against boundaries and therapy speak (or... fuck your goddamn oxygen mask)

CONTENT WARNING: This piece very vaguely, very briefly mentions sexual assault, and the mention of suicide as a struggle for lonely people.

I sometimes pray that whoever or whatever is up there will stop putting me in challenging situations for just a little while. I have not yet had that prayer answered, and at this point it does feel like I’m being dommed by the universe—her Demonia combats on my face, smushed into the ground, making eye contact with me as I wriggle around, smiling and saying I’m gonna learn a lesson today. I guess, as a former domme myself, I can respect that she’s committed to my growth through practice. Nevertheless… I digress. 

There are few pop cultural adages I loathe more than “You have to put your own oxygen mask on first.” I get the sentiment. You can’t help anyone else if you’re not breathing, and therefore not alive. But it’s the contexts in which people use it that rub me the wrong way and strike me as incredibly incorrect and even cruel. The way most people throw it around, it is used as a selfish excuse for why you shouldn’t have to help someone with their oxygen mask at all. And while not everyone who has treated me poorly when I didn’t deserve to be treated that way at all has used this exact phrasing, the devil is in the details—the ways they feel about me have been in the selfish nuances. 

Lately, I have experienced much betrayal. I’ve never used that word in my life before now, and in fact have refused to use, much to my therapist’s confusion and exasperation in session. You’ve been hurt so deeply, and you still wouldn’t use ‘betrayal’ here? they said to me through the Zoom screen, raising an eyebrow, three and a half days after my birthday—which I had just finished explaining I had spent all of sobbing from having been treated so poorly by people who have been in my life for years and have heard me talk about how difficult that day is for me, for many reasons.

Among them is that my parents stopped celebrating my birthday after I turned five, because I leaned too far into the cake and my hair caught on fire. How could you let that happen?! And they said it was my fault. Among them is that when I turned 15, someone who called themself my best friend decided the gift they’d give me was pinning me down to their bed, screaming and crying and saying no, and take something from me that I did not want to give, because If you don’t help me practice, how will I ever be prepared for the real thing?! And they said it was my fault. 

My birthday has never been mine. It has belonged to trauma and heartbreak. I still have not reclaimed it and I don’t know if or when I will. Someday I’ll stop caring, I think. Someday I won’t have to care about people showing up for me on one specific day of the year that feels hard because I’ll already have a life so abundant with love and reciprocity that I don’t need friends to acknowledge me in a particular way on a particular hour. In fact, I already feel much closer to that life, because I have spent the last month and a half ripping through my life like the tornado that took Dorothy from Kansas to Oz and killed the Wicked Witch of the East—changing her life and her heart forever, and the the entirety of Oz, too—in one blow. 

I mean this, of course, in the best way possible. The Talking Heads sang of burning down the house, and Tegan and Sara sang, “You've been planning to remember this so nothing will be lost in the end / Then you burn, burn, burn your life down.” Now most people might consider these acts of arson to be brought on by mental breakdowns or insanity. I plead the fifth. Perhaps I have entered a brief period of insanity, but if what has spurred me to change my life is instability it’s certainly not lack of clarity. I’ve never felt so clear in my life. Something in me woke up, like a dragon in a cave guarding treasure who had been asleep for a thousand years and suddenly opened its eyes to find it was sitting on a pile of gold and had everything it needed right there all along, so close to its chest. In the last month and a half, I have divested from and taken large leaps back from more friendships than in the entirety of my life. I’m experiencing something that must be what the old guard of Hollywood loved to write into protagonists in romance: gumption. 

I have stopped acting like the best friend in a movie who only has a B-plot, and accepted my main character-hood. You’re meant to be the leading person of your own life, not take a backseat to make everyone else happy just because you love them. And so I finally stopped. Over two decades of letting my trauma responses lead when people tried to make me feel small, gone in a flash of smoke as if a dragon—the one I’ve been all along—huffed them away.

I will not fawn towards people who treat me badly and give me less care than I deserve in difficult situations when I work so diligently to give everyone I love as much intention, attention, generosity, and grace as possible.

