Because conflict security isn’t just about knowing what to say. It’s about building enough capacity in your body that, when conflict actually happens, you have more choices than freezing, people-pleasing, over-explaining, controlling, disappearing, becoming defensive, or waiting until you’re so resentful that everything comes out at once.

And I don’t think we learn that alone.

We become conflict secure through relationships. We need experiences of disagreement that don’t end in abandonment. We need to witness other people struggle with the same impulses we thought made us uniquely fucked up. We need spaces where we can practice staying curious, taking accountability, asking for what we need, surviving someone’s disappointment, repairing after harm, and discovering, over and over again, that conflict does not have to cost us belonging.

The thing is, and if you’ve been reading me for a while, you know that

True intimacy begins after rupture.

Conflict is the doorway to intimacy.

It’s easy to love someone when they’re cute, kind, funny and in a good mood. It takes another set of capacity to move through conflict without losing safety, dignity, belonging when everything is hard. What we don’t like to admit is that we’re terrified of intimacy, maybe more than oppression, because our nervous system are used to the harm. Are you scared of the intimacy that conflict asks of you?

The other truth that I am sure you know is:

Abolition requires intimacy.

We won’t be able to do this work and abolish the police if we can’t even have a conversation about the piles of dishes in the sink.

That’s why Becoming Conflict Secure is a 28-day practice we’re doing together.

For €8 (instead of 57!), you can spend the next 28 days practicing becoming someone who no longer abandons themselves during conflict, alongside a community of people committed to building relationships capable of holding disagreement, complexity, accountability, repair, and care.

Every day, I’ll send you right to your inbox you a short video, a reflection, and/or a somatic practice so that we can take everything we intellectually understand about conflict and slowly, repetitively, imperfectly practice it into our bodies. Because we seriously need to FRENCH PRESS THE WHOLE THING BABY.

I don’t want you to leave these 28 days simply knowing more about conflict.

I want your body to have experienced something different.

I want you to know what it feels like to stay with yourself when someone is disappointed in you. To notice defensiveness without immediately obeying it. To say the difficult thing before resentment says it for you. To fuck up without disappearing into shame. To experience accountability without experiencing yourself as disposable. To discover that disagreement can coexist with love.

And I want hundreds of us practicing this at the same time, because if conflict is the smallest unit of abolition, then becoming people whose relationships can actually survive conflict is collective work.

Becoming Conflict Secure starts September 10.

28 days to practice somatic capacity for the smallest unit of abolition: conflict.

The entire course is included in your €8 paid subscription to Erotics of Liberation! No need to do anything else !

Come practice with us =)

As I am writing those words, I am sitting in Berlin airport to go back home…?

I hesitate writing “home”because I am not sure what home is or what it feels like. Berlin in many ways feels like home and in many ways will never.

I will write a long letter about this another time.

For now, I wanted to share with you common psychosomatic pains and the emotional wounds they point toward. The reason is, I’m in physical pain now. I suffer from lower back pain and hip pain and have been since I’m 13. I could tell you a lot about why, but what I find most fascinating about this is that my mother has the exact same pain. Every time I am in deep pain, my body takes on her exact shape. It’s the weirdest thing.

Until now, my mother and I haven’t found any resolution to this pain. I want to be clear that this letter is not here to persuade you that everything is emotional. I have and will continue to see doctors to ease my pain. But I have a feeling that this physical pain has become the best way for my emotional distress to express itself, because sometimes the body speaks most loudly when something in us has not yet found another language.

I don’t believe the pain is imaginary because it might have an emotional dimension. I don’t believe understanding its emotional life makes its physical reality any less real. I am simply curious about why this pain, why this part of my body, and why now. What might my body be carrying, bracing against, or trying to metabolise that I have not yet been able to fully feel elsewhere?

In other words, the question of this letter isn’t: is this physical or emotional? I think the question is more so: what if my body and my emotional life were never as separate as I was taught to believe?

There is no separation in the body. Everything is mushy in a body. Grief touches muscle. Fear changes breath. Stress reorganises posture. Pain changes mood, and mood changes how we experience pain. The categories we use to make sense of ourselves — physical, emotional, psychological, relational — are useful, but the body does not necessarily experience itself through those borders. It is all happening in the same place. It is all touching everything else.

So, here are the common emotional pains I have witnessed in my clients and communities I am serving and what I have seen they often point toward, emotionally, as well as the wound they carry:

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One of the most surprising consequences of trauma is that the adaptations we’ve developed to survive it are often the ones that keep us from finding connection as adults.

If your caregivers constantly criticised everything you did, you might subconsciously become allergic to being seen. If you were told that you were too needy, you might come to believe that being hyper-independent is the best thing you can be for the people you love. And now, no body knows how to love you.

As a child, instead of learning how to receive love, you learned how to reduce the cost of loving you. And so later as an adult, you’ve become incredibly skilled at making deprivation look like preference.

I’ve written here about neglect many times. About how neglect wires us for obsession. I’ve noticed how easily we recognise active abuse as harm, while neglect is often treated as

a choice people are simply entitled to make.

And you know what, it’s true: people have the ‘right’ not to care. We hear it all the time: nobody owes us anything. People have the right to set boundaries. They have the right to leave. They have the right to decide they no longer want to participate in a relationship. We can’t force anyone to care for and love us, not even our own parents.

But it is disingenuous to believe that for social beings like humans, withdrawing care causes no harm, even when we’re adults. Adults need care, too.

Neglect is the passive side of abuse.

We’ve become so concerned with protecting individual autonomy that we sometimes struggle to talk about the relational consequences of exercising that autonomy. Two things can be true at once: we are allowed to leave, & how we leave can wound someone. We are allowed not to give care, & we shouldn’t obliged to give care, & the absence of care can still be devastating to someone who’s survived neglect. We are allowed to have boundaries, & not everything we call a boundary is care.

Love can never be an obligation. That's what I love most about love. Love is feral, it needs room to be practiced. And I refuse the idea that because care cannot be coerced, its absence is therefore neutral. Nothing is neutral in the body, not even absence. As one of my friends once said to me: care is noticed only when it’s gone. That’s how powerful care is.

I’ve learned it over and over as a somatic practitioner, sometimes, the thing that harmed us the most wasn’t what someone did to us. It was what, over and over again, nobody did.

So we survive neglect by adapting to it. We realise that wanting and asking for what we need doesn’t change anything, even worse, we have been shamed for it, and so to escape the humiliation ritual of being human, we quit wanting altogether.

