Long ago, sometime early in my teenage years, I developed a fairly unusual habit. As it turned out, that habit became a significant part of my life - it directly contributed to much of my success during my career, it helped me reckon with some truly horrific experiences and set in motion a profound process of healing and recovery, and it has led to a kind of perception and understanding of a surprisingly large swath of the current state of the world as a whole.

It began as a way to understand things going wrong in computer programs. I've loved programming ever since I first learned of it as a young child; but as anyone who's spent much time around computers and software knows, things go wrong a lot. These problems - "bugs" as they're commonly known - are ubiquitous. Sometimes, they're easy to figure out and fix. Other times, they're elusive, mysterious, almost even seeming defiant in their refusal to be properly addressed. And so, as a young programmer, I learned the importance of how to dig deeply into what's going on, in search of genuine understanding, and in turn, of ways to truly address the root causes of undesired outcomes.

After a lifetime of making this skill a regular part of my everyday approach to life, I can summarize it very simply: keep asking why.

My Origin Story

I have a lot of things I want to link together, in this particular piece. To really do it right, though, I need to go back to my own beginnings.

There is a lot about my past that I've generally been very reticent about, historically; hopefully, the reasons for that will become clear as I tell the story. It is time, now, to start to bring more of that out into the open; I trust the reasons for that, too, will become apparent.

My lineage is predominantly German, with a notable chunk of Welsh, and a smattering of other ethnic traces lost to time. I was born into a solidly middle-class family that was doing their best to cosplay working-class people. A bit before my arrival in the world, my parents had become entangled in an extremist, fundamentalist christian cult. They were on the path to become evangelical missionaries, dedicating their lives to continuing the legacy of white colonialism by traveling around the world and coercing minority cultures into adopting their religious views. Of course, they didn't think of it that way, and perhaps never will; but we'll get back to that.

As a result of their choices, my parents ended up moving to the country of Thailand when I was in elementary school. As the youngest of the children, I went along; my much-older siblings stayed behind in the U.S., beginning their own adult lives. In total, I spent over 7 years of my childhood in Thailand. The consequences of that experience cannot be overstated; the impact was formative to a degree I can't even fully name, and I will probably continue to discover aspects of how it all shaped me periodically for the rest of my own life.

Because of that upbringing, and in particular the ages I was when it happened, I wound up quite a bit different from most other people living in the U.S. - and especially different from most other white people. I have always felt more of an affinity to the parts of the world that the U.S. wants to subjugate and ignore and deride, than to the supposed "best country in the world." I do not feel fortunate to be a born U.S. citizen; it is an ever-present source of grief for me. This is probably quite surprising for most people who'll read this; but we'll get back to that, too.

Even growing up, I never really felt comfortable or aligned with the ideology my parents upheld. I had questions, even from a very young age, that they never seemed to want to address. Their avoidance and authoritarian insistence on "because I said so" (or, more frequently, "because god said so") rankled, but I had no way to recognize that it was unusual, or problematic, or unfair. I just knew I couldn't quite make the pieces fit.

Unfortunately, the authoritarian and patriarchal leanings - both of my parents and the cult at large - went well beyond poor child-rearing styles. Quite frankly, violent abuse was incredibly rampant. My childhood was characterized by genuinely horrifying amounts of violence, all day, every day - psychological, emotional, physical, and more. But it was all I knew; it wasn't until much, much later, as an adult, that I realized that it was even unusual - let alone heart-breakingly, inexcusably evil.

I never quite managed to shake the feeling that it wasn't all adding up, though, especially after moving back to the U.S. as a teen. The cult's attitude of revering and venerating missionaries couldn't have clashed harder with the realities of secular suburban high school life. I'd always known I was different from the people around me in Thailand - that much was obvious even from a distance because of skin and hair color, let alone language and culture - but I was utterly unprepared to be surrounded by people that looked like me but were as unlike me as it could get on the inside.

And so it was that I started asking why.

