From what I can tell, my sex life is relatively atypical. As a recovering Mormon, I always feel like I am trying to detangle what I’ve been brought up to believe about sex. I’ve navigated this by going in and out of phases of sexual activity throughout my young adulthood. As a perpetually single person this usually looks like going in and out of what would be considered by some to be a “hoe phase”. I typically go through Tinder with the intention of having sex, go at it for a few days/weeks/months, and then go back into tentative celibacy for another 6-12 months. I go about it with a lot of intention, protection, and communication, so it’s never really felt “slutty” to me.

I have previously shared a funny hookup story from one of my very first phases of sexual exploration in college. The following story, of the most spontaneously “slutty” weekend I’ve ever experienced, is from a couple years later. I’d just finished my second-to-last semester of college and had just started a new job at a hotel near my apartment. I’d been celibate for around 5 months.

I’ve always loved to take myself on little dates, and I’m also always looking for reasons to use public transit. This Friday night in May, I bought myself a ticket to the Salt Lake Symphony Orchestra- a little treat for surviving the week of training for a new job. I grew up playing violin and always enjoy attending instrumental musical performances- plus they had a student discount. My days with the student discount were numbered, so I took care to take advantage. I took the train to Salt Lake City from Orem early in the afternoon to meet with a friend for lunch and thrifting before the concert. When she dropped me off at the concert venue, I popped an edible for maximum enjoyment of the forthcoming performance.

This photo is from that day in Salt Lake City- taken by the thrifting/food friend.

With the help of the ushers, I found my seat. As the rest of the audience (on average much greyer than I) filed in, I texted an old family friend of mine. The concert was set to start at 7:00 pm, and would be finished before 9:00 pm. That left plenty of time before the last train left to Provo at 1:00 am to enjoy a weekend evening out in Salt Lake City.

The family friend I texted had moved up to Utah from Missouri a year or two after I had. We mostly knew each other through our families, who’d known each other in their formative years. As we grew up, we ran into each other at a number of Mormon summer camps and extraneous youth events. He was a couple of years younger than me, but I knew through our cumulative years of light social media contact that he was funny and charismatic. He’d dated one of my close friend’s little sisters in high school. I was always very endeared to him, I thought he was witty and pleasant to be around.

We’d talked sometimes about getting together in Utah, but we’d never prioritized it. Our schedules were busy, we lived an hour or so from one another, and we were never really more than acquaintances. But this evening, he offered to pick me up after the concert when I told him I’d be free for the night to hang out in Salt Lake City.

I don’t remember much about the concert- only that I’m sure I enjoyed it. They may have played Tchaikovsky. The edible did its job quite well. My family friend- I’ll call him Danny- came to the concert hall at the time I’d told him. He rolled into the parking lot with his Missouri license plates, and something about that felt comfortable. We chatted and laughed in his car as he drove around Salt Lake City. I consider myself to be very funny, and he matched my wit in a very satisfying way. He took me to get food, and paid when we were given the bill.

Now, it had previously crossed my mind that Danny might like me a little. Some of our DMs and interactions over the years had left me with that impression- I just hadn’t let the idea settle anywhere permanent in my psyche. I didn’t know what to do with it, honestly. I’d known him since we were (very) little, he was my sister’s age and… well… and nothing. I just wasn’t sure how to process it, so I didn’t. I hadn’t considered Danny liking me as a factor in this hangout- until he paid the bill. And then, I was hyper-aware of it.

After we ate, he told me he’d mulled his own wine at his apartment- and asked if I’d like to try any. It was still before 10:30 pm- plenty of time to drink and even sober up before the 1 am train. Of course I’ll try your homemade wine, Danny.

So Danny took me to his place for his home-mulled wine. He lived in his own apartment in Downtown Salt Lake City, despite only being a college sophomore. It was a nice apartment for a single man living alone. He had some art on the walls and the kitchen seemed to be clean. He poured me wine and put a jazz playlist up on his television Spotify channel. He sort of goofily danced around his living room to the music while I sipped on my glass of wine- which was delicious. I’d never even considered it a possibility to make my own wine. He eventually sat on his couch next to me, put his arm up- I thought to put his arm around me- but he began to scratch my head. Which was even better, in my opinion.

Anyways. The qualms I had in my head about potentially hooking up with Danny quieted really quickly, and I turned to kiss him while he played with my hair. He quickly reciprocated.

And then we hooked up! And it was sweet, but kind of a little bad, too. And that’s literally okay.

The sex really isn’t even the point of the story, it’s more just the lore of spontaneously hooking up with a childhood friend I’d only casually kept up with for a decade, in what was I believe our first (and only) one-on-one in-person interaction.

I did not make it to the 1 am train. Danny offered to let me stay the night like a gentleman- although the gentleman tendencies did not go so far as to offer me a ride home. I unfortunately had an early shift at the new hotel in Orem the next morning. I needed to get home to ensure I’d make it to work on time. (I quit the job on the spot the next day, so- had I known the future- I really could have stayed.) I ordered an Uber, and it cost more than it would have for me to just drive to and from Salt Lake City with my damn truck.

Oh, well. It was still fun.

Two days after hooking up with Danny, I was home at my apartment complex. I have an ongoing goal to spend an average of 3 hours outside per day. On this particular Sunday I took a crochet project out to the front of my building. There were some shaded grassy areas by the apartment’s parking lot that provided a nice place to enjoy the weather right outside, and I frequented a spot under a particular tree.

While I worked on my project, a very whimsical looking girl with wavy blond hair, green eyes, and an abundance of gem-studded jewelry introduced herself. Her name was Bry, and she liked my top (it was thrifted), and she’d also seen me reading and crafting under this tree a number of times from her window. She pointed at a window on the second floor of another building in the parking lot- a window with a very clear view of my spot. She said she loved my energy, I was flattered, and we exchanged Snapchat usernames.

This photo is also from the exact day- under the tree, thrifted top.

That night, Bry and I had exchanged a few pleasantries on Snapchat when I sent a photo depicting myself holding a glass of wine I was in the process of consuming. Living in Utah, it’s always important to cultivate a group of people who deviate from the Mormon standards in the same ways as you. I guessed from how she dressed that she wasn’t Mormon anymore, and this was my attempt to test the waters with her. I was right. She was excited to see that I drink, and send back a photo of her taking a hit of a weed pen. I invited her over to my apartment, just across the parking lot, so we could share in our bounty.

She came over, and we had a really great time giggling and getting to know each other. She drank from my wine box, I took a few hits of her weed pen. She was a couple of years younger than me, had gone to a two-year college and had a boyfriend of a few months. We talked about our journeys with spirituality out of Mormonism- a reliably interesting topic with anyone out of the church in Utah. We both connected deeply with the outdoors- which was partially how I’d caught her attention.

We had been talking for a few hours when she let me know she was feeling tired. To my surprise- instead of making the journey across the parking lot to her own bed, she let herself into my bedroom. A little confused (but accommodating), I sat on the end of my twin bed while she laid down. She asked if I was feeling tired, too. I said yes, of course- it was nearly 1 am and I’d had a few glasses of wine in the preceding hours. She patted the spot next to me- again, on my own bed- inviting me to lay down with her.

She turned to me and asked if I usually slept with the lights on. I got up and turned them off, my head foggy. What on earth was going on? Was she actually going to sleep here when she lived across the parking lot?

I laid down next to my new friend, my neighbor, the girl who’d watched me read and crochet under the tree, who I’d only just met some 10 hours previously. When I climbed into the bed, she was facing away from me, towards the wall. I took a sort of pseudo-big-spoon position, facing myself the same direction as her, but careful not to actually make physical contact with her body. This was difficult to do in a TWIN BED! She had mentioned her boyfriend no less than a half dozen times in our three or so hours of chatting. I did NOT know what was going on, but it was probably best for me to not move a single muscle.

I had my eyes closed, but I felt her shift next to me. She turned her body around, so our faces were an inch apart. I felt her breath on me, and I was very likely holding my own breath. I stayed completely and absolutely motionless, eyes closed. Feigning ignorance of our closeness. I felt her move her hand on the back of my head pull me in to close the inch between our mouths. We started to kiss, and I looked at her panicked. I asked about her boyfriend, and what she was doing. She said, and I quote, “I will deal with that later”.

And then, by golly, we hooked up. Maybe against my better judgement, but it was also her judgement. And it was fun! She did, in fact, tell her boyfriend a few weeks later. I know this because she blocked me- and we had a mutual friend who updated me with the news that the two of them had broken up. Well, damn.

And then, I saw her at a gay bar in Salt Lake City 3 years later.

Okay there you go, that’s the most bisexual weekend of my life. You’re welcome.

I listened to Olivia Rodrigo’s first album, SOUR, the first day it came out in early 2021. I was attending college at Utah Valley University and Olivia was filming High School Musical the Musical the Series only an hour away in Salt Lake City. I was only really aware of her as a Disney girl, and had never been particularly moved by any of her Disney music at that point. I remember upon listening to her debut album being shocked and delighted by her creative lyricism, musicality, and her clear artistic vision- especially for such a young girl. I was not always so impressed by Disney actors turned musicians. I even remember being surprised and impressed at the time of her use of explicit language while still under a Disney contract.

I was extremely online at the time (more so than I am now) and found a lot of my mutuals on twitter noticed something similar in Olivia’s album: her music and sound had some of the DNA of Taylor Swift’s music. She explored similar themes as Taylor (in fact, the thematically parallel songs Good 4 U and Mr. Perfectly Fine came out within a few weeks of one another). Olivia actually sampled New Years Day in 2 Steps Forward 1 Step Back, and Rodrigo used syntax, chord progressions and storytelling familiar to a Taylor Swift listener. This observation was not critique of Olivia’s writing: in fact, in the earliest days of SOUR’s launch, Olivia cited Taylor as “my greatest songwriting inspiration”.

Throughout her career, Taylor has taken to “adopting” young artists who look up to her. There are examples of this all over her career: Lorde, HAIM, and now with both Gracie Abrams Sabrina Carpenter. She will take these girls on tour, collaborate with them, and boost their careers- a real “girl’s girl”, according to some historical retellings. Never before has she reacted to an upcoming female artist like she reacted to Olivia Rodrigo: with something close to contempt.

It’s not known exactly what went down between the two women’s legal teams- but around 3 months after the wildly successful release of Olivia’s debut album SOUR, Taylor Swift’s name appeared for a songwriting credit on track titled Deja Vu. The song had alleged similarities to Cruel Summer- however, the similarities between the songs are extremely subtle. The similarities are more an inspiration of “vibe” than any actual musical, lyrical or thematic similarities. It’s likely the songwriting credit came with legal fees and songwriting payouts. And since the adding of artistic credits, there has been virtually no public relationship or mention of the other between the two powerful artists. This silence between the two is icy and noticeable.

At the time of the SOUR album release and the legal fallout with Swift, I was a die-hard Taylor Swift fan. 2021 was just after the double-album releases of folklore and evermore, when public regard for Taylor’s talent was somewhere near it’s peak. She was ruling the music scene with her folksy storytelling albums, her extensive team of musical collaborators and her (Taylor’s Version) project. I had grown up with Taylor’s music- and held Taylor as a role model. The legal moves against Olivia- still a literal teenager at the time- felt disproportionate and mean spirited (especially from a woman who was embarking on her own journey for ownership of her music!)

Despite my deep fandom and love of Taylor, I never could defend her in these mean spirited legal movements against Olivia Rodrigo. It left a stain on my regard towards her. Later in 2021, just a few months after Taylor’s name appeared in Deja Vu’s songwriting credits, Swift released Red (Taylor’s Version). The album contained a number of songs “from the vault” (vault songs having been withheld from the original 2012 album’s release), including the extremely timely song Nothing New (featuring Phoebe Bridgers). These lyrics speak directly to Taylor’s insecurities, and it didn’t take long for the Swifties at large to link the subject of these amorphous insecurities to Olivia Rodrigo:

Will you still want me when I’m nothing new?

I know someday I’m going to meet her, it’s a fever dream

The kind of radiance you only have at seventeen

She’ll know the way and then she’ll say she got the map from me

I’ll say I’m happy for her, then I’ll cry myself to sleep

The bridge of this song shows an insecurity Taylor hadn’t previously exposed to her audience: The fear of being replaced by someone newer and shinier than she is- while following her footsteps. Taylor was 31 when Red (Taylor’s Version) was released, and Olivia was a fresh 18. Olivia’s debut album was instantly popular and immediately put her on the map as a musician- Taylor did not get such widespread recognition until her second album. The lyrics placed Taylor’s actions into much clearer relief- she was terrified of Olivia’s talent, and what it would mean for her own dominance in the music industry. Her fears were not unfounded.

The lyrics and her behaviors towards Olivia also shines a somewhat different (and less flattering) light onto the women Taylor does choose to mentor. SOUR has many references to “another woman”- a pretty blond girl Olivia’s ex boyfriend dated immediately after their breakup. This woman was widely agreed upon by listeners to be another ex-Disney and budding pop star, Sabrina Carpenter. Very shortly after Olivia’s rise to popularity, Sabrina Carpenter was adopted to be a Taylor Swift mentee. Sabrina opened the entire second half of the Eras Tour for Taylor, and afterwards was featured on the title track of Taylor’s most recent album.

Taylor choosing to boost Sabrina’s career was a clear message to Olivia: I have the power to lift up and tear down. But this move also bore another message to those of us paying attention- Taylor views Olivia as a much greater “threat” than she views Sabrina (or HAIM, or Gracie Abrahams, etc.). Taylor is willing to invest her time into Sabrina because she does not believe Sabrina will ever exceed her in popularity or skill. This puts into question, at least in my view, the purity of Taylor’s “girls’ girl” intentions. Taylor believes Sabrina will uphold Taylor’s place at the top of the pop girl hierarchy- she believes Olivia could topple her over. In isolating Olivia Rodrigo so much from the rest of the music industry, Swift has inadvertently marked Olivia as an equal. Very Voldemortian, if you think about it.

Okay, now we have laid the groundwork. Olivia, an up-and-coming artist was somehow legally affronted by Taylor Swift’s team for songwriting credit*. It is widely agreed upon that Taylor did this because she is threatened by Olivia’s songwriting and popularity. Taylor later boosted and highlighted a less threatening pop star Olivia had a rocky personal history with. Taylor did this because she is deeply insecure and is afraid of being outperformed.

(*Taylor’s willingness to go after Olivia for songwriting credit is much more rich with the album The Life of a Showgirl in her discography. She did not give the Jackson 5 songwriting credit for Wood, she did not give The Ronettes songwriting credit for Opalite, and she did not give the Jonas Brothers songwriting credit for The Life of a Showgirl featuring Sabrina Carpenter. Each of these respective songs bear a much stronger resemblance than Deja Vu does to Cruel Summer.

We also really can’t go into songwriting credits between these two women without mentioning Get Him Back!- released by Olivia on September 8, 2023 and Taylor’s vastly inferior imgonnagetyouback- released April, 2024. These two songs share identical themes and play on words. It was a humiliating swing and miss on Taylor’s part, and the second song likely only exists to piss off Olivia. And Taylor’s song is SO MUCH WORSE THAN OLIVIAS!)

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This is not the first time I have written at length about Taylor Swift. In this time period I’ve described, I was a lifelong fan of Taylor’s. This was, however, when I first began to question her intentions with the platform she had so much power over. She had been a consistent part of my childhood- her music followed me from elementary school to college. But only with this attack of Olivia Rodrigo did I ever begin to question her character.

The questioning of her character has now taken place, despite it all. I now consider myself to be in a pretty stable state of Swiftie Remission. I highly encourage reading the linked essay to get a more detailed background on my journey out of the Taylor Swift fandom- it will definitely contextualize the rest of this essay.

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In marking Olivia Rodrigo as her equal, Taylor Swift did something dangerous: she gave Olivia the incentive to outperform Taylor. She turned an adoring, wide-eyed fan- someone who openly credited Taylor as an inspiration- into someone who hasn’t publicly breathed Taylor’s name in half a decade. Taylor may have actually sent Olivia on the direction to legitimately dethrone Taylor’s spot at The Top. As fascism has risen in the United States, there have been a lot more cracks in Taylor Swift’s facade- stories and illusions she has a much more difficult time upholding as her wealth and power accumulates.

As I covered in my Swiftie Remission essay, Taylor Swift has abandoned any semblance of her previous identity as an “activist”. After insisting in 2019 she wanted to be on the “right side of history”, she has let her platform and voice go unutilized for half a decade on any number of topics that plague the world. She performed You Need To Calm Down across the country in states where queer rights were being stripped- without saying a word (or spending a dollar) to advocate for those rights.

The answer to “why” is actually quite simple- Taylor’s self-interest and popularity trumps everything else. Once it was advantageous to Taylor’s brand for her to be a democrat. Now it is more profitable to be politically neutral with her football boyfriend. To summarize it further: she is a billionaire who is ultimately benefitting from the rise of fascism, the accumulation of wealth at the top. She has no incentive to stand up and fight the powers oppressing the rest of us.

This is a weakness more and more Swifties are becoming aware of. Those of us who were raised with the idea of Taylor’s activism are becoming adults in a fascist world- and noticing Taylor sitting in silence. This silence is causing a lot of Swifties to feel more and more disaffected by their role model, who seems to be happily sitting on her piles of wealth. Luckily, we were raised alongside other artists who have taken the road map from Taylor Swift and improved it immensely. In other words: Olivia Rodrigo, it seems, has a much clearer view of Taylor’s weaknesses than Taylor has of her own.

Maybe not as a direct result, but simply because Olivia is simply made of better stuff than Taylor: Olivia has prioritized building her blooming brand around being politically outspoken. Taylor focused on LGBT activism during exactly one of her eras: Olivia has chosen to make access to women’s healthcare central to her entire career. She began by raising funds for reproductive rights on her Guts World Tour, and was regularly using her stage time to discuss the related issues facing her fans.

I find her initiative and humanity inspiring- even more so now that she is getting an entire community of musicians involved with bringing more activism into the entertainment industry.

Olivia Rodrigo recently announced the Daisy Chain Fields Festival- a festival where the entirely-female lineup will be donating 100% of the profits made to nonprofits that advocate for women’s and girl’s health. The lineup is insane. They will be funding nonprofits that focus on reproductive health, black women’s health, indigenous women’s health. Olivia is hosting the festival, but the performers expected to attend include Chappell Roan, KATSEYE, Stevie Nicks and DOECHII among MANY other talented women. In a country that does not provide healthcare, zeroing in on funding healthcare for the most vulnerable communities is an intentional and political move.

In her announcement of the festival, Olivia made several statements I found interesting. She talked about how, in expressing her emotions as an artist, that she must talk about how the genocide in Gaza makes her feel- the same way she must talk about the way a breakup makes her feel. So many of her artistic peers won’t speak out about these things- and while the festival itself isn’t focused on aid to Palestine, the direct movement away from the apolitical fence musicians and artists often ride was a notable statement. Her goal is not to be liked by all.

And that trait of Olivia’s is, I think, her biggest strength. Olivia has carefully never interacted with Taylor in nearly half a decade, but I believe her trajectory is a both reflection and a rejection of the path Taylor chose. Early in Taylor’s career, it became clear she was deeply insecure about being disliked. Ever since Kanye West took the stage during the 2009 Grammy’s, she’s been desperate to be beloved by all. Taylor wants to somehow prove to an amorphous, ever-changing goal post that she was worthy of all this acclaim, damn it. She regularly writes in her music about feeling socially outcasted, different and awkward around people. There is no doubt this insecurity became an oversized Achilles heal in her lifelong development.

Taylor Swift folds under the idea of not being absolutely beloved by all. She spent multiple years of her life hiding in her home from the public’s scrutiny. She sacrifices parts of her real self to her brand, to her streams, to her metrics. She adapts her writing style to different critics tastes. She polishes her image to be the most profitable thing- she has trained her fans to be the most profitable fans. She is so unwilling to be disliked by anyone, her stance has become neutral by default. Taylor Swift, the Brand, won’t stand for anything that might lose her streams, that might hurt record sales, that could take her off the top 10. She equates her numerical success to true talent, she equates her streams and sales to recieving true love. And a politically silent billionaire is sitting precariously close to the wrong side of history right now.

(Especially as her extremely commercial and gaudy wedding guest list continues to be leaked… One “Vote for Kamala” tweet nearly 3 years ago isn’t enough to convince me she hasn’t become very cozy with some very unsavory types.)

As Taylor continues to show us who she really is, Rodrigo is also showing us what a popstar could be: an activist, an organizer, and a megaphone for greater causes. I also believe that Taylor’s blind spots have shown Olivia exactly where she needs to be right now to maximize the impacts of her advocacy.

Taylor Swift had the ability to use the last 5 years to show up for her fans. She could have used the Eras Tour to advocate for trans rights, she could have used her platform to speak up against deportations or healthcare or food security or anything that’s been under attack in the United States. She instead got to the top of her game and promptly forgot about those who lifted her.

