Photo by Spencer DeMera on Unsplash

CW: child abuse, everything else

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Sometimes when I’m falling asleep, 

I wake up briefly back in a cabin in the redwoods, 

Giggling, running. Sea air and cold, clear creek water. 

Feet slapping hard against well worn trails. 

Carpenter ant sisters. Porcupine cousins. 

6’ tall paintings of naked women. 

The world a gift I haven’t opened yet

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I wake up at your house,

Deep green in the shadow of the elders,

And I forget that you are gone.

That it is gone. 

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And I marvel at the wonder of tomorrow.

What we could make here tomorrow.

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Yesterday, I took a nap, and when I was falling asleep I started to dream about one of my favorite places on earth, my great uncle’s cabin in the redwood forests of Northern California. I was just awake enough to remember, while dreaming, that he is dead and that the cabin has been abandoned or bulldozed by the park service since he gave the land to them when he died. 

I sobbed in huge gulping breaths, tears streaming down my face and when I thought I was done, I blew my nose, and it started to bleed. Blood ran down my mouth and onto my night shirt and I caught it with tissue after tissue. Grief pushing its way out of me by any means necessary. 

As a child, my great uncle Bill was a very safe adult. Some who knew him before I did would probably not think of him like that. He got home from the Korean war and used his GI bill to buy 500 acres of redwood forest, where he build a real log cabin by himself, did naked yoga in the mornings, bathed in the creek, and made gigantic paintings of himself carousing with nude women in orgiastic bliss.  

He taught me how to tie my shoes, he encouraged what he called my artistic nature when I used one entire (expensive) gold acrylic marker to paint a piece of bristol and most of his workdesk in sticky, smelly golden scribbles. I used to fall asleep to the sound of him and my grandmother in great debates about the philosophy of the world, weed smoke gently wafting to my camping cot around the corner from the single dividing wall in his otherwise one-room cabin. 

He taught me not to be afraid of the half-inch long carpenter ants who marched neat lines up and down his kitchen wall, he showed me the porcupine quills he pulled out of his porch railing, and he spoke to me like I had a potential that no one else saw. He lived free in a way a person can’t be permitted to do anymore. He also had flaws and damage and I’m not going to tell you what they were because this isn’t about him. 

He died a long time ago, and I still do miss him, obviously.  But yesterday’s grief was for me. The bright young thing running wild on a brief respite from my violent groomer grandfather. The beneficiary of his post-war safehouse building, unburdened and hopeful and full of a future he still believed in, or at least he made me feel like he did. I am grieving the version of me that had something to believe in.

I no longer have hope for the future of this place. I don’t think that’s a permanent state, but it’s where I’m at now and it deserves to have a voice while it’s here. 

Like most young activists, I was filled with a blinding hope for the future from a very young age. I believed in my values, I believed in my activism and I invested every moment of every day of the last 30 or so years in that hoping, that striving. 

When adults put their hands on me, when my mom threatened to kill me, when my parents stole from me, attacked me, abandoned and abused me, I had a hot furnace of hope burning deep inside me that knew beyond all reason there was more out there for me. When I lost jobs and professional opportunities because I couldn’t and wouldn’t shut up about the exploitation my bosses and colleagues wanted to sweep under the rug, even and especially when they were the victims of it, I had hope. 

When I dove headfirst into a global pandemic to build a business with a $500 laptop and an unfinished shed in my backyard, hope was there. Cancerous, treacherous, persistent, and uncompromising hope. 

But now it’s gone. 

I look back on the work of my life and I’m proud of it. Without ever knowing me, or what I specifically did, there are tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people who are still to this day directly benefiting from my labor in the movement. It was never meaningless, it still has meaning and impact. And also, with all my potential, all my smarts, all my time and my energy and my dogged persistence in doing the right thing over the thing that will preserve me, the right thing over the thing that will enrich me, we are here anyway. 

At some point in the relatively recent past, I woke up without hope. I have become a person who no longer believes in the power of people. Who no longer believes we can bend this particular arc of history towards justice. I spent the first half of my life fighting for my life, sometimes literally. Confronting abusers and abusive systems and believing deeply, as a given, that I had power inside of me, that together, we could make things better for ourselves and others. That we could have a different outcome for the generations who follow us. 