I want to say I don’t know why it took me so long to get here but I do. 

When you’re taught from a very young age that people can treat you like shit but tell you that they love you, and that’s what love is, you believe it. There’s a bittersweetly vulnerable scene from the movie Pretty Woman that’s haunted me quite literally my whole life, and I’ve likely thought about it every day since childhood. My criticism’s of the movie’s portrayal of sex work aside, it’s always resonated with me as a kid who came from poverty and violence, never experienced real romantic love and accepted very little from people because of their upbringing. Vivian (played by a young, enchanting Julia Roberts who can sing Prince in a bubble bath like nobody’s business), the protagonist who’s a young woman who’s been doing sex work in Los Angeles to survive since her dreams fell through, is being paid to spend the week with a lonely older man and keep him company. Throughout their brief foray, they break boundaries they’ve both set, falling for each other. One night, while lying in bed, he expresses shock that she hasn’t believed in herself more—because he thinks she’s brilliant. (Again, I resent the idea that sex workers could or should be more than that. You can be brilliant and a slut for pay! Bite me.) Softly, she says, “People put you down enough, you start to believe it. The bad stuff is easier to believe. You ever notice that?" God, I wish I didn’t. 

Of course I’ve had the relationship patterns I’ve had. It’s just a neural pathway issue. Three decades of mostly having people in my life who gave me the better half of the bad and told me that was the best that I deserved, and you really do start to believe that’s all you’re ever going to get. So even though you have dreams and hopes about being loved the way you love, you settle. You cave. Maybe you don’t. But I did. 

And looking back on who I was before December of 2025, I feel so much shame. Only this time, for the first time in my life, I haven’t let that shame lead me down a yellow brick road towards more of the same sparkly, green skylines in the distance that fool me with a mirage that tells me it will make my life better in the ways I desire. I have taken the ruby slippers for myself and tapped all the way home. The knowledge of how to come back to myself has always been here. It was just so buried. I find it right here in the center of my chest, and in the pit of my stomach. Like a peach tree seed that’s taken root and blossomed. There all along, but now realized and listened to. 

Yet a month and a half ago, it felt like having the kind of life I wanted—one full of reciprocal love and care from people who show up for me as much as I show up for them—was perhaps still years away from coming to fruition. I felt broken and I felt incapable of changing, as I'd tried and "failed" so many times, continuing to keep loving the wrong people even if I was no longer dating them or fucking them but just doing them myriad favors and laying myself down a doormat for them to step on as they entered their homes with people they put more effort into, who they clearly think deserve it more than I do. I am not a victim complex person, believe you me. So this framing and this feeling felt astonishingly bad to have on loop in my head.

When I finally accepted that it wasn't that I don't deserve love, but just that I was focusing on many of the wrong people in my life, chasing friends and acquaintances who don’t see me and can’t give me what I need, I realized the only thing I needed to actually do to stop being a doormat was to stand the fuck up. I was not consistently considering that my own pain and my own desires mattered just as much as it mattered to consider others’ and I was suffering constantly for it. But this solar return has scrubbed the roses from my eyes and forced me to be even more demanding of reciprocity—and that I must walk away when someone shows me they think they can get away with treating me badly and then continue on as if I'm too kind or naive to notice or do much about it.

I have put this into action fiercely, because I have stopped internally fucking around about what I deserve. No bones about it, I cannot allow the inside of my already too crowded head, my too tight chest, to keep feeling like I did for the first three decades of my life. I will not collapse under the weight of shame. I will release myself from pushing the boulder up the hill.

This has partially been due to watching my friends, some of the most brilliant people in the world, accept lesser love and poor treatment as well and feeling absolutely baffled about why they would do that—saying to myself, I would never accept that little... and then realizing how mortifying it is that I had been.

While lying on a Too White Pillow, I asked a former friend I have since stepped back from, too, heaving into the phone, if I was being a brat and making a mountain out of a molehill.

