The world does not like poor people.

At this current moment, I am systematically being kicked out of my mobile banking because I do not have a newer phone.

How sad. How capitalist. How white.

I spent my twenties being anti-establishment and anti-capitalist. I set out to travel the world through alternative means: barter, hitchhiking, good Samaritans, and working for shelter. I stopped after five years because it became clear that, whether or not I had money in my account, someone had money, and that person had power over me.

In the end, I realised the fault in my thinking. No, I did not need a lot of money to travel the world. But someone did have money. And I did have a British passport that opened doors and kept visas to the bare minimum.

With the current crisis of a burning world and climate collapse, I am more insistent than ever that this white, sadistic, patriarchal, imperialist machine will not free us.

Yet here I am, trying to plan a life around the lack of access I will have to my own money because I do not have a particular piece of software.

I feel privileged to be sitting here with a laptop, electricity, and a full stomach when I know there are people who look like me mining cobalt for the phones that I will need to buy in order to retrieve my hard-earned money.

My writing seems insignificant.

I feel trodden on, and it leaves me wondering: why?

Why can’t they keep a version of the app that works for those who do not need or want a new phone?

Because this system needs you to buy, buy, buy. So many people are told that this will save them. They believe it will save them.

If you are Black, at least you can be rich.

This will make life better. This is what we learn subconsciously.

How sad. How trivial. How wrong.

What is individual wealth in the face of collective despair?

Perhaps Jay-Z is the answer. But we all know that doesn’t quite feel right.

Yes, you can buy access to whiteness. It can afford you more ease, more comfort, more protection. But you will never be fully comfortable. You will never be fully safe.

Wealth can change your proximity to power, but it cannot change the system itself. The white, inadequate world teaches you that you need to be better at capitalism.

You need to want more.

You need more.

By any means necessary.

It is heartbreaking to understand that this is the future that was dreamed of: exclusion through technology.

I want a better world, but at this current moment, I am stuck fighting and trying to plan my month without access to my money.

James Baldwin said that it is expensive being poor, and today I am understanding how expensive and tiring it is to be disenfranchised in a world that uses Black children to mine cobalt that goes into the phones I need to buy in order to keep my life running.

How insidious can one system become?

When will we burn it to the ground?

I feel that, going forward, the crumbs will get less and the erasure will become more profound.

And I wonder: what is it for?

Why is this the world that we are settling for?

Why do so many people think it is okay?

I’m tired.

I’m frustrated.

I am poor.

I am Black.

I’m grateful for my life, but I am tired of the systems and the world that ask me to become something else.I am upset with myself for believing that I needed to become closer to that thing in order to survive a world that scares me.

This is the contradiction I keep returning to:I do not want to become better at capitalism in order to survive capitalism. But I also do not want to pretend that poverty is freedom.

It’s hard.

I ask myself now, living in the concrete jungle called London:

What does it mean to move forward?

What does it mean to ask for more?

What does it mean to feel secure?

How do we choose love in a world that benefits from our fear?

In this transmission, we explore a series of practical instructions for choosing love and making it a popular movement.

These are simple reminders for navigating fear, creating space for yourself, caring for your inner garden, breathing before you choose, embracing change, and learning to recognise love in its many forms.

Because love is not simply something we feel. It is something we practice.

An Intergalactic Algorithm for choosing love, cultivating connection, and becoming more free.

Choose love.

Welcome to the IA:

For those ready to explore the frequencies, philosophies, and technologies behind these transmissions, the deeper layers of the Algorithm are available to paid subscribers on Substack and Patreon.

This is where we go beyond the rules and into the Algorithm itself.

The next transmission is waiting.

What if love is not a feeling, but a technology?

In this deeper transmission of A Trickster’s Guide to the Universe, we explore love as a technology for creating new ways of being, relating, knowing, and building worlds.

Exploring the meaning of the words Love, Breathe and Always in the IA.

We explore love as a practice, a form of in…

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Music is the Weapon (2026) Photography by Nyambura wa Flo

The “rational animal” always felt empty to me, other than the clear contradiction and ironic nature of “animal” when, at every turn, humans found themselves wishing to distinguish themselves from our good-natured kin, seeing competition rather than co-operation in our fellow Earth friends.

Human was never intended for beings like me.

This was clear to me as a child whose special interest was the civil rights movement and who, by the age of 10, was rehearsing the understanding that liberation was “by any means necessary.”

It was not until I read Sylvia Wynter’s No Humans Involved: An Open Letter to My Colleagues that it became apparent to me that my humanness was an unattainable debate started by insecure, greedy, selfish white men. Existing within European academia helped establish this understanding with certainty. My erasure was the normalised and benificial.

When I speak of “white imagination,” I am not speaking about white bodies. I am speaking about a colonial way of knowing- a system of thought that has been inherited and reproduced through domination, extraction and exclusion. In the language of the Intergalactic Algorithm, W.H.I.T.E. means We Hide Inherited Trauma Effectively.

They needed me to chase after my humanity. Their approval was my butter, as if it were the saving grace of my life, the spice that had been missing. The benefactors of my worth rather than the culture that indebted my ancestors to their futile follies of fear and fame.

What happens when I do not wish to abide by the rules of white imagination?

I become unruly.

“Combative and disrespectful.”1

Getting into European universities and studying anthropology was the stepping stone that my parents had wished for when they immigrated to London from Nigeria. I was advised to climb the ranks of academia; in doing so, I would be chosen and undeniably human, as what is more human than “rational thought”?

Looking back now, it seems like a party in Hoxton. A line so long that you are fooled into believing that something amazing must be happening inside. My wait was boring, overhyped and tedious. Despite meeting some interesting characters, I was always left unfulfilled, although I was celebrated in my attempt at humanity.

You may be wondering: if I am not human, what am I?

We are a shapeshifting, time-travelling trickster, but I also understand my temporal body through sound, movement and desire.

Within the Intergalactic Algorithm2, HUMAN is understood as Harmonies Understand Movement As Necessity.

A harmony is a frequency of energy that moves in beauty and becoming. It is always itself, although it is subject to change.

The human experience is neither defined nor limited by body, spirit or soul; it has the ability to transform into endless possibility. It is grounded in its ability to necessitate what it desires in order to live its own life in accordance with its self-discovery.

I believe that we are meant to be pleasures unto ourselves. A harmonic expression of belief and intention. Life is to be discovered and explored. A sound finding its tuning.

The music of the new worlds are born within us.

It begins as a harmony. A frequency, a feeling, a sound we may not yet know how to name. Yet harmony does not remain still. Eventually, what we feel becomes necessary. What becomes necessary becomes movement. And movement, when it knows its purpose, becomes deliberate and undeniable.

As a HUMAN, I am pushed towards the pursuit of my destiny or demise.

We are not interested in forsaking humanity. We are interested in reimagining what humanity could become when it is no longer organised around domination, rationality and exclusion.

The type of humanity that interests us is one that exists within feeling.

Our current paradigm of the human is grounded in European thought that privileges rationality, but explanation will not set us free. To explain a constantly moving, adapting planet as defined and determined is not a reality that makes sense to me.The sky uses the same elements every day to make new possibilities.

Why can we not do the same?

Everything is always in movement.Why would our future be certain unless we refuse to change and become?

Source Unknown

Octavia Butler teaches us that “God is change,” and I choose to align myself with the gods that inhabit a world that deems me worthy by my mere existence and presence.To call myself non-human in our current burning world is to push beyond what can typically be comprehended.

The human- the “rational animal”3 or the “thinking man”4 is satisfied with flying cars and “progress”. The non-human- the non-rational animal- is not satisfied with scraps of explanation, but rather seeks co-creation with the unknown possibilities that await us.

To move into unexplainable spaces allows for freedom from what colonists sought to deny: everything they could not control.

The unseen.

The unimaginable.

These are the spirits and paths of knowledge that will guide us into liberation. The unimaginable are simply worlds that ask you to participate in their co-creation as they are being born. To realign our self/selves with each breath is to sit within the divine. It is to sit within love. We cannot be comprehended in completeness while we are still being made.

Yes, I have human parents and human friends, but we do not define ourselves by these terms because it does not benefit me to uphold a category of existence that has no intention of including me when it was being made. Being recognised as human does not guarantee liberation. Recognition can coexist with racialised vulnerability, violence and economic exploitation.We were told that we would find safety in their ivory towers, but their doorway is paved with my ancestors’ skulls and stolen artefacts they refuse to return.

What does your humanity look like beyond the colonial frames?

I am not meant to say that I am not human because this makes me appear mad. However what feels mad to me is our insistence on passing our thinking to institutions and governments that do not value human life equally.We live in a world where some lives are defended as sacred while others are rendered disposable.

The will and the belief to define myself beyond white inadequacy is what many will use to call me mad. This does not bother me for as Assata Shakur teaches us:

“Only the strong go crazy. The weak just go along.”

