Surely this is obvious. It’s self-evident, isn’t it?

When a kid uses profanity, this signifies exposure. Whether your little one is hearing explicit words or phrases expressed by you (their caregiver), or by other people whom you have permitted to be in the presence of your child, or through media they’ve been subjected to, the repetition of obscenities proves proximity to the airing of them, and you, as the parent, bear the responsibility for this.

I reminded myself of this fact when our daughter, Margaret, two-and-a-half years old, bellowed, “Stupid ****ing head!” while we were at the library recently. I immediately leaped up in shame and horror and bounded towards her, motivated initially by the ignominious instinct to somehow preserve my own dignity, only to recognize in that very instant that whatever decorum I was pretending to have had just been irreparably shredded, though I was somewhat relieved to find that Margaret had been uttering such vulgarities in reference to the Lego figure whose head she was struggling to rip from the body (and not towards another toddler—or her brother Helio, who is four and a half and whose natural disposition has always precluded the use of expletives, thank goodness—no credit to me, I’ll confess).

I fixed the head (the Lego head) and brought over a pile of board books and moved on with the day (as the mother of eleven children I’ve seen and heard it all, and at this point, I’m relatively immune to the opinions of others). Yet as Margaret began to peruse the books contentedly, I was transported once again, to a similar scene that unravelled seventeen years earlier, at another library, this one across the world in a small conservative backwater Baptist town in rural New Brunswick.

There, a lonely, isolated, unhappy young mother in her twenties and her grubby two-year old boy stood across the desk from the chief librarian, a woman in her fifties with a feathered bob and a pale pink twinset. She knew the unhappy young woman’s in-laws and the latest gossip and the sordid rumours, and when the little boy with the sour expression said, disagreeably (and seemingly apropos of nothing), “bullshit,” and then again, loudly, in direct response to the mother’s nudge and hissed reprimand, with real defiance this time, “BULLSHIT,” the librarian thinned her lips and closed her face like a door and looked up and said to the mother smugly, censoriously, “little pitchers have big ears.”

And she was absolutely right.

The offensiveness of profanity is rooted in the taboo, but impiety isn’t even the primary purpose of swearing, the many uses of which include reflexive emphasis, class adherence, humour, and, yes, shock. It’s interesting too that the social domains that generate the most odious forms of speech vary cross-culturally— in English, sex and the body are the primary loci, in Germanic cultures it’s the scatological, in historically Roman Catholic societies it’s the church (the Québécois tabarnac! Seems fairly innocuous to an inherently heretical WASP), and so on. But whatever the origins, there is something especially corrupt about beholding a sweet little baby cursing, whatever the specifics, (not to mention often being quite inescapably funny, precisely on account of the terrible contrast inherent in a child’s innocent deployment of corruption for the sake of simply needing to be noticed).

That little boy from long ago is about to turn eighteen (and is a very upstanding young man, for the record), and his delinquent mother was, of course, me. And even now, I can still conjure, with horrific precision, the fiery flush of shame I felt at the unalloyed disapproval of the librarian as she delivered her indictment.

“Little pitchers have big ears,” a proverb that dates to at least 1546 and surfaces in Shakespeare’s Richard III, signals the obvious fact that children absorb everything around them, especially those words and phrases that carry emphasis, intrigue, and connotation. But children also take in the atmospherics of every exchange, and in that moment, both my son and I were receiving an education.

He was learning that ours wasn’t really a respectable family, and that his behaviour, even at a young age, could be the instrument, and even the cause of his mother’s humiliation. And I was having my own wretched conclusion confirmed: That I was, indeed, a bad mother.

And I was, in many ways (as we all are, from time to time). I was also lost and lonely then, far from home, friendless, and wallowing in financial and marital desperation. My life was an absolute mess, and quite frankly, I was depressed. My husband (who was seriously ill at the time) and I frequently argued in front of our then-two-year old, who probably saw and heard inappropriate media as well, and while none of this is any sort of excuse for my emotional (and verbal) dysregulation at the time, all of this context *is* part of the confluence of factors that contributes to an innocent child being subjected to inappropriate speech.

I’ve been pondering that exchange with the librarian for almost two decades—its aftereffects and what I made it all mean. For a long time, in an extension of my shame-spiral, I hated that woman for her judgement of me, for her smarmy pink twinset, for what I perceived to be her condemnation and subtle cruelty.

But as I have grown up, and had more children, and worked increasingly as a coach to other mothers at various stages of crisis and struggle and evolution, I have not only played out in my mind what might have been a more compassionate and effective response to a mother like me, I have had the privilege of practising it.

On several occasions in more recent years, I have been the older woman bearing witness to a frazzled young mother’s embarrassment at her kid’s comportment.

And this is how I respond to that flustered, self-conscious mother when I encounter her: First, I smile warmly at her, in solidarity, because I see her, I know her, I am her, and because I know that she loves her daughter or son. Then I kneel down to the level of the child, and I say to them, directly, something along the lines of “hello sweetheart, you must be tired of shopping, is that it? I understand. I bet you’ve been helping your mum out all day long, and you’re ready to go home—and I bet your mum feels exactly the same way.” Then I turn to the mum again and I say a version of, “I just have to tell you that you’re doing wonderfully. It can be so hard sometimes, but your little one is just lovely, and everything is going to be ok.” And this is always true, and I always mean it.

In the end, I have come to cherish what the librarian taught me (and to forgive her those five little words). My life is very different now—I have many more children, I am no longer depressed, I'm (relatively, ha) emotionally stable, I have a very close circle of amazing friends, and at 45, I'm happy and confident as a woman and a mother, and I'm no longer fazed by other people's projections. I also strive to speak with clarity and discernment, from a place of internal order—and (obviously, for anyone who reads my substack) I fail continuously. There are also several things that have remained the same, over the past twenty-or-so years, including the husband (who is a pretty great guy, all things considered) and the fact that somehow I still have a toddler that swears in public. Forgive me, a sinner.

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I have made a commitment to never use this platform as a place to sell to you heavy-handedly, and I’ve mostly honoured that commitment.

But I’m going to make an exception here, because I have created something specific to writers, and I wanted to share it with you — my readers — first, before I release it to the wider public.

It’s called ATELIER — an intimate writing lab for women writers with a book, a memoir, or a body of work, that they’ve been carrying a long time and haven’t yet brought into the world.

Six women, one season, sixteen weeks beginning in September, with my direct attention, criticism, and coaxing.

The details and how to apply are here, and the invitation goes out to my wider list tomorrow. But you — Jungle Diaries readers and those of you who supported my book, PORTAL, from the beginning — are the first to know.

Apply to ATELIER here

Warmly,
Yolande

It's half the size of the former location further down on 10th, but I have to really search to find the English books, which are located at the back, past the multiple rows of shelves of more-relevant Mandarin new arrivals. The kid's section is a cramped hamster run, dominated by nauseatingly therapeutic self-esteem pablum (several copies of a book revoltingly titled "I Like Myself!" are featured at eye-level) with garish digital illustrations depicting visible minority cartoon protagonists frolicking gaily. We head straight to a shelf labeled "fairy tales," but it is dismayingly sparse. What it doescontain are several feminist butcherings of Grimm's classic stories alongside a few more original renderings of Hans Christian Andersen originals. In a state of rising intellectual anxiety, but with a sense of faint hope that maybe I've got it wrong, I actually stop one of the ashen androgynous librarians as they/them walk by, and ask her where the rest of the fairy tales are kept. She assures me that this is all they have, but my horror must be evident, because she then starts to stutteringly attempt to explain that there are certainly some fairy-tale-esque stories interspersed among the other children's books…and I feel bad, then, for putting her on the spot, heroically resisting the urge to pull her aside and ask her, clandestinely, whether she too notices the disappearance of children's literature and its replacement by denatured sludge, and why, and how, and who's in charge around here…but I know the answers so I smile apologetically and flip through the 27 remaining myths and legends, of which only a handful are worthy of any child's attention. Margaret has wandered off at this point, and Helio is watching a group of Chinese kids playing a card game, enraptured by their passionate yet inscrutable dialogue. I grab a brown version of The Three Billy Goats Gruff along with Little Red Riding Hood, and we gather our things. Later, in the golden afternoon sun, we sit in the backyard and read our books, and it turns out that what seems like a nondescript copy of the billy goats is a fantastically, hilariously written (by Mac Barnett) rendition of the quintessential story—and, on closer inspection, a beautifully illustrated one (by Jon Klassen). We howl and cheer and have a rip-roaring good time of it. Those goats, amirite?

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Which reminds me--I keep wanting to make a reel of some sort about how silly it is that everyone keeps talking about the importance of being “delusional” when following one’s dreams. I know it’s hyperbole, and I know they’re reclaiming the term to describe believing in an outcome the evidence doesn’t yet justify, and I know I probably sound legalistic here, but as someone who has spent altogether too much time around losers who really *are* delusional (that is, people who talk about wanting certain things but don’t actually do anything to acquire or develop them), it’s triggering (haha—but really). For anyone who is confused about this, having a vision for what one aspires to while, for example, waking up early every morning, going to the gym every day, and working for hours on that precise aspiration, constitutes the antithesis of delusion, fyi, and no amount of confidence is unreasonable when the effort is commensurate, circadian rhythms be darned. This brings me to the very best alarm clock I’ve ever had in my life, and that’s this one right here—its vibration is the digital equivalent of having someone grab me by the scruff of my neck and pry me almost violently from the realm of soma.

…and when I strap little Neon George to my back in the carrier and mow the lawn with the push-mower with Helio and Margaret biking back and forth on the long stretch of sidewalk under the shade of the cedar tree that now towers over the elderly hawthorn, mum comes home and nearly cries because "in forty-seven years no one has ever mowed the lawn without having to be asked" and I bask in the inarguable truth that I am indeed her favourite child, and that on this day, at least, I'm less lazy than my long-dead indolent father (though I will be forever vigilant, of course—don't get too comfortable). I even do the edges as precisely as mum taught me to, with her ancient shears, which, like all the artifacts installed in her eclectic cottage, are extensions of her and of her glorious garden and her dogged commitment to using things to the death. I can envision her now, wielding those shears—bought in 1976, she proclaims, with pride—angling them just so, adjusting them repeatedly in the way one must to finally allow the blades to cut through the turf, eliciting then the precisely icy slicing sound when they align—the payoff for all that effort. They're beautiful shears, and they're also dull and infuriating and incredibly inefficient, and there is a moment when I am on my hands and knees on the boulevard—slanting them, tilting them again just so, not yet, wait for it—that I want to smash those f****** shears so that she would have no choice but to use the new ones I would buy her, that would hold the edge and slide through the sod with ease…but I don't. Smash them, that is. But I might buy these new ones anyway, because I can, because I'm a grownup, and because even though she would be offended if I do, take it as a personal affront if I do, and judge me as frivolous and improvident, it might be worth it.

This barrage of intimidation went on for months, fire-hose style throughout the final trimester of my pregnancy before the birth of my eleventh baby, our little Neon, who was, shockingly, six months old yesterday, and whose birth story I will, finally, be sharing (here) in a few days.

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Countless people have approached me over the past half a year asking why I hadn’t yet published Neon’s birth story.

For a number of reasons, I have had to deeply consider whether I would even write about his birth publicly at all. I know I have no obligation to (please resist the urge to condescendingly write in to tell me that), but I am a writer and a memoirist, and ultimately, this is how I make sense of the world, so here I am…

Let’s call this autoethnography, shall we?

Everything has changed so much. I’ve changed so much.

I’m gearing up for it. I’m bracing for it.

I’ll do it, because I must, and I want to.

But I can’t share Neon’s story the way I might have told it five, or even three years ago, because going through the meat grinder has messed with me. It has awakened me to the cost of being visible at all — and to anonymity as the greatest privilege I didn’t know I had, before the tyranny of the screen.

That said, we’re all in this— this strange dynamic of having greater access than ever before to “authorship” in every way possible, while also being stripped of the liberty of being untethered from the brand of one’s digital identity. We have all made icons of ourselves, to some degree, and of each other, continuously.

My trolls and haters and stalkers have already crafted several versions of me out there, circulating, and any story I release will be read and then recast as either a confession or a sermon before the ink is dry.

It wasn’t a single incident (or even a single melodramatic, sensationalized podcast, but a series so I’m told) or a string of unfortunate comments— it was a saturation of the atmosphere of my entire reality. It took immense concentration and prayer to stay sane, to stay whole, but also to overcome the temptation to interpret my promoted degradation as the evidence of my ultimate righteousness or even as a kind of chosenness —the inverse of the automatic condemnation strangers would dispense.

I still feel the pull to justify, which I suppose is partly what this (article) is, though hopefully my alertness to it is antidotal, to some extent.

Does it matter that the same scaffolding that built the “baby-killer” version of me is waiting for Neon’s birth story? Or that whatever I write will be almost immediately metabolized into symbolism and mal-intent?

Does this negate the private, bodily, singular fact of our beautiful boy’s surprising, challenging arrival? No.

