The Lindsay Clancy trial is bringing up a lot of discussion regarding healthcare providers and there’s been a lot of public critique towards her providers. Sharing my thoughts on the matter.

The public sentiment that "providers should spend more time with patients" fails to address the underlying systemic issue of productivity requirements, and nuance. We (any and all healthcare providers with an NPI) have to see a certain number of clients a day to stay employed. When I worked in inpatient psych at Nationwide Children’s (bc I’ma always name them), I routinely saw 10+ individual patients and their families per day. This doesn't even account for the extensive time spent on the phone with insurance companies, advocating to individuals without medical degrees to “por favor Jesus please” - stress ball in shambles - as I squeezed and simultaneously spoke tightly into the phone asking a stranger to please honor my professional judgment and pay for this chil…

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As a social worker people often ask me how they can best support their friend/family member/coworker who is in an unsafe relationship. My answer is “do nothing”. Like literally do nothing. Chances are, if you know someone who is being abused, they told you about it. Survivors are incredibly skilled at hiding their pain. I had a client tell me once that it was her second job. Her co-workers, friends and family never knew. So if they trust you enough to confide in you, then that’s a big step, so don’t ruin it by making it about you.

Something all abusers do as default is use guilt and control to seperate people from the people who love and care for them. It hurts my stomach when I see people vent online about how hard it is to support victims of violence, and not because it’s a lie. It is hard to see some…

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It’s been a little over two weeks since putting Lola to sleep. There’s not a good way to describe how I’m feeling, really. “It comes in waves” doesn’t really even begin to describe the abrupt transition of feeling “okay” and then just…not, in the span of seconds, minutes, hours or during work with a client. Yesterday was the first time my eyes didn’t well up when explaining to clients why I wasn’t at work last week. With the world the way it is, we are long past pretending or playing a role as therapist. We are humans too and there is another layer of grief that is exposed when supporting others’ and dealing with your own shit too.

I saw a post that went viral over whether or not therapists should drink water during session. Um, fuck you, I’ll eat my leftovers too ( I won’t but I long to be unapologetic like that). Because are you kidding me? I get increasingly irritated too when people assume we’re in it for the money. Those of us that accept insurance don’t get what the full rate is. And those of us who work in group practice get even less. More mercy please. Even though, therapist hat on, lots of people are projecting their frustrations with systems and even close relationships that failed them, onto us I guess that’s what we get paid the not so big bucks for.

Let’s get straight to it. I’m fostering a puppy. Yeah. So two days after putting Lola to sleep, I saw a post from a woman in the rescue Facebook group that I’m in, begging someone to come meet her and pick up some puppies that had been dumped on the side of the road. This is unfortunately hella common here in Mexico. I scrolled past. I waited about an hour then checked again. No one had come forward to help. I wrote her on WhatsApp and said that I’d meet her at a nearby landmark, a church, in a part of Merida that I had never been too before. Ripe for a kidnapping, an extortion, or a robbery. If this wasn’t Merida, the second safest city in all of the Americas. I was still wary though. You can definitely hook me with a sob story about puppies. I got in my car and drove thirty minutes south from my house anyway. I circled the church, unassuming and attached to a small sweet park, and parked. I got out, sent the “estoy aqui enfrente la iglesia” mesage, and waited. Waited some more and then text, “soy la unica negrita jeje”. We unknowingly walked in circles around each other for about five minutes, then I saw someone wave hesitantly from a distance. She was with a teenager, her son. When she stood right in front of me she hugged me, in typical Latin American fashion, but held on a little longer. She had been crying. She wasn’t like me. She was a true animal lover, not liker. I’d do most things for my Lola. But not all things and that I think is the difference. She explained to me that she already had six dogs and that her husband was adamant about not bringing in more. A man who was walking his dog meandered over and peeked inside the bucket. “Quieres dos cachorros? Podemos divertirlas” I joked, telling him we could split up the four pups. He shook his head hard, giving me an emphatic “hell no” as he backed away clenching the leash. “Ya tengo diez”. “I already have ten”. See? Animal lovers, not likers. The woman, animal lover number one, was hesitant to hand me the bucket. She kept asking if I would take care of them. I get it. I’m a foreigner. Some of us adopt dogs just to leave back to the United States soon thereafter, leaving them for locals to rehome. But the difference is, I’m not adopting. I’m providing a home until they find their furever family. Four puppies, a grieving heart, an an urn full of ashes that used to be Lola.

