Part of the Series
Movement Memos
“I’ve seen a lot of people lashing out at people horizontally, and my gut sense is that sometimes it happens because the folks who are lashing out are definitely super traumatized, in crisis, feel and are really powerless in a lot of ways,” says disability justice organizer Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. In this episode of “Movement Memos,” host Kelly Hayes talks with Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and Elliott Fukui, who develops community safety strategies for emotional wellness and safety, about why people are struggling right now, what’s keeping people alive and engaged, and what we need to create together to survive these times.
Music by Son Monarcas & David Celeste
TRANSCRIPT
Note: This a rush transcript and has been lightly edited for clarity. Copy may not be in its final form.
Kelly Hayes: Welcome to “Movement Memos,” a Truthout podcast about organizing, solidarity and the work of making change. I’m your host, writer and organizer, Kelly Hayes. Today, we are talking about mental health, the crises of depression and overwhelm that many of us are experiencing, disability justice, and the work of collective survival. We will be hearing from disability justice organizers Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and Elliott Fukui. Leah is a writer, a space creator, and a low-tech survival technologist. Elliott is an organizer, facilitator and trainer with two decades of experience in social justice movements. Leah and Elliot’s work has been deeply important to my own practice of community care, and I can honestly say that the lessons I have learned from these organizers have helped me and others keep each other alive during times of extreme crisis.
Over the summer, I talked with Harsha Walia, William C. Anderson, Robyn Maynard and others for an episode about the kind of crises that people in our movements are presently experiencing. If you haven’t checked that episode out, I recommend doing so. For today, we are going to be exploring why people are struggling right now, what’s keeping people alive and engaged, and what we need to create together to survive these times.
If you appreciate this episode, and you would like to support “Movement Memos,” you can subscribe to Truthout’s newsletter or make a donation at truthout.org. You can also support the show by subscribing to the podcast on Apple or Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, or by leaving a positive review on those platforms. Sharing episodes on social media is also a huge help. As a union shop with the best family and sick leave policies in the industry, we could not do this work without the support of readers and listeners like you, so thanks for believing in us and for all that you do. And with that, I hope you enjoy the show.
[musical interlude]
KH: Leah and Elliot, welcome to “Movement Memos.”
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha: Thanks for having us.
Elliott Fukui: Thank you.
KH: How are you both doing today?
LLPS: I was telling Kelly before we started recording that I love/hate that question right now. I’m just like… what I got are hand gestures. How much time you got? In the moment, I’m okay. It’s a real intense time on the clock of the world, as Grace Lee Boggs would say. I think I’ll put it that way and leave it there, because otherwise, I could spend the whole hour answering that question.
KH: That’s fair. Elliot, how are you doing today?
EF: I am hanging in there. I am trying to stretch and drink water and take naps whenever possible and make space for the hardness of this moment, but also the potential of the moment. So trying to be in that both/and life.
KH: I am also trying to live in that both/and life and I am just so appreciative of you both making space for this conversation amid everything that’s happening right now.
LLPS: It’s a real pleasure and I’m really glad that you’re asking these questions. I think we’re really on time to have this kind of conversation on a podcast.
KH: Absolutely. Can the two of you introduce yourselves and share a bit about the work you do?
LLPS: So my name is Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. I use she and they pronouns. Mostly they, these days. I’m a 49-something-year-old non-binary — I’m just reading my bio– non-binary fem of Burgher and Tamil Sri Lankan Irish and Eastern European, some Roma ascent. I grew up mixed working class, lower middle class in Worcester, Massachusetts. Yeah. And I have a really long history in disability justice and transformative justice movement is the short version. And I also want to say I came up as a young crazy survivor and was lucky enough to find a psychiatric survivor movement in Toronto in the late nineties that was working really closely hand in hand with prison justice and poor peoples and Black, Indigenous, POC movements that were also hella queer and trans, and got my life saved by that. And I’m a writer who’s been writing a lot of poetry, essays, non-fiction, co-edited two books on how do you deal with violence without the police, with Jai Dulani, Ching-In Chen and Ejeris Dixon.
I like to describe myself tongue in cheek, but also real as a structural engineer of disability and transformative justice where I just really look and think and be like, sometimes I come up with tools that people could use and sometimes I’m like, here’s my observation of what’s happening. Let me share it. Also I believe in, I kind of view myself as an archivist and a documentary. And a lot of what I do is just writing it down, writing down, here’s what people tried, here’s what people tried to make this disabled performance, or here’s what people tried to do to address fem suicide. Or here’s what people tried to do as young, feral survivors of color who couldn’t go to the cops because the cops were already after us. Here’s what we tried.
Yeah. And I’ve been involved in the mad movement in a lot of different ways since I was that 22-year-old. And even when it’s not something that’s the first thing that people think of when they think of me, it’s always in me. And a lot of what I do is just being in community with other crazy and neurodivergent folks and helping support each other and helping just be nuts together and helping be in space where it’s like, yeah, this is normal, because it is normal, it’s regular. And just sharing all the tips and little things we do to stay alive. And also, I want to say I really enjoy being disabled and crazy and autistic. It’s not easy all the time because the world makes it hard, but I really like who the fuck I am and I would not trade it. And that might sound very corny and ABC Family, but I mean it in a very, not that way. I just wanted to say that.
KH: Well, I really like who the fuck you are, too. Elliot?
EF: I’m pushing 40. Nikkei hafu, so that means I am first generation mixed Japanese American. I am a survivor of many things, and I’m someone who for the past 20 years has been supporting other people who are also experiencing altered and emotional states for free, because I don’t think you should charge for that work personally. And I have been a community organizer primarily in queer and trans GNC [gender nonconforming] spaces of color over the years. And so I feel really blessed. I’ve actually had the opportunity to meet trans people all over the country. And you’re all amazing. Hi friends. And I’m also someone who, yeah, is committed to transformative justice, committed to abolition because of my lived experiences. And I’m someone who wants everyone to be out of their cage regardless of who they are.
And again, I like talking to the folks who’ve been inside and who are inside, because I know it’s so hard when you’re in there, but yo, you can do it. You can do it. I’m someone who was heavily medicated and forcibly drugged and experienced a lot of abuse within the psychiatric and foster care system. And I want you to know that if that’s your lived experience, find your people and you will find a way. Keep reaching out even though everything in you tells you to isolate and to stay inside. Keep trying to find your people. And you don’t know. They might be at a Comic-Con, they might be at a D&D, they might be at a movie theater. You don’t know where you’re going to find them. So keep looking. And that’s who I am.
KH: Well, I am so grateful for you both, and for all of your work, and so glad to be in conversation with you today. I want to begin by talking about what you both are seeing and experiencing in movement spaces, and in your relationships with other activists and organizers. We made an episode this summer about some of the crises that people are coping with right now. But I would love to hear from you all about how you would describe what we’re up against with regard to mental health and healing in our movements right now.
EF: Gosh, I was thinking about how to talk about what has happened over the past four years. Oh my goodness. I would say, okay, so I just moved back to the Midwest from California and over the past few years, I think some of the major things, so there have been issues. So firstly and foremost, nobody can afford therapy. So I read a statistic in a political article for your fact-checkers to check, you can tell me if I’m wrong, but it said something like, there’s one mental health provider for every 350 people who need those services. So what I noticed is once people started losing their jobs and started losing income, a lot of people also lost access to any kind of care or support that they were receiving if they were receiving those kinds of services in psychiatric spaces or medications or things like that.
And that was a big blow for a lot, a lot of people, and obviously impacted people’s ability to show up, to be well, to be present, to take care of themselves, to take care of what they needed to take care of in their lives. So I think that was one big noticing over the past few years. And then the other crisis I’ve seen… Leah, I’m hoping you can articulate this better than I can because I don’t know how to articulate this one.