It’s not that the body stops wanting, or that we stop having needs, it’s that we don’t want to feel the want and be met with silence. And so we collapse into shame. The shame of being profoundly vulnerable, the shame of being human.

As a somatic practitioner, I can honestly say that:

the real tragedy of neglect isn’t only that we weren’t given enough. It’s that eventually, we participated in our own deprivation by organizing our lives around never needing very much.

I am writing this to say: while healing neglect starts with acknowledging your wounds of neglect, for it to truly take root in the body, healing also has to be about learning to want & receive more. In other words, at some point, you have to recover your capacity to want.

So, how do we learn to want again?

Here are 4 paths I have been practicing alongside my clients to connect to your desire again. The goal of those practices is to help you feel your desires without immediately collapsing into shame or disgust—because that shame was never yours to begin with.

Ready?

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If you never had “good enough” parents, this is not an essay to keep you off the hook. I didn’t have great parents, and at 34 I can honestly say: I am golden.

Sure, I have plenty of privileges, the first one being that I was born and raised in France.

But I need you to believe me when I say that rewiring is around the corner. Let me explain.

Two years ago, on my birthday, I received a call telling me my father had fallen into a coma. I knew he hadn’t been feeling super well for a while, but when the news hit me, I went blank; I simply didn’t know what to feel.

The reason was simple:

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DIRECT ACTION & DISRUPTION

• NO CAUSE I SAID SO

• Protests, walkouts, blockades, sit-ins

• Refusal (of labor, of compliance, of silence, of heterocisnormativity!!!)

• Strikes (labor, rent, sECS, digital platforms)

• Civil disobedience as moral stance

• MEDIOCRITY AS SPORT AT WORK

CREATIVE & CULTURAL TACTICS

• Art as protest, ritual, or collective memory

• Poetry and performance that cracks open the heart & remind us that this shit is whack and we deserve better

• Dance, song, or storytelling as methods of organizing

• Zines, murals, radio, memes, and alt media

• Cultural refusal: reclaiming names, language, body sovereignty

• grief as portal

• MAKING SHITTY ART JUST BECAUSE

SOMATIC & HEALING STRATEGIES

• REALISING YOU’RE THE ISSUE

• Embodied practice (breath, grounding, movement) to metabolize trauma

• Co-regulation in community as political infrastructure

• Rest as resistance and nervous system repair

• Healing justice circles & community-based care /accountability pods

• Inner child + ancestor healing to interrupt generational cycles

RELATIONAL PRACTICES

• Intentional relationship-building rooted in trust

• Conflict transformation, not avoidance

• Apology and repair as everyday praxis

• NOT SENDING THAT DAMN TEXT, CALL INSTEAD !

• Building “containers” of safety for hard conversations

• Regular check-ins and accountability agreements

• stop giving away youR power!

• decentering the relationships that capitalism banks off of

• also make love pls and spill that energy onto those haters in demos, thanks

• laugh louder than they hate

INFRASTRUCTURE & MUTUAL AID

• Care webs & disability justice-informed access practices

• we leave no fucking body behind

• Housing and food cooperatives

• Community defense and safety teams (non-police alternatives)

• Resource redistribution (land, wealth, time, knowledge), nobody gives a fuck bout your land acknowledgment, give back!

• Organizing shared childcare or eldercare

EDUCATION & POLITICAL FORMATION

• Study groups, reading circles, and popular education

• Skillshares: somatics, facilitation, harm reduction, security (especially if you go to demos!)

• Political storytelling and testimony as tools for change

• Mapping power and history locally

• Decolonizing knowledge and truth-telling

• share knowledge, care, open scholarships, give for free when you can !

DIGITAL & TECHNOLOGICAL TACTICS

• Online campaigns and toolkits for collective action

• Open-source platforms for organizing and education

• Digital safety practices to protect communities

• Crowdfunding for survival and experimentation

• Podcasts (NO CIS MEN WE GOOD), newsletters, and social media for movement-building

• MORE MEMES PLEASE, MORE GAY MEMES

SPIRITUAL & RITUAL PRACTICE

• stop looking down on spirituality as pathway for liberation

• witches as leaders (preferably lesbians)

• Prayer, altar-making, and collective ritual

• Ancestral remembrance as compass and guide

• Honoring grief together as a path to deeper solidarity

• Seasonal, lunar, or elemental organizing cycles

• Dreamwork, divination, and visioning as strategic tools

• cats over dogs sorry not sorry! cats would never work for the police!

SMALL IS STILL STRATEGY

• 1-on-1 conversations, choosing repair when possible

• surrounding harm doers as much as victims because this binary is just another lie

• Intimate listening circles, taking care of each other

• Sharing meals, supporting the most affected of us

• Writing love letters to the future

• Whispering radical hope where it’s needed

• dropping in despair when it’s needed

• becoming a menace

Sending care,

Stay ungovernable,

Care

In this 2011 experiment, three white cis men, Whitchurch, Wilson, and Gilbert showed women profiles of men and essentially told one of three things:

1. the men liked them a lot,

2. the men liked them an average amount, or

3. they didn’t know whether the men liked them a lot or an average amount.

Guess who reported the greatest attraction??

Before anything, let’s address the men/women situation.

I do believe that patriarchal societies make sure that people socialised as women are taught to experience being desired as a source of value, and therefore to pay extraordinary attention to whether or not they are being chosen. This matters when we talk about studies suggesting that uncertainty can increase attraction. We cannot separate “Does this person like me?” from a social world in which women have historically been taught that being liked, wanted, pursued, partnered with, or chosen—specifically by cis men—is evidence of their inherent worth. (And here I’ll only mention men and women because, of course, gender non-conforming folks are not counted for in those studies.)

So before we conclude that uncertainty simply makes women more attracted to cis men, I want us to remain curious about what exactly is being activated. Is it desire? Is it attraction? Or is uncertainty activating an already deeply rehearsed (& designed) social question:

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I believe that to survive her own pain, my mother became extremely critical. Nothing was ever good enough for her, starting with herself. Being a literal extension of her, I was not good enough for her either.

And so I became extremely critical of myselves. I suppressed every part of me that could make me too visible or be seen trying: the playful, expressive and creative parts of me. I internalized her voice so deeply, as a crude strategy for maintaining attachment with her: maybe if I abandoned those parts of me first, I wouldn’t have to feel abandoned over and over again. In other words, I performed her rejection of me internally so that I never had to experience it relationally.

As I became a teenager and grew more and more independent from her, I distanced myselves from my mother because being around her meant being critiqued for absolutely everything, even down to the way I brushed my teeth.