But it has become increasingly evident to me that I wouldn’t be able to write about the birth of my youngest (and maybe my last?) child and the struggles his arrival entailed, without at least making an effort to unravel the tangled revelations of the past couple of years, to sift through the wreckage (and the end) of my visible career in the birth-world, the partial-rubble of my professional life, the damages incurred to my personal life, and to make a bit of art out of it all, not to mention attempting to make some sense of it.

These days, thank God, I only get a handful of aggressively hateful messages a week.

To be frank, it was all a bit upsetting.

You might imagine that this sort of thing only happens to people who are especially reckless, fringe or “extreme” —as I am so often described (for suggesting that it’s possible to give birth without institutional oversight, as human beings have done since the beginning of time until very recently) but I think more than anything, my experience is an example of how quickly the Overton window is shifting, and has shifted (or maybe even lapped its course) in a number of ways/directions.

Sustained hostility is strangely clarifying.

In a way, it reveals the world, but more significantly, it revealed…me, including the insidiousness of my vanity, as fluffy and pretentious as a little gâteau millefeuille. Sigh.

One does become desensitized, eventually—even menacing harassment gets boring and repetitive after a while (a bully’s repertoire of intimidation is fairly limited, and I do think they’re mostly bots).

But when one of my obsessive fans (a real person in this case) informed me a little while ago that I’m “worse than Andrew Tate,” I was amused and intrigued. Finally, something to write home about. Most insults are just degrading, but others reveal the scaffolding of the culture that produces them, and this was too amusing to pass up.

I had only the vaguest idea, at the time, of who Andrew Tate was—I had heard the name, but I assumed he was a b-list actor or the 2025 equivalent of a backstreet boy who had fallen out of favour by letting slip some sexist statement that caused momentary outrage. (I’m forty-five years old and I have better things to do than follow the pop charts—but maturity and the fact that I have a real and busy life not to mention nine children at home notwithstanding, I couldn’t care less about celebrity in general, and never have, not the concept itself, or those who fall under that category, or, God forbid, being one.)

It turns out, though, that Andrew Tate is not a pop star, but a former kickboxing champion bazillionaire who owns an online education platform and makes shocking statements ranging from “women can’t drive!” to “the media is corrupt!” (no way!) Tate has also been formally charged separately in Romania and the UK with serious crimes including rape, human trafficking, and money laundering—terrible charges, none of which he has been convicted of.

Apart from his legal issues, however, Tate has become a mythological figure in the collective imagination—despised by many, idolized by others, and to whom is attributed the awesome, formidable powers of having created the “manosphere” and the ongoing corruption of young men everywhere. Tate is, in many ways, a mirror of the consumptive appetites of this particular stage of the fall—the fall of cultural cohesion, of the empire(s) of history itself.

Whatever comes of the allegations against him — and I won’t pretend to know his culpability (and neither do the people who quote-tweet his name like a curse or a psalm) — it has almost nothing to do with the version of Tate that actually circulates. This raises some far more uncomfortable questions than guilt or innocence (which God only knows) including: what kind of man must one be, to be simultaneously elevated, consumed, condemned, and mythologized at such a scale? More deeply, does this level of infamy really have anything to do with Tate at all, or instead, is it a reflection of our societal preoccupations?

Granted, it might seem bizarre (to some?) to suggest that offering an online natural childbirth education program in which I share my lifetime of accumulated and embodied insight into birth on the free market is somehow ‘worse’ than Tate’s aforementioned alleged misdeeds. No thinking person really believes that I am a murderess for the decisions strangers to me have made downstream of purchasing my online birth-course. But in this world of absurdity and inversion, the idea that birth is a normal biological process women have an inherent God-given right to choose to experience outside of institutional surveillance and control, or that true midwifery is by definition grassroots and independent of institutional oversight is, to some, apparently tantamount to murder.

Setting aside the fact that thousands of women have purchased and loved the programs I created with my business partner (among a predictable spectrum of responses to any body of work, the majority have been positive), I do recognize the risk of collapsing the entire issue into a dialectic of institutional control versus personal freedom, and I know that’s not the axis of truth. But at the same time, it seems like a fairly clean example of the veritable diabolical idiocracy we’re living under.

Of course, it would be natural (for some) to assume that I am exactly what they say I am. Poor little me (ha). But this isn’t an essay for those who can be easily “influenced” [eyeroll]. But hang on—it’s also not an essay written from a position of unassailable lucidity, let alone purity. Spoiler: one of the most painful things I’ve learned over the past year is how quickly I’m tempted to believe my own vapour, and to veer off into vainglory. (And yes, maybe that’s all this is, but I have bills to pay, and this is the game.)

Anyway. Given our evidently distorted cultural landscape, and curious as to how a person comes to be made into a symbolic artifact, I decided to suspend my indifference and give Andrew Tate the benefit of the doubt. So I buckled up, put on my safety vest and listened to an interview he gave with Tracy Harmoush (it’s right here on Spotify).

What I discovered—surprise surprise— wasn’t a beast at all, but a man who, despite his relentless characterization by the media and its parrots as a hateful, “toxic,” misogynistic, dangerously far-right radical, seems to be quite articulate, sensible, reasonable, open, funny, and intelligent—along with possessing an acute and relatable (to me) perceptiveness in regards to the function and machinations of disinformation and power.

He is also clearly traumatized, insecure, full of pride and ego (relatable), overly flamboyant (for some tastes) not to mention a little crude (for my taste), and, yes, somewhat bombastically sinful (the polygamist—or polygamist-adjacent—lifestyle to which he candidly admits is deeply sad to me). But apart from all that, much of what he says seems fairly logical and self-evident. In fact, I was almost startled to hear him describe having come to so many of the same conclusions I have likewise come to about group psychology and narrative control.

As far as the crimes of which he is accused, who knows? Not I, and not you. The specifics, of course, are almost beside the point. What I find more interesting is the sheer scale of moral condemnation that can be generated, amplified, and directed at a single human being, and why.

Now, this really should go without saying, but nothing ever does, so I’ll spell it out: My opinions and positions differ (drastically) from Tate’s on several significant fronts. These include (but are not limited to) our views on parenting, sexual dynamics, sexual morality, religion, and God. We also depart (unfortunately) when it comes to our levels of wealth to say the very least (despite the absurd mendacities the press has fashioned to the contrary, which is very difficult for me not to characterize, in my more cynical moments, as, among other things, the perfect foil for granting neurotically jealous women the social permission to mask their envy of me with moral outrage and to thereby justify participating in my reputational destruction).

I’ll also gladly admit that Andrew Tate and I share a few wider perspectives in common, including many of the assessments we have both arrived at about the state of the world, human behaviour, and, funnily, enough, women, in a way (which I’ll explain in detail, below). That said, I’m not his “fan” by any stretch. He’s just a loud, obnoxious, fractured man, and I am, therefore, his sister.

Overall, I appreciate Tate’s candour and his self-responsibility. It takes courage to own one’s choices (including the bad ones) and to be willing to be disliked. My suspicion, though, given what I’ve learned about media smear campaigns, is that the accusations being levelled at him aren’t necessarily reflective of the reality, depth, or texture of his real sins at all—I like to think I’ve always been fairly media savvy, but I am less likely than ever to take the media’s verdict as the truth of a man— not that I imagine I know what the truth is, and not that the fact that he has been targeted for character liquidation by one of the leading bastions of New World Order propaganda in a similar manner that I have, proves anything about him, just as it proves nothing about me to anyone reading this.

What I will say—because it’s obvious to those willing to give me even a smidgen of the benefit of the doubt—is that although I am indeed an abject sinner, what I’ve been publicly accused of is such a bizarre contortion of my work in birth, it’s still hard to apprehend.

What I was actually accused of — once you strip away the baby-killing pantomime, which no honest person believes, even from the warped tabloid reportage — is something far more ingenious, and I’ll confess a grudging admiration for its architecture.

I am, it turns out, so persuasive, so silken in my mesmerism, that the thousands of times I have said, explicitly, in writing, and within every programme I have ever made — that risk is everpresent, that death is possible in every context including the hospital, that there is no risk-free way to be born or to give birth, that to experience birth outside the system is to accept the possibility of sorrow (and social condemnation), and that I have absolutely no credentials whatsoever beyond my personal experience as a mother who has given birth to all eleven of my children at home— all of that, my detractors explain, is merely the velvet cushioning of the trap I manage to spin.

What I really mean (they can hear it, apparently, in my frequency —the “dog-whistle”) is that by my implicit commandment, every woman must birth alone in a yurt, and that all women should obey my superior ordinances, and the very fact that I have actually said precisely the opposite, carefully, repeatedly, publicly, for over twenty years is the strongest proof of how dangerous I am. My clarity is the con. My caveats are the lure.

Can you see the elegance of it? There exists no sentence I could utter that would acquit me, because the responsible sentence has been pre-designated as the very instrument of my manipulation. The circularity of it is perfect: Say the dangerous thing and you’re, well, dangerous; say the careful, concise, truthful thing and you are (I am) diabolically dangerous.

My philosophical consistency itself is the “tell.” I have been convicted, in other words, of being too good at communication— which is a strange charge to level at a writer, though I suppose also the only one that sticks.

And here, farcically, is where I find my unlikely comrade. Because the accusation that has actually done the most to annihilate Andrew Tate — more, I suspect, than the grave criminal allegations he faces, which are a different matter entirely and not mine to weigh — is the small, portable, infinitely deployable term “grifter.”

His platform is a scam. His students are marks (but also, by extension, predators). And how it works, is this: any disclaimer he offers, any “this is only my view,” becomes the patter of the swindler, the wink that proves he knows. His success is the evidence that he’s fleecing the credulous. His caveats are proof of his sophistication as a con-man.

This, structurally, is the identical apparatus that was built around me and my work — the unfalsifiable accusation, engineered so that the very evidence that should exonerate me is nonetheless entered as proof against me. Absurd.

And this reveals what the rape charges, for all their gravity do not. A culture will rouse itself to greater outrage over the suspicion that someone is making money by being persuasive and subversive than over the allegation that women were harmed. Don’t get me wrong—Harm is real when it’s real, and I would never say otherwise — but…it’s actually not always real. I know (because it was done to me) how readily the charge of “harm” to others is weaponized to legitimize the total invalidation of a person’s business, their self, their very existence.

My supposed crime was “endangering” others with my ideas, but the real offence was spreading the insurrectionary gospel of self-responsibility, and illustrating (never instructing, never telling, but embodying) the possibility of reclaiming birth outside of the system. The truly unforgivable sin within the demonic inverted matrix is offering a solution that threatens the existing power structure—and even worse, making money from it.

This, of course, speaks to the patterning, incentives, and unspoken rules of ideological and spiritual warfare, the mechanics of which are among the many things I have learned as a result of this unfortunate chronicle. I see now, profoundly, and in a way I did not, before, just how little of what we are told to believe about public figures is organic, and how much of it is engineered.

But I see myself with fresh eyes too, and the ways I have contracted into all of this—and the gifts too, of my own ritual humiliation. It’s been pretty brutal, actually. I’m not sure I would have survived had I not found the Holy Orthodox Church, or allowed the church to pour into my life.

Am I “worse than Andrew Tate”? I doubt it.

I like to think that I’m a relatively sane, intelligent person, with the capacity to both agree and disagree with another human being’s position(s) without dehumanizing them (or idolizing them) and to separate an individual’s political beliefs and public personae from their intrinsic worth (an ability that I do indeed recognize might potentially be a bit of a super-power in this era of extremism and cognitive and moral decline).

Am I “better than” Andrew Tate? Absolutely not.

Andrew Tate is repudiated and idolized and made mockery of, but we have been subjected to the same machine—his construction is merely the most prominent instance of a thing that has happened to me too, albeit (thankfully) on a far lesser scale: the replacement of a person by the rumour of a monster.

In any case, given what I’ve discovered (and what I paid for that insight in ways I wouldn’t necessarily wish on anyone…but which have offered me riches, I have to believe, beyond any of the material things I’ve lost) I’m going to tell you exactly what this past year has revealed to me about fame, power, birth, feminism, womanhood, and myself (and God—as minute my insights are of Him)—things I would never have fully understood had I not been dragged into disrepute; things I feel an obligation to reveal.

I’ll be writing about all of these in the future, but my incomplete list (in no particular order) is as follows (and if any of these themes resonate with you in particular, or if you’re interested in my expanding on anything specifically, please let me know in the comments):

This is some of what I’ve learned:

I was right about birth, and I should have shut up about it.

I was wrong about birth-work — it cannot be done in person with integrity. Not in this world.

I was wrong about women, in a specific and very expensive way I’m still reckoning with.

I have no regrets — and I would also do every single thing differently. Both are true.

Every woman who wants a homebirth “outside the system” but with someone — a doula, a traditional birth attendant, an independent midwife — beside her, “just for support” or “in case something goes wrong,” is asking for something she doesn’t know she’s asking for.