LLPS: Make no promises.
EF: I make no promises. But we’re up against also this… The ways that social media plus COVID have changed the way that we can be in community together. And I think for a lot of people, fun and joy and connection have been incredibly difficult to access. And this obviously impacts people’s wellbeing, right? The inability to access your community on a regular basis, the inability to participate in your regular hobbies, the inability to see your friends when you want to see them and have some hot pot or do whatever you’re trying to do. Those things really took a toll on a lot, a lot of people.
And then I would say burnout. Burnout is a huge one. People who were working in mutual aid projects and also were showing up for Palestine and also were showing up for Black lives and also were showing up for — and we are not in a place where any of this work is sustainable, and we’re not in a place where we’re able to refill our cup as we’re having to deal with all of these horrendous and horrifying things that are happening across our communities. There hasn’t been the space to refill the cup.
So I’d say the people I’ve been talking to over the past four years, one-on-one, when I’m doing support with people or with family members, a lot of the stress and distress, number one, capitalism is a crisis, but number two is the resources that are necessary for the amount of people who require mental health support just don’t exist right now. So I’m going to wrap it up there and let Leah hopefully articulate that a little better than I did.
LLPS: Elliot, thanks for taking the hit and kicking us off because I was able to be like, amorphous thoughts that could take up three hours, let me make some notes. I’m going to start by saying that what I’ve observed as a mad person and someone who is in a lot of different communities and movement spaces, including people who are political as fuck, but don’t really relate to movement spaces and feel alienated by them for a lot of reasons, what I’ve seen actually going back to the last eight years was that when Trump came into office, it’s not like everything was great. We were dealing with… We, the collective we, that’s a lot of different we’s, were dealing with mass Black death and police murder, genocide, all of the things.
And then Trump came in and it started a four years of people just being like, and then there’s another thing and then there’s another thing. And then, oh my gosh. And then that was when I started noticing and writing about people just being in shutdown, panic, anxiety, really having to fight despair. And I think that a lot of movement spaces I was in, multiple movement spaces, disabled, mad and not, were like, all right, let’s address this. And then 2020 happened, and I’ll just zoom into myself. In the past four years, I lost two, three really, really close movement friends and comrades to deaths that happened at the intersections of ableism, racism, fat-phobia and transphobia. Both my parents died, a lot of other people I knew and loved died. A lot of people I didn’t know personally, but really mattered to me, died.
You’ve got the mass organizing of 2020, 2021, which was intense and hard, but there was hope in it. And then you have the mass mindfuck of the last two years of not only from the government, what pandemic? Business as usual. But the thing that is really, really hard for a lot of us, particularly in disabled and mad movements, which is left to spaces being like, oh, Let’s go shopping. I eat indoors. What pandemic? Everything’s fine. It’s been really, and I use this word deliberately, maddening times, and people were already squeezed four years ago. They were already squeezed. We were already squeezed eight years ago. But I feel like this year we’re at a point where I’m like, I’m not the first or last person to say this. I see a lot of people being like, we just don’t have capacity to hold the level of shit we’re being asked to hold.
And I’m talking about everything from a virus that has mutated so many times and there’s no data, there’s no public health. A lot of movement spaces have abandoned masking and watching the genocide in Gaza, Sudan, many, many countries live on air for months and doing massive amounts of organizing and it mattering and it’s still not stopping what’s happening. So I feel like a lot of times I’m out of words and a lot of people are out of words to describe the spiritual and mental place that we’re at. But what I will say that helped, that I’ve said, and I’ve gotten a lot of help from hearing other people articulate, is that especially in the last year, especially with the multiple genocides that we are witnessing, some of us are in directly, we are all being impacted by, it really feels like a battle for our souls as a human species.
And the thing is that a lot of people, and I don’t blame everyone for doing this. I know people who I care about who feel like I have to look away. I just can’t. My brain is going to break. My brain already broke, and I get it. I get it. And then there are those of us who are like, wish I could, can’t, still in it, not doing particularly great either. And I second everything Elliot said about when good therapy is 140 bucks an hour most places and is not covered by any insurance, let alone Medicaid, your real shit out of luck. I also think that to a certain degree, individual therapy is great. I use it, God knows I use it. I can’t afford it either. I’m putting it on a credit card right now, but sometimes I’m like, I don’t think that therapy actually necessarily has the tools to hold what we’re going through as a human species, as a collective and as individuals.
And then out of that, what I’m seeing is I have seen in the last couple of years more lateral violence and horizontal hostility, some of which is coming out of extreme states than I’ve ever seen before in movement spaces. And for context, I first, I’ve been mad slash neurodivergent (ND) my whole life and I found the psychiatric survivor movement in Toronto in 1997 when I was 22 years old. So I’ve been in and around mad movements for a really long time. And in other movements, and I am not romanticizing it, when we were organizing psychiatric survivor Pride Day in Toronto in the late ’90s, early 2000s, we were a bunch of very working class and mostly poor, capital-P poor, mad people who’d survived a lot of institutionalization and violence. And we screamed at each other and we went off. And it was not just like we’re all holding hands in a circle, but in the last few years I was like, God, I’ve never seen people in altered states — I’m sure other people have — but I’ve never seen people lash out at other mad people in the way that I’m seeing. I’m seeing more of what would be labeled as paranoia, as spiritual psychosis where I’ve witnessed people I know in community to be like, God’s talking to me and he wants me to kill you. Shit like that, where I’m like, that at other mad people and I’m like, God damn, thanks for the learning opportunity, God, what is the anti-carceral, anti-ableist way of dealing with this? Because I’m a little fresh out of luck, and honestly, I’m triggered as fuck right now. And I see a lot of people in mad and ND movements struggling with this too, where some of our comrades, a few, not tons, but have gotten radicalized to the other side, and I’m like, whoa, you’re sounding real racist, comrade, or you’re saying some stuff where I’m like, what the hell?
And I’m just like, this is not something I would’ve expected. And it breaks my heart and it scares me, and I don’t have an answer. I’ve seen a lot of people lashing out at people horizontally, and I think this is a hypothesis, but my gut sense is that sometimes it happens because the folks who are lashing out are definitely super traumatized, in crisis, feel and are really powerless in a lot of ways. And they’re like, if I lash out at you, you person over there, you’re an abolitionist, you’re not going to call the cops on me. And it’s like, okay, very good. But then that person who’s being lashed out at is like, yo, I’m withstanding all of this real hairy stuff from this other person, and I don’t want to call the cops and I’m not going to, but what the fuck do I do?
And to back up what Elliot said, I mean, we have more stuff than we’ve maybe ever had before. There are more peer respites, right? Anti-carceral crisis lines, a handful of crisis lines that won’t call the police. I think people have more skills due to mad and disability justice and neurodivergent organizing around crazy 101 and altered state 101. And yes, there are mad movements and here’s how you support somebody or yourself who’s in crisis or suicidal or experiencing an altered state. And there’s still not enough. I live in a major Northeastern city and there’s no peer respite. I mean, there’s a lot of harm reduction. Those spaces are really, I mean, under pressure to hold what a public health system should hold. Right? And I mean there’s more and they’re still not enough. And I will wrap up by saying the two last quick things.
