For three nights I had nightmares about my mother & during the day I had constant flashbacks to last June when she threatened me & tried to physically fight me.

What plays over & over is her slight chuckle & grin as she repeated “who’s going to believe you? nobody is going to believe you” as she told me she was going to call the police & tell them I’m physically violent with her & making her feel unsafe in her home (that she didn’t pay for, not even the toilet paper & soap she used to wash her ass). My immediate response to her was “Are you out of your mind? You tryna get me killed?” She looked me in the eye, grin still present on her face but never verbally answered my question. Instead she continued her diatribe about how the police will believe her because she worked at the psychiatry practice I went to & she could tell them there’s something wrong with me.

NOBODY IS GOING TO BELIEVE YOU. The laughter & grin said it all, she knew she could spin whatever story she wanted. Cause who’s going to believe the genderqueer Black man with a vagina?

For three days straight I experienced repeated flash occurrences of the evil grin on her face & by the 2nd day they were inducing panic attacks. My heart rate sky rocketed from a 99 BPM to 125-130 BPM while I was sitting down. I couldn’t sleep, so I tried to used the energy to chip away at my task lists.

The conclusion of my dissertation* is that how humans treat each other, has biological (life & death) consequences, you can’t rob & abuse people & expect them to not get sick. I know this to be true through practiced expertise in rigorous & critical analysis of scientific evidence. But I also know it to be true because of it’s the lesson my biological mother taught me for over 33 years.

*NOTE: Dead ass, its in the conclusion section of the concluding chapter of my dissertation:

“…how humans treat one another has consequences for human health. Collective human interactions are major forces in structuring the environmental conditions that we live in. How humans treat one another is an ecological system. We are each other’s environment & thus co-create each other’s external conditions” (McLean 2021:95).

The people that I love have always been at the center of my work, especially since much of what I researched was connected to my general desire to make sure that I improved the quality of life of those around me. Understanding where I am situated within my work is a bit more complicated. The complications are produced by the basic fact that I did not wish to do them harm & was not aware of the fact that they intentionally wished me harm. Reality is, it doesn’t matter what legitimating rationale they use to justify their violence. What matters is whether or not I am able to escape or survive the violent outcomes of their actions.

I try to regularly remind myself that people don’t have to be as horrible as they are. Emphasis on have to be. None of this is fated or inevitable. Euro-colonialism wasn’t & isn’t inevitable. Choices were & still are being made every day. Change is not simply possible, it’s probable. Change is the one inevitable thing. In a similar sense, the inevitable destruction of settler imperialism lies within itself. It’s own contradictions weakens it, that dialectical fact is a strategic one that can be used to resist & overcome/overthrow Euro-settler capitalist imperialism.

As a kind or expression of main-character syndrome, Euro-Settler American individualism easily makes settler agents of colonized peoples. The overwhelming sense or experience of inevitability surrounding exploitation lies solely in the likelihood that the exploited be actively disciplined into subjecting themselves to the rules of those who collectively exploit other human beings. Neoliberal & neocolonial delusions are relational stages in a process of the pursuit of Euro-capitalist ideals at the expense of all else.

Contemporary commoditizing of “activism” & “social justice” is a reflection of a shared (collective) desperation for “being good” (or appearing as such) through the exploitation & the denial of freedom & the responsibilities that come with that freedom. It’s colonial relations that makes disasters out of human beings. I’m doing my very best to make sure I don’t become a disaster because of what others have done to me.