brain dump

I told this story last night to a few people on call, and it's been circling back to me all morning. A memory I haven't visited in years suddenly insising itself upon my brain. So I'm writing it down now, before it slips away again back into that part of my brain that archives things we carry but rarely examine. We were talking about school stories, most of them about awful teachers. The topic of teachers being kinder than university professors came up, however, and it kind of pulled this story out of the recesses of my mind. The kindest teacher I ever had wasn't a teacher at all. She was a TA. Seventh grade science. Probably about 20-23 years old. I don't think she knew then (how could she?) what I needed or how deeply her small acts would root themselves in me. But looking back now I realize that she was one of the first adults who truly saw me. Growing up I was a good kid. That's what everyone said. An angel, according to my mother, who loves to tell the story of how I never cried as a baby, how her friends used to compete for the privilege of watching me, how I greeted her with kisses in the morning at only 3 years old. I was great in academically too. I floated through school on a cloud of praise, gifted program, reading at a twelfth-grade level when I was eight, always turning things in on time, always following the rules. I was the type of kid they put the troublemakers next to on the seating chart. This was, unintentionally, camouflage. Behind the good grades and the teachers pet act was a home that barely qualified as one. Neglectful. Abusive. The kind of environment that teaches you early how to disappear in plain sight. I learned to be invisible in all the ways that mattered, while performing excellence in all the ways that didn't. Good grades meant no one asked questions. Perfect behavior meant no one looked closer. I wasn't a problem, so I wasn't a problem to solve. This was true from kindergarten through graduation. Seventh grade, though. God, seventh grade was its own kind of disaster. We were homeless then, or close enough. Cycling through motels, cheap ones with stained carpets and that particular smell of industrial cleaning products failing to mask something worse. Most mornings I showed up to school wearing the same clothes I'd been in all week. My hair was often a matted tangle because no one at home thought to help me manage it, and showers weren't always possible. I smelled. I knew I smelled. Lunch was the only guaranteed meal I got each day. I was tiny for my age, not in a cute way, but in the way that makes you look twice and wonder. The emaciated kind of small. CPS showed up at school more than once. They'd pull me from class, ask careful questions in careful tones. And every time, I lied. Said everything was fine. What else could I do? I'd already learned the hard way that telling the truth doesn't always fix anything. Sometimes it makes things worse. So I protected the mess I came from, even as it slowly consumed me. One day in science class, the TA came around with the homework basket. I'd done the assignment. I had. But my backpack was less a backpack and more a fabric void where papers went to die; no folders, no binders, nothing to contain the chaos. My mother never bought school supplies that year. Everything I owned existed as loose sheets slowly disintegrating at the bottom of a bag that was itself falling apart. I dug through it in front of the TA, who was waiting on me far longer than she should have, that familiar panic rising in my chest. I couldn't find it. The shame was immediate. I could feel tears burning behind my eyes. She asked if I could come in during lunch to make it up. I nodded, not trusting myself not to break into tears right there if I spoke. So I did something I almost never did: I rushed through lunch. Usually I was obsessive about savoring every bite, neurotic about making the meal last, stretching out the only certainty of my day. But not today. Today I shoveled food down and hurried back to the science classroom, that knot of dread still sitting heavy in my stomach. When I walked in, she gestured to the table. "Put your backpack here." Then she opened her desk drawer and pulled out folders. Binders. Fresh supplies that still had that new-plastic smell. She sat down beside me, and together we went through every single paper. She asked which class each one belonged to, her voice was so kind, no judgment in it. Just patience. She helped me tuck them into the right folders, labeled everything in her neat handwriting. Tossed the trash while I held the bag open. Slowly, impossibly, my backpack began to look like something a real student would carry. The whole time, I fought back tears. My throat ached with the effort of not crying, and when she'd ask me a question, my voice came out shaky and small. I was so embarrassed. So deeply, crushingly embarrassed. When we finished, she handed me a Ziploc bag. Inside were granola bars. A hairbrush. Deodorant. Toothpaste. Small things. Essential things. Things no one had thought to make sure I had. I didn't know what to say. I'm not sure I said anything at all. No