Who Wants to Look When it’s Too Bright

They said, look hard enough, you’ll see the light

My persecuted passions cursed, they claimed

I wished and wished away with all my might

Oh, beholding you, such a wretched sight

What kind of loving God would be ashamed?

They said, look hard enough, you’ll see the light

Sometimes, I forge forth intently to spite

Those who squirm with discomfort, acting pained

I wished and wished away with all my might

Self-quarrels, unending torment at night

Why do they think that it’s them, I have maimed?

They said, look hard enough, you’ll see the light

Hopelessly I plead, see it’s not a fight

Their resolve steadfast, they watched, grieved, and prayed

I wished and wished away with all my might

I can always tell, their expressions tight

Their hearts and glass windows, commonly stained

They said, look hard enough, you’ll see the light

But no one wants to look when it’s too bright

Your Call Has Been Forwarded: On Digital Identity

A childhood friend messaged the other day asking whether my mother had changed phone numbers. I replied and passed along her contact information. Earlier that autumn, I had gone through a change in phone numbers, myself, and I learned not only the frustration of the AT&T surcharge but the joy of accessing a new life, all via a simple +1.

The first string of messages struck at 21:50 on October 14th:

Yo g
Wdy yofay
Today
Tryna go to UW GAME ?

I asked who the owner of this (206) area code is. It was, of course, Mikey g, who proceeded to ask: How’s your gunshot did it heal up already? (Mikey g must have sensed I fabricated my response, for he no longer replied.)

10 days later, Jay (216) slid in with a Hey. I told him there was reason to believe he had the wrong number. Ain’t you 26? I told him I’m eighteen. Oh he must have changed his cell. Sorry love. I told him that it was ok and to have a wonderful life.

The messages stopped until around Halloween, when I received an invitation to “The Final Apple Cup House Party on November 25th” from another (206) number:

At Sam’s parents house from kick off ‘till whenever my friends with children need to get back to their children (so like midnight) take uber.

This time, I did not reply. Although a short-lived hobby, I stopped emulating whoever Mikey and Jay and so-called Sam were attempting to contact.

Those who were close to the former owner of my cell number must’ve also caught on. The only people left contacting me were up to no good, having to do with illicit photos from a (212) of a woman’s rear end covered in vandalised dollar bills and Chinese business proposals from a (424) and a (949) addressing me by the name of Mr. Liu:

Hello, Mr. Liu, I’m sorry to contact you in this presumptuous way. I asked for your phone number from Linda. I contacted you to promote our cooperation as soon as possible!

Hello, Mr. Liu, if it is not convenient for you now, please give me your email address and I will send you the medical equipment quotation that you need to purchase this time. I sincerely hope to have the opportunity to cooperate with you.

The spam messages, however, all seemed to refer to the same name: After further review Devon, you can still accept newer amounts over $3250 this weekend msg STOP to end.

I had seen that name before, from Josiah (234), writing, Hi Devon, I was going through my contacts and I found your number and I just decided to say hi. It’s been a long while, what happened? And from an (803), reaching out to say, Just saw your name in a bar bathroom in Brooklyn (this is Katie from years ago—I go by Drusilla now.)

There was a real person attached to this number, a person whose life remained constant despite the change in cell numbers. I later realised that the same must have been happening to me. My personal identity was not lost, and yet it remained inaccessible to persons attempting to identify me.

Personal identity, in the eyes of John Locke, consists of “the same thinking thing in different times and places.” It becomes difficult to pinpoint personal identity when one assumes an identity that is neither personal nor consistent across time and place. Modern technology, in particular, has much to do with constructing a fragile form of personal identity—a single self existing in multiple guises and narratives. In some cases—a catfish, a shape-shifter, whatever one may call it—there is also a sense of imposterism.

Is it imposterism, or symbolism? Edward Delia argues that “to some degree, we all live in different symbolic universes outside our immediate social milieu,” when discussing philosophy in the contemporary world (which he deemed a “society of strangers.”) Boston College’s Richard Kearney further argues that we are living in “an age of excarnation (flesh becoming image) that delivers connectivity but not necessarily closeness.” And it’s true. As satisfying as it is to trace back another (digital) identity, it becomes increasingly difficult to reconstruct a holistic image of Devon, let alone feel a sense of human-to-human familiarity, although various facets of the self are funnelled into the same iMessage inbox.

