Ancestors

Written by Kate Bowles on 2025-01-24 at 19:13

This beautiful reflection on a year by @lornamcampbell brings up so many issues, but for me it’s that diagnosis is never one thing because of the way illness shows up in the full scope of life, work, place, love. The medicalisation of illness seeks the common, but the experience of it is always at the scale of n=1. It’s then up to us to make the common.

“Across all these different spaces, it feels like little dormant shoots of community are reemerging. We need these human connections now more than ever.”

https://lornamcampbell.org/higher-education/2024-end-of-year-reflection/

=> More informations about this toot | More toots from kate@aus.social

Toot

Written by Kate Bowles on 2025-01-24 at 19:33

The other thing that @lornamcampbell says in this post:

“I like the different pace of the two platforms. Bluesky feels like the place to keep up to date with news and events, while Mastodon provides space for slower, quieter, thoughtful conversations.”

Like illness experience, user experience of any system or platform (or bike lane or store or tarot deck) lives in this space of “feels like” which is much more precarious and changeable than the space of “is”.

It’s so hard to think beyond what we know through experience, to reflect with the tentativeness of “feels like” in a world of proscription. But if we can own that what feels a certain way is because of who we are, the possibility that opens up is change.

=> More informations about this toot | More toots from kate@aus.social

Descendants

Written by Kate Bowles on 2025-01-24 at 19:42

@lornamcampbell For so many people, it still “felt like” Twitter/X was a space of community until perhaps the salute, or maybe some other thing yet to be worse. Everyone waits until their own line is crossed.

So sometimes “feels like” is also the languaging of your own experience limits.

If somewhere feels safe to me, or welcoming to me, that’s not an assumption I can extend to anyone else. The reason why it “feels like” a certain way to me is likely what’s preventing me from grasping that it’s set up precisely to exclude or harm or oppress others.

=> More informations about this toot | More toots from kate@aus.social

Written by Kate Bowles on 2025-01-24 at 19:43

@lornamcampbell Just thinking aloud here. Thank you for your wonderful blog, always.

=> More informations about this toot | More toots from kate@aus.social

Written by LornaMCampbell on 2025-01-25 at 13:55

@kate Thank you so much for your thoughtful comments Kate. You're so right about how we each individually experience things (platforms, spaces, life) and how important it is to understand and respect that "feels like" is always deeply personal.

=> More informations about this toot | More toots from lornamcampbell@mastodon.social