Almost no one understands self-responsibility. Far fewer want it.

Anonymity is the greatest luxury. If you are not visible, and don’t have to be, guard it.

If you have no gatekeeper and you’re willing to speak the most dangerous truths, they will come to destroy you. Not debate you. Destroy you.

I do care what people think of me.

The women who said they loved me, who most wanted to learn from me, who were most “inspired” by me, taught me the cruellest lesson of all.

People will wield Christ as a licence for their own hatred without a flicker of compunction or self-awareness.

Never, ever talk to the press. Ever.

I value my life, for my children, far more than I value the truth.

When your name is smeared, almost no one will stand up for you — not publicly, and least of all the ones with a platform of their own to protect.

What I have come to believe about how women regard one another — and themselves — is shocking, even to me.

The demonic inversion doesn’t merely happen. It is celebrated and incentivized, deliberately.

A cult does not require an eager or willing leader. Cults can be built entirely by the acolytes that form around someone who never asked to be idolized.

Coercion and control were never the real issue, or the danger. The danger is how badly people want to be coerced and controlled.

…and of history—along with the very idea of the past, it seems—being *disappeared* via the now-evidently wholesale replacement of all the well-built architectural gems with a plastic beige institutional version (I’m writing about my observations of this phenomenon, lately, in my Jungle Diaries series—the first instalment of my sub-series “The Degradation of Vancouver” is here). Husk buildings for husk people, I suppose. But the real conundrum is that Vancity is still…not just beautiful, but stunning, especially in the springtime. Everything is blooming and burgeoning riotously and there are still signs of human life amid the ongoing wreckage, which also somehow makes the felt experience of it all the more painful… Or maybe I’m just especially sentimental, which, I suppose, is what it is to be a writer.

…all I can grasp are words for things—rotary phone. Stucco. Objects had meaning then, and were tethered to time, class, memory, status, the body. She rolls her eyes, but then she makes another glorious painting and I suspect there is hope, within—knit into— my grief about it all. She and I have been going to the movies, which is something I’ve never really been interested in, and which also seems to be an anachronism these days. Not only that, we’ve now watched two horror films in Vancouver theatres, a genre I have always actively disliked and avoided. But while I found the experience of watching both Curry Barker's Obsession and Kane Parsons' Backrooms distinctly unpleasant each time, the films are also both excellent, thought-provoking, and deeply, (and truly horrifically) relevant. The latter (Backrooms) Treva and I saw last night at the soon-to-be demolished Dunbar Theatre, and I took this photograph of her standing under the marquee, next to the bulletin board with show times, alongside the development permit document alerting the public that the application for rezoning the building has been approved. She and I were two of four moviegoers for the 7pm viewing. (I’ll be talking more about Obsession and Backrooms on my upcoming podcast episode—here). (Oh! And Jay Dyer’s psycho-sexual-spiritual analysis of both Backrooms and Obsession is excellent, and well-worth listening to, whether you see these very dark films or not—here).

…on account of the visceral sense of dread and revulsion their music elicits in me, or did, when I was subjected to it by the computer programmers I found myself hanging out with in the 90s as they recompiled their Linux kernels. Now, as time is folding more and more into itself, and there is an increasingly recursive feeling to all aspects of culture — especially as a Gen Xer/Millennial born in 1981, which has always been a liminal era, a liminal generation — I feel a strange reverberating almost-affection for Boards of Canada, which, I'll concede, might be the very point of their music. It also just so happens that I recently picked up the book 20th Century Ambient, by Dusty Henry, from the library, which makes the obvious but somehow revelatory connection between some of my favourite classical composers (Satie) and Eno and 90s ambient and the Japanese "environmental" ambient music I'm increasingly listening to now.

I adore this photograph, not just because I loved my Granny (who was born in 1915 and who died just a few years ago, at age 97) but because this image of her in the late-seventies (or maybe even right when I was born in ’81) captures so evocatively her gentility and her conscientiousness, her fastidiousness and discipline, and her deeply attuned, considered, consistent style, which was always perfectly calibrated to the class and status to which she not only aspired, but fully attained in her lifetime, which may indeed have been a shallow project, but which has its own internal logic and merits, beyond economics, I do believe. She and I probably have similar measurements, and gosh I wish I had her vintage Jaeger, Aquascutum, and St. John suits, and her Ferragamo pumps. I could never pull off her soft-set hair, done weekly with the same hairdresser for aeons (my hair will not hold a curl), but I suspect I could rock a bob her now-long-lost pantsuits.

The venue was a bust, but they had a lovely selection of Waldorfy toys, including the most beautifully crafted wooden swords, with fabric shields, and even a knight’s tunic. Helio implored—and he’s *not* a child who tends towards entitlement—so I decided to splurge on an early (very early) birthday present, and I bought both Helio and Margaret their own well-balanced broadswords, which they’ve been wielding in passionate duels in the backyard ever since. On a recent video call to dad and their older siblings back in Central America, Horus (almost 18) got on the call and gave a rare beaming smile when his two little siblings brandished their swords proudly, and promised to fight them mercilessly when we get there. The swords are made by a company called Kalid Medieval, based, I believe, in Spain.

The day is glorious—full saturation—and we set up camp with all our luggage next to the dog park enclosure outside the arrivals gate. After eating the stale airline pretzels and granola bar remnants found in the churn of my carry-on, Helio and Margaret go to work establishing a rock gallery and retail store, organizing the handfuls of smooth quartz pebbles fetched from the perimeter landscaping (Mum, are these stones actually FREE?) in neat rows on the pavement, selling them back to me for imaginary pennies while I rotate between bouncing Neon on my knees and walking back and forth across the grey concrete.

We read stories, we sing songs. When Margaret announces she has to pee, I wisely, for once, decide not to take her out behind a bush near the shuttle area, so we trudge back across the multiple lanes of cabs and rideshare cars snaking slowly by, scanning for their pickups, and back into arrivals to use the bathroom. That alone, eats up 45 minutes.

In the midst of it all, Treva sits on the far bench, imperious, impervious, headphones on, implicitly refuting any affiliation with the gong-show that is her bedraggled mother and baby siblings. But when I ask her to take Helio for a little walk down to the garbage can to get rid of some of our litter, she gets up willingly, smiles, and takes her brother’s hand. And still, we wait.

I’m prepared for all this—I’ve done the work, I’ve healed. Time to prove it. Patience builds character, being last on the playground every afternoon throughout elementary school gave me space and creative expansion—a sense of independence.

My mother doesn’t pay for parking, on principle. She was born here—it would be beneath her to capitulate to this nonsense, and surely, someday (she seems to believe), her personal rebellions will catalyze bureaucratic awakening. Just breathe. None of this is personal. I could have taken an uber, of course, and accepted her offendedness, but I’m the one who wanted to save a hundred dollars, so be grateful.

When Mum finally rolls up just as everyone is on the verge of complete breakdown, I smile graciously, shaking off the road dust and residue of childhood trauma and resentment. Mum! You made it. Thanks for coming to pick us up. She purses her lips, masking her concern that I’ll be outraged, with her own preemptive indignation.

Then I look at her—an old woman, I suppose—weathered and furrowed and hardened and soft, and so beautiful, and so very my mother. I give her a hug. Hi Mum. Her eyes are bright and glossy.

As I suspect, we and our copious number of suitcases won’t all fit in her car, so it’s determined that Mum will drive Treva, Margaret, and Neon, and Helio and I will take the skytrain into the city, and then bus home. Helio gasps, delighted at the news.

Our curious four-year old has never been on an above-ground train before, and I haven’t ridden Vancouver public transit in ages, and neither of us have gone on many trips just the two of us. We hold hands up the escalator and onto the concourse, merging with the sea of other travellers, then settle into our seats, and we’re off, moving through the industrial fringes of the runways, surging over the northerly arm of the Fraser river, plunging underground after Bridgeport, into Vancouver, coming up for air in a dense landscape of office-beige condos, which I believe to be Oak street only on account of what the robotic voice over the PA announces as the next stop. All the while, Helio talks my ear off—Spiderman, the dogs back home, battling Iggy with swords, Father T., God. The usual.

We disembark on Broadway and Cambie and catch the b-line. Helio settles on the elevated seats in the seam and I point out all the remaining landmarks, along with the conspicuous absences—no more Sushi Boy (it was a hole in the wall, sure, but a precious one), South Granville seems faded and dishevelled, but ah, look, there’s Tanglewood books, still kicking, though Carson’s is long gone.

We pass that section of Broadway that served the twenty-four hour crowd—students working on term papers well into dawn, where I too dallied following my lectures out at UBC— and the post-bar carousers. We all converged at Calhouns then, which is now, it seems, from my fleeting glimpse through the filthy windows of the bus, an empty curry-house. To my shock, the Fringe Cafe persists, despite looking a bit lost and forlorn—grungier than ever.

In 1996, though, it was the height of lackadaisical cool, and my chosen spot at sixteen for drinking and writing but mostly for posturing as an artiste —practising practising. I did well playing that part, though ultimately my impetus was to make him love me, the young flâneur, my tutor, the smoker of Belmonts, who hung out there on the weekends, hanging, as Destroyer has it, like a willow off the arm of yet another visionary prophetess east van punk*.

He was indifferent to me then, and when, years later, there was a moment of electricity from across the internet, I was already a mother and a wife (and a kind of prophetess, for a moment, anyway), married to the man of my dreams—whose brown eyes and sweet smile are mirrored in our Helio’s face, eager, now, to ring the bell at Trimble.

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This was the post (see it on instagram here).

I tell my children all the time that

they’re not special.

*

One of the conclusions I’ve come to

over the years is that

absolutely no one is special,

and that the vast majority of labels

we apply to ourselves

we do so out of vanity and insecurity.

*

Maybe the greatest handicap in this world

is the delusional belief in one’s own exceptionality.

*

I’m a “creative” (yes yes—we all are).
I’m “neurodivergent” (yes yes—we all are).
I’m an “empath” (yes yes—we all are).

*

The only thing that makes anyone “special”

is effort, courage, and consistency—

and these aren’t special either,

they’re just rare.

*

I tell my children all the time that

they’re not special,

but even more often I tell them

I love them beyond the pale,

past the fringes of this world,

into the outer realms and onward,

and that I cherish them

more than words could ever express.

*

And as much as possible,

I strive to model effort, courage, and consistency.

I teach mothers to do the same, in mind, body, and psyche.

By “special,” of course, I meant the contemporary usage — the identity-label, protected-category, I-am-uniquely-exceptional sense of the term. The kind of “specialness” that has become a substitute for the actual work of becoming a full human being outside of an identity label, a talent or aptitude, or inclusion in a protected group or category of supposed extraordinariness (whether positive or negative).

And by the way, I should know—I was one of a small handful of students in 1991 (or thereabouts) among the very first in the pilot GATE program in Vancouver, BC. GATE, for those who aren’t aware, stands for ‘Gifted and Talented Education’ — a globalist project designed to identify the kids of a preeminent intellectual class and to ensure they were educated as such.

After having been thoroughly vetted via IQ testing, the reward was being pulled out of regular programming to attend “enrichment” sessions that involved more IQ tests and the opportunity to work on project-based learning. I already felt like an oddity at that point given my background in piano performance (I started formal piano lessons at age three and regularly played in piano competitions and festivals), and all of this, naturally, created an inner maelstrom of pressure, ego, workaholism, expectation, dread, and ongoing existential terror, which I will be healing from for the rest of my life. It was loathsome and traumatizing and I hated it.

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No one is special. Human beings are designed by God to be wonderful and intelligent and completely unique, of course. And of course it goes without saying (doesn’t it? Yes, it does, unless one is devoted to villainizing me—sigh) that everyone is unique and that I adore my children, and I express this to them all the time.

But they’re not special. They’re not special in their brilliance—even though, granted, most people’s radiance and intelligence are indeed restricted via trauma and conditioning—and perhaps most importantly, they are not special in their capacity for sin, failure, wrongdoing, or wretchedness.

And that last part, for kids who were raised believing they are exceptional, can be the rudest awakening (to which I can attest). When one’s entire identity has been built on the belief that one is truly phenomenally anomalous in one’s “giftedness,” and that everything feels easy (for a time) on account of one’s “specialness,” it’s not just shocking, but terrifying to have to confront life’s inevitable failures.

The public reaction to my post was revealing in a number of ways. The most prominent group among those who disagreed were the gleeful haters — those committed to interpreting the post (and me) in the very worst light. A pretty hefty handful came striding in to tell me what a terrible mother I am, that I’m abusive, that telling my children they aren’t special is “poisonous” (as one woman put it), and that my children are doomed to wallow in profound trauma and insecurity.

One delightful individual wrote in to say, “I suppose when you have eleven kids none can be special. I can’t imagine how saying that out loud serves them positively though” — which made me wonder what measure of contorted hardship she must have endured to have developed such a casual facility for cruelty and bad faith toward another mother—a stranger, no less. Whether or not she really believes that having a large family dilutes love and engenders a scarcity of affection, or if she’s just trying to be mean, either way, her own bankrupt morality is nakedly exposed.

