Real healing is about a truth and reconciliation process that we're called upon to carry out between the warring factions that we carry inside of us... Some of those voices don't belong to us at all—and the good news is we get to send those back to where they belong…

The stories of how we resist, how we survive, how we gather, how we fight, and how we heal, will give us the best shot at finding out how we eventually triumph - for the cause of humanity, justice, and truth.

Every single time that we gather enough breath and courage to tell our stories, we are writing back against the surge of fascist standardization and human erasure.  Telling our stories is an act of resistance.  Telling our stories loudly, beautifully, genuinely, and even with great humor, is a nonviolent strike back, and crucial fuel for truth and dissent.

After a few months, he told me he did have something to say. It was a shaky start, but through one-on-one sessions after school, email correspondence, and a lot of red ink, his nervousness transformed into something that looked like a quiet excitement. 

Even though I had been writing through my own myriad traumas for a decade already, I hadn’t expected this somehow...as people yelled and laughed and bustled around us, as Carolina’s September heat painted sweat on my brow, what he told me has stuck in my hippocampus prominently ever since.

She faced him, and behind her she could hear the inane squeals of drunken girls and bravado of drunk boys boom in the thicket of Evergreens where the keg was planted. 

Always, the banging of their four fists together before and after the fight; always, the victor lofting the arm of the defeated; always the exchange of the bottle of Crown Royale, throatfuls of fire that conclude the ritual charade of savagery.