As an adult, I realised how terrified of intimacy I had become after years of conditioning. You see, the brain learns through association.. If intimacy was repeatedly paired with criticism, abuse or fear, our nervous system can begin to predict one when it encounters the other. Intimacy itself can become a cue for danger because closeness and danger once arrived together.

I can honestly say it now: I feel like I have healed and transformed the script I inherited. Now, when I close my eyes at night, and everything turns to Black, I am not scared of meeting this background of sadness, loneliness and fear. The back of my body sounds like joy, excitement, and presence. I am not just happy, I have learned that nothing that happens in my life is proof that I am not worthy of joy, love & care.

After years of working with clients who experienced the worst kinds of abuse and trauma, those are the phases I have identified in transforming the scripts we inherit. Bear in mind you’re a complex human being living in a complex world. This is meant to support you, but it doesn’t have to be the whole truth !

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Every single time, I felt what I believe she always felt as a teen: humiliated for my toomuchness.

Over time this is what it did:

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All of that is true. And, as a somatic practitioner, a hill I will die on is the belief that the body learns on yes (introduced to me by Staci Haines and Generative Somatics).

The brain doesn’t hear negation. Example: don’t think about a pink elephant.

So here are some ways you practice TJ that are not rooted in not doing something, but are actually active ways to practice abolition.

Because yes! TJ is a practice rooted in abolition.

Abolition is the ongoing practice of building relationships that render domination unnecessary.

Abolition unfolds in 3 movements:

• dismantling the systems that kill us,

• imagining the relationships that would make domination obsolete,

• & practicing those relationships in real time.

TJ follows the same arc:

• we stop the harm,

• we reconcile with the pain and repair where we can,

• & we create the conditions that make the harm unconceivable to happen again.

So, you’re practicing TJ when:

Before this! I want to introduce myselves!

I am Care (they/them), a Transformative Justice & somatic practitioner, doula and artist. I created Erotics of Liberation, a space dedicated to practicing the relational capacities that make domination obsolete: accountability, generative conflict, repair, and staying connected through difference, so we can collectively inscribe abolition on the agenda of our futures and liberation on the map of our collective body.

I started Erotics of Liberation because I believe our movements are only as strong as our relationships. If you’re convinced that conflict is the smallest unit of abolition, and that 1312 is going to be hard if we can’t even have a difficult conversation about the pile of dishes in the sink, I think you’ll get along with us.

And by us, I mean cuties like you (and me) who are tired of reading about the world we long for on cute little Instagram carousels. We want to practice it now. We want to french-press our values into our bodies until they become habit, so we can collectively inscribe abolition on the agenda of our futures and liberation on the map of our collective body.

Every week, I share essays about conflict, intimacy, abolition, grief, love, power, and what it means to practice becoming more human together. My hope is that these words don’t just give you something to think about. I hope they slowly change the way your body meets the people you love, because abolition is relational practice.

But words can only take us so far.

Somatics isn’t about knowing more. It’s about practicing differently. We are not our values—we are what we practice most. And we’re always practicing something!

So if you want to go beyond reading and actually practice alongside me and a community of fellow cuties, becoming a paid subscriber is for you.

And honestly, this is the perfect time to join!!!! Because on top of accessing all my zines FOR FREE,

on September 10, I’ll be opening Becoming Conflict Secure, my very first live course on Substack (free for paid subscribers, usually 47 euros!)

If you want to go beyond reading and actually practice alongside me and a community of fellow cuties, this is the perfect time to join my Substack.

Because on top of accessing all my zines FOR FREE, on September 10, I’ll be opening Becoming Conflict Secure, my very first live course on Substack (free for paid subscribers, usually 47 euros!)

For 28 days, we’ll practice together. Every day you’ll receive a short video, reflection questions, and a somatic practice to help you build the capacity to stay connected to yourself and others during conflict. We’ll also meet me live every week so you can ask me questions and practice in community.

I want to be clear! This isn’t about becoming better at arguing. It’s about becoming someone whose nervous system no longer experiences conflict as a threat to survival.

If you’ve ever frozen, people-pleased, shut down, over-explained, disappeared, or exploded during conflict, I made this for you.

Ok, we are some ways you already practice TJ!

1. You are committed to building the somatic capacity to hold complexity, so you can stay curious. Curiosity is the opposite of trauma.

2. When you notice yourself wanting to escalate, you reach for support. You understand that when you’re in pain, escalating will not make the pain subside. In pain, you need more water than fire.

3. You build friendships that can hold the weight of abolition (meaning: that can survive conflict), because you understand that conflict is the smallest unit of abolition, and if we can’t repair with one another, we’ll keep outsourcing repair to systems of punishment.

4. So when you’re hurt, you can get support instead of escalating hurt into harm. You understand that you deserve care even when you experience a paper cut; you don’t have to wait for thousands of paper cuts to advocate for yourself!

5. You refuse to stockpile pain as leverage. Revenge is lazy grief, and if today doesn’t prove that to you, I don’t know what will!

6. You forgive yourself when you act shitty. You can separate personhood from behaviour.

7. You practice apologising like you deserve love. It’s much easier to ghost when we’ve hurt someone we love than to face the harm we’ve caused them.

   join us for my first live course on Substack, starting sept. 10!

8. You understand that accountability is a function of dignity. Us having such an impact on people we love only means we matter. Accountability means: I understand that I matter. That my actions, non-actions, words, and silences matter.

9. You want your wounds to become scars, not worlds you build to keep others at bay. You understand that your wounds, when shared and politicised, do not make you illegible to belonging but are proof that you belong.

10. You refuse to believe that your mistakes render you illegible to your own dignity (and you believe the same for others), but you understand that abolition does not mean we all have to love each other (yes, you have the right not to like ppl!).

Stay ungovernable,

Care

As a somatic practitioner, I can tell you one thing:

one of the hallmarks of repeated trauma is

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One of the things I keep seeing here, especially in queer spaces, is this tendency to make people who are trying to be hopeful about their lives, who dare to imagine a future, who want to take up the full space of their bodies, go through a little humiliation ritual that sends them spiraling into shame. Let me explain.

My roommate is 23 and full of life. She is so passionate about what she is doing, and with that comes the desire to share her dreams for the future with the people she loves. She wants to positively impact the world around her. She wants to contribute to the well-being of queer folks.

Last night, she went on a date with a cutie she’s been seeing. When she shared her dreams for the future, her date replied: “That sounds so neoliberal.”

This is when I had to warn her:

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1. In case you missed it

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This isn’t a column about answers. It’s about slowing down long enough to hear what a question is really asking.

