Okay, sorry for the rage bait title — I actually only left the online Leftist space. My politics are probably actually better rounded than ever because of this strategic (desperately needed) move. And I’ve been giving it a lot of thought, what it all means. How I, as a “Leftist” relate to my politics, learn from my community, and become an all-around better person and community member if I am not deeply attached to the light up rectangle in my pocket.

Since January of this year, I have not posted publicly to my TikTok account. The reason is that after I graduated from my MPA, I was so severely mentally ill and physically unwell that all I could do was to post online. I got into many fights with online trolls, I critiqued the Democrats to no end, and I made response video after response video to racist white liberal women. I was so drained all the time, and while I was actively blaming the institutional white supremacy of my MPA school for that (correctly), I realized towards the end of 2025 that I was not really doing anything to actually support my nervous system to actually heal. As it turns out, as trite as it might sound…doom scrolling actually really is bad for you! And I think it says something that the only sense of venting I could get was through a platform where I was undoubtedly “influencing” people. In my following, there were people who always agreed with me, clearly simply for the chance that I, someone they respected or thought was cool, would validate their own opinions.

Once I really understood that I wasn’t a person, but rather a sounding board for validating other people’s opinions, it felt awful and it felt wrong, a responsibility I wasn’t willing to take on. Not only because I’m just a person figuring things out, but because I felt like I was selling my audience a pipe dream. Recently, with the uptick of visibility for movement politics online, there has been a shift of discourse away from the “white-supremacy” led cynicism, apathy, and ignorance of the current political moment. In an effort to push against that very incorrect way of thinking, Black and brown activists and influencers began to shame people, pushing folks towards a “hope and joy” framework of politics, and insisting that hope and joy were the only ways to connect with activism, making no room and space for the very real despair and depression we are all experiencing under such a destabilizing system. In so doing, we (as in BIPOC, activists, allies) are actually just reinforcing the same binary that white supremacy culture does — to dismiss any parts of the self means to dismiss the whole self, especially when it comes to politics. And now, the “Hope and Joy” guys on TikTok aren’t wrong. But they are lying a little bit about how often they feel those things, I think!

But my thesis goes further than the individual. As much as I think the world in general has been destabilized by oppressive forces for a very long time, this particular moment feels different in a way that I’m not sure anyone has truly theorized on how we get of it. But first, how is the online Left harming the Left?

In a podcast, one of my favorite creators, and someone I’d like to think of as a friend, Sanjana of Baskinsuns fame, said something like, Americans love to moralize media, which does the interaction between person and media a deep disservice. It pauses the analysis and obscures the reason for the “problematic” thing to play out in its pages, and people put the piece of media in either a “right” or “wrong” in their brains to simplify whether or not they should engage with it. This sparked a thought in me. Now, with content creators as primary sources of media consumed by regular people, we have taken that type of interaction, our incessant need to moralize media, to its logical conclusion: we moralize the people making the content. If. you are a Good Leftist Creator, you are expected to debate The Bad Ones. You are asked for your thoughts on so and so and what they said about this and that. And I’m not saying that followers are wrong for asking for clarification or seeing what side you’re on, but rather that the debate bro industrial complex has seeded itself into the smallest of small time creators. I don’t think any of my peers would disagree with me on this — if you are a creator that has had in the past any level of following, you were being asked for your opinion on something that literally just happened. And if you don’t have a fully formed thought, you are either “contributing to the problem,” or you just don’t care enough. The need for instantaneous dialogue and discourse is what drives this machine, and we as creators feed its hungry beast of a mouth, gobbling up all of the attention and dopamine hits from each time a like lands on our page. And look, I love attention as much as the next chick on TikTok, and it’s not a bad thing at all, but when the political strategy for organizing youth is through the pretty self-obsessed Leftist content creators? Brother, we are cooked.

TikTok and Instagram as political discourse spaces do not allow for thoughtful dialogue, at all. The obvious must be said — whereas in the past we may have watched Foucault and Chomksy debate big ideas on a stage, we are now watching people who — in their defense — might be well read, but are certainly no Foucault or Chomksy. I’m sorry, I know I’ll get called elitist. But sue me, y’all just aren’t you know, literal political theory scholars. And I say that fully indicting myself! I only have a masters degree and I wield that thing like a sword. And while it means something, it doesn’t make me right 100% of the time (mostly because I actually deeply disagree with 90% of my education). But, if you mix speedy discourse with poorly constructed arguments built on someone’s 201 intro to European Political Theory class, you get absolute garbage piles of content that gets thousands of views, and sometimes, the power and ability to endorse political candidates. It is usually not a centered experience rooted in shared definitional understandings and thoughtful dialogue.

Even those of us who do take the time to make thoughtful response videos are bombarded with questions about what our thoughts are and where our responses are. Do you know the amount of peace I’ve achieved without that constant yammering in my comments and DMs? Brother, I can finally hear my own thoughts! But if you don’t speak, you’re also tossed out with the day-old garbage. There’s nothing worse than missing the discourse cycle because you were doing your research, and then your video bombs or people comment on other videos saying you don’t care about something you actually did make a video about.

And by no means it is a a new thing for Leftists, especially young ones and especially those in vulnerable situations to adhere to and worship Leftist thought leaders, of course, and then to dump them when they have scandal about them (or merely choose not to respond to some drama or scandal). We have relegated politicians, journalists, professors, experts, scholars, etc. untrustworthy for decades based on what comes out about them. If anything, we are so over-scandalized by public media creators that we have come to expect scandal, to be primed and ready to say “I knew it! I knew they weren’t trustworthy!” But in the past, those on stages and in media might have been more prepared to deal with such public lashings, might have been able to expect it in some ways, and might have been able to bounce back to their jobs doing whatever public service or education work they were doing prior to the scandal being outed by the enemy camp. Now, people are not any less trusting, but the people they are thrusting into the limelight do not have publicists. They do not have the ability to shoulder accountability for their own mistakes that deeply wound the people that loved and supported them. They handle it poorly, at best, and at worst, they have an entirely different option: to disappear, and to never show their face again. In so doing, sometimes hundreds, if not thousands of people lose their central educational touch point. No longer are we losing an on-air journalist to be replaced by another, but a distinct, charismatic leader of their own TikTok page who vaguely resonated with the previous guy. But you can’t replace them entirely. I should know. In the time since leaving TikTok, I have gotten multiple message requests, wondering where I am.

Some of this is typical parasocialiality, which may or may not be a word, but has been written about ad nauseam here and elsewhere. I have nothing more intelligent to add about that, except to say that I am terrified for what it means for the Left. It’s not like the Left hasn’t been full of these types of leaders since forever. Many people don’t seem to know this, but guy who made people drink the poisoned Kool-aid in Jamestown, Jim Jones? Yeah man, that guy was considered a “Leftist!” The Left hates to admit this, but we are just as likely to form fringe groups that irradiate with toxic ideologies and cult-like vibes as much as the Right. We have always needed good, smart, thoughtful engagement with our politics, and the insanely important ability to discern what is and isn’t true. But, now more than ever, Leftists are caught in information cycles that knock the wind out of them. We consistently ask Leftists to know and hold information about everything, everywhere, and then yell at individuals when they aren’t local enough. And the worst part is, unlike the Right Wing, the Democrats cannot seem to take hold of that energy and turn it into systemic power. So what is the point?

Which is why it is not only imperative to touch grass, but I’m wondering if we even stand a chance with how much over-usage of social media that online Leftists use. The reliance on the internet as the strategy to deliver organizing is a flawed one, at best. Yes, we can say that those Jubilee debate videos are doing some amorphous “awareness raising,” but in the end, regardless of who “wins” the debate or what debate bro is “humiliated,” can we say any of the profits from that video go to, say, a homeless shelter? Or a campaign? Or even to voter education materials? And now, when you watch a Hasan Piker streamer, unless it’s for charity, what praxis are we getting out of it? And even me — have any of you joined a MaskBloc because I talked about it? I don’t know.

I even fell victim to this. A few years ago, I was approached by someone who wanted to use their internet savvy for Indigenous rights and awareness raising. Me, being the Indigenous rights supporter than I am, and having the anti-colonialist mindset that I have, fell for her scheme of showing up as an anti-Hindutva content creator. She strung me along, planting pro-Indigenous talking points in my ear. When I realized that she was a Zionist and pro-Hindutva, pretending to be something she wasn’t so she could build up an audience to trick them, I had already done damage by sharing her work, which did not nuance anything, like she tried to say it did. All it did was muddy the ground of a genocide that is already unpopular to try to stop. So, when the lines started to get clearer, I pulled myself out of that friendship. But like I said, the damage had been done. And that’s me. I am incredibly picky about who I allow in my life politically. If I can be persuaded through someone manipulating my logic to support Indigenous return to land (an objectively Leftist stance), when I have extensively studied and worked in progressive spaces, who’s to say they aren’t convincing much less read people through rhetorical manipulation and internet propaganda?

Are our “Leftist influencers” up to the task of defending the Left against that? From what I see, we have the same seven conversations over and over again. I don’t even have to be online to know y’all are talking about how calling Indian food gross is racist, again. Or Olivia Rodrigo’s clothing is pedo-baiting, somehow. A friend of mine complained to me once that the internet isn’t a place to hold any real work, because the curriculum is expected from creators is “always 101.” How can we ever expect any real progress, when we are expected to teach the same class over and over again? This is not to say there are not creators whose main goal is to induct people into the Left. But surely, after we learn the basics of Marxism from an internet personality who is about to graduate from Berkeley after his parents funded his education into absolute joblessness, there must be some path set out for us? Some place to go? Why is raising class consciousness the goal, in and of itself, without some sort of political apparatus to find ourselves in? More than anything, most debate bros just want to get into media and entertainment — that is their goal. The political theater is simply the easiest way to get there. That, and hating women, which never seems to be the dealbreaker for who y’all follow, by the way.

The intelligent ones do find the political groups. We join the DSA or PSL or some other three letter acronym that loosely stands for “we are mostly socialist but also we really love hoarding power.” Others, smarter even still, join and serve in mutual aid groups, fiercely protecting their communities and serving their neighbors until the Discord group falls apart, because someone dated someone else, or something! I don’t mean to be trite here — these groups and spaces are incredibly important. They also almost always leave people scarred. Part of the reason for that is because the entry points for people that we have now — namely, internet personalities — don’t name the obvious thing: that the groups they align with are deeply flawed. Their content thrives based on getting you to believe their way of thinking is the absolute way, even if they don’t believe it, themselves. Even if they go so far as to say that they are not perfect, their followers make them out to be. “You never miss” should be written on my gravestone, after I’ve been doxxed and killed by someone who thought I missed, at least once.

But I’m not getting to some right-wing talking point about echo chambers or cancel culture. I’m trying to get to the point that the Left is not disunited, or even disjointed given its much more diverse identity and ideology range than the right wing. The right wing is not out organizing or even, at points, out funding us. The right wing is, however, intent on causing damage to nervous systems of internet users all over America, and then harnessing their fear, anger, and confusion and mobilizing that into votes. The Left does the exact same, but it has trouble harnessing that energy. It’s not that the internet game isn’t good strategy on the Left. It’s that they cannot harvest fear the same way the right wing does, because ultimately, the values they espouse do not correlate with the foundation of fear that mobilizes voters. Hope and fear are not direct opposites, but one does directly challenge the other. When you are so unregulated that you cannot make space for both, then one wins and the other loses, which is why the RW mobilizing on that makes sense. The Democrats cannot harvest fear when they say they mobilize on hope, when their constituents are so devoid of regulation that they may truly not feel either, or when their version of “hope” is diffused from its real truth, one that wrestles with fear on the ground, in the grass, getting all dirty. You can’t really do that on the internet.

I worry for the youth. It has always remained true that the revolution will be young. Youth lead, elders mentor, and the rest of us who fall in the middle fall behind as foot soldiers. Youth have always led revolutions all over the world. Young girls are our leaders, young girls of color our imaginative and creative engines. We also have to engage young men, and men of color, who have historically been incredible leaders as well, but also because it’s our responsibility to get to them before the right wing does. I know this is an unpopular opinion, especially among the Internet Feminists, and perhaps most Second Wavers, too. But you can’t have a people’s revolution without half of the people. This, too, is no real revelation that hasn’t been discussed to death on internet forums and in Socialism conferences. But it leads to me to a point that I don’t find discussed more often: I think the online Left is doing a number on young people being able to identify for what they’re actually longing, and replacing the need for connection and community with…watching streamers rant and rave.

I do think people are disconnected from community. And I think the Left — the real Left — can offer a sense of real connection, of that innate thing for which we all search and deeply desire. To be seen and understood, and to feel like your existence on this planet means something, anything. The Leftists of Yore (organized bunches between the 40s-70s) capitalized on this tightly, efficiently. The SDS led youth to massive breakthroughs on theories that shaped the world, both through intellect and praxis. The Black Panthers saw the world with clear eyes, and bright hope for building something different and new. The women’s groups of the sexual revolution dynamically changed how women viewed themselves and each other. Queer and trans activists — some of whom didn’t mean to become activists themselves, but had to in order to save their own lives — changed the game forever. But more than anything, these tightly organized groups offered something that changed people’s lives. More than social acceptance or policy change, they made space for people to connect. To be themselves. To find places they could find love, friendship, community. More than the theories they came up with, crit-self-crit circles, or even praxis, that is what changed anything at all.

And when those groups fell apart, as they do, it was from both external pressures and internal schematics. Young people fall together and fall apart, and you can’t stay on top forever. We keep thinking we want to be just like them, like our political forefathers. We keep wondering what we are doing wrong. We are more connected than ever, but we cannot seem to move people from online to offline, from theory to praxis. We blame each other, we blame the scholars, we blame the internet, but it takes two to tangle here, and neither party is moving one step forward. The Right Wing sees the dysregulation and capitalizes on it. The Left wing refuses to acknowledge it or to address it, but they sure as shit can’t capitalize on it. It doesn’t work for our end of things, unfortunately, for our youth to be so scramble minded that they reach for anything at all. We cannot just place ourselves in front of empty eyes and say “look! We’re the party of hope and joy!” without actually offering connection.

The Left is not regulated. The Left is crying out to be heard. But the Leftist organizers today are not as equipped or as resourced as the Leftist organizers of Yore. Which sounds crazy to say, right? We have undeniably more money flowing into social causes today than we ever did back then. That’s precisely the problem. Yep, this is about the NPIC LOL. The Nonprofit Industrial Complex, my old friend. The high level history is that, in order to cull the social movement work happening, the grants and philanthropy industry really blossomed (mostly specifically in the anti-Domestic Violence movement). The Reagan Era saw the massive destabilizing and rolling back of government programs, introducing more and complex government grants and contracts for nonprofits to take on that work, instead. This brought more and more progressive and social cause organizations into the sphere of grants cycles and funding and philanthropy. As we progressed socially, more organizations became a part of this cycle, and today, the situation is so dire that I saw a radical movement group advertising a grant writing seminar for organizers. If this doesn’t sound dire to you, I don’t know what could be. It’s not that I don’t want myself or my peers to do paid work. I want that very badly, very much, actually. But there is an undeniable vibe shift when you have to spend time on funding the organization’s work with grants instead of, you know, Doing The Work. And while there are radical donors and progressive philanthropies, the general consensus in the fundraising world right now is that philanthropies are shutting their doors and tightening their coffers, and the Federal Government’s rules on government grants is a death knell for smaller progressive organizations. And still, we have more wealth than ever flowing into movement organizations, but they are still sitting at a juncture of barely passing by, leaving fundraisers and grant writers in severe anxiety and further dysregulating activists who just want to do their work and also be able to pay rent.

So, we have more money than ever, but our organizing is still weak and not resulting in mass victories. Why? Some of it is biding our time. Massive changes do not happen overnight. And the burnt out activists, fundraisers, and grant writers are all doing the work. People are not quitting (even when they should, honestly). But we cannot count on the 22-35 year olds who are getting Lupus because they can’t stop themselves from working into the night to save the world. Movements mean people. Like more than just the paid organizers. So, back to my question. Is the internet the main vehicle we have for this? Because if so, we are cooked.

Because, as I said earlier, our Leftist theory/debate bros online are not just charismatic leaders. They are content themselves. They are mere images of who they actually are, and while that is very similar to the old timey cult preachers, I’d argue that because of reach, it’s worse. When people replace community with online identity, politics with whatever Hasan Piker is preaching, and making these folks rich instead of feeding their neighbors, I have to wonder if we are making any real progress at all. On the other hand, where are the Democrats knocking on my door? I live in a particularly class diverse part of the city. Why isn’t anyone trying to organize me? Even in a blue city in a blue state — or perhaps especially here — my vote is taken for granted. One cannot wait to be organized, but neither can one quell the desire to be organized.

So, I left the online Left. I don’t know that I will ever return, because my own dysregulation was feeding into other peoples’, and I do deeply apologize for that. I know now, in the core of my being, able to stand firm and strong that I do believe in radical politics and people and compromise and never, ever discarding people, that I am regulated. Or more regulated than before. And I don’t think we can do politics without at least 50% of us feeling this way. And a lot of that needs systemic changes, but a lot of it is also incumbent on us, the Internet Leftists, the Content Creators, being honest about what this is. If it isn’t a job that pays your bills, then a part of it is for your own validation. And that’s okay. But I don’t think we can act anymore like it’s an educational program that is getting people inducted into the Left. Because there is no 201 course on internet Leftism. There is no real call to action. There is only engagement and content and engagement and content and engagement and content, and nothing else. You are being sold a pipe dream through Hasan Piker’s mic that he will never make true — at least, not through you watching him rave about whatever catches his fancy and pays his bills.

For now, I will sit here politely and wait for the Democrats to organize me. I will do my part in the ways I know that I am doing. I will lead where I want to, and lean back where I must. But in the quest of calming myself, I have to leave behind something I loved. But if the thing you loved tries to kill you to make you feel beloved, is it worth it? Is it good for you? And more importantly: Is Internet TikTok Leftist Discourse going to save us?

Nah.

More sometime soon. Maybe.

Yours,

me

What I will ruin is its discussion of mental health and religosity, because that’s what this essay is about. Our main character, Emily, is a content creator who makes a living from doing astrological chart readings and posting memes to Instagram. She’s super popular and has a far reach, but in recent years felt depressed and burnt out from her work, seeking to return to the excitement she had in wanting to be an actress in LA. Her life has become about making the next rent payment through her astrological readings, which she does — and doesn’t — actually believe in. She learned how to read charts from the Instagram School of Pop Astrology, and gets people to pay her $200+ dollars just to tell them validating things about themselves, facets of who they are, thereby confirming and validating that their personalities cannot change and that they are in fact, rooted in the stars.

The book itself is funny and meaningful (in ways I did not expect. Anyone whose screen time is over 8 hours a day needs to read it, please). I absolutely love characters that are easy to hate, and sometimes kind of stupid. But the part that struck me the most was Emily’s discussion of mental health in connection to what she does and does not believe about astrology. Emily has OCD — something a therapist diagnosed her with when she was making enough money with her astrology work to pay for a therapist. Because Emily’s work was in identifying and diagnosing people’s personalities through astrology, it became the foundation of how she thinks about the world. From there, her OCD took over. While her rational brain understands and knows that in some capacity, astrology just reflects the very human attributes we all have, she cannot help but spiral about astrological traits, both within herself and other people. The sets of rules and numbers ran her life. The irony here, of course, is that the thing that was allowing her to pay the therapist was also the thing that was rooting itself so deeply in her brain that she was becoming depressed.

And as I was reading this book, I thought to myself: Oh, fuck. That’s how I treated Hinduism FOR MOST OF MY LIFE.

I grew up fairly orthodox Hindu, if not in practice, then definitely in theory. Where I lived in Ohio, there was a budding Satya Sai program, which follows Satya Sai Baba, a guru based in Puttaparthi, India, as an Avataram (another coming) of God. I could never get totally straight if people really thought he was divine or if the teachings simply say that everyone is divine, with some people just realizing their divinity. Now, in hindsight, I realize that confusion was probably on purpose. But Satya Sai Baba was so popular in the 90s and early 2000s, that now deposed leader of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, also followed him. His family did, too. In fact, they made a national day out of it, recognizing Baba’s divinity. He and his family once snuck themselves into seeing him in Puttaparthi, India. I cannot overstate this enough. The former leader of Venezuela, snuck out of his country to go see an Indian spiritual guru. This was a mere few years before my family went to go see Baba, too. That trip was wild, by the way. I had these really cute platform sandals (I was seven), and I left them outside of a temple, and they got stolen, and I was told by the adults around me that it’s okay because someone needed them more than I did. I had to buy new sandals that day. Thus begins my laundry list of examples of how I may have aqquired a form of religious OCD.

Aside from Baba, my family participated pretty heavily in the makings of the new Shiridi Sai Baba temple in Columbus, Ohio. At the time, there was only one other Hindu temple, which had been there for quite some time already. It came to be known as reflecting North Indian Hindus, of whom a majority do not recognize Shiridi Sai Baba, a later-born guru, as a divine figure. This man is interesting because he is important to both Hindus and Muslims of the region, but Muslims, of course, don’t participate in idoltry, and thus Hindus took on the burden of building him temples, I suppose. So, my family became really integrated in building the second Hindu temple in central Ohio, which would house a large marble Shiridi Sai Baba figurine. This consited of years of fundraising, bhajans (divine songs) in each of the founding family’s basements, hours spent building relationships, lectures from visiting guests from India who called themselves gurus, etc.

My childhood was spent spiritually nourished. I was never forced to worship in any particular way, as Hinduism is not dogmatic like that, but I was shaped by the currents of Satya Sai Baba’s society and Shiridi Sai Baba’s temple. I spent my Sunday mornings in Sai Spiritual Education with teachers who were certainly not qualified to lead discussions with children and teenagers, talking about ethics, morals, right vs wrong, etc. It really shaped my life and brought me to social justice. As you can see, liberation, freedom, and justice are some of the core values of SSE. Thus, in many ways, I felt aligned with the Catholics in the room at school, who spent their Sundays in a similar structure of school (though, I’d argue, nuns are likely more qualified to teach their spiritual education, as you do have to go through nun school, whereas my classes were being taught by folks who worked in insurance, tech, and academia — the last one would make them slightly more qualified to teach, but they were chemistry professors and the like). I was raised on the knife’s edge of right vs. wrong, with a precocious understanding of life and death, karma, and hyperreality. I was then, as I am now, fascinated by the other world, the one we escape to after death. I had not myself been touched — ravaged — by grief until my early adulthood. So happily, I spent years of my childhood engaging in extremely adult concepts, allowing my tiny body to become wracked with guilt about returning for seven more lifetimes should I break a rule or two. I wanted moksha — eternal liberation from the suffering of the body — so badly. As a child, this meant not lying to my parents. As a young adult, it meant denying my innate sexuality, my desire for love and touch, and attempting to kill myself when I wronged anyone about whom I cared deeply.

Is anyone surprised that I turned out the way I did? I spent my later teen and early adult years trying to right my wrongs. I studied hard, I never partied, I dated monogomously and did not have sex with my first real boyfriend — ever — and for all intents and purposes, I was a good kid. So then, why did my community bad mouth me for mistakes I made when I was fifteen? (read: mistakes, meaning, a boy forcing himself on me, but don’t worry y’all! In Hinduism, a woman can only ever ask for it! We are so feminist like that!) Why did the people who raised me, in whose basements I sat singing about my devotion to the Gods we all shared, who debated scholarship with me, who praised me for reading the original Ramayana and Maha Bharata, talk about me like I was ruining my life and slut shame me? And why did I allow those rules to suffocate me until they killed me, if Hinduism is not dogmatic, if Hinduism is nothing like Christianity? If Hinduism is “not a religion, but a way of life,” called “Sanatana Dharma,” why did others forgo their dharma, their duty, to protect me or protect the more marginalized? If Hinduism answers the call to walk away from oppressive religious regimes, as the Hindu right wants you to think that it is, why did it walk away from its responsibility to save us?

Hinduism, like any religion, cannot be blanket statement-ed. We cannot say that it is somehow more or less progressive than Western Christianity. Not when Western Christianity also produced Black churches and freedom fighters in every corner of the North American and South American continents. Not when Western Christianity fused with indigenous peoples’ belief systems to create rich, beautiful tapestries of belief. That isn’t to somehow beautify the damage that Christianity has done in every corner of the world. But it is to say that there is no one without the other. There is no Hinduism as it stands today without the advent of Christianity as it was yesterday. The relationship between the two religions just isn’t an either/or — it’s dialectic. Hinduism today, especially as it’s practiced by the American diaspora, is in fact influenced by Christianity, which is why the Hindu Right Wing echoes the Christian Right Wing in so many ways. Caste supremacy and white/Christian supremacy are two sides of the same coin, but they are also somehow, facing each other.

And honestly, it takes real creativity to make Hinduism — a blatantly decentralized religion with a million+ ways of practicing it — into a Catholic church equivalent of producing religious trauma. Not only courage, but creativity. How did my community do it? Between terrorizing their kids for their ACT scores and judging other people’s kids while their own ran rampant under their own roofs, how did the aunties and uncles of Dublin, Ohio, manage to religiously traumatize us, too?

I’d like to think Hindus can have religious trauma, too. And in many ways, it feels reflective of OCD perpetuating people’s minds. Religion, apparently, is supposed to be an uplifting guide to how to understand and cope with the world’s realities. God is supposed to be a kind, devoted entity who specifically created you through His love. Even in Hinduism, where the relationship between man and God is more transactional, there are elements of divine love that shine through, like when Krishna is Arjuna’s charioteer in the most difficult battle of his life. Krishna tells Arjuna that he will not leave him. That Arjuna must complete his duty, but that he has Krishna on his side, and they will see their dharma through together. Religion is to believe that God is your charioteer. That you are righteous in your movement towards liberation, or Moksha, the eternal peace of not being reborn over and over again. In Hinduism, to be human is to suffer. To end suffering is the goal, which means, essentially, reunification with the divine eternal “being,” or cosmos.

To do so, we are inundated with rules. There capital K Karma, and then there’s little k karma. Karma dictates how the universe reacts to what you do. Every little thing has a karmic retribution — from drinking this coffee today to hurting your mother’s feelings tomorrow. There is little k karma, which dictates throughout your lifetime (this is the popularized form in Western media), and then there is capital K Karma, which carries over lifetime over lifetime. This is a super highly simplified definition for the sake of the article, but you get the gist. As a kid, the concept of Karma was fascinating to me. I lived in lockstep with the universe. I could feel spirituality in my bones, it was always sticking to me in ways I could see and others could not. Even more than my parents, I think I had an easier time aligning with what the “right” thing to do was. Later, I would find out that this is called integrity, and that was a value I would come to hold in very high regard. But what it also did was develop a set of rules for me to follow. I am still parsing out the ways in which this impacted me — but essentially, I was taught that everything mattered: thought, word, and deed. And while I don’t remember being terrified of negative consequences (as Christian kids might), I do remember taking my life so seriously even at the ripe, tender age of 10 years old, that I would try to follow all the rules to the best of my ability, to build good credit in the bank of Karma, even going so far as to school my own thoughts, to hide them under thick blankets in my brain, lest a negative thought of mine somehow changed the environment around me.