Elly, I would tell you if you were being dramatic about something that doesn’t matter, or if your expectations were unreasonable. But I think you and I both know this is not about people forgetting your birthday, they started. And I knew exactly where they were going because it was a truth I’d already admitted out loud earlier that day while sending a voice note to my low capacity lesbian group chat trying to figure out why I was freaking out about several of my oldest friends not remembering my birthday. If certain people you love made more of an effort to consider you on the other 364 days of the year, I don’t think you’d feel bothered at all about this one.

They were correct. It wasn’t people I love seemingly not caring about my birthday. It was just one day that represented much larger ways I haven’t been cared for in my moments of need, when almost everyone in my life comes to me first the second they have an emergency. And I have indulged the crisis texts at 2 am. And 7 am. And 11 am. And 9 pm. I have shown up to the hospital 45 miles away and stayed by many a side and advocated for their proper care in the emergency room, preventing deaths. I have gotten to someone's door at the exact moment they needed a homecooked meal and a hug after being sexually assaulted. I have gone through 33,000 of Not My Own texts to help a friend find evidence that someone was publicly defaming them and lying about things they have receipts for, despite it fucking ruining my brain because of ties to my own trauma.

So I know that when I ask for people to, let's say in conflict, ask me questions instead of making terrible assumptions of me, or pick up my phone calls in an emergency situation and help me evade [redacted] things I cannot talk about on the internet, I'm very aware that I am not asking for that much. I wouldn't be were I a regular person who is not very generous. And so I definitely know I deserve more as the person who for decades has shown up for just about anyone special to me who has asked. I simply know that real care requires sacrifice and discomfort sometimes.

I just want more people who reach out to me and plan time with me when there’s no problem I can help them solve or emergency they need support with. Is that too much? So in the last month, I had to come to terms with something I have spent my whole life denying: Care is a finite resource. 

This is, actually, an undeniable truth, but it took an utter and complete lack of care from a majority of the people I was pouring it into for me to realize that my own cup was empty, and I had fucked up even worse than I’d ever thought possible. 15 years of good therapy, including 5 years total of intensive trauma therapy, and 7 different modalities, and it still took me sobbing alone in a hotel room on my birthday in my thirties for me to finally Really Get It that I was not budgeting my care well at all, and there was no choice but to make the change of all time. 

I am now actively practicing through my actions and who I do and do not show up for, whose texts I do not answer, and whose crises I don’t offer my support through, that I don’t have to take the backseat in my own life.

I don’t have to sleep on the gold. I certainly don’t have to believe all of the people who have put me down and tried to shrink me because they saw how big I could actually be and felt so threatened that convincing me to be small was the only way that they could benefit from my generosity and care without taking accountability for all the ways they feel lesser to me. I love myself too much to let this continue, and so I stopped letting it continue. A wise meme once told me that you forge your own chains, and I am deeply aware of that truth. 

The oxygen mask has shown up in many devastating and heartbreaking ways over the years, but especially recently. Abandoning me in life or death situations after offering to help me, simply because they felt tired or scared, or whatever. Blowing up a friendship by making poor decisions from a place of trauma instead of a place of care. I won’t list all of the situations, because there would be too many to name, and it would be pointless, and quite honestly no one who has hurt me recently deserves more of my time and space on the page than this. My conflict is for the confines of my text messages and the floor pillows I sit on during mediation sessions where I am not the third party holding the hands of all involved for once, because I am one of the hands being held.

So let's consider the mask. If we go off the notion that you really do have to secure your own oxygen mask first, then I believe you should secure it as quickly and efficiently as possible so that you can help someone else with theirs. What’s the point of breathing if you don’t immediately make sure the other people around you are breathing, too, so that you can all make sure the people behind and in front of you and to the left or right of you are also alive and taken care of? 

Despite this, I’ve heard people use this phrase or even simply embody the concept of it when justifying why they just can’t show up for friends because they’re dealing with every type of circumstance that, in my mind—as someone who would traverse each level of hell for my loved ones—feel way more flexible than made out to be. 

Sure, sometimes you really do just need a day to focus on only yourself. But a whole life of withholding support and care from others because you feel overwhelmed by the responsibility of caring about another human being? That sounds really lonely. 