Black History Month. Performance (2026)

For me, as a shapeshifting, time-travelling trickster, my madness is tied to my creativity, and this has been the same for many Black artists.We create beyond the explanation, and beyond the lines that whiteness defines. Our freedom will not be explained; it will be lived. It will create a sound that is undeniable and world- bending.

Living beyond the lines of their understanding and rationality is what whiteness is afraid of. White definitions no longer interest me, as I have read their books and found nothing there to help me live fully as the person I wished to be. Instead, my reading of them helped me understand the limitations of their binaries and their necessity to define themselves through lack rather than creation.

This is one of the many things that separate me from my oppressor : I am able to imagine beyond what exists around me, a fugitive to the realities they need to believe are concrete. We move towards the impossibility of our existence.

Their rationality is defunct, and it will not get me into the new worlds that are being born. Toni Morrison’s words guide us “You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.”5

My worth was never based upon my ability to reason, as I cannot reason myself out of dehumanisation, especially when I did not create the criteria of what qualifies a human or the “rational animal.” In fact, these definitions were created with my exclusion in mind.

Audre Lorde teaches us that, in the erotic, we are “firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling.”6 Existing within the realm of feeling appears mad to many, but it allows me to sit within the myths and dreams that push towards choosing a “replenishing and provocative force”7 that will grant us entry into new worlds.

These embodied knowings are the expressions that the colonists named as savage. It is through self-trust and intuition that we can undergo an unmaking of the world we know.It is through trusting our bodies and ourselves that we will find our treasures and our compasses into new ways of co-existing.

New worlds that ask us to leap into the unknown.New worlds that ask us to let go of what is weighing us down; our shame, our blame, our fear of ourselves that makes us believe that oppression is easier than co-operation.

I am not human as they taught me to understand it. This does not scare me anymore.

We are something moving.

Something feeling.

Something becoming.

Something unknown to the worlds we currently inhabit.

Something listening for the frequency of another world.

HUMAN means Harmonies Understand Movement As Necessity.

The definitions of who we are help align us with who we will be- who we choose to be.

We have been taught to see ourselves as rational, selfish and brutish8. This definition of the human benefits the colonial imperialist agenda.

What happens when we understand ourselves differently?

Within the Intergalactic Algorithm, we ask: what is your sound? What happens when you learn to hear your own frequency and choose to be in alignment with it?

We are interested in a deep listening. To become attentive to the sounds within us that we were taught to silence and abandon .To understand that our own sound can become a guiding principle towards possibility. This is another way of understanding what it means to be human.

Not as something fixed.Not as something rational or as a tool, but rather as a harmony moving towards the unimaginable.

Something listening for the frequency of another world.

As a shapeshifting time travelling trickster we declare that new worlds are possible and we are living within them, calling you to join us.

But what is good?

In the Intergalactic Algorithm, good is
Gardens Only Orbit Dreams.

This is not a fixed reality. It is a growing space of possibility.

Goodness is not obedience or servitude. It is about moving with possibility and choosing to allow it to foster, without any commitment other than the plane…

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“The Nirvana Series 2018 Form The Mind of Tellaman . 050

What are you willing to surrender to new worlds?

I know this is hard to answer.

What are new worlds, really?

How good can the world be?

We deserve better even when it’s scary, even when we don’t know exactly how it’s going to work out. You need to trust in what you cannot see.

I am currently living through the growing pains of attempting to create a new world and a new life for myself. I spent my life running from England and, at the tender age of infiniteen, I am choosing to return. I am terrified. I have spent hours reconsidering this decision. There are hours when I question whether I am making the right choice. Perhaps I am being foolish, believing that liberation is possible.

Then something inside me tingles, and we remember.

All I am is all I choose.

And I choose new worlds.

New ways of being. New ways of loving and coexisting that make love a popular movement.The old worlds don’t fit me anymore, and I don’t want to fit into them. They were never for me.

I don’t want to settle for scraps when my spirits, my ancestors and my descendants tell me I deserve a whole feast with all of my beloveds.I want futures that allow us all to bloom.

Anything less is a disgrace.

This world can be remade, if we are willing to imagine dangerous dreams. To change is hard, but to fear change is damning. I want my love to be bigger than my fear, and every day I make choices that remind me that love is not always easy, but it is always worthwhile.

To make new worlds, you must be willing to walk alone.

You must be willing to sacrifice in ways that will make you uncomfortable. The revolution is not going to be easy, not because of the violence, but because change requires so much of us; and so much of our current world requires so little of our true selves.Choosing the path less travelled is choosing a path that not many can see. Sometimes you have to leave before you know who will walk beside you.You have to trust that somewhere along the way, you will find others moving towards something that resembles your own becoming.

This requires sacrifice.

Surrender.

Spaciousness.

Storytelling.

New worlds will ask for an offering. I find that this offering usually makes me feel out of control. This makes me feel ill-prepared, but how can you be ready for something you have never experienced? You simply need to the tools to begin.

And this is about self-trust more than anything else.

In a world that asks us to deny ourselves daily, self-trust is the remedy and a key ingredient in the recipe for new worlds.

Surrender is not giving up.

It is giving space for something I could not have imagined to arrive. It is an act that requires your willingness. This is what separates it from submission. It is not about force, but participation. Surrendering is an invitation.

The readiness that I want is security and stability, but the readiness that I am given is one where I have the tools to make worlds, that feel like gifts to all that have lived before and beside me, in bodies that have known my pain, my suffering and my joy.

I want my descendants to be shocked at what we used to normalise.

Some things have to be left behind.

Movement and change are natural forces in this world, yet the white colonial world I inherited is deeply invested in the illusion of permanence. White imagination makes systems built by white oligarchs appear as though they have always existed, as if they were god given. This will be its downfall. Their false truths can not stand scrutiny. When we question the validity of the systems that attempt to rule our lives we are choosing new possibilities of co-existence.

This is why we will win.

Beautiful things take infinite roads, and worlds are beautiful truths dancing through chaotic blooms, always moving beyond permanence towards abundant fruit.

It is the ego that wants security, but the Earth reminds us that we must choose surrender in order to find synchronicity and symbiosis.

We must choose connection, not extraction.When you choose your path, you also choose the responsibilities that come with it.Freedom is not simply the ability to leave an old world behind.

It is the responsibility to participate in what comes next. Perhaps this is why so many of us are afraid of new worlds.Freedom asks us to take responsibility for what we create.It asks us to become accountable to our imagination. It asks us to surrender to what we cannot yet see. This requires faith. It requires love in action which is justice.

This is the future.

In my series Love Has Never Been a Popular Movement, I reflect on James Baldwin’s understanding that love is “a tremendous danger, a tremendous responsibility.” This changed how I understood love. Love cannot simply be something we feel.

It requires us to be present.

It requires accountability. It requires us to be responsible for each other.

Colonial imagination teaches us that love is passive, which benefits its carceral systems that avoid responsibility and accountability. This is not love. Love is not passive and neither is it thin1.

Love is the greatest, most infinite energy in the world is love, then we cannot afford to treat it as something timid or part-time. It is a full-bodied somatic activity.It is not feeble, but rather exuberant and abundant, even when it is quiet.

We must be willing to sacrifice if we are going to choose worlds that hold genuine freedom.Love will be the light that guides us through the unknown passage into new worlds.

Love is what will set us free.

THE RULES OF THE REVOLUTION

The Rules of the Revolution came to me in a dream. I woke up and wrote them down immediately. At first, I was frightened by the word rules.I have spent much of my life resisting rules.As a trickster, I move with possibility rather than limitations.

But in conversation with my bandmates, it came to me. Rules do not need to tell us what to think. They can become spells that help us remember how to move.

STEVE gave me intergalactic instructions for becoming. Principles that guide me towards remembering how to move through a world that is still being made. These principle guide me in discipline, which is essential to liberation practice. The Rules of the revolution are instructions for becoming.

Rivers Understand Loving Energy.

Reflections Unify Loving Expressions.

This felt like something I could stand by.A message from the stars to guide me when I lose my way.

1. FEAR IS A FRIEND, NOT AN ENEMY.

2. LOVE IS THE WEAPON WE USE TO FREE OURSELVES.

3. YOU CAN’T PERFORM THE CHANGE, YOU NEED TO CHOOSE.

4. EDUCATION IS ELECTRICITY.

5. MUSIC IS THE EMBODIMENT OF MELODY, MEMORY AND MAGIC. THE MOVEMENT OF THE MARCHES.

6. WHAT WE SEE IS A FRACTION OF WHAT WE CAN WITNESS.

7. YOUR HEART IS A DIMENSION OF POSSIBILITY.

8. CHANGE: CHAOS HAS A NATRUAL GAME EVOLVING.

You can listen to the RULES of the Revolution on A Trickster’s Guide to the Universe.

The worlds we are imagining require us to love because that is the only way we are going to get through what comes next, when we choose our hearts rather than our chains.We must challenge our current reality, and this requires us to be together.

