The Doe’s Latest Stories

It’s 130 degrees out and I’m wearing body armor, which includes this new triangle flap they’ve given U.S. soldiers in Iraq. You attach it to the bottom of your vest so it covers your groin. Every time I sit in a Humvee, I tuck my flap in just so—because I believe that when this truck goes up like a piñata, the flap will save the goods.We’re parked. We’re outside of a giant apartment complex. It has about 200 buildings, four or five stories each. Squalid. Packed. Some of the buildings have families living in the stairwells with little mattresses and curtains.We’re waiting because my commander is inside talking to the Mayor.He does that a lot because the Mayor is our informant. He tells us about IEDs: roadside bombs. He tells us who’s been planting them and where they’re going to be.I don’t get to talk to the Mayor, which is for the best. My commander is much better suited for this kind of thing. One reason is that my interpreter, “Lee,” doesn’t speak much English. He’s also overweight and asthmatic and whenever anything urgent happens, I can look back at him through the spinach green of my night vision goggles to see him lying on the ground, frantically taking hits off his puffer. I curse at him and he scrambles to his feet, but his helmet is too big and he can’t see where he's going.The Mayor tells my commander that he, himself, is going to be assassinated this week. One of the things that makes the Mayor such a good informant is that he knows everything that’s going to happen in our city. He doesn’t know where, or how, but he knows that this week he’s going to die. And he’s not running away.

The Mayor tells my commander that he, himself, is going to be assassinated this week.

This War Story Is All About Location

In order to understand our Mayor, you have to understand our city. Our city was the birthplace of the Iraq-as-nuclear-threat narrative. It had a giant weapons factory. Back in the ‘80s, there was a massive explosion and thousands of workers were killed. Details were murky and Saddam’s government executed a foreign investigator, pegging him as an Israeli spy. That was the beginning of the West being very nervous about weapons development in Iraq. Right here in our city. That factory was the economy for 200,000 people in our town. That factory is now rubble.But, among that rubble is the foundation for an industrial facility, and there are investors from Europe who want to turn that rubble into a tractor factory. This is why the Mayor informs for us. The IEDs that are blowing us up by the truckload? They’re also scaring the investors.So the Mayor is going to hold his ground, we are going to patrol, lie in ambush, raid houses, search vehicles. Destroy the enemy! Only that’s really difficult because we can never find them. They plant their bombs in potholes, hollowed-out trees, garbage, animal carcasses. They detonate them with tripwires, pressure plates, radio signals, washing machine timers. Everything we do to intervene against them requires that we walk and drive around, exposing us to more.

I see a mushroom cloud rising from above the apartments.

My Solider Story's Main Takeaway? Death

Fast-forward a few days. We’re just back from a mission: a foot patrol through the market at a busy time. Some of my soldiers are outside using diesel fuel to burn our trash, our shit and some dogs they had to shoot. I see my friend, Josh, from third platoon. His wife gave birth about a year ago and he got to go home for two weeks to see the baby. I ask him, “Do you ever catch yourself remembering that you’d forgotten that you’re a father and you have been for a year?” He says. “Absolutely. All the time.”Boom.An explosion. I see a mushroom cloud rising from above the apartments. We scramble to get our gear on. We assemble into a wedge formation and start striding over there. That’s what you do when there’s an explosion: You go closer to it, not farther from it.Thousands of people are streaming out of the apartments to see what happened. It looks like the explosion took place near the Iraqi police checkpoint. We’re getting closer. The crowd is growing. It’s as though all 200,000 of them have us surrounded. We’re getting close now and the smoke is starting to clear. It’s right at the police checkpoint. I see bodies: black, charred, skeletonized, mouths agape. In a pickup truck: also charred, black and skeletonized. I recognize the frame of the pickup truck as being a lot bigger than the Bongo-style trucks that most ordinary Iraqis have.The crowd is getting really overwhelming now. I have 20 guys including Lee. In a spasm of competence, he translates what they’re shouting and what I already know: Those bodies in the pickup are the Mayor and his security detail.The Mayor has been incinerated by a roadside bomb, planted at an Iraqi police checkpoint that is manned by Iraqi police 24 hours a day.This crowd. The police are firing into the air, over people’s heads to keep them back.We back away. We back away and observe from afar. We back away and watch it burn.

I’ve heard it so many times: “How can you defend those people?” From friends on the right and friends on the left. I hear it from detectives, police, sheriffs, jurors and loved ones. How can I defend “those people”?I think when we make it about “us” versus “them,” it’s impossible to do what I do. It’s also impossible to reach across that imagined void and hold someone’s hand who is in immense pain.I’m a public defender and I try to help the helpless.

“How can you defend those people?”

What Is the Role of a Public Defender? To Help Those Who Need It

When I first met Rose, she was accused of stabbing her boyfriend several times. When I first met Matt, he was accused of raping a woman in a beer cooler. When I met Roger, I was told that he stabbed a perfect stranger in a restaurant parking lot. And, if I had only read the police reports, I’d probably agree with you if you said these people needed to be removed from my hometown and locked up.As it turns out, each one of these beautiful people needed desperately for someone to just listen to them, to see past the district attorney’s allegations.

He was accused of raping a woman in a beer cooler.

Rose Wasn’t Innocent, but She Was Also a Victim

Rose grew up in Denver but had immigrated to the United States when she was five. If she was convicted of the crime she was accused of, she’d spend between ten to 32 years in prison. She then would likely end up in a federal detention camp before being deported back to a country she never considered home. What was more, her ex-boyfriend was a classic domestic violence guy: smooth, manipulative, abusive. She took weeks to open up to me. She didn’t trust me. And why would she? I have over a hundred cases and would call her the week of her next court appearance. When we met in court she was one of a dozen cases on the docket.When she did finally open up, there was a world of pain and scar tissue so deep she had lost herself. Before the fight in the kitchen that lead to her charges, the boyfriend had beaten her in the kitchen so many times she had lost count. She recalled one instance when he threw her to the ground in front of her two-year-old son and held her face to the carpet floor with his knee, screaming at her until drool from his mouth hit her face. He left her there quaking on the floor and went out drinking with friends for days without coming home. She remembered lying there for an untold period of time, scared to get up because she’d have to face the reality of what had just happened. She would have to look herself in the mirror, she’d have to go to her crying toddler and lie that, “Everything was going to be okay.”When we finally went to trial—because the DA continued to insist that she needed to be imprisoned—an expert testified about how victims of domestic violence blame themselves, how they internalize the physical pain and ignore it. Rose broke down crying right next to me. She had never been able to meet with a therapist to explain her pain, the fear she lived with—she had boiled over. No one had ever listened to her.

Matt will spend the rest of his life in prison.

A Jury Decided Matt Deserved to Die in Prison

Matt was also not from the United States. He had walked first, then hitch-hiked, then worked on a boat to get to the border of the U.S. and Mexico. He wasn’t from directly south of the border: He was from much farther away and, at first, I wouldn’t believe his story. But, then, I got his immigration file. He had been taken to an internment camp outside of St. Paul, Minnesota and waited for six months before a judge told him that he could apply for asylum.In his home country, he had been in a military prison for over a year before being told that he could either be conscripted into the military (to join the civil war) or continue to waste away in prison. And why was he in prison in the first place? For asking political questions, in his government class, in what is the equivalent of a state-run university.When Matt finally made it through the political asylum process and was released, he was asked, “Where do you want to go?” He had only heard of Denver because a friend of his family had immigrated there. He had no idea where he was going or what was next for him.Fast-forward a few months: Matt was working in a liquor store where his friends had helped to get him a job. A young woman, who worked at the fast-food restaurant in the same parking lot, loved to come in to see him. At first, it was to flirt. Then, it was to share cigarettes on their lunch breaks. She would bring him food that she had taken from her store, he would bum her smokes and, sometimes, they would sneak a shooter of liquor, laughing while they did. They knew each other well.When she came into the store to see him the night in question—the night she later told the police that she had been raped—she was on camera asking the store clerk at the desk where Matt was. She went and found him at the back of the liquor store and hugged him and kissed him on camera. She took his hand and led him back to the beer cooler behind the refrigerators full of beer. She later told police that he took her pants off and made her have sex. He explained over and over again that she sat him on a pile of boxes and climbed on top of him; that they used a condom; that he told her that he loved her.Matt will spend the rest of his life in prison.I don’t know if there was a gap in the communication between them or if he really did attack her in the beer cooler. But, I know for certain that he doesn’t deserve to spend the rest of his life in prison. I had failed to properly tell his story and a jury didn’t much care for the look of a man—who had come from where he came from—claiming to have had consensual sex with a woman a few years younger than him.When people ask me how I can defend rapists, I think of Matt wasting away in a prison for the rest of his life. I think of the video surveillance in the liquor store that made it look to me like she had hugged and kissed him and taken him into the beer cooler. I think of how I wish I could have connected with the jury to help them understand. But nobody cared. He was led away in shackles, quickly forgotten by the prosecutor and the judge.

But nobody cared.

Roger Wasn’t a Criminal, but He Was Treated Like One

Roger was by far one of the saddest people I had ever touched. The combination of failed mental health networks in our country, limited family resources and a broken education system made it so. Roger was loved: His mother and his sister would come to court to support him. He was semi-homeless; not because his mom wouldn’t let him live with her but because he had mental health issues and would wander off unassisted for times on his own. He’d sleep by a river. He wasn’t really that into drugs. Some of my clients certainly are, but Roger just smoked weed occasionally.Roger was very inventive and lacked the ability to point his creativity in one direction. In many ways, he reminded me of an innocent child. Roger was a goth makeup fellow. He would dress in all black with white face paint and decorative nonsense hanging all over him. He was also the kid that people in high school would call a “freak.” He is exactly the type of person that would end shooting up a high school like Columbine because the jocks picked on him and treated him like shit.When Roger was arrested, he looked like a Marilyn Manson stunt double. He donned huge black leather boots with all kinds of silver straps, gloves that had fake plastic claws and so on and so forth. Frankly, if his creativity had been harnessed and he had been shown a path to develop his costume-making abilities, he could have been something really special.But not Roger. Roger was attacked riding a Razor scooter down an alley by a group of homeless people who called him a “faggot” and a “loser” and so many other terrifying things. He fought back—not well. He isn’t a pugilist, he isn’t very big, he isn’t intimidating in the slightest. The hardened homeless people laughed it off and stole his scooter from him before telling him to get fucked. So, he ran off and then circled back around the building and stabbed one of the men.Self-defense, perhaps? A jury disagreed and convicted him. They didn’t know the penalty that would be imposed. 46 years. He was 35. A guy like Roger has a life expectancy in prison that is something in the high 60s. You can do that math. District attorneys and judges will claim that he gets out in less than that and will be fine. But, will he? When he does get out, he’ll have no assistance getting back into the swing of things. Hell, he had no assistance before he went in, when he was exhibiting signs of mental health issues, when his family let him wander around homeless.

What Are the Duties of a Public Defender? Mainly to Not Pick Sides

So, you could ask me how I stand next to people like that. How do you defend those people? I have found that when I sit down across the table from someone in a bind like Rose, Matt or Roger—when the world’s largest incarceration system has put them in the crosshairs—I look for the pieces of them that remind me of my friends, my family and the failings of our community.I cannot profess to have done a good job with all of my cases. Each of these clients breaks my heart and cuts me to the core. And I have found that when I remove the “us” and “them” dichotomy, I am able to talk to each person and meet them where they are. I have found it to be a privilege to see people and discover a small piece of whom that person truly is. To touch sadness like this is to separate the “us” from “them.” I consider a privilege of the highest order to do so.

You’ve heard the moth-eaten adage before: Actions speak louder than words. So, when thinking about mass incarceration in America, it’s imperative to consider the actions of the offenders. Day after day in court—in my role as a deputy district attorney—what I hear people saying is: “Judge, please send me to prison.” Those may not be the actual words coming out of their mouths but they’re saying it loud and clear.Past actions are the best predictor of future behavior, right? There’s a saying that the definition of “crazy” is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. So, let’s look at mass incarceration from the viewpoint of the judges who sentence people to prison, and the deputy DAs who recommend people be incarcerated.I spend every working morning in a courtroom handling a criminal adult felony docket. I have been doing this for 14 years. The first two years were spent in a small rural jurisdiction and the last dozen in a large urban area. I heard the same thing in the small town that I hear in the big city: “Judge, please send me to prison.”

Bail Bonds Are Unfair, But Progress in Being Made

Let’s start with pre-conviction and talk about bond or bail. There are many people incarcerated pre-conviction in America. There is change happening across our nation in terms of how we address bond. Bail schedules are being challenged and deemed unconstitutional. It is not fair that a poorer person remains in custody after an accusation and a wealthier person does not, simply because of their ability to pay or post bond. The ability to pay should not be a determinative factor in pre-conviction incarceration. Both are innocent unless and until proven guilty by the government—so why should a poorer person remain in custody whereas a wealthier person does not?Things must change.This is an area where we are making progress in the criminal justice system. We are moving away from bail schedules that dictated the amount of bond one must post simply based on the severity of the charge(s). We are moving towards individual risk assessments. Judges are trying to set bonds based on not only the charge but on the offender, too—considering the existence or lack thereof of various factors. Good idea.Additionally, we are trending towards releasing more accused persons on their own promise to return to court—what we often call personal recognizance bonds. You sign a piece of paper that says you will come to court when required, and you are released from custody without having to post or spend any money on bail or bond. Again, a good idea.But what do we do about those who sign the personal recognizance bond promising they will abide by the conditions and come to court when required but don’t? When the accused misses a required court date, a warrant issues for his/her arrest due to the failure to appear. Eventually, that person is picked up on that failure to appear warrant and they are back in front of a judge. Maybe the same judge that released them on a promise to appear. What is the judge supposed to do now? Release he/she again on a promise to appear? At bond advisals, which occur every day in basically every courthouse in America, I hear accused persons tell judges that they will appear next time and that it was a mistake the first time they did not. But actions speak louder than words, right?

Things must change.

The Role of the Judge in the Criminal Justice System

Now: incarceration post-conviction. The accused has now been convicted at trial—or much more likely—has accepted a plea bargain and admitted that he/she is guilty of a crime. Now it is up to the judge to impose a sentence. The judge has options (besides in the most serious cases where mandatory prison sentences are legislated). Most felony convictions, and nearly all misdemeanor convictions, are probation eligible. The judge decides if you go to jail or prison, or if you go on probation, or if you just pay a fine and close the case.Let’s assume someone has pleaded guilty to a first felony. The judge is determining the sentence and decides to give the convicted an opportunity to serve a community-based sentence—such as probation. The convicted will be required to meet with probation and comply with any requirements the probation department puts on them, or whatever requirements the judge specifically imposed—e.g., monitored sobriety and/or domestic violence classes. Some convicted persons do everything required and complete probation. Their cases are closed. This is the result everyone at the courthouse hopes to see. But, oftentimes, probation is not completed successfully.