If you train your brain and body to always defer responsibility and care, it will always be your pattern. And I see people who claim radical politics move through the world this way constantly. At this point, I have nothing kind to say about it. I’ve seen too much. In recent weeks, I’ve been told by people who constantly claim community care in language do things like say no to me when I asked them for five minutes to help immigrants detained by ICE get out of detention. I’ve been told that their safety is more important than mine by white privileged people with resources and stability I don’t have, who are not at risk in the same way that I am doing the kinds of community organizing and frontline work I do to address authoritarianism and fascism head on. I have seen my queer friends of color with dark skin be painted as the aggressor by white trans people who claim victimhood simply by virtue of having One Marginalized Identity that apparently grants them the right to be abusive and manipulative for their own benefit then leave my friends shattered and nearly inconsolable. 

I have seen the absolute worst of humanity and I have decided that not everyone is actually deserving of my magic, my generosity. I have also decided that a lot of people are probably going to the ninth level of hell, and not the parts that Hozier or Anaïs Mitchell wrote about so well, but the areas that can’t even be described because they’re just full of flesh eating demons reciting dramatic readings of Benson Boone songs to you. Unless of course all ye who enter here repent and take responsibility for your actions! But most people won’t do that. At least probably not for years down the line. And even if they do, it won’t matter to me because in the context of the situations that I or my systemically harmed and targeted friends have been treated poorly in, they let me know that they are not safe enough people to make the mistake of giving my trust to again. That is deeply sad to me. I want to believe in people's ability to create and sustain a world that runs on transformative justice. Unfortunately, I have not seen the proof or the pudding, hey where the fuck did y'all put that pudding?!

And nevertheless, I have accepted this. I have moved on, and I am running towards myself at lightning speed, knowing, as Miss Williams herself sang, "Now I'm the one's who's gotta love me differently." (And yes, Alex Reads Tarot reads the shit out of me, too.)

Often during my life, I have been absolutely baffled by the way that people seem to think about relationships and other people, so seen through the ways they treat them. My default state of being is wishing other people well, and wanting to act in ways that positively affect people. This is different from being concerned about what others think of me, or what many have come to know and call “people pleasing.” I am simply talking about the thought process and act of having the basic empathy to know how I impact other people around me and wanting to be as intentional as possible while still taking care of my own needs. 

That prosocial behavior (the scientific term for it) seems to be lost on many people, and I genuinely believe it’s why we’re in all of the horrible situations we’re in here on our spinning rock in space rapidly approaching an intense revolution, at least I hope if we can get our goddamn shit together—including but not limited to the mass ICE raids taking immigrants out of their homes and workplaces, dragging people who are here legally, in fact, through violence just because, people being executed by those same members of the state in the streets because the mighty few with bravery (that many more people should be stepping up to exhibit) put their bodies on the line.

What is unfolding in the world now is unfolding because of cowardice in the face of cruelty. I have family that’s survived genocide in Palestine and Lebanon. I have ancestors who survived the camps in Ukraine-Russia and Germany. I am deeply tied to histories of genocide and mass state harm by strong threads that I have studied all my life—even majoring in it as one of my many majors in college, because I wanted to understand how we got to where we are, and that felt like the most obvious place to start. The history of this settler state launching genocide against Indigenous people. And all the rest around the world that’s come after. Something burned into my brain and heart is a plaque from the wall next to train parts at a Holocaust museum I once visited years ago.

The Holocaust also happened because of the people who built the trains and clocked into work that day to run them.

Cowardice in the face of cruelty leads to people carrying on with business as usual, doing their day jobs without question, being part of the blueprints to harm because they are too frozen to do otherwise. Not wanting to lose the lives they’ve built for themselves. Choosing their comfort over someone else’s safety. Times they are not a-changin’ all that much. We never reinvent the wheel. We clearly just keep chugging along, the scenery of the rich tapestries of the mountains and grasslands passing us by through the windows, hoping that wherever we’re going leads us somewhere different, despite the fact that we are not changing the gears or dismantling the train altogether.

Because the truth is it’s not taking us where we want to go. It’s taking us further away from revolution as long as we fail to build solidarity with each other and forgo the selfishness. 