Let me give you an example: if I was mean to my mom, I would have to sleep on the floor to correct it, because otherwise, my negative thought would cause her to have cancer. So while I couldn’t control my Scorpio mouth, at least I could course correct my behavior by self-punishing myself, which would not make the original action okay, but would help me proceed with my dharma of being a good daughter and protecting my mom. In tough moments like that, I remember debating with God. “Do I really have to do this?” a voice — mine — would ask. A response from a voice that sounded kind of like mine, but more distorted: “Yes. You behaved in a way that goes against your dharma, you must correct it.”

This practice transformed throughout the years as I became less and less religious. As a kid going to temple, I loved the social aspect of it, but was also enamored by the religious portion. To be able to pray and pay penance for my bad behaviors (I was a normal teenage kid who walked around with guilt the size of the moon). To be able to show society how devout I was. And yet, the normal teenage parts of my life were pulling me in a different direction.

For a long time, I was ashamed of my sexuality. I have always known myself to be bisexual, but I held it deep inside of me until I was around thirteen or fourteen years old. When I explored online, progressive Hindus would say that Hinduism is actually so open to queerness! But in practice, that really didn’t translate. Hindu Brahmin communities were, and continue to be, closed off. Hinduism is built specifically on the virtue of creating families, so you can be gay, as long as you don’t act on it. Hinduism’s core purpose is literally to create more Hindus, to procreate, to have a little Dharmic family. Anything that takes you out of that path has to be justified by another Dharmic pathway, and that’s often dictated by your Hindu community as opposed to yourself. And yes, you can say that being gay and queer is Dharmic, and I’d agree with you. But that’s the beauty of Dharma; anyone can say whatever, and it’s whatever. The thing that’s hard is getting your community to accept that. And while my community was deeply hypocritical — Brahmins who don’t eat meat buying Teslas and LV and high end leather, etc. — ultimately, they were still the ones who called the shots. And in a society that is so driven by shame as its primary motivator, who wouldn’t develop OCD in that framework? Therefore, to be bisexual was out of the question. Simply liking a boy was even out of the question, much less a girl. Hindu society, as much as Hindu progressives hate to admit it, is deeply homophobic, not just rooted in its culture, but indeed, rooted in the meaning and philosophy of its very religion. And, my mind riddled with holes and mental illness filling them, tried to think my way out of my sexuality. I only dated boys, I settled down quickly, and I put the issue to bed (because a non-practicing bisexual is just really kind of hated upon, but not in a way that denies you housing…so…that’s that, I suppose). While I did come out to my parents early on, since I married a man, they had forgotten, and I had to come out…again…when I spoke at my school’s queer graduation. So much for being honest, brave, and transparent as a kid!

But back to the point. You might see why an environment like this would make something like OCD hide in its own periphery. It doesn’t help that most of the time, I am right. The my little rituals — from prayers to studying in a specific way to cleaning up cat vomit right away when cat sitting instead of leaving it for my friend to come back to — might result in ruminating on the “right thing to do.” For a while, it felt like protection from society, to make sure I wasn’t stepping on any lines. Other times, it felt like a death spiral, worrying myself into wounds, into slices on my arms, punishing myself for things I couldn’t get myself to do. When John Green’s Turtles All the Way Down came out, I tried to ignore how much I related to the main character.

So now, I have some big questions to ask myself. If I do have OCD, then does that free me from my adherence to religion? Even now, I find the religious voices inside of my head, telling me that eating gelatin will make me go to a Hell my religion doesn’t even believe in. So, will I be able to eat the marshmallow, no problem? Will I be able to eat the Fish n’ Chips, without the decision eating at my insides? Is that even how normal people behave?

I should be allowed to be bad. I should be allowed to make mistakes I never made. Hinduism took a lot from me, but most of all, it took my autonomy, and told me, “it’s okay. Don’t make mistakes in this lifetime. You have the next to think about.” But I’m starting to suspect that was the OCD talking. The anxiety that would spout out of me like a uncapped fire hydrant, blaring red, if I took one small misstep. The control I need over my home, my clothes, my hair. If I am diagnosed, if I work on this, does that mean I get a second chance at developing a relationship with God, one that is truly with His voice and not the OCD?

I don’t know. The possibility feels endlessly optimistic, while the road ahead to get there is daunting. Perhaps the real question is whether I’m willing to do the work to find my way back home to religion, or if abandoning it altogether is the only way out. In any case, my somatic coach sent me a referral, and she’s South Asian! So I suppose we’ll get some answers, soon. I hope.

See you on the other side of diagnosis.

Yours,

Me

My parents moved to the US when they were younger than I am, right now. At 27 and 29, my parents had two young children and were traversing a landscape they had never expected. Back then, Ohio was even more white than it is now. It was the late 90s, and everything was flush with newness. The migrant Indian wave came in a rush that continues to this day. The place we ended up, a suburb of Columbus, Ohio, was filling to the brim with biriyani spices and the sounds of cricket played well into hot, humid summer evenings. Ohio became somewhat ubiquitous with Indian people, at least to our own communities. So many Indians (especially Telugu people) moved to that area that in the park of the apartment complex down the road from my house, we didn’t even call that park by its name. We called it “the Indian park,” laughing at the way the uncles and thathas (grandpas) walked around with their hands behind their back. So many Indians moved to this place that it sparked anti-Indian violence in the area — we faced the “you’re stealing our jobs!” crowd long before it was popular. You know you’ve made it in America when they hate you so much that they try to kill you just for drinking your fourth cup of chai on your front porch. Like, relax. We’ll give you some, too, if you ask politely.

We lived in an apartment for a few years. I was brought over as a nine month old, barely recognizing my father, who had come a few months before sending for us. I grew up passing by that apartment complex on my way to school, never having moved so far from where we started to forget those humble beginnings. We moved to what most Dubliners (of Ohio) would consider a “starter home” — four bedrooms, two-and-a-half baths. To me, it was a mansion. And to many, indeed, it was a much larger home than most Americans get. To my parents? It was a representation of how far they’d come. My parents, unlike most Indian immigrants from the skilled laborer wave of the 90s and 2000s, grew up in abject poverty. My bedtime stories consisted of my folks telling me the meals they skipped, how my grandfather disappeared for one solid year after gambling away all of my mothers’ family’s money, how their families scraped together money to send them to school (my mother being the first woman in our family to gain a higher education, through her Scorpio willpower and fear she cultivated in everyone around her to try and dare to stop her.) I learned early on that my parents would buy me T-shirts, but never branded ones. They would send me to a great school, but never spent too much time on prioritizing social status. My parents cared more for my health and my soul than for their pockets and their cars. This isn’t to say that my parents did not indulge their wealth later in life. But where my friends’ parents were spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on their children’s birthday parties and vacations to Sweden every year, my parents somehow remained (mostly) humble throughout it all. When everyone else upgraded their homes to mansions (honest to god mansions), we stayed in our perfectly sized home for the four of us, where I had a very happy childhood.

So now that the house is emptied of 26 years worth of memories, I thought I would write a walk through of each room, remembering what made my home so worth loving that none of us can truly let it go. To me, those four walls were protector, faith, and sometimes, tragedy of living in the United States. Of living far away from land that calls my name, a land that knows me by rights alone. I feel at home the second I step off the plane in India, but I feel similarly at home when I make the trek back to fall asleep in my old bedroom, the silence at once overwhelming and welcoming. Those four walls did their best to love me back the way I loved them. Those four walls held my family with tenderness when we could not receive the tenderness we so badly wanted from our family in India. In honor of that house and everything it gave me, I wanted to share a bit more about it, and how it made me who I am, today.

The House in Dublin, Ohio

Imagine. You are facing our cute little house. It is a ranch-style home, much to my chagrin as a house-hunting five year old girl. I had been living in an apartment, and I wanted an upstairs/downstairs so badly. I dreamed of sneaking out of my room as a teenager, of having my space. But, when the old Indian man who was one of our dearest family friends, already nearing retired age when I was just a little girl, unlocked the door and showed us this house as our realtor, things began to click. I remember walking up the walkway. The front yard was lush, green, big. Enough space to run and play with my brother. There were three big trees: an Ohio cherry tree, its red ruby leaves lighting up in the summer sun, a big tree I couldn’t name, its jade green leaves sparkling, and my favorite, a baby weeping willow. Oh, be still, my emotional little girl heart. I loved seeing it sweep over the ground, welcoming visitors, as it sat right up by the porch. Later, summers and summers would come and go. In the spring, I would watch the baby weeping willow bloom into these delicate pink blossoms. I took them off the tree, plucking and thanking her, and wove the flowers and leaves into flower crowns. I played in the yard with the neighbor boy, two years younger than me, and when I was ten years old, he confessed to having a crush on me. He’s an athlete now, married to some other girl. The crush, like the willow, did not last. My father had to cut her down, diseased with something or another. But I remember her fondly, because for years, I would stare up into her branches. She shed her leaves in the winter, and I wondered if she was unbearably cold. But as soon as the thought passed, it was spring, and it was time to make flower crowns again. The first time I laid eyes on her, I had a feeling that this would be something to remember, forever.

The house opened into a raised foyer, black tiles set against — what had then been, and later would be changed into wood — carpet floors. That foyer would be the stomping grounds for arriving guests for the next twenty something years. It would also become the hallowed ground where my brother and I, bored on one summer’s day, set down little candles and burned the edges of paper, making pirate maps look aged and cool. My father, who had been working from home in the basement, smelled the smoke (even though we had tried to mitigate this by opening the front door). He came running. up, stomping up the stairs and into the foyer. Grabbed our things and gave us a stern talking to. It remains one of my favorite memories of me and my brother. Years would go by, and the foyer almost never changed. My mother had creeping vines decorating the two windows on either side of the door, and images of Hindu gods greeted every guest who walked through. On cold Autumn evenings that accompanied Deepavali, I’d watch as my mother, hearth of our home, lit candles and put them outside each evening to ward off the dark. On Deepavali, we’d exit the foyer with sparklers that we saved from the Fourth of July, spinning them around like crazy with each other, reveling in the brightness of family, of tradition. Can anyone blame me for believing that good always overcomes evil, when every year in the stark bleakness of an Ohio November, my family would find a way to hold off the darkness? The foyer was also a perfect entry point to clomp off the snow that would inevitably stick to the bottom of our boots, or the mud from the spring rainfall. I loved when people would knock on the door, whether a boy scout selling popcorn or guests or friends coming over. It was always my pleasure to see people come through our never-quite-empty home. The closet to the right side held my jackets and my band gear until my parents moved out. The foyer held so many years of welcomes or a welcome backs or a see you laters, but rarely ever truly a goodbye.

The living room was open plan, backlit by the backdoor window and another window over to the side. The carpet was not soft. It was scratchy, grey. I remember first looking into the living room, which had light streaming into it from the windows in the back. The last residents had wicker furniture, which I had never seen before. My parents replaced it with a black leather sofa, which took the shape of our butts over time, sinking comfortably in when you sat in it. It was an L shaped sofa, and while it was rearranged over the years, we never replaced it. To me, the sofa was as permanent as this house belonging to us. If I close my eyes, I can see my mother’s small figure, covered by many sheets and blankets, in the nook of the couch where she watched TV. I would lay directly on top of her, feeling her body and warmth, craving my mother in the way only a daughter can, and her giving me warmth, in the way only a mother can provide. The living room had our big blocky TV, which I refused to let my father replace until well after LG TVs became the thing. I loved that thing. I loved how bulky our TV set was. I watched Phil of the Future and Wizards of Waverly Place. I learned how four episodes of TV was two hours of time, shocked, even then, at how much time I was capable of wasting. I watched Monty Python with my friends during movie night (a questionable choice for a girl of thirteen watching with her family right there). I ate pickles while I watched the premier of Halloween Town Four. I still remember the crisp crunch, the sourness filling my mouth. I still remember wondering what the hell happened to the actress who played Marnie for the first three movies. The living room was where we spent so much time as a family. I did my homework on the matching rug that T had — because our mothers bought them together. We’d laugh and joke that “you stole my rug!” She lives in New York now, and her family was one of those I mentioned moved our of their “starter” home and into something much bigger. Those years, though, she spent hours in my home and I in hers. And in that hall, I learned the shape of me against her. I learned the shape of me against my mother, my father, and my brother. I learned the shape of me against the broken fireplace that stopped working a few years into living there, after my father had bumped his head trying to get it to work. I learned the shape of me against myself, sitting crying on the couch after being confronted by my parents for my bad grades in math, the boys I had let touch me, the ones I did not let touch me but did anyway. I learned how the world worked for young girls of color there. I came out as bisexual when I was fourteen years old to my parents, sitting on that couch, and them responding saying that “I should just focus on school, and we’d figure out dating after graduation” (It could’ve been worse!) I learned how to be resilient to cruelty and confusion, there. I graduated in the living room, as my 2020 graduation was canceled due to COVID. The same place I had applied to college was the same place I finished it.

Off to the side of the open plan living room was the dining table. Here, I remember my parents buying our first real formal dining table. This table, like the couch, was bought rather early on and stayed as a permanent fixture until the day my parents packed it up for their move. The table is a light wood and bears the wounds of many dinner parties, painting sessions, late-night homework after hours of band practice, the time when we had that uncomfortable conversation with those people I don’t care to remember, and, as my parents refuse to let me forget, resin from when I took on earring-making as my COVID Lockdown hobby (whoops). My fingerprints, from ages five to 25, are all over that table, as are my brother’s, my mom’s and my dad’s. We could make the table extend with an additional piece. We moved chairs when we had more guests over than the black couch could seat. We made a mess of that room, a catch all for photos with my friends for my 16th birthday party, to hosting a recently widowed auntie when she couldn’t figure out taxes on her own, after her husband had died. The formal dining hall was where I sat texting my secret boyfriend. Years later, it would be where we sat, across the table from my father, as my now-husband stated his intention to marry me. In the photo below, I am sixteen, skinny from hating myself and feeling ugly and unloved. Nearly ten years later, I would sit at this table and show my father the diamond ring on my finger (which he would thoroughly inspect, like the Indian man he truly is).

Next, we walk into the kitchen, where my memories are of finding my mother standing over the stove. Every morning before school, my mother made me and my brother breakfast. In the years where I struggled with disordered eating, this was my battleground. My anxiety prevented me from eating well, but my mother still attempted to feed me. Here, you stand facing the back windows. Large, overlooking our gently sloping backyard, and later dressed up in fancy curtains. I loved walking out into the back of our kitchen area, next to where our altar for god sat, smelling the incense, opening up the windows. The hazy light that flowed in regardless of season filled my senses every morning. We had bar stools and sat up at the counter to eat breakfast, but took casual dinners at the back of the kitchen near those windows. The years we spent huddled, a family of four, eating the delicious food my mother made (delicious food that I hated back then, eating my daily pappu and rasam, that I deeply miss now), debating everything from social and political happenings to my friends and their silly boyfriends. My parents held an open forum where we could talk about so many things, if not everything. The language flowed, Telugu to English back to Telugu again. Some days we ate in silence, my father angry with me, or me angry with my brother. There was always some anger, the hard edges of resentment that only happen among family that deeply adore each other, but it’s all okay, because there was more joy there that overrode that, every time. Here is where I sat when I raced to finish my meals (I was always a slow eater). Here is where I sat in tears when I couldn’t, when my anxiety and disordered eating had been taken to its heights by bullying at school. I took this table with me to University, finally discarding it upon moving out. This table had followed us out of the apartments, to the house. On the underside of it, my brother and I had colored with crayons as kids (probably me more than anyone). I could be conflating this table with another, but the truth is, it hardly matters. This kitchen is twenty five years worth of my mother’s creativity, when she would eat something yummy at a restaurant and then recreate it at home. Decades of family friends coming over for Christmas, or New Years, or Thanksgiving, or whatever else excuse we threw together to spend time in community. Years of ny father’s hard earned money on the table, him working late into the night while we ate dinner without him. My brother developed his appetite there. I fixed mine. I learned how to sustain myself, to nourish myself. I sought my mother’s long hair, the braids falling down her back, playing with it as a child while she yelled at me that she was trying to cook. I yelled at her back, in this kitchen, trying to get her to be more careful so she didn’t burn those perfect, delicate hands that I worshipped so much. In the kitchen, I can smell the permanently stained walls, the rising waft of my mother’s Indian spices sizzling throughout the house. Every morning I woke to my mother’s prayers on the kitchen floor, in front of our altar to God, followed by sounds of making coffee and breakfast. The heart. My mother. The kitchen. This place that taught me how to do something so core to being a human: to eat.

We walk down the hallway next, down to my parents’ bedroom. It was painted blue for a while, but I don’t remember the shades from before. My parents slept in a queen bed that was backed against the wall closest to the door. The master suite is beautiful: it has two windows off to the side, offering soft light into the space. There is a vanity with drawers where my father kept every important document he collected over the years. In the cabinet off to the side, my Indian clothes dwelled. Between my mother and I, we had too many for them to live in our regular closets. I remember opening it up as a kid, a teenager, a special kind of excitement filling me. To be adorned in the clothes best suited to my body type, that complimented my skin color, my eyes, and to feel like a girl becoming a woman is so unique, so special. When I was little, my mother would lay out the sets on the bed for me to pick out from, and later, I would pick them out myself, and lay them out until she was ready to help me get dressed. The vanity had a large mirror where I would watch my mother put on her bindi. My parents’ bedroom was sacred ground. I was always welcome here, the door was always open, never turned away. I’ve always had trouble sleeping, and as a kid, I would find my way from my own bedroom in the middle of the night, half-asleep, and crawl into bed with them. For a long time, I would find myself curled up between them until I got too big, and my father had to move to sleep on the ground. But in my memory, he never stopped me from doing it. He simply waited for me to outgrow the habit of needing my parents’ warmth to put me back to sleep. Over in the walk in closet next to my parents’ bedroom, I would play hide and seek with my brother. I would shut myself into any tiny space, knowing my size was my secret weapon. He’d never find me behind all these coats and scarves that smelled like my mother. I still love small, enclosed spaces. My parents’ master bathroom was recently redone, right before they moved out. But for the longest time, the massive bathroom had tiles that my father had put in with a man whose daughter shared my birthday. The work wasn’t shoddy, but you could tell it was DIY because some of the tiles didn’t match with the ones next to them. The bathtub was one of those that you could tell was built in the late 80s or early 90s, because it was inset in the wall. We hardly every used the tub, but when I did, it felt like an island unto itself. I started preferring this bathroom to the kids’ one because of its size, and because a teenaged me could not share with a teenaged brother (mostly my fault). The counter space is brimming with all of mine and my mother’s girly things. Hair ties and clips, bindis and makeup. My mother is a humble woman, but we Telugu girls like our nice, sparkly things. I remember watching my mother braid her long hair, which at times slipped past her hips. I have always maintained that she is the most beautiful woman on this planet, even if she (and I) left hairballs everywhere for my dad to scold us about. She didn’t need the makeup. She never has. I changed into my wedding dress in this bathroom. I did my wedding blush in this mirror, while my best friend since childhood did my hair. Every year, for my birthday, my parents made me sit on the edge of the bathtub and put oil on my head and body as a blessing, a Telugu tradition that I cherished year after year. So many blessings on that poorly tiled floor.

Back down the hallway, to the right. That’s where the mudroom is. They recently redid this, too, but here we had the same washer/dryer for years. In the closet to the right is where chips and other snacks went. Our shoes found themselves a mess on the floor, but should have gone into the shoe rack. Out the exit door is our garage, but the last door left goes downstairs. The basement. For me, my earliest memories of the basement were ones of deep fear. I would run down the basement steps to our finished basement, get whatever I needed, and run back up as quickly as I could. You see, my brother had convinced me that there was a gorilla in the crawl space (which was shut in by a door, but still. Scary!) One summer, T and L were over at our house. L, the gang leader and oldest boy, convinced all of us to go “gorilla hunting” and we took “weapons” (tennis rackets) and went into the crawl space. I don’t remember much from that day, but I do remember running back up the stairs, screaming. The basement was also where we held parties for kids. For years, we had a ping pong table, a must have for kids growing up in the 2000s. I loved this because I was really good at it. That I accidentally hit that girl who shares a birthday with me in the nose with a paddle…not one of my prouder moments, but it was an accident, I swear! The summer I was fourteen, my Ammama was visiting from India. We had a futon in the basement where she slept, and I opted to stay in the downstairs bedroom (which also worked as an office). I loved this summer because the separation from my parents, who slept upstairs, meant that I could stay up all night on the internet watching Merlin. That was the year I wore a red scarf all year round (if you know, you know). I also held sleepovers here, nights spent on Omegle with my friends A and M, whispering secrets, sharing traumas. A’s mom was an alcoholic; M’s parents were Catholics. I didn’t know this until later, but our voices carried. If my parents heard us, heartbroken for each other and fusing together as one, they never said. In this basement, I was hurt for the very first time. In this basement, years after the hurt subsided from a tsunami to a small well, every so often, my husband stayed before moving across the country to join me as I attended graduate school, his head nearly hitting the low ceiling. The good memories swell with the bad ones, creating something that tastes like tart ice cream. It was always colder down there than in the rest of the house.

Let’s run back up the stairs lest the gorilla of memories catches us. Back through the mudroom (take a quick peek at our garage, where my mother would deep fry foods and we parked our two cars, one of them being mine later on in my life). We won’t spend too much time here, except to say that it is where I got married. We had a engagement-turned-surprise-legal wedding full of silliness, and it was one of the best days of my life. I got to marry my soulmate right there in the same house where I thought I’d never wind up with anyone great. Well, I was wrong. I wound up with someone perfect. In so doing, we cemented our marriage in my childhood home, married by my childhood best friend, K. I held white roses in my hands that my best friend made for me the morning of the wedding, and my vows were eight minutes long even after I tried to cut them down. Hey! My love is verbose, okay? If that wasn’t clear.

If we take a right out of the mudroom and walk down the hall, past the living room and formal dining hall, we take a right into what, for the majority of our life there, was my brother’s room (there was a brief switch while he was in college, though). The last I had seen it, it was navy blue on three sides, with a lighter blue accent wall. Before that, it had been light blue with an outer space themed wallpaper on the far side. When we had first moved in, I, being the bratty baby sister that I was, cried for the bigger bedroom. I got it — he was a good boy and he had been convinced that somehow, this was the better room, anyway (imagine me shaking my head at you, dear reader, for it was not the better room). He did have two windows, with a lot of light streaming in. His bed faced the door, his desk to its left, and a bookshelf to his right. My brother was an avid reader. I was amazed by his ability to take things in (still am). He was thoughtful and introspective. I wanted to do everything in the world that he did. I read every book he read. I stole books from him, constantly. I was completely unoriginal. I didn’t spend too much time in this bedroom, because he would often come to mine, instead. I hated that wallpaper. I thought it was so ugly. When, years later, he wanted it painted dark, I questioned his sanity. But in the end, he was right, as he is about most things: it was super cozy.

If we back out of his room, we come upon the shared kids bathroom. Nothing to write home about, really, except I spent hours in here to get some privacy as a child. I would talk out loud, make up stories in my head, keep myself entertained. My brother had his ear up against the door, made fun of me, but that’s okay. I was a burgeoning writer, and he had no way of knowing that. When we moved in to the house, the previous owners had wallpapered a strip around the bathroom. The wallpaper was stupid. It depicted different kinds of bathtubs. I hated it. One day, when I was a teenager, I picked it off, left bits and pieces of it everywhere. My parents never yelled at me for that. One memory of this bathroom, though, comes from one of my darker years. I hadn’t been eating well, and my PMDD was really getting bad — though I wouldn’t know it was this for many years. I had been being bullied at school, and without going into detail about it, it really scarred me. One morning, before something to do with the band, I woke up in a lot of pain. I went to the bathroom, thinking it was normal cramps. But I ended up falling onto the floor, weakly calling for my parents. I don’t remember much, but I do remember my father picking me up off of the floor. He carried me to the car and rushed me to the hospital. I was given fluids because I had been severely dehydrated. Later, I would learn how my body’s cycle worked against me. How much more I had to do to take care of my body when I was on my period. But that day cemented something in my mind: my father rushing into action, my limp body hanging from his arms. I knew with certainty that there isn’t a place in the world I could be, whether that was in my own bathroom or across the world, where my father wouldn’t come rushing to me if I called for him. There isn’t a chance in this universe that I could ever truly be alone while my father lives. He is always coming for me when I need him. I try not to brag about this, or abuse it, but the truth is that I act like a princess because I was raised by a king who would move mountains for me, but tried his best never to limit me. My father and I might not always understand each other, but we are a wave to a shore, always meeting each other when we can, the ocean and its moon, the stars and their light. Who would I have been if he had not been there to carry me to the hospital? How would I have survived without him? I wouldn’t have. He will spend the rest of his life making up for the few months of mine that he missed when moving here. I will spend the rest of mine telling him he doesn’t need to.

Finally, we exit my bathroom and turn towards the holiest of ground: my bedroom. I spent so much time in this space, becoming many different versions of myself, which was reflected in how many times I changed the room. Man, which version do we enter? Let’s work backwards. When I last left it as an adult, it was blue and grey. I picked out these shades shortly after I moved home after undergraduate graduation. The bed is from an aunty and uncle who downsized their giant house as they got older. That aunty is gone now, having battled breast cancer — a weight I have still not processed. There is a beautiful, large vanity, the type I wish I had when I was growing up. We built a bookshelf in the room, too, which I did not have as a kid. Going back in time, this bedroom was also orange with a red wallpaper with gold flecks (I had wanted gold walls…my father, ever the pragmatist, bought pre-mixed orange, instead). Before that, it was mint green with a jungle themed wallpaper. This was a cool kid’s room, honestly. Bravo to my folks, for that one. And of course, the first color of every little girl’s room in America…after we moved in, my parents had my room painted pink. My room reflected the person that I have always been, and eventually would become more of: eclectic, undefined by any one theme, pulled in a thousand directions. This was the place I rested every single night. I pulled clothes out of my wardrobe. I wrote at a bulky desk for years. I read voraciously. Here, I texted on my first phone ever (a Pantech Jest!) Here, I wrote notes on our family laptop. I saved files I shouldn’t have saved. I discovered what I loved about boys and girls. I dressed myself like Merlin. I stashed love letters and notes from friends so that my parents would not find them. I gave way to my precociousness. This is where I snuck in my now husband when my parents were away in India. There is where my parents allowed me and my now husband to sleep when we visited back in March. Do you know how many stories I wrote in this bedroom? One summer, I collected pine cones from outside and I painted them, then hung them up from my ceiling like decoration. If my mother said something to me about how ridiculous it looked, I don’t remember. I spent years inside my own mind here. I had friends over here, promising forever. When my mother and I fought, I slammed the door and slept on the floor, punishing myself for being so cruel. I’ve felt loved and unloved here. I was made and unmade here. I took so many selfies, and hated almost all of them, here. I wrote my essays, my books, my thesis, my homework. I cried over grades, boys, girls, friends, parents, family. This was refuge. This was place. I don’t know that I could ever write something honest about how I feel about my childhood bedroom. And now, some other kid will be laying their heads there, unknowing of the Harry Potter Marauders Fanfiction poster I had hung up in my early twenties. They won’t know about the jungle wallpaper, or the pink walls that I enjoyed as a child. They will paint over the ugly orange, which they won’t even know was ever layered behind the blue hues. They won’t know about the night I tried to run away. They won’t know about the years I spent crying over people who didn’t deserve it. They won’t know about the magnificent fiction I wrote from ages five to twenty five, rolling hills and beautiful women taking back their queenships and reveling in their liberated power. Isn’t it so strange, how a place can hold the best and worst of us, all of our joys and our traumas, and when we leave it, it doesn’t whisper, doesn’t gossip, doesn’t share about us to the next folks that come through? It’s like it’s all erased, but I know it’s not. It can’t be. An entire life was lived in that room, from learning that my white neighbors’ parents wouldn’t let them in my house because we were brown, to kissing my white husband where once I secretly messaged him. How many times will that same moon shine through, falling softly on another sleeping child like it did to me? And will that child ever think of the child that came before them? I suppose I never did.