And now my daughter gets 7 different angles of the American Gestapo shooting a woman in the face live on every streaming service followed by a string of powerful people, mostly men, justifying their lack of action on this and every other police killing we’ve witnessed up to this point. And I get to decide if it’s better than it was because at least now there’s video every time the police murder us in cold blood and get away with it. 

I do realize how I sound. I’m so sick of privileged people like me having the luxury to “give up.” Fuck off. Cry into your caviar, you hero-complex bitch. Things didn’t work out the way you wanted? On, no shit honey. Did you think you could out-labor generations of colonialist rape and enslavement with advanced reading skills? 

Yeah, I did. Not all the way, but I thought that at some point, I would have a life that mattered to myself. I was raised an unwanted child in a cruel world and I thought that if I made the world less cruel, I could make myself more wanted. In an ironic twist of fate, I actually did. But creating value is not the same as feeling valuable. 

In the face of a cabal of billionaire abusers who have always gotten away with it, who’ve held power for less than a year and destroyed nearly everything so many of us have spent decades building, I lack the capacity. 

The longer I pretend to be the person I was last year, the more time I’ll waste. I can accept that this is where I am and move on, or I can continue to fight myself over why this is happening or what I can do to avoid the reality of this loss. 

There is no furnace burning in my chest. There is no glint left behind my eyes. The running child on the redwood trails was not choked to death, or beat to death. They were not starved or overworked, nothing that simple or direct could have made them stop in their ravenous pursuit of the future they were promised. They fought hard for more than 30 years for a life worth living, and they used up every ounce of hope they had to do it. 

I will never wake up in a world that wants me to be here. From birth to death, there will be something about me that powerful people hate. If you’re reading this, I suspect you might be the same. Power loathes humanity, individuality, creativity. 

You can’t control joyful people. You can’t suppress the nature of hope, even if you can take it away for a limited time. 

I find myself thinking about my uncle Bill, young and damaged and back from Korea. Done with the world, done with capitalism and war and governments. Retreating into peace at any price, into solitary hedonism, into folkways and the hardships we bring on ourselves when we think we are alone, or that we have to be alone to be safe. 

Inside of me is still the rhythm of running uneven paths through the redwoods. Inside of me is still the child who stood up to my parents, the teen that left and chose myself, the young person struggling and doing good work and learning new skills and trying so hard to find that loving care I’d never truly had in any sustainable amount. 

After all this time, I don’t need to feel hope to do the work I’ve always done. I don’t need to know the outcome to do what’s right and what I’m called to do. When I had nothing, I had hope, which made it feel precious and special and even essential. 

I think about my childhood hopefulness, battered and tired after endless battles. Sputtering and ember-like from the neverending cycle of building safe places only to have them destroyed again and again. I think it’s okay to be done hoping for a while. It’s more than understandable that the version of me who hoped for a future would not want to be here now. 

But I don’t feed people because of my deep well of hopefulness. I feed them because they are hungry. And I don’t teach people because someday it will be better, I teach them because I have skills they need now, in this moment, regardless of tomorrow. 

For months, I’ve been trying to figure out what’s wrong with me so I can fix it. I want to fix it because I want myself back. But I am not one thing inside. I was born complete, and it was the world that made me turn every aspect of my personality into rocket fuel so I could escape the orbit of my abusive family and have the power to leave abusive systems after that. 

I assumed that, because I spent the first 40 years escaping on my own with very little help, that I would have to continue on that way. I assumed that I was alone, or that I would have to be alone to be safe. It’s true that I had to leave a lot of places I thought were safe. Not because they were destroyed, but because they had never been safe in the first place, merely safer than the place I’d been before. 

Now, in the face of an undefeated oligarchy, descendants and recipients of a legacy of colonization and harm, there is no winning. Not alone. There is no hope. Not for myself. There are only the millions and millions of us who are broken by this. Who are ruined, overwhelmed, low down and in grief. I don’t believe in the future, but I believe in you. I don’t think we can do this, but somewhere someone else can think it for me. I have lost myself to this horror, and I suggest you do as well.

Collective action doesn’t need you to be perfect, it doesn’t need you to be right or even good at things. Together, we counterbalance each other. Together we heal one another. Together we find the lost pieces and we reunite them. That’s all I know anymore, that even if we have nothing we have each other.