we don’t survive off being right.

It’s been a minute since we’ve done this, and there’s … so much I gotta tell you. Some updates loud enough to laugh about, others too tender to rush. Life has been moving, in that quiet but decisive way where you look up & realize you’re standing somewhere brand new. I’ve been adjusting. Building. Learning how to belong to my days again. Paying attention to what feels worth holding & what needs more time. Yadda yadda. We’ll get into that one of these days because today we’re getting into something that’s been sitting on my chest for a few weeks now.

Someone asked me a question recently that didn’t feel academic or hypothetical. It wasn’t asked to spark debate. It felt real in the way things do when you’re asking because you’re trying to live honestly & not lose yourself in the process. It went a little like this: How do we keep standing for something in a social & political climate that shows no mercy, gives no grace and seems invested in grinding people down? How do we keep showing up? Not out of obligation or panic … but with intention?

And I can’t even front … I surprised my damn self with how clear my answer felt.

While I (like most) am mad tired across the board of the bullshit we gotta deal with on the daily, I’ve learned how to name the biggest, most prevalent frustration underneath all of it. What I’m tired of is watching our energy get wasted. I’m tired of seeing care get flattened into content. Of watching people pour everything they have into arguments that don’t build anything, don’t protect anyone, don’t feel solid afterward. There’s a difference between being exhausted & being misdirected, and I think we confuse the two all the time. I don’t feel drained by resistance. I feel protective of it.

Politics, for me, has never been something I clock into every four years or whenever something especially horrifying happens. It’s always been closer than that. It lives in my day-to-day. In who I trust. In who I don’t. In who I make space for & who I move through the world with. It lives in the rooms I enter & the rooms I build when the existing ones weren’t made with me in mind. And being a black lesbian sharpens all of this in a way that’s hard to describe unless you live it. My relationship to politics has never been optional. There is no neutral setting. No off-season. No version of my life where the stakes disappear. My body enters rooms already politicized. My love does too. The way I move through the world, who I desire, who I protect, who I build with … all of it is read, categorized, judged, regulated. I don’t have the luxury of believing that change happens primarily through debates with strangers or perfectly worded posts that disappear down the timeline in twelve hours. I’ve watched too many people burn themselves out trying to be understood by systems & audiences that were never invested in their safety to begin with. I’ve learned that visibility without protection is not progress. Attention without infrastructure is a trap.

What keeps us alive — literally and historically — has always been community that knows how to move resources, not just language. People who understand that arguing with a stranger online about morality means very little if your neighbor can’t eat, if your friend can’t pay rent, if the people you love are one emergency away from free-fall. We don’t survive off being right. We survive off being connected.

For us, community has never been optional or abstract. It’s how we’ve passed information when institutions shut us out. How we’ve created safety when the state refused to. How we’ve loved each other out loud when the world tried to legislate us into silence. Mutual aid isn’t a trend … it’s inheritance. It’s memory. It’s strategy. And every ounce of energy we spend chasing strangers is energy we don’t spend fortifying the people who already have our backs. That’s why I keep choosing proximity. That’s why I keep choosing to invest where the return isn’t applause, but stability. Where the work looks like groceries, job leads, childcare, housing, rides, healing, rest. Where politics stops being theoretical & starts being practical again. History has made it very clear that people like me don’t get the luxury of disengagement. So when I talk about community, I’m not being idealistic. I’m being very very specific.

I’m talking about the reason I’m still here.

Kitchens. Living rooms. Group chats. Chosen family. The quiet intelligence of people who know the system is fucking violent & horrific & unstable and still figure out how to care for one another anyway. I understand the work that needs to be done because I live inside its unfinished business. There are atrocities happening every single day. Not in some distant, abstract sense … but in real time, to real bodies. Wars funded and televised & then quietly ignored once they stop trending. Children being buried before they’ve had a chance to grow into themselves. Entire populations starved, displaced, surveilled, policed, erased … often with the full blessing of governments that expect our silence in return. Laws being written and rewritten to make certain lives smaller, harder, more dangerous to live out loud. None of this is subtle. None of this is accidental. And pretending it’s just “how things are” is its own kind of violence.

I know this. You know this. We don’t need to catalogue everything for it to be real.

And I also know that staring directly at the scale of it, all the time, will hollow you out if you let it. Not because you don’t care, but because no one is meant to carry all of that alone. And that’s not failure … that’s just human limitation.

Which is why I keep coming back to the same place.

Community isn’t just a vibe to me. It’s where accountability actually lives. Not the public-shaming, cancellation-adjacent kind, but the kind where people know you well enough to challenge you & love you in the same breath. It’s where resources circulate instead of stagnate. Where care becomes habitual instead of exceptional. It’s people feeding each other, hiring each other, showing up for court dates and art shows and hospital visits. I’ve watched how much power we lose when we scatter ourselves chasing attention, consensus, or validation from people who are deeply committed to misunderstanding us. I’ve also watched how much power we gain when we stop chasing consensus & start strengthening the bonds that already exist. When we choose depth over scale. Proximity over performance. When we stop asking, how do I prove I care? and start asking, who am I actually responsible to?

So when I ask myself how we keep going — how we keep standing for something without burning ourselves hollow — the answer wasn’t dramatic. It isn’t louder arguments or better language or perfectly calibrated opinions.

It’s smaller than that.

Closer.

It’s choosing who I’m responsible to.

It’s tending to the relationships that can actually hold weight when the world feels unbearable.

I don’t believe the future is built by people who win every argument. I think it’s built by people who keep showing up for each other when things are bleak and unfair and unresolved. By people who understand that survival is collaborative. That care is active. That community is not a fallback plan — it is the plan.

My fight may never be over. I’ve made peace with that. What matters to me now is how I fight — and who I fight alongside. I fight in rooms where people know my name, my history, my limits. I fight in kitchens and group chats and living rooms, in relationships that stretch me and steady me at the same time. I fight with people who know the world is on fire & still decide to set the table anyway.

If you’re here, reading this, you’re probably already doing this work in your own way. Building something quiet. Keeping someone steady. Staying when it would be easier to bounce.

That matters more than you’ve been told.

Thank you.