Tragic's Wake

• ~xo. (though I was caught a bit off guard lol) http://t.co/5FMmRAfP #
• ★ New post: Tragic’s Wake | Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-02-11 | http://t.co/IrPljyme #
• Play hard, play tight, and play fierce. Never EVER let’em see you sweat and never let’em think they’ve got you. #
• Deadpan, bitches. It’s the undoing of many and you will never know if you’ve snagged me or not … P.S. I love youuuuu ♥ mwa ha ha ha! #
• Grrl Face: A Beauty Collective is out! http://t.co/aE7kdvvP ▸ Top stories today via @marinatosi @swarmjamsaintj @mspriss21 @stylebymeli #
• Silly me ;-P http://t.co/tgbsTvv8 #InstaPhoto #
• Well, if I was dieting it just got tossed right out the window! Footlong Subway Club on flatbread, dbl meat, dbl cheese, bacon, real mayo <3 #
• Now THAT is a sandwich! http://t.co/KfQO9C03 #
• ( ⋇ Y ⋇ ) #
• ★ New post: Tragic’s Wake | TWisted Glitter; Tragic Shine [pic] | http://t.co/vyvC7Nk6 #
• This is how I express my abject boredom. Edits. http://t.co/D14Xd6lr #
• #hellokitty http://t.co/qFYDgnsF #
• Grrl Face: A Beauty Collective is out! http://t.co/aE7kdvvP ▸ Top stories today via @jacksjunk2 @shesaidbeauty @eco_age #
• aww @_sabrinadawnxo he’s too cute <3 in reply to _sabrinadawnxo #
• ★ New post: Tragic’s Wake | A Rose By Any Other Name. . . | http://t.co/77P5gM3P #
• Freshly made from a photo I took last summer. http://t.co/E3ko5Toy #
• New avvie, me and my amazing daughter. http://t.co/TVEMrBsa #
• Let’s play Words With Friends. My username is ‘GrrlTragic’. http://t.co/F4ZYxqH6 #GamesWithFriends #
• Help Save This Cat | No, Seriously, What About Teh Menz? http://t.co/4COn8K0i #
• Scariest monkey EVER. http://t.co/8N8SJv96 #
• yeah I need a nap #
• Grrl Face: A Beauty Collective is out! http://t.co/aE7kdvvP ▸ Top stories today via @tatianakeen @linhardt @luxlyfe @thoughtsbyrozi #
• ★ New post: Tragic’s Wake | ReDeath of the Bills; How GrrlTragic Found Her Way.. | http://t.co/3zuzWtTi #
• Which is something I need to remind myself to do on a daily basis.. Don’t let life pass you by because of fear or… http://t.co/Eyw65Asu #
• Oh! I love this! Somethnig I posted brought this into my referrers on my site! Click the little dots to see what… http://t.co/GD5SxxK4 #
• -23C (-9F) before windchill today.. I am NOT going ANYwhere. #
• Happy VD. http://t.co/FQ9lvLkk #
• Given my own rather unorthodox Valentine conception, I thought this was fitting http://t.co/kEX5oKG1 #
• ★ New post: Tragic’s Wake | I Hope You Have VD. | http://t.co/NEnsuoPk #
• Grrl Face: A Beauty Collective is out! http://t.co/aE7kdvvP ▸ Top stories today via @visagedelayla @whatfashionis @angelatague @lckhenry #
• Watch Ti sposerò – Gay Marriage on Vimeo! http://t.co/TA8CA04i #MarriageEquality #NOH8 #
• I liked an @YouTube video http://t.co/FC0KZDsv It’s time. #
• Check out @homophobes, a social experiment giving homophobes the attention they’re looking for. #
• My delightfully divine darling daughters : @BrandiFerret @_sabrinadawnxo –my beloved belly blossoms <3 #
• This is such a fab pic set of Zigabyte <3 http://t.co/SKLIzOkK #
• I’ll see y’all in a while.. <3 #Nintendo #DSi #FTW http://t.co/NmGCQd7q #
• This is my personal #makeup salvation. http://t.co/vMHpCM3A #
• I haven’t been able to do much of anything today, I’m getting super vitamins on Saturday. #
• Grrl Face: A Beauty Collective is out! http://t.co/aE7kdvvP ▸ Top stories today via @johnc817 @venusocean @stavchuk @insightmanager #
• Rock on, Ellen! You can dance if you want to, we Can leave those moms behind.. http://t.co/Tn6uUwjd #
• Grrl Face: A Beauty Collective is out! http://t.co/aE7kdvvP ▸ Top stories today via @carmelamakeup @textpertmistry @margauxz @crashingred #
• Can’t talk, gone fishin’ ;-P http://t.co/U4seEfVh #
• Facebook Releases New Content Guidelines, Now Allows Bodily Fluids http://t.co/4kDmPOGx #
• ★ New post: Tragic’s Wake | Gore Porn for a Cause — The Social Network Edition | http://t.co/WS2s4Q1p #
• Grrl Face: A Beauty Collective is out! http://t.co/aE7kdvvP ▸ Top stories today via @what_ua @amandamcardle @aisforalex @caraderica #
• http://t.co/LzhNv2yP #

STOP!