Then we had the neurodivergent-empath-creatives, who came running in to champion all those terms — again, with absolutely no sense of awareness whatsoever that their vociferous defense of such badges of honour is itself exposing the very phenomenon my post was naming. (The attachment to the term “neurodivergent” is positively neurotic. The word sounds clinical, but it isn’t. There is no scan, no biomarker, no objective measure of a “divergent” brain — only behaviour, and the person describing it, which means the category is self-reported, self-applied, and self-confirming. By that [non]-standard, everyone is neurodivergent. Which is another way of saying no one is.)

Many women, however, agreed with what I expressed in the post (including another fellow GATE survivor), along with someone who wrote “as a counsellor working with children, this is…the foundation for everything else” (and the psychotherapists in my immediate family also agree).

Some of the most interesting responses, however, were the theological ones—both for and against—which brought into sharp relief the distinctions between Protestant and Orthodox worldviews.

One woman wrote:

“[T]here’s nothing wrong with calling your kids special. We were all fearfully knit in our mother’s womb, and there is not one person to have existed exactly made like another. That Gods design, we are all unique! Also, why wouldn’t you want them to feel that they are your calling, your mission or purpose to raise them! They are not some other parents kids to raise, they belong to you as their mom, so that makes them special! Why would it be wrong to remind of that?! Also, other kids are special as well. Not better, but equally special. If it makes YOU feel better, then you go right ahead, you do you. …Christianity does not teach us to believe anyone is superior to another, but it does say we are His unique handiwork, and He prides Himself in us as His prized creation. I get the sense this perspective has to do with your lens of Orthodox Christianity...I am not an orthodox Christian so I suspect that is why I don’t agree. Which is fine. But, the self righteous attitude or sarcasm here is just not necessary—Not very Christ-like in my opinion...Also, your statement about ‘effort, courage and consistency’ is not biblical. The fact that these behavioral traits may or may not be rare is irrelevant. Being unique in God’s eyes is an inherent quality. There is no way you can ever earn your ‘specialness’ to God via your behavior. What a religious ‘Pharisee’ mentality. That completely undermines the work Jesus did on the cross for us. That is why this post was so bothersome to me. Because it is unbiblical and not God’s true perspective according to the gospel.”

In a general sense, on the surface of it, this comment expresses the same commitment to viewing my post negatively that so many of the other commenters displayed, because, of course what I wrote never denies or discounts the uniqueness of every individual at all, nor do I suggest that I don’t see motherhood as a sacred vocation (I do), or that I don’t adore my children and let them know that (which I state explicitly). Furthermore, “equally special” is, obviously, another way of reiterating my point. And this person seems to miss that what I’m really getting at is a commentary on the self-absorption inherent in believing our children are out of the ordinary in their singularity, which so often becomes an inherited narcissism.

But when I considered this person’s objections more thoroughly, what I found was a profoundly Protestant argument, framed as “biblical” in a generic, universal sense, with no recognition at all that she is in fact articulating a very specific theological—and un-Orthodox—framework.

Her disagreement with my post isn’t really about whether or not people are unique, or beloved, or even the appropriateness (or not) of using the word “special” towards a child. The dispute here, is about the nature of salvation, the nature of the human being, the meaning of grace, and the relationship between divine love and human effort—and in a way, this is exactly what my original post is speaking to.

I’m no theologian, and I don’t really care about apologetics, because the faith I’ve found in Orthodoxy makes mystical and poetic sense to me in a way that cannot be argued or proven or categorized at all, and so it is somewhat disingenuous for me to wade in here—but given the invitation, I’ll oblige: While I appreciate this person naming the distinctiveness of our worldviews, her subtle dismissal of Orthodoxy as a ‘lens’ comes with no acknowledgement whatsoever that her own interpretation of Christianity reflects a contemporary doctrine — one that emerged from the Reformation and has become the unexamined background assumption of most Western Christianity in the English-speaking world.

When she writes “There is no way you can ever earn your ‘specialness’ to God via your behavior. What a religious ‘Pharisee’ mentality. That completely undermines the work Jesus did on the cross for us,” this is a direct distillation of the sola fide framework of Protestantism—the idea that justification is by faith alone. As is the case for so many Protestants, this woman has been triggered by my mention (in a post which, it must be said, is in no way intending to be overtly “biblical” at all) of effort, virtue, and work in connection with our personhood and has immediately flagged this as somehow “pharisaical,” which, ironically, is pretty judgemental and self-righteous. For a self-described Christian, that is.

In contrast, salvation, according to the Orthodox Church is found within Synergeia—a word that denotes the synergistic cooperation of divine grace with human will. (This is a concept, incidentally, that I attempted to describe in my book PORTAL, which I wrote before I became an Orthodox catechumen. I can now humbly recognize that most of the ideas in PORTAL were rendered in the new-age language I was accustomed to, to describe concepts that I was reaching into Orthodoxy to access—and that its creation was the precursor to my eventual arrival in the church.)

So what, you might ask, is synergeia?

Synergeia is the Orthodox understanding that we are saved neither by grace alone nor by our own efforts alone, but by the harmonious interaction of both. Grace is offered by God, freely and abundantly, and we respond—or we don’t. How we respond is the invitation and challenge. Nothing about this is transactional (no, we don’t “earn” anything from God). Instead, we engage our free will to step towards what has already been given—true freedom through obedience, and the joy that is ever-present therein.

This, according to my admittedly limited experience and understanding as a newly illumined Orthodox Christian, is a significant part of the structure of Orthodox spiritual life. We fast, we pray, we confess, we struggle against our passions, we perform acts of mercy, and we do these things simply because discipline and praxis (the embodied practice) are the stuff of transformation, and the path to theosis—the seeking of union with God.

And this is what I hope for myself and for my kids—which is also what I failed to articulate in my original post. Yes, effort, courage, and consistency are rare — but they are not ends in themselves, they are the vehicles through which we bring forth faith, compassion, and love, for God and each other.

When I tell my children that they are not special (which, for the record, I don’t actually make a habit of stating literally, but which I say indirectly in my posture and my counsel—something I also assumed was obvious but fear is not), I am not stripping them of dignity, or (God forbid) withholding love, but rather refusing to participate in the spiritual delusion that they have somehow *arrived* simply by virtue of existing, or that they are entitled to concessions based on their self-concept, or that the abstracted notion of having been “saved” precludes continuous striving and repentance.

Yes, we are eternally loved and accepted by God, without condition. And—and—the fullness of faith is participatory and collaborative. This is the same paradox to which my original post alluded.

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St. Paisios, one of the most beloved contemporary Orthodox saints —whose teachings on family life reflect my own thoughts on parenting, and whose loving encouragement to mothers I have personally benefitted from — is unsparing when it comes to protecting children from the perils of ego-identification. In Spiritual Counsels Volume IV: Family Life, St. Paisios returns again and again to the same warning: the parent who inflates the child’s sense of importance, who builds the child’s identity on her own giftedness, is, paradoxically, suppressing that child’s optimal development, and (I believe) her creative potential, albeit with the best of intentions.

When I wrote in my original post that “the delusional sense of one’s own exceptionality” is a handicap, I mean that quite distinctly. Contrary to several of my detractors who indicated that self-doubt and unworthiness arise from being told one is not ‘special,’ I genuinely think it’s the opposite. The all-too-prevalent parenting trends of over-validation and continuous praise have produced—in large part—exactly the phenomenon we now see so frequently among young people: rising displays of collective and individual narcissism emblematic of our current culture of artificiality and degradation.

This does not mean I am encouraging mothers to belittle their kids—quite the contrary. I want my children to know that while they are not “special” over and above anyone else, they are uniquely precious in my eyes and in the eyes of God, as we all are. Achievement is part of life, but it’s something to hold lightly. Developing discernment and compassion—and the goodness they produce—is the constant, humble, unglamorous practice of becoming, for all of us.

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Yolande Norris-Clark is a wife, mother of eleven, writer, and embodiment teacher, working with women in the realms of parenting, birth, and healing. The conversation continues in THE SOURCE, her private membership for women mothering against the grain. Her workshops on raising toddlers and teenagers are available [here]. Get her VITAL fitness & perimenopause masterclass here. 1:1 mentorship is available by application — details [here].

There you are, Vancouver. I’d recognize you anywhere.

Beauteous Burrard inlet, the gemstone that is Stanley Park, that unequivocal profile of yours. I feel a trill of affection intermingling with dread. I’m home. God help me.

On Treva and Helio’s side of the aisle is the Fraser river delta (look, Helio—that’s the river where your great-grandpa fished for salmon in the 1930s) and its patchwork quilt of farmland—the most fecund on this planet?—coming to an abrupt stop at a cluster of aggressively erect diamantine shards of glass, slicing into the sky.

I’m confused for a moment, then I realize this is nouveau-Richmond, an agrarian-suburban backwater no longer. China put a ring on it and there’s no going back. Welcome to the family. The captain announces our impending landing and everyone starts to fidget, except Margaret, who, after several obtrusive berserker-esque protestations at the beginning of our two-hour long flight from Denver is passed out beside me. Neon, too, is dozing on my chest.

Apart from a couple of Margaret’s bombastic meltdowns (which I navigate with queenly equanimity and grace, obviously—all while carrying little Neon on my back, Helio’s sweaty little palm in-hand, and Treva’s studied indifference and not-so-subtly contemptuous eye-rolling in my peripheral view) our entire journey from the midwest to Vancity is an unexpected joy. Especially given the state of the world and my personal travel traumas and the fact that we’re apparently in the midst of a war and on the cusp of another breakdown lockdown Santa’s coming outbreak or whatever the heck, it’s almost shocking to be sailing through security and customs and layovers with a minimum of drama and a maximum of kindness from strangers (a beautifully groomed elderly gentleman tugs at the oversized Oxford broadcloth shirt I’m wearing as a jacket as I pass him in business class on our way to our seats in the bowels of the plane and says “You’re amazing,” and I almost stop to ask him if he’s my daddy or my husband—Lee, if you’re reading this... [he’s not] you’re the best—or to tell him he doesn’t know the half of my heroism and that these are just four out of eleven kids…but I resist all temptations and smile serenely.)

We leave the midwest in an absolute tizzy— I know I’ve ended up packing about three suitcases of books too many and I’ll probably have to ship them ahead of us wherever we end up next. Instead of cleaning and packing with proper consideration, I allow myself to be coerced into taking a horde of Orthodox Christian teenagers to the roller rink the night before we fly out, but it’s worth it to witness them fall in love with themselves and with each other amidst the rhinestoned crowd bouncing to JB grooves and hiphop. Our Felix is a natural, which is unsurprising in some ways, but I’m still baffled by the extent of it.

Over the course of three hours I watch him instinctively absorb the pulse bounce stride roll shuffle like a newborn animal melding into destiny, and by the end of the evening he’s doing low roll dips and decent toe-heel spins—who is this kid? Lee’s son, evidently.

We’ll only be apart for a couple of weeks in all likelihood, but when Xanthe, on Saturday night, wakes from a terror dream and comes into our room, sobbing “I need you mum, I need you,” I hold her gangly coltish overgrown body in my arms like a baby and tangle my hands into her Shirley Temple curls, and tell her that I need her too, and I do. I really do. We cry together for a little while, before falling back asleep, sardined on my side of the bed while Lee snores, happily oblivious.

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The Irises have bloomed at church and all across town, and the finch fledglings in the broken glass light fixture on the verandah are beating their wings in anticipation of taking flight. There are young rabbits everywhere, hopping audaciously about the city in broad daylight, indifferent, it seems, to the fact that they are, technically, prey. This is bewildering and curious for a number of reasons, including the fact that the brazen bunnies at large underscore the shortage of dogs here—stray and otherwise—in this lovely place we hope one day to call home, for real.

Come to think of it, I’ve never seen so few dogs out and about. In Vancouver, my hometown, people are obsessed with dogs, but in a particularly warped, infantilizing way, and their ubiquity is underscored by the pathological intensity of their domestication. Vancity dogs are neurotically restrained, repressed, and often subdued with the canine equivalent of Adderall. It’s quite disorienting, especially as an avowed child-mother (as opposed to the dog kind).

In our beloved Nicaragua, the birthplace of two of our younger children, the dogs roam entirely unfettered. They loiter, and sleep, and trot about in the thick of it all. Despite their service—security, mostly—they’re also a menace, barking uproariously and copiously, and defecating and copulating (often) in the midst of intersections—undeterred by car horns or jeers of disgust.

Overall, however, Nica street dogs tend to get along very well with each other, and with the chickens, horses, children, pigs, and herds of cattle with whom they share free rein of the highway shoulders and backroads and city streets. It’s a rarity to see a dog on a leash in San Juan, and a bite from a frustrated, dysregulated dog is probably far less common there than in Vancouver, where every effort is made to engineer a rigid sanitization and suppression of instinct in all species.