Rehabilitation in the Criminal Justice System Exists

Look, you can’t be involved in the criminal justice system 14 days, let alone 14 years, without dealing with addiction and addicts. Addiction underlies so much of what goes on in and around the criminal justice system. Hell, I’m an addict myself—lots of prosecutors are— whether it’s alcohol or exercising or something else: Most prosecutors I know, and I know hundreds, are addicts. We are no different or better than the people we are working with in court. But let’s get back to the judge and the convicted person who has chosen to not comply with probation. What is the judge supposed to do?Eventually, the probation department files a motion with the court informing the judge that the convicted is not complying with the requirements of probation. The convicted is brought back to court and back in front of the judge to be re-sentenced. The judge gives the convicted a second chance to comply with a community-based sentence and reinstates probation for a new term with the same conditions as before. The convicted leaves court, does not comply with probation again and probation eventually files another motion with the court saying that the convicted is non-compliant. The convicted is brought back to court, back in front of the judge—so now what?The convicted asks the judge for another opportunity on probation because the alternative is, ya know, incarceration. If you are convicted of a felony, you are going to be put on probation or sent to prison. So, probation or prison—those are the judge’s options. What the convicted says to the judge does not comport with their actions. They say they want another chance, they say they will attend probation meetings and therapy appointments, they say they are serious about substance abuse treatment and they just need a third second chance. From my prosecution table, I listen to the words coming out of their mouths, but what I hear is: “Judge, please send me to prison.”

It’s Not the Judge’s Fault Some Offenders Can’t Complete Probation

Let me give an example. There was a woman in my courtroom recently who was driving drunk one night several years ago. Police attempted to pull her over on the street but she pulled into a fast-food restaurant. The traffic stop occurred in the drive-thru lane in the middle of the night. She was arrested for DUI, a misdemeanor offense. She was uncooperative with police on the scene. I get that: She was drunk and making poor choices, i.e., driving. She chose to call the police horrible names—which is not illegal—and choose to physically assault the police. That is definitely illegal, a felony in most instances. She kicked the police officer in the face as he was driving the police car to the police station. The officer almost lost control of the car while driving at posted speed on a highway.So, she was additionally charged with felony assault on a police officer. She took a plea bargain. She pleaded guilty to a reduced felony offense and a DUI. She was put on probation. She did not comply. She tested positive for alcohol and marijuana. She submitted diluted urinalysis (UAs). She set up treatment but never followed through with it. She was brought back to court on a probation revocation, was revoked and reinstated to probation. She got a second chance. She did not comply again. She continued to drink and drop hot UAs. She continued to miss required UAs. She was discharged from treatment due to lack of attendance. She was brought back into court for another revocation. The judge gave her a third chance to do probation, to avoid incarceration. The judge told the woman that if she came back again he would impose a prison sentence—that this is the last opportunity to comply. She did not. She chose to keep drinking and therefore failed additional UAs. She chose to not attend probation meetings. She even picked up a new case in a different county for assaulting a police officer. She was before the judge again, asking for another chance on probation.What is the judge supposed to do? The judge finally incarcerated her. The convicted gave the judge no other choice.

It all comes down to choice.

Mass Incarceration Is a Result of Choices, Not Sentences

Judges do not like sending people to prison. Deputy DAs would much prefer a convicted person take advantage of the opportunity to do probation and use the resources probation provides than suffer the alternative. Judges will suspend prison sentences as an incentivized threat to a convicted person: ”You better comply with probation or I am going to impose the suspended prison sentence.” The convicted does not comply and, in my experience, more often than not, the judge will still give a person a second chance on probation—even though he/she told them otherwise. On drug cases, I have seen probation sentences revoked and reinstated six different times. On the one hand, it’s hard work to wind up in prison on a drug possession case: Judges will give offenders multiple opportunities to comply with probation. On the other hand, it is easy to wind up in prison on a drug possession case when the offender chooses to not comply with probation. It comes back to choice.I have seen much written about mass incarceration and the broken criminal justice system in America. I have not seen much written about personal responsibility and the consequences for one’s own actions. Lots of felonies are committed. Some of those people get caught and prosecuted. Day after day in court, judges are tasked with making a decision—put someone on probation or put them in prison. After someone is convicted of a felony, he/she has a choice to make. Is he/she going to comply with the sentence imposed or not? Is he/she going to complete probation requirements or not?It’s not judges and DAs who choose to put people in prison: It is offenders who give judges no other option than to put them in prison. Offenders who refuse to go to probation appointments, offenders who refuse to remain sober, offenders who choose to re-offend.Back to addiction: Should we not require people on probation to remain sober because they are addicts? Should we allow people on probation to consume alcohol and drugs? No. Should we connect addicts to treatment options and provide them with the skills and tools to turn their lives around? Yes. But, it all comes down to choice. Offenders choose to comply or not. It is not judges who choose to send people to prison. It is offenders who ask them—oftentimes by their actions and not their words—“Judge, please send me to prison.”

I was sitting in a 68-man Orange County jail tank, surrounded by the usual chaos. The stench of hopelessness and despair that hung thick in the air around me wasn’t new, but as I sat there, knowing I was about to spend the rest of my life in prison, it seemed more potent than usual.I was convicted of three counts of attempted murder and three counts of assault with a deadly weapon. At the age of 23, I was sentenced to 32 years-to-life. Nothing made sense. I had no direction. I was lost to my circumstances. I had no idea how I was going to survive my new lifetime of imprisonment.The sheriff yelling, “Mail call!” snatched me out of my trance. On any normal day, I’d be excited to hear it. I always looked forward to a letter from a family member, friend or girlfriend to give me a taste of the reality I once knew. Today I was numb because any dream I had of one day getting back to them was fading away with each passing second. The sheriff had to call my name twice before I realized that he was talking to me. When he handed me an envelope, I was confused. I didn’t recognize the name in the upper left corner. Curiosity made my hands fumble a bit, but when I finally got the letter open, I was flooded with all kinds of emotions.

I Didn’t Know Her, but She’d Already Changed My Life Forever

The first page was brimming with compassion and empathy.It was immediately apparent that whoever this was, they felt for me and my family, and the loss we were experiencing. For the first time in a long time, I felt like somebody saw me as a person, not just the worst thing I’d ever done. Then came apologies for the part that she played, and how much guilt she felt for helping turn in my guilty verdict.It slowly dawned on me that the letter in my hand had come from one of the jurors who’d convicted me.I was instantly furious. My shirt felt like it was choking me. My body was burning from the inside. A voice from deep down within me screamed at her, “This is all your fault!”After all, wasn't it?In her letter, the juror—Juror Number Ten, as it turned out—talked about how she held out for three days of deliberation. If she would’ve stuck to her guns, I wouldn't be heading to prison, right? I wanted to rip the letter into pieces, but I couldn't. Maybe some part of me understood that this person was searching for the very same healing I was.We kept up our correspondence for the next couple of months that I was in the reception center. We spoke honestly about how our paths crossed, and what that meant for me and my family, and for her too. I couldn't dedicate much energy to where this was going, because I had no way of knowing what level-four prison life had waiting for me. That’s what occupied most of my thoughts.

A voice from deep down within me screamed at her, “This is all your fault!”

I Was Behind Bars, but I Wasn’t Forgotten

I’d only been at Calipatria State Prison for two days when the guards came to my cell to handcuff me for my first visit. I assumed they’d made a mistake. My mail hadn't even reached home yet, so nobody knew where I was. The guard rattled off my state identification number to confirm and told me my visit would be behind glass because I hadn't been classified yet.When I stepped in the visiting room for the first time, I had no way of knowing that it would be Juror Number Ten waiting on the other side of the glass. At first we were both overwhelmed by the trauma that we shared. Then she started telling me about her experience as a juror. She said that when she was the last one holding onto a not-guilty verdict, she asked the room how much time they thought I would get. The foremen, full of patriarchal white privilege, slammed his hand on the table and stood over her. “It doesn’t fucking matter,” he growled. “It's not our problem. Just say guilty so we can go home.”I listened intently as she recalled how scared and small she felt. I flashed back to the day of my verdict, and remembered seeing her cry uncontrollably as the judge asked the jury whether they all agreed I was guilty. She told me that she wanted to change her mind, but felt like she couldn't. It was easy for me to empathize because I had felt the same smallness and powerlessness for much of my life. In my current situation, people were constantly using their power and position to drill into my head that I no longer had agency, even over my own body.On that day, our healing began, behind thick plated glass while we perched on stainless-steel stools. We cried together, forgave each other and forgave ourselves. There was no room for “juror” and “defendant” in our exchange because our humanity couldn’t be objectified that way. I was able to take full responsibility for where I was because I realized she hadn’t done anything that needed to be forgiven.She was just as much a victim of this system of oppression as I was. The system didn't care how her experience as a juror affected her, or the countless hours of counseling she needed afterward, as long as she played her part.

We chose community and healing.

Our “Justice” System Is All About Punishment; We Chose Healing Instead

Over the next couple of years, Juror Number Ten and I would write often. She sent me pictures of her vacations, giving me the chance to escape mentally. I would share with her the things I was discovering about myself and the ways my paradigm had shifted. She didn’t even know how influential she was in my new journey, as I began to see the power of forgiveness and the capacity of human beings to love without limits.If two people separated by geography, socioeconomic background, race and gender could find a way to embrace, what else was possible? This was a lesson that would serve me well in a place so hellbent on maintaining those separatist ideologies. Juror Number Ten and I couldn’t control the system, but we had the final say-so on our relationship to each other.We chose community and healing.We became so close that years later when her son was having behavioral and substance abuse issues, I asked her to bring him to see me so I could share what I was thinking and feeling at his age. Frankly, I wasn't surprised that her son and I had a lot in common. He was also trying to find his way in a culture where he couldn’t ask for help or being emotionally vulnerable unless he wanted to risk being seen as less than a man. Juror Number Ten told me that after our visit, he cried and prayed for me. Her son and I are still very close.It's been 16 years since my first letter from Juror Number Ten arrived, and I’m proud to say that since then we’ve become family, sharing love, connectedness and a motivation to heal. Although our paths crossed because my actions produced trauma and pain, she was able to see and appreciate my humanity. I struggled early on to see how our “justice system” provided justice to anybody involved. The system only seemed concerned with subjecting me to a lifetime of isolation and trauma. Still, through the actions of one woman, I learned that everybody is entitled to the opportunity to connect and heal. I carried that throughout my time of incarceration. Now I am no longer serving life in prison, but living a life in service to others and building a community that supports one another in making positive decisions.

My life is average for a South African of my race and class, a white woman born in 1986. However, I may have had a slight disadvantage by having experienced sexual abuse right at the start. (Although in South Africa, where a woman is raped or abused every 25 seconds, I'm by no means an anomaly). My earliest memories are from age three. The images I see in my mind's eye are of being molested.My father was a pastor. I was molested by his colleague. This man, who today lives happily with his wife and two children, admitted openly to the church what he had done to me when it came out. He begged for forgiveness and went to counseling. He also filled a sheet of paper full of other girls' names he'd molested in the church.This serial pedophile was happy—even comfortable—sharing the details of all his sins with the church’s leaders. My dad sat me down in front of this pedophile, in our family home, and told me to say, “Stanley, I forgive you.” My father—still a minister today, although he’s left us to chase tail from the pulpit elsewhere—pinned the outcome on me telling my abuser, “I forgive you.” There was no justice served for the many girls the man would go on to molest after me.

The church did nothing about the pedophile.

Pedophiles May Get a Second Chance, but Their Victims Don't

Here was a father’s opportunity to do something meaningful for the rest of his daughter’s life, despite the damage that had already been caused. Here was an opportunity for my healing to begin. Instead, I would spend the next 30 years of my life battling to understand if I had any value.The church did nothing about the pedophile.They counseled him and sent him back to work. I recently saw an article about a woman who had been sexually abused around when I was, by her father, who was our church's youth pastor. It seemed to be part of the culture.I assure you, as any psychologist would, that you cannot pray pedophilia away.Years later, heavily pregnant with my daughter, I discovered that a primary school in my hometown had hired my abuser's wife. You'd best believe I waddled over to confront them. I asked that the school ban him from the premises. My motive was to protect every other little girl that this man was going to have access to. That's the most significant purpose a victim has, to stop pedophiles and sex offenders from committing those heinous acts again. Thankfully the school obliged, but there were further interviews with the abuser regarding his crimes where he again cried, pleaded not to let the story affect his family and claimed Jesus had healed him from pedophilia. Nothing more came of it.This is where my self-worth goes on a bumpy ride. I've spoken out, to my family, to schools, to churches and to our communities. My own father, the church and the schools who see firsthand the damage abuse causes, all did nothing. You can see how the message I've received over and over has been that my voice and my pain mean little compared to the cries for mercy from a pedophile.

Victims Are Abused a Second Time When Their Stories Are Dismissed

I'm aware that by sharing my story, I'll probably be labeled "abused," just as I'm often told that my voice, when I'm most passionate, "comes from a place of pain," and is set aside.Fighting abuse isn't as simple as going to the police—or shaming an abuser publicly or speaking until somebody finally listens—when the natural reaction our culture instills in the people hearing it is, "Oh, she's damaged." The abuse itself set a course of pain and confusion in my life, and sparked a battle with depression that has long been a part of me. The abuse told me that I’m less important than the abuser—that a man can take from me what he wants. It left me powerless.As women, we are always aware that men are physically capable of disempowering us, even within an inch of our lives. (When eight South African women die daily at the hands of abusers, death is a statistical reality.) Abuse reminds you that your life is at the mercy of the men around you. When you report an abuser, and nothing is done about, it the message is: “You are not valuable enough. You are less valuable than a criminal. You are now a damaged stain on society.”The world's systems have been set up to protect abusers, to keep pedophiles, rapists and harassers safe. To hold men accountable for every inappropriate action, every joke, every touch, every improper engagement, would mean that too many men would be guilty. We can't have that in a world where "boys will be boys."

Rape Culture Permits Abuse

With robbery or fraud, we all know what the punishment will be. There are guidelines for length of imprisonment, fines and retribution. The penalty serves as a deterrent. We understand that if murder goes unpunished, it’s not just a matter of private justice but also public safety.This kind of common sense is not applied to gender-based violence. There are not clear enough lines for when the crime starts and ends. There aren’t clear punishments for sexual abuse or harassment, especially for crimes that don’t include penetration. The church did not consider the hundreds of girls who would be abused by that same man when they let him go without consequence. When he touched me, he emptied me of trust, joy and freedom, and filled me with self-hate. That is a crime.I once worked at an agency where one of their executives, who evaluated my application for promotion, had sent me inappropriate text messages. He felt the urge to say that I'd intrigued him since he first met me because I have a "hot body." At that moment, I realized that the man who held my career path in his hands was not making a choice about my growth based on how intelligent I am or how good I was at my job. He was only thinking about my body.There is no justice for victims at that agency. Their rape culture protects abusers and disempowers victims. I spent the rest of my time working at there in a deep depression. I lost all confidence in my abilities, and I eventually quit.