Through my window I could see the backyard. We had roses planted, which became my favorite flower. I could see them waving in the warm summer Ohio breeze. There was a line of pine trees that delineated our property line with our neighbors. The gentle slope was perfect for those cold winter mornings when we woke up to a foot of Ohio snow. White as white could be, sparkling brilliantly in the winter sun, blinding me in the process. We’d wear all of our pants, all of our gloves, and sled down our tiny little hill. One year, in the summer, my father woke me up to go look at a meteor shower. We laid out in the grass, just us two, and he told me that if my mother woke up, she would check on my brother first, then me, and then him. I think he meant to share how much she loved us, but it had lodged in my heart that she loved my brother more than me — my deepest wound. But no matter, because while I don’t remember seeing any meteors, I still remember the warmth of my father’s love for me, desire for me to see something new and astounding. He mowed the lawn, kept it short for the HOA. Whenever I house sat for them later in life, when they had to go to India for my ailing grandparents, I let the grass overgrow. If they were fined by the HOA, they never brought it up to me.

My house was perfect. I spent hours outside, finding rabbit holes in the summer, building snowmen in the winter. I watched the trees change from my perch on the porch. I cried actual tears every time my father had to cut down a tree. I watched my mother garden, and benefitted from the beauty of the flowers even if I hated the concept of buying flowers to put into a garden. I played outside with my neighbors, who owned a basketball hoop in our shared driveway. I biked up and down our street, feeling free with movement and wind. When I learned how to drive, I did it in the church parking lot up the street where I used to attend Kumon. I cut through the backyard to get to T’s house when she lived there, and the park beyond her house to play. One time, a band of bullies broke her glasses. They were white. I came back home, walking through my backyard, after I had been sexually assaulted by her neighbor. I curled up in my bed, and spent years putting the pieces back together, seeking to be held and not feeling it when the house responded with empathetic stillness. My house held all of it. My alarming rage — the screaming heard from outside. My impossible grief that soaked every corner of my house, so much so that my parents agreed to send me to therapy for the first time. My immaturity and inability to keep track of important things (I accidentally let the basement flood once while house sitting as a twenty something). I ate mango on the porch with my mother year after year, and watermelon too. I cried on the couch when T sent me a breakup text that was not warranted. K and I baked cookies senior year of high school (K baked. I yapped.) I took photos with my mama in our saris. I watched countless rays of light beam up my house, and I watched them fade away, too.

I visited in March, and I really did try to soak up what it meant to be in the house for the last time. But everything was so different — I was so different — that it didn’t feel like a painful goodbye. I think that’s how I knew I was ready. As tender and as aching as this all is, I knew that my parents would thrive in India, and that some other family would take advantage of these hallowed halls. I sat there, ready during the family meeting, to hear my dad out about why selling it off was the best thing to do. I think he expected resistance from me, since I have been the most emotionally tied to the physical home more than anyone. But then, my sister-in-law raised her dainty little hand up first. She, who is the most recent addition to our family, who had only been in this house for this trip, for the first time ever (but has doubtless heard the stories of our youth from my brother), saw the value in it. She, who had never spent these years in joy, in grief, in growing up in this charming ranch-style home that we made our own, saw how much it meant to us. I loved her to pieces before this, but this endeared her to me forever. My sister-in-law went to bat for something I was ready to let go of for the sake of my parents, without even knowing how valuable it was to me. And that’s how I knew that she continues to prove to be one of us, though we never asked her for that in the first place. Once she opened the floodgates, we discussed selling versus renting, and we ended up deciding to rent out the house. Keeping the asset within our family felt special and important, if not simply financially stable in these uncertain times. One day, the house will either be mine or my brother’s. Either way, it lives with us, grows with us, breathes with us. I wouldn’t mind seeing my own children grow into authentic versions of themselves here. Playing in the yard in the sprinklers, building snowmen in the winter, running inside for me to warm up their little hands with hot cocoa. I wouldn’t mind visiting my nieces and nephews here, either, seeing my brother and sister-in-law start their family in the halls that started mine. We, who have never inherited anything, get to inherit such a gift, now. Thank God for my beautiful sister-in-law for making it known that what is important to us, her family, is important to her, too. I bless everyone to have a person who cherishes you this way, too.

But still, it’s strange. My parents moved out, along with twenty eight years worth of things. The house is barren of us, now. It simply is what it was before: someplace for some people to live. And seeing it so emptied out, even in pictures, haunts my sleep. It feels like I might spend the rest of my life longing for the first 18 years of it, when all I wanted for those first 18 years is to be where I am now. Ironic, isn’t it? The loss of this place, even if it still belongs to me? I have to wonder if I can let it go now. Let another family make it this important to them, too. Isn’t that the beauty of it, anyway? A house that stands the test of time, brick walls and a fireplace that someone else wants to fix, in a time of cardboard and cookie cutter? A yard that requires care rather than turf? Isn’t it a blessing that at least while we own it, the world can make of it what it wants, but fundamentally we won’t let it change? We — my father, mother, brother, and I (and now my sister-in-law and my husband) are its foundation. We make up its plaster and its tile, the wooden floors that creak with every step. We are the incense smoke on the walls. We are the pink paint under the green paint under the blue paint under the new white paint for the renters. My parents measured me against the door frame, my little body expanding upwards and then just stopping, even when my mother tried to coax another inch out of my genetics with warm milk and jump rope. My brother snuck into my bed with dinner when I refused to eat what my dad had made me, making sure I didn’t go hungry. My mother intercepted my acceptance letters from my dream schools and sent me photos of them while I was out and about my senior year. Another family can live there — hell, another family can buy it, if we let them — but there’s no taking any of that away. The photos on the mantle might be different, but my grandmothers still haunt the living room.

I am in the incredible sunsets we would watch from the porch. I am in the lush greenness of grass on an Ohio summer’s day. I am in the magnolia flowers off to the side. I am in the carpet in the bedrooms, and under that, too. You can pull me up, but I am written all over the house like a never-ending novel. You can move into my bedroom, but you’ll be sleeping with my ghost. I promise not to haunt so scarily. I promise to watch you grow and change and love and lose and weep and cry-laugh. I promise that even though I inhabit the walls, I wont keep you from leaving. They never kept me from going — especially because I always kept my promise to come back.

Seattle doesn’t have the pretty skies you do, Ohio. No home will ever be the same, but the one I’m in now is starting to take on shapes, characteristics, memories that I cherish. I know one day I’ll write a love letter to this cottage, too, the warm light of a perfect Seattle summer waking me up everyday. When I leave, I will ache for this, too. For my first home with my own little family.

And so, I think all we can do, when we know that leaving is inevitable, is to hold onto the bits and pieces of the memories in each room, even the bad ones. We can turn them over in our palms, examining them, marveling at them, at how each facet cracks and splits into new views of the crystalline brilliance of our lives. How outrageously lucky am I to have left a place I loved so much. How absurdly blessed it is to have stood all this time. How out-of-this-world chosen I am, to know that one day, I will go back.

The house will be waiting for the new iteration of me. The land will swell with tears of joy, which will splatter on me from the earths above — my favorite rainfall, an early Ohio autumn. It’ll be just starting to get cold. I will wrap my jacket around me tighter as I walk up the pathway again. Everything will be so different, but it’ll all still be the same. The trees will be ruby reds and jade greens and magnificent oranges, all confetti around my head and drifting slowly to my feet. The house will say, “welcome back. I missed you.” And I will walk through that door, hand in hand with the love of my life, ready to make new memories. And one day, my daughter will say goodbye to the house, write a love letter dedicated to it, and I will swell with the earth, rise with the foundation, beam with the light, pride and pride and pride in my heart for everything we have created, for everything we have named ours.

Goodbye for now, house.

Love,

Me

I don’t like to write about people who die young, because it doesn’t feel right to talk about their lives. It doesn’t feel like it’s my right to write about them when they aren’t here, when I didn’t write about them in their life. I don’t mind sharing about the grief I endured while I watched my paternal grandfather slowly lose her quality of life. When my Ammama died suddenly, I didn’t weep for days, but I sure did write about her. Writing is how I make sense of these things. Love is easy for me to understand. I have always had it in buckets and buckets. I grew up a happy, if dramatic, child. And I have my fair share of childhood trauma and identity crises, but all in all, I have many happy memories and two parents and a brother who deeply care for me. I had a bounding extended family who celebrated me every time I was lucky enough to visit. I had grandparents for most of my life who could talk with me, call me on my birthday, take me shopping, and make me delicious food until they died very recently, well after they saw me married off.

Grief, I have had very little of. I didn’t lose anyone as a child. I never had cats or dogs who died on me. I had fish (I named mine Angel and I loved her so much), and when she died, I wore black for months. My parents vowed never to get me a pet again after that. I was around eight or nine, and they decided I was too sensitive to handle such pain and grief, and they sheltered me from it. But my parents didn’t do a bad job of everything. They introduced me to the class divide pretty early on, through the concept of “seva,” or selfless service. Every third Sunday of the month, my parents took me down to the homelessness shelter in downtown Columbus, Friends of the Homeless, to serve food. This is where my worldview took root. In knowing that these men were down on their luck — and seeing with my own two eyes that most of these folks were Black — I began to start questioning my own house, our cars, the phone I got on my birthday. I’m ashamed that it took seeing poverty to understand it beyond the stories of their own poverty that my parents told. But at the same time, the grief that my parents tried to shelter me from by not giving me a pet, they introduced to me by making me interact with real people, and showed me how grief in life can be moving, can be present, can look like a man who just needs a free, warm meal and somewhere to sleep that night. My little sensitive heart took those lessons and embedded them in my bones. Those visits informed all of my politics from then on.

Grief followed me in ways I cannot really describe. When I was fourteen, my cousin, who was sixteen, died from dengue fever, which is brought on by dengue-carrying mosquitos in India. One day he was “just a little ill,” and the next day he was gone. I wasn’t close with him. In fact, we had many only hung out a handful of times, as I visited Hyderabad and he lived in Delhi. When my mom got off the phone to tell me that he died, I was sitting on our black leather couch (the one we had for over 20 years), and I remember it was sunny that morning. It must have been a weekend day. She said, “your cousin died. I don’t understand how he could be there one day and gone the next. You aren’t supposed to die that young.” The weight in my chest has never fully decreased. I only feel the full weight of it when I see his mother or his brother, which isn’t often, but it squeezes in my lungs when it happens. Reminders of my own blood who is gone.

Working in social justice, I felt the reverberations of every person we lost. The cause of so much loss in that world (in the real world) is policy choices. We choose to privilege some over others. We call some people collateral damage. The choice people make with the degrees that I hold shape the world into either livable for some people and not for others. The grief of that consumed me. One day, when the world felt too grievous for me, I sat under my desk at work and hoped no one would come in. I had read an article about a family friend’s son who was involved with grand theft auto the same day I had to write a response about yet another unarmed Black man who was murdered by the Columbus police. I needed the world to stop spinning for just one moment. When you work in a world like that, the wins feel euphoric because the losses are murder and rape. There are so many more losses than wins. The grief overtook me, but I didn’t know what to call it. I pursued a line of work that nearly ended my life, thinking, incorrectly, that grief signaled my commitment to the world, when all it actually signaled was that I was in grief.

Shortly after that, I lost that same family friend’s father. The first man who ever believed in my writing. The uncle who had given me my first locked journal, who thought of me as brilliant and caring and kind. He thought I could become a writer. I can’t talk about him too much.

Grief is a freight train. Recently, I lost someone who I can’t talk about yet. She was too young, and too bright, and the loss is too recent. Maybe I will feel okay telling you all about her soon, but I’m not sure that’s respectful, at the moment. My best friend asked me how I was doing, and the sad truth is that I don’t think of myself as someone with a lot of “experience” with grief, but I have enough to know that it isn’t just the first part of that stanza that matters. Oh, what’s a little pain, when we’ve got so much to love?

In all of the grief I have slammed into these past few years, they have taught me to turn towards the love. They aren’t lying when they say that grief and love are two sides of the same coin. I hate platitudes, but most platitudes about grief are probably true. To me, grief is like putty. I can shape it into whatever I need it to be. In most cases, I struggle against it, not letting it get the upper hand. But in some cases, like this one, the grief wraps around me like a vine. It holds the shape of me together, painfully reminding me that the molecules that made up the bond between me and this person aren’t gone. Grief is transformational. So is love.

In the aftermath of loss, I have to remind myself that just because a person is gone does not mean that my adoration for them disappears. I have to remember that I am one star in the constellation that loved them. I have to think about how expansive grief is, how mine almost took my life, how that would have left so many people destitute because my life is so full of love. How I am a constellation unto myself, and everyone I have ever loved have been stars in my own sky. There was a time when I wanted nothing more than to die, and I have remember that in my life now, even when I feel excruciating grief, that I don’t want to die. I don’t want to follow the people I loved over that edge. Even at my worst, even when the weight of losing my grandmothers in quick succession sat like an anchor in my chest, I felt sparks of joy.

When my Ammama died shortly before Thanksgiving, I spent those holidays in Seattle with my husband. It was our first holiday as a couple, and we were supposed to go spend my winter break in Texas with my brother, but weren’t able to. I remember one day, my husband and I went to downtown Seattle to see some lights. And it was gross and rainy, and downtown Seattle isn’t very fun, but my eyes go buzzy when I see large structures with little lights. I don’t know what it is, but I feel a little drunk during Christmastime, with all of the dazzling little lights. I’ve always loved Christmas because of it. I love how humans, in the face of the dark, found a way to make beauty out of abundant light. I love how, even though Jesus’ birthday is not actually Christmas, that we fall in love with the season, aching and reveling in what makes us quiet and soft and vulnerable. A baby Jesus. A Christmas tree. Angels and grace. Cultures all over the world celebrate the changing of the seasons. It’s as human as anything else, as sex and birth and, yes, death. In that moment, looking at all the lit up structures paid for by the Seattle taxpayer, something that no one really protests because even the most cynical liberal in Seattle couldn’t make a legitimate case against wintertime cheer (I mean, they could, and they do, but like. Please don’t prove Fox News right, liberals). I wore my most whimsical sweater, the black one with swirls on it, and green trousers, and I tried my damned hardest to let my brain go fuzzy with the joy of a million little twinkling lights. Hand in hand with the man who ran to me across the country the second he got the news that my favorite person died, I tried my damnedest to find what I needed to move forward.

And there, in between my astigmatism riddled eyes, and in the Summer days in Seattle with bright blue skies, no cloud in sight, and in the way my husband’s beautiful brown eyes greet me in the morning when I open mine, and in the paws of the kitty that I’m cat sitting for, tapping my thigh for more pets, and in the colors of the universe all around me, I am reminded about the most cliche, most profound part of grief: that death never means they leave us forever. We simply change form. We simply transform the way we love. The way we honor. The way we respect. The way we know them, in our hearts, for centuries, and forever. I’m not very religious, but I have to believe in reincarnation. There is something I recognize in the bones of the people that I adore, something about them, the life in their eyes, the boldness and curiosity, the humor and their ability to tease out different versions of me. It makes me think that we have all known each other in every lifetime. I have married my husband seven times over in every lifetime (two, in this one alone). Who’s to say I haven’t loved my friends or my parents in some form or another three lifetimes ago? Who’s to say that I didn’t talk about Greek myths with B in the 60s, or organize with J in the 20s? Maybe M and I went shopping for cute skirts in the 50s. Maybe A rescued cats even in the 1780s, and maybe I brought her supplies when she sent a carrier pigeon late at night that she has, once again, brought a baby cat into her home. Maybe, just maybe, in the next lifetime, I will sit with T in a classroom again, and we will debate how to fix the world, and I will stand back and watch, once again, as she actually does it.

I’m not ready to talk about her yet, but I will say fuck Cancer, and fuck the defunding of science, and fuck my own heart for not having more capacity for doing more, fuck my mind for not being the kind that can solve these problems in one go. And praise my body for holding me through this grief, expanding sideways and longways, making me bigger and bigger in how I love the people that I love. Praise my fear and praise my anxiety for keying me into what’s most important to me right now. Praise my urgency and my courage for life, for appreciating it, for taking all the opportunities I can because you don’t always have time. Praise my friends and my husband for crying with me. Praise God and praise the Universe and praise everyone who did the work to keep her around as long as they did. It was nothing short of a blessing.

Grief is a freight train, indeed. It’s impossible to keep it from coming at you. And it comes for all of us, at some point or another. But it is possible to get off the tracks. To instead hop on it, and ride along. What’s a little pain, when I’ve got so much to love?

In memoriam,

Me

Olivia Rodrigo’s new album dropped early this morning, and I’ve already listened to the whole thing twice. I will not mince my words: I was right about her plans for her aesthetic change, and the losers were wrong. I believed that Olivia had a purpose for the shift towards this lovey, pinky, girly aesthetic that so drastically diverged from her previous dressing and aesthetic. The first few posts of her in pink clothes that signaled a major shift on her Instagram, I thought, were elegant and lovely. They looked more grown up, more intentionally classy than her previous looks. Then she posted some more playful outfits. Finally, she put out her album cover art and released the Drop Dead music video, both of which feature her in objectively girly clothes, short cropped skorts, very pink and pastel. This, combined with a shirt dress that Olivia wore at a concert shortly before the album came out, had the internet in flames: how dare she wear what we dress our toddlers in? How dare she sexualize these clothes? (Though, I’m not sure how she “sexualized” the clothes by simply prancing around in them, like a girl in love, but, whatever). Similarly to how they critiqued Sabrina’s “Lolita” inspired photoshoot, they put Olivia in that same category (I doubt these people have ever read Lolita, let alone understood it).

And now, they must eat their words, and I must rejoice. The album, from top to bottom, is a critique on her own limerence. It is a commentary on delusion, on finding love at the wrong time, at delving into a person to heal you. In other words, it is a very grown up album about growing up. While Sour and Guts were both young girls trying to find their place in the world, you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love is a coming of age album. But more importantly, the entire work, including her girly aesthetics, is a reclamation of the self, yanked back from the her lover, the media, and society as a whole. Olivia Rodrigo is here, back in our ears, reminding us that who she is and how she shows up is for her to decide, in all facets of her life.

The album starts off with Drop Dead, which is a perfect track one, in my opinion. She is at the beginning of the relationship, recounting how she literally fell in love because she was bored. Olivia, before her most recent relationship, had already lived an incredibly full life. A child actress, a rising pop star, selling out concerts before she turned 20, Olivia has remarked before in her songs about her sense of alienation from herself. She has talked as well about being taken advantage of, in love, which in part was possible because of her star power and young age. She’s bored, so she falls in love with someone she sees as an “angel on the walls of Versailles.” High praise for someone who is just a dude. In context with Guts, and the self awareness in her other songs about her own awkwardness or feeling uncool or wrong, I see this line especially as reflecting that Olivia felt like this man was truly too good for her. She feels lucky just to be seen by him. She even ignores the stars telling her that they do not align (“Pisces and a Gemini, but I think we might go really nice together) and forges ahead, anyway.

In multiple songs on this new album, she references love healing her wounds. In Stupid Song, Olivia sadly describes how she feels about this man. When I listened to the song for the first time, I thought it was just a sweet song about falling in love, but the more I listen to it, the more I realize how sad and scared Olivia really is. She says “I want you more than any stupid song could ever say,” which to the average listener is just a sweet platitude about love, but we have to remember that songs are Olivia’s career. She has spent countless hours coming up with exactly how to describe how she feels in music, and she has searched for meaning in every song she has ever listened to. The music video makes it more clear: Olivia is not well. The video shows her moving through New York City with a set of ballerinas, but she, herself is dressed in black. Two parts of herself are represented here: who she’d like to be, and could be if she was in love (ballerinas, beautiful, lithe, dressed in frilly pink), and who she really is (a punk girl wearing black boots up to her thighs, generally sad and emotional. The song expresses how he is a “spark in the dark,” literally lighting her out of her darkness. Olivia is not in a great place, but she is starting to fall in love. She literally cannot find that she can write her way out of this one. The video is also brilliant and beautiful, especially in the way that it ends. The ballerinas and Olivia end up in a park, dancing in the rain. It’s jubilant, and you might think that Olivia has finally accepted that she is in love and feel her joy and freedom in it. The song ends, and the video cuts to Olivia, standing in the grass alone, eyes closed, under the spray of a single sprinkler a few feet away from her. When I saw this, my jaw literally dropped. I immediately understood the imagery: not only is this saying that Olivia’s love is delusional, but she is also inverting the popular Lolita imagery here. She is a young woman on green grass under the sprinkler, just like Dolores Haze is in the Lolita adaptation, but whereas Dolores is laying down (and in HH’s mind, seductively so), being sprayed down in girly clothes, Olivia is standing upright, swaying, eyes closed in her punk girl clothes. Olivia is saying, I am a delusional woman, experiencing a mental health crisis, not a young girl being taken advantage of (as she was in her prior relationship). The inversion of the Lolita imagery is so far, my favorite thing about this album.

It frames the rest of the album for me. In Honeybee, she makes another reference to her wounds being healed by love. She references being comfortable now in the dark. She is accepting that she might be loved even for her worst behaviors, her mistakes (which she references again later in the album). In this song, she also says, “it feels like God threw me a bone,” which is bone chilling, to me. As someone who has survived violence at the hands of an older man, Olivia trying to find peace in am age-appropriate relationship, feeling like she has been saved from suffering…it cuts deep. In Maggots for Brains, Olivia laments that she has well and truly lost herself when her partner isn’t around. This seemingly cute and happy track is actually a lot darker upon the second and third listen. She is literally brought back to life by her romantic partner, and the only reason for her existence is for him to take care of her. My first listen made me cringe (being male centered in 2026?) but my second listen broke my heart for her. Olivia is once again referencing how little of herself she had when she entered this relationship. That isn’t either of the partners fault, but it will (and does) come to a head later in the relationship. Once again, in U + Me = <3, she references their relationship healing her wounds. She even talks about his sister, and how much she likes her — cueing for me, a need for community that understands her (which she tries to get by “winning her over”).

We start to see the cookie crumble in the next song, My Way. This is where her well-curated pretension that she’s finally okay comes apart, as she expresses an obviously unwell craziness and jealousy. One who is pretty secure in their relationship probably wouldn’t write a revenge song about a girl who is hanging around her boyfriend — but then again, her boyfriend seemingly doesn’t do anything about it, which only contributes to Olivia’s feelings of insecurity. We’ve all been there. In Purple, she starts to realize how intertwined her and her boyfriend’s lives have become. She sings, “It’s a small world when it can only revolve around us two, it’s crazy I had big dreams til I tied myself to you.” I love this. It reminds us how young Olivia actually is. She might be one of the biggest pop stars in our time, but she is only 23. Everything she is doing is playacting at growing up, like having her toothbrush and shoes at his place. She says, “we fight over who I’m hanging out, like a real couple,” as if that’s sweet, before she realizes that the dynamics here are actually impeding who she wants to be.

I love the placement of the Cure in this album, because it does two things: it reminds us who Olivia actually is, insofar as a musician. Referencing one of her favorite bands and inspiration for a story about how she is unwell (finding her solace in music and art), while also following songs about how she is starting the realize that love will not heal her. “I thought I’d found the antidote with you.” Olivia isn’t made unwell by the relationship. He tries his best, but she is not well in general. The imagery for this single is great too, invoking a sense of nostalgia for those of us who grew up in the 2000s, playing games with yarn between our hands. Olivia here, seems to be saying, that she’s dealt with this for a long time. I also wonder if she’s saying that his love will never be the literal band, “the Cure,” which seems to symbolize the height of love for her (she references them in Drop Dead, as well). She seems to come to understand by the end of the song that this relationship, his love, as much as he tries, is not enough.

In Begged, she starts to unveil the perfect love we (she) thought she had. A part of her delusion is coming undone by his imperfections, perhaps in looking at other women, perhaps in not being more direct about being done with his exes. But it’s “a virtue to not let good love slip away.” He’s the best partner she has ever had, given what she has gone away. He is supposed to cleanse her of her body’s sins against herself, against the world, as a young girl who was taken advantage of. A lot of times, when a girl or woman goes through something sexually traumatizing, we lock ourselves into relationship after relationship, trying to outrun that which follows us, that which is buried in our bones. So she tries to make herself feel like this is enough, but it isn’t. She can’t decide if she should just be okay with it, or if she should move on. “I’m a penny in a fountain, waiting for my luck to change.” Just wow. She is drowning in what she thought would be good for her, but ultimately, she overestimated what love, and this relationship in particular, can do for her. She is realizing she shouldn’t have to beg for what she wants, even if the relationship is perfect on paper.

So fun and cool that she got to have a track with Robert Smith on this album! I won’t lie, I don’t know anything about the Cure, but her adoration for the band and the music is evident. I love how she tries to go to the doctor to fix her, but the problem here isn’t medical: she needs to leave the relationship. But she can’t talk about it because she has told the world that she’s in love, and she is so happy about it. “I’m not feeling like myself, and I’m not hiding it well.” What started out as a way to heal her has started to hurt her, further. What a horrible feeling, when the person you loved is the reason you are starting to feel insane (in a bad way). Still, she is hanging on, and she almost doesn’t know why. In Less, she sings about how she knows that the relationship has to end, how she knows he has to go (a face she never wanted to see going). But she understands that he does love her, but that there is something bigger happening here. I broke down hearing “but you’ve seen me truly happy, so you know right now I’m not.” He doesn’t make her happy anymore, and they both know it. Love, this time, isn’t enough, and she wishes so badly that it was.

Expectations is a bop. I don’t understand it because I kissed a boy who raised my standards and then married him. But I love the song. It’s bleak out there, y’all. The only other thing about this song that’s fun is that it references her less-than-great loves of the past, and how much she has grown in her own self respect. I do think it’s probably making fun of herself…because she is going to make more mistakes, and she is clearly on the rebound. But it does seem self aware!