When I got home, I quarantined them to my bathroom. I’d never seen puppies this small. Upon further inspection I saw that they were covered in ticks and fleas. The fleas I expected. But the ticks? It was horrible. A true infestation. No one knows how long they were outside. When I tell people the story, they automatically get angry. But my favorite question to ask before I judge is “what else is true”. Mexico’s streets are laden with street dogs. Street dogs who give birth to street puppies. Vet visits, dog food and the time and attention that puppies that small need are expensive. In my version of their story, a kiddo, maybe a teenager, saw them bumbling around the side of the road, eyes crusted over or just not opened yet to see, because they were barely four weeks old. Maybe their heart dropped and they looked around, saw an old unused bucket, and placed them in gently one by one in the hopes that a dog lover or dog liker would find them. A much better fate than dying from dehydation or being eaten slowly by another animal (we have boas) or dying after being run over by a car. A good samaritan. A dog liker, not lover.

I ordered milk subsitute from Petco. A cool $50 USD. They were fed by me, every three hours that first night. Around 5AM I woke up to my television showing Mary’s husband forcing his hand up Nancy’s skirt at a ballet recital (Imperfect Woman on Apple TV) apropros I think, because men are dogs. I paused it, because there was clearly a lot of catching up to do in that series. I’d have to rewind. Mary’s husband seemed like such a great guy in the two episodes I’d watched before falling asleep, but don’t they all? I opened the door slowly to my bathroom to avoid startling the pups. Two weren’t moving at all. The other two whipered and whined, climbing on top of their siblings lifeless bodies. I had danced with one of them around my living room just hours before. I sang “Survivor”. He wasn’t that anymore but he was free. I have some old tshirts of Eden and Lincoln that I keep meaning to donate. I chose the softest ones from the pile and carefully wrapped each pup seperately, and laid them side by side in my living room, in a box. I returned to my bathroom floor with re-sanitized tweezers, and lifted the toilet seat, ready to drown more ticks with glee. Resentment built and as I continued to carefully remove the ones feeding on the two surviving puppies. One white and one marbled black and brown, the biggest one of all. Lost count but I think I removed well over seventy ticks between the remaining two. The next day I bathed them both with a special tick shampoo and removed a few more. The white one was listless and didn’t resist. The brown one fought back.

There’s a vet on my street. Equipped with the basics and a doctor that cares who has probably seen much worse than malnourished puppies. My hysteria is always taken in stride here in Mexico. It’s very American. As mentioned, I’m in the rescue group. I’ve turned notifcations off because every week there are photos of still alive by some miracle (or curse) street dogs who are disembowled or left bloody and stunned in the middle of the street after a hit and run. Just last week a man hung his family dog from the tree in front of his house…for eating his chickens. Dogs are poisoned on purpose as a form of animal control (or maybe folks are just sadistic pieces of shit) and whatever they’re given doesn’t result in a soft and easy death. The dogs (and cats) choke, seize and pant. And sometimes they survive for days, immobile and dazed under the blistering hot sun. The high is 104 today. The doctor is a slight, soft spoken Yucatecan woman in her thirties, with medical/veterinary books stacked high and hapharzardly around her exam room, some of them sliding off her desk but for some reason, they didn’t topple over. A testament to her skill with animals I hoped. Her assistant barely looked at me but warmed up when they realized I spoke Spanish. The vet told me the white one was “delicada”. It’s a word I know, but didn’t really understand in full until he passed that night. Not just delicate. Fragile. He had stopped eating the night before so I “knew” but I still hoped. Even with the smallest infant bottle that I could find at the Bodega Aurora (where the overstock goes from Walmart in the U.S, same company lower prices) he wouldn’t take the milk substitute.

In the early morning I watched as the biggest sniffed and poked her brother’s listless form, restless and persistent until she finally scooched her butt as close as she could into his body and sighed. He didn’t want to play. I let her say her doggy goodbye then I picked up the “delicada” and took him to bed with me, wrapped in a towel that I’ll never use again. I rocked him to sleep for an hour and after three loud exhales and a final whimper, his little body relaxed for the first and final time. My landlord was scheduled to do maintenance at my house later that day. I asked my landlord to call the city to remove the body. Because I was self conscious. Hey, hi, um yes another report of a third dead dog at the same address. Awkward. Plus, the first time I called the city to schedule a “dead animal pickup” the operator asked if there was anyone near me who spoke spanish, so asking my landlord to do it for me was definitely rooted in that ego blow. (I told her “nah, just speak slow” and we got it done.) My landlord was sympathetic and offered to hang some pictures that he noticed I never got around to hanging. In moments of crisis and grief it’s the small things that people appreciate the most. Something he took off my plate without me asking. It was very much appreciated and I told him so.

