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Today is July 4th, 2026, and at the time I drafted this piece, I had been awake for at least a solid 25 hours. The last two weeks have been filled with what I could only describe as kicking, clawing, scratching, and biting, and I’m exhausted. But against my better judgment, I stayed up, and in the rumination of my life, my past, my pain, and random memories of movies and animated shows I watched throughout my life, I realized what was driving my anxiety to the point of insomnia. To that, I pose the topic of this piece in full.

Sometimes the body understands a conclusion before the mind is willing to say it out loud. You can feel it in the way your chest tightens before a thought can have the opportunity to be translated into language. You can feel it in the way every distraction starts failing at the same time. Your game keeps crashing. The background noise stops working. The little rituals you built to keep yourself functional stop holding the line, and then there you are, awake, not because you have energy, but because something in you has decided you need to figure out something you’ve been avoiding for a while, and it’s not going to let you sleep until you do.

I realized that running from something horrible is not always based on the idea that there is a better place waiting for you on the other side of the wall. Plus, humans are storytellers by nature. We tell stories to explain the world around us and offer more comfort and agency than we would typically have over our environments. We use mythology and dogma to make sense of phenomena we may not have the means or technology to truly understand just yet, and we use lessons and fables to pass down knowledge from generation to generation about what food is safe, what behaviors are not, what dangers to look out for, and what it means to be a person in your community. We use storytelling to rationalize the world around us. To be human is to perceive the world through the lens of storytelling. The question of which story is being told, or what is most popular at the time, is often the core source of any conflict, violent or otherwise. Now, humans can be a bit predictable, so our stories tend to overlap in terms of tropes and themes, as there are only so many ways you can write Gilgamesh and Enkidu without it becoming a buddy-cop plotline. But one of the universal stories that can be seen across many, if not all, cultures and nationalities at one point or another is the story of migration: when an entire community of people moves from one place to another in search of better circumstances.

In the Abrahamic texts, that story is referred to as the Exodus: the mass migration of enslaved Hebrews out of Egypt. To the billions of enslaved Africans who were trafficked across the Atlantic, that story was about seeking emancipation from bondage just as the Hebrews did, and for good reason. The murky part of the story, where nobody seems to agree these days, is the destination. If the migration out of bondage and slavery was the whole point, then there must have been, or “should be,” a holy land, a land of milk and honey, a mother Africa to return to and find safety, food, and paradise after a long journey through endless trials, tribulations, and danger.

For the Islamic texts, they have a set destination for such journeys: the holy site of Mecca, which people still embark on pilgrimages to this day, as the idea of a sacred destination is the draw for making the pilgrimage to begin with. A golden city on the hill where the streets are paved with gold, and the persecuted and outcasts can find sanctuary at last. The idea of there being a destination to run to after escaping something horrible is so appealing. It brings hope that if you just make it far enough, that is the part I keep circling back to: the fantasy of arrival. The belief that if I just survive long enough, explain myself clearly enough, work hard enough, become useful enough, and become legible enough, then eventually I will reach the place where the fighting stops. Not where life becomes easy, exactly, but where I am no longer required to justify my own existence before I am allowed to rest.

I think part of what makes this realization so brutal is that it does not arrive as a clean epiphany. It doesn’t feel like wisdom or even validation. It feels like fatigue. When your brain is running out of rooms to hide in and distractions to keep your focus tied elsewhere, it’s not like you suddenly become enlightened about your life. You just become too tired to keep negotiating with the fantasy that a perfect version of safety is still waiting somewhere ahead of you. There is something about being wide awake at 3 a.m. that strips the performance away. No audience. No framing. Just you, your mind, and everything you’ve spent days doing: classwork, projects, ideas, meetings, and hours and hours of Stardew Valley just to avoid thinking about anything too clearly beyond what my body could handle in that moment. And what I realized, somewhere between the exhaustion and the memories, is that I have come to a sobering conclusion as to what my future is going to look like. For the first time in my 7-year-long journey through emancipation, homelessness, medical abuse, malpractice, and the constant fight for my own autonomy, I realized that the safety I sought after independence might not exist.