The album ends on cigarette smoke. This is great, because it references the entire album. She looks back on the relationship with clearer eyes. A part of the relationship died because of how unwell Olivia was throughout, the darkness she was dealing with, how he couldn’t save her from herself. But another part was external: him not standing up for her, not taking her more seriously, for not being honest. She wants him to tell her something to sour the memories of the relationship. She is reminding herself that being alone is better than arguing and begging him to care for her the way she needed, for making her feel crazy. I love that she references “Honeybee” here, because that’s arguably the most romantic song on the album. A person who was once God sent to her is now someone who she regrets and resents. But at the very least, she is awake and has eyes wide open. She knows she deserves better, beyond her own delusions and mental health issues. Outside of what she needs to give herself, she wants an equal partner who respects and loves her. And isn’t that just what we want to see in a coming of age story? She takes accountability for her craziness, but she also is starting to understand that she isn’t to blame for all of it.

This album is a master class in storytelling about a relationship, start to finish, not only with a romantic partner, but with yourself. Not only did I enjoy it so much that I whipped out substack to write about it, but I felt really moved by Olivia’s honesty and vulnerability about a relationship that played out a lot in public. I am struck, as I always am, about how bright she is, especially being so young. Her music is self aware and also aware of the public moment. At a time when tradwifeness and conservatism is being pushed on us, Olivia is taking back the narrative on love, on how she should be treated, on her own struggles with mental health in the realm of romantic partnership. It shows in how she dresses, her unabashed commitment to femininity, to girlhood. When she was seventeen and writing about love, she was performing womanhood. But now, at twenty three, having gone through her first true, real, adult breakup, where no one is wrong but nothing is right, she adorns herself in girly clothes, reminding herself, and us, that there is joy in this heartbreak, that she can dress in short pink skirts and still be deserving of being treated as a woman, knowing herself and her needs. That being a girl means in many ways, experiencing the full range of emotions. That when you are honest about it, you won’t be liked, but you will be respected — if only by yourself. And that’s the most important person’s respect to gain, anyway.

If you have to hate her for her usage of frilly dresses and girly aesthetic, then you have to extend her praise for her inversion and critique of the imagery used by lolita filmmakers and media moguls who didn’t understand the book/adapted the movie for the entertainment of grown men. Olivia is at a standstill age right now, one where the world perceives her as a young woman, but she is aging out of the age group where she gets preyed upon. She is learning what real love looks like, what it’s like when two people are compatible for a time and then they are not. She is becoming a woman in terms of the pain and embarrassment of a televised breakup with who she assumed was her soul mate, when in reality, the only person who could fulfill her is the one person she cannot escape, even when she wants to: herself. She is experiencing what Dolores did not get to: becoming an adult on her own terms, finding out that the love she thought she wanted might end up killing her, not because it’s a much older man using her for parts, as she describes in Vampire, but because it isn’t enough for her.

You look so pretty for a girl so in love is not just happy, happy, happy, and then sad, sad, sad. It’s a journey following a young woman in a relationship that succeeded a former lover who took advantage of her. It’s about looking for healing through the body and validation of another, when the crooked thing you are feeling is deep below the surface, and it is ringing out of you in ways your lover does not, cannot understand. She’s asking him to hold all her most wicked parts, the parts she is worried is what made her a target, a victim before, the parts that whisper in the dead of night that everything is — and was — her own fault. She is nervous that he will see how unloveable she truly is because of it, that him walking away means that she will have to be alone forever. She is begging for a love that he cannot give, not because he doesn’t want to, but because she hasn’t shut the well in her heart closed, yet. When something is missing from the relationship, she tries to recreate the limerence they both felt towards the beginning of their time together. But that came so soon after one of the most traumatizing experiences of her life that she mistook it for love, and he didn’t realize how deep her wounds really go. She hasn’t figured out how to exercise self love and adoration, both things she says she has in the last two songs of the album, but both which come with time and maturity. He can’t give her what she needs. No one can.

Olivia walks away from this seemingly perfect relationship on the outside. She walks towards the uncertain, the unknown, and in so doing, she walks towards herself. And that’s the real love story here. That’s the reclamation act. From the girl who wrote Vampire, to the girl who wrote the Cure, she is growing in her understanding of what pain, shame, and humiliation is hers to own and what isn’t. Her clothes represent that. The inversion of Lolita represents that. This album is telling us that. She gets to wear what she wants and tell a story: that no matter who holds her heart, no matter what she wears, no matter what people say about her, Olivia Rodrigo has always been, and will always be, herself. She will not let a man define her, and neither will she let you. She is a testament to who she is, and she will never let anyone take that away from her, ever again.

Godspeed, Olivia. May your hair bows never be crooked and your frilly thigh high socks never fall down.

Right around now is the time when folks will be graduating from school, whether undergrad or graduate school (maybe I’m off by a month if you are on semesters), so undoubtedly many of you will be feeling the same thing I did, this time last year. On top of graduating though, I was also a victim of race-based discrimination from my institution and peers, and probably some sex-based discrimination, too. Given this, I have to say that if you are a person of color or a woman, or another gendered minority, that what you are feeling is both unique and common among folks like us. I wish I could give you the magic cure, but the truth is, you take you with you everywhere you go; moving through the academic and professional worlds as a person of color or a gendered minority means you will experience bouts of discrimination or general weirdness wherever you go. But that doesn’t mean it has to define your life. I certainly let it define mine, and then very much decided to put in the work not to let it. But before that, first and foremost, I let my body finally succumb to what it needed after years of high achieving excellence: I let it die a little.

After about six months of laying on my couch, and six months of applying to jobs while unemployed, I’m finally out in the sunshine now. I am not totally untouched, but I am in somatic coaching, I took a job that aligned with my life and am not forcing my life to align with my job, I am recognizing my dreams are in fact, more important than some ambiguous, all important “movement” that no one asked me to join, and that in ways that are both important and true, that I can live my life according to my values, but that I do have to figure out what those actually are. After a lifetime in social justice spaces, the groupthink does take a toll. And while I regret none of my work, I know I cannot go on like that without developing chronic illness. And I don’t want that to happen to you, either. But I also know that not everyone can afford to take so much time off from their lives to rest, and I want to share in the abundance of my year of doing nothing. So, without further ado, here is what I learned from my year of rest and relaxation.

• Self awareness only goes so far: you can do all the therapy you want, but you aren’t sexy or cool or super self aware if you only think about your mother trauma and don’t dig into the parts of your behavior that are actually actively hurting the people that love you. Activism work is incredibly rewarding. It can make you feel like you’re flying at a hundred miles per hour when you’re in the legislature or when you’re standing down your enemies. But it can also be a way to dissociate from your present self and reality. It can eat into your relationships, force you to turn away from the interpersonal, because “everything is political.” You need to get molecular with your relationships, because when (and it’s when, not if) you lose sight of yourself, those folks should be your barometer. They are a good sign of whether or not your crazy is in service of your sanity, or if it is just crazy.

• It is work to try not to do social justice: healing from burnout means that you actually have to heal. Which means that you have to take a break from what is hurting you. And when it comes to activism, it is not necessary the content of your work that’s hurting you — but the way you do it is. What you feel you owe to other people, to some “movement,” is what is hurting you. So many of us dive right into this work without prioritizing the relationships in the movement that will save us when the work tires to kill us. If your job is burning you out, you have to walk away from the job. This might sound self explanatory, but the aesthetic isn’t cute. It’s not therapy and face masks. It is saying “no, I can’t take that on right now,” when someone asks you to plan a potluck protest educational event, or whatever you’re used to doing for Pride month. It isn’t fun and it isn’t cute, but you need to re-evaluate how you are living your values, because values aren’t rules, and if you are using them as such, it might be time for an OCD analysis (just kidding. But like, for me, it kind of was).

• Ignore the impulse: you will be tempted by your previous life. You will think people must benefit from what you need to share. You will hear someone saying something problematic and want to correct them. You have to ignore those impulses. For your own sake, you need to choose your battles. For an engineer, they aren’t going home and hacking their phone (maybe? Some of them might be), but social justice workers take their work with them…everywhere. Do you know how exhausted you even are? Worse, do you know how much policing of other people you are doing? Invited by some invisible moral police that wrote an Instagram guide on how to start political fights with your dad, when you could just be watching football and having a beer. You aren’t responsible for changing every interaction of violence in your off time, and thinking that you are is more about your ego than about “the movement.”

• Boredom is key: you have to be bored. You have to be so bored out of your mind that you start looking to learn something, anything that could take that boredom away. That’s how you find issues in which you’re a novice. There you don’t — and shouldn’t — take up any space. Maybe that’s ornithology. Maybe that’s hiking. Maybe it’s cooking. And yes, you can tie in social justice to any of those things, but do try not to. Enjoy being in the presence of what you do not know. You do not have to be the leader of every space, and there is joy in learning what others know better than you. It deepens those relationships, too.

• That nonprofit industrial complex job posting on LinkedIn can’t hurt you: I know you are trolling LinkedIn for advocacy and political campaigns jobs that would burn you out so much in the first three months alone that your husband will have to peel you off your work desk to eat dinner, but you just can’t help it, can you? You need to build in rules for yourself. You need to set boundaries about job hunting, applications, and types of employment. And then when that feels like you are abandoning the movement, you need to dig your heels in. The movement is vast; you are not its lynchpin, no matter how much it feels like it. You will come back, in time, in a way that wont end your life. Promise! Exit out of LinkedIn, right now!

• Body presence: be in the body. sorry. I won’t expound on this one, but it is necessary. Sorry, again, my beloved intellectuals. I, too, have a hard time with this one. Your body loves you. For God’s sake, give it some love back.

I have learned a lot over the years from those deep in movement work about how to have work-life balance, how to manage and cope with your emotions, how its an ongoing struggle to not lose yourself. And undoubtedly, there have been great folks, activists I look up to and cherish deeply who have spent their lives in service to the greater good, who also had great joys and deep knit communities that saved their lives when things got hard. But those are unfortunately, in my experience, exceptions to the rule, not the rule itself. Like anything else, activism work (as in paid activism work, but also volunteer work) is subject to the corruption of capitalism, racism, and labor exploitation. Underpaid and overworked is essentially the driving issue, and honestly, motto of the nonprofit industrial complex. And there are better academics and scholars than I who have at length condemned and critiqued the NPIC, whose solutions offer systemic analysis and changes. But until the NPIC — and the American Empire — are brought to their knees, we individual activists must take care of ourselves. And that isn’t “self care,” or some other form of individual aesthetics of the self. It is deep and ugly work. It is sometimes giving up on the work to save yourself. It is, sometimes, refusing to offer yourself as a sacrifice to the rest.

Ask yourself, has anyone asked you to sacrifice anything? Or are you simply self sacrificial because you believed that’s the only way to do the work? Because you are a good person, who wants to do good things, and this is how you defeat the evils of the world? I’m starting to wonder what the point of defeating those evils is, if all we have left of ourselves are our weary bones. If our work is more than moral policing, if our virtue is true change, then why is the self often rendered obsolete in our conversations and discourse? Why is the Black or brown woman’s body considered a sacrificial element (read: because we are often also so highly capable, given our deeper commitments to values and social change) to a society that benefits all? If Feminists want equality, why can’t we, too, seek pleasure in daily elements, sometimes not recycle, sometimes wear polyester blends?

Why is it our lot in life, as activists of color, to give up comfort for progress? For academics of color to develop poker faces when white colleagues attack them? For Feminists to forgo activities they enjoy, lest the public name them hypocrites? Why does intellectual debate and argumentation become negated if the author of color likes to drive a gas car over a hybrid one? Why is it so easy to dismiss our critiques if we do not live, what the public deems, a perfect life? At what point do these pressures to perform become policing rather than accountability?

We should all try to be better people. Just because I am not pursuing policy change actively doesn’t mean I am not supporting causes I care about deeply. But I am remiss to use a broken system to validate my human self. I am resentful of the way Black and brown women have to publicly uphold all of our values in order to be deemed as “reasonable” and “believable” or to have to “back up our hot takes with actions.” This is a bar we do not hold for white men, or even white women. We expect debauchery, hedonism from those groups, all the while white men read bell hooks in a bar to impress their romantic and sexual interests. But a woman of color engages with something as innocuous as a smutty book, and suddenly she is upholding patriarchy (even if on Monday she goes to her nonprofit job at the ACLU, continuing to challenge sex discrimination). This double, triple standard is what burns us out. Not the work. Not the resource issue in nonprofits. Though those things are terrible and overwhelming, women of color would stay through thick and thin in organizations that gave them half an ounce of respect. But the burnout, once felt, is nearly irrevocable. The only thing we can do about it is to vigorously pay it attention, and heal. And healing will look like taking us out of the game. I’d love for y’all to stop burning us out before that point. If the world stopped insisting on our labor to fix what it broke, then maybe we might stand a chance.

But we also bear an individual responsibility. Everything I always say I am going to do, like my creative pursuits, always get waylaid by social justice and movement work. But what is the point of doing this work if I cannot, at some point, center my joy? And I’m not just saying to do things I enjoy for “self care” or “filling up my cup” just so I can go back to work the next day to get lambasted again. I am saying, at what point is dreading work everyday going to be fixed by supplementing the dread with little acts of joy, as opposed to actually really centering that joy? When it comes to working towards an equitable future for everyone, do you count yourself? I sure don’t. My life’s devotion towards social justice is not altruistic. It is a self-induced punishment for the ways in which I see that I lack. Maybe if more of us were honest about that, we would achieve some sort of real self care, instead of the simulacra of it.

But then again, maybe I’m just bitter at the experience of white supremacy that almost killed me, the job I didn’t get when I should have, and general displeasure with the state of the movement. Doesn’t mean I’m not still actively on a reproductive rights organization’s board of directors, though! Nothing says “relaxing” like reproductive justice discourse!

Sarcasm aside, I do truly wish you the best. I wish all of us the very best because figuring this out is hard. I’ll let you know when I have my shit figured out, and you do the same, yeah? I imagine that wont be until forever.

In the meantime, may the nonprofit industrial complex gods be with you.

Yours,

Me

Well, no. It’s not. That’s the short answer. But I’d argue in some weird ways, it kind of was? Or like, the interpretation of it can be. In this piece, let’s talk about the complexities between good and evil, how it’s portrayed, and yes, once again, I’m going to talk about pedophilia. Strap in bitches, it’s time for a ride.

When the showed aired in 2010, audiences were captivated and titillated by Aria Montgomery and Ezra Fitz’ relationship. Introduced in the very first episode when Ezra hits on a fifteen year old Aria in a bar, you’re immediately made to think that this is steamy, sexy, hot — all things you probably did think if you, like me, watched the show as a teenager. The idea that you as a teenager (often told you are in the prime of your life) could attract a full grown man in a bar where you’re waiting out your boring chore? Hot (from the perspective of a teenage girl who wanted nothing more than to be seen and loved). Then you get older and you do a rewatch when you are closer to Ezra’s supposed age (24), and you think…creepy. Then you get older than Ezra, and you think, oh God. Predator. But in this essay, I will argue that the imagery of Ezria isn’t actually that simple. It isn’t that we suddenly understand something now as adults that we couldn’t as teenagers. I will argue that there is something about the perspective of a teenager that makes the child feel some semblance of power in a relationship like this, which is what allows the relationship to flourish in the dark. It is key to groomers to put the “power” in the hands of their victims. It is why victims stay silent, and maybe don’t even recognize how improper and inappropriate their relationship is until well after their childhood is over. Power is a slippery thing. You can feel that you don’t have it, and you actually do. But more important, you can be made to feel like you possess it, when you actually don’t. That’s what we’re exploring here, today, through the lens of a 15 year old show that no one but me cares about.

I’ve always maintained that if you only look at the monster, you forget about the existence of the maiden. We do no victims any justice by removing their autonomy from the story. In truth, it doesn’t matter if Aria wanted the relationship with Ezra or if Dolores (whose character is completely changed in the movie adaptations, directed to be more adult-like and seductive) acted like a petulant child, who indeed “was asking for it” from Humbert. It doesn’t matter because the moral here is that it shouldn’t have changed anything — HH is still a predator, and so is Ezra Fitz. Watching the show in quick succession in a binge, rather than it was intended as a serialized drama to watch week after week (when many watchers would forget what happened the week prior) makes it clear to the watcher, or at least to me, that we aren’t meant to forget that Ezra is a teacher or that he is much older than her. A lot of the storylines between Aria and Ezra emphasize their power differential: he had been engaged before, it’s believable that he had a kid, he has a masters degree, etc. But equally, it emphasizes that Aria is still in high school, often a refrain from Ezra himself throughout the first and second seasons. Even when he transitions to teach at Hollis College, they note that they can be seen out in public since he is not her teacher anymore, but they still hide from Aria’s father, knowing that their connection is still taboo. Thus, we know the show is intentional in its galmourizing of their secret relationship. The showrunners knew then, as the audience knows now, what made their relationship so sexy was the age gap, not the power differential of their teacher-student dynamic. The show also treats other age gaps similarly, with Aria and Jason’s age gap being a somewhat similar theme of taboo (her dead best friend’s older brother), Hannah being kissed by Ella’s then-partner (an adult who owned a coffeeshop), etc. People argue that the writers didn’t recognize these problematic behaviors. I’d argue that they recognized them, they just put the lion’s share of the blame on the shoulders of the girls. I imagine the showrunners didn’t understand Lolita.

And we can pathologize Aria all we want, and it probably would make sense: Aria is clearly a parentified older daughter with mental health issues. She holds Byron’s secret when he cheats on her mom, she raises Mike and cares for him like another parent, her parents (and indeed, all parents except for the Fields’) are conspicously never around (who lets their kid have sleepovers on school nights?). Aria is by all intents and purposes, a victim that is perfect for the chase and capture. She is a natural secret keeper that Ezra can guilt. She is poised for the kill as a girl who takes care of everyone else, but no one takes care of her. Enter: Ezra Fitz.

But still, I’ll refrain from making their relationship purely predator-victim. Because Aria initiates the relationship. Aria is the chaser, the one who keeps coming back for more. Again, this doesn’t matter when it comes to assigning fault because Ezra was the adult in the relationship. What does matter to me is examining Aria’s feelings of power, of autonomy, of control when it comes to her relationship with Ezra. The feeling of keeping an adult’s secret is intoxicating. It can make a young girl feel grown up, disconnected from her peers, making her feel special and seen unto herself. The girls even say it: Aria is the best liar of them all, and I think this is because Aria has to lie consistently about who she is and what she wants to almost everyone around her. While to some degree, honesty is a reprieve to the other girls (Spencer gets help for her brief drug addiction, Hannah gains a supportive, age appropriate boyfriend, Emily is able to be out as a lesbian), for Aria, honesty seems more like a cage than anything else. Aria had to develop these skills young, shielding herself from any familial disputes or disarray while maintaining the facade that everything is fine.

Aria is 15/16 when she enters this relationship. Approximately around this time, girls experience a self-esteem drop, and if it isn’t supported, can veer into depression and anxiety brought on by experiencing the world as a girl. They stop participating in classes, they slink out of responsibilities, they tend to disappear from friend groups and take on their burdens alone. Aria, who had just spent a year in Iceland after the mysterious disappearance of her closest friend, was almost undoubtedly experiencing this self-esteem drop. Once again, enter Ezra: an older, attractive man who talked to Aria like an adult and paid attention to her needs. Whose job, and indeed, livelihood ends up in the palm of her hands. What more power could a teenager want than the ability to destroy the life of her ex-boyfriend? When she is angry at him, she writes a letter accusing him of seducing her and using his power over her. Aria, from the beginning, knows if their relationship is outed, that she would be protected more than him. The show tries to showcase that their relationship is not one of victim-predator because she consented to being in it, but any scholar studying Feminism and sexual assault knows that there is no way to consent in that dynamic. But what matters here is that she felt like she could consent, and therefore, felt the burden of keeping their secret, and felt like she held power over him (something that the villain, A, exploits quite a bit). Power that she almost exercised when he betrayed her deeply (by being outed as even more of a predator than he already was!) but didn’t, because even then, the show refrained from going to a much darker truth that we all recognize: that Ezra deeply messed up the last years of her childhood.

Most people today who were big fans of the show shipped Ezria back then, but now take it back. I get that — as an adult who is past Ezra’s age in season one, I could never look at a 16 year old the way he did. With age, we realize that predators are not romantic, and we take on a much more adult mindset about these relationships (because we are good people and also, we are not teenagers). But, I want to harken back for a moment when we were not Ezra but we were Aria. When we were teenagers, and it felt sexy to keep a secret. It felt powerful because in some ways, it was; or rather, it was a mimicry of being powerful. It was play pretend at being powerful. As a teenager, I couldn’t see past myself. I was vying for some form of autonomy that I couldn’t yet have. I wanted sex, but I was forced to have celibacy. I wanted someone to understand me, but the world itself refused to provide that. I now watch Aria freak out about Ezra’s ex-girlfriend that he didn’t mention, and I think “no one is required to disclose their past partners unless it comes up,” because I am an adult. But somewhere in my heart, I retain some empathy, because it really was that dramatic to be a sixteen year old girl. Of course she flipped out about Jackie. She hadn’t dated anyone before who had a Jackie.

I’m not so shameful that I can’t admit what it was like when I was young. I’m not such a liar that I would pretend that because I know better now that I don’t understand why I did what I did back then. You as an adult can co-exist with the decisions you made as a teenager without co-signing them. You can revel in what felt good without painting yourself to be all bad. This is what they don’t understand about victimhood. That sometimes you were the monster. That doesn’t mean they’re allowed to forget that you were also the maiden.

Aria marries her abuser and the internet resents the writers for making it this way, but in reality, many of us do. Or many of us never get closure. Or many of us forgive our abusers. Or many of us kill ourselves. Or many of us, yes, kill our abusers. No matter what, we can never get it right. I won’t justly the writing choice, but if aria was a real person, I’d want to stay close to her. Wait and watch. Try to help her get out of that relationship by being a consistent support. Understand that her pain is buried deep under a false sense of power that we both know she can wield. I wouldn’t write her off like most of you would. And yes, I do mean that as an accusation. Because you forgot the maiden when you focused on the monster. You think because you’re an adult, that you know better than a child. And that part is true, but you still don’t know the child. And you owe it to her to know her enough to be able to save her.

Aria is not the perfect victim, and I resent the discourse around this term. “There is no perfect victim.” But there are. There are the raped women who go to congress to change policies. There are the child sexual assault survivors who go on to take on epstein with a perfect life after their assault. There are victims of domestic violence who claim they no longer love their ex, because how could they love someone who hit them and pushed them down the stairs? There are perfect victims. You force us to be. Those of us who cling to our truths, who parade out our disgusting parts all over the internet for you to see, to make certain that we display both the mountaintops and the trenches both, get your hatred for ruining your ability to be complacent, ignorant, and even at times, stupid about survivorship. Many of us marry our abusers. Does that make us any less worthy of not being abused? Because those of us who choose to live in the light of our honesty, even as dark as that could get, do so at the expense of the rest of the world. We do so because facing the truth is the only way to heal. Should we have to set that aside to make you more comfortable?

No one wants to contend with the maiden when she’s sometimes the monster. Easier to write off a man as a predator than to admit that a girl could have felt any sense of power in a relationship that ultimately still victimized her. How dare she grapple with power? Doesn’t she know she was supposed to be raped, not loved into submission? Aria’s relationship may have been glamorized but you’d be lying if you said you never felt what aria felt: power. adulthood right in your reach. autonomy to love who you wanted to love. Ezra was the predator. Aria was just a teenage girl. But that means something more complicated than you want it to mean.

If you look at the monster, you forget about the existence of the maiden. I really think this is true for how we talk about pedophilia. We are so obsessed as to why adult men would go after teenage or younger children. But we never really stop to discourse, as a society, why an older teenaged girl might see herself thriving in a relationship like that, only to come to terms with it much later in life as something that ruined a big part of her childhood. We have so much time to give to the pedophile (which is why after all these years, Lolita is still fascinating to so many), because unconsciously, we are more drawn to depictions of evil than we are depictions of victimhood. We are drawn to black and white thinking, and it’s easier to paint the villain than it is to understand the victim. Easier to hate than it is to extend empathy. The knee jerk reaction is to want to castrate the pedophile, but even in a justified witch hunt where you’re drowning a real witch, the commotion makes you forget the little girl that was cursed. PLL might be simply the continuation of the 2000s obsession with pedophilic culture, but in retrospect, there are some really interesting themes to pull apart when it comes to how it portrays its villains, what it considers evil, and the consequences of evil actions. PLL does an interesting job of highlighting the contradictions: that a single person can be both, somehow. That victims can turn villains can turn victims. That the cycle doesn’t end until its internalized, or more often, when it is ended by external force.

Jenna is the most obvious example. As a victim of the girls’ (however unintended) actions, Jenna bears the consequences of Alison’s poor behavior. The show tries to make Jenna an unsympathetic villain by making her the aggressor in her sexual relationship with her step-brother, Toby. But take away the perfect hair and beautiful eyes that the actor has, and Jenna is still just a fifteen year old girl. And while her behavior in that relationship was wrong, Jenna needed help, not divine punishment through the hand of God that is Alison Dilaurentis. Scholarship shows us that girls who act out in sexually inappropriate ways may have experienced sexual abuse themselves as younger children, and act out on their siblings. That being said, there is absolutely no justification for sibling sexual assault. Yet, the show runners easily castigated and punished Jenna for her teenage behavior and worshipped Ezra for his adult-child relationship. But, Jenna is also interesting because while it is established that she was evil before she was blinded, she continues to be evil after she is blinded. In this way, the show makes her a complicated villain: where stereotypes of disabled people force them into kind, good, placid figures in media, Jenna holds against that stereotype. She’s like, “I don’t care if I can’t see you, I will still terrorize you.” The fact that the girls don’t treat Jenna like she is made of glass right from the beginning is also interesting. PLL didn’t intend to do this at all, but they actually went against the status quo for disabled representation at the time of viewing. While we can definitely argue that it’s ableist to make disabled characters villains too, I’d argue that Jenna is a complex villain, which is what makes her so interesting and fun. Jenna has reason to terrorize the girls, and she follows through with that for years. If Jenna “deserved” to be blinded for her actions against Toby, then the girls “deserve” to be the victims of her torture for the role they played in permanently blinding her. Jenna is not simply a villain or a victim, and the show doesn’t try to redeem her as either.

So then, why does PLL try so hard to redeem Ezra Fitz? Yes, because he is the romantic lead, for sure. Lucy Hale and Ian Harding had crazy chemistry, and while I think his hair style choices make him look like he’s a little boy, back in the day when PLL aired, he was considered a prime hottie. But the most interesting thing that Ezra’s character got to do was his villain arc. The betrayal of Ezra Fitz was the last daring thing the writers really tried. You couldn’t expect that a man who adored Aria like that, who risked everything to be with her, could convey his villainy through a secret can of chickpeas (seriously, who makes their underage pretty girlfriend drive an hour both ways, in the remote dark forest, for chickpeas when you already have them?) This was the last time that the writers really took a leap. And even after that, Ezra’s redeemed! But why!