adult had ever looked at me like that before. Not with pity, that I would have recognized, probably recoiled from. This was something else. It was steadier. Just... care. Simple, uncomplicated care. It strikes me now, all these years later, that she did something my own mother never managed to do. She sat beside me. She helped me. She made sure I had the basics to take care of myself. And she didn't make a spectacle of it, didn't ask for gratitude or acknowledgment. She just saw a kid who needed help and quietly offered it. I don't remember her name. I've tried, but it's gone, lost to time and the fog of trauma that clouds so much of that period. But I remember her face. I remember the calm in her eyes. I remember the feeling of being helped without being interrogated, noticed without being shamed. That's what made it special, I think. She didn't try to save me. Didn't push me to reveal things I wasn't ready to speak. She just gave me structure and warmth in a moment when my entire world felt like it was unraveling. She offered gentleness without expectation. I carried that with me long after I left her classroom. I definitely appreciated having an organized backpack, sure. But more than that, I carried the memory of what it felt like to be cared for, even briefly, even by someone who owed me nothing. I don't know where she is now. I have no way to find her, no way to tell her what that day meant. I doubt she even remembers it. It was probably just another lunch period for her, just another kid who needed a little extra help. But I remember. I remember feeling, for maybe the first time in my life, like I might be worth taking care of. Sometimes the smallest gestures are the ones that save you. Not because they solve everything; they don't, they can't. But because they remind you that gentleness exists in the world. That someone, somewhere, even just one person, was willing to offer it to you without asking anything in return. For a kid who didn't have much, that was enough to hold onto. It still is.

Today I went to the aquarium. It was quite the revelation. As I walked through the exhibits, I couldn't help but feel a deep connection with the fish. They seemed to be calling out to me, inviting me to join them in the cool, crystal clear waters. But it wasn't just a desire to swim with the fish that overwhelmed me - I was also ravenous. The more I looked at the sleek, shimmering bodies of the fish, the more I wanted to sink my teeth into their flesh. I couldn't shake the feeling that if I could just catch one of those slippery creatures, I would be able to sate this insatiable hunger that had taken hold of me. I must have looked like a madman, stalking through the aquarium with a crazed expression on my face, trying to catch glimpses of the fish through the glass. I'm sure the other visitors thought I was some kind of lunatic, but I didn't care. I was on a mission to satisfy this primal urge. In the end, I had to tear myself away from the glass before I did something I would regret. As I left, I couldn't help but wonder what it would be like to feast on the succulent, salty flesh of those underwater creatures. Maybe one day I'll come back and find out.

True desire transcends transaction. It exists in a realm beyond what I will call the "marketplace" of human relations. I believe souls are not commodities and love is not currency. When we truly desire another being, we desire them for their essence; an irreplaceable bundle of qualities that make them who they are. We recognize in them something profound and admirable that stands apart from what they can provide us. I believe true desire asks nothing in return. It persists independent of reciprocation, like a star that shines regardless of who gazes upon it. I reject the algebra of conditional love. The moment we begin to calculate "What do I give versus what I receive?" is the moment desire becomes corrupted. To love authentically is to abandon the ledger book. It is to step away from the negotiating table of affection. When desire is genuine, the question "Do they desire me in return?" becomes irrelevant. Their being is enough; their existence is the gift. True admiration cannot be retroactively erased. What we have once loved remains worthy of that love, even when circumstances change, even when wounds are inflicted. The ability to hate what we once loved is a poverty of spirit. It suggests our original desire was contingent, conditional, fragile. What was once beautiful to me remains beautiful, even through the lens of pain. The person who has harmed me does not erase the person I once knew. Hatred is the failure of imagination. It is the idea that we cannot hold complexity within our hearts, that we must simplify the human being before us into something deserving only of contempt. I refuse this simplification. I hold sympathy even for those who have caused me harm. I believe that the capacity for both beauty and destruction exists within the same soul. True desire acknowledges the fullness of another's humanity. It does not demand perfection. It does not withdraw in the face of disappointment. I reject the marketplace.

