We Were Never Meant to Survive Alone

If you found your way to this page, maybe something’s fraying. Maybe your thoughts are looping too fast or not coming at all. Maybe you feel like you’re disappearing inside yourself. Maybe you’re not sure what would help, but you knew you needed something. That’s not failure. That’s awareness.

First, pause. Not forever. Just long enough to notice that you’re still breathing.

Put both feet on the floor, bare if you can. Press down gently. Feel the contact.

Name five things around you. If that feels like too much, name just one.

Say it out loud, even if it’s just “my socks” or “a tree.” The point isn’t meaning. It’s presence.

Now: what’s one small thing that might help right now? Not something that fixes everything. Just something that helps you get through the next few minutes.

Here are a few ideas. You don’t have to do them all. Just scan and take what feels possible:

• Drink a glass of water, even if it doesn’t feel like enough
• Hold something with texture: a stone, a leaf, a piece of fabric
• Put on a song that doesn’t ask anything of you
• Say your own name. Out loud. Twice
• Text someone just “Hey, I’m here” even if you don’t know what else to say
• Put your hand on your chest and breathe like you’re with someone safe
• Open a window. Let air meet your skin
• Bookmark this page or screenshot a line that helps

You don’t need to explain anything right now. You don’t need to feel better right away. But you do get to stay. You are not too much. You are not not enough. You are here.

Disorientation doesn’t follow rules. It doesn’t respond to logic. It unravels time. So don’t try to solve it. Shift your rhythm instead.

Pause. Notice. Respond. That’s it.

Maybe light something: a candle, a lamp, the screen of your phone in the dark.

Touch something that remembers who you are.

Repeat a phrase that steadies you. You can borrow one if needed:

I’m still here. This moment is real. I don’t have to go anywhere yet.

You don’t have to move fast. You don’t have to move at all. You just have to stay with yourself a little longer.

You are not a crisis to be solved. You are a person trying to return.

If you’re feeling lost, you’re not broken. You’re wandering. And even maps need margins. Let this be one.

Healing does not move in straight lines. It does not follow a five-step plan or progress neatly from rupture to resolution. It does not reward effort with outcomes. It forgets. It loops. It drifts. It stutters. It disappears entirely, then returns in a breath or a dream. Some days you will feel like you’re making progress. Other days, you may not move at all. Neither is wrong. Neither is failure.

Here, we honour the time of the body. The time of trauma. The time of grief. The time of memory. The time of being disabled in a world that demands performance. The time of neurodivergence in a system obsessed with regulation. The time of madness, not as crisis to be managed, but as wisdom, as signal, as response to an unbearable world. These are not delays. They are not disruptions. They are part of the rhythm.

There is no catch-up to be done. No final state to reach. Some healing will come in fragments. Some will be unknowable. Some will look like nothing on the surface but will be everything underneath. A breath held a little longer. A sensation returning to your fingertips. A thought you let pass without spiralling. A moment of laughter you thought had left your body forever.

You do not need to move at the speed of systems that were built to exploit you. You do not need to recover on a timeline that was never meant to include your survival. The pace of your care is yours alone. Slowness is not a flaw. Delay is not dysfunction. Stillness is not emptiness.

This framework trusts you to take the time you need. To pause. To wander. To return. To not return. To circle back without shame. To begin again in a way that makes no sense to anyone but you.

Time here is not a measurement. It is not a target. It is breath, drift, collapse, rest, recurrence. It is the space between what happened and what might still be possible. It is nonlinear. It is sacred. It is yours.

The myth of the isolated self cannot survive the truth of our histories. It collapses under the weight of genocide, slavery, colonialism, environmental collapse, and the relentless violences of transphobia, queerphobia, racial capitalism, and carcerality. What those forces try to erase—our entanglement with one another—becomes the very foundation of how we survive. Relational healing begins with the recognition that we are never just individuals managing our pain alone. We are always in relation. Even when it’s hard. Even when we’ve been taught otherwise. Every moment of trust, every act of witnessing, becomes a thread in the larger tapestry of community. We mend one another not through solutions, but through proximity—by staying when the world urges us to disappear.

Picture this: you and someone you trust sit by a window at midnight. The city hums low outside. You speak a single sentence about your day—one that trembles with exhaustion, maybe even fear. You don’t have words for all of it, but you offer what you can. They don’t try to fix it. They don’t shrink away. They stay. They listen. Their breath slows to meet yours. Their presence doesn’t demand anything of you. And in that quiet, something shifts. You are no longer alone. Not as a problem to be solved, but as someone worth holding. That is the seed of relational healing. Not performance. Not perfection. Just presence.

Relational healing invites us to build practices that make this presence sustainable. It asks us to hold each other not only in crisis but through the ordinary rhythms of life. One way to begin is through dyadic holding circles—simple, intentional spaces for mutual care. You sit with someone you trust. Maybe you light a candle. Maybe you don’t. You take a few breaths. Then one of you speaks for two minutes without interruption. No fixing. No commentary. Just your story. The listener reflects back the feeling—not the content, not the diagnosis, just the pulse of what they heard. Then you switch. Then you breathe. That’s it. And still, everything shifts. Over time, these circles become a form of embodied trust—a shared language of care that doesn’t rely on expertise, only presence.

But relational healing is never just personal. It scales. It spills outward into kitchens, group chats, clinics, courtyards, community fridges. We create kinship constellations—care networks built on intentional, reciprocal commitment. When someone falters, a web activates. Rides are offered. Meals are cooked. A message arrives: “I’ve got you.” These aren’t random acts of kindness. They are coordinated refusals to let anyone disappear beneath the weight of survival. They are care continuums. Living proof that no one needs to carry it alone.