Why were other people my age seemingly so disconnected from the rest of the world? It wasn't just that I'd lived elsewhere and they hadn't; everything about their attitudes seemed irreconcilable with what I knew - from first-hand experience - about the way things worked. As usual, my parents shrugged it off, and dismissed the questions. The older I got, the more uncomfortable and avoidant they seemed to get about my inquisitive desire to understand things. I think the real reason white culture stigmatizes children who ask "why" a lot is that most adults are deeply ashamed of how infrequently they actually have good answers. We'll get back to that, too.

Then September 11th, 2001 happened. I watched in abject horror as the country responded all around me; what seemed to me to be a patently obvious flare-up of fascist nationalism was, to the country at large, beyond any kind of criticism. I knew absolutely no-one who would entertain the idea that maybe, just maybe, this was a bad thing. I'd felt alone before, but that was the moment when it became clear to me that I would never - could never - find any form of belonging in this country.

Shortly after that, I began my own steps into adulthood. Some of the immediate discomfort had faded, but I remained keenly aware that I wasn't going to fit into any of the conventional narratives of what a newly minted adult life "should be" - especially not in this part of the world. I chose to drop out of high school and never pursued any actual university education. Instead, I got a job as a computer programmer; or, more accurately, I got two jobs - one that could "pay the bills" as my day job, and a second full-time job I did at night, working on things I actually wanted to be doing.

After about a year and a half of that, my "second" job became a bit more stable and reliable, and I quit the first one to focus on the more enjoyable work. (It helped that they also paid better and were significantly less abusive than my first employer.) I found myself doing remote work exclusively, working alongside a German company while living on the East Coast of the U.S. I set my own schedule, and largely felt good about it. I had some free time and energy to spend on introspection - and, for the first time in my life, I was free to explore my questions without hindrance or resistance, from anyone.

All of the questions of why came surging back to the surface, from my entire life up until that point: why christianity? Why were we, the white and affluent people, imagining ourselves to have "The Right Answers" and "The Truth" while everyone else was somehow wrong? Why was it unthinkable that everyone else was right, and we were wrong? Why did it annoy people so much when I talked about why I liked Thailand and Thai culture better than All Things America? Why had I been so viciously subjected to social rejection and isolation, in response to my disallegiance to the idea of American supremacy? Why had I felt compelled to bury the reality of my own childhood as a secret, in order to get some shred of acceptance from the people around me? Why did all these supposedly "righteous" people live lives of such incredible violence, and bigotry, and animosity? Why did this religion that was supposed to be about unconditional love seem to only have unconditional hate? Why couldn't christians even agree among themselves what the truth was, and where to find it?

Newly equipped with internet access and an abundance of undisrupted free time, I set out to understand the origins of christianity itself. I reasoned that, if it really was some kind of truth, there had to be a way to cut past all the propaganda, and rhetoric, and socio-political posturing - to get back to the actual true bits, as it were. I knew I didn't like what I had been offered, so I wanted to try to find something I did like. Something I could feel good about. What I actually found felt simultaneously earth-shattering and weirdly validating.

I learned the actual history of how "christian" beliefs began as a diverse, wildly variegated set of counter-cultural movements within the Roman Empire. I learned about how Constantine fabricated a whole new form of the religion, based around the tried-and-true Roman tactic of stealing popular cultural customs and enshrining them as "official Roman" ways. I learned the repressed history of how the holy scriptures of christianity were secretly assembled by political authorities and then passed off as "divine" text, for literally two millenia. I learned the realities of how this religion had been forged as a tool of empire - and how, even long after the dissolution of Rome and the scattering of nationalized political control within Europe, christianity continued to be a hegemonic political force. I learned how the beginnings of European conquest and colonization were fuelled directly by the imperial greed and bloodlust that had never been cleaned out of Europe, still lingering like a silent disease in the very cultural fabric of the continent. And I learned how all of that fed into the contemporary formation of imperialism under the hegemonic stranglehold of the U.S.A.

