I filled out an interesting survey today.

It was about the experiences of Disabled people (like myself) with political organizing efforts, specifically those hosted by "leftists."

I have no idea how the people who put out the survey will feel about my responses; but as I typed out my thoughts one agonizing letter at a time with my phone, lying in bed and unable to quite move yet for the day, I realized that I want to do more with my own feelings about that survey. I said a lot, in answering those half-dozen questions - but I have much more to say still.

I suppose the survey wasn't actually interesting at all, the more I think about it. But it inadvertently and indirectly touched on something of significance to me, something that's been on both my mind and heart for many years, and something I want to elaborate on here.

My answers were, to be quite honest, frankly pretty morbid. The subject is a bleak one, for me. I did not feel like anything I said would matter - not so much as an indictment of the people who were conducting the survey, but as a kind of emotional scar tissue from the past six and a half years. The survey wasn't interesting. It was dull, dreary, and yet another paltry dose of "too little too late." As I wrote in my responses, it felt to me like yet another hollow "we're listening" gesture - the kind that have been so plentiful in recent times that (as I put it in my comments) they've "littered the ground almost as densely as the dead bodies of my comrades who were ostensibly being listened to."

Yes, it's harsh, and dramatic.

So is surviving in a pandemic that most of the society around me insists on pretending has gone away.

But I didn't want to talk about COVID, or the failure of so-called "leftist" solidarity, or even the frustration I feel about the rampant, systemic ableism that continues to kill, and to deny the fullness of life to me and millions like me every single day. It's not that I don't have anything to say about those things. It's more that everything has already been said, often by others. Our voices haven't mattered until now about this, so I sincerely don't feel like somehow I'm going to be the one that turns the tide by saying what's already been ignored and shrugged off for over half a decade now. I'm sure there's plenty of people who already closed the tab as soon as I alluded to any of this. Part of me is certain that I won't convince anyone new, although the rest of me gently holds on to hope that she's wrong.

There are things, though, that aren't in that conversation. I've been following the unfolding of this for many years now - first as a matter of heartfelt solidarity, and then as a matter of my own personal survival, once I fully realized how disabled I myself have been throughout my own life. I know what's been said. I also know what isn't being said.

And the void - that empty, silent place in the negative-space, where nothing is going on - that says it all.

Gaps

It's hard, to notice the non-existence of something. In order to become aware of such a thing, to perceive that which is certainly not there, we need two things. First, we need to be fairly aware of what is there. After all, we can't know the difference between something not being present and something not being known to us without first having that awareness. Any room can seem quiet with good enough earplugs; any vista can seem dark from under a blindfold.

Secondly, we need to have at least a vague sense of the thing that we're not finding - its shape, its nature, how it moves, how it affects what is around it. It is only by familiarity with what we can expect that we become able to recognize what is absent.

I have had a truly intense and wild journey of a life. Much of it is chronicled (or at least alluded to) in my writings in this space. But for all the things I've experienced, it took me decades to reach a point where my experiences were broad enough to include something very specific - something that I have, as a result of those experiences, become painfully aware does not exist in the majority of so-called "progressive" subculture in my part of the world. I can recognize this because I have begun to experience it; and I can recognize its absence in collective settings because I have learned to recognize its absence from my own past.

So today I want to spend some time talking about love.

I'm hardly the first to bring it up. There's some great work out there about the importance of this thing, this concept that defies definition and categorization and yet somehow seems to be a thing we all recognize as at least a nice idea. There's even plenty of work about the vital necessity of love for things like making the world a better place. There's work about how frustrating it is to be told that love is some silly dalliance, a luxury, a distraction from the Real Work. There's been endless volumes said about how systemic oppressions and marginalizations undermine love in exactly this sort of way, why that happens, and why such dismissal must be resisted by anyone interested in truly improving our collective reality.

Ironically, a large bulk of that work comes from Black women and femmes - which is probably why it goes unread and unheeded in so many spaces that want to imagine themselves to be on the side of "improvement." Racism (especially anti-Black racism) and patriarchy both run profoundly deep in our society.

So on the one hand, I'm not really saying anything new. My observations can just as easily be found in the pages of Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Mia Birdsong, ebonyjanice, Prentis Hemphill, and dozens of others - I know this, because that is in fact where I learned these ideas, myself.