It is only now I have learned the (206) area codes and the UW Game and the Apple Cup—a college football rivalry game between the University of Washington and Washington State University—are all connected. It is only now I can see the continuities and the narratives unfold, piece together remnants of a life I did not live. I would never know how my gunshot healed nor if Devon made it to the Final Apple Cup House Party.

I could be as connected to Devon as I pleased, but I would never feel close to him. And whoever received my missed calls and texts likely didn’t consider the flesh behind the number either.

So, take this as a warning: update cell numbers frequently.

Eudaimonia, Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy, and the Promise of Rationality

Eudaimonia is having a moment in clinical psychology. For a long time, research on therapy for depression and anxiety has focused on reducing distress and managing symptoms. Happiness has always been the goal of therapy, of course, but in the early days of clinical research, it was usually defined simply as “the experience of positive emotions or pleasure”—a hedonic definition. This definition makes sense at first glance, especially since one devastating symptom of major depression is anhedonia, the inability to experience positive emotions. Reducing the symptoms of depression would therefore mean increasing a person’s capacity for hedonic pleasure.

The problem with the hedonic definition is that even after most individuals have successfully recovered from the symptoms of a mood disorder, persistent impacts on the individual’s well-being still remain. Some argue that reaching for hedonic pleasure alone misses another, more crucial component of a good life: eudaimonic pleasure. Aristotle originally defined eudaimonia as rational activity performed in accordance with human virtue. Meanwhile, positive psychologists have defined eudaimonia more broadly as “realization of one’s best self,” and operationalized it using a six-factor Ryff Scale of Well-Being that includes items like “self-acceptance,” “positive relationships with others,” “autonomy,” and “purpose in life.”

Many people benefit from therapy—some do not. Even those who do benefit often still experience impacts on their lives even after they find relief from symptoms. Maybe it’s a matter of finding the right therapist or sticking with the treatment long enough. Maybe some individuals are just more “treatment-resistant” than others. But a significant fraction of patients simply don’t respond to therapy. For example, cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) is the field’s gold standard of evidence-based practice. CBT can be effective for many different disorders, but it works best with anxiety-related disorders. How well? A 2015 meta-analysis from UCLA found that in published studies, on average, only 50% of clients with anxiety disorders respond at all.

The best-known evidence-based therapies for affective disorders were developed before eudaimonia was a relevant concept in clinical psychology. CBT and its close cousin dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) both emphasize distress reduction and symptom management through “skills” and coping mechanisms. A wave of new therapies has attempted to rectify this problem. The most famous is acceptance and commitment-based therapy (ACT), which focuses on “flourishing” and “living according to values.” Other new ideas like Well-Being Therapy (WBT) and Positive Affect Therapy (PAT) also incorporate eudaimonia into the client’s goals.

Here, I ask whether eudaimonia-focused therapy could close the gap for the 50% of clients who don’t respond to the field’s best methods. Can considering eudaimonia finally make therapy work for everyone?

This article does not intend to question the legitimacy of evidence-based therapies or attack psychology as a discipline. However, I hope to illustrate the categorical difference between treatments that are “evidence-based” and “universally effective.” For example, Ibuprofen is an evidence-based treatment for pain, but taking ibuprofen will not always make your pain go away. Sometimes your pain is worse than what the drug can handle; sometimes it appears to work, but the pain returns after the medication wears off. Right now, therapy is like ibuprofen: evidence-based, but far from universally effective. This article is about addressing the gap between the two.

To understand those who experience mental illness, especially with long journeys not immediately respondent to therapy, I draw from my significant lived experience and the friends I have made along the way. I also draw from online discourse about mental illness, where a curious association emerges. There are those who speak about the therapy tools that have helped them recover; there are those who have had negative experiences with it; and there are also those who simply seem as if what plagues them remains untouched by therapeutic ideas. The latter section is full of ironic memes, aesthetic montages, and bitterly self-reflective quotes from Camus, Dostoevsky, Kafka, and Plath—authors whose worldviews lean existential, absurd, and hard to understand. But if we look closer, they might actually hold an important key.

Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground is a polemic against utilitarian ideas. If man truly possesses free will, the underground man argues, what use is that free will if it is always directed towards the most rational choice? There is something intrinsically satisfying in making the wrong choice, the one that hurts, because it is an assurance that you are still free. If there existed a tool—say, a skill or a therapy—that could reduce your distress, there is pleasure that comes from using it, but there is also a deeply life-affirming pleasure that comes from not using it, from choosing to exist in distress. Consciousness is an irrational thing, after all; pain is an irrational thing. To behave entirely rationally is to be reduced to a utilitarian “agent.” Behaving irrationally affirms the reality of one’s consciousness and the freedom of one’s will, what Dostoevsky called “that primary and most desirable good which is dearer to [man] than anything in the world.”

This argument might seem repugnant at first glance, and the character who advances it even more so. The underground man is not a happy person. He is full of self-hatred, cynicism, and despair. He traps himself so completely in overthinking his own actions that he withdraws from society, convinced that everyone else who values rational well-being (and, for that matter, their own eudaimonia) has constructed a society with no place left for him. And yet we begin to sympathize with him as the narrative continues. If you’ve ever decided to do something you’ll regret, for no benefit, no reason at all, a small part of the underground man lives in you. If you’ve ever clung to a self-destructive pattern without trying to solve it—worrying, smoking, oversleeping, distancing yourself from your friends—then a small part of the underground man lives in you. If you’ve ever come face to face with depression, or another mood disorder, then you and he could be well-acquainted. You might have even spent some of your own time underground.

I know from experience—and most clinical psychologists would probably agree—that mood and anxiety disorders involve certain patterns of irrational thought. These patterns usually involve debilitating emotional distress that makes everyday life a challenge. They can feel uncontrollable, inescapable; they can feel true and right even when you know they are false and destructive. Therapists hand patients tools to deal with their patterns of thought: you can challenge a thought on its rationality, distance yourself from it, or meditate on whether it reflects your values, for example. All of these tools assume that the patient wants to move towards rationality in their life. This is often the case, and these tools are often very helpful. After all, if something in your mind is holding you back and causing you pain, why wouldn’t you want to move away from it?

If this were true for everyone, then we would all be reaching toward eudaimonia all the time, and the underground man would be nothing more than a strange, sad caricature.

The resonance of irrationality also appears in the writing of Camus. In The Stranger, Meursault kills a man for reasons unknown even to himself. Imprisoned, he speaks with a chaplain who counsels him to accept a rational, religious worldview. Meursault refuses and holds onto his irrational worldview even though it means his certain execution. To Meursault, the universe is absurd and indifferent to reason, and his own indifference makes him feel like a part of this universe. To give that up would be another kind of death. Instead, he finds meaning within the absurdity and makes peace with his fate. In his own words: “I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe. To feel it so like myself, indeed, so brotherly, made me realize that I’d been happy, and that I was happy still. For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained to hope was that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration.”

Meursault’s last wish is a bleak thing to hope for, yet in some sense, hoping for his death as a criminal affirms the choices he made in life. Even after doing harm to others and harm to himself, even once caught in the machinery of justice, he continues to walk down his own irrational path. This is how he recognizes himself as alive and free. For both Camus and Dostoevsky, irrationality is a sort of freedom. It creates vital meaning and importance in our lives, even if it ends up causing harm.

This idea could help explain why people cling to self-destructive patterns instead of going to therapy. It could also explain resistance to evidence-based practice among both patients and providers. As long as therapy is a wholly rational endeavor, it rings false for that irrational part of us which provides meaning. This includes therapy which incorporates eudaimonia as a goal. Striving towards eudaimonia is inherently a rational endeavor; this is how Aristotle originally defined the term. The “good life” comes from a realization of one’s rational potential. And—again, I speak from experience—buying into the rational endeavor of therapy is not a trait, nor is it a one-time decision. It is a constant struggle. The rational part of us that wants to objectively improve is pitted against the irrational part that wants to make things worse. Is there a way to reconcile the two?

