Erasure

By Cliff Potts, CSO & Editor-in-Chief, WPS News

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What Erasure Is (and Is Not)

Erasure is not disappearance.
Erasure is continued use without continued recognition.

Life does not stop making demands. Bills still arrive. Responsibilities remain. Decisions still have to be made. What disappears is acknowledgment, care, and shared responsibility.

Erasure happens when a system continues to extract labor, money, attention, or emotional regulation while quietly removing the human being from the equation.

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How Erasure Actually Works

Erasure is rarely dramatic. There is no announcement, no confrontation, no single moment where someone says you no longer matter.

Instead, expectations continue as normal while support fades away. Tasks are assumed. Limits are ignored. Needs are minimized.

Because the work still gets done, the strain becomes invisible.

Survival is misread as strength. Endurance is mistaken for consent.

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Responsibility Without Recognition

Erasure becomes clearest when one person is holding the structure together—financially, logistically, emotionally—while assistance quietly disappears.

The system does not reduce obligations when support evaporates. It simply stops asking whether the burden is survivable.

At that point, the person is no longer seen as human. They are seen as a function: the payer,
the caretaker,
the stabilizer,
the one who “handles things.”

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The Cost of Being Reliable

The cruel irony of erasure is that competence accelerates it.

The more reliable someone is, the less visible their limits become. The fewer times they collapse, the more the system assumes they never will.

Asking for help gets reframed as weakness. Exhaustion becomes a personal failure instead of a structural one. The person learns to self-silence—to shrink needs, reduce expectations, and absorb damage quietly.

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When Visibility Returns

Visibility usually returns only when something breaks.

When the person finally falters, the system reacts with surprise—not accountability, not reflection, just confusion. Why didn’t you say something sooner?

Erasure ensures that saying something sooner would not have mattered.

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Why Erasure Is Structural

Erasure is not a personality flaw. It is not a lack of resilience. It is not poor communication.

Erasure is structural convenience.

Systems reward continuity, not wellbeing. As long as output continues, there is no incentive to intervene. The human cost is externalized onto the individual carrying the load.

This pattern—unacknowledged labor, moral pressure, and quiet extraction—is examined further at https://Occupy25.com.

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Naming It Is the First Defense

Erasure thrives on silence and normalization. Naming it interrupts the process.

Once erasure is recognized, it becomes harder to justify, harder to excuse, harder to internalize.

The goal is not sympathy.
The goal is visibility, limits, and refusal to disappear quietly.