october bullets
because south seattle still slaps. “no genocide, just genessee park full of our people” is a bop. lyrics here
hello
greetings from a place where there’s abundant stars, rivers, sky, clean air and water. silence. all the shit that shouldn’t be a luxury but is. sending some of that to you.
I was maybe not going to do an October post because I reposted Alice, Jane and my Crips for E Sims October 7 post last week, but it turned out there were some life or death words to be written.
but first, the news.
disabled wild ideas and big dreams, hard work paying off despite.
After four years of work, much hitting of brick walls, research, despondency, digging myself out of that and total autistic brown femme hyperdrive persistence, I am so fucking proud to announce that the Stacey Park Milbern Liberation Arts Residency is launching at Tidal River Residency in Mik’maki, “Nova Scotia” in May 2025. T.S. Banks and Cyree Jarelle Johnson are our initial two residents.
SPMLAR is a writing residency by and for disabled/ sick/ ND/ Deaf QTBIPOC writers. An experiment, not an institution. An honoring of my loved one’s work as a poet and writer. Legacy. The fulfillment of a promise I made to my comrade, friend and chosen sib, disability justice writer, movement worker and friend Stacey Park Milbern, the morning I found out she had died on May 19, 2020 before she could finish her book.
Her book might not be able to be in the world, but honoring her life and legacy can mean living room made for other disabled/sick/ neuroweird/Deaf QTBIPOC writers to be able to just fucking write and get our books in the world. And to just be.
I am so thankful for the slow steady work and allllll the kinds of support that made this project happen. Thank you to everyone who filled out the survey I made about “what do you want in a SDQTBIPOC writers residency?” two years ago, the individual donors and Borealis Foundation’s Disabled Joy grant for giving me some money, Autistic Women and Nonbinary Network for the fiscal sponsorship that makes the work possible, Elizabeth Sweeney of Tidal River for making an accessible residency space on a river that leads to the ocean and gifting it to us, Stacey’s mom and sister Jean and Jessica Milbern for giving their blessing to name the residency after Stacey, and everyone who told me to keep going. You can read more about the project here on the Living Altars webpage (which, keep an eye, there are more projects afoot soon to be announced.) I also wrote about the process of making it happen over the past four years in this August post.
Long live the disabled wild idea. Long live disabled Asian brotherfemme love after death. Long live all our books, all our weirdness.
Other news:
Crips for e Sims for Gaza hit a million USD last week.
We continue to raise money (we need about 30k a month to top up/ keep running existing eSims that have been activated and are being used by all kinds of Gazans, and we raise more to give for new e Sims) at our Chuffed fundraiser link here.
We also got got a shout out on Mercedes Eng’s Cop City Swagger, on pages 102-103 where Eng writes a long list of what care is and includes Crips for e Sims on it.
Me, Meg Day, Cynthia Mannick and Danez Smtih read at Dodge Poetry Festival’s online “the body; a praise song” reading here, with ASL. Dodge Poetry Fest is a very cool non shmancy non academic poetry festival in Newark, happening this weekend (but you can watch us reading and talking about bodies and poetry anytime at the link.)
Kelly Hayes interviewed me and Elliot Fukui about being Mad people in this time, the current conditions for Madness in the world right now, and keeping each other alive, for her Movement Memos podcast (transcript above, embedded audio below)
and now, the bullet points, with a little homily on community SI in this moment.
(tw for discussion of suicidal ideation)
Crip brown travel is a thing. my big homelands trip got pushed back to november because my ovary exploded (eta, cyst, not actual ovary, but you get the gist) the week before I was supposed to get on 24 hours of planes, and then an old friend/ lover died too young. thank god for travel credit refundable plane tickets, one of the only things that stuck around since 2020 high access in early covid. thank god for friends and comrades who told me to listen to my body and heal, not the doctor who dismiss shrugged and said o just take ibuprofin, you’re fine. thank god for grief. I guess this is what it means to listen to a body, and spirit.