So listen to Olivia Rodrigo’s new album. Take a few Taylor Swift songs off your rotation- it gets easier every time you do it, I promise. (And replace your Taylor Swift music with the music of the women performing at Daisy Chain Fields) This sort of movement is exactly what will give us the energy and the joy to keep our communities going as our rights continue to dissolve. As the world continues to spin (and fall apart), try to be an Olivia Rodrigo rather than a Taylor Swift.

I am a nearly twenty-six year old woman, living a completely unfamiliar life to any of the women who have come before me. I have a full-time job at a nonprofit, a university degree in Political Science, multiple years of full-time travel under my belt. I live on my own in a camper I purchased after graduating college. I dance and go to the beach on weekends, I write on Substack, I create friendships everywhere I travel. I feel throughout my life that the thousands of women who live inside of me lend me their strength. They send me their power that was left untapped in their lifetimes.

When my mother was twenty-six, she gave birth for the first time, bringing me here to Earth. My mother gave birth three more times after me, and she continues to parent my youngest brother at home as a fifty-two year old woman. I have passed the age my parents got married without ever having held a serious romantic relationship, and I am now passing through the ages my parents bore children with a willfully empty womb.

Women just like (and very unlike) me have given birth for as long as the world has existed. And yet, one of our body’s greatest powers, that of creation, has become weaponized against those who possess it- through the centuries-sharpened knife of patriarchy. The portal through which all life arrives is litigated, violated, disregarded and unresearched by the patriarchs who create and reinforce their systems of dominance. To live in a woman’s body is to carry an inherent risk with you- a risk that a man might turn violent or neglectful towards you, a risk that your womb will betray your mind’s desires. None of my foremothers had any say in whether they became mothers at all. And still more treacherous than the risks of womanhood are the promises of patriarchy.

Patriarchy delivered each woman that lives inside me the smallest life it could. They were forced into boxes- to be owned as their father’s property, then their husband’s, to be intellectually limited, to have no control of their finances, their future, their present, their reproductive systems. Their willpowers were beat to dust over the course of their lives. The entirety of their light was dimmed to the smallest flicker of a single candle, and forced to be kept indoors. I feel the forces of patriarchy as it continues to attempt to shrink my own life, snuff out my own light. And I feel the women’s rage within me when I am limited by my circumstances. I feel the limits put upon them and the limits put upon myself.

I feel the breath catch of the women inside me when I pay my rent, when I dance with women at the lesbian bar, and when my will supersedes that of a man’s. When I am rude, unruly, dirty and outspoken, the tidy and soft women who live inside me raucously cheer for me.

The thing is, I don’t particularly envy the lives these women lived. I feel in some way that they live inside me because they never got to experience many of the joys and freedoms I am allowed in my time and body. And yet, there is something achingly familiar about the lives they got to live- and there is a price I pay for my rejection of this same lifestyle.

“Rejection” isn’t even the complete truth of how I fell outside of this married-with-children lifestyle. Part of me also thinks I would capitulate my life to the first person I loved to declare their real, true romantic devotion to me. That I would turn my life and ambitions over for a comfortable and loving partnership, that I would have married or settled down by now had the opportunity presented itself. If I had been caught early enough by a lover, I might even have children by now at 25.

It’s not too difficult to imagine a world where my life unfolded this way- I grew up fantasizing about my future husband, my future wedding, my future children. I wanted 10 sons and 10 daughters, I wanted to adopt children from everywhere in the world, I wanted to foster kids who needed parents to love them. Mormonism is really insistent upon marriage and family, mothers and children- and I was bought in young. I have a baby name list on my phone that has been developing since 2016. (It has been put to use only to name cars.) The other young girls and I made wedding vision boards in church, and we had wedding fashion shows where we’d sport our mother’s own wedding dresses. I found a list of “requirements” for my future husband in my journal from high school not too long ago.

And yet, for whatever number of reasons, my tall, dark, handsome musician engineer Mormon husband never arrived to take me to get married in The Temple. I left the Mormon church at age 20, and felt lucky to be able to do so without a partner. Being married made the process so much more difficult for those who decided they wanted to leave Mormonism- especially because of the way the Mormon church upholds eternal marriage and family.

Even after leaving the church and coming out as queer, however, I found that I wasn’t able to find a long-term romantic partner. I love to date and connect with people, but it feels sometimes as though there is some basic incompatibility between myself and the very idea of romantic partnership. I dated some really fun and interesting people, but nothing stuck. Even as I grew to learn more about myself, even as I redefined over and over what I wanted.

The view I was given of the future was limited in imagination and scope, and even still that dead future lives somewhere in my stomach. I love my present. But I am no longer a Mormon, and I am also not a partner or a mother- the only things I was able to imagine for myself as a child. The life I live today would be completely foreign and entirely distressing to my 13 year old self. And yet I know logically that along the shores of this dead future I grieve are the lives of the thousands of women who lived it out themselves, at the cost of their entire selves.

And I now wonder, given these series of truths, if these women inside of me are steering the direction of my life a bit more than I would have previously imagined.

Today at work, a woman in her fifties or sixties came in to our nonprofit for a public assistance meeting. My coworker, another young child-free woman, and I were talking about childbirth as the older woman waited in the room for her meeting. I asked my coworker casually whether she wanted children someday, in regards to our conversation. Before she could answer, sitting across from us in the waiting area, the older woman interrupted our conversation to insist that neither of us should have children. Ever.

She told us, “I’ve had eight. They are incredible people who I am glad exist. But it costs you so much to have children, and not just money. It just costs so much. Go travel, go experience life.” I listened to the aged sound of her voice, and realized she spoke in the same voice as the women who live inside me. In the voice of the women who have lived the life of partnership, motherhood and security I feel so lonely and strange without.

Recently, I read the book Motherhood by Shiela Heti. The book is incredible, thoughtful and reflective on the concept of Motherhood. It describes in depths one woman’s struggle on whether to become a mother or not, her experience growing through her childbearing years, and the dreams she has of motherhood and the rest of life. She speaks about how, in many cultures, girls are seen as a means by which to bring about new boys. Having a son is ideal- but if you have a girl, perhaps someday your daughter will have a son to make it worth it. The daughter was never the birth to be celebrated, because her life would likely not be much to celebrate. She would only be a potential means for future boys.

She describes in the book how she feels like an end in herself. Like maybe she was the one who was supposed to exist, like she was the one who would be the one to make something of herself. She was the means to nothing. Her womb would not determine her power- she alone would determine her end.

And I wonder if this is the ultimate message of the women inside me. You are the end, Merriah. You do not need to create anything besides what naturally flows out of you. Poetry, nonfiction essays and infodumps, friendship, laughter, violin music, crochet art, songs, dance and the occasional brilliant idea flows out of me- and that needs no coercion. I don’t need to wonder whether I will dedicate the rest of my life to these arts- I simply know that I will. Motherhood should come with the same certainty. The creation I give is enough. I need not justify my existence with anything or anyone else.

Many of the women who live inside me I don’t know by name, only by spirit. But Merry Jo is the name of one of the women who lives inside me. My namesake, Merry Jo gave birth to her first child, my father, and died eleven days later from a very preventable case of toxic shock syndrome. It was 1974. She was twenty-three when she died. I visited her grave in Provo, Utah when I was twenty-three, about to graduate with my degree in Political Science. I realized upon examining her grave that I had now lived three months longer than she had. Something about outliving my own grandmother- even one I’d never met- filled my body with a completely unidentifiable emotion. I won’t even try to identify it now.

I have now lived nearly three years longer than she did. That fact fills my body with the same amorphous feeling I had staring down at her grave in 2023.

An idea Heti shares in her contemplations about parenthood is the concept that every life contains pain and discomfort. There is nothing you can do to avoid pain and discomfort- however we do have a choice in which pains we carry. And from that perspective, the emptiness I feel in an absence of partnership and parenthood gain a much deeper meaning. Because yes, there is a discomfort in aloneness. There is a discomfort in being different from the outline drawn for you by society. But that pain and discomfort is so undeniably mine, I can’t do anything but claim it as a part of my whole self. It feels like a limb, familiar and comfortable and incredibly easy to navigate life with.

The pain and discomfort of motherhood and child rearing is not mine. Availability to this path could literally have granted my grandmother the rest of her life. And I get to choose this very available path myself, as her direct lineage. With this context, the thought of parenthood feels almost off-limits- like the concept of a prosthetic. I might be able to learn to navigate life as a parent, but it would never be without an ache, without constant adjustments. The ache of missing autonomy, the ache of deprioritizing my own needs for the benefit of my nameless, faceless offspring. Those pains are not mine. The imagination of feeling this stress feels so much more foreign than, say, the imagined stress of running a hostel or spearheading community organizing projects.

And, importantly, the discomfort of navigating sexuality, politics, religion and personhood with a partner to consider is also not mine. This one feels a bit more retrospective- because I certainly would have loved partnership at any time of my life. And yet, with my own self-knowledge and romantic temperament, I never would have prioritized in these unfounded ways if partnered. I really don’t know in which ways I would have been able to grow if grasping onto anyone for too long. The travel, the ways I have been able to learn about myself, the independence I’ve welded, the skills I’ve gained, the depths to which I understand my body and psyche would never have been able to develop if I spent my life prioritizing someone else.

And I am glad, with this view of it all, I somehow was never able to connect well enough with anyone to prioritize them above myself. That feels like a very special gift.

The pains of discovering which parts of me will be lost to motherhood are not mine. The pains of wondering what motherhood might be… are. And the women in my bones have lived enough lives to calm the wonderings into musings, into art, into more freedom and more fire.

Those who sign up for the program get placed at various worksites across the country with a small team of other young adults. The program is an incredible opportunity to get a taste of the world outside your corner of the country- I traveled from San Diego, California to Anchorage, Alaska with this program. The experience was incredible, eye-opening, and connected me to some of my favorite people in the world.

Everyone I served with for that year in AmeriCorps was outdoorsy, adventurous, independent, and wanted to make the world a better place as much as I did. AmeriCorps had been lovingly nicknamed the “Hippy Military” by generations preceding us, and we all fit the bill pretty completely. We had so much fun in our time together, but there was one major limitation to our nature-service-travel-friendship experience: Hippies, even those of us in the hippy military, often like to smoke weed. And these particularly sad hippies worked for the United States government.

The entire corps got drug tested upon arrival at campus. I lived in my camper and traveled full time before AmeriCorps, and was usually pretty stocked up on marijuana- which is still federally illegal, despite being recreationally and medicinally legal in many U.S. states. I had stopped smoking 6 weeks before deploying to the AmeriCorps campus to give my body all the time it needed to expel any remains from my previous habits. I was still scared shitless, however, as I pissed an extremely hydrated, clean drug test on AmeriCorps campus’ drug testing day. I’d read on the Reddit page r/americorps that drug tests that came back with anything positive resulted in immediate dismissal from the program. Nobody in my entire corps got sent home on drug test day- which was apparently unusual.

Because of this restriction, many of us switched from being tree-hugging stoners to more of an alcohol-drinking blue collar vibe throughout the service year. However, my natural and inquisitive instincts sent me (initially) in a different direction. My team, Blue 8, consisted of myself and around 10 other young adults at this point of the service year. The first project we were assigned to was at the Redwoods State and National Parks, located in the Northernmost portion of California. We were placed in a house in the National Park itself- the experience was nothing short of magical.

The team quickly dove into the local community- volunteering even more on our off-time, attending a local church’s services, and participating in community LGBT events. It was not long before the team was invited by a community member to a Mushroom Festival on one of our days off work. The event sounded to be exactly up our alley- and it was hosted in a nearby town on the opposite side of the California/Oregon border. Excited to go to a new state, a small group from my team piled into our 15-passenger van and took the trek on the day of the event.

The event was literally exactly what you’d expect. Hosted in a brewery’s warehouse and parking lot, we pulled up to a… a pretty DIY Mushroom-themed Festival in southern Oregon. Hippies- the real-life ones not in the service of the U.S. government- were all over the venue. All sorts of mushroom-based products were being sold behind various hippy-run counters- mushroom coffee, mushroom jewelry and clothing, mushroom crafts of all kind. And of course, the real thing: pressed, dried, potted and labeled mushrooms. Books about identifying mushrooms. Vegan food stands had lines forming outside of them- many featuring mushroom-heavy menus.

At the time of the festival itself, it had been a solid 10 weeks since I had ingested any marijuana at all. I had been living in California, a weed legal state, but was restricted in my use by much more evil and sinister forces (the United States federal government). The threat of monthly randomized drug test floated over my head, keeping me in check. However, in my research about the particular drug tests administered to us, I came to the correct conclusion that psylocibin mushrooms would fall completely through the radar.

And while at this mushroom festival, I could not shake the idea that this was more than likely the perfect place to inquire about the acquisition of such a prize.

I have also never really gone somewhere with the intention of finding drugs. So I had no idea where to start, who to ask, what… to do. I felt so out of my league with the task at hand. I was at the festival with three of my teammates and my team leader, and I began to make not-so-subtle jokes about how fun it would be ON mushrooms at the mushroom festival. Of course, drugs of any kind weren’t technically allowed to be taken while serving with AmeriCorps. The team and I were still just getting to know one another, testing our boundaries and senses of humor with one another. And it was at this event, making these jokes, that I discovered that our team leader also had a particular affection towards this specific type of fungus. This was a complete fucking score- most team leaders had infamously long sticks up their asses.

Within a few minutes of establishing a common interest, the two of us (and one accomplice) began to visually scan the event, trying to figure out who to ask about the acquisition of magic mushrooms. There was a booth with a psilocybin mushroom growing in a little labeled pot, and we thought the blue-haired girl behind the table may be a good place to begin our inquiries. She didn’t have any magic mushrooms besides the one in her pot, but she pointed us in the direction of a long-haired pottery seller. When we approached him asking about magic mushrooms, he informed us he was fresh out.

Not to be deterred, we walked another lap around the booths, keeping out a much sharper eye this time around for someone to ask about acquiring magic mushrooms. When we were close to returning to the blue haired girl’s booth, we were approached by an older white woman wearing a silly red mushroom hat with white polka-sots. She said she’d heard our conversation asking about magic mushrooms and let us know the mushrooms we sought grew in her very backyard. In fact- she informed us- they grow everywhere in the Pacific North West if you know what to look for. She didn’t have any with her, but she knew exactly what they looked like, where and how they grew, and regularly distributed them to friends. Her name was Kerri.

Kerri and I exchanged numbers.

Over the following weeks, I became the most annoying person on Earth to my team and also to Kerri, poor lady. We spent hours upon hours each day in the Redwoods, and I would take photos of any mushroom I found growing out of woodchips in the forest. Kerri would let me know what colors and shapes to look for, sending over photos of the mushrooms from her yard for comparison. I would bring home various samples over the days, nibbling on them as the days went and taking note on any effects.

My collection of mushrooms grew, and I began keeping my different samples in little Tupperware boxes in my bedroom- which I shared with another teammate. There were a couple mushrooms I felt confident about, but never felt any serious effects on my mind when taking my little samples.

Until Thanksgiving day.

The weekend before the holiday, my team leader hauled the team out to a community garden to help pull weeds. Or something along those lines, I don’t know. The team and I spent the day working on various projects in this garden- weeding and digging and whatever else they needed. While working on a weeding project, I noticed something extremely exciting. Next to one of the flower beds, growing out of non-redwood woodchips, was a cluster of large, brown, golden-topped mushrooms. These all perfectly matched the descriptions I had been keeping my eyes open for, and I sent a picture of the cluster of mushrooms. She responded with a very promising “thumbs up” emoji. I don’t know, boomers are kind of weird.

I took the entire cluster of mushrooms home with me, hidden in my outdoor gear. I laid them out on my bedroom shelf to dry overnight. I stored them in a Ziploc baggie when they were ready for consumption. A few days later, on Thanksgiving Day, I knew how I was going to show gratitude to the universe.

My team and I celebrated the holiday by having a nighttime campfire on the beach. Our house, situated in the Redwoods State and National Parks, was only a few minutes walk from the beach. It was November in Northern California, so it was very regularly gloomy and cold. This night, however, the stars were out.

We drank beers, laughed, listened to music, and only a half hour or so after taking the mushrooms I knew I’d hit gold. The stars were dancing, the ocean was singing, and my brain felt like it was floating out to reach it all. The rest of the team had no idea that I’d been deadass serious about my hunt for magic mushrooms, and I kept my victory to myself- at first. I nibbled on the mushrooms throughout the night to keep the pleasant sensations going- I even took a really magnificently trippy shower after the campfire.

The first project of the AmeriCorps service project lasted only six weeks- and soon after Thanksgiving my team and I made out way back to campus to finish out the last of the six weeks with two weeks of service in Sacramento. Corps Member Training had taken place at an old retired military campus in Sacramento- at its peak, it contained around 200 young adults. The return to campus after the first project was extremely exciting, even though most of the teams were still spread out on their various projects. However- a couple of the teams were stationed close by Sacramento, a couple teams had upcoming weekend-long “layovers” in Sacramento as they traveled from one project to another.

I am deeply beloved by the universe, and as luck would have it, my closest friends from AmeriCorps training were all on one of these very few teams that would be in a very small radius for a very short amount of time. The chances of this happening was statistically very improbable. I let these friends know I had come across some truly magical specimens in the Pacific Northwest- and I had more than enough to share.

Two of my closest friends had a single weekend in Sacramento overlapping with my team before they finished up their project in Yosemite National Park. One other friend we were close with was stationed only an hour or so from Sacramento. The four of us concocted a plan to get together in that weekend we’d all be in Central California, and the Ziplock bag of dried mushrooms was to be the guest of honor.

This is the part of the story where I have to issue an apology: my dear friend, Molly, received a promotion in AmeriCorps after our first few weeks of Corps Member training. We spent the first few weeks frolicking together, causing trouble, etc. during Corps Member training. And then, suddenly, she was promoted to be my superior. Which made things a little weird in some circumstances.

Anyways, we needed someone to drive us as close as we could to our friend, stationed with his team in Stockton, California. We arranged to meet in a park somewhere close to the midpoint of Sacramento and Stockton- within the driving radius allowed to both groups. There were three teams staying on campus on this particular weekend, and we gathered a group together to embark on this trip to meet up with members of the fourth team stationed in Stockton. We recruited Molly to be our driver and official Team Leader of the outing. Unfortunately, this did put her in the position of being in charge of us when we were high… without her direct knowledge, per se.

We met the fourth team at the park, and reunited with hugs and running around. The month of training we’d spent together had been intense, and the month we’d spent apart had been difficult. It was so wonderful to be back with them.

We set up a picnic, and I distributed the goodies. There were no measurements, by the way. Only vibes and nibbles and hopes and dreams and passing the baggie. My intention was set: connect and love the people here. I loved them so, so much during AmeriCorps training. I missed them so, so much while I was away from them on my Redwoods project. I only had a few hours before we’d be gone for two more weeks of dispersed projects.

We shared stories about our projects we’d been dispersed to. Farah and Owen had been doing disaster recovery in Florida after a hurricane. Thomas had been distributing food in Stockton. The mushrooms elevated my emotions, making me feel light and sparkly as everyone talked. The mushrooms brought out other, sadder emotions in a couple of my friends as well. Life is big and complicated and emotional, after all. We tried to process everyone’s experiences together, making the trip a shared experience for all of us.

We got hungry in the late afternoon and piled the entire group, now around 10 of us, into the 15 passenger van Molly brought us in from Sacramento. Molly drove us to a little Italian mom and pop shop, we got a massive table and placed our orders. The lighting was a little low, football was playing on the televisions around us, and the group of us monopolized the entire restaurant for the early afternoon.

Before the food came out, two of my friends got scared and had to sit outside. It was admittedly much brighter and quieter outside, so I can’t blame them. I brought their food out to them when it came, and we ate together, sitting on the sidewalk. I was so unbelievably happy. I was basking in their presence. It felt like the mushrooms were causing me to explode into love.

We returned to the park and watched the sun go down. We sat on a little cow sculpture, and also at a park bench, and also on the grass. We held hands and hugged. We took pictures with a polaroid camera and more with a digital camera. And we giggled a lot.

The event only lasted a couple of hours, total. It was silly and fun and largely uneventful. We returned to our assigned housing within a few hours and rode the high of that day for the next few weeks. It was also by far the hardest I’d ever worked for a single mushroom trip, so the entire event was extremely special to me. It made me feel like a magical witch that was able to cast a nature spell on all her friends with her magical foraging skills. The story makes me feel more powerful and fun and adventurous than is maybe really necessary.

PS- I got selected for random drug testing less than a week later, and passed with flying colors. Yay for psilocybin mushrooms being undetectable in urine!

(Side Note: The only reason history books show Martin Luther King Jr. in black and white is to create the illusion of distance between ourselves and them. Colored film was absolutely available and in use during the Civil Rights Era.)

I continued to learn about the systems in the United States set up to prioritize the safety and prosperity of White people at the cost of everyone else’s stability. As my learning progressed, even the new title of “anti-racist” didn’t feel like enough to describe my emotions about racism. Racism only exists as a result of White Supremacy- and in order for racism to be uprooted, we must eradicate the far more pervasive concept of White Supremacy. And, most importantly, white supremacy must be actively eradicated by people labeled as white.