I’ve thought a lot about this in the last several weeks as I’ve been writing, and this is the thought I keep coming back to at the end of every day when I've had to navigate frustrating situations with thoughtless, careless people who are not taking my experience into consideration the way I am theirs...

The less work that so many people do to show up as safe, consistent community members and friends, the more labor the rest of us take on and are more stretched thin. 

This helps no one. Being in relationship with each other does not exist in a bubble outside of racialized, white “supremacist” capitalism. I think doing both physical and emotional labor and creating safety for each other within our communities is quite literally what life is about. I cannot cognitive behavioral therapy my way out of my exhaustion. I have tried and I can’t. I don’t want to shift my perspective that it’s hard to be someone who shows up consistently as a giver when most people want to be takers, instead of givers and receivers. And believe you me, I have had to put in work this year to become a receiver when I have spent my whole life priding myself on my hyperindependence and ability to handle anything alone if I have to. I don’t think it’s fair at all for some people to be so inconsistent, or uncommunicative, or lacking the ability to take initiative (as just a few examples) that everyone else around them has to try harder to make relationships function.

When I’m having a hard time and know that I need space before I can show up for my people, I do something that helps me feel grounded. I take the hour or five hours and I return to center. Obviously, I’m usually going to tell a friend I can’t be The Person they turn to for an emergency if I’m experiencing something truly hellish myself, because it’s going to be a difficult experience for me and also likely make it less possible for me to be reliable for them. But I’m also in the business of being discerning about when I can withstand a little discomfort to help someone, because there’s always a way to balance your own hell and another’s when someone needs you. 

And let me tell you something about leaning into this lifestyle:

If you are someone who chooses individualism and selfishness over solidarity in most moments, you are going to end up alone, and you will not survive the revolution.

The pathologizing and therapy speak to excuse actual community harm has gone too far. It has been weaponized egregiously to minimize outrageous levels of selfishness—not just by white people, though I do mainly witness white people weaponizing language like “boundaries” and “self care” to actively Nope The Fuck Out of accountability, and labor and love they owe more vulnerable, less privileged and materially-resourced people—but also by anyone who has internalized white supremacy and the entitlement of it all to the point that they are just Putting My Own Oxygen Mask On First < 3 it up to levels previously unseen by man. Give me a fucking break, my dude. Say that type of shit to me about how your "emotional boundaries" are more important than my literal safety in a life or death situation when you're supposed to be my friend and we're not even in a fight or anything, and I will leave you right where you are and you can fucking hitch-hike to wherever the hell you think you're on the road to. Way down, Hadestown!

Several weeks ago on Twitter (no, I will not call it X), there was discourse over how difficult it really is to text a friend back. A lot of people made good points about how depression and social anxiety work, and that the world is falling apart so maybe texting back a friend can’t be the priority right now. To that, I say: we actually do owe the people we claim to love the bare minimum communication. 

Hanif Abdurraqib, both one of my favorite writers and someone who I know to be a truly good friend through our mutual friends, wrote about this later that week. “I believe fully in the reality that friendship is a privilege, any kind of intimacy with other people is a privilege in that it isn’t promised to any of us,” he says. “But to be in relationship and community with others is also a necessity – and it requires a lot of us, and it requires a lot of those we choose to love and my biggest concern is that nothing is sacred enough anymore for anyone to feel like they want to rise to a standard of affection or care…” 

Another favorite writer who I also have mutual friends with, Ashley C. Ford, spoke about another issue orbiting this in relationships on a podcast released by Glennon Doyle this week.

A few people I love have recently had to tell me to keep my standards high but my expectations low. I resent that I should have to do that. I’m trying. But that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t feel awful to lower my already very low expectations for basic consideration just because other people are neglecting the sacredness of it. And to be honest, I do not believe that many of you are even prepared for the leftist revolution you claim to want publicly, not even in the slightest. Because it’s already “too hard” for you to do basic things to keep your fellow humans safe and cared for: wearing a mask on public transportation to prevent illness, taking COVID or flu tests before seeing your loved ones for holidays to make sure you don’t get anyone sick because we have been abandoned by the state when it comes to many things but especially public health (and disease is a tool of colonialism that aids in genocide, by the way, for all of you who LOVE to wear keffiyehs but refuse to mask!) Oh, and sitting in your discomfort long enough to send one text message that says, “hey I’m dealing with a lot right now but love you and will text when I feel a little less overwhelmed <3” or something. SOMETHING! 