Last week I was bitching to a friend in the park as we ate our banh mi and waited for my car to get inspected so it could get suited and booted for PA registration, I was supposed to be on a spirit journey right now and they laughed and said, you are, it’s just different than the one you thought you were on. true.
it’s October but it feels like early winter. it was summer forever and then winter hit hard. early winter feels like the mood right now on the world’s clock.
I love spring and summer, I truly do, and strolling around Philly in a series of bra tops and miniskirts in the hot heat was right. but now I just want to curl up inside and be warm, as safe as I can get. digest and integrate. the desire to curl up like a cat on a couch and sleep for the duration is there, which may not be possible but is an understandable yearning.
It’s coming up on a year since I moved to Philly in 7 days and I’ve been doing some reflecting on who I was a year ago, how it felt to first come, and how it feels a year in. Looking at old photos and texts, sifting through my own archive.
Two weeks ago, it was a year since the Israeli genocide on Gaza intensified into the beginnings of what is its present calcified year long nightmare.
It’s weird to remember a year ago. even with the stark horror, everyone’s vibe was lighter then than now. “Lighter” is relative, it’s not like we were skipping through the daisies. But even remembering going to dc for the big march in november 2023 - everything was so fucked but so many people I knew were hoping that somehow this was going to be a horrible three to six week war, like israel has inflicted on Palestine over and over again, and then it might be over. And if the marches were big enough and we shut down everything hard enough we could help make that happen. the idea that it would be a year long nightmare that may stretch into years was not something I could let in my brain. there was a different kind of hope then as we walked together, laid down together.
That hope didn’t happen. Instead there’s a grief plaque that’s settled in.
(tw for discussion of Israeli brutal murder of Palestinians)
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Late Sunday night, I clicked on the news of Israel bombing Gaza’s Al-Aqsa Hospital in central Deir al-Balah. The IOF’s bombing set off a massive fireball on Palestinians sheltering in tents around the hospital, who had come seeking sanctuary and medical care. They burned alive.
One of the people murdered was 19 year old software engineering student Sha’ban al-Dalou, pictured above, who died along with his brother and mother. As of this writing, his sisters are in critical condition and may also die of deep burn wounds. Photos of him, on fire, his IV bag and line on fire, inside an inferno, were everywhere in social and other media for a long moment.
I tried to sleep, woke up at 5 AM, couldn’t.
The image of Palestinian people in hospital beds, many of whom, like Sha’ban, were immune compromised and disabled and sick, with IV bags engulfed in flames, burned alive by Israeli weapons paid for by U.S. tax dollars. What is that if not what we mean when we say Palestinian liberation is disability justice?
My friend commented the other day, “It’s hard to be present with just how bad shit has gotten.”
Everyone I know has gone through so many stages of these genocides shaping us over the past year. Sometimes we can’t even track how this has changed us. I remember how griefed I felt in december, now that feels like nothing. I’m grateful for this blog as record keeping, month by month. Archive continues to be everything in a time of mass disassociation and erasure of the news the moment after it happens. Often during.
(these are the paragraphs with the TW for suicidality discussion. I hesitated on sharing this because it’s really vulnerable and sharing anything SI related feels very risky in the current state of surveillance and policing of talking about mental health. but fuck it, it feels like a needed risk because so many people are going experiencing similar stuff right now.)
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My mental health has off and on been really rough lately, in a way I’ve dealt with before that’s also different than before. Perhaps you relate?
Many things can be true at the same time. Right now in my life I have a lot of good things, core strength, new and old family, loves, strategies. It is simultaneously true that I’ve lived with suicidal ideation off and on for a lot of my life, as a survivor and as a lot of things. My SI went away for the most part for much of the past decade. It returned in a different way after I got Covid in May, five months ago this week. My intrusive thoughts flare in a different way when the stress wild piles up now. It’s neuroinflammation (did you know this was a common thing people who’ve had COVID experience?) and it’s also the state of the world.
I’m an old hand at SI, don’t have a method or a plan, am committed to being here, and I’m grateful for all these coping skills and Crazy community I can call. But many things can be true at the same time and it’s still a lot. Last weekend in some emotional distress I went to new york, was hanging on my friends’ roof having a nice time, and had flashes of intrusive thoughts that I should jump off. I didn’t, but. Still a lot.