She still doesn’t have a name. Her prognosis is good, although I won’t exhale until she hits ten weeks. She finished her dewormers, doesn’t have anymore ticks and is hella feisty. She has transitioned to regular dog food (we say croquetas here). Steven babysat her a few days ago, and I haven’t got her back. Shall I report her mising or nah? Lol The kids love her. A puppy wasn’t part of the plan but then again neither was putting my chocolate lab to sleep on a random Saturday after a week of progressing paralysis, and years of energetic and unhinged giant goofy lab behavior that never signaled “hey mom, inoperable and cancerous tumors are growing inside of me, ouch” Personally, I prefer to adopt an older dog when the time is right, one that is crate trained and that can walk on a leash. Training a dog is not for the weak. Right now the brown one that survived is in limbo but being loved. Eden likes the name Jasmine or Latte. I like Trinity (to honor her siblings that passed), Zora (because we Black) or Nova, which means something extraordinary and new. Even if I put her up for adoption in a few weeks, she needs a name. Right now she probably thinks it’s “girl stop” because that’s all I say when I see her. And “awwww” when she snuggles close.

Name suggestions welcome in the comments.

Two friends of mine are death doula and imparted words of wisdom that fed my spirit when I was like wtf am I cursed why are all these dogs dying in my lap this month. Death is depressing and. They were all loved in their final moments, just like Lola.

I read an article on Facebook that talked about the United States being one of the least racist country in the world. My brain said “oh hell no” but my body said “facts”. Maybe because I read it after weeks of receiving death threats for talking about antiblackness in Mexico. And bullshit meter on red and about to explode - people like this don’t actually care about gentrification, no, not even if they’re experiencing it. You should already know this but people can use valid issues to be antiblack. Spoiler alert. Because like I wrote about before, it’s possible to critique Black American privilege and blind spots without being racist, unless you’re racist.

Most countries are not a “melting pot” - they are ethnically and racially homogenous, particularly in Latin America. Colorism and classism is what people identify with and understand the most, but both are inextricably linked to antiblackness. The United States is segregated, yes, but it’s a very different experience than in large…

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Deactivated my social media yesterday, and it feels….unremarkable. For me (and probably many others) the issue with social media is the impulse led “FOMO”. You think about someone, wonder how they’re doing and instead of texting or calling them, you check their feed and stories. This has led to (in my opinion) a lot of pseudo relationships. Which doesn’t mean they aren’t meaningful, it means that we fill in the blanks about a person solely based on what they post online (or don’t). As a neurodivergent, its been increasingly overstimulating. My ADHD really locks in and before I knew it, I’ve scrolled for many mindless miles. I’m also Black, and the amount of grape and d*ath threats I’ve gotten has increased, and not just from people in the United States. I live in Mexico and the anti gringo sentiment paired with overt antiblackness means that Black foreigners are blamed for the things white foreigners do, and no amount of education is going to f…

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Black Americans largely gather their own and it's because we see each other and everyone else, as human. Can't call out or correct if you don't even believe we're people, and that's on blanquimiento.

It's also pretty wild (it's not, it's propaganda) to make Black Americans the face of ICE virally. We are the whipping boy of the West, and people so easily enraged at us than the people who created the system. That keeps Black Americans in a space of ambiguous safety (which one could argue isn't safety at all) globally.

Also and hella related - y'all have been just fine with Black and Latino soldiers, police officers and prison guards. Help me understand. (I already do)

Remember that Black women ICE agents wouldn't exist in this capacity if you had listened to Black women. We're the cure not the cause, even with some coon ass outliers. I also think it's worth SCREAMING that we take jobs for survival and that over 400,000 of us were fired within what, a year?? under this administration. “I…

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1. Seems no one read the part in the Epstein files where rich people smugly wrote about how they’ll be able to get away with whatever they want because bystanders are pacified by performance.
   

2. Very dope that a Black America woman (Charm La’Donna) was the lead choreographer and that means Benito definitely could have said Happy Black History Month.
   