The flip side, though, is that by nature I'll have a tiny bit of reach that none of those thinkers and writers do. There are people out there who will read Amelia's blog, but not any of the books or essays by the people I've named. So there's a place for these ideas to go, as carried by my voice, that matters. Part of how I myself choose to show up, in the effort to improve the world, is to further the wisdom of those who have taught me - and to forward it along to those who I myself am uniquely able to reach. This alone is enough reason for me to write about love and liberation.

But more than that, I know the real lessons of studying the efforts of others. I know the real point of learning about Black survival and liberation. I know the real point of learning about Indigenous survival, resistance, and decolonization. I know the real point of reading poetry from writers trying desparately to avoid the bombs still falling on Palestine. I know the real point of learning about people who are not like me.

It isn't to mimic what they do, although that's a very easy mistaken assumption to make (and I have no problem admitting that I made that mistake for a long while myself).

The real lesson is to learn how to adapt, to be contextual, to be senstitive to the particular uniqueness of circumstances, to adjust and to move and to operate like I am alive. Liberation is not the work of mechanisms and clockworks and machinery. Liberation is the work of the alive.

And how are we to feel like we can truly be alive, in a situation that's so bleak and difficult? Economic instability, political turmoil, literal war, the very climate of our planet unraveling, and - yes - unchecked pandemic disease... how can we be asked to waste our precious time and energy on silly things like "love" when we're trying so hard not to succumb?

That, right there, is the crux of all of it.

That's the deepest value of learning from those who hurt in ways in which we ourselves do not: it can reveal to us the possibilities for contending with the pain and struggle we do have. Getting free, making the world a better place, changing things towards justice... these are not "bigger goals" that must be prioritized so we can "luxuriate" in trifles like loving, or being happy. It's the other way around.

I promise I'll get there - but, as is my way, I need to establish a bit more context first.

Roots

It's been almost two years, now, since my wonderful partner Quinn wrote about Beginning With Love. It's a magnificent and many-layered piece - I highly recommend pausing this and going and reading what they had to say. I promise I don't mind waiting, and I promise it's worth the detour. I revisit it often, and never cease to feel admiration and hope from their sharing of their perspective. It really isn't just about a "chronological" beginning (although that's one of its layers) but rather about something deeper, more important and fundamental - it's about what our roots are doing.

It speaks to something more than the disingenuous, superficial farce of our society's fixation on "how people are choosing to act" and gets right to the core of something infinitely more imporant: who people are choosing to be.

I've lived much of my life without roots, in more ways than one. I moved homes more than a dozen times before I even became an adult - not merely to different neighborhoods or towns, but sometimes to different continents. I've left behind places, people, entire lives genuinely more times than I can count. I've lost friends, jobs, partners, family, communities... you name it. The house I live in now holds my current personal record for longest place of dwelling in my entire life - at twelve years and counting. I've lost entire identities - a necessary (and often under-addressed) grief of being trans, and being required to leave behind three decades of life as a person I no longer wished to claim to be.

So when I talk about where my roots are, what my roots are doing - this is something I've poured a phenomenal amount of thought, intentionality, and care into, over the past eight years of my life. I've had to make a lot of decisions, about a lot of things. Nothing has felt so important as to decide what grounds me, where I find my stability and anchoring, and where I seek nourishment - where I seek survival.

It is not coincidental that this very blog opens with an unapologetic love letter to myself. It is also not coincidental that the very second entry is a love letter to you as my reader.

It is not coincidental that my single largest (and heaviest) work of memoir in this space also winds up being a love letter.

Nor is it coincidental that Quinn's essay (correctly) names my piece on "How Technology Really Gets Created" as a love letter. In a way, their own love letter has become a central guiding philosophy of what I now consider to be my life's work, with SpoonStack.

This theme matters.

So let's talk about why.

Histories

Quinn's piece points out a truth that many others have observed over the ages as well: that there's something about love that makes life... better. Not silly and giddy and carefree - those are the lies and distortions of an overculture that desperately does not want us to understand what love really is. Life gets easier. The good moments get better. The bad moments are... well, sometimes, it's simply possible to endure in a way that otherwise may be out of reach. Love alters the very fabric of our experienced reality in ways that are impossible to summarize.

I think it's very easy to fall into the myth that things like loving and being happy are "bonus goals" that we can all get to "later" - a sort of "reward" for what comes after the imaginary moment in time of "a revolution." We have to do the hard part, and then we can have the fun stuff.

