Saturday Substack
I chose rest today.
Saturday Substack
Beloved—
For most of my life, I lived in my head because that was the safest place I knew. Thinking became shelter. Theory became camouflage. I learned early that I was not like the people around me, that my body carried a different frequency, a different grammar. I still feel it now, tucked into the rural hills of Western New York—alien, out of phase, marked by difference.
Lately, I’ve been keeping late hours. Cooking for students. Feeding bodies and then staying up to talk about the world as it is—uncertain, terror-soaked, bent by accelerating fascist folds that pretend they are new but are simply louder now. I cook. We eat. We pass herbs. We linger. We imagine what might still be possible here in Alfred, even as the ground trembles beneath us.
I am healing from white betrayal. And some white folks—unexpectedly, imperfectly—are showing up to model something else. Not innocence. Not absolution. Practice. Presence. I am learning how to be in real time, without the armor of performance.
I am unraveling from years of intense academic training—a kind of socialization that quietly tutors us into genocidal thinking: abstraction without accountability, brilliance without care, mastery without love. I am letting that training fall away from my nervous system, piece by piece.
After my mental health crisis in 2025—after 6.5 years of targeted harassment by the extreme right, including neo-Nazis, Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and their digital militias—I entered four distinct modalities of healing. I was pushed to the margins of the margins by white-serving institutions that know how to protect themselves better than they know how to protect people. I am still learning how inherited complex trauma lives in the body, how it scripts behavior, how it sharpens fear into reflex.
In search of stable housing as a Trans refugee, I took a job at a church knowing full well that my vocation has always been prophetic. I believed—perhaps stubbornly—that what the church needs, and what we need, is a return to formation: slow, embodied, relational work that actually changes how we live.
Though I am no longer situated within a white-serving institution, I am being held by ecumenical communities—Richmond Hill, The Community of the Holy Trinity—who are teaching me how to live more fully into my monastic path: mendicant life, community-supported scholarship, prayer stitched to practice. Unitarian Universalists are holding me. Jewish friends are holding me. Buddhists keep appearing, quietly, like bells. I am paying attention.
An academic partner once told me, when I was thinking too hard about belonging: return to becoming. It turns out my becoming is teaching me how to belong. Nikki has always known this. Some people are light before they are language.
Today, I needed rest.
Late nights cooking, eating, connecting—up past midnight, awake before sunrise. In my Neuroscience Narrative Healing cohort earlier last fall, I named an intention to wake earlier. I’ve always needed a lot of sleep. Now that my nervous system has softened—no longer catastrophically anxious, though still acquainted with existential dread—I am waking earlier without panic. That feels like a small miracle.
I took a long siesta after a coffee visit. People still stop by The Hull House for coffee. And if not here, I go to Noonday. It’s the next best thing. Hospitality keeps teaching me what theory never could.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve theorized another possible world. But alongside traditional psychotherapy, I’ve been engaging neuroscience narrative healing with Liz Morrison—cohort-based, held by sacred trust. We are a small group. Each of us carrying different violences: work violence, emotional violence, structural violence, intimate harm. We are healing together by returning to ourselves, by re-patterning neural pathways that learned to survive too well.
As a survivor of a traumatic brain injury—including a brain aneurysm—I’ve long been curious about brain science. When I’m in Zurich, I plan to connect with researchers working on the neuro-epigenetics of inherited generational trauma. The body remembers what history tries to erase.
Today, I felt grounded in my body—something I’m grateful to Air for modeling. I go outside every day in some capacity. Friends insist on it. Even with bouts of extreme agoraphobia. Being hunted does something to the nervous system. So does living in this moment.
I needed rest today because the hate mail has increased. Because vigilance is tiring. Because vocation requires grounding. Because following the Way—this pilgrimage of metanoia—demands rest as much as refusal.
I see more carefully now, having stepped back from hegemonic academic bullshit. I listen for wisdom again. I am returning to my teachers, my primary intellectual partner, and to the Jews in my life who are teaching me anti-Zionist, embodied healing practices rooted in memory, refusal, and life.
Tonight, I end the day with a glass of red wine and Buena Vista Social Club. I’ll cook again for students—simple food, peasant food. Rice and beans. Rancho Gordo beans. Thrive staples. Food that knows where it comes from. I’m grateful to write toward you in this moment of accelerating collapse—which has always been here; we can just see it now.
Next week, I’ll pilot Metanoia Meals in DC. On April 20, 2015, at 8:00am—the day of my PhD defense—I knew I was minted with three little letters that would signify folds of epistemic violence. This past April 20, 2025, I made a conscious pivot toward social repair in everything I do. Ten years later, that moment of awareness still organizes my life. I will eat with strangers next week and practice in community what I call an ethics of en conjunto.
I see the lack of trust in Alfred. I see how white-serving institutions protect assets instead of people. This land is not innocent. There is no historical memory here, only selective forgetting. So I am practicing what I preach: repair meals across the country and beyond. I’ve been invited into people’s homes. The first meal is next week.
Stay tuned for what is emerging through Our Collective Becoming.
I am grateful for community-supported scholarship—for the way it lets me live my vocation with people, not above them.
Today was a rest day.
I hope you rested too.
And if you didn’t—tomorrow is another chance to choose yourself, to return to yourself, to begin again.