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Feral Heather Profile picture
Feral Heather
@FeralHeather
Mediocre writer. Excellent underseller. Researching: 19th century 📖 literature & 🌲land policy |🔥fire stewardship | ✊🏼disability | ✍🏼poetry, fiction, & CNF
2 subscribers
Sep 20 • 65 tweets • 16 min read
Time to tell my cautionary tale of how this tweet led to a disastrous case of romance fraud. Because it started on Twitter, & ended here, this is the ground I’ll bury it. The tweets will come at random times over weeks or months. I may have to layer threads. But here we go🧵 It begins in my marital bed with my husband. My head on his chest. Listening to his breath like I had for 9 years.

But something sounded wrong: shuddering, rattling. His skin hot against my face. Sweaty. His snores turning to coughs. Summer 2021: Delta variant of covid run amok
Jul 26 • 12 tweets • 3 min read
CC Twitter: @WesleyWilson uses his Dr. title & pretends to be Covid-safe to gain trust. He lied to me repeatedly over the past six months to gain sexual access to me. Said he loved me, wanted to marry me, move in with me, & have children with me… as recently as a few days ago. Wes and Heather in Colorado When he did something that hurt me, and I shared I wanted to talk about it so we could repair, he refused to talk to me about it, then discarded me via text message. This despite presenting himself as “trauma-informed” & gaining my trust over 6 months
May 28 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
that was awkward. The pharmacist filling my prescription was none other than… a former student I wrote a letter of rec for pharmacy school! She is about to graduate with her PharmD. She said “you were my favorite professor!” as she handed me the sex drug “I’m so proud of you!” I said, “& so embarrassed that this is how our paths crossed again!”

“Do you want me to go over this with you?”

“No, I’m good, thank you!”

Still I’m so stoked for her! And laughing. Because of course.
Apr 26 • 15 tweets • 3 min read
3-6 years old. My dad pulling me in a radio flyer wagon on his daily 5 mile run. He turns around and smiles back at me. “One day you’ll be a runner like me.”

8 years old. Running with him now. Struggling to keep up. “One day you’ll outrun me.” 🧵 10. On trails through the redwoods. Leaping over roots & brushing ferns. Playing the plant identification game. If I get enough right, we get ice cream on the way home.

“Uhhh… myosotis… laxa?”

“Common name?”

“Forget-me-not.”

“Ding ding ding!”
Apr 25 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Sometimes I wonder what it must be like to go through [insert deeply painful event] & be able to find comfort in hugs from parents, siblings, partners, or friends

Pain on pain being reminded that I’m all alone with every struggle, and those who hurt me are being held What is it like to know that, when all else falls away, you can seek shelter with family?

The only place left for me — and many like me —is the street
Apr 16 • 26 tweets • 5 min read
When I was a community college student (18) my International Communication Professor paired me with an older, VERY handsome fellow student (30s) from Bulgaria. Our assignment? To teach each other about our cultures, then share what we learned with the class. TW: trauma So Yuri* (name changed for his protection) taught me the beauty of Bulgaria. He explained they have this massive, opulent rose festival, where his home city is filled with beautiful people & the perfume of colorful roses
Feb 18 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
Something I’ve been reluctant to share b/c I don’t want to platform eugenicist rhetoric… but it’s important to note that the architects of eugenics thought specifically dreamed of pandemics as a means to rid society of “worthless race types” “the insane” and disabled. (1/5) …that duty can be harmlessly performed in full, provided they be deprived of the capacity to procreate their defective strain. Those who read these pages will feel that there is little hope for humanity, but the remedy has been found, and can be quickly and mercifully applied. A rigid system of selection through the elimination of those who are weak or unfit in other words, social failures would solve the whole question in one hundred years, as well as enable us to get rid of the undesirables who crowd our jails, hospitals, and insane asylums. The individual himself can be nourished, educat...
Under existing conditions the most practical and hopeful method of race improvement is through the elimination of the least desirable elements in the nation by depriving them of the power to contribute to future generations. It is well known to stock breeders that the color of a herd of cattle can be modified by continuous elimination of worthless shades, and of course this is true of other char-acters. Black sheep, for instance, have been practically destroyed by cutting out generation after generation all animals that show this color phase, until in carefully maintained flocks a black ind...
…man is now, and has been for ages, undergoing selection through disease. He has been decimated throughout the centuries by pestilences such as the black death and bubonic plague. In our fathers' days yellow fever and smallpox cursed humanity. These plagues are now under control, but similar diseases, now regarded as mere nuisances to childhood, such as measles, mumps, and scarlatina, are terrible scourges to native populations without previous experience with them. Add to these smallpox and other white men's diseases, and one has the great empire builders of yester-day. It was not the swor...
THE COMPETITION OF RACES 5 I Nordic vice, and through consumption, and both these dread scourges unfortunately attack those members of the race that are otherwise most de-sirable, differing in this respect from filth diseases like typhus, typhoid, or smallpox. One has only to look among the more desirable classes for the victims of rum and tubercule to realize that death or mental and physical impairment through these two causes have cost the race many of its most brilliant and attractive members. This is from Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race (1916), arguably one of the most influential pieces of eugenics propaganda. So influential, in fact, that Hitler quoted it as his “Bible” & Teddy Roosevelt used its race rubrics to craft anti-immigration policies. (2/
Jan 21 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Covid-competent people: does anyone have a resource for “how to live like a covid-competent person” basics? Like broken down Barney-style?

