Saturday Substack: Coffee + Sativa
Shelter, Healing, and Abolition
They say Alfred, NY is the place where people come to heal. I want to believe that. I need to believe that. And yet, my experience here has been triggering, traumatizing, violent. This is the pattern of the dominant culture: violence becomes the air we breathe, and somehow we are expected to call it safety.
I’ve internalized oppression so deeply that my anxiety is catastrophic. For over a week, I have not left the house. Today, though, I stepped outside—barefoot in my bamboo pants and black tank—and stood in my yard. My partner tells me that when I can learn to co-regulate with Pachamama, I can begin to heal the wounded parts of me.
We are so disconnected from ourselves, from the land, from one another. I don’t always know how to find shelter in another. And yet, that is my work: to learn how to trust again, to sow seeds of connection in the face of gendercide, in the face of annihilation of all that is True, Good, and Beautiful.
They say the gold is where the wounds are.
Six and a half years of targeted harassment has taught me what it is to carry Complex PTSD in my body, to be hijacked and thrown out of my window of tolerance. Healing has not been linear. It has been in fits and starts, moments of progress and moments of collapse.
This past weekend, when Air and I were at Foster Lake, they told me I needed a limpia—a spiritual cleansing from my cultural heritage. They were right. They are always right. I reached out to a curandera and Toltec medicine woman, a colleague and healer, to help me begin the process of cleansing the violence etched into my bones.
I won’t share the details here. Some things are not for public consumption. But I will tell you this: intergenerational trauma lives in our genes, our bones, our very materiality. And it can be transmuted.
I wrote my PhD dissertation at the intersections of Deleuze and Anzaldúa, arguing that the body is always becoming. Out of that work I began to articulate an ontology of becoming. And this is my life’s work: to live into forever becoming, to heal my family line, to compost violence into love.
I am at the end of my family line. My pivot to the work of social repair is also a pivot away from violence and toward each other. This is abolition—not simply the undoing of prisons and police, but the refusal of the logics of domination in our bodies, our families, our communities. Abolition is the practice of composting rage and anger into expansive acts of care and love, what José Esteban Muñoz might call a queer utopia.
That is my work. And it is our work, if we can bear it together.
People either love me or hate me. I disrupt decorum. It’s because I name what I see—in myself, in the world. And what I see is terror. Terror that I have embodied and internalized, terror that comes out sideways as fear and anxiety.
Becoming human has been a terrifying journey. And yet, my great hope is this: that in the face of accelerating collapse, we might imagine repair.
Can I find shelter in another? Can I risk being vulnerable enough to tell you how terrified I am of the stories I hear and the violence I see? I’m going to try like hell.
This is the abolitionist imagination I want to live into: that we might discover ourselves and the lives we want to live, not in spite of collapse, but in the work of repair that sutures us to one another.
I hope you will stay with me on this path.
✨ Ritual Exhale:
Breathe in violence.
Breathe out repair.
Breathe in grief.
Breathe out love.
Breathe in collapse.
Breathe out abolition.