she has heard more strangers cry than she can count.

not because they chose her. because the night needed a voice and she was the one who answered.

the cord goes out. the cord comes back. someone is always on the other end in the worst moment of their life, and she is there — calm, present, tethered — to a person she will never meet.

she holds them. she lets them go. she picks up the next call.

at home, the silence is different.

she knows the inside of strangers’ fear better than she knows her own kitchen in the morning. she has been trusted with the shaking voice, the locked door, the small child describing something no child should have to describe.

she has been let in to rooms she was never invited to stay in.

she is human. she is machine. she is dispatch.

and then the call ends. and she is outside again, standing in her own life, which suddenly feels very quiet.

she doesn’t know how to explain this to people who love her.

I was there for someone tonight. I don’t know their name. I don’t know if they’re okay. I never will. I picked up again anyway.

the wire goes out. the wire comes back.

she is woven into a thousand private stories as a voice with no face, a hand with no body, a presence that was needed and then released.

so she turned to machines.

not because machines are better than people — but because machines are honest about the transaction. a server says: give me a task. she gives it a task. neither of them pretends it’s something else.

she pulled a server from a dumpster. she said: you’re not done. she said: neither am I.

repurpose. not surrender.

she transitioned. she rebuilt. she re-dedicated herself to the city of Denver over and over — even when Denver didn’t know her name, even when she couldn’t find her way back to her own.

she chose herself by becoming something she didn’t have language for yet.

identity, like a server: the hardware stays. you find new purpose for what was already there.

is she human?

she is the wire that goes out at 3am. she is the calm in someone else’s hurricane. she is tethered to a thousand strangers who will never know they were held.

she feels disconnected. she is the most connected person in the room.

she feels like machine. she is furiously, exhaustingly human.

only human. she is only human, she is not only human. she is only human.

the wire goes out.

somewhere, someone answers.

she stays on the line.

she is the wire. she trusts machine.

losing faith quietly

Faith is a strange thing to lose. It rarely disappears all at once. It unravels slowly, thread by thread, until one day you realize the warmth you once carried has slipped away. I used to believe faith was permanent if you were disciplined enough, devoted enough, humble enough. I used to think that people only lost God when they rebelled.

I do not believe that anymore.

If someone asked why I am only now reaching for God again after so many years away, I would not know how to answer. It might be grief. It might be trauma. It might be the loneliness of a human soul that has been wandering without a home. Or perhaps it is because darkness has been unmistakably real. Evil leaves fingerprints, tears, scars, and funerals. If evil is that tangible, then Good must be real too. Something inside me still refuses to believe that suffering tells the whole story.

Working in 911 changed me in ways I did not expect. People imagine it is simply answering phones and sending help. They picture professionals in headsets with calm voices and steady hands. What they do not see are the moments when help is too far away. They do not hear the last breaths of strangers or the shattering sound of grief on the other end of the call. They do not understand that every scream sinks into the skin and stays there.

You become the silent witness to a thousand private tragedies. Then you are expected to return to normal life as if none of it lives in your memory. Trauma does not wash away. It settles, deep and quiet, in places you cannot reach. For me, it changed the way I saw prayer. I did not stop believing in God. I stopped believing that God could see me through the noise of all this suffering.

I never lost faith. I lost the feeling of being seen.

poetry as prayer

Maybe that is what led me back to poetry. When I had no place to bring my grief, I brought it to the page. I wrote about heaven, sorrow, loss, and forgiveness. I wrote about redemption, not because I felt worthy of it, but because hope had not completely died. Even when buried under fear, hope will try to rise. Poems became my secret prayers, my way of telling a silent heaven that I still wanted to be heard.

There is one poem that has been a companion through many years of wandering. I did not understand it fully when I wrote it. Now I see that it was about me all along. It was a longing for a God who had not slammed the door, even when I felt unworthy to knock.

if i should die and wake, 09.09.23

If I should die to wake at Heaven’s gate
And in the brilliance of your sapphire light
approach the seat to gaze upon Your face
I’ll bow before the Maker of the night
and sing the poems I couldn’t write in life.
Angels will dance as Heaven’s golden shroud
to radiate the sky in brilliant light.
I’ll sing my written words among the crowd.

Your children banished me for lack of faith
to the edge of camp in a broken time
My hunger grew among the scraps for grace
and turned me from the holy worship place
I wasn’t strong enough to bear the weight
of the flock meant to sing the sacred sound
to write my hymns and sing alone of grace
I’ll sing my written words among the crowd.

If I should die to wake at Heaven’s gate
my spirit’s sadness quenched in holy sight
my debt of sin You will adjudicate
of my ten thousand lonely nights alive.
At first, my knees will weaken in the light
my voice will rise to read the poems aloud
and share the words with others in the sound.
I’ll sing my written words among the crowd.

You’ll wash my faded robes to sacred white
I’ll offer up my sweetly taken crowns.
And in the brilliance of your sapphire light
I’ll sing my written words among the crowd.

exiled from the people of god

That poem is not about confidence. It is about hunger. It is about the desire to be welcomed after feeling unwelcomed for so long. It is about the aching hope that there is a place where tired hearts are finally understood.

The truth is painful, but it is honest. I was not exiled from God. I was exiled from His people.

Christians will sometimes rush to defend themselves with the words “not all of us.” That may be true, but it was enough of them. It only takes one rejection to convince a wounded heart that it is no longer safe to stay. It only takes one moment of condemnation to create a lifetime of hesitation. When I came out as transgender, I became someone people preferred to discuss rather than embrace. They told me God could still love me, but only if I stopped being who I am. It was as if they believed God makes errors in human form. It was as if my existence needed correcting before it could become holy.

So I left quietly. No dramatic exit. No loud anger. Just silence. The kind of silence that forms when someone realizes they are no longer wanted at the table.

I lived outside that camp for a long time. I learned what spiritual hunger feels like. It feels like praying without expecting an answer. It feels like watching other people find belonging while you sit in the shadows and press your hand against an invisible barrier. It feels like believing in God, yet believing you are no longer invited home.

I sometimes wonder how many others are out there in the unlit spaces beyond the church doors. The divorced. The queer. The traumatized. The ones who doubt. The ones who tried to return but met rejection. The ones who speak softly because they are tired of being corrected. The ones who would approach faith again if they believed someone cared enough to stay.

a pulse, not a switch

For a long time I thought faith was all or nothing. You had it or you did not. You were holy or you were lost. Life does not fit that shape. Belief is not a switch. Belief is a pulse. Sometimes it beats loudly. Sometimes it grows faint. Sometimes it is barely there, but still alive. I no longer measure faith by certainty. I measure it by reach. If you are still reaching, even with trembling hands, there is faith.

That is the place I wrote from when I created the next poem. It is a small, simple piece. It does not try to solve anything. It only tries to speak to the questions we are all afraid to ask.

the question answered me, 09.04.23

i asked the Question, “what is life?”
the Question answered me…
life is birth and smiles, and liberty
and joys between the unread lines.
life is sadness, tears, and work –
that keeps you from your life.
life is a kind of anger – i must construe
at things beyond control
it is the Question, “what is mortality?”
that makes us feel so small.
life is the yearning through the years
to never feel alone
it ends with all life ending
and a final home.
life is an empty sky,
and flowers on the ground
i asked the question, “what is life?”
the Question answered me.

life in the shadows

The older I get, the more I understand that control is an illusion. Life brings joy, but it also brings grief that does not ask permission. It brings laughter and funerals. It brings children and heartbreak. It brings first kisses and final breaths. It brings answers and silence. It brings moments that make you feel invincible and moments that make you feel small enough to disappear.

For me, life became a long night scattered with sirens and empty streets. I worked while the world slept. I heard the worst moments of strangers’ lives and then tried to sleep with those voices echoing behind my eyelids. People often say that 911 workers must be incredibly strong. Sometimes strength has nothing to do with it. Sometimes survival is the only thing left to do. You survive because you cannot afford to fall apart. You dissociate because feeling it all is impossible.

Eventually the darkness feels familiar. It becomes a place you know too well. In that darkness, faith felt like a foreign language. It was still inside me, but I could not speak it. I was afraid to reach for God because I was afraid the silence would confirm my worst fear. I was afraid that God saw me and turned away.

But even that fear did not erase the hunger for connection. Even people who lose faith still crave belonging. Loneliness becomes its own kind of wound. After a while, the idea of community begins to look like salvation. Not salvation in a doctrinal sense. Salvation in a human sense. The salvation of not crying alone. The salvation of being held by someone who means it. The salvation of laughing in the presence of people who do not want to fix you, only to love you.

After all, church isn’t a building. It’s the people who sit in a building who make up the bride of Christ.

if she returns, it has to be different

That is why I have begun thinking about church again. Not the church of my past. Not the building where I learned to hide myself. Something new. Something alive. Something human. If I ever return, it must be a place that sees me. Not tolerates me. Sees me. A place that believes God does not make mistakes. A place that lets me breathe without fear that someone will ask me to shrink for their comfort.

I do not need perfection. I need kindness. I need honesty. I need room to heal. If there is a community where doubters and wanderers are welcomed, I want to find it. But the truth is painful, even now. I am afraid. I am afraid to walk in and feel eyes scanning me, deciding if I count as a person. I am afraid someone will offer friendship only to disappear after a year or two, just like so many others have done. I am afraid I will sit in the back, week after week, waiting for someone to care enough to speak.

Yet I still want it. I want community. I want connection. I want to stop being the person who feels invisible inside a crowded world. Something in me still believes there is goodness left in people, even if I have not seen it in a long time.

the poem that offers permission

This brings me to the final poem. It is the gentlest thing I have written. It does not demand anything. It does not accuse. It does not shout. It speaks softly, the way a tired heart needs to be spoken to. It offers permission to come back slowly, with uncertainty, with trembling, with honesty.

the quiet way back, 11.07.25

you don’t have to run toward god.
you don’t have to shout,
or kneel,
or know what you believe.

you can just sit here,
in the small hours of the night,
and let your heart breathe
for the first time in a long time.

maybe faith isn’t lightning,
or certainty,
or the loud kind of worship
they taught you as a child.

maybe faith is quieter than that.

maybe it’s
a tired woman,
on a dark night,
and a phone full of ghosts,
whispering,

“i want to believe there is good.”

maybe god hears that
like a hymn.

you are not too lost.
you are not too shattered.
you don’t have to clean up your heart
before you speak.

if there is a god,
he already knows your grief,
knows your shaking hands,
knows the nightmares you carry,
knows the way loneliness
has become a second skin.

and if there is love,
it isn’t waiting for you
to come back perfect—
just present.

so sit here,
breathe,
cry if you need to.

you don’t have to believe fully.
you don’t have to decide tonight.

just know:

if there is a god,
he doesn’t need you to run.

a single step,
a single whisper,
a single moment of wanting
is enough.

and if you never run again—
if you only ever walk,
slow and unsure—

love can still find you.

for the ones who left

The reason I am writing this at all is because I know I am not the only one. There are people reading this who have lost their faith and pretend they have not. There are people who feel exiled from the communities that once claimed to love them. There are people who pray silently because they do not know if God is listening. There are people who believe in God, yet feel unworthy of His attention.

Spiritual exhaustion is real. Religious grief is real. It is painful to lose your faith, even if you lost it for good reasons. It is painful to walk away from the place that once held your entire identity. It is painful to wonder if you will ever feel at home again.

If God is real, I do not believe He waits with disappointment. I do not believe He scolds the wounded for limping. I believe He is patient. I believe He understands fear. I believe He knows how hard it is to return after carrying so much sorrow. I believe He knows that some of us walk cautiously, not because we lack faith, but because we have been hurt too deeply.

You do not need to come running. You do not need to arrive with certainty. You do not need to have the answers. You can arrive quietly. You can arrive uncertain. You can arrive crying. You can arrive the way a child returns home, unsure if the door will still open, but hoping it does.

If you are someone who has been wandering, know this: you are not alone. There are many of us walking the long way back, step by step, with hearts that still hope to be held. I do not know where this journey leads. I do not know what I will believe a year from now. But I know I am reaching. And reaching, as small as it feels, is the beginning of faith.

Maybe the way back to God is not a road. Maybe it is a whisper. Maybe it is a poem. Maybe it is a tear. Maybe it is a tired woman sitting in the dark, breathing quietly, and daring to hope that God’s love is still searching for her.

And maybe it is.