I have housing and live on my own, yes, and I’ll confess that my position and station in life may not be glamorous, but logistically, it is a lot more advantageous than the circumstances of those in my age bracket. I’m 26 and was homeless for 4 years and fought like hell through the system. Because the night I packed my duffle bag and barreled out the garage door, I made a promise to myself that if I were ever cornered and forced to go back to that house, I would take my life before anyone even got the chance to force my hand. I made a choice that night that I would figure out a way to exist on my own terms or die trying because being stuck and sedated in my parents’ basement was a fate worse than death in my eyes, and I refused to go back on that promise to this day.

I realize now, as I go about my routine cleaning my apartment and doing coursework and projects just to go day to day, that my independence-or-death conviction is not something many people experience in their lives unless the trauma they face is more excruciating than shutting down would be able to compensate for. The urge to leave, run, and figure out a plan on the fly is not something most people would consider doing, let alone succeed at as far as I have. For most people in any kind of abusive situation, the threat of taking their chances with the streets or the cliffside or the unknown over the wall is enough of a deterrent to keep them stuck and in pain. For many, the fear of the unknown is more painful than the familiar agony of being dragged, constantly berated, and abused by your captors. The threat of the wilderness was enough to scare people into compliance because, unfortunately, it works.

And maybe this is where the personal becomes political, not as a slogan, but as a structural fact. Because communities do this too. Movements do this too. Nations do this too. The threat of the unknown outside of the gates is terrifying enough that even if you can escape one form of harm and abuse, the chances of those practices and behaviors manifesting inside you only to recreate their logic somewhere else are a very common occurrence. It’s a tale as old as time: the heroes seek freedom from their oppressive overlords, whose domination they renounce in theory while preserving domination and recreating it with a new spin in practice the moment they establish a locus of power outside of their previous overlords’ control. You can rename the room, repaint the walls, change the language on the door, and yet still act surprised when the same old machinery starts running underneath and a new generation of heroes and freedom fighters begin fighting to liberate themselves from you.

America sold this myth to the entire world while actively pillaging every nation those dreamers were fleeing from. The land of opportunity, the shining city on a hill, the place where things are better and fairer and your particular kind of person finally has a shot. People ran toward it while America ran toward their resources. The golden city was always a sales pitch for someone else’s conquest. But there is a mirror version of this fallacy, and it may be the one that lives closer to home for most of us.

Instead of purifying inward, you search outward. You spend your life looking for the golden city: the place where people finally get it. The community of people who share your values, your mind, your specific frequency; the total eclipse. The promised land. El Dorado.

Here is the thing about El Dorado that the movies always get around to eventually: even if it exists, it’s probably abandoned. It’s probably in ruins. The perfect community of people exactly like you, if it ever existed, is long gone. Or it never existed at all. It was always a map drawn by someone who had never been there.

I call this the El Dorado Fallacy. It is the belief that community exists somewhere else in its perfect form, waiting to be discovered. The problem is just geography or outdated maps: that there has to be a space, whether physical, social, or digital, that you haven’t found yet, filled with your tribe or your people. And if you haven’t found it yet, then you just haven’t looked hard enough.

And here is the terrifying thing that both fallacies converge on: accepting that neither path leads anywhere means accepting something most of us are not ready to accept. There may be no one on earth whose values, mind, interests, and damage overlap with yours in a full total eclipse. There may be no place that was built for you. There may be no golden city and no community pure enough to feel safe in. That is a grief that doesn’t have a clean name because it’s the kind of grief you feel when you realize that a dream or a person or a protective figure ultimately failed to live up to the expectations that kept the dream alive in the first place, and with that grief comes the standard five stages of processing it.