I grew up in an extremist religious cult, so I'm aware that this pattern is more obvious to me than to most in our society - but this mentality is in fact a direct descendent of a mindset used by the Roman Catholic church (beginning in the rough ballpark of the year 350 CE) to instill cultural domination and subjugation across the ailing Roman Empire. In practice, even though Roman political presence has been gone for well over a thousand years, the ideology persists. It was adopted by the church and branded with a religious facade, in an effort to solidify political domination where military might was failing to do so. Ironically, it outlived the empire it was created to serve. And then, in time, it outlived the very religion that was created to teach it; the mass secularization of European society (particularly during the 1700s) decoupled this particular "work ethic" from the shared umbrella of christendom, including from the "Protestant" roots that are famously associated with it. These days, comparatively few notice the similarity, or know enough about the history to understand the significance at first blush.

The reality is that capitalism inherited the mentality that first spread across the world in service of Roman imperial subjugation. The notion that we must work first, "pay our dues," and then maybe we can enjoy some "luxury" (like being happy, for instance) goes back a long ways. It's no longer for the benefit of Rome, or even of christianity - but it's still for someone else's benefit. And the sneaky, pernicious scam of it all is that most of us don't even know it's a tool to keep us subjugated. For most people in our society today, that's just... a Fact of Life.

I can notice these things, because I've experienced enough to be familiar with the shape and texture and nature of them all. I know this pattern when I find it.

I also know enough to recognize how important it is to reject this notion. Years ago, I started intentionally telling myself "you can work when you're done playing" as a kind of microscopic attempt at seeding an antidote to this poison in my own day to day life. I continue to nurture a principled insistence that joy, pleasure, rest, care, and satisfaction are not things to be deferred; it is our sacred responsibility to prioritize them - especially and specifically above the "Real Work" our anti-culture tells us must come first.

Why does this matter?

Let's try a thought experiment for a moment.

Futures

Suppose the model we're all given is true: we need to do The Hard Thing, and then The Change will happen, and after The Big Moment we get to have time left to enjoy existing.

If that is the case, there are some problems. First of all, what happens if The Change doesn't occur in our lifetimes? Are we to just exist in misery, and try and take comfort from the notion that "someday" somebody else will have a good time because of our sacrifice? The overculture says yes, emphatically, to this question, all the time - which, again, traces its own roots back to the christianized mythology of suffering on Earth in order to earn "eternal rewards" in the afterlife. Of course, we don't really culturally uphold the notion of an afterlife that much anymore, so this begins to feel a bit flimsy as a persuasive tactic. So instead, we're given milestones within our lives: just graduate school, get a university degree, get a job, get the next promotion, buy a home, just make it to retirement - oops, you're too old, exhausted, and physically worn down to enjoy life anymore, so sorry, maybe you'll enjoy some "active senior living" before you're shuffled off to languish and disappear in the nursing home!

We're conned into chasing an endless stream of tomorrows that somehow never quite transpire, in service of exploiting as much as possible of the priceless value of our todays.

If we're not finding value and delight and joy and meaning in our time right now, who is? Is anyone? If not, our choices are clearly worth reconsidering. If so... why are we content to fuel their fulfillment, at the cost of our own?

So let's set aside the notion that we should just suffer until we die, or that if we suffer for long enough, we'll live to do something besides suffering.

After all, what we practice grows stronger. What we choose becomes habit, becomes normal, becomes way of life. Our ways of life get passed on to those around us who learn from us, and become cultures, become the tapestry of societies themselves. If we choose to practice suffering, that'll be how we live - and it'll be how all of us live, for generations to come. It won't suddenly change someday. So why are we still so eager to choose to suffer? I mean, I know we're told to. But it's a directive we should ignore.

Maybe this isn't convincing enough yet. So let's try one more quick thought experiment.

What if The Change does happen in our lifetimes? What if it happens next week? What if the dramatic, sudden, and permanent alteration of our collective existence happens a mere seven days from now? Let's imagine that, together, just for a moment.

Will you be ready?

If all oppression, marginalization, strife, war, and violence vanished - all at once - in just a few more days, would you be prepared to live in the world that followed? Can you even guess what that would be like? Is this an outcome either of us is actually equipped to comprehend?

We'd have no habits, no cultural norms, no societal structures, no infrastructure, no ways of living that could support such an existence. All we would know is surviving, fighting to not be overwhelmed, struggling to not succumb. And if the only skills we have are scraping by and resisting oppression, how can we expect to do anything useful with ourselves when those skills no longer have any purpose?

