rereading my own writing is just a constant fluctuation between “damn, girl, you wrote this? (affectionate)” and “damn, girl, you wrote this? (derogatory)”
I am also “damn, girl, you wrote this? (forgetful)”
people are so fucked up when it comes to addiction, even with things that are normalized or legal.
when my mom got cancer, which eventually spread to her lungs, then her brain, and killed her, the first thing people would ask is “oh, was she a smoker?” as if smoking cigarettes would have justified her death, made it more palatable, would absolve them of feeling sympathy and absolve me of feeling grief. it was an implication of “it is less sad because it was her fault.”
my mother quit smoking thirty years prior to getting cancer. but that isn’t the point. i don’t care if people smoke 5 packs a day. no one deserves their death to be trivialized just because they were an addict and no one deserves to feel like their loved one’s death was less important because they were an addict.
ALT
