No matter who you are, you can provide value. We each have an individual purpose that cannot be compared to everyone else. You have a different perspective to share. You can shed light on a situation that maybe no one else can possibly provide. You can utilize your unique experiences to help and positively influence others. At the end of the day, always remember that You are important. Stop comparing yourself to everyone else. Value, appreciate and learn from others, but don’t cut yourself short. We have all unique abilities and talents. Believe in yourself and appreciate your own value.
“It’s easy to say “fuck cultural identities, we’re all human” when your culture is not the one being exploited, marginalized and oppressed. It’s easy to say “fuck borders” when your country is the one who puts up the borders. And it is really fucking easy to say “we all bleed red” when it’s not bodies of your people riddled with bullets because Western capitalism has a price.”
“Maybe lost things find a way of coming back to you or maybe they don’t. Maybe the people you love live inside of you and that is how you remember them. That is how you keep loving them. Until then, try to stop lamenting the ones that leave. Sometimes they’ll turn up at your door five years later saying ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I missed you’ and you’ll find that yes, the lost do come back, and if they don’t, well, maybe they weren’t ever yours to begin with.”
“‘The Lord Of The Rings’ is mythology, it’s a fairytale, it’s an adventure. It never happened. Except in our hearts. But there was The Shire, in three dimensions and smoke coming out of the burrows where they lived. And… I believed.”
‘Girls like you’ your mother says
‘are going to be disappointed a lot.’
She’s chopping coriander so fast that her hand is a blur
and you’re 12 and you’re standing
like a tremble, grubby knees and tear stained cheeks,
an offering in front of her
‘Why?’ Your voice is a quiet shake.
She puts the knife down and calls you ‘jaan’
she holds your face in her wet hands,
you don’t flinch because this
is what love looks like
she kisses your forehead like forgiveness
‘because you mean what you say,
you think other people are the same.’
She tells you that she spent four years
trying to learn their language
but people ask how you are
and walk away before you can tell them.
‘I’d rather be silent.’ She says.
‘At least being quiet is honest.’
You’ll come home seven years later
wearing your heart like a bruise
on the inside of your sleeve
‘mama,’ you’ll say, voice like a thunder crack
‘he said he loved me, and I believed him,
I shouldn’t have,
I think that he lied.’
She’ll be older then, but she’ll kiss you
just as tender, just as birdlike.
‘Is it my fault?’ You’ll ask.
She is half lioness, half woman. She is all roar.
‘Listen to me’ she calls you her soul again.
She says it in your language so you know
that she means it.
‘You are so infinitely tender,’ she takes the frown
of your face in her hands and holds it carefully
'People will not always know what to do with that.
You can’t ever be sorry for the way you loved,
You can’t be sorry for who you loved.
Don’t ever let them bend you backwards
don’t let them make you hard or bitter.’
Her voice turns into a growl
'You did not get this from me.
Somewhere inside of you there is rain.
Somewhere in your stomach,
something beautiful is growing
and it is infinite.
Don’t you let them try and take that from you,
you are open and you are a flood,
someday someone is going to want to die in you.’
I shouldn’t need to say this, but I will: Taking reports of sexual violence seriously doesn’t mean denying anyone due process or chasing the accused down with pitchforks. I’m not talking about punishing people at all right now; I’m talking about forming educated opinions, by weighing up what evidence we’ve been allowed to see and deciding what we think of it all. We do this every day when we take in the news, except when the news is about rape, in which case we act like “innocent until proven guilty” means no one—preferably not even investigators and prosecutors—may legally suspect that the guy might actually have done it.
Let me tell you a wonderful secret about the U.S. and Canada: If you’re not on a jury, you are allowed to hold any opinion you like of an accused criminal’s guilt or innocence, regardless of whether he’s been prosecuted and/or what the prosecution can prove! You are not required to wait until some vague future date when “all the evidence” has come in, nor to withhold judgment until a jury has decided the matter, nor even to accept that a jury verdict is necessarily correct! So far, there are no actual thought police—isn’t that terrific news?
So you can go ahead and believe, even deep down in your heart, that O.J. did it. Or that Darren Wilson murdered Mike Brown in cold blood. You can believe Oscar Pistorius knowingly killed Reeva Steenkamp, George Zimmerman did not fear for his life when he shot Trayvon Martin, and yes, Drew Peterson killed his fourth wife, even though her body has never been found. And by the same token, you can believe that any given celebrity accused of sexual violence probably did it.
You don’t have to believe that—you don’t have to believe anything—but you are not actually prohibited from arriving at that conclusion, based on your own impressions of the publicly available evidence. Your personal opinion isn’t going to hurt any of those guys or deprive them of any legal or human rights. You cannot, of course, present those opinions as fact in a public forum, but why would you want to do that, anyway? Facts are facts and opinions are opinions. There’s a time and place for each.