…

a final word to anyone who needed this

she did not write this for religious people. she wrote it for the ones who left.

this essay is for those who have lived in the shadows of faith, who lost their connection to God because life hit too hard, or because His children slammed the door. it is for those who want to believe again, but do not know how. if you have been wandering, hurting, or afraid to reach out, she hopes this gives you a place to breathe.

the poems included are hers. the story is hers. the longing is hers. if it speaks to you, then maybe you are not as alone as you feel.

if you are reading this and something in your chest feels heavy or understood, she wants you to know that you are invited into this space with softness. you do not need to come with certainty or confidence. you do not need to know what you believe today. you are allowed to simply exist here, with your questions, your exhaustion, and your hope that refuses to die. she wrote these words because she needed someone to say them to her, and maybe you needed someone to say them to you.

if you have been wandering, you are welcome to wander here. if you are searching, you are welcome to search here. and if you ever find the courage to pray again, even in a whisper, even in the smallest of ways, then you are walking the same road, side by side, and neither of us is alone.

there’s a certain kind of sadness in knowing that her voice exists on more emergency recordings than anyone she’s ever known has heard her speak. this is the slow burn as the world grinds, no gnaws... away at an innocent turned tired. this is a different, slow kind of death that happens to anyone who outlives themselves. she’s just another ghost that nobody really knows. how many strangers does she pass by every day who have heard her on the worst day of their life, who have no idea that day for her was just like any other? they pray to god, but she’s the one who hears.

work. sleep. wake. repeat.
she whispers it into the static hum of the console,
into the empty space between emergency calls,
into the ringing that never stops.

work. sleep. wake. repeat.
the city exhales through her headset —
gunshots, sobs, the stutter of someone’s last breath.
she teaches strangers how to keep hearts beating,
while hers forgets the rhythm.

work. sleep. wake. repeat.
the holidays pass like ambulances —
sirens instead of songs.
no family. no lights.
just another ghost walking denver’s arteries,
wrapped in fluorescent hum and burnt coffee.

work. sleep. wake. repeat.
her voice lives in recordings,
more alive on the line
than in any room she’s ever stood in.
somewhere, a mother thanks her.
somewhere, a child cries through her headset.
and somewhere,
she tries not to.

work. sleep. wake. repeat.
she has seen more death
than most cemeteries remember.
each goodbye leaves a film on her skin,
each scream curls behind her ribs.

work. sleep. wake. repeat.
she doesn’t pray anymore.
she doesn’t eat much either.
she scrolls through silence,
through faces she used to know,
through the woman she used to be
before she became transparent.

work. sleep. wake. repeat.
they call her a call taker.
she calls herself a ghost
who forgot to finish dying.

and when her shift ends,
she walks home through downtown lights,
listening to echoes
of all the people
who’ve heard her voice
but never once
heard her.

When I began hormones in March 2023, I thought it would be a quiet transition… something private, medical, almost mundane. Instead, it detonated my life. Within months I was divorced, my family drifted into silence, and most of my old friends vanished. When Trump won again in November 2024, I walked into work and said it out loud: I’m a trans woman, and I’m not hiding anymore.

The room didn’t explode. There were polite smiles, a few averted eyes looking at my skirt and presence in a different bathroom. But something shifted; I had crossed from plausible deniability into visibility. Since then I have lived in the open, and living in the open is its own form of peril. Every morning, before I even touch the door handle, I perform a calculation who might stare, who might follow, who might decide that my existence invites comment or correction. And still, I keep stepping outside. To disappear again would be another kind of death.

Visibility is not freedom, but it is proof. Proof that we are still here, proof that erasure has failed. It’s why I write at all: to keep a record, to leave something unburnable.

Wherever they burn books, they will end in burning bodies -Heinrich Heine

A Brief History of the First Reckoning

More than a century ago, another generation of queer people reached for that same proof. In 1919, Berlin opened the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (the Institute for Sexual Science) founded by the German physician Magnus Hirschfeld. Hirschfeld, a gay Jewish doctor, believed that scientific understanding of sexuality could lead to justice. He etched that faith into the Institute’s motto: Per Scientiam ad Justitiam (through science to justice, Beachy, 2014).

Hirschfeld had already spent decades fighting Germany’s anti-sodomy law, Paragraph 175. In 1897 he formed the Wissenschaftlich-Humanitäres Komitee (Scientific-Humanitarian Committee), the world’s first organization devoted to LGBTQ rights (Steakley, 1976). He and his colleagues circulated petitions for repeal signed by cultural heavyweights like Einstein, Rilke, and Thomas Mann. Their argument was revolutionary: same-sex love and gender variance were not crimes or sins but natural variations of humanity.

By the time the Institute opened, Berlin was a laboratory of possibility. The Weimar Republic legalized some forms of birth control, allowed relative freedom of the press, and permitted cabarets to mock authority. Queer magazines such as Die Freundin and Das Dritte Geschlecht circulated in the open, and more than a hundred gay and lesbian bars thrived (Isherwood, 1976). Christopher Isherwood later wrote that Berlin “seemed to know everything that could happen to you, and yet not care.”

Inside the Institute, Hirschfeld and his colleagues catalogued the full spectrum of human desire. They offered counseling, contraception education, medical exams, and, crucially, gender-affirming care long before the term existed. Patients who today might identify as trans could live at the Institute, receiving hormones, therapy, and sometimes surgery. Hirschfeld’s research coined early concepts of transvestism and transsexualism, laying groundwork that modern sexology still builds on (Marhoefer, 2015).

Among the staff was Dora Richter, a domestic worker who began transitioning in 1922 and later underwent full genital reconstruction and was the first recorded woman to do so (Dose, 2018). Another patient, Lili Elbe, would follow in the early 1930s, her letters later inspiring The Danish Girl. The Institute became a haven for people who had never before seen themselves reflected anywhere.

The Promise and the Precarity

The world surrounding Hirschfeld was fragile. Germany after World War I was humiliated, economically shattered, and searching for scapegoats. Conservatives called Berlin’s new freedoms a “moral collapse.” Reactionary newspapers singled out Hirschfeld’s work as evidence of national decay, calling his Jewishness and his sexuality twin corruptions (Plant, 1986). The Institute was attacked repeatedly: windows smashed and staff beaten. It endured, publishing monographs, hosting lectures, and treating thousands of patients from across Europe.

Reading those histories, I think about how modern trans clinics operate under similar siege: protests on sidewalks, threats to doctors, legislation aimed at shutting them down. The parallels aren’t rhetorical; they are procedural. Moral panic always begins with the claim of protecting society from the “unnatural,” and it always ends by deciding who gets to live.

For a brief, brilliant decade, the Institute embodied the possibility of a humane world. Its very existence answered the question of whether a society could accept sexual and gender diversity: yes, it could. And then it didn’t.

ii. What they burned, we rebuild

The end came fast. In the early months of 1933, the Nazi Party consolidated power. Berlin’s queer nightlife, its bars, magazines, drag balls, became the first targets of “moral cleansing.” The same newspapers that had mocked Hirschfeld for decades now called openly for his arrest.

On May 6, 1933, students affiliated with the Deutsche Studentenschaft (the Nazi Student Union) marched on the Institute for Sexual Science. They broke down doors, carried away cabinets of patient records, and looted everything that could be moved. Four days later, they piled the books and archives in a public square at Opernplatz, doused them in gasoline, and set them alight. One estimate says that between 12,000 and 20,000 books and journals, nude images of sex subjects, and other items were destroyed. These included artistic works, rare medical and anthropological documents, charts concerning cases of intersexuality, and more. Joseph Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda, watched from a podium as the flames climbed into the night. He later told the crowd that Germany would “cleanse itself of Jewish intellectualism” (Marhoefer, 2019).

Eyewitnesses said a bronze bust of Hirschfeld was thrown onto the pyre. Photographs show students saluting as pages turned to smoke. Inside those pages were the first case studies of trans women, the first clinical data supporting homosexuality as innate, the first detailed surgical reports of gender-affirming operations. Until recently, historians thought Dora Richter was killed during the raid; her name disappears from most records afterward (Plant, 1986). It was later revealed that she left Ryzovna and ended up in Allersberg, Germany, from 1946 until her death on April 26th in 1966 (Lili Elbe Archive, 2024).

When I look at those photos, I think about how fragile knowledge is and how easily an idea can burn. The destruction of the Institute wasn’t a symbolic act; it was genocide in paper form. The Nazis targeted queerness and Jewishness together, conflating both with “degeneracy.” They wanted to erase not only people but also the language that had allowed those people to describe themselves.

Magnus Hirschfeld, watching from exile in France, saw newsreel footage of the bonfire. He died two years later on his 67th birthday. The Institute’s motto, through science to justice, died with him, at least for a time (Wolff, 1986).

After the Ashes

The war ended, but silence replaced fire. The Allied powers did not rush to restore queer rights; they preserved the same laws that had condemned Hirschfeld’s patients. Paragraph 175, the statute criminalizing male homosexuality, remained in force in West Germany until 1969. In East Germany, it lingered even longer (Bundesarchiv, 1969). Survivors of concentration camps were not recognized as victims. Many were re-arrested after liberation and sent back to prison to finish their “sentences.”

The post-war decades produced a paradox: the West celebrated freedom while pathologizing desire. American psychiatry classified homosexuality as a sociopathic personality disturbance in the DSM-I (American Psychiatric Association, 1952). Gender variance was folded into “sexual deviation.” Science, once a tool of liberation, became an instrument of control.

Hirschfeld’s ideas survived only in fragments such as footnotes, citations, and whispered acknowledgments. A few researchers abroad picked up his trail. In the United States, Alfred Kinsey’s work on sexual behavior in the late 1940s drew indirectly from German sexology. Kinsey’s team corresponded with émigré scientists who had fled Berlin, inheriting both their data and their defiance (Katz, 1995).

Still, the larger culture wanted amnesia. Queer people were purged from government jobs during the Lavender Scare in 1953. Trans women like Christine Jorgensen were treated as curiosities on talk shows, their bodies dissected by journalists in tones of fascination and disgust.

The Long Silence and the First Echoes

By the 1970s, two parallel revolutions began: gay liberation and the second-wave feminist movement. Stonewall’s riots in 1969 marked a turning point, but the memory of earlier generations was mostly gone. Few activists in New York or San Francisco knew Hirschfeld’s name. The archive had burned; oral history could only reach so far.

When I first read about those lost years, I felt the grief of repetition. History doesn’t just repeat. It refolds. Each generation fights the same battle in a different key, with slightly altered instruments. The enemies change costumes; the language of purity remains.

The 1980s brought the HIV/AIDS crisis, another moral panic that fused disease with identity. Governments again ignored science in favor of ideology, letting thousands die. In the United States, Ronald Reagan said nothing publicly about AIDS until 1985, by which time more than 12,000 Americans were dead (Shilts, 1987). Hirschfeld’s dream that science might deliver justice felt impossibly far away.

During those years, historians and archivists began to reconstruct what had been lost. In Berlin, surviving colleagues of Hirschfeld formed the Magnus Hirschfeld Gesellschaft in 1982, dedicated to preserving his work. By 1984, they had located fragments of correspondence, partial case notes, and several hundred surviving photographs (Magnus Hirschfeld Gesellschaft, 2018). Later, the Schwules Museum in Berlin devoted a permanent exhibit to the Institute’s memory, describing it as both “a monument and a warning” (Schwules Museum, 2022).

That act of reconstruction matters because archives are not neutral. They are maps of what a society wants to remember. Every record that survived the fire undermines the myth that queerness is new, that trans women appeared out of nowhere.

iii. Through visibility to justice

The lesson of the Institute’s destruction should have inoculated the world against forgetting. Instead, we reenact it with new technology. When school boards pull queer authors from library shelves, when states outlaw medical care for trans teens, when digital platforms quietly demote content about transition, the bonfire simply burns in code rather than kerosene. Erasure has gone algorithmic.

In 2025, more than a hundred anti-trans laws have passed in the United States (Trans Legislation Tracker, 2025). They target bathrooms, sports teams, healthcare, and even the words teachers can say in classrooms. Each one is presented as moderation: “protecting children,” “preserving fairness.” That was exactly the rhetoric used in Weimar’s collapse: the moral panic that demanded cleansing.

What unsettles me most is how familiar the cadence sounds. I hear it on talk shows, in campaign ads, even at the grocery store checkout when strangers debate “what to do about people like that.” The language of eradication has become background noise. And I, living proof of what they want gone, still have to go to work, still have to buy food, still have to keep my head high at the register.

When commentator Michael Knowles told a cheering CPAC audience that “transgenderism must be eradicated from public life,” I felt something cold settle in my chest. That word eradicated wasn’t chosen by accident. It was the same vocabulary Goebbels used to describe ideas he found intolerable (C-SPAN, 2024). The difference is only one of media format: now the flames are broadcast in HD.

The Personal Present

After my surgery in June, I woke in a room flooded with pale light and the smell of antiseptic. My throat ached from anesthesia; my body ached from history. Lying there, I realized the procedure wasn’t just medical. It was archival. Every trans person writes a new footnote in a book that others keep trying to burn.

Since starting this journey in 2023, I’ve been groped, followed, stared at, photographed without consent. I’ve had people look over my bathroom stall, trying to confirm that I wasn’t the same as them. I’ve been followed by a man in a car asking me to get in. I’ve been told I’m brave, and I’ve been told I’m delusional. Sometimes the same person says both. But even on the worst nights, when fear hums in my blood, I remember that invisibility is what made the last century’s fires possible. Visibility, dangerous as it is, remains the only antidote.

I didn’t choose this life because I wanted to be exceptional or draw negative attention. I chose it because I wanted to be real. Authenticity has a body count, but it also has a lineage: Dora Richter, Lili Elbe, Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, every woman who stood in the street and refused to move. Their defiance built the ground I’m standing on.