Camus’ absurdism may provide one possible answer. To him, an “absurd victory” entails finding purpose and joy in an irrational world; unlike Dostoevsky, he rejects despair and the contemplation of suicide. The Myth of Sisyphus does not consider illogical decision-making an integral part of the human condition like Dostoevsky does, but it does consider the absurd as a powerful, yet irrational answer to the world. If irrationality lends itself to humanity and to meaning-making, then Camus is right: that meaning can be positive as well as negative. Due to the nature of irrationality, it cannot always be positive, and by necessity it is sometimes hurtful. Camus embraces this complexity. To him, any joy you can find is a victory. If this sounds like a platitude, that’s because on some level it is one. Certainly it does not provide a satisfying answer for what one should do with debilitating thoughts and emotions. However, it is remarkable in that it manages to deal with the unreason of human consciousness and still come up with a positive.

The science of psychology attempts to address the stream of human consciousness in all its sense and nonsense. It is remarkable to see Aristotle’s ideas of eudaimonia adopted in this discipline centuries after his death. Psychologists have used it to create powerful tools for the measurement of human well-being and the development of new therapies. For those of us who live with mental illness, however, eudaimonia as an idea can fall flat because it makes too much sense. The writings of Dostoevsky and Camus are unique in that they address themselves to the nonsense of the human condition. Just as Aristotle’s ethics were folded into the psychology of happiness, if we are to reach out to people and care for them in all their irrational being, we would do well to take a cue from these authors’ irrational thoughts.

7 and 21

7

That I could stand on the curb,

waiting on a cold Wednesday morning in the gray Boston haze

It means I built a world for myself I had always imagined

and what’s better, it’s yours: this city, this sprawling kingdom

On hot days, the earth smiled back at us when we danced

And made these streets sing like a symphony

A rigid cloud reminds me I’ve not much to mourn

This place once doomed me with sinful barren skies

But a fleeting lark crosses the horizon just to remind me

This gray beauty was strung for the two of us

You made the overcast sky a bounty I am grateful for

You made this love a warm passionate blue

You made me yours, and that made me everything

You made me yours, and that made me everything

21

Today, I see me.

These plump cheeks tell stories of friendship and acceptance

My arms brag to my younger self about being embraced by those we love

My calves are endlessly sore from dancing and bearing new roads

More and more each day, I appear closer to the person I think I am

A fading horizon, this vision is impossible to reach,

but that doesn’t mean the growth is futile

The chimera runs toward the setting sun for the beauty of the chase

Remembering harder days

Back when I was Ozempic skinny

Locked up in my Parks Belk and Tom Ford prison

And winter brought drought upon my poor cracked little hands and pale skin

When I felt beautiful in the bathroom light only after a night of cursed memories

And my hair cascaded down my neck, weaving in and out of the sunlight

I think about the rainwater sipped from black plastic

The little ants that soured my first care package from home

And the countless days laying there waiting on imaginary calls

I wrote endlessly about the words behind the walls

I never wished to be less myself but cursed providence for

the bricks around me

the train beneath me

and the people out the window

But today is my 21st birthday

On this day, my vice no longer makes me criminal

I’ll gyrate in the gay club as is my homecoming

I brought my passport since my license was expired

I never really felt like I belonged anywhere

The eyes will peer through hazy neon vision to lock on

Another dainty fumbling queen narrating the next gay national epic

The behemoth drag goddess at the front door will leave me enamored

Flustered enough to hit ‘25% tip’ paying cover on the iPad

Looks from idols just months my elder,

Though confused and dismissive,

They cleanse me of who I once feared I had to become

One day, they will inspire a new list of fears,

But today is my 21st birthday

And I fear not the unseen as I have never been more prepared to live.

Southern Sophocles

Haemon
pick up your memory. steady hearts, a little while
Ennis, Orville, Willie singing our sermons and songs
Strait on, straight raised
regret and pastimes forsake kisses
shame, pearls, rosary. mama’s blame.
prejudice, have you broken our love?
love. is love simply this? lies in their truth?

Creon
state your sickened purpose and abomination.
filth to you! read leviticus close libraries
hate to have to hold you.
ignorance—this own doom.
hell in me, cast light. this faith failed you.
man foreshadowed this end—now anyone can see you.
codes and laws of mess. my fire, my office desk.
me with mess don’t mess my Texas zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Polynices
hope lost on me saved you
name your pains. what wounds? burdened by hurt
asking me to listen, but you cannot.
dimmed are days. now, look well and
reflect. I look through you. shattered mirrors.
face? to face a life without self
fear brings this body to flame
dreams allow yourself to be forgiven and forgive.
you forget—to want never changed everything

Ismene
brother—the mourned, and sister—the buried.
remember youth, the lavender days
sideways winds comb honey-like blonde hair blowing wild
melt still memories in our photos, frozen in time
truth in herself becoming new, becoming someone just?
all for justice and hope.
you left. we had lost you.