In this column I respond to one reader—not to tell you what to do, but to help return agency where it belongs. You can write to me with whatever you’re circling: a conflict you can’t resolve (internal or external), a regret that won’t loosen its grip, a pattern you’re tired of repeating.

Today I’m answering S. who asked:

“I keep wondering what kind of person I would be if it wasn’t for this trauma that happened years ago. I know this question leads nowhere, but it keeps coming back. Is there something underneath I am not seeing/sensing? I feel stuck.”

As always, I’d love to hear your reflections in the comments!!!

Dear S.,

Thank you for asking this question.

Before anything, I have to admit that this question moves my waters in ways I won’t be able to explain, even through words. But I’ll try.

I think it is not only because all of my clients have, in some way, asked me this question, not only because I have asked this question myselves. I think the true reason is that this question is not so much a question, as it resembles some kind of begging.

Before you read this essay, I need you to drop all the associations your brain has formed around begging. The word comes with all the hate we have for ourselves for being so dependent, so vulnerable, in other words: human.

This essay is meant to honor the begging we all carry in our bones. I hope this essay, instead of keeping you more sheltered from life, will drag you just a tiny bit closer. Because it is human to beg.

The only respectable answer to begging is mercy. It is solidarity, it is witnessing, it is acknowledgment. It is heart. It is tissue and flesh.

So I want you to know that every word I write comes from there: from my heart, from my tissues and my flesh.

I don’t have perfect answers to this question. What first comes to my body is a deep sigh.

Like you brilliantly noted in your initial message, this question doesn’t lead anywhere. And those are my favorite questions, because that means we get to wander and arrive exactly where we started: the body, the breath.

When we elongate the breath for more than one second, there is this strange thing that happens: time stretches.

Maybe you know the difference between Kairos and Chronos? Chronos is chronological time. The time of clocks, deadlines, calendars. It is binary (before/after) and it is linear (obsessed with what happens next). In other words, it is quantitive time that is unstoppable.

Kairos is something completely different: it is lived time. Lived as in: being fully alive.

It is the time that opens inside a first kiss. The time that slips through our fingers during a long awaited hug. The time that stretches into what feels like infinity when we’re in pain.

Kairos gives a moment its meaning, its weight, its depth. It is qualitative rather than quantitative. It is not measured by how long something lasts, but by how deeply it is lived.

Trauma, like anything profound, blurs the distinction between the two.

You can probably point to the moment your life changed. When this horrible thing happened. In that sense, trauma belongs to Chronos. It happened at a particular point in time. And yet, trauma refuses to stay there.

It follows us into the present. It colors the way we interpret a text message, the way we enter a room, the way we interpret someone’s voice, the way we read these very words. Something that happened years ago continues to organize what feels possible today.

This is why I teach trauma in all of my courses the same way:

Trauma is time travel.

Not because we literally return to the past, but because parts of our nervous system never entirely realize that it has ended. The body keeps asking today’s relationships to answer yesterday’s questions. It keeps looking for the danger that once existed, even when it no longer does.

But there is something else that travels through time, and it’s longing.

I don’t bring up longing as the opposite of trauma, but as its natural descendant.

Trauma introduces us to a world we never wanted to know. At its core, trauma reorganizes our relationship to ourselves, to others, and to life itself. It teaches us to orient around what should never have happened.

I’ve said it so many times here, and I’ll keep saying it: we cannot transform away from something. We have to transform toward something.

Trauma transforms us away from the world we wish had never existed. Longing is the orientation that calls us back toward what trauma uprooted inside us: our agency, our sovereignty, our imagination, our hope.

As Mariame Kaba reminds us, hope is a discipline. I believe what she means is: hope is not optimism, it is a practice. And so hope is work and dedication. It takes a tremendous amount of work and resources to find your way back to the river of hope after trauma. You have to intentionally place yourself in the way of beauty. You have to practice noticing what is still alive. Some mornings you have to get out of your own way, some mornings you have to put yourself in your own way, over and over again, until your nervous system slowly begins to believe that life can hold more than survival.

But this is the last step of trauma recovery. So let me slow this letter down.

Many trauma therapists argue that recovery often takes a recognizably common shape made of 3 “phases”:

1. The establishment of safety

2. Constructing or completing the narrative of the trauma (closing the loop)

3. Coming back to connection

Let’s go over each one together.

Phase 1 is the establishment of safety, and it is crucial. Without it, there is no path toward healing. It is only from a place of safety that we can begin to face the truth of our own story. our nervous system can only metabolize what overwhelms us when it no longer has to spend all of its energy trying to survive the present. In other words: trauma needs space for distance. Trauma needs time, it needs breath.

Phase 2 is about completing the narrative, which entails going back to the trauma. We often tell survivors that memory is imperfect, as though the goal were to become suspicious of their own sensing body. What I am saying here is almost the opposite. It requires that you believe yourself. That you take seriously every inch of you when it says, This is what it felt like, right here.

You have the right to change your mind. You have the right to remember differently as new pieces emerge. The point of this phase is not to produce a final, definitive version of the story. It is to tell it, so that you can return to it over and over again, allowing it to become more complex each time.

We live in circles, not in lines.

Coming back to the story doesn’t always mean we’ve changed our mind. More often, it means our mind and body can hold more than they could before. Insight can only be downloaded through experience.

The point of returning is—as the philosopher Hermann Cohen said— about making the past known to know yourself as changed.

Writing has always helped me with this part. Once I have written what happened, I can begin asking a different question: What does this mean to me? It is here that I find more of my agency—the very thing trauma tries to take from us. Because while we cannot choose what happens to us, we do get to decide how we respond to it.

What I love most about healing is that it offers us the unique opportunity to live life twice: once as we move through time, and again as we look back and make meaning of what has been.

Here we are, back to Kairos.

What I keep telling folks in my program is this: what you believed to be true yesterday does not have to be true now. You’re allowed to create the story that heals you and yours.

This is why the questions we ask ourselves matter so much. The nature and quality of our questions determine where our healing lands. The one question that keeps returning, no matter who I’m sitting with is:

Who would I be without this trauma?

Underneath this question I suspect lie other questions:

• Can I still become someone I love, even though this happened?

• Is my future still available to me?

• Has this trauma stolen something that can never be recovered?

• Am I condemned to live only in reaction to what happened?

• Will I ever get to meet the self that wasn’t organized around survival?

The reason ‘Who would I have become?’ hurts so much is because it is an impossible counterfactual. There is no answer to that question. At least not in this timeline.