I want to second what Elliot said about the panopticon of surveillance, social media, AI, etc. And the ways in which social media in particular as movement people, as regular people, we’ve been hacking it to connect since it existed. And I think a lot of us were always clear of… this isn’t for us. We’re just trying to use it to be able to organize with each other. And it was really crucial in the early pandemic in lockdown times, there’s so much organizing that came out of, okay, we’re all in our houses, but we can get together and do massive mutual aid online. And the powers that be really noticed it. And with the death of Twitter with, I go on Instagram or Facebook and it’s a fucking mall and I can’t see anything. And I tried to promote Crips E-Sims for Gaza, and I got told by Instagram after a week that because my post has a watermelon in it, that’s a hate symbol. So they took it down.
It just feels like we are being surveilled and data mined. And really it’s a matrix shit where our functioning life force is being harvested and we can’t connect with each other. And it’s also really screwing with us. I do see more than ever what feels like attempts to manipulate us against each other and really set off rumors and fear and all kinds of things. And it’s tough. And yet some of those online spaces are the only places people have to connect. And finally, last step, disability justice (DJ), Mad Pride, et cetera, for the vast number of years that we’ve been movements with different names, by and large didn’t have any funding. We had grassroots money. We were just passing the $20 back and forth across the movement. And we got some in the last four years. And I want to be really clear, I’m not taking myself out of that equation.
I’ve accepted some of that money. It’s a small amount of money, mostly it’s social justice funds trying to fund DJ. I don’t think money is bad. I think that we need money to buy ramps and interpreter services and all kinds of things. And also money changes everything. And I see there being a lot of battle now that there’s financial resources where it used to feel like, okay, we’re all crazy and disabled together and we all don’t have resources. We’re all on the same level. And with some of us accessing funding and some of us not, it’s created some really funky power dynamics. And you throw that in the mix, it doesn’t help. And one thing that’s in the mix, both within I think, disabled spaces and also where those spaces touch movement spaces that aren’t fully disabled, is that I’ve seen more than ever this real mindfuck where it’s like, oh, you can be disabled, you can be crazy, but we want you to be professional.
We want you to show up on time and not be sad and not be weird. And if you are, ooh, we don’t know. And I’ll end by saying, if there’s one thing that I miss about 2020, 2021, and there’s more than one thing, it’s that there was more, I at least felt like there was a little bit more permission to be fucked up. And by that I mean sad, depressed, grieving.
I could show up as a neurodivergent person in 2020, 2021 and be like, my friend just died. I’m sad. And people would be like, that’s okay. And now there’s more of a vibe, and I work in disabled spaces where it’s like, well, yeah, sure, everybody’s dead. Why are you five minutes late? And I think that that’s hard, and I think it’s driving a lot… When people are already struggling to keep their heads above water and there’s feeling of like you can be crazy, but not too crazy, and you can’t actually let it make you organize in a different way or at a slower pace or with more sad, I think that honestly, that drives suicidality and crisis in a lot of folks I know, including at times myself, where I’m just like, well shit, if you’re going to yell at me for being messy because I’m sick or sad, then what the hell are we even doing?
That’s it. That was probably 10 minutes. I’m sorry, but that’s what I got.
EF: That was so good. Thanks Leah. Can I add one more thing?
KH: Absolutely.
EF: The wellness-industrial complex. Girl. Oh my God. You can rub an onion on your forehead if that makes you feel better. You know what I’m saying? But I feel like the thing that frustrates me deeply is that we are being exploited. We are actively being exploited by people who are trying to make money off of our suffering, who have no training, who are creating these things. And it’s very difficult for our folks in this era of what is real and what is not on the internet. What is real? How do you fact-check anything? That we have people who are knowingly taking advantage of disabled and neurodivergent people and people who are experiencing suicidal ideation to make money and to get views and to do these things. And it hurts my heart deeply that for so many of our comrades, that might be the only thing they have access to, is some frou frou BS that is not backed by anything, and that is actually about extracting more, more than has already been extracted from our communities.
KH: I want to thank you both for all of that. So much of it resonates. The idea of being reliant upon systems and platforms for connection that are actually fostering more strife and division — that is something that I have been grappling with a lot over the last year, in terms of how it’s hurting me, hurting my communities, and obviously, hurting our movements. As a person who’s still pretty COVID cautious, I put so much thought into planning how I engage with people, in-person. I never used to have to think about it. My apartment was the place where people wound up after the meeting. It was the place where we hosted fundraisers and holiday parties, and got drunk to celebrate our wins and mourn our losses. My home was a community hub, and now I am trying to piece together these moments of connection. And, I’m a little older now, so I am not sure I even have the capacity for what this space used to be. I am too old to feel like there’s a nightclub happening in my apartment because it’s New Year’s Eve, but I also don’t know how to function socially in the piecemeal way that I do now,
Leah, I also really appreciate what you said about how you can be crazy, but not too crazy. As a person who grapples with my own mental health, that is something I think about a lot. Like, is it really okay to not be okay? How are people actually going to respond to that? Will the response match the rhetoric? Probably not.
So amid all of this difficulty, what do you see people doing that is actually helping people work to heal themselves and support each other? What kind of safety planning, care work and infrastructure do you think is serving people well right now?
LLPS: I can jump in. I have an initial thing that actually speaks to an earlier thing you said before the question, but speaks to the question and then I have some stuff about the question.
So Kelly, I just first wanted to speak to what you shared about the thing about, oh, I don’t want a nightclub in my house anymore, but I didn’t use to have to plan out my sociality and now I really do and I feel so mixed about it. I wanted to speak to that because when you were saying it, it made me think about, I did have to plan out my social life a bit more around disability pre-pandemic. And then what I’m trying to say is that a lot of high-risk disabled people, I spent the first two years of the pandemic in really intense isolation. I just was kind of in an airlock in my house with one other person maximum and then for a time just me and my cat, and very limited outdoor-only hangs. We were on a lockdown where you weren’t supposed to hang out outside where I was living, for part of it.
And then I moved to a small town in western Massachusetts for 18 months, where I had less community and where I was like, and it was at a moment in the pandemic where I was like, where people were starting to not mask. I mean some people never did, but you know what I mean, and I was like, okay, maybe I need to live in a less dense rural environment with a very small pod of people who mask and that’s going to be what saves me. And it did to a degree, but I ended up moving away from that area after 18 months for a number of reasons, but partly because I was like, I’m so isolated here and it was going into year three, year four, and I was like, I could die here if I stay here of isolation. And my friend Gem Butler, we were talking during that period and they said something that’s really stuck with me.
Because it was around I think 2022, 2023 when they said this, where they were like, “You know, a lot of people have died of the virus, but a lot of people are dying now of the isolation. They’re dying of suicide, they’re dying of overdose, they’re dying of any number of things.” And I was like, yeah, it’s fucked up, because I don’t think anyone would say this, but in my head I was like, I’m not trying to be dramatic, but I was like, yeah, I think that could happen to me too, if I stay here because I had clean air and I was able to limit my exposures. But there were weeks going by where I’m like, I talked to the checkout person at Stop and Shop, and that was the only person I’ve talked to for three weeks. I voice memo people as Elliot knows, I left some podcast-level ones. I’m on Zoom. I watch TV.
And I guess the TL;DR is like, I think that we’re in a place now, where for a lot of people and in particular people who are disabled physically, chronically illness-wise, but also mental health wise. We’re in this position of like, shit, we’re being told that we can either have the community connections maybe that we can have that support our mental health and our being in a good way or we can be safe from covid. We can’t have both. And it’s a real killing fucking ass that we’re being asked to have. Sorry, that was long-winded. I hope that you can figure out a way of summarizing it. I think that it’s no surprise that some people who I shake my head at sometimes because I’m like, you should know better, why are you going to that thing. And then I was like, oh, I get it. You’re so isolated and you’re so depressed that you are taking risks that you wouldn’t have taken two years ago.
