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To the vote blue-no matter-who, Corporate stooge, military and carcerality industrial complex butt licking, oligarchy syncophantic, democrats who are lionizing Lindsay Graham: fuck you. Yes, all of you fake deep, phony centrists who are closeted fascists.

You don't have to mock him. But don't you dare pretend he was anything but evil. He sold America out for personal gain over and over and over again.

You democrats can be respectful without falsely painting Lindsay Graham as a hero. His policies were directly responsible for the hardships and deaths of our neighbors and family members and friends, including hundreds of thousands of dead Palestians, Iranians, Iraqis, refugees, not to mention those brutalized on January 6th, murdered extrajudicially by the police state, and kicked off of healthcare with his deciding vote.

So fuck you. Fuck you right in your centrist do-nothing fascism-enabling cowardly faces.

Sometimes we all feel out of place.

I’m not “strong.” I’m just someone who survived things I never should’ve had to face alone.

Who's shocked? 🙄

A report by the watchdog group Public Citizen found that 14 of 27 known corporate donors to Trump’s White House ballroom project received more than $50 billion in new or expanded federal contracts after contributing.

The report also says many donors are facing or have had federal investigations reduced or suspended.

Source: WaPo

When you’re in survival mode, isolation isn’t just to avoid people but to ensure no one can hurt you. Is it lonely? Yeah, it is. But when you’ve been wounded by those closest to you, you accept loneliness over more wounding. It’s not ideal, but often the safest bet for someone to begin to heal.

I'm training my boundaries to be stronger than my empathy.

I'm tired af

The cycle of trauma is not fully broken when you stop hurting others. It is broken when you stop hurting yourself to keep others comfortable.

And yet the world becomes safer every time someone refuses to hand their pain to the next person.

Sometimes it is as simple, and as difficult, as being hurt and choosing not to make the next person pay for what the last one did.

And some people spend their whole lives becoming the safety they once searched for...myself included.

ADHD isn’t “oops, I got distracted.”

It’s staring at a sink full of dishes like it’s a hostage negotiation.

It’s forgetting to eat, avoiding the doctor for six months, and treating basic day-to-day human survival tasks like a side quest in a cursed video game.

Your brain doesn’t just lose focus.

It loses custody of your entire life for stretches at a time.

REST IN POWER Marjane Satrapi. 💔

Repeat after me:

you were beautiful before anyone ever noticed you & you’ll remain beautiful in their absence

I think one of the biggest lies of adulthood is pretending we are all “doing okay” because we answered emails on time.

Meanwhile half the population is one bounced payment, one breakup, one diagnosis, one dead phone battery away from walking directly into the ocean like a Victorian ghost.

People keep calling this era “burnout” like we all just forgot to stretch or something.

Nah.

This is spiritual asbestos.

This is what happens when human beings are asked to metabolize economic dread, algorithmic loneliness, climate grief, political psychosis, and the emotional equivalent of 14 open browser tabs while still replying “haha no worries!” in Slack.

Everybody I know is fighting the urge to disappear in one way or another.

Some people disappear into work.

Some disappear into substances.

Some disappear into irony.

Some disappear into situationships with people who text like Civil War widows.

Some disappear into wellness culture and start speaking exclusively in podcast quotes and magnesium supplements.

And some of us just stare at the ceiling at 2:13 a.m. trying to convince ourselves that surviving another Thursday is a revolutionary act.

The darkly funny part is society keeps rewarding people for abandoning themselves efficiently.

“Wow you’re handling everything so well.”

Brother I am operating entirely on nicotine-free panic and ancestral dissociation.

But I guess there is something strangely sacred about continuing anyway. About refusing to fully vanish. About dragging your tired spirit through another morning even when your internal monologue sounds like a foreclosure notice narrated by Morgan Freeman.

Maybe that’s what being alive is right now.

Not thriving.

Just fighting disappearance with small stubborn acts of return.

Repeat after me:

I am allowed to outgrow the identity that was shaped by fear and choose one shaped by truth.

People can only meet you as deeply as they’ve met themselves.

The majority of the men whom I taught and mentored behind the walls of San Quentin State Penitentiary for 11 years aren't just missing one parental figure. They were often missing an entire familial system of support that as a justice impacted refugee who left his homeland could relate to inherently.

Not a week goes by that I do not think about them.

Healing is not always soft.

Sometimes it arrives as nausea. As grief. As the nervous system finally unclenching enough to realize what it normalized in survival mode. Public health researchers talk about trauma adaptation like it is merely behavioral, but the body keeps score in far more humiliating ways than statistics can capture. We confuse familiarity for safety. We beg for love from people who were only ever teaching our wounds how to become fluent in abandonment.

And one day, without warning, the fog lifts.

You reread old messages. Revisit old rooms in your memory. Remember the ways you shrank yourself to stay chosen. The ways your body tightened before certain phone calls. The bargaining. The over-explaining. The performance of worthiness. And disgust emerges ... not because you were weak, but because your psyche is finally healthy enough to recognize what your survival instincts once renamed as intimacy.

Krishnamurti once spoke about how it is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. The same is true of love. There is nothing noble about adapting beautifully to emotional deprivation. Sometimes healing means becoming incapable of tolerating what you once romanticized.

But if we stop there, healing curdles into cynicism.

The goal is not to become disgusted with your own tenderness. The goal is to protect it better. To understand that the parts of you which begged were often the youngest parts. The exile parts. The refugee parts. The child parts trying to negotiate safety inside systems and relationships organized around scarcity, ego, domination, or emotional illiteracy.

Real healing is when disgust transforms into discernment.

When your nervous system no longer mistakes anxiety for chemistry. When peace stops feeling boring. When reciprocity no longer feels suspicious. When you stop trying to earn the right to exist inside someone else’s heart.

And perhaps the deepest act of recovery is this: refusing to let the people who mishandled your love convince you that love itself was the problem.

Healing comes with disgust.

Real disgust.

You’ll look back and be repulsed by the people who you once begged for love.

Everyone needs someone they can call when they're suffering in silence who doesn't want anything from them.

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