Always returning to myself

January 7, 2026 

Writing is the primary way that I've developed of returning to my own center. I can't really articulate how important it's been to me, but I think decades of writing, at this point, demonstrate how much coping it has allowed me to do healthily. 

When I was studying for my master's in clinical mental health counseling, I learned the term "externalizing." This idea that simply getting things out of our minds, our bodies, somehow, was therapeutic and helpful. And it makes total sense when you think of people like feeling containers. Sometimes they're too full, and they've got to let something out so they don't combust, or they've got to fill themselves up so that they don't crumble. And sometimes they crumble anyway. But there have to be folks who know how to help people who are both pre- and post-crumble. There are doctors to help with physical maladies and therapists to help with psychological maladies, and the two overlap sometimes, but people have a lot of emotions, and it isn't always clear what to do with them. 

It was nice to hear my friend talking about community. I've been thinking so much about it these last couple of years, and so to hear someone else in my friend group spontaneously bring it up was so satisfying. We talked about how much is designed to keep us from having community. Reproduction being one of the primary ways we are drained of our energies for anything else--but that's still structural limitation, because if everyone has access to the childcare they need to thrive, then it wouldn't matter how many children people have. So then, when you're disabled as well, taking care of yourself along with another human is truly impossible to do in a completely healthy way, because there isn't infrastructure to ensure it's possible. There isn't enough childcare. There isn't enough decent-paying work that doesn't require one to sacrifice every ounce of their working energy that they have some left over for their families. So that's part of why change has been so slow. Progress so challenging. Because the working class, which still makes up the majority of society, is so burned out that they don't have the energy to do anything, including rebel. They just want to live. We just want to be able to feel some goodness in our lives before we die, when so much is so bleak. We don't want to take on the responsibility of changing the world, because the same hyper-individualism we've been colonized to believe makes it impossible to feel connected to the entire web of humanity, much of which would fight with us if we would only pay attention. 

It's easy to feel defeated. It's also easy to feel more effective putting more of our effort into one child rather than all of them. I don't blame anyone who ends up at despair. The world is heavy. Colonization has destroyed much of life, much of the planet. But there is plenty to fight for. Plenty to keep our hearts soft while our skin is thick. I know it's hard because I struggle all the time with wanting to stay here. Regularly I manage suicidal ideation that makes the eternal peace of death much more appealing than the chaos and violence of this mad-made global society, which has ensured inequity and injustice prevail. I get it. I've lived below the poverty line for most of my adult life. I'm basically mid-life, unless I'm lucky enough to make it to a hundred, but something most of my friends agree on is who wants to without a quality of life? 

We're all (my peers, the eighties babies) at ages now when we've seen our grandparents age and die, our parents aging, our friends die. We're acquainted with all kinds of death by mid-life. Aware of our mortality. Worried we'll be forgotten (we will be). I do find comfort in the connections that have supported my sense of community since I was a young college student. In high school, my friends were everything too. But I learned, very awkwardly, that some people are not capable or interested in sharing as deep of a connection if it doesn't serve them in exactly the ways they find most precious. Maybe that's true to a degree for all of us. That was a hard lesson for me--learning that some people become your friend and then discard you as soon as it isn't convenient for them any longer to be pals, and really understanding that it wasn't something personal, even though the pain I felt sure was. No one likes being rejected. We all need to feel we matter (some more than others depending on a whole list of childhood development factors!). 

Some friends don't open up and share with you the ways you do with them, because people have different ideas of privacy, and some people are looking for only a single person to connect deeply to save them the trouble of having multiple friends, with multiple schedules, and multiple obligations. And we're back to how capitalism isolates us. Capitalism makes matrimony more appealing because for many people, without their own family unit they've created, they wouldn't get to interact with people enough to sustain their wellness. And then conversely, when they are in that situation, they're so overwhelmed with the obligations of caring for their family (multiply by a hundred for any person in the family with a disability, and again for multiply disabled parents and kids), and that's it. There is no community. People reproduce to form their own little world, and ignore the rest because we just don't have the structures in place to do it differently. And that's what's so frustrating about where we are as a society. I think there are plenty of people who see the ways that things are not working for us. But people don't want to admit that the same system that benefits them in plenty of other ways is also killing them in ways they ignore, or presume are part of how life is. The most oppressed among us have always led revolutions. Because for many people, you reach a point where you can manage, and you just try to stay stable within that. You do your best, and that's enough. You keep your head down and press forward, and you don't make too many waves, because otherwise the thin layer of stability you move along will tear, and you'll fall back into the pit of despair, where all you can do is survive. 

But the reason I really try to listen to black folks (I mean just as many not white voices as possible) is because they've been working on revolting since day one on this stolen land, and I respect that they have a lot of experience navigating life in a nonsensical society that belittles them and tries to brainwash them every step of the way. It's why I appreciate all the content-creators that I can have access through the internet to learn from. Not just black folks. People from all over the world, really. But people who are experts within specific areas sharing their insights with the masses is one of the best things about the internet. Real knowledge supports progress because it looks at the truth of systems and patterns and the results of how we've been living and says here's what works and here's what has never worked and will never work no matter how many times it's repackages and recycled to a new generation. I try to listen to the people who know more about things than I do, and I still bring my own knowledge to the table, because it's not my first rodeo either. 

When I consider a mate, there are really only 2 questions I need to know the answer to up front, aside from whether or not I want them to touch me. Are they a feminist, and how has intersectional feminism helped them? And how are they engaging in antiracist work? I would add to that when was the last time they went to therapy and when the last time they took a shower was. Those questions tell me a lot about the person. I need to know the person I'm with is going to feel passionately about the same core issues I do. Because I've learned how hard it is for me to live with people who don't share those passions. I can't match with someone who prefers to spend most of their time in a fantasy world. I want someone very present in their lives. 

But I'm getting off-topic. The point really was that most of the people I feel close with, connected to, share some of the same core values I have. That's why they feel like allies. That's why I joke I'm slowly creating a rainbow army of loving warriors who will reshape the world in love's image. Actual love. Not toxic love. Not fake love built on authority that relies on fear to rule. True love. Unconditional love with conditional boundaries that protect our deepest needs and values.