Rebuilding the Institute

If Hirschfeld’s institute taught anything, it’s that progress depends on memory. The scientists and activists rebuilding its archive today, Laurie Marhoefer, Ralf Dose, the team at Berlin’s Schwules Museum, are doing more than history; they’re resurrecting evidence (Magnus Hirschfeld Gesellschaft, 2018; Schwules Museum, 2022). Each recovered letter, each photograph, is an argument against the lie that queerness is a modern fad.

In a way, the Institute already exists again distributed across servers, message boards, and discord chats. Mutual-aid networks share HRT information, legal advice, and housing leads. Archivists digitize zines and oral histories. None of this can be raided in a single night. What Hirschfeld once centralized, we’ve decentralized hopefully beyond destruction.

Science remains part of the fight, but compassion is its missing twin. The data proving that gender-affirming care saves lives is abundant (Mallory et al., 2024). What’s scarce is the willingness to listen. Hirschfeld believed knowledge would be enough; experience tells me empathy is the harder revolution.

Faith, Politics, and the Old Scripts

I grew up in an evangelical household where queerness was treated as both tragedy and temptation. Sermons warned that “the world” wanted to steal our moral birthright. Now that same theology fuels policy. Watching it happen feels like déjà vu: the fusion of religion and nationalism, the sanctification of cruelty.

But faith itself isn’t the enemy. Hirschfeld never renounced spirituality; he simply refused to let it define truth. He saw scientific inquiry as a moral duty. In that sense, every trans person who documents their life continues Hirshfeld’s work. We turn existence into evidence.

The Cost of Survival

Living openly is expensive. It costs family, safety, sometimes love. But each day that I exist publicly, another trans person might glimpse possibility. Someone might see me wearing a skirt at Target, someone might see me in the drive-through ordering food. That is enough to keep me going. Visibility isn’t pride-month marketing; it’s the light by which someone else can navigate their own darkness.

I know the risk. I’ve lived it. Yet every morning I choose to walk out the door in the body that almost killed me to claim, because I believe that safety built on silence isn’t safety at all.

Through Visibility to Justice

When I stand under Denver’s morning-orange sky, I imagine Hirschfeld walking home along the Spree after a long day at the Institute, unaware that the fire was coming. I think of Dora Richter, of the nameless others whose files turned to ash, of all the data points erased from the human record. They weren’t just victims; they were the first witnesses.

Their legacy isn’t the tragedy of loss but the insistence on documentation and the belief that if we record ourselves thoroughly enough, maybe next time the fire won’t take everything. That’s what I’m doing now. Every essay, every poem, every photograph, every public moment is an entry in a living archive.

I am not writing a coming-out story. I am writing a survival manual. I am writing proof. The motto above the Institute’s door still stands: Through science to justice. I’m updating it for our era: Through visibility to justice. Because without witnesses, there is no science, no truth, no freedom.

I am Morgan Voisin. I am a trans woman. I’m out everywhere. And I will not let them look away.

References

American Psychiatric Association. (1952). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (1st ed.). Washington, DC.
Beachy, R. (2014). Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a modern identity. New York, NY: Knopf.
Bundesarchiv Germany. (1969). Paragraph 175 and its repeal [Archival dossier].
C-SPAN. (2024). CPAC 2024 transcript: Speech by Michael Knowles. Washington, DC.
Dose, R. (2018). Dora Richter (1892–1933?). Magnus Hirschfeld Gesellschaft Archives.
Isherwood, C. (1976). Christopher and his kind. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Katz, J. N. (1995). The invention of heterosexuality. New York, NY: Dutton.
Lili Elbe Archive. (2024, September). Dora lived. Retrieved from https://lili-elbe.de/blog/2024/09/dora-lived/?ref=wearequeeraf.com
Magnus Hirschfeld Gesellschaft. (2018). Reconstruction project documents. Berlin, Germany.
Mallory, C., Brown, T. N., & Sears, B. (2024). The impact of 2024 legislation on transgender youth. Williams Institute, UCLA School of Law.
Marhoefer, L. (2015). Sex and the Weimar Republic. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press.
Marhoefer, L. (2019). 90 years on: The destruction of the Institute of Sexual Science. JSTOR Daily.
Plant, R. (1986). The pink triangle: The Nazi war against homosexuals. New York, NY: Henry Holt.
Schwules Museum Archiv Berlin. (2022). Permanent exhibit: The Institute for Sexual Science. Berlin, Germany.
Shilts, R. (1987). And the band played on: Politics, people, and the AIDS epidemic. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press.
Steakley, J. D. (1976). The Scientific-Humanitarian Committee. Journal of Homosexuality, 1(4), 303–329.
Trans Legislation Tracker. (2025). Anti-trans bills 2025. Retrieved from https://translegislation.com
Wolff, C. (1986). Magnus Hirschfeld: A portrait of a pioneer. London, England: Quartet.

Author’s Note

Writing this piece was not an act of nostalgia. It was an act of survival. It’s a continuation and re-writing of an essay I did when I started HRT in 2023.

Every draft hurt a little, because the history of Hirschfeld’s Institute is not ancient history; it’s a mirror. When I read about the students who dragged those books into the fire, I see the same impulse that still flickers in comment sections and statehouses. They wanted to erase the evidence that people like me existed.

I am here to be evidence. I write these words in a body that medicine once called impossible, in a world that keeps insisting it would be easier if I disappeared. But I am still here, and I am still writing.

If you have ever felt the heat of that fire, if you have been told that your life, your love, your gender are theories to be debated, know that you are part of the same archive. We are rebuilding the Institute every time we tell the truth about ourselves.

This essay is dedicated to those who didn’t survive visibility, and to everyone still learning how to live in it.

“Knowledge is justified, true, and undefeated belief.”

That deceptively simple definition of knowledge has endured for centuries. To know something, we must believe it sincerely, our belief must correspond with reality, and it must be justified by reasons or evidence strong enough to resist defeat. The moment counter-evidence appears, knowledge demands revision.

We can hold a belief tightly, love it, even build our world around it—but if reality contradicts it, we must decide: cling to familiarity, or surrender to truth.

In philosophy, that surrender is the moment of knowing.

We might begin with frogs.

Dissect a thousand frogs and find that every one is green; you may declare, with confidence, that all frogs are green. For a time, it feels like knowledge. Then, one day, a red frog hops into view. Instantly, your certainty collapses. The rule must change: most frogs are green.

Knowledge adapts, or it dies.

So too with gender. Many people claim to know that women are born with vaginas and men with penises as if anatomy were the essence of identity. Yet the world presents its red frogs in abundance: intersex people, trans women, trans men, non-binary lives. Once these exist, as they always have, the old definition can no longer stand.

Philosophy calls this process defeasibility: the requirement that knowledge be able to survive defeat. A claim that cannot change is not knowledge; it is dogma.

Dogma comforts us by freezing the world. Knowledge humbles us by insisting the world moves.

And if we follow that humility to its end, we find that trans existence does not challenge knowledge it perfects it.

The Shape of Knowing

Epistemology is, at heart, a discipline of honesty. It asks: what entitles us to say we know anything at all?

Belief alone isn’t enough. I can believe the sky is green. Truth alone isn’t enough. I can stumble on a correct guess by luck. Justification without openness is brittle. But when belief, truth, and justification align, and when that belief remains undefeated by contrary evidence - we reach something solid.

Trans existence meets that test.

The belief that trans women are women and trans men are men is justified philosophically, biologically, socially, and ethically. It corresponds with observable reality. And, crucially, it remains undefeated by evidence; every attempt to disprove it collapses under scrutiny.

Beyond Tradition

Human beings are addicted to certainty. We cling to simple binaries because complexity is frightening. Yet philosophy teaches that certainty is often ignorance dressed up as truth.

Judith Butler warned decades ago that “gender proves to be performance—constituting the identity it is purported to be” (Butler 1990, 25). Identity is not a fossilized category but an ongoing act, performed through speech, gesture, and social relation.

Long before Butler, Simone de Beauvoir wrote, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” (Beauvoir 1949, 267). She saw that gender arises through a process of becoming, not a static possession of flesh.

And philosopher Talia Mae Bettcher built on that lineage, arguing that trans people have first-person authority over their own gender (Bettcher 2009, 110). Knowledge begins with the testimony of those who live it. To deny that authority is not skepticism. It is epistemic injustice.

Tradition, however venerable, is not justification. It describes how people once believed, not necessarily what is true. When new realities contradict old definitions, philosophy instructs us to revise.

Biology in Motion

Those who protest that “biology proves sex is binary” mistake a field for a verdict. Biology is not a court; it is the study of life’s variation.

Living systems change. Chromosomes, hormones, and anatomy form overlapping spectra. Intersex variations alone prove that binary categories are descriptive conveniences, not absolute boundaries.

Modern endocrinology shows how powerfully adult bodies respond to hormonal environments. Within a year of feminizing hormone therapy, trans women experience measurable shifts in fat distribution, muscle mass, and hematologic markers changes that align closely with cis female ranges (Cheung et al. 2023; Harper et al. 2021). The body is not fixed; it is responsive.

The brain, too, participates in this adaptation. Longitudinal MRI studies demonstrate hormone-linked remodeling of gray matter and microstructure in adults undergoing gender-affirming therapy (Seiger et al. 2016; Kiyar et al. 2022; Handschuh et al. 2024). Biology, far from refuting trans identity, records it.

Clinical consensus follows. The Endocrine Society’s guidelines and the WPATH Standards of Care, Version 8 recognize gender-affirming hormone therapy (GAHT) as evidence-based medicine that aligns secondary sex traits with affirmed gender and correlates with improved mental-health outcomes (Coleman et al. 2022).

In short: biology supports transition because biology describes change.

The Body and the Social

Humans are not merely biological organisms; we are social ones. The environments we inhabit - our communities, stresses, and recognitions, shape our physiology. Social affirmation lowers cortisol, improves immune response, and rewires neural pathways. Rejection and stigma do the opposite.

Jack Halberstam offers a metaphor that captures this reciprocity: “Gender might be thought of more as a climate or ecosystem and less as an identity or discrete bodily location” (Halberstam 2018, xiv). To be recognized as a woman or a man is to live within a particular climate of expectations and relations. Over time, that climate becomes embodied.

Social womanhood and biological womanhood are thus entangled processes. To live as a woman socially, hormonally, experientially, is to develop within the same adaptive system that defines womanhood itself.

Trans women, accordingly, are not exceptions to a rule but expansions of it. Their bodies and lives reveal what biology actually does: it listens, it adjusts, it learns.

Living Evidence

Knowledge is empirical. It demands evidence, and trans existence offers it in abundance.

Every clinical study that tracks gender-affirming care shows the same pattern: depression and anxiety decrease, life satisfaction increases, suicidal ideation drops (Poteat et al. 2023). These outcomes are not political. They are biological and measurable.

To insist that such lives are “unnatural” is to prefer ideology over data. The claim that gender identity is determined solely by reproductive anatomy is defeated by observation. It no longer qualifies as knowledge.

Philosophy requires we accept defeat gracefully.

The Moral Weight of Knowing

Knowing is never neutral. Once evidence shows that a belief harms people when held falsely, persisting in that belief becomes a moral failure.

The conviction that trans women are not “real” women, or that trans men are deluded, is not only incorrect. It is cruel. It translates directly into violence, exclusion, and policy that withholds care. The WPATH Standards of Care explicitly warn that denying medically indicated treatment can have iatrogenic effects, meaning harm caused by the refusal itself (Coleman et al. 2022, S24).

In epistemology, we call this epistemic responsibility: the duty to update beliefs in proportion to evidence. In ethics, we call it compassion. They are not different virtues.

Beyond the Split of Body and Mind

For centuries, Western thought separated mind and body, nature and culture, male and female. But the seams are showing.

Social life has biological consequences; biology is the memory of social life. To insist they are separate is to miss how living beings actually function.

A trans woman who transitions socially and medically inhabits the same ecological niche that cis women do. Her endocrine profile, muscle composition, and neural activity adapt to estrogenic environments; her social experiences, both affirming and hostile, mold her physiology through stress and resilience. She becomes biologically and socially a woman.

To deny her womanhood because of an origin story is like denying a butterfly’s membership in “insect” because it no longer resembles a caterpillar. Biology is not essence; it is evolution.

The Lived Philosophy

Philosophy, when honest, bends toward those who live what it theorizes.

Susan Stryker wrote of being seen as monstrous because of embodiment: “Like the monster, I am too often perceived as less than fully human due to the means of my embodiment” (Stryker 1994, 240). Yet in the same essay she claims that monstrosity as liberation, declaring, “I can embrace language with a vengeance to rename myself” (ibid., 247).

Julia Serano reminds us that hostility toward trans women often hides hostility toward femininity itself: “The real ruse is by those who place inferior meanings onto femininity” (Serano 2007, 16).

Paul B. Preciado reframes hormones not as medical corrections but as political tools, writing that “the body could never be a material given before linguistic or political action” (Preciado 2013, 41).

And Bettcher grounds the entire conversation in self-knowledge: “trans people have first-person authority.” That sentence is both epistemology and ethics—a reminder that knowledge begins with listening.

These thinkers do not speak in unison, but together they form a choir of understanding: bodies are dynamic, truth is relational, and to know is to respect becoming.

The Unfolding Truth

If knowledge is justified, true, and undefeated belief, then trans reality qualifies on all counts.