Fight for me, because I don’t want to live in this world anymore.

We Need to End Society's Cycle

I am wrong in this society because I expect justice and clear penalties for destroying lives through perversion. I am wrong because I cannot stand by and watch others being abused. I have been made to believe I am unworthy of God, unworthy of a father's love, unworthy of my government, my partners, teachers and bosses.I don't want to live in a world where a three-year-old girl is told she is unworthy because she's experienced abuse by the hands of an adult. I want to live in a world where victims are treated with empathy. I want to live in a world where a sex crime in a church is handled the same way grand theft would be. I want to be interviewed by police about the abuse in the same way they would care for me if my partner were murdered. My essence was murdered the day I was abused. I wish my father had cried for me then, the way he may have if the abuser had killed me instead.So, fight for justice, fight to change the culture, fight your government, your schools and your organizations to normalize coming forward about sexual abuse the same way you would come forward to report the theft of your possessions. If I had told you today that someone had stolen all of the belongings from my home, would you respond instead with sympathy and understanding? Would you label me damaged? Would you hope the "thief" would be found and punished so that it can't possibly happen to you too?Fight for your daughters. Fight for the future. Fight so that if they're abused, they will still go on to live knowing their self-worth, because you and the legal system and their community stood up for them. Fight your church on their policies for handling abusers. Fight for justice in our legal systems. Sign petitions, vote governments into power which will put victims first and enforce severe penalties that match the severity of the crime. Do something about it, because the onus cannot be placed on the victim—on me—to make sure we are finally given the justice we need to feel valued. An abuser in your society is a destroyer of that world.Fight for me, because I don’t want to live in this world anymore.

I identify as a Black, queer, intellectually disabled man who is living in modern-day America during a pivotal moment in history. I write this during a time when the world is experiencing racial injustices and the horrific pandemic of COVID-19. Many of my Black brothers and sisters have experienced gun violence by white Americans, only to end up in a tragic death.From my birth, I navigated the world with a different lens than the other Black men around me. I grew up in South Georgia, a place where men were usually socialized through sports. Although academics are often praised—and enforced—in the households of my hometown, Tifton, Black men here are often perceived only as athletes. Sports have been a constant stressor in my life. My brother became a professional athlete when I was in middle school. My maternal uncle was the first athlete to ever receive a scholarship at his university for two sports: football and baseball. I never engaged enough in any games or developed any athletic skills.

Athletics Can Liberate Some Black Men—but Not All

I had a close-up view of the countless hours my brother dedicated to baseball and many of the issues with racism that he experienced from the start. At that time, all of the coaches for male sports in the public school system (except basketball) were white men. I noticed that these white men only cared for the Black athletes until their senior year, if they made it that far.Access and equity for Black students within public school systems in rural areas like Tifton face significant challenges. The Black athletes who were advanced enough might receive some support, but many wouldn’t even get the help they needed to graduate high school. Of the Black men in my graduating class of more than 500 students, fewer than ten of them have gone on to earn a bachelor’s degree. Black male athletes’ bodies in Tifton are used to generate sports funding, yet a disproportioned number of us do not have academic success in the classroom. Considering the four million dollars my hometown spent on renovations for their football stadium in 2008, the low number of Black men who matriculate into higher education to earn a bachelor’s degree is alarming.

Why It Took 16 Years to Discover My Learning Disability

My educational journey required me to manage my own academic challenges along the way. My academic performance was inconsistent from elementary school until my senior year of college at Georgia Southern University. I would flourish in English and history but struggled with math. I had to retake college algebra the same semester I scored 102 in one of my history courses.After a meeting with my college algebra teacher, where I could verbally walk him through how to answer several problems on a test but couldn’t correctly write them out, he recommended that I visit the school’s disability resource center. They did an evaluation and referred me to a local psychologist for a psycho-educational assessment. After a month-and-a-half process, 14 hours of testing, and a two-week wait for the results, I received notification that I had been diagnosed with a cognitive processing disorder—after 16 years of school where I didn’t even know I had a learning disability.I believe that part of the reason I discovered my learning disability so late is Tifton’s rural location. Rural areas in America are often under-resourced, so school systems don’t always get the funding they need. Even now, Georgia governor Brian Kemp has decided to make cuts to education during the COVID-19 pandemic—a pandemic that happens to be occurring in conjunction with the murders of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and the long, sad list of other unarmed Black Americans who’ve been killed by white men.These tragic deaths occur on concrete sidewalks, in the isolation of our own homes and even when we’re peacefully walking home from purchasing Skittles from a 7-Eleven. I agree with Bishop T.D. Jakes that, “Blacks deserve justice in the courtroom, not on the concrete.” My soul is fatigued from advocating so long for my Black people. I marched for Trayvon Martin and for Troy Davis. These injustices happen all over our nation and world, but have increasingly occurred throughout the State of Georgia. Ahmaud Arbery’s murder hit home for me since it happened only 100 miles from Tifton. Kendrick Johnson was killed less than 40 miles away.

Education and Community Can’t Be Separated

There are a lot rural communities in Georgia and across our country. Beauty exists in these places, but so does overt racism, due to lack of access to knowledge. Some of them are home to reputable public schools, colleges and universities. I think it is important to examine the bridge between those institutions and the places they’re located, and what these institutions are doing to dismantle racial injustices, starting with having conversations about racism in the community.Through it all, I remain hopeful that Black folk will persist through these racial injustices by clinging to our spirituality and being in community with each other as we have during difficult times throughout history. Food is how many of us connect. My grandmother Doretha cooked each Sunday for 23 years. I still vividly remember walking into her house after church to smell fried chicken, cornbread and delicious Southern food.Being in community with each other is a healthy outlet for Blacks during these harsh times.Yes, I navigate this world as a Black, queer, intellectually disabled man. Although my Black brothers and sisters vary in their social identities, I see me when I look at them. I think about the biblical story of Moses, who delivered his people out of Egypt and into the Promised Land. Moses was an Israelite who delivered freedom to his own people. Today's liberation of Blacks will come from us liberating our own people, ourselves—no one else.

When you meet a gang member, your initial thoughts are liable to be negative. This type of person needs to be locked away, one might tend to think, for the safety of the community, and the protection of society as a whole. As a person who joined a gang, did drugs, committed crimes and was ultimately locked away in the name of societal protection, I can tell you with 100 percent certainty that this is not the just way.I speak for myself when I say that I made an active compromise to join the gang, in the pursuit of identity, acceptance, family and safety. I can speak for others, both in my position and not, by saying that we are all taught that approval from peers is more important than the things we dream of, or the people we love and admire. We live in a model that values power over others over innate personal ability. We forget the more vulnerable person who once dreamed and was scared in the process, almost as a defense mechanism.I learned early on that the little boy who loved and laughed and cried was weak and could not possibly survive in the world. I walked this education out into membership, and eventually leadership, in a gang—a hardened mind, violent crimes and a worldview based on the idea that it was my gang and me against the world.This view cost me almost 21 years of my life and not just because I was incarcerated. I did spend over two decades inside the walls of juvenile facilities, group homes, foster care facilities, jails and prisons. The actual time in these places was not the most impactful price that I paid.The real sacrifice I made for the “power over others” mentality was that in those 21 years, I ceased to be me. I was only the person others wanted me to be. This loss of identity was pervasive and spread like a virus throughout my entire being as I got older. For much of my life, I sought approval, all the while telling myself—and fully believing—that I didn't give a fuck what other people thought of me.The combination of traumas and angst I had experienced in my younger life created a recipe for disaster.Patriarchy informed me that the only way I could claim a place in the world was through the false notions of superiority and power that I got from my gang identity—that these people were the only ones who had my back, and that without them I was completely unsafe in this world.The mask of a gang member became manhood for me, but this mask was also a security blanket for a scared and hurt child, encompassing every aspect of my life. I felt safe and sheltered from harm in the short term. In the long run, however, this blanket closed the real me away, it locked me from everything valuable in life. That mask became the real prison—everything else was circumstantial.

They were the only family I could depend on.

Why I Joined a Gang

I first got involved in a gang at 13. I was a runaway escaping a drug-addicted and abusive father, sleeping in parks, abandoned schools and behind grocery stores. I was a small and gangly kid, and while bunkered down in a dark park one night, a group of loud kids walked through and interrupted my drunken sleep. Immediately, I was struck by this group’s collective presence.These young men had all of the things I felt I didn't have: confidence, grit, style, intimidation factor. I was a small, longhaired runaway who spent most of his life being beaten by his father and said nothing. These kids had everything he'd taken from me. They could have jumped me and things might have been different, but instead, they talked to me. Embraced me. Invited me to go with them to a show. I could have declined the invitation but, in a society where young boys are taught to admire domination and force, my clarity of choice was blunted by the more present desire of wanting these boys to like me. The thought wasn't as clear as that, but it was almost instinctual that I gravitated towards their confidence and force. Within minutes, I knew that I wanted to be just like them.Over the next days, weeks and months, I learned their mannerisms. I picked up their style of dress, and through a series of actual fights, I was taught that to be a part of this group—and to get the respect they had—I had to be willing and able to hurt people. This seemed less terrifying than the thought of losing this newfound acceptance. I also learned that to excel, I needed to do crazy things, often violent, to gain a reputation. That way, people wouldn't want to fuck with me, and I won the added protection of having my new group in my corner when things got hectic.What did hectic look like? It looks like attacks from others that I had been trained were my enemy—and I use the word "others" quite deliberately because everyone outside of our small group became classified as the "other." Unimportant. Not as good. Not worth anything in some cases.Over the next few years, I found myself expelled from school, detained and continually arrested. Eventually, I was deemed undesirable by the courts and placed in a juvenile facility. After several times through this cycle, the juvenile courts determined that my house and family could not adequately manage me and, as a result, I was designated a ward of the court. Basically, that meant that the state was my new parent. I was thrown into foster care. One would think that my gang identity would end there, at the point where freedom ends and custody begins.But inside these juvenile halls and foster care group homes, I was introduced to hundreds, even thousands of other children who had made similar choices. As a response to trauma, kids had sought protection and security in the pursuit of manhood through violence and objectification—through power over others: kids who had different skin tones, attitudes, mannerisms and gang names, but ultimately the same security blanket.Despite the external differences, society had classified us all as "delinquent,” but what we really were was traumatized. We had responded exactly as we were socialized to, and society was afraid of the results.

I Became What Society Wanted, and It Wasn't Myself

I never went home.I don't mean that I was never released. At 18, I was kicked out of the foster care system, but by this point had ceased to ultimately be myself. I found my way to jail, then to prison, and almost always for the gang's benefit that I still considered my family. Upon arriving at prison for my first term, I remember thinking that it really wasn't that much different than foster care and juvenile hall. I even saw some of the same faces that I knew from my years in group homes. We all wore our masks of confidence and brazenness. We all pretended like nothing affected us and hid all our other “weaker”—I would now say more real—emotions, like sadness, fear and insecurity, behind anger.After all, anger is socially acceptable and vulnerability isn’t. In the process of learning manhood, how many of us were told that boys don’t cry? What I had become, and was seeing daily in prison, was the living result of that lesson.We were a group of hurt people without any ability or knowledge of how to respond to that hurt in a way that healed. Sure, we did terrible things, and society had either openly or suggestively determined that we were "bad." But nothing about locking us in cages and separating us from the world was intended to treat that hurt. There was nothing to live for in that environment, so on the inside, I lived for my gang the same way that I did on the outside—with the entirety of the version of me that they had created. The gang was always all that I had, and even more so locked up.They were the only family I could depend on.I pushed for that gang, even when it was harmful to me, and this perspective got me a second bid with double-digit numbers. It got me into numerous riots, staff assaults and violent altercations, and gave me new cases while I was already in for an extremely lengthy period.In every instance, I knew my reputation was growing. That fed me more than the fact that my parole date was moving further and further away. The thinking was simple: There was nothing out on the streets for me anyway. In there, and in the gang life, I was someone not to be fucked with, and therefore I was safe. Whenever I was challenged (and I was on many occasions), I responded with a degree of brutality that would get my message across: Do not fuck with me. Whether through prison political moves or actual violence, I maintained my safety.But I was never really safe, and I was never really myself.I could have been lost forever. I had started my second term at 21, and by 30, I had no intention or clear vision of going home. If it did happen by chance, nothing I did showed that I had any intention of staying home. The system had done what it was designed to do: create a permanent resident in its institutions. The system provided no means of treatment for my traumas, no rehabilitation method for the issues I had developed. It only gave me a number, meals and the lesson that I would always be marked as less than in society's eyes. And again, I assert: This is what the system is designed to do! The millions of other people incarcerated in America and I are not failures of the system. We are byproducts of patriarchal control and mass incarceration. I turned out exactly like the system meant me to.

Real Talk Gave Me a Way Out

It wasn’t some state program that saved me from myself or some benevolent staff member who made me realize my worth. No teacher or preacher singled me out and lifted me up.This isn't a Hallmark movie. But there is a happy ending.I eventually found healing and peace. I was able to reclaim myself. I was freed and now I live a life based on integrity and love for others. I found my salvation in the very men that I was housed with in prison, and in the real and raw connections made as we discussed why we did the things we had done.A whole community of people, of all shapes and sizes and colors, had come together to discuss what role that patriarchy played in their lives. If this seems like an unlikely conversational topic in prison, that’s because it was. But real conversations centered around healing and discussing toxic masculinity are crucial—they’re the key to curing what has sickened society. And in doing this, I found myself again.I also found out that what we have been taught is justice is not just at all. Justice has nothing to do with taking from me because I took from you. That revenge model stems from the same patriarchal tree as my original choice to seek acceptance and hurt others. What my peers and I did inside—and still do—is real justice. We were harmed, we openly and unabashedly discussed why we chose to harm, we found the systemic cause and we worked to uproot it. We began the process of healing, and of making society better as a whole. Justice is achieved when the behavior and the systems that led to harm are transformed for the better.I committed to that idea in a visiting room at a remote prison, and my life transformed. I came home, but I continue to go back into prisons and hold these conversations with my peers who are still inside. I’ve broken the cycle and removed my chains. Finally, I am free.