Needless to say, it was a lot to take in. At the same time, it was immensely comforting to know that there had been some very real validity to all my years of feeling off about what I'd been taught as a child. I was prepared to reconsider the whole thing, but hadn't really made any committed decisions, until summer of 2007.

That year, I started having profound health problems. It would be another 11 years before I was able to ask why enough to understand what was happening - to my body, my brain, and my emotional state. I didn't know, at the time, that I was experiencing the effects of severe trauma. Regardless, it was a pivotal moment. If that had happened much sooner, I may well have gone along with what my relatives and friends would have all said: it was a test from god, perhaps, or maybe a warning for questioning my faith too much, or whatever; regardless of the excuses, they all would have given the same advice: to surrender my own agency over my well-being and "trust god" with it.

But after all the research I'd been doing, I knew that wasn't an option for me any more. I knew I'd never again be able to regard anything even remotely adjacent to christianity without some severe degree of scrutiny and dislike. I'd gone in search of the truth about the history of christianity, and - ironically, if you know your bible verses - the truth had set me free from any interest at all in any of it. I became the first person in my immediate family to openly seek secular psychiatric help for what I was going through. Instead of getting mired in the endless sludge of asking "why does god let bad things happen to good people" I accepted that shit just kind of happens to all of us. I didn't care about why - not yet. I just wanted to stop hurting.

That kicked off a decade-plus span of wrestling with talk therapy, medication, and not-quite-secretive substance abuse problems. I kept going back - to doctors, for better pills; to therapists, for better advice; to alcohol and nicotine and extreme doses of caffeine and other chemicals, for some sense of still being alive. In that span, I realized I needed to leave the Atlanta area - where I'd been living my entire adult life up until that point - and set out for a different social and political environment. I started - and ended - a long-term relationship that repeated many of the worst aspects of violence and abuse I'd grown up with, and added a few new ones; I was still almost completely unaware that what was being done to me was even all that unusual, let alone incredibly wrong.

In 2018, I'd been coasting along on this messy arrangement for so long I'd almost started to believe it was working. My career was growing, I was "successful" in all the ways society told me I was supposed to be successful, and things seemed good... until suddenly they didn't. While traveling for a conference, a very close friend of mine was walking across a street one evening, on the way to a group dinner with a bunch of our friends and colleagues, when we was hit by a car and very severely injured. I spent part of that night with him - one of three people who did - in the Intensive Care Unit at the hospital, until the staff told us to leave for the night. He was never the same after the accident; and, somehow, neither was I.

That confrontation with mortality made me think about what was going on in my own life. I realized I wasn't really happy; I was surviving, but mostly on sheer stubbornness and spite. I wasn't getting what I wanted from life. I'd grown into a kind of resigned acceptance of certain things, but I wasn't really satisfied. I'd learned to ignore certain things about my day-to-day reality, but I wasn't ok with them.

And so, once again, I began to ask why.

Trauma

It was late in 2018 that I encountered, for the first time in my life, a real explanation of the phenomenon of trauma. As I've come to understand it since, trauma is connected to basic survival instincts. Pretty much any living being with a nervous system has a set of patterns - deeply honed over enormous spans of time by evolution - that exist to keep the organism alive and away from severe, life-threatening forms of harm and danger. This of course includes humans.

When an organism's nervous system perceives an existential threat, it activates certain responses. These "threat responses" are - crucially - rooted in a protective instinct. The point of them is to keep us alive and unhurt as much as possible. There are four primary types of threat response: fight, flight, freeze, and appease. Each is an attempt to avoid harm in some way: "fight" responses (which, across nature and human society alike, are primarily defensive behaviors) exist to create separation between us and the perceived source of danger. "Flight" responses are about getting us as far from the danger as possible, usually by moving physically, or by redirecting conversations in social settings where we cannot literally leave. "Freeze" responses involve trying to shrink, to be invisible or imperceptible - basically to avoid being noticed or holding the attention or interest of the source of danger in the first place. Lastly, "appease" responses (among humans at least) are often concealed under social and cultural patterns of interaction; the essential idea of an "appease" response can be stated as "if I make friends - or maybe just a truce - with this source of danger, maybe I won't get hurt."