White supremacy is not just the belief that white skin is superior: it is the continuation of beauty standards modeled off thin, light, European bodies. White Supremacy is the continual spread of a dominant white religion, a dominant white economic system. The eradication of indigenous living styles comes alongside White Supremacy. The colonization of language, family, communication, food systems, and moving patterns. White supremacy is the medical industry treating bodies that vary from white maleness as deviant, it is the construction of legal systems to crystalize all of these systems as indisputable fact. To understate it: White Supremacy is in the air we breathe, the water we drink. It’s impossible to stop noticing it everywhere once you start. And the truth is most of us, people labeled as white, benefit from this system in some way.

Despite it’s pervasiveness and our undeniable downstream benefits, White Supremacy as a concept is generally agreed upon to be bad. Whether White Supremacy is a worthy ideology of upholding isn’t really even up for debate. Nobody in their right mind admits openly to being a full-on White Supremacist- even though the title has certainly become more popular as the Overton Window has shifted towards fascism in the last few decades. However, very few people with any real credibility, even on the far right, will openly claim the label. That doesn’t stop the concepts spread by White Supremacy from dictating nearly every moment of our life, culture, politics, and energy.

This gap is completely unforgivable to me. And now I am no longer just “not a racist”, or even anti-racist. I am completely, full-throated anti-White Supremacy. I have gone to the roots, and will fight the systems and conditions which bring about the existence of racism in the first place.

Now, while discussing uprooting White Supremacy, let’s talk a little bit about The Bystander Effect. The Bystander Effect is the widely known phenomenon wherein people are less likely to act helpfully in the presence of other people. When experiencing the bystander effect, the “percentage” of responsibility one feels to help is divided by the potential helpers- ten witnesses to an act of injustice may feel only 10% of the responsibility to contribute helpfully. However, if only one person were to witness, they may feel 100% of the responsibility to act helpfully.

Of course, the diffusion of responsibility in a group of people is not actually real- and 10 people would have 100% of the responsibility each to act helpfully. But the perceived idea of distributed responsibility does something to psychologically protect the non-actors. The Bystander Effect is the effect of a psychological blanket thrown over personal responsibility to cover cowardice and non-action.

The most common type of citizen in Germany’s Holocaust was the bystander- those aware, witnessing the destruction, but not directly involved in the genocide’s actual execution. Those who lied to themselves about not knowing what was going on in their own country- and did nothing to stop it- were the majority. Their untapped collective power was massive, and cost millions of lives. What a tragic reminder that it doesn’t always take malice to create the circumstances for a genocide. Only complicity. With this understanding in mind, I have always had the deep desire to avoid the fate of a complicit bystander: to say something, even when it is inconvenient, uncomfortable, or socially improper to those around me.

Because remember: social propriety is largely set up by a system of White Supremacy. A system set up by those who believed their manners and ideas to be the correct way of interacting- a system set up by those intent on distinguishing themselves from the “savage” brown people we deemed ourselves superior to. Being “polite”, “refined”, and “civilized” has drawn, over years of White Supremacy, a false equivalency to “good”.

(A fantastic example of White Supremacy showing in the form of social propriety/tone policing: a protestor standing up and screaming to Columbia University’s board of trustees about directly profiting off Israel’s genocide in Palestine through investments. In response to screaming in distress, “You are committing a genocide!”, someone in the row near the protestor says in response “You are committing obnoxiousness”. Only in a White Supremacist world is the sin of outspoken, unruly obnoxiousness even notable in the presence of a genocide.)

I have maintained consistency in my desire to avoid the lull of the Bystander Effect as our country descends deeper into fascism. However, while recently listening to an incredible podcast, (Our Common Nature, featuring Yo Yoma by NPR) that I gained further insight onto the hold the Bystander Effect has on everyday Americans.

The podcast series, featuring Yo Yoma’s travels around the United States to play the cello at different National Parks, is a truly beautiful piece of contemplative art. It explores multiple angles of United States history with a variety of geographically and historically diverse stories in an effort to find the common ground we all occupy as citizens of the United States. This project was taken on to examine and heal some of the political, racial and social tension many of us feel in this current iteration of the United States. In one of the earliest episodes, Yo Yoma is asked- more or less- “You are an immigrant and therefore chose to live in the United States. Why do you feel any responsibility for the racial and political unrest that exists within this country today?”

His response blew my freaking mind. He stated, more or less, that he believed everyone has a hand in being the solution to the problems the country has created, whether or not we had a personal hand in creating them. He chose to take on the responsibility of the United States’ future as an immigrant, because he believes he can be a part of the solution. He stated that, when he became a citizen of the United States, he was taking on the responsibility of the trauma inflicted upon those who had been oppressed and hurt by the United States. This project of his was intended to attended to that responsibility.

As an American descended from exclusively Europeans (who actually did commit many of the crimes against humanity Yo Yoma has claimed responsibility in repairing), I am extremely accustomed to the completely opposite, pacifying message: we (you and me, dear white reader) didn’t own any slaves personally- it was such a long time ago! (Remember the black and white photos?!) It isn’t our responsibility to fix the problems slavery (or colonization, or the perpetual destabilization of the rest of the world) caused. It’s not our fault! What on Earth would you even expect us, powerless white American people to do about these atrocities!?

I’ve always felt this intuitively this line of thought to be counter-intuitive. It’s not technically an untrue statement- we- you and I, that is- didn’t own any slaves. We are not… individually… what? responsible?

But what is it, then, to be responsible? Because the profit accumulated during the centuries of slavery (and the subsequent years of Jim Crow, redlining, and all forms of legal discrimination) has stayed accumulated at the top, with the white slave owners’ descendants’- and accumulated interest. Meanwhile, slavery is still fully legal within the United States prison system, which just so happen to be chalk full of Black people thrown in for largely poverty-related crimes. Working for sometimes pennies an hour. For other people’s profit. Really interesting, honestly how that happened to shake out. Purely by happenstance, I’m sure.

White people are suffering badly from the bystander effect as it comes to corrosive impacts of White Supremacy. We are living and breathing it’s toxins daily. Most of us uphold White Supremacy daily, in tiny ways without realizing what we’re doing. When we push Eurocentric norms onto other people- beauty standards, dressing standards, family structures, financial systems, gender conformity. White supremacy exists even in the very information we have in our mind- our lack of knowledge of other cultures, other languages, other types of music, other histories besides the European and the close by. For example, even the immense gap of knowledge I have on the entire histories (especially colonial histories) of Africa, Asia and South America- that gap is there because of White Supremacy. And I can not be a bystander to White Supremacy. So, while I may not be personally guilty of anything by having an immense knowledge gap- that gap contributes to a White Supremacist worldview that I have the responsibility to decenter, for the literal safety of my community.

BECAUSE WHITE SUPREMACY IS DANGEROUS! IT CAUSES YOU TO ACT RACIST TOWARDS OTHERS IN WAYS YOU DON’T ALWAYS UNDERSTAND! White Supremacy ingrains FALSE ideas in your mind about the world, placing you, dear White Person at top. It allows you to feel comfortable overconsuming, it allows you to feel qualified to speak on topics you are not qualified in, it allows you to believe your personal moral compass ought to be universal. So no- you don’t need to feel personally guilty for any of the sins of your ancestors. But the world you live in, the privileges you inherited from those ancestors, continue to cause harm to the communities around you. And it is our job to stop being bystanders in that harm.

Look, I’ve never owned a slave. Nor have I killed any Native Americans, nor have I invaded any country across the world to bomb them. My guess is you haven’t either, dear white reader. But my ancestors did these things- and by doing so, they created the world that you and I directly benefit from. Every day. In my air conditioning, in my gassed-up vehicle, in my full closet, in my full belly. I benefit daily from the spoils of White Supremacy, the world built to privilege the lightest skin. And I want to tear that world down.

I’m really grateful I am not the first person to embark on this deconstruction journey- I am only waking up to the depth of my own personal responsibility towards my community. I know the future of this struggle is Indigenous and Black, and I find my comfort in Indigenous liberationist ideologies. The practices, languages, relationships and systems that have been drown out to White Supremacy hold the future. We must return to those practices. I am extremely early in the journey, but I will continue to share as I move along in my decolonization. I also want to brainstorm and feel out ways to make deconstructing White Supremacy part of my daily routine- and ways to spread it’s demise.

Participating in these struggles is essential to the future and safety of our planet. Listening to the voices who have historically lead these struggles is even more essential- those who have had their ways of life (or roots) destroyed by White Supremacy. Supporting Black and Indigenous community organizers, uplifting their perspectives, decentering your own perspective, and understanding your blind spots can only lead to a safer future for all members of our community. Be an active participant in that safer future. Read more, listen more, participate more, ask more questions, and be part of the reason White Supremacy ceases to exist.

The 4B movement (or something inspired by it) is picking up steam in the United States, especially in lieu of Trump’s second election. Long before this, however, birth rates have been on the decline in the United States, and the recent arising of the “Male Loneliness Epidemic” sheds further light on the extent to which American women are pulling back on their previously held “responsibilities” to the opposite sex- much like how Korean women withheld sex, childbearing, dating and marriage. I’ve seen sentiments among women that it’s is becoming more and more difficult to even want to date men- given how horrifying the state of the world is, the violence and domination so engrained into men’s minds, and how much emotional, household and caretaking labor women have been forced historically to bear in most heteronormative relationships.

This shift in population (and values) is all very bad news for capitalists, who rely on a literally impossible model of exponential growth for their (extremely apocalyptic and self-consuming) version of the future. This model of growth relied on unrestricted access to women’s reproductive systems. Eventually, eventually, there would have to be a leveling off of population growth- and they fucking know that. Infinite economic (and population) growth is literally, literally impossible- since the Earth itself is a finite resource. Cancer will always eventually kill its host- and the cancer dies with the body. Capitalism is self-consuming in it’s desire to commodify everything.

I was never really sold on the “shrinking birth rate is so terrible” schtick- because I did not trust the perspective of those concerned. So far as I could tell, the shrinking birth rate in the United States is a direct result of reduced teen pregnancies (down 7% in just 2025), increased economic opportunities and health outcomes for American women, and a decreased tolerance for useless men. If your economy will collapse if equality for women is achieved, education is increased and autonomy is strengthened… perhaps your economy should collapse. Perhaps your economy was built upon women’s helplessness and unpaid servitude. Your economy depends on the lack of education, weakened autonomy, and complete financial dependence of women. Fuck your economy*.

*(If you’re interested in reading more about this topic I loved this book- Holding it Together by Jessica Calarco- a really concise, well-written and engaging book that describes in depth the history and intention with which the United States has systematically replaced it’s social safety net with the free labor of women.)

On a completely unrelated note- Republicans really, really want people to have more children than they’re having now. (And they’re trying to deregulate child labor laws. And refuse to eradicate child marriage. These are all, I am sure, completely unrelated topics that ought to be investigated separately.) The declining birth rate stresses them out, and they are not quiet about it! There have been multiple times in the last few years where the quiet part has been said out loud- my favorite recent example is of some Fox guy lamenting the decline in “teen fertility”. So fucking creepy. For those who are confused: teen pregnancy being down 7% in 2025 is AMAZING!

This desire for infinite growth, for restored access to women’s reproductive system, led the supreme court to overturn Roe vs. Wade in 2022. There has never been such a large reversal in reproductive rights in the history of our country. The loss was devastating, and has been paired with increases in women’s mortality, infant mortality, and women’s imprisonment.

So yeah, they want our babies. They want ‘em baaaad. They’re kicking and screaming about it. They want little consumers, little laborers, little child brides. And… a lot of us are done giving them what they want. We have our education, our friends, our lives, our jobs, our travel. Our birth control (which they will certainly be coming for next). In fact, in the CDC’s most recent report, 52% of adult women of childbearing age (20-40) have not “yet” had a child. THAT’S MORE THAN HALF OF US!

And also, yeah, the republicans and the Christians are screaming, crying, throwing up, whatever. (The democrats are also secretly letting them do everything they want, too so they are not let off the hook on this one. They might “care about our reproductive rights”, but their system relies on our subjugation just as much as the Republican’s does) But the Japanese* and the Korean women figured this one out first: we hold the reigns here. Their model relies on us. You can not oppress what created you. And women were not created to submit, and this should be your first piece of proof: given three generations of access to birth control, women’s shifting priorities has created a capitalism-threatening crisis. Which is, in my opinion, the best kind of crisis.

(*I researched a little about how Japan was handling their decreasing population, and I want to point out their initiatives included incentivizing marriage and children. They provide benefits, childcare, tax cuts. It doesn’t do anything to budge the birthrate, because the problem is much deeper than just a few benefits at this point. The entire structure must change)

So- what will actually, physically change within the next few decades in the United States if the birthrate (hopefully) continues to decline? There will be less children- and the primary concern seems to be “fewer people to- checks notes- care for the elderly”? Like what the fuck? Not enough people to pay into Social Security? Talk about the worlds biggest non-crisis. Are there not still billions of humans with hands and brains on earth? WE TAKE CARE OF EACH OTHER! WE LITERALLY ALWAYS HAVE.

Listen: Look at me: Literally all we need is each other. We don’t need social security if we have established networks of community care. The shift towards community care needs to be intentional, but it is completely possible to transition. I read this article recently, and it literally shifted everything for me. In this co-housing unit in London, 26 women over the age of 50 live together in a completely woman, community-oriented space to take care of one another as they all grow old. The most elderly in the group get multiple check-ins per day from younger community members- some of whom are not even retirement age. Care is very preventative. Medical issues are handled by healthcare workers, but the totality of the care is much more widely distributed.

The transition can- must, even, begin now. The transition out of reliance on some imaginary future of infinite growth, of some government that will forever be able to maintain the literally impossible economic system they have created. We can begin building communities- now. Preparing to alter the entire system of community care. We must create a better world of care for the babies we do have- and show them a better way to inherit community than we’ve been shown.

The shift will be political one day- large-scale change will literally have to come eventually. I think it’s soon. But before that, we must try and fill the cracks people might fall through. It’s a life goal of mine to build a community housing project, and I am reminded of the goal each day as I witness the people who are already falling through the cracks: the homeless who live all over my town in San Diego. You see, another primary reason I don’t actually really believe they care about an “ageing population to care for” is that they’ve already made it damn clear what they do with people who can not perform in the capitalist Olympics. You’re trying to tell me that the country with millions of homeless will ultimately bend over backwards for an aging population as capitalism continues to implode upon itself?

I’m sure other shifts will need to occur across multiple sectors of the world to adjust for an aging American population- but they will shift. The ideas and resources to create that shift already exist- we just need the guts to bring that world into existence. And we will survive this terrifying nightmare of the Social Security infrastructure crumbling and the ensuing end of the world.

The good news for literally everyone is that literally thousands of generations came before the existence of Social Security and capitalism- and they seemed to survive, reproduce and continue on with life just fine. Populations eb and flow. The answer for survival is ALWAYS community, and can ALWAYS be found MULTIGENERATIONAL, MUTIFAMILY HOUSING! COMMUNITY CARE! Non-parents have the ability to be in community with parents and create a net for them. Keep widening the net- keep expanding it to different members of your community- and it will be there to catch you, too. But it needs to be intentional, focused, and focused on the needs of the most vulnerable.

This stool-throwing incident occurred before she was even pregnant with Ever- the baby to link Taylor and Dakota together in a perpetual, un-ending cycle of violence and emotional abuse. Anyone who has watched even a single episode of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives is fully sick and tired of the screen time their relationship occupies- even when they are broken up, they are incapable of staying out of one another’s business.

The video Dakota took during the stool-throwing incident stayed hidden in the police reports and the depths of his camera roll for years afterward. What, though, from the incident wasn’t caught on camera? We know that Taylor came home from a night out with her friends, drunk. Dakota screamed at her for drinking (a choice that had nothing to do with him), and locked her in her own garage as some form of punishment, causing Taylor to be pushed into fight or flight. Trapped by her boyfriend, while intoxicated. It’s interesting to me how those details didn’t feel as important for him to document.

This is far from the only incident of abuse we are privvy to from the goings-on of the show, however. Throughout the viewing of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, there is a very strong theme of interpersonal, sexual, and institutional abuse. (I have previously written an entire essay about the frequency of sexual abuse depicted on the show, it’s connection to Mormon’s sexually repressed culture, and the ways Hulu has grossly mishandled the topics).

The first type of abuse I want to highlight is pretty universal to the women in the show: the structural patriarchy of The Church of Jesus Christ is inherently traumatic to be raised within, particularly as someone assigned female at birth. In the doctrine of the Church, 12-year-old boys are treated with more respect and deference than fully grown women. The lessons perpetually and institutionally engrained in girls’ heads are abusive at their core. A significant portion of a Mormon girl’s upbringing is teaching her how to adapt herself to be most effectively abused- often by the women around her.

Women are not even seen as full humans capable of going to heaven on their own according to Mormon doctrine. Women must be heterosexually married and invited by their husband to meet God in the next life, according to their own religion. This forces practicing Mormon women to prioritize their relationships with men over nearly anything else (and teach their daughters to do the same)- as it is literally doctrinally essential for their salvation.

In addition to the structural abuse of the Mormon church, we also saw interpersonal familial abuse leak through into Taylor’s own nuclear family in Season 2. In this portion of the show, their words overflow with highly damaging themes of Mormon purity. Taylor’s mother, Lianne, is overtly jealous of Taylor and her success, youth and beauty. Taylor’s father insinuated she deserved to be treated poorly by the men in her life because she “gave it up so easy”- and Taylor agrees.

Taylor does not have a foundation of self-confidence on which to stand up for her decisions and intuition- she doesn’t even know what her own personal morals and boundaries are. (Much like Mayci- as I evaluated in yet another essay about the ways she was forced to take blame for much of her own abuse). We saw her family verbally berate her for not performing the role of womanhood according to the standards of Mormonism. Her intentions are assumed, she is consistently spoken over and spoken for. She is shamed for not waiting until marriage to have sex, she is shamed for not wanting to marry the father of her child.

In addition to all this patriarchal Mormon abuse, familial abuse, etc., in Season 4, we see Taylor and Lianne take a trip to meet some of Taylor’s biological father’s family. Most of them did not want to be filmed, but one of Taylor’s biological father’s friends agreed to be on the show. In this portion, the friend of Taylor’s biological father relays an incident where he saw Taylor’s father hit Lianne in the stomach, while she was pregnant with Taylor, in front of a group of people. Taylor seemed most shocked about how the abuse took place in front of others- not that the abuse took place at all.

Season after season shows us the depth from which Taylor is a product of abuse. Her mother was abused by her biological father, and her mother still actively verbally and emotionally abuses her children. Taylor’s biological father left Taylor and Lianne, and the man who raised Taylor also abused her- if only in the culturally invisible, traditional Overbearing Mormon Patriarch way. She was raised in a religion that does not value women as independent agents of their own salvation, and has been taught her entire life the “correct” way to behave, without being taught to use her intuition or personal insight as guide.

This context and background feels extremely important for me to cover before discussing the abuse Taylor Frankie Paul did, in fact, perpetuate. Before Taylor Frankie Paul was ever an abuser, she was a victim of lifelong abuse. She was created and brought up in and taught abuse. These moments I’ve listed are only a few incidents from what I have been able to pick up on from on the show, which probably depicts less than 10% of their actual lives. There was (probably) no way for Hulu to pick up on the extent of the abuse Taylor has endured before they picked the show up, but they certainly know now.

Taylor Frankie Paul’s abuse (and her reactions to abuse) have become a primary source of fodder for The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives’ content. Taylor and Dakota have not been romantically linked since Season 2, but the producers of the show insist Dakota stay around for filming- probably because it makes Taylor act literally insane. Dakota lied to Taylor all throughout the beginning of their relationship, covering up for the various times he had cheated on her. Taylor seems to find out about a new lie of Dakota’s each episode of each season.

And yet, she refuses to let him go. Taylor and Dakota argue every time Dakota makes eye contact with another woman, regardless of if Taylor and him are romantically linked at the moment, regardless of where they are and whos around. Taylor has no qualms in dating around herself, but can not handle Dakota doing the same. However, Dakota intentionally plays the field closest to Taylor- flirting and hooking up with family members and acquaintances of hers to keep her spiraling out of control. And Hulu loves it.

Despite this never-ending cycle of toxicity Hulu has more or less forced Taylor Frankie Paul into for the show, despite their knowledge of her history of domestic abuse (both as a recipient and a perpetrator), and despite her infamous internet crash-outs, she was still somehow selected to be ABC’s 2026 Bachelorette. Anyone who has seen more than four isolated minutes of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives would have been able to tell you that Taylor Frankie Paul had no business being the Bachelorette.

Season 4 of the Secret Lives of Mormon Wives was released shortly after the announcement of Taylor’s Bachelorette Season. I hoped (in vain) that we would witness some legitimate self-analysis or improvement. Something that might indicate any form of emotional maturity or preparation for what was to come on the Bachelorette. I wasn’t alone in my worries- it seemed even throughout Season 4 and Bachelorette preparations the other women in MomTok weren’t completely sure about the Taylor/Bachelorette situation.

