Love as an unpopular movement
and the crazy-making of normalizing the current state of the world
I feel crazy. I don’t use this word lightly. I use this word to describe the crazy-making that happens in a culture of shame, suppression, and avoidance.
There are so many political takes on the unfolding genocide in Gaza, analysis from freedom fighters, revolutionary cultural workers, and artists aching for a culture that cares. I’m not writing you with a history lesson or a plea to pay attention. I’m writing you to put words to my grief and make something of my mourning.
I knew I had to quite my job when, during the protests of summer 2020, I logged onto meetings over zoom and the days went on as if it was business as usual. I stewed and simmered at my colleagues talking about their weekends at brunch and vacations plans while the foundation of the world I knew was shaking. Summer 2020 was a time of dismantling and we saw it in the broken buildings and spray-painted street corners. People were angry at a government that protected status quo over collective safety. And the people who didn’t understand the conditions that led to this anger were full of narrow judgement, righteous blame, and detached dissonance.
It was this dissonance that led me to set in motion a process of freeing myself— as much as I can, within the systems I have to survive within— from an environment that demanded normalcy from me.
I wasn’t identifying as autistic yet. I hadn’t discovered the language and frameworks of neurodivergence through hashtags like #actuallyautistic and #auDHD, and “autistic” elicited stereotypes of being recluse, odd, uncouth, and unable to feel empathy.
Years later, I see how my autistic, neurodivergent, disabled traits made me hypersensitive to the different experiences I was having from the people around me. And it’s these same traits that are awakening me into action and confronting me with the trickle-down effects of violent ideologies in power.
I feel crazy trying to have conversations that bypass the clear, urgent calls to ask our elected leaders for a ceasefire and skip to mundane weekend plans. I feel crazy that millions around the world are mobilizing in the streets to sound the alarm for an end to Gaza’s suffering under a 75-year occupation, yet people are being fired, doxed, harassed, and threatened for amplifying the noise. I feel crazy that it’s considered controversial to orient ourselves toward solidarity, justice, and liberation.
It feels crazy not to be changed by this.
Mariame Kaba said that hope is a discipline. Which means hope is something we have to show up for, something to cultivate with deliberate practice to keep it alive. Hope is like a plant that we care for, so it has the means to grow. The cynicism of thinking we have no say in what the future holds, that our voice doesn’t make a difference, that the personal doesn’t influence the collective, is a kind of poison that detaches us from our potential to build a different world. And it’s a kind of self-abandonment that troubles me deeply. The signs seem clear: acknowledge your power, be responsible with your power, use your power to generate change.
I’m devastated by what I’m seeing on my feed. The lives lost, the land destroyed, the survivors displaced while U.S. continues its investment in militarizing the world by being the only country to veto the United Nation’s resolution to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza.
I’m thinking of two lessons from James Baldwin.
Both, about the fierce practice of love.
So maybe, perhaps, possibly, this is all a calling back to the roots of love. Because love, without practice, digresses into silence and shame. Love, without people fighting for it, turns fear, hate, and horror into a comfortable norm. So maybe I’m okay with being considered crazy, if crazy is what it means to be loyal to love and true to my belief that we’re capable of far more than this.