All I ever wanted, when I was young and oblivious to the world, was to live in a quintessential American small town, in a white farmhouse with a wrap-around porch where I could sip coffee. My husband would wave goodbye, dressed in a suit, as he left for the office, and I would stay home with our ten children, joyfully frolicking around our American Dream.My dream began to fade when I fell in love with a Welsh man and moved to the U.K. after college. I was a teacher by trade, but my qualifications didn’t transfer. We needed money, though, and I needed something to occupy my time. I found a school that didn’t require a teaching degree and began educating seven little girls about math, reading and writing—seven little girls that had grown up in safe, loving families.Their stability gave me a feeling of unease. These girls didn’t need me. Inside, I knew there were vulnerable girls, and vulnerable women, who did. So, I quit my job, with no alternative for income. Perhaps it was intuition. Perhaps it was God.I have always, ever since I can remember, had a faith in God that has guided me in the direction of love. When I left my teaching post, I spent a summer praying to Him to show me where to go next.

Helping People Let Me Find Order in the Chaos

He answered through a documentary called Nefarious. The film introduced me to the world of modern-day human trafficking—a grimy, exploitative world I had never heard of before. It’s a world where women and men are treated as property to be worked, raped and used. I read. I learned and I cried. Eventually, I resolved to do something.The little town I live in has a high street, which isn’t very high anymore. It’s actually quite dirty and abandoned. There’s a well-used office there that offers support to the many victims of domestic abuse that the town’s struggles with drugs, alcohol and poverty have produced. I decided to start volunteering. Answering phones and creating spreadsheets wasn’t quite the vision of saving the world I had pictured, but it was a step in the right direction. A job eventually opened up and I was trained to support victims of domestic abuse. For two years, I helped to keep victims safe from their perpetrators, taught children how to protect themselves in abusive situations and encouraged women to understand their worth.People who find themselves stuck in abusive relationships—whether the abuse is emotional, physical or sexual—often feel as though they’ve had their worth stolen from them. They’ve been controlled by a predator, and tricked into believing that they are powerless, inferior and stupid. It’s only once a woman knows her worth that she’s able to leave an abusive relationship.This is what I hoped to give the women I worked with: power.I eventually had to leave this meaningful job when I had my first child, but I stayed involved with the chaos of our community. My husband ran a drop-in project at our local church for people who are homeless and suffering from substance abuse issues. I would take my little baby along (which in retrospect might not have been the greatest idea), hoping that he would bring light to the darkness. I would drag him to the city to volunteer for a beautiful charity that distributed food to refugees. We would sit in a room with people representing various nationalities, just to have the chance to glean more about their experiences and journeys. Once a month, I left the baby with my husband and traveled two hours to spend time at a recovery home for women who’d been rescued from trafficking. My heart continued to ache for women who had been exploited.

How We Harnessed Friendship to Save the Lives of Trafficked People

Fast-forward two years: Another baby. A jobless husband. Postnatal depression. Survival mode. The same unease I felt years before came creeping back in. There was a dark underworld bubbling beneath me, but I couldn’t see it from my bubble of nappies, meal-times and playdates.In the middle of the monotony, a friend who managed a Christian charity asked if I would start and manage a befriending project for survivors of human trafficking. I jumped at the opportunity. Within a few months, I was all set to begin matching members of the community to survivors. It was only as I started associating faces with names that I began to understand how much I had to learn from these amazing women, from their tenacity, courage and hope.As strong as they were, the trauma that they had experienced presented itself in a variety of ways that they were unable to address alone. For most of them, their loneliness was acute. They’d been smuggled into a country that was foreign to them. They didn’t understand the language. Communicating at shops and doctors was an overwhelming venture. They weren’t familiar with the culture. How would they take the bus? Where would they buy their food?They had no purpose.Days were full of staying inside—a safe reprieve from the outside world. And to top it off, they had experienced horrific atrocities at the hands of people they expected to trust. They struggled with PTSD, depression, eating disorders and anxiety.

I Learned What Friendship Really Means—and Now I Can Share It

At this low, lonely point, I was able to introduce them to a befriender—who had been trained and checked appropriately—in their local community who would commit to one year of befriending for our project.Once a week, the befriender gets in touch to plan some sort of stress-free outing: a friend who would take them for coffee, or to the seaside, museums and parks. A friend who expected nothing in return, no strings attached. A friend who loved out of purity. A friend who was committed. Often, at the first introduction meeting, the survivor would be downcast, sad and quiet. I would see the woman months later, but she was not the same. Her countenance was bright. In part, because she has been loved by a friend.This wasn’t a love that requires payment, as many of the “lovers” before them had. Those ones required slave labor in return. Sex. Domestic work. Farming. Criminal activity. Organs. If you did what traffickers wanted, you would be paid with protection, food and possibly friendship. But it all came at a cost.Unadulterated friendship brings life and I have the honor of facilitating it. It isn’t the wrap-around porch I imagined. That dream is a distant memory that I no longer hope for. The joy of giving life to brokenness is better. Far better.

My pops was drafted into the Army for Vietnam. Then he was stationed in Korea, he met my mother and he brought her back to the United States to get married.I was born at a military hospital in Massachusetts in 1974. My mother is South Korean and my pops was Black and Native American. He was from Bridgeport, Connecticut. My grandmother raised seven kids in the projects, the P.T. Barnum Houses. She was able to move her children out of the projects.My childhood was spent in Bridgeport. I went to public school. And when I went to high school, I got in trouble. I went to juvenile detention. I first got arrested when I was 11 years old. They accused us of stealing hubcaps and radios from a junkyard. But we weren’t. We were just in there driving cars. I got arrested with four other kids. That was my first experience with the criminal justice system. And they lied on us.My pops had a drug program. My parents got divorced and my mother moved back to North Carolina. I lived in Bridgeport with my pops and his side of the family. The second time around, my friend and I had a gun but it was broken. We got arrested in a mall. I was 13. But we got out right away because the gun was inoperable. Nothing major. A lot was going on in Bridgeport at the time. We were thinking that we were protecting ourselves. It was foolish. Bridgeport was one of the worst cities in the United States in the ‘80s. I’m making that declaration and it can be proven. Connecticut is a small state. That’s where a lot of people from the suburbs and outside counties would come and buy drugs. The drug trade there was so lucrative that there was a lot of violence.As I got older, I started to understand that my family helped build this country. My father was in the military and so were my grandfather, my great grandfather. My pops wasn’t an addict before he went to the military. So, he got caught up in it. He was never able to completely break the cycle because my pops ultimately passed away from HIV in 2003. I was in prison at that time, so that was a heartbreaker. I had an older brother who was killed in 1989. He was named after my pops.

I Was Wrongfully Accused of Crimes From the Beginning

In October of 1991, my friend and I were driving in a car on Bridgeport’s east side. We pulled into a parking lot. My friend went upstairs to talk to a female, a girl who he was trying to court. I was sitting in the passenger seat, he went upstairs to talk to her and I saw two police cars pull up behind me and tell me, “Yo! Don’t move.” They asked me to step out of the vehicle. They said, “We got a call that you were burglarizing the house.” I said, “Burglarizing the house? We’re not burglarizing nothing.” They said, “Sit in the car.” And the officers went to the back of the driveway to talk. So I could have run if I wanted to but I didn’t. I assumed nothing was wrong. They came back and said, “We found marijuana in the car; you’re under arrest.”In the report, they said I was walking down the street with a bulge in my waist. And when the officers saw me, I got nervous and ran. He chased me and caught me, and I had the weed on me. That’s wrong. That’s a lie.And so I wind up going to jail. And I had to stay behind bars for five months behind that shit. Then I got out on three years probation and some other stuff. I didn’t do that! I was in the streets at the time. I was selling drugs. That was my lifestyle. By that time, I had so many bad experiences that I was cold.

It was foolish.

One Bad Decision Changed My Whole Life

After I got out that time, I went to a pizza place. And I saw my friend Todd; he was with Jeremy. He asked if I wanted to go to New York City. They wanted to do a stick-up. I said, “I dunno; I just came home today.” They said, “Well, we got your number, we gonna beep you.” And all they did was: beeping me, beeping me, beeping me. I had stayed with my lady friend that night. That’s my daughter’s mother. That was the night my daughter was conceived. So the next morning, they beep me. I had a friend’s car and I drove over there. Picked them up. They brought the plan to me; I was willing to go.All three of us were 17. None of us had licenses, the car wasn’t registered. One of us had a gun and the gun had four bullets. So, the plan was to find this location where they had given us some fake cocaine a few months ago. And go take something, try to get something back. So, that was the plan. It was a stupid-ass plan. You know what the federal judge called it? He called it “a hare-brained scheme.”

My Friends Didn’t Give Me the Full Story

So when we got to Manhattan, Jeremy stayed in the car. It was just me and Todd. When we got into the apartment there were three guys. The guy who opened the door, he had a gun in his hand. So we walked past him and there were two guys weighing the coke and putting it on the scale. What I did not know was: A few months before that, Todd and some other people came to that same area in New York and they robbed a lot of cocaine. I was in jail at that time so when I came home I was oblivious to this and they didn’t tell me because they didn’t want me to know. I could have said, “Hell no, y’all just did that? I’m not going there.” These people ultimately ending up testifying on me at my trial. And they’re relatives of Todd.

You know what the federal judge called it? He called it 'a hare-brained scheme.'

I Nearly Lost My Life

The dealers went into a closet and pulled out a kilo. Then they opened it with a razor and peeled it back. They tried to get me to test it. But I don’t do drugs like that. So I said, “No.” They tried to get Todd to test it. He refused. So when we didn’t test it, I don’t know if they thought we were police but the whole energy shifted in the room. The biggest guy in the room came to me aggressively and said, “Get against the wall.” So I complied. I didn’t have a gun on me, Todd had the gun. I got on the wall and he was patting me down roughly. So Todd is watching me and the other guy is standing in the doorway with a gun out. So Todd reached his hand where he had the gun, and then they stumbled into the other room. That’s when I heard multiple gunshots: boom boom boom boom. The guy who had me on the wall, he tried to throw me into a chokehold. I maneuvered out of it and ran into the other room. Todd ran into the bathroom and I followed him into there and closed the door. Then I heard gunshots coming through the bathroom door. I ain’t got nowhere to run. Todd was in the bathtub, I’m against the wall. So, he puts the gun on the windowsill, he opens the window. He jumps on the fire escape. I followed him, I jumped into the bathtub but I grab the gun. I jumped on the fire escape and saw the gun was empty and I just threw it. So, as we were running down the fire escape, someone starts shooting down. They shot Todd and hit him in the top of the head and he fell over the fire escape onto the ground. I got grazed on my leg. It was bleeding but it didn’t penetrate. It just grazed my shin. I’ve got a hole in my pants, my leg is bleeding and I jumped down from the fire escape. I look back at Todd. I didn’t go check on him, but he looked like he was already gone. I panicked, jumped a couple of fences, ran into the front, got in the car with Jeremy, we drove off a couple blocks then Jeremy jumps out the car and runs. I parked the car and we caught a train back to Bridgeport. When we were back in Bridgeport, we went back to Jeremy’s house. And when we go to Jeremy’s house his mother comes back from work. She be like, “Yo. Where Todd at?” And Jeremy told her what happened in New York. She was like, “Well, you gotta go tell his family what happened.”

My Word Against Their Word

So she drove us over to his family’s house and I was trying to explain what happened. And then Todd’s older brother, he started questioning me. So while I’m trying to answer the questions, you know I’m a little panicked, I don’t know what’s really going on. I just told him, “I don’t know. I don’t even know if he is alive or not.” He said, “You left my brother out there? How you gonna leave?” I said, “They were shooting at us. I didn’t have a gun!” He was like, “Yo, we're going back. I’m gonna go get a car, go get ready. Imma come pick you up, you gotta show me where my brother is.”I left and my cousin pages me. When I call her back she was like, “Did you kill Todd?” I said, “What?! Hell no! Why would you ask me something like that?” She said, “Well they talkin’ in the projects that you went to New York with Todd and y'all got into something and you got a lot of money and you killed him off it.” I said, “What?” I thought the only people who could have spread that rumor were his family. So when they started calling me back to go to New York, I didn’t go. Now it looked even more suspicious. They start talking like: I set him up, I got him killed. His family was supposedly looking for me.

I Couldn’t Accept Being Falsely Accused of a Crime I Didn’t Commit

About six days later I got shot at a house party. An older guy shot me over some female stuff. It was corny, man. Jealousy. And he shot me in the leg with a nine millimeter, broke my leg completely in half.While I was in the hospital, I got arrested. I didn’t even get out of the hospital until April. And then I was in Bridgeport County jails for a few weeks and I got extradited to Rikers Island in May of 1992. They accused me of felony murder, attempted robbery in the first degree and criminal possession of a weapon in the second degree.After I was on Rikers for a year, they offered me six-to-18 and then, right before trial, they offered me a four-to-eight for manslaughter. My lawyer brought the offer to me and I asked, “Manslaughter? That means I slaughtered a man! I didn’t kill nobody, I didn’t even shoot nobody, I didn’t have a gun!” He said, “Well, you know. This is your life. We can go to trial.” I said I wanted to go to trial because I didn’t kill anyone. I went to trial and got convicted of felony murder, two counts of attempted robbery and I got acquitted of the weapons possession charge. I was found guilty in April of 1993.Going in at 17 years old, I felt like I was still a juvenile—no matter how advanced I was, or how intelligent I was, I still was a juvenile. I couldn’t buy cigarettes legally, I couldn’t get into the military legally. But, I made a dumbass criminal decision as an adolescent, as a juvenile. And I got treated very, very harshly. I basically got tortured.I had no real legal representation because I had legal aid. All the people who dealt with me, there was no real compassion. And in my paperwork, it all says that I didn’t even have a weapon. So if everybody knows I didn’t have a weapon, that means that I couldn’t have shot anyone. So I couldn’t shot anyone, why would somebody even want a murder charge connected to my name?

The Criminal Justice System Doesn’t Care How You Feel

As a 45-year-old man right now, as a learned man, I want to ask these men, “Where was the compassion? Where was the humanity?” I was not a lost cause. I always felt like I was a gift. So, for them not to see that, and almost sacrifice you. There were so many times I tried to go back into the courts. I went before these same people, the same judge, and it was he was so cold and callous. He almost destroyed the spirit of my family. That’s what hurt me. Because my family always kept hope that I was gonna come home. So every time I would go to court, my family would all come to court hoping that I would get some justice, knowing that I didn’t kill anyone. And every time he would deny my motion.I had a lot of fights in prison. A lot of fights. I was fighting a lot. Because I was little, I was young. I felt like I was handsome. There are predators in there. So I had to carve out a little square for myself or I would have been devoured.I wound up doing 12 years in solitary confinement. I did 25 years in prison straight. So I used to be praying, “God, please man, give me another chance.” I was young. I didn’t even do it. I didn't’ kill nobody. I didn’t shoot nobody. So when my pops died, my faith was a little shaken. So I used to say, “God, keep my grandmother alive, keep my daughter safe, keep my mother and let me get home. And if you do that, then I’m a believer.” And when I got home, my grandmother was safe, my mother was safe and my daughter was safe. And my whole family was pretty much intact. I lost my pops, but my family was still solid. So that’s why I came home with a different spirit.

