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Victoria Brownworth

@VABVOX

Aug 10

🧵1/It's astonishing how many people want to scold sick people and those with #cancer. It always makes me wonder what they think the future holds for them and those they love. The struggle to survive a catastrophic illness is in itself life-altering. Be supportive. Period.

🧵2/
It shouldn't be hard to do this and yet it seems to be. We got meaner and less empathetic during the pandemic when we should have gotten more compassionate. No doubt there will be studies in the coming years on this and on resiliency. But for now we all should do better.

🧵3/
The POV that very sick people somehow made themselves that way has always been an element of the whole American individualism concept/theorem (or fantasy). But it's very damaging and toxic. Resist thinking sick people are somehow weak and less valuable. That's harmful.

Read 16 tweets

Victoria Brownworth

@VABVOX

Aug 6

🧵1/
Pretty angry about my #cancer and that cancer numbers are going up, in all age groups, and all we are talking about is immigration, which is a GOP canard and impacts very few Americans in reality, while nearly half of us will get cancer and a third of those die.

🧵2/
What are we doing for #cancer and for people with cancer? Where is the testing? There are tests for like 5 cancers and the rest--including 10 of the next most common-- you are on your own, hoping you have symptoms before stage 4. That's lunacy. Where's the research?

🧵3/
I have been reporting on #cancer since my 20s when I got breast cancer at 26 and a recurrence at 28. The incidence of #breastcancer is exactly the same now as it was when I was 26. How? Why? Now I have a different cancer, for which there is no testing.

Read 11 tweets

Victoria Brownworth

@VABVOX

Jul 28

🧵1/
Some thoughts on how to treat friends, family and patients who are battling serious illness, like I am.

When you take away the personal agency and autonomy of sick people you may have the best of intentions, but you are actually causing harm.

🧵2/
Never ever make decisions for someone else's life without their permission. It doesn't matter that you "know" it is what they need and/or want or so you think and you also think they are 'just afraid to ask." They aren't. They just want to make their own choices.

🧵3/
You may think someone just doesn't know how to ask for something, but in point of fact, a lot of us are just trying to figure out what we want and need and how we should handle things. It takes time. And thought. And energy. Sometimes we're just sitting with our diagnoses.

Read 4 tweets

Victoria Brownworth

@VABVOX

Jul 3

🧵Throughout this election cycle I've been so disheartened by the disconnect between actual voters who I report on and the Very Online interpretation--largely through a yt male prism--of what the election is "really" about. Some of us--though not many--warned against Biden or Bernie as 2020 nominee precisely because this moment would arise.
1/

My concern was 2024 would create a crisis of the sort being manufactured now at a time when the GOP was flexing it's power and voter solidarity. Dems consistently run from conflict instead of addressing it, AND don't vote, which is how we have GOP leadership in the House.
2/

The multiplicity of perils facing the country and more microcosmically the Democratic party, must be addressed and NOW--not at the convention, which would be disastrous and ensure a Trump victory. The lessons of 2016 and party schism were never learned, in part due to the disruption of the pandemic.
3/🧵

Read 11 tweets

Victoria Brownworth

@VABVOX

May 18

So let me say this: A few dozen MAGAs in my mentions are telling me I'm a "self loathing white person," so let me clarify for those folks and anyone else that my support for Black women like Jasmine Crockett (who has been very supportive of me during my recent illness and bereavement) is my being an ally. I am blessed to have some fabulous Black women in my life and I support many Black women politicians and Black women activists. My mentor for two decades was a Black woman theorist and writer. I grew up with strong Black women Civil Rights activists staying in our house because my parents were Civil Rights workers. I was in college before I truly understood how unusual that was--that a Black woman activist would be sleeping in my bed and I would be sleeping on the floor in a sleeping bag while she told me stories about her life in Mississippi. I am grateful to have been raised by anti-racist parents and I have tried to carry on that legacy. So no, I am not self loathing. I am proud to stand with Black women (and my many Black male friends as well!). And you thinking I have to hate myself to lift up and support Black women is a you problem that you should work on because racism continues to wreak havoc on this country.

I wrote this piece about a few weeks back about Civil Rights, my parents' activism, my early childhood in the Civil Rights movement and the long ugly history of bathroom discrimination in America and the harn it's done and does. (Gift 🎁 link)
epgn.com/2024/03/28/the-

I wrote this tribute to my longtime friend and mentor Audre Lorde 9yrs ago. I can still see us dancing together like it was yesterday, not decades ago. I so wish she were still with us. I love this essay. I hope you will too. (Gift 🎁link.)
lambdaliterary.org/2015/02/dancin…

Read 9 tweets

Victoria Brownworth

@VABVOX

May 17

🧵I once filed a column from cardiac ICU when I was 30something and my heart just went haywire when I was out on assignment and started beating in the 200s and I passed out and was taken to hospital via ambulance and they had to shock me several times. It is nothing like on TV.

🧵 It's like having a hot iron (remember those?) dropped from a tall building onto your chest. They never show that on TV. It's pretty terrible. It didn't work, so they had to do a coronary ablation, where they try to re-set your heart's electrical circuitry by threading some wires into it.

🧵I was just thinking that maybe I am being a big baby by not working today due to my having surgery yesterday ("you can work from bed") and then I thought about when I did that column (I was at the Daily News then) and the nurse coming in and yelling at me because the alarm went off on my machine because I was stressing.

Read 4 tweets

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