Our own motley pack of dogs are safely back in the tropics, awaiting our return, but every time I see an overly confident rabbit, the image arises, unbidden, of Lucy, our devoted Doberman, bloodied, panting, eyes glittering with feral innocent joy, ripping at the seams of her quarry after a chase through the long grass. Lucy is not an urban pet.

I have no desire to harm a rabbit, but I could dispatch one if I had to. I am—perhaps hysterically—deeply comforted by the knowledge that if the fan were hit, our boys would have no trouble setting out on a hunt through the inner city, armed with slingshots and hammers, fully equipped to keep the family alive.

We’re not quite there yet, but Felix, thirteen, did take the initiative and applied for a volunteer position at the church farm, weeding the vegetable beds. He was so excited on his first day that he fluffed the time and showed up an hour and a half early—eager, voracious for manhood.

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One of the ideas that has emerged among some of the meta-analyses of Adult Braces, is that West, one of the most prominent standard-bearers of the body-positivity movement—a woman who, by many accounts, built much of her career on defiant fat-acceptance—describes in the book feeling (apparently) ambivalent, and deeply insecure (not to mention occasionally miserable) in her body, even while championing radical self-love, and she’s fairly open about her equivocation.

The dominant reading of these confessions is sympathetic and predictable: see how damaging fat-phobia really is? Even West, a valiant crusader for fat liberation, has succumbed to the corrosive projection of cultural shame, and she’s being so honest about it, how refreshing. Maybe. I guess. But also maybe there’s a lot more to this that warrants interrogation.

I should state here for the record, that I don’t believe Lindy West—or any public figure, or anyone, for that matter—has any obligation to the masses. No writer or cultural commentator owes complete strangers a consistent ideological or political position, and I find the assumption that celebrities should display unwavering fidelity to a particular idea, nauseatingly entitled.

All that to say that this article is not about West’s “betrayal of a movement” as I’ve seen some suggest—I couldn’t care less about that, because I’m a reasonable person. Everyone is a mess, no one is fully coherent, maybe her book is terrible (maybe not), leave Lindy West alone. We’re allowed to change our minds, we’re allowed to be wrong, we’re allowed to be delusional, even. (And, of course, the wronger, more delusional, more unhinged a person is, publicly, the better the book sales. So also, congrats Lindy, for all the hullaballoo, here’s some more of it).

You may be wondering, at this point, what business a skinny monogamous forty-something pro-patriarchy Ortho-mum has in dissecting a polyamorous fat-positive third-wave feminist’s bestseller (un-read, no less)—and I suppose the official answer to that is the same business everyone else has. Or maybe you’re prepping yourself at this very moment for my impending moralizing tirade against sexual degeneracy and the various other transgressions West publicly celebrates. In that case, buckle up for what I can promise will be maybe a smidgen of the aforementioned…but in broad sociological strokes only—far be it from me to judge Lindy West personally, but as always, I am deeply interested in judging cultural phenomena.

I come from the left, actually, and I myself am a practised sinner. I’ve also been fat (briefly, and not colossally, but I got a taste of it) so no condemnation there, and, like almost every other woman I have ever encountered in my life, I too have struggled with image, deprivation, nourishment (on every level) and my own embodiment, generally. Most significantly, I am deeply interested in how the body, womanhood, sin, morality, and the idea of salvation are viewed in our broken world, and these are precisely the issues this larger conversation around Adult Braces has dredged up—for good reason.

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On one hand, we’re in the midst of a macabre real-life episode of the walking-dead, with celebrities making appearances tottering around on chicken legs like zombified wax-mannequin simulacra of their former selves, gaunt and shrivelled by their GLP-1 injections, and on the other hand, we’ve got a woman who was, I am given to understand, among the most vocal in her generation about fat-acceptance and instrumental in architecting the anti-diet movement—revealing that she was privately miserable in her body the whole time.

And, I mean…of course she was. Are we meant to feign surprise here? I can’t imagine that there’s anyone out there who was fat once, and then became *not-fat* who doesn’t already know, that, obviously, West didn’t really adore her curves. I’d hazard a guess that few obese people do.

In the most basic, material sense, fatness is… heavy. It’s hard on the body, and creates literal and logistical pain and friction (among other detriments).

West’s revelation about her self-esteem isn’t much of a revelation at all, in a similar way that the book’s other major cringe-worthy disclosure is utterly predictable—that she was repeatedly cheated on by a man (her husband) who, when his philandering was discovered, refashioned his infidelity as “openness” then coerced her into reluctantly accepting this as a polyamorous lifestyle (and the sharing of said husband with a not-fat other woman). Except that instead of owning the humiliation that acquiescing to become a woke sister wife inescapably is, West launders her artistic husband’s slim-curious infidelity1 into a growth and empowerment narrative to bypass her cognitive dissonance and shame. (Again, I haven’t read the book, but this seems to be the gist of it, forgive me if I have it wrong. I’m almost sure I don’t.)

I am not so much interested in litigating the sordid details West has made public about her marriage, but I do want to discuss the arc of this familiar relationship trajectory because it’s a precise mirror of the stunt the body-positivity movement asks its adherents to perform (and there is an unsurprising intersection between fat-positive folks and polyamorists, naturally). Both cognitive contortions are a kind of re-branding of the most painful versions of compromise—self-betrayal—as liberation.

Both take some of the deepest wounds—the wound of not wanting this body (which excess both illustrates and perpetuates) and the wound of not being wanted, and recast them as simple matters of perspective. The unifying principle, in West’s case, seems to be the casual reversal of what’s true: the personal truths she admits to sidestepping, and the broader truths the entire woke identity apparatus was built to deny, all of which are buttressed by a kind of ontological nihilism; a sleight-of-hand that presents newspeak as salvific.

Denial works well as a self-soothing mechanism, sure, but it’s costly and deceptive. When you accept the fat and call it “self-love,” does the fat, therefore, cease to be a problem? Not really, no. In reality, it remains just as burdensome, as West herself acknowledges. When you just accept your husband’s adultery and call it “relationship expansion”, does it really cease to be a problem? No. The husband stays selfish and callous, and being spurned still hurts. The only change occurs within the woman, who, by gaslighting herself into compliance, silences the very instinct that is in service to her self-protection, contorting herself into policing her own grief, and convincing herself this is what she really wanted all along.

Magical thinking and willful blindness aren’t restricted to a specific demographic, of course, but I do find this pattern especially fascinating among liberal leftist women. West is a prominent self-proclaimed feminist, and, oddly, this is her most congruent position. Because the foundational principles of feminism include framing one’s willing surrender to ritual humiliations (namely those involving men) of the kind West is embracing as emancipatory, while simultaneously playing the victim. And yet, like most progressives, West can’t seem to access just how impressively submissive her posture or internal contortions are, or how fundamentalist her ritual of self-erasure and abasement seems to be—she is far more deferential to her husband than any of the conservative Christian women I know (who would never allow themselves to be so demeaned).

What popular culture has labelled “internalized shame,” is a concept that has been re-cast, ironically, as something to be ashamed of, to the extent that we are encouraged, via the dominant narrative, to circumvent it altogether. This is unfortunate. Because what the clang of cognitive dissonance is pointing to, and what shame reveals—what West herself, quite tragically reveals, with no self-awareness, as yet—is the voice of one’s conscience.

In the Orthodox tradition, the conscience is the internal dialogue of our rightful, God-connected identity, representing our most faithful, authentic spiritual instincts. The conscience will always be in opposition to our baser tendencies towards pride and vainglory.

The patristic term for the conscience is the “adversary”—the part of our soul that objects to the ego’s urge to protect itself. This is precisely why the Orthodox view stands in contrast to the body-positivity framework entirely. The wellness and self-help industries tell us that discomfort is simply the projection of cultural disapproval, and that the palliative satisfaction of a delusional form of “radical self-love” is the highest triumph.

The problem is that this is a lie. It’s spiritually bereft, and it’s the antithesis of what Christ taught, which was radical self-responsibility. But the point isn’t to hate ourselves for being fat or for our complicity in a dysfunctional, morally bankrupt marriage. The point is to see ourselves clearly — and to learn to love God to the extent that we can come to love ourselves as God’s creation, enough to repent and turn, in rightful submission, toward the good, the true, and the beautiful. This is the enigma: the truth is the path to real love.

And this, I suspect, is what Adult Braces is unwittingly documenting. Not the wages of fat-phobia, not the wages of an unkind culture, or the wages of the puritanism West triumphantly overcomes by leaning into polyamory, but the wages of, well, sin, which, within Orthodoxy, is simply seen as missing the mark, or ignoring the spark of our conscience (as sixth century monk St. Dorotheos of Gaza2 described it). Lindy West’s book is, it seems, the tragic chronicle of a woman who assiduously documents the spinning of her own internal compass as she reprises her orbit, all while laboriously attempting to convince herself and the rest of the world that she has never been more oriented.

West is not alone—we all do this in various ways, some clandestine, and some that are evident to everyone but ourselves. But the body God has crafted and entrusted to each of us never lies, nor does the soul. And no amount of empowerment rhetoric—no slogan, no creed, no inclusivity clause—can mask the truth of it.

***

I wrote a book about birth, choice, power, and embodiment, which also happens to be a memoir of the experiences that led to my eventual conversion to Orthodox Christianity. You can get it here.

Also, I teach the craft of coming home to the body in coherence with our conscience as active praxis. The program is called TEMPLE, and you can find out about it here.

I also have an introductory blueprint, here, if you’re looking for the roadmap to begin.

Subscribe below if you want more of this kind of cultural critique.

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He is, by temperament, a placid baby. I’m grateful that he seems to be taking his time to roll over, to grow up, but it’s right over yonder, I know. Heavy in my arms now, he blinks and drools and bobbles his head just a little bit, quiescent with curiosity as he surveys our urban street with his lambent eyes, meltwater blue.

The birds are everywhere. Black-capped chickadees in the bushes, an American Robin pulling worms up from the grass, a plague of grackles hopping around our neighbour’s low-peaked roof, clattering and whistling flamboyantly. (They say our midwest city is one of the most significant avian migratory corridors on the planet. We’re on the lookout for warblers, sparrows, hummingbirds, and indigo buntings.) Neon tracks the sky intently, following the threads of melody and dissonance.

A dog barks and he cocks his head. I kiss his soft white cheek, then, awkwardly, with one hand, I lay the blanket down on the lawn.

We sit there together, Neon and I, lulled by the shimmering leaves in the burgeoning trees for a good long while, just watching the flowers grow, and chatting about life. I tell him about the smell of blossoms and cut grass and I explain that on the west coast, there are berries to eat at every stage of summer, and how, in Vancouver in 1987, I knew where all the salmonberry bushes grew in May along the trail we took to school, and the rarer velvety thimbleberries that ripened in June and July that the uninitiated easily confused with raspberries (also plentiful), followed by the cornucopia of tart tiny huckleberries.

The sequence of summer was parsed through foraging and flavour.

Near the end, during the golden fullness of the season, plump, wild blackberries were all over the place—down the lanes and on the margins—and we would brave the snarled foreboding briars that tumbled over fences and laurel hedges, scratching up our arms to feast on the swollen perfumed fruit, soft piles of garnet in our palms, lips and fingers stained wine-dark, giddy with the thrill of treasure.

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This is it, my love, I say, picking a stiff green blade, and holding it up for Neon to reach for, which he does, drunkenly, yet intently. This—here, now, almost—is our summer of love, the one and only summer of your babyhood, my sweet little boy, and this is what we’ll do: we will fly back across the world and time to the west coast and the house where I grew up, to sit in the long grass and talk together and go on walks to the park and into the cool woods together and while you sleep in the warm sun I’ll weed my mother’s garden and sing you songs and then, when the time comes, when you’re sitting up and leaning forward and holding on, I’ll feed you luscious berries, and you will be delighted.

Read my bestselling book about birth, life, motherhood, choice, and power here.

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I know that everything is likely fine at church. Lee is a pro, our older kids are helpful and willing, and Neon, like all the babies, spends his time during liturgy being passed around amongst all the eager pre-teen girls and mothers with grown kids and often sleeps for a good chunk of it. But in my current state of unravelling, the knowledge that everyone else is at church without me, and on such an auspicious day as Antipascha, is unbearable, and makes me feel even more deliriously bereft and victimized.

In that familiar hallucinogenic state of hysteria that descends when a fever is burning its way through one’s system (which is often, I think, a spiritual purge), I compound and amplify the loss, spinning alternate realities, summoning future catastrophes and reliving past failures and finally, in a horrendous apotheosis of what an outside observer would be forgiven for assuming is some sort of demonic possession (though I think maybe it is), I finally begin to vomit (into the diaper bucket that thankfully happens to be sitting, miracle upon miracles, empty beside my bed) a torrent of acrid, fluorescent bile reminiscent of the very worst benders I willingly inflicted upon myself in the past (no, not this time, not anymore), and then I sleep.

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But the short version is that I am very glad to be an Orthodox Christian.