Crucially, these threats do not need to be purely physical in nature. For humans in particular as social creatures, the threat of social harm is experienced in exactly the same way as the threat of bodily harm. In other words, we have threat responses to the possibility of rejection or alienation in exactly the same way we have threat responses to the possibility of being hit by a train or eaten by a wild predator. Moreover, the threat doesn't even necessarily have to be real: even a perceived but illusory threat will still evoke a threat reaction from the body's nervous system.

These protective reactions are impossible to turn off. They're a core part of our existence, and they function without our intentional choice. A lot of times, they happen without even our conscious awareness that they exist. From a biological standpoint, this makes sense; if they were easy to bypass or ignore, they wouldn't be able to do a very good job of protecting us in split-second life-or-death situations. At an anatomical level, these mechanisms actually "short circuit" and turn off the parts of our nervous system (within the brain) that are responsible for "thinking."

However, the mere fact that our threat responses are reflexes - distinct from our cognitive, rational "minds" - creates a unique challenge. It is fully possible for a human to experience a threat reaction so intense that we can't actually intellectually process it. This is particularly common in childhood, when our capacity to intellectually process anything is still developing. It is also common, even in adulthood, in extreme scenarios of danger - like wars, disasters, and other "dramatic" experiences.

When this happens, our nervous systems and our conscious thinking "minds" get split into two different tracks. Our thoughts may acknowledge that the bad thing is over and we're out of danger; but our bodies can still be stuck in this reactive mode, trying to find ways to get us to safety. It is because our survival instincts happen in a different place in our nervous system than our cognition that we can exist in this state of dissonance without even knowing it. This extreme overwhelm of the threat response ends up "disappearing" to our conscious minds, even while our bodies relive the experience of danger over and over, day after day. At seemingly random and unpredictable moments, something may remind our bodies of this lingering, unresolved sense of danger, and suddenly we find ourselves reacting in ways that probably don't make much sense. This disconnect is what is now widely known as trauma.

As I began to learn about trauma, I encountered many stories of people with experiences like PTSD and Complex PTSD (or Developmental Trauma). I began to recognize myself in those stories, and it became clear to me by the end of 2018 that I needed to do some serious reckoning with my own history of severe trauma. It was that reckoning that led me to end the abusive relationship I'd been in, to start questioning my gender identity and sexuality, and to start earnestly trying to process the truths of my own past.

I spent most of 2019 immersed in the work of untangling all those things. I wrote a lot, mostly as a kind of private diary during that year; the vast majority of that writing I later went on to publish as the beginnings of this blog. By the end of the year, I felt like I had some answers at least; and I was willing to at least try and reach out to my parents - who I'd become very distant from in the years prior - to talk about some of it. As it turned out, much later, they weren't particularly receptive. Despite some hopeful indicators early on, we never did re-establish any kind of meaningful relationship. I gave up on them eventually, but couldn't quite shake a sense of sadness and confusion about what had happened.

I'd learned about my own trauma and how it had affected me, but I seemed to be utterly unable to communicate the realities of any of it to some of the primary perpetrators of that trauma in my own life - my own parents. And so, yet again, I started asking why.

I recognized tiny glimmers in my parents - little hints, deeply buried, of sense of right and wrong that was deeply misaligned with the teachings of the religion they'd spent their lives upholding. Even they had begun to acknowledge that the cult they raised me in was problematic, and started trying to distance themselves from it. But I couldn't make sense of why they seemed "stuck" at a very slight remove from their former extremism, unwilling to embrace it, but also unable to continue their own journey of disillusionment. Both of my parents are impressively smart people; why couldn't they connect the same dots I had, at barely 20 years old, about the history of the violent zealotry they'd sworn their lives to?

