a believer
on freedom and flames.
“I believe in us. I have no choice but to believe in us. We have no choice but to believe in us.”
Forgive me for citing myself, but I wrote this on July 1st, in a note restacking one of Joshua P. Hill’s excellent pieces from his newsletter New Means (which I hope you’re reading along with me!). I hear those words ringing in my ears now.
I imagine there are those who would read that and dismiss it as delusional, who would look at the state of our current reality and find it impossible to believe in this belief.
I imagine there are also those who would read it and feel the ominous undertones, who would interpret it as a directive that we must believe or else. The “or else” being, of course, our destruction as a species. You’re not being hyperbolic for recognizing that the stakes of this moment are life and death. Not only for you and I, in these bodies, in this lifetime. Your body is responding the way that it is because it accurately gauges that this moment – which began long before November 5th, long before October 7th – is an inflection point that determines whether or not our species will continue to exist on this planet.
I understand how someone could read, “we have no choice but to believe in us” and complete the sentence with, “or else we’re done.” That interpretation is not inaccurate. And it doesn't encompass all of what I mean when I say this.
I also mean that we have no choice but to believe in us because there’s really no choice to made here.
My belief in us is a given. It is, for me, the status quo of the experience of existence. It’s my body’s inherent knowing of how we’ve survived.
I, of course, can't reference our survival without acknowledging how many of us haven’t survived, won’t survive. And our bodies know that, too. We’re grieving that, too. The grief we feel at the loss of life is a reminder of our belief in life itself.
But I need not choose to believe in my breathing. My breathing doesn’t require my belief in it in order for it to sustain me. It just is. I just breathe.
I believe in us the way that I breathe.
I believe in us the way that my heart beats.
I believe in us the way that my eyes well with tears and my heart swells with love for you as I write these words.
That's what I mean when I say that I have no choice, we have no choice, but to believe in us. It’s a fundamental function of my being in a body.
Imagine if we decided to harness this inherent, generative force with the fullness of our conscious awareness. Imagine if we remembered that our right to life, our place in creation, is a given. Imagine if we used that remembrance to dissolve all false structures that have shown and told us repeatedly that they mean us nothing but death. Imagine if we loved each other as though we had no choice, loved this planet as though we had no choice, chose love as though we had no choice. As though it were simply our nature.
Are you breathing?
My belief in us has grown more and more palpable as I’ve learned to believe less and less in the governing bodies that currently exist.
I spent over ten years working in academia. Always one foot in and one foot out. I recognized that it was, at the time, the safest place for me to land as an artist who wanted to be able to support herself materially. I appreciated all that I learned from being in contact and community with young people. I enjoyed co-creating spaces for collective discovery and transformation. And…I navigated a daily onslaught of relational and institutional trauma that impacted us all.
Working for so long in such an openly hierarchical structure gave me ample opportunities to discover myself as a person who questions, who challenges, who offers alternative visions. Academia expertly catalyzed me to tap into the inherent gifts of my autistic sensitivity to injustice. I did this in such a way that I became a go-to person for folks who were similarly impacted on every campus on which I've worked. A person with whom they could have their reality reflected back to them, so that they knew they weren't making it up. A person with whom they could strategize about how best to communicate the impact. A person willing to hold up the mirror to show the institution to itself, to point out the contradictions between mission statements and actions.
Side note: I'm in engaged in such collaborative truth-telling work right now, in the midst of the painful sunsetting process of the organization that was my political home. And I’ll certainly have more to write about what I’m learning in this work sometime soon.
My time in academia also called me to accept that nothing about the institution would meaningfully shift in response to our emails, our petitions, our town halls, our senate votes, our walkouts. Cosmetic changes from time to time, sure. But nothing more. This recurring nightmare - of speaking up only for our efforts to amount to nothing - was deeply triggering for me, for the particular wounds that I carry. It also called me to access the gift of speaking with force and fire as an adult in a way that healed the part of me that couldn’t speak, wasn’t safe to speak, like this as a child.