Dealing with a specifically difficult situation in your life? Don’t face it alone. Spend a moment to write out a message like, “hey [X THING] is happening, so I’m overwhelmed… maybe we can grab coffee sometime soon? I could really use the support.” It doesn’t have to be coffee! Make a plan to go sit in someone’s living room. Accompany them while grocery shopping. Maybe that isn’t for everyone. Perhaps some people who have left do find it overbearing that I’m constantly offering to cook us dinner, or help clean their apartments. 

If you’re all actually so obsessed with the intimacy present in Heated Rivalry, apparently (which yes, I did write an essay all about), I dare you to grab life by the lapel and create that kind of intimacy and care in your own life. In your own backyard! Where your grass is green. And you find yourself... in a beautiful house. With a beautiful wife, even?!

I dare you to text your friends to talk through an issue you have even though you fear it might be too scary.

I dare you to take a pause in an angry moment and, instead of saying that cruel thing you feel entitled to get off your chest, you withhold, and ask for some time to cool down, and you do not put your desire to get the discomfort over with over someone else's right to be safe.

I dare you to tell people when you need help with groceries, and check in with the people you claim to love more than once a month, just because well I guess they'd reach out if they needed me.

Do you have any idea how many people kill themselves because they were overwhelmed and didn't actually know how to say it in the moment, and needed people who loved them to do more? I am so glad that it's been years since I was consumed by that and tried to end things. I am so lucky that I have done so much work to heal.

i am running into a new year
and the old years blow back
like a wind
that i catch in my hair
like strong fingers like
all my old promises and
it will be hard to let go
of what i said to myself
about myself
when i was sixteen and
twentysix and thirtysix
even thirtysix but
i am running into a new year
and i beg what i love and
i leave to forgive me

—Lucille Clifton, Good Woman: Poems and A Memoir 1969-1980

I will believe that you want to mirror that intimacy in your lives when I see the evidence, your honor! This ain’t a scene it’s a goddamn call-in. 

Communicating directly with each other, asking for help, asking questions when we don’t understand where another person is coming from, checking in on people when we know they are having a hard week instead of simply ‘hearting’ the close friends Instagram story… this is bare minimum love to me, and I will not accept less than it, let alone this as the maximum care given to me. 

And in fact, when I did stop accepting less than it, I found that the Big and Bold and Extremely Reciprocal kinds of love and affection I already give and receive have been seeking me, too. I was looking for them in the wrong places, but when I stopped doing that, they found me in the right ones. 

Now, I have prioritized my friends like Mia, who on a random Sunday in January shows up to my door with a Red Bull and a full bag of freshly foraged shiitake mushrooms from the grocery store, as requested, in a quite literal life or death situation. We sit on my couch together while she croons to my cat, and we exchange chisme about awful people in the literary scene whose work is famous for its nuance but who can’t understand why they’re shitty people for the ways they treat people that they hook up with, and about white people who claim to be community organizers who can’t be fucked to take five minutes of their time to do a good deed for an immigrant who might die in detention, because they just need to shake ass at the club because “it’s been a really hard year for me.” We write our respective essays, both about letting people treat us poorly again and again and again and again, until we just finally... stopped.

I have prioritized friends like Em, who lets me call them at 7 am where they are in Oregon when I’ve just been treated terribly by someone I trusted deeply, and let me cry and scream WHY THE FUCK AM I EXPERIENCING THE SHIT THAT BUFFY EXPERIENCES IN SEASON 6 RIGHT NOW? THIS SHOULD NOT BE HAPPENING TO SOMEONE AS GENEROUS AS I AM. into the phone, and answer me with affirmations about how much better I deserve. 