No human being should ever have to earn their right to exist. The moment we draw breath, we possess worth that cannot be measured, quantified, or disputed. This is not a privilege to be granted, it is a fact of our humanity. It is a birthright. Society has constructed elaborate systems of valuation, demanding that we prove ourselves worthy through productivity, conformity, or fulfillment of assigned roles. These systems are fundamentally corrupt. Your worth is not contingent upon your utility. You are not valuable because you produce, reproduce, serve, or satisfy expectations. You are valuable because you are. When we reduce humans to their functions; worker, mother, soldier, we commit violence against their wholeness. We carve away the universe that exists within each person and focus only on the small fraction that serves external purposes. The state that demands women bear children "for the good of the nation" and the state that forcefully conscripts young men as cannon fodder for its wars both treat humans as resources rather than as beings deserving of self-determination. All systems that would turn the sacred beauty of an individual life into a mere instrument of collective aims are vile. Under capitalism, your worth becomes a calculation: how much profit can be extracted from your labor? How efficiently can your time, energy, and creativity be converted into shareholder value? This system demands that we commodify ourselves; that we package our gifts, talents, and passions into marketable assets. Those whose labor generates less profit are deemed less valuable, regardless of the essential nature of their work. The elderly, whose productive years have passed in the eyes of the market, find themselves discarded. The disabled, whose bodies or minds don't conform to capitalist efficiency, are treated as burdens rather than those simply living under different circumstances. Mothers, whose labor produces no direct profit despite sustaining all human life, are rendered invisible in economic calculations. We as humans should strive to eliminate these cruel mathematics that measure human lives in terms of productivity and profit margins. We should refuse the notion that a CEO generating millions in shareholder value is worth hundreds of times more than the teacher shaping young minds or the parent raising the next generation. Capitalism's greatest trick is convincing us that our market value and our human worth are one and the same. This is the fundamental lie we should seek to eradicate. Make no mistake: to assert the inherent worth of every person is a political act. It creates systems that benefit from treating some lives as more valuable than others. When we declare that no one should have to earn their right to dignity, we can eradicate these hierarchies that determine who deserves care, who deserves freedom, who deserves life itself. The idea of earned value has been used to justify the exploitation of workers, the subjugation of women, the marginalization of the disabled, the abandonment of the elderly. It fuels the engines of capitalism, opression, and authoritarian control. Those who benefit from these systems will always insist that value must be earned. They will disguise this belief in the language of merit, tradition, or necessity. A system of capital requires the myth of earned value to justify its fundamental inequalities. The billionaire must believe he has earned his vast fortune through superior merit, rather than through exploitation and extraction. The worker struggling on minimum wage must believe their poverty reflects their worth, rather than a system rigged against them. This ideology serves one thing; power. Systemic oppression is now personal failure. Economic inequality is now the natural outcome of varying levels of human value. I believe in the right of each person to determine their own path, to define their own meaning, to choose which roles they embrace or reject. Some will find fulfillment in parenthood, others in creation, others in service, others in solitude. The beauty of human existence lies in this diversity of purpose. What I demand is not the abolition of all roles, but the freedom to choose them. The mother who chooses motherhood freely expresses her humanity. The mother coerced into this role by lack of options or societal pressure experiences a form of bondage. I envision a society built upon the foundation of inherent human worth, where: - No person must justify their existence through productivity - No person's value is determined by their adherence to roles - No person must earn their right to food, shelter, healthcare, or respect - No collective entity; whether nation, corporation, or ideology, is placed above individual dignity - No human need is withheld because it cannot be profitably provided - No person's only, singular time on earth is reduced to what market value it holds This is not a vision of selfish individualism or hedonistic desire. True community can only exist when each member is allowed full humanity and agency. Profit, expansion, and growth cannot be the arbiter of human worth. When we surrender our right to self-determination to capitalism or any other authoritarianism that tries to decides our way of life for us, we accept a system that will inevitably value the wealthy over the poor, the productive over the reflective, or the conventional over the divergent. Freedom from this system requires us to disconnect our sense of value from our relationship to capital, to recognize that our worth exists inherently and entirely outside the human constructs of profit and productivity. I will not earn my place in the world. I already have one, as do you, as does everyone. This is the truth I live by.

