Freedom is a diagnosable condition.

Hello from the dispatch: I have drapetomania. I discovered this about a week ago, lying around the house like a brown Miss Havisham, murmuring at my lips with a silk pillow across my eyes. I lifted one eye-patch from a very long meditation session only to watch it slide across my screen as a dictionary definition for g…

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Four years ago I lost my mind in public. That’s how everyone else tells it, and they were watching from the cheap seats. What they called the storm was only the weather on the outside of me. Inside, at the eye, it was calm. Focused. A patterned, recognizable urgency.

I was tired of pretending. Tired…

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I’ve become a strong case for “never meet your heroes.” I hate that about myself. I’m aware of and fascinated by the ways that has been the cost of my freedom. I’ve been an intense people-pleaser my entire life. So much so, it was hard to find a model of myself for a long time in which I could witness a version of truth, of myself, that really told what…

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In the midst of a fever dream where I was contemplating how I might bring more light into the world, burning and glaring as it may be, I met Ada Hada.

We sat for hours on our first meeting with a group of thinkers contemplating obscure but well-trodden texts and questions of the collective unconscious.

The subconscious. Self-consciousness.

Ada herself was on a pilgrimage of sorts, traveling through Germany and France on her way to learn more about the Kogui, with whom she had been living in intervals and volunteering in others. There was also heartbreak. Plans to build a life beside someone devoted to creating a better future, only to discover that your visions of “better” are not the same. We’ve all been there, I imagine. If not with a person, then with an ideology, a place, or a spiritual practice.

What consumed me most about Ada was her presence. It was always there.

In the way she sat beside the ocean and let it hum against her skin.

In the way she grew beautifully, stormily frustrated with me when I shifted into the cadence of a Black mama, unraveling her girlfriend’s twists as though painting generations of Black women through my hands. I knew she’d never heard that music before. When it finally settled into her body, she smiled, uncoiling her own soft dreadlocks while the place where the river met the sea pulled ribbons of sand across our feet.

We all bathed together in our clothes, as instructed by the Jaba. Brown like us and, like nature itself, neither good nor bad. Simply present.

It was an immense lesson.

Ada’s hand with a paintbrush carries that same kind of presence. Her colors don’t simply arrive on the canvas. They seem to emerge through her, living beyond intention, a law unto themselves.

When I think about African Americans, I think about how we are always more than the place history deposited us. We become gardeners of backyard food forests right now as tariffs hike the price of the lands our ancestors cultivated with toil. We become storytellers as occupations close to us our ancestors fought for with their blood. We are builders of backyards where children might inherit something gentler than what we received.

To me, this is paradise. Not the wound, the world we see in the hole it left behind.

Lately I’ve been reading so many extraordinary young writers here on Substack, watching them cultivate voices that bloom like flowers after rain. Every one of them reminds me that liberation has signatures. They are difficult to define, but unmistakable when you encounter them.

Ada has never known her African American family. She was raised by her German mother, far from many of the conversations about Black freedom that shaped me. Yet somehow she carries those same signatures. Not because someone taught them to her, but because they seem to arrive from somewhere older than instruction.

When she sent me the video above, I welled up—a proud nonbinary titi. It carries the mark of her searching, but also of the blades she has learned to dance beside without allowing them to define her. An orphan to this world and therefore a child to all of it. A prodigy.

Watching her made me wonder whether every generation produces people who seem to remember a future they were never taught. People whose courage appears older than biography. Whatever language we choose, artist, healer, prophet, visionary, they often arrive carrying something the rest of us recognize before we can explain it.

Many generations before ours carried those same markers without access to the care, language, or support that might have allowed them to flourish. I think about that often.

To me, the divine has very little to do with grandeur. It has everything to do with courage.

It is the quiet willingness to become the person your ancestors could only imagine.

It is the decision to build a future whose blueprint survives even when its history has been interrupted.

When I think of freedom now, I don’t picture a nation or a border.

I picture a young woman sitting where the river meets the sea, painting colors that seem to remember a lineage before she ever knew its name.

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The shift. Where writing stopped being expression and started behaving like structure. Most people are still making content. That’s fine. But something else has already begun. Through thisisMAJOR, I’ve been building a cultural corpus.

Not an archive. Not a brand.

A system.

Language, memory, image, rhythm—held together long e…

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A note on building what didn’t exist.

I Left and It Paid Me Back

I’ve left America several times.