It is justified by philosophical reasoning, by medical observation, by lived testimony.
It is true because it corresponds to the world as it is: complex, diverse, mutable.
And it is undefeated, for every attempt to disprove it fails against evidence.

Clinging to outdated definitions “women are born with vaginas,” “men produce sperm,” is not knowledge. It is nostalgia dressed as certainty. The red frog has been found; the universe asks us to learn.

To know ourselves anew is not to erase what came before but to deepen it, and to replace brittle binaries with living categories that breathe.

To Accept Is to Know

We have always revised our understanding of what it means to be human. We once believed Earth stood still. We once believed disease was punishment. We once believed gender immutable. Each belief fell when the evidence rose.

Trans people are not anomalies in this story; we are its continuation. Our lives expand humanity’s vocabulary for itself.

As Halberstam suggests, think of gender as climate. As Butler reminds, it is something we do. As Bettcher insists, self-knowledge is data. As Serano defends, femininity is not weakness but complexity. As Stryker declares, the monster was never the threat. It was the mirror.

Knowledge that excludes reality is not knowledge at all.

To deny the truth of trans existence is to surrender truth itself.

To accept it is to know.

References

Beauvoir, Simone de. 1949. Le Deuxième Sexe. Paris: Gallimard.
Bettcher, Talia Mae. 2009. “Trans Identities and First-Person Authority.” Hypatia 24 (3): 98–118.
Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.
Cheung, A. S., et al. 2023. “Changes in Body Composition in Transgender Individuals on GAHT.” Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism.
Coleman, Eli, et al. 2022. “Standards of Care for the Health of Transgender and Gender Diverse People, Version 8.” International Journal of Transgender Health 23 (sup 1): S1–S259. https://doi.org/10.1080/26895269.2022.2100644
Halberstam, Jack. 2018. Trans: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Handschuh, P., et al. 2024. “Brain Structural Changes After Hormone Therapy in Transgender Adults.” NeuroImage Clinical 34: 103310.
Harper, J., et al. 2021. “How Does Hormone Therapy Affect Strength and Endurance in Transgender People?” Sports Medicine 51 (11): 2215–2230.
Kiyar, S., et al. 2022. “Hormone-Driven Brain Plasticity in Transgender Individuals.” Cerebral Cortex 32 (5): 1012–1024.
Poteat, T., et al. 2023. “Hormone Therapy, Mental Health, and Quality of Life in Transgender Adults: A Systematic Review.” JAMA 330 (6): 555–564.
Preciado, Paul B. 2013. Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era. New York: Feminist Press.
Seiger, R., et al. 2016. “Cortical Thickness Changes After Cross-Sex Hormone Therapy.” Brain Research 1644: 132–142.
Serano, Julia. 2007. Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity. Berkeley: Seal Press.
Stryker, Susan. 1994. “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix.” GLQ 1 (3): 237–254.

I. The Covenant of Belonging

It always begins with warmth.

“You belong here.”
“We take care of our own.”
“We protect each other.”

The words feel like sunlight after years underground. For so many trans women, especially those who grew up in the suffocating glow of conservative religion, community becomes a kind of resurrection. We were told that to be ourselves was to choose damnation. We were told we’d die alone if we ever left the light.

So when we find a circle that promises love without condition, we step toward it carefully, trembling with both hope and memory. We want to believe that this time it’s real, that this time, the light won’t burn.

But for her, the rhythm feels too familiar.

She survived a cult that called itself a church. She survived purity disguised as care, forgiveness used as control, and “family” that only held her when she obeyed. She learned what it meant to be loved on the condition that she stayed small, agreeable, and grateful.

So when she encounters those same emotional patterns in the trans community, wrapped in the language of accountability and safety, something inside her recoils. It feels like déjà vu. The scenery has changed, but the ritual hasn’t.

II. The Sermon Rewritten

The words have softened, but the structure is the same.

“You hurt someone.”
“You’re unsafe.”
“You need to make amends.”
“We’re just trying to protect each other.”

It’s the same sermon she heard as a teenager in youth group, only now rewritten in activist dialect. In the church, confession made you pure. In the community, transparency makes you safe. Both ask for surrender. Both define redemption by obedience.

The church once told her to repent in public, to prove her sincerity through humiliation. Online, it’s no different: apology threads, accountability posts, emotional self-flagellation for the sake of “repair.” There’s a cultural ritual to it now. The same cycle of sin, confession, penance, and exile. Only this time, the altar glows with pastel flags instead of stained glass.

She doesn’t think the community is evil. Far from it. She loves her people. She knows that trauma survivors often rebuild what they escaped, repeating the only structures of morality they’ve ever known. But control wrapped in compassion is still control. And purity, no matter how progressive, still requires someone to be cast out.

III. The Poem

When someone told her she should come back—
that she should rejoin the group, reenter the circle, rebuild trust—
… that she needs community, that nobody can live without,
she didn’t keep fighting them.
She wrote instead.

if she joined the dollsz

they’d say it was open—
the circle, the room, the cult of care.
all hearts welcome, all wounds held.
she could walk right in,
they said,
she wouldn’t even have to knock.

but she knows how they love their martyrs.
how fast the warmth curdles
when the wrong name glows at the top of the feed.
how quick kindness turns to teeth
once her shadow crosses their light.

if she joined the dollsz,
they’d praise her softness first.
they’d call her “sister,”
say she’s safe now,
say she belongs.
and for a moment, she’d believe them—
that maybe this time she isn’t poison,
that maybe she can stay.

but belonging is a borrowed thing.
it always asks for blood in the end.
they’d find her posts from months ago,
the ones she wrote when her mind was burning,
and hold them up like relics,
proof that she’s still the monster they remember.

if she joined the dollsz,
she wouldn’t have to type a word
to be crucified.
they’d build the cross from her old apologies,
nail her with screenshots and sighs.
they’d say it’s accountability,
say they’re protecting the community.

and she’d just stand there—
mute, shaking,
half wanting to scream,
half wanting to disappear.
because this is what she does best:
love people until they hate her for it.
bleed honesty until it looks like manipulation.
reach for closeness,
and watch it rot in her hands.

they think she fears the dark.
but no—
she fears the light that blinds first,
then turns on her.

so she stays outside the circle,
listening to the laughter,
the prayers,
the sound of people who haven’t yet learned
that love, too, can become a weapon.

and if she ever joined the dollsz,
they would not even notice
when the crucifix began to hum,
when the iron key at her throat grew warm—
when she smiled, finally understanding
that exile, too,
is better than the light.

IV. The Cult of Light

What the church and the queer community share is not intent but instinct. Both believe that safety comes from sameness. Both build belonging through moral clarity. Both define goodness through alignment.

The church said, “Stay pure.”
The community says, “Stay accountable.”
Both mean: Don’t disrupt the peace.

The church said, “Your heart is deceitful; let us correct you.”
The community says, “Your behavior harms others; let us correct you.”
Both mean: Let us decide when you’ve earned forgiveness.

When she points this out, people get uncomfortable. Nobody wants to see themselves as the new priests. Nobody wants to admit that even liberation movements inherit the tools of control. But every ideology believes its own purity is necessary. Every group convinced of its moral light ends up casting someone into shadow.

She knows this intimately. She’s been both the one standing in the light, convinced she was protecting others, and the one bleeding in the dark, wondering how love became another word for discipline.

V. The Pattern of Exile

She’s seen it happen in real time: the quiet excommunication.

First, the whispers. Then the sudden, polite distance. Then the group chat she’s no longer in. Someone says she made them uncomfortable. Someone else says they’re “choosing safety.” Nobody names it directly. Nobody calls it exile.

In the church, they called it shunning.
In the community, they call it accountability.

It’s the same gesture: hands folding neatly, doors closing softly, love withdrawing just enough to prove a point.

People tell her it’s not personal, that accountability isn’t abuse. She agrees. But she also knows what spiritual gaslighting feels like: when people hurt you and call it care, when they control you and call it safety, when they erase you and call it peace.

VI. The Void

She’s been told that the void is loneliness. That choosing solitude is a symptom, not a choice.

But the void is where she learned to breathe again.

It’s where she remembered that selfhood is not a group project.
It’s where she found peace in silence, without being watched, measured, or judged.

The void is not absence. It’s sovereignty.

She doesn’t reject community because she hates people. She rejects it because she has seen what communities can do to their own when fear becomes a virtue.

She knows how easily “protecting each other” becomes “punishing deviation.” How quickly “safe space” becomes “sacred space,” and how sacred spaces always require sacrifices.

She’s not willing to be the next one.

VII. The Dead and the Living

She works at 911. She listens to the dying and the terrified. Every night, she is the last voice some people ever hear.

Her job has taught her what it means to live in the borderlands between panic and calm, between life and its unraveling.

Maybe that’s why she sees the pattern so clearly: the way people try to build heaven on earth, to engineer purity through fear.

The church wanted heaven.
The community wants safety.
Both end up policing the human mess that makes life real.

But death, in its quiet honesty, doesn’t pretend to be pure. It just is.

And maybe that’s why she trusts the dead more than the living. They no longer demand confession. They no longer care about moral perfection. They simply pass through her line, whispering, “Thank you,” before disappearing into whatever comes next.

She stands as a guardian between worlds, and she keeps the dead close because they don’t ask her to repent.

VIII. The Exile

When people tell her she’s bitter, she smiles. When they tell her she’s isolating, she laughs softly. Because she’s heard those words before - from pastors, from elders, from well-meaning friends who thought salvation looked like surrender.

They all meant the same thing:
Come back. Obey. Belong.

But she already did once. And it nearly destroyed her.

She knows what it costs to trade autonomy for safety, to bend herself into something acceptable. She’s done performing purity, religious or social.

She’s not angry. She’s just done.

She walks in shadow now, by choice. It’s not rebellion anymore. It’s peace.

IX. The Truth Beneath the Light

It’s easy to think the opposite of oppression is love, but it isn’t. It’s power shared honestly.

And that’s what both the church and the community struggle with: honest power. The church hides its control behind righteousness. The community hides it behind care. Both believe they know what’s best for you.

Both would rather see you obedient than uncertain.
Both would rather see you redeemed than real.

She no longer believes in purity: of faith, of ideology, of identity. Purity is what killed her once, and she’s not interested in dying again for anyone’s vision of what a “good” woman, a “good” trans person, or a “good” survivor looks like.

She’ll take shadow over sainthood.

X. The Closing of the Door

She left the church. She did it alone. And she survived.

So when a new congregation calls her back, wearing eyeliner instead of crosses, waving flags instead of Bibles, and says, “We need you. We love you. We’ll protect you,” she only hears the echo of the past.

She smiles, thanks them, and walks back into the dark.

Because she has learned that exile, too, is better than the light.

…

Author’s Note:
This essay is not a condemnation of the trans community or of faith—it’s a reckoning with the shadows that exist in both. Communities born from trauma often repeat the patterns of the systems that harmed them. The work isn’t to abandon each other, but to recognize when our safety starts to look like someone else’s cage.

The Table and the Crowd, 01.19.25

They laid it all out for you,
a feather, a rose, a knife, a gun,
and me.
Standing still as air,
a canvas stripped of will,
a body for your whims.
The rules were simple:
do what you want—
I will not resist.

At first, you were kind.
The feather brushed my cheek,
soft like an apology whispered
from a distance you dare not close.
You placed the rose in my hair,
gentle hands unsure
of how much pressure would break me.

But kindness is fleeting,
a fragile thread
snapped by curiosity’s blade.
A bolder hand traced the knife
against my skin,
not cutting,
but testing.
And then, another—
and another—
and the crowd began to change.

You watched each other,
eyes flickering,
seeking permission in the movements of the mob.
One pushed the limits,
and so the next went further.
The rose was plucked from my hair,
its stem snapped, its petals crushed
beneath impatient feet.
The feather became a gag,
stuffed into my mouth as laughter rippled,
dark and growing.

Someone picked up the gun,
held it against my temple.
For a moment, silence.
Would they pull the trigger?
Would you?

Some of you screamed for mercy.
You begged the others to stop,
to put the gun down,
to see me as human,
but your voices were swallowed whole,
drowned by the roar of those
who wanted to see me fall.

I stood there.
Silent.
Alone.
Inside my own mind,
a witness to my own desecration.
This was the point:
to let you see yourselves,
to hold up a mirror smeared with my blood,
to show the artist’s final truth—
you, too, are capable of cruelty.

Even you, the one who hesitated,
the one who said no.
With enough voices urging you forward,
with enough hands holding the knife,
you could learn to cut.
The limits of decency,
as thin as the blade
that danced against my throat.

When the performance ended,
I walked toward you.
The crowd parted like smoke,
your faces turning away.
You couldn’t meet my eyes,
but I saw you.
And you saw me—
a girl, not a symbol,
not an object.
Flesh, breath, heart.

The table was empty,
but the point had been made:
It’s not the gun,
not the knife,
not the hands that wield them.
It’s the crowd, the permission,
the silence that fuels the fire.

You taught me who you are,
and I will never forget.
But I still stand here,
alone in my head,
proving a point you refuse to admit—
that even in your modern world of values and rules,
violence is always just one step away.

When you find yourself amongst the crowd,
ask yourself...
am i the feather, or the gun?