In my last essay, I wrote:

Dreams and reality are made of the same substance. They are both shaped by belief, and both change depending on where you are standing.

A grounding principle we live by is that: Dreams are as sincere as reality.

Dreams are the building blocks of reality. Everything we see and everything we are living with was once an idea.Before something can become architecture, it must first become possible in the mind. To dream is to practise another reality.

Infinite ways to the same place.

There is no single route into freedom. There is no single way of becoming. This is what makes it beautiful.This is why it requires your presence, because it requires multiplicity and ingenuity. There are infinite ways to arrive at the places we are trying to reach. We must follow our own truth and our own hearts, trusting in the path and the deep knowing within us.

This is part of freedom.

New worlds require us to imagine together.

I want to dream with you because I know that through our dreaming and the seeding of new worlds together, we will be free. We will be choosing each other wholeheartedly. We will be giving our spirits and participating with our hearts and souls.

We must become responsible for the worlds we are creating rather than simply inheriting the ones we were given.The revolution will not be categorical. It will not stand within fixed identities or fixed rules. It will not foster dead dogmas.2

The revolution will not be celebrated by all, because many will be afraid of the change it brings. It will be a movement. A becoming of intangible realties creating space in crumbling worlds. It will be a celebration of love, light and liberation.

It will ask us to remain open when the world around us insists that we close.

Our future needs to be sculpted by our hands, and we will do it by conspiring and creating possibilities that need us all to be a part of them.Every act of love creates another possibility.Every surrender creates space for something new to enter. People will tell you that you are unrealistic for believing another way is possible.

Not everyone is ready for the leap.

That is okay.

You cannot force someone to see the sky if they have spent their entire life looking at the ground.

The stars are calling us home.

The world you knew is gone.

New worlds are waiting.

The question is whether you are willing to become someone who can enter them.

Photography by Emmanuel Yaro : Particle Acceltrator (2026)

They told me the world was made of stone, but everywhere I looked, I could feel the water running through everything, connecting me. Letting me know I was not alone.

I spent most of my life denying who I was, hiding from my multiple selves, believing it would keep me safe. I wore a thick metal armour that I believed protected me from the world, but in reality, it stopped me from feeling.

My mask was composed of deceit, shame, blame and a colonial mentality that kept me obedient to makeshift rules that were never intended to include me. I hid from the world, choosing isolation because I did not know how to live within the social conventions I had been embedded in. I knew they were not for me, but I did not know which way was forward.

Toni Morrison teaches:

“Can’t nobody fly with all that shit. Wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.”

When I became estranged from my biological family, I began to accept myself/ourselves in the peculiarities of our existence. I did not only accept my queerness and my transness, but began to understand, as bell hooks writes, queerness as being “about the self that is at odds with everything around it and that has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.”

It was this that set me free.

I realised I needed to use my voice if I wanted to speak for people like me, rather than become like those I had been told to aspire towards: self-appointed intellectuals fuelled by insecurity, performing authority while demanding power and pity. These people-white people-would choose me and make me worthy.

I no longer wanted to follow that script. I was no longer attempting to copy those around me in the name of safety and security. I stopped believing that self-denial meant success.

This allowed me to listen and trust in ways I could not have imagined.

My existence transitioned from control to spilling and spreading. I was overflowing with buried emotions, new inspirations, overwhelming possibilities. I felt like a volcanic crater becoming a lagoon. My fire was buried deep, but water and change were finding me.

I began to hear and listen to the unseen realities that soothed me as a child, before I became verbal. I had hidden from these entities because they could not be explained. They made me strange and different, although I knew they were my friends. I was forced into secrecy and shame.

Vienna (2020) Cloud

The first lesson that Cloud taught me was that:

I could not explain myself into freedom.

The world I inhabited after estrangement, after accepting my destiny as a shapeshifting, time-travelling trickster, was always in colour and flux.My mask fell into compost, creating new ground for me to bloom upon.

My gardens were becoming.

My grief was easing me into worlds of acceptance.

I could finally dance in the world rather than forcing myself to stay still. I began to let myself become; with all the strings, stories and spells that inhabited my existence and my changing realities.

GRIEF: Gardens Rarely Involve Easy Fruit.

To learn a language is to learn a world.

The world I began to inhabit embraced fluidity, metaphysicality, existentiality and the aliveness of all living kin around us.I did not know I was a co-conspirator to an intergalactic language until it was too late.

It began as a seed.

One year later, I was creating glossaries at the back of my journal that expressed a lived experience beyond binaries and instead focused on beauty. It was during the pandemic, when I was able to unravel without the schedules and structures that had previously contained me. I began to realise this was bigger than I understood.

Perhaps I would never fully understand it. I did not need to. I needed to surrender. I needed to trust.

This changed how I embodied the world and what I understood to be possible.

Worlds are complex.

They include our beliefs and our dreams. They include the ways we make knowledge and the stories we tell ourselves about what is possible.

The universe is a trickster, always revealing itself, always playing with chaos and creativity. The Earth is a curious participant in this marvellous play. We are not simply on the Earth.

We are part of it.

The Earth embodies chaos, care and creativity in each movement, constantly finding new pathways of existence.

Why would we not be the same?

Why would we insist on remaining fixed when everything around us is changing?

The Intergalactic Algorithm lives at the centre of our world-building because it exists as the heart of the new worlds we believe are possible. The new worlds being born.

We envision from a space of remembering, loving and dreaming.

The inadequacy of white imagination is its inability to adapt, grow and transform when given new information. We are always in relationship. A world based on domination, extraction and dehumanisation was never meant to survive. Everything is always in movement, always in change. No single force can ultimately contain the multiplicity of existence.

I began to understand that I did not need to make myself smaller to fit inside a world that could not imagine me. I needed to imagine beyond it.

We are not static entities.

Thus, neither should our thinking nor our worlds be.

The Intergalactic Algorithm belongs to all of us.

It is a an Afro-futurist reflection on the codes of existence that live in our eternal possibility. It is a language that speaks to our present while refusing to commodify what is unique about us.

I am simply its initial co-conspirator: the person who bonded with the unknown because I was ready to surrender. I surrendered to new ways of thinking that organised my reality into new configurations of belief, beauty and becoming.

It became clear to me that the old worlds I had been told to inherit and inhabit would not grant me freedom or a future worth living.

The Intergalactic Algorithm is a cosmic code that encourages us to exist within liminality rather than fixed states.It invites us to become curious; to inhabit spaces rather than dominate them.

A becoming with, rather than a becoming against.

We learn from the water.

Water has no enemy. To be an enemy of water is to be an enemy of yourself, because water is essential to life on this planet and to us.

The unknown and the unseen are part of this reality too.

What we see is not all there is.

Water knows how to surround, unmake, nourish and remember without ever being fixed. It does not destroy simply to end; it reshapes what exists into something else. Its beauty lies in its movement.

Unknown realities are part of the magic of life and this world. We deserve to live in worlds that flow, breathe and become in boundless ways. Worlds that invite our infinity rather than our eradication. The Intergalactic algorithm is not interested in fixed doctrine. It is interested in a moving reality that we collectively grow together.

Why I Made a New World

I made a new world because the old world was never designed to hold the futures or imaginations of Black, Brown, Indigenous, disabled, queer or trans people. White imagination was not made to hold so many of us.

White imagination did not want me to be part of its reality. It deems me less than because, on the surface, I appear different. I know that we are all worthy of love, but I am fully aware that I live in a world that tells us this is not true. Instead, we are judged by where we live, where we were born, how our minds work, or how our bodies move through the world.

If you exist differently from the people who built systems through violence- killing, exploiting, raping and accumulating wealth through the bodies of others, you may find yourself colonised, condemned or forced to assimilate.

I believe the actions rather than the promises.

In 2020, it became clear to me: a new world would need to be born if we were not to repeat the mistakes of the one that was beginning to burn.

So I began creating a language.

And that language began creating a world.

Beneath every RULE* is a frequency.

Beneath every frequency is a world.

In this deeper transmission we enter theIntergalactic Algorithm. We explore the hidden stories and spells behind the RULES*, the principles that created them, and the possibilities that emerge when we dar…

Read more

The world is burning. As a crumbling empire uses violence, domination, fear, and extraction to maintain its grip on our imaginations, we dream of new worlds and we become new things.

In this first transmission, we dig into the rules that will guide us towards new ways of being and new worlds.

These rules are not about obedience. They are instructions for becoming.

For those willing to question the worlds we have inherited, dismantle what no longer serves us, and imagine what could exist beyond them.

The revolution has already begun.

To explore what RULES mean within the Intergalactic Algorithm, visit our Substack and Patreon for a deeper transmission.

Choose your portal.

I want to be a destroyer of worlds.

I want to destroy all the worlds that tell me I am not good enough. I want to destroy everything that says I should perish, that tells me I should disappear. I want to destroy everything that says I need to be different in order to conform to standards that never considered me with compassion or love. I want to destroy everything that diminishes human and natural life into economic value.