Haemon
dear father. father’s fear. nothing to see here, dear.
windows without one to see can house no fears, my love.
thorns rose from injured humanity
prickly pear cactus. thorns of pairs in pricks
healed alone, time somehow shows repentance. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Creon
appearance disavows, my darling.
here spilled alleged, an ‘innocent of blood’
flowing river, red in peace.
longing ever, for now you part.

---

ARTIST STATEMENT
the series is a collection of reverse poems based on Sophocles’ Antigone. each stanza follows a call and response format (read left to right). this conversation-style form allows me to provide insight into their reactions, thoughts, and relationships with references to southern LGBTQ+ pop culture—Ennis Del Mar, Orville Peck, and Willie Nelson. this poem weaves themes of love, hate, and the power of acceptance in the face of fear to share the story of transphobia and homophobia in the american south.

---

Antigone while little, a heart’s steady memory. your pickup. songs and sermons our singing Willie, Orville, Ennis raised straight on Strait kisses’ sake, for times past and regret blame mama’s rosary, pearls shame. love our broken. you have prejudice. truth therein lies this simply: love is love.

Antigone
‘abomination’ and purpose sickened your state.
libraries close. leviticus read you to filth.
you hold. to have, to hate.
doom, own this ignorance
you failed faith. this light cast me in hell.
you see? can anyone now end this shadowed foreman?
desk office. my fire, my mess of laws and codes
Texas, my mess. don’t mess with me. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Antigone
you saved me on lost hope
hurt by burdened wounds. what pains your name?
cannot you but listen to me asking?
and well, look now. days are dimmed.
mirrors shattered you through look. I reflect.
self without life. a face to face
flame to body, this brings fear.
forgive and forgiven. be to yourself. allow dreams.
everything changed. never want to forget you

Antigone
buried the sister and mourned the brother.
days lavender, the youth remember
wild blowing hair blonde like honeycomb winds sideways
time in frozen photos our memories still melt
just someone becoming new. becoming herself in truth.
hope…and justice for all?
you lost, had we left you?zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Eurydice
dear, here. see to nothing. fear father’s father, dear.
love my fears. no house can see to one without windows.
humanity injured from rose thorns
pricks in pairs of thorns. cactus pear prickly.
repentance shows how some time alone healed.zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Eurydice
darling, my vow’s a disappearance
blood of innocent, an alleged spilled here
peace in red river flowing
part you now, forever longing.

I’m Tired of Talking About Hope

I cannot get away from it—it haunts me, showing up in my everyday life, my coursework, the organizing in which much of my extracurricular life has come to consist—and I am deeply, desperately tired of talking about it. I seem unable to prevent myself from going back to it again and again and again. Lounging on the too-rarely sun-soaked steps of Memorial Church, staring blankly at the bare ceiling of my dorm room as I pretend to draft an essay, caught up in conversation over plastic dining hall trays: my mind is relentlessly, unwillingly, drawn back to the seemingly-mundane topic—or question, rather—of hope.

I blame it on the collection of radical theory courses which have accumulated on my transcript. Katie Stockdale’s Hope Under Oppression, in particular, centers what it is to have and act with hope; to engage with the collective; to struggle and fight even with all the messy particularities of exactly what that means and aims towards. I have tried, failed, and failed again to manage a reprieve, to get those ideas out of my head. So, as a last resort, I’m writing about them. I claim no responsibility for the mind they end up in next—I hope they find more satisfaction in navigating them than I have.

Stockdale grounds her account in the varied notion of faith, specifically of the intrinsic, that which tethers you to the struggle, which renders all the evidence which points in the opposite direction not ignorable, but rather insubstantial. In Stockdale’s view, “intrinsic faith enables resilience not by changing the way the agent of faith relates to evidence but by rendering evidence irrelevant to one’s actions.” Faith, here, is not merely an idle longing, but an attachment that goes beyond, that demands more of you and of the world than either is capable of giving, but that we must strive towards achieving regardless. And this, then, requires practice, requires the solidarity bonds of the collective. Stockdale makes central the notion that this builds in a risk of dialogue, of a praxis which emerges from, is an embodiment of, and reinforces the faith which sustains us. It’s risky because we face the threat of being disappointed in every moment; it’s essential because we have no other option, because “to be human…[is] to reflect and act in concert with others.” In her view, if we hope, we must hope together. We must have faith not only in the deep-rooted rightness of the struggle and our role in it, but also in the collective, in this entity which—like the aims it strives towards—transcends us, shapes us in its image, relies on our commitment to function in community.