Denial is not always ignorance or even a deliberate and stubborn refusal or struggle to accept the loss or change. We crave a simpler time because the acknowledgment of the complexities of the world makes the need to be responsible as intelligent humans with power impossible to ignore. Sometimes denial is an emotional shelter. Sometimes it is the last room the mind hides in before it has to admit that the old story no longer works. We tell ourselves that if we can just restore the old order, recover the old community, return to the old language, or rebuild the old version of ourselves, then the grief will stop moving through us. But the old world is not waiting behind us untouched. It has already changed. We have already changed. What we are really grieving is not just what was lost, but the version of ourselves that still believed the loss could be reversed, or even the fact that the loss could happen to begin with.

Anger is the feeling of rage, resentment, blame, or unfairness. It is seeking accountability and retribution, or even self-blame and hatred for the reality in front of us and behind us. It is the stage where the grief stops sitting still. It becomes heat, motion, accusation, and sometimes a desperate search for something solid enough to blame. There is a kind of relief in anger because it gives the pain a target. It says: this happened because of them, because of me, because of the system, because I was careless, because I trusted the wrong people, because the world is cruel, and nobody warned me in time. And sometimes that anger is correct. Sometimes there really was a betrayal. Sometimes accountability is necessary. Sometimes retribution feels like the only language left after every gentler request was ignored. But anger also has a way of folding backward into the self. When there is no clean culprit, or when the culprit cannot be reached, the rage turns inward and starts calling itself honesty. It becomes self-blame. It becomes shame. It becomes hatred for the reality in front of you and the version of yourself that survived what happened behind you. It needs somewhere to go. It looks for a culprit, a system, a person, a movement, a family, a country, a god, a younger version of the self who “should have known better.” And sometimes that anger is justified. Sometimes there really was harm. Sometimes someone really did fail you. Sometimes the system really was designed to grind people down and label the damage as a moral failing or personal weakness. But anger can also become a trap when it convinces us that punishment is the same thing as repair. It can make destruction feel like clarity. It can make exile feel like justice, and it can make cruelty feel justified when there is no justice or legitimate solution to be found.

This is where the fantasy gets clever. It stops sounding like denial and starts sounding like strategy. If only we had better rules. If only we removed the wrong people. If only everyone used the right language. If only the community were smaller, purer, more disciplined, more aligned. If only I could become easier to love, easier to understand, easier to include. Bargaining is the part of grief that still believes there is a formula that can save us from uncertainty, but we do this to ourselves in more ways than one, unfortunately. For those of us who grew up weird, or queer, or neurodivergent, or visibly other, we tell ourselves there is a place, a community, a city, a corner of the internet, a found family where the overlap is total. Where we are fully seen, fully matched, and fully safe. We spend years chasing it. Some of us spend entire lifetimes replaying “if only” or “what if” scenarios: the belief that community becomes safe by becoming smaller, or that belonging and intimacy become tangible via exclusivity, when it doesn’t. It just becomes a different kind of loneliness because there is no place on earth where everyone is going to align with your values or goals or plans in a total eclipse, because we are all growing and changing.

Depression is the moment where the bargaining inevitably fails. Not dramatically, or with a single final betrayal. Often, it just runs out. You get tired of auditioning for belonging. You get tired of translating yourself. You get tired of pretending that the next room, the next group, the next identity label, the next theory, the next city, the next platform, the next version of yourself will finally make the ache stop, no matter how many times you try to recreate the “perfect community,” only to realize that every time you rebuild with the same formula, you lose more and more. Depression arrives when the fantasy of arrival collapses, and there is no immediate replacement for it: feeling the weight, sadness, exhaustion, or emptiness of the loss. I do not think anyone wants to hear that when they are exhausted. I know I do not. I want the clean version. I want the part of the story where endurance is rewarded with arrival. I want the scene where the door opens, the music swells, and someone says: you made it; you can stop fighting now. But life keeps refusing to become that kind of movie. The door keeps turning out to be painted on. The map keeps leading back to the same impossible choice: keep building anyway, or let the ruins decide what comes next.
I do not think anyone wants to hear that when they are exhausted. I know I do not. I want the clean version.