Because it feels like it’s either taking a risk that you get covid or being taken out by suicidality or isolation, right? In terms of what’s working, I would say that something that’s working for me and then I’ll go bigger, but I, out of that experience of being so physically COVID safer, but really in a dangerous place with isolation, I made a choice to move to Philly, where I have family and I’ve been visiting for a long time, and I have chosen family, because I was like it was a gamble, but I was like, there’s people here who I know who mask and the winters aren’t so bad that you can’t hang out on a porch during the winter. And there’s places where you can hang out outside. And I do see events where people are masking.
I went to BlackStar Festival last weekend, which for folks who don’t know, is a Black radical film festival and they had all of the screenings were mask required and with filtration. And they were very explicit, they were like, “We keep us safe.” And I was like, “I want to cry, thank you.” And I was like, I can go and be in a big community social hangout and not fear death as much. And I’m with other people who otherwise are pushed out. There’s just a real feeling of love and we actually have each other’s backs that is life-giving. So I want to say, like not being afraid, it might seem like, oh, we’re not talking about mental health, we’re talking about masking. But I want to say that not being afraid in community spaces to be like “mask required.” When my friend was like, it was when FLiRT was just starting to surge and they were like, “Hey, my birthday party’s outside, but can we all wear masks?” That was an act of love.
And in fact I got covid for the first real time a week or two before that and I’d been testing negative, but I’m so glad that they made that decision because I went, I had a mask on, I took it off to sip water, whatever, and then the next day I tested positive on a PCR, which turns out you can do that for months if you’re immune-suppressed. But I was like, thank fucking God we were outside and we were masked on because everyone’s going to be okay and they were. Breaking that isolation really helps. On my end, I had a circumstance recently where I had a conflict with somebody where I felt really some of the dynamics around “you’re messy, you’re asking for too much.” I felt my experience was like, wow, I feel like I’m being shamed for my crazy showing in certain ways. It was really tough. And I had two friends locally, who are both mad Black and brown femmes, and we were already just chatting about how are we dating in COVID at this moment in 2024.
And then we were like, I shared about what I was going through and they shared some of what they were going through, and there was just space to be crazy and Black and brown and femme, and it was okay. And I want to share that because I think sometimes when people are like, “What do we do?” The problem seems so huge that I think it’s natural to be like, oh, the solution has to be really huge. And then people are like, “But I can barely get off the sofa, what do you mean I have to build a peer respite and buy a building or something?” And I’m not saying that we shouldn’t build peer respites and do big projects, but I also want to say that for me what’s working is just the granular space of like, I reached out to two mad Black and brown femme friends and I was able to be like, yeah, I was able to be honest about I’m having a really hard time and I’m having suicidal ideation and it’s been a minute and I’m struggling.
And I just really needed to be witnessed and I need you to just get it. And them being like, “Yeah, we do. And you want to hang out? You want anything? You want some tea?” But also just witnessing and heart reacting, that’s what worked for me. And I just want more of that in whatever way shape or form works for folks. And I also want us to continue to build alternative structures, but I also feel really nervous about that. And I’ll stop here, because I’ve been talking for a minute, but just like sometimes when we build institutions, I worry about them getting really institutional real quick or just buckling under the weight of the need that’s out there. So it’s tricky, I think both/and. Yeah, I could always say more, but I’ll stop there.
EF: I think I want to shout out my comrades at the Detroit Peer Respite, who are working on organizing and training folks, and these are all folks who have survived institutionalization. I think as someone who survived institutionalization and solitary confinement, when February came in 2020, I actually got my safety team together and I was like, people who live alone, you need to find someone to move in with, because I have been alone for chunks of time, and it does, pardon my French, but it does fuck you up to not have access to connection or community a lot. I think I described with my friend Ryan Lee the other day. I was like, it kind of feels like coming out of the hospital after you’ve been inside for two or three months, and you’re disoriented, and you don’t have a job anymore, and you maybe don’t have a place to live anymore, and you maybe don’t have any friends anymore, you don’t know what’s happening and you just got to figure it out.
And I wish that more people listened to disabled and neurodivergent people and incarcerated people who had experienced isolation, because it is such a massive contributor to the pain that people are experiencing, and it is a huge contributor. I mean, we had the highest suicide rates on record since we started documenting in 2020, almost 50,000 people that were documented — and I want to make that very clear, that were documented. This moment requires us to actually exercise empathy. I don’t do anything extraordinary or magical or I don’t have any kind of super intensive training. I do what I do because I have been to the point where I didn’t recognize myself as human anymore. And the only thing I can do for people who are in that moment, whether that be an altered state due to emotional crisis or substance use or violence that they have experienced. The best thing we can do is remember that that is a human being, that we need to have empathy for people.
I think when Trump came in in 2016, I was so anxious, because I knew how this was going to impact our people specifically, but because we lost that sense of empathy, that sense of this is another human being. I grew up in a Buddhist family and I grew up in a family, where if you walked by someone who was houseless or sleeping rough, you gave what you had on you. And we didn’t have much. But that’s the law of abundance. That’s the law of abundance.
I think if more of us were functioning from the law of abundance, I have been poor my entire life, I’ve been crazy my entire life. I was institutionalized for six years of my life. The only reason I’m still alive is because people had empathy for me. I am going to say particularly like Lucia Leandro Gimeno. I was 15, I had just gotten out of the psych wards, and they saw me and they brought me into organizing. If you are not volunteering and you’re crazy, try and volunteer somewhere. If you have skills and you can be a Dungeon Master, go to your local game store and offer to DM for first time campaigners. If you are someone who likes to play musical instruments, invite your friends over who also play musical instruments and have a jam session. Anything you can do to connect, to find commonality and to have empathy and compassion for the people around you and also for yourself, this is critical.
End stage capitalism is crazy-making. Like Leah says, it’s maddening. And the only thing I think about how Audre Lorde said, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” What is the opposite of fascism? Joy, humor, connection, building together. And the pandemic ruptured that in a real way, but we have a responsibility to keep reaching out anyway. I have been funny-looking and disabled and gender-nonconforming my entire life. I haven’t had a year in my life since I was a very small kid where I haven’t been hate-crimed, essentially. I understand what people see when they see me in the world, and every day I say, “Hello and good day” to the people I walk by. Every day I tip my servers when I have the money to go out and eat in the first place. Every day if I can afford to buy a coffee for myself, I make sure I can get a coffee for the comrade, who I’m going to walk by, who I know is hungry or thirsty and hasn’t had it today.
I almost feel like there’s two worlds that we exist in. The world of the middle-class left and the world of the working and impoverished left. I was taught if your comrade needs a place to stay, you give them a room in your house. I was taught that if someone is hungry, you feed them, and that there will never be enough money. We don’t do this for money. But that we have an obligation or responsibility. That’s how trans people survive. That’s how immigrants survive. That is how our community survived, is love and care and compassion.
And that is what I see in things like Detroit Peer Respite. That’s what I see in these respite programs that are started by survivors of psychiatric intervention. Because we know firsthand that it’s not going to save us. So keep building, keep reaching out, go to a ceramics pottery class. Go to literally any place where you can find and access joy. That is critical. That is critical to our survival. And it’s also if you are middle class or owning class or you have wealth and you’re terrified, you have to understand that the only way we’re going to get free of this is if we take care of each other, is if we take care of each other.
I don’t know how else to do this besides if you have it, you give it. I don’t know how else to do this except for if you have the five hours to sit with someone and feed them, you sit with them and you feed them, and it will change your life as well. I think there’s this assumption that those of us who are mad or disabled, anyone who’s coming to hang out with us is taking care of us. No. We have a lot that can shift the way that we engage with one another.