My friend Toazty and I had a bit of a discussion..

Toazty: “For those of you who keep posting those pics of babies needing transplants . Look them up before you post. A lot of them are hoaxes. The one for 1000 shares with the mother and baby and the baby is connected to lots of stuff. Yes its sad to see and all but if you actually looked it up you would see that baby is long gone and didnt even have the problem thats posted. If I was a mother and that happened to my baby Id be pissed that someone is hoaxing it through Facebook. Come on people I know you want to have a heart but really thats not a way a mother wants to keep seeing her angel who is gone from this earth.”

Me: “Also, they could consider ways to raise awareness without posting some of the graphic gory abuse and disease pics, it’s not helping, if anything it’s scaring people off. We want to help legitimate causes but we don’t need to be blasted with images that will scar us for life (or any kids that happen to be nearby) >_< ”

Me: “The people who post those horrifying images (the diseased and/or battered children, the beaten and mangled pets)–would those same people print out and blow up those same images to spread over their coffee tables in their homes? Would they bring those and leave them scattered all over MY home? Probably not. What happened to basic social etiquette? ”

Toazty: “Gone to the way side Its sad when people think that gore will bring the best out in people :S

For sure. Things like that most parents wouldnt put those pictures in because of the graphic details. We dont need to see everything that is strictly for the poor parents who are going through it at the time. That would be so devasting to see at least 3 or 4 times a week when most parents would only look at the anniversary of their childs b day or death or the anniversary of their survival if they were lucky but not every day on the net with everyone watching and seeing the agony

People can give a shit without needing to see the gore unless that family is close to you and you see the gore in person. Then it isnt gore then its reality and a knowledge that what may be bad in your life there is always something worse somewheres.”

Me: “There are so many causes, if we trust that our friends are intelligent, we should be able to make them aware of the issues without posting these huge bloody mangled photos in the timelines. I have silenced so many people from my feed because they keep posting every death/abuse/cruelty “awareness” photo that comes along.. I don’t like opening my feed and seeing a bloody warzone. They can post a link to an article, fine. Let me be informed, don’t bombard me with stuff that will give my whole family freakin’ nightmares.. And for God’s sake, give me an actual sourced and cited article so I know it’s legitimate..”

Random Toazty Friend J: “im sorry not really my place but just a opinion i suppose… i wouldnt have ever noticed one of those stories on facebook had it not been for the obnoxious pictures they use.. i dont approve of waking up first thing in the morning checking facebook an seeing a poor mangled puppy but it did catch my attention outta the 10 or 15 posts on there that morning thats the one i stopped to read… why cause it stands out amongst all the other crap on here.. cause as horrible as it is to say if there was a happy little puppy or smiling little kid there i wouldnt have taken the time to read the title or the story… ”

Me: “But that’s sort of the problem too, J. It’s a sad fact that we’re conditioned to pick out the horrible immediately and after a while we’ll be so desensitized to it that we’ll still notice it and pick it out but we’ll have seen so much of it that we won’t even be moved anymore. It’s like people who live in war zones, after a while they don’t even feel the bodies anymore, they just scoop’em up and get on with their day.. ”

Toazty: “The extreme ones though dont need to be there and for the most part NONE of the stories especially about the children are false or old and just reminders to the families that already went through the pain once. To have to re live it every day through media outlets like this is just mean and cruel”

Me: “I read an article a few weeks ago from a mom who went through that, she was horrified to see a pic of her own infant (who died from organ failure or some such thing) come across her own timeline with some story about how the baby needed money for some operation or other but the baby had been dead like five years and the people who posted it were using it to get shares so they could gather information about well meaning folks who sincerely thought that with every share someone was going to donate a dollar and such..  it was truly tragic for that family..”

In closing: STOP! Just stop, it’s gross and rude and hateful, it’s ignorant and just fucking wrong. Just bloody well stop.

I did my best to hold shit together for years. I’d take that 2AM call and reply to that desperate shot in the dark cry for validation and/or assurance that happened to land on me via inbox. I’d go for that long inscrutable coffee date to discuss things I hadn’t contemplated in years, a show of support and a firm shoulder, because that’s what friends do. We listen and we hold each other up. Sometimes I felt bitter because though everyone was supporting me back, it often felt like they weren’t mostly because I didn’t tell anyone what was bothering me and I left my friends to hold onto the issues that they could outright see were weighing me down.

