If you do want to work with secondhand materials- put a message round to friends. I have a cashmere jumper I got for free because a friend was going to throw it out. Just 20 minutes of knitting some custom elbow patches and sewing them on and I had a jumper for free that would have cost £150 new and was headed for the trash.

When I was a teenager my brother saved all his jeans for me and I made them into a quilt- it's got a lot of heft to it so works similarly to a weighted blanket (I didn't know what they were when I made it!).

A friend of my mum is an interior designer. She gives me offcuts.

Get the word out there among friends, in your community, even through things like Craigslist. People hate throwing away a pair of jeans over a crotch hole, or a sheet with a blood stain, or a tablecloth with a cigarette burn.

Estate sales can be an excellent way to get material for super cheap. I got like 10+ yards of a white poly cotton blend (I think! I'm honestly not sure!) for like $10; the original receipt in the bottom of the bag said it was over $50 worth of material purchased like 5 years ago. Also, the piles of fabric I have seen at estate sales is ridiculous.

Also tools! I needed a rotary cutter - I found a brand new one with a mat for $8 - that same one new would have been over $25. I also have a big cutting mat that was only $12 - new, it's over $30

If you're in NZ (and i believe some other countries too) freecycle dot org is the best

Also your thrift store will have a TON of donated stuff that isn't good enough to get put on the floor because people treat them like a dumping ground for their trash (I used to volunteer in a Charity shop) and it's actually pretty expensive for them to get rid of the ripped, unsellable stuff.

So make friends with the people who work at your local one and ask them if you can have a rummage through their reject pile for rags! You can still go to your usual place, still get roughly the same type of materials, you're not taking the stuff anyone else needs and you'd actually be helping out a little by taking crap off the store's hands that they can't sell and they would otherwise have to pay to have disposed of.

Depending on your area you may need to pay for your stuff (please do, this is still for charity after all) or you may be lucky enough to get some stuff for free (like I said, at least some donation, don't be a dick) but yeah. You don't need to radically change your habits to avoid impacting others, you just need to be aware of how these places work.

Oh, this is super important.

⠀

When trying new coping strategies or learning a new habit, you’ll fail. Possibly many many times.

But that’s alright! No one just PICKS it up immediately. 

⠀

You’re trying to learn to do it sometimes, and then occasionally, and then more often than not, and finally every time!

Similarly, you might fail in any plan or timetable you’re trying to use.

But that’s alright! 

As OP’s therapist said, it doesn’t have to be perfect! In fact, no one can pick it up immediately. 

⠀

Doing things OCCASIONALLY is better than not doing it at all.

Doing things LATE is better than not doing it at all.

Doing things PARTIALLY is better than not doing it at all.

“Within the lesbian community I am Black, and within the Black community I am a lesbian. Any attack against Black people is a lesbian and gay issue, because I and thousands of other Black women are part of the lesbian community. Any attack against lesbians and gays is a Black issue, because thousands of lesbians and gay men are Black. There is no hierarchy of oppression. It is not accidental that the Family Protection Act, which is virulently anti-woman and anti-Black, is also anti-gay. As a Black person, I know who my enemies are, and when the Ku Klux Klan goes to court in Detroit to try and force the Board of Education to remove books the Klan believes ‘hint at homosexuality,’ then I know I cannot afford the luxury of fighting one form of oppression only. I cannot afford to believe that freedom from intolerance is the right of only one particular group. And I cannot afford to choose between the fronts upon which I must battle these forces of discrimination, wherever they appear to destroy me. And when they appear to destroy me, it will not be long before they appear to destroy you.”

—

Audre Lorde   (via marxist-mermaid)

Quote is from “There Is No Hierarchy of Oppressions.” 

(via tilathebun)

“No mask is wholly a mask. (…). Some people, no doubt, do wear their masks as a sheathe for the lithe but insupportable emotions beneath. But surely most people wear a mask to efface what is beneath and become only what the mask represents them to be. More interesting than the mask as concealment or disguise is the mask as projection, as aspiration. Through the mask of my behavior, I do not protect my raw genuine self —I overcome it.”

— Susan Sontag, Reborn
(via weltenwellen)

In my community we started a co-op in order to, in part, purchase things with mass buying power (i.e. we can get things at wholesale if we order enough of them, so we can, for example, eat organic food for about what conventional costs a lot of the time.)

But we also set aside a little money each time we order, and that money helps pay for donation boxes… and the social network we created when we created the co-op means that if someone has a crisis, someone else probably has the answer. “This family just lost their job and can’t afford to buy presents for their kids” may get a response of “Here are presents for every single family member” or it might end up with finding a job for the people looking for work, or both, because the co-op membership is diverse and represents a lot of people who are otherwise very connected in the community.

When a part of town is out of power, it’s usually possible to find a co-op member who can run for ice or bring a meal, or offer use of a washer/dryer for the evening.

We had one year where we were making donation meal boxes for a holiday, found out on the last delivery about a family in severe need, talked about it in the co-op group and ended up showing up at their house with not only a meal, but enough dry goods, paper towels, toilet paper, etc. for a month, plus a credit with the co-op for fresh fruits and veggies.