Before Season 4 was released and Paul was announced as the next Bachelorette, I thought it was an actual joke- wasn’t Taylor like, still heavily involved with Dakota? They slept together in Season 3, and when Season 4 was released it was revealed they had slept together twice more- once the night before she left for The Bachelorette. Her online behavior and her domestic violence charges were public. ABC without a doubt saw the videos of her throwing the stools long before we did. And they still cast her as The Bachelorette. It had to have been a calculated risk. A miscalculated risk, I would venture to say.

Because, yes, one week before her highly anticipated season of The Bachelorette was slated to air on ABC, Dakota Mortenson leaked the video of their 2023 domestic violence incident to TMZ in an overt act of sabotage. The extent of the violence perpetrated by Taylor that night was certainly downplayed by The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, but the content of the video was not surprising (at least to me)- I knew she was arrested that first episode for throwing stools at Dakota. Her daughter was present for the explosion and got hit by a bouncing stool, which has caused it’s own specific branch of backlash. I also know what Dakota had done to her off camera before she started throwing stools. And I also know her entire self-concept is warped by the endless layers of abuse I am positive she has yet to begin uncovering.

And as a result of the public outrage evoked against Taylor by the video, ABC cancelled the completely filmed season of The Bachelorette- despite the video being available alongside Taylor’s Domestic Violence charges for 3 years. (I can’t help but point out the irony here- the same domestic violence incident that launched The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives also brought Taylor’s season of The Bachelorette to it’s knees.) ABC cancelled Taylor’s season of The Bachelorette because we saw the video, not because of their moral uprightness or unwillingness to platform an abuser.

In the fallout of the cancelled season, I had a really hard time gathering my thoughts about what had happened. Taylor is clearly unstable, abused, and liable to harm people- including her own children- as a result. Hulu has used her as a cash cow because she is a conventionally beautiful woman with a huge following- and drives the drama on the show with her highly dysregulated nervous system. The drama on The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives continues to exists because Taylor is kept in an unhealable state of distress, trapped in abusive relationships.

When it comes to “consequences for actions”, there’s always the double-standard to contend with. Shortly after the cancellation of Taylor’s season of The Bachelorette, I saw a tweet that observed “if we cancelled every NFL game when domestic abuse charges were laid out, we’d still be waiting on the first ever pro football game”. Women are held to account for their sins while men’s lives and careers go largely unchecked from their violence. Rappers, athletes, politicians- proof of abuse doesn’t seem to permeate anyone’s professional lives, so long as they are a man.

But neglecting to hold anyone to account for abuse isn’t the answer, either, right? Taylor’s flying chair hit her daughter, who was a completely innocent bystander in the incident. Taylor’s nervous system is absolutely fried. She is not healthy enough to be on television, on social media, under such scrutiny, period.

Taylor has spoken about having ADHD, and I think one of her most obvious symptoms to me- as an ADHDer, is her emotional dysregulation that often comes alongside the diagnosis. Intense, explosive, and seemingly uncontrollable emotions rule Taylor Frankie Paul, her reactions, her relationships. Her friends and family all walk on eggshells around her, in fear of what she may feel at any given time. This is because she has been trained by her abuse to react stongly in her own defense. Speaking from experience, experiencing emotional dysregulation is both a major strain on interpersonal relationships, but it is also incredibly difficult on the personal psyche.

There could be more than just ADHD going on with her mental health (in fact, I suspect there is), but it is not lost on me that there are real solutions to genuine mental health issues, that generally don’t include sticking a reality TV camera in someone’s face for 3 consecutive years.

Taylor makes a show of going to therapy retreats, reading her scriptures, and posting videos of herself playing piano when she wants to communicate that she is “working on herself”. She likes to “take accountability”, but her accountability and alleged self-improvement is never paired with any noticeable change in behavior patterns. And the unfortunate fact of the matter is that, while Taylor remains in this state: reliant on the eyes of millions for personal success, those pulling the strings around her will never allow her to heal. It would be bad for business.

With all of this said, I do not think The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives should continue to exist (maybe at all, but certainly not) with Taylor Frankie Paul at the center. If the business (in this case, a reality show) relies on the perpetual abuse and timed triggers of an extremely vulnerable person, the business needs to stop. Taylor Frankie Paul probably has enough money, and Hulu certainly has enough money to take her offline and get her serious, long-term and intensive care. Her children should not be in her care while she is in recovery. I do not believe her intentions are to cause harm- but impact is far more important than intent in situations like these.

Dakota’s abusive actions (the release of the stool-throwing video to TMZ, for example) are far more calculated and pointed to cause intentional harm to Taylor. Her abusive actions stem from a lack of control of her emotions, a fried nervous system, and from being held in a permanent state of fight or flight.

I understand why the other Wives on The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives defend Taylor, even when her actions seem quite indefensible. They know their friend’s history and depth, and they also desperately want her to get better. They complain, on camera, when Dakota is around for filming. They see the effect he has on her. Storylines following the relationships and careers of the other women (including Mayci’s book tour, Mikayla’s skin health journey, and Layla’s struggle with eating disorders) have been cut to make more screen time for Taylor and Dakota’s ENDLESS bickering. They do not need to keep this relationship present for the show to be interesting. In fact, I’d argue that most of us are incredibly sick and tired of Dakota’s face on our screen.

Here’s my highly official proposal to Hulu: No more Dakota. Ever. There are plenty of exes and baby daddies who never make an appearance on the show at all. AND WE LIKE IT LIKE THAT! THE LESS SCREEN TIME THESE MEN GET, THE BETTER!! Taylor Frankie Paul needs like, a year of in-patient treatment for her various traumas and emotional dysregulation. Take that woman’s phone AWAY, and get the cameras OUT OF HER FACE. The other women can share their stories in the meantime during all that dead, empty airtime that would otherwise be filled with Taylor and Dakota’s arguments.

So, yeah. Taylor Frankie Paul is an abuser, sure. Her daughter will probably remember the night with the flying stool for the rest of her life. But Hulu has known this about Taylor for years and intentionally provokes her dysregulated reactions for their profit. They encourage her to be in situations where she will be dysregulated, and capture her dysregulation for content. Hulu/ABC/etc. keeps her like this, because it makes them money. Until, of course, it loses them money.

May this be a lesson for ABC/Hulu/Disney/etc.: don’t exploit people’s emotional dysregulation for views and clicks. And don’t expect those same people you exploit to behave like angels on their off-time. Also, please feel free to socially punish abusive men as freely as you punish abusive women: maybe we shouldn’t be watching male domestic abusers knock each other all over football fields if we aren’t able to watch a domestic abuser be The Bachelorette. And consumers: don’t allow your views and clicks to go towards the emotional exploitation of others. And don’t pedestalize people who’s entire personality is a conglomeration of various trauma responses. They will not always behave in ways that make you proud.

I had the Fearless tattoo done in October of 2022, a week or two before the release of Midnights. I was slated to give a huge speech at a conference hosted at my school, and the Fearless tattoo felt appropriate for the moment. Even more so with a new Taylor album drop so close on the horizon, and rumors of an ensuing tour. Swift hadn’t been on tour since before the pandemic had begun, and the excitement among her fans was palpable. It was a great time to be a fan of Taylor’s.

What followed was, of course, the famed Eras Tour. The musical exploration of her history and discography was a lightning-in-a- bottle cultural moment- one I absolutely participated in. The costumes, the bracelets, the girl’s trips, the celebration of femininity was extremely special to experience.

But by October of 2023, one year after I got my Fearless tattoo, I was aware that Swift had been deemed a billionaire from the profits of The Eras Tour (profits I’d contributed to, mind you). It had been projected for a number of months, but the actual crossing of the threshold felt important to me.

I knew at the time her billionaire status became official that it would eventually become an issue for me. Just historically speaking, I’ve never been the biggest fan of billionaires. But, I figured, so much of my time loving Taylor had come before she was a billionaire- surely I could be grandfathered into this fandom and keep a clear conscious about it for a little while longer. Theoretically, of course I didn’t love that Taylor was hoarding a billion dollars, but the scope of it didn’t feel real. I’m not sure how else to describe it- my para-social relationship with Taylor made it really difficult for me to stay consistent with my anti-billionaire sentiments. And, lets face it. I wasn’t exactly innocent of involvement- I was certainly a cog in the Swiftie machine that got Taylor to billionaire status.

For a while, I jokingly referred to myself as a billionaire hater first, Taylor Swift fan second. I couldn’t quite reconcile my politics with my various Taylor Swift posters tacked around my camper. But in recent months, I have found myself removing more and more of her music from my rotation, swiping past her announcements without a second glance, and changing the subject whenever she is brought up in conversation- unable to articulate my increasingly complicated feelings about my once-favorite popstar.

To understand the scope of it, I am going to take you back to 2019. Taylor Swift released a documentary- Miss Americana, which highlighted her journey to “come out” (so to speak) as a democrat, and the ensuing backlash that occurred. It was honestly a bit of an underwhelming statement, but meaningful movement for the previously apolitical Swift. She made a fuss about wanting to be on the right side of history, wanting to use her platform for good. It presented her as having a spine, which was a nice image to project out at the time.

In 2020, I listened in awe to folklore and evermore respectively as they dropped. Her writing was so sharp, the storytelling so clear, the music themes so consistent, both within and between albums. I noticed in betty upon my first few listens she seemed to be singing about kissing a girl- and I googled if Taylor Swift was queer.

(I now know betty is not about Taylor kissing a girl, but an imagined character named James. In betty, Taylor is singing as James, who wants to kiss Betty. That was not apparent to me in the first few listens. Anyhow, inventing a boy to sing about kissing a girl still feels pretty gay.)

Anyways- that google search sent me down a three-year rabbit hole. Apparently, there was so much evidence that Taylor Swift is queer- (complete with evidence of her kissing, living with, and sneaking around and lying to the media to hide being with various women)- there was an entire subsect of the Taylor Swift fandom dedicated to analyzing her lyrics through a queer lens. I will not get into the details of this right now, because it is honestly a little exhausting to begin with all the context necessary- but as early as her first album, there is evidence of queer subtext, female romantic interests in her immediate life, and attempts to cover them up.

Being the person I am- queer, a lover of pattern recognition, and already a Taylor Swift superfan- I became an active participant in the online Gaylor community. I made so many friendships and shitposts on the internet in that period of time, and really began building confidence in my own queer identity. I told anyone who would listen to me about the queer themes in Swift’s music- analyzed by my friends and I on our online spaces. I had multiple slideshows on the topic I had put together for various occasions I was known to pull out to present at a moment’s notice.

This was a really fun side-hobby- interest and investment in Taylor Swift’s various interactions with the LGBTQ community, her own history, the use of queer themes and language and callbacks in her music and various artistic expressions. I was involved in twitter, tiktok, and reddit communities dedicated to this sort of analytical breakdown. It became more and more uncomfortable, however, to stomach the Taylor Swift queer artistic analysis as the political turmoil in the United States began to heat up.

The first mentions of this in my Taylor Swift-themed social circles occurred during the first leg of the Eras Tour. She was alarmingly silent on any of the legal queer issues that were plaguing the country- she gave only a single speech during the first weekend of June in 2023 about voting to protect LGBTQ people. One very short mention, three months into the tour, in a LGBT-friendly stadium (Chicago, Illinois). She did not maintain the galvanizing energy to vote to protect our queer friends- even throughout pride month. The standalone statement itself highlighted even further the silence she did maintain on causes she had previously championed.

She used her platform to speak up for the LGBT community during her Lover era… why was her conviction so softened, especially now there were real legal threats to the community? She literally performed You Need To Calm Down every single night. The opportunity was present. She visited the arenas of states who were actively attacking trans people, and wouldn’t say a word to the crowds about the rights actively being stripped where they stood. She maintained silence on social media, on all her onstage speeches. It had been only four years since the release of Miss Americana, but seemed to already be shying away from her so-called activist convictions.

In fact, Taylor Swift’s only major political statement since the release of Miss Americana was her endorsement of Kamala Harris after Harris’ presidential debate with Trump in 2024. Swift has not spoken up about any of the movements of the government towards fascism, she has not spoken up about any of the actions that Trump has made in the country that impacted women, queer people, hunger, animals, or any of the causes she has championed in the past.

It was exhausting and frustrating to grapple with, but as time went on her behavior began to make more sense to me. Taylor Swift’s strength has always been her mass appeal to young women and girls of all walks of life. Her music specializes in the broadly specific: really distinct brushes of lyrical storytelling, encapsulating universal emotions. The Eras Tour was a successfully executed cultural phenomenon- which she was abe to accomplish by being highly consumable and palatable.

I saw a tweet that clicked the dissonance I felt about Taylor into place. I have not been able to find the original tweet, but it went something like this:

If you are disappointed by your favorite artist’s being silent on the most important issues of today, remember that the face you see is a carefully curated brand. The artist themself has very little choice about their presentation, their public stances. Artists are the working class of the upper class, and their silences is created for them by their circumstances, their position as the face of a brand, and the virtual breadwinner for an entire team. Palatability sells so much better than political dissonance.

Something like this had begun to brew in my mind already. I knew Swift hid certain elements of her personal life from her public image to increase her mass palatability. I also knew Taylor was extremely numbers-oriented in her presentation as a Pop Star. She gamified the charts in a way that no other artist had before, and has essentially worked out a way to achieve any numerical metric she could possibly want through limited edition sales and streams from her mega-fans. She wouldn’t do anything to jeopardize her numbers. Her father was well known to be the business-man behind her success, working the levers of her fame. The Swifts were very much in the business of editing Taylor down to make her sell better.

For a while, the able I was able to reconcile this was to separate these things in my mind: there is Taylor Swift the person, and there is the Taylor Swift Corporation. Is it possible the private citizen Taylor Swift was doing advocacy for the causes she claimed to be in favor of, if only in one documentary and album…. half a decade ago? Or… is descending back into political silence simply easier for her easy, sparkly, uncontroversial brand?

The more I mull it over, the less I can see her avoidance of difficult topics that plague the entire country as anything besides cowardice. She has accumulated more than a lifetime’s worth of wealth in her pursuit of mass appeal. Part of her success is due to her advocacy and pandering of the queer community- and the queer people who felt seen and appreciated by her Activism Era. She won’t use her platform to elevate LGBTQ causes the way she did in 2019 because it is no longer universally acceptable in the United States to unequivocally, vocally, and unapologetically support the rights of queer and specifically trans people, who are primarily the targets of today’s legal violence. Taylor’s strengths are palatability and numbers, and that makes her, in my opinion, a fucking coward.

And yet, when the Life of a Showgirl dropped, I couldn’t hold myself back from giving it a listen. I tried to refrain, but after only a half hour after the album dropped, I began my first listen-through. I kept a few of my Taylor Swift friends in the loop, texting along as I listened. I actually enjoyed the first few listen-throughs, even though I definitely recognized a few flops in the lineup.

I enjoyed the newest album as A Thing That Taylor Swift Made, and not as an acclaimed piece of art. And when I began to read other’s reviews of the music, there were certainly some valid critiques I had not picked up on through my first few listens. There were extreme moments of tone-deafness, coded language, and some seriously interesting moments of warped self-perception. And while the music was fun for my ears, (mostly) enjoyable as Taylor Swift Songs, they did not reflect the sharp lyricism, storytelling, imagery, and relatability of many of her previous works.

And it’s the fucking billionaire effect. I knew it would become a problem.

Taylor Swift built her entire brand on being relatable, awkward, the girl-next-door sort of cute. Famously bad at dating, a sort of awkward dancer, attacked by Kanye as a teenager while winning a major award, much of her brand is built upon garnering sympathy. Her music is good, but she created a cult following through her lovability. I remember watching her livestream of the Red album announcement in 2012, with an adoring group of Swifties in her actual living room. She serenaded them on her guitar. She hid secret messages in her lyric books, and then on her website when that launched. The Taylor Swift website had chatrooms wherein I spent hours with other Swifties, exchanging favorite lyrics and moments in her music videos.

And now that relatable girl-next-door was demonstrating some very blaring social blind spots in her newest album. This was literally bound to happen, but it’s occurrence was still extremely disappointing. Billionaires do not exist in the same world as the rest of us. They have a literally unfathomable amount of wealth, and they own it at our direct expense. The blind spots created by her social position were becoming more obvious, even to the loyalists. The sympathy schtick just didn’t taste the same coming from a billionaire.

At this point in her career, Taylor is surrounded by yes-men. Her crew, her producers, her family- nobody can hold Taylor to account anymore. She is not held to the same music writing and production standards as she once was, but expects the same acclaims for her half-baked showgirlypop album or her tortured word vomit. (I am so, so disappointed that she won Album of the Year for Midnights. To this day. Like, holy shit- Midnights and not RED? You sick fucks.) She is not pushed musically by those she surrounds herself with, she is no longer relatable in her life experiences, and her writing suffers for it all. She has dropped many of the things that actually connected her to her audience (like her advocacy, like feedback, like collaboration, like critique) in exchange for sloppier, less relatable, less lyrically sharp music.

It’s gotten to the point in my life where things really are that serious for me. The Taylor Swift character has failed to live up to the standard she has set for herself. Maybe she is a loud and proud and avid donator and advocate in her personal life. There is no denying, however, that a deliberately neutral platform, hoarding a billion dollars, and a noticeable decreased touch with reality is a statement in itself. Which, since Miss Americana, I would say her words have absolutely fallen short.

She built an entire facade of activism when it was popular and interesting to dislike Trump (remember, 2020 was the election Trump lost. That’s when tides were strongest against him). It was popular to do, and she was legitimately praised for her work with the LGBT community and for the various candidates she endorsed. But when those same communities, her very fans, the people who literally built her career, were under actual attack, her platform was no longer a place for her to advocate. Our investment failed. She sold out.

And so now, when I shuffle my music and Taylor comes on, I take a moment with the song. I think about whether the song means anything specific to me, or whether I just have it on rotation as a Taylor song. I’ve “unsaved” around a dozen songs recently. The posters are slowly coming down. (I’m also keeping a couple up).

It’s like I’ve gotten the ick. And I don’t enjoy Taylor Swift music, news, and media just for the sake of it anymore- it’s turned to distain. I enjoy many songs from every era (even showgirl and tortured poets) but I am having a very difficult time with the whole package anymore. At this time in history, it is irresponsible to be so disconnected with the people around you. It is irresponsible to fumble an audience so large- an audience you cultivated in part by creating a false activist image.

Miss Americana, being on the right side of history is not a one-time-thing. You have to do it when it makes you unpopular. You have to do it when it hurts your streams. And if that is your highest priority, I have no time for you anymore. I just can’t anymore.

I was also raised on the Mormon myth- a descendent of the weary, tired group of European immigrants and converts that were run out of three different states in the United States before settling permanently in Utah. Mythology surrounds Joseph Smith, his visions and his leadership. Downtrodden, the Mormons were targeted by various local governments, hated for having God’s one and only truth.

Both the American and the Mormon myths are, of course, just that. Mythical. Fabrications woven to cover the much more unpleasant reality. Myths that boast of courage and honesty from the American myth cover the cowardice and evil required for the perpetual domination of white supremacy, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the eradication of native human populations, and patriarchy. Myths that boast of oppression and rejection of Mormons cover the reality of the violent white supremacy the church is built upon, the patriarchy it instills, the inequalities it perpetuates.

These founding myths are actually, in some ways, incredibly important. They’re lies. But they are aspirational lies. Aspirations of honesty, integrity, diversity, inclusion, and progress that some of us who are lied to are actually capable of upholding. And so we must uphold them.

And that’s the paradox America finds themselves in. Those of us who have truly embraced the America they tried to sell us- a beautiful, diverse place with protected lands and a rich history of rebellion and fighting tyranny- now find ourselves in opposition to the American Empire.

Throughout my life, I have been able to break through the mythical nature of much of my upbringing (there are also, of course, myths I have likely not unraveled). It is disorienting, for sure, but the aspect of this deconstruction that has been most interesting to me has been the fact that so much of my moral compass and my actual value system is still aligned with what these systems claim to believe. The moral compass that the Mormon Church gave me is the moral compass that directed me permanently out the doors of the chapel. And now, the founding myth of America is leading me to the same point.

I said the pledge of allegiance far too many times as a child to not have the words “liberty and justice for all” graved onto the inside of my skull. I might be autistic with the tendency to take things too literally, but actually I do believe in the literal equality of worth of all human beings. Which is why I am vehemently against the reign of terror being brought down against the entire world by the hands of the United States.

If the United States wanted to overpower the world through bombs, tarifs and sanctions without a word from their citizens, they ought not have lied to us about the moral backbone of our founding fathers. They ought not have impressed upon our minds the importance of equality, liberty, safety, life. They ought to have expected some of their fabrications to actually sink in. I feel called to uphold the country to the standard it set for itself.

These opinions are not uncommon. On my particular corner of the internet, I am constantly bombarded by people frantically trying to educate one another on the atrocities in the world. Sharing the faces and the voices of those suppressed by more mainstream news sources has become routine for myself and many of my closest friends. So often, the talking and sharing and reposting feels useless- even if it is actively fighting the suppression of information. Shouting into the void with each other- trying desperately to figure out any small way to alleviate one another’s pain in the mess.