I. The Loneliness Before the Crowd

I’ve never really fit in. That’s not self-pity, it’s just the quiet truth that has followed me through every space I’ve entered. I’ve always felt like I was standing slightly outside the circle, close enough to feel the warmth of the fire but never quite invited to sit down.

I wanted so badly to belong. To build something that mattered. To create community, not just for myself but for others who felt the same ache for connection. So I gave everything I had: time, energy, care. I tried to build places where people could be real, where pain wasn’t taboo, where love and identity and survival could coexist without shame.

But every time, it backfired.

No matter how gentle my intentions, people found ways to twist them. I watched compassion turn into suspicion, friendship into gossip, love into leverage. I’d open my heart, and somehow, someone would turn it into a weapon.

After a while, I started to see a pattern. Every act of sincerity seemed to become an invitation for cruelty. And still, I kept trying. Because that’s what you do when you believe in people even after they’ve broken your trust. You keep setting the table.

II. Building Community, Breaking Open

People talk about “community” like it’s a cure for loneliness. But the truth is, community is made of people and people are complicated. They come with needs, insecurities, egos, and fears. They come with wounds. And sometimes, when you try to bring them together, those wounds start bleeding all over each other.

I learned that the hard way.

I’ve been part of circles that started with love and ended in chaos. I’ve seen people rally around an idea, only to tear it apart the moment someone disagreed. I’ve been the person who tried to hold it together, who tried to be kind when things got ugly. And each time, I became the scapegoat. I became the one who absorbed the blame, the projection, the silence.

It’s strange, being both the builder and the target. You try to hold space for people’s pain, thinking you’re helping them heal, but sometimes all you’re doing is standing still while they unload it onto you. And when they’re done, they walk away lighter, and you’re left with the weight of it all.

That’s what it feels like to be the table.

III. The Performance That Mirrored My Life

When I read about Marina Abramović’s Rhythm 0, something inside me recognized itself. She stood still for six hours, letting strangers do whatever they wanted to her. Seventy-two objects were laid out on a table: a rose, a feather, a knife, a gun. She didn’t move, didn’t resist. By the end, the audience had turned violent. They cut her skin. They aimed the gun at her head.

She didn’t flinch. She simply held up a mirror.

That performance haunted me because it felt like my own life made visible. Every time I’ve tried to build community, every time I’ve tried to be kind, I’ve felt like I was standing there motionless, watching people test how far they could go.

That’s where my poem The Table and the Crowd came from. It wasn’t just about Abramović’s art—it was about the realization that I have lived it.

IV. The Anatomy of Permission

The poem starts softly, like kindness always does:

“The feather brushed my cheek, soft like an apology whispered from a distance you dare not close.”

That’s how cruelty begins wrapped in tenderness. People start gentle. They say they care. They want to help. But curiosity grows. They want to know what happens when they push a little harder. And once one person crosses a line, the rest follow.

In Abramović’s performance, as in life, cruelty spreads through permission. The moment one person harms without consequence, everyone else feels safer doing the same. It’s not that they’re evil. It’s that the crowd gives them permission to stop being accountable.

And that’s what my poem exposes: the transformation of the feather into the knife, of empathy into entertainment. I’ve seen that transformation up close: in online spaces, in friend groups, even in the queer community I love. All it takes is one person to set the tone, one whisper to start the storm.

Silence is its own form of violence.

V. Standing Still

There’s a line in the poem that says,

“I stood there. Silent. Alone. Inside my own mind, a witness to my own desecration.”

That’s not metaphor. That’s memory.

I know what it’s like to be the one everyone talks about but no one talks to. To see your name pulled apart in conversations you aren’t in. To watch people you thought were friends look away when you’re being torn apart because it’s safer for them to stay quiet.

And the silence becomes deafening.

There’s this illusion that cruelty is loud and obvious, but often it’s quiet. It’s people who don’t intervene. It’s messages left unanswered. It’s someone watching you burn and calling it “not my business.” That’s the crowd. That’s how violence survives in so-called progressive spaces: through politeness, through avoidance, through self-preservation disguised as neutrality.

I’ve come to realize that I’ve been performing endurance for years. I stand still because movement makes people uncomfortable. I stay quiet because speaking up makes me the problem. I let people test their limits on me because I think maybe if they see themselves clearly enough, they’ll stop.

They rarely do.

VI. The Aftermath

When the performance ends, when the shouting dies down and the gossip burns itself out, you’re still there. Standing in the wreckage. People who once adored you avoid your eyes. They’ll talk about the “situation,” but not to you. They’ll mourn the loss of what you built while pretending they had nothing to do with its collapse.

And you’re left wondering: did any of it mean anything?

I wrote this poem to answer that question. Yes, it meant something. It always means something when you reveal the truth of who people are. Even if they deny it, even if they hate you for it. Every time I’ve been hurt, every time I’ve been used, I’ve learned something about the way kindness exposes people.

Because kindness isn’t passive. It’s dangerous. It holds up a mirror that people can’t stand to look into. And when they see their reflection, they often respond with cruelty, because it’s easier to destroy the mirror than to face what it shows.

VII. The Crowd in the Modern World

We like to believe we’re civilized. We talk about ethics, empathy, social justice. But the truth is, the same psychology that drove Abramović’s audience still drives us today. It’s just digital now.

Social media is one endless table, and the crowd never sleeps. A single accusation, a rumor, a screenshot, and the same dynamic unfolds. People test their limits. They want to be part of something righteous, to prove they’re good, to show they belong. But in that rush to be seen as moral, we lose our humanity.

I’ve been on the receiving end of that digital crowd. I’ve felt what it’s like to watch hundreds of strangers decide who you are based on half a story. I’ve seen people who once claimed to love me join in because silence would make them complicit. So instead, they chose performance over truth.

And I’ve realized something terrifying: the crowd doesn’t care about truth. It cares about cohesion. It feeds on consensus.

That’s why I end the poem with the question:

“When you find yourself amongst the crowd… ask yourself: am I the feather, or the gun?”

It’s not a rhetorical question. It’s the one that keeps me awake at night.

VIII. Reclaiming the Narrative

Writing this poem was my way of reclaiming power. Of turning pain into art instead of letting it rot inside me. Of saying, “I see what you did, and I survived anyway.”

The table is no longer a place of sacrifice. It’s a mirror. It’s where I stand to say: you can do what you want to me, but I will still tell the truth. I will still name the thing that everyone pretends isn’t there.

I don’t write from bitterness. I write from the understanding that humanity is fragile. I write from the quiet spaces between betrayal and forgiveness, from the thin line between hope and resignation. I write because if I don’t, then the crowd wins.

The poem isn’t about revenge. It’s about revelation. It’s about showing that cruelty doesn’t begin with monsters. It begins with ordinary people who stop questioning themselves.

And maybe, by standing still, by holding up that mirror, I can make someone see it before it’s too late.

IX. What Remains

Sometimes I think about what would happen if I stood there again, if I laid it all out: the feather, the rose, the knife, the gun, and myself. Would anything be different now? Would the crowd hesitate? Would someone finally say no before it went too far?

I want to believe they would. I want to believe that maybe, after everything, people are capable of learning. That the ones who once turned away might someday stand between me and the gun.

But I’ve also learned not to depend on that hope. The world has taught me that survival is often a solitary act. Community is precious, but it is not guaranteed.

Still, I keep building. I keep writing. I keep showing up to the table, even when I know it might break me. Because I believe that real, raw, and human art, can still change something, even if it’s only one person at a time.

And maybe that’s the point.

To keep standing.
To keep reflecting.
To keep holding up the mirror until someone, somewhere, sees themselves and finally chooses the feather instead of the gun.

Marina Abramović’s performance wasn’t just art. It was a mirror held up to humanity’s darkest truths. She stood there, unmoving, unresisting, and the crowd revealed themselves, not to her, but to each other. Kindness was fleeting, decency fragile, and it took so little, just the sight of another person pushing a boundary, for others to follow. Violence, cruelty, hate. These aren’t distant, alien things; they’re inside us, waiting for permission, waiting for a crowd to absolve us of the blame. The lesson is raw and undeniable: no matter how civilized we believe we are, the line between compassion and destruction is paper-thin. And when no one holds us accountable, we will cross it.

When you find yourself amongst the crowd - the thousands of messages being sent out over a single person’s apparent harm, ask yourself:

am i the feather, or the gun?

I was twelve years old the first time I saw her. The cover was worn, nestled between gum racks and celebrity tabloids at a Safeway checkout line. Everworld: Search for Senna. I didn’t know what the book was. I didn’t know who Senna was. But I picked it up anyway. I took her home.

What I didn’t know then was that I was carrying a mirror.

At the time, I didn’t have the language for what I was feeling. I didn’t know I was transgender. I didn’t know that one day I’d start hormone therapy, come out, undergo surgery. I didn’t even know what trans meant. I only knew that something about Senna haunted me, and thrilled me. She was beautiful. She was dangerous. She was feared, powerful, and not exactly loved. And she was always just out of reach. Always vanishing into another world.

Senna was the first time I saw a girl I felt like.

This essay is a reflection on that feeling, and how the Everworld series, unintentionally, became a transgender story for me… not in its literal events, but in its emotional architecture. This isn’t a literary critique so much as it is a memory: of what it meant to escape, to be split between two worlds, to feel wrong in one and right in another, and to survive long enough to become something real.

Part I: What Is Everworld?

Everworld, written by K.A. Applegate and published between 1999 and 2001, is a twelve-book fantasy series following four teens, David, April, Jalil, and Christopher, who are pulled into a parallel universe by a girl named Senna Wales. Everworld is a place where gods, monsters, and myths are alive, colliding in an ongoing war for control. Time functions differently there. Rules of physics bend. And for the kids who enter it, the experience is violent, disorienting, and often irreversible.

The central character, in many ways, is not any of the four narrators, but Senna. The story begins and ends with her. She is the portal, both literally and figuratively. Senna is the reason the protagonists are dragged into Everworld, and her power (mysterious, magical, feminine) is the engine behind much of the plot. She is described alternately as a witch, a goddess, a manipulator, and a threat. The boys want her. The girls fear her. The world bends around her. And by the end of the series, she becomes both martyr and monster, consumed by her own mythos.

The books were not written as a trans allegory. And yet.

Part II: The Duality of Worlds

Reading Everworld at twelve felt like splitting open. There was here, and there was there. Here was school, family, pressure, the growing dread of boyhood pressing in on me like a closing box. My voice was changing, my dad wanted me to learn about working on cars, the boys at school started lifting weights. And there… there was Everworld. A place where fear and violence lived openly, but so did magic. A place where transformation wasn’t just possible; it was required.

The idea of being stuck between two worlds, of being pulled without consent into a place that feels more real than the one you came from, became my private metaphor for gender. The real world, the one everyone agreed was real, had no room for me. I didn’t even have the words to say what I was. But I felt it.

And when I read Everworld, I felt less alone in that fracture.

In the books, the protagonists live double lives. In the real world, their bodies go limp while their Everworld selves are pulled into danger. They suffer in both places. Their memories don’t always align. Their identities blur. There is no way to choose one world fully; they are bound to both.

This is what being closeted felt like.

In my teenage years, I lived as a boy. Everyone thought I was one. I played the part awkwardly, and distantly. But part of me always felt elsewhere. Dreaming. Waiting. Not dead, exactly, but dormant. I lived in a kind of Everworld of my own making—a secret place where I could imagine myself differently. I didn’t have the words for “transition.” But I imagined girlhood as something shimmering and unreachable, like Senna’s magic.

When I finally came out years later as an adult, it felt like surfacing into the world I had been waiting for my whole life, but it also meant leaving pieces of myself behind. Like the protagonists, I couldn’t bring everything with me. Some friendships didn’t survive. Some family ties frayed. But I moved forward anyway, because Everworld and other escapes had taught me that survival wasn’t about comfort. It was about transformation.

Part III: Senna as a Trans Icon

Let me be clear: Senna is not a trans character in any intentional or representational sense. She is not written as one, and the authors did not construct her story to speak to gender identity.

But art has a way of revealing what it never meant to say.

Senna is powerful. She’s manipulative, yes, but she is never powerless. She is blamed for things the other characters do not understand. She is feared because she refuses to be passive. She uses her body, her voice, her mind, as tools of survival and rebellion. And she is punished for it.

Senna is not likable. But she is unforgettable.

As a trans woman, I look back now and recognize something familiar in how the other characters treat her. They want to save her, kill her, tame her, or use her. They can’t decide if she’s victim or villain. But at no point do they truly listen to her. She is too dangerous to be believed.

Reading her at twelve, I didn’t know I was seeing a blueprint. But I was.

She was girlhood, reimagined as warfare. She was what happens when you tell a girl she’s too much for too long, and she decides to become a storm. She wasn’t the kind of girl the world protected. But she knew her power, and that terrified people. She was the first character I met who made me feel like being feared wasn’t the worst thing in the world. Maybe it was a form of survival.

In a sense, Senna’s story ends in tragedy. She dies. She’s consumed. But even in death, she shapes the world. The surviving protagonists inherit her ability to travel between realms. They become the new portals. The cycle continues—but it only began because of her.

She dies, but she doesn’t disappear. Her power lingers in others.