I want the part of the story where endurance is rewarded with arrival. I want the scene where the door opens, the music swells, and someone says: you made it; you can stop fighting now. But life keeps refusing to become that kind of movie. The door keeps turning out to be painted on. The map keeps leading back to the same impossible choice: keep building anyway, or let the ruins decide what comes next. Acceptance is not approval. It is not forgiveness. It is not pretending the harm was necessary or meaningful or secretly good for you. Acceptance is simply the point where you stop negotiating with the fact that the old promise failed. There may not be a perfect community. There may not be a final safe room. There may not be a version of belonging that never asks anything painful of you. But that does not mean there is nothing. It means what exists has to be built with the materials actually in front of us: flawed people, partial safety, incomplete repair, bad days, good faith, boundaries, accountability, maintenance, and the stubborn refusal to confuse imperfection with failure.

Steven Universe said it cleaner than most academic frameworks ever have. In the context of the Diamond Authority’s oppressive regime against all gems that didn’t meet their standard of perfection, we get this: “If every pork chop were perfect, we wouldn’t have hot dogs.” Meaning: if you spend your energy eliminating everything you see as flawed, you will eventually destroy the things that actually bring you joy. You will purify yourself into emptiness. You will build a perfect community with no one left in it. Survival does something strange to your sense of the future. It teaches you to treat peace like a destination instead of a practice. It makes safety feel like a place you have to find, earn, or escape into, rather than something people have to build together in imperfect conditions. And when you have spent years running from systems that harmed you, it is very easy to mistake motion for progress. Forward movement starts to feel like proof that you are getting closer to freedom, even when all you are really doing is staying in motion because stopping would mean feeling everything at once. Maybe that is why the idea of “one step forward, three steps back” hurts so much. It is not just frustration. It is the humiliation of realizing that progress is not linear, and worse, that it was never promised to be. You can do everything right and still end up back in the same room with the same fear wearing a different outfit. You can heal and still be triggered. You can grow and still relapse into old survival strategies. You can leave the original danger and still carry its architecture inside you. That does not make the work meaningless. If anything, it makes the work more honest. It means the work is not simply to find the right people, the right ideology, the right community, or the right promised land. The work is to notice what we keep rebuilding by accident. The work is to ask what parts of our survival became doctrine. The work is to admit that escaping harm does not automatically teach us how not to reproduce it.

We as a species are grieving our own barbarism and the innocence that came with it for the first time in our history. We see the horror, the pain, the atrocities, the suffering, and death of the last 10,000 years of human civilization. We know we can’t go back to the way things were. We know too much now, for better or for worse. We know something has to change, but we fight amongst ourselves over what that change looks like in practice and whether we can still rely on the stories of old of finding or making a “perfect golden city,” and whether that is ethical, feasible, or even possible to do. And if so, what would that “perfect world” look like, and who would be allowed to participate in it?

None of this is comforting in the way people usually mean comfort. But it is clarifying. And sometimes clarification is the only kind of mercy available. If there is no perfect room, then I do not have to keep destroying myself trying to find it. If there is no golden city, then I do not have to measure every imperfect community against a place that never existed. If there is no exit door, then maybe the question changes. Not “where do I go to finally be safe?” but “what can I make survivable here, with the people who are actually here?” That question is smaller than the fantasy. It is also harder. It does not let me disappear into longing. It does not let me outsource responsibility to some future place where everything finally makes sense. It asks for practice instead of purity. Maintenance instead of arrival. Repair instead of revelation. And maybe that is the only version of hope I still trust: not the hope that something perfect is waiting, but the hope that something imperfect can still be made less cruel. The single greatest obstacle to building a truly inclusive community has nothing to do with who’s in the room. It has everything to do with what we think the room is supposed to become.