Someone in a position of power who wants to date me is open to learning, and I want to take this opportunity to radicalize them. I started with the info about ED (lol), then moved onto the other health risks (they have lung disease), explained asymptomatic & presymptomatic transmission, airborne transmission, but I think it would be helpful to have a little booklet or something to refer to.
Oct 27, 2024 • 13 tweets • 3 min read
Attended church this morning for the first time in 5 years (have attended remotely during COVID). I am going through one of the darkest times of my life. Craving connection, I sought spiritual guidance and community… but instead of finding Jesus, I found disease 🧵 I love this church. It preaches a message of inclusion and, for the most part, matches word with action. They truly are Jesus in the following ways: feeding unhoused neighbors, providing refuge during wildfires, hosting legal clinics & AA meetings, truly embracing LGBTQ+ people
Oct 4, 2024 • 12 tweets • 3 min read
One of my family members waited until after we had breathed shared indoor air and been in close proximity for hours to tell me they had been vomiting yesterday.

“I took a test!”

We have been over this. Again and again. I’ve also been sick for MONTHS and have NO IMMUNE SYSTEM RN FYI, this person knows that they should have been masking until they had gotten several negative tests over several days. They know that they can maim or kill me. They have exposed me multiple times before and we have had to repair trust multiple times.
Sep 30, 2024 • 22 tweets • 4 min read
I was an ableist asshole when I first became a teacher. Because that’s what I was taught! In my defense, academic institutions told me a strict attendance policy was required. What changed my perspective & my assessment criteria? Disabled students 🧵 I can’t go into identifiable details of students for obvious ethical reasons. But I will say that, as a teacher, I was a piece of shit who stubbornly held the line my inflexible attendance policy (some permutation of more than X =automatic failure).
Sep 22, 2024 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
My pastor — who wanted to come back to church COVID+ — instead listened to my advice about isolating to prevent COVID spread. He even made a church announcement about his isolation precautions today.

Wish he & everyone else were masking, but glad that chain was broken. He even thanked me for the resources I sent him about isolation (thank you @PeoplesCDC ) and said he would share with others.

Not used to people listening to me about COVID. This gives me hope.
Aug 25, 2024 • 26 tweets • 6 min read
This is my villain origin story. Like literally part of why I’m writing my dissertation. Each year 31-40% of CA wildland firefighters are incarcerated. A lot of it is due to the fire industrial complex (capitalism). & part of it is the Romantic idea of wilderness as curative Incarcerated firefighters are paid shit wages while in & can’t get hired once they get out. They are on the frontlines at dangerous fires, not to mention their lungs getting toasted b/c wildfire smoke is toxic. Most incarcerated folks POC. Environmental racism at work.
Aug 24, 2024 • 19 tweets • 4 min read
Just think it’s funny that the doctor told me my tonsils “look healthy” but I had a tonsillectomy in 2009 so I don’t have tonsils.