So often, the refrain “why doesn’t anyone fucking do something” is echoed time after time in comment sections. Why didn’t anyone fucking do anything about the Epstein files? Why doesn’t anyone fucking do anything about Trump’s senseless attacks- on his opponents, on his citizens, on nations abroad? Why hasn’t anyone done anything about the persistent cuts to healthcare and food access? Or the stagnant minimum wage?

I’ll admit: I’m one of the commenters. I do some in-person activism. My full time job is helping low-income people get signed up for government assistance- a source of activism that takes up the majority of my waking hours (and also the reason I have not been able to write nearly as much these last few months as I would like. The ideas are still flowing, they’re just clogged up right now in the mess of menial tasks clogging my brain). I did a whole year of unpaid service to American communities through AmeriCorps. I march at protests and wear my Bans Off Our Bodies t-shirt and my Black Lives Matter t-shirt and my Palestine flag pins.

But I’m kidding myself if I believe anything I have done has made even one iota of difference to the overall structure of our oppression. Maybe I have helped temporarily alleviate some pain for some people at some points. But none of my actions will permanently shift the way the working class lives their lives on a day-to-day basis. Not in the way the warehouse fires might.

When I first watched the video- you know the one-, it didn’t quite process in my mind what I was watching. Artificial Intelligence is so rampant online that I don’t tend to take any video I see at face value anymore. I liked the sentiment, but I didn’t know it was real. The original video caught my feed first, and I didn’t see any additional commentary on the incident attached to that very first exposure.

A few scrolls later, a video of a leftist content creator I follow popped up- commenting on the fire video I’d just seen. Describing the inevitability of actions like this given the increasingly oppressive circumstances we are all under. The wealth gap is larger now in the United States than it was during the French Revolution. When we are not making enough to live- when there is no longer enough to eat- things as trivial as property damage begin to look a lot more non-violent. I went back to watch the video, understanding. Oh. OH. My god. Finally. Someone is doing something.

The comments I scrolled past reflected my feelings of hope. He was quickly nicknamed “warehouse Luigi”- or WaLuigi (after the famed Luigi Mangione, the United Healthcare assassin.). Nobody was harmed in the fire he started. There were only 20 employees at the warehouse at the time of the fire- all escaped the premises without injury. No bodies were harmed. Definitionally a nonviolent act of protest.

These are the sort of characters our mythical heroes- (George Washington or Joseph Smith, take your pick) are built to resemble. The arsonist burnt down the warehouse, recorded it, and posted it to make a point. To identify a point of pain that nearly everyone can relate to. He injured no humans. He demonstrated solidarity, consciousness, and timing with his actions.

He is being swiftly taken down by the law, which highlights even more clearly how corrupt the United States justice system is: we have still yet to see even one American arrest of anyone involved with Epstein. I believe the arsonist knew the risk he was taking when he lit those fires, when he posted that video. He saw a bigger picture, and I see it, too. And yet the perpetuators of the American myth- those who still see the Boston Tea Party as a point of historical pride- are those who are taking him down.

I’m not really interested in the discourse I am sure is arising around this issue, because I know those with the loudest opposing opinions will be held by those with the most comfortable lives. Those who hold stake in the blazing businesses themselves. Those with the most to lose if and when the working class receives their demands.

The richest are not the only ones who will give voice to opposition. There are also those who are so entrenched in the status quo- those who are vaguely in line with the demands of the working class, but bitch and nag at the tactics used to gain attention. Martin Luther King has a name for these people in his Letter from Birmingham Jail- White Moderate. In King's words, the white moderate is

“more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"…

Progress is never given politely and kindly because we asked for it. Progress is won, fought for, and sacrificed for. And property damage is the most catastrophic form of nonviolent damage you can perform against a capitalist- because they have built their entire world upon physical things. They hold their own personal and social value in the ownership they have accumulated. We- the working class- have our values with one another. With the friends, and family members we want to take care of. With our futures, our children, our communities, the futures we want to build with one another. And right now, the capitalists’ accumulation of wealth has come at the expense of our communities and futures.

They value their capital more than they value our communities. We must value our communities more than we value their capital. And now, we are lighting their capital on fire- just as they have done to our communities for generations now.

This is the first (or maybe second- thank you Luigi) step of a much, much longer game. The United State is poised for a revolution of the working class. This graph alone from Federal Reserve Data should be the source of at least 10 warehouse fires per day:

A growth of class consciousness is an objectively good thing. The current system is upheld and maintained by a billionaire class of cannibalistic pedophiles who extract and hoard literally as many resources as possible from us. Truly, any possible alternative we could dream up will be better than what we are being subjected to right now. And when this fire lit with the accompanying video, many other warehouses across the United States began to mysteriously catch on fire. How strange.

The working class has had their pay, benefits, and quality of lives depleted for decades (mostly thanks to our lord and savior Ronald Regan)- and we are now frogs boiling alive in a pot of water. We were promised ice water would trickle down into the boiling pot. It has not. Unions are all but gone, benefits packages are regularly cut, and the country’s social safety net is unreliable at best.

Nothing will not change if nothing changes, and fires are very famous for the change in matter they bring about. Wood must burn to become smoke, then ash, then soil. Forest fires are extremely important to the ecosystem of a successful forest. While it might seem counterintuitive, forest fires clear out old brush to make space for new life, stimulates the growth of new life and creates a better environment for growth to occur. What sort of changes could come from an increase in class consciousness? What changes could be brought forth, what growth could be increased, what old systems could be cleared out? What a beautiful metaphor for the future we could build from these warehouse ashes.

Fortunately, with the invention and spread of birth control, the increased educational prospects for women, and greater variety of lifestyle options available for women across the world, women are more and more able to make informed decisions about their reproductive futures. We have seen the significance of this shift through decreasing birth rates in the United States. Fewer and fewer women are choosing parenthood for themselves, and there’s hardly any wonder why.

There are many social media accounts across platforms dedicated to “reasons to stay child free”, and it is undeniably becoming a movement among young women in the country (arriving not-so-coincidentally alongside the “male loneliness epidemic”). Women who choose not to have children celebrate their freedom, their disposable income, and their hobbies with one another- maybe the first generation of literally all time to be able to do so with such ease.

This is a great thing. More of the children that are born onto the planet born intentionally. Women are being more thoughtful about whether they become parents at all, and women have more choice in their own pregnancies and futures (obviously these autonomies are not consistent around the United States and are under constant attack. However, the general trend of generations has been towards more education, more autonomy, and more access. We are experiencing the outcomes of generations of movement. We have the momentum on our side, even with the attacks we constantly endure.)

And in the discussions about thought and intention into becoming a parent, I haven’t been able to separate this from my own personal conversation I have about myself. Many of the conversations had on Regretful Parent subreddits are helpful and meaningful. Many of the stories shed light onto how difficult it is to be a parent with an unhelpful spouse, or how difficult it is to be trapped into parenthood. The ways children have been used as a trap, as a weapon, as a bargaining chip to abuse and manipulate various women across the world. How motherhood specifically drains you of your previously held identity.

And some of the conversations are upsetting to read. The discussions that disturb me the most are the parents, oftentimes mothers, violently railing against how difficult and horrible it is to raise a disabled child. Of course, the United States of America is not a country that has been set up for the safe and effective parenting of any child. Disabled children least of all. Autism in particular can be spoken of in particularly heinous terms by their parents, and the language used can often be very upsetting to digest.

It’s very difficult to not read these conversations about disabled children through the lens of my parents’ experience raising me. I was diagnosed with autism in 2025, and had a very rocky relationship with my parents growing up. My parents have, by no means, identified themselves with being regretful parents. They try very hard with me, they love me very much- but I was their oldest- and I am queer, autistic, and raised very Mormon. I have an inherently strong resistance to all authority. I was set up from the beginning to have a rough go of it with them- especially in their more devout and less emotionally regulated days. More than anything, these reddit stories have made me realize I regret existing on their behalf.

They began having children in their mid-20’s, and I am the oldest of four children. No critical thought went into the question of whether to become parents- both of my parents were raised in large, Mormon families with 5 siblings apiece. Having multiple children was what you did with your BYU-grad Returned Missionary spouse. This way of thinking feels very antiquated to me now, but it is impossible to judge people in the past with the measuring stick of today. Even though I kind of want to.

The problem is, if having experienced my own childhood is enough evidence, raising a child with autism is difficult. Research on girls with autism and ADHD was so nonexistent there were absolutely no eyes on the lookout for my symptoms- or my discomfort, my pain. I didn’t have any major delays as a baby my parents were privy to. And because of my relatively high verbal/academic/physical competence I remained undiagnosed, untreated, and as a result had all of my additional emotional and physical needs unmet my entire childhood. I was held to a neurotypical behavior standard, and could quite never measure up. I was failed by my parents and teachers in these years, but they were also failed by the system long before they failed me. I was crushed by a cycle of inadequate education, misogyny, poor funding and apathy.

I don’t think I will ever feel comfortable putting anyone else into that same cycle of inadequate care on purpose. These regretful parents of reddit have shown me through a third party lens how systemic these problems are. I understand why parents of autistic children go online to share their horror stories. It is important to know, before having a child, that they could be autistic. Raising an autistic child has many challenges associated with it, particularly in a neurotypical world. When parents complain about their autistic children on these forums, they often fail to understand the real issue is structural. There isn’t anything wrong with their child- their child is simply reacting normally to being forced to operate in a state of constant discomfort.

Ultimately, in the real world, the system does not get the weight of the blame when autistic children act up. The disabled child gets punished- as I experienced multiple times in my own childhood both in school and at home. The regretful parents speak of the ways their autistic child has complexified and ultimately worsened their family dynamics, and I see those sentiments reflected in many interactions I have had with my family over the years.

The issue with autism is that it both

• is a bodily and neuro sensitivity that is very easily traumatized by external forces. The five senses are all heightened and sensory overload is common for autistic people, which can be traumatizing to the body. AND

• autism is often displayed as a social ineptitude, which then opens the door for neurotypicals and those in power over us to inflict abuse upon us- verbal, physical, social, emotional, etc.

Autistic people are therefore vulnerable to being traumatized on multiple fronts. Traumatized people are more difficult to be in relationship with- especially if the traumatized person sees you as someone who inflicts trauma, or someone in a position of power where you might wield power or authority unfairly. (Autistic people often have an inherent distrust for authority- hierarchical social norms often feel strange, arbitrary, and wrought for abuse.) Being raised in an environment completely incompatible with your neurotype is inherently traumatic, and meltdowns result from an extended period of discomfort.

I wonder what life could look like for autistic children in a world that is friendly to them. I don’t even know what I could dare to imagine for a better world, but I know I can not allow another autistic children to experience this. I imagine what could have become of my parents if they were not roped into parenthood so young- if they had learned more about the world and themselves before they gave way to new life. I don’t blame them, of course, for their choices. I just wonder what life might have been like for some other child of theirs, born into a world where they had already deconstructed their stuff (patriarchy, Mormonism, whatever) before becoming parents.

I know parents can’t be held to this standard- of feeling stable and secure in their lives and sense of self before having children. It has not always been possible (and is not always possible for everyone)- socially, physically, religiously, financially, practically, whatever to prevent pregnancy. My parents were Mormon-ed into having children young. It is, however, the standard I honestly need to hold myself to to feel comfortable considering parenthood. I think this is a new bar being held by my generation, because we actually can- we have the background we need and the resources available. Birth control is better for us. We have more options. Less of us even have partners.

I don’t think my parents regret having me. But in reading about other regretful parents, it has made me realize how truly unsuitable American society is for any form of divergence. Mothers are expected to be 10 different types of caregiving professions in one, and some children need more support than is strictly available for the average working family. When a child needs more resources than a two-parent family can provide, there are very few resources available outside of the legal and mental health facility systems. That is not a child’s fault for needing more help than a system is able to support them with.

Maybe the conclusion that I am regretful of my existence is sort of eugenicist when you boil it down- I just regret the weight my existence adds to a family who was unequipped for it. I don’t regret needing the help, but I regret what my lack of help did to my family, to my ability to connect with others, to my nervous system. I regret that, in my brain, my family- the ones who do ultimately love me the most- are the face of the systemic abuse I endured. I do not think existence here is worth passing on, truly. I do my best to bring good to the earth, but the horrors of the planet are too unspeakable to really feel anything I can do will bring balance. It speaks truly to the cycle of natural selection- populations (baby)boom in times of plenty, and plummet in times of scarcity.

I want to write an essay on the child free movement next, because I think that’s the natural flow of this essay. Also it’s kind of fun- you guys sort of get to see what I’m working on in therapy via my writing.

https://www.reddit.com/r/regretfulparents/

When I came to the conclusion I never thought the United States would elect a woman to be the president of the United States, I was a year and a half into my education at Utah Valley University. I was a Political Science major and minoring in Gender Studies. My emphasis in Political Science was in in Peace and Justice Studies- wars, peacebuilding, ethics. I studied abroad in Cuba. Throughout my education, I intertwined what I learned in Gender Studies into all of my Political Science work. I did presentations on abortion laws, anti- transgender legislation, and did gendered analysis on election results. I loved politics, and I could never stop thinking about gender.

And I didn’t really know how I’d come to the conclusion, but I had. The United States, the way it was built, was not capable of it. It would not happen. I can explain why I felt that way, and maybe this essay will do that in a round- about way. Instead, however, of talking about Trump’s races against Harris or Clinton or whatever, I am going to talk about the origins of American capitalism and patriarchy, and the disgusting ways we see power wield its head when we give it up.

It’s been about two months since the massive, three-million file drop from the FBI of the files, interviews, images and emails released from the Epstein Resort. I haven’t talked about it (on Substack- I’ve talked about it plenty to everyone around me) because I honestly needed a LOT of time to physically and emotionally register the depth of the disgust and rage I felt. But I think I have done most of that now. OR at least, I think I can actually put words to the disgust.

I think, first, and foremost, the surprise was in the overtness and the depravity, not in the actual… existence, I guess, of the abuse. My reaction was more visceral than anything. The undeniable language indicated the direct involvement of our President and so, so, so many powerful people. Evil, people. People who are so sanitized, so polished, so legal and systemic and airtight with their evil. So much more evil than any “terrorist” they tout as a threat to American’s safety. I knew this, what I was seeing in the files, was same sort of torture the slave owners had enacted upon their slaves. Of course I did.

But how ignorant of me to have believed, or maybe hoped, that sort of evil, that sort of raw, unfiltered taste for power, had died off somewhere in the 1860s. The baby-raping, skin-eating, child enslaving. I will not white wash what was clearly spelled out in those files. No major sources are reporting on files, because they are all owned by one of Donald Trump’s buddies. No, I’m an not kidding they ARE ALL OWNED BY THE SAME GUY. (You are consuming propaganda, probably daily, whether you know it or not. So it’s better to know it.)

It was a torturous awakening, and for a month or so my sleep schedule and actual day was impacted by he horrific things I saw in those files. And no doubt, the horrors are still front of mind- but I have digested the information in a way that I feel I can now take productive action with it- or at least form words around. This evil has always existed, and we now have a flashlight onto it. Let us use this flashlight and excavate the rotten, stinky filth the foundation of the United Stated of America has been built upon.

In my reflections, I have come down on three evils that have been baked into our country’s foundation, and have allowed for the existence of a secret pedophile island run by the world’s most rich and powerful people: Capitalism, Patriarchy, and Whiteness*.

*When I say “whiteness”- I do not mean the very existence of people or skin some would call White. I have skin that is would lead some to believe, correctly, that I have exclusively European heritage. This is not what I am talking about. What I mean by “Whiteness” is the concept of Whiteness itself. The imaginary idea that there is anything inherently superior or inferior about anyone due to the pigment of their skin. Whiteness has been used as a tool to divide us from our siblings and comrades with more melanin because of some imagined divide between us- that the billionaire class wants to exploit. Whiteness is culturally neutered, and views historical and brown cultures as evil, pagan, Satan-worshipping, and in need of extermination. This evil still lives within the concept of whiteness, and people considered white still carry the generational benefits of this extremely made-up, evil system. I want to write a whole essay about this.

SO yes, I was absolutely horrified by what I saw on Epstein’s Island. But then I began to think- Donald Trump isn’t even the first U.S. president to have raped a child- Thomas Jefferson had 6 children with his SLAVE, Sally- starting when she was only 14 years old.

And he has a starring role in Hamilton. He’s one of the ones we supposedly idolize ourselves after.

And in my studying and learning and thinking about just… all of this in general, I think about how commerce wasn’t solidified as a race to the bottom with the goal of maximum accumulation until the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade. The origins of The United States of America- the original sin of our nation- helped solidify the beginnings of modern capitalism. There is no reforming what is inherently, at it’s very base, a system built upon the backs of slaves.

Their ownership of slaves (the basis of capitalism) and the general state of women’s rights at the time give us a peek into the second evil: the patriarchy embedded into the creation of this country. We can’t give the founding fathers as much credit for creating Patriarchy, but they did very little with their one wild and precious lives to do anything to combat it. Placing men at the top of a hierarchy with women, children, and nature all in “servicing” roles is counter to nature.

Created capitalism, imbedded patriarchy, and ultimately, The United States of America invented the concept of whiteness. The United States of America has effectively eradicated it’s lands’ indigenous population, and created a brand-new category for European immigrants to set themselves apart from those they deemed as lesser. And the entire nation was created around this superiority.

And that is what America is. That’s what America has always been. We, The United States of America, are the culmination of patriarchy, capitalism, and whiteness. We are what happens when extraction is the only model of function- no creation, no nurturing, no honoring what is, what could be, or what once was. Only greed for more personal accumulation. Hierarchy, dominance, competition, and extraction. That’s what America requires of you to become the True American: the most generalized, most extracted, the most culturally neutral. Hence, the creation of whiteness. The most neutered, the most cut-off of all histories.

When you are completely cut off from your own history- a self-mutilation that Whiteness requires- it becomes much easier to tear others from their histories. How could something as unimportant as history, roots, and culture bear weight to these people? They must be savages. As though the true act of savagery isn’t disregarding and abandoning your own historical practices, languages and religions.

I didn’t have the language for all or this in 2020, when I decided I didn’t think the United States would ever see a woman as President. I didn’t have the depth of understanding of the world I have today. But I had my pulse on the correct idea, and I have only become more convicted of my opinion.

And, after all this time, I have the words for it. The United States continues, to inflict its most actualized form of capitalism around the world. It insists upon itself internationally: dismantling countries democratically elected leaders, raining bombs, inflicting hot war upon hot war on countries that dare to nationalize resources or collectivize wealth. Anyone, actually, who dares do anything but respect the highest international order of global capital wealth. The extraction of the wealth from those who can not fight for themselves: who can not defend their land, who can not survive the plague, who can not share in the audacity that this violence requires.

And I did not think, at 20 years old, that a nation who’s entire history, foundation, and future were built upon this legacy, was capable of electing a woman as president. The winds of history were too strong, the pulse of patriarchy too alive. And I agree with my stance. I do not think, as long as the United States exists (hopefully not much longer), we can expect to never see a female president. We have elected the worst mankind has to offer in their stead. And this isn’t even necessarily something to be grieved- it’s something to be observed with curiosity.

Because why would we ever elect a female president to run this, the most patriarchal, white, and capitalist of countries? The country who’s continual violations of international law, who’s history of covert invasions, who’s lack of consent of the governed, or the invaded, has never been a reason to stop. The United States is violent. The United States has created unspeakable horrors across the globe in the name of Capitalism. These horrors are disproportionately felt by those in the Global South, who are primarily not white-skinned. Who are valued less when their lives are sacrificed, when their economies are destroyed, when their natural resources have been stolen. We have done this by touting masculinity, by touting whiteness- speak softly and wave a big dick, or whatever the saying is.

And maybe, in some version of this universe, we may have gotten it together to elect a woman. But the country is not based around either honesty or integrity. We know it doesn’t even really matter if Clinton won more votes in 2016- the country could not allow for something like that- a woman in the highest seat of patriarchy- to happen.

Because, even if Clinton or Harris had won in their respective election years, that’s what their position would have been, even still. They would still be sitting in the highest spot the Patriarchy grants anyone in the United States- or perhaps even the world. Their presence there would not ease the horrors the United States inflicts upon the world- they would just put a smiling, woman’s face up to defend the bombings and the invasions and the United States would continue to pursue around the world. We would have a woman as the global representative for global patriarchy. And the global reign of terror would stay the same.

And this is where I have landed on the issue of Epstein’s island. Of course, of course, of course this is what happens when the system of capitalism reigns: celebration of the greediest. Worshipping of the bottom line, utter disregard to those who’s labor created the wealth they bathe in. In a world where we have boasted the accumulation of centuries worth or resources and wealth as the highest marker of success, where we have systematically chipped away at women’s rights, never acknowledged children’s rights, and have severed any ties to our own personal histories or roots. It is no wonder something as evil and disgusting as Epstein’s island has come into existence.

I think the project of the United States of America has failed. I think we have allowed capitalism and patriarchy to run its course- and we have seen where it leads. It leads to private islands filled with child sex slaves. It leads to more than half the world’s resources being hoarded by the very most evil- the very most depraved. It leads to toppled socialist governments, CIA assassinations, and bombs for oil. The filthiest rise to the top under capitalism- those who feel most comfortable cutting wages, hoarding a bit more, and doing so at the expense of the planet, their children’s future, and their own humanity.