Why did my mother - born into a German family that was imported to the U.S. after World War II as part of the now-infamous Operation Paperclip, daughter of a literal Nazi weapons scientist - end up unwilling and/or unable to recognize the overt parallels between 21st century North American fascism, and 20th centry Europen fascism? Why did my father - who once had begun attending university to study anthropology out of an ethical desire to help protect and preserve Native American cultures - end up veering wildly into a life of intentionally colonizing indigenous cultures half a world away?

I had other questions cropping up, too - why had someone I'd thought of as my best friend since we were barely teenagers drifted so far away from me over time? Why had he ended up hurtling down the so-called "alt right pipeline" and embraced the fascist, carceral ideology of American imperial hegemony, when at one time I'd actually looked up to him for his insistence that more kind and ethical ways of being were desperately needed at a cultural level in our world? Why had he suddenly decided he could no longer tolerate my existence after I came out as trans?

Why had I embraced my authentic self and suddenly found that a supposedly "queer-friendly" environment around me was subjecting to me forms of abuse and oppression they wouldn't even acknowledge existed? Why did I feel a surge of hope during the uprisings after the murder of George Floyd in 2020, while everyone around me seemed terrified of them? Why did so few other people around me seem to know or understand any of their own struggles and pain?

I'd already been deep in research mode ever since 2018, and so I branched out - reading every bit of political theory, radical history, and cultural analysis and critique I could find. I spent most of the early COVID lockdown devouring and processing everything in reach. I thought maybe I was ready to start doing something with all of it at a large scale - until late in 2020 when some of my experiences of trauma came rushing back to the forefront.

It was during 2021 that I really developed an apprecation for the somatic aspect of trauma. After all, trauma - by definition - isn't just "a bad experience." It's not even just a bad experience we can't easily think about. Fundamentally, we cannot address trauma using just thought alone - again, recall that the actual mechanism of trauma involves our bodies and our nervous systems, as a whole, being split away from our conscious thinking. In order to truly address and heal trauma, we need to cultivate patient, gentle relationships with our bodies. Only after truly understanding how to listen to and care for my body did I have any real success at changing the way my mind worked.

It took a lot of work, and progress seemed very slow and tiny for a long time; in fact, I still often state that the hardest part of the entire process of healing trauma is the patience it requires. But after enough cumulative effort, I began experiencing dramatic results.

Way back in 2007, I had an experience of trauma resurgence (often called a "flashback"). It scared me so badly I decided to seek help - the feelings were so intense I literally believed I would die from feeling them. I couldn't understand why my emotions - and even my actual physical body - had suddenly entered this potent state of pain and panic, when all I was doing was hanging out in my apartment alone. I didn't know it until much, much later, but that was my body trying to get my attention - to finally try to resolve horrors I'd endured as a child but had long since left behind in my thinking. The past remained present within my body.

Towards the end of 2023, I had another profound emotional experience. I'd reached a point in my own process of healing that I was no longer afraid - not only of intense emotions, or intense pain - I wasn't even afraid of death. I'm in no rush to have the experience, but something shifted in me that autumn and has never gone back; I carry no real fear of the prospect of my life ending. Once again, I started to ask why - why now? Why did I start feeling like I was truly, profoundly at peace with having no control over my ultimate fate, even my own mortality? Was this really the result of all the trauma healing and somatic work I'd been doing?

And through that question, I began to understand the connections of all of it - of my own past of trauma, of generational trauma, of trauma at societal scales and across enormous spans of time... and I began to realize just how utterly interlinked all of the pain and suffering in our contemporary world is with these strange, overloaded, fractured survival instincts running amok in our lives. It has become clear to me that every single existential question I felt had gone unanswered, from across so many disparate years of my life, ultimately come back to the same root causes. Every bit of pain and confusion and awfulness I've ever been subjected to - every bit I've ever seen perpetrated around me - every bit I've wondered why people can't seem to quit doing... all of it comes from the same, singular place.