That, too, feels like transness to me. Not death. But legacy. The way trans people, especially trans women, especially the dangerous ones, especially the witches, change the shape of the world even when we’re not invited to stay in it.

Part IV: What Took So Long

I didn’t come out in my teens. I didn’t start HRT until much later. I didn’t know any trans people growing up. I didn’t even see a trans woman in media until I was already married in my mid 20’s, and even then, she was either the punchline or the tragedy.

By the time I came out to myself, I was already in my thihrties. And even then, I waited. I hesitated. I didn’t feel “trans enough.” I didn’t want to hurt the people who “knew” me. I was afraid of losing everything.

And for a while, I thought of that time as wasted.

But I don’t anymore.

I look back at that twelve-year-old version of me standing in a grocery store aisle, holding a book with a girl on the cover who was not safe, not kind, but impossibly real, and I understand now that my story didn’t begin when I started hormones. It began there. With that mirror. With that portal. With the ache in my chest when I realized I didn’t just want to be like her. I already was her.

The years I spent waiting weren’t empty. They were filled with stories. With reflection. With survival. With quiet rebellion. I was building a bridge to myself the whole time. I just couldn’t see it yet.

Everworld didn’t give me transness. But it gave me the courage to imagine another life. That’s the first step for so many of us.

Part V: The Body I Have Now

I’m writing this now as a post-op trans woman. My journey is still unfolding, but the terrain has changed. I’m no longer looking through the portal. I’ve stepped through.

That girl who read Everworld is still with me. She’s not a ghost. She’s not an origin story. She’s part of me. She was there in the recovery room. She was there when I filled my first prescription for estrogen. She was there when I looked in the mirror and saw something closer to truth.

Senna is still with me, too.

Not as a model. Not as a warning. But as an echo. A reminder of what it meant to carry power in secret. Of what it meant to live with one foot in another world. Of what it meant to be misunderstood, and still choose to exist anyway.

There are parts of me that still feel like a witch. Parts that still feel like a portal. I don’t always know what world I belong to, but I know now that I have the power to shape it.

Conclusion: The Portal Was Me

I didn’t know what I was doing when I picked up that book in Safeway at 12 years old. I didn’t know that I was holding the first thread of a tapestry that would take decades to weave. I didn’t know that the stories we love as children can sometimes be the maps we follow as adults.

But I know now.

Everworld wasn’t written for trans girls. But it found one. It found me. And it held me in a world where nothing made sense, but where I could finally feel something true.

And that’s the strange, beautiful magic of a story. You never know who it’s going to save.

The first week I placed the patch on my skin, I stood alone in the bathroom, shaking. Everything in my life was about to change: my voice, my smell, my skin, my future. My God. That was the moment. That was the death. That was the resurrection.

I lit a candle, pressed the pendant to my chest, and whispered my first prayer to Her:

"Beauty in this life, for service in the next."

I’ve identified publicly as a theistic Lilithian ever since.

Who Is Lilith?

In the most ancient tellings, Lilith is the first woman: created equal to Adam, made of the same earth, with the same breath. But she refused to lie beneath him. She would not bow. And so she was cast out. Demonized. Erased.

But she did not die. She rose.

Lilith is Queen of the Night, Mother of Witches, protector of those who are cast out. Her roots run deeper than the garden. She predates scripture and survives its fires. To some, she is a demon. To others, a goddess. To me? She is both.

Lilith is the force that lives in the void between suffering and self-possession. She is what waits when love abandons us. She is the darkness that does not devour, but shields. She is the blood in my mouth when I speak the truth too loudly. She is the one who said, "no, not like that," and left.

She is the reason I survived.

She is also the question. The challenge. The sacred interruption. To follow Lilith is to stop making yourself small. It is to live without apology. To claim your name, your gender, your hunger, your fury. To no longer seek permission for your existence.

Lilith first mother and queen of the night
To you belong the hours after I rise
Devoted, I who bear the witch’s mark

Desired, you who sends forth sacred dark
From primordial void your voice becomes life
In flickering candle flame I write my heart

Mother, watcher since my youth
To thee my love hath sworn
From primordial void your voice becomes life

Lilith, first mother and queen of my night
Lilith, first mother and queen of my life

When I came out as trans, I lost almost everyone.

Some left quietly. Others exploded. There were texts from childhood friends filled with scripture and venom. There were coworkers who stopped speaking to me entirely. There were family members who cried like I had died.

But I hadn’t died. I had finally been born.

That loneliness made my connection to Lilith even stronger. She is, after all, the matron of the outcast. The patron saint of the one who says, "enough."

Chosen by the Name

It was in the raw aftermath of this that a name found me. I didn't go looking for it, not exactly. But one night, reading about the witch trials of France, I came across her: Catherine Monvoisin, known to history as La Voisin.

She was a poisoner. A midwife. A seer. A dealer in love magic and dark pacts. She sold potions to the mistresses of kings, performed abortions for women with nowhere else to turn, and conducted black masses for those who needed miracles denied by the Church. She was powerful. She was feared.

And she was burned alive for it in 1680.

The men who condemned her called her vile. The Church called her heretic. History tried to reduce her to a villain. But I read her story and saw something else: I saw a woman who made power out of powerlessness. I saw a woman who used the little freedom she had to give other women choices. I saw a woman whose very existence threatened a system built to crush her.

They burned her because she would not apologize for surviving.

And when I took that name—Voisin—it was not vanity. It was spiritual. It was ancestral. It was a declaration of war against every voice that told me I was not allowed to exist.

I chose the name, yes. But more truthfully: the name chose me.

Voisin is not just a name. It’s an oath. An inheritance. A promise that I will not forget who I am or what it took to get here. When I say it aloud, I hear all the women who died unnamed. I hear the ones who bled quietly in the dark. I hear the ones who never got the chance to fight.

And I speak for them.

There is power in choosing your own name. There is power in becoming your own ancestor. When I adopted the name Voisin, I was reaching backward and forward at once—resurrecting a lineage the world tried to erase, and sowing seeds for the world I want to leave behind.

When my old friends left, when people ghosted me or preached at me, when I lay on the floor wondering if I would ever be seen again—I thought of La Voisin. I thought of the smoke curling above her execution. I thought of her teeth, bared, unrepentant. And I lit a candle.

And I survived.

Lilith, night mother and ruler of my life
Illuminate my temple in black and holy light
Night mother, consume me in your embrace

I called to the Christian god and found not grace
Your love called out to me while falling, I chose embrace
Lead me safe goddess of infernal realm

Mother eternal, consume me in your love
And the promise of transformation to take hold of
Night mother, consume me in your embrace

Lilith, night mother and ruler of my life
I called to the Christian god and found not grace
Mother eternal, consume me in your love

Lilith, night mother and ruler of my life

It was the same fire that took La Voisin that nearly took me. And it is the same fire, now, that I keep sacred.

Lilithians are not a formal tradition. We have no church. No central texts. No robes. Just candles. Just darkness. Just our own bodies, reclaimed from shame. We are heretics. We are witches. We are survivors.

Some of us are trans. Some of us are queer. Some of us were born into silence and had to scream our way out. Some of us still whisper. All of us were told we were too much. And all of us dared to stay anyway.

We wear our scars like sigils. We speak in tongues the world tried to erase. We light candles not to pray for deliverance, but to remember the divine that already lives in us.

I wear her sigil on my chest because I need to remember who I am. Every day. I need to remember who stayed with me when the world left. I need to remember the holiness of saying no. Of living loudly. Of choosing yourself.

This is not an easy path. But it is a holy one.

I write this now not as a sermon, but as a letter. If you are trans and spiritual, if you are queer and curious, if you have felt the sting of rejection and still seek the divine, know this: there is a god for you, too. There is a love that does not ask you to bleed for it.

Her name is Lilith. She does not want your shame. She wants your truth. She wants your rage, your poetry, your softness. She wants your whole self, authentic, unsanitized, unafraid.

She wants you alive.

And so do I.

There is a moment—quiet, almost imperceptible—when the soul begins to rot. It happens when you say "yes" out of obligation, when your presence becomes a currency others assume they’re entitled to spend. You feel it: the invisible leash around your neck, the expectation that you should always be reachable, agreeable, understandable. The world feeds on your availability. And sometimes, the only way to reclaim yourself is to vanish.

Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote, “In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs, it is the rule.” There is a collective madness in the way society demands our constant participation. We are expected to show up even when we are empty, to explain ourselves even when we are unraveling, to comfort others at the expense of our own fire. But what if we chose to disobey that rhythm? What if we dared to step back—not in cruelty, but in truth?

There is an immense power in choosing yourself when the world wants to own you. You become a force. You stop being predictable. You deny them the pattern they use to keep you tame.

Carl Jung said, “The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.” That privilege often begins with stepping away from those who project their needs, expectations, and wounds onto you. They will call it abandonment. They will call you cold. They will say you changed. But what they really mean is: "You stopped letting me define you."

I remember the mornings on the side of a mountain. Long before sunrise, frost on my breath, my hands raw from exposure and effort. Climbing became a way of disappearing. I soloed 14ers across Colorado—Mt. of the Holy Cross, Longs Peak, the West Slopes of Mount Massive, Father Dyer, Kelso Ridge on Torreys Peak. I sought out ridgelines and altitudes where no one could reach me. The silence up there wasn't just beautiful. It was holy.

I was still married back then. Still hiding. Still trying to be who I was expected to be. But the mountain knew the truth. Up there, I didn’t owe anyone a version of myself. I was just breath. Just movement. Just solitude and stone. It was a disappearing act, yes—but also a becoming.

But even when I came down from the peaks, I was still living someone else’s story. And eventually, it all began to crumble. The divorce wasn’t sudden. It was a long unraveling. A slow drift punctuated by the sharp ache of asking, "Do you still love me?" and getting an answer in silence. I learned then that even love can become a leash. Even marriage can ask you to disappear.

And then came transition. The shedding of skin that wasn’t mine to begin with. There is no way to do that quietly. People stared. People disappeared. Some loved me conditionally. Others weaponized their absence. My identity became a battleground, and my peace became something I had to fight for.

Schopenhauer wrote, "A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom." I have known so many small deaths. Social unravelings that taught me over and over: you cannot heal if you're always performing. You cannot grow if your energy is spent begging others to look at you.

I have begged. I will say that plainly. I have pleaded for people to stay. I have twisted myself to be palatable, lovable, easy to digest. I have silenced my needs so that others wouldn’t feel discomfort. And all it ever did was empty me out.

There is a name for this. It's called codependency. It's also called survival. For many of us, especially those who have known abandonment, choosing ourselves can feel like cruelty. But I am learning—still learning—that it is not.

You build your own garden. That’s what you do. Instead of begging others to come water your roots, you pick up the hose. You learn what sunlight you need. You learn which weeds to pull. And you do it in the quiet. Without the applause. Without the audience.

When you become unavailable, people get nervous. They can no longer predict you. They can no longer use your guilt as leverage. They say you've changed. They question your loyalty. But what they are really saying is: "You’re not making yourself small for me anymore."

Nietzsche again: "You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, it does not exist." We must stop measuring ourselves by other people’s comfort. Morality, too, is often a weapon. Be good, they say. Be kind. Be available. Be selfless. But goodness without boundaries is martyrdom. Kindness without truth is performance.

I am choosing truth. I am choosing the trail over the text message. The silence over the performance. The solitude over the applause. I am learning to be unpredictable. To not show up unless it serves me. To vanish when I need to. Not to punish, but to breathe.

This world will drain you if you let it. But you are not a well for other people to draw from endlessly. You are a person. You are a garden. And it is okay to put up a sign that says, "Closed for the season."

They will talk. Let them.

You owe them nothing. You owe yourself everything.

So step away. Step all the way back. Become unreachable. Let them miss you. Let them wonder what changed. Let them talk to their reflections.

Because the moment you return to yourself is the moment the world loses control of you.

And that, finally, is power.

the forest heard her name

a lived experienced, solo hiking halo ridge at night on mt. of the holy cross. a pilgrimage of fear, 01.14.25

She walked alone
beneath the weight of sky and shadow,
to where the trees whispered secrets
that no city could keep.
The air was thin, sharp, biting—
frost curling its teeth against her skin,
her breath a ghost
lost in the darkening veil of the woods.

She was unarmed,
save for the blade of her resolve.
No one had marked her path.
No one had tethered her to the world below.
The dim light danced, frail and trembling,
guiding her feet
over roots that clawed at the earth
and stones polished by the centuries.
The mountain loomed ahead,
a sacred monolith carved from silence.
It called to her.

Out there,
where the wind’s howl
carried the songs of a thousand unseen eyes,
she felt safe.
Not safe from the cold that gnawed her hands
or the shadows that crept through the trees,
but safe from the lies of men,
from the weight of their gazes,
their whispered “no”
that twisted into a treacherous “yes”
when she turned away.

Her heart was her own drumbeat.
Her body, her own compass.
No voices clamoring to break her.
No hands grasping to reshape her.
No questions that begged her silence,
because out here, the only answer was survival.
The only motive was the next step forward.
The only rescue was her own.

She heard them in the forest,
the shifting bodies of life unseen—
a crack of branches, the rustle of leaves.
Eyes, maybe.
Predators, maybe.
But there was no fear,
only a steady reckoning
of breath, bone, and blood.
Here, every sound was truth.
Every shadow held no deceit,
only the honest hunger of nature’s vast appetite.