So many people I know are also experiencing an uptick in SI and intrusive thoughts right now. Post COVID, and not. Very few of us talk about it. It’s not safe, we don’t want to be locked up or lose our friends or jobs, be looked askance at and not called back. We don’t want to lose the ability to be loveable or fuckable or hireable that we have. Also it’s embarrassing and also IDK, it might go away in five minutes so do I say anything if everyone is also stressed and I don’t want to freak them out? Also I can cope. I know how to do this. And not: I fucked up something last week, and it was because I was trying to work while battling this shit in my brain. Sure I “should” rest, and I do, but there are deadlines and life, and doing the things I want to do grounds me, helps me ease off the pedal.
It’s a mood of the world. We are all trying to do the most or even the bare minimum of what we must during complete mayhem, and some of us can. and then we can’t.
Susan Abulhawa, Palestinian author of Against the Loveless World, wrote last week after the Al Aqsa fire murders:
there's a part of me that would rather burn with them than live in this world among cowards and hypocrites. I hate all of you and I hate myself for our impotence to stop this. most of all I hate the pontificators who peddle queer and women's rights to justify their vote for the monsters underwriting this horror. I hate their pseudo intellectualism and fake solidarity. I hate my safety and my comfort. I wish I never left Gaza. I thought I could get more supplies and return. But now I'm stuck here in this lie of a world with all of you.
From a different positionality, I relate. It is difficult to understand how to be alive in a world where this kind of evil is happening right now. And I don’t mean that rhetorically and I don’t mean it literally. I mean I think my soul is asking: what is the way to be alive right now? I think a lot of our souls are asking the same question.
I’m committed to staying. Please don’t call the psych cops or any cops on me, or anyone. I’m also committed to naming the conditions we are in because it helps people to hear about it, and the work continues to be to name the real conditions we are in.
One of my Crazy friends called me this week and asked if I was doing ok. Mad psychic: I wasn’t and I called him and he let me wail out all the everything. and afterwards, I texted lol look at us living the podcast we just did, keeping each other alive indeed!
he said, I don’t ever want you to go through this alone. we’re not supposed to go through it alone.
I know this. but maybe like me, you need a reminder.
Every single person I know who is feeling these thoughts thinks they are the only one, that everyone else is working on their projects and bopping along. We are not. And our SI is a response in the face of crimes against humanity that continue unchecked, to a deep spiritual and moral wound.
I remember back in ‘08, being in a 3 day Generation 5 training on radical childhood sexual abuse survivorhood and radical ways to end childhood sexual abuse, where the concept of somatics was introduced and the trainer said, this is a tool to re-inhabit our bodies after being forced out of them to survive some of the most intense experiences of trauma that humans experience. She added, as things get worse we will be forced to experience more intense experiences, and this can be a tool to build resilience.
It’s 16 years later and we indeed are forced to withstand more and more extreme intensity all the time. Of course it makes sense we would want to leave our bodies, whether through disassociation or through the knife’s edge of wanting to go.
But I still want us to survive, to make it to the other side.
All I can say is what has helped me: Find each other, find yourselves. Sometimes we don’t have other humans but we have land, spirit, dreams. Do the things that help you. Know that we are not alone in these feelings even if systems have gaslight us to feel that we are.
I want us to go through this fucking super intense portal and come out the other side, alive.
Edited to add 10/23: Check out this interview with Dr. Hassan Abu Safiya, all of it but starting at minute 32, where he talks about widespread suicidality amongst Gazans and how even though most people believe suicide means going to hell, there is now a widespread feeling that hell is better than current conditions in Gaza.
on a different note: slow and steady
it’s ten months since I’ve been training doing lifting with Olivia at groundup barbell club. when I moved here a lot of people talked about Olivia and her Covid safer home gym and training practice and how great she is, and I made a resolution to check her practice out. I don’t do new years resolutions but this was one.
this is the first time in my life I’ve done exercise without post exertional malaise or flares after. like, ever. After a lifetime of trying to do anything but gentle walking and inevitably being in a flare for 1-3 days after or fucking my knees up doing Couch 2 5k, being like oh well, my upper body strength is always going to suck, it is what it is, I am benching and lifting more every week and feeling my strength grow. my longterm hip breakdown heals and feels better everytime we do kettlebell rows. my brain feels better and works clearer after every lift. I see my muscles move and remember and get stronger. I watch myself learning.
