Ride At Dawn

I love that your first instinct isn’t comfort.
It’s justice.

I love that your heart doesn’t know how to look away.

That somewhere between your compassion and your fury,
you decided the world could be kinder than this.

And you’ve never quite forgiven it for refusing.

I love that every news story is personal to you.

That strangers don’t stay strangers for very long.

That every injustice finds its way under your skin and refuses to leave.

You rage at men who believe a woman’s body is public property. That her sexuality is something THEY control.
At politicians who speak of freedom while taking it away.
At people who use religion and their god as a weapon and cruelty as a moral code.
At children going hungry being sold as sex slaves on commonplace websites, all the while billionaires build bigger rockets to try to take us to a world that will never save us from ours.
At books being banned because someone might recognize themself inside one.
At people being punished for who they love, who they are, or the truth they refuse to hide.
At racism wearing a tie and calling itself policy.
At immigrants being spoken of as though they are problems instead of people.
At a planet, and our continent, burning while the powerful argue over whether the smoke is real.
At women being told to be
quieter,
smaller,
nicer…. especially when they are right.
At men who could simply listen but instead explain the world back to the women already surviving it. Surviving THEM.
At cruelty disguised as tradition.
At indifference disguised as neutrality.
At every person who sees suffering,
shrugs,
and decides it belongs to somebody else.

I love that you’ll say things like, “I am so utterly full of feminine rage this week.” or
“I’m about to go off. Burn it all down.”
Not because you enjoy fire, especially right now,
but because you’re tired of watching people keep living inside the smoke of their ignorance.

I love that you’re always ready to ride at dawn.
Sword and knife drawn.
Santa Muerte summoned.
Boots on.
Coffee in hand.
Ready to fight for people you’ve never met.

I love that somewhere inside your brilliant, beautiful mind
there is an entire imaginatively detailed plan for dismantling EVERY system that mistakes power for worth.

I love that you announce “Maybe men should just disappear for a while… or forever”
then immediately turn around and spend an hour trying to explain patriarchy to me hoping, I, too, can dismantle these systemic bullshit structures in our world.
I, too, wish there was a simple fix other than chanting and reposting reels that scream, FUCK THE PATRIARCHY!

I love that your anger is never crazy even if you refer to it as such, like you always seem to do when you are scared of being right, being seen, being too vulnerable with me.
It’s informed.
Curious.
Relentless.
You ask questions because you want better answers.
You read.
You learn.
You change your mind when the evidence asks you to.
And then you keep fighting.
Because the work is never done.

People mistake rage for bitterness, cynicism.

And I know you don’t want to be mistaken, misunderstood.

But yours…?

Yours is hope that refuses to be silenced.

It’s love with its plaid shirt sleeves rolled up.

It’s compassion that finally ran out of patience.

It’s the part of you that still believes people deserve better, children deserve better,
women deserve better,
this aching, beautiful, impossible world deserves better.

Maybe apathy isn’t the absence of rage.
Maybe it’s rage that has stopped believing it can move anything.

Maybe apathy isn’t the absence of rage.
Maybe it’s what happens
when the list of things worth saving
grows faster than our hands can reach them.

You call it apathy.
I hear grief—
for everything you learned to love
in a world telling you
it no longer matters.

You tell me you are waiting.
Waiting for enough people to see it.
Waiting for enough people to hurt.
Waiting for enough people to finally say,
fuck this.

But I keep wondering:
if all of us who see it are waiting,
who moves first?

Every movement was once one person
refusing to wait for a movement.

I am one person.
So was every person who ever stood up
before they knew who would stand beside them.

And maybe that’s what I love most about you.
Not that you want to burn it all down.
But that beneath every spark, every battle cry, every
“Let’s fucking ride at dawn!!!”
is a woman trying with everything she has, with ALL of her rage,
to leave the world more
just than she found it.

And I’m lucky…
Not just to know you, but
to be riding and fighting
right beside you.

Pointed North

You know what I blame?

I blame my seventh-grade English teacher.

She handed us fresh and challenging books, journals, and poems and somehow convinced me that my feelings were valid and worth paying attention to, worth writing about because, you know, why not immortalize my life in writing at age 14.

I blame Anne Frank.

A kid hiding from the worst humanity had to offer, somehow still writing:“In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.”

What the hell was I supposed to do with that as a teenager?

Read it once and move on?

No.

It got lodged somewhere inside me. Forever. 

I blame Sunday school.

I blame church pews.

I blame the Golden Rule.

I blame the Beatitudes.

I blame every sermon about kindness and mercy and forgiveness.

I blame every adult who looked me in the eye and told me to treat people the way I wanted to be treated.

I blame the Fruits of the Spirit: 

Love.

Joy.

Peace.

Patience.

Kindness.

Goodness.

Faithfulness.

Gentleness.

Self-control.

What a ridiculous list to hand a kid.

Because dammit. Once you believe those things matter? You spend the rest of your life trying to exude them, live them, be them, and all while looking for them in everyone.

And when they’re missing, it hurts. It’s confusing. Did they not get the same memo? 

I blame karma, too.

Not because I know it’s real.

But because I liked the idea that goodness mattered.

That what we put into the world eventually finds its way back to us.

That cruelty wasn’t the winning strategy.

That decency counted for something. Everything. No, maybe that’s dignity. 

And maybe most of all, I blame myself.

Because somewhere along the way I developed the deeply inconvenient habit of wanting to be a person of integrity.

Wanting my actions to match my words.

Wanting myself and all people to tell the truth.

Wanting me and everyone to own their mistakes.

Wanting me and them to care when we hurt someone.

What an exhausting way to move through the world.

Because the older I get, the more I discover there are so many people who missed the memo. Who avoid hard conversations. Who don’t put in the fucking work. Who don’t have a therapist. Who think they’re always right. 

People who disappear instead of explaining.

People who say they care while acting like they don’t.

People who keep one foot in your life and one foot out the door.

People who want connection right up until connection requires truth and accountability.

People who ask for a lot. Like asking for understanding while offering very little of their own.

People who protect themselves from discomfort by refusing to acknowledge the discomfort they’ve created.

People who can see someone else’s hurt and still convince themselves they had nothing to do with it.

People who rewrite even your stories because the truth asks too much of them.

People who call it protecting their peace when what they’re really protecting is themselves from difficult conversations.

People who mistake avoidance for healing.

People who would rather quietly exit someone out of their life than sit across from them, have a hard but honest conversation, tell the truth, and repair the relationship. 

People project and call it your problem, your fault. Because heaven forbid people own their own shit. 

And every time I encounter any of these? I feel like some part of me is standing there arguing with Anne Frank and Jesus and my seventh-grade English teacher all at once.

Because they taught me to believe in goodness.

But reality kept introducing me to people who claim those values right up until those values cost them something. 
And that cost? Affects more than them. 

and that’s the part I still can’t reconcile.

How humanity can contain both the girl hiding in an attic who still believed in people and the people who walk away from or avoid difficult truths because facing them asks too much. 

Maybe that’s the lifelong assignment.

Not learning whether people are good.

Not learning whether people are bad.

But figuring out how to keep your own heart from becoming either cynical or cruel.

To keep my own heart from breaking.

To keep choosing integrity even when others don’t.

To keep believing kindness matters even when kindness isn’t returned.

To keep telling the truth even when other people rewrite the story.

And how to keep your own moral compass pointed north, even after you’ve met enough people to make you question whether anyone else is actually even carrying one.