Safety, Agency, and Liberation

I did a lot of my own analysis around all of this stuff, especially up until 2021 or so, but it's important to acknowledge that most of my real progress did not happen because of me thinking about this on my own. Even just reading and studying other peoples' work around these ideas wasn't the biggest factor. In fact, the single most impactful change during my own process of dealing with all of this came about as a result of my relationship with my partner Quinn. They've had a truly incalculable effect on my life overall (some of which I've already written about with regards to my work over at SpoonStack). A huge part of that stems from the two of us comparing notes about our respective experiences and understandings of trauma, as well as other, larger patterns of life.

Through those conversations, which I will always cherish endlessly, we've pieced together a lot of things about the world. One of the pervasive patterns we've become aware of, together, is the ubiquity of unexamined trauma in day to day life. I've come to understand that the purpose of almost every aspect of kyriarchy and oppression relies deeply upon unhealed traumas: capitalism and even the very concept of whiteness are built to create and perpetuate trauma as a fuel for oppression and abuse. Even our own urge to avoid scary, uncomfortable, overwhelming things - a fundamentally protective instict, like the threat responses that underlie trauma itself - becomes a hindrance to the inherently uncomfortable work of healing.

Because of the very anatomical, biological nature of what trauma even is, the vast majority of people are utterly unaware that they've lived their entire lives traumatized. In much the same way I didn't know my upbringing was horrific and violent as a kid, or that my domestic relationship was abusive and violent as an adult, most humans are completely unfamiliar with the true depth of how much trauma each and every one of us carries in life.

All forms of systemic oppression rely on trauma to exist. The first and most important thing they seek to do is to fracture our sense of safety. Even this very word has become co-opted by extreme political forces of oppression and violence, so it's important to clarify what exactly I mean here. A useful dictionary-defintion of "safety" is not being in danger - not facing immediate harm. True, complete safety almost never actually exists in our reality; especially for those of us who are on the shitty end of systemic oppressions, safety may be very rare and fleeting indeed.

But there is a difference between a real, practical immunity to harm, and having an embodied sense of safety. This feeling is actually distinct from our true level of risk or danger. In fact, it is quite possible to have no sense of danger in profoundly risky situations, just like it's possible for trauma to cause us to feel unsafe in perfectly innocuous contexts. An important piece of the puzzle here is our own sense of agency: our ability to recognize what we can do. It is through a deep, embodied awareness of our options in a given situation that we can maintain a sense of safety even when facing obvious risks. This is part of why people who do dangerous work - like firefighters, for example - spend huge amounts of time training. Practice can help us stay in touch with the knowledge that, even if we are in danger, we can do something about it. In fact, a huge amount of trauma research has indicated that this sense of agency is actually a crucial distinguishing factor between experiences that are stressful and unpleasant, versus experiences which become sources of trauma.

This cannot be overstated: no matter how intense or awful our experience is, if we feel like we can engage with it on our own terms, that experience is less likely to be traumatic. Moving through life with a deep sense of both agency and safety is, therefore, an incredibly powerful innoculation against oppression, coercion, violence, and manipulation.

I am genuinely not sure how rare it is for anyone in the world to experience this at a truly deep level; I don't think it's especially common, at least not in the places I've lived. The lack of safety generates a lot of reactions in us - and, again, this is frequently invisible. These things stay hidden in part because we're experiencing them separately from our conscious thoughts; it takes serious work to re-merge our minds with our bodies and actually be truly aware of our physical, embodied experiences of emotion. But there's another aspect of this that comes down to culture and social norms. Given a couple of generations worth of time, social patterns shift until the very definition of "normal" we are enculturated into also evolves to include certain trauma patterns.

A powerful example of this is the way that certain forms of oppression (and especially white supremacy culture) enshrine hiearchies of authority. First, we are made to feel unsafe - again, recall that our biological threat responses happen for both perceived physical and social dangers. With enough repetition, we begin to feel threat reactions even to things that aren't actually dangerous to us, but simply remind us of existing trauma or past real dangers, both physical and social. Once this fear is deeply entrenched in our bodies, we can be taught - in our minds, which have been split away from our embodied awareness of all this - that our only hope for "safety" is to defer to the relevant authority figure. We do not come into the world susceptible to oppression, or inclined to help perpetuate it - both the oppressor and the oppressed become so by way of human social, cultural patterns, and nothing else.