Now and again, I’d get really pissy because it felt like I was always ”giving giving giving’ but I was being brushed aside for less depressing shit when I needed some sensitive get-backs.  Mostly I’d just sweep it aside though, in my heart of hearts I knew it was just a hissy fit and I was being stupid, I still do. Knowing that I was needy n some places is a bit of a low point in my psyche and overall self image not to mention my huge swollen rockstar pride.

In other areas though, sometimes I’d worry about how I looked, how people saw me, how others felt about me. I’d worry that I was too skinny, too swollen, too plain.. Silly shallow things that we all worry about but many are simply loathe to actually admit. I would worry about a few ridiculous people from my past who would purposely hunt me and haunt me, for their own attention and validation. Some of those people would (and still) go out of their way to antagonize me and create a monsoon of drama, nowadays I can skim it though, like a tiny drying brook, a trickle of wasted sense of self on the part of the poor bastards who still hate themselves enough to bother with my simple little world..

I had this tank of mice once, I had started out with a momma and a poppa and one day there were twelve. We called all the babies “the Beans” they were naked and pink and such tender little morsels. They’d squirm under their momma’s warm belly and their poppa actually didn’t try to eat them, odd for mice, I know. Anyhow, momma died when the babes were only a few weeks old. Their eyes were still two days from opening and they were starving and cold and afraid. I didn’t stop to think, there was no hesitation, they were my responsibility and I was going to keep them safe if it killed me.

I found an old felt Crown Royal pouch and I stuffed it with cotton and mouse babies. I wore it on a cord around my neck during the day to keep them warm and I put a lamp on their tank through the night. I fed them milk from tiny nibbles of bread so they could suck the milk through whatever little crumb they could fit in their mouths until eventually they started taking nips off the bread and their eyes were open and they had no fear of me, nothing but love and trust. They all had shiny silky fur and since they no longer looked like Beans, we named them all Bill. I only lost the tiniest of the Beans throughout that, the other nine grew and flourished into glorious little Bills.  Finally the Bill Beans didn’t need me to nurse them anymore and I was just so proud. I let them all loose in their tank and gave them big mouse treats.

One day when I reached in to fill their little bowl, one of them got mad at me and snapped his little mouth near my finger. My feelings were hurt but I didn’t punish him, what can you do? It’s his nature, he’s just an animal after all. I suppose the tank wasn’t big enough or the Bills were just too many and too closely nested. Maybe they just decided that they didn’t need my help anymore and it was like teen rebellion “aww mom, screw off, you don’t know anything, you just wanna ruin all the fun!” But eventually the Bills turned on each other and one by one, they ate one another. I’d try to break them up, separate them, give them things to distract them, extra affection, good food.. Nope. Pointless. They just ran around smacking into glass, crying out, and biting each others’ heads off. I didn’t even feel it after a while, I’d just wake up, clean up the mess without a word and do whatever I was still obligated to do for them but my heart wasn’t in it anymore. I just didn’t feel it.

I haven’t had mice since. I love them but knowing how greedy, self centred, and cannibalistic they are: I just can’t be bothered to even try again. A huge part of that is also me, I’m too selfish to dedicate that amount of love and care again for naught. I can’t risk any more strain on my own psyche because something else doesn’t have the innate ability to even see how much I’m doing for it. I’m too fragile to deal with the pain of rejection from something I’ve given so much of myself to and gotten barely more that a side-eye in return. I’m too strong to ever let that kind of thing affect me again, I’m cold yes but I’ve worked damn hard to get here. It is what it is and there’s no going back now.

My priorities are changing; objects in mirror are closer than they appear. I don’t feel that same sense of urgency where the trials and tribulations of others are concerned, not unless it’s fully a two way street. I no longer feel the need to prostrate myself before those who couldn’t care less anyhow. I don’t have the desire to be that voice of reason for whatever episode that is ending the world tonight and I don’t expect you to feel it either. I’m just tired. I’m tired of being seen as “less than” of being mocked or worse still, held in complete disregard, by those who have sworn some sort of misaligned (and possibly maligned) allegiance that I never required in the first place.

I can’t bear to love any more Bills and I don’t really want to help them just so that they can keep running willy-nilly smacking into glass walls and eating each others’ faces no matter the effort I make. Speaking to Kylearyn on a similar topic, in a retelling of the Bills and how it relates to current issues of the soul, he said to me “Did you ever think that’s how God must feel? He just looks down on them after everything and just sighs?”  Yes Kylearyn, I do. Every fucking single day.