We have a problem on both sides of the culture war, and it is the same problem wearing different clothes. On one side, you have the far right: religious conservatives, nationalist movements, alt-right communities, and Nazis all operating on a vision of a purified world. One that looks a specific way, encapsulates a certain kind of person, believes a specific thing about what the world should look like, and justifies that view with stories and claims that trace its bloodline or its faith back to some imagined golden origin point. Anyone who doesn’t fit gets removed. The community gets smaller and purer and more brittle until it shatters or metastasizes into something violent. On the other side, you have DEI-aligned spaces, progressive communities, social justice movements, support groups, community action organizations, etc. And here is where I will say something that will make people uncomfortable: in many of these spaces, the leadership and social dynamics are running on the same algorithm. Different values, same logic. The callout, the purity test, the tiered credibility based on identified proximity to harm, the exile of anyone who doesn’t perform the ideology correctly, and the very common instance of leadership and power struggles: the more you delve into the logistics of how these values are upheld, the more you, the person asking questions, begin to be “the problem” in this equation. It’s a common dynamic found everywhere, from family structures to workplaces, and the means of combating it and genuinely making truly inclusive spaces a reality often fall victim to the abuser’s toolkit dressed in the language of safety. I have always had this criticism: that the behavior- or output-oriented DEI initiatives of the last 10 years have been a failure not because of their intention, but because of their execution. A space can be diverse but not inclusive by default, and a space can be equitable but not diverse by any means.

It’s very similar to an expensive washing machine in a way. While the machine can technically encapsulate 14 towels, 17 blankets, two children, and a dog, and still be able to close the door completely without leaks, that doesn’t automatically mean that all the contents in the drum will be washed and cleaned to the best quality possible. Now, this dilemma may come to a few different solutions. You could just wash the towels and the blankets and leave the children and the dog to run around the house unwashed, but that’s a larger mess just waiting to happen. You could just go without everything else in the load, save for the linens and the blankets, and that would be easier to an extent, but ultimately ineffective in the long term, as you can only do so much with linen blankets before they begin to break down. You could just wash everything in the bathtub. That would work for the children and the dog, and possibly the towels too, but it’s not the most effective way to do laundry, plus it’s incredibly messy. The moral of the analogy is that before you commit to one method above all else, first recognize the fact that just because you could close the washing machine door doesn’t automatically mean your problems will be solved like magic.

“We are an inclusive and safe space” carries the same weight as declaring, “If the door thus closeth, the machine must washeth,” when we all know by now that never works in practice. Ditching the other elements of laundry and stripping them down to linens only because they can be most effectively washed via machine is often a mentality associated with the far right, or the same mentality of “if we just kick out certain groups of people from our spaces, then everything will be perfect as it once was.” Or another common phrasing I’ve been subjected to again and again: “This is not a punishment. This is a consequence that you must learn through (aka suffer through ) so that you will understand that we are an inclusive and safe space and that actions have consequences and you must take accountability,” despite being unclear whether accountability entails an apology, a clean kitchen space, a confession of some kind, or exile via social ostracization or social media cancellation, regardless of whether the offense in question was addressed or even legitimate to begin with. The exclusion, the bullying, the ideological gatekeeping show up just as readily in the spaces that claim to be the safe alternative. It is not a both-sides argument. The harms are not equivalent. But the mechanisms within them are identical in practice.

Let me be specific about what letting go of these fallacies actually requires because it means accepting that if you are trans, or queer, or autistic, or disabled, or brown, or some combination of things this world has not yet decided to stop punishing, you will probably not see the full fruits of what you’re building. It will get better, just not for us. Not in our lifetimes. Not in time for it to count where we needed it to be. It means accepting that the life plan we were sold: the stability, the safety, the promise that if you did everything right, the world would eventually make room for you. That plan no longer exists, and even if it did, making spaces for some doesn’t always mean making room for all. We were handed a map to a city that was always burning. It means abandoning the Amazing Digital Circus exit door. For those unfamiliar: in The Amazing Digital Circus, the characters are trapped inside a digital world they didn’t choose and cannot leave. The show lives in the tension between that entrapment and the question of what it means to keep going anyway. There is no exit. The circus is permanent. The question is only what you do inside it. Accepting community as it actually is: imperfect, partial, sometimes painful, and never a total eclipse of your own values. That the door you’ve been looking for is not there. That this is not a waiting room for the real thing. This is the real thing. That is terrifying. I want to say that clearly without rushing past it. It is genuinely terrifying to sit with. But it is also, strangely, the only thing that makes building anything possible.

