitpicky drawing-related things I would change, if I could do this again. For whatever reason, this comic seems to have struck a chord with a lot of people. As I type this, this comic has over 21,000 notes, and counting. The goal of my work is mostly to make people happy, but I felt like doing a slightly more serious comic this time, just to see if I could. When I drew this, I was still recovering from an abusive relationship I had left 2 years prior, and had frequent night terrors related to it. A lot of the notes on this thing are from people who say this comic has helped them deal with similar issues. I’m glad I was able to use my own pain as a way to help someone else through theirs.
all the highly empathetic people i know in my life have had abusive home lives and that’s because we were trained to read a situation at any given moment in our homes and learn how to react within seconds because if we didn’t and said or did the wrong thing, we’d get fucked up and beat and hurt
but like subconsciously always reading the mood of any atmosphere or space you’re in, always being able to gauge how people feel, it’s not a fucking gift, it’s exhausting. you can’t turn it off, even if you want to. you read the situation and if it’s negative, you freak out because if someone’s angry at you, it’s the end of the world
like we’ve internalized the scars from our childhood when an adult being mad at you was the worst thing ever and it’s carried with us into adulthood. it’s hard to unlearn all that.
so like a lot of us have mental health or anxiety issues because we also start internalizing all the energy from people, be it positive or negative, and so anxiety-inducing and frustrating to the point of tears
…..I had no idea this counted as hypervigilance. no idea what so ever.
#thanks Youre welcome. I’m writing out all the shit I learnt from the cptsd specialists when I was in the hospital because so much of it was brand new information for me, (and i consider myselr fairly well educated on my illness) and even being there for only three weeks gave me enough info to completely change how im viewing my plans in terms of treatment and recovery.
I figure it will also be extremely relevant to a lot of my friends on here, but it’s going to take me a while to sort it all and write it out in a readable way. But I’m working on it.
this is so fucking helpful for me
the symptoms of ptsd (and cptsd) are so poorly known by the general public tbh, as is the cause. Friendly reminder:
And child abuse is chronically under-reported. I didn’t know until I left my family that anything was unusual about my upbringing, and was diagnosed with PTSD this year from it.
also, that
you freak out because if someone’s angry at you, it’s the end of the world
like we’ve internalized the scars from our childhood when an adult being mad at you was the worst thing ever and it’s carried with us into adulthood
This is a type of flashback. What’s known as an emotional flashback. People think flashbacks have to be sensory hallucinations, when in fact in C-PTSD (that is, PTSD from chronic mistreatment, like child abuse) it’s more commong for flashbacks as a symptom to manifest as emotionally responding to a situation as if you’re “back there”. You sense your friend is mildly displease with you and you get a strong fear response, despite the fact that your friend hadn’t and wouldn’t be hurtful towards you for it? That’s your body using that maladaptive schema it developed from when you were in abuse!environment to try to protect you from what it learned was a dangerous situation. It too is absolutely a symptom of PTSD.
This is why confrontation is so difficult for survivors sometimes. Reactions to people who have reasonable/mild disagreement can FEEL like a serious threat, so you can be compelled to respond with appeasment, strong defensivness, shutting down, basically your go-to survival response.
It’s a hard thing to train yourself out of, but if you have this kinda symptom you can mitigate the effects by actively recognizing when it’s happening (this is the hardest part imo), then taking a step back to assess the reality of the situation. Is this person’s emotions your responsibility? What is the likely outcome of this conflict? How mad is this person actually? Are they even mad at you?
It can also help to have a plan for people you interact with a lot, like a partner or best friend. For instance, you sense someone is angry and it feels like dangers, talk about asking how angry they are outside of a conflict, maybe like a number scale. “I’m senseing you upset. What’s your number? What’s going on?” “Oh, pfft I’m just a two cos my amazong package didn’t get delivered on time today.”
You can learn how serious a vibe is and what it’s actually directed at by asking, and it can help mitigate that constant impulse to ask if someone is mad at you.
Also, if you have access, I strongly rec a good therapist to help you reasses how much responsibility you should claim in other people’s feelings. Maladaptive schemas can make you feel like you’re responsible for other people’s happiness, to the point where you can start to micromanage and become codependent. It can even feel like you’re doing a good thing. It’s not. Pls learn how to take care of yourself folks
“if somebody becomes panicked when you accuse them of lying theyre obviously not telling the truth” shut up ugly im a survivor who got punished for shit i never did all the time of fucking course im gonna panic when im blamed for something i didnt do
since this post is actually getting attention rn i really want to emphasize this-
many of the “tells” of lying are traits commonly found in abuse survivors and mentally ill/disabled people.
stuttering, averting eye contact, panicking, raising your volume, fidgeting, and other similar traits are actions performed commonly by these groups, especially in situations of heavy stress- such as being accused of doing something we didnt do, especially if we are afraid of being punished for doing nothing.
im honestly begging people to think critically when accusing somebody of lying for small traits like these.
not to be controversial but the reason they wont pass a law saying that people with a history of domestic violence arent legally allowed to purchase a gun is bc half of the police force would no longer be legally allowed to hold their jobs.
this ain’t tea this is hennessy
based on reporting, 10% of families in the general population endure domestic violence.
escaping abusive partners in law enforcement is made particularly difficult for these victims, because police officers
are armed
know the otherwise confidential locations of domestic abuse shelters
are able to game the system in order to avoid punishment
are often friends with the very officers who would be called to assist in a domestic situation
and can sometimes redirect blame onto the victims—one of my coworkers knows someone whose spouse was a cop who got her arrested for kidnapping when she fled with her children.
It’s almost like a lot of police become police because of the inherent power they then have over other people and can use to abuse others 🤔🤔🤔🤔
Just reminded of one instance of the old “Why would you ever think that?”
For a few years before they took off, my biodad and stepmother were living right up the road from his parents. Also my aunt, who he’d never gotten along with but totally despised by that point. I guess he still had more use for my grandparents, especially my Nana, because things were at least friendlier on the surface there. He and my Grandaddy never got along either, but he was always my Nana’s favorite.
Anyway, I barely got to see any of them whenever I was there, because I was told that my Nana was busy and really didn’t need me underfoot.
They were about as pissed off as you might expect, after it came out that he’d been lying and deliberately keeping me away. And quick to reassure me that I was always welcome.
My mother’s response? “Why would you even believe that?! That’s just ridiculous, and you should have known better.”
Maybe because he was anything but stupid, and could tell which buttons to push for maximum manipulation? Whether or not he was the one primarily responsible for installing that particular button?
Of course I couldn’t have said that to her at the time, even if I’d had the perspective to wrap words around it. When I was 10 or 11 and didn’t know to call any of it abusive.
My Nana was probably my biggest and most consistent supporter in this world, and she never made me feel that way. It still seemed totally plausible that I might be in the way, and I really didn’t want to put out someone I cared about. I had been getting enough messages that causing problems for other people was kinda what I did by default.
Still working on that one, yeah. Besides the part where avoiding causing problems for other people is supposed to be a reciprocal thing.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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