I have an obsession with listening to black box recordings from fatal plane crashes. Just hearing someone who knows they are about to die is exhilarating to me. When I think about being in that position... fear grips my chest and it gets a little harder to breathe. I imagine thats what it feels like to be in that situation, only 100x worse. No one should ever get to hear someone in their final moments like that. It's so fucked up. Yet I'm filled with this morbid curiosity. The range of reactions from the pilots are always so different. Sometimes they'll start praying. Sometimes they just go silent. Sometimes they'll swear. Sometimes they'll say something along the lines of "this is it". Sometimes they'll scream orders at the other pilot desperately. It's so fascinating to me. I'm also just kind of obsessed with reading about plane crashes in general. I've been going through the Wikipedia plane crash masterlist. Did you know that there have been around 76 mid-air collisions involving 2 planes since 1922? You'd think it wouldn't be that common. How hard is it to not hit another fucking plane? A lot of plane crashes have no survivors, too. There are a lot of them with only *one* survivor. Could you imagine? There's a case with one of the sole survivors where she had to live in the jungle for like 14 days. The youngest sole survivor was a 15 month old boy. There was another one in Michigan where the only survivor was a 4 year old girl. Naturally this fascination (which I've had for a while now) has made me hate flying. Any time there's turbulence I'm convinced its the end. I have nightmares about being in plane crashes often. I hate the thought of dying like that. I'm not afraid of death itself, but I'm afraid of a death where I don't get time for self reflection. I want to die on my own terms or from some illness that slowly takes me so I have lots of time to reflect on my life and accept my death. I don't want to die suddenly in some accident. It would be too quick. I'd die before I could even finish a thought. It'd be like if a book ended mid-sentence. I don't want to go out that way. I don't want to die in fear. Do you ever think about how you'd survive during the apocalypse? Like, some kind of doomsday collapses society and everything becomes anarchy and you're left to survive afterwards. Do you ever think about that? I do. A lot. I would probably kill myself, if I'm being real. Could you imagine being a woman in a society with no laws? No fucking thanks. I'd get chained up in some psychos basement or something. No shot. If the apocalypse happens I'm taking a little trip to yellowstone and jumping in a geyser or something. Gotta make sure there isn't a trace of me left. I think I need to stop listening to those black box recordings.

There's this type of wasp; parasitoid wasps, they're called. Nature's perfect creation. I need you to understand exactly what these things do, because it's important. It's the whole fucking point. These wasps, they're not the assholes that just sting and fly away. No, that would be too simple, too clean. What they do is find a host, usually another insect. A caterpillar, a spider, whatever, and they lay their eggs inside it. Inside a living creature. The host doesn't die right away, see, because that would ruin everything. The host keeps living, keeps eating, keeps walking around, completely unaware that it's already over. That it's already been turned into nothing but an incubator. A walking nursery for something that's going to eat it alive from the inside out. When it comes to the larvae, they're smart about it. Efficient. They eat the non-essential organs first. They save the vital ones for last to keep the host alive as long as possible. Maximum extraction. The host is alive but it's not alive, it's just meat that hasn't figured out it's dead yet. But here's where it gets really beautiful. Some species are polyembryonic. The mother lays just one or two eggs, and those eggs clone themselves. They split and split and split inside the host until there are hundreds, sometimes thousands of genetically identical siblings all growing in the same body. Copies of copies of copies, all eating the same host from the inside. It goes deeper. They develop into different castes while still gestating. Like a fucked up little society. Some become reproductives, the ones that will actually grow into adult wasps. But some become soldiers. Sterile. Born only to kill. And their job, their entire purpose for existing, is to search and destroy any competing parasitoid larvae from other wasps that might have infected the same host. They kill the competition. Sometimes they even kill their own opposite-sex siblings to control the sex ratio, to optimize the whole operation. Still with me? Because it gets better. After all of this - after the soldiers have killed off the competition and the right siblings, after the reproductives have consumed every last bit of the host and pupated in its hollowed-out shell - the adults emerge. Brothers and sisters. Genetically identical clones who were literally born inside the same violated creature. And then they mate with each other within seconds of being born. Immediate inbreeding. Siblings who shared the same womb that wasn't even a womb but a dying host they murdered together from the inside out. That's the baseline we're working with here, right? That's the template. Creatures that exist solely to infiltrate, consume, murder their own siblings for efficiency, emerge from the corpse they created, immediately fuck each other to make incest babies, and then move on to the next host to start the whole cycle over again. And you know what I realized? There