your body doesn't need another framework. neither do your relationships.

forcing people to be accountable will never be satisfying for us.

Jun 22, 2026

healing is not about never feeling uncomfortable—

there’s this forgiving tension i find between being a person in an audience and witnessing an artist perform for the first time. the viewer in an audience naturally tends to give their trust to the performer, creating plenty of space in themselves to be surprised & to have a pleasurable experience.

while, as a witness of an art form, we can be critical: it takes us longer to become critical because we come into these spaces with an open heartedness—we want to experience something that will change us.

if you’ve ever been at a show holding your breath when a performer did or said something that wasn’t politically/morally/experientially aligned with you, and then took a breath of relief when they fully circled it back into their politic or process of reality in a way that rebuilt your trust with them—then you’ve experienced this sense of trust. i observe this {phenomena} everytime i go out to shows and watch someone perform who i have no frame of reference for. artists have a big responsibility in this way. we have to delicately place our ideas and experience of reality into the viewers hands without losing their sense of trust and curiosity.

i experience this relationship between the performer and the audience as a phenomena because we generally do not offer this same level of openness and curiosity to strangers unless they hold some position of perceived power (or unless we’re in the practice of challenging our systemic avoidance of each other’s shared humanity). i invite you to observe this next time you take in some form of art where your role is to witness—whether its live music, comedy, or some experience where you are placed in the role of being a part of an audience. im in admiration of this dynamic, because the performer has the first couple minutes or so to really gain the viewers trust, or to lose it.

my question as an observer of this experience is, why do we give performers/artists so much power over our trust? i sense that part of it has to do with the power dynamic at play where the performer controls what kind of input we take in as an audience—that’s real. the other layer is that we rely on the performer to fulfill something in us as an audience. we want to experience something beautiful, and so, we open ourselves and make space for that experience to fit the shape of our bodies & lives.

this is my loose definition of holding wonder.

this is a tender skill to have, and something that art can teach us how to do as experiencers of each other in a world that encourages us to treat each other as disposable, and to employ alienation as the remedy to our experience of tension/disgust in relationships.

how can we learn to listen to each other in a way where we can allow ourselves to suspend each other in time?

accountability requires curiosity.

i keep talking about conflict and abolition together because if we do not learn to humanize each other now, and sit with the complexity of the relationships that are currently in our life—then what’s the point of getting rid of prisons and police? and i say that with the fullness of my heart, because honestly, it’s downright disrespectful to the future to expect change to happen without also disassembling the systems that live inside of us.

you want to abolish police? but you won’t even sit with the tension of your relationships long enough to stop yourself from alienating someone from community when they’ve been a bad friend to you? you won’t stop yourself from writing someone else off for not having the exact same politics as you?

you want to abolish prisons? but you won’t even treat the people in your community with humanity? you think that there are humans that you know who deserve to be punished, forgotten, and denied access to care and resources. but you won’t even face the cop that lives in your head?

to be clear: the police and prisons are violent and unnatural and any world without them would be better. and, i want to invite you to hold the simultaneous reality that we’ve all been taught to handle conflict and abuse from the lens of imperialism & domination. what i want to emphasize is that we need to prepare ourselves for what happens on the otherside of collapse, and what other possibilities exist outside of the systems that have been given to us. if we do not, we run the real risk of re-iterating these same systems of violence.

note: if you are new to my work, here’s some pieces to read to situate you in my line of thinking around conflict and abolition:

i am BEGGING ya’ll to commit to humanizing each other. i am begging you to try every creative thing you can think of before disposing of another person who you care deeply about. i am begging you to believe in the future enough to start embodying it right now.

that means—what 10 other things can you do besides calling the cops? and really sit with it. try those avenues in low risk experiments first. be an artist in the way you co-create the world. you will be wrong. you will fuck up. you may sometimes even have to rely on the systems that don’t support the futures you imagine. your futures may even clash with people you love. you may sometimes have to end relationships.

still, i end relationships even though it sometimes clashes with my heart because i give myself space to hold the complexity of reality. ending relationships does not always equal disposability—though when left unpacked, it is the frequent motion of how we’ve been taught to relate, and often is from the lineage of diposability we are all steeped in.