I cannot overstate the power of networking in your community. This one started out in a natural parenting group, but quickly spread beyond that, from college students to retirees. It’s like a small town, only more open-minded. We started with about 20-30 families. There are now hundreds of people involved.

I had a trans kid land with me at one point and asked if anyone had size whatever clothes and within a few hours we had a box on my porch, within a couple days we had a bunch of things he needed.

The co-op keeps a lending library of tools and weirdly specific kitchen devices like an Æbleskiver pan, a food dehydrator, a capsule maker and a carpet cleaner. The kinds of things people need once or twice a year, but might not have the room to store.

We periodically do a buy of sensory toys and sensory bin supplies, for example, because we have a lot of autistic members and parents of autistic kids.

I have bought socks from the co-op that were purple with unicorns farting rainbows on them. We recently got in Black History flashcards and we’ve done a lot of Black Lives Matter and Hate Has No Home lawn signs. Pretty much if people want it and we can find it at wholesale, the co-op will order it.

It even spawned a side-business (more than one, actually, but this is the relevant one) of an online app for co-op managing, called http://managemy.coop
so that other communities could take advantage of our experience and start out with an easier tool than the google spreadsheets we started out with.

Anyway… if you want to network within your community, this is a really, really good way of connecting with a broad cross-section of people.

All that stuff about unions still applies, too. Unions have hardship funds. If you’re a union member and you’re broke, or you’ve been fired, or whatever, you can apply to the union for a grant to help you out. The binmen in Birmingham pulled off a months-long strike recently thanks to the union paying their living costs. Unions force employers to pay decent pension contributions and have safe sick leave policies.

If you’re employed, join your damn union!

You might check out http://www.transitionus.org/transition-towns too. They’re trying to build resilient communities by getting neighbors to talk with each other about stuff.

also join a grassroots workers union like the IWW (US) - IWW Uk Site, the Independent Workers of Great Britain, Solidarity Federation, the CNT (Spain & France). Get involved with Food Not Bombs, who gather food that’s to be thrown out from supermarkets and from donations & make meals which they’ll share with anyone, rich or poor, sober or otherwise. Check to see if there’s a community garden near you, and if not how you can set one up to build self-sustainability within your community - Food Not Lawns may be useful.

Another grassroots UK union: United Voices of the World. It originates from and primarily supports outsourced migrant workers in cleaning, catering, portering, and security. They have many other sectors as well which are all autonomous: architecture, sex workers, legal, gender-based violence workers, charity, and design & cultural. 

UK-based QueerCare is a transfeminist care network who provides real-life support to all queer ppl in the UK, especially trans people. among other things, they provide all-round community care, and their advocates help queer people access various services (healthcare, education etc) so they are supported from within their community, rather than as part of an institution that holds power over them. also carefully maintains resources on various subjects anyone anywhere can read, including detailed COVID protocols. Please do donate and share.

With any org you join, including unions, look at how they are structured, who they’re working to support, and who gets to have a say in what they do. they should make that info very clear on their websites and social media, and you should be able to judge whether those terms seem fair to you, personally. 

(as an aside, some seemingly community-based orgs comprise people who just want to replicate powerful hierarchies over vulnerable folks who come to them for help. so if something feels off, it’s ok to take a step back. there are always other groups!)

I love all of this but

Disabled folks have a hard time networking, have no union, have few or no professional/iseful social connections, and need more community support than just about anyone. And we get left out over and over, especially those adults who cannot and never have worked who are denied the sort of connections one makes through jobs.

🙃

So try to find disabled members of your community who may be isolated and unable to seek YOU out and see about helping them. I don’t just mean food. I mean physical assistance, house cleaning, pet care, help making phone calls, getting rides to and from places, shopping. Home repairs are a big one. We can’t pay for services many others take for granted. There’s a hole in the side of my house. A window is falling out. My social worker can’t find shit for financial aid for fixing this that doesn’t have stipulations that exclude me (not elderly, no kids, not physically impaired, not a veteran, not a former worker, etc.).

This is where community help would be nice.

Instead, I get told to do legwork to find materials for cheap and call handymen to see if someone can give me a cut rate on labor, when the inability to do shit like that is why I am qualified as disabled.

INCLUDE us. TALK about us. REMIND people that we exist and have value. And if nothing else motivates you? If you aren’t fighting for us, you are failing your future selves. Most people end up disabled, because most people get old and infirm. Your abled status?

Temporary.

Start planning.

The book is “A Voyage to Arcturus” by David Lindsay! He uses ae/aer pronouns for a nonbinary alien creature introduced in Chapter 16. You can read it online here, though be warned, it’s written by a white man who is also cishet so far as I know, and can be pretty gender essentialist.

One memorable passage, though:

“Leehallfae looked at him in silence. The smile faded from aer face, and its place was taken by such a look of unearthly pain and sorrow that Maskull had no need to press his question. Ae was consumed by the grief and yearning of a lover eternally separated from the loved one, the scents and traces of whose person were always present. This passion stamped aer features at that moment with a wild, stern, spiritual beauty, far transcending any beauty of woman or man.”

It was a favorite book of C.S Lewis and J.R.R Tolkien, and inspired a trilogy by C.S. Lewis, so it’s easy to see how ae/aer became one of the most common non-traditional pronouns used today.