How many people struggled with restlessness, aimlessness, and uncertainty about what to do during those infamous days of "COVID lockdown"? Who was ready for it to "all be over" just to get away from the sensation of not knowing how to live in such conditions?

Perhaps more to the point, how many people did things differently for a little while - found hobbies, passions, interests either new or old - and then dropped all of it as soon as we all got told it was time to Get Back to Work?

As a collective, a culture, a society - even to a point as a species - we are not well-practiced at life outside the reality of oppression and exploitation. It's been all we've known, generationally, for hundreds of years, if not longer. If we think we're ready to be free all at once, we're kidding ourselves.

Now obviously "all bad things go away all at once" isn't exactly a believable scenario. It's easy to decide that such a fantasy is unimportant, and this argument is a waste of time because we need to just make smaller changes instead, and if we do that, the shock won't be so overwhelming. A lot of "reformism" comes from this mindset. It's also an easy assumption to make, an easy trap to fall it - and it's also a trap our overculture spends a fantastic amount of energy digging deeper, precisely so that we will fall into it readily.

The truth is, gradual changes that only target the "bad things" can't spare us from this issue, either. No matter how we slice it, if major change were to occur in our lives, we'd be forced to learn how to live in the new circumstances. And if we're not already prepared to do so, chances are we'll struggle, and fail.

It's like taking a professional chef and dumping them on a desert island for a survival reality TV show. Being handy in one situation doesn't automatically guarantee success in another - that celebrated chef may well starve. Or perhaps more to the point of our overall discussion, just because a survivalist can make do on that desert island doesn't mean they're cut out to run a gourmet kitchen. Would you pay a pretty chunk of money, for a reservation six months from now, in a restaurant operated by a guy who's famous for eating meals of desperation in harsh places?

I wouldn't.

I'd rather have the gourmet chef cook for me instead.

So why do we feel compelled to believe that we can "just figure out" how to live well, After The Revolution, and for now the important thing is to Keep Struggling and Keep Suffering?

It's equally absurd, equally ill-advised. The results would be equally disappointing and unappealing.

So let's talk about a better option.

Love

We're already tired. We're already overwhelmed. The world's already rough enough as it is. Being asked to put yet another thing on our to-do lists can - quite rightly - feel like an injustice all by itself. So I want to be clear about one thing right up front: I am not suggesting that we need to add love on top of what we're already doing.

My point is that we need to replace what we are doing. We need to supplant it with choosing to pursue love.

I've thrown this word "love " around a lot, but it's famously hard to define, or agree on what the hell that even entails. No, I'm not talking about destination romances, or sappy ceremonies, or commercialized holidays in February. Those are all the distractions and distortions our overculture has created to pull us away from the thing itself.

I don't know that I can offer you a compact, satisfying definition of love. But I can tell you how I have learned to recognize it.

I've learned this through experiencing it - truly feeling it, both towards myself and towards others, and both from myself and from others. It has been a relatively recent development in my own life, in terms of my overall total lifespan, but the contrast has been undeniable to me. And because of these experiences, I've been able to recognize how much love was missing from my past. Most importantly, I've learned to recognize how love is missing from our overall collective reality.

And because I've felt it in my personal life, I can feel the vital importance of it for anything larger. I know how much it's changed things for me to prioritize love instead of anything else in my own day to day existence. I know how much it has - seemingly paradoxically - made the very things possible that I otherwise would have chased for even more decades without any real results. I know how much pain and grief filled my years when love did not, and I know how much regret I have avoided in the years when love has been my focus.

And I can tell that this applies not just to the personal scale, but to the collective - to the entirety of total experience of everyone living on this earth.

Love changes us. To extend love, even to ourselves, changes us. To extend love to others changes us - and can also potentially change them, too. Love changes what it's like to experience things. If we want a powerful tool for changing the world, love does it all - every aspect of existence can be altered, when love is truly present. Even better, love helps us avoid making destructive and harmful changes. We'll still make mistakes - that much will never go away - but mistakes are so much easier to repair and recover from, when that work is done with love.

How do I recognize love?

Love is the dynamic that happens when we can bring our authentic presence to one another, and establish both sufficient consent and trust with each other to know that the things which are most important and sacred to us will not - can not - be corrupted, deprioritized, or lost... and this leaves us free to change ourselves, and to change each other, as much as healthily possible.