what i’m calling for is not boundless risk. rather, an invitation to use the relationships that do matter to you as the practice ground—and then when you’re ready, begin rippling those practices into the world. this is a slow process.

the thread that connects us all, we all have the same core needs. this is a crucial feature in learning to rehumanize each other. we all need access to not just food, safety, water, housing—but belonging, connection, freedom, empathy, trust, to be heard/seen.

i fully believe most of our conflict with each other de-rails into full scale dehumanization because we do not know how to hold curiosity alongside our experience. being in conflict isn’t about saying the right things or following some step by step procedure that someone outside of your body came up with. it’s about acknowledging and leaning into the tension between you and another person. conflict is specific and relative to the bodies directly experiencing it—the solution lies there, in that present directness.

while i believe accountability is a healing tool for deep harm, i do not think it is the antidote to conflict—in fact, i find it to have the opposite effect at times. in my work within conflict, i’ve found that accountability, in the way that we know it, sometimes isn’t even necessary at all.

i’ve written about my chosen distance from conflict frameworks that suggest there is a step by step procedure that we should follow in order to ‘facilitate repair’. there is no step by step process for mediating or resolving conflict because conflict is deeply embodied, felt, and unique to the people involved and the specificity of their histories and hurts. i find the same to be true of accountability.

there’s a current culture, that largely exists in parasocial online settings, where people who are not specifically involved in a conflict will demand accountability from someone else (generally who they do not even know).

you can not hold someone accountable—this language and frame of thinking is rooted in carcerality. and to me, is an extension of physical prisons and a subtle vehicle of control that enforces us all to police and punish each other, perpetually, without any labor from the system itself. the fact that we have an entire culture of liberatory centric people who believe that you can make someone be accountable is deeply concerning to me. this is the same punitive logic that continues the economy of the prison industrial complex. while demanding someone perform accountability might make people feel safer, it is often an illusion, especially when the people demanding it do not have any connection to the conflict except as spectators.

punishment is not a deterrent for harm, care is. as toussaintF12 writes “abolition is about presence, not absence.”. alienating people from community and systems of care perpetuates harm. since we are all humans who share the same core needs, our work as abolitionists is to hold the complexity of hurt alongside the reality that people who hurt other people also deserve to have their needs met.

the fact of human’ing—when our needs go unmet, we are at a greater risk of hurting each other. abolitionary loving requires us to hold the reminder that we are all capable of hurting each other. abolitionary loving requires me to accept that i will hurt other people, and other people will hurt me.

there are many humans in my life who know that when i get hungry, i need to eat soon or i will get a lil cunty. i have friends who will immediately ask me if ive eaten any food if my energy changes. this is a small example of how my ability to hurt other people can emerge from an unmet need.

a broader example from my life is that when i feel unheard, i struggle to hear other people. this is not because i am bad, or because i don’t care about other people’s needs, but because i sometimes want so badly to be heard that i start to unknowingly dehumanize the people i love—because there are parts of me that equate being unheard to being uncared for. does this make me selfish? sometimes. does this mean i am undeserving of care? no.

because of this recurring feature of myself, i will subtly, and unknowingly, punish the people in my life at times when i actually just really deeply need to be heard. i will write them off. i will tell myself our relationship isn’t shit. i will tell myself i don’t need them. anything, to convince myself that they are somehow binarily bad, and a deeply flawed human being. i take responsibility in myself to cultivate an awareness of this pattern in me.

i am lucky, because atp most of the people in my life are also committed to doing the deep work of being in conflict together. that means holding each others shadows, and traumas, and walking the unstable path of learning to navigate walking in the dark together, even when everything in my body is convincing me to run away.

that unknowing dehumanization, it is something we are all capable of. and it happens most when we feel deeply hurt—when whatever traumatic forces within us are able to convince us that someone hurt us because they do not care, rather than that someone hurt us because we are all capable of hurting each other, and hurt is a natural expectation of deepening relationships. that unknowing dehumanization occurs when we rely on binary thinking to protect ourselves.

your body does not need another framework.