The people who know how to survive are the houseless, are the people sleeping rough, are the disabled, are the kids in the psych wards and the juvenile detention centers, all 50,000 of them, side note, 50,000 minors in group homes, in juvenile detention and these horrifying spaces that the only way we protect ourselves and keep ourselves safe is to take care of each other and keep together, and sort of what you were speaking to with a lack of trust, with a broken trust, with a broken accountability that has occurred in many of our movement spaces and in our own individual lives. We cannot become bitter and jaded. We cannot become what it is that has harmed us in the first place. And I think about this a lot as someone who’s again, pushing 40 and works with young people, we have a responsibility to do better.
And so if you have it to give, give. If you have an extra car you’re not using, give. If you have a laptop sitting in your [home], give. If you have a comrade who’s not making rent this month, throw a party, give. But the only way we survive is when we see each other and we take care of each other and we practice that empathy. And what fascism means is the exact opposite of empathy and compassion and care.
KH: Elliot, I think what you’re saying about fascism is so important. There are a lot of conversations around fascism right now that are so divorced from the reality of what it takes to fight fascist movements. We are not going to defeat fascism by embracing a differently branded politics of disposability. You might fend off particular threats, through your electoral choices, and that can be important, but if we are talking about fighting fascism, that demands so much more of us. Fighting fascism means holding onto our humanity, and it means resisting the idea that some people are disposable — whether those people are deemed disposable from a place of hatred or by way of practicality. We have to hold each other in our humanity. That’s really hard right now, because people in leftist movements are exhausted and frustrated. We feel like we’re losing, on multiple fronts, and in some cases, that’s because we are losing in horrible and devastating ways. In this society, when something starts to feel like a lost cause, we are conditioned to simply cut our losses. We are told, you can’t help everyone. Unhoused people, migrants, people in prisons, people without health care, people being killed by bombs and starvation in different parts of the world — we’re basically encouraged to wash our hands of it all and live our lives. And so, sometimes, it feels like our choices are to join the sort of zombie march of consumeristic capitalist bullshit, where we act like the world isn’t on fire, or just become consumed by the pain of what’s going on. Of course, those aren’t the only options, because they can’t be our only options. Both are self-destructive as fuck. But it can sometimes feel like those are our only options, especially when we don’t have the tools or resources to function differently.
That brings me to the question of what we need to build and cultivate in these times. What do we need to create more of in order to help each other survive and stay in the fight in these difficult times?
EF: The way I was taught to organize is if you see something that needs doing, you do it. I lost my job from a nonprofit. I decided I’ll never work for a nonprofit again after 20 years of engaging in the system because I found that it was not serving my people effectively. What I did is I started something called Magic Box Monday where once a week I opened up my house for a few hours a day to QTBIPOC folks who were underemployed, unemployed, who were looking for connection and resources.
This was pre-pandemic. For a year, every Monday I would have anywhere between two to 20 low-income, disabled, queer and trans BIPOC who were hanging out together in the backyard. We supported each other in applying for food stamps. We supported each other in getting on Medicaid. We supported each other in applying for jobs. I would make a big pot of sweet potato soup off my food stamps and that would work to feed people and people would bring what they had to bring for food.
I think a lot of what we need is remembering what we do and why we do it. I didn’t come here to make money. I didn’t come here to become rich. I didn’t come here to become famous. I joined the movement because I was a very sad and lonely young person who was seeking reflections of myself, seeking validation that what happened to me was not okay, in my time in psychiatric institutionalization and being forcibly medicated. I was seeking reflections of other trans people and other mixed kids.
Even if I didn’t have the language for what I was looking for, that’s what I was looking for. If you can create a space without the goal of making money or putting it online or making it whatever, but like, what do your comrades need right now? What’s happening in your community? Do folks need a food pantry? Do folks need a clothing swap exchange so folks have the right clothes to apply for work? Do folks need a space where they can drop their kids off while they’re working on their job applications or whatever?
These are things we can do without systems. These are things we can do without necessarily infrastructure. I’m tired of waiting for the infrastructure. It isn’t coming. It is not. We can try and get all the coins in the world and I’m going to be honest. Most of those coins are going to executive directors’ pockets and not directly to the people who actually need that support right now. As someone who spent 20 years working with houseless and, sorry, I sometimes get very upset about that where it’s like so many years of my life where I was like, “All we needed was $300 to keep someone in their apartment.”
All I needed was $300 to keep someone in their apartment and if that had happened, they wouldn’t have ended up in the shelter in the fucking first place where they would’ve gotten assaulted. They wouldn’t have lost their job if I’d had $300, but I can’t get $300 unless I do a GoFundMe, even though there’s billions of dollars sitting around that’s supposedly supposed to be going to our people and to be addressing these issues.
I think this lack of accountability from the part of systems, all of them, nonprofits, the wellness-industrial complex, the medical-industrial complex, the military-industrial complex, I can keep going all day. The lack of accountability leaves us in this struggle in the first place. I have tried to unionize at almost every nonprofit I’ve ever worked at. Why is that a problem in this era when we say we’re about economic justice to have unionized nonprofits? Why?
This is something we need to be asking ourselves too. What is it that is actually going to enable people to stay alive? I’m going to tell you the reason people come to me when they are in their suicidality or the reason families come to me when they’re trying to get their family member out of institutionalization or out of a shitty situation like that is because I’m not judging anyone and I’m not telling anyone what to do. I’m understanding that we are individuals in crisis and the crisis is usually capitalism.
The crisis is usually misogyny. The crisis is usually heterosexism. The crisis is usually anti-Blackness that pushes someone over that edge and we still talk about mental health as if it is an individual experience. If you are not upset right now, then I don’t know what the fuck you’re looking at in this world. If you can’t feel what we are feeling on the ground, those of us who do rely upon state systems, those of us who need to survive, this is why I got pissed at coasties as a Midwest kid.
Coasties are like, “Well, fuck it. Let’s do this accelerationism shit.” I’m like, “Yeah, say that in Kentucky, boo. Say that in Tennessee. What are you doing to protect your people right now?” All of us have a responsibility. If you are about this work, guess what? All of us have mental health. You don’t know what’s going to happen to you tomorrow. You don’t know what’s going to happen to any of us tomorrow? You don’t know what the tipping point will be for you.
The assumption that there are a few of us who are just going to be in this situation is a personal lie I think abled people tell themselves. We have to actually invest in each other, not systems, not things that are exploiting and extracting from us, but what can we do to actually feed each other directly in your local community? Start there because this problem of like, yes, and I feel it everybody. It’s overwhelming.
Multiple genocides, climate crisis, shit is nuts, but I also try to remember shit was nuts during enslavement. Shit was nuts during colonization. Shit was nuts during every revolution. We have to remember that we have this resilience in us that has been handed down by generations and that we know what we actually need to do, which is love each other and protect each other. As long as we’re coming for each other online, as long as we’re, “Oh, I’m smarter than you because I have this degree,” or, “I read Marx,” or whatever, fuck you.
Everyone needs to decide that it is better to admit that we are wrong and to show up in community than it is to do this performative shit we do online and that we do in our collective movement spaces. We have a responsibility to remember that this is real life. These are real lives. This isn’t something that you put into a report or put into a video to make people feel good about where they spent… I lost 40 people over the pandemic and the majority of them were trans women of color, low income, sex working, houseless.