If I were working with you as a somatic practitioner, this is what I would ask following this question:

• Who do you think you would be without this trauma?

Then I would ask you to write that person down.

Who is this version of you? How do they speak? How do they love? How do they fuck? How do they work? How do they move through the world?

Most of the time, when I ask this question, people’s answers circle around the same longing: connection. They would relate to others differently.

Trauma convinces us that there is something deeply wrong with us—otherwise this wouldn’t have happened—and/or that there is something deeply wrong with the world. We collapse into binary thinking: I am a piece of shit/ every body is a piece of shit.

That is part of trauma. Trauma is binary thinking, it is black or white, it is all or nothing. trauma splits.

Healing, on the other hand, is the slow reintroduction of plurality. It is both/and. It is neither/nor. It is the return of nuance, of contradiction, of complexity. It is our growing capacity to hold.

So let me tell you something that may surprise you:

The list you just wrote is true. It is true because you wrote it down.

You see, abolition unfolds in three movements: dismantling the systems that kill us, imagining the relationships that would make domination obsolete, and practicing those relationships in real time.

Transformative Justice follows the same arc: we stop the harm, we heal and repair where we can, and we create the conditions that make the harm unconceivable to happen again.

When you write down who you could have become without trauma, you are doing something profoundly political:

you’re casting a spell. That spell is called longing.

Trauma is time travel. So is longing.

And here we arrive at the third phase of healing.

Undoing the binds of shame that keep us sheltered from life.

In other words: coming back to connection, where we are meant to live. Trauma does a number on us. Trauma wounds our spirit. It wounds our body. It wounds our relationships. But it also kills by sheltering us from the very thing that keeps us alive: connection.

I’ve said this before, and I’ll keep saying it: Trauma happens in relationships, and so healing has to happen there, too.

There is, however, an important caveat.

While connection can reduce trauma symptoms, trauma symptoms also make support harder to perceive, trust, and receive.

So when I say healing happens in relationship, I do not mean that connection automatically heals us. Trauma can make care feel dangerous, illegible, burdensome, or impossible to receive. It often does.

Trauma is not only painful because it separates us from the world. It is painful because it convinces us that we have become unintelligible to it. That we are somehow no longer worthy of love, of belonging, of being understood. Perhaps this is why we keep turning to the past…? Who would I have become if this horrible thing hadn’t happened to me? But I don’t think that is really what we mean.

What I think we mean is: am I still lovable after what happened to me? Will people still choose me after I’ve changed?

In other words, the grief underneath this question is rarely about the life we lost. It is about wondering whether we have become too changed to return to life at all.

Trauma doesn’t only steal our sense of safety. It steals our sense of legibility. It convinces us that we have become impossible to understand, impossible to hold, impossible to love.

And so we imagine another version of ourselves—not because we truly want another past, but because we are desperately searching for evidence that we are still worthy of a future.

Healing requires relationships that repeatedly make care visible, trustworthy, and receivable, but perhaps even more than that, healing requires our own capacity to receive.

In other words: healing is somatic capacity.

Support can exist all around us and still remain unavailable to our nervous system because we have learned that closeness is what brought us into the light of harm and shame. So healing asks a heartbreaking question:

How do I let people come close enough to support me, when closeness is also what has hurt me?

We long for connection, for being seen, for intimacy. And yet the very thing we need—relationship—is what feels most dangerous. This is the central dilemma of relational healing: we need connection to reconcile with pain, and yet we fear it, because it has also been the site of our deepest wounding.

So, dear S., it requires that you believe me when you read my words: no matter who you could have been without this trauma, you are still worthy of love. You’re always worthy of love. And if you can’t hold the hope for that to be true, I’ll tell you what I love telling my clients most: I’ll hold the hope for you. I’ll hold it until you realize how undoubtedly true it is.

To conclude

Phase 3 of healing is about coming back to connection—not because we are finally certain that harm will never happen again, but because we have become, little by little, more curious than afraid. It’s interesting how trauma makes us crave certainty. We organize our lives around prediction. We restrain every impulse toward expansion because we believe that if nothing changes, nothing can hurt us.

And for a while, this protection is wise. It can keep us alive. But there comes a moment when protection slowly becomes resistance to the natural order of things: change.

All magic begins with uncertainty. If we already knew what was going to happen, there would be no need for trust, no need for hope, no need for relationship.

You see, the grief underneath Who would I have become? isn’t really about the past. It’s about the future. It’s asking:

Is there still enough life left for me to become someone beyond what happened to me?

As a somatic practitioner, I know that trauma doesn’t only make us mourn what happened. It also makes us mourn the futures it foreclosed—the versions of ourselves that were never given the conditions to emerge.

We’re back to time again. Only this time, it’s as though Chronos is the only kind of time we believe in. Trauma convinces us that because years have been taken from us, possibility has been taken too.

But Kairos tells a different story. Kairos reminds us that while trauma can certainly steal years from our lives, healing can open up just as many years. Not by returning us to who we were, but by allowing us to become someone we could never have imagined while we were surviving.

When you heal, you do not heal only for yourself. You heal for the versions of you that never had access to this kind of care. You heal for your ancestors, whose wounds had nowhere to go. You heal for your descendants, who may inherit a little less fear because you chose to interrupt its transmission. You heal for those who, in this timeline, will never have access to healing.

You heal for all of us.

Because healing, like trauma, has always been collective.

PS!: While writing this piece, I came across another Greek way of understanding time: Aiôn. I had never heard of it before!!

Unlike Chronos, which measures time, or Kairos, which gives time meaning, Aiôn refers to the rhythm of existence itself. It is cyclical time—the time that endlessly returns.

Aiôn means: the changing of the seasons, the rhythm of the breath, the tides, day becoming night, and night becoming day. Aiôn also means the victim becomes the oppressor and history repeating itself over and over.

Aiôn reminds us that life does not move only in straight lines. It moves in cycles.

We don’t get to leave our pain behind, there is no redemption from the past, but we get to meet it differently each time it returns. We have a choice to integrate pain instead of letting it rule us. So I hope that when this question returns to the shore of your skin, you meet it with a deep, long awaited breath. You meet it with a bigger sense of possibility than fear.

I am in solidarity with you, dear S. !

And here are some songs that really help when this question finds the shore of my skin. Music for me is where I integrate most of my healing, along with moving my body. Believe it or not this is what I listen to while pushing the heaviest weight I can lol!

Sending big care your way!

Have a question for Care?

Just fill the form here.