i do not follow a step by step process for accountability because i have learned that accountability rarely happens in the way that i imagine it will. sometimes, accountability happens after repair, sometimes it happens before, sometimes it happens when i am not even searching for it, sometimes it does not happen at all and i feel good about that.

as i wrote in “a lot of ya’ll don’t know how to apologize”, apologies are satisfying when they are felt by all people involved in them. —this is why people who demand accountability who are not involved will never be satisfied. accountability can not be reduced to a procedure, or a demand, or something that binarily follows conflict. accountability must honor the embodied reality of our conflicts. accountability is a deeply experimental thing that we must practice, explore, and acknowledge that it can take many shapes.

when we reduce accountability to a binary process, we position ourselves into the same rigid thinking and way of relating to each other that has been given to us by our oppressors.

everyone wants to talk about surveillance, but nobody wants to talk about how deeply we surveil each other. i find cancel culture boring for a long list of reasons, but the one that captivates me the most is that there is the underlying assumption that cutting people off from society is a form of liberation and community care. what captivates me the most about this is that it is often white folks who are “using their voices” to “protect community”, but often they are most interested in protecting themselves.

what i’ve learned in my advocation for practicing conflict as a way of abolitionary worldbuilding, is that often people are more afraid of getting canceled themselves than they are committed to building a safe future. there is a risk in orienting yourself towards a liberated future: you will lose the safety of the world you live in.

to me rejecting punitive models of relating to each other is also a way of rejecting whiteness. alienation is one of the key pillars which whiteness rests upon. under white supremacy, violence is a form of social currency: a shared hatred for something ‘other’ is literally how white people have learned how to commune with one another.

so yaaa, when i see white people rallying together to exorcise someone from a community, i am suspicious. punishing people doesn’t create more safety, it just creates more surveillance. if punishing people worked, then prisons wouldn’t be one of biggest industries in the usa. i’m a lil convinced that white people know that punishing people doesn’t work though, they just like to do it because it makes them feel good. white people have been rallying to push people out of communities and ‘their’ spaces for a very long time. at this point im starting to think it feeds some intergenerational memory of fucked up belonging.

i started writing about abolition because i felt fucking insane living in the echo chamber of a community that would judge me for advocating for people’s humanity. i lost so many friends because i refused to deny people care for shit that honestly could have been resolved between the people that were immediately connected to the conflict. when i hear about some of the conflicts that people are getting cancelled for in my immediate community im like “okay, so what u just described is literally someone being a bad friend to you”.

the risk in acknowledging this punitive fuckery is that people will think you are messy! you will lose friends! people will also try to alienate you! and mostly, you will not be able to be in community with people who rely on whiteness to feel belonging.

avoiding discomfort is a tool of white supremacy.

committing to anti-carceral futures requires you to be uncomfortable. i wrote this note that went viral the other day abt how dehumanized homeless people are and how i find it weird how many people are unwilling to make eye contact with a homeless person because they don’t view them as human, and they are unwilling to sit with the discomfort and shame that seeing someone who deeply needs care brings them.

—yes i fucking get it that we have every horrible demonic system positioned against us with increasing pressure at every moment. i know these systems churn us into their lil automated oppressor robots. and i could not believe the amount of people who had shit to say about me saying that homeless people are human beings.

what i learned, because people literally said this in response, is that there are many people in the world who have taken the therapized idea that they should not have to be uncomfortable, and that they are allowed to avoid things that cause them distress—including dismantling the empire. and holy fuck—

distressing ourselves is important if we want the empire to fall.

there is no world where we are liberated where we didnt have to put deep labor into deconstructing, and sitting with the systems that live inside of us.

some of yall really think the revolution is going to come from OTHER people doing labor while you sit on your phone and watch it happen?

if you cant challenge yourself to make eye contact with a stranger for 12 seconds and acknowledge their humanity, how do you expect to survive in a cooperative world where we have to communicate our needs to each other and do the deep work of deconstructing alienatory systems from our bodies?

i find this to be true of how we approach conflict culturally too: disposal culture rests upon our fear of being uncomfortable. we put people in prisons and tuck them off into poor rural landscapes so that we will not have to look at what we’ve done to each other. we cut each other off the second we feel friction so that we don’t have to sit with the pain of having our hearts broken by someone we love—or the pain of holding both our anger and the reality of another person’s humanity.