I have prioritized friends like Maria who give me medical supplies for me to redistribute them to disabled people so I don’t have to spend money without necessity and in exchange make her and her sick kids homemade matzo ball soup as medicine—so we can exist outside of the language of capitalism for a moment, together. I prioritize friends who show up intentionally in conflict and talk through the hard things, then take steps to make changes so we can repair, approaching me in good faith instead of automatically assuming harmful intent. 

Among many others, I have re-prioritized friends of over a decade like Carter who send my own lines of poetry to me and remind me that I am a badass who has always known how to wield a word like a sword, and people should be more careful with me lest it gets pointed at their chest—and it’s deserved. I continued to prioritize friends like Arielle, who asked if I want to come stay in their guest bedroom for a while, and bring my cat, so that I’m not so alone in a major moment of need when my life is shifting in ways I can’t control and I just have to let the scary things happen and do my best. Unfortunately, that didn't work out.

But I realized, at least, I don’t have to do this alone. Or even with people stepping on the cape I wear to try to help them in dangerous situations, stopping me from flying and choking me out in the process, all from their own selfishness and lack of respect for me. 

I can do it with the right people by my side, who love me in action and not just in words.

Who create safety for me because they see me. And they want to show me through love that they are grateful that I help them feel seen. 

That is bare minimum love. And in 2026 and beyond, we are simply demanding the most generous forms of love and leaving behind anything that refuses it by default. No more oxygen masks. Fuck your goddamn oxygen mask. And mine too. 

If we allow ourselves to excuse the ways we let each other down by utilizing therapy speak or social justice terms, I don’t think there’s much hope for community care. 

If you’re having a hard time balancing everything in your life and being a human while consuming news, or maybe even literally being out in the streets fighting the good fight, you owe it to the people you claim to love to tell them what is going on, and get curious about how you can navigate it TOGETHER. I do. It isn’t so difficult. 

When I’m having a hard time mentally or emotionally, I let my friends know what I’m going through, so even if I disappear for a bit, they still have the opportunity to care for me within that context. People can’t care if you don’t let them in. So let someone in. 

As my former friend Arielle told me on the phone in November... Pulling back from people who don’t know how to or don’t care to hold you correctly doesn’t mean you’re being the least generous version of yourself. It just means you’re being a version of yourself who can be more generous. When people show you who they are, believe them.

Real healing requires that I learn how to go in the direction of places I am celebrated, not just tolerated.

I am so tired of being tolerated or mistreated when I know there are so many people out there trying to hand me flowers, and I have vases that need bouquets. 

I am done wasting my time. If you refuse to see that I deserve so much better—and that we all do, in fact—I'm on my way elsewhere. I have places to go, and people to support. I have dreams to pull out of my head and breathe into reality. I have a whole better world to build with people who have the same blueprints I do, and we're standing on the scaffolding together, holding each other up steady beams.

In one of my favorite songs by K. Flay, on top of a wicked beat that you can, if you’re me, choreograph a whole figure skating routine about anguish to, she sings: “I'm learning to live / I'm trying to be better / I'm learning to give / But I don't know if I'm a giver.”

I need fuel in the tank and care in my cup, and I am realizing in these terrifying days full of authoritarian regimes and selfishness disguised under a cloak of false vulnerability that life is much too precious to be a giver if I can’t also be a receiver. So I’m done being as generous as I’ve been my whole life, and especially recently. I’m learning to give without being a giver.

I’m learning to let people love me in the ways I deserve. I am learning to get away with asking for what I deserve, like I'm robbing a joy bank.

No guilt. No shame. Just unadulterated desire. My foot on the gas. My eyes on the horizon. My hand on my heart. My mouth, uttering to myself, I am not always easy to love, actually. AND. AND. AND.

That is not the point. No one is totally easy to love. Life would be meaningless if we all did this because it wouldn't be complex enough. It is meaningful because it is hard to love each other sometimes. And it is still worth it.

My hand on my heart. My fingers whispering, When someone safe and kind offers me what I want, I am going to take it with these limbs outstretched, holding myself steady while I try to believe I can hold it well, and run as far as my feet will take me.