As a bit of a prelude to the story, I shared a photo essay and some brief ponderings on the afterglow of our illumination and Pascha over on Instagram the other day.

The post wasn’t — I thought — even remotely controversial. My intention was simply to share some of what’s real for us these days, and to attempt to do justice to what has truly been the most profound (and normal) transformation of my life.

Yet as always, the most provocative (and triggering) thing of all is to know oneself and the Truth, especially for those whose ontology is built on the premise that certainty itself is suspect.

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Here’s that incendiary post:

The vast majority of responses I received were immensely positive and supportive, along with a multitude of respectful questions from those who were genuinely curious about the story of how we arrived at Orthodoxy, but then I came across the following:

Are you aware of the massacres of non-believers the Orthodox Church has conducted? The murder of innocents simply because they would not ‘join’ what the orthodox thought to be ‘the one true religion’?

In a live recorded episode of The Lord of Spirits, co-host Father Andrew Stephen Damick talked about a Catholic parish in Lithuania, which still stands to this day, that was going to be demolished following the country’s annexation by the Soviet Union. The gist of the story is that the parishioners decided to stand between their church building and the bulldozers, and the Soviet soldiers began executing them one by one to try to force them to surrender, and they chose martyrdom. When the Soviets realized these people weren’t going to budge, they moved on and allowed the building to stand.

Many of those Soviet soldiers were baptized Orthodox, and the reason why Father Andrew told this story is because Orthodox Christians need to know so that you don’t become preoccupied with being on the right ‘team.’

The Massacre of the Latins was a large-scale massacre of Italian-descent Catholics (called ‘Latins’) in Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, by the Eastern Orthodox population of the city in April 1182. The Orthodox leaders invaded and murdered all the Catholics who would not convert. Over 60K people were murdered.

How about when The Russian Orthodox Church under patriarch Nikon’s guidance persecuted the old believers who didn’t want to follow the liturgical reforms. A lot of old believer priests were burned at the stake in front of their own churches.

Orthodox clergy or monastics have committed scandalous sexual sins. They were usually held accountable for this and defrocked, but not always.

Orthodox clergy or monastics have embezzled money that was supposed to belong to the Church, and used it for their own private expenses.

So with all this history of wars, sex crimes, and money embezzlement, how do you plan to navigate joining a religious group? Religion and cults have been the main cause for most wars and oppression.

So why is it not okay to be curious and to study many religions and various versions and interpretations of the bible and other ancient religious texts, and even to have a deep reverence and respect for Jesus, but decide to be sovereign? Why do you have to join a group to be considered spiritual? Why go through all the made-made systems of control to worship?

Do you actually believe this is the only way and you are stuck here without questioning? 😐 What will you do if you come across corruption within your own church? Just curious!!! 🧐 💕 ❤️”

Now, before I continue I want to state openly that I won’t share this person’s name or any identifying features (despite the fact that her comments were all posted publicly) but I will say, for some context, that I know this individual casually, on a personal basis, since meeting her IRL several years ago when we struck up a brief but warm acquaintanceship. I also know she is a yoga teacher and practitioner, which is relevant.

Since my initial connection with this person, we had conversed a handful of times via Instagram. But we never knew each other well, by any means, and at no point did we ever discuss faith or religion. I don’t believe she had any idea, when our paths crossed way back when, that I considered myself to be a Christian then, as I always have.

In recent months, however, she has responded to several of my posts with a surprisingly fervent (and seemingly outsized) critique—and there’s nothing wrong with that. Even the somewhat scandalous details that I’m about to share, are, in the grand scheme, irrelevant.

Therefore, you might ask, why then, Yolande Katherine, are you writing about this at all? What’s the point, other than to make yourself look good (yes, I’m talking to myself here), and her look bad? Is there a larger objective to this essay outside of condemnation and/or mockery and humiliation?

I’ve toyed with—and prayed on—how to approach this. My intention is not to mock or humiliate anyone. Yet I think it’s important to unravel the cultural undercurrent at play in this conversation, as it serves as a remarkably concentrated example of something I want to unpack at length, and that’s a particular strain of contemporary spiritual pluralism that presents itself as open-mindedness while operating, in practice, as its own rigid, aggressive, and ultimately nihilistic orthodoxy.

Alright, back to the exchange: at this point in the conversation I’m somewhat surprised by the specificity of her references to Orthodox history. She had never offered any inkling, in the past, of having any interest in Orthodox theology or anthropology, but heck—I don’t know what she’s been up to. I’m still feeling a residual tenderness towards her, though, and I have some hope of forging an understanding on the topic of faith. Therefore, in an effort to give her the benefit of the doubt, I replied as follows:

How wonderful that you’re so interested in my journey to faith! Rest assured that I am well aware of the fact that the Orthodox Church is full of sinners, past and present — human beings are sinful. The historical events you’ve referenced are terrible, yes — war and violence are part of Orthodox history, though there’s quite a bit of distortion and oversimplification in your framing: these were not atrocities carried out by Orthodoxy per se, but by political factions at war, all of whom had differing faith backgrounds.

Your citing of the Father Stephen Damick podcast is a bit baffling to me — Father Damick is himself an Orthodox priest and apologist, and I am actually familiar with the episode in which he shares the story of Soviet soldiers (some of whom happened to be baptized Orthodox) executing Catholic martyrs. His point is to illustrate the dangers of tribalism. The fact that he discusses this atrocity so openly is, in my view, a great example of the honesty and self-critique that I find so refreshingly common among many Orthodox thinkers.

As to how I am going to “navigate” having joined a church with corruption and sin in its history — how do you navigate practising and being a proponent of yoga, given the very dark, cult-like scandals, dramas, and sexual misdeeds so well documented in that world? I suppose it all comes down to the way anyone navigates any human group or endeavour, all of which are replete with corruption and evil.

It’s also simply not true that religion and “cults” are the main cause of war and oppression. In fact, only a small percentage of historical armed conflict can be attributed to religious differences. During the 20th century, the most horrific and deadly wars were almost all motivated by nationalism, anti-religious fascism, and atheistic communism. The real drivers of war and oppression are human sin, pride, and lust for power [and resources]— things that attach to any ideology, religious or otherwise. One might even argue that the diminishment of Christianity specifically — whose fundamental tenets are love and humility — can be associated with an increase in death and destruction.

Who told you that it’s “not okay” to be curious, to study religions and religious texts? Of course it’s okay — I hope you disregard anyone who says otherwise. It’s exactly this kind of voracious study and deep questioning that ultimately led me to the Orthodox Church. I spent years reading eastern mystical texts, deeply exploring Buddhism, Taoism, and Sufism, practising yoga, and trying to rationalize my Anglican heritage. What I have experienced in my 45 years is a far cry from being “stuck anywhere without questioning.” Quite the contrary.

It sounds like you may be conflating the rejection of institutional religion with “sovereignty” — a concept which, incidentally, I spent years seeking to materialize through politics and new age mysticism, only to find that true sovereignty is not of this world. It is, paradoxically, only to be found in obedience to Christ.

Orthodoxy is the most beautiful, open, and truly mystical faith — and it is very different from Protestantism or Catholicism. It is rooted only in willingness: willing submission, willing sacrifice. It is the most freedom I have ever known. And it’s such a blessing that so very many people are finding their way to Orthodoxy after years of involvement in yoga, the occult, and new age spirituality.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

With that, I felt rather pleased with myself (I know, I know—pride and vainglory) in that I had managed to respond with what I thought was some measure of generosity and openness towards someone who seemed to have a real bone to pick with Orthodoxy.

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But I kept thinking about her opening salvo, and specifically her citation of Father Damick’s podcast episode in which he discusses Orthodox soldiers persecuting Catholics, that piqued something in me. I had indeed thought I had heard Father Damick discuss the incident somewhere in the Lord of the Spirits archives (I’ve been listening to his podcast on and off for several years) but when I went looking for the episode, I couldn’t find it.

What I did find, initially, was Father Damick’s documentary series “The Wolf and the Cross”—a multi-episode pilgrimage through Lithuania, available on YouTube—in which he and his companions explore the deep and complex history of Catholicism and Orthodoxy in that country, and I came across an engaging conversation between Father Damick, Richard Rohlin, and Jonathan Pageau, in which the three discuss that same history at length with grief and reverence (I watched/listened to a good chunk of it while folding laundry, and I highly recommend).

I also discovered a reddit thread from two years ago, which included the following comments:

Now, perhaps the only fair thing to do would be to assume that this is mere coincidence—the fact that these three screenshots from reddit contain almost word-for-word the very same content that this woman published as a response to my Instagram post joyously proclaiming our entry into the Orthodox faith.

Sadly, I think not.

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We hold an impromptu Pascha dinner with friends and neighbours and I adorn the table with the slightly bruised geraniums dead-headed from the front stoop right before we sit down to eat. Following our meal of roast chicken, pasta, leftover brownies from the Pascha feast the evening/morning before, and cheap kids chocolate, we chat as the young ones spill out the front door into the warm evening, play-fighting like baby bears and throwing the football around and singing Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death and upon those in the tombs bestowing life.

We end the festivities with joyous shouts of Christ is Risen! Truly he is Risen, and it’s lovely and perfect.

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But instead of going to bed promptly as I should have after our improvisational meal, I stay up ridiculously late once more—into the early hours of the morning. This time, my excuse is the need to complete the doll I started making for Margaret a year before, specifically the hand-stitching of Perle cotton onto her scalp for a glorious mane, which is somewhat ironic given Margaret’s own self-inflicted experimental hair-style (more on that later). (The poor thing—below— looks quite gruesome at this stage, but I have every confidence that with a full head of hair she’ll be irresistibly charming.)

The linen cat dolls for Helio and Neon are mostly finished, but the other day, Ignatius (six) came up to me while I was hand-sewing an arm to a body, and said sweetly, with the most transparently hopeful smile, “Mum, is that doll for me?” And I couldn’t think of anything artful to say, so I just paused and said, “…No, sweetheart, it’s actually for your little brother—I wasn’t sure you would want a doll…but if you do, I would love to make you one, and I will.” His eyes sparkled and he assured me that he most certainly does want one, and there was the aching duality of being chastened by my own too-quick assumption of our son’s maturity, while feeling so very heartened by his ongoing innocence.

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A tiny finch builds a nest in the broken star-shaped glass light fixture hanging over our verandah while I buttress my defences, and the midwest begins to bloom, offering a string of breezy warm days (and a couple of scorchers), then a sudden, brief, but blistering frost that bites all the eager first tulip spears that have come up around the front entrance of the church and border our own garden path, withering them before they’ve even had a chance to show their colours.

The tulip situation is tragic enough to become a topic of conversation among the women at church. I overhear several of us asking ourselves and each other if they’ll recover or come back? They don’t.

Although a few weeks later, in the midst of the weightiest part of Lent, before my first (failed) attempt at a life confession, a couple of deformed yet determined blossoms push through despite their abortive circumstances, surrounded by armies of indefatigable dandelions.

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I’ve always been avid about geraniums—pelargoniums. Their presence is warmth and sunlight and the contrast between the fretted brick threshold and glossy white columns that framed the yellow door of my grandparents’ stately house on Angus drive all those years ago.

Geraniums are the quintessential symbols, in my mind, of home and childhood innocence and domesticity, though I recently discovered that it was only in the 1780s that geraniums were brought to the new world by way of South Africa—they’re new immigrants, really. In any case, there is something so deeply comforting and quotidian about red geraniums in a terracotta pot to the extent that during our five years in Central America, their absence gnawed at me more persistently than any other longing.

This year, knowing that our departure is imminent and assured, at least one more time before our residency application will be ready, I cultivate a veritable fixation throughout the winter, on the goal of buying several geraniums as early as possible in the season and planting them pots that would line the stairs where I would sit between bouts of weeding on the precious few warm evenings we would have to spend here before heading south again. There we are, in my vision: Lee doing the final sanding on the orange osage bow he began shaping last year, this time with Neon on his lap, smiling and kicking, me, tired and happy with dirt under my fingernails, the kids biking and scooting and skating along the sidewalk, looping up and around our neighbour’s driveway then back down again, over and over until dark.

So one gray afternoon right before the war, with that image in mind and the morning’s liturgy fresh in our eyes, I pile the four littlest kids and Cosmo into the truck and we drive to the fancy nursery. I fill a shopping cart with children (Neon, blessedly, in a deep sleep, doesn’t seem to mind remaining in his car seat for once) and we stroll through the rows of plants, chatting about our favourite flowers and their latin names and where this or that one likes to grow best, and, No, I don’t think we’ll buy a Japanese maple sapling now, but Yes, we can certainly bring home a vibrant purple Bacopa, and a mauve Alyssum.