healing is not about never feeling uncomfortable. my sense, as someone who works deeply with people’s bodies and trauma, is that building our capacity for discomfort is a way of surviving ourselves into the future. as i wrote in “ur therapist is trained to oppress u”, other peoples feelings ARE your problem. there is no inhabitable future where we do no acknowledge our deep inter-connectivity. most of these skills have been largely left forgotten and unexplored under the normalization of punitive loving, and the imperial lie that [othered] people are the dangerous ones, not the systems.

the most liberating inner work i’ve facillitated, for myself and others, is the kind that we avoid the most—it involves looking into the densest places of our bodies and histories. i find that sustainable healing comes when we find the courage to sit with the parts of ourselves that terrify us the most. and when we do this, often, we will find ourselves feeling a new kind of spaciousness and energy—a way of relating to the world that’s more confidently from ourselves. the things that cause us deep discomfort, those things that we would prefer to avoid, take up so much space in our consciousness. they literally suppress our life force.

accountability, contrary to the ways we’ve externalized it, is a process that takes deep introspection. to practice becoming accountable people, we must be able to sit with our deep feelings of discomfort and avoidance. just as apologies must be felt by all people involved, accountability requires the same kind of deep embodiment, and willingness to feel into the tension and aliveness of the wound.

accountability does not always require an apology though. accountability may follow an apology through action, or tending to the wound across time, together. accountability may happen in the moment when the other person is thoroughly unlocked and liberated of their suffering by the felt knowing that you can feel the way that you have caused them to hurt.

as students of conflict, we must be willing to feel around in the dark together. our pain is nonlinear, as in the way that the people in our life have the power to invite out our histories through the way they interact with us, we may have to do a lot of excavating and returning over and over to the sites of pressure.

in my practice as a breathworker, i do a lot of exploratory work with people to integrate the different pieces of themselves that have been scattered across time into the present moment. pop culture calls this parts work or IFS—though i found this practice by working deeply within my body, and listening to the medicine of Life. in the spiritual world, this is sometimes called soul retrieval work. to be clear, this kind of inner exploration has existed long before the colonial project, and long before the “invention” of western models of mental health.

part of the teaching i share, and have learned from my own inner world practices, is that every moment in your body contains a deep kind of intelligence, especially the more symbolic, non-sensible whirlwinds that unravel within us. in my practice, every image, thought, random feeling, or wave of texture is a doorway that leads us towards a path of integration, and contains information about what our bodies/spirits need.

in myself, i practice this even outside of healing sessions. the world is constantly drawing out different pieces of myself. i find myself to be the most fragmented when i am in conflict with people i love. the way that someone i care about can say something that will transport me into the feeling i carried at 8 years old when the ice cream shoppe didn’t have the cookie dough ice cream i wanted is not random1, or some absurd thing that our body just does—it is deeply intelligent. when i follow those fragments of nonlinearity in myself, they often lead to more fragments, until they become sites of healing.

for our bodies, everything is happening nonlinearly. our birth is just happening now, just as our death is. we are in deep convergence with all points of ourselves across time, now and forever. you have never been born and you will never die.

conflict to me is proof of our nonlinearity and cross self entanglement. when i allow myself to be a witness, there’s something deeply beautiful about the way that the present moment is always trying to get me to bring the past and the future right Here, too. in the law of Now, there is not separation between past and future, and our bodies remind us of this law in every moment.

if you are interested in learning how to do this kind of integrative work and facilitate depth work for other people, i am hosting a 16 week breathwork training in this very practice—it will include my practice for guiding folks through their bodies & trauma integratively, conflict & abolitionary worldbuilding, and facillitating community healing spaces <3

~connect here if you want more info.~

to me, accountability follows this same kind of nonlinearity—and it’s a large part of why i do not trust frameworks of conflict or accountability to be the things that will save us from each other’s violence. our work together must be an invitation, otherwise we deny each other agency and choice.