Stockdale tells us to be patient—a skill at which I have never even remotely excelled. Under her account of hope, we are to cultivate a resilience which transcends us—“us” used in a sense which marks both the individual within the collective and the collective as a whole entity in itself—which spans decades, millenia, continents and ways of being. There is an inheritance, then, to the struggle: of organizing, of drive and commitment, of reflexivity and a careful consideration of what it is to hope at all.

Organizing, to put it far too simply, is hard. There is no way to overstate that. Some might contend, in the face of its unceasing demands, that hope feels too flimsy, that there is not enough substance, enough power, held within hope itself to foster and then sustain a movement merely through its presence. I am inclined to agree—I don’t know that I trust, or feel secure in trusting, hope alone to get us that far.

We risk so much in hoping. And while Stockdale outlines how faith grounds us when all hope seems out of reach, when despair threatens to sink in, I find myself unsatisfied with her (lack of) answers regarding the pain and risk that faith leaves us open to. This resilience borne of faith and hope can, in its unwavering endurance, be painful—so painful. When the institutions we exist within turn against us, attempt to silence us, to punish us, for our refusal to be complicit in genocide, in oppression, in apartheid, it literally hurts to have hope.

Maybe I am asking too much of her, of hope—but then again, maybe that’s just it. I think we stumble when we conceive of hope as a thing which is worthy in itself. Movements are made not merely by hoping, but by doing, and while the moment in which we hope might be the moment in which we are most moved to act, it is not hope itself which drives that doing. When we hope, even when we do so well, there necessarily remains some uncertainty. It is simply untenable to expect our hoping, our faith, to attend to all the messy particularities of what it means to strive towards the realization of some emancipatory goal. The thing is, hope does not act on its own—and neither do we.

“There are countless parallels between hope and all those things which build and sustain a collective; chief of these collective-building efforts, in my view, is love.”

Emancipatory struggle is not a solitary effort, but necessarily both the product and the cultivator of the collective, in all its forms. There are countless parallels between hope and all those things which build and sustain a collective; chief of these collective-building efforts, in my view, is love.

It sounds gimmicky, I know—really, I get it—but we can see hints of it in Stockdale’s piece: she makes the claim that “people who have faith in humanity are thus committed to demonstrating the goodness of humanity… because they deeply believe in the intrinsic value of relating to others with love, kindness, and other virtues,” and that if one has “intrinsic faith in humanity, nothing people do can make me see other human beings as worthy of hatred and violence and unworthy of compassion and love.”

Self-oriented understandings don’t seem to pass this test; a possessive and selfish relationship between parent and child, wherein the latter is regarded only as a product of the former, not as a real being unto themselves, seems totally void of that faith and orientation of valuing. Approaching love as a site rife with the radical potential of going beyond our selves and attending to people as infinitely complex entities allows us to begin weaving love together with hope. Just as we hope for an outcome we are yet unable to make sense of (insofar as “liberation” varies widely depending upon subject position), we love what (and who) we are never able to truly, wholly, comprehend. This eternal striving to understand is rooted in the fact that everything and everyone we aim at loving, along with the concepts with which we strain to apprehend them, are ever-changing, forever in flux.

And there is so much love in a revolution. Every moment, every halting step towards our emancipatory vision is suffused with care for others, for the future, for the collective which makes up our present. To stand amidst peers at a protest; to spend weeks on weeks on weeks wholly occupied with the mundanities of organizing; to scream and fight and give everything you have, everything you are, to some world-altering battle; is to love, to attend to something wholly beyond ourselves. When we love, we imagine, and it is that intergenerational dream of a better world which forces our hope into action, our faith into movement, our selves into struggle.

I want so desperately to hope, and love has always helped me find my way back. I offer this not as a platitude, but as an opportunity for practice, however hope-full (-less? you tell me) it may seem.