Your Feelings Are Not Fact
a poem
your feelings are not fact is empowering when feelings don’t match reality and gaslighting when the feelings are formed from a series of experiences, and they do match reality.
My feeling of anxiety for dogs is irrational and my feeling of jumping right to the worst (improbable) scenario that the dog will bite my head off is not a fact; it is unlikely a fact, and something would have to go very very wrong.
But my anxiety that my mom will hurt me is likely a fact; she has a strong history of being triggered by seemingly random events, with tantrums that result in broken things,
so to tell me that my fear is not a fact and that the “correct” response to this horrid situation is simply to reframe, to accept, to think differently enough such that her behaviours are now normalized, dismissed as intentionally good, is gaslighting.
Writing Prompt: Your feelings are not fact — what is your relationship with this statement?
Inviting Raffaella Ferretti | Pretheesh Presannan | Anthony V. Lombardo | Coco Joan| Kasun Ranasinghe| Sharing Randomly| h.a wadi | Radhika Ghose| Kasun Ranasinghe | if you’re up to it and anyone else interested to smash that writer’s block, join in on this tiny challenge and write a response, wherever it takes you! It can be a tiny poem, a shortform piece or an essay — whatever comes into that brain noodle!
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Hi I’m Lucy Dan 蛋小姐 (she/her/她) and it took me a long time to find the words to describe this. The deepest wound that’s since healed with the finding of these words is the fact that I’ve had white therapists tell me that the microaggressions that I faced weren’t real, or could be reframed away, and that’s the plan of coping with these situations. I still sit on the fence. Maybe if I had just seen things from a new angle, maybe I wouldn’t have been affected. Maybe if there was equal responsibility in taking on change related to equality, it wouldn’t all fall on my shoulders to simply not react, even to the most overt of reactions. // PS, I PUBLISHED A BOOK 📚
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