They aren’t sending the best and the brightest to Kaiser. The weirdest tweets take off. Anyway here is my throat for public perusal. Context: I’ve been sick for over a month. If you see anything off please tell me because there is a non-negligible chance strangers on the internet provide better medical care than Kaiser Heather’s throat with white patches and uvula that tilts to side away from white patch near where tonsil used to be and has irritated appearance compared to normal
Jun 29, 2024 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Disorienting to complete my mandatory 2024 training for my workplace on COVID-19 & OSHA. The training says COVID is airborne! & to wear respirators to prevent illness! & to isolate if you test positive & alert the workplace and all your contacts! Here are the updated “non emergency standards” in effect until 2025 dir.ca.gov/dosh/coronavir…
May 29, 2024 • 15 tweets • 3 min read
RE: the current mask debate: the lone maskers in otherwise dangerous unmasked crowds can be ambassadors. By that I mean: a lot of people think “no one else is masking so I won’t” because that’s what they see in certain spaces. Survivorship bias. (1/ But even just one mask in a crowd sews doubt, if not cognitive dissonance. My husband and I, on multiple occasions, have walked into an otherwise maskless space. People immediately ask us “is something going around?” “Is COVID back?” Or “are masks required here again?” (2/
Mar 16, 2024 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
Just think it’s funny I called/emailed a healthcare office 3x reminding them to send testing instructions they were supposed to have already sent. They ignored me. & then my husband calls & they send it immediately.

“Sexism is ridiculous!” he laughed.
“I know.” I said. How do people without an America’s Golden Boy husband (deep-voiced white guy Army veteran) get people to take them seriously?

Because, for the life of me, I can’t get anyone to listen to me unless it is through him.
Feb 13, 2024 • 28 tweets • 7 min read
Something that haunts me: years ago my mom, an alcoholic, went to rehab to get clean. My grandparents who grew up soaked in alcohol culture —prolific partiers/socialites their entire lives —went sober in solidarity.

Except it turns out they didn’t…🧵 (an essay on access) 1950s family picture of my grandpa and grandma looking dapper in black suit and black dress next to my uncle and mom as young kids, all smiling My great grandparents on both the Polish/Russian & Swedish sides (1st gen immigrants) were allegedly infamous bootleggers in Chicago. That’s the environment my grandparents grew up in. Several men dressed in long black coats and white fedoras, and a woman in a fur coat, including my bootlegger great grandparents, are wearing what can only be described as “syndicated crime style” on an unidentified street in Chicago
Jan 16, 2024 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
I hope every disabled/immunocompromised child’s family sues the school district when their kids are inevitably hospitalized, killed, or end up with long COVID.

The position-holders running this school district are abhorrent. Sue them into the ground. Sue them so hard that their head spins would make Regan from The Exorcist envious. Bonk them so hard with the legal system that money spews out of their mouths in a never-ending font of FAFO.
Aug 14, 2022 • 28 tweets • 11 min read
Twitter: can you help me find this woman? She was my “Big Sister” (from Big Brothers Big Sisters) in early 2000s in Marin County, CA. She saved my life when I was an at-risk youth enduring extreme trauma and abuse.

I want to tell her thank you. Two people sit on a plaid f... Unfortunately I have trauma-related memory loss and I cannot remember her name. But largely thanks to her I made it through. I’ve since volunteered myself as a “Big Sister” to an at-risk youth & also tutored at-risk youth at a rehab facility to help others the way she helped me.
Jul 23, 2022 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
It’s getting real goofy having to beg for access at conferences.

Me: “I am disabled and at high risk of severe COVID outcomes. What safety measures are in place to make this event equitable & inclusive?”

Organizers: “uhhhh...”

It’s been almost 3 years. Figure it out. Accessibility shouldn’t be slipshod performativity after someone asks. It should be built into the event — and advertised as such. It baffles me that folks are complaining no one participating in their events but doing absolutely nothing to protect attendees.