don’t know how to go from a to b or get anywhere when someone tells you they don’t need to
respect
you.
like-when respect is not needed, what else can you say.
when you need to talk to this person every single day for probably the rest of your life.
let me think about this-I don’t warrant the least amount of respect from whom I share blood/bones/flesh in common. I don’t understand this. I don’t understand what can I say or do to make it not like this.
this is psychological abuse. I know it. I see it. And I don’ t know how to just get away from this because its just not that easy. And really, if one more person fucking tells me to just brush it off, to to let the words bounce off you, I’ll implode. So tell me exactly how this is done when there is blood/bones/flesh involved and years past and years to come. And I don’t know how it can be that someone I have no invested feelings with, can make me feel a little dead inside.
its systematic, meant to injure. methodical. unrelenting. Tiring.
Hermana, Resist is a personal, political zine with literary tendencies which manifest in forms of poetry, free verse, haiku, short stories, journal entries, rants, raves, critiques, commentaries, photos, recipes and dreamy manifestos. 
ay, hermana, i have no answers of course. i have had a very similar-sounding issue with my parents. i tell myself that it is because we are not blood, maybe it’s part of being adopted and not sharing a culture & the outlook that comes from that. it deeply saddens me to know that people can even be that way when you do share blood. either way, these are people that we cannot shrug off, push aside, walk away from. we might want to, but there will always be a connection. and we cannot just ignore, forget, act like the things they say and do don’t matter. to actually be told point blank “i don’t respect you and i don’t have to respect you”… it hurts my heart to hear that someone would say that to you, and so i know how it hurts you is ten million times more. without respect we cannot have love, and without love we cannot have healing. without healing we cannot have growth. and those things are necessary for our souls and they are a reasonable, understandable expectation from family. there is no way to ignore it or act like it isn’t important and soul crushing. but do know that you have other family that embraces you, that respects you and that will uplift you. it doesn’t lesson the pain of the other, i know, but it is something. you are not alone.
si its hard to talk about. its not family but someone I share blood/flesh with, who I was in a relationship with. yes cryptic.
either way, someone you have shared your life with in some way, that there are relationship ties with… whether that is “love”, activism, friendship, or family… those are ties that it is very hard to sever completely. especially if there are certain strings that continue to hold you together anyway; like for me, i can never sever ties with the father of my son, no matter what he says or does, because my son will always tie us. Or, certain friends or lovers that i can never truly sever from, whose words will hurt me, because we are bound together by our past and although we may no longer be together, there are still connections. i think others have spoken eloquently recently on how it is that way with people who we “work” with on an activism level… in order to “get away from” their negativity and disrespect, we’d have to leave our entire circle, stop doing the work, stop building the community, because that person is part of it, and for many of us that isn’t an option either. it is not simple, there is no answer that someone can say “this is what you must do”.
i saw/knew/felt and heard my little one’s father say he didn’t respect me. and i decided raising my daughter on her own was the healthiest for both of us. her father is sort of around ….he hasn’t changed but now life for she and i happens on my terms.
I don’t have that option. Wish I did.