Nobody gives a fuck about them and that is even in the radical left. Even in the radical left, when I ask for help, when I say, “I have someone and they’re suicidal. I need a room for them,” I can’t get that shit, right? So, what are you actually about? What are you saying out of your mouth and what are you actually doing to show up for people right now? This isn’t about judgment. Everyone has what they have to offer. I think everybody does that differently. Some of us are artists and we make posters. Some of us are chefs and we make the soup. Some of us are the people who read to the kids, but what are you doing besides sitting in front of your computer or on your phone right now to be a part of community, and to actually be in community with the people that you say you’re with? Because I think what the internet also does is provides a sort of mask for people. I’m going to stop there because I am getting emotional.
KH: Elliot, I want to thank you for your vulnerability, and for refusing to give up in situations where our movements and so many people are not showing up the way they should. I am so grateful, and I am grateful for the challenge you’re laying down for us all, to think deeply about what we have to give, and how we can contribute to collective survival. I just really want to name and emphasize my gratitude for that intervention.
LLPS: Me too. My, do we need to build more to stay in the fight? I think we need to mix up our ideas of what the fight looks like because I think this has been something I’ve been talking about and other disability justice people I think have been talking about for a long while. There’s this very abled, often middle class idea of what the fight is, that you’re a capital-O organizer and if you’re just a regular person who likes to watch TV, you’re not doing anything.
I think it kind of goes back to something that Elliot said earlier that I really wanted to say thank you for and lift up, which is when, Elliot, you were saying a lot of people still assume if I’m hanging out with a mad or disabled person, I’m helping you. You couldn’t possibly do anything. I think that was one of the things that was so important about disability justice and mad spaces when I first found them and what continues to be important for me as years go by and things change.
It was really a feeling of like, no, we’re not clients to be served. We are people who are doing stuff. It may not be legible or comprehensible to abled, non-crazy, neurotypical people, but we’re doing stuff. We’re doing stuff with our half a spoon of energy a day or it might look really fucking weird or not be seen as real activism, but it is. I guess it’s kind of meta, not in the social media way, but you know what I mean. I think that I want people to keep unpacking what counts as the fight and to know that their “weird small thing” matters.
I want people to push back against the idea that there’s one way of doing it, which a lot of movement spaces, social justice spaces are guilty of, of like you’ve got to be in the cool kids club or you got to go to this conference or publish on this press or we all kind of know each other and nothing else exists. I think there’s a lot of shit happening all the time and it’s done by people who aren’t in touch with any capital S, capital J social justice spaces.
I think that for those of us who are in those spaces even partially we really need to keep being like, “Yeah, no, we’re not the only game in town.” We got to be learning and not fall victim of thinking that we are the orthodoxy and that we always know best because we don’t. I second everything Elliot says about make some fucking soup. Cook some chicken. Hang out. Buy a coffee, all those things. I mean the things that give me hope are the million things — I mean, not to toot my own horn or our own horn, but Crips for eSims for Gaza, which Kelly interviewed us for it back in January when it was just starting. For people who don’t know, it’s a thing that Alice Wong, Jane Shi, and me came up with, three disabled Asians in North America back in December, 2023. We were like, “Well, we can’t really go on all the marches in the whole world because we’re too disabled, but what can we do that’s a disabled, mad way of being radical Asians in the West who can support Palestinian survival in Gaza?”
We were like, “Let’s buy a shit ton of eSims for people,” which are basically electronic SIM cards. They’re things that people have used, have been using in Gaza to connect because the IOF [Israeli Occupation Forces] continually destroys the entire telecommunications and WiFi system. Mirna El Helbawi of Connecting Gaza/Connecting Humanity and her team are people that we just raise money and we give it to them and they buy a lot of eSims for people. I guess I was just thinking like, “Shit, it’s month fucking nine.”
I get weird with time, but it’s seven months straight of Crips for eSims and we’re about to have raised a million bucks. This is not a like, “Yay, we’re great.” I don’t mean it like that. I never thought disabled people all over the world would be helping replace an entire telecommunication system sort of in a fucking genocide zone, but we are and you know what? It doesn’t save everything because what would save everything is if the genocide stopped and there was WiFi towers and phones, but it does something significant.
I guess I’m just like, “Lean into that,” and something that every time we’ve been asked to speak about that initiative, we’re always like, “We’re not special, fancy disabled people who are super Crips who came up with this.” This was a crazy idea that was come up with on the heating pad and in a Google Doc where we’re like, “What the fuck could we do? Let’s try it.” I think just some throw some shit at the wall and see what sticks is really important as an organizing tool and I also think really the basics like feed each other.
Do your prep shit in your community. It doesn’t have to be $1 million. Buy some bottles of water. Buy some rice and beans. Buy some fucking masks when they’re on sale. Buy some rubbing alcohol. Talk to your neighbors. If your neighbors are assholes, talk to your friends who live in a 10 block radius. If you don’t have them, figure out how you’re going to get by on your own or where you might need to go to. That shit is important. Staying human is important.
Then, in terms of madness, I think what we need more of is I think that for people who are new to early to thinking about madness and altered states and crisis, I think there’s a lot of skills and knowledge to learn. Go read stuff that mad people have been writing and putting out there. Learn about mad mapping and try it. Make your own even if you don’t think that you’re a capital C crazy person. Practice your skills. I mean I’ve seen a lot of people.
I mean suicide has been in my life my whole life in different ways. It is going to be 10 years next year since, there was a real state of femmes in queer communities I’m a part of killing themselves in 2015. It was a really horrible thing that made a lot of us start talking about suicide and sharing suicidality resources and our own experiences with suicidality. One thing that we named then and that we’ve continued to name is a lot of times people will be like, “Oh my God, if you’re in crisis, just call me.”
The reality is so much more complicated than that because if I’m in suicidal crisis, if I don’t know that you’re really going to know a little bit what to say or not tell me, to not shame me, not tell me to just go to the hospital, not guilt trip me, then I’m not going to call you. I mean maybe I’m worried that if I’m honest with you about just how crazy I am, you might be nice, but you’re not going to hire me for work after that because you’re like, “Oh, she’s kind of had a hard time.”
TL;DR, I want people to deepen their skills around madness and peer support whether we’re old hands at this shit or whether we’re new to the rodeo. I’m just thinking about different movement examples. I remember when somatics first became a big thing 10, 15 years ago. I mean there’s a lot I could say about that, but one thing that I remember talking about with some people who are also crazy and have struggled with suicidality is we were like, “Shit, this isn’t bad.”
A lot of people are learning, going to these weekend trainings and they’re not necessarily learning about how to support somebody who’s in suicidal or other crisis. Maybe if I’m in suicidal crisis, I don’t need to feel into my shame shape right then. You need to ask me, “What do you need? Do you need Seroquel? Do you need to go to the woods? Do you need both? Who are the people you trust?” I think that kind of movement cross training and not reinventing the wheel, but really looking at what mad communities have been putting out there in all of our contradictions too, because we don’t fully agree. But learning from that is really important.
I guess I just want to underline what Elliot spoke to before, which is that for me what I believe is there’s a real, that friendly nurse practitioner who can prescribe you your pills that you know work for you, that’s very helpful. But I get really nervous with the spread of knowledge about madness and disability and the attempt to create projects that are like anti-carceral support projects that sometimes do work with psych NPs or psych RNs.
I’m not saying that’s always bad, but I worry about that crazy people ourselves will get pushed out and it will be very similar to what happened in second-wave feminism where rape crisis centers were started by people who’d survived rape. I mean this is what INCITE! formed around partially. It was that in the ’80s and ’90s we saw the professionalization where it’s like you can’t just be an incest survivor and be on the hotline. You’ve got to have an MSW, right? Otherwise, it’s not professional enough and there’s liability.