The Point

Love cannot be practiced alone, and yet it is critical to practice love towards ourselves. If we are not rooted in our own love, we will not regard ourselves well enough to survive changing the world - we will struggle even to survive the changing the world does in spite of us. We must learn to love ourselves, fully, truly, and genuinely. When we love ourselves, we do not volunteer to suffer. We do not accept a forged cheque promising happiness tomorrow at the expense of the opportunity to be happy today. We learn to find comfort, and peace, and joy, and satisfaction, even in the harshest of circumstances. To love ourselves is to prize our own lives.

Once we have our roots, and when we have committed to choosing our fuel wisely, our love begins to spill over. We overflow, beyond the edges of ourselves and our personal situations, and begin to spread love to everything and everyone around us. It is not a sudden or dramatic change - but it is profound, and it is undeniable. The further our love spreads, the more collective support we create together. The more healthy and caring and loving our families, communities, and social circles become, the more love we can generate and sustain together. Like all things that are alive, love grows outwards... but only from that which is already living and healthy.

Love will require much healing of us. Both within ourselves and amongst one another, we have many wounds to tend to. Love not only makes such healing possible, it makes it irresistible. When we are rooted in love, we cannot help but care about healing and repairing. We cannot choose to ignore our own suffering anymore. We cannot choose to disregard the suffering of anyone else, either, when we have the capacity to do anything about it. Moreover, we also develop the discernment to know our own limits, and to let go of our conditioned sense of obligation to miraculously resolve things we literally cannot affect... but only as a reflection of loving our own finiteness, the edges of our own capacity and ability.

With love, and with healing, altering reality for the better is not simply possible: it is inevitable. We know it's working - it may feel slow and inexorable and painfully prolonged at times, but when we pause to check up on our progress, there's no mistaking it. We joke in English about how unenjoyable it is to watch grass grow, but the truth is there's great wisdom in learning to notice and appreciate tiny, unceasing changes across time. Life itself tends to operate that way, after all.

Love would make it impossible for any of us to neglect our own wellbeing by choosing to reject simple, affordable, and easily available precautions to prevent the spread of a deadly and mass-disabling disease. Love would make it impossible for any of us to neglect the opportunity to care about each other's wellbeing in the same way. If we were prioritizing love, instead of play-acting at progressivism in a vain attempt to accomplish liberation, the survey I filled out this morning would never have needed to exist. It's not just that we're failing to love each other, in this haphazard amalgam of people wanting things to get better; it's that we are, ultimately, failing to love ourselves.

Liberation is not the work of tearing down and eradicating. It is the work of being alive, in direct defiance of all that wishes us to not be.

And in much the same way that a tree - given time, and nurturance - can shatter concrete pavement into dust, when we choose to be alive, to love our own being alive, we will inevitably break the things that try to stop us from doing so... and we will inevitably connect with, strengthen, and mutually flourish alongside other life.

Liberation is not a project of demolishing the systems that harm us. Liberation is the work of being so alive that those systems fail and crumble away, almost as an afterthought. We won't need to learn to out-battle domination and subjugation. We can't beat them at their own game, anyways; the forces of domination and control have literally thousands of years of practice, and, by definition, they already have us at a severe power disadvantage. Fortunately, the best way to win the game of domination is not to play: when the time comes, when we truly know how to live, oppression will cease to be relevant. Its end will be a side effect of our living, not the climactic conclusion of our struggle.

And this, in the end, is the lesson of all who have passed along the wisdom of how important love is, from the background of the most horrific experiences and struggles any humans have ever been forced to endure. This is why poets still write in Palestine right now, continuing genocides and wars notwithstanding. This is why Indigenous cultures still prize caring for the land and life around us, climate change notwithstanding. This is why Black culture still retains a vitality and a veracity that is the envy of every other cultural group left in the white-dominated world - and even catches the attention of the rest of the planet, too... all while continuing to face perpetual bigotry, neglect, and violence from that same world.

This is why I feel it's important for me to talk about disability, and disease, and well-meaning but perhaps inconsequential surveys.

There's a saying that comes up frequently, in critiques of the status quo, and social justice conversations. We often quip, about the behavior of oppressive systems and patterns of doing things, that "the cruelty is the point."

If we truly wish to position ourselves in opposition to injustice and oppression, shouldn't we be choosing to establish that, for us, the love is the point?