We have seen the end point of capitalism now. We have seen the end point of this rotten, depraved, and extractive country. We have seen what happens when we allow a child rapist to build a country in 1776- it will continue to be lead by a child rapist in 2026.

I love to read, and I am always exited to read a memoir from a public figure I admire. I have recently read (or rather, listened to) the Secret Lives of Mormon Wives’ Mayci Neeley’s Memoir: Told You So. I’d been anticipating this book release for multiple months, and have always been very fascinated by the bits of Mayci’s story she had dropped on the show. Before reading, Reddit informed me the writing in her book was choppy and childish- a bit like a blog. From some reddit-ers reports, the audiobook felt a bit more like a phone call with a friend. After a full listen-through, I agree that her writing is a bit underdeveloped, and she may have benefitted from a ghost writer. But the story was also told so honestly and colloquially. Maybe de-valley-girl-ing the language would have taken away from the authenticity of the book in some way.

I also think Mayci had a pulse on something interesting in writing this book- her life story is fascinating. There is a lot people can learn about her life experiences, and not always necessarily the things she would think. She has a lot of non-Mormon eyes on her since the Secret Lives of Mormon Wives became such a popular show, and I am not sure if even Mayci understands how reflective her story is of Mormon culture. The way she was raised by her family, the specific nuances of the abuse she experienced at BYU, and the way her world imploded around her when she had an unplanned pregnancy all paint the picture of a uniquely traumatic and uniquely Mormon life. Even her socioeconomic status and tone deafness in some portions ring incredibly Mormon in my ears. And I think these Mormon “elements”, so to speak, might be much more obvious to those on the outside.

In her story, she drew some of her own conclusions about her life and what she wants the readers to learn from her “mistakes”, so to speak. I think she missed the mark a lot in these portions, which isn’t even really that surprising. She’s still balls deep in both Mormon and Utah culture- and all that entails. Even if she does represent a slightly more subversive type of Mormon. She is missing the hindsight necessary for all of the lessons to come through from these experiences, and she is likely still experiencing a lot of the trauma she shared with us in her mind and body. With all of that laid out, I think it’s good that she wrote and released the book as she is now- if only for the insight into Mormon culture the book gives us.

Mayci Neeley has always been a standout character on The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. She has one of the best behaved husbands, she is known to stand up for herself and her friends when confronted, and she started a (very Utah-coded) pre-natal vitamin business. She is often stated to be an active, temple recommend holding member of the Church- one of the very few left on the show*. She’s also incredibly nice, doesn’t find herself in the middle of drama very often, and will never be caught taking a formal “side” of a conflict. She is a famous fence-rider, and receives both admiration for her level-headedness and criticism for her neutrality.

*This is, in my opinion, one of the most Mormon things about the Secret Lives of Mormon Wives- the way the show demonstrates the spectrum of Mormonism and cultural vs. religious participation. Utah is incredibly Mormon, but Mormon is far more of a cultural phenomenon at this point than just a religious belief system. All of the women are Mormon in their heritage, personal history, culture and interactions with one another. And yet, only a few of them still actively participate in the religious activities of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. That distinction is important to understand when engaging with Mormon media- and also with Mormons themselves.

Her book offers a deep dive into her upbringing and nuclear family, even though we don’t hear too much about her actual childhood. One thing I noticed early on from her writing was that Mayci seems unaware of how specifically unusual her upbringing was. She acknowledged a number of times that her parents Had Money- but it seems as though her family dedicated small fortunes creating tennis superstars out of all three of their daughters. Mayci recalled her first few semesters of college, fully believing there was nothing important for her to learn in college- she was just at BYU to play tennis and get married. This was certainly also a lesson she learned at church- her only real purpose, or so she thought, was to be a wife and mother.

She told a story reflective of her socioeconomic class that landed oddly with many readers: when she got a full-ride scholarship to college, her parents promised to buy her a new car. She had told them a specific car she wanted- an Audi with a specific color pallet. I’m not going to go back into the book and find what the color pallet was- I promise it was not important. Her parents surprised her with a slightly dirty, scuffed-up Audi with a different color pallet than she had asked for. She reported feeling grateful but confused about the state the car came in- there was a cracked windshield? There was a vague smell in the car? Her parents then surprised her with the real, brand-new car- and revealed the other Audi was a friend’s. The brand-new car was, in fact, the correct color pallet.

The story shines a light onto Mayci’s life I’m not even sure she was aware of, and something that I had to learn myself as an adult: there is a lot of tone-deafness that comes with that amount of money and access. Participation in Mormonism requires a level of sheltered-ness that creates socially incompetence when paired with privilege. It’s a sort of cringy story, and it’s compounded by the cringe-iness of her lack of self awareness while telling it. It’s also such a strikingly Mormon story- I am not sure if I’ve heard the exact same one, but weird and strange “pranks” are often played on Mormon kids to teach us gratitude and humility. These lessons are often seen as necessary, because a lot of Mormons (myself and Mayci included) do have a lot of financial privilege. This story seemed a bit silly, but not altogether unfamiliar, given my proximity to both her social class and her religious background.

While bizarre, the most telling stories about Mayci’s upbringing were, in my opinion, shared in retrospect from when she had already left the house. She began dating a boy in college she nicknamed “Dick”. Dick verbally, physically and sexually abused Mayci for months, and used her status as a D1 athlete to trap her into staying with him.

When you choose to attend BYU, you sign an Honor Code, wherein you commit to live your life according to the rules and guidelines of the Latter-Day Saint church. Failure to uphold these standards can result in severe punishment- including expulsion. The standards include no drinking alcohol, no participation in illegal drugs, no sex before marriage, among a myriad of other rules. (The Church is commonly under fire for banning any form of homosexual activity- including holding hands and dating, in the Honor Code). The BYU Honor Code system is exploitative and relies on students surveilling and reporting each other for breaking rules.

While in college, Mayci explored alcohol, marijuana and sexuality like any other normal young adult might. Except, in her case (like many other Mormons), she was given absolutely no education about any of these activities before she dove in. She was repeatedly sexually assaulted by her boyfriend and was shown, over and over within her book, to be incapable of giving voice to her concerns and misgivings about being sexually active. I saw some who read her book complain about her sounding like a passive participant in her own life- with a very strong theme of “I didn’t want to, but I did”. I perceived her retelling completely differently.

Mayci Neeley (alongside the majority of obedient Mormon girls) was never taught to question herself internally to see what felt good to her. She was told what NOT to do by The Church (don’t have sex before marriage!). She was regularly reinforcing and defending her boundaries around her boyfriend- who persistently did want to have sex with her. Neither of these external voices had anything to do with Mayci and what she wanted to do with her body. There was never any discussion, either internally or externally, about what she did want- only what she was told to do, by whom, and when.

Never did pleasure or autonomy arise as a topic of discussion in regards to Mayci’s early sex life. She was at the mercy of her boyfriend at first, and then of her Bishop as she tried to repent. As a result of this highly objectifying crossfire Mayci found herself in, it’s absolutely no wonder she found herself unable to voice, or even discern, her own needs.

Her not wanting to have penetrative sex wasn’t even just about wanting to save herself for marriage- she also just didn’t want to have sex with Dick. She wanted to feel like she had one thing left for herself. Dick consumed her time after class, he followed her around campus in his truck, and openly used abuse tactics to control her. She did not want to have sex with him. He did not care. Because she did not have the language to parse out her own emotional experience about the matter, it’s no surprise she kept her discomfort and complaints to herself. She had been separated from her body enough to not have any concept of her own wants and desires- and this was done completely by design by her Mormon upbringing.

Mayci repeatedly reiterated that, in this time of her life, she was completely trapped. And she was- but it was not her fault, as she seemed to insinuate throughout the book. Her dad begged her to dump her boyfriend, but she was not able to do so safely. She could not come forward at school about the abuse without confessing that she was sexually active. She was in the jaws of an extremely abusive, patriarchal system that puts women like her at a significant social disadvantage. Her abusive relationship was not just with Dick, but with the University and with her family.

She described her stance in the Mormon Church- as a sexually active young woman (there was, at this time, no internal distinction between sexual activity she consented to and sexual activity she did not consent to), she was told by many of her leaders that sexual sins were crimes against God. There is a common teaching in the Mormon church- that sexual sins are an extreme offense to God, second in severity only behind murder. During one round of the “repentance process”, she was even made to read The Miracle of Forgiveness, one of the singularly worst pieces of literature produced by the Mormon Church. I was shocked to see that someone had been assigned to read the book as recently as the 2010’s- it has been so thoroughly discredited and disavowed by even faithful Mormons.

Her boyfriend reminded her each time they fought of how much she had already sinned- and how it was probably too late for her to repent at this point. The church’s own teachings, persistently reiterated in Mayci’s head, were used to keep her trapped with her rapist. Confessing her “sins” could lead to her losing her good standing with the school, and therefore her D1 tennis career. Asking for help would include revealing her sins. And due to the arbitrary “ranking” of sex as a “worse” sin, she was persuaded more often into more drinking and smoking, exposing her further to exploitation and control.

There is now an immunity clause for situations like this in the BYU honor code- but it only exists because of too many situations like this one. The immunity clause has only existed for the last few years- a very recent addition to the school’s long history. How many other women have been trapped in situations like this due to the oppressive BYU honor code? Unable to report a rape because they were drinking- unable to report physical abuse because they had sex before marriage? (Again, consent is NOT a factor Mormon culture has any serious interface with). How many of these women ended up marrying their abuser, got kicked out of school, or ostracized by their families? How many disempowered women didn’t have the language to speak up for their own body, due to lack of education? Mayci experienced the reality of being caught in the crosshairs of a patriarchal school, a patriarchal relationship, and a patriarchal family.

Now, through this abusive relationship she experienced, Mayci was between 18 and 19 years old. Not a grown-up by any means, but also definitely not a child, and at this point multiple states away from her parents. However, because of the way she experienced her childhood with her family, the way the Mormon church (and especially BYU) infantilizes their young adults, her situation was far more restricted than another young adult’s might be.

She reiterated multiple times that if she called her parents for help about her abuser, they would bring her home from college to live with them again. It was jarring to hear it laid out like that, but I knew many Mormon parents like that from my time in the church, from my time in college in Utah. Many Mormon parents are incapable of allowing their children to grow, to develop identities away from the family and the church and the systems set up for them. Some Mormon parents insist upon maintaining high levels of control even on their adult children, even on their children who have left the home. This parenting dynamic was incredibly apparent in Mayci’s descriptions of her nuclear family.

Her father, in particular, screamed of an overarching and overbearing Mormon patriarch. Multiple times throughout the book, we see him using his domineering and persistent personality to bulldoze is way through his family’s lives. He constantly harassed Mayci about dumping her various boyfriends, inserting himself into her life in frankly creepy ways. This becomes extremely important a little bit later in the story.

Shortly after her actually abusive boyfriend left Utah to handle medical issues, she began to date Arik, the father to her oldest son. Mayci repeatedly contrasted the relationships she had with Dick and Arik, emphasizing how much fun she always had with Arik, how much he loved her. Arik’s ex-girlfriend was pregnant with his child at the time, and shortly after his first child’s birth, Arik got Mayci pregnant, too.

Mayci remarked that during the early stages of her relationship with Arik, she was not able to have sex sober. There are like, literally one million layers of shit we could unpack there- but this fact was included in the book to explain part of the the reason behind their sloppiness with birth control. She was also incredibly young, uneducated on birth control, and a victim of repeated sexual assault from her first relationship, and clearly extremely disconnected from her own body and sexual experience. She said they were not good with using condoms when they had sex drunk, which seemed to be the only kind of sex she could handle. She then remarked that there was nowhere she personally could access birth control- which was also true in her circumstance.

She listed the ways she might be able to access birth control- most of them involved using her parents insurance, which would surely notify them of her use. That would throw up red flags in her family, if they did not know what she was being treated for, especially as an athlete. She also was not able to access Planned Parenthood- there was only one functional Planned Parenthood in Northern Utah at the time (now there are 2). The Planned Parenthood was closed before her tennis practices ended. She was stuck, and relied upon luck- like any other young adult with the same access to education and resources.

Upon hearing about her pregnancy, Arik’s family offered to take care of Mayci, offered to let Mayci and Arik live together at a town home they owned. They could get married and start a family, if they wanted. But Mayci’s parents were, predictably, far less supportive of the whole thing.

As soon as they found out about her pregnancy, they whisked their 20-year-old daughter home and forbad her from interacting with her boyfriend. She had a curfew, she was forced by her parents to hide her pregnancy from her hometown- she was forbid even post pictures of her bump. Her mom didn’t want it to look like they were “celebrating” her sin. Mayci was effectively a grounded pregnant adult.

Her father insisted that Mayci had been taken advantage of by both Dick and Arik. Mayci resisted the comparison, but her dad became obsessed with proving that Arik had cheated on Mayci in their relationship. Simultaneous to Mayci’s dad’s insistence that she had been taken advantage of, Mayci’s mom berated her with accusations of being a slut. Was she a lied to, manipulated girl who was too dumb to avoid getting taken advantage of, or was she a manipulative conniving Jezebel-ish slut? Somehow, to her parents, she was both. This also feels incredibly Mormon- a completely inconsistent sexual ethic and piss-poor communication, responsibility, and empathy.

In addition, Mayci’s married older sister was also pregnant. This sister openly resented Mayci for her pregnancy, feeling as though attention was being taken away from her pregnancy. She had done everything the right way, after all. Some feeling of moral superiority was pushed onto Mayci- the slutty college kid who can’t help but taking the spotlight from this very intentional pregnancy. I simply can not imagine being in Mayci’s position at this point. The levels of indignity she had to face from her own family are mind-boggling, all while literally about to be a parent.

Leaning into his role as the domineering patriarch, Mayci’s dad obsessively combed through Arik’s digital life. He insisted he knew Arik cheated on Mayci, and made it his mission to find evidence. He wanted to break Mayci’s trust in her boyfriend- in her baby’s dad. He did eventually come up with damning evidence that Arik had, in fact, cheated on Mayci.

Mayci and Arik get into a fight about it. She broke up with him. And then he died hours later in a car crash, while texting Mayci. There is a very, very solid argument to be made that Arik may still be alive had it not been for Mayci’s dad’s meddling in her life.

Her grieving process was (likely still is), of course, long and arduous. Her autonomy was gone, her boyfriend and baby daddy was dead, she was still processing the trauma of being raped and abused by her first ex. She was taking online classes from another University to keep up with school work (she quit BYU to avoid being kicked out for premarital sex). As her pregnancy progressed, she lost her ability to practice tennis. Her dad announced her pregnancy to her entire home ward without her consent. Her autonomy and desires are, over and over, demonstrated to be supremely unimportant to her family.

Through her story, she explains that this was the time of her life she realized why all of the rules and standards had been set up for her in the Church- to avoid this sort of pain. The pain, of course, being the indignity she felt she brought her parents. The grief of losing her boyfriend, the loss of mobility in her body, the loss of social life from her friends in college, and the loneliness of experiencing a pregnancy alone without her partner.

Pain that, in my opinion, could have totally been avoided if Mayci had been given more autonomy over her body, more education about consent, and more access to reproductive care at an earlier age. If her mother had been excited with her about her baby bump, rather than forcing her daughter into baggy clothes, Mayci may not have gone through so much emotional, isolating pain. If her parents had allowed her to the autonomy to pursue a relationship with the man she loved, Arik may not have even died- regardless of if he had a one-night stand with another woman a few months into his relationship with Mayci. If her sister had allowed their shared pregnancy to be a cause for celebration, that time of their lives could have been an amazing time for bonding. Mayci’s pain did not come from her poor decisions- her pain came from her family’s (and school, and wider culture’s) treatment of her.

Mayci began dating her now-husband Jacob when her son was a baby. They waited until marriage- two whole years- to have sex, despite neither of them being virgins. This seems to have been the correct choice for Mayci and Jacob in their courtship- but I also wonder what may have happened if she had simply been allowed to have a healthy relationship with sexuality. If she had just been allowed to learn about herself, prioritize her needs and pleasure, maybe she wouldn’t have felt the need to go so “all-or-nothing” in regards to sexuality. She made the decision with Jacob that kept her the safest within the context of her family and culture- again, not even necessarily what she actually wanted.

Mayci seems to have worked out a lot of things for herself. She is lauded by many to be one of the more mature ladies in The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, and I have always admired her ability to put direct language to her experiences of rape and abuse. That is not always common, and I can tell that language is empowering to her and her story. I also think the abuse Mayci has endured is far deeper than just the one ex-boyfriend. I think the relationship with the ex-boyfriend was a culmination of all the other kinds of abuse Mormon women are trained from a very young age to endure, and just the most obvious experience she had.

The rest of the abuse was covert, designed as systems that create the circumstances of women’s disenfranchisement. The silence she was forced to keep in her romantic relationship was a result not only of the abuse of her boyfriend, but of her family and school. Her pregnancy was only specifically painful because of the rejection and abuse she experienced from her family. These stories shine far more of a light on the Mormon culture that disempowers women, abusive family dynamics, and the ways women are forced to fight for their survival in circumstances like these.

we imagine the angels, the ancient prophets

vicious and charged and perfect

tightly strung and equally ridiculous and ludicrous

we have thieves among us, adulterers, liars, hyporcrites,

the map towards the devil remains unsung

ring in the nose, bands around the neck

and being perfect, there is room in our hearts for…

Read more

I had voted by mail a few weeks earlier, but the vote never got counted. I checked and made multiple calls to the Provo county office about it. I had signed the ballot, but the voting office claimed a discrepancy with my signature. My democratic right to vote was suffocated by bureaucracy. I could have faxed in another signature, but my work schedule with AmeriCorps was unforgiving. We were scheduled exclusively during “traditional work” hours- my time any government office might be open had already been committed. I also had no idea what was wrong with my initial signature, so I would not have known what to fix.

Despite being barred from personal democratic participation in the election, I continued to refresh the results. My team was in a stupor- silent with dread for hours into the evening. Tension in the air grew each time the Associated Press declared a new state’s results- Trump creeping closer and closer to the dreaded 270 mark. The team sat silently around a radio and listened to NPR report the election results live in the living room. Eventually, still without much conversation, we each left to go to sleep.

I have a degree in Political Science, which you can only really accomplish in this point of history if you have somewhat of a masochistic streak. Before the election, I was sure to read the entirety of Project 2025. Having done so, I knew exactly what Trump was planning on doing with his second term as president, regardless of his feigned ignorance on the subject. He was going to gut all internal processes of the federal government and fill the positions with yes-men. The Supreme Court had already ruled a few months earlier that Presidents could not be held legally accountable for their actions as president- and I knew how that was likely to play out with Trump at the helm of the country. He planned to instill massive tariffs, effectively taxing the American people without representation. Not to mention the direct impact the election would have on us, federal volunteers tasked with preservation natural, federal lands.

The guard rails protecting the American people from the worst of the first Trump administration would be, by and large, removed. The Supreme Court was already compromised. I knew a second Trump presidency would be worse than any of us had the capacity to imagine.

I (along with just about every other woman in the country) woke up around 2 in the morning after the election had been called. I didn’t want to know, but I did know. I refreshed the election page I’d been obsessively tracking for a final time. And my worst fears were confirmed.

I did my best to sleep for the rest of the night, but I don’t know how (or if) I did. The next morning, everyone on my team sort of looked at each other bleary-eyed and silent. My team leader said taking her birth control in the morning made her emotional. We got our supplies ready and drove to the Headquarters of the Redwood parks.

In college, I had a professor heavily involved with polling political data from the general public. In September of 2023, he presented to the Political Science cohort his findings from his most recent poll- showing the Biden/Harris ticket had under a 10% chance of winning re-election based off current polling. The information was a gut-punch, but it also gave me time to mentally prepare and educate myself on what was to come. I began to tell my friends (in a somewhat “the end is nigh” way) that next year, 2024, would likely be our final year without an authoritarian dictatorship in the United States.

I felt an enormous amount of unexpected hope around Harris’ campaign when Biden dropped out of the race. (Yes bad Palestine stance, yes Democratic capitalism and liberalism bad, yes, yes, etc., I decided to be a single-issue voter for abortion rights on the Presidential election). Hope that, of course, turned out to be unfounded. Or at least not enough. Sometimes I wonder how many other potential Harris voters had handwriting discrepancies on their ballots.

The morning after Trump won the presidency for the second time, our team was maintaining a trail near a campground owned by one of the Redwood State Parks. We were chopping roots, clearing brush and tamping down dirt to keep the path walkable. It was an isolated campground, and the trail was uphill. At one point up the hill, my phone received one single bar of service, and I got a text notification.

My dad’s side of the family is based in Houston, Texas. They are white, they are Texan (in the serious way), they are capital-R, red-blooded Republican. Even to this day, in the year of our good Lord 2026. I remember the days when my father was far less removed from his family of origin and reflected similar ideas to them. He has made incredible personal progress in the 2.5 decades I’ve known him, but his early raising of my sister and I reflected strong prejudices and biases against a number of oppressed individuals that I still find upsetting to reflect upon. Many of his siblings have not experienced this same level of personal progress.