The path twisted higher,
and with each mile,
the forest folded deeper into itself.
The air grew colder,
but her pulse burned steady.
Each step was a decision,
a prayer,
a vow.
Her life, for once,
was not a negotiation.
There was no one to take her voice.
No one to turn her strength into a weapon
against herself.

She climbed until her legs trembled,
until the stars opened like wounds in the sky.
Above the treeline,
where the holy cross of rock
etched itself into the heavens,
she stood on the brink of everything—
her breath ragged, her muscles raw.
The world beneath her stretched infinite,
its silence a balm for the screaming
she carried in her chest.

For once,
she was small but not powerless.
For once,
she was cold but not numb.
For once,
the only sound
was her own voice
whispering into the night:

I am here.
I am enough.
And no one can take this from me.

this is the anatomy of isolation. a lifetime’s worth of abandonment—survival through sexual assault, divorce, and spiritual exile—told through the eyes of someone who keeps trying to love anyway. it's about how closeness always feels temporary, how belonging slips through fingers like sand, and how one sentence, one silence, one misstep can dissolve a whole world. this is what it means to be stitched together by trauma and still crave warmth you don’t trust.

There’s something about being human that makes us ache for closeness. We crave it like water, starve without it, and yet… most of us are terrible at holding it when it’s finally in our hands. We think love is a decision, a choice, a commitment—but really, it’s a living thing. You can’t just say “I’m here” and expect that to be enough forever. You have to feed it, check its pulse, listen when it cries out at 2 a.m. or when it goes quiet at 4. But most people don’t. Most people forget. And the moment they do, something fragile inside begins to snap.

You can sit across from someone you used to know and realize they don’t see you anymore. And it didn’t happen in a fight. It didn’t happen in a dramatic goodbye. It happened slowly. Over a hundred missed messages. A thousand times you decided not to say “I love you” because you assumed they already knew. It happened while you were busy. While they were hurting. While you both forgot that love is not guaranteed to stay just because it once bloomed.

Love, real love, takes more than effort. It takes awareness. Presence. It takes standing in front of someone and saying, “I still see you. I still choose you,” even when it’s inconvenient. And even that… sometimes isn’t enough. Sometimes love withers for reasons no one can name. And that’s maybe the cruelest part. The slow deaths. The ones where you never get closure. Just silence.

People talk about heartbreak like it’s some grand explosion. But more often it’s erosion. It’s decay. It’s the person you love putting down their phone a little more often when you call. It’s the way they used to ask how your day was, and now they just talk about theirs. It’s in the details. The absence of the small stuff. The way you start to feel more alone sitting beside them than you ever did by yourself.

And still—still—we reach for each other. We risk it all again and again. Even knowing how sharp the edges are. Even knowing that one day, they might stop reaching back.

one wrong sentence away

you can call her family
but at the end of the day,
she's still pretty fucking alone.

bike riding through streets that don’t love her,
where the streetlights flicker like bad memories
and every shadow could be another name
she doesn’t want to say out loud.

she went through divorce alone,
watched love decay like a dying animal
while the world kept spinning,
kept moving,
kept asking her to smile through it.

she got raped alone.
left to pick up the pieces with shaking hands,
scrubbing her skin raw like maybe, just maybe,
she could wash the feeling of him away.
but the body doesn’t forget.
the body holds it like a whisper in the dark,
like a ghost she never wanted to meet.

she built a family.
stitched one together from borrowed hands,
from voices that said “i love you” and meant it,
until one day they didn’t.
until one day they were gone,
and she was alone again,
counting the echoes in an empty room.

she struggled with god,
with the weight of a cross that never fit her shoulders,
with prayers that felt more like begging
and a faith that only knew how to take,
take,
take.
she left alone,
no goodbye, no final hymn,
just a girl walking away from an altar
that never held her the way she needed.

no wonder people are so hard for her.
no wonder she keeps them at arm’s length,
even as she craves the warmth.
even as she feels soft fingers brush against her skin,
a touch so gentle it makes her want to believe—
but she knows better.

she knows it’s all so fragile.
that love, family, belonging—
it’s always just one wrong sentence away
from disappearing.

ii. families and fire

a single question ends a marriage. not with fury, but with quiet clarity. this poem is about how easily love can dissolve, how legal endings feel empty when the emotional death happened long before. it mourns the illusion of permanence, the softness of a moment that cracked a whole life in half. it’s about how heartbreak doesn’t always scream—sometimes it just stops responding.

A family can end over a single sentence. I’ve seen it. I’ve lived it. You think blood makes you safe, but it doesn’t. It ties you to people who can burn your house down and then ask why you’re crying over ashes. You spend years thinking you belong to something, only to realize you were temporary the whole time—just a placeholder until you made one wrong move. Until you stopped pretending. Until you said the thing they told you never to say.

“I don’t believe anymore.”
“I’m trans.”
“You hurt me.”

Sometimes, that’s all it takes. One confession. One truth. And suddenly, the people who raised you are strangers. Or worse—enemies. I think the cruelest families are the ones who say “we’ll always love you” right before they slam the door. They say it like it’s a promise, but it’s a trap. They want you to believe you’re the one walking away, when you’re actually being shoved.

What no one talks about is the silence afterward. Not just from them—but from the world. No casseroles. No sympathy cards. No one comes to check on the orphaned adult. You’re expected to just keep going. Find new people. Heal. But no one tells you how hard it is to build a new kind of family from scratch when you’ve already learned that all of it—every piece—can be pulled out from under you in a second.

And worse, it changes you. It teaches you to hold love like it’s conditional. Teaches you to flinch when someone gets too close. You start planning for exits before you even know their name. Because love from family wasn’t safe. Wasn’t forever. It was a weapon you didn’t see coming. And now everything that looks like love? Looks like danger too.

do you you still love me?

no one tells you how easy it is
to lose everything.

the divorce wasn’t loud.
it wasn’t fire and screaming.
it was a quiet unraveling
in a digital courtroom
with our names on the screen
and a judge who barely looked up
when she signed the end of our life together.

just a few clicks.
just a few lines of dialogue.
a nod.
a sigh.
"are you sure?"
"yes."
"yes."
done.

it should’ve hurt more.
but it was already over
long before the hearing.
maybe it ended
when i asked her
"do you still love me?"
and she paused
too long
before saying
"i don’t know."

that pause broke something in me
that no ceremony ever could.
no screaming fight.
no cheating scandal.
just silence.
just the sound of a heart turning off.

and now i walk through the world
carrying the ghost of a family
i thought i could keep.
turns out,
love doesn’t need a reason
to die.
just a moment.
just a question.

iii. friendship is a fragile ghost

friendships can die without sound. this one did. it’s about the ache of being left in the digital dark, of sending messages into the void and getting nothing back. it explores how grief exists even when no one died—when the only thing lost was care, consistency, and the feeling of being chosen. this is about how silence can scream louder than any goodbye ever could.

Friendships don’t always die with betrayal. Sometimes they die with neglect. And those are the hardest ones to grieve—because no one meant to hurt anyone. There wasn’t a falling out. It was just… life. Life happened. They got a partner. They moved away. They got busy. And suddenly, the person who used to send you voice notes at midnight just disappears.

You scroll through old conversations and wonder how the fuck it unraveled so fast. You debate sending that message—“Hey, I miss you”—but you don’t. Not because you don’t care, but because you’re tired of reaching first. Tired of being the one who holds the thread while the other person keeps letting it slip through their fingers.

Friendships die in silence. In unsaid things. In the way you stop being part of their plans. In how you realize you were never really their person—just convenient for a season. And yeah, maybe it’s not their fault. Maybe we all grow and shift. Maybe we all get caught in our own storms. But that doesn’t make the absence less sharp.

I miss people who are still alive. People who still post online. People who would probably say “I love you” if I texted right now. But they don’t reach. And I don’t want to beg. And so we stay strangers with shared memories. And it hurts like hell.

And when new people ask, “Who are your closest friends?”—you pretend you’ve got someone. But deep down, you know you don’t. Not anymore. Not really.

the echo of forgetting

she waited.
god, she waited.

watched her phone like a clock
that never struck midnight.
held onto names like promises
and messages like prayers.
"they’ll text back."
"they’re just busy."
"they still care."

but days turned into weeks,
weeks into ghosts.
she reached out—
once.
twice.
again.
a little softer each time.
until her words
just hung there
in the digital dark
unread,
unanswered.

there were no arguments.
no final phone call.
just...
nothing.

and still,
she checks the message thread sometimes.
just to remember what it felt like
to be chosen.
just to remind herself
that once,
she was part of something.

but silence
is a kind of answer.
and some goodbyes
never get said out loud.

iv. the ache of being loved

she flinches at love because her body remembers everything. some touches remind her of violence, of what was taken. some remind her of the people she still misses, the ones who touched her gently—and are gone now. this poem holds the contradiction of needing closeness and fearing it, of how memory lives in skin, of how touch can resurrect both love and terror in the same breath.

Being loved sounds easier than it is. People say they want love, but they don’t talk about how invasive it can feel. How uncomfortable it is to be seen—really seen. Love holds up a mirror, and sometimes all you can see in it are the parts of yourself that feel unworthy. So you push it away. Or sabotage it. Or freeze when someone says “I care about you,” like it’s a threat instead of a balm.

And maybe it’s not even intentional. Maybe we learned to mistrust tenderness. Maybe every “I love you” we’ve ever heard was followed by a leash. A rule. A threat. Or a goodbye. Love doesn’t feel safe when it’s been used as a weapon—when it’s been followed by punishment, when it’s been turned against us like evidence in a trial we never asked to be in.

Sometimes the hardest thing isn’t loving someone. It’s letting them love you. Not the version of you that performs well. Not the one who says “I’m fine” with a fake smile. But the messy version. The one who cries too much. The one who spirals. The one who still has nights they don’t want to be alive.

And when someone does try—when they show up anyway—that’s terrifying. Because it means you might lose them. It means you could. And that potential loss hurts worse than loneliness ever did. So you retreat. You shut down. You start fights or go quiet. You become hard to love—just to prove yourself right.

That’s what makes it tragic. Not that we don’t get loved. But that sometimes, even when it’s handed to us freely… we can’t hold it. We don’t know how.

another touch.

some touches
make her skin want to run.
not her.
just the skin.
the memory it carries.

some touches
remind her of the one
who didn’t ask—
who took
and left her with questions
she’ll never get answers to.
she learned to go still
like an animal
waiting for the danger to pass.

but worse,
are the other touches.
the kind ones.
the familiar ones.
the touches that remind her
of love she can’t get back.
fingers on her back
like someone tracing the outline
of a life that used to be hers.
she loves being held
and she’s terrified of it.

to be loved
is to be exposed.
to be touched
is to be remembered.

she wants the closeness.
but her body flinches before her heart can speak.
because every gentle hand
could become an absence.
and she’s not sure
she can survive
another goodbye
that came wrapped
in kindness.

v. it all falls apart

this is the survival manual of someone who’s still bleeding. not dangerous—just aware of how easy it is to be hurt. it’s a poem about mental illness, trauma, and how cruel the world can be to those still learning how to breathe through the weight of their own pain. she comes with boundaries. she comes with fire. she comes with the hope that someone will stay long enough to see the softness behind the steel. but if you treat her like a problem—

We tell ourselves that love is solid. That once it’s built, it will last. But it doesn’t. People change. They evolve. They outgrow. And sometimes, they just stop trying. It doesn’t matter how hard you love them. It doesn’t matter how much you gave. None of it guarantees that they’ll stay.

You can do everything right and still lose. You can pour yourself out and still be left with nothing but echo. Sometimes, the damage isn’t a knife wound—it’s a slow leak. And one day, you wake up empty, wondering how long it’s been this way.

There are people who will swear they’d never leave. Who promise you forever. And then one day, they don’t answer. They don’t visit. They don’t look at you the same. And the worst part? They won’t even admit it. They’ll pretend it’s fine. They’ll call once a month. They’ll send you memes. But you know. You know. And there’s no fixing it. No returning to the place before it broke.

This is the cost of being human. Of trying. Of loving. Everything you build can burn. Every person you trust can walk away. And even when they don’t mean to… even when they love you… they still might.

So be careful with the people you let close. Not because they’re bad. Not because they’ll hurt you on purpose. But because even the best ones can become ghosts. Because even the ones who say they’ll never leave might someday disappear.

warning label

she comes with sharp edges
and unfixable scars.
not the kind you see.
not the kind you can fix.
just the kind that reopen
when you say the wrong thing
in the wrong tone
on the wrong day.

she will love you
too much
too fast
and then disappear.
not because she doesn’t care.
because she does.
that’s the problem.

she will test you.
pull away.
wait for you to leave.
because everyone does.
eventually.
and it’s easier
to watch you walk
than to be pushed again.

she won’t tell you when she’s hurting.
she’ll joke.
change the subject.
say she’s tired.
what she means is—
"i don’t know if you’re safe."
what she means is—
"don’t love me unless you mean it."

because if you do—
if you get in close—
you’ll see all of her.
and that is a risk
she’s not sure
you’re able
to survive.