Olivia brings her personal and professional experiences with disability, pain, body shifts and ND to her work. she started groundup as a place where trans people, queers, fat people, BIPOC and/or disabled people and anyone excluded from most gyms could feel safe training. She is a neurodivergent and chronic illness genius. She enforces breaks. She praises me whether I do three lifts or 20. After I got Covid and needed to take time off and found my stamina and strength were all the way gone when I came back, she patiently coached me through building myself back up. If you in Philly, check her out for in person sessions and she does virtual sessions as well if you’re long distance.
Working with her has been one of the best things of my year. And, it’s a really different thing, after a lifetime of relying on hyperfocus sprint/crash as a strategy to live my life, to show up every week for this steady slow new thing. To hang in there, through ups and downs, through the absolute shit and yet joy of this world, through disaster punctuation, and still make steady, slow progress.
It does not feel nice always. Slow steady plod does not give me the big seratonin hit of a hyperfocus speedball accomplishment high. Going slow feels counterintuitive, it feels fucking weird. Period, and to do this in the middle of a time that is so much disaster panic cortisol all the time
And yet. It’s the titanium bones that hold up. It’s the slow steady plod that continues. It’s the limp that gives a steady reactor fuel in my heart. It’s the kind of pace I, and maybe a lot of the we, can sustain through all the grief, all the wild, all the hits, all the Long COVID. it might not always feel nice, but it feels good.
Philly is the first place I’ve lived in a long time where I came meaning to stay. It’s something, a year in, to continue to commit to a place, with all the similar to the above slow, the ups and downs, perfect imperfect. To be committed to disabled, working class, sick sad slow movement where, as a friend reminded me recently, shit just takes time. Period, and in a time where there is a klaxxon alarm going off constantly screaming, this is a thing. To be part of a community again, where the same friend who had stuff to say about the spirit journey was like “Community is not always a bunch of people who just get along and agree.” And yet, that doesn’t always have to always mean abandonment. Wild.
To learn to be in in-person community again, and to be doing so in a crew of folks learning to be in community again after all the ways the last four years of pandemic isolation have changed our neurotypes and paradigms. After all we’ve lost and when the loss hasn’t stopped. It’s not just a matter of relearning how to be with people, it’s a matter of learning how to be together as we are now.
Perhaps you relate to this, too?
Catch you next month during whatever we’re waiting on, that’s coming and already here. I’ll be here. Hanging with the slow and steady and the wild disabled idea. I hope you are too.
-Leah
ps: because so many people are in it right now, I wanted to include some radical writings and resources about suicide
tools:
Fireweed Collective Crisis Toolkit
Fireweed Collective Online Groups
SUICIDE INTERVENTION (FOR WEIRDOS, FREAKS, AND QUEERS)
radical mental health first aide - suicide and safety planning workshop-
radical mental health first aide workshop
Wildflower Alliance Peer Support
writings:
stop letting trans girls kill ourselves / not a poem
scrambling time and collapsing space
learning to live with wanting to die
The Long Covid Survival Guide has a chapter on post-COVID suicidal feelings
I have two pieces, suicidal ideation 2.0 and the femme suicide strategies one, in care work.
crisis lines that don’t call the cops:
https://www.callblackline.com/
https://www.antipoliceterrorproject.org/mh-first-oakland
Peer respite spaces in the United States: https://power2u.org/directory-of-peer-respites/ (peer respites are non-carceral, non-forced treatment spaces where people experiencing emotional crisis or altered mental states can go and receive food, support, care, meds hookups if wanted, other forms of alternative healing, and often peer support from other Mad people who have experienced similar.)
Sweet bottomless gratitude for your wisdom forever, and esp. the whole-ass section, "and now, the bullet points, with a little homily on community SI in this moment." The way you write your experiences just... whew, captures stuff I don't have the writing chops to put words to. Thanks for staying.