As poignantly stated by Alok Vaid-Menon, "We were all born beautiful - and then came shame.... Everyone has an entire Olympic-sized swimming pool of grief that they've never allowed themselves to swim in, because they are afraid of drowning in it.... The true drowning is above surface, not below; the true drowning is people walking around protecting themselves from the grief. But the protection becomes the actual instrument of violence. It is in fact our trauma coping strategies that are responsible for our trauma."

Contemporary patriarchy in white society offers a potent concrete example of this. The "masculine" role, especially in the 1950s, became culturally defined as the role of "protector and provider." In other words, in order to be a acceptable as a man, one must carry the burden of being the source of safety for the "family" (or other social unit of influence, in cases where the white "nuclear family" notion didn't quite take hold). Everyone else is expected to defer, at least to some degree, to this "fatherly" authority. Nobody else is supposed to be responsible for safety or protection, and in fact, for others to attempt to do so will undermine and emasculate the man himself! This goes a very long way towards explaining the resistance that has persisted in the face of cultural movements like feminism. This is slowly evolving, but even today, most men in white societies feel like they cannot embrace the dissolution of patriarchy, because it stirs up a deeply embedded fear of their own potential rejection and alienation. bell hooks explored the need for men to summon the courage to confront this fear in her book The Will to Change; but, crucially, she did not include the framing of trauma, or how severely it compounds the difficulty men face in actually doing such work in themselves. White patriarchy in particular exists by permanently alienating men from themselves and their own sense of both safety and agency within their full authenticity. No wonder, then, that it has proven such an intractable challenge in society as as whole.

White society in general loves to use rejection threats overall. This same fear - again, usually deeply unconscious for most adults - is why white women will so frequently take a half a faltering step away from openly supporting status-quo systemic racism, and then seem to get profoundly stuck. They've already risked the rejection and separation from mainstream white womanhood by even thinking about things like anti-racism; and that brings them to the brink of their capacity to deal with the social existential threat they experience as a result. Unfortunately, they're not far enough along in actually contending with their place in systemic racism to feel safe enough to be around for people of color - and white women then percieve that as a threat. They can't go "back" to mainstream whiteness, and they feel rejection (and rightly so) from the rest of the global majority, and so they wind up paralyzed by their own trauma, stuck in a not-quite-getting-it state, able to find social safety only among other white women in the same basic limbo.

This is especially insidious for white women, because they're culturally trained to believe the only rung "up" from them in the hierarchy is white men. The more white men push back on any kind of erosion of kyriarchy, the more white women fear rejection for doing so themselves. They can no longer employ "appease" responses to the threat of men's rejections, and their attempts to appease people of color are (again, rightfully) shut down. The women are locked in a perpetual state of alienation - the very outcome they feared to begin with - and may even end up becoming counter-radicalized to support white supremacist patriarchy even more as a result. So the very existence ofwhite men's trauma reinforces white women's trauma, and vice versa. The knot of oppression pulls ever tighter.

All of this existential social fear feeds into the second major effect of oppression, which is to shatter our sense of agency.

When we are paralyzed by trauma and fear - fear we cannot, almost by definiton, even fully consciously recognize much of the time without specific practice - we logically begin to conclude that we have no options. We surrender to the limited choices offered to us by whatever systems we find ourselves trapped in. We rule out ideas that could lead to dramatic - even radical - change in our lives almost before the thoughts can even form in our minds. Deep down, our nervous systems are trying desperately to protect us from potential harm, and so we find ourselves funneled, often unwittingly, into continuing to uphold the very systems that are causing all the harm to begin with... and many of us literally have no idea it's even happening.