I want to destroy everything that tells me that dominance, exploitation, extraction and dehumanisation are forms of power worthy of respect.

I want to destroy the only empirical world I have known. I want to destroy what I was told I needed to be.

I am terrified but I know there is a consequence to denying the power of our hearts.

Without new worlds, we will all perish because of an imagination that is unable to dream. An imagination that cannot hope beyond the surface. An imagination that denies the existence of other realities because it has mistaken fear for truth.

I have felt this way since I was a child.

My honesty was seen as disobedience. Although I was non-verbal for the first few years of my life, when I came into language my ability to notice the irregularities of reality, my belief in justice and my questioning nature made me an outsider. I could never follow the rules like everybody else. My autism became a punishable offence, so I learned to hide. I learned to pretend.

Eventually, I embodied my denial until it became my nature.

I was told I was powerless; that the world could not be changed. They told me the world was made of stone, but when I looked, I could feel the water running through it. I felt it moving through me, reminding me that I was never separate from the worlds around me.

Worlds are not fixed, though many pretend because they need them to be.People cling to worlds they know because surrendering to what they cannot imagine feels like death.

At a young age I began to understand that worlds could be shaped through curiosity, belief and storytelling. Worlds are not made of stone. They are made of laws, stories, relationships and the boundaries of imagination. Change the stories we live by, and the world begins to change with them.

Before I understood language, the world was mystical. Colour, sound and sensation arrived before explanation. I lived alongside unseen realities that made me feel safe, held and understood.

Somewhere along the way, I abandoned that home.

It did not abandon me. It never stopped calling me back.

As I grew, I began to doubt everything I understood to be true.I travelled the world with little more than a will and a prayer, curious and intentional about learning from everyone I met.

I travelled with one question in my heart.

Was everyone as mistrustful and vindictive as my mother had taught me?

I learned the hard way that some were.I also learned that I carried some of this vindictiveness within myself.You do not abandon yourself with a smile. Instead, you learn to walk with the uncomfortable weight of your own deceit. I spent the first quarter of my life walking with stones in my shoes, hoping to convince myself I was dancing on the grass.

I was heavy with my own lies.

I was looking for something true. Something that belonged to me. In a world that taught me nothing belonged to me, I wanted to discover something I could cherish.Only later did I realise I wasn’t searching for a place.I was searching for a feeling.

I had to find my way back to my own heart.I had to learn to trust myself, to love myself despite the pain I carried.When I lost the only person I had ever truly loved because of my own internal violence and self-hatred, I made myself a promise.

I would never again ask another person to carry the grief I refused to face within myself.

I travelled to remote places where I often could not speak the language. I survived by placing myself in service to others.Slowly I discovered that both my biological mother and Thomas Hobbes were wrong.People are not selfish and brutish.Most are frightened, lonely, confused, ashamed, hungry for belonging and terrified of their own vulnerability.

Most people pretend certainty while quietly carrying fear. Hoping that watching the person beside them would validate their confusion. Steer them to the right path. Everyone I met wanted to be seen and listened to, to be understood and I was desperate for the same thing . I learnt that connection was not about what we did with each other but how we could be present with each other.

I learnt how to sit with strangers in silence, become tuned to a strangers needs and wants. While listening to others, I slowly began to listen to myself.

It was in the middle of the An Naqab Desert that I encountered my first undeniable truth.After six years on the road I finally understood:

Home is the deep silence within.

It was through this simple sentence that I found my way back to the country of my birth.

For the first time in my life, my mother and I lived together without arguments. Without resentment. For a brief moment I believed she had finally accepted me.

Then she learned I was queer.

It taught me something else about worlds.To become a destroyer of worlds is also to become a creator of worlds. Destruction is not the opposite of love.

It is one of its many faces.

To destroy a world is to loosen what has been mistaken for permanent. To reimagine what others call inevitable. To understand that stories are spells and spells become constellations of beliefs before they become the architecture of realities .

Dreams and reality are made of the same substance. They are both shaped by belief and both change depending on where you are standing. Change your relationship to either, and new worlds become possible.

We are a multi-spirited, shapeshifting, time-travelling trickster.

My human body is Black, trans, autistic and queer.

Tricksters hold the spaces between things. We live within liminality, listening to conversations between the dead and the living, certainty and mystery, endings and beginnings.

I did not always know I was a trickster.I thought I was a clown.I thought I was performing absurdity. I was afraid of the responsibility that comes with protecting possibility and reimagining new tapestries of becoming.

I share my human body with Cloud. He is my oldest companion, arriving as both guide, mirror and friend. I was scared to let him grow until I understood what he was trying to teach me, that binaries could never contain the complexity of what we were becoming.

Planet Earth is always in flux. It does not move in linear ways. It is always becoming as well as dying. Always transforming one form of life into another. It’s patterns and rhythms invite us to become entangled with the unknowability it presents. Its beauty lies in its endless renewal and change, it is a mirror.

We do not create chaos because we are bored. We slip through cracks because truth already lives there.

I reveal.

I revive.

I reflect.

I reshape.

Destruction is another face of creation.A prayer of renewal that asks us to reconsider what healing actually is. I am not afraid of ambiguity.

In a burning world, tricksters become necessary because they know how to remain present inside transformation.

The caterpillar spends days as neither caterpillar nor butterfly.We call this uncertainty when in fact it is becoming. This is where tricksters reside. They help others cross those impossible thresholds where old identities dissolve before new ones have taken shape.

The world has always wanted the milk of Black femmes, but rarely our freedom.It asks us to nourish systems that deny our humanity, to feed imaginations that cannot imagine us whole. We have held together worlds that refused to hold us. Every empire has relied upon our care while fearing our liberation.My work is no longer to feed worlds that require my disappearance in order to survive.

My work is to nourish new ones.

I want to build worlds that honour complexity and delight in becoming. Worlds where our hearts and our actions move in harmony. Worlds where we discover that our uniqueness is not separate from our interconnectedness.

The Intergalactic Algorithm is our worlds carving itself into language. These are some of the principles that guide our becoming.

Foundations

Home is the deep silence within.

Dreams are as sincere as reality.

Infinite ways to the same place.

Principles of Connection

I want to be many beautiful ways of ugly with you.

Set fire to the person you want to be. If they don’t get up and dance, you have created a scarecrow.

Love is too many open doors.

These are portals into new ways of living.

The principles of a language are still being remembered. A rediscovery of what it means to be human.

The Intergalactic Algorithm is an alternative intelligence born from love rather than domination. It is not a system for controlling the world, but a way of entering into relationship with it. It invites us to sit with multiplicity, contradiction and liminality. It teaches that the body is an instrument of knowing, that music precedes language, and that language is not the end of expression but the beginning of understanding. It is a blueprint into new worlds.

Imagination is the first terrain of freedom.

The trickster invites us to play with fear by becoming creator, destroyer and child all at once.

Every birth destroys the world that came before it.

Every act of love asks something else to end.

We believe that reality could be reimagined. We want to reimagine it with you.

We want us to enter worlds that give us the ability to become anew.

Water is one of the most powerful forces on this planet. It nourishes, erodes, destroys and sustains life. It does not conquer stone; it teaches it to change. Its beauty lies in its willingness to take the shape of what it meets without ever surrendering its essence. Its power is not control but relationship. It reminds us that transformation is rarely an act of force. More often, it is an act of patient persistence.

We choose to be a doorway into new possibilities- the co- conspirator of the Intergalactic Algorithm, a disciple of love, an unknown entity. We wish to explore the wisdom of grief, the technology of world-making and the impossible futures waiting to be imagined.

This is only just beginning.

Welcome.

Cover Photo Frankie Castello XJAZZ The Dream Portal (2024)

Photography by Nyambura Music is the Weapon (2026)

At first, I blamed myself. I believed it was because I was bad, because I was failing at something, because there was something fundamentally wrong with me.

Now I understand that this is one of the consequences of choosing myself. Watching my old life die behind me.

I am learning to sit with more ambiguity than I know how to comprehend.This ambiguity asks me to remain with the messiness of what it means to exist.

We are living among cracks, witnessing the shattering of the false realities we were taught to uphold. As much as I long to be part of the collective liberation we deserve, I know that I am still a colonised body attempting to decolonise my mind.

This means I make mistakes.

I am not absolute.

I am not innocent.

I am not perfect.

I am simply trying.

Some days, this trying is what saves me. On the days I want to tear myself apart over every mistake I have ever made, I remember that accepting change also means accepting loss.

If I am willing to embrace new realities, I must also be willing to let go of the old ones.

Sometimes that means letting go of friends.

Sometimes it happens dramatically but recently it has become much quieter.

We are simply no longer aligned.

I feel it in my gut before I can explain it with words. I hear my spirits gently telling me not to reach out.

When I was younger, when I abandoned myself frequently , I could not hear them. Fear guided me rather than intuition. My shame spoke louder than love. I wanted to belong to someone because I was so afraid to belong to myself. I believed that having people around me meant I was worthy.