Some Wrongfully Convicted Stories Have a Happy Ending

I learned that in prison, you’ve got some of the worst types of people to be around. And then you’ve got some of the best types of people. Because you’ve got some people that are great men. They just got put in bad situations. They might have made a bad decision, a pressured decision, but they’re great men. Like I could trust them with my family, they would never steal from me, they would never hurt my kids, none of that. I learned that these men, that society deems to be like a waste or outcasts, these men were actually like buried treasures. I learned from these men. They gave me books to read, they guided me. But I was able to be open to that teaching because I was raised with my pops. So I didn’t have like a complex about learning from older men. That’s where a lot of younger men slip: They’ve got a complex because they didn’t have a strong, male presence in their life. Your message is not going to be received because they don’t want to hear it. I had great people come around me: Whether it be a fellow prisoner, correctional counselor, it could be a lady friend. I’m just happy now, it’s like everything I could dream of in life is happening now. I feel right now, at this moment, I’m finally getting the blessings of life and freedom. I just got off parole in March. I’m completely a free man now. I’m with a new music label. And we are trying to secure a deal with RCA. So I’m in the music business, which I love. I’m in the hip hop culture, which I love. And I’m around young people that I can educate with my life experiences. So even if they’re wayward, I’m in a position right now in life where I can catch them and redirect them. And I’m trying to teach them that music is a way to communicate to the world and make sure that people around me are conscious in their messages.

I was raised in Long Beach, California. I lived ten blocks from the beach and I don't know how to swim.I remember the day my uncle Jorge held me tight in his arms, when he looked me in the eyes and told me, “Today you’re going to learn how to swim.” I trusted my uncle and the thought of learning how to swim filled me with joy. He walked into the surf while holding me and then, with no warning, threw me in. “Swim,” was all he said.I began to swallow water as the waves tossed me around. There was no doubt in my mind that I was drowning. As I struggled, I could see that my uncle was standing close to me. He was saying something, but I couldn't make out what. Finally, I got my head above water and so I could hear him. “Stand up,” he told me.I used my last burst of strength to plant my feet on the ground and stood up. That's when I realized that the water was below waist level. I was drowning in the shallow end of the ocean.

The best way I can describe sentencing day is to say that it felt like drowning.

I Was a Troubled Kid; the Courts Treated Me as an Adult

My city has always been beautiful, from the weather to the beach to the diverse people who bring the many flavors of the world together in one place. But there's another truth to my city: Although we may be diverse, we’ve also been very segregated.I grew up in the ‘90s, when street violence was at an all-time high. The war between Blacks, Asians and Mexicans felt normal to me. Even schools weren’t safe from this tension. As a teenager, I thought I had to do whatever it took to survive.That hyper-vigilant perspective eventually led to my arrest. I was walked into an adult courtroom, tried, found guilty and sentenced to multiple life sentences in an adult prison. I was 16 years old.The best way I can describe sentencing day is to say that it felt like drowning. The judge’s voice sounded as far away as if I was underwater. I struggled to breathe as the waves of life sentence after life sentence crashed over me, along with the sudden overwhelming certainty that I was going to die in prison.

I Couldn’t Become a Better Person Until I Started Asking Hard Questions

As my sentence went on, I began taking college courses and going to self-help groups. For the first time ever, I started to recognize that besides simply understanding what I was reading, I also needed to ask questions. This questioning eventually became a powerful tool for investigating my distorted beliefs and the negative actions that had sprung from them. More than anything else, I started recognizing how wrong my definition of masculinity was. I believed that the more money I had, the more women I slept with or the more I could dominate others, the more of a man I was. I began to realize that this toxic belief was behind many if not all of the reasons I had objectified human life.People always talk about how time flies, but I spent close to 19 years in prison and I felt and lived every single day. In 2018, Governor Jerry Brown commuted my sentence. I stood in front of a parole board and was found suitable for release.It felt like a dream, but it’s not.

All we gotta do is stand up.

I Left Prison a New Man, but the Outside World Is Still the Same

Life is good, but it’s not over. I find myself standing next to the beach, remembering how I almost drowned in the shallow end. The weight of knowing that I’ve been in prison longer than I’ve been physically free weighs heavy, but it doesn’t bring me down.There have been many moments where I’m overwhelmed by waves of insecurity and doubt, and I feel like I’m drowning in the shallow end of my beliefs. It’s in these moments that I remember to stand up, not only for myself, but everyone around me as well.My city is going through tough times at the moment and the racial tension I remember from the 1990s is back. Just yesterday I was at a gas station pumping air into one of my tires and a car slowly pulled up next to me. A tinted window slid down and a gun pointed out, two feet from my face. The person holding it asked where I’m from. I looked into his eyes and said, “I’m not from anywhere.”I don’t remember what he mumbled, but I do remember how vulnerable I felt as I watched the car take off. I picked up the air hose that I dropped on the ground and put it back in its place. Filling up my tires didn’t seem that important anymore.The tension between Black and white is becoming unavoidable. Every human life is precious and irreplaceable, and even through the fear I’m left with the strength to plant my feet on the ground and stand up for everyone regardless of the skin tone.My uncle had it right. All we gotta do is stand up.

Doing time is hard enough as it is.But out of the 13 years I’ve been incarcerated, the last three-and-a-half months have been the hardest—by far. I have never experienced this much stress and anxiety. And it all started once COVID landed here from Chino.Up until then, I felt San Quentin was doing a decent job at keeping the virus out. All staff was reduced to C.O.'s, medical and kitchen staff only. No work, no groups, no sports and worst of all: no visits. That hurt me the most, but as much as I miss my loved ones, I felt safer having all these activities on hold. To continue to run the normal program would have been a recipe for disaster. So here we were with a modified schedule of yard every other day, showers every other day and phone calls once every five days. I definitely wasn't a fan of the limited calls, and I would much prefer to shower every day, but, hey, we were COVID-free so I took the good with the bad.Then some genius decided it was a smart move to transfer 121 incarcerated people here from Chino. It has been hell ever since.For the life of me, I can't understand why they thought this was a good idea. Don't get me wrong, my incarcerated brothers at Chino were dying and the outbreak was out of control. So, something needed to be done and fast. But the answer was not to send them to a prison with zero confirmed cases. Would you move infected members of one nursing home to another with no cases? Would you send infected soldiers from one military base to another with no cases? Of course not! So why do it to us?Simply put: Our lives don't matter. We are considered second-class citizens (if citizens at all) and because we have committed crimes, we are not worthy of the effort of protection.

How the San Quentin COVID-19 Outbreak Is Being Handled

Our lives aren’t worth saving. This is clear by the way they have dealt with me and my celly. We were both tested June 23. A few days later, the nurse came by to check my temp and oxygen level, but didn’t check my celly. That didn't make sense to me, so when it happened again the next day I asked, "Why am I being checked but not my celly?”And the C.O. tells me, “Because you’re positive.”So, I reply, “And my celly’s negative?”To which she says, “Yes.”So, I ask, "And you're going to leave us in here together?"I couldn't believe it. The C.O. told me that this was her first day back and that she didn't know how they were handling people who were testing positive.On June 30, we officially received our results in the mail. I immediately showed this to custody and the nurse, requesting a cell move. The response I got this time was, “Well, he (my celly) probably has it by now, so we're not going to move you."But he didn't have it. He tested again on July 6, received his results on July 11 and was still negative. They’re sure to move me now, right? Wrong. This time reason being they aren't doing any moves right now. They had already taken dozens of people to the hole who tested positive and there were at least 50 empty cells. Space wasn't an issue.

COVID Isn’t Only Affecting San Quentin Inmates

Since then, my celly has tested negative two more times and I continuously requested to be moved. I was told by the lieutenant to, "Get your shower and get the fuck out of my office."I was told by medical that since it’s been over 14 days, I am no longer infectious, so a move is no longer necessary. Without being tested again, I am now considered "clear" or "resolved." Now I pray that I am no longer infectious for my celly’s sake. But that has done nothing to quell my anxiety.Every day I am worried that I'm going to infect him.And, what scares me the most is that he may not recover as easily as I did. He is classified as "high-risk medical," is over 50, has high blood pressure and has already had valley fever. The stress of this has caused me to lose sleep and lose my appetite. I have conveyed this to medical staff as well as custody and the only answer I'm given is that I shouldn't be worried because I've recovered—so I'm alright now."I'm alright now?" What happens in a few months when: The flu season hits and my antibodies go away? I'll be in the same position. God willing, I won't catch it again but I'm afraid a second wave is inevitable. Unless the population is drastically reduced, we will begin to get re-infected if our antibodies are depleted.

A mass release must be done and fast.

The Only Solution Is a Mass Prison Release

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation and Governor Gavin Newsom are dragging their feet in taking decisive action. And the longer they take, the more lives we will lose. And it's not just the incarcerated population here at Quentin. This outbreak will continue to impact the staff here as well as the surrounding communities.Almost 300 staff have tested positive and Sergeant Polanco has died.A mass release must be done and fast.And I'm referring to more than just the "non-violent, low-level offenders." This narrative is not only misleading, but it also fuels the fear of the public when it comes to releasing us. There is an irrational fear that if you free people who have committed violent crimes, they will go out and immediately rob, rape and murder. However, the numbers simply do not support this. The recidivism rate for lifers is low. And the majority of lifers, like myself, are incarcerated for violent crimes. We are growing, changing, maturing and learning from our mistakes. We are reentering society no longer taking from or harming but contributing and being productive.My crime will always be violent. That is something I cannot change. But what can and has changed is me. It is time to shift the focus from the crimes committed to the rehabilitation efforts taken post-conviction. This should be done in general, but now more than ever because of a pandemic that cannot be controlled in this environment.

Our living conditions are inhumane.

COVID-19 in Prison Is Simply Not Sustainable

Our living conditions are inhumane.The building is filthy and the deep cleaning they say has taken place is a joke. The cleaning crew wiped the rails and mopped the floor. Porters do that every day. They finally cleaned the trash from the gun rail but the vents are still clogged with layers of dust, and turned off: They have not been cleaned in years. They are refusing to open the windows, so there is no fresh air coming into the building. Fans are blowing recycled air around, which is doing nothing but helping the virus spread.And they have not touched the cells; it is a complete lie when they say they have. Hand sanitizer hasn't been passed out since April. (Not to mention the gallons of hand sanitizer Bay Area rapper E-40 donated. We have yet to receive one drop of that.) And if that isn't enough, they are forcing two people to live in a smaller cell than what's legally required to house a dog. So, an animal is entitled to better living conditions than what we are afforded.How long must this continue? How many more must die before something is done? When will the powers that be recognize our humanity and start making decisions based on what's right and not what's best for their image? Round two is coming, and mass release is the only answer.

Before George’s murder, in my small town, I was constantly told, “You’re doing a heck of a job.” He was killed on May 25 and, after his burial, I started getting mass texts. I got 400 or so. I was called everything in the book. People have put memes on Facebook about me. The first thing that most people jump to when it comes to a black man like me is: He’s gotta be doing something besides working. My little town has totally ridiculed me. I've been to many states and talked to numerous people, taking pictures, preaching and spreading the word about George, about racism. Nobody in my town has offered condolences. It’s all about power and control.

What’s a Black Man Worth in America?

A nigga ain’t killed on nothing: They’re not thinking of his opinion, it doesn't matter. I've had two or three people tell me: Why would we change anything for a dead nigger?We’ve had some protests about the Confederate flag here and it throws me all the way back to 1970. I see people ride by every day who have called me names and said bad things about me because somebody murdered my kin.In certain places in the world, a black man is still a boy. It obviously started many, many years ago and kept perpetuating itself. But I wholeheartedly believe that Trump has made it worse. That is their man; he is the poster child for bad decisions and bad actions.

If that video doesn’t break your heart, you are part of the problem.

George Was All of Us

George was a good guy, big smile, happy-go-lucky. But life didn't go the way he really wanted it to go. He let himself down. We all know how that goes. When people let themselves down, it can drive them into depression. And then bad things feel good. I honestly believe that the Lord got tired of seeing him suffer and make bad decisions. The Lord realized that he was going to use George for a sacrificial lamb to open everybody’s eyes. That or the devil reared his ugly head and said, “I’m going to show you how bad people really are.” I think both of those can be true at the same time.

It Was Murder, End of Story

It seems to me it’s a closed case. We visualized from start to finish a man suffer for eight minutes and 46 seconds. It’s probably the worst thing I’ve ever seen. When I saw it the first time, my wife called me over to the television. It was early in the morning. I didn't know it was him. I said, “Oh my God. This dude is gonna kill this dude. Man, what the hell.” Then my sister called and said, “Have you seen what the police did to Perry?” If you knew him you called him Perry. Perry is his middle name.He was lying on the ground with his face down. I heard his voice. He started moaning, “I need some water. I need some water.” And I knew it. “Oh my God, it’s Perry.” I think that’s the only time I've watched the whole video. If that video doesn’t break your heart, you are part of the problem.

I'm Not Giving Up

Racism runs wild in some people. The little place I live in hasn’t a care about black, blue, green, yellow or orange—they live in their own circle. It’s crazy to live in a town where everybody thinks you’re a dumb nigger. It goes back to power and control.But I live close enough to Minneapolis and go back often. It wouldn’t matter if it were in China. I have got to see this through, I really do.

America Is Broken and I Want to Help Fix It

Things in my mind and my heart have changed a great deal since Perry died. I can’t let him die in vain. I am preaching for equality. This situation has made me stronger than anything I could’ve imagined. My whole goal is to start on people who are 35 and younger, people who haven’t had babies, people in college—spreading the word. Because something’s got to change. We can't let another three or four generations go on like ours have. If we can’t educate and communicate with the younger generation, this world isn’t ever going to be right. That’s where it has to start. It has to start at home. Racism isn’t in our DNA. It’s taught. It totally blows me away that someone would literally sit down with a baby and tell them, “If he has dark skin, he’s ignorant. He’s dumb. He’s stupid. He’s not like you. He’s not as good as you.” And that’s how it begins.I believe that because eyes are open and ears are open, we can do something to change this. I have two young children. I’ve got to do something because otherwise, I’m going to be leaving my babies in a world full of chaos, prejudice and racism. We need to push through.