When we go through life profoundly disconnected from our agency, we forget that we really do have options. We forget our own power. We forget our own possibility. We forget all the ways we've chosen to quietly align with things that will get us accepted, and thereby abandoned things we actually wanted. We lose track of our own patterns of setting aside our desires in favor of electing for not being punished for our choices.

I am convinced that this pattern is precisely why being queer is so upsetting to mainstream society. To be queer is to be a living, breathing reminder to everyone around us of the ways in which they have chosen not to challenge the norms of society at large. I think the same pattern arises around the way white society reacts to autistic people. Even those who aren't aware that I'm queer will almost immediately balk when they realize that I unapologetically think, feel, and live in ways that are "not normal." To be confronted with a reminder of one's own complicity in the stagnation of the status quo is unbearably terrifying; but without any way to recognize - let alone understand - that trauma, the threat response must be channeled into hatred for "the other."

Of course, the flip side of this also occurs widely; it can be found in the desire for queer assimilation into mainstream society; in lukewarm variants of "autism acceptance" or "differently-abled" distortions of disability justice that settle for just being routed into the capitalist machine of extortion like everybody else; it even underlies the very concept of "model minority" behavior that plagues people of color in white-dominated societies. Meanwhile, the pervasive ideology of individualism helps obscure us from the reality that we're doing all this stuff out of fear of being socially harmed - i.e. of not having friends and support and community. Instead, it becomes a "personal moral failing" that exacerbates our pre-existing feelings of shame, guilt, and fear. The trauma traps us in believing we, personally, are the problem.

Meanwhile, the truth is that even those who enjoy tremendous privilege and advantage under systems of oppression are, themselves, wounded in the process. To hold power over another person requires damaging our own humanity on a fundamental level - the desire to coerce and force and control does not come from a place of safety. It comes from a place of fear. In fact, I've reached the conclusion the entire history - all 2000 years - of European imperialism and colonial conquest, currently incarnated as the global domination machine of white supremacist capitalism, can be fundamentally traced back to personal insecurity and inadequacy, left rampant and unchecked, and then turned into cultural identity. The fear of not being "good enough" gave rise to supremacy ideologies, and has been playing out across the entire planet with truly apocalyptic consequences ever since... but that's a deep dive for another time.

In the end, our fear of social harm has become the single biggest seed of creating more social harm in our entire collective existence on this world. Even the very fear of not knowing why - or fear of having made bad choices - can lead people to feel ashamed of asking why.

There's a reason so few of us do, and a reason so many of us are punished for even thinking of it.

I suspect that most of this must seem overwhelming and maybe even hopeless. But I think it's crucial to note that those feelings are, by themselves, reflections of the very pattern of pervasive trauma I've explored here. For myself, I feel very differently about all of this.

I learned, as a fledgling young programmer, the value of not panicking or giving up when things seemed broken beyond repair. I learned to ask why, and I learned to keep asking why - because, eventually, after chasing enough threads and leads and mysteries, we find answers.

And through those answers, we can understand how to fix the thing that we started questioning to begin with.

I do not believe our world is hopelessly broken, or that the pervasive state of violence and oppression is unsalvageable. In fact, I don't even believe that all of the myriad forms of kyriarchal horror that manifest today require fundamentally separate solutions. The particulars will vary, yes, and the deployment of answers must be situational and contextual.

But underneath all of that, we really only need a couple of things, in order to all get free: we need to reconnect to own embodied experience of safety, and we need to reconnect with our own sense of agency. These two things are sufficient to help us make contact with a very real, very present experience of being liberated - not in some hypothetical, distant future after some imagined "revolution," but right here, right now, even as our actual lived circumstances still include oppression, and pain, and suffering. These things give us access to a kind of joy and power in our own existence that is unlike anything I ever could have imagined, even a few years ago.

These two things, combined and working together, are sufficient to transform the entire world.

With these answers - to all of this why - I truly think we can construct the how of undoing the awful legacy of it all, and seeding a new existence for everyone on this planet and everything we share it with: one with a hell of a lot less trauma, and a lot more freedom, autonomy, and joyous delight in the precious gift of existence.