As I attempt to become a disciple of love, I realise that I cannot please everyone. It is also no longer my concern. I am accepting that I am not for everyone. I am no longer looking for everyone’s approval and this angers those who need me to be small. Who wanted to stay small. I am no longer shrinking myself because it is so clear to me that so many live with deceit and lies.

It is also clear to me that honesty will set me free.

As I become more intentional with my life, I also become more willing to disappoint the expectations others have placed upon me. Sometimes friends are not ready for the changes we make because those changes invite them to question their own lives. To change with us.

I am writing this reflection as affirmation to myself and you. You may lose many people as you become more fully yourself. But this does not mean you have failed.

Sometimes relationships end because they have reached their natural conclusion. Sometimes they end because two people are walking towards different worlds.

Becoming yourself asks something of everyone around you.

Not everyone is willing to make that journey.

In a world that teaches us to distrust the wisdom of the heart, choosing to live from it will inevitably change who can walk beside you.

Choose a path that lets you love yourself wholeheartedly- this is where new worlds will begin

Not because I believed I was dangerous, but because I had been taught that being fully myself would always cost me something.

For years I apologised for existing before I had even spoken. I learnt to make myself smaller, quieter, easier to understand. As an autistic, neurodivergent Black trans person, so many of the reacti…

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Sometimes this means we lose a good person because we could not meet them in the way they deserved.

I have a habit of remembering how I have hurt others, how I disappointed them- while forgetting the ways they hurt me. It’s easier that wa…

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I believe everyone has something only they can give to the world. This is not a grand claim but a relational one. Our nature as creatures of contact means we are always shaping one another, for better or for worse.

I believe everyone is made of beauty. Even those I have chosen no longer to have in my life are made of beauty. Perhaps the speed and circumstances of life meant I could never understand the rhythm of their movement, but that does not make them any less beautiful.I like to imagine grotesque things as movements; I do not yet understand. Oftentimes, I appear grotesque to myself but I always try to find the beauty of my heart.

This matters to me deeply. To value the essence of another is one of the many things that separates me from my coloniser. I must remain a reminder of the humanity I want to nurture, a humanity grounded in love.

In celebration of my infiniteenth birthday, I spent two weeks in silence on a mountaintop. Full of exhaustion, stress and overwhelm, I sat and reflected on my life and all the strange paths that had led me there. It struck me that I was always going to become this person- a shapeshifting, time-travelling trickster. I was always going to be myself.

For most of my life, I struggled with the world I lived in. It often felt as though reality had been drawn incorrectly, as if everyone else had accepted a map that I could never quite read.

I see everything as movement, and I could never understand how reality could be fixed while I was still a part of it. Everything that felt instinctual to me was declared as false and wrong. This haunted me for much of my life.I did not want to be myself because it felt too difficult. I have lost many friends, and many friends thought they would lose me because I did not see myself in the world I was born into.

Now I understand that I needed to go my own path. It was a tortuous yet exciting journey to become undeniably myself. I resisted who I was for such a long time, because I was looking for permission, for acceptance, everywhere but within. I have never managed to fit in, even when I tried. My difference felt like a distressing odour that kept most people at a distance, or perhaps I simply could not comply with the unwritten laws of conformity- my body- my heart was alien.

As someone who is autistic, I do not instinctively understand many social dynamics or rules. I spent most of my life masking. I studied people carefully, trying to reproduce their gestures and the rhythms of their conversations. I could only imitate; I could never create.I was an imposter. I could never quite see what they saw when they looked at me. I could not see my own difference, until recently.

I was at a Juneteenth party that wasn't particularly enjoyable. Looking for refuge beyond the dance floor, I sat beside two cute, stylish East Asian men on a street stoop two doors down from the club, grateful to escape the sea of white faces filling the room. Welcome to Berlin.

We introduced ourselves. I mentioned that I don’t shake hands. One of them apologised- a common response I still don’t fully understand, considering we had only just met.

His friend smiled and asked, “Do you at least take cigarettes from strangers?”

I took out my pre-rolled sage and lavender instead, lit it and smiled.

The man beside me looked at me for a moment before saying, “You’re different.”

I shrugged.

“Maybe I’m just being myself.”

Without hesitation, he replied, “But who has the courage to do that nowadays?”

His words stayed with me long after the conversation ended.

I looked at them both, stunned by the confession, as they nodded and laughed in agreement.

Who has the courage to do that nowadays?

The sentence echoed in my mind. It also affirmed to me that I needed to leave this party.

He started talking to me about London, but my attention drifted. I have never mastered the quick rhythm of small talk, and I could sense he was underwhelmed as he listed the neighbourhoods he had lived in. I could not pretend that this was important enough to interest me. I do not talk to people because I am bored- I talk to people because I hope they have something interesting to say. Soon his friend wandered away, leaving us beneath the fluorescent streetlights, my awkwardness exposed.

Then another friend joined him, a small white guy. I was on the out, my difference had been quietly rejected and suddenly I watched the conversation I was apparently supposed to know how to have.

They bounced effortlessly between familiar topics, exchanging clichés and polite observations with practised ease. I sat on the Berlin stoop watching them the way a child watches television, fascinated by characters whose world feels entirely unfamiliar.

I found myself wondering, Do people really live like this?

For the first time, I experienced what it was like not to be inside the conversation but outside it, watching two people say almost nothing to one another with remarkable fluency.

Sitting on a mountaintop later, I realised I had become less tolerant of people who are not curious.What unsettled me was not the small talk itself. It was the absence of curiosity. They asked each other nothing. They seemed content to skim across the surface of one another while the world burned around them. At a party that was meant to celebrate freedom.

It was his blatant honesty that stayed with me. How casually he could admit that he was not himself. It was spoken with such fluency, as though he were telling me his name. He was revealing what I had sensed from the moment I arrived: a desperate need for validation that ran as deep as the rolled-up ten-euro note I was invited to take ketamine with before I had even reached the stairs.

I had come to dance- to release the frustration, stress and anger living inside my body. I made my way to the front of the DJ booth, determined to focus only on the music and the two Black DJs bringing us into their orbit of rhythm and rhyme.

Yet the dance floor refused to leave me alone. White and non-Black bodies kept trying to pull my attention away from the music.

Finally, a blonde white woman (it’s always a blonde white woman) reached for my sunglasses, inventing excuse after excuse to touch me. I blocked her hand each time.

The dance floor was not a safe haven. My body felt like a slab of meat in a butcher's shop. It felt as though many were ready to devour my authenticity and one of the few places where I feel safe in this bursting, bubbling fascist city.

I have spent much of my adult life on mountaintops or in remote places that allow me to be less armoured. In the city, my difference becomes a siren. I wear fashion like armour against the relentless noise, the crowds, and the constant demand to be perceived.

On a mountaintop, my difference is as soft as the breeze.

Nothing in nature apologises for the way it exists. Rivers follow their own course. Trees grow towards their own light. Birds sing their own songs. Everything moves according to its own rhythm.

There are fewer distractions and fewer obstacles. My many spirits can finally meet one another with grace, space, and silence.I was always searching for quiet places where I could be myself. It has never felt unusual to me, though it often surprises other people, as if I am the first Black, trans, autistic person they have encountered sitting alone on a mountain.

Perhaps I am.

I am no longer ashamed of that part of myself. Bless the souls who look for homes in places they should not go. We are fugitives. We are pioneers. We are those who choose to make possibility in a world that denies that new maps can be made.

I no longer judge myself for needing long stretches of silence or distance from the people I love. Solitude is not a flaw in my nature; it is how I return to it. It is where I can see the full landscape of myself, including the parts I find difficult to love.

I remain curious about my fears, my grief, and even my nightmares because I know my love must always become larger than my fear.

This is how I survive the collapse.

There are so many people in this world running from themselves, trying desperately to fit inside clichés while the world changes around them.

Everyone has something to give. Sometimes it is enormous. Sometimes it is as simple as telling the perfect joke, comforting a stranger, asking the question no one else thought to ask, or bringing a different kind of energy into a room.

We are taught to abandon our nature because no one applauds our uniqueness.

There is no one who can be you.

What makes us special is also our gift. My difference has guided me towards my light.

Returning to the city, I am surrounded once again by noise, motion, and overwhelm. My difference becomes a siren.

I feel the stares and the façades of so many people refusing to acknowledge their place in the world, refusing to face their own reflections and come to terms with who they are and what they must become to survive the violence of collapse.

What each of us carries matters.

The future will not be imagined by people who abandoned their own nature. The world we are trying to build will not be created by people who perfected conformity. It will be created by those who remained curious enough to become themselves.

We need to pay attention to the parts of ourselves that wear no mask.

Those are the parts building the next world.

In this special episode of Celestial Suites, I continue the journey of Love Has Never Been a Popular Movement by exploring love not as softness or passivity, but as a force of courage, imagination, accountability, and transformation.

