Even as worlds end, we still braid hair: A letter to the newly disillusioned/ awaken.
I read a post a while ago written by a young white woman about soft girls during fascism. She was passionately urging girls to abandon their “soft girl eras” and cancel their soft girl summer plans because, according to her, “the world is ending!” I skimmed the post and left with a sigh.
I’ve seen this panic before, just dressed in other aesthetics. From eco-anxiety to white feminism to climate guilt, it’s the same cycle of alarm from newly awakened western white people, only now realizing that the house of empire has been burning for centuries.
For many of us – Black and Brown people, colonized people, displaced people – our worlds have ended countless times already, long before hashtags and headlines made the apocalypse trend; we’ve watched the sky fall and our kin vanish, we’ve buried languages, dreams, entire cosmologies, and we’ve done it with heartbreak, and rage, and music still softly playing in the background.
We have built homes in the rubble of bombs that didn’t wait for breaking news, we’ve whispered prayers while the machines of war flew overhead, we’ve found ways to meditate to the sounds of sirens and scream-lullabies, and we’ve learned to dream even when sleep would not come. Because we had to. Because not dreaming would’ve meant truly dying.
We’ve felt grief so deep it eats through the bones and taints the spirit – and still, out of resilience, we’ve laughed, made art, cooked, and braided each other’s hair – as empires collapsed around us. Because that’s what we had to learn to do, to master. We rose in the ruins, tending to new gardens, waiting for our seeds of hope to grow again. Dreaming of new beginnings in every ending.
We’ve long been disillusioned by “the new world,”, we’ve seen how many so-called salvations were just new versions of the same extraction, led by psychopathic greedy white men playing God, building mega-churches of chaos just to impress each other and leave the rest of us to pick through the dust.
So no, I did not cancel my soft girl summer this year. No, I do not feel guilt for the ease I am still cultivating. I have not abandoned my mental peace just because The Architects of Ruin have boldly and openly started scheming closer to their own homelands and own kin.
Instead, I will, as I have aimed for a while now, continue to move with intention, not reaction – I will continue to pull at the roots of our collective destruction, not chasing the smoke, because I know the fire didn’t start yesterday, and it won’t be put out with The Day’s Trendy Panic.
I will continue dreaming of another world with the calm and precise alchemy of ancestral healers, who knew that true change is rhythmic, not a race. I will write and speak and work like someone who’s already seen worlds end and knows how to begin again. I will not offer myself as an offering to prove I am paying attention.
I will use my words as sharp, sacred tools – not to perform, but to protect, to plant, to cultivate radical holistic transformations and not just another quick fix – and then I’ll log off, laugh at a good joke, admire the sunset, make art, give gentle kisses, go swim in wild rivers and forage chestnuts for roasting. I will remain whole and intentional, in all the big and little ways I can. These are my sovereign acts of defiance.
Because these bones remember, this spirit knows that this has always been a marathon – Spirit has always shown that these wars are not fought with weapons and bombs but minds, hearts and souls too.
And to the newly awakened I say – pace yourself, root yourself, choose your priorities wisely, because this is only the end of a world not the world. Prepare for the long run because you might outlive all your panic and fears to find you have no voice left, no heart beating with care and that all your hope has long been shredded to pieces and buried behind you.
So, dearly newly and passionately disillusioned – stay wise in your rage, purposeful in your grieving, and visionary in your actions.
With love, light, and courage – always,
