Hi Angel,
It is almost my birthday.
I am turning 34.
I hope I get to live 34 more years in this body.
What a quiet miracle it is to be here. Despite everything, I am deeply grateful to be alive. More than grateful—I was planned. In divine timing.
Birthdays are emotional landmines for many of us. They invite the kind of reflection that can spiral if we’re not careful. If we’re privileged enough to pause for a moment, we’re tempted to ask:
Am I doing this right?
Am I on the right path?
Am I becoming who I intended to become?
Who am I walking with—and toward?
Over the past few years, I have had enough stability and support to begin reconciling with many of my wounds. I’ve written about this often—the slow process of loosening my grip on the identities I built around my injuries in order to survive them.
Those identities protected me. They gave language to my pain. They gave me coherence.
And yet, they were built in survival. Survival is a creative act. (And so is thriving.)
Letting them soften has been one of the greatest privileges of my life. It is something I wish for all of us. More than that, it is something I feel called to be in service of—because the ability to metabolize harm without becoming organized around it should not be a luxury. It should be a basic human right.
Lately, though, I’ve been sitting with a harder question:
If I let go of the identities I built around my wounds… what do I do with the identities that made those wounds possible?
I am frankly tired of the endless identity politics debate. And I want to begin by saying something clearly: only the privileged can fantasize about distancing themselves from identity politics.
As long as we are alive under racial capitalism, identity is not abstract. It is administratively enforced. It is economically weaponized. It is socially regulated.
Race, gender, and all of these markers are inventions. Science was manipulated to justify them. They were constructed to serve empires, to secure labor, to concentrate wealth.
Yes, race is completely made up and yet racism is real.
Yes, gender is completely made up and yet transphobia is real.
Yes, classism, ableism, fatphobia, queerphobia all completely stupid inventions— and yet all real.
What I mean by real is: they have real impact, on real bodies, every day.
Liberation, oppression: they all happen to bodies. To our bodies and the one of the home we are lucky to live on, planet earth.
So, where do we go from here?
We, Black, Brown, trans, queer people have always been experts in our own liberation. We have reclaimed language meant to strip us of dignity. We’re reclaimed all words they’ve used against us. We have built kinship inside systems designed to erase us. We have created belonging in worlds that tried to kill us.
And still.
There are moments in our spaces that break my heart.
Moments when I feel my body tense. Moments when I want to equate safety with solitude. Moments when being alone feels simpler than navigating the fractures between us.
But I know something else is true.
As much as community can activate me, I would be miserable without it. None of us can have liberation alone. Safety that requires isolation is not really safety. It’s a near enemy. (I also think safety is a western lie. But we’ll talk about this another day.)
So I ask myselves:
What is this collective pain? Where does it live in my body? What is it asking of me?
How do I witness it without hardening around it? How do I let go of identities built on injury without erasing the injuries that shaped me?
How do we fight hierarchy without reproducing it among ourselves, while acknowledging that all traumas are not equal?
Maybe this birthday is less about answers and more about capacity.
The somatic capacity to hold complexity.
The somatic capacity to stay in relationship, to still reach for you even if I am terrified of the harm we are capable of.
The somatic capacity to soften without forgetting.
The somatic capacity to remember that our wounds are real—but they are not the only proof of who we are.
At 34, I do not want an identity organized around survival alone. I want one organized around aliveness.
What makes you feel alive these days? I’d love to hear if you want to share.
Sending care to you,
Stay ungovernable,
Care
Thank you for sharing. What makes me feel alive these days? Realizing the opportunity of the time we are in. Those of us who are able to use our words to ignite transformation - this is an incredible period for us.
So many of us are shedding identities that were born of trauma and survival. It's important work to name this so that others can see their own journey or what's possible. When we know better, we can be better.
It's pretty wild how difficult it can be to try and carve out a life lived in the unsolvable middle rather than choosing sides in everything. Thank you for these beautiful, difficult questions to ask ourselves around that.
For me, I'm realizing how I have never given myself a fair chance at developing true self love and inner safety and deciding that I will give it a shot because I've done almost everything else I could think of to find some inner peace and it hasn't worked. And in the last year or so of really committing to a softer handling of myself, all of my parts, wounds, and mistakes, I've found what I was hoping others would give to me my whole life. I feel more alive, more sustainably, than I ever have, and I'm filled with gratitude every day even while trying to face, understand, and dismantle all of these harmful things surrounding us. Thank you for your words!