3. Bad Bunny is not Afrolatino. End of discussion.
   

4. The Superbowl being the “heaviest day for trafficking” is a wrong but widely held belief.
   

5. Poor, rural and middle class Caribbean culture doesn’t necesitate consumerism for community and neither does his music so it’s just all very ironic given what the Superbowl ads seek to do - make you buy. “Did you buy it or were you sold to?” We are complicit and we are also highly manipulated thorugh the bombardment of ads. The new Apple iphone commercials will no doubt depict people in community, but on their phones and center “capturing moments” (and your facial recogn…

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Y'all about to be so mad pero a reminder: Black History Month used to be Black American History Month, and it should still be treated as such regardless of the quietly disrespectful rebrand. As much as some folks like to gaslight around this, let me be like crystal and clear, Black American is an ethnicity and naming that is not erasure. It's not about you.

Black History Month is for those of us who would put a flag in their bio if they could but can’t because the only accurate one would be American (which I personally associate with being told to shut my n*gger mouth” idk y’all I'm from Klan land i.e Ohio 😭)

All jokes aside (except I'm not joking about the last sentence) it is deeply traumatizing to have to explain our collective wounds again and again, to white people and to immigrants who don't know our history but expect us to know theirs, that no, we don’t know where the hell our ancestors came from because of slavery and the destruction of families, languages, and lineage was an…

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I’m from the Midwest. Ohio, to be exact. I don’t exactly have the privilege of never encountering a Trump supporter. During that man’s first campaign, I shared a cubicle with someone who voted for him, unapologetically. He was a kind white man in his late fifties. We worked at a children’s hospital together. He worked in billing and I triaged child sexual abuse cases. Some details are foggy, this was pre-COVID, feels like another life really. But I remember how he dressed like Mr. Rogers. I remember belly-laughing with him about the most random things - he was genuinely funny. I remember leaving that job due to burnout, and him offering words of quiet affirmation that made me cry. What I couldn’t understand and what I still can’t reconcile, iis how someone could spend so much time working alongside a Black woman and actively support someone like Trump.

A few years later my former boss forwarded me an invitation to his retirement party. I ignored it completely. And I felt like a bad per…

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“This is not just a playground for tourists to visit, without giving a thought to the local community. The Caribbean is real life for millions of people; school children, grandmas, aunties, dreamers, believers. Real. People.”

Some time ago I interviewed Frédérique Stephanie, a seasoned travel curator from Martinique and mama of Maison Carib, a company that designs bespoke travel itineraries with an emphasis on keeping money within the local economy and authentic sustainable human connection. She graciously agreed to an email chat with me about what conscious travel looks like and shares with us how her mission of creating sustainable human connection through travel is being realized through Maison Carib. It’s such a beautiful interview that I wanted to update and amplify it again here on Substack instead of my now defunct Medium (where it was originally published).

In case you didn’t know, Martinique is a picturesque, French speaking island in the Lesser Antilles with an overabundant te…

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Hi. So, this is a photo of “Si” Newhouse and Trump from the late eighties.

Si Newhouse is the late brother of billionaire Donald Newhouse, who founded Advance Publications in 1922. It’s the parent company to Vanity Fair.

Donald Newhouse owns Condè Nast, the umbrella corp that Vanity Fair (and Vogue and The New Yorker) are under. The company has stakes in Reddit and also acquired Discovery Communication, which merged with Warner Media (HBO, CNN, Warner Bros Studio) in 2022.

Mark Guiducci is the white man who wrote the recent article named “Susie Wiles, JD Vance and the “Junkyard Dogs”. He replaced Radhika Jones (one of the few persons of color working there) in June of this year when she stepped down after seven year. She said she wanted to take on new challenges and didn’t want to “experience the horror of staying too long at the party.” Won’t speculate, but every single BIPOC person reading this knows exactly what that means. Also and curiously,Vanity Fair doesn’t publicly publish em…

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There is a viral video series being widely critiqued [TikTok nyèrradagoddess] where a dark skinned woman matter of factly refers to herself as ugly. Her point (made quite clearly - I think y'all are just uncomfortable with ugly people speaking) is this - beauty might be subjective but how you're treated because of it is not. Beauty is currency and how much or how little you have matters. To pretend it doesn't is not trauma informed, it is clinically harmful and hella invalidating.

Some people see acknowledging where they are on the ugly scale as a step in the right direction to dismantle racist systems and, essential to being on the right side of desirability politics.