The audience has a little something to do with it. At the time that PLL was airing, weekly ratings were really important. #Ezria was viral. Everyone loved them together (and don’t lie and say you were one of few who didn’t. We all did, loser, get in the car). Certainly, fan service played an integral role. But could it be that the relationship itself reflected the characterization of Aria in a way that was setting her up to be the Big Bad? A popular fan theory states that the writers intended for Aria to be Uber A, but when fans figured it out, they pivoted to a weird twin of Spencer’s who resented the girls for their good fortunes in life while she grew up destitute and poor in…London? Random and bad, everyone agrees there. But let’s think about it for a second. If Aria was the Big Bad Villain, what would that say about her relationship? That her trauma was so manifest, that it was so twisted what happened to her, that a) love alone, or even friendship, couldn’t save her, and b) that perhaps her victimization by the people around her — her father using her as a secret keeper, her mother abandoning her to that house, her brother consorting with bad people while it seems like she is singlehandedly responsible for him, and most of all, her high school English teacher preying on it — actually did make her evil. This is a storyline that could’ve been so cool not only because it would could have been developed in a really beautifully scary way, but also because it could highlight and expand who victims can become. We are not all sunshine and rainbows. We don’t all stand ten toes down staring down rapists in courtrooms. Some of us, plainly put, go insane. We turn on our friends. We rampage our families. We hurt the ones we love. And that asks the most interesting question of all, in my opinion: what about us then? Will you still treat us as holy if we treat you like trash?

We could have had…so much. And yet what we got was…

Now, fifteen years after the series first came out, we all watch in horror at the downward sloping show, all agape and aghast that we could have ever allowed something so cheap to hit our TVs. We groan when we see anything positive about Ezria. But we are lying. We loved Ezria then, and we understand Ezria more now. The actors, writers, show runners all say that it was a different time, but power differential taboos are time resistant. There are young girls today who find some false sense of power in “seducing” older men. I don’t know what the show could have done (beyond the obvious) to make this more clear, but I find what we don’t talk about re: Ezria more interesting that what we do talk about. Put yourself in Aria’s shoes. Wouldn’t you be interested in an older man who treated you like an adult, yourself? Nine times out of ten, I think you would. We cannot expect young girls to stay out of grooming relationships on their own. We cannot shame them when they fall into them against their own better judgement. It takes a village to rear a child; it takes the universe to keep them from falling into the hands of a pedophile.

One of our jobs is to keep our eyes on the girls. Watch the maiden. Mind the monster. Resurrect the woman out of the graveyard that is being a teenage girl. It’s no easy chore, but it is a part of this social contract, one that privileges being an entitled man over any kind of woman. But how do we protect the girls without policing them? How do we mind the predators without just creating gaps to let them fall through the cracks? So long as the attention is on the horrors of the existence of pedophilia, and not on the girls (and other genders) it impacts, I am not sure we can. Again, it is easier to be fascinated by evil than it is to accept the harm they left behind.

Aria was failed, but failing to understand her motives in her relationship, her lust, her desire for lust, fails us further. We can sit here and extol the evils of pedophiles, try to understand them to prevent them, but while we turn our eyes to the darkness, our girls are following the pied piper all the way back to his shitty studio apartment in Rosewood. If we spend a little less time lambasting the glamorization of Ezria (a point well and truly made, which to me, makes it boring), paid a bit more attention to Aria (and Jenna, for that matter. And Spencer.) then maybe we stand a semblance of a chance at protecting girls from their own fates. Maybe we stand at chance at collective healing, when we ultimately fail them. Maybe we can keep the maiden from becoming a monster, and stop the monster from eating the maiden.

Either way, we have to stop pretending that teenage girls are lust-less beings with no brains. They are acting in their best interests to find love and desire, fueled by crazy hormones and a thirst for a taste of power that most adults do not want to give. They seek the evil adults who do. What can we do to stop this? This, I don’t know. All I know is that I certainly will not be judging them for anything they do, including marrying their abusers.

Sorry to rant about a stupid show. See you next time on “Corn’s Stupid Thoughts”

Yours,

Me

In an effort to do something different, to keep from wasting away into an Internet abyss where Leftists and liberals argue forever into the void, I picked up a book about the making of the Renaissance in Europe. It’s called “When Women Ruled the World” by Maureen Quilligan, and it explores the intertwined lives of Queen Mary of Scots, Queen Elizabeth of England, and Queen Mother Catherine Medici of France. I’ve been reading it slowly since October of 2025 (so yes, it’s been a while, and no, I haven’t finished it). My intrigue of this book is sparked, of course, from my forever fandom of Reign. Following a fictionalized version of Queen Mary of Scots’ story, Reign (2013) is an absurd show with terrible historical costuming, some downright offensive portrayals of the Indigenous peoples of France, and just…some weird stuff (like when it’s insinuated that Queen Mother Catherine Medici of France made the anti-christ with her lover and a witch in a threesome. Not sure how we got there). But it is one of my all-time favorite shows because Adelaide Kane is so pretty and the love story is so sweet, even though in real life, Queen Mary and Prince Francis were wed as children and ruled only briefly together before Francis, always sickly and weak, succumbed to illness, leaving the young queen in her own right widowed and sent back to Scotland to rule her threatened nation on her own. I loved living in this world, where righteousness won out, where women ruled the world. I was irrefutably moved by Adelaide Kane’s performance as Queen Mary, the rightful heir to the Scottish throne, the cousin of Queen Elizabeth, a Tudor by blood (and maybe even a Plantagenet), and her moving portrayal of loyalty to crown and country. Like every other older Gen Z in America, I was obsessed with princesses, queens, and royalty. It makes me feel a certain way, okay? Leave me alone.

Anyway, I’ve been learning a lot about the shape of the Renaissance, how these monarchies shaped the world to come — indeed, the world we now occupy. Understanding historical currents and how they have influenced current day politics has always been interesting and important to me. But when discussing American democracy, we talk about Greece, we talk about the Magna Carta, but we rarely talk about the impact that sexism had on the rise of democracy against the era of Kings. While the whole of England was countering the specter of democratic decision making, according to The Book I’m Reading, the race to dismantling the monarchy’s sole power for good was done through the hands of men using sexism to gain power. Queen Mary of Scots in particular named this danger in her letters to her cousin Queen Elizabeth, noting that Elizabeth’s own advisor who sat dangerously close to the throne did not believe women should rule. As an aside, it’s interesting, though, that because Elizabeth believed in the divine right of Kings, that she dismissed this fear as paranoia, only to have her own power be thoroughly diminished by that same advisor later on. Anyway, none of this is actually important to the point — I’m just trying to set up the context.

So envision me, sitting on my couch in late October, light slowly dying outside, my trees in my garden beginning to turn red, purple, gold, then dying, trying to learn about anything that isn’t directly related to the damn Democratic party of the United States of America, the “greatest” democracy on planet earth, only to be smacked in the face by the fact that democracy, as an invention, was ushered in because people thought women couldn’t rule. Here, in the now, a year after a woman lost an election (because she ran a bad campaign, but let’s not kid ourselves — it was also because she was a woman who wanted to govern), I was confronting the same truth that I tried narrowly to escape in all my years working in politics. Now, I obviously disagree with the divine right of kings. By the time monarchy truly ended (later down the line), it was already much too late. So much damage had been done to the everyday people. But monarchy gave way to major democracy in tandem with the early start of capitalism, so even that great dismantling of tyranny, we didn’t do entirely right. Rooted in the intellectual ramblings of men, the transition from monarchy to democracy in the West has always been laced with sexism. I know this, you know this. But it still pisses me off that had Mary been a man, or had Elizabeth not been a woman, literally all of world history would have been different. At the core of it, men hating women was bad enough that it ushered in the end of their own worlds. Can you believe it? Of course you can. Men hating women into ruining their own lives is a tale as old as time.

What does this have to do with Lily-of-the-Valley, though, you might be asking. That’s fair, that’s fair, let me get to the point. I bring all of this up because I found myself still deeply resonating with the decisions, the sacrifice, and the political machinations of these ruling women. Though I have not been raised with the specific destiny to rule, I can relate to the deep sacrifices that Mary of Scots made, like being forced to marry a man towards the end of her life who had ostensibly raped her and never faced charges for that, for indeed being blamed for marrying him even though all accounts insinuate that it was done against her will. I can relate to Elizabeth’s deep jealousy, which still did not prevent her from aiding her sister queen when she fled into her territory, because she knew that the axed head of her sister queen only spelled abject destitution for herself (a woman and a woman might be an enemy, but allowing a man to destroy one of them destroys them both). I can relate to the art exchanges between the queens, the symbolism of their works, the pricelessness of their art only to be ignored by male historians who reduced them to squabbling enemies, desperate for each other’s heads, reducing complex relationships into a simpler one that men can understand. I can relate to Queen Catherine and her commitment to Queen Mary, despite her leaving French court after she was widowed, begging until the very end for her safety in her decades long house arrest under Queen Elizabeth. And while I can’t relate to any of their ideological beliefs on purity or ruling or even God, I can relate to the politics of being a woman in politics, your gender preceding you, your contributions ignored and your ideas mocked. I can relate to the self sacrifice and years a woman puts in, only to be side stepped and betrayed. And, more than anything, I can relate to a woman scorned by society who dramatically portrays herself as Mother Mary as the Queen of Scots did. Mary, who was thrice married, had herself painted in a parallel to Mary Mother of God, sanctified herself in Catholic mythology as important as the Virgin Mary herself. Not only were their names the same, but she, like her namesake, sacrificed her child for the sake of a nation. She, like her namesake, wept tears for her birthright. She, like her namesake, is remembered for her tragedy while her son is remembered for his legacy.

Lily-of-the-Valley represents a return to happiness. In Christian folklore, the flower also represents Mother Mary’s tears having fallen to the ground on the day of the crucifixion. Her grief for her child and for the world around her turned into this beautiful dew drop flower, a permanent reminder of sacrifice. In this way, it holds both the meanings of grief and happiness. Death, rebirth, and a new start. It blooms in the springtime, around May 1st, a day full of symbolism in and of itself. It reminds us that it’s delicate beauty, which cannot be replicated in perfume as it is too delicate to distill, is brief, only here to remind you of what could be. Lily-of-the-Valley is a flower of potential, its rhizomes spreading under the soil quickly, thickly, making it hard to weed out, but beautiful to stand amongst.

For eons, women have had to sacrifice to make the world. My mother sacrificed her career to get married and to raise two young children in another country. Her mother sacrificed her childhood (albeit, forcibly) to take care of an abusive man who would outlive her. My paternal grandmother forced her daughter in laws to sacrifice their comforts for her sons’ morning coffee. My matrilineal line may not have been divine queens, but they were divinely human, and were denied their rights by the men around them, the same as literal reigning queens in Europe. Yet, despite this, all of these women made great changes. They made strides, they turned the world into what it is, what it could be. Under Elizabeth, Scotland and England united by way of Mary’s blood. Under Catherine Medici, the arts flourished. Under my Ammama, my mother became the first educated daughter of her family. Under my mother, I became the first to gain a Masters degree. We are forces of nature, even when nurture denies us.

Jasmine defines my family, blooming in the nighttime and filling South Indian morning air with bursts of rich sweetness. My mother decorated my hair with them at my wedding, at my coming-of-age ceremony, at every temple event. But Lily-of-the-Valley is my current favorite. I spent months in the aftermath of graduate school trying to find meaning in anything, and I came across this flower online, and immediately took to its symbolism. On January 1st, when I decided that enough was enough and that I needed to get better or I would continue to get worse, I swore to myself that I would find a way to return to happiness, and that Lily-of-the-Valley would help me get there. I decided that Lily-of-the-Valley would be my flower of the year (not that I even had a practice like that before, but I sure do now!) I journaled about it, I sought it in a perfume, and I generally obsessed over it for months. I realized I liked it because it was the heart note in fresh linen perfumes I loved, but I had a hard time finding a pure Lily-of-the-Valley note since it is what perfumers call a “mute flower” (it cannot be distilled on its own, all notes of this flower are synthetically produced because its smell is so delicate that once plucked, it’s gone in a few hours). I spent money and time on this endeavor. I bought and used most of Philosophy’s Pure Grace, which has a heart note of Lily-of-the-Valley, giving it a clean, soapy, and green vibe. I pined after Replica’s Lazy Sunday Morning, which heavily features Lily-of-the-Valley as its top note. I eagerly used my Sephora birthday giftcard given to me by my in-laws to purchase Rosie Jane’s recent hair and body spray release, White Tee, which blooms into a fresh cut grass scent mixed with Lily-of-the-Valley. I wanted it in every iteration. The most pure version I have found is Lily-of-the-Valley perfume oil by Kuumba made. I wore it for months behind my ears. It lifted my spirit.

Let’s fast forward to April. The days are getting a bit warmer, a bit longer. I have to stop hibernating on my couch. I decided that past the threshold of my house, where my abundant garden was starting to bloom, might be the perfect opportunity to shed my fear of the outside world. I had really come to resent the world around me, but it was high time to stop.

I walked outside of my house, and for once, outside of myself. I left my black void indoors curled up on the couch in my heated blanket that I never turn off, and stepped out onto the tile of my front porch which precedes our garden by mere steps. I observed the leafs, the flowers, and took in fresh air without purpose, for once. I’ve never been big on flowers, on gardening (indeed, why would I pay money to plant flowers when plants grow naturally if I let them), but something possessed me to take a moment and exist there with these living things right outside of my window. I even walked over to the corners of my garden, where I rarely go, and looked over the dark bits. And there, in the very corner of the property that my husband and I rent, I stood, expecting nothing at all but more plants I could not name, maybe some squirrels running away. Imagine my surprise then, when I took this time that I normally would not, and I see tiny white buds peaking out from between great big leaves. I leaned in closer. Surely, this could not be…

And it was. Lily-of-the-Valley. In my own garden, not ten feet from where I sat on the couch googling the best perfumes for this scent. The delicate buds hanging low in my garden. Their blooms sweet smelling, their leaves fresh and green. Dew sat on top of them like they had just been waiting for me. I couldn’t believe my luck. I spent weeks searching for a mimic, but the real thing was here all along.

And here I could say something trite about how if only I had removed my eyes from a screen and gone outside to feel the beauty of life, etc. And that’s all probably true (however cringe it is). But the truth here is that this discovery felt like more than that. After brutal rejections for jobs I should’ve gotten, after spending months in my own mind, in my own black void, in hissing whenever someone tried to make me feel better, this felt like the Universe was acknowledging my pain. It felt like the mirror was being held up to my face. It felt like my tears were being sewn for something I couldn’t yet see blossoming.

I am not going to compare myself to Jesus Christ on the cross, but I will compare myself to every other woman who has worked in politics or the movement space (who might be like Jesus, honestly. Maybe braver). Women on average put in more work in movement spaces, and still get relegated with the emotional work and emotional labor in supposedly equitable spaces. I mean, this is known, right? We all think about this, right? Even in majority women’s spaces, there is still a hierarchy — white women float to the top, the cream, and the rest of us sink to the bottom. Snow capped nonprofits, white men masquerading as social justice warriors while allowing women to do the lion’s share of organizing work, it’s all common knowledge…right????? RIGHT?????? And yet, we are trapped in this cyclical torture because too many of us are trying to make a point. Too many of us are tied to missions, to accepting less than, to putting others above ourselves. Women make more sacrifices to be in the working activist space than men do, and we know it, and we have to put together task forces to solve issues that impact us disproportionately, like paid time off policies. The irony is that like the Queens of the European Renaissance world, women in politics/policy/movement work have to, ourselves, integrate equity oriented policies for…ourselves…while we experience the excruciating pain of why we need those policies in the same environment. Which is not unlike Queen Elizabeth needing Queen Mary, her literal enemy to her crown, to retain her own crown in Scotland, enduring the humiliation of her own standing by watching her male advisors try (and in the end, succeed) to tear Mary down. The enemy of man is friend to woman, or however the saying goes. Yeah yeah, the policies impact everyone, not just you. But by the time you’re doing achieving equity for everyone else, you’ve been beaten to a pulp. Where exactly is the justice in that? (Mind you, while I say this quiet sentiment out loud, there will be fools screaming at me that babies are being kidnapped and girls are being accosted by pedophilic elites, how could I ever say that the work isn’t worth it when we need to save them! But it’s always about saving us from the evil men. It’s never about making men not evil.)

All the time and the effort I put in, the sacrifices I made, moving away across the country from my family, from my movement support system, allowing my “teachers” and “mentors” to humiliate and disrespect me. After everything I had done to be great, influential, meaningful, intelligent, intellectual, analytical. And after all of the pain I had endured in the last two years, this little flower popping up in my garden felt like Mary had cried tears for me, and the world was showing me that I needed to stop suffering. I needed to stop dying. I needed to stop sacrificing.

There is no way around it. To work in politics right now is to sacrifice. And women and women of color have to sacrifice exponentially more. It is always an ask that is unreasonable. It is always discriminatory, and it is always painful. I know the statistics and I still gasped when it happened to me. I have heard the stories, listened to the women of color who came before me who implored me to figure out how to save myself. I watched while they withered away, and no, they are not unsuccessful, but they are in a lot of pain. The difference between me and the women who have come before me is that I watched their chronic illnesses flare up, and the minute my body got caught in something weird like that, I recognized it and have begun to refuse to give into it. And refusing to give in made me stand out. It made me a target. At some point in this work, you take it laying down, and if you don’t, it kills you. Actually, either way, it kills you. I’m not saying I wouldn’t sacrifice anything for the greater good. I am saying I will not sacrifice so much of myself that I am bones in dirt, nonfunctioning, and chronically ill. Something has got to give, and that something cannot be me anymore.

Mary cried for me and her tears hit the soil, she does not want her child to suffer. God does not want me to suffer. The movement does not want me to suffer.

I did not remove the dead flowers from the garden bed. I let last years’ leaves rot on the ground. I do not know how to take care of a garden. Still, they grew this season.

I planted nothing and reaped the reward (and felt like a cishet white man for that!) I walked outside just in time to catch their bloom. I wept when the Lily-of-the-Valley buds died because they wouldn’t stick around all summer long.

I wonder if my own tears will hit the soil and grow something abundant. I wonder if longing for something that is dead and gone somehow produces another thing, beautiful in its place, delicate in its understanding of what has now gone. Can I build something I love, subtle and divine, in place of something I desperately cherished but no longer belongs to me? I wonder if my tears are as holy as Mother Mary’s, if indeed the Universe conspires to make me happy, or if I just work hard at it myself. I’m not sure the answer to those curiosities matter, because the matter of the fact is, since seeing those little plants in my garden, a lot of things shifted.

I started to understand what my next steps were going to be. I started to notice that the arc of life is long (God willing), and that no one, not a single person, has ever asked me to sacrifice. I was paying penance for a life I used to lead, but not living according to the one I have built since. I was never bad, but I used to think I was not good. And that’s really got to stop. Whatever the reason for why I punish myself, it’s self inflicted. I am frankly not Jesus on the cross, and I do not have to die for anyone’s sins, not even my own. I do have to cultivate my own garden. I am responsible for my own return to happiness. I can decide what that looks like for me, and only me. Maybe my tears will yield something beautiful and delicate and brief. Maybe I can make a synthetic version of that beauty and enjoy it all the same. Maybe this year, I spend spreading my rhizomes under the soil, reaching as far as I can go, stabilizing. Maybe next year, I will once again cherish the white rose, my all time favorite flower, knowing how much water it takes to bloom, let others pour into me. For now, I want to be selfish. For once, I get to be.

This time next year I will see if any of my tears produce flowers. I do think of myself as holy, but not sacrificial. I will treat myself as more than a womb, a generator, a movement worker. Whatever’s next for me, I know I will not yield anymore. I deserve a beautiful and full life. Damn everything else but that. Don’t pluck me up. But if you do, it won’t matter. I am sewing enough seeds to reap next season.

Yours faithfully,

Me

But I don’t mean that I have always voted Democrat. No, since my sophomore year of college, since passing said economics classes and learning about public policy from one of the leading undergraduate institutions in this field, I became well and truly, a nondenominational Leftist. And while I have flirted with other ideologies — at times calling myself a DemSoc, an Anarchist, and at the worst of times, an anarcho-syndicalist, just to be contrarian about it, I have always returned to my bottom line, which is that I am for the people, by the people, with the people. That means in my practice in daily life, I will do what it takes to protect the outside game from being hunted and thrown into prison. I will soften policies and enact protective ones to help build towards revolution. This is just my read of my place in the movement we share — not everyone agrees with me, and no one really has to. Arguably, the policies I have helped pass or detract have saved lives, and that’s enough for me.

But here’s the thing. I stay on the Left because my work demands it, and my community requires it. I operate in good faith to convince policy makers of my opinions, of the needs of my people. That’s enough for me to keep current on theory, to engage in community dialogue, and to interrogate my own mistakes and perceptions. Unfortunately, that is not enough for many other people. Historically speaking, the Left in the US, the true Left, is more about aesthetics than it is about the political movement building undergirding those aesthetics.

The Left has a long history in the US, starting from the inception of the country with Enlightenment ideals which led to Marxism and flourished from there. Even in the US, where we see Marxism as a countercultural ideology to ours, American and “liberty centered,” Marxism made its way to how we structure our public schools even well before the mid 20th century. Class conflict has always existed, and organizing and mobilizing among oppressed classes and races punctuate American history across the board. I’m not a historian or a philosopher, so if my loose historical threads irritate you, argue amongst yourselves in the comments.

I say all of this to bring us to the early-to-mid-20th-century. When unions solidified, when racial solidarity began to rise, and when organizing became the truth of the undercurrent of how progressive policies passed. I don’t know how it was back then, but looking back at even the 40s, there’s an undeniable coolness to the Left’s cultural impact. Imagine joining a union back then, collectively bargaining for your workplace — and winning real concessions. Imagine joining a racial justice march that was more than just a parade. Imagine going to an SDS meeting in the 60s and 70s, where the Moaist factions would break off because the others didn’t want to kill landlords (obviously more happened, but I think this line is funny). The Left was undeniably cool. And while the same Fox-news/right-wing rhetoric exists about us being rebels and punks or anti-American still exists today, back then, it seemed somewhat warranted, because the Left was influencing major cultural shifts. From music, to clothing, to sexual liberation, people were really engaging with the changing tides of social culture as a response to the stringent purity culture and Americanization of the 50s. White Americans had something to cling onto: a sense of idealization of what American society could be, a taste of true freedom. Black and brown Americans had a place to slot in to real organizing that uplifted their communities, possibilities of freedom beyond the confines of public policy that only existed to oppress them. There was in some capacity, cross-racial solidarity and organizing (though there was also plenty of racial divide amongst the Left, as well as severe misogyny and queerphobia).

But even within the problems the Left had, there were budding ideas, new places to go, nightclubs to party in. The world was decolonizing rapidly, and imagine being a 2o year old brown person in the diaspora, watching every last colony you never thought could do it, break free from Empire. I mean. Hell. Yeah. MF.

Even the later decades were cool. The 90s brought new technology, the mass production of computers, dial up and the Internet becoming weird, immediately. Again, I wouldn’t know because I was born in the 90s, but at least in hindsight, there seemed to be something to cling onto, rather than just fight against. The world was booming with change, and everyone was clinging onto the radical re-imagination of it all. I can only imagine what it was like for people to go from little connectivity to one another to messenger, from messenger to cell phone, and from cell phone to smart phone, and so forth. I, myself, went from flip phone to iPhone in a decision from my parents that changed my life. I can certainly tell you about watching Instagram go from a Tumblr-Esque artsy vibe to what it is now (a machine invented specifically to sell me perfumes and make me have severe FOMO being excluded from other people’s Indian weddings).

That brings us to now(ish). From 2014-2018/2019, the #MeToo movement took media by storm. #MeToo within Feminism is now so ubiquitous, it’s hard to imagine now, in 2026, that we ever were chill with older men chasing after young girls. The #MeToo movement gave survivors somewhere to go, somewhere they were wanted. Not to say that anti-violence movement work wasn’t happening prior to the movement’s internet rise, co-opting the underground work of Black and brown women, but normalizing sharing stories took the blame, momentarily, off of victims and survivors and shifted it back onto society and most importantly, perpetuators of violence. It sparked a shift in discourse that made it so unbelievable that anything before it was allowed to happen. Just to let y’all know…people were cool with Epstein and Co.’s abuse. Just saying. It wasn’t always like this.

In 2020, it was cool to be woke. Social justice swept over the internet, and being isolated to stop the spread of the pandemic, it became everyone’s personality. That summer felt like real change to me (though the critiques land heavy and accurately on target when the activists share what it was actually like — well meaning white liberals and broken policy change promising more than it ever delivered). Still, for a moment, it felt like we had moved past the leftist debate of yore. It felt like being blue haired and polyamorous was mainstream, now. It felt like we could come out of the shadows, even more so with almost all interactions moving into an online sphere. All of a sudden, Zoom classes were peering into our homes, Teams meetings had our bosses looking at the art behind our heads, and community engagement with policy makers allowed us to go camera off and yell insults at them (deserved ones, honestly).

And that brings us to…now. If there was this beautiful coming together in 2020, where the world seemed on each others’ sides, when abolition started to go mainstream, what happened? Why are we here now?

And I don’t mean the grief or hopelessness, or the detachment that has been studied and written about over and over since the BLM summer of 2020. I mean, why is our side so deeply uncool, with people outside of the Left accusing us of just being “theory bros” with no insight into real organizing or community connections? When did we lose our street cred?

In just a few decades, we went from being the cool counterculture kids to being the loser nerds who do nothing but read Marx in reading circles of the same four white men with curly hair and glasses. Now, you have internet discourse about our insufferable discoursing nature, how the Left consistently gets nothing done, how they have never held power in America, and how they never well.

My jaw is always on the floor when people say this. The Civil Rights Movement wasn’t POWER to you??? But moving past the ahistorical disrespect for a moment, I have to wonder what we did to make this reaction happen. Since 2020, there has been a yank on the social culture from being deeply connective and supportive of other people who are different from yourself back into this white supremacist culture of apathy, disengagement, and not caring. The same people who signed and even created petitions are now dating cops, making excuses for ICE, and not participating. Some may say that’s a sign of apathy, but I think it is also because there is nothing about the Left, right now, that is attractive and cool. At least, not on the surface level. Not on the internet.

On the ground, Leftists are always doing cool shit. Water drops for unhoused people, COVID mask blocs, protests, underground organizing to prevent violence in their neighborhoods — cool shit. But online, the cyclical discourse is similar to the SDS conferences where our political forefathers left rooms to signal their disdain, made their own little factions, did their own little political engagement. Except, on TikTok, when you leave a space, you don’t go to another room where you devise your treatise on how to treat women feministly. You go to discord where you become a mod.