exist on this planet - right here, walking upright, wearing human faces - these fucking human lagoon creatures that operate on that exact same spiritual frequency. The same level of existence. Not metaphorically. Not kind of sort of if you squint. Actually. Truly. Human beings who function with the same base programming as those wasps. They don't see other people as people. They see hosts. They see opportunities for infiltration. They find someone, ANYONE, and they start the process. Laying their poison. Burrowing in. And you don't even know it's happening at first because they're smart about it, just like the larvae. They don't go for the kill shot right away. They take their time. They eat away at your boundaries first, your comfort, your peace of mind. The non-essential organs. They keep you functional enough to continue serving as their interests. And somehow. Somehow. Despite the billions of people on this planet, despite the infinite possible hosts they could choose, some cosmic fucking force keeps sending them to me. It's like there's a beacon. Like I'm marked in some spectrum of light only parasites can see, and it just broadcasts "here, this one, this fucking loser is ripe for the feeding off of." And they come. They always come. One after another after another. Different faces, same programming. They come to destroy my sense of safety. To poke and prod and tear down any boundary I try to establish. To abuse, rape and molest me. To harass me and invade my space and my mind and my life, to crawl into every crack and crevice until there's nowhere left that feels clean, that feels like mine. Day after day after day until I can't remember what it felt like to not be on guard, to not be hosting something that wants to consume me. I don’t even remember what it’s like to not be violated anymore. You wanna know the part that really fucking breaks me? They hate me for it. They hate me with this pure, almost confused rage. Like I'm the problem. Like I'm the one doing something wrong by existing in their vicinity, by being the thing they chose to latch onto. I didn't send out invitations. I didn't ask to be the host. But they hate me anyway. For no reason. For no goddamn reason except that I'm here and they need someone to consume and I had the misfortune of being visible. I've tried to figure out what I did. What I'm doing. What signal I'm sending that keeps calling them to me like I'm some kind of feeding ground. And you know what I've concluded? Nothing. There's no reason. Just like there's no reason the wasp picks one caterpillar over another. Just proximity. Just opportunity. Just bad fucking luck. And you want to know what this has done to me? What all of this - this endless parade of parasites - has actually accomplished? It's gradually torn down my ability to just be a kind and normal fucking person. I used to be kinder. I used to be more patient. I used to give people the benefit of the doubt, used to assume good intentions, used to smile and let things slide and try to see the best in everyone. That person has slowly been rotting away. Eaten alive, from the inside out, just like the fucking caterpillar. Now I'm angry. All the time. I'm hateful. I'm critical of everyone and everything because I have to be, because if I'm not, if I let my guard down for one second, that's when they slip in. That's when the next one finds the opening. I've become spiteful in ways I didn't even know I was capable of. Mean in ways that would have horrified the person I used to be. And everyone's seen it. Everyone's noticed. "Geez, you've been so bitter recently, Znazzy!" they say. "What's wrong with you?" "Znazzy hater arc." "Why are you always so angry?" That's the part that makes me want to genuinely break something. Everything that came before that? The subhuman treatment, the poking and prodding, the harassment, the violation, the endless fucking parasitism subjected to me before I even got to 4th grade. Nobody sees it. Nobody comments on it. But god forbid I react in any way that makes logical fucking sense. God forbid I'm not just content with being a walking host for parasites to thrive off of over and over and over again. God forbid I develop defense mechanisms. God forbid I’m mean every now and again. I'm literally Adolf fucking Hitler if I do that, apparently. If I'm anything other than endlessly accommodating, endlessly patient, endlessly kind while being consumed alive - then I'm toxic. Then I'm the bad guy. Then I'm the one who needs to work on myself, go to therapy, figure out why I'm "so negative lately." The wasps get to be wasps. The parasites get to parasitize. But the host? The host better stay sweet. Better stay soft. Better keep those vital organs accessible and easy to reach! Because if the host develops a shell, if the host gets angry, if the host starts fighting back, well, that's just unacceptable behavior, isn't it? I'm so far past tired I don't even have words for where I am anymore. Exhausted doesn't cover it. Depleted doesn't cover it. I'm hollowed out. I'm the host that's still walking around, still going through motions, but everything vital has already been eaten. I'm just meat that hasn't figured out it's dead yet. That's where I'm at. That's what I've learned about the world, about the universe, about the grand design of whatever sick fuck is running this simulation. Some of us are hosts. Some of us are parasitoid wasps dressed as humans. The universe doesn't just not care which one you are. It actively, deliberately, repeatedly sends the wasps to the same hosts over and over and over again until there's nothing left but the knowledge that this is all there is. This is all there ever was.