Love asks us to be honest. To be vulnerable. T…

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Love takes imagination.

We often speak about love as though it is a feeling that arrives and leaves us without our participation. But love is creative. It asks us to imagine what does not yet exist.

Love requires thoughtfulness. It requires curiosity. It requires the humility to admit that we do not know everything and the courage to keep discovering. Love asks us to walk towards the unknown.

It asks us to play.

Love is not black and white. It is not transactional, and it is certainly not one-size-fits-all. Loving well requires us to be present and to ask the people we love what they need and how we can care for them. Love is a conversation. A dance. A constant act of becoming.

Stevie Wonder sings:

“Have I lived to see the milk and honey land?

Where hate’s a dream and love forever stands?

Or is this a vision in my mind?”

We must become visionaries if we are to create new worlds that require the fullness of our hearts, bodies, and spirits.

Without a vision of what love can become, we repeat the same patterns that wounded us. We recreate selfish and fearful worlds that survive on disconnection, domination, and greed.

I do not want relationships built on control. I want relationships that move me towards freedom and trust rather than fear. I want relationships that ask me to remain present, even when it is difficult.

I want to be seen.

I want to be vulnerable.

I want to be held.

I want to become, even when I am afraid of where I am going.

To love differently, we must first imagine differently. Every revolution began as a dream that someone refused to surrender.

As Assata Shakur teaches us:

“We need to be weapons of mass construction. Weapons of mass love.”

Liberation will not be handed to us. We must imagine a future beyond our chains. When we care for one another, when we love one another, we are saying yes to a new world.

Love requires us to be dreamers.

It asks us to believe in futures we have not yet touched. It asks us to create shared visions with one another. It asks us to become curious about what humanity could be when it is not organised around domination, extraction, and fear.

Perhaps this is why love has never been a popular movement.

Imagination is dangerous. It asks us to move beyond the banal binary stories we inherit because it is easier to repeat the familiar than to live with the multiplicity and generosity that the world offers us every day.

The sunset is never the same.

No two leaves are identical.

So why do we expect humanity to repeat the same systems and stories created by only a select few?

Love asks us to believe that things can change.

It asks us to release what is familiar.

Love invites us to become anew.

If you are loving well, and if you are being loved well, you will be transformed.

This is terrifying.

I am scared of this kind of love because for so much of my life, I believed I was unlovable. But I know now that I deserve to be held and cherished by someone who wants to love me in my fullness. To do that, they must have an imagination that allows them to meet me with new eyes every day, because every day I am trying to become something more truthful, more expansive, and more free.

Freedom lives here.

Love is not a feeling. It is action.

It is vision. It is imagination.

Love is the courage to create a world that has not existed yet.To live as though that world is possible before anyone else believes it.To plant its seeds in our relationships, our communities, and ourselves.

Every new world begins first as something someone dared to imagine.

P.S. This may be the end of this chapter of Love Has Never Been a Popular Movement, but it is also the beginning of another.

I am excited to share that I will soon be launching my podcast, A Trickster’s Guide to the Universe.

Together, we will explore the questions that have guided this series: What does it mean to be free? How do we love better? How do we imagine new worlds? How do we become who we are?

Until then, remain curious.

The universe is much bigger than we have been taught to believe.

Artwork by @taya_blank

I do not think I can.

Love Has Never Been a Popular Movement was never meant to be a conclusion. It was an invitation, an invitation to question what we have been taught about love. It was an inquiry into what love could become and what we might become if we chose it whole heartedly.

Everything Changes- Black Enlightenment (2023) Photography Ceren Saner

I began this series because I wanted to make love a popular movement. Throughout writing it, I have learned how intricate, difficult, and expansive love truly is. I have questioned myself, reflected on my shortcomings, and considered what it means to become a better steward of love. As a hopeful romantic, I imagine I will spend the rest of my life writing about love; not the love I was taught to idealise, but the love that asks me to rise.

Since accepting my role as a shapeshifting, time-travelling trickster, I have learned that love requires me to embrace contradiction. The trickster does not arrive to offer easy answers. The trickster arrives to reveal, disrupt, and transform.

As James Baldwin reminds us:

“There is not as much humanity as one would like, but there is some.”

This is what keeps me from despair.

I have seen people act with extraordinary cruelty, and I have seen people offer extraordinary generosity when they had very little to give. I have watched strangers feed one another, protect one another, and create moments of tenderness in a world that constantly teaches us to turn away.

I refuse to believe we have lost the battle when so much of my spirit is rooted in light and in the knowledge that our interconnectedness may be our salvation. As long as I can reach toward you, I refuse to abandon hope.

People are not only one thing. We all contain the capacity for care and the capacity for harm. The question is: which parts of ourselves do we choose to feed? Which parts of ourselves do we allow to grow?

Our morality is not simply born from social convention, and neither is love. Love is embodied. It is a full-bodied, somatic experience. It lives in our actions, our choices, and our willingness to remain present with one another.

The choice to love is not easy. Making love a responsibility does not mean becoming a martyr. It means recognising that your humanity is not something automatically bestowed upon you, it is something you must continually define and practice.

Perhaps this is what it means for me to love as a trickster: to be a force that calls transformation into the room. To remind myself and others that we are not fixed. We are constantly becoming.

Baldwin writes:

“Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.”

We must decide what it means to love and how we can love better, not because we must sacrifice ourselves for others, but because our liberation has always been tied to one another.

We need each other to create a world where all of us can live with dignity.

We need each other to make love a popular movement.

This is not an ending. It is a beginning.

Let us continue choosing love until love becomes a popular movement.

Until we are free.

Photographer: Ceren Saner

I wanted to be joyful, although I was hiding so much inside. I wanted to be of service to the people around me. I subsided my travels by working on farms and teaching as well as being a listening ear. I wanted to be a good person while also denying who I was inside. I attempted to love people while abandoning myself at every opportunity.

El Salvador: 2018.

I did not want to upset people with my feelings, so I kept quiet about all the things that lived inside me. Although I wanted to be free, freedom was abstract. It was distant. I approached freedom like a waterslide rather than a winding stairway, and this was because I was terrified of the actions I would have to take in order to become a person no longer chained to fear and shame.

I was often spoken about as someone who had experienced no hardship because I insisted on smiling. I would nervously chuckle because the opposite was true, but I was focused on being loved rather than loving myself, although I only understand this in hindsight. I thought being valuable, being useful, and being of service would solve the darkness that loomed inside me.

I insisted on smiling because I had spent most of my life trapped and running, convincing myself that fear and abuse were love. Violence was a daily occurrence growing up, but when I was on the road, I could choose when I interacted with people. I was still convinced that being useful was the same as being loved.

Travelling through Spain, Italy, India, Morocco, and Thailand, to name only a few places, with little to no money made me dependent upon strangers. I hitchhiked across Europe and met so many beautiful people who gave me food, shelter, and kindness when they owed me nothing. Travelling in a Black AFAB body often placed me in difficult situations, but it also helped me understand the ambiguity of the human condition. People were rarely simply good or bad. Most existed somewhere in between.

This changed me. It taught me not to pedestalise those I met. People come into your life and you can learn from them, but no person can become your answer. No person can become your salvation. They are as complicated as you are.

I was taught that love was duty and that no one could be trusted. I could not survive on the road with fear and mistrust guiding my heart, and this was not the person I wanted to become. Over many years, I learned to trust my intuition and my body. Although I met people with cruel intentions, I simultaneously met people who taught me generosity, tenderness, and understanding. The more I listened, the more beauty I found. The more solace and safety I discovered, the more room there was for my many selves to become and explore.

James Baldwin reminds us that, “You have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you.”

It took me a long time to find out who I was, and I am still discovering that person. I hope I continue learning about my many selves until I die. I am no longer waiting for my worth to be determined by someone else’s understanding of me. Realising that my home- my body- was where my freedom lived gave me the courage I needed to begin living my life.

Baldwin also teaches that “the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive.”

I could not be one thing.

Two books that shaped my life were The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland- both books of curious and intelligent characters navigating worlds that were overwhelming and demanding.

Malcolm X taught me that freedom was never going to be easy. “By any means necessary” was not a slogan. It was a commitment to refusing surrender. Freedom would require determination. It would require speaking your truth even when others disliked it. It would require accepting that honesty does not guarantee approval. But at least you know you are living truthfully, and there is a vitality in that.

I was trying to find out who I was, but I was still asking the world to define me because I was so afraid of defining myself.

As Alice asks:

“Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle.”

Love will ask you this question.

I have repeated throughout this series that love is not passive. Love challenges us because it requires us to choose it daily. If we do not think critically about love, we may embody and reproduce the instincts of a genocidal, patriarchal, colonial world without even realising it.

I see this more clearly since October 7, 2023, so many of us choose fear, compliance, and social acceptance over our own moral compass.

Love lives in our gut. In our knowing. In our remembering that we are connected to all that lives.