It's not bad to be unattractive and of course you have value regardless. Somebody said that somewhere along the way (my elder millenial ass blames filters) looking average and not being a baddie became a bad thing. And that's what most people are. Average looking without filters makeup and face tune. So no, looks shouldn…

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This is a photo of a performative activist. Pretend there's another of Beyonce breaking bread with Ivanka and Jared Kushner. 

Y'all please don't be disappointed or surprised. Pattern recognition will save you. What frustrates me most is not that Bad Bunny doing the Superbowl, people get to do things I vehemently disagree with. It's that he used radicalism as a tool to get folks to ignore the damage of U.S capitalism while claiming to be against that and U.S imperialism. The same language and ideals that shadow bans and unalives and disbars actual activists who speak up and stand on business.

I got hired and fired last week. I was hired as a contractor by a huge mental health company and during training they in not so many words told me to avoid politics online because, stakeholders. I feel naive and dumb because of course we're monetizing mental health and policing clinicians for profit. 🥲 Black women are suffering in today's financial and racist climate with real tangible consequences…

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talent. a lot of time. unlimited discipline. less anxiety. social proof we can write well. a newer laptop or newer phone. courage. experience. friends and family to support it. an audience of strangers to support it. diligence. cohesive storylines. to be out of the grips of grief. to be in recovery. recovered. a large vocabulary. to have experienced directly the topic we are writing about. thicker skin to confront any criticisms that come after hitting publish. an end game. all our shit together. to acknowledge any irony or hypocrisy that exists in the words we write down vs our actual real life. several drafts. perfect grammar. to feel good while doing it. to love it deeply.

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Your value is inherent because you exist. The silly mental health walk helps. A lot could go right. If you never accept good things you’ll learn to live without them. What someone else thinks of you is none of your business. A lot of people actually would if they could, but they can’t. Sometimes you need to zoom out to see how far you’ve come.

Surprise, you’re human.

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A Belize photo dump just because. This isn't recent (although Belize is easily accessible from Mexico) - this was my last solo trip before COVID. I had a lot of angst and had dreams of chaos and the border closing. I chalked it up to flight anxiety (ya girl likes control and you have none 50,000 feet in the air going 300 miles per hour inside a funky metal container that you're praying holds up, because, Boeing 👁️)

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This is in response to people who sound and look ridickalous (Keke palmer voice) punching sideways and down at Black women these days. If I walk past construction workers here in Mexico (where I live more on that later) and think about how horrible it is that they are exploited and paid less for the day then what I paid for breakfast, that doesn't mean I won't curse them out for sexually objectifying me as a woman. This common sense sentiment for self protection and pain seems to get lost every time African American women are apprehensive and cautious or protective in our advocacy alongside non Black POC's. Your values and morals don't change because you crossed the street to distance  yourself from abuse. Your situational awareness changed because ain't no unity without respect? Are y'all okay? 

In summation, look both ways before you cross Black women. 

And another thing, intersectionality my ass…

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You really have to understand that white supremacy is a system with both narcissistic and sociopathic traits and tendencies. Abusers use coercive control to do interpersonally what white supremacy does systemically. Coercive control is the baseline maintenance system of power in general, including white supremacy. It involves tactics like gaslighting, surveillance, threats, financial control, and emotional abuse to maintain power and erode their sense of autonomy. The same is true on a larger scale. When there is too much solidarity, too much resistance, too many questions from the people,especially across race and class, violence is the U.S’s panic button. It is a stoic and unapologetic performance globally streamed via carefully manipulated news, body cams, viral videos, social media. “Look what you made me do” is the message. I really hope no one is surprised. Violence is never a failure of the system, it’s the purpose. Whenever you hear me say white supremacy is…

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This is in response to people who sound and look ridickalous (Keke palmer voice) punching sideways and down at Black women these days. If I walk past construction workers here in Mexico (where I live more on that later) and think about how horrible it is that they are exploited and paid less for the day then what I paid for breakfast, that doesn't mean I won't curse them out for sexually objectifying me as a woman. This common sense sentiment for self protection and pain seems to get lost every time African American women are apprehensive and cautious or protective in our advocacy alongside non Black POC's. Your values and morals don't change because you crossed the street to distance  yourself from abuse. Your situational awareness changed because ain't no unity without respect? Are y'all okay? 

In summation, look both ways before you cross Black women. 

And another thing, intersectionality my ass…

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