This is the exact camper, picture taken by me in my grandmother’s yard before she moved into a retirement home.

When I was 14, I got kicked out of my house and I started my first business cleaning houses and gardening in order to survive. Eventually, I had a little gardening truck that I drove all around Southern California working and doing youth activism against the second Gulf War. I was also deeply involved in mental health and survivor work. 

I remember what it felt like to come home from 8th grade and find all my shit packed in two duffle bags on the floor of my room and think my life was over. I had nothing. I could float off the planet and no one would miss me. 

More than that, I remember what it felt like to work with my body, to clean and repair; to dig in the dirt and take the bus and then my truck to different gigs around town and feel strong and capable and happier than I ever knew a person could be. 

My grandmother used to let me stay in an abandoned camp trailer on her property sometimes. It wasn’t hooked up to anything, just a roof with four aluminum walls, a mouldering banquette seat, and no electricity. I would listen to John Lee Hooker CDs that my friends burned for me and smoke Marlboro Reds while sitting in the doorway as the sun set and feel like life was finally going my way. 

Anything I needed I could work to get money and buy it, anywhere I wanted to go I could get there. I had hundreds of friends from the valley all the way down to the border. For the first time, living felt like something that could be both easy and good. 

I think about that person a lot, especially lately, when things are so complicated everywhere. My problems haven’t been that big, or that easy to solve in a long fucking time. The way I worry about food and shelter these days is completely abstract. Usually as it relates to public health. 

Today my fears are about the encroaching fascism, the nuances and obstacles of running a business, being a parent, partner, and a community member while trying to live in my values with an aging, chronically ill body. 

The version of me blowing smoke through my nose, covered in dirt and blood from hard work, listening to Crawlin’ Kingsnake feels like a safer version because I know that almost 30 years down the line, we survived. They’ve already made the choices and the sacrifices that allow me to wax poetic about hunger and housing without those being actual personal barriers anymore. 

All my life, I’ve been pathologically unable to ask for, take, demand, or even give myself what I need. When I make money, I give it away or I pay people a living wage to do things I don’t like to do or can’t do. Even when I myself am not making a living wage. I used to sleep three hours a night and eat one meal a day. I don’t know how to advocate for myself the way I know how to advocate for other people. And when I do advocate for myself, it’s usually because there are other people involved. 

There’s something about being a kid; being the kind of kid who was never taken care of the right way, then getting kicked out and having to make a life out of nothing. Out of gumption and physical labor, and personal charisma. Other people just don’t understand.  

That gossamer thin network of perilous dependence and skin of your teeth survival was my first real home. The first place I felt safe was most people’s nightmare. But I know how to navigate scarcity in a way I have never been able to navigate abundance. I can live on so much less than other people need, and that was a strength that saved me. 

So there are two motivating factors for never asking for what I really need. The first is tactics, the second is loyalty. To a young punk barely scraping by, but thinking life is finally worth living. To a lost queer who felt like they had all the time in the world to find their way. To a little kid being thrown away like trash by abusive parents in an abusive system where some people get to live and others are left to die or are actively killed for being who and what we are. 

Fundamentally, I don’t want to be properly fed in a world where people starve. I don’t want to keep my money, to charge what I know I’m worth on this market I am so familiar with that I swear I can feel the changes in my knees like a snow storm. Because I don’t want to admit that I’ve gone over the horizon from the self that got me here. That I occupy a world they could not even fathom. I never want to be so far away from them that I don’t remember what it took. I don’t want to find out I no longer need what they gave me.  

14 year old me deserved comfort. 14 year old me deserved ease. And because they didn’t get it, I reject it now. That’s not justice. But it feels like the only proximity to justice I can get. 

Most of the people who harmed me are beyond all mortal recourse. Which is one of the reasons I’ve worked so damn hard to bring justice, resources, and whatever else I can get to every marginalized population I can find. 

I live in the fantasy that by giving others what I didn’t have, I can somehow pay back the version of me that got me here without actually doing the one thing that would really pay them back. The thing they discovered and that I forgot. That living well, resourcing myself, is life affirming. Is worth the effort. Can make big changes. Changes beyond our comprehension. 

We have to solve the big, simple problems if we’re going to solve the complicated and nuanced ones. We have to give ourselves what we need whenever we can. So we can live in a world where getting everyone’s needs met isn’t such a fucking mystery. Because maybe when we know how to care for ourselves, we can learn how to properly care for others.