Bday dump ✨ This is always a heavy time of year to navigate as I grapple with seasonal depression and the heaviness of mortality, particularly amidst this pandemic which reminds us daily the fragility of life. I’m stuck ruminating on the unflinching callousness of the institutions that are entrusted with our response to the manifold crises we currently face. I wake up every morning wondering how we keep going, and I sit with the notion of habituation and imagination. Habituation, the diminishing response to frequent external stimuli, is the sad reminder that the longer we endure unabated these unprecedented times and gross, eugenicist violence, the less visceral we feel it. To borrow Malcolm X’s analogy, the knife has been buried in our backs for so deeply and for so long, we hardly know it’s there. How defeating indeed it is to know our imagination is stifled by the reality that we have grown accustomed to not just the bare minimum, but anti-Black, ableist, fatphobic, and genocidal violence. How can we demand what we deserve when we’re conditioned to see our needs as luxuries? How do we reclaim our worth at the end of the worlds? Still seeking out the answer to these questions.