LBE is a series of essays exploring heartbreak, grief, tending to old wounds, reclaiming longing and fearing getting stuck there. I believe it is also my first memoir being written.
In April 2025, I was approached by publishers to write a book about conflict.
My plans had worked out: In May 2024, I joined Substack with the intention of developing my writing toward a book project, initially imagining it as prescriptive nonfiction. I already had the book title: We Can’t Be Abolitionist AND Conflict Avoidant.
People really loved the workshop, and another author reminded me that if you can speak about something for 4 hours, you probably have a book in you.
As my writing deepened, the project has clarified itself more and more. The more I write, the more it becomes clear that lived experience, embodiment, and narrative are the most honest containers for the work. I need to write a memoir more than I do prescriptive nonfiction. But the truth is: I don’t know many writers. And the literary world is weird. Like, weirder than healing spaces.
Although I was advised not to do this, I decided to share this project with you as I am writing it. I think of it as a living memoir—written in real time with reader engagement—rather than a closed manuscript developed in isolation.
My goal is to push myselves each week so I have something to share with you on my favorite day: Sunday.
I have no idea where I’m going. I never have. But every time I’ve trusted my intuition, it hasn’t taken me where I wanted to land, but where I needed to arrive.
Stay ungovernable, keep following your intuition,
Care
The windowsill
On a hot July afternoon in Berlin, I sink to my knees on the cheap black-and-white tiles of a kitchen that isn’t mine. The tiles are cracked, uneven, and sticky from the humidity. I lean forward over the windowsill and wonder how hard the impact would feel from the fourth floor. I don’t usually let myself go there. I’m afraid of heights; I’m afraid of emptiness.
But right now, the void inside me feels larger than the distance between my body and the ground. Something beyond death, beyond the end of suffering, is pulling me — it’s revenge.