The laser look of the male gaze is what jettisoned me into the tech world.My ex-boyfriend's kid brother told me about AngelList, the tech world's equivalent to Monster.com. At the time, I was a 24-year-old, New York City female trope—a self-punishing perfectionist who couldn't pick a healthy relationship out of a lineup if she tried. My then-boyfriend worshipped the ground I walked on and I couldn't stand him for it.Our relationship's saving grace was his much cooler, smarter and funnier younger brother, a welcome third wheel on our dates. He'd recently graduated from UCLA and had this laissez-faire attitude about everything. All things worked out for Spencer, whose worldview was the magical realism that only white-passing male privilege offers, with dollops of coolhunting and performative feminism for flavor. He was 22, had a trust fund, lived off the Lorimer stop in Brooklyn and was having the time of his life.Instead of getting a real job (“In publishing, like me!” my boyfriend would say, as I rolled my eyes), Spencer scoped out roles at exciting, quirky startups he’d found on AngelList. He didn't worry that startups had a 99 percent failure rate. He didn't care about job stability, because he planned to quit in a year anyway."Wait, listen to this one,” Spencer would say. “They're looking to rent unusual spaces for co-working, basically to have people share offices." Or "I applied to this startup that delivers your laundry to your door every week." Or "… something about data."When Spencer got the job at the co-working startup, his starting salary sounded generous, even exorbitant—more than I could imagine for myself at 24.But it planted a seed.

In Tech, Fake It Till You Make It Is a Legit Strategy

When I moved to L.A. a year later, I remembered AngelList and its infinite scroll of lucrative job opportunities. Los Angeles was campaigning to become the new home of California tech. People in the industry were trying to brand it as "Silicon Beach."Toggling through the filters on AngelList made me realize how grossly under-qualified I was to do pretty much anything in the tech world.So, I lied.But by lying about my qualifications, I'd unwittingly breached into the tech world. Everyone lies here. No one really knows what they're doing; the numbers are always inflated. Nobody's ever actually qualified for the job they get.It's called “failing up.”My fake resume got me in the door. I got hired at a small startup, but because I was the CMO's type—physically. Petite, brunette, young. We remained friends for a while after I left the company. Every few years, usually when I was transitioning into a new role, I'd ask him why he took a chance and hired me. "You were persistent," he'd shrug. "That seemed like a good sign. And you turned out to be a great hire, so I was right."

It Took Two Days for My First Boss in Tech to Hit on Me

I'll give him the persistence thing. But the truth? He wanted to sleep with me. He almost kissed me on my second day of work, at a drunken company-sponsored karaoke party in Koreatown. We stood next to each other at the bar, as everyone else wailed the chorus to "Sweet Caroline." He whispered in my ear, drunk on booze paid for by the company card and the ego that I imagine a 29-year-old guy gets when someone hands him a million-dollar check with the vague instructions to "go start a company."A few years later, he'd tell me that he wanted to take me home that night. We worked together for another year before I quit to join another startup, with yet another male founder with boundary issues.I thought it was a fluke.But there was that dull, omnipresent drone of sexism that hummed along in the background as I moved through the tech world. It would change form with every role, and at each startup I worked. As I got savvier, the sexism did, too.Sometimes it was blatant. Male engineers making jokes about the sizes of women's brains compared to men’s. Gross, leering CEOs who made veiled sexual innuendos during morning meetings about KPIs (“key performance indicators”).Other times it was silent, therefore so much more insidious. Male employees were grossly overpaid while their female counterparts were shamed for trying to negotiate their dismal paychecks. Despite all this, I never felt like I got held back because of my gender identity. I just felt as if all the men I had worked for were idiots and I’d gotten supremely unlucky in the boss lottery.

The solution is to burn the whole thing down.

My Plan to Escape Sexism in the Tech Industry

My solution to escape the rampant sexism in technology? Start my own company.I figured part of my problem was that people didn't take me seriously because I was just an employee. If I became a founder (which clearly wasn't that difficult because all those idiots had managed to make it happen), people would respect me. Men would respect me.You see where this is going, right?The hard stuff wasn't building and coding a technical product without a computer science background. It wasn't growing my 30,000-person community with zero budget. It wasn't difficult to make money.Fundraising, though, was a different story. My first investor meeting was with a husband-and-wife couple. I was nervous. It was midsummer and I wore a white wrap dress with nude heels and pink lipstick. Approachable, clean, sweet but not sexual. They'd both started their own companies (the wife pitched me on her protein bar brand during our meeting) and they acted as angel investors for promising female founders. When I mentioned that I really only wanted to raise from women, the female angel investor looked me up and down, eyes hovering at my chest for a moment, and said, "When you look like that, you'd better raise from men."I realized quickly that the rules would be different than they had been when I was just an employee at a startup. Before, I could wear jeans and no makeup to work. Now, people were looking to invest in me and I had to look the part of a founder. Except that most tech founders are white males with dad bods. Obviously, it was more complicated than just codeswitching. I had to get a whole new costume.

I Tried to Play the Game, but the Misogyny Got to Me

For the next 50 or so meetings that I took with investors, I never again wore a dress. I started a spreadsheet to track what I wore to every meeting. There were rows for Hairstyle, Shoes, Makeup, Lipstick, Outfit, Purse. Over time, I left my notes and highlighted the cells: green for good, red for bad, yellow for unclear. After a lot of trial and error, I found that when I wore a somewhat fashion-forward jumpsuit with my hair pulled back and a face of natural makeup, male and female investors responded more favorably to me. The ensemble said, “I'm hip and asexual, and therefore less threatening to you.”A male investor once forgot about our meeting for which I'd traveled across the country and confirmed many times. When he showed up 30 minutes late, he proceeded to tell me that I "didn't look like a San Francisco founder," even though I was from L.A., all the while looking at my boobs. He shoveled lunch through his thin lips as I tried to deliver my elevator pitch without seething.On that same trip, a male investor introduced to me by a friend convinced me to take a second meeting with him at his apartment. (Red flag, but I figured a male would say yes, so I did, too) He reached his hand up my leg while I told him about my growth metrics. I tried to brush it off as an accident but stormed out of his apartment after he groped my chest.I never thought my B-cups would be so enticing. "Not bad for a six," I'd joke to my friends as we commiserated over wine.

Brushing Sexism Under the Rug Is Not a Solution

I kept fundraising for a few months after the groping incident, but I became more and more disenchanted with the whole experience as I met other investors. For as many who were gross, many were well-intentioned. But even the nice ones had prejudices and personal biases that oozed into our conversations and interactions.When I first entered the tech world, I was dazzled by the possibilities. I learned that no matter how ill-equipped I seemed to be for a job, as long as I could produce results, I'd earn respect and clout. There was something attractive about the false idea that the tech world operated as a meritocracy.I saw the problems but figured I could remain loyal to my own values even though the industry in which I was enmeshed didn't hold those same values. It seemed, for a brief moment, that I could maybe help change things from the inside out.But when we go full double-agent, we risk forgetting what side we're really fighting for. The idea of losing myself, and my values, kept me up at night. I felt that the only way forward was not to break the system from the inside out. It was to reject the system outright. Opt-out and form something new.I'm grateful for what I learned working for seven years at startups and in the tech world. There's nothing I love more than innovation, data, ideas and people with really bold dreams. But I believe the ecosystem is deeply broken, because it perpetuates oppression at every intersection. The solution is not to create more “Women in Tech” conferences, or to try to set up all-female venture capitalists, or even to invest in more solutions for working moms.The solution is to burn the whole thing down and start anew.

It’s 2012. Britain is basking in the reflected golden glow of an Olympic Games going off hitch-free. Skyfall is in the cinemas and Andy Murray is conquering the U.S. An account called Very British Problems earnestly begins to tweet out the aggressively apologetic thoughts of: All British People Everywhere. And Boris Johnson is but a wiff-waffing twinkle in the nation’s eye, with some time to go before he’ll foist his bumbling, table-tennis-based hubris onto the whole country. The Guardian would later describe this as the country’s best year of the decade, although to be fair it didn’t have many competitors.At the time, I lapped it all up.Jump forward to 2020. The United Nations reports that the last ten years of Conservative austerity, designed by chief architects David Cameron and George Osborne, has inflicted “great misery” on the country. Levels of child poverty in the U.K. are “not just a disgrace, but a social calamity and an economic disaster.” Yet with councils and communities on their knees, the people have kept on voting in droves for more of the same. A significant Conservative majority at the end of 2019 confirmed a ten-year lurch rightwards, from the final days of the dying New Labour project to today’s damp squib: a vapid synthesis of all the worst parts of the decade, half-chewed and spat back out in a smart suit and the meaningless Brexit aphorism du jour sprayed abjectly on their forehead.And with this shift, the twee but politically docile sentiment that propped Very British Problems has been shattered irreparably, all whilst being mined for its riches by the combination of “relatable” best-of books and forgettable Channel 4 adaptations. The account still exists, and still enjoys relative popularity, but it stands apart as a Twitter relic of its time, its satirical format almost wholly surpassed in an internet meme scene staggering in its volatile self-immolatory tendencies.Today it’s an odd online memorial to a forgotten middle-class folly, an unhelpful resource for any doomed new resident wishing to easily understand the current culture. To accurately reflect the zeitgeist, Very British Problems should really just be a succession of tweets like: “Welcome to Britain: We have cups of tea, gaslighting and a politely fascistic government.”

Welcome to Britain: We have cups of tea, gaslighting and a politely fascistic government.

Where I Fit Into the Picture

My situation: I’m currently in the middle of resurrecting a freelance career after being abruptly laid off from my nine-to-five job, left without a furlough by a company who put management’s interests above their lowest employees’ futures. Exhibiting some of those horribly flawed British anachronisms cherished by Very British Problems types, I “puffed out my chest” and “toughed it out” with a “stiff upper lip.” But with scant creative work around, and little other accessible freelancing being commissioned, I’ve had to re-evaluate what time spent “working from home” might mean when there wasn’t work to be had.In the process I’ve learned that it’s almost impossible to think of time without thinking about work. Everyday phrases like “time off” or “leisure time” imply the existence of a work or occupation that fills the rest. But even this understanding becomes deeply flawed post-COVID-19. Among the changes that a post-pandemic society will undoubtedly usher in are an inevitable acceleration of the already speedy surge we’re seeing towards a completely freelance gig economy. It’s easy to see why.From profit’s point of view, why prop up a culture that actively encourages time off? Why not simply employ people on cheaper, more competitive “flexible” contracts that disallow the simple satisfaction of switching off in favor of a morale-sapping situation where people hover precariously, waiting to pounce, a 24/7 standby mode of production?This insecure relationship between work and time can only thrive in a fractured country where socioeconomic divides have dismantled any illusion of unity. Step forward: Britain. Long established dividing lines quickly became tribal blockades in the battlegrounds of Brexit: Tory/Labour, North/South, rich/poor. Newer ones already seem worn out, cheap, soundbitten: Leave/Remain, forgotten towns/liberal metropolitan elite, gammons/snowflakes.

Black Lives Matter in Britain

Even in full knowledge of our aggressive ways, we still summon the energy to find new ways of dividing society. The anti-racist marches in support of Black Lives Matter were met by vehement opposition from what the BBC calls “anti-racism critics”—not “racists,” but “anti-racism critics.” A move to a wholly insecure world of work would fit perfectly into the mechanisms of an unsteady, angry Britain.Often though, the temptation to look twitchily toward times of economic insecurity means that the current situation’s small crumbs of comfort can be overlooked. Friends melancholically remark at how much free time we have now, unable to comprehend the current situation without the presence of a working Other. Obviously, the time to ponder is an elitist privilege older than the class system, but it’s important to look at who is now afforded this privilege.The younger you are, the less likely you are to die from the virus. But equally, the younger you are, the more likely you are to be in insecure, public-facing work like hospitality, catering or bar and restaurant work. And the more public-facing your work is, the less likely you’ll be back at work soon—and the more likely it is the government will support your employers with some sort of furlough pay. This creates a peculiar situation where the most immediately protected group in society happens to be, for one instant, some of the formerly least secure. Furlough pay, job security and protection against contraction of illness due to age and stay-at-home advice suddenly buys a radical concept in this age: genuinely free time.I realize now that I’ve been radicalized during lockdown. Or rather, lockdown has afforded me two things I didn’t have in my life before: the luxury of time on its own merits, without financial constraints, but also the added bonus of perspective, not only to come to terms with this radical new concept, but to use it towards revolutionary change by any means.

I truly believe that this is the time to embrace radical idealism while the young have the chance.

Now Is the Time to Get Radical

I truly believe that this is the time to embrace radical idealism while the young have the chance.Other people agree. Take the recent events in Bristol as a measure. Black Lives Matter protests have forced Britain to begin the long journey towards a proper engagement with its own racist past and present. In Bristol, protestors gleefully pulled down the much-maligned statue of slave trader Edward Colston for a global audience, as video clips of the statue being kicked down the road and dumped ceremoniously into the harbor drew praise and acrimony across the country and around the world.Despite the how vividly news footage of the 2002 toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue is etched into my childhood memory, the naive British exceptionalist inside of me never thought I’d see the U.K. pulling down its own statues. Neither did I ever imagine that I’d wish I’d been part of it.When the #RhodesMustFall and Robert E. Lee debates drip-fed into the national discourse, I quickly lost interest, never really entertaining the idea that anything would change. America was too far away; Oxford, Harvard and the other universities too far removed from the public debate and too heavily insured by private interests. But seeing the events unfolding organically in Bristol made me wonder what has changed.I’ve come to the conclusion that it has to do with time. What’s different now is that there have been three fundamental shifts in the way we experience time during lockdown: the affordance of time disassociated from work, the memory of feeling “productive” suddenly being transferred into the space previously occupied by “working time” and the stretching out of the social media moment into something that can go on for weeks, rather than days or hours.For many who came out for the 20,000-strong BLM Manchester protests, there was no question of their attendance, despite COVID-19 restrictions being in place. But for others like myself, this was a decision that required a week’s worth of thought, research and debate to weigh up the pros and cons. The old ideologies of productivity and industry have simply transferred into a new embrace of radicalism. COVID has helped me start to understand the seriousness of the situation, to research further into areas I thought would never apply to me, and to be moved to action by organizations outside of my immediate circle. In the background, social media has filled the important gaps in the wake of a disrupted news cycle gives debates time to flare up, sustain and come to a series of constructive solutions. My reappraisal of solidarity—a word I turned my nose up at for so long—is an unexpected surprise, made possible only by a determination to find something good in such dire circumstances.Those who are able to do so must embrace the spacious, non-for-profit time ushered in by COVID for what it is: a chance to imagine, realize and commit to a future radically different from the present.