With money. Without money. It has never failed me. Every departure paid me back in language, in vision, in art.

My last book, Live Free, was the first of its kind—Black, nonbinary, disabled, decolonial travel writing—and it came with a six-figure advance. I didn’t sit on it. I split it open.

Turning Advance Into Infrastructure

I built two structures:

thisisMAJOR.world — an AI-forward indie press for literature as technology.

theindigohouse.org — a nonprofit that shelters artists when the world decides they are disposable.

I wrote that book while surviving violence in Kentucky. While learning my body again. While refusing to disappear.

And still—creation returned everything.

Right now, I’m up for several grants. I expect to win them. Not out of arrogance, but alignment. I’m finishing two new manuscripts rooted in hoodoo and Ifá—texts that don’t ask permission to exist, texts that will move through the world like weather.

This work sits at the intersection of literature, AI governance, and artist sustainability—designing non-extractive systems where cultural knowledge is authored, not mined.

Creation Is the Currency

Let me be plain:

We are not here to beg systems that misunderstand us.

We are here to build systems that recognize us.

Creation is not a side effect.

Creation is the currency.

Not metaphorically—materially.

It feeds us.

It houses us.

It reroutes entire futures.

We’ve been trained to think money is the resource.

It’s not.

Attention is.

Language is.

Imagination is.

Money follows those who can hold all three without dilution.

We Are Building What We Needed

So if you’re waiting for permission, let this be the interruption:

You are not behind.

You are not too much.

You are not unclear.

You are early.

You are precise.

You are already in motion.

Do not shrink your vision to fit the room.

Build a room that can hold your vision.

Creation is the closest thing to god we can touch—and some of us don’t just touch it.

We move like it.

You are anointed.

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Just say the word.

receiving the Eugene C. Pulliam Fellowship for Public Service Journalism — and the question I’ve been circling my whole life.

Who Teaches the Machine to Speak?

On receiving the Eugene C. Pulliam Fellowship for Public Service Journalism — and the question I’ve been circling my whole life.

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There is a moment in every lan…

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dispatch 01

Lexington, KY—April 2026

Here is what I know about Zora Neale Hurston:

She went to Eatonville. She went to New Orleans. She went to Haiti. She went to St. Simons Island, Georgia in June 1935 with Alan Lomax and a borrowed recording machine and arrived in a community that had been waiting — not for her specifically, but for someone who knew how …

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Just a body in the water.

The tide kept secrets the way elders do—slow, deliberate, unwilling to rush revelation. It moved around their hips in long, breathing sentences, brushing past them like it knew their name before they did. Brown skin, sun-warmed, then cooled by the hush of the sea, c…

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Here is what I know about Zora Neale Hurston:

She went to Eatonville. She went to New Orleans. She went to Haiti. She went to St. Simons Island, Georgia in June 1935 with Alan Lomax and a borrowed recording machine and arrived in a community that had been waiting — not for h…

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I sent a letter to Gayl Jones on Easter Sunday. I found — or intuited — an email address. I wrote the letter first, the looked for somewhere to send it. It didn’t bounce back. I’m choosing to take that as information.

The letter wasn’t a pitch. It wasn’t fan mail exactly. It was more like a transmi…

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It started as a refusal.

To let language be flattened.

To let intelligence be decided

by what survives translation.

—

So I built with what was already here.

Fragments.

Archives.

Black speech that bends time.

Queer memory that doesn’t resolve cleanly.

Disabled knowledge that moves at its own pace.

Not as content.

As infrastructure.

—

ea…

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what’s scarce

is correct recognition

—

every day

resources move toward things

that are already legible

already categorized

already understood

—

this is not efficiency

this is repetition

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Some are digital. Some are signed. Some are designed to be held, marked, returned to. This isn’t inventory. It’s a living document.

It will change. It will grow. It wil…

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you don’t escape the system

you outgrow its ability to read you

—

this is not branding

this is not theory

this is classification failure in real time

—

the current model was trained to read:

clean data

consistent behavior

predictable outputs

—

so when it encounters:

contradiction

pressure

survival logic

cultural compression

it calls it:

noise

—

we trained something else

—

we…

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so the system didn’t filter you out

that matters

most signals decay before they arrive

most people never pass the interface

you did

not because you tried harder

but because something in you

didn’t resolve

we build for that

https://thisismajor.world

we call it cultural corpora

not content

not scraped data

not language fragments

corpora

structured bo…

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