if we are willing to drop into the thickness of conflict with each other, solutions will emerge. again, we may have to keep returning over and over. it may feel hopeless. we may feel that we have made no progress. we must remember in these moments of sameness that everything is in a simultaneous process of becoming.

it can be very easy to dehumanize each other in long term conflicts. it can be easy to view each other as unchanging. this is not true, not of anyone. even the smallest form of erosion is worth recognizing.

part of this emergence, is holding the histories that accompany us alongside our journey of suffering together. if i am the one who has hurt someone else, what comes up for me? memories of when i was forced to answer or take the blame for things i didn’t do, that now make owning up for my actions feel repulsive? the sensation of wanting belonging and fearing rejection? kicking rocks on the playground alone? where does this moment tether itself across time?

if i am the one who is hurting, what is surfacing? what hurts have followed me to this moment? what does the sting of this pain remind me of? have i ever played the reverse role of causing this level of pain?

in conflict, we must follow the absolute randomness like its a cosmically given map—an internal guidance system for navigating our infinite thoroughness. conflict work, abolitionary work, is a commitment to holding discomfort and trusting in the wisdom of our togetherness.

for the sake of my own thoroughness—there are obviously moments where accountability is impossible. there are people we can not expect healing from, and we have to be boundaried and discerning enough to know they can never offer us what our hearts need. simultaneously, we have to cultivate our own awareness of when we are bringing carceral imagination into our relationships and limiting the depth possible between us and the people in our life.

if every relationship you have ends in no-contact, you have to account for the cultural influence behind that and your own role in disposability culture. i am also someone who had a long history of running my relationships into the ground, and when i could no longer handle the weight anymore, i would dispose of the relationship and never see them again. i first learned of the culture of disposability within myself. i had to look very deeply in myself and realize that i was part of the problem. i had to hold the reality that i didn’t have many sustainable relationships in my life. partly, because i was so poorly boundaried and continued to choose people who were not in alignment with my values, and partly because i was DEEPLY conflict avoidant.

when i write about abolition and cultures of relating to each other, i am able to do so because i have explored and processed my own deep shit. my expertise, is from an expertise in myself, and by trying out these practices in my relationships. like “oh shit, im conflict avoidant? alright then i guess its time to lean in, even when it makes me want to fucking throw up.”

this is also a process of accountability. to me, the most satisfying accountability is the kind that comes from someone who really can hold the weight of their actions. people that are skilled in this are skilled in navigating their own complexity and are courageous enough to face their own deep wounds, shadows, and core fears.

accountability does not require frameworks or step by step processes, it requires people who are willing to hold their depth in the light and let other people look at it.

i wrote in why friendships are harder to repair, our conflict together must explore the intricacies of our hurt, and the histories that make them possible. this to me is the crux of building conflict skills—expanding our capacity to hold and be held.

generative conflict to me, is often marked by how willing we are to hear each other. i’ve been in situations where someone only wanted me to hear them, but had no interest in hearing what forces shaped my actions—our conflict never made it very far this way. neither of us ended up getting what we needed. the best situations of accountability i’ve experienced have often involved me hearing and understanding the other person’s perspective and line of thinking—this helped me humanize them and really hear the heart of their apology.

one of my favorite practices in conflict is timeline sharing. whereby, me and another person each take uninterrupted turns sharing our experience of how our conflict got so deep, starting from our perceived roots of conflict. this practice alone often goes farther than a simple structural apology or a statement of accountability because it roots both us into the reality that humans experience things very differently. it is humanizing to hear a story that you’ve maybe narrated one way for a long time in another person’s voice. that kind of story sharing has the power to break up binary thinking.

part of deconstructing carcerality and embracing abolitionary loving is holding the nonlinear needs of conflict/tension. punishment, discipline, and punitive measures all exist on a linear level. this is precisely why i have low levels of trust with conflict frameworks that do not offer space for variance, complexity, and context.