Academia put me in situations in which I had no choice but to say something, do something, try something, offer something, in response to how the institution repeatedly harmed students, colleagues, surrounding community. Forced me to learn that appealing to the institution would never be the solution.
How familiar does this sound to those of us who’ve screamed ourselves hoarse in the hopes that it would influence our government to change course, to shift, to respond to us?
I know now that this doesn't mean we ought to just give up or shut up. It means that we must face the reality that our speaking up is for us. We use our voices to find each other. We use our voices to affirm our own dignity, our own shared humanity. Not because we believe that the institution can give any of that to us. It can’t. It is what strips us of it.
Can we frame the efficacy of our work by the metric of how we’re learning to offer what we need to ourselves and each other, rather than by what we can or can’t force the state to grant us?
Devon Price wrote in June that decolonization and the creation of a new world requires that we become “more interdependent, collaborative, patient, steadfast and gentle - with one another and ourselves.”
This is what we’re learning to become, the method by which we grow our liberation. For too long, we’ve related to ourselves and each other based on how the state relates to us. We've witnessed how the machine treats us, and modeled our treatment of each other based on that. We’re rife with wounds, riddled with injuries that we sustained each time we’ve called out the powers that were (and I say “were” rather than “be” because you and I both know that they’re on their way out) to no avail. We’ve collectively projected the unfelt pain of those wounds onto each other.
There’s no time left to appeal to government for our dignity, for our humanity, for our worthiness of belonging and existence.
We must turn our attention now toward each other. We must feel fully all that we’ve avoided feeling about the horrors that we’ve survived in a structure designed to dispose of us. And here, in feeling, we find the chance to choose our freedom.
There's freedom in accepting that this system existed to extract from us to the point of death, to gaslight us into believing that we chose it, and to teach us to replicate that dynamic in our interactions with each other. When we accept that this was never how we as humans were meant to exist, we can then invest our energy in co-creating our liberation.
We’re reaching this point. The point at which more of us than not realize that this structure is fake, and that we don’t have to live this way. That we’re free to take individual and collective action to change ourselves, change how we relate to each other, and consequently change how we live, how we organize our existence.
We have the power to create our reality. We don't have to accept the status quo. And we certainly don’t have to place our hopes for change in the very structure that was made to exploit and exterminate us in the first place.
I’ve had two dreams in the past week that involved fire.
In the first, I stood by my bedside as I witnessed my headboard in flames. It was a focused fire. Nothing else in the space was at risk, and neither was I. It was just the bed that needed to go. I view the bed as a symbol of the old limiting beliefs, the old creature comforts, the old relationship patterns, the old ways in which we’ve been asleep to our own power. All of these burning away to make space for the new. 2024 has been such a year for me, a year of allowing security blankets that I no longer need and dreams that no longer serve us to go up in flames, with little effort to hold onto them. Perhaps the same is true for you.
In the second, I was in a student center on a university campus. I understood within the context of the dream that this building was the campus “safe space” for people of color. I looked out of the window and saw a raging fire in the hills right above the building, moving rapidly toward us. I started to panic, but people around me reassured me. I called 911. I called the fire department. Campus security knows. They're on the way. Help is coming. We all safely evacuated just before the fire reached the building. And we stood there watching as no fire truck showed up, no emergency services arrived. Our designated refuge burned to the ground, and the institution did nothing to stop it. As we stood gazing at the flames, it became clear that the fire was purifying us, clearing away the illusion that any structure within that institution could ever truly be safe.
The day before Election Day, I watched Saul Williams’ keynote speech at the End of Empire and the Future of Freedom Conference at UCSB. In his talk, he references how Indigenous people have made use of fire in their stewardship and caretaking of the land. If you live in California like I do, you’ve likely heard of cultural burning, the intentional and strategic use of controlled burns as a way to prevent larger wildfires and promote biodiversity. Our Indigenous relatives know that fire is a necessary element of our shared co-existence, and they use its medicinal properties from a place of respect and reverence for all that it can do.
Sometimes the thing that best supports creation is our willingness to set what must burn ablaze.