We are taught to deny the obvious because acknowledging it would require us to question the very world we were raised to accept. Living in my Black, queer, disabled body, the world teaches me repeatedly that I am disposable, that I exist for everyone except myself. It teaches me to perform joy so others remain comfortable.

But my feelings are valid.

My body is my own.

I am not a Disney character.

I am a real person attempting to survive a world that wishes to exploit, dominate, and define me before I define myself.

We are taught to rely on control. We are taught to distrust our feelings and our intuition. When people speak about realism, they are often speaking about rejecting social transformation and abundant justice rather than questioning the status quo. We live in a society that teaches us freedom exists everywhere except within ourselves.

Evil is ordinary.

Evil is often compliance.

It does not always arrive wearing a moustache, jewels, or a uniform. Sometimes it looks like silence. Sometimes it requires looking away. Sometimes it looks like deciding that someone else’s suffering is not your concern.

That is what frightens me.

We do not need to be evil in order to participate in evil acts.

Love, in contrast, requires a stance.As Cornel West reminds us:“Justice is what love looks like in public.”

Love requires your body and spirit.

Love requires responsibility.

Love requires courage.

Evil often requires nothing more than your silence.

As a trickster, I reflect beauty and chaos simultaneously because they are cut from the same cloth.

The trickster loves by reflecting the magnitude of possibility. This truth is not always easy, but it is always necessary. We like to believe beauty is simple and digestible, yet beautiful things cannot be understood in a single glance. Beauty requires attention and presence.

The trickster is this contradiction.

A challenging force that welcomes your magnitude, your beauty, and your presence.

A formation of light and dark.

A reminder that transformation is possible.

It does not ask for your understanding.

It asks for your growth.

It asks for your release.

Love is not always smiles. Sometimes it means staring into the void with someone, holding difficult emotions, and remaining present when things become uncomfortable. So many people hide beneath the disguise of love, but love does not ask us to hide. It asks us to be honest, and in a world built on lies, that may be what scares us most.

Love is simple.

It connects.

It creates space it does not exclude or dehumanising.

It creates possibility rather than domination.

Love asks something of us.

So many of us learned to survive on scraps and call it a meal. Love is not the bare minimum. It is the abundance we are afraid of facing.

Making love a popular movement means facing our fears. It means facing rejection, abandonment, and loneliness. I want us to become disciples of love, and that means refusing self-abandonment and choosing presence.

Our presence is our power.

Our presence together will change the world.

Love will remake this world from the inside out, but it will require us to change.

Are you willing to make that choice?

For much of my life, I attempted to love people while abandoning myself at every opportunity.

I thought being useful would save me.

I thought smiling would save me.

I thought becoming what others needed would save me.

I thought denying who I was would make me safe.

I was wrong.

Love began when I stopped abandoning myself.

Love began when I chose myself honestly.

Not when approval is guaranteed.

But when you are alone.

When you are afraid.

You must choose love. You must choose your authentic self and trust that person is good and powerful just as they are; a growing, changing being.

To make love a popular movement, we must rewrite our instincts. We must create a world that welcomes multiplicity rather than singularity.

Making love a popular movement is frightening before it becomes liberating.

Love asks us to show ourselves.
Not as ideal, not as performance, but as we are, when no one is watching.

I thought love was something I had to earn by becoming smaller. By being useful. By being agreeable. By disappearing just enough to be valued.

Love began when I stopped abandoning myself.

When it was uncomfortable to do so, I chose myself. This is where everything changed.I was no longer seeking approval. I was learning to stay in my body and my heart. The questions that plagued me stop being abstract- it started forming into a moving question that I ask myself daily-

Who do I become when I stop leaving myself behind?

What can I say? I believe Black feminism will save the world.

I say this for a few reasons, and I hope it is clear that I do not mind appearing biased.

Black women have often been treated as though our purpose is to sustain everyone but ourselves. Our nurturance, our life force, our cells, our blood, our wombs, our minds, and our love have been used to keep the world turning. The world we live in expects Black women and femmes to feed it.

This is what I have seen throughout history and in my own life.

I see it in my friendships. I see it in institutions. I see it in the expectation that I should always take the higher ground, always remain composed, even while being seen as unruly and less than human. At the same time, I am often rendered invisible because, within a white imagination, my body and my voice are among the least respected.

As the Combahee River Collective writes:

“Merely naming the pejorative stereotypes attributed to Black women (e.g. mammy, matriarch, sapphire, whore, bulldagger), let alone cataloguing the cruel, often murderous treatment we receive, indicates how little value has been placed upon our lives during four centuries of bondage in the Western hemisphere.”1

Although this statement emerges from an African American context, the colonial project has always relied upon similar forms of domination across the globe.

Women and children are routinely used as instruments through which power is enforced. Patriarchy rewards certain men with status and authority. White imagination inherently values the male body, while women are often treated as tools of that power rather than fully realised human beings. Black women, in particular, have historically- and currently- been forced to endure sexual violence, exploitation, and extraction at the hands of those who oppress them. We are witnessing this in real time in Sudan, where one of the world’s largest humanitarian crises continues to unfold.

Yet despite this, Black feminism offers us something undeniable:

A philosophy rooted in love, accountability, survival, grief, care, and collective liberation.

Part II: Discovering Black Feminism

As a child, I did not know any of this.

I simply knew it felt unfair that I was expected to be in the kitchen and that my future seemed tied to a husband, while my brother could become anything.

My young mind was trying to make sense of a world that did not make sense.

I denied my body and my experiences in pursuit of academic freedom and approval. I attached knowledge to whiteness, yet there were moments that fed me a different kind of sustenance- moments that allowed me to continue believing I could be free.

I read The Color Purple by Alice Walker when I was twelve years old.

It opened my eyes to worlds I somehow knew existed but could not yet understand.

Reading the story of Celie and Shug stirred me awake, unearthing a knowledge and curiosity that was asking me to become a part of it. I did not need to be a spectator in life because heroes were ordinary. Heroes were women and people who refused to be defined, even though they were afraid all the time.

This was me.

My young mind was quivering as it tried to understand what I was denying deep within myself.

I can still remember reading The Color Purple on the 41 bus on my journey home. As Shug encouraged Celie to look inside herself for the first time, I realised I needed to do the same.At that age, I was ashamed and frightened of my own body. Attending Catholic school and growing up in a Muslim household as a quiet queer child, I was afraid of my desires and my body.

Yet under the loving gaze of Walker’s words, I found myself lying on my parents’ bed, legs wide, skirt pulled up to my stomach, wondering what to do next.My small dark body stretched across a wall-length mirror felt insignificant, but something in me understood that this moment was important.

I was amazed that there was a part of myself I had never truly seen, despite hearing so much about it and watching it be vilified for merely existing.

Suddenly, my body no longer belonged to childhood. It became something people projected onto, judged, and regulated. I was treated as a problem to be managed rather than a child trying to understand themselves.

I stared at myself and wondered how I could be so horrible, or why this meant I could no longer play with my friends. I wondered how Alice Walker knew I needed to be loved like this.

Then, at thirteen, I discovered Toni Morrison.

Reading The Bluest Eye left me equally transformed.

I was in awe.

I never wanted to be white, but I wanted to be free. And the only people I saw who seemed capable of moving the world to their will were white.

It seemed that freedom did not exist for girls, or non-binary children like me. I was unsure of myself, but I knew the violence of wishing I could be different.Perhaps not the colour of my eyes, but something in my heart.

I wanted to be acceptable.

I wanted to be loved for who I was.

I was reading until midnight, wondering how I could be seen from so many angles that I was left stricken by my own beauty; frightened by its majesty and confused about what it meant for me.

It felt as though these women were speaking to my future.

They were showing me the world.

I did not understand what they were trying to teach me, but I knew I would remember their words and return to them countless times.

Part III: What These Women Taught Me

“Feminism is for everybody.”

These are the words of bell hooks.

Black feminism taught me something even deeper: when Black women are recognised as fully human, everyone benefits.As bell hooks reminds us, a world that recognises Black women as fully human is a world transformed.The struggle Black women face is that our humanity is constantly up for debate.

Even when we are ignored, dismissed, or rendered invisible, we are expected not to be angry.Not to speak too loudly.Not to take up space.

Not to demand or inconvenience the world with our wishes. Black feminism taught me that love requires the opposite.It requires truth.

It requires making space for people to exist as they are.You cannot love people in the dark.Yet I spent years trying.I loved myself in fragments.

I loved others in fragments. I loved myself and others while refusing to acknowdlege what and who I was. I loved myself in the dark. I chose lovers who could only see a sliver of me because I was terrified of being seen in my entirety.

I was afraid that wholeness would lead to abandonment.

I was afraid that being fully known would mean being rejected.

I was never loved in a way that allowed me to feel truly seen until I began seeking myself.When I embraced my trans non-binary identity, I held onto one lesson:

Feminism is for everybody.

Because feminism is ultimately about freeing ourselves from systems of domination. The Black women whose work shaped me did not retreat when times became difficult.