Disney’s Atlantis: The Lost Empire gets at something most inspirational frameworks refuse to touch. Milo brought a crew of mercenaries into an ancient civilization, nearly triggered a genocide by accident, and is now watching an irreplaceable cultural treasure, one that also happens to be a potential world-ending weapon, be sold by Rourke to the Kaiser. Everything has gone wrong, and much of it is at least partly Milo’s fault. There is no clean solution. There is no version of this where everyone gets out okay.

So what do you do?

“We’re going after him.”

The communications officer has a cigarette in her mouth, and she says with the most deadpan, grizzled, blunt honesty that only an elderly lady who’s old, tired, and dealt with way too much in life says: “We’re all gonna die,” and joins the fray anyway because you might as well go out doing the right thing. There will probably be no reward for this plan. It’s likely going to get everyone killed, but they aren’t going after Rourke to get the crystal back and save Atlanteans because it will be rewarded with a parade or recognition. Not because history will remember them fairly, if at all, for that matter. Because the world will likely still be as chaotic as we know the 1930s were, but because it still needs to be done one way or another.

No choir. No reward. They will probably be treated like garbage for the rest of their lives because of what they did, if they survive this at all. And they go anyway. The understanding that the work of repair, cleanup, grief, and forgiveness does not become your job because it is fair or glamorous. It becomes your job because it is in front of you, and no one else is doing it, and it still needs to be done. We were promised a golden city of opportunity. We were lied to. We move forward and go anyway because when all of the chaos and corruption and debris from the last 200 years comes crashing down at last, whether by the AI bubble bursting and tanking the global economy or by the slow dying of the boomer generation that has held power and scorched the earth behind themselves for no other reason than its own sake, someone is going to have to be there to pick up the pieces, clean up the mess, and build something better than what was there before. The world our children will grow up in is going to be chaotic. It is going to be harder and stranger and more unstable than the world we were promised, and I know that is depressing as hell, but it is an acknowledgment that the situation is bad, the odds are poor, the reward is nonexistent, and the work still needs doing. There is a difference between the condition of the world during your lifetime and the condition of the world you hand forward. We may not get to enjoy the fruits, or we may not live to see the city we were building, and though the world the next generation may grow up in may be a bit shit, it does not have to be the world they inherit from us, the way we inherited this mess from previous generations. The goal was never perfection or utopia. It was never supposed to be. The goal was always just: don’t make it worse than how you found it. And where you can, make it a bit brighter, a bit better, and slowly make the improvements you can, where you can, to make the world something worth inheriting. Nothing is perfect, because perfection and immortality are the same. For perfection to exist, it must be immune to change, but since change is inevitable, perfection is impossible. Everything changes; change is a fundamental law of the universe, and knowing that makes our ignorance or refusal to acknowledge change immature, irresponsible, and dangerous. We are recognizing the barbarism of our fellow humans and our neighbors in real time, how patriarchy, white supremacy, and imperialism are inherently barbaric, yet they justify themselves through ignorance because letting go of those things means stepping into the unknown of an ever-changing, unrecognizable world, which most people aren’t ready for and that’s ok. So we have to lead them. Not because the community will ever be perfect, or the ideology will ever be pure, or the golden city will eventually appear on the horizon. But because hot dogs exist, perfect or otherwise, they are still good. Because an imperfect, partial, sometimes ridiculously stupid community is still a community, and no matter how flawed, messy, or aggravating it can be, there are still golden moments in the fray of the chaos if you can see them, and there are still people in here with you worth showing up for. The United States, as a country built on life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, has failed to live up to its expectations. But there are perks to acknowledging failures. It gives you the opportunity to learn from them, improve them, fix what can be mended, heal what has been wounded, salvage what cannot be brought back, and find a way to move forward anyway.

No choir. No reward. We go anyway.

Because somebody fucking has to.