No one is free until all of us are free

Hello from Pride weekend in NYC 🏳️‍🌈

It’s another NYC weekend, but this time, it’s the weekend to celebrate PRIDE.

You may have noticed I didn’t send a newsletter last week (you may not have, lol). That’s because I had pre-written my “from the page” section when I made a drastic decision to change what I’m doing, and I didn’t have the gumption to rewrite it and send a new missive. My apologies! Back today and better than ever, though.

I recently got a new keyboard and it’s very clickety clackety and green and I love it. But my wrists are still adjusting to typing on it :( so it’s a work in progress!

Read on for this week’s thoughts from the heart (US, Palestine, Pride, and freedom), images from the camera roll, and reflections from the page (burnout)!

From the heart 💗

If you’re following US politics, you may know that this was a pretty big week for the hellscape we’re inhabiting. Not only was the first presidential debate, by all accounts, a total disaster of two ancient evil men floundering and/or lying; the Supreme Court was up to its usual rights-stripping shenanigans.

I’m talking about the criminilaziation of homelessness.

Essentially, the court ruled that cities could “punish people for sleeping in public places.” It added that they can do this even when there isn’t enough shelter space.

This is a horrifying decision. Do you know how many people in this country are unhoused? Do you know how many people who currently have shelter are potentially in danger of losing it? I’m talking disabled people who can’t work; LGBTQ+ teens and even adults who may get kicked out; employed people living paycheck to paycheck, one emergency away from disaster.

We are not free in this country. Not when homelessness can be criminalized and people can be locked up for the crime of not being able to survive the unjust system that is literally designed to beat us down and destroy us.

This weekend is Pride, and I can’t stop thinking about how Americans are losing rights from every direction, and forever on the verge of losing more. We’re not free.

This weekend is Pride, and I’m thinking about Palestine, and every single life that’s been lost to Israel’s colonization and apartheid state. They’re not free.

This weekend is Pride, and my heart is with the people of the DRC, more than 7 million of whom have been internally displaced, are on the brink of starvation. They’re not free.

This weekend is Pride, and I am thinking of every country where homosexuality is not only illegal, but criminalized. They’re not free.

None of us are free, is the thing.

Pride is not just a celebration; it is, historically, a protest. It is a fight. It is a clarion call that things are not right, things are not just, things are not equitable, and it is up to us, the people, to fix that shit.

This weekend is Pride, and today I’ll be recommitting myself to fighting. To using the power at my disposal, my privilege as a white American woman, my platform and my words and my time, to making the world a better place. To making the world a free place.

A better world is possible. I know it. I believe it. Because there is goodness in humanity, there is hope. There is evil in humanity too, and oppression, and I don’t know the details of how we’re going to get to the better world. But I know that it’ll be a fight. I’m here. Let’s go.

From the camera roll 📸

From the page ✍️

I had a realization this week. After months of beating myself up for how slow I was writing, how little I was reading, how much of a slog it felt like everything was…I realized that I might be experiencing some burnout.

At the very least, I’m disgustingly exhausted after two packed years of doing grad school + working full-time, and five months after graduation of trying to keep chugging along like nothing had changed. During those six months, I traveled; I was hospitalized; I had work struggles; I got sick; and I also completed two drafts of HEX and a draft of a short story.

But I was still furious with myself for not doing enough. Because for the past two years, I was reading 10 books a month, writing 150-200 pages a month, and working the same job I have now. I thought the only thing that should change upon graduation was that I no longer had the pressure of needing to do so much. Turns out, I just replaced external pressure with internal pressure.

Something my brilliant final advisor Fran Wilde said to me in my fourth semester has been coming back to me this week: graduation is a threshold, and when you cross a threshold, you leave something behind.

It took me five months of trying to pretend I hadn’t left anything behind to come to terms with the fact that…I’m so ridiculously, existentially exhausted, y’all.

I’m tired of HEX, too. That’s been the hardest thing to come to terms with. That this book that initially brought me so much joy to draft had turned into a weight around my neck, dragging me down. I did three drafts of the book in quick succession over seven months. I was diving into a fourth draft, and something wasn’t working. There was nothing wrong with the writing, or the story, or the characters…there was something missing in me that wasn’t letting me connect to it as much anymore.

So I’m taking a break — from HEX.

I don’t know how to take a total break from writing, and I definitely don’t know how to take a break from writing with the goal of publication. Writing is something that I do because it feeds my soul, so I don’t want to pause entirely, not right now. But I can’t keep going with HEX, because I’ve piled so much pressure1 onto that book that it’s tainted it.

I want to be able to love HEX again. I think the story deserves that, and the characters deserve that, and definitely my potential future teen readers deserve a story that I’ve poured my everything into. I’m incapable of doing that with this book right now, alas.

So I’m pivoting. I’m beginning to draft something new — an adult project that I’ve been cooking up for a while — and I’m trying to take my time with it. To keep pressure off of it.

Like I said above, I don’t fully know how to write without thinking about publication, but lately it’s gotten more intense to a really unhealthy degree. I think about it constantly, I have turned it into a marker of my own value and worth as a human. I am living in a potential future where I am published and that is unhealthy because I need to be living in my current reality. I need to be present with the life I have been given, not 10 years into the future living a life who knows if I’ll ever get to.

So I’m working on this new project, but I’m trying to focus on the craft of it, the joy of writing it, and not the potential future publication of it.

And who knows? Maybe I’ll get halfway through next week and realize I need to take a TOTAL break for my burnout symptoms. If so, I’ll reevaluate. I’m trying to be more flexible with how I live, how I create, because I want to get to a healthier relationship with writing and with my creativity in general.

Stay tuned for more, I suppose!

Alla prossima 👋

You may remember (how could you forget, I talk about it a lot, lol) that I was accepted to this year’s Lambda Literary Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ+ Writers in the YA Fiction cohort. This retreat is a virtual, week-long intensive where I’ll have my writing workshopped by fellow YA writers + a powerhouse faculty member, Dr. Darice Little Badger. I’m still fundraising to meet the $1,100 retreat tuition. The new fundraising page is on the Lambda Literary site; if you’re in California, they won’t let you donate because of something to do with the law, but you can always hit me up and I’ll let you know what you can do.

Happy Sunday, happy Pride, love y’all.

— Karis xoxo