They moved forward.They understood they were not the first to suffer, nor would they be the last.They treated freedom as a responsibility as our birth-right.As a dark-skinned Black queer person, I know no one is coming to save me.I do not need saving.

I need the courage to become myself.

I want that freedom for everyone, because love liberates.

Part IV: Love, Liberation, and The Color Purple

The world is burning.

Each day I look at the news and see more death, more disposability of human life, and more reminders of how little value is placed on Black and brown lives.

Whenever I feel lost, I return to Black feminism.It offers a philosophy rooted in grief, love, and the wisdom that emerges from lived experience.While rereading The Color Purple, something became very clear to me:

Love is messy.

Our lives are intertwined.

Our destinies are connected.

For it to be love, it must include all of us. There is no liberation that leaves people behind. There is no freedom built on dehumanisation.

As Terence once wrote:

“Nothing human is alien to me.”2

I refuse to dehumanise, mislabel, or vilify people simply because we are not aligned.

Alice Walker teaches us that joy is vital.You cannot be free without love.This is where I think many of us go wrong.We believe freedom comes despite love.

I believe freedom is the ability to love, choose, and act with a deliberateness that awakens love in others.Fear separates. Love unites.Love will transform you, or it has done nothing at all.

Living in a body where the world expects endless labour and understanding has taught me that love does not mean I am responsible for healing you or carrying your trauma.

Celie offers a powerful example.

Forced into marriage as a child and subjected to years of abuse, she works, cleans, and raises children without complaint.Yet what finally breaks her is not physical labour or the sexual abuse.

It is the denial of love.

It is being separated from her sister- the only person who truly loved her.

I am estranged from my own sister.

For much of my life, she was my best friend. Our love will always exist. Toni Morrison once said of her own sister, “I need her.”

I understand that feeling.

Despite the distance between us, I have sometimes doubted our choices. I have questioned what happened between us. Yet I have never doubted that I love her. It was my love for her, that made the heartbreak so strong.

Rereading The Color Purple helped me understand that there is something especially cruel about denying a person the right to love and be loved. To create a world where someone is forced to believe they are unlovable is to create a world where that person cannot fully exist.

To be loved is to enter a new world of possibility. A world where someone sees you and allows you to become yourself. A world where your shadows and your light are both welcomed.

Celie eventually leaves and declares:

“Until you do right by me, everything you even think about gonna fail.”3

Despite everything she endures, she eventually learns to build relationships beyond the harm she experienced.

She does not forget the harm. She learns to forgive through loving herself, by choosing herself. Walker teaches us that love is not linear. It does not move in neat lines.Love exists within our complexity. Love continually chooses the world, even when the world is difficult.

This is Black feminism.

It chooses growth.

It chooses connection. It chooses possibility. It chooses to witness the world through grief, care and understanding. It chooses to believe we are capable of greatness despite the pain we know.

Black feminism reminds us that none of us get free alone. It teaches us that love is not softness without accountability, nor liberation without care.Love is the decision to keep choosing each other, even when the world teaches us not to.

We stand together, or we do not move forward at all. Love, like freedom, has never been an individual project.

It requires our bodies.

Our hearts.

Our imagination.

Our willingness to embody new possibilities.Black feminism taught me that liberation is not something we achieve alone.We become free together.

We learn to love together.

Or not at all.

“The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.”

James Baldwin

Yesterday I had the great opportunity and honour of sitting and listening to Kimberlé Crenshaw speak. For anyone who does not know this beautiful, brilliant woman, she popularised the term and helped create our understanding of intersectionality. She accurately named a phenomenon that so many Black people before Crenshaw understood, but it was she who deciphered and categorised it into a recognisable term that I truly adore and am grateful for. She is a lawyer, a thinker, a civil rights advocate, and a feminist whom I deeply admire.

Before I went to the talk, I was feeling rather heartsore. I have dedicated this whole week to a project that seems determined to evade me. The more I try to force it onto the page, the further away it seems to move. I dressed up despite my growing fatigue and my fear that I am not good enough to achieve my dream- that I will listen to my fear instead of the page.

I want to write it out and let it be finished, but that is not what is happening. I spend hours thinking, feeling, looking at what I have understood, and finding new ways of understanding it, but I do not have the courage or the words to type. Or perhaps this is an excuse because the work is so hard. The work is consuming.

However, it was listening to Crenshaw, as I greedily took notes and thought alongside her, that I realised what it means for me to be a philosopher. Listening to Crenshaw reminded me of something I often forget when I am trapped in the anxiety of producing work: I am not only a writer. I am a thinker. More importantly, I am a thinker who refuses to separate thought from feeling.

I think and I feel. I work with the intangible.

As a philosophy student digesting art and books written largely by men, I once came across a comic about the difference between male and female philosophers. The punchline was that women and men practised philosophy differently because women did not have beards, moustaches, or an inherent disdain for the women in their lives. I remember laughing because it was the first time something I had experienced so often had been named so accurately, even through the distortion of a joke.

Now, however, I see that white and Black philosophers also operate differently. We use all the tools at our fingertips. We can be both artist and thinker. The ways we create patterns of thought are not dependent on sitting in a large leather chair, detached from the world around us. When I attempted such an endeavour- I was a pessimist and naive. i can not understand or care for the world if i place myself above it.

The difference between Black thinkers, and especially Black women thinkers, is that we refuse to dismiss the body. How terrible it would be to dismiss such a key part of our orientation in this world. The same cannot be said about much of the Western canon. The denial of the body seems to be a central feature of Western philosophy, and I say this as someone who dedicated my early life to reading men who often seemed to despise my existence.

The works of Toni Morrison and bell hooks speak directly to the human condition, yet they are not always treated as foundational fixtures of Western thought. Black femme existence is still debated as though our humanity is up for discussion. Under the white male gaze, we are denied the dignity of being fully human.

I am a writer. I am a cultural worker. I am an artist. I am a shapeshifting, time-travelling trickster.

Growing up, I only saw male writers. These men drank, smoked, and slept with women. They were not nice people, but somehow this was meant to make them great artists. I did not question these images until I started making art myself and realised that I could not deny the body or deny the violence I did to my body. I did not need to massacre my body in order to make great art.

However, when I push my body through pressure, deadlines, and intense bursts of creativity, it is an act of love. I admit that I enjoy the pain and the ferocity of my desire to demand brilliance from myself and transform dreams into reality.

Writing, however, is different. It is slower and solitary. Its intensity lies in its deliberateness and patience because words make worlds. To choose the right word is to be precise and delicate, to carve and sculpt the human condition according to your understanding of it.

I have spent this week fatigued. I am certain there is a spirit haunting my house because I am so exhausted, but it could also be the onslaught of violence that defines life in a genocidal, fascist, authoritarian world and country.

I am not hopeless because I am feeling and I am thinking. To paraphrase Kimberlé Crenshaw yesterday, “they want us to go to sleep when there is a tornado going on.” Many of us would like to ignore it, but I do not have that luxury, nor do I want to be the kind of person who pretends there is not a human disaster unfolding around us. The future is ours to decide.

I wish I could work faster for you, but I know that I must stay truthful. The truth is that writing, witnessing, and attempting to name the violence that shapes our daily lives- and my Black queer trans autistic existence- is not easy. Yet I do believe that I can change something through the act of naming, through labelling the world that I see in front of me.

Seeing Kimberlé Crenshaw- composed, beautiful, stylish, and brilliant—reminds me that Black women are the light. I am grateful to be guided by them and by the embodied ways they make changes in this world. I wholeheartedly believe that the day Black women stop giving love and nourishment to this world, it will fall apart. As a Black AFAB person, I am aware that this world wants me to breastfeed it while denying my life. Freedom must occur in and through our bodies, not through dominating another’s, but through claiming our own as sites of liberation.

I am grateful that I attempt this daily. Today I am back to attempting my words and trying to place the undefined into clear and comprehensible terms that help us understand ourselves a little more. That is my job as a writer and a thinker, as an artist.

Growing up, I inherited an image of the artist as someone who must burn themselves alive in order to create something meaningful. Yet there sat Kimberlé Crenshaw, reminding me that brilliance does not require self-destruction and that intellectual labour does not have to come at the expense of the body.

I needed to see Kimberlé Crenshaw just as I need to listen to Toni Morrison and read Toni Cade Bambara. Kimberlé Crenshaw changed so much for me yesterday with her composed elegance and intellectual insight. These women did not need to destroy themselves through their work. Instead, they chose to uplift, educate, and speak truth to the false powers of the worlds they inherited. They are not consumed by their grief, nor do they perform suffering as proof of genius.

That reminder is a gift.

The path she walks is not mine, but I can use her light to guide me through the treacherous terrain of my own mind and creative process.

I am attempting to do this.

But first, I must move through the pain.

First, I must acknowledge that I am not the first person to attempt to write something true. But it is my first time attempting to share it so willingly with you.

Thank you for your patience and your time.