this whole thing is a lie.
the idea that this is a zero-sum game and someone will always suffer for you to thrive. the idea that we can own land, that we have to pay for water, that people do not have a right to a home, or to be well in their bodies, or to be safe in their communities. the idea that in order to be ‘successful’, you must sell your skills through another entity that will ‘validate’ you and then take both the income and the credit.
it’s a system. one that we live in and has been imposed on us. but it is not ‘the truth’.
there are multiple truths and many, many systems.
many ways to make a living. organize housing, community safety, and restoration. provide healthcare (and research innovations in the field). to be proactive. to be creative. to be brave, resilient, ready. to know that if we have us, that means the Earth and the Universe have us, too.
the first time i was able to imagine my life beyond the next 6 months ahead of me, i was 25 years old. i had just finished my first journal, breaking through my doubts about myself as a writer internally - what kind of ‘writer’ are you if you can’t even finish a journal? - and with the help of intensive therapy and grad school, to be honest, was steamrolling through beliefs about myself as ineffective, a fraud, and not to be taken seriously. this was around the time in my life when i really started encountering people who took my question ‘what happens after the revolution?’ seriously, because they were thinking about it, too.
These were educators, counselors, healers, also people with lived experiences on the margins - sex workers, undocumented people, people with chronic illnesses, people on the edges of the law and society - those of us who are least likely to be afforded security under the lie. Who are first to lose their jobs, are last to be chosen for housing, least likely to receive proper treatment or be believed about anything. My upbringing had my mind in a place where I was determined to utilize every privilege I had been afforded - my class background (though mostly in name/heritage), and my education to do what I could and also to stay in my lane, but as I got deeper into my praxis - political and spiritual - certain lessons began to hit different, especially when they began to bruise different. When they began to show different. It really came down to this:
“If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete.” - Jack Kornfield, Buddha's Little Instruction Book
The lie had gotten me too - I thought I was lucky! But I spent 13 years unstably housed, working multiple jobs, managing multiple illnesses, caring for others at work and in my personal life, and settling for things I shouldn’t have because I thought it was arrogant of me to complain. My life had to take me to the mat before I could really see the contrast between the actual compassion and generosity in my life, and where it certainly. was. not. Including in my relationship with myself. That lesson hurt, but I’m grateful for it because nothing like body memory to reinforce knowing.
—
Under the lie, I’m supposed to be successful. I look around at the people I was raised with or went to school with and I should be making a cool 6 figures and traveling quarterly with a pretty savings account. Part of the reason I’m not is that I can’t bear to hoard money when there are people close to me who need it - learning to navigate that has been a balancing act. But the other part is that is that a Black Queer Chronically Ill Neurodivergent Radical Abolitionist person who will not compromise on the necessity of humanity and kindness in the work I do is not welcome, at least not for long, in most places. And I can build my own, but will enough people believe in it, believe in me, believe in us, to choose to invest in a different kind of truth for themselves and the future?
I’m still holding out hope.
We have to be ready.
Stay Brave,
Seph