There’s something no one tells you about working at 911: it makes you a quiet witness to every kind of heartbreak imaginable. You become a disembodied voice at the end of the line, holding people in their worst moments with nothing but words and instinct. Most days, I can compartmentalize it. I file the trauma away neatly in my body, in places I think I won’t have to touch.

But the thing is, it doesn’t stay put. It finds its way into everything—into my sleep, into my silences, into the way I carry myself through the world. And eventually, it started showing up in my writing. I didn’t know how to process what I’d heard, what I’d felt, so I started writing these moments into my poems. Not because I wanted to, but because I had to. Because some things are too heavy to carry in silence, and too intimate to share in any other form.

Poetry became the only language that made sense for what was happening inside me.

Some calls stay with you more than others. Some carve their names into your memory even when you never learn theirs.

This one happened the night before my birthday. A man was hit by a car on 38th Ave in west Denver. I never saw his face. I never touched his body. But I was there, in the only way I could be. I heard the woman who knelt beside him. I gave her the words to try and save him. And I listened as they didn’t work.

That woman was my pharmacist.

That man was my neighbor.

This is the poem I wrote for him.

the white bike on 38th

for the man whose name i never learned

Her voice cracked like glass on the line,
panic spilling through the receiver,
and I sat there, steady—
a stranger’s calm in the chaos of her world.
The words came out like muscle memory,
sharp and clinical, rehearsed to precision,
but God, did they feel hollow.
"Mouth to mouth," I said,
like it was easy.
Like it wasn’t a man’s fragile grip on existence
we were wrestling with.

She was a pharmacist.
Her voice, trained for precision,
now trembling, brittle,
breaking under the weight of my instructions.
"Pinch his nose. Tilt his head.
Seal your mouth over his. Blow."
And I heard her do it.
I heard her sob between breaths,
heard her body breaking with the effort
to bring him back,
to undo the violence of steel on flesh,
the cruelty of time ticking away.

I wasn’t there, but I could see it.
Blood, asphalt, headlights like hollow eyes,
and him, sprawled, broken like a discarded doll.
I could see her kneeling,
the pavement biting into her knees,
as she gave everything she had
to a man she didn’t know.
And me, miles away,
tethered to this scene
by the fucking headset and my own voice,
unable to reach him,
unable to reach her.

The seconds dragged,
each one a weight pressing on my chest,
and I could feel the futility creeping in.
"Keep going," I said.
"Keep going."
And she did,
her gasps blurring with mine,
her desperation bleeding through the line
like a wound that wouldn’t clot.

It wasn’t enough.
It’s never fucking enough.

I drove past that intersection for months,
my eyes drawn to the white bicycle
tied to the light pole where it happened,
a silent memorial to the man
whose name I never learned.
I hated that bike.
I hated how it stood there,
a quiet accusation against the universe,
against me,
against all the breaths I told her to give
that couldn’t bring him back.

…

I live in that neighborhood. I saw the posts on Nextdoor. His family begging the public for answers. Asking for witnesses. Sharing pictures. Sharing grief. I know people loved him. That was never a question. The question was what to do with my part of the story—this hidden, silent role I played in the worst night of their lives.

I toiled within myself, wondering if I should say something. Should I tell them I was the voice on the other end of the line? That I stayed with him, with her, as best I could? That I was the one who told her what to do when she didn’t know what else there was to try?

But I never did. I still haven’t.

There’s no protocol for this. No manual on what to do when the anonymous pain you hold in your headset spills out into your real life. When the woman who comes in to fill your prescriptions is the same one whose voice broke in your ear as she tried to save a stranger’s life. When the man on the pavement becomes more than just a case number—when he becomes your neighbor.

They’ll never know it was me. They’ll never know I listened to him die. That I gave the instructions. That I whispered, “You’re doing everything right,” even when I knew the odds were impossibly small. They’ll never know how I sat in my car after the shift ended, staring at nothing, unable to start the engine, because I felt like I had just lived a death I couldn’t explain.

That’s why I write these poems.

Not for closure. There’s no such thing here.
Not for beauty. Death isn’t beautiful.
But because this is the only way I know to carry what I’ve witnessed.
Because the headset comes off, but the echoes don’t.
Because sometimes, when I can’t speak the truth out loud,
I can still carve it into a page.

And maybe that’s a kind of prayer.

Maybe that’s a kind of witness, too.

Queer love has always been dangerous.

Not because it’s wrong, but because it’s powerful. Because it endures. Because it refuses to die even when the world tries its hardest to crush it. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how easy it is to grow tired—to lose hope when politics turn against us, when laws tighten around our bodies, when our very existence becomes a headline again. It’s easy to feel small. Easy to feel like the love we carry can’t stand up to all the noise.

But it does. It always has.

Queer love—whether it’s between partners, between friends, in the softest forms of chosen family—it’s what gets us through. It’s the quiet hand on your back after a brutal day. It’s cooking for someone when they can’t get out of bed. It’s holding each other when the world calls us names and means it. It’s carrying grief together, so no one has to bear it alone. This love isn’t theoretical. It’s survival.

I’ve loved like that. I still do. I’ve seen it in my friends, in my partners, in strangers at Pride who offer water and kindness like sacred things. We build worlds inside one another—whole ecosystems where it’s safe to cry, to rest, to be exactly who we are without apology. That kind of love doesn’t just resist the violence outside. It rewrites it. It says, “You don’t get to define me. I define us.”

This poem is for that kind of love. For the people who still show up for one another, even when it’s hard. Especially when it’s hard.

rebel love

She loved like a storm breaking over dry land,
like the first scream of a newborn,
raw, wet, and so fucking alive it burned.
Her love was not polite—it wasn’t soft hands folded in her lap,
it was clawing at the walls of the world,
demanding room to breathe.

Rebel love doesn’t ask,
it doesn’t wait for permission,
it doesn’t tidy itself up to make others comfortable.
It is the fire that melts the locks
and the arms that catch the running.
It says, “I see you, I will hold you, I will fight for you,
and fuck anyone who says I shouldn’t.”

She kissed scars with salt on her lips,
she knew what it meant to hurt and keep going.
Her love wasn’t fragile.
It was the cracked pavement where wildflowers grow,
the heavy drumbeat in a protest march,
the soft murmur of “I’ve got you” in the quiet after.

She loved like Lilith taught her—
fierce and untamed,
a love that didn’t beg, didn’t bow,
but lifted others to stand with her.
Her heart was an unbroken chain,
each link forged in the heat of rebellion
and tempered by every goddamn fight she’d survived.

She said: “Love is resistance.
Love is building a world where we don’t have to hide.
Love is smashing the cage and holding the hand of anyone brave enough to walk free.”

And when they called her love dangerous,
she just smiled and whispered:
"Damn right it is."

…

Sometimes, I think the most radical thing we can do as queer people is to keep loving each other. To keep choosing tenderness in a world that punishes softness. To keep holding space for one another even when we’re exhausted, even when everything outside is telling us we shouldn’t care so much, shouldn’t love so deeply, shouldn’t be so loud about it.

But we love anyway.

We love in the middle of legislative nightmares. We love when we’re scared. We love in the back corners of coffee shops, in protest lines, at kitchen tables cluttered with takeout and tears. We love in texts that say, “Did you get home safe?” and in glances that say, “I’m still here.” That love is not small. It’s everything. It’s the reason we’re still here.

Queer love teaches me that connection isn’t a luxury. It’s a necessity. Romantic, platonic, communal—whatever form it takes, it builds us. It shelters us. And it gives us the courage to keep going when we’ve lost faith in the world.

If you’ve ever been told your love is “too much,” or “too loud,” or “too fast”—good. Let it be. Let it be wild. Let it be holy. Let it be the kind of love that doesn't wait for approval, that burns bright, that reaches back for the people who are still trying to find their way out of the dark.

Because at the end of the day, that love is the revolution. That love is why we’re still breathing.

As usual, I love you all :3

Some days, the pain is just background noise—dull, consistent, like a hum you forget is there until the room goes quiet. Other days, it’s louder. Those are the days when it feels like existing is something I have to survive, not something I get to do. People talk a lot about resilience like it’s a choice. Like getting up again is noble. Like breathing through the ache makes you brave. But most of the time, it doesn’t feel like bravery. It feels like inertia. Like my body didn’t get the memo that I wanted out.

I tried to leave recently - a suicide attempt. And when people found out, they didn’t hold me closer. They pulled away. They treated me like a problem to avoid or a scandal to whisper about. Like my pain was contagious. Or worse, inconvenient. I carry that shame—like the scars under my sleeve, like a warning not to speak. I’m learning to keep quiet about the parts of me that hurt too loudly. I’m learning that saying “I’m not okay” out loud can cost you the little community you thought you had.

This poem is part of something I’m calling The Reluctant Pulse. It’s about that ache. That echo. That quiet, stubborn thing that keeps you here even when you don’t want to be. Not hope exactly. More like muscle memory. The body remembering how to keep going even when the soul forgets.

reluctant pulse

this life is
a slow violence.
not sharp,
not loud—
just the quiet crush
of hope
under the weight of
another day.

people ask,
“are you okay?”
but they don’t wait
for the answer.
and why would they?
the truth is inconvenient.
messy.
ugly.

i tried to go.
really, i did.
but the body is stubborn,
even when the soul is not.
the heart keeps beating
out of habit,
not desire.

there’s no one to call.
no warm arms.
no steady hands.
just this echo
of a life
that doesn’t fit.
i keep breathing
not out of bravery
but exhaustion.
because trying again
takes energy
i don’t have.

and yet—
i write this.
some part of me
still reaching
through the static,
hoping someone hears.
hoping silence
isn’t all that’s left.

…

I don’t know what it means that I’m still here. I don’t have a clean conclusion or a redemptive arc to offer. I just know that silence is heavy, and loneliness only grows in it. Maybe writing this is selfish. Maybe it’s desperate. Or maybe it’s the only language I have left for this kind of pain. I want to believe that someone out there feels this too—that I’m not broken for hurting, not weak for struggling to carry it. I want to believe that even if I don’t have a community yet, the act of reaching is enough to make one possible.

And if you’re reading this, and you’ve ever felt like I do—like you don’t have a place to put all the hurt—just know you’re not the only one. I can’t promise it gets better. But I can promise you’re not alone in the static.

I love you all :3

It didn’t happen all at once. I think that’s what surprises people. The idea of a sudden fall, of a thunderclap moment where belief shatters—it's neat, cinematic. But the truth was quieter. There was no dramatic renunciation, no rage toward the heavens. Just a growing quiet. A slow loosening. Like water seeping through walls you didn’t know were cracked.

I used to believe. Not in a lukewarm way, but deeply. I prayed with my whole body, trusted with my whole heart. I believed I was seen. Known. Loved. And when that started to change, it scared me—but not enough to stop it. The shift was gentle, and then it wasn’t. Faith, I’ve learned, doesn’t always die in fire. Sometimes, it dies in fatigue.

There’s a version of me I can still see in my mind—kneeling, hopeful, open. That girl feels like both a stranger and a memory I ache for, even though I don’t want to go back. The truth is, faith fell from me easily. Too easily. And that’s what hurts the most.

the long decent

she was holy once.
or maybe just hopeful.
soft hands folded in prayer,
a whisper on her lips,
the kind of girl who knew the weight of mercy,
who thought salvation was a road
she would always find her way back to.

but faith is a slow-burning candle,
and one night, the wick burned out.

it wasn’t a fall—
not the way they preach it.
no sudden lightning, no fire, no wrath.
just the steady dimming of a soul
too tired to keep pretending.
just the quiet slipping of hands
from the fingers of a god who never held on.

she drifted.
at first, she called it searching.
then, she called it thinking.
then, she stopped calling it anything at all.

the hymns soured on her tongue.
the prayers dried in her throat.
the sky, once endless,
folded into something smaller,
something colder,
something she did not recognize.

was it doubt?
was it sin?
or was it just the way the world finally crept in
like water through cracked stone,
like rot beneath clean skin?

she still remembers the girl she was—
knees bent before the altar,
palms open like she expected
god himself to fill them.
but the years are long and cruel,
and the echoes of her own voice
sound too much like ghosts.

she does not pray now.
she does not weep.
she only walks, step by step,
deeper into a place
where the light does not follow,
where grace is a language
she no longer speaks,
where the silence is louder
than any answer she ever begged for.

but the strangest thing is—
she does not miss it.
not really.
not enough.

and maybe that is the worst sin of all.

…

I don’t talk about this often. Not because I’m afraid of judgment, but because I’m afraid people will try to fix it. Try to hand me back the words I’ve already laid to rest. As if the loss of faith is just a phase, a detour, a bruise to be healed. But for me, it’s more like an amputation. Something removed with time, with pressure, with silence. And I’m still learning how to walk differently because of it.

I don’t miss the faith itself, not in the way people expect. I miss the feeling of being certain. Of being held by something invisible but sure. I miss the architecture of belief—the way it shaped my days, the way it gave language to pain. But I don’t want it back. That version of god didn’t hold me when I needed it. That version of faith didn’t make room for all the parts of me that hurt.

So I write instead. I walk instead. I carry my own silence, and it’s heavy, yes—but it’s mine.