That is deeply, deeply uncool. It isn’t attractive to give people nowhere to go but yet another online forum. It isn’t working to bring people off of TikTok and onto discord because you are still missing the connective tissue: anyone can be whoever they want to be online. And those of us who are really on the Left take people at face value, and then go Pikachu face when they turn out to be not actually that committed once the face value of the aesthetic wears off. I’m not sure if the answer is trying to be cooler, but I do think it’s worth investigating how aesthetics show up in your organizing space. People join spaces because they want to be something and do something — you can’t just allow them to do the first bit without giving them something to do. Otherwise, you get the mess of a discourse we are always in on LeftTok: that no one hates Leftists as much as Leftists hate Leftists.

And it’s true! The history of the Left is absolutely filled to the brim with infighting. But infighting didn’t always tear us apart. We still got shit done and shaped history doing it. The point isn’t leftist unity, honestly. The point is cross-Left solidarity and movement strength building, resilience testing. The point is for a singular individual Leftist to look past how lame we all are, to look past the reading circles and discourse bros, and get their hands dirty doing some real Leftist work!

And that takes good facilitation. That takes hands-on skills in nonviolent communication and the ability to use a fucking Outlook calendar. It takes a leader who isn’t just charismatic, but knows how to do the boring stuff. It takes us getting a little more boring, so that other people we invite into the space can start to feel like they’re kind of cool.

We need to step up our game. It isn’t enough to go to lectures and then leave feeling holier than thou. We need to open our homes, to play music together, to watch movies that aren’t just Leftist media together. We need to be better friends before we can be the best comrades. We need to re-learn how to maintain strong relationships, because relationships are how the world works. We need to stop debating who we let into our spaces, and trust that when we open them up in good faith, that we can take care of our space by pruning it if we need to, but we can’t be afraid to try. No space is so holy that we have to keep it so clean and pure that we end up with no one in it.

But more than anything, we need to make the left cool again. I don’t endorse you know, violence. That’s not what I am saying at all. I do endorse real community action, however that looks to you, and enthusiasm for real systemic change, and love for your neighbors. And that’s ultimately what will make the left cool again. Our feelings :-)

No, I’m just kidding. I am not cool so I don’t have the answers on this one. But someone else really should figure it out. And when you do, I’ll be taking notes on how to be a cool leftist (just don’t tell me I need to dye my hair again, I don’t have money like that right now).

I have always loved being outdoors. I know this may come as a surprise to those of you who know me in real life as an indoor cat, snuggled up with a good book or leaving my house once a week to shop at a mall. Especially in the PNW, you aren’t really “outdoorsy” if you aren’t going to hike the Enchantments. If you don’t know how to build a fire outside or aren’t deathly afraid of bear — or god forbid, moose — encounters. No, the outdoorsy here are not simply people who enjoy the sun on their skin if even from simply behind the car window, but those who climb mountains with bare hands, who traverse landscapes to camp in places where snakes are abundant, who aren’t afraid of getting a little muddy or dirty or sweaty. I have massive respect for those people, not least of all because I am scared they will beat me up if I don’t admit it (have you seen a hiker’s quads? I think they could squeeze my neck until it snaps with them).

But as a kid, I got a reward from my summer reading program one year. It was a bird watching kit, some binoculars and a guide to identify birds in my state. I fell in love with the red cardinal, the way it would flash its bright colors in a flurry as it swooped down from trees and then back up. I would leave my little house in my little suburb, explore the creek nearby, where the local HOA had decided to let the natural environment grow to protect the ecosystem, where I saw muskrats and mistook them for beavers, where I collected shells only to realize with great panic that they were in fact, live snails that I had brought into my mother’s kitchen, only to get rid of them in the fastest way a child knows how (punt them out of my front door and hope no one notices and that God forgives me). As a child, I loved these explorations. I would team up with my neighbors, the eldest child leading us to far away places we’d call Africa and Asia (they were the neighborhood a couple miles down). Summer days stretched on and on, while I would daydream by the stream. I wrote my first novel sitting under the walking bridge between my neighborhood and the next. Unbothered and unrelenting in the summer heat, I dreamed up my first understanding of revolution against a fascist dictatorship; a loosely ripped off version of the Gail Carson Levine books I was reading, a love letter to Ella Enchanted. Even then, in my little girl brain, I was still wondering how the unjust could be allowed to be unjust, when my little kingdom in the suburb of Dublin, Ohio, was so peaceful.

Being outside gave me that. It allowed my imagination about what the world could be flourish. I wrote stories in my head as I stretched my limbs, moved my body, my brain providing bits and pieces of imagination to add to the landscape in front out me, even if that landscape was nothing so brilliant and dazzling as the PNW. As I grew up, I read less and left the house less. The outside became daunting as I learned about the dangers it posed to me. I was sexually assaulted by someone I thought I had loved when I was fifteen. I allowed that boy to play in my face for another subsequent two years. I was quickly snatched up by my next boyfriend, who embedded in me that my feeling unsafe was not because my boundaries were violated, but because my boundaries were violated due to my being a woman. There are reasons that there are empowerment programs built for girls going outdoors. The trees aren’t the reason we stop leaving our safe, if boring, abodes.

Summers also stopped being a time of magic and imagination as I got older. My time was monopolized thinking of where I would go to college and what I had to do to get in. I was competing with national merit scholars and future doctors. All of a sudden, my hobby of spending hours writing wasn’t going to cut it, anymore. All of a sudden, my imagination, my own brain, wasn’t enough. I had to be good at math, science, logic, philosophy. Nothing that came easy to me. Everything that the world demanded was important. No matter that my most interesting thoughts about the world happened when I was scaling a river bank in an urban park in downtown Columbus, alone in my flip flops. No longer was it good enough that I felt God when I felt the water between my toes as I waded down a creek with my friends. So many things collided in my mind: here I was, seventeen, the most beautiful I had ever been, the most energetic and the most enthusiastic about life, and all of the signs pointed to keeping my magic in a cage rather than letting it glow and grow.

I stopped going outside. I stopped writing altogether. Oh, I wrote poetry. I performed it at open mics and shared it with my then-boyfriend. I was lauded by the people who caged me as brilliant, fine, wonderful. No one ever walks into a cage because they were told they’d be trapped forever. I let the outside world turn into something that I cannot traverse. My peers in the PNW learned how to climb rocks and paddle board. I learned how to fear the touch of men and the jaws of sharks — in that order. Somewhere along the way, in choosing logic and reason (safety and soundness), I lost my sense of adventure, imagination, of radical play. And in doing so, I lost my imagination, my voice, my poetry and prose.

I met my matches in my job in anti-racist public policy. As “woo-woo” as the anti-racism space can get sometimes, I have to appreciate that the Black and brown folks who lead with spirituality always find grounding in being outside. While I teetered on the very edge of the “divine feminine” alt-right pipeline, it was in the community organizing and radical anti-racist spaces that held me in the contradiction of being a policy wonk while also unearthing and cherishing this little adventurer in my soul. I had colleagues who want to rewrite how we think of the entire world; from renaming and reassessing disability as a pathology to reimagining police safety and accountability, this work takes deep connection to the imagination. Once again, I started daydreaming. I started wondering about what could be, not just limiting myself to what was. And in doing so, made real changes to the world. I moved policy that was formerly considered immovable. I imagined my way into a slightly better world. The little girl in me who dreamed about a version of me with superpowers became the woman who had a superpower — the connection between policy, praxis, and spirituality. I didn’t necessary start playing outside again (that comes later in this story), but I did start daydreaming out of car windows again. What could the world look like if we prioritized this as much as we prioritize data-driven outcomes? What would it look like if we centered the radical imagination, if the stories of how we overcome somehow aligned with how we actually try to overcome?

When I moved to the PNW, I came in with optimism, but not with a focus on environmental justice. Environmental justice was just too hard for me. It always has been. The fact is, it is the easiest policy issue to solve, but the hardest to pass politically. We literally all see that the earth is falling apart, that we desperately need to protect our forests and trees and lakes and rivers and all of the beings that occupy that space, but the answer is always a resounding no due to the human inability to trade progress now for mitigation later. I had decided that the environmentalists had it well in hand, that I would focus on the people and they could focus on the trees. But it doesn’t really work that way, not out here.

I went on a hike the other day, and in the sweaty incline that I pushed myself up, I felt my heart racing like it did when I was a kid, running up and down the streets of my neighborhood scaring bunnies away (yes I was that kid). On the way down, I felt the cool breeze coming off of the wide river, which looked deceptively fun to get down into (I did not. Glacial water is no joke). Butterflies flew around me, illuminated like jewels in the sun. The rays of the brightness reflected off of the water, splashing up against the rocks. I sat on a rock by a waterfall and my butt got muddy, and for the first time in years, I did not care. I walked along the path thinking about the stories I would get to write when I got home later that day. I imagined my characters in this setting. I thought about the way their hair would gleam, how they would feel alive in my stories for once, instead of dead at the touches of evil men doing terrible things to them. I thought about how in this kind of light and warmth and trees, how it is impossible for me to choose anything but being alive, and how lucky I was that given the choice between living and dying, I would rather choose living and writing these intense, dark, weird stories about intense, dark, weird girls than to die and not get a chance to radically imagine at all. That choice hasn’t always been so clear.

The reason that one cannot be a radical imaginer without taking the environment into account in the PNW is because the first time I went to Lake Wenatchee, I was stunned. I understood, for the first time, how someone growing up on the West Coast might see all of this bounty and go, wow, this is what I need to protect. I could understand how someone who isn’t rooted in Black and Indigenous radical study would see how humans treat the environment and decide that the problem was us. But I was grateful for my roots, even then, standing in what could only be described as the most beautiful place I had ever seen until that point. I was grateful that I wasn’t white, that I did have community, that I spent time in my motherland, where everything is beautiful and very little is untouched, because the earth is ours to imagine and unimagine and make and unmake.

Lake Wenatchee & a bonus photo of me that looks really hot and did not get the likes it deserved on Instagram.

This land belongs to us as surely as we (the general we) belong to it. And it gives us the right, as humans, to imagine for it to be so different. And that’s when I really started to understand how my work in anti-racism and policy connects to my imagination, my creativity. My selfish desire to see beautiful places. My childlike joy at feeling the sand under my feet and warmth on my skin, to imagine entire worlds, including this one, and how I want to remake them in the way I believe is true and good and anti-fascist. How I’d give anything to be on my ancestral lands myself. How I’d give anything to give back these ancestral lands I am now on back to the Indigenous peoples. The land not only misses its people, but their imagination. Their willingness to shape it and change it according to ways that benefit both land and people.

Although in this moment, there were no thoughts behind my eyes, rest assured that the child in me who loved to write stories while outside is coming back. Bit by bit, I am nurturing her. She is what’s most important right now. And when she comes back fully, I will have stories and plans and ideas about how to defeat the fascists.

For now, I will go outside and be grateful to come back to my laptop so I can write stories about traumatized girls and their complicated feelings.

I hope the Spring turning into Summer will bring you joy and outside time even if you refuse to rock climb or paddle board (are you all not afraid of the whales turning you over like please be serious). The world is on many levels so very bad, but I am feeling optimistic about the one thing the earth knows how to do without prompting: the changing of the seasons, for the 8 millionth time, its ancient secrets and ways unfolding to make new pathways for us, its beloved inhabitants. Fiction stories to come soon — I’m gatekeeping my fiction work until I’m ready. They are such little flames of joy. I want to tend to them a bit longer, first.

Yours,

Me

MM’s journey made me think more deeply, on this here six year anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic, how much we have lost. How much we could’ve had. I’m aware that MM is more important than just the work she produces, but there are so few people on this planet who are both uniquely qualified, good at, and passionate about what they do, who are also recognized by their peers to be good at what they do, and to be given the platform to change souls and minds through their work. MM is one of those people; her work is transformational. It’s no secret that I didn’t like Song of Achilles, but even I can see how important of a work it is as a modern classic, and Circle is absolutely singular.

Everyone can write, but very few people can occupy the space of embodying what authorship really is, and MM is one of those people to me. And while she is absolutely more than her books, it is a significant loss that her career was disrupted by an illness that still ravages all of us, that most of us still don’t take seriously enough, and then find ourselves in her comments demanding more while we do less and less. I do think one of the downsides of being a genius is that your audience strips you down to what you can produce for them; this isn’t some new insight, but rather one that artists have struggled with plenty for many years. And even if MM doesn’t express that herself, I find myself angry on her behalf about it. Genius can only be produced if given the conditions to do so, and for six years, we have continued to fail people like MM to allow space and healing to make that happen. I’m not sure that I can see outside of this: the demand on her work, but the refusal to mask or take illness seriously in the bookish space. The conferences, the mass-gatherings, the fantasy balls that people host so that they can capitalize on the BookTok space, while one of your favorite authors suffers from a condition she got from an illness you refuse to prevent the spread of. Your consumerism is curbed by your lack of direct care. Surely, this has to be enough to get you to care, right? Of course not. People will blame the publishing industry, and it’s true that they should bear the brunt of the blame, but consumers are powerful. If you think you have enough power to demand works of art, then why don’t you think you are powerful enough to keep people safe, so that you can enjoy what you want from them?

The speed at which authors are pushed to publish has concerned me for a while. Not only because I care deeply about authors as people, but also because in the age of AI-slop, being prolific means nothing anymore. Authors are pushed to produce less-than-quality work so that their publishing partners can get a check cut, and consumers are allowing this to happen. Don’t get me wrong, I love a fun, “brain-off” read myself, but if that’s all you read, at some point we have to contend with the fact that as consumers, we have to fight the degradation of art. I’m not even talking about romance, before the conversation devolves into that. Romance, smut, whatever that involves can be incredibly meaningful, thoughtful, profound. It’s not the genre that’s the problem. There is degradation of quality across all genres, and the rushed nature of publishing, the expectation of consumption, the need for instant gratification is destroying our ability to really engage with literature in meaningful ways. And yes, obviously overconsumption is a problem in the bookish space, though it is not unique to just our community. I, too, have a book buying problem, but I’m not specifically talking about culling your collection as the solution. It’s not the amount of books that worries me. It’s their quality.

This leads me into the other big point about the publishing industry that’s been on my mind. Again, this isn’t new insight, but I want to make it a point: the authors that I love the most are the ones who take time with their craft, who are obsessed with it, whose homes surely look like crime scene investigations for their own plots. In the spirit of Alyssa Liu, I can tell when a writer is writing because the act of it is compulsory to their own wellbeing, to their own souls. They are in the pages, in between the words, they are crafting each sentence meticulously. No one has ever accused such authors of being lackluster, or stable-minded, or not neurotic. But that neuroses produces some of the best works. For me, that means that authors who take longer to produce their works typically are better authors. This is a blanket statement that lacks all nuance, obviously (the publishing industry punishes people for being BIPOC, marginalized, etc. and rewards people who produce faster, quicker, so they can make their money and sell books, no matter how lackluster they are in quality or even in plot.) But this is something that feels true to me. For example, Tracy Deonn’s Legendborn series has massive wait times in between the installments. Kristin Cashore’s Graceling realm had, at one point, half a decade between the third and fourth installment (Cashore is also a disabled woman). There are countless other examples, like Kate Elizabeth Russel, who wrote one of the most profound works on the #MeToo movement, and then dipped. She’s working on book two, allegedly, but she’s a writer in the way we want writers to be: obsessively a perfectionist. These are people I’d consider artists, but I know that a large part of their struggle is rooted in their traumas, disabilities, marginalization, so I don’t want to romanticize it too much. But it is a stark act of resistance to take time with your art in this age. To bake your work to perfection, to take out the post-it notes and write novels in your head while your partner drives you through desolate lands, to write haphazard scenes in between fits of insomnia. This, the age of instant gratification, a Taylor Swift album expected every year even if its drivel, the latest installment of whatever SJM is writing (inexplicably), and AI slop.

In this, we have the discourse rising again of fanfic being used to become traditionally published works. From the Dramione-to-TradPub-Works to now, the rumored sale of All the Young Dudes in a seven-figure deal to become its own, standalone work, and it’s exhausting. I think some of the most valid points here is that it is on the publishing industry for turning something sacred into something profitable, but at the same time, industry never acts alone. And to act like the industry isn’t collecting information, data on its consumers, that we aren’t the ones who they are reacting to, is a little removed from how that relationship really works. Yes, the publishing industry is exploitative, but many of us don’t tap into our own power in how to engage with it. And at this point, I do think we should just be honest about that: you want to read ACOTAR or whatever, so you do. I’ll even admit that I’m a part of this problem: I didn’t see a problem with the Dramione trad-published books because I thought the authors did their best to divorce them from the HP cannon context, and anyway, they were not cannon compliant within universe. But with the potential sale of ATYD, it is becoming more and more clear that fan works are being threatened. Don’t get me wrong, I have no problems with fanfic authors who get their start on fanfic websites and then go to traditional publishing. I have a problem with taking works that already exist within cannon, stories that are near impossible to take out of their context without losing all of their meaning, then being marketed as HP-world related in order to, specifically, sell books. It turns the act of writing for the craft and community into a profit-driven scheme. Authors deserve to be paid, but I’ll say it boldly: not like this. There is right and wrong, and this is firmly on the side of wrong.

This brings to me to a memoir I think about every day. Virginia Guiffre, who wrote her memoir about her life as a child, but most famously about being abused by Epstein and Co., and her activism trying to get justice for it. This book was written by Guiffre and, I believe, a supporting writer, over the course of many years. Yet, it was published after Guiffre allegedly committed suicide, near the release of the tapes. It was, perhaps cynically, lined up, in my opinion, to be bolstered in sales at the time when it was released. I learned after I read the book, which seemed to good to be true regarding the incredible person her husband is, how he saved her, etc., that indeed, that was too good to be true. Allegedly, her husband was an abuser, and she wanted to rewrite the sections of the book that he allegedly forced her to write him in a good light. She allegedly did not want it to be published this way. And yet. The tapes were coming out…the publisher saw an opportunity, framed it as social justice, and here we are. A dead woman who, in death, had as much power over her story as in her life. Which is to say, she had no power at all. And isn’t that just the truth of how victims of sexual violence experience this world?

And, on a different note, perhaps I am just old school. I see writing as craft, not career, not necessarily. I see it as something to toil over, to love into oblivion. When it is the most painful, it is the most rewarding. And maybe that is overdone, boring, too classical for what is a source of joy and light for so many people. Maybe I’m thinking like the alcoholic writers of yore, who romanticized illness and suffering. I probably am, but I find this to be the truth: that to be transformed is to experience, even in the most joyful of transformations, some pain. You contort your body, make sounds with your mouth. Sometimes they come out coherent, and other times they do not. And so I think I will always prefer the dark, emotional writer to the one who sees nothing but “fun” in their books. And again, don’t get me wrong: I’m not going after any one genre of books. Romance books in particular always catch flack about not being “serious” enough, but in most cases, a well written romance novel traverses the deepest emotions that we could possibly feel as human beings, and it rips those apart, analyzes, and puts them back together in the end.

I just think like most things in life, the satisfaction that comes with engaging with art and literature comes after development. It comes with taking the time, both to write and to enjoy, to tease apart, to wonder deeply about what you’re seeing. And I’m honestly a hypocrite here. I stand in front of modern art and I seethe, hating the way the lines and colors make no sense. I appreciate beauty in only what I can get from it — my own amusement. But this is what the profit-sphere wants from you. It wants apathy, disdain. It wants you to stop engaging the deeper muscles, the practice of being you, the way you can contribute something just by being in relationship with it. It isn’t the opinion that makes you special; it’s the transformation that comes from being bonded, in that moment, with the art that you are making, or even just engaging with it. Everything I have ever written has changed me. Not everything I have ever read has changed me. Why not? Why can’t I let it? Why isn’t every page of a book just as meaningful as the last?

And so I come back to capitalism and disability and racism and patriarchy. In a world that forces you day-by-day to skip ahead, the art of luxuriating is truly a privilege. But remember what it was like to stretch out on your bed on a Saturday morning, you’re eight years old, and you’re reading the new Percy Jackson book? Mom’s making pancakes, dad’s mowing the lawn, and the sunlight drenches your bed, and you’re in another world? It feels like you can manipulate water, too. And you wonder why your godly parent hasn’t claimed you yet, and you feel your own crush on Percy or Annabeth growing, and you are certain it’s love, and you want to go on adventures, and time turns in on itself and suddenly it’s time to stop but the chapter isn’t over and you need to know if such and such character makes it out of their conflict alive. But mom’s calling and dad’s coming in, and it’s time to eat pancakes or dosas and you get to just be a person who is reading a book that you love. Let me bring you back to reality: this is not us anymore.

Madeline Miller is forced to take her time, because disability shows up in that way for her. And yes, it bothers me that COVID took that away from us. It continues to bother me that COVID continues to take so much away from us. And I’m really not interested in the conversation about what is “privileged” and what is not, anymore. Either it is a privilege or it is not, to be able to slow down — either, you get to slow down because you have the money to do so, or you are forced to slow down, because of the privileged nature of those around you, who chose not to mask, who chose to get you sick enough to have to slow down. The idea that no one is responsible when someone gets sick is a nightmare to me. Sure, we don’t want to blame anyone, but if we don’t analyze the problem, how do we find the root, and how do we devise the solution? It bothers me a lot that we cannot be honest about this. No, having chronic illness is not your fault. Yes, it is actually rooted in the fault of a collective system, of which we are all a part. Yes, I truly believe that if we had a better response to COVID, that we wouldn’t have lost the potential of what could’ve been — with MM and with so many others. And yes, that is selfish. A person is more than their art. I also want a person’s art.

And so, I really do think we have power. I think the way we consume is so powerful — in fact, people have entire six figure jobs dedicated to figuring out how we consume and shifting marketing and business to meet those demands. I don’t think we can sit around on BookTok and just say “read is best.” It’s really not the same as feeding newborns. Not just because of the absolute drivel people are reading, but also because it trains the industry that those of us who want quality, who want better pay for authors, who want more fair deals and more representation are only a small, perhaps vocal, minority. It makes us the outliers in their data if we say one thing, and then consume in a different way. It makes us easily ignored.

I want good literature to come from people who work hard but also are treated well. I want their humanities to be centered so their creativity can flourish. I want them to take the time that they need, for that to be okay, for that not to impact their livelihoods, and I want it now.

I am changing my own relationship to reading and literature. I am not going to allow myself to be rage baited by the newest bookish conversation. I know what I care about, and I am only going to discuss that, because everything else is a distraction from what I love best about literature: the way it transforms my heart. I will endure any amount of become irrelevant if I can protect that.

Yours truly,

Me

P.S. I’m currently reading Oathbound by Tracy Deonn, and I’m trying to savor it because the next installment isn’t anywhere close to being released, and Deonn’s writing reads like water. So easy to digest, so clear and necessary. I’m also reading Mary Knight’s memoir on her childhood sex trafficking experience, which connects me to my own experiences of trauma, which certainly fuel many of my chronic illness issues. It’s all connected. I have my tinfoil hat firmly on.

Virginia recounts her life to us, her captive audience, built in from the way that the Epstein files loom heavy over our political state as a nation, and have since before the Trump presidency was even a conception in Republican minds. Virginia’s early life was one where she was trained by someone who was supposed to love and protect her — her father — to become an object for him and his friend to use. Though for me, those chapters are a blur of sickness and a metaphorical (and sometimes physical) doubling over in pain, I remember one scene quite vividly. Virginia tells us that her father and his friend, her first abusers, tell her that she must apologize to them for “what they’ve been doing together.” That they had found religion, and realized it was wrong, and that she drove them to cheating. I know why this sticks with me. As someone who has had to apologize for my own “behavior,” someone who faced the subtle and not-so-subtle sexualization of her body as a child, I know what it’s like to apologize for it. What it feels like to apologize for being a girl.

I’m not sure if people who read the book paid much attention to these chapters. After all, they wanted to read the real juicy stuff. The stuff that is in public view, the stuff that impacts us as a nation. But these chapters are vital, crucial to understand both Virginia and the state of victimhood right now. It’s important because of its casual cruelty. It’s important because Virginia’s father outlived her, and his abuse of her killed her. It was the single starting point for all of the other abuse in her life. Virginia was not destined for tragedy; she was set up for failure.

Virginia recounts her abuse at the hands of Epstein et. al., and then she goes on to talk about meeting her perfect charming prince husband who she marries in two weeks in another country and moves to Australia with, starting their difficult but sometimes charmed life. This part, to me, seemed too good to be true. While I have an incredible husband who is extremely supportive of me, it doesn’t seem realistic to meet someone so good, so quick, and then have that be good forever. And in fact, it was, indeed, too good to be true. Virginia was separated from her husband at the time of her death. She had wanted to rewrite her manuscript, allegedly, according to her family, and as it was published it was too kind to her husband, who also allegedly beat her. It reminds me of Lolita — how Humbert Humbert’s voice is so sweet that you forget that he is the monster narrating his abusiveness. The reader (apparently) is convinced that HH is in love with the girl, that the girl loves him back. The point is obfuscation. But whenever I read Lolita, I only see a twelve year old girl with no other choice than to go with her kidnapper, after he murders her mother. Virginia’s husband sweeps her away, when she has nothing to go back to, except Epstein and his violence. But I always see through this tactic, the savior husband and his broken girl that he loves into being healed.

Why? Because not being on social media cuts through the noise. I see Virginia for who she is: a convenient hero for a movement that needs one. Not to say that she wasn’t brave or deserving, but that she put so much of her life at risk for taking down impossibly huge power-hungry people, and she paid the ultimate price: not her life, but her own truth. Even now, in her death, her story is being circulated full of half truths. She is not some poor woman who got extremely unlucky. She is a woman who was set up, from the very beginning, for men to take advantage of. She did not “attract” it, either. They found her, not the other way around. I don’t want to focus on Virginia for this entire piece, but she serves a point that I am trying to make, a point that she herself makes in her book: what is worse than surviving sexual assault is the judgement about how you survived. For Virginia, she escaped an abuser by finding an abuser and escaped that abuser by running into the arms of another one. And I don’t judge her for this. I task the world with the judgement that you are not interrogating her voice in her book. You are letting yourself be washed away by the image of a savior. Her husband, a perfect man, who lifted her out of an abusive situation, and who now, in her death, gets to be the one who reaps the awards of a former prince going down for his crimes against his wife. In the end, men writing over women. In the end, men burying women’s voices. In the end, women becoming characters, instead of complex people who found ways to cope, even if those ways don’t fit your agenda.

There is no one way of being a survivor. I don’t know why this is still debated. After everything that #MeToo put us through. After seeing how being in this network of Epstein supporters means you wind up rich, or dead, or rich and dead. After battling with the prison industrial complex, after nuancing the debate over and over again. The one thing that you people do is judge a victim and a survivor of sexual violence for her behavior (and I do mean you people, maybe you’re reading this, maybe you aren’t, but the general public is at fault here). Even now, with Virginia’s suicide — so many say it couldn’t have been a suicide. So many read her book without understanding the controversy behind it.