We meander over to the tropical plant section, where Margaret insists on getting out to commune with the cacti from her motherland, and Helio—our other Nicaraguan— exclaims over the palm trees, remembering our life before, and I join in the recollection until sharp slivers of sadness slide into my heart and I have to change the subject and the scenery. Eventually, we find the geraniums at the very back of the greenhouse, just recently delivered, still on pallets, and I instruct Iggy to pick out the best specimens among the most beautiful blood-red varieties, a task he takes on with the utmost seriousness. Everyone is hungry after the mission, so we stop at the park to eat our hard-boiled eggs, and I nurse little Neon while Cosmo chases Iggy and Helio

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Alongside a handful of other women whom I have come to know and love deeply since joining our church community just a year ago, we stood in the warm kitchen facing the wall of radiant icons of Christ and the Theotokos and cherished saints and we invoked the Akathist to the Mother of God, Nurturer of Children while we held our babies in our arms, passing them back and forth to each other and our older kids played happily in the backyard, and the sun shone in and we bowed and sang and I felt cleansed and humbled and tenderized.

Afterwards, we sat around the polished wood table, nursing our little ones over coffee and chatting about life and motherhood and the joy and pain and struggle of faith in the world as it is. We discussed our teenagers and our husbands and beauty and how our own mothers mirrored and received and disappointed us, and we talked about who would make it to vespers that evening.

Not one mention was made of armed conflict, or economic breakdown, or the explicit shape of evil—there was no need for any of that.

I was asked, recently, what I’m doing about The War—how I’m handling it, what I’m telling my children about it, and how I’m preparing for the apocalypse.

As soon as the question arose, my mind wandered back twenty-two years to that scene in the sitting room when my father told me “we” had invaded Iraq and I cried in terror and despair, imaging him being sent into battle even though I was officially a teenager and should have known better.

My poor, sweet, broken dad—a survivor, a victim, and a hero all at once— tried to reassure me in a way, but his own wounds and fears ran so deep and his pet demons were so firmly installed that he ended up staying at war with himself for the rest of my childhood and beyond, until he finally prevailed, and won the death he had been so intent on achieving.

***

What am I doing about the war?

Well, as I explain with more detail in my previous Jungle Diary entry (right here) I’m holding my three-month old baby on my hip while making the eggs and I’m admiring the narrow green grass-like crocus straps pushing through the wet earth already, now, heralding the spring.

We’re really in it, folks, that much is clear. Good versus evil, end-timey everything.

Yet that’s always true, at every time, in every place, at every stage in the unravelling, isn’t it?

The word apocalypse simply means revelation—full disclosure—the lifting of the veil.

It certainly does seem as though all is being revealed.

My own social media “feed,” is heaving, all of a sudden, with truth-tellers tackling topics that, it seems, have been forbidden or censored for years: occult ritual horrors, the questioning of official world war narratives, the middle east, “the files” and the overall phenomenon of extreme harm done to children by elites in positions of power…it reads like a critical mass of full disclosure.

What a gift! We’re finally being allowed to see the truth.

Lol. Guys. Please let’s not forget that every online platform is owned by the military-industrial AI surveillance complex and that literally everything you’re being allowed to see on the oracle genie in your pocket is in service to your mental enslavement.

Everything.

**

What am I doing about the war? I’m sorting socks and folding underwear and I’m cleaning my husband’s beard hairs off the toilet seat where he threw them after wiping out the sink and I’m not saying one word about it, nevermind mentioning how virtuous I am by holding my tongue…except to all of substack.

***

Of course, some of us have been aware of the current trajectory/program for a long time. If you’ve been following me for the past decade or more, you’ll know that I’ve been talking about the breakdown forever, so it’s both exciting and suspect to see the collective awakening…what is the value, really, of a revival that is simulated and deeply fake, not to mention too little, and far too late?

Alas, every single time we enter the vortex of the screen, we are being played and manipulated and exposed to a fine-tuned echo-chamber designed to elicit a delicately orchestrated emotional response, perfectly customized and calibrated for you and you alone, whether maximum fear, outrage, shock and awe…or hope, inspiration, and the simulacrum of connection. Whatever you consent to, the zookeepers provide.

**

I’m not special, I’m no different, I’m caught up with and playing the game, gaming the plays, spinning in loops just like you.

But (for whatever it’s worth in a world of illusion) I am delighted that you made it here, to my little corner of the circus, and I can promise you (for whatever it’s worth again) that I am, as yet, still alive and sentient, and yearning for God, and that my memory of rotary phones and maps and raw walks to the park and the romance of books and the weight and joy of embodied labour is indeed pressed like a caress into my fascia and my flesh like an old fashioned human being and that everything I share comes directly from my own heart and mind…as compromised as we all are, at this point.

So gather round while I tell you, right here and now, exactly how to survive the coming storms. Because you’ve probably found yourself wondering, at least in passing, how you’re going to make it through financial collapse, mass conflict, cybernetic takeover, extreme techno-feudalist surveillance, and collective mental breakdown all at the same time.

***

What am I doing about the war? I’m sweeping the floor for the sixth time today and reading stories and mending his little pants by hand.

But the answer isn’t really planting potatoes or buying land or digging a well or building a hutch for breeding rabbits when the food shortages start (though these things are wonderful if you can manage them—and thank goodness our neighbourhood is heaving with wildish rabbits, we’ll be just fine.)

Nor is the answer bitcoin, or investments, or real-estate, or trusts, or general financial preparedness (not that any of those are bad ideas…).

The answer isn’t even stockpiling weapons (too late for all that, honestly—not so relevant in an era of robot fido and DEW, I’m afraid).

The playbook is surprisingly simple.

There are three things, and three things only, that matter above all else.

First: build spiritual fortitude and get right with God. Prayer, repentance, and the willingness to face the truth of who you are and your relationship with the divine is paramount.

Ground yourself in faith. Attend liturgy. Go to church.

Seek the way, the Truth and the Light. This requires, and, in turn, builds, spiritual discipline, discernment, and sobriety, all of which will serve you in all ways, in all endeavours, and particularly in the challenges and reckonings ahead, the greatest of which might be overcoming the allure of hostility and hatred.

Second: prioritize your family. Your husband and your children must be the secondary focus (after God) of your material life. The priority in marriage is spiritual salvation, and although I am stunningly inept at remembering this, I do know that re-orienting to this elemental truth is key.

My husband is not just my partner on earth, but my companion in the eternal, and our children are the only real investment and the sole form of true wealth.

The ease with which it has become possible (and even seemingly pleasurable) to absent oneself from a relationship even while sitting next to someone—one’s child or spouse, no less— in the same room, by desending into the widening gyre of the virtual should genuinely frighten us all.

I do know the pain of loss, and I know with excruciating certainty that being present with your children and family—truly present—as much as possible is the greatest gift.

This is precisely why I am continuously finding more ways to reduce the time I spend in front of a screen and in the digital ether. I am, increasingly, ferociously intentional with my time and attention—where I direct it, and to whom I offer it.

And third: cultivate physical & mental strength and resilience. Fragility (in mind and body) is a significant liability, especially in a time of intensity and fracture. For me, building the structure of my body isn’t a hobby or an indulgence at all, it’s real preparedness.

I strength-train to ensure I have the mental and physical resources to protect my children and my energy, and to remain steadfast and capable.

When we hone the body as an instrument of devotion, our mental faculties are automatically strengthened as well. Becoming physically strong requires (and produces) the structuring and disciplining of the mind (along with a deep, wise, and moderate approach to nourishment).

None of this has anything to do with vanity or aesthetics, really (though beauty does tend to emerge naturally as a result of health and vitality).

Rather, it’s a reflection of our capacity to carry the weight of life and motherhood, and to endure the spiritual battlefield, whether that’s developing the courage to face inevitable conflict, or the power to turn away from the temptation to charge onto it.

Strength is an extraordinary form of freedom, derived through an obedience to reality.

And this is precisely why the cultivation of strength has become such a central part of my life.

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Sweet Neon George gazes at me, gurgles, reaches for my face, then breaks into a radiantly beaming smile. Glory to God. Thank you God. He smells like pure love. My sweet baby. You are two months old, but how? Fat and jolly now, you’re holding your head steadier by the day. I am brimming with happiness, despite being critically wounded by the gnaw of time.

The other night I cried as I folded most of your newborn onesies once and for all—you had worn them comfortably just last week, but the remaining few are appearing like archaeological relics amidst the sierra range of laundry on our bed, and the evanescence of it all is almost unbearable.

Neon squawks as we gaze at each other in mutual awe, and I have to say it, I can’t not say it, so I say it, erupting with the singsong spoken word poem that every mother has her version of that goes Little baby sweetheart Neon George, you are the most beautiful Neon in the whole wide world and my love for you is the fiercest love of all the ages and it’s pouring from my eyes into your eyes into your entire being and your essence is streaming into me and mine into you and here we are, shining like sunbeams, loving each other more ferociously than any other person outside of God will ever love me or you again and with such magnitude that neither of us will ever ever forget being loved like this, not even when you’ve left me and stepped forth into the world of forgetting, not even when I’m old and white as winter and your life is spinning by its own seemingly perpetual momentum…I babble on and he giggles as though his mother hasn’t just told him the most heartbreaking secret of time and I kiss his eyes and his earlobes and he grabs a fistful of my hair and I thank God for the gift of knowing how certain and ceaseless change is.

I make a mental note to ask Father T. about the rich man and the loaf of bread (outrageous) when Helio emerges from under the covers on my other side, sweaty and adorable and snuggles up to Neon, stroking his velvety head. Foggy with sleep but still precise and perceptive, Helio’s first statement of the morning is “Mum, first I loved you, and now I love Neon too, and the love I see you giving Neon, I give to Neon.” I have won the day already. In this moment, every prize is mine. The innocent wisdom in this perfect summary of the quantum multiplicity of maternal adoration is the shining victory.

The three of us cuddle and I nurse Neon until he gets annoyed with my empty breast, so I plug him into the bottle and he gulps the milk down, voracious, as the house starts to thrum a little, coming to life. Iggy streaks through the room waving a lightsaber, doing a half-cartwheel off the dresser, followed by Margaret, round-bellied, banana squelched between her fingers, eyes wild, bird’s nest hair. She climbs up onto the bed and gets close to me and says, brightly, “Apadurthday Mum!” Every day is my birthday these days, according to our shining two-year old.

Lee is already working but he must have heard through the grapevine that I’m up, as he now appears with the perfect cup of coffee, gorgeous man. I love him, and the pain and danger of that recognition arrests me as it always does. What if he dies? Stop it. He will, but not for a long long time. It’s early yet. Stay with it. Don’t start a fight to convince yourself you can live without him. You can’t, and some day you will, but not for a long long time. Let yourself be imperfectly loved by this wonderfully scarred, impeccably tarnished well-meaning man.

I scrub Margaret off and send her downstairs with the promise of an orange and I make the bed and prop Neon up on the pillows so I can fold the t-shirts and underwear while chatting with him and Helio. Xanthe comes in with her blue cotton yarn in a snarl so I sit with her and unravel it while she tells me about the conversation she had with her friends at church, and I offer her my expert analysis as to why someone would ever say such a thing.

In the kitchen, breakfast is well under way. The usual toads-in-the-hole are being made, but our teenage line cooks are lackadaisical. They lean against the counters, reading, chatting—eggs are burning. Felix takes his plate into the living room despite having been asked a million times not to…but the first meal of the day is a casual affair.

“Mum, mum, what does this say?”

Helio is drawing and writing at the massive mahogany table. I take the sheaf of paper being waved in my face, and I read aloud his newest attempt with the gravitas such an endeavour deserves.

“Heee at ell oo,” I intone phonetically, in all seriousness.

“Oh!” says Helio. “That’s very close to my name!”

It really is. Shall I write your name again so you can practise?

Treva staggers downstairs in her pyjamas. Neon is in Lee’s lap, vibrating with excitement and waving his arms around expressively. Treva reaches out to take him.

“Hi, fat brother,” she says.

I mention that a friend of mine recently pointed out that two of the kids in our family are named after gases—noble ones, no less—Helio, and now Neon. What are the odds?

“It’s not really a question of odds, Mother,” says Horus, admonishingly. “It’s more accurately a simple result of your poor decision-making.”

I am appalled.

“Stop! How dare you! Noble gases and saints are the most distinguished namesakes.”

But Horus is unstoppable, especially with an invitation like this one.

“I suppose I’ll have to name my poor children after the cowardly liquids,” he says. “Mercury! Bromine! Dinner time! Or how about some traitorous solids—meet the twins, Lead and Plutonium.”

At this point, Treva, Horus’ most enthusiastic cheerleader, is in stitches, cry-laughing.

“It’s really not that funny,” I sniff. “Besides, isn’t plutonium some kind of nefarious etheric mist?”

“It’s a solid metal at room temperature, Mother,” Horus says.

“Well, I failed algebra,” I say.

“Chemistry, Mother. Or chemical metallurgy.” Horus shakes his head, despairing of my ignorance.

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I’m enraged and I hate him.

I’m trembling with incipient, violent rage, but instead of picking up the broken hair brush that sits there, tempting me to turn to savagery, I spin on my heel, grab the keys, and exit stage left. I leave my coat behind.