My father’s side of the family is also significantly less politically diverse than my mom’s. You’re more likely to get multiple points of view, differing perspectives and arguments on my mom’s side. Dad’s side is one of conservative unanimity- or so the assumption went.

The text I received was from one of my dad’s four younger brothers, in a group chat with a dozen other adults from my extended family, as well as a few unsaved numbers that undoubtedly belonged to some of my more emotionally distant family members. My mother, who is known to move against the grain in this family, was not included in the group chat. For some reason, I still was.

The text read (something along the lines of): “Good morning family, and congratulations to everyone on this wonderful victory for God we have won. America will soon be back to it’s former glory, and I want to thank everyone in the family for the part they played in this wonderful outcome.”

I was removed from the group chat shortly after the message was sent, (by my Trump-voting brother, reliably following his natural patriarchal instinct to silence dissenting women- the same instinct shown by my uncle who chose to exclude my mother from the group) The damage had been done- I had seen the text, understood it’s meaning. I found a secluded campsite, curled up next to a tree, and sobbed.

I saw so clearly what the impact of this election might be, and my extended family was celebrating. People with whom I shared ancestry, history, memories and traditions were celebrating an overtly racist man. People were going to die because of the results of the election. People were going to be separated from their families, locked up, raped, starved, denied medical attention, deported. Ukrainian sovereignty was at much greater risk under Trump. The federal government and it’s operations were going to change drastically. Tariffs would hurt literally everyone financially, and damage international relations. In fact, Trump’s existence damages international relations.

Not to mention the 34 felonies Trump had been convicted of in his 4 year sabbatical between his two times in office. The extremely common knowledge that he was highly connected to child slave sex trafficker, Jeffery Epstein, the dozens of credible sexual abuse allegations, and extremely credible accusations of literal pedophilia. His overt hatred of women. His distaste for the “least of us”. And somehow, somehow… SOMEHOW, my uncle and extended family experienced this as a “win for God”.

I no longer identify with the religious beliefs of the Mormon Church- the religious background of my entire extended family. My father’s entire side of the family remains active and in good standing with the Mormon Church. The “God” who had supposedly acquired a significant “victory” in Trump’s election is an unfamiliar caricature of the kinder, softer and more balanced universe I have found outside of the Church.

I don’t believe in a Patriarchal, male or even a physical God. I’m not an atheist, but I am extremely removed form the paintings of White Skin White Hair God that decorate the halls of Mormon churches. And yet, my sensibilities were extremely offended by the assertion that any God rooted in love would be happy with this election.

After I was removed from the group chat by my Trump-voting younger brother, I was informed by my sister that our dad had spoken up clearly and directly to his siblings about the harm he saw in Trump. He spoke about racism, misogyny, and dishonesty Trump had displayed, and how he believed God would want none of these traits used to represent Him. They did the predictable rig-a-ma-roll expected of blindfolded, ear-plugged and dizzy Mormons- he doesn’t have the best personality, but his values, his policies, his viewpoints, etc. will promote Christian ideals.

As the first year of Trump’s presidency has played out, I have thought back to that morning multiple times. The celebration of God’s victory, being thanked for our individual roles in making this happen. As I watch the violence from ICE agents increase, I wonder if my uncles are satisfied with God’s victory lap. I certainly felt the presence of God watching Alex Pretti being shot by 7 armed and masked officers, and feel the Spirit overcome me every time I hear of a new instance of a black person’s lynching by cops. I know, deep in my heart, Jesus loves to see his homeland in Palestine depleted to rubble.

When Trump threatens Greenland, Canada, Venezuela and Gaza with ideas of further colonization, I understand this to be the work of the God who oversaw the genocide of the Native Americans. The God who flooded the entire planet, the God who impregnated a 14 year old girl. And this, ultimately, is the Christian God worshipped by our neighbors, friends, and even our own families.

There was once a time I believed the Mormon church to, at very least, be on the side of protecting children. I grew up in a staunchly pro-life family, hearing all the arguments about saving innocent, unborn, lives. I grew up aware of the anti-sex trafficking work of the famous and highly connected Mormon Tim Ballard and the Operation Underground Railroad project he ran- until stepping down after himself being accused of sexual misconduct. I was heavily sheltered and protected as a child, and thought this to be the standard care Mormons aspired to give all children.

The Save The Children Underground Railroad folks have been, perhaps predictably silent about the sexual misconduct exposed by the massive dump of the Epstein files from Jan 30. In fact, nearly every Mormon I know to have shown vigor and passion regarding Ballard’s Operation Underground Railroad, or pro-life activism, or anti-Drag Queen activism, has seemed to have forgotten that child sex slavery is bad. Like, a lot worse than being read to by a man in makeup.

In seeing evidence spelled out of Trump’s own participation in child sex slave trading (measuring children’s vulvas with his fingers and then selling the children at Mar a Lago for example), I hoped to see a spell broken.

But, of course, this is the God of Joseph Smith we’re talking about. We must remember his two 14-year-old wives- one of whom began as his foster daughter. We must remember Mary’s un-consensual childhood pregnancy. We must remember the bishops who continue to cover up the sexual abuse of the children in their wards. We must remember the inherent sexualization of children within the Mormon church- the fixation on modesty for young girls, the elders accusing their misconduct on the temptations they are unable to overcome.

From the time my body began to develop, I knew the men around me noticed. When we swam for church activities, I was always required to wear a t-shirt over my swim suit to hide my curves. When I was 14, my family had another family over for dinner. I wore a loose red t-shirt that was incredibly soft and comfortable. Halfway through the dinner, my mom pulled me into the laundry room and informed me that I had to change. The gentleman they had let into our home was looking down my loose top. And somehow, the instinct was not to kick him out of the home for looking at their 14-year-old’s body, but to require me to sacrifice my own comfort. Being told to change subliminally (and successfully) communicated to me that my body was the problem, not the man.

And so, yes. With more than a year of reflection behind me since the election, since the group chat, I do in fact believe Trump’s victory to be a win for their God. The God who trains little girls to cover their bodies for the pedophiles that are simply assumed to be populating the halls of their church. The God of the Bishops who allows those girls to be raped by their fathers without consequence. The God who supported slavery in the Old Testament surely allowed for the sexual abuse of those slaves, too. And with the approval of slavery enshrined in the Bible, is evidence of Trump’s participation in the buying and selling of human children really that bad?

Maybe that’s the God they want to worship. The God who validates and upholds their power, the God who gives only men the Priesthood, the God who only has a wife to enshrine his masculine heterosexuality- not to introduce a substantial female deity into the Godhead canon. The God who lead Christopher Columbus to the Promised Land, the God who cursed the children of Cain with black skin.

I, personally, want nothing to do with that God. A God who can drown his children, a God who can impregnate a child, a God who sacrifices children’s safety to maintain overarching patriarchal power. I care far more about centering the needs of the Earth that sustains us, the humans who need help, and the children who will inherit what we leave behind. The God I would hope to believe in would stand staunchly against the exploitation of children, rather than endorsing and engaging in exploitation himself.

If you’re reading this and see descriptions of your belief system reflected in my words: know that it is never too late to change your mind. It is never too late to center, rather than exploit, the vulnerable- nature, children, racial minorities, and women. And if you find your faith pulling you towards power, question that. Do not allow your faith to be hijacked and exploited by those who do not give a fuck about you. Donald Trump would rape and sell your child, too. Horror stories of sexual abuse in ICE detention centers continue to fly around, and these should not surprise you.

The ones locked in cages are the least of these. The ones being silenced. The ones being abused and then blamed for their own abuse. The land that is being drilled for oil, the animals’ homes who are being destroyed. The ocean that is being polluted. The least of these.

And as Jesus, the rebellious and equality-oriented son of the Genocidal God of the Bible, once said Matthew 25:40, ‘Verily I say unto you, inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these My brethren, ye have done it unto Me.’

At the time of our firing, my team and I were stationed in San Diego, California preparing income taxes for free for the low-income population of the area. (For similar services in your area, check out the VITA Program). Our project was by and large pretty depressing- especially on the backdrop of a global, live-streamed genocide in Palestine. Many of the lowest income people would have to set up payment plans with the IRS to pay their taxes, and I’d go home to watch those tax dollars drop in a firey blaze on camps in Gaza. I was constantly nauseous about it.

Around 1/3 of the AmeriCorps teams in the Pacific region had been assigned a tax preparation project during this round. Our final day of the entire tax preparation project was scheduled for April 15th, naturally. My team had been promised a three-month project in Alaska following the tax project, and we were days away from our departure. Without that project in the horizon, I find it very hard to believe I would have made it all the way through the project- taxes was very hard on me. On April 14th, just one day before being disbanded, my team had been e-mailed our boarding passes to Anchorage. We had just one day of taxes left, a highly anticipated week of training with the other AmeriCorps teams in Sacramento, and then Alaska.

In what I am sure is a complete coincidence, the United States allowed for the AmeriCorps teams filing taxes to funnel up every penny they could before dismantling the program. Halfway through our workday on April 15th, after four months of filing taxes, our Team Leader was called into an emergency meeting. In this meeting she was informed that, effective immediately, the entire AmeriCorps NCCC program was being disbanded* by Donald Trump and the Department of Government Efficiency. The team was instructed to leave our workplace immediately, return to housing, and had 4 hours to be packed up and on the road campus.

*Ours- the Pacific Region of AmeriCorps NCCC- was the last region to be notified about AmeriCorps being disbanded. I found out around an hour before my Team Leader via the r/americorps subreddit that we had been disbanded. People from the Eastern, Midwestern and Southern regions had Paul Revere’d the information along. What a surreal hour to be alive- still staring at a computer with a tax client in front of me.

I don’t really remember the details of next few hours. I called every single friend I had from the entire program- we were all in complete shock. I called my parents, letting them know I was coming home. I cried and cried and cried- way louder and way more uncontrollably than anyone else on my team. (I always seem to have the biggest emotions in the room- we now know this to be part of my autism diagnosis). We packed our bags. We had to make quick decisions on which items to leave forever- we no longer had storage options in Sacramento.

An AmeriCorps alumni from San Diego had kept in touch with us throughout our project. She came by our housing before our final departure to commiserate our loss with us. She gifted us a big bag of marijuana as consolation for being fired. We were officially, as of a few hours ago, no longer federal employees- and no longer subjected to random drug testing. The long-awaited moment of indulgence had come. I offered to take the first driving shift so I could spend the rest of the evening smoking with the team we were meeting up with in LA.

On our drive to Sacramento, the team shared with one other the rules we’d bent and broken throughout the year. There was more underage drinking happening on the team than I had been privy to. Reconnecting with the team stationed in Los Angeles was a surreal moment of reunion, laughter, and dazed heartbreak. My friend Owen and I busted out the weed pen, and spent the rest of the night’s drive giggling together in the back rows of a 15-passenger van.

We arrived in Sacramento the next morning. The teams who had been stationed nearer to Sacramento had already been flown home. A significant chunk of my friends from training had already caught their flights. We had been planning the week of training in Sacramento for months. 24 hours previously, I had been preparing people's taxes, enthusiastically awaiting our project in Alaska.

The day that followed our arrival to campus was a blur. Around half of the Corps was on campus, no longer beholden to the restrictions and guidelines that guaranteed our good standing in AmeriCorps. Our superiors had all been fired, too. Their last duties were to get us all home, and they were too busy booking flights and taking trips to the airport. Nobody was babysitting anymore. My team was far from the only group to have acquired marijuana in the time between being fired and our return to campus. Other Corps members began to share their alcohol stashes with under 21 Corps Members. Rumors of the rules other teams had broken throughout the year flew around.

I spent the day with friends who’d been assigned to other projects across the country, spending the last of our government-issued food budget on ice cream and Thai food. Our (new) flight information trickled into our emails throughout the day- a new, much sadder flight to Kansas City replacing my flight to Anchorage. And while it was a terrible experience that destabilized the foreseeable future for everyone involved, there was a certain energy on campus that day I can only describe as hysterical- or manic.

Everyone’s worst fears had come to pass concurrently- we were all being fired. Our highly anticipated third project would not come to pass. Our teams were being torn apart 3+ months earlier than we’d been promised, after 7+ months serving, traveling, working and living together. And yet- all together on campus- that final night on campus was unforgettable.

I remember stopping myself from saying “this is the best day EVER” multiple times that day. I was smoking weed for the first time in… well maybe not since the very beginning of AmeriCorps. But definitely for the first time in some time, and now with my AmeriCorps friends with whom I’d never smoked. We were sad, we were crying, but we were also laughing and skipping and running around Sacramento. I bought around twenty $1.00 shooters from a liquor store and handed them out like I would to trick-or-treaters. We had been looking forward to a week together in training- instead we got one day (with only partial attendance). And it was a really fun day.

We called our friends who’d been sent off before us. We promised to visit; we talked about future travel ideas, road trips and jobs abroad we could take together. It was miserable and bad, but it was so completely simultaneous. Everyone was going through the exact same earth-shattering experience together, which made the initial blow a lot less painful. Like, the earth couldn’t swallow us all whole together, right?

The repercussions of being fired in such a way continue to ripple through mine and many other lives. This was by no means a good thing to happen to any of us, or to the United States as a whole. But, in that moment, when we were all going through the worst case scenario- the togetherness of it alleviated some of the sharpest emotions of the experience.

This sort of togetherness in our suffering is something that has stood out as a bright spot of the current state of the world. I do not think there is anything, not one single objectively good thing about Donald Trump or his administration. But being able to experience this literal hellscape with others like me- others aware and cognizant of the suffering around- has made the experience livable.

I’m not going to white girl out about how joy is resistance- but there is no better place to draw your strength but from your joy, from your community. And while this is important- joy can be directed. Joy can be harnessed.

On Halloween of 2025, I attended a Palestine and Mutual Aid fundraising party in Salt Lake City, Utah hosted by a couple close friends of mine. The concept was simple but incredibly clever: Everyone wants to go out for Halloween. My friends hosted party with multiple avenues to donate: artists donated prints of their work, bakers brought an array of treats available for donation, an attendee who’d gone to hair school was offering “haircut coupons” for donations, I got a tarot reading done for a donation.

The coolest donation collection tool, in my opinion, was the DIY thrift store the hosts put together. They requested attendees to bring clothing they’d want to donate, and they put together a gorgeous display of a couple hundred articles of clothing for “sale”. They even set up a little dressing room for comfort- I went home with a new t-shirt, cookies, and some new art for my camper.

The Mormon Church, the predominant religion in Utah, has multiple billions of dollars of investments (siphoned from member’s tithing funds)- many of which benefit Israel. At this party, we had a member of a local letter-writing campaign distributing post-cards to send to the local Latter-Day Saint Headquarters, opposing their investments in Israel, requesting them to invest in causes that are more aligned with their stated principles as a religious institution.

As the night went, dozens of people cycled through the home. People drank alcohol, danced to loud music, smoked weed, surrounded a campfire, made out and partied like they would have at any other Halloween party in the state. However, here, we had a purpose for our celebration. We had a direction to point in. We collected over $1,000 in donations and had collected more than 25 letters written for the letter-writing campaign.

Did we change the entire world by shaking ass, buying each other’s clothes, and drinking somewhat shitty alcohol on Halloween? No. Like, not substantially, anyway. But this party was fun, it was organized, it was intentional, and it inspired me. It put into focus the ways joy can be used as a tool- or a weapon. Collective action need not be exclusively done with anger and indignation. This party, with many of my closest friends in the world, showed me we possess a lot of untapped power in our capacity for joy, fun, and creativity.

When humans get together and connect with one another, our brains release oxytocin. Oxytocin is one of the four major “happy chemicals”, and creates feelings of relaxation, trust, and stability.

I was experiencing an incredible oxytocin high on the last day of AmeriCorps before being shipped back home- which is why I couldn’t have a bad day, even though I’d just been fired. I was having too much fun with people I felt safe and loved around. And at the Palestine Party, we weaponized our good-feeling brain chemicals to make some small, local changes. We could definitely use more of that energy now, don’t you think?

I knew for sure I was non-binary around 2021- when my first friend referred to me using they/them pronouns, I knew I’d landed on something big. In the time since 2021, my relationship with my body and eating has changed, my self-conception and education has developed, I have shaved my head and grown out my hair, I spent an entire year doing manual labor in cargo pants. As these changes flowed through my life, I have felt like a completely different type of “non-binary” every time I try and pin down my specific identity.

As I have reflected on my childhood since coming into my non-binary identity, I have come to realize the outsized role the Mormon church played in my initial exposure to gender. I oftentimes associated the discomforts I felt with womanhood, gender, and femininity with my issues with The Church. The rigid boundaries Mormonism set for womanhood made it both unattainable and unappealing to me. When I imagine this discomfort with the expectations of Mormonism, it is often associated with the physical feelings of an itchy dress, a third-hour hunger headache, or the indignant hurt of being condescended to by a leader.

Womanhood felt like a sentencing to me as a child. Forcing something unnatural for the sake of it. Making myself uncomfortable for show- for other’s approval. There was physical discomfort, emotional discomfort, and layers of social discomfort I was constantly faced with due to this body I had no choice but to inhibit. The messaging I received from those around me was always that I was wrong- too loud, too dirty, too big, I ask too many questions, I’m too rude.

One instance from 2015 stands out to me- I was 14 years old, about to graduate from 8th grade into my freshman year of High School. I was in Mia Maid’s- the Church class for 14-15 year old girls to attend 3rd hour of church (back in the day). We were sat in two rows of fold-up chairs. There were less than 10 girls in the class, and the fold-up chair in front of me was empty. I propped my feet up on the seat in front of me.

My Young Women’s Leader told me to sit like a lady- with the accompanying side-eye and disgruntled huff to be expected from a 60-somethings Mormon woman given an ounce of superiority over anyone. Womanhood is so heavily policed in Mormonism, it’s surprising nobody had worked out that the polite behaviors I was unable to adhere to were actually extremely unnatural for me. I kept my feet up, and told her I would probably stay a lady no matter where my feet were resting- but thank you for the advice.

I had my pulse on something shockingly correct at such a young age. Being critiqued on my gender performance (in this case, resting my feet on the chair ahead of me- which I am sure the Young Men were all doing two classrooms down the hall.) didn’t actually change the fact of my female biology- which seemed to be the metric we used in the Mormon church for determining who was a “lady” and who was not. And it’s even funnier, because Sister Trent was also right. I’m not a lady.

I’d come to these discoveries a few years before I was diagnosed with autism in September of 2025. When I did get diagnosed, more of my experience came into relief.

This general discomfort with nonsensical social expectations is an extremely common autistic experience. Autistic people are especially prone to questioning and forgoing social norms, and as a result, are far more likely to express their gender and sexuality in ways that vary from cisgender heterosexual expectations. In fact, autistic people are 8x as likely to be LGBTQ than their neurotypical peers. We break boundaries and violate all sorts of norms every day. Queerness is just another way in which autistics are drawn to violating norms.

Even in very archaic autistic research, it was documented early than autistic boys were more likely to be labeled “effeminate”- and little autistic girls were more likely to be “tomboys”. While the research is dated, male-centric and has some extremely strong western-influenced bias, it demonstrates an early understanding of gender variance within autistic people. Before they even put any queer language to it, the early autism research acknowledged a weakened adherence to gender norms among young autistic kids. And here we have exhibit A.

I wouldn’t have considered myself a tomboy, necessarily- but I didn’t really think of myself as anything else, either. I was a girl because I was a girl. I would dress up or wear makeup during various crushes- I definitely liked boys, and that felt “girly” among my peers. I took great joy in getting made up for different dances and parties. It felt like playing Barbie- where I was the doll, getting to feel temporarily beautiful. I played Barbie’s religiously as a child and equally enjoyed getting them dressed up to go out dancing. And somehow I knew the beauty I presented was equally pretend. It was all dress-up.

However, despite my casual adherence to some of the most basic gender norms, I remember distinctly the distress I felt when I began growing breasts. I felt nauseous for months and years as my bra size increased, and increased (and increased, and increased). I remember sobbing as a child because I would never have a flat chest again- I loved to sleep on my stomach so much. The sensation of growing breasts was so uncomfortable- they were always so itchy when they were growing. I literally still feel stressed whenever the skin on my breasts itch- even though I realistically know they are done growing.

My period was a similarly horrible childhood experience. I remember feeling for years like my childhood had ended in blood and cramps- like I may never be able to fully enjoy anything else ever again. The sensations were so horrible in my little body, and very few people seemed to really understand the toll it took on me. I remember vividly sitting on the school bus, knees curled to my chest, in unimaginable pain, bleeding through my pants on the way home from 5th grade. The pain came with a weakness and nausea I can still close my eyes and remember. It was so distressing to be switching tampons in the bathroom of swim team and elementary school as an 11 year old. To have to remember a strict ibuprofen schedule just to be functional throughout the day.

I hated everything about my body and what it was doing to me- and how people around me reacted to it. Like I was doing something wrong just for existing, for wearing comfortable clothes, for forgetting to wear a bra. When I began to grow breasts, I filled out in the rest of my body, as well. I started getting harassed at the swim team by the boys my age. I was grabbed, stared at and whispered about as the fat cells stuck themselves to my breasts and thighs and hips and stomach. A little kid, no older than 12, in a racing swim suit.