With former prince andrew’s name painted across every network right now, I am compelled to think about his victims, first. Surely, there were more. Surely, more than are being presented in the open. You might label them brave, deserving of justice, etc., but you will never give them the freedom they truly deserve. What if one of those women enjoys BDSM consensually? You tear her apart. What if one of those former victims identifies with being a victim, more than a survivor? Discourse. What if one of those women didn’t want to take down a super powerful evil man? What if, what if, what if? No matter what, no matter what action we take, survivors are on your tongue, and you attack our autonomy with your judgement, over and over again. Now, this conversation is on all tongues, everywhere, every eye is watching the story unfold, now, when it is easy to hate the villain, when it is easy to “support victims.” Away from social media, my anger burns slow, simmers, right under my skin. We were all there. In the early 2000s, those of us who grew up in the lion’s den of pedophilic culture, those of us who were watched for the ways our bodies developed, those of us — girls, just girls — whose youth was fetishized. This was the same culture that let Cody Ko (allegedly) sleep with a seventeen-year-old Tana Mongeau. This is the same culture that sees that as a “mistake,” rather than social conditioning to take advantage of a girl just under the age of adulthood. This is the same culture that won’t let Tana feel the way she wants to feel about it, rather chomping at the bit to define her feelings for her. This is the same culture that smashes victims’ heads against pavement for the way they behave.

This isn’t new critique. This isn’t clever, nor is it analytical. What it is is that we — the collective we — love a dead victim more than we want to help a complex victim. Some of Epstein’s worst colleagues were victims themselves. Some of those who excuse his behavior were victims, themselves. And there is no excuse for the violence they enact on other women, girls. But Virginia did it, too. She introduced other girls to this world, too. And forgiving her is easy, because she is dead. But ending sexual violence isn’t as easy as life or death, prison or freedom. When you are branded a victim, you are a victim to those who wish to discourse you until you die, and even then. You are theirs. You are violated, again and again. It’s kind of ironic, isn’t it? In a crime that takes away your autonomy, the journey to healing is rife with other people telling you how to regain your autonomy, by letting them define you.

The only narratives I am interested in are the ones from Epstein’s victims. I am not interested in the late night TV talk show hosts making jokes about pedophilia. I’m not interested in the lawyers who worked the cases. I’m not interested in the husbands and how they saved their victim wives, I’m not interested in the Wexners or any Ohio statehouse legislators who took Wexner money (which is many of them). I am not interested in the boards associated with L Brands that talk about women’s empowerment nor am I interested in the network influence of Epstein. I am only interested in the victim’s narratives, their healing, their perspectives, what they need.

God, someone’s got to. I’m sick of the Netflix true crime shit. I’m sick of the way violence against girls and women is ignored until it can make a pretty penny. I am sick of the way Dolores never gets to tell her story with her own name. I am sick of the same story coming true. I am sick of celebrating mug shots of a former prince and not investigating (allegedly) a prominent former prime minister of a US ally country. I am sick of the names of the victims being in the mouths of people who tore apart Monica Lewinsky. I am heartbroken that the news covers stories of little white girls because it’s easier to gain sympathy for innocent, virtuous white girls than it is for Black and brown girls, who are thought of as promiscuous in nature. I am shaking, still, about learning about the woman in France whose husband drugged her and allowed hundreds of instances of rape and sexual assault against her, all the while she loved and trusted him. I am always sobbing, clawing at my own heart, at the way that my grandmother’s child marriage is connected to the weight of a boy’s body against mine, even after I said no. I am terrified at my own shortcomings, not pursuing justice through a carceral system, and then calling myself an abolitionist because I didn’t. I am ashamed, fire in my belly seeping into every limb, that I still feel responsible for what my abuser did to other girls, despite the wisdom I have learned since I was fourteen, despite the other victims’ forgiving me, themselves. I have to wonder. I knew that if I pursued justice, I would lose more than I would gain. So if I were Jane Doe in the Epstein case, if I came forward, would I even get the same kind of support?

More than anything, I am sick of the self righteousness of white men (and women), who swears they hate pedophiles, but you’re the ones who bristle when women and girls speak up in a way that is slightly against what you perceive as “the right way.” Do you know how many men in your life uphold sexual assault and sexual harassment culture? Virginia’s husband saved her only to keep her for himself, his own abuses (allegedly), his own image of himself, always more important than who Virginia actually was. Dolores wasn’t herself, she was only a fantasy for HH to project onto, words he literally says himself. The most violent part about domestic violence, sexual abuse, and CSA, is that it takes you away from yourself. Your body, your soul, even sometimes your face. You become something someone is projecting onto. It is violence against you, not just in your body or will, but your existence. Penance for being born a girl, or weaker, or smaller, or arousing another person or angering them, or daring to be something they did not own before that moment. The worst part is your life becoming about this abuser, whose life isn’t about you. You will spend the entire rest of your life trying to relearn who you are, when you weren’t even you when your autonomy was taken from you.

The carelessness, it seeps into the ways we talk about these things. The ways that the attention is on Epstein and his colleagues, the victims’ almost never getting mentioned. It’s almost laughable, as I read news updates about prince andrew, how often people don’t even mention Virginia’s name. Even as the most prominent survivor of the #MeToo movement, even Virginia’s name gets lost. Dolores to Lolita to Mrs. Schiller. Virginia to Victim to Mrs. Guiffre. We all agree that HH is the monster, but that’s an easy conclusion, so easy that I would laugh at you if you thought anything else. The true conclusions here are just under the surface. While you are busy being surprised at the monstrosity, those of us who were half devoured perform our own surgeries on our own bodies. We stitch things up. Don’t be surprised when we come out a little jagged around the edges, a little morphed into what you can’t stand. You’d rather us dead than broken or messy, and you know it. Dead, you can go on lamenting about HH, how you couldn’t have seen it coming, but alive, we poke holes in that theory, we point out how HH is your father, your brother, your friends — you. No, dead is better. Dead is helpful. Dead is silent.

If I thought for a moment this was about justice, I would be surprised that Virginia’s book was published without mentions of her husband’s abuse. But I’m not. This isn’t about celebrating survivors. This is about the shock value, the clicks on newspaper articles, the unthinkable (but everyone’s thinking it — “16 is basically an adult, right?”) If you can’t get us silent, you will control the narrative, and that’s enough to make that money, and you’d do anything for that.

Well, I’ve got nothing to gain. I have no horse in the race, and only a delusional interest in the truth, whatever that may be. I won’t be discoursing the violence, gleefully typing away or making Tiktok videos about it for views, calling it activism or awareness (of the most famous story on pedophilia in modern time, but sure, you’re definitely raising awareness, TikTok User 89526).

I only care about the victims. Someone’s got to.

Anyway, I see the ways in which I slave over my career in echos of the abuse endured by my grandmothers. The attachment they wore to their destitution, like it was some prize. Like they were heroes for raising the children bestowed on them by social norms and expectations of motherhood, like they didn’t thrust their emotional baggage onto their children, who went and bore more children.

I am listening to “Pure” by Adrianna on repeat while I write this, hoping that I can tire out my need to identify with the song. I’ve never slept with a married man. I have been entrenched in weird dynamics with older men, but I was always safe, never touched. My husband saved my life, because I almost walked into fire several times, convinced that the pretty flames wouldn’t burn me. Not all girls are as lucky as I am. But in place of that level of sexual abuse, I turned to my career. The public sector, nonprofits, whatever you want to call it, the way you are drawn in, pretty girl, good girl, you’re doing so great, you are saving the world, you are so special. And then the smackdown: the degradation, the subtle tearing into your humanity, the low dollars and low value work, you are saving the world but you must do it at the expense of yourself. How is that any different than the martyrdom entrusted to the women in my family? I thought I was so special, the first girl in the family to work, the first in my family to graduate from a US education granting institution. I thought I was so special, breaking away from the abuse at the hands of a husband. I thought I was so special, turning my pain into some kind of gain, an art, really. The art of organizational management and rising to the top and being so obsessed with power and hierarchy that you are half convinced that you would be a benevolent dictator, if only they let you, if only they just stopped to listen, and if you scream enough, you might be able to make them listen.

It’s delusional, is what it is. I’m judging myself as I go so slow, so slow. I am creeping along at a snail’s pace, and when I think about my birthday, November 3rd, and how the people I loved most in the world came to see me, all I remember is the blue skies matching her blue eyes, and everything else is a blur. I rarely make sense these days, rarely do I have a point, but the point here is that I barely remember the last two years, and 2026 is supposed to be my fresh new start, and I am supposed to be getting better.

I think of my career is an abusive one because there is no other way to think about it. I could pretend that I care so much about “helping people",” but that piece of me is long gone. That piece of me doesn’t exist; not that I don’t care about ending suffering, but that the idea that this is how we do it, through org charts and bullshit memos, is hard to believe anymore. Don’t tell my employers, of course. I lead with fear, of course. Even now, I am terrified writing this because this is what you turn girls like me into. Girls that thought that they could fix themselves by fixing the world, the girls who turned away from the grotesque thinking they could reach for the light, girls who betrayed their conscience for the “greater good.”

This is a terrible message to be sending right now, but I’m no longer willing to be your guide. I was sold a pipe dream, and I spent a decade thinking I could turn it around. It’s not that I don’t believe in people, but I don’t believe in the ability of groupthink and organizations to take care of girls like me. I need to become girls like them, happy to wear ballet flats and ignore when coworkers imitate Indian accents, and don’t you dare bring up that sexual harassment thing, and no, we don’t have policies to hold anyone accountable, and it’s okay that people are burnt out because this is just how work, works. I’d have to be one of those people, because the person that I am now, the one that doesn’t accept abuse as the bare minimum experience of the workplace, can’t function knowing I am being punished for saying the quiet part out loud.

This isn’t to say that there isn’t a fair share of people really doing the work. The people who never stopped caring, who move to being educating like months to a flame, lit up by the prospect of being good. I find that kind of courage is dwindling, minimal, a treat when it’s found, but never the norm. I have these friends, gold upon gold, who are like this. They care so deeply, they recycle as the norm. They still believe in the ability of the people to change anything. They do their part, and they expect me to do mine, and I routinely let them down. Not because I don’t care to do my part, but because my part feels heftier, it feels more like it’s taking pieces of me out of my body and putting it on display. And I am trying not to put myself on display. I’ve always reached out to connect, into the nether, into the void, and it is exhausting to be considered this advisor, someone who has anything interesting to say. I know that sounds pretentious, but it’s how I feel.

I was a kid once, and I had big dreams in a big suburban town best known for its wealth and whiteness. I wrote my story from the beginning, the scapegoat, the unwanted child, the girl with too much happening for any one person to handle. Back then, I thought my words alone could change anything. The way I operated, I was so sure I could change minds if I just found the right thing to say. Advocacy work is a lot like that. It’s finding the right combination of words to get people to understand, to listen, to move. I’ve mastered this skill. I am an MPA, after all. I think, at the end of the day, I really thought as a kid that I could make real change, and I had to, because it felt like I had no other choice to earn my place in this world. And everything felt like it was about earning my spot, it never felt like I was particularly needed or wanted. It’s a thread that weaves through my life, even today.

So much of my fear of myself comes from believing that I have to earn my place. I have to shout into the void, I’m here, I’m here, I’m here, for anyone to notice that I am, in fact, here. Like everyone else in the world, my feelings about myself do not match what other people have reflected to me. Those who love me have reflected that I am confident, magnetic, larger than life, and a hard worker who cares about seeing things through. And I do think all of those things are true, but they’re dissonant to me. They ebb in the air around me when said aloud, like I can see the version of me that is those things, and she exists alongside me, but maybe in an off-kilter universe that we can almost see, almost touch, almost be. I know this isn’t just the case for me, but for everyone. I know that no one sees themselves as others see them, but in my case, the gap might be larger than is necessary. The gap might be what’s making me lose control. The gap has to be fixed.

How do we fix this? The answer, just as the problem, is obvious. If the diagnosis is that I am suffering alone, the cure is to allow in community. The only way to break an abusive cycle is to have supports on multiple levels, people pulling you out, resources at your fingertips. We know this. This has been studied. And yet. And yet, thousands, if not millions of women are stuck in abusive marriages, and they have children, and they don’t have the financial means to escape, or even if they do, they love him, please, they really do. They can’t leave, not now, not when things are just about to turn around. They can’t leave! You have to understand, you can’t judge them, this is their life, it’s all they have ever known.

It’s all I have ever known. To be this. To be kicked like a dog and then told to get up and walk like nothing ever happened. To bite back, to bark loudly, to even try to run away, but I know the route back like the back of my hand, I am a loyal thing, I am tied to the image of myself I drew when I was 18 years old, full of optimism, I can change them, I can change them, I can change them.

You cannot love white supremacy into changing itself. You cannot hope and joy you way out of it. You have to fight it, teeth bared, fists clenched. You have to sock it in the eye, leave a bruise, until the people you love hold you back, take you away, and bandage you up. When you bite, you cannot just nip. You have to tear into flesh and taste it, knowing you once contributed to it, knowing you are sentencing yourself to a lifetime of hurt, finding bits and pieces in your teeth for years to come.

Change is possible. But it is messy. It requires you, sometimes, to tear out your own bleeding heart and flatten it into something recognizable. Other times, it requires you to vocalize what possibilities you are avoiding by choosing the wrong thing, over and over again. You know it means freedom, but you still don’t choose it. Why? Why don’t you choose liberation over this, over being the caged pet, brought out to do circus tricks when they want someone to talk about DEIAB and all the other letters we keep adding onto what we know as community? What we know as ourselves? What I know as you and me? We will never not be an aberration to white supremacy. How we make change is maybe, some days, going to ask you to do pressure point therapy on your most painful parts.

But you don’t have to do it alone. You actually shouldn’t. All the things everyone is so mad about? The things that are so painful right now? ICE disappearing people, murdering people, policing and facial recognition technology and fascism rising and rising and rising?

You can’t do it alone.

I want so badly to break the cycle. I can’t do the work without breaking the cycle, not anymore. My tender heart needs more than nonprofit jobs and well-meaning white liberals. It needs more than discourse that we cycle through 3-6 months and judging those who don’t or can’t participate. My aching, bleeding heart that dies every moment that injustice prevails needs so much more than what we are given as coping mechanisms and tools.

It needs you to also be in it like this, for real. And I’ll be looking for you to love and hold, to agitate and to rest, to push and to hold accountable, to take risks and be bold, to make change, however messy, and deal with the consequences. And no, I don’t believe the way to do this is through organizational charts or memos. I’m no longer willing to do anything it takes — or rather, I’m not willing to do anything it takes in just any environment. But I am willing to put my heart on the line in the right environment, in the right space, with the right people. Because everyone wants to help, but not everyone wants to unpack their white supremacy. Not everyone wants to apologize when they treat BIPOC wrong. Everyone wants to post about their DEI values, but not everyone upholds them.

I’ll be looking for you. Yes, you, the person who understands everything I am saying. The reader who is clenching their first to their heart, wondering if they will ever find a place they belong, where structures don’t tear them down. The girl, maybe, who thinks she would rather die than be silent, and they take that so seriously that they do indeed, try to kill her. I’ll be looking for us. I am on my way home. We’ll be loud and messy and fight the good fight together, soon.

And maybe she is just me. But I want to believe there are more of me out there.

Disclaimer: I am not advocating for violence. All actions taken in advocacy should be done so at the risk of the individual. I trust my readers to do what they will with courage and sense for their own safety and the safety of others.

So, Taylor Swift released the most MAGA album she possibly could, and the reactions are stunning, really. First, the wave of people who didn’t like the album came online the loudest. From the lyrics to the content, we critiqued everything. I include myself in this, because surprise surprise, I didn’t like the album. And while I didn’t love The Tortured Poets Department, I came to understand most of the album, and even purchased a CD and cardigan (even though they stopped making sense years ago). But that’s because Taylor Swift threw up an album from her guts — it was not well edited, but it was raw, dark, and emotional. This time, she promised us a pop album that crossed 1989 with Folklore, meaning that the production would meet the sharp lyrics and storytelling of her best album of her career.

Color everyone surprised when she instead dropped an album that contained a song about her partner’s penis. And like, look, it’s cute when Sabrina does it, right? Sabrina is a young 20-something with a dazed look on her face, completely taken aback by her own desperation, never taking herself too seriously, and always condemning herself in her attempts at love. It speaks to the confusion that comes with seeking love so young in life. Crossed with her personality, which has always been consistently silly, it works for her. She also has the vocal range to match her bravado, which is something Taylor has never had (both bravado, and vocal range). But Taylor is — simply put — to establishment for this.

It’s like when the adults in the room catch onto the meme, and it turns it uncool. Taylor’s approach to this album is glitz and glamour, but even her photoshoot fell flat to me. Taylor tries to be sexy, but comes off as dark and emotional, even in her photos. So, when people argue that this is a “happy” album, I wonder if they have eyes or ears? Did they see the images she put out? What would have made more sense for this album is to call it “Football Wife,” with imagery of her in white clothing surrounded by a meadow of flowers, preferably in Chillicothe, Ohio, where the wildflowers are phenomenal. Except for tracks “Elizabeth Taylor” and the title track featuring Sabrina Carpenter, the songs do not really scream “showgirl,” or even “the life of.” They are love songs to Travis, which is great, but I fail to see what is really showy about being in love with a man when you are a heterosexual white woman, whose brand is being in love with men.

The album also promised to be a more mature version of 1989, but included a diss track allegedly against Charli XCX, who no one knew was being mean to Taylor, until Taylor made it everyone’s business. Charli XCX — a half Indian pop star from England — is apparently married to Matty Healy’s drummer in their band, which is called some year name that I don’t care to remember, because they faded into relative obscurity like, five years ago. Look, I’m not saying they aren’t relevant musicians, but I am saying nearly everyone pales in comparison to the heights that Taylor Swift is at, and that context matters. Charli, it seems, released a song that was about her insecurities about being around, allegedly, Taylor Swift. Honestly? Relatable, queen. Charli grew up half-Indian/Ugandan, in England. Didn’t we all fear and desire blonde women growing up? It is only a relatively recent thing to accept our ethnicities as beautiful of their own volition. Taylor Swift is upset that an ethnic woman is upset about her own insecurities being around the world’s most famous pop star. Typical. This is the cheerleader who has no real self esteem, upset that the nerd talked shit to her friends about how she is boring. If you aren’t brown, you might not get this one. I’m not defending Charli, by the way. It seems she is, herself, not an amazing person, but I don’t expect that from someone whose brand is partying and doing coke. Still, this is effectively punching down. Taylor is too big to diss someone like this publicly, and the contents of the song really leave you wondering if Taylor feels like Charli’s diss on her actually impacted her or not. Because in my experience, that kind of snark really only means it did get to you. So, the blonde girl is impacted by the cool, kind of nerdy, hot Indian girl, after all. Vindication!

So then, the counter reactions to the critique have been interesting to unpack. First, the stans are upset. They are upset because the immediate reactions were that for some reason, this album feels very much a part of the alt-right pipeline. From its promotion of suburban life with your husband and an all-white neighborhood, to the comparison of Charli — a half Indian woman — to a dog, Taylor Swift is the barometer of our cultural moment. And the cultural moment is one in which the alt-right pipeline is the mainstream one. Not to mention the mentions of Travis’ ex, who is a Black woman, to “onyx skies” in Opalite, the usage/appropriation of “I’m not a bad bitch / this isn’t savage,” using AAVE to separate herself from Travis’ ex(es). Nevermind the entire song “Cancelled",” which is apparently about (according to the stans), Blake Lively and Sophie Turner, women who have been “cancelled” for no reason other than misogyny. It can’t possibly be about her new besties, those Mahomes people, who are vocal Trump supporters! Using once again, a term created by Black women to call out their sexual violaters, something that Taylor herself has benefitted from utilizing, in a satirical way. Now, I’ve never claimed that Taylor Swift is…that smart or politically apt. But it seems like neither are her stans, who are using this critique as a way to harangue the “woke left",” for some reason. Listen, the anarchists aren’t listening to Taylor. I promise.

This brings me to my last point. If your politics slip and slide because you can’t see how Taylor Swift is a shiny, reflective surface for our current culture, then you are misguided, wrong, and quite frankly, under spells, people! You are under spells. Taylor has always been a cultural force to be reckoned with, but she doesn’t set the cultural standard. She only uses it as a way of making herself permanent in that moment — a part of the dialogue, but never the starter. And if that is your reason to parrot alt-right talking points taken straight from Fox news (who have a vested interest in dividing those who vote Democrat — meaning, as long as they stew discord between white moderates and more left-leaning/social justice-oriented voters, they are winning), then you should unregister to vote and sit at home every election, because you are a danger to progress. But that is the history of American white voters. They are consistently the ones who let minorities down, but blame the minorities for their own inactions. All because what — we critiqued the most successful pop artist of all time, perhaps?

White fragility — while not my favorite read of white supremacy culture — outlines all of this. The trigger point for white liberals is their own comfort and safety. Any action you take up until you ask them to give up their comfort and safety is usually fine, but anything after that crosses a significant line. White people are emotionally and physically unregulated (and so are the rest of us because of white supremacy). They choose to find comfort in what they know — their favorite artist promoting segregated neighborhoods through her promotion of the suburban dream. And no, that isn’t me being “too woke" — the suburbanization of America was literally, through policy rules and public speeches , literally made to segregate America. If you don’t believe me, look at any historical record. White supremacy isn’t a myth, and we know that, because the white supremacists wrote it down. If you don’t want to hear it from a brown person, at least listen to…Presidents past. And so, that’s what can describe this current moment. The pivot to comfort, safety, and white joy. The entitlement to joy at the expense of people of color. That is what is happening, and Taylor Swift is profiting from it.

Let me ask you, when they come for us, is she going to defend you?

If your answer to that is anything but “no,” you need to wake up, and you need to do it expeditiously. Because they are coming for us, policy by policy, moment by moment. And this album, in all its white power and glory, cements a cultural moment where Taylor Swift leaned into her aryan princesshood (once again), than to speak out and correct herself.

Thanks for reading. Stay safe,

Me

A lot of people have been discussing political violence, lately, and while it feels obvious to me, the points that many are making (that the American political system is violent, that white supremacy is built on violence, that the current firm hand of the state is a harkening back to that same violence) are still sound. I look around, and I see unhoused people everywhere. The very fact that we can leave human being outside in the cold, without food, without access to basic human necessities, is just about the most violent thing I can think of people doing. Then, of course, there are the endless wars, there are the identity politics, there are the political murders, the gun violence, the medical system ripping your guts out in case you weren’t already hurt enough. It’s all so obvious to me, but I find myself being sucked into the mind fog too. Every perfume on my wishlist, every time I find myself pulling at the thickness on my thighs wondering when I stopped being as skinny as a teenager, every time I look at my double chin and wonder if I should get a little cosmetic surgery done (it’s no big deal, everyone does it!), I have to ask myself what is reality?

I’m out of practice, and I have one foot in the ivory tower. I am systems oriented, solutions-driven. I am synergized, or whatever. I am product-minded, and I am a weapon of liberation. I am revolution’s daughter, or I am academia’s brightest treasure. I am buried under books, under words, under knowledge about how the world works in ways that are deeply useless to actually changing how the world works. I double over, keening in pain, the mirrors of the sheer similarities of circumstance, when I see other people in pain. My grandparents, 5 years old when the country split apart, then again in their teens, watching people who look like them slaughter other people who look like them. My parents, born during a national emergency, born when being born was being punished. My brother, firstborn son, fighting for his place at one of the world’s most elite colleges because intellect was all he was known for. And me, making it out of graduate school alive, barely, because I believed that succeeding was the answer to misery. Even if I thought I had undone that thought inside of my heart, I wore it on my skin like armor. I am, I scream, highly educated. They cannot do this to me, I say, as they do this to me. I watch people, those whose parents immigrated here, like mine, lose their homes. I watch people, who had children with men they loved, who beat them, lose their access to safety. I watch children — children — lose access to the roof over their heads because funders have decided to prioritize something else. It’s never a matter of believing these people aren’t important — you understand, the funding is limited.

I am trained to be cold. I am trained to be a machine, to look at grants and applications, to sift my way through, to take as much money as I can and turn it into as much good as I can, and it’ll never be enough. That’s why we have to placate ourselves, tell ourselves that even one life changed, one life saved, is enough. And in the process, we lose our humanity. We lose the ability to feel this killing pain, this overwhelming vulnerability, this indication that we are still people, the wretchedness still in our hands, our right, our responsibility to save this world. I am trained out of that, now. Gone are the days where I sobbed under my desk at another person dead at the hands of a cop. Gone are the days that I railed against the system, showed up in every single room that I could, making sure my voice was louder than the opponent’s. But even in this winter, I feel sparks in my chest, pointing me back to who I know I am, at the core of it. I have always been uniquely positioned to hold others’ pain. As a kid, I wrote stories about revolution and liberation. As a young adult, I moved along the movement in significant ways. And just because I have been frozen cold recently doesn’t mean I cannot thaw.

The right wing is insistent that the Left has no emotions. That we have no empathy, that we celebrate death. My problem has always been that I am overflowing with emotion, with empathy. I often could not decipher the difference between myself and another person, I did not know where they stopped and I ended, and I swam in their aura until I absorbed it. It fueled me, I was addicted to it, and it made me brilliant, a raging fire, and it burned me all the way up. There is so much tragedy in this world, and the good news is that I was equally good at soaking up joy, but replacing joy with victory, and victory with “being right” did me in. I don’t want to be right if it means that I lose my community. I don’t want to win if it means I do it without you.

And I had to. I won so much without you. I gained so much, respect, validation, academic success. But I lost you. You, a general you, people I care about, my community.

Reading Babel in grad school, I agreed with RF Kuang’s general thesis — that at the center of oppression, the ivory tower stands to benefit. I read her analysis, and I watched myself be stripped of who I am, every day. I engaged with her story, and I let myself become a victim of the real thing. I’m reading Katabasis now, and all I see is an echo of Alice/RF Kuang’s pain throughout the entire thing. Academia is hell, indeed, but being trapped inside of yourself and your desire for it — despite everyone telling you it’s not good for you — is the truer hell. Losing your ability to sleep, to eat, becoming ten pounds lighter and being filled up with intellect and knowledge, even now, I feel a desire for it. It all makes sense. And it all hates you. It will never love you back, you know? You get erased, page by page, and sucked into the coldness that the machine requires for you to some degree, to function.

I am trained to be cold. I am trained to be analytical and cruel, to look at numbers and data, and to depreciate the value of people until there is nothing left but me and the political violence my every keystroke allows.

How do I get back to making space for the pain that reminds me I am a human? How do I remember what it’s like to be in the middle of it all, so overwhelmed by inaction, that all I could do is act?

This is the question.

