Content Warning: Mentions of suicide & depression. I’ve been thinking a lot about time markers this season. Living in the heart of empire, time is meted out in dollars earned and spent, bill due dates, units of productivity, and unencumbered growth. As Octavia Butler said, “God is change,” and
The fear that follows me and so many other marginalized folks, amidst rising fascism and violence, is real. But through community, creativity, and tenderness, I reclaim aliveness. Choosing to feel, create, and love—even in fear—is a radical act of resistance and survival.
New York City, 1985. The high sign that rules this summer is increasing fragmentation. I am filled with a sense of urgency and dread: dread at the apparently random waves of assaults against people and institutions closest to me; urgency to unearth the connections between these assaults. Those connections lurk
a meditation for remembering our power breath in: i am powerful. breath out: you are powerful. repeat: our power lies in our connection to each other. because your power is great and our power together, is greater. property-hoarding billionaires, elites, and politicians with lineages stacked with stolen wealth all suffer
Do you know there’s a humanitarian crisis unfolding in Sudan? I promise this isn’t a gotcha question. For better or worse, many of us use social media as our primary source of news, and the algorithm gods do not deliver the same information to all of us. On
White supremacy culture breeds fear—fear of not doing or being enough. As a result, we fall into despair. But you can shape this fear into something productive. The only antidote I’ve found is to connect to myself through creativity, community, and care.
Writing this piece has been a struggle. I'm confronted with the tension between the hyper-individualistic “self-healing” posturing of the wellness industry and grounding myself in practices rooted in community. As Ayesha Kahn described in their latest essay, empire's commodification of self-care throws us more profoundly into
"Sometimes we have to do the work, even though we don’t yet see a glimmer on the horizon that it’s actually going to be possible. The groundwork has to be done on a daily basis. " —Angela Davis, Freedom is A Constant Struggle I’ve been overwhelmed
"Cultures of domination rely on the cultivation of fear as a way to ensure obedience." ― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions Domination is defined as the exercise of control or influence over someone or something, or the state of being so controlled. The United States was born