I worry about, and I’ve seen to a degree, I’ve witnessed to a degree, a similar thing happening where you can’t just be crazy. You have to be a professional crazy with a degree to offer support for crazies. Then, what gets replicated is the idea of only a professional can help with that and that’s just so fucking dangerous on so many levels. I’m not saying that anybody with experience of madness is by virtue willing or in a place to offer good support. We’re not always.
We deserve to be able to be like, “Let’s debrief what happened,” or, “Hey, I’m not sure how to support this person. What do you think?” But I don’t want us to be pushed back into clients only or only if you’re a super crazy or professional crazy, you get to talk. I think there’s real risk in that because, just to underline what Elliot said, it is in peer-to-peer spaces where so many of us find the best safety and support and we also hit walls.
I’ve talked to a lot of people in the last few years who were like, “Yeah, I was supporting. I, a crazy brown person, was supporting another crazy brown person through some real shit and I hit a limit of my capacity.” I’m not saying that doesn’t happen, but doctors hit capacity too. I mean a lot of times they don’t have it to begin with or skill, but you know what I’m trying to say? I’m not saying we’re superheroes and we can automatically fix anything, but I just want us to be crazy together and to know that our lived experience is crucial. It might not always work.
I mean, I find strength in liberatory 12 step and I really love the principle of take what you like and leave the rest that’s found in those free peer spaces that I go to. I just want us to bring some of that to our work. The TL;DR is like, I don’t want us to build things that might say on paper we are an anti-carceral peer support healing center, but it’s all degreed people with no lived experience who won’t let people with lived experience do our stuff. I want us to have some room for, we make judgment calls and a lot of time the rubber hits the road and we’re doing the best we can in a broken system.
It might not always be perfect, but it’s something if that makes sense. I want us to just keep learning from that. Okay, that’s a lot. And more peer respites, more medication exchanges, more everything, more spaces where you can call if you’re suicidal and just listen to somebody and they won’t call the cops on you, more support for that. More, what do we actually do in this tricky situation? Let’s talk about it.
And, I think, last thing, I promise. In another thing I’m going to be interviewed for, somebody asked the question about what do disabled grief practices have to teach us? I’m like, “You know, it’s both and,” because it’s not like, “Oh, we’re just so good at it and we’re fine.” I’m like, “I’m heartbroken by the amount of grief I’ve lived through.” Elliot, you named you lost 40 people and their identities during the last four years, Jesus Christ. It’s a both and of I kind of know how to do this a little bit more and it’s also really fucking hard and it’s both.
Kind of knowing that hopefully it gets better, I mean I hope that we don’t just all die in five to 10 years, or be living in fascism or the camps on a flaming planet, but that it’s not going to be like that was a rough few years and we went back to normal. It’s like we’re going to be grieving a lot for a long time. So, how do we build our movements around that rather than trying to be like, “Nope, we’re normal, nothing to see here. Let’s just keep going to meetings the way we always have,” if you know what I mean? I’ll really stop. That’s what I got.
EF: Thank you for that.
KH: We’ve talked a lot today about the fact that people are in crisis. People are struggling with alienation, despair, depression, and more. On a personal level, is there anything you would like to share with anyone who’s listening who might be in crisis today? Whether they’re struggling with what we’re up against politically, or just at their wit’s end in general, is there anything you would like to extend in their direction?
LLPS: Yeah, this is me. I was at my wits end just last week, and I want to say I might be beating you to it, Elliot, but I remember you said to me once that Ella had said to you, “Hey,” something like, and correct me if I’m misquoting, but I remember it as what you shared was that Ella had said something to you at some point, “The movement saved me, but the movement also kind of killed me. Don’t let the movement kill you.”
EF: Yeah, that was basically it.
LLPS: That’s basically it. I would say I was there and I was just like, whoa, I’m really hitting a wall and I’m really in crisis and I haven’t been in crisis like this for a minute. And I just want to say to someone who’s out there who’s really struggling, it’s like you can always hit pause and step back. I don’t care how crisis it is in the world, it’s real crisis in the world. I know that. But if it’s your life, you can always take a minute and be like, I just need to go and do the thing I need to do that doesn’t make sense to anybody. For me, it’s those moments that have come to me over and over again in my lifetime of being crazy of I need to go to the woods and scream. I know it’s not convenient, but I got to cancel everything that I can cancel and I got to go and be in the silence. I gotta go talk to the plants. I got to go be in my room with the door closed for three days.
I had a friend recently who was like, “The crazy parts of me are my guide.” And that’s really hard to tap into. And it doesn’t necessarily get easier even if you heal because you’re like, oh, they’re less of a frequent guest sometimes, not always, and we don’t get told that the crazy parts of us are strengths and guides. But a lot of times for me, the way I experienced them, it’s that thing where it’s like the oil light in the car coming on where it’s like, Yo, you got to pull over and you got to do whatever you need to do. This is mission-critical. Go do that thing. Go do that thing. Think about, is there one person in your life who it’s not going to be too much for and reach to that person. Maybe if you don’t have that person, is there a book you can go to that’s always been a friend or a vacant lot or your bathtub or whatever, go to that place and just really honor that in yourself.
Something I learned from Fireweed Collective when it used to be Icarus Project way back was when it was like, here’s our knowledge, that’s people who’ve been in crisis speaking and supporting people who are currently in crisis. People need to hear really things that might seem obvious, like you matter, your life matters. You’ve done good things, you’re going to do them again. You’re probably doing them right now. The world is not going to be served by your death. Your pain’s really fucking real and we’re not trying to sugarcoat it away, but you’re not better off dead and the world wouldn’t be better off without you. And that doesn’t mean that your pain is not super fucking real and more than a lot of people can hold, but you matter and you’re wanted and needed here. And if there’s spaces that don’t want and need and know how to love you the ways you need, that really sucks. And I’m really sorry. And I believe it’s possible to create those spaces. Yeah.
EF: I want to talk to the folks inside because I’ve been inside, especially for the kiddos inside right now, I spent, from the ages of 12 to 19, I was pretty consistently inside. I received multiple diagnoses. I was forcibly drugged and medicated into a chemical lobotomy, and I chose myself. And I know that’s a very difficult thing to do. I know what they’re telling you about yourself and what you are capable of, and I want you to know that they are liars. And once you find your people, and you will find your people because we are out here, there is a world for you. There’s a place for you. Do not believe them when they tell you that you will never be able to live on your own. They told me I’d never graduate from high school or college, and I’m going into school for my master’s to become a librarian right now.
And I might be a little bit older. I was older when I graduated from college too. I was special education. You can do anything the fuck you want to do. And if anyone tells you you cannot, you can tell them to go and kick rocks. And it’s not going to be easy and no one will believe you and people will try to intentionally drag you the fuck down, but you are worth it. My love, you are worth it. And we need you. We need people who are not trying to make a million dollars. We need people who are not trying to become this end-stage capitalism bullshit. We need you. We need your art. We need your music. We need the weird stories you write alone that you haven’t shared with anyone. We need you because that’s the only way we’re going to get free. And so if you think because you’ve been locked up or you think because you got these diagnoses or whatever that you can’t do shit, that’s a lie. Love, that is a lie.
And we are out here. We are out here. Find us. Please find us, find your people and know that this is not forever, what you are feeling. I was in foster care. I have been on over 13 medications forcibly. I’ve been in solitary confinement. There are days when it is very difficult to get out of bed. There are days when it’s really fucking hard, and I want you to know that you are worth it. If nobody else says this to you, you are worth it. Please give us what you have to give. Please share with us your creativity. Please tell your story because every time you tell your story, it’s terrifying, you know, I started telling my story when I was young and it’s terrifying.