Include your question with the information you believe is necessary for me to answer thoroughly. Make sure to offer up a pseudonym, or indicate the name you’d like me to answer to as well as your pronouns.

What I love to answer:

The question you can’t stop thinking about, the one that keeps coming back to the shore of your skin

The question you keep avoiding.

Those are usually the ones that matter.

A few things to know before you send:

• I may lightly edit questions for clarity or length, but I’ll keep the heart of what you’re asking intact.

• Make sure to offer up a pseudonym, or indicate the name you’d like me to answer to as well as your pronouns.

• Although I do read each one, I probably won’t be able to answer all of them. If I choose yours, I will answer with all the information and heart life allows me to access in this present moment.

What This Column Is / Isn’t

This column is:

• reflective, relational, somatically informed

• grounded in accountability and abolitionist care

• oriented toward agency rather than reassurance/validation for the sake of it

This column is not:

• quick fixes

• moral judgment

• therapy

• crisis support

• advice about who’s right or wrong

• a place for public shaming or surveillance

If your question feels unfinished, uncomfortable, or hard to phrase, that’s usually a good sign.

Stay ungovernable, and thank you for entrusting me with your question,

Care

I recently made this friend. We don’t see each other often, but when we do, all we do is hike and talk. It’s like we’re excavating each problem with every step we take.

Every time we meet however, she tells me this one thing: “I have a small appetite”.

The first time she said those words, I already felt some discomfort in my body. You know this kind of wincing, this contracting of sort? I recognised it because it’s ancient, and it’s female. Small is better. Always, in every single way possible: small is better.

The second time she said it, I felt something different. It wasn’t even relevant to the conversation, yet there it was again: “I have a small appetite”.

I could feel anger mixed with frustration rising in me—not simply why do you keep telling me this but also and most importantly: what are you saying, exactly?

Recently, I went back on T, and for those of you who don’t know,

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So, I’ve been dating. It’s been great. Turns out, Berlin people were really the issue!

But anygayz, that’s not why I’m writing to you.

I think I’ve reached the other side of obsession.

I’ve written before that neglect wires us for obsession. That obsession is, at its core, an avoidance strategy. We become consumed by another person because it keeps us from having to sit with ourselves: our own lives, our fears, our loneliness, the quiet tremors that visit us at night. Sometimes what we call chemistry is simply a very effective distraction.

But nobody talks about what happens when obsession no longer works. So let me!

Before I do!

If any of my writing has changed the way you think, imagine what practicing together could change. Join us before September 10 to be part of my first live 28-day course. 💌 On September 10, we begin Becoming Conflict Secure, my first live 28-day course on Substack. If you’ve been waiting for the right moment to become a paid subscriber, this is it: this course, originally priced at 57 euros, is FREE for my paid subscribers. Every day for 28 days, we will practice what it means to become conflict secure and see each other live every week for questions and integrations! Come join us!

For 28 days, we’ll practice together. Every day you’ll receive a short video, reflection questions, and a somatic practice to help you build the capacity to stay connected to yourself and others during conflict. We’ll also meet me live every week so you can ask me questions and practice in community.

I want to be clear! This isn’t about becoming better at arguing. It’s about becoming someone whose nervous system no longer experiences conflict as a threat to survival.

If you’ve ever frozen, people-pleased, shut down, over-explained, disappeared, or exploded during conflict, I made this for you.

And the best part? The entire course is included in your paid subscription! There’s nothing extra to buy. Join us as a paid subscriber now and come as you are on September 10, and we’ll begin together!

I can’t wait to practice alongside you!💛

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“How did you even think of getting the elastic? Like, how did it even become part of the play?” I asked.

“I was being bad” they said with a smile, “so I had to get punished.”

That’s what stopped me. That’s what gave me a download.

It was the word: punished.

I already knew that pain and pleasure overlap in the brain. I knew they share some of the same circuitry, that under certain conditions they can become remarkably difficult to untangle. But this download wasn’t academic. It was somatic.

I stopped chewing and narrowed my eyes, not out of confusion but because I could feel something landing somewhere much deeper than a simple thought ever could. I could almost feel my soma rearranging itself, and I recognized the feeling immediately: pleasure. An opening. A softening. An expansion.

“Hmmmmmm,” I said, snapping my fingers. It just hit exactly where it was supposed to.

That’s when I knew there was a deep connection between pain and pleasure, between being bad and the salvation that comes from facing your shit, between Transformative Justice (TJ) and BDSM.

I want to start this essay clearly: I don’t think BDSM is inherently transformative or abolitionist. BDSM communities, like activist communities, can reproduce coercion, heteronormative bullshit, patriarchy, racism, misogyny, transphobia, abuse, and much more. This essay is not a claim that they are the same, or even particularly alike. It is a claim that both are deeply concerned with the ethics of power, pain, and pleasure, and that although they might seem worlds apart—one rooted in abolitionist politics, the other in erotic and kink communities—at their core, they are wrestling with the same question:

Before you keep readin!!!!

If any of my writing has changed the way you think, imagine what practicing together could change. Join us before September 10 to be part of my first live 28-day course. 💌 On September 10, we begin Becoming Conflict Secure, my first live 28-day course on Substack. If you’ve been waiting for the right moment to become a paid subscriber, this is it: this course, originally priced at 57 euros, is FREE for my paid subscribers. Every day for 28 days, we will practice what it means to become conflict secure and see each other live every week for questions and integrations! Come join us!

For 28 days, we’ll practice together. Every day you’ll receive a short video, reflection questions, and a somatic practice to help you build the capacity to stay connected to yourself and others during conflict. We’ll also meet me live every week so you can ask me questions and practice in community.

I want to be clear! This isn’t about becoming better at arguing. It’s about becoming someone whose nervous system no longer experiences conflict as a threat to survival.

If you’ve ever frozen, people-pleased, shut down, over-explained, disappeared, or exploded during conflict, I made this for you.

And the best part? The entire course is included in your paid subscription! There’s nothing extra to buy. Join us as a paid subscriber now and come as you are on September 10, and we’ll begin together!

I can’t wait to practice alongside you!💛

Read more

It’s the tendency to perceive meaningful patterns where none objectively exist.

Our brains hate ambiguity. Humans like to predict because not knowing is just too painful, so we see faces in clouds, animals in rock formations, religious figures on burnt toast or tomatoes. Our brains are prediction-making machines. Faced with uncertainty, they would rather invent a pattern than remain in the discomfort of not knowing.

I sometimes wonder if we do something similar in our relationships, like, emotional pareidolia? Let me explain.

Before I do!