our current model of punishment that is densely rooted in prison carcerality, imperialism, and coloniality, requires us to frame our relationships on linear timelines. someone does x then y happens as a result. our oppression even, relies on binary, linear models of thinking. it does not take much proof for someone who has a hatred for a group of people to affirm their hatred. in part, i think this is why, both, one action from a person of an oppressed group is enough to amplify polarized belief systems AND it also plays a part in why bigoted people experience so much cognitive dissonance when someone moves outside of their categories of expectation ([see:] “you’re not like the other x [insert group of ppl]”).

so much of what these systems rely on is our passivity and our reliance on *percieved comfort and safety.

i was listening to one of my favorite posthumanist thinkers, Bayo Akomolafe, talk about how in the usa we take rules very seriously, and how in other places in the world people take them as suggestions. ( this was maybe last year, and i can’t remember the podcast i was listening too!! or really the specifics besides this—but check out his work, i love and trust his heart so deeply <3 ) the examples he gave were like how on planes, in the united states, we are told not to stand up until the flight ends and we listen to that, whereas in other cultures, (i think india was one of the examples) folks will take that as a suggestion and just stand up at the end of the flight before the plane even lands.

i’ve been thinking of this a lot in terms of abolition, & the ever-looming question of when the masses in usa will do literally anything in response to the ever-increasing horrors of the world. like damn. we won’t even stand up on the plane yall.

all of this to me, speaks deeply to the linear kind of way we are coerced into engaging with each other/reality.

abolitionary loving, transformative ways of relating and practicing conflict, must be nonlinear if our goal is to humanize each other. again, linear frameworks for approaching relationships can be destructive to the integrity of the relationships we are in. my thought, just like the standing on a plane, is we should take them as suggestions. i am suspicious of any framework that tells me it can solve all my relational problems or teach me how to relate to people, if it does not take into account that relationships are specific. our histories. our cultures. our experience of love. it’s all specific and direct.

recently, i’ve been sitting with the reality that change can not happen in a sustainable way if the wound is not tended to. this should be obvious in some ways. we know what happens to wounds that aren’t tended to—they fester. this is true of our relationships too. this is true of dismantling systems of domination. as i wrote in “this pussy is work so i only fuck deconstructionist”—if we do not do the work of uprooting these systems from our bodies, belief systems and relationships—the future’s we imagine will not come. even if the empire does fall, we will replicate the same wounds, and horrors of violence over and over upon each other.

i notice in conflict, sometimes we have the urge to jump to the solution and strategizing before the wound has been properly tended too. this makes sense to me. on one level, i think it shows that we are invested in our relationships, and we want them to feel good—we are committed to creating security for each other. on another level, i think it also speaks to our cultural avoidance—the strategizing to me can sometimes be representative of our fear of going into the wound—our fear of sitting in the depth of our hurt. strategizing (frameworks too) sometimes are band aid fixes that require us to do more work later.

sometimes, accountability is not possible yet, strategy and healing are not possible yet, because we first need to be heard, and know that the other person(s) is willing to hold the immensity of our wound. this might be a starting place if you find yourself coming back to a wound over and over, even though you “should” be over it. our wounds do not lie about what is needed to move forward.

recently, i’ve learned to say “hey, i know you want to focus on solutions because you care about me but i don’t feel safe to explore them right now because i need to be heard”. if the wound has not been felt, and seen in the way it needs to be seen, you might not even be able to conceptualize strategies for moving forward because it hurts so loudly. part of learning this reality of accountability has meant that i have to be accountable speaking to that when i feel it.

this is one nonlinear nature of conflict, where “i know i hurt you, here’s how i want to move differently in the future” does not always work. friends, i am begging all of us to not be reduced to frameworks. to not let our relationships be reduced to frameworks. had i have followed accountability frameworks when i was hurt and not ready to strategize, my relationships would have crumbled. i would have felt insane everytime i brought back up a wound that “i should have” moved through. but instead, by deciding if a framework fit my need in the moment, i create more creative space for me to get into the experimental needs of my relationship.

frameworks are not bad. they are also not the solution to everything. we have to hold this reality nonlinearly, on our relational spectrums. so many times, ive experienced myself and others policing ourselves when our needs dont fit into a framework that was intended to provide us all the solutions to our problems. we are so much more free than that. we have to let ourselves be more free than this. this is part of worldbuilding. this is part of how we bring the future into the present.

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