But I want you to know I’m a crazy motherfucker. And I did a lot of drugs and I did a lot of stupid shit when I was a kid and I’m still fucking here, and you can be too, but you got to find people to do that with. Nobody can do that by themselves. Check out Fireweed, check out respite centers, check out parachute programs. Check out your local punk scene. Check out your local coffee shop at an open night. You don’t know where you’re going to find your inspiration to live. Go to a free draw night. Go to a night of Rocky Horror Picture Show at midnight.
Literally do anything that you’re a little bit interested in because you will find your people and we need you. I know it doesn’t feel like it, but we need you to stay alive because you have something really fucking awesome to offer us. And it might not look like some mainstream bullshit, but it’s necessary. I didn’t think anything, I thought I was stupid my entire fucking life because that was what I was told. But then when I told my story and I started doing the work I was doing, people let me know that it mattered.
Your art matters, your singing matters, your voice matters, your Taekwondo, whatever you’re into, keep doing that. Please, please, please. And know that this feeling is not forever. It’s real and it’s hard. And I don’t blame anyone for following that feeling. Lord, have I tried many a fucking time. Right? But we need all of our weirdos to stay alive. We need our-
LLPS: Yeah, I was going to say, stay weird. Stay the fuck weird.
EF: Stay queer, stay trans, stay neurodivergent. Stay loving whatever it is you love and do it because it will make a difference. Even if you don’t think that right now, it will. And I will tell you, I have attempted many, many fucking times. Okay. I get it. I get it when you’re in the fucking hole, and we need you.
LLPS: Yeah, I’m 50 and I’ve wanted to die a lot and so far so good not. And I’m really glad I’m here. And I really try and remember that the pain has lasted years and years of my life. And there also was something that was different.
EF: Yeah.
LLPS: And I also want to say, and it’s a hard thing to convey, but I think sometimes people are like, well look at me and be like, “Oh, you’re a success story. You wrote all those books or co-edited those books, and you did all these things.” And I’m like, “Yeah, and I’m still crazy.” And it’s hard because a lot of them won’t believe me, but I’m like, “No, I’m still crazy.” Just shout out to the fuck ups. I’m like, “I’m still a fuck-up. I’m still a fuck-up, depressed, crazy, ugly, no social capital kid who grew up.” That’s still me. I’m somebody who has more friends, community, self-esteem, love, good things going on.
But I think often there’s just this paradigm that gets internalized of like, oh, but you can make it and you can have a beautiful life. And there’s the assumption that the beautiful life is not crazy, neurotypical and kind of normie. And I’m just like, nah, that’s not it. And the times that I have tried that, I’ve gotten more suicidal. And it’s been really something. And I just want to shout out because I think Janet Mock created that term “possibility models.” [Editor’s Note: The term may have originated with actress Laverne Cox.] She was writing her own Black Hawaiian, trans life, trans feminine life where she’s like, if you don’t see what’s possible, you don’t know what’s possible. And for me, I’ve been recently like, shit, I kind of knew what 40 would be. What’s 50? What the fuck? I’m not married. I don’t have biological kids. I don’t own a house. Am I just a loser? What is it?
And then I actually have friends, a lot of really deep astrological head friends, and one of them was like, okay, Scorpio rising, your fourth house Aquarius, fourth house is the family house. They’re like, you’re going to have family, but it’s never going to be conventional. It’s going to be fucking weird. You’re an autistic crazy weirdo. You’re going to have a big family, but it’s never going to be a homonormative life partner in a house in the suburbs or condo or whatever. But that doesn’t mean that your shit’s not real. And I want to shout out, I have a dear chosen sister. We have a thing that we say, which is my life is real. And it’s very much about being all the things we are and being like our life is still fucking real. And you get to have whatever weird youth, middle age, elderhood you get to, and it gets to be fucking weird, and it gets to be real, and it gets to be, you get to make it on your own terms despite all of those motherfuckers.
EF: That’s right.
LLPS: Yeah.
EF: That’s right. And you’re not alone. I think the other thing I want to say is this is systemic. Systemic. The kids who are locked up right now, or all the people who are locked up right now, it’s not just you. It’s not like there’s something fucking wrong with you. There’s something wrong with the system that decides when someone’s suffering that we got to lock them up. And that’s not about you. That’s not about you.
KH: I really deeply appreciate all of those insights. And as someone who has also been on the inside of the carceral, so-called health care system, I really appreciate what you’re saying, Elliot. I was just tearing up a bit as you were sharing that message. And Leah, what you were saying about suicidality — as a young person, I never expected to be 43. I could not have even imagined that, for a lot of years, it just did not seem in the cards, at all. And for what it’s worth, to any young people who are listening, who cannot imagine decades more of the BS they are dealing with, I can’t tell you what life is going to be like, but like Leah, I can say that I’m glad I am here. And that whether it’s curiosity, or love for the people around you, or that project you really want to finish, or stubbornness and spite — whatever it is that makes another hour, and then another day possible, there are a lot of wonders on the other side of misery. And I take those words from my friend Ruth Wilson Gilmore, who has talked about a moment she experienced as a young girl, when she was sort of stuck in the drudgery of her school work while other people were having a good time. The late great George Kent, a family friend, watched her struggling along, and finally said that there were wonders waiting on the other side of misery. Ruthie talks about what it meant to be her, to be a young Black girl, in 1960, and to hear that promise, that there would be wonders. There aren’t a lot of assurances anyone can offer about the future, but that’s one that was true for Ruthie, and that was true for me, and that I feel comfortable laying out to anyone who might be listening. There are wonders on the other side of misery. Those wonders are worth living for. Possibility is worth living and fighting for, and so are you.
Anyway, for whatever it’s worth, I’ve been there, and I’m glad I stuck around.
EF: I’m something grateful you did too, Kelly. Thank you for sticking around. Thank you.
KH: Well, thank you both as well. I’m really, really glad that we’re in the world together. And I’m really grateful that you could join us for this episode and share all of your insight with our listeners and our readers. So thank you so much for being here today.
EF: Thank you for giving space for disabled and neurodivergent people to talk about what’s up. And I’m really grateful. I don’t know what work you had to do to get here, but I’m so grateful because the work you’re doing is going to impact a lot of people, Kelly. So thank you.
LLPS: Yeah. And I want to say, same, and just to underline that. I think that in a lot of non-crazy movement spaces, when the subject of mental health comes up, it really comes up in this very normative way of we’re going to talk about the mental health crisis and how we can help those people. So I really appreciate that you were like, no, I want to talk to those people or two of those people because there’s a lot more out there about like, hey, what’s good? What do you want us to do? What’s it like to be you? What are your insights? So thank you for that. And that it’s not coming in a place of like, let’s fix it and make you guys normal. I could really go on about how, unfortunately, not in the healing justice spaces that I fuck with, but in some spaces that talk about, that say they’re healing justice, they’re really like, “Cure your schizophrenia now.” And I’m like, “Oh God. Oh no, no, no, no. That’s not what it is.” I’ll just leave it at that. Appreciate you.
KH: I could go on and on about how important you have both been to me, and how your work has helped me and my friends do the work of collective survival. In fact, I am gonna say a lot more about that when we stop recording, but for now, I just want to express my gratitude for this conversation, and for everyone who joined us to listen today. I also want to remind our listeners that our best defense against cynicism is to do good, and to remember that the good we do matters. Until next time, I’ll see you in the streets.
Show Notes
- To learn more from Leah, you can check out their books, including Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, The Future is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes, and Mourning Songs, and Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement. You can also learn more about their work by checking out their website.
- You can learn more about Elliot’s work here.
- To hear from Kelly between episodes, you can subscribe to their newsletter.