I’ve thought a lot pain and care and community in my own way — mine centering homophobic Othering and the correlating Rejection that follows, in lieu of the one that Piepzna-Samarasinha discusses in the caption featured. It’s my primary metric for inclusion in my own Chosen Family. I got so tired of supporting dominant classes in their “too-hard-to-handle” pain at the expense of mine — I think there are ways where we can focus in-community care of our specific marginalized pains while simultaneously meeting others at the edge of their own community’s internal care structures. My hope being that those kind of borders could be a hand-holding rather than a region of conflict.