Charlie Kirk was shot in the neck and he died. Everyone and their mothers have opinions about this, but I honestly didn’t really know who he was or did until he died. His legacy is very much present, as he influenced anti-trans rhetoric and policy all over the nation, bills that I was very hands on in fighting during the early years of my career. It’s strange, how he didn’t even know but I was in the match box with him, and I was swinging my hardest, and everyone has so much empathy for his children, but what about mine? The ones I put off having, the time I could’ve spent with my family, the years I could’ve spent building my own happiness — I spent, instead, sharpening myself for attacks like that. I put my body and mind on the line against people like him, his wishes, his vision for the world, which included mine breaking apart and failing. That he died by gunshot wound that allegedly comes from a white man, a Mormon (in Utah? The shock!), some kid who allegedly grew up in a Republican household — and not a Leftist — seems logical to me. We are so busy writing testimony to make a shot like that. It’s truly never bothered me that people like Charlie Kirk thought that people like me shouldn’t exist, anyway. When you grow up in a family like mine, you learn to hide parts of yourself that aren’t acceptable. You learn to be who they want to see, and it’s okay, because you can be yourself in private. You learn that your grandfather might be a huge misogynist, but you still exist in the same timeline, so you have to learn to cope with it. Which is why the current pearl-clutching liberals and tear-bending conservatives are annoying me — you’re in grief? Over a man who didn’t know you existed?

My grandfather passed away earlier this week, right after Charlie Kirk, but he has been sick for a long time. He was bedridden when I went to India this past July to get married, and he was barely there at my wedding itself. Even before that, he has been ill for several years. My Baama, his wife, passed away last year, so he only lasted about a year after her. It seems right — they married as children, so over half of their lives have been spent together. I don’t know much about this life because I wasn’t brave enough to ask, and he was too cowardly to tell, but the little I do know paints a picture of a strict father with a government job (coveted in those days, how I laugh now), a man who was very young at the time that India became a nation, a man who married as a child, and who left his child bride to rear children while doing little to no parenting himself outside of creating an environment of fear. It’s always going to be odd to me that my parents were parented by children. Whenever I have to reparent myself, I remind myself of that fact, because I grow triple in size with my empathy, thinking of a terrified 17 year old man holding his newborn. But when do we get to hold our elders accountable for the ways they messed us up?

And as diaspora, do I really even get to? All the horror stories I hear, I hear from my cousins or my family, and I don’t know them myself firsthand. As the American cousin, all I ever really got from this grandparent was a few words about making sure I study well over the phone, and the occasional conversation about a random American political figure like Bill Clinton, to which I would nod politely and in no circumstances share my actual thoughts about Bill Clinton. My grandfather didn’t know me. He barely knew I studied a masters degree. He knew I got married — because oh, thank God I got married, the only value a woman could possibly earn — but he didn’t know much else about me, if anything. He didn’t try, and I didn’t share. So, now I am supposed to grieve. I am supposed to sit here and feel the feelings my body feels, despite having no reason to. I should feel about him the way I feel about Charlie Kirk (which is to say, nothing at all). Yet, my body is moving through the motions of grief, anyway. It’s in my bones, I suppose. It’s the way his genetics link to mine, making me as stubborn and unlovable as he was, in the end. I am connected to him, I come from him, and I harbor his trauma in my body. I have never tended to it, opting to look at his wife’s world instead. I have never confronted it, because I am terrified of what I might find there. My grandmother might have been beaten, but he did the beating, and sometimes I wonder if I am made up more of abuser than abused. That in-between state, fighting against the contradiction, where I come from villains and their victims, and I have to love them both, that is complicated. Your fake tears about a grifting political commentator? That isn’t complicated — you just don’t know what grief actually means.

Realistically, Charlie Kirk and my grandfather have nothing in common, other than the fact that I feel both of their deaths on the surface of my mind. I don’t believe that people are actually in grief over either, really, but one is more understandable than the other. So why am I in grief over a man who didn’t really know me?

Well, the difference here is that my grandfather was born shortly before India became a nation. His upbringing happened during the formation of a new state, and he became a young adult through emergency states, genocides, and ethnic cleansings in a traumatized, formerly colonized nation. He likely was raised by children, himself, as my family practiced child marriages until my parents’ generations. My grandfather was racist, casteist, and abusive, and there is no excuse for that. And, he also grew up in abject poverty, and while he espoused vile rhetoric and beliefs, he did not do it on a stage to hundreds of thousands of people at a time. His grift was pretending to be a family man, not selling out tickets and getting rich off of transphobia. Trust me, if he did, I wouldn’t be in student debt. My grandfather may have been a coward, but at least he wasn’t a grifter. There is still some semblance of respect there.

There is so much grief in this world, and most of it we have to feel like shockwaves through our bodies. That people are choosing to feel grief over a grifter, a political commentator, when everyday people need that empathy, is striking to me. When I heard that Charlie Kirk was shot, I too was surprised. It is something that takes anyone aback, but it isn’t something that requires my empathy. My attention, at most, perhaps. But barely even that, if you ask me. And maybe it’s because I was dealing with my own grief, but it just seems abundantly clear to me that grief is a finite energy source, and I have been using mine up for two years, at least, now.

The world makes so much space for men who contribute basically nothing but trauma and grief. They are husbands and they are fathers, but are they really meaningful beyond that? Do they really contribute in the ways we make it out to be?

Grief is complicated enough. Stop faking yours. It’s insulting, and it’s useless, and it won’t change anything.

that really challenged what i believed about death. since then, others have died. family, friends, aunties, uncles. and without fail, my first thought when people die from old age or sickness is to think, “my god, their bodies are so small.” i don’t think i was ever prepared for how small the body gets in death. everything flowing to make you plump with aliveness stops. this makes sense medically, i suppose. but the way humans shrink into their deaths is painful to see, especially as i am still in my 20s. i have so much expanding to do, still. it is hard to know that at the end of it, it is all flesh and bones that’s left. all of the ways we become, the ways we breathe out who we are, all sucked into the vacuum of death, until those left in life too cannot perceive it accurately. i shrink when other people shrink.

i’ve been thinking about this shrinkage, lately. i wonder about it, in my jet lagged sleepless nights, my husband wide awake in the other room. i think that we shrink in ways, make ourselves small, succumb to tiny deaths in life, too. every time the internet is hit with another scandal of yet another leftist man who did wrong by women, i watch people be incredulous. as if putting people on pedestals doesn’t lead to exactly this kind of shrinkage of the self that results in wrongdoings. i’m not saying that famous people cannot be held accountable for their harm or that they can’t be good people on account of their fame. and it certainly is not the victims’ faults. yet, i am tired of the rinse and repeat. i see people disavowing leftist politics entirely, based on the time and again behaviors of white leftist men. i see people taking up the mantle to prevent sexism and misogyny from these spaces, but they don’t know the first thing about conflict resolution or centering victims and their needs. the internet turns into a carceral machine — and i am not saying these men don’t deserve it, but i am saying that the effectiveness is hard to measure. what i do see happen is that people shrink, and the narrative becomes about the abuser, whose apologies will never measure up, whose behavior is never held accountable, and the amnesia that follows where the victims never get the help they need. this is the same kind of shrinkage i feel in the aftermath of the death of my loved ones. we are always simply just waiting until we forget. are we not?

how do we inflate ourselves again? how do we make it so that in life, we are not cutting away at skin and bones and deflating every time someone big disappoints us? how do we learn lessons from grief, from managing life after death, after we watch the downhill spiral of the health or mental health of people we loved and trusted, perhaps in complicated ways? how do we tether ourselves to reality, when the crushing nature of it is that it is so, so sad, and often so disappointing?

my leftist politics have taken a hit lately. you could say i am grieving, or you could say i am depressed, but either way, i have taken several steps back in my adherence to my politics. the only reason i can be halfway faithful is because of my daily practice doing so, but otherwise, masking feels ridiculous, strangers in my neighborhood feel like threats, i hate taking the bus when i have a car, and generally feel more entitled to be a worse person. but that is precisely what i mean by shrinkage. i have shrunk into half of myself — my nervous system has been in shambles for ages. i don’t feel hope, and i certainly don’t feel surprised when people die, and i don’t feel surprised when people let me down. but i want to. and because we are so accustomed to a culture that thrives on immediately seeking dopamine through sharing these regular degular feelings as something profound, leftists rush to the internet to try to make something of it. in doing so, they create these bonds with their followers, all of whom are good people and terrified of the world we live in. and that familiarity creates the very thing that will time and time again defeat our movements: god.

i say none of this to get any of you to relate to me. i only mean to share that we need to start understanding this grief in order to explore how we might come out of it. hope is the other face of grief, and you cannot keep letting people get away with stealing yours through amplification of your own personal depression into their online personality. this goes so much deeper than you think. but being your own person and defying shrinkage is your duty and your birthright.

let’s try to understand grief in all of its facets. then let’s figure out a world in which our movements do not hinge on the saintly few. that way, we can overcome these deaths.

yours,

me

Is there anything more complicated than the relationship between an immigrant mother and her daughter? I have outgrown every expectation placed on me as a child. I was creative, I was good at thinking and talking and yelling. I was slow to start talking, but when I finally did, I never stopped — that’s what my parents like to say. From the moment I opened my trap to say my first words, every word that has come out has been a call looking for a response. Recently, I have wanted nothing more than to be silent, to stop talking. Well, that’s not true — I have always resented this about myself. If I’m going to write, I should be honest about it, right?

I have always resented my own voice. It seems like at every point in my life, there has been someone telling me that there is a time and a place for me, and it was never the time or the place I chose to be in. I remember, as a child, through the haze of memories, myself, straining towards the adults. For someone to see me, to understand my desire to be a part of something. I remember in India, during my early college days, the men sat outside talking about global politics (my major), and I sat next to my dad while I listened to them be wrong about what was happening, feeling, not for the first time, that didn’t matter for them to be wrong if I couldn’t prove that I was right. I remember sitting in the kitchen, listening to my ammama and my mother speak to each other, listening to them just miss each other and what they were saying. I remember my ammama telling me that I could love whoever I want, but that I couldn’t leave them, and then hearing my mother repeat the same thing, that gay marriage is fine, but that divorce isn’t. I remember all of the conversations where I felt edged out by my father, who paid for my degrees, only to forsake that I know anything at all. I play all of this out throughout my life, straining against the expectations of idiocy placed on me. I am not understood. I am not seen by my family. At graduation, my worlds collided, when my friends — who call me “the smart one” (even though we are all smart), who tell me I can do anything, who laugh at my insecurities (not because they’re mean, but because they can’t understand why I have them, looking around at who did the damage to me to make me feel this way) — met my family, who see me as a mess of a girl who still doesn’t know anything. But unfortunately, I am built to yap. I literally cannot shut up.

In more recent times, I have come to accept this about myself. I worked at an amazing antiracist nonprofit where I shaped the foundation of their advocacy work, I went to a top 5 graduate program, and I am well loved and desired in my field. This is foundational for me, now. I feel very little about it, because it is just fact. I am talented. I am good. I am naturally gifted and trained to be a professional. And yet, there is the child-side part of me that is wondering if I am loved unconditionally, finally.

My mother does not understand me. She doesn’t understand why I live so openly and authentically, not understanding that it mirrors the way she lives her life. It’s the oldest cliche in the book: we are destined to either hate our mothers, or become them, but I don’t want to experience either. But everyone knows that.

I feel more connected to my grandmothers, honestly. It’s like I can forgive them for the choices they made under constraints, but I can’t forgive my mother. I think that’s harsh, but my mother did have more choices, and she chose to give birth to a person that I’m sure she loves, but I’m not sure she likes. For my part, I haven’t tried to get to know her more recently, and I should.

It makes me think about love in Indian culture. At least in my own family, love feels very conditional. It never was “you have to be a doctor, lawyer, or engineer,” for me. My family at least beat that stereotype (although my brother is a coder bro, damn him.) My family has always been supportive of my non-traditional path (which isn’t that non-traditional, seeing as multiple of my family members have worked in the government throughout history), but my career in government is still seen in Indian culture as largely outside of the scope of normal. But I do think that in general, Indian culture teaches conditional love.

Indian families often would do anything for their kids — move countries, sacrifice everything, hard labor, etc. They will often point to these traits as evidence that their love is unconditional, but they are misreading the foundational truth about unconditional love. It isn’t necessarily about doing something for someone, but rather a commitment to being present in their lives. I remember when I was graduating the 5th grade and I expressed to my dad that I was sad that he might not be able to make it (he was working and it was during the day), and when he did in fact show up, and I expressed my surprise, he said, “Well, I didn’t want you thinking like Disney channel taught you that I don’t care about you if I don’t show up.” From the start, my feelings about my family’s presence were dismissed. Yes, my family has always shown up for everything — but no, I’m not sure they fully understand why it was important to me.

Back to the point. Indian culture teaches conditional love. You can see it in the statement we all know and hate: “what will other people think?” Incorrectly, most people attribute this to Indian judgey culture. And while it is that a little, it is more accurately rooted in fear.

For Upper Caste Indians, it is about fear of losing status, fear of becoming the status of those they mistreat. It is a fear-based culture, and you see it play out in how honor is placed in the vaginas of daughters. So much of Indian culture is about honor, respect, and fear of losing those things. It teaches us to love only conditionally, because unconditional love means to accept someone’s flaws as parts of them that you also love, and not weaknesses. Indians perceive flaws as weakness. They train you to see human beings as competition, and distrust undergirds almost all actions, even including marriage. In the arranged marriage culture, the first thing that gets potential suiters rooted out is if they had past relationships or scandals. And while past behaviors can be indicative of a pattern, especially when it comes to abuse, they are not always indicators of the success of a marriage. Just because you’ve broken up with one person doesn’t mean you are going to divorce your spouse. But this logic doesn’t sit well in Indian brains because we are also more clinically anxious than most people. We are trained to sniff out bombs even when there aren’t any. We will make up disasters to “protect ourselves",” except all we are doing is reinforcing anxious thoughts and behaviors, and letting that spill into how we treat actual people.

I am not an inherently kind person. I am anxious, and I am mean, and I am likely to cut you down before I think about it. But over the years, I developed capacity and, like a toddler, learned how to love people better by curiously watching my husband accept every part of me — the flawed, the gross, the imperfect — no questions asked. How was I supposed to know that you weren’t supposed to recoil when someone shows you their weakest moments? How was I supposed to know that someone’s worst moments don’t define them? They have always defined me.

I was raised to be afraid of my own voice. The reason I feel like I can’t stop talking is because I was taught that I was not supposed to speak, but I broke that rule and I keep breaking that rule. In reality, I am just a person who wants to be a human with other humans. There are no rules, there are no taboos I am breaking. I might be unique and special because of my career, but the cage is arbitrary, made up by people whose entire lives are shrouded by fear of failure, fear of losing, fear of losing me. I forgive them for that. I should learn how to forgive myself, too.

So I get it, Lorde. I get thinking about your mother’s trauma while you’re having sex. I get thinking about how to be a person when your mother is also a person. I get feeling like everything you have ever done is an ode to your mother. I get feeling misunderstood and unseen, while at the same exact time, being exactly like your mom. I am my mother’s clone, and the only person that doesn’t see that is my mother. I try not to take it personally, because while I think she is the most amazing person ever, she might not think that about herself. So maybe, in her eyes, I am nothing like her, and maybe to her, that’s a good thing.

I’ll live my life trying not to take anything personally. After all, it’s just broken glass.

Anyway, a random cat came up to our house this morning, and I really want her to come back because she was so cute. I’m going to go try to find her. Listen to Lorde’s album (or don’t, if you, like me, have mommy issues. It might be hazardous to your health.)

Yours,

me

And you know what, even that is too harsh. I was seventeen, and I was being seventeen. I was also being a seventeen year old who had just survived sexual assault and was dealing with PTSD by burying myself in people who exceptionalized me. My entire adolescent life post-sexual assault was a matter of finding people to tell me I was exceptional, to find a way to vindicate myself, to justify my survival. I had this voice that I could never tamp down and this must have been why God gave it to me. If I could never shut up, then I might as well use it for something bigger than myself, right? And I spent the next decade of my life chasing down the “right” thing. The right opinion. The right degree. The right way to do public service. My whole life, the dreams I had, the path I paved, was all in service to a girl who wasn’t given the choice to heal. 

I was coming into my own just as the beginnings of the #MeToo movement came into shape. I recognized what happened to me as sexual assault – I even have screenshots of FB messages saying so. Which I think was really incredible of me, I am incredibly proud of myself for recognizing harm, but I thought the way to fix that harm was to become a public advocate. I screamed as loudly as I could in the context I was in about this harm, and then came my first heartbreak – the one that would follow me around for my entire lifetime in this work – everyone stood by him. I couldn’t believe it. How could they do that? All of my “friends,” my teachers, everyone – they blamed me. They told me I should have known better. My family was upset because I knew better than to date, and then I got hurt (a fact which they don’t really know, but they know, you know?) I was only fifteen. I was a baby, and no one believed me, and instead of shattering me, it made me so furious that I kept going. I majored in public policy, I worked at an antiracist organization that centered women, and I got an MPA. Everything I have done in my life is to vindicate that experience, the one where I felt small and unloved and used up and unholy. I spent so long in this world that I forgot to heal my own. 

Still, through it all, I could not help but be exactly who I am. I never did understanding performing fakeness, because I could never do that. I wish I could, because it is absolutely a survival mechanism. But I didn’t, couldn’t. I was alienated because of this, of course. I was thought of as too much, because of this, of course. And while I have come out as a person I am so proud of, I still can’t help but wonder who I would’ve become if I stopped serving the liberalized #MeToo movement, and started serving me. (For the record, I am still a huge supporter of gender justice movements, and I think the #MeToo movement did amazing things for survivors of violence, but I also think the co-optation and liberalization by white women of that particular movement led us to wane in our effectiveness and also encouraged performance from victims as opposed to true healing.) 

And this brings me back to my point about the people that I love. My husband is the kindest person on this planet. I don’t mean just nice, or just Midwestern, but well and truly kind. I watch him as he loves other people, and listen as my friends reflect to me how good he is, and I feel my heart glow with this pride. He looks at people as people first. This might seem small, but I don’t know many people who can truly do this. He sees people as people, and that is a gift. He is so normal about it too, he swear it isn’t hard, and he is genuinely a kind person who wants so little in return. The way he loves me, so unconditionally, you’d think I’d never been touched before. And yet, he loves me in a way that honors that. He loves me in a way that takes all of my broken parts, and doesn’t necessarily glue them back together, but truly respects them. And this is normal to him. He is so delightfully real, so delightfully complex, so delightfully human in his empathy that he allows me to shift who I am and he still loves me so thoroughly. I can change my mind, say something problematic, try to figure out who I am next, and he will hold me accountable, tell me who I am, remind me that I can do anything but that I certainly don’t have to, and when I look at him, it reminds me that the purpose of my body isn’t to serve others, but it is to do what he does: love with the depth of all seven oceans. My husband is probably hand-made by God Himself. I know that all wives say that their husbands are the best, but they are wrong because mine isn’t just the best, but he is singular. I don’t know anyone else like him, his soul is made from old growth, strong and firm and inherently connected to the earth like some ancient wise spirit. He is a wonder, and I am in awe that he could love me, so flawed, so mean, so judgey, so fallen. He reminds me of my best friend, Frankie, too. They are both so politically anchored in their empathy, so kind, so empathetic, but they are steadfast in holding you to it. 

I watch the way Frankie loves, too. I watch the gears in her brain turn when she speaks to her loved ones, the way she notices their moods and what they need. I watch her sometimes battle herself for her needs, and then I watch her spouse take care of them, silently, in front of me. It’s funny, I thought this household was anti-plastic, for some silly reasons, but mostly because I thought of them as better than me, as more committed than me. Then, Frankie pointed out all the plastic they use. She said, “we do try not to use single-use plastic, but no more than anyone else.” So delightfully human. So delightfully normal. So delightfully committed to being of the planet, intertwined. Like my husband’s kindness, it is a reflection of how Frankie wants to be in the world, her striving towards wholeness. And somehow, she has opened her home and her heart to me, of all people. Judgey, flawed, mean, sometimes elitist (a lot of times elitist) me. 

In a world where I was raised to be competitive, to hate my colleagues, to be a capitalist worker, to submit to a culture of toxicity within Indian American spaces, I was sent two souls who operate the opposite of me. They remind me not of who I am, but who I want to be. My husband is my anchor and role model, and Frankie is a parallel soul living the way in her mind that I want to be in mine. There is nothing superior about this energy. There is nothing holier than thou. There is only truth and acceptance. 

I wish I had known my two most special loved ones in high school, but I’m glad I had time to cook before I met them, because the brightness of their light might have made me pull my curtains shut. I am still wounded in ways I cannot explain. I am certain I love everyone poorer than they deserve. I don’t know who I am outside of the scope of this decade long project, trying to seek revenge through success, and at times it has made me vengeful and mean and disconnected from love and rest and the beauty of the natural world. But my heartbeat pounds to the rhythm of “I am trying. I am trying. I am trying.” 

I have people who want to see me try to become a better person, not because they don’t love me now, but because they know I am capable of the growth, and they are simply along for the journey. 

What a blessing, to be loved so unconditionally. What a gift to watch HSM2 with my best friend and think of my husband’s grace in my life. 

I hope the people you love are your role models. It really means everything. I hope I am just like them when I grow up.

Yours,

me

Public policy school is largely about how we take and use things that people already know – relationships, stories, human complexity, and smash it into narratives that can convince people that our version of politics, of analysis, of data narratives are the correct versions. I have never been convinced about this education. From day one, when I was a fresh faced 18 year old at the John Glenn College at Ohio State, I blasted my professors with questions about their reliance on the field’s assumptions. For example, we must simply assume that everyone is a rational actor who is selfishly going to center their own needs above the needs of the collective – and that’s how economic policy operates (despite centuries of Indigenous economic wisdoms that insist otherwise.)I hate logic models for this reason, because you can always invoke the “what if” clause and change the scenario, making the outcome change almost selectively on your opinion. There is no objective truth in public policy; therefore, the decisions we are making as a field must reflect the field itself. The field being, of course, wealthy white people with mass amounts of discomfort around race and racial conversations. 

And because of whiteness, people misuse hope as a tool of mobilization. White people have recently caught on to the Black abolitionist political narrative of hope as a skill, something you take time to build, and something you build in community. At our college graduation, our Dean talked about how this world is beautiful, and how it’s up to us to fight to protect it. But the Dean also did not move on Palestine when we asked her to. The Dean did not move on protections for BIPOC students when we asked her to. When we asked her to write a letter to the other policy schools that outlines protection of speech on campus, she called it “performative.” When we expressed directly to her that we feel that we have blood on our hands as policy professionals, the Dean said not to worry so much, because we have more problems to worry about as policy professionals that we need to solve. As if the end-all-be-all of being a public servant is not to prevent as much mass tragedy as possible. And yet, her speech hinged on “hope.” What is this so-called hope we are supposed to feel? When Republicans and Democrats finally get along? When they split a beer and call it a day? I’m supposed to feel hopeful when people come together to pass policy? Their literal jobs? Call me a Capitalist if you want, but I don’t want to celebrate people just…doing their jobs. My problem with policy professionals is that nowadays, they talk about hope as if its theirs to control, but hope is wild. Hope and imagination, especially radical imagination, are community organizer terms that get co-opted into policy spaces and completely torn apart. Hope should not be a tool that policy bureaucrats get to wield against people they see as lesser than them. It should not become a virtue signaling measure of how “in community” people are. It should not become a rhetorical tool used by MPA educated policy wonks who, in reality, feel a morose sense of satisfaction from denying the right of full-scale emotions to the average person. It stems from the belief that the “Average American” is incapable of doing the things that we – the educated people – can do. Hell, the entire program of policy education is built around catering to the so-called “average American.” We sit around in classes that are paid by enormous endowment investments in war and genocide, talking about how the “average American” is an idiot. So now, we sell hope to this fictitious “average American,” who now has more access to information than ever before in history, so we have to tell them that their emotions are wrong, that they need to self regulate, instead of checking the industries that prey on their emotions. For some reason, policy always chooses policing the individual over regulating the industry. And when I say “for some reason,” I mean because of Capitalism. 

The critical point, the breaking point is that policy professionals  do not care enough to make large enough changes – that is why everyone says change is incremental. Change is not incremental because that sentiment is inherent to human behavior. In our personal lives, we make huge decisions all the time – to marry a person, to break up with them, to have children, to give birth, to change careers, etc. We often make large changes that shift our foundations, and find a way to cope with it. But with policy, we lie about how processes work to the public because we don’t want to deal with the real truth beneath all of it: that we will not do the work it takes to get people to care. “We are only human,” we say – but medical professionals have to go through years of training to ensure they don’t kill their patients (along with having hefty medical insurance) – meanwhile,  we can order the mass deaths of an entire people with a stroke of our pens. I have always found this disparity enraging. We must be more careful with human lives, we have to be more aware of our power, but the field is first and foremost defined by its adherence to cowardice. Courage, while a “core value” of most MPA programs, is rarely present while policy professionals are actually making decisions. Confounded? Me too. I have been for over a decade. I thought we were here to defend humanity; it turns out, we are here to secure a check and ourselves. 

“Head in the sand,” doesn’t begin to cover it – but it’s really less ignorance than there is willfully, gleefully denying humanity to people who desperately need the help. Americans – the West, white people – simultaneously expect to be infantilized and exempted from hard work and also venerated for our less-than-effective governance of the world. And when the outcome of the policy analysis is the unintentional consequence of Black and brown lives? We call that a mistake. We call that “unintentional.” We continue to re-entrench policy solutions like segregation, and when we weight our policy solutions, we weight the ones centering Black and brown people the lowest. Collectively, as a professional community, we balk at the prospect of sticking our necks out for the most marginalized. Collectively, as a field, we benefit from allowing AI to pollute Black neighborhoods, like we did when we allowed industrial waste factories to be built on the banks of rivers that polluted Black and Indigenous community waters. Collectively, we thrive when the system functions the way that it is, which means that we will never choose, of our own volition, to reduce those disparities in favor of autonomy, sovereignty, and liberation. There is no incentive; there is no outcome. 

Take it from someone who has invested thousands of dollars in this field: this is not the solution. Systems change is a necessary evil to playing the long-term game of liberation. It isn’t for the faint of heart to work in this space to contribute to systems change – most of us would be better off building real community, engaging in mutual aid, and voting down ballot in local elections as opposed to getting formal education and hoping that means white people will hear us when we speak. I’m not saying that more people of color in public policy is a bad thing, but the trade off is the time you could spend actually connecting with the people in your neighborhoods and communities. The trade off is going up against a field that inherently benefits from your oppression versus filling your cup with people who understand that collective liberation can only come from solidarity with one another, which means that your individual self also needs to be taken care of through and through. The trade off is potential legacy or the safety of your soul. 

Academia does not allow for wonder. It takes the curious, the vast, the unknowable and turns it into logic models, data analysis, and digestible bits. Public Policy as a field takes the complex and smashes it into boxes of simple. It breaks apart your bones and reassembles you into a mid-level bureaucrat with no hope for the future. Hope is a wild thing, but even the way that the most liberal of policy professionals use it as something contained for their own use. Hope is a tool, yes, but it is not an analytical one. It is not a snide thing you can sneer at others for not having. Hope is built in community, but policy breaks communities apart. 

Choose wisely. Once you’ve shaken hands with the devil of white supremacy culture, once you’ve given up your capacity for wonder in favor of the analytical, you can never go back. 

Great friends, though. Perfect, honestly. I paid lots of money to find my best friends. I would do it all again, for that.

Seriously, don’t go to grad school.

Love,

me