The Body Remembers Survival

Prolonged trauma and chronic toxic stress can change the brain in lasting ways. When my nervous system is overwhelmed, my worldview narrows, my temperament becomes more abrasive, and I become highly reactive and distrustful. In these moments, I am like a wild, wounded animal backed into a corner. My eyes wide with panic and disbelief, my chest tightens, my shoulders tense and my jaw clenched….

My origin story begins with a near-death experience. Born with the umbilical cord wrapped around my neck twice; I was turning purple and in obvious distress until emergency doctors rushed in to save me. I used to think of this as an interesting anecdote about my birth. Now, I wonder if this experience tattooed my soul with a kind of mysticism that expresses itself as empathy: the capacity to witness others at the level of the soul.

I came into this world fighting for breath, already learning that survival is both miraculous and heartbreakingly painful.

Identity, Trauma, and Difference

For much of my life, I have struggled to understand why I have felt “different,” even among my peers. I often attributed this to trauma-related social anxiety, and sometimes that is true. However, it is also a neurobiological response to everyday stressors; social anxiety may be the outward expression a nervous system trying to survive in a world not designed for it.

My lived experiences of housing insecurity, poverty, gender-based violence, and adverse childhood experiences have been shaped at the intersection of my various social identities and their proximity to power, privilege, oppression, and marginalization.

I am easily exhausted by society’s rules, so I limit my exposure to a world that normalizes harmful conditions for our communities. Ultimately, am tired of neuro-normative paradigms that mistake difference for dysfunction and compliance for good governance.

When Personal Pain Reveals Structural Harm

Modern life demands more of our nervous systems than most bodies can sustain. This is visible in the overwhelmed worker, the burned-out caregiver, the student who cannot focus, and the family struggling to remain housed.

We are taught to treat these as individual shortcomings requiring more discipline, resilience, or gratitude. But when the same patterns affect millions, they are not simply personal problems. They are symptoms of toxic structural conditions: burnout, loneliness, instability, and chronic disconnection.

Healthcare systems manage stress-related illness while workplaces intensify the conditions that create it. Housing systems respond to crisis while economic structures generate new insecurity. We have built systems that produce suffering, then built industries to manage it.

We have to address the historical and structural roots of violence and oppression. That is where my vision takes form: systems designed around wellbeing instead of survival.

Recent Rupture and Repair

A recent rupture brought these patterns into sharp focus for me. Domestic-violence-related PTSD can make emotional and psychological gaslighting feel immediately threatening, especially when manipulation, blame-shifting, or self-pity replace accountability.

In those moments, triggers blur the line between old harm and present danger. A traumatized brain in an agitated state is in full-on survival mode; when we’re triggered, we are incapable of making decisions or responding appropriately to stress (at least for me). Our nervous systems need time, safety, and supportive coregulation to restore balance.

Empathy is difficult to balance with self-care, though. The depth of my emotions can unsettle others and usually exhausts me (unless it’s an oxytocin kind of energy).Keeping myself at arms-length is the best way I know how to protect myself and the people around me from absorbing my emotional baggage.

Returning to the Vision

If there is a path forward, it begins with refusing to treat survival responses as personal failures. My story is not separate from the systems around me; it is evidence of what those systems produce. Healing cannot be isolated to the individual when harm is organized structurally, inherited historically, and reinforced institutionally. To move from survival to wellbeing, we need systems that honor nervous systems, protect dignity, and make care easier to access than crisis response. This is the vision I return to: a world where people are not forced to earn their humanity or prove their worth by enduring cyclical patterns of institutional harm.

Two absurdly privileged executives retain their combined $600,000 in annual salaries while program staff lose their jobs and community absorbs the impact.

Are you f*cking kidding me??? There is no logical explanation for this…..unless you count ineptitude and moral bankruptcy as logical responses to homelessness?!?

The misalignment between community values and institutional behavior is truly alarming. These executives are profiting off the backs of our unhoused neighbors while the Governing Committee and City & County Councils practice their puppetry? #F*ckThatForever

This is not simply mismanagement. It is a breach of relational accountability and proper stewardship.

A Culture of Executive Protectionism

We’ve been conditioned to accept the status quo; these layoffs represent a history of paternalism, maintaining executive roles while eliminating positions essential to direct service coordination. These are the very functions that keep people sheltered, connected, and safe. This is structural inequity in its truest form.