If any of my writing has changed the way you think, imagine what practicing together could change. Join us before September 10 to be part of my first live 28-day course. 💌 On September 10, we begin Becoming Conflict Secure, my first live 28-day course on Substack. If you’ve been waiting for the right moment to become a paid subscriber, this is it: this course, originally priced at 57 euros, is FREE for my paid subscribers. Every day for 28 days, we will practice what it means to become conflict secure and see each other live every week for questions and integrations! Come join us!

For 28 days, we’ll practice together. Every day you’ll receive a short video, reflection questions, and a somatic practice to help you build the capacity to stay connected to yourself and others during conflict. We’ll also meet me live every week so you can ask me questions and practice in community.

I want to be clear! This isn’t about becoming better at arguing. It’s about becoming someone whose nervous system no longer experiences conflict as a threat to survival.

If you’ve ever frozen, people-pleased, shut down, over-explained, disappeared, or exploded during conflict, I made this for you.

And the best part? The entire course is included in your paid subscription! There’s nothing extra to buy. Join us as a paid subscriber now and come as you are on September 10, and we’ll begin together!

I can’t wait to practice alongside you!💛

Lately, I’ve been thinking about what my therapist calls markers of relational productivity. I’ve realized that because I’m queer, I don’t want to get married, I don’t want children, I don’t even want to live with a partner, and I am not monogamous, I don’t have many of the milestones our culture has agreed to recognize as proof that a relationship is “working.” My relationships won’t naturally produce engagements, weddings, mortgages, children pointing toward the next step, or any of the familiar signs that reassure us we are moving in the “right” direction. They don’t generate the kinds of evidence our culture has been taught to celebrate.

I don’t reject monogamy because I think it is inherently oppressive, nor do I believe polyamory is the answer to our relational wounds. Like every system, neither one saves us. Systems don’t heal us; they reveal us. Every relationship structure eventually exposes the practices we have rehearsed for years: how we relate to (mostly) power and care, but also jealousy, fear, repair, grief, longing, commitment, honesty. We don’t become different people because we enter a different relational structure. We simply bring our nervous systems into a new one. We are not our values, we are what we practice most.

What is interesting about my relationship to monogamy—or perhaps more accurately, the religion of the one—is that unlike so many other things in my life, I haven’t had the chance to integrate it by actually getting the thing I so desperately wanted (or, more perhaps, the thing I was taught to want), only to discover that it couldn’t save me.

I have never been in a long, beautiful, secure, monogamous queer relationship. I don’t know what it feels like to wake up next to someone and think, this is my person!, and to keep thinking that for years. I have never been able to recognize one person as a solid anchor in my life, go through challenges together and grow despite the world, feel chosen and wanted, and realise that life is still… lonely at times. I never got to climb the mountain only to realize the view wasn’t what I imagined, you know? My best integrations come from getting exactly what I want and realise that it will not make me happy… at least forever. Only through this process of getting exactly what we want and still be miserably human can we realise that no one is coming to save us (which is key in abolition work!), and that happiness is certainly not the point of a human life.

What I’ve had to do instead is grieving the mountain itself. I’ve had to stop trying so hard, which, is not the easiest for me. You see, I am team chalant. And I am quite type A (writing this makes me want to throw up, but that’s the truth). What I am trying to say is: I struggle to receive. I struggle to surrender. I struggle to believe that I won’t have to go without. And so I am certain that if I don’t do it, no body else will. The problem is, while this works great in business, it doesn’t work AT ALL in relationships. Business requires strategy, love requires surrender (!). One can only surrender when we trust that support will find us. I don’t trust that it will.

So what I’ve been doing the last two years or so is slowly dismantling the religion of love as it was taught to me. I’ve had to question whether the longing belonged to me, or whether it had been force-fed to me by a culture that insists there is only one way for love to become meaningful.

That kind of integration feels very different. It isn’t the kind that comes from postponing our happiness to reaching a milestone or getting something and realizing when we do that that’s not it. Integration from a space of lack, having to turn away from the religion because it has become more hurtful than anything hits different in the body. I am learning to loosen my grip on an ideal I never got to touch without becoming bitter that it wasn’t mine, ever.

Here we are again: dismantling the illusion of ownership! And as you know, learning to compost that illusion in our soma is a deeply political project. Our fear and insecurity can easily become a longing for absolution through another person, through land, through ownership itself. That longing sits at the root of so many forms of domination. Ursula K. Le Guin said it better than I ever could: “Walk here, sleep well, on the ground that is not yours, but is yourself.”

Instead of asking how we can possess one another—or the land—what if we asked how we can belong to each other without ownership?

To live in the practice of this question is the abolition work we should all be on.

I understand why monogamy feels so reassuring. One of its greatest strengths is that it arrives with a script. So many expectations have already been negotiated before two people even meet. Both arrive with a common language and know what counts as betrayal, commitment, exclusivity, fidelity, partnership. Progress often requires very little conversation because the culture has already had those conversations on our behalf. There is a profound comfort in inheriting a map instead of drawing one from scratch, especially under material conditions that become more and more scarce. I suspect that much of what people experience as security is sometimes less about intimacy than about certainty. Security and intimacy are near enemies. If the rules are already written, we can mistake following the script for deeply knowing ourselves and one another. We can confuse identity for personality, or our hunger for status for our truest desires.

When culture gives us preconfigured, recognizable markers—marriage, exclusivity, cohabitation, children—we don’t have to wonder very much about what a relationship means because meaning has already been attached to those milestones. All we have to do is reach them. But when those markers disappear, as they often do in queer or non-monogamous relationships, our brains begin searching desperately for other signs (or create meaning of the cloud).

Even though I’ve never proposed to anyone, never wanted to move in with a partner, and never dreamed of building the kind of life that heteronormativity promised me, I have still found myselves desperately looking for reassurance that my relationships were ‘real’, or ‘serious enough’. Writing that now, I have no idea what it actually means. All I know now is, I’ve caught myselves escalating relationships, mostly with words, because I couldn’t tolerate the uncertainty of simply being inside them and surrender to what they are now. I wanted definitions, promises, declarations, futures.

Looking back, I don’t think I was chasing commitment nearly as much as I was trying to escape intimacy with myselves, the fear I felt, the tragic and tender violences of love.

Escalation became a way of soothing my own anxiety rather than deepening the relationship. It allowed me to bypass the hardest truth love has to offer: love was never designed to reassure us. Love is, and has always been, a risk. I also think that I was escalating because I simply couldn’t sit with my feelings at the time.I've loved people so deeply that reaching for bigger words allowed me to avoid feelings that were simply too big for my body. I think experiencing that depth of love forced me to confront the truth that I was actually lovable. And that was much scarier to practice in real time than the script I had been rehearsing for decades: that I was unlovable.