It’s unseasonably warm out, for February—almost tropical. The truck starts (great—hard to drive away when the truck won’t start), and I feel sick with madness and defiance and the terrible emptiness of freedom. I pull out slowly and carefully—no need to alert the neighbours of my defection.

I hate him. I hate him and I head south. Only the gangsters and I are out now, in the dark, right before midnight in a perfect world. I hate him I hate him I hate him. He said some words and they were the wrong words according to me the imperator and arbiter of words around here and now I hate him and I’m driving very carefully south, now and forever.

I hate him for saying exactly the right words that prove what I’ve known to be true all along—the hopelessness and futility of it all, his delusions, my delusions, the copes and codependencies, the dumbness, the stupidity, the years of trying, the cyclical scripts and stories. He said precisely the words that evidence the hatefulness I’m due, the hatefulness I love, and this time I hate him beyond time and space and in and out and form and nothingness, into the beyond and the before and the eternal now.

The only solution to this is vodka and cigarettes and frightful oblivion, naturally—obviously—so I drive south on Troost, on a mission for venom to keep my hate alive, hating him so much, coasting past the darkened buildings and the huddled junkies and the lone homie in the Chevy caprice quivering with bass, that peels away as I pass by, late for a deal or a dalliance. Dale Pues, bruh, go get it. I hate him.

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Now that you’re here, I’m in the thick of it.

Now that I’ve looked into your eyes and held the warmth of your weight against my heart and the taste of your name is in my mouth, I’m lost and found in you forever.

Now, until the final traces of me—ancient and acerbic, but also, I secretly hope, oracular and pious— wash away, I’ll unravel the story of matrescence and of you in every time signature, lay out and re-arrange all the words, decode the enigma, strive to realize the pattern from the inside out, in case I miss anything.

All these impressionistic paintings a preemptive defence against forgetting.

It won’t work, I know, but I’ll do it this way until the end of memory, until we’re alive only in the story.

Hello. Hello little one. Thank you God. I’m your mum and I love you. You’re here.

These are the first words I speak when you land.

Before you were born, Sweet Neon George, this is how you came to be:

Once, I thought the world was many things at a time, all possible entry points at play, each branch of potential reality reaching outward, growing towards and into the meaning we make of it, every position and energy state its own wave in parallel.

Motherhood, more than anything else, has made me know the only singularity.

Holy God Holy Mighty Holy Immortal.

Long before you came swimming, little boy, long before your delicate body was wrought inside me, you were ensouled and known by Him.

Forgive me for ever doubting you would be.

You were eternally intended. God gracefully allowed us to will you into being through love, out of love, in love.

You look exactly like your dad, whom I still adore, even after all these broken years.

***

October, 2025

I had a charming idea, when I first became pregnant with you, that this time—during this occasion that might well be the last—I would finally experience pregnancy in true serenity.

This time, we would finally be settled. This time, things would be calm. We would have a home, and I would feel free to retreat from the world. At long last, after a lifetime of mothering with a mask and a cape (activist heroine, defender of the faith I thought was true) I imagined I would experience gestation just this once as a quiet pilgrimage instead of a bloody crusade—an experience of sanctuary and contemplation (amidst the usual delightful cacophony of my everyday mothering life, that is).

I’ve written these lines before—the proof is out there, that I’ve harboured this fantasy to some degree during the wait for each of our children. But see? It’s a hallucination, according to the evidence of my reality, the constant commitments I make to creation and the destruction that tends to go along with standing for, or making, anything—a book, a cake, a cause, a statement, a family.

This is my [in]famous recipe. Occam’s razor’s-edge. If not for the risk—before all worlds—you wouldn’t exist.

***

April - September 2025

You are conceived during Great Lent (I know), in the midwest, at our rented foursquare craftsman bungalow, in the radiant field of our newfound faith, our community, and the liturgical year. Even before I know you’re coming, I pray for you, and during those early weeks of possibility (as with all our babies), I question if you’re really true, even as my body is burgeoning.

But I’m finally at home here, and that makes all things new. We settle down and attend services.

In the spring, we leave the modest but elegant house near the parkway and move again, to a smaller, considerably scruffier shirtwaist—closer to church— where we spend our final month (and where we’ll store our household possessions) before flying back to Nicaragua, this time, to occupy a white boxy modernist nouveau-mediterranean villa built on the cliffs above barrio la Planta, overlooking the bay.

Casa La Loma is a luxurious place by some standards, its hard-angled concrete softened by the sky and seascape showcased in every massive window. Apart from the perpetual black outs, brown outs, water problems, and sewage malfunctions, the house is almost perfect for us. I run the air conditioning continuously to counteract the fact that I mostly hate everything about being here. Lacunae.

But I love that the majority of your siblings love it here. For our middle ones, it all grows sweeter as the season ripens. Mangoes, language, their capacity to navigate the landscape, their knowledge of the plants and animals. Their access to tools, weapons, and shields. They’re deliriously happy, actually, falling ever deeper in love with it all this time around.

Each day opens with a symphony of cock-crows and screaming dogs reinforcing their territory and proclaiming their joys and sorrows. The town soundtrack. We all take turns panic-shouting from the balcony just after sunrise for the moto milk guy to wait on the cobblestones for Felix who hops on the navi with the bottles clanking in his backpack to be filled with the milk, fresh from the cow a few hours ago, but poised to sour soon in the heat.

“El Pan!!” calls the baker in his singsong voice, a refrain that Margaret, at a year and a half, repeats throughout the day on her walks up and down the hill, her happy paddling in the pool, and while reading books in the living room. Iggy and Helio spend their mornings caminando and digging in the dirt of the vacant lot next door, and playing battle and building forts with the neighbours, J. and F. a constant loving presence, hovering, correcting, guiding.

Friends stop by on rotation to take Felix and Cosmo out after our raucous homeschooling sessions. They skate down to the port to practise kick flips, before or after fishing off the pier. Xanthe attends dance class twice a week with her bestie, and they practice their gyrations and hair flips devotionally on the off-days.

Cosmo becomes locally famous for his rizz—the platonic, nine-year old-kind, that is. He is confident and hilarious, and fluent enough in Spanish to argue his case, hold a crowd, mimic an enemy or a gadfly with biting accuracy, incite unrest, then deflect and deescalate just as dextrously, all in Nica slang, switching codes mid-motion. He spends frequent overnights at F.’s house, where the two chavalos light fires in the yard, visit with F.’s cousins and extended family, hunt birds, buy pocket shots and set them off to keep the dogs at bay, then fall asleep in their hammocks after dark.

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In the two-minute video, I stated—outrageously— that I suspect that Trump probably believes he is doing the best he can to protect American interests and to address and even reverse the damage done by “woke” liberalism over the past several decades (an exercise in complete futility, of course), all while he is, simultaneously, without a doubt, ushering the US, and the world, further into the transhumanist, technofeudalist program.

I also asserted that, ultimately, no one really knows who Trump is, and that the media lies and manipulates relentlessly (understatement of the century), all of which I think is a fairly sober, realistic assessment. Several seemingly contradictory things can be true at once. Obviously. (This is obvious to you, right?)

My point was, and is: everything we see onscreen is theatre, loathing Trump is just as ridiculous and inane as believing he is the saviour of western civilization, and we’re fed the “news” we’re allowed to see. Always (including all the “leaked” files). No one knows anything. Better to just weed the vegetable garden (or shovel snow as the case may be).

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In that same reel, I also stated plainly that I do care about other people, I recognize the immense suffering in the world, I feel for those who are struggling, and I wish this weren’t the state of affairs for humanity…but here we are nonetheless.

As usual, the reply section was divided, for the most part, between those on the “right” who were outraged that I’m not more explicit about my supposed nationalism (ha!), people on the “left” who believe I’m a racist fascist transphobic white-supremacist (double ha!), and a handful who appreciated my non-committal nuance, as much as this is possible to bring across in 90 seconds or so.

But I was particularly interested in the psychology behind a comment that began with, “I call BS on your supposed care for other people,” followed by a tirade about what a terrible, uncaring, mean and nasty person I am.

This presumption of privileged access to my interior motives, intentions, and the deepest moral orientation of my heart is a kind of straw-manning of my innermost thoughts. This person was essentially claiming psychic omniscience, under the cover of moral righteousness.

I see this phenomenon occurring more and more, but the most common arena in which I’ve encountered it is the birth-world: When I state outright (as I have thousands of times) that I fully acknowledge that home birth, unassisted birth (and every kind of birth) carries risk, or that I fully support the choice many women make to give birth in hospitals, or to have elective C-sections (which I unequivocally do), or that I don’t ever advise or encourage women to give birth in any particular way, because my prime directive is, and has always been, coherence and personal autonomy, I am met with scores of women (and it’s mostly women) who insist that they know that I don’t truly believe this, and that I’m simply feigning compassion, masquerading as someone with a belief in freedom of choice, and/or falsifying my rationality in order to disguise myself as a human being, when in reality, I’m a monstrous villainous extremist, harbouring the most malevolent of intentions.

As always, I welcome respectful disagreement and debate, and I’m relatively immune to the rest of it, at this point—I really don’t take it personally. But on a cultural level, I find this to be one of the most interesting, and darkly demonic, dynamics I have observed over the years of participating in this cesspool we call social media. This near-automatic impulse on the part of people who disagree with me, who think they dislike me, who feel threatened by me, or who claim to feel “unsafe” in the presence of my ideas, to ascribe to me the very worst of intentions, in direct contradiction to my explicitly stated beliefs, is…disturbing to say the least.

Again, I realize this has little (or nothing) to do with me, or with Trump, or with birth, or with any specific claim I’m making at any given moment. Instead, it’s a primitive rhetorical maneuver that arises from cognitive dissonance. When a person’s entire worldview depends on the preservation of a moral binary, they *must* dehumanize me (or Trump, or the big bad wolf) in order to maintain their reality. I do understand what’s happening here, on a sociological level, but I also find it shocking—still—to encounter such intellectual, emotional, and spiritual bankruptcy. And I honestly can’t relate (thank God).

I truly cannot imagine hating another person--especially someone you haven’t even met— to such an extent that when that individual states a belief or presents a perspective that suggests compassion, care for others, or fundamental reason in general, you are so committed to your position that you assume the very worst of that person’s intentions to maintain the rolling boil of your disgust.

Here’s how it works: if I am allowed to be human—if I’m permitted complexity, sincerity, contradiction, compassion, ambivalence, good faith, and moral struggle, then the entire scaffolding that supports my haters’ delicious certainty (that I’m a “dangerous” person, as I’ve been told so many times by these self-declared psychics) begins to teeter precariously.

Nevermind that the overarching subject of my work is precisely this: the paradoxes and complexities of risk and autonomy, suffering *and* responsibility, care *and* critique. Yet if any of this were to be acknowledged or even considered by those who accuse me of being a “dangerous purveyor of misinformation,” then I wouldn’t really function very well as anyone’s hero *or* their supervillain (and both go hand-in-hand--those who start out obsessively adoring me, inevitably end up turning to the other side when they discover that a) I’m just a normal person and b) I’m not actually the cult-leader they’re looking for). For these mid-level histrionics (which encompasses increasing numbers of people as evidenced by the heightening political hysteria out there) the tribal story of good vs. evil is a requirement; it’s the very mechanism by which their orient themselves morally in the world—as bereft as it is.

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When I’m assumed to be acting in bad faith by default, on the basis of the omniscient telepathic probing of these malcontents (who needs neuralink) in defiance of actual substance or behaviour or reality (their only proof is fourth-hand gossip and hearsay), then nothing will ever dissuade them from this belief. In fact, the more nuanced my position, the more I attempt to explain the subtleties of the issues as I see them, the more I share my genuine self, the more these people will contort my efforts and my attempts at clarification to represent their foregone conclusion.

Me me me. Poor little me. No, the tragedy in all of this is not my hurt feelings—I honestly don’t care on a personal level. I know exactly who and what I am (which is also assumed to be suspect, largely because the degree of conviction and self-ownership I possess is increasingly rare, and seen as exceptional, though it shouldn’t be). The real tragedy is that people really are becoming less intelligent and more spiritually injured, which engenders the abdication of responsibility, projection, and scapegoating.

The scapegoat gesture has always required the suspension of humility and humanity, alongside the certainty of the “community” (the mob) that always believes it knows what and who the scapegoat is, what it/she intends—no need for evidence, dialogue, or proportionality. But in the digital age, the psychologization and solipsism of the ritual has ramped up exponentially. Instead of accusing the scapegoat of explicit crimes or heresies, the accusation targets invisible mental states: bad faith, manipulation, malice, hidden agendas, and unconscious “harm” solely on the basis of the accuser’s moral clairvoyance. Thought-crimes, in other words.

Indeed, all of this is the precondition for “stochastic terrorism,” (which I discussed here, in relation to the [unaliving] of Charlie Kirk). The irony of course, is that an accusation of stochastic terrorism is, in itself, an act of stochastic terrorism, which is exactly why I stubbornly stand for absolute freedom of speech…an exercise in futility at this point, I know.

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