This pattern mirrors earlier reporting: unionized staff explicitly urged the governing board to cut executive positions first, citing their combined compensation of over $600,000 — equivalent to five or six full-time program staff. [!!!!!!!!]

Surprise! Their recommendation was ignored.

The Human Cost of Executive Avoidance

Dragging out the layoff process for days — with unclear timelines and no leadership presence — inflicted unnecessary harm on employees already carrying the emotional and logistical weight of a collapsing agency. Staff reportedly received one month of paid administrative leave and no severance, a stark contrast to the more generous packages offered during previous layoffs.

This is not how a public agency behaves if it genuinely values its people.

A System That Punishes Workers for Leadership Failures

The forensic audit revealed KCRHA lacked basic financial controls, lost track of at least $8 million, and relied on loans it could not afford. The consequences of these failures are being borne by frontline and operational staff — not the executives responsible for oversight. This is the inverse of accountability and responsible stewardship of a public agency.

Sadly, this is a common occurrence in both public and nonprofit spaces, emulating the structural inequities of corporate culture. I am calling for a Wellbeing Audit of local leadership and governance systems. As a King County resident for the vast majority of my life, I have watched politicians deceive and otherwise manipulate the communities they govern. Enough is enough.

Organized Resistance to Systemic Corruption

The coercive abuse of power and unscrupulous practices of system leaders will not change unless the community mobilizes to remind them of their purpose!

KCRHA’s most recent shenanigans are pretty well captured in the image below. For the sake of clarity, I will list a few examples:

• Executive absence during moments of crisis

• Punitive consequences for operational vs. executive & administrative staff

• An egregious lack of transparency, collaboration and accountability to the community.

• A political environment that rewards ego-driven performance rather than substantive leadership.

In other words, these layoffs are not isolated events. They are representative of an archaic governance model that prioritizes optics over outcomes, hierarchy over humanity, and dirty politics over community wellbeing.

The Unhoused Community Deserves Better

Every administrative failure at KCRHA reverberates outward:

• Delayed contracts mean service constraints

• Lost staff capacity means lost continuity of care.

• Public distrust means more people are suffering in isolation.

Let me be clear: Our unhoused neighbors are paying the price for political puppeteering. King County politicians have been running roughshod over vulnerable constituencies for decades, well before KCRHA was conceived! This is bigger and deeper than KCRHA. This is and has always been about preserving power hierarchies.

Wellbeing Revolution Calls for a Different Strategy

A wellbeing-centered regional response requires:

• Transparent governance

• Executive accountability equal to or greater than frontline accountability

• Financial stewardship grounded in relational ethics, not community gaslighting

• Decision-making that centers people most impacted, not the people most insulated

KCRHA’s leadership trajectory shows none of these commitments.

As a Wellbeing Wayfinder and Steward, I am exceedingly disappointed in this outcome, not only the layoffs but the culture that made them inevitable.

🌺 Closing

Wellbeing Revolution stands in solidarity with the workers who were laid off, the workers who remain in uncertainty, and the unhoused community whose lives are shaped by these politically-motivated, nonsensical decisions. We reject governance models that protect power at the expense of people. We call for a regional homelessness response rooted in integrity, relational accountability, and universal wellbeing design.

Fun challenge: Identify the paraphrased quote,

“Justice is coming. And hell is coming with me.”

.

I did have fun chasing ideas down rabbit holes and following a maze of connectivity. Still, I realized why I need more discipline and structure in my life, including a real “team” to check me when I lose focus. I am easily distracted by things that intrigue me, which is how I end up in a web of confusion and delayed execution on my goals.

I have been untangling the knots I created, humbled by my own naivete. In this process, I am turning to WBR content for inspiration and personal grounding. The following is an excerpt from a manuscript I started working on months ago:

Pasifika Ways of Knowing as Methodology

Wellbeing Revolution does not fetishize Pasifika culture or treat it as a source of entertainment for the Western gaze. Culture is our methodology. Three Pasifika epistemological commitments shape every aspect of the WBR model:

● Relational Responsibility: Relationships are not context — they are content. Every interaction carries ethical weight. Every decision is made in relationship and accountable to the broader community.

● Collective Care: Wellbeing is not the same as individual wellness. Wellbeing is held, nurtured, and sustained by the community. The goal is not individual resilience but collective thriving.