I was walking to the liquor store to get some snacks when my friend Victor was recklessly killed in front of me. My life was completely changed forever. I hoped the police would ease this experience and protect me from harm, but they did the opposite: The Los Angeles Police Department made me feel worthless. They treated me like I committed a crime rather than having survived one. I was traumatized, hoping for resources, but I never received them. I was hoping they would make me feel heard and safe, but minutes after losing my friend, they treated me with aggression. I really did not deserve any of this. I have been a Latina woman living in South Central my whole life. Because of this, I've had quite a few encounters with the LAPD. I’ve seen and experienced police brutality and overall discrimination.

I had four adult male cops pulling my arms and yelling at me to get away from my friend.

My Friend’s Murder Changed My Life Forever

When I was 22, my life was flipped upside down. Victor was taken away from this world by men in South Central. As my friend laid lifeless on the ground, my other friend, Mike, held Victor in his arms while his body was convulsing. I tried to help. I told Victor that everything was going to be okay. I soon saw a police car driving by, and I flagged it down to help us. The officer immediately got out and flashed a light on our faces. He ordered me to step a few feet away and I did; he soon called for backup. It soon arrived and they began to pull me away from the scene by force. I am 5’3” and I had four adult male cops pulling my arms and yelling at me to get away from my dying friend. I was shocked and mortified by what I had just witnessed. That wasn’t taken into consideration once. They antagonized me and kept asking me what had happened. I told them and they asked me to repeat myself a total of ten times. They also took my purse without my permission and went through it looking for a form of identification. I was not once asked for my purse: It was taken from my hands while I was in shock. I felt taken advantage of, I felt, at this moment, as if all of my rights were taken from me. They found my ID and were asking about Mike and who he was. They asked me several times if we were gang members, and I always responded with “no”—they were not listening. I felt as if they were trying to use a tactic to manipulate me into saying “yes.” I know they didn’t care about my mental state; it made me feel very small. While I was being interrogated, Mike was also being antagonized by the police. Mike later told me that they told him to calm down—he was crying hysterically—and, if he did, he would be able to ride in the ambulance with Victor. He soon realized that was a lie: They took Victor’s body in the ambulance without us.

I had Victor’s blood on my shirt.

The Los Angeles Police Department Must Do Better

Mike and I were taken to the police station for questioning around midnight. They left us alone in a room and we held each other and cried for hours. We were waiting for detectives to arrive to question us—they arrived at 7 a.m. the next day. Mike was questioned first. Then it was my turn. I told them everything I knew and had witnessed. Because Victor was shot in the head, Mike held him up in fear he would drown in his own blood. Because Mike and I had held each other and cried, I had Victor’s blood on my shirt. The detective told me he needed to collect my shirt for evidence but I did not have a shirt on underneath. I asked if he had anything I could wear and his partner brought me a jail jumpsuit. I was humiliated and disgraced. I didn’t have time to process what I had been through, I was done being questioned and I waited for Mike. I soon began to feel overwhelmed and I began to cry. A different detective saw me begin to cry and rudely asked me, “Why are you crying?” I responded with defeat in my voice, “Because I’m worried about my friend.” I was worried about Victor. We were both released from the police station at noon in jail jumpsuits. And we went to the hospital. They didn’t ask us once if we were okay or needed anything. I felt as if we were treated like trash. Since they had asked us everything they needed to know, they didn’t need us anymore. So off we went into the public with our jail suits—treated like suspects instead of survivors.The days after his death were not easy. I knew I was a victim but I had no idea what was to come: I’d never been in an incident this serious: It was a murder scene. I met with two detectives several times and they never offered any resources. I was told by a friend that was I was a victim and could be offered benefits. I asked them about this and they didn’t point me in the right direction, give me a phone number to call or anything. As a victim, I felt alone and confused. Had the police car been driving by five minutes before, everything would’ve been avoided. Two weeks after my friend’s death, we held a rally. The police and detectives were present. Their demeanor was aggressive, which was not the point we were trying to get across. I didn’t feel safe with the police there: I felt judged and watched.It’s hard to fathom what’s been going on these past few days. All I know is we are all watching history unfold. Police abusing their power has been coming to light. This is very personal to me, everything about this: black death, police brutality and everything in between. George Floyd was a victim of police abusing their power and he didn’t make it. I acknowledge my privilege: I am here to tell my story. He is not. I want to be change. I would do it all over again if my story could somehow make a difference. I hope you think about George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Trayvon Martin while reading this and wonder: What can I do to change this?

Each year on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, prominent leaders, politicians, pastors and residents of my small hometown in North Carolina participate in marches in his honor. The speeches commemorate how far we’ve come as black people and invigorate us for the fight to come: the work towards equality is far from over. It was a tradition I was honored to be a part of as a child. However, what I underestimated then was just how long we, as African Americans, would be in this war against systemic racism, oppression and prejudice. Decades have passed since the civil rights movement and history continues to repeat itself over and over again. In spite of the physical removal of “For Whites Only” signs, we are still living in two vastly different and segregated worlds in America: one is black and the other is white.

Trayvon Martin’s Death Galvanized Me

The first protest I participated in as an adult was in 2012. It honored Trayvon Martin. That day—my one- and nine-year-old nephews in tow—I sported a hoodie similar to that worn by Trayvon when he was hunted down by the racist vigilante George Zimmerman. In the days surrounding his death, I bought the two items he had on him: an Arizona iced tea and a bag of Skittles. Standing in front of my mirror, I held these items in varying ways trying to understand how anyone could’ve mistaken them for weapons or threats. Rotating from side to side and front to back, I couldn’t make that distinction. I couldn’t figure out how these items equated to the loss of a life—a child’s life at that. My mind immediately began to think of my eldest nephew, who wasn’t far from Trayvon’s age. I knew then that my fight against racism had become personal: My nephews were now targets for racial injustice and police brutality. I knew that in our neighborhood of predominantly white people, someone could see my boys in the yard and take it upon themselves to play God, to take away life. Perhaps, to them, my sweet innocent boys' lives weren’t worth living because of the color of their skin.

One is black and the other is white.

There’s a Long March Ahead

In the eight years since Trayvon’s death, it’s hard to know exactly how many more black people have been the victims of blatant and outright racism, with many of their deaths unknown due to lack of national attention. We’ve seen police attack black toddlers, brutally beat black men and murder black women in their beds. The cops usually receive paid administrative leave. We’ve heard audio recordings of agonizing deaths and watched body camera footage replayed on the six o’clock news like the Friday night football reels during homecoming season. We’ve witnessed white women using 911 as their personal customer service hotlines for theatrical calls of distress about black people doing everyday tasks. We’ve seen black people get significantly harsher punishments than their white counterparts for the same or lesser crimes. We’ve relentlessly explained how problematic the stance “All Lives Matters” is; our calls continue to fall on deaf ears. Even with the innumerable cases of systemic racism, microaggressions, prejudice and discrimination, the reality of being black in America has been devalued. The protests erupting globally in the wake of George Floyd’s death are both the largest and most violent that I’ve ever seen. Much like those MLK marches I participated in as a youth, the local protests I’ve attended in honor of George Floyd have both commemorated how far we’ve come and invigorated us for the road that lies ahead.

Let it fucking burn.

Total Rebellion Is All We Have Left

However—never in a million years—would I have imagined that my small North Carolina town would be under two-day curfew because businesses were vandalized in the name of justice. Even more surprising has been seeing white-owned businesses stand in solidarity of the Black Lives Matter movement. (Some have welcomed artists to paint murals on the boards that replaced the windows to their buildings.) What the world is seeing unfold these past few weeks—a shift from peaceful protests to riots and back again—is the straw that broke the camel's back. In this fight for equality, we've tried every form of acceptable rebellion: complying with police, voting, rallies, kneeling during the national anthem, forums, petitions and running for public office. And yet our lives are still reduced to trending hashtags on social media—if we’re lucky. Despite the popular Martin Luther King Jr. quotes white people use to ease their guilt, let us not forget that "peaceful" Martin—the same Martin that was assassinated by the way—also said, “A riot is the language of the unheard.” Black Americans are tired of being unheard. Undoubtedly, there will be property casualties and job loss, but if all this shit has to burn down before our voices are heard, before we can dismantle a system that wasn’t created to protect black people: Let it fucking burn.

During the beginning of this social distancing season, I hit the ground running. I had just gotten back from facilitating a healing retreat in Utah. But, the “I miss you, I wanna quarantine witchu” texts from a lover grounded my reality of how soon quarantine was coming. The stay-at-home order was announced that night. I went grocery shopping the next day, stocked up on all of the things I needed and surrendered to the circumstances of this global situation.Most of my time was spent in bed. After expending energy in large groups, I tend to heal by prioritizing time for myself to do nothing but masturbate, binge watch anime, eat and day-nap. I did all of these things, while spending a month trying to find a new pattern of communication with my lover through our phones (a method we usually don’t use).So, it was a shock to me during our first conversation since staying at home that they thought it would be better for us to change our romantic relationship to a platonic one.I’m a methodical person. My brain is most comfortable when I can trace the threads that connect my thoughts, emotions and actions to one another. This goes for understanding others as well. So, when they couldn’t give me a reason why they wanted to end our romantic relationship, I began to spiral as my brain tried to make sense out of something that didn’t. I had to take a bath and process my emotions in water. There was this numbness that came on during the initial phone call that helped minimize the amount of pain I later would express on FaceTime. I have never cried in front of them. In the water, I felt myself coming back to me. The protective numb melted away and revealed this angry being that kept shaking their head and laughing as if I would wake up from a dream, but no.

The reality was that I was experiencing my first breakup ever from my first relationship ever—in the middle of a global pandemic.

This Was My First Breakup and What a Time for It

The reality was that I was experiencing my first breakup ever from my first relationship ever—in the middle of a global pandemic. What lay beneath was coming to the surface all at once. In this closing of a chapter, I noticed a dramatic difference between how I and this lover communicate. I feel like I am mourning alone. I replay in my head the last times I kissed this person, held them, were fed by them, massaged them, not knowing they even would be the last. I feel that the blocks or challenges that we have romantically would only carry into a platonic relationship and the lack of acknowledgment of this by them doesn’t give me any sense of comfort stepping into a friendship with them. I have no desire to go there.Because I am new to the shiftings of a romantic relationship, especially one that I had been in for one and a half years, I battle a pattern of gaslighting myself and my emotions. But, releasing images, stories, my own witnessing of what a breakup could or should be through both friends and family, and centering my own experience in relation to a very dramatic shift in my life, feels aligned. What came to the surface was me asking to be taken care of—so, I did.I unfollowed them on social media. Seeing their face unplanned, when I already was having trouble sleeping (playing in my head the conversations and feelings I wanted to share with them the next time we talked), was something I wanted to avoid. I’ve been honing my thoughts around relationship, commitment, discomfort, anger, communication and intention.I acknowledge the facts. This happened the day before the start of Taurus season. The season in which I was born. This happened days before a new moon. The magnetic pull of ceremony as a place to process these emotions was undeniable. So, ceremony is what I did. I set my altars with intentions of release and forgiveness. I wrote letters that I would never send while reading them to the planets. I am preparing for the Venus retrograde period that happens right before my birthday and spans both my mother’s and grandmother’s birthdays as well. There is a shift taking place in relationship to what I deserve, what I desire and what I need to do in order to make these things physical. Everything in me keeps saying, “Heal.”

The pain and toxicity of paternal abandonment inform my relationship to my emotions.

It's Hard but Necessary to Ask for Help

It takes a lot of energy for me to ask for help. I have a high tolerance for pain because I experienced heartbreak at a very young age. The pain and toxicity of paternal abandonment inform my relationship to my emotions. The pattern of seeing the femmes in my family navigating painful experiences with very little open communal support informed me as well.It’s a generational response to apologize for crying, for inconveniencing someone close to you with the weight of your emotions. It is a response I am learning to drop. I acknowledge that I hurt, that my feelings are valid no matter if this person truly did not intend to hurt me and to ask for help. So, I have. I talk to others in my community who have experienced romantic shift, sharing conversation, receiving affirmation for how I’m responding and asking them to make me break up playlists. Then, I dance.The mantra “There is no day, there is no day; there are only darkness, eternal sea of darkness” plays as I dance with the sun, thankful for the light and the shadow that my being casts in its presence.I think about what love is. If it were only a physical entity created between two people, just because we no longer weave energy in that way doesn’t negate the existence of it. It is still alive. It dances outside of my general orbit while simultaneously is closer to me than before. This love is a paradox. I mourn the lack of closeness I feel. I did not anticipate my access to this love would expire so soon and in such a way. But I see the echoes of it paint my day-to-day in pictures in my phone, smells of peppermint black castor oil, hair stopping up my drain and meal recipes I was excited to share. This energy we created together brought me a lot of things and has a mind of its own. I will never meet this energy again in the same way, for I have changed, this lover has changed and the energy lives its own life dancing between the memories of them, me and the places and people with whom we shared this energy. We created something infinite that cannot be bound even by my expectations of what I wanted it to be. This is both beautiful and scary for me.This experience has made me question many things. Was it all a dream? How could it be real if it were to end like this? It takes my friends to confirm that all of my feelings are valid. That paradox exists. That something can be so free and so limiting at the same time. This polarity has shined light on what experiences I want. What love I deserve, what relationships I desire—romantic, sexual, non-sexual—and what intentions I want to thread between this spectrum of intimacy, time and my own understanding of myself.

Was it all a dream? How could it be real if it were to end like this?

I Continue the Search for True Love

I want so deeply to love me, so that everyone around me knows what love I need, what love I desire and what love I am capable of receiving.I want communication that is deeply rooted in truths that flow freely like a river, communication that nurtures many growing things in its path so that they flourish, blossom and attract many a pollinator to lick many a nectar.I want equivalent energetic exchange that is balancing and abundant. I want emotional vulnerability that is so courageous it is not swayed in the face of fear and grounds its roots into the earth at any wavering sign. I want a magnetic, long-term dance that mirrors courting swans, birthing seahorses and leopard slugs having sex. I want access to an unconditional love orgy to which time, distance, my selves and any beautifully aligned partners are invited.I intend to show up fully to receive these blessed things, so I am taking this time to release anything I don’t need in order to open my arms and embrace a dream so clearly spoken from my exposed heart.

I came out at 18, knew I was queer at seven or eight, and had my first sexual experience at 13. I didn’t find my first soulmate until I was 21. My second came at 24. Every single one of them I’ve loved—or maybe just thought I’ve loved. I had my first therapist at eight, then 13, then in college and then at 24: When I met you. I wanted to love you, but your trauma—and mine—took me to therapy.If you’ve ever been in love, you know that the nervous system tricks you into thinking in an eternity: I want this to be perfect this time, I want him/her/they to be the one to meet my family, I want them to see where I came from, my room, my bed, the morning after.I wanted this all for us. I just didn’t know my soulmate came with trauma, too.