If looking up at the sky and finding faces in the clouds is pareidolia, then constantly asking, What are we? might be our relational version of it: a brain trying to make certainty out of ambiguity.

I am not saying that it is not acceptable to ask for clarity. Clarity is kindness. And, I guess our broken hearts can both attest to this: we can plan all we want, but relationships can only unfold over time. It’s like purpose: you’ll only know what your purpose was once you’ve lived your entire life and you’re dead.

If we want to stop following a script and let our relationships unfold, the good news is that somatics has a lot to say about it.

Somatics teaches us that we can’t simply stop a habit our bodies have practiced for years. We have to replace it with another practice that meets the same need, only more truthfully, so that the body eventually chooses it instead.

When I ask myselves what I was trying to secure through monogamy—or perhaps more accurately, through the religion of the one—I realize I wasn’t actually looking for marriage (although I look so good in a suit) or living with someone and smell their poop first thing in the morning or unload the dishwasher together. I was looking for security, comfort, certainty, and control.

The problem is that I no longer believe those things can ever truly be given to me by another person. They are illusory guarantees, and our attempts to secure them have shaped some of the most violent systems on Earth. Those guarantees dissolve the moment life reminds us that we are finite, unpredictable creatures.

What has helped me is thinking in terms of near enemies.

The near enemy of security and comfort is safety. Not the kind of safety we’ve turned into a political weapon—safety is inherently relational: it emerges because we stick to each other. Safety is possible when two people become increasingly capable of honesty, repair, dignity, and care. It is possible when our nervous system know that our mistakes will not be used against us for punishment and exile, that being human is not a liability. It doesn’t promise you’ll never deal with the consequences of our actions or even be hurt, but promises you won’t have to face hurt alone, and that your safety, dignity and belonging will not be taken away from you. I want to be clear: there isn’t much absolute safety on this planet. We are all here to die. We cannot build a life that protects us from loss. Safety isn’t absolute, it’s relational.

The near enemy of certainty and control is connection. Connection asks something entirely different of us. It doesn’t ask us to predict another person. It asks us to keep meeting them. Again and again. It asks us to surrender the fantasy that love can ever flirt with possession and to practice relationship instead.

The goal isn’t to find certainty in others, but to build relationships that make us more capable of staying connected in the presence of it.

This is perhaps one of the greatest gifts of queerness. Queerness is, by design, collaborative. Queerness doesn’t only demand to stop inheriting relationships, it requires we begin creating them. Monogamy offers a map. Queerness often asks us to draw one together. Either guarantees intimacy. One simply arrives with culturally inherited markers, while the other requires us to co-create them, conversation by conversation, practice by practice, repair by repair.

I am done with markers of relational productivity. I want markers of relational depth.

So the questions I am trying to live in/practice now:

• how do I measure my relationships differently? Although asking better questions truly excites me (I am a sag rising after all), living in their embodied practice and witnessing my life change before my eyes excites me more. Ideas, if never practiced, are just that: ideas in the ethers.

• Instead of asking where this relationship is going, what I am trying to ask now is: who am I/are we becoming because it exists? I want to date people who inspire me to up my game a lil!

• Instead of measuring relationships by what they produce—marriage, children, exclusivity, cohabitation—I want to measure them by what they practice: Do we practice more compassion, more care, more depth, and more alignment with our political values, or does this relationship become an escape from them/the world? I want my relationships to root me deeper into community and purpose!

• How much freedom becomes possible between us? Freedom is responsibility, and so here I am thinking about freedom as in responsibility and care, not carelessness and I’ll-do-whatever-I-want kind of attitude!

• How much truth can we tell? How much repair have we learned? How much dignity does this relationship make possible? How much more capable have we become of loving ourselves, each other, and the world?

• Most importantly: I ask every single person who enters my life to co-create a map with me of our care. What does depth mean to them? Where do we meet without disappearing into each other?

If relationships are where we learn emotional literacy, conflict navigation, and deepen our capacity for care, they should be a stepping stone for us to be able to distribute care wildly, so it’s not just personal, but political.

It makes sense that heteronormative culture would teach us to evaluate relationships through productivity. After all, the nuclear family was never simply a romantic ideal; it was also an economic institution designed to organize inheritance, property, labor, and the transmission of wealth. Productivity has always been built into the model so that the financial elite keeps their financial power over us. But if abolition has taught me anything, it is that the value of a relationship cannot be reduced to what it produces. It has to be understood through what it practices, how it transforms us and how untenable it makes systems of domination and supremacy.

If abolition is the practice of building the world we all want and deserve, our relationships should help us rehearse the kind of people we want to become to birth it. Relationships are not meant to prove our worth. They are meant to transform our capacity for care.

Stay ungovernable dear one, fall in love more (with yourselves!),

Care

If you like my writing, consider sending it to a friend and/or better yet purchase my zines/ courses:

Somatically, the reason is surprisingly simple:

don’t think about a pink elephant.

Really, don’t.

The moment you read those word, your mind has already conjured one.

Our brains don’t orient themselves through negation; they orient…

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In Buddhist philosophy, a near enemy is a quality that imitates a virtue but ultimately distorts it. Far enemies are easy to recognize—cruelty stands in opposition to compassion, despair to joy.

Near enemies, however, are subtle. They can feel almost identical to the real thing, which makes them harder to detect.

Comfort is the near enemy of safety, pity of compassion and peace of liberation.

Control can sometimes wear the mask of care. It feels like closeness, like attention, like love. Yet at its core, it is a refusal to surrender to what is. It is an attempt to use someone else to soothe our own fears.

While true connection arises from love, control is born of fear.

Connection says, “I will stay present with you, even without knowing how this will end.”

Control whispers, “I will only feel safe if I can manage the outcome.”

Because our need for connection never disappears, its near enemy slips in unnoticed. It keeps us alive, but never nourished. A ghost that keeps us company in our loneliness.

Control takes the lead when intimacy feels too raw, shielding us from exposure before we can be hurt. Connection, meanwhile, waits—unguarded, tender, defenseless.

True connection asks us to stay—not necessarily with the other person, but with reality itself. It invites us to meet what is without armor, without bending it to fit our fears.

Stay ungovernable,

Care

If you like my writing, consider supporting me to keep writing and/or purchasing my zines/courses on Transformative Justice, accountability and care:

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