It wasn’t better anywhere else- it was just most noticeable there, where my body was the most exposed. In church, I was taught that modesty was important for young girls. Immodesty would cause boys to sin, and it was our jobs to protect them from their own… instincts. I didn’t feel like I was being immodest at the swim team, but clearly my body was doing something wrong. When my body started growing, my dad began asking me to wear a t-shirt over my swimsuit while eating dinner before swim team. It was humiliating for my growing body to be spotlighted in my own family. In the 6th grade, my Health and Fitness results came back listing me as “obese”- a growing and highly athletic 12 year old. It seemed everyone, everywhere was distracted by what my body was doing, and nobody asked me a single question about my experience.

I was 14 years old when my mom signed me up for my first competitive dieting competition. She showed me MyFitnessPal, instructed me on how to track what I ate in a day, how to set weight loss goals, and how to maintain a calorie deficit. My dad started packing me sandwiches with only one slice bread to save me from TWO slices of bread sticking onto my growing, pubescent stomach and thighs. I went off sugar completely the latter half of 8th grade to further increase the calorie deficit. And part of me thought maybe, if I stuck closely enough to the diet, my breasts would stop growing. Maybe this could all be stopped.

Now, at this point, my body and therefore my assigned gender identity was causing me to be physically and emotionally uncomfortable at church, caused me horrible pain on my monthly periods, and now the way my body stored fat and grew was causing outward discomfort to those in my family, and physical hunger in my body. My dad didn’t want to see it, my mom didn’t want me to grow anymore. And it never occurred to me once that any of this was wrong- only that I was wrong.

And so- yes. Womanhood felt far, far more like something to overcome and move away from than an identity that I would learn to grow into. It just felt too restrictive, too laced with expectations I could not dream of upholding, and filled with judgement I never asked for. Womanhood seemed like a costume I was expected to put on- a role I never auditioned for, a position I played that took everything out of me. It dictated how I was treated by everyone around me, and I fucking hated all of it.

As I have deconstructed all of these experiences, a few things come to mind. First- my intuition was, as I always come to realize, absolutely unreal. While I certainly internalized and blamed myself for the discomfort felt by those around me (as is outwardly and overtly encouraged by the teachings of the Mormon church!), part of me also knew I hadn’t done anything- so how could I have done anything wrong?

And while I still considered the way I was treated for my body to be my fault, I also knew what I felt wasn’t fair- it did not seem like the majority of other young people were being tormented so relentlessly for the way they were growing. Nobody else seemed to be fielding opinions from every angle on the way they behaved, on the way their voice carried, on the way they’d interact with their peers, the way their body looked, or how their body might look to others. It felt like a full-time job for the adults around me to coerce me into compliance. And I was simply not made for compliance.

I felt the injustice of the way I was perceived on a cellular level in my body. It came out in rage, it came out in anger, it was directed towards my parents and towards the Church- the strictest enforcers of my gendered cell. I was a supernova of color and energy suffocated and folded to fit into a cardboard box. I was not allowed the oxygen I needed to expand into something so much more magnificent than a “woman”.

When I realized so much of who I was expected to be, in regards to my gender identity, was completely arbitrary, I began to explore other possibilities for myself. The “woman” the authorities around me were trying to build me into had absolutely nothing to do with the person I actually was. None of these feminine traits felt good to me- and they didn’t actually have to. And that realization felt like my first breath of fresh air, ever.

The foundations of gender that were instilled in me made for absolute certain that I would not comply. I literally couldn’t with the body I was given, nor with the personality I had attached. Once I lived in a setting where my body hair wasn’t inspected before I left the house, I grew it out. It felt so much better to be soft and fuzzy all the time than to be smooth for a few days, just to be prickly again a few days later. The routine of shaving was exhausting, and the sensory experience was distracting at best, unpleasant at worst.

When COVID hit and I stopped wearing makeup, I decided to stop purchasing makeup altogether. In lockdown, I really began to free myself from the rules of womanhood, and began exploring other expressions. I realized I had no interest holding myself to standards of “beauty” or “grooming” that men aren’t held to. I just do not care enough.

My specific gender identity- the way I experience the social world and my body within it- has shifted dozens of times since initially trying on new pronouns in 2021. Far from being a disqualifying factor, this is actually the magic of a non-binary identity. There are no regulations to be held to, no rules I could possibly break. I have resisted “coming out” as non-binary, because it feels like a formal statement, a consistent state of being- but that’s exactly what being non-binary isn’t. I don’t have to pin down any sort of consistent gender expression- I can just say “no thank you” to the boxes altogether, and float wherever I want outside of them. I can allow myself to be the wildly colorful, loud and growing supernova that I am- and take up all the oxygen I could possibly need to become the non-woman I am becoming.

tapping my card at the convenience store

ain’t as cheap as it was before

when i fill my tank with the spoils of war

bombs drop in the Caribbean

no proof, no weapons, come again?

these people die and sink, not swim

when we bomb in the Caribbean

sending my taxes to Israel,

with a blank check and a license to kill

god i’ll die …

Read more

I was handling some very distressing personal news regarding religion at the time, and was so excited to learn the Pastor of the church was openly gay, and happily married to a man*. As a no-longer-Mormon, I became religious (in a way) in his presence. God is something I am not sure of, but the moral compass and determination of a gay pastor who escaped Kansas… him I can put my trust in.

*I oftentimes feel the need to clarify when someone in within a religious institution is both openly gay and “practicing”. Mormonism, where the majority of my religious background lies, technically allows for people to be “out” but not “practicing”.

Pastor John had shut down most functions of his church in order to streamline resources to the unhoused population of Imperial Beach. The basement of his church has been made into a food pantry, functional by donations and volunteers. By mid 2026, his church will be demolished to be developed into low-income housing. His ministry has become housing God’s children. Truly, the only sort of pastor I can trust.

After the team’s service project (we worked for a while in the church’s gardens), the Pastor and his husband took the whole team out for lunch and ice cream. They were generous and enthusiastic to give back to us. As the year went on, I remembered those men and the respect I felt for them. At the end of the year, I listed Pastor John as one of the people we’d worked with that had the deepest impact on me.

Their belief in God drove them to dedicate their lives to love, give, and serve their neighbors. I have a strong connection to this strand of theology, and have found myself contemplating much recently about liberation theology and universalism. It felt so perfect to meet these shining examples of Christianity in such a pivotal time of my life regarding religion and institutions.

Upon moving to San Diego in November, one of my first instincts was to reconnect with this Pastor. I reached out to him quickly, and he responded enthusiastically. He remembered me, and updated me with information about the functioning of his congregation. Despite the open response, I did not make my way down to Imperial Beach to connect with his ministry for the first couple of months I spent in San Diego.

However, in the new year, I found myself in need of a place to feel community. I remember lying in bed on a Saturday night on the first week of the year, contemplating the next day. I didn’t have plans, I didn’t have any friends to see in the area, the weather was bad. I was sad. I felt lonely.

I thought about Pastor John, and remembered the remainders of his congregation met Sunday mornings. I still hadn’t seen him since volunteering with him in March of 2025. I texted him, and got the address to his church. I got up early the next morning, and went to fucking church, damn it. The congregation barely broke 15 people, and I showed up last, around 7 minutes late, per my standard time clock.

John’s sermon was about creating light. Winter is the darkest time of the year, but many winter holidays tout celebrations that create light. I honestly trust Pastor John’s perspective- a feeling that is (perhaps unsurprisingly) rare for me, given the number of Pastors I’ve listened to with no pulse on the real pain the Church has inflicted upon others.

When he began to really preach, I understood why he became a Pastor. Some people really are gifted with a special connection to the Universe, and John spoke in a way I only know poets and artists to speak in. He had notes on his phone- for guidance I’m sure, a collection of inspirations, perhaps scripture references. But as he spoke, I recognized the words of someone in contact with the Universe. The Flow. He wasn’t reading from a script- he was speaking in prose and in scripture and with the literal Spirit. I’d never experienced a sermon like that before- where the Pastor was so visibly in touch with something beyond him.

His speech was hardly religious- he spoke of Christ and quoted scripture- but more than anything, he spoke of humanity, and our role in it. He spoke about creating light and healing for others, as darkness seems to be everywhere. He spoke of the power of connecting with others. He talked about the homeless in San Diego. He talked about immigrants.

Jose, John’s husband, sang and played “At Last I See The Light” from Tangled on the piano as part of the sermon. It was an absolutely delightful way to engage pop culture into the sermon.

I was the youngest participant in the congregation by more or less 4 decades, and my presence was definitely a little bit noticeable in such a small audience (not in the least because I showed up late). John introduced me to the congregation, and told a very sweet story of me and my AmeriCorps team. He tied this story of my team into his sermon- telling the congregation about the light my team and I brought to various communities around the country during our year of service.

I cried from the sincerity of his words, and the knowledge that they were true. I needed the reminder that I also bring light into the world. In a time where I was aching for community, the reminder that my presence is valuable and necessary felt so beautiful.

The congregation began to file out, but John and Jose stayed to chat with me for another half hour. I shared photos from my time in Alaska (where my team and I had volunteered after our time in San Diego), and share different bits of gossip from other members of the team. It was so touching how much they remembered about us, and how meaningful our service to their church had been to them. They shared some of their life and family updates, as well as updates on the plans to have the church demolished and rebuilt.

We walked outside as we concluded our catch-up, and they noticed together that I drove a truck (by process of elimination- only a couple of cars were left in the parking lot). John’s primary ministry is with the homeless population of Imperial Beach. Anyone who has spent time working on homelessness outreach knows there is a very constant need for the transportation of things. Knowing people with trucks is essential for some of the more labor-intensive work, and I have noticed significantly fewer trucks in San Diego than, say, my home in Kansas City. Must be a regional thing. Needless to say, I offered my car up to be useful to them.

I don’t quite have a nice way to tie this story up, so I will do a little gratitude summary, which usually tends to leave things off nicely. I am grateful to my frankly unbeatable intuition- and the instinctive knowledge I have on when and to whom to reach when in need. I am grateful for the city of San Diego, for being a place for queer Midwesterners to run away and find each other. I am grateful for John and Jose for showing me what Christianity has the capacity to look like.

Irreantum 23.1

When I turned 8, I began attending Activity Days. This was an every-other week gathering of young girls, aged 8-11 at the church. It exists as an avenue for little girls to strengthen their friendships with one another, and for them to strengthen their testimonies, I’d presume. I mostly enjoyed the activities- they were often sewing nights, movie nights, and game nights.

However- the boys got to meet every single week when they turned 8. The Mormon church had a partnership with the Boy Scouts of America for the enrichment of the little boys, with no equivalent enrichment program for the girls. They learned so many skills, went camping, and got to play together every week! That did not seem fair to 8-year-old Merriah- and that was my first time ever feeling that sense of injustice.

At the time, I felt the unfairness of not getting to see my friends every week, but now (obviously, 17 years later) I see even more inequalities. Budget, time, care, attention, resources- everything was funneled directly into the boys education, enrichment, future. They would not have put any time or resources towards the girls at all if we weren’t the up and coming crop of hopeful New Mormon Mothers. Our value lay in our reproductive futures.

This flavor of injustice did not correct itself as I grew- and I never got used to its taste.

Each year, the Mormon church took the girls aged 12-18 on a camping trip. It was usually pretty rigid and pious, but I was usually able to eek some fun out of it. I would print out a hundred or so black and white photos of Nicholas Cage to tape up around the cabins and dining hall most years. It was a prank I loved executing and was beloved by many of the campers.

The campground we returned to annually had a variety of activities to keep us occupied- horseback riding, archery, and ziplining were yearly traditions for us at this campground. In 2018, our annual Girls Camp trip had all three of these events “stripped” from our camping package- the church could not afford to send 50-something girls for $225 each for a four-day campout that included the “major” activities.

We were to go camping at the same campground (an hour or so away from us in Kansas City) without participating in any of the activities they provided at the campground. Due to cost. The young men (with whom we attended church and school- our literal brothers) went white water rafting in Colorado that same year. I knew what the Mormon’s budget was capable of- they just didn’t care enough about the girls and women to spend it on us.

It was my final year of Girl’s Camp, and the majority of my closest friends had already graduated and moved out to Utah. I was still in Missouri for another year and feeling like a loser about it. And let me tell you- the week at Girl's Camp was bad. Boring, hot. We spent hours upon hours each day at the craft cabin (they only supplied us with the materials for one craft each) braiding each other’s hair and diving down a tarp someone had laid down a hill with a hose.

That was what they gave to us. One craft for the week. We had an hour of pool time per day- in our t-shirt covered swim suits (we can’t tempt any boys with our bodies now, can we?) (yes it is GIRLS CAMP). And you know, plentyyy of scripture study and journaling. Can’t ever have too much of that, can you girls?

I was a good Youth Camp Leader (or YCL)- I taught my 14- year old girls about the solar system and took them star gazing one night. I took them on a couple cute little hikes, a picnic, and we sang all the fun Girls Camp Mormon songs. We did s’mores.

But I was pissed off at how the church, the Young Women’s leaders, and the male authority were treating us. Like we were stupid. Like we were unimportant. Like they wouldn’t have even done this much for us if they felt like they could have gotten away with it. If our uteruses didn’t have these pesky brains and personalities attached to them. They let us sit in the unrelenting heat of Missouri while our brothers and friends flew down rapids in Colorado. It almost felt like they wanted us to know their distain for us- and I did. Loud and clear.

This feeling of inequality and frustration was pretty widely felt among the YCLs I spoke to- at last my friends, who had the tendency to verge from the traditional docile Mormon girl situation a lot of them had (have) going on. On the first or second day of this nightmare camping trip I started asking some of my friends in whispers if they wanted to go skinny dipping before the week ended. The idea spread. Truly, and I do mean this, a lot of them did. And I am nothing if not an organizer.

On our final night of Girls Camp- ever- a group of YCLs and I gathered. An hour or so after we were supposed to have gone to bed, we commenced on my cabin’s porch. We’d planned the event in whispers over the few days preceding, and around 10 girls showed up in total. We left the less rebellious girls to hold down the fort, and ran to the pool.

A smaller girl climbed over the fence of the gated swimming area, opened the door to let us all in. The 10 or so of us I’d gathered stripped to (varying levels of) naked- and jumped in. It was fun- and it was my very first time doing anything intentionally rebellious like this.

It was silly and ridiculous, and it couldn’t have lasted more than a half hour or so. Most of the girls weren’t even fully naked (I was- don’t get it twisted). We tried to keep quiet, but we were also fairly far away from anyone we could wake. I clearly remember the sensation of the cold water on my body. The night was warm, the sky was unincumbered by light pollution, and we were laughing and carefree in a way we had not been the entire week.

After we were done skinny dipping we were so… awake. It was not bedtime. A few girls ran off to the zipline to see if they could get any of the ziplining supplies dislodged (I am grateful they were not able to- had they, this night may have a much different legacy). A couple others went to the dining hall and rang the dinner bell- a LARGE, LOUD bell used daily to signify when meals were ready. Somehow, throughout the entire evening, I don’t think we woke anyone up.

A few of us (this was my side quest of choice after the skinny dipping-) signed our names on the (already very graffitied) walls of the craft cabin- then climbed onto the roof of said cabin. One of the girls I’d gathered gave me a haircut. In the dark, past midnight, my hair still wet from skinny dipping, with scissors found in the art cabin. I lost about 6 inches of my hair to that night… 18 year old Merriah was so cool.

Because the Mormon church is insanely paternalistic, archaic, etc., Girls Camp must always be supervised by male authority leaders. The Girls Camp leaders are all women- but there must always be a man present (and awake) to supervise. There is ALWAYS patriarchal oversight of women in the Mormon church. Each night, there was a Priesthood holder tasked with the assignment to circle the camp in a golf cart on patrol. You know, to keep the evil spirits away or whatever.

One girl, still on the ground on the perimeter of the cabin, threw a hula hoop up to the girls on the roof. Another girl caught it and began to hula hoop- standing on the roof of this cabin. Up until this point, we had all stayed seated on the roof to aid our center of gravity and prevent any destruction of the cabin itself. As she stood, the Priesthood patroller turned the corner in his golf cart- no longer obscured from the forest between us and the dining hall.

He was probably the equivalent of a couple blocks away from us, and it was the dead of night in the forest. His headlights did not reach us- there would have been no silhouette. He likely did not hear us, was probably not even paying attention. But also, we were 17 and 18 year old girls, and my self-perception of volume has never been terribly trustworthy. We may have been way more obvious than I judged us to be.

We all slammed our bodies flat to the roof and held our breath as the patrol golf cart passed by us. The road went right past the craft cabin, and we could hear him approaching. I was scared someone would laugh, or cough, but no one did. I felt proud of the little gaggle of rule breakers I’d gathered as the golf cart passed by us without even slowing down. I think there were 4 or 5 of us on the roof. Maybe one or two had run inside the cabin to avoid being seen.

Of course, the next morning everyone was whispering about what we’d gotten up to. 10 can keep a secret if 9 of them are dead or whatever, and I was not particularly worried about getting caught after the fact. It was the last day of camp, I was 18 and I (accurately) assessed that there would be very few serious consequences that could come from a stunt like this.

None of the leaders at the camp seemed particularly stressed or upset by what they heard- we got a few giggles and some rolled eyes from some of the more relaxed and carefree Camp Leaders. None of us were hurt, we were just a little slap happy and under-rested. A bunch of my hair was missing, and some younger girls approached me to ask what had happened. I did not divulge any details until we were safely home- but they’d heard through other yappers.

Only a few days after being home from the camp, all of the YCLs received a summons from the Stake Young Women’s Leader (the woman who was in charge of the entire camping week- both the campers and all of our leaders). I had a sneaking suspicion I knew what the meeting was going to be about, and put on an Oscar-award winning performance of shock and disgust when she described the rumors she had heard about her precious Young Women. She was so upset. Nobody came forward to confess what had gone down- and nobody overtly ratted, either. (Plenty of girls who did not participate also did not rat. Thank you ladies).

This lack of confession would come back to me a few days later. I’m fairly certain my name was in the center of the rumors, which was an accurate if somewhat inconvenient assessment of the situation. I was pulled into a meeting with one of the Stake President’s Counselor’s (one of the top 3 patriarchs of the Kansas City area) office on a Sunday morning. I was pulled out of the pews of Sacrament Meeting while I sat with my family, and taken to his office. This man (for the sake of the story, I’ll call him President Thomson) was not even in our ward- he’d gone very out of his way to pull me out of church. Once in his office, he questioned me about both the reality of, and my involvement in the skinny dipping rumors he’d heard about Girls Camp.

(Both the Young Women’s Leader and the President Thomson both only addressed the skinny dipping rumors, despite there being rumors about a half dozen forms of shenanigans).

For some additional context, Thomson is famously an extremely pious man with a very high opinion of his own holiness- an opinion he does let us in on. He also has very strong opinions about the way Young Women should dress, and has been known to stare young girls down when he finds their attire to be “immodest”. He probably hasn’t read the scripture about plucking out your own eye when it offends you. He probably hasn’t read a lot of the more important scriptures, actually. Anyways, I didn’t (and still don’t) respect him.

What he repeated back to me sounded only mildly exaggerated, but (remember, I am an Oscar winning actress at this point) I did not give in on any of the major points. I had a very close friend who did not participate in the antics (LINDA IS INNOCENT!), and let our Most Holy Stake Counselor Thomson that he was hearing exaggerated stories made up to make other girls jealous. And also it’s a little strange to be this obsessed with the Young Women skinny dipping isn’t it?

He informed me that if any of the rumors were true, that it could be a Law of Chastity (the name for the Mormon Laws regarding the appropriate time/place for sexuality- AKA heterosexual marriage) issue to address. This could impact my temple worthiness, and by extension the church’s literal measure of whether I will get to the Celestial Kingdom* or not. He never “had” me, but he completely lost me then. There was no way in hell God gave a shit if I swam naked with some of my friends, and I knew that. At the ripe age of 18.

*The Highest Level of Mormon Heaven.

Anyways. He interviewed a few of the other girls, and nobody cracked. I love them all. We sort of had different variations of the same story- a little bit of running around and breaking curfew, but mostly just made-up stories.

I am proud of myself for my insight and my perspective to know that the girls were not being treated fairly. I’ve always loved causing a bit of harmless trouble, and this is one of my favorite early executions of this passion. I am proud of myself for taking initiative, planning and playing out the most fun event of Girls Camp in 2018, even if it was not sanctioned… and ultimately could have even gotten me kicked out of Heaven…

Luckily, at the age of 18, I was also wise enough to see through the Priesthoods’ obsession with controlling us, their puritanical obsession with girl’s bodies, and the overarching desire to have a say in our every move. I knew God probably thought it was cool to rebel against the patriarchy by being a pain in their patriarchal asses.

My fight against the Patriarchy is long and never-ending, and one of my earliest battles was fought naked in a pool with 10 other Mormon girls against a purity-obsessed cult. Thank you for reading.