I just didn’t know my soulmate came with trauma, too.

His Suffering Is Now My Suffering

As I write this, I can’t help but make myself suffer at the thought of this being a goodbye letter to you. Why am I like this? I’m sitting in your apartment while you cook our dinner. There’s silence. I want the night to end early. You’ve invited me to sleep over so that we can go on a hike tomorrow. My inability to tell you how I feel isn’t letting me enjoy the meal you prepared with so much love and the ancestral gifts—given to you by your grandma. I think this is why I fell in love with you. We were both raised by our abuelitas, our grandmothers, from different parts of Northern Mexico. You were the first person I was able to talk to in poems about our motherland, without questions, because every other sentence had the other yearning to share how we lived those years of our lives.Our first summer together arrived. If you know anyone who grew up in Los Angeles, you know the ocean is part of our upbringing. At least for the black and brown folks in the city, it’s an escape—our parents happily shepherding us to it for free entertainment: two rotisserie chickens, a watermelon and a hot ride down the 710 toward the salty coast.So, we went to the ocean.At the time, I decided to go back to school. I was juggling school, my underpaying job and what felt like our newly-formed-yet-eternal relationship. We were so in love. That summer, the sun and the ocean whispered, and you tumbled in between her lips. But I only watched from afar. I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to swim with you.The weeks passed. A new therapist. A referral. The looks of pity in their eyes, the same look I had been given by seven different therapists. I’ve seen enough to know that life is a continuing readjustment to every time we are met with challenges. But, this time, I was madly in love, equally invigorated by you—yet aching at the thought of spending another minute with you. So, there I was, spilling it all out to my Latina therapist—who I searched for and found because I knew I would be able to connect with her.I told her how I felt like you didn’t listen to me, how your quiet persona gave me anxiety, how you were selfish in wanting me to be emotionally and physically present for you—but wouldn’t give me the same energy back. I felt like I was 18 again and going through the angst of being in a selfish relationship. You triggered the abandonment issues caused by my father or the many other men who have found tenderness in me but were then were too afraid to indulge in it and walked out.As my sessions came and went, my conversations with you seemed healthier and we began to be more open with each other.Fall came, and we traveled to Dallas to visit your family. You decided you wanted to take me to the apartment complex where you last lived with your dad and his family. As we walked, we met little brown faces who stared at us in amazement. Their faces were decorated in dirt and sweat; hope bloomed from their eyes. The sun was the warmest that evening as you shared your experiences of being violently abused by family friends in those rooms: The way they’d grab your head and smash it against the walls or call you homophobic slurs as they insulted your feminine gestures.We are well aware that child abuse is a major factor in adult depression, inhibiting growth in many aspects of our lives. Here I was thinking your quiet, self-centered gestures were acts of selfishness or rejection.Rather, they were acts of self-preservation.

They were acts of self-preservation.

We Can't Escape Our Childhoods

I am made of my father’s tender, worn immigrant hands. And my mother’s smile, the way she’d swallow a whole room with it. I am a balance of both but there was something about me and you that didn’t fit. You are much quieter than me. You keep to yourself in large crowds. You don’t smile unless it benefits you. I, immaturely, found this incredibly unsettling. How could you not be happy with this love? Isn’t it the greatest of revolutions our ancestors, our immigrant parents, could have never imagined? Why the silence? Why the seriousness? Why won’t you smile? I took it personally. I wanted this for 24 years of my queer life, 18 of those hidden with guilt.In learning of your trauma, I realized that it had nothing to do with me. The years full of confusion, the alcoholism and addiction that came with it. How the violence that was inflicted on you inhibited you from allowing anyone into you. Into those parts I ached to see, because if no one else would be able to, I hoped I could.Poverty and a lack of access to a good education, proper healthcare and a stable residence didn’t help your—or our—situations growing up. And it’s also true that LGBTQIA+ people of color are several times more vulnerable to health problems, mental or physical, than their white, affluent counterparts.It’s about to be two years now—I am 26 years old—and the therapy sessions have ended. For now. I don’t know if summer will come again. I don’t know if this revolution, this love, will subside. I do know that I went to every one of those therapy sessions. I showed up every time I could and listened to you. I traveled south to meet your family. I wrote poems you’ll never get to read. I know I loved you and for that I am grateful. In the same way, I am thankful for your vulnerability. We are fighting this battle together, and I only hope that this unimaginable revolution of love continues to travel beyond us.

I don’t know if summer will come again.

Being plus size in the late ‘90s and early 2000s, clothing choices were far from fashionable. Add in the pressure of being a teenager wearing baggy jeans, oversized sweaters or gauchos and bell sleeve floral shirts: It’s no surprise that when it came to the boys, I was a late bloomer. In my senior year of high school, my sister gave me a pair of lightly washed denim jeans that showed off my figure. It was the first time that I realized that I had hips for days, and fitted clothes made me look far less frumpy than anything else in my closet at the time.The first day I wore those jeans to school, heads turned. I probably wore those things at least twice a week from that point forward. There was a newfound confidence that awoke in me. Suddenly, I cared more about what I looked like. I discovered that eyebrow waxing and acrylics weren’t just for special occasions anymore. Most of my Saturdays were spent in the hair salon. This confidence followed into my college years: While it was a bit of a culture shock to me, it didn’t take long to adjust. I was suddenly visible, and to be honest, I loved the compliments and the attention. I loved being the person who wasn’t seen as conventionally attractive and still left the party with the finest male there. I'm not sure if I chose the ho life or if it chose me. Either way, I loved the power that came along with it. I do know that my ho phase was a good-ass time. All of it (and them). I was a preacher’s kid, so my unburdening seems to be on-brand for a somewhat geeky person deeply submerged into Southern Christian culture. Most of my weeknights were filled with church-related events: dance rehearsal, choir practice, bible study, connection group, a conference of some sorts. Now some of the church kids were fresh as hell, but I respected the house of the Lord—for the most part.There was something incredibly intoxicating to me in the power that came along with having a roster of men at my disposal. The rush of going out with multiple men on the same day was a high that sent my ego into orbit. I remember having a party one night and “scheduling” the three men I was seeing at the time to make an appearance because I wanted to spend some part of my birthday with all of them. What a time!

The ho phase wasn’t strictly about ho’ing around.

Dating Helped Me Realize What I Did Not Want in a Relationship

The ho phase wasn’t strictly about ho’ing around: Although I was dating multiple men, all of them weren’t sexual partners. That’s nasty as hell. Occasionally there would be a loose commitment. No matter how much I tried, faithfulness was not my strong suit. The monotony of settling down paled in comparison to the rush felt when being in the thick of a ho phase.I used a color-coded calendar to keep track of whom I went out with and with whom I slept. There were men just for date nights, some that were a guaranteed good time after a drunk night and, yeah, even some just for conversation. However, as much excitement as there was in dating multiple men at the same time, each relationship brought greater clarity. The biggest epiphany being: "Bitch, you’re getting too old for this."Some of these men were also involved with other people. Some didn’t have any ambition or goals, some only wanted a beneficial arrangement and more than one left the indication that should I fall pregnant, I would be parenting on my own. On the surface these men were good-looking but what could they really offer beyond a few meals and admittedly (sometimes) lackluster sex? I think part of the reason I kept reverting back to this phase was that the more men I met—and took some time to learn who I was—the more I was able to see what I did not want from someone whom I would be seriously dating. It was easier to avoid vulnerability by erecting this wall over my heart and emotions. I continued to play the game because this way, I was in control.And it worked until it didn’t.

Bitch, you’re getting too old for this.

How I Accidentally Met “The One”

On a whim, I found myself creating a profile on Plenty of Fish. Browsing the profiles, the right swipes were beyond generous because I wasn’t looking for commitment as much as I was looking for a distraction from life. Some fresh meat would be just what I needed. As the ho phase goes, a batch of gents gained enough of my attention and the selective weeding began. From this round of folks, I ended up meeting a few of them in person. In true ho fashion, I met them on the same day.Over time, my communication with a lot of men began to dwindle. I ignored the infamous “you up?” text at 4 a.m. with one guy in particular. This one guy. His exuberant confidence made his mere presence command attention. The light that reflected from his eyes when he talked about things he was passionate about was blinding. And I could get lost in them forever. He had a smile that would calm the roughest seas. Everything about him felt new yet familiar at the same time. As time passed, we were hanging out quite often (not even having sex) and I never felt the need to be anyone other than myself.And then it happened.

It was a perfect moment.

Falling in Love Unexpectedly

Almost instinctively, I began to let my guard down. Of all the men I had previously dated, he was sui generis. While I didn’t know a lot of things relating to relationships or commitment, it was certain that anything I could possibly want in a partner could be found in him. He was intelligent and handsome but also patient, attentive and reassuring. His ambition and motivation were infectious. But, most of all, he was a provider; I felt safe with him. Even on the days that we were upset with each other, there was peace and comfort in his presence.I remember the day that I genuinely wanted to lay all the cards on the table, quit the game and officially focus on this one person. Somehow, in the midst of ho’ing, I started falling for this man. We were at his house eating ice cream after dinner, watching the original Lion King and it felt so nostalgic. It was almost like one of those moments where a married couple would be reflecting on their relationship and asking each other, “Can you believe this is where we are now?”He said, “I want you to listen to this.” He played a song that expressed his love toward me. It was a perfect moment. I knew, without a doubt, that every word in that song was about us. For once, there were visions of the future and a desire to grow old with someone. I didn’t want to see other people. I didn’t want to hurt him, only learn how to love him truly. What the hell was happening? Every broken piece of me was suddenly whole. “Redamancy” is defined as to love and be loved in return. That’s what this had become. Our relationship was the first time that I experienced what it felt like to be genuinely loved for who I was. And to genuinely love someone as well. It was pure. That feeling alone was greater than any power that I had felt previously. Even now, years later, nothing else compares.I can’t say that we would have met had it not been for my mindless swiping that night. One could even say that the universe knew what (and whom) I needed, even when I didn’t. It seems weird to be grateful for a ho phase, but without a doubt, this relationship was the greatest blessing. As the old saying goes: You have to kiss a lot of frogs before you find a prince.

We were used to it. I had lived in California, Emily in New York. It had been five years. People didn’t really understand how we did it: They didn’t understand how we could keep a long-distance relationship alive for so long. The truth is, we faltered. We broke up for an indeterminate amount of time. When we muddled back together, we had bad fights and sent ugly texts. But, we somehow steered the ship through the storm. Earlier this year, we began looking for apartments in California, anticipating her move.Then, the virus hit.Then, I got sick.

My Long-Distance Girlfriend Might've Given Me the Coronavirus

She had visited California at the end of February before the coronavirus pandemic took control of the nation. Emily cut her trip short, thinking she might not be able to get back for work or to see her family. I wish she had stayed but she didn’t. Sometimes I think she chose them over me, but I try to push those thoughts away.I’m not sure how I got sick—I’m not even sure what I had, but the COVID-19 symptoms were there: a sore throat that turned into a dry cough that gave way to night sweats, chills and fatigue. I was ill for well over a month.At first, I figured I contracted it at my coffee shop. It’s a sustainable kind of place, where they use ceramic cups instead of the disposable variety. I’m not sure those hippies have a dishwasher. Then, I thought that I might’ve gotten the virus at a bar or concert in California. But as the numbers started to explode in New York City, I began to think: It was her. She had come from the epicenter of the virus. I came to the conclusion that she had been infected but asymptomatic. And she had infected me.When I brought that theory up—she safely back in New York by then and feeling fine—things didn’t go very well. She accused me of blaming her for my prolonged illness. She accused me of blaming her for my mother’s subsequent illness. This was all being done via text messages, mind you.

They didn’t understand how we could keep a long-distance relationship alive for so long.

Back-and-Forth Texts Made Our Problems Worse

Emily: In my mind apologizing is for something you say when you did something wrong that you should not have doneMe: Yeah you’re real rigid with your sorrysEmily: I’m not rigid I just think it’s when you do something wrong you shouldn’t have doneMe: Well you know I apologize a lotEmily: So you think you should apologize for something that was either out of your control or you didn’t mean to do purposelyMe: Humans are fuck ups. Admit wrong move onEmily: But why would it make you feel better if I said oh sorry I probably did give you coronavirus. Like how does that help you

She accused me of blaming her for my prolonged illness.

How Do You Deal With a Long-Distance Relationship When You Can’t Travel?

The thing is: I was blaming her. But, I think, more than anything I was just looking for an acknowledgment, an apology. Emily doesn’t do apologies.We made up. But the relationship is still fraught, tenuous. We don’t know when we will see each other again. That, I’d say, is the most difficult part of all of this. It’s certainly the biggest mind-fuck, and one that long-distance couples are going through across the globe. Will we be back together this month? August? November? And will our relationship even make it till then? If it does, what will it look like?One thing that our tandem depended on was planning: Planning for the next trip to see each other. Planning for the next trip to New York or Chicago or San Francisco. There is no planning now, not much of anything to anticipate or excite. (I’ve usually dated “nice girls,” not having the foresight of anticipating a global pandemic and a resulting frustrating lack of nudes landing in my inbox.)We don’t know when she can move. Basically, like many people right now, we just don’t know much.A lot of people are suffering far worse problems than ours: death, sickness, job loss, empty cupboards. In one way or another, this virus has impacted nearly every person in the world. I get it.Emily and I, all things considered, are fine.(It bears mentioning that she has more admirable qualities than I do—her humor, charm and dedication to her family chief among them—but this here is a rant. And rants tend to live in the negative.)

We don’t know when we will see each other again.

Loneliness Might Be the Hardest Part for Many During the Pandemic

Modern love is rife with complications that are exacerbated by the existence of social media. Yet, long-distance relationships depend on technology: Lovers separated by distance in 2020 needn’t write letters like Civil War soldiers and their wives. I’m not a big fan of FaceTime or Zoom; a writer by trade, I’d rather text and email. But, that doesn’t work so well for Emily.She also isn’t as sentimental as I am. She’s getting better about the “I love yous,” but I find myself constantly questioning how much she actually does. If this sounds like a laundry list of complaints, that’s where my mind wanders when I actually cannot see and be with the person about whom I have a myriad of feelings. It’s easy to overanalyze and be negative. It’s no wonder why long-distance relationships often don’t work out.It’s probable that it’ll be five months of absence from one another, barring a COVID-19 resurgence—a distinct possibility. Both of my grandfathers, who fought in World War II, probably wouldn’t have a lot of sympathy for my complaining. And that’s perfectly understandable. But it’s also true that this virus has amplified feelings of distance, remoteness and desolation. I can only hope that, in the future, it’ll be a blip recounted with a sense of removed wonder during family gatherings and on barstools.We can all hope for that day to come, sooner than later.