● Intergenerational Wisdom: Ancestors are not metaphors. Their guidance — embedded in language, practice, story, and song — is living knowledge that informs present action and shapes future possibility.

Wellbeing Revolution Guiding Values

Loto Maʻa: Courageous Love

Loto maʻa is more than warmth or kindness. It is a disciplined, strategic commitment to seeing people fully — their dignity, their pain, their strength, and their possibility. It requires courage because it does not look away from harm. It requires discipline because it holds accountability alongside compassion. It is the practice of showing up completely, honestly, and without an agenda.

Ngutu Kovi: Truth-Telling that Disrupts Harm

Ngutu kovi is the audacious act of truth-telling. Where loto maʻa opens the heart, ngutu kovi speaks plainly. It locates and identifies harm wherever it is present. It holds institutions, leaders, and communities accountable for the gap between what is promised and what is delivered.

Together, loto maʻa and ngutu kovi function as partners: courageous love needs truth-telling to remain honest, and truth-telling needs courageous love to remain humane.

Why Community Power Matters

Lived experience IS expertise. Community members who have navigated these systems hold irreplaceable knowledge about what works, what harms, and what is needed. Wellbeing Revolution positions community stewards as the architects and innovators of enduring systems change.

Our work is not simply an ethical commitment. It is a practical one. Models designed without community knowledge fail miserably. Models that extract community knowledge without returning power and resources exacerbates the very dynamics they claim to address. Community power — genuine, structural, compensated — is the mechanism by which this model works.

I will be presenting different sections of this manuscript at the Lived Experience Leadership Conference in September.

The technology debacle reminded me to stay in my lane! If I don’t have the skillset, I need to find it! This is how I visualize and evaluate my own wellbeing audit.

I still have sensory nightmares about the state-of-mind I was in at the height of my distress. Phrases like “Compassion fatigue” and “burnout” don’t even come close to capturing the depth or breadth of harm I experienced; I’m not exaggerating when I say it nearly killed me.

I’ve learned over and over again that martyrdom doesn’t do shit for community transformation. Grind culture and hero worshipping are merely forms of mass distraction and labor extraction. To get beyond my reactive state, I will need to send targeted healing to my soul wounds so that I may better protect my peace.

The Psychosocial Hazards of Transformative Justice Work

Community organizing and direct service provision are not for the faint of heart. Each field presents psychosocial risks that ought to be treated as occupational health hazards (i.e. vicarious/secondary trauma, crisis response, downstream impacts on wellbeing). Trauma-informed care cannot stop at client services. It must be practiced internally through HR policies, strategic planning, restorative justice and enforceable leadership accountability!

Power hierarchies do nothing but create inefficiencies and piss me the f*ck off. If I must do so, I will reenter the workforce with clearer boundaries and give myself 100% permission to leave it, without feeling shame, guilt, or regret.

My work, My terms

All employers, corporations, businesses, nonprofit and government agencies need to stop f*cking around with our infrastructure and LEARN how to actually apply trauma-informed care to their teams and communities. Safety, trust, self-determination, relational integrity, cultural humility, and psychological safety must be embedded into every workplace culture. Staff deserve environments where their nervous systems are not treated as expendable, where truth-telling is not punished, and where psychological safety is an established protective factor, particularly for frontline staff.

This declaration is part of my wayfinding journey: to transform scars into a model of wellbeing-centered protective factors for other communities seeking liberation. Alas, I return not as a traumatized worker but as a sovereign practitioner, trainer, and community wellbeing steward.

Meanwhile, I will build Wellbeing Revolution: Leading with Heart & Strategy - loto ma’a, ngutu kovi from the ground up. I can still choose financial stability without abandoning my sovereignty. So…I let my rage become fire. I use my fire with discipline and intention to manifest abundance. I allow it to warm my warrior spirit without allowing it to consume my peace.

Commitments

This is not a return to dependence. It is a deliberate step toward autonomy: financial stability, sovereignty, meaningful work, and the freedom to build WBR from a calm and centered space. I will meet this moment with loto ma’a, ngutu kovi and keep my focus on building the life and legacy I want to leave behind.

Closing Vow

As a Pasifika Wayfinder, I will read the storms without becoming them. I will listen deeply to what they reveal. I will move with passion, grace, and unapologetic authenticity.

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