This is how we last. Not by being invulnerable, but by spreading the load. Relational healing tells us the truth the world often hides: you were never meant to do this alone. And you don’t have to.Hidden block

When language begins to fray, the body steps in to speak. Let it. Not all knowing begins in the mind. Some of it lives in the ache between your shoulder blades. Some of it hums under your breath when you’re not even trying. Wisdom doesn’t only arrive through theory or talk. It comes through movement. Through making. Through breath. Our bodies are living archives. They carry what textbooks can’t: inherited grief, ancestral gestures, the quiet survival knowledge passed down when words were too dangerous or lost. To trust creative and embodied knowing is to believe that your fingertips, your larynx, the soles of your feet can hold truth.

One way to meet this knowing is through grief cartography. Take a piece of paper larger than your body. Begin to map the emotional landscape you inhabit. Use colours like language—red for rage, blue for sorrow, yellow for unexpected joy. Draw rivers where your feelings flow. Mark mountains where pain has rooted itself. Place stars over the places you return to for warmth. Then choose a medium—paint, clay, dance, sound—and enter one region. Shape the peaks of your grief with your hands. Let your feet trace longing across the floor. Let your voice build a soundscape of survival. This is not about art. This is about finding a language when words fail.
Another practice: embodied prayer. Not institutional prayer, but prayer as gesture, as repetition, as sacred attention. You might kneel, or sway, or shake. Let your body write its own liturgy. A hand to your chest might mean remembrance. A slow circle of the hips might be mourning. A stillness might be defiance. When shared in community, these movements become ritual fires—gatherings where truth is spoken not through words, but through shared breath and mutual rhythm. Care moves through the group not by advice, but by presence.

But this kind of knowing isn’t just for sacred moments. It’s already living in the everyday. In how you stir soup the way your grandmother did. In the way your fingers fold a shirt like smoothing out grief. In the rhythm of braiding someone’s hair. In a quiet song while sweeping. These gestures hold memory. They hold resistance. They hold care. If you pay attention, they start to shimmer. They remind you that knowing doesn’t always knock—it waits.

To live this way is to honour the body as teacher, not burden. As prophet. As keeper of record. When you let the body lead—when you trust imagination to shape meaning beyond what can be said—you reclaim a way of knowing that was never lost, only buried. This is not indulgence. It is survival. It is memory. It is a refusal to let the world tell you what counts as knowledge. It is how we begin to build futures not from domination, but from rhythm, ritual, and the infinite possibility of creative care.

To insist on joy in a world that profits from your exhaustion is an act of resistance. When the systems around you demand productivity over presence, suffering over softness, endurance over exuberance, joy becomes more than a fleeting emotion—it becomes strategy. A politics. A rhythm of rebellion. This joy doesn’t always have to be loud. Sometimes it’s the quiet kind: sunlight warming your cheek through the window, the scent of sage and sweetgrass from your traditional territory, a single sentence in a group chat that makes your whole body exhale. Other times it erupts: in dance, in laughter, in skin meeting skin. It is the sound of a room full of survivors, laughing not because they’ve forgotten the pain—but because they’re still here.

Practising joy doesn’t mean denying grief or rage. It means refusing to let them be the only story. It’s an act of balance: allowing delight to take root, even in the rubble. It’s a declaration that you are still a body capable of feeling, still worthy of softness, still allowed to seek pleasure without apology. When we gather—in basements, backyards, kiki balls, or sidewalks—to eat, to joke, to hold one another up, we do more than endure. We conjure another kind of world. One where joy is not indulgence, but instruction. Where pleasure is a way of knowing, of remembering, of reaching for the possible.

Build joy into your day like ritual. A dance break while cooking. A stretch that turns into a sway. A moment alone with your breath and a blooming plant. These are not small things. They are scaffolding. They train your nervous system to remember that feeling good is not betrayal—it is balance. That joy is not escape—it is a homecoming. Over time, these moments form a kind of muscle memory. A resilience that doesn’t rely on stoicism, but on sensation.
To feel deeply is not a distraction from the work: it is the work. And when we share that feeling, when we laugh in defiance, when we craft pleasure into our collective rhythm, we begin to move differently. We begin to resist not only with our analysis but with our aliveness. That is not just survival. That is revolution.

If relational healing is the soil, abolitionist praxis is the seed. It asks: how do we build care at scale, not just in moments, but in systems? Abolition isn’t only about tearing something down—it’s about committing to the slow, collective labour of building something more honest, more alive, more rooted in care. It begins with a refusal: to believe that harm must be met with surveillance, confinement, or exile. Instead, it asks different questions. What if harm opened the door to collective reckoning instead of punishment? What if safety wasn’t a function of control, but of deep relationship? Abolitionist praxis challenges us to unlearn punishment as a default and ask instead: what structures can hold pain without replicating it? What kinds of justice could emerge if we let go of revenge?

That shift doesn’t start in policy papers or protest slogans. It starts close in. With our friends, our kin, our classrooms, our inboxes. The next time conflict arises—a rupture in trust, a moment of harm—what if you paused? What if you chose not to default to blame, silence, or exile? What if you declared a “restorative intermission”—a shared breath before speaking honestly about what happened? You might sit in circle, in DMs, on the floor of your kitchen. Each person offering what hurt, what they need, and what might make repair feel real. Not as a performance. Not to perform virtue. But to keep the possibility of future intact.

Abolition doesn’t stop at the interpersonal. It lives in the structural. It’s there in the work of community bail funds that free people not because they’re innocent, but because cages are inherently violent. It’s in student-run collectives that meet each other’s mental health needs when the university offers only waiting lists. It’s in re-entry programs that meet people released from prison with housing, food, and reconnection to the culture they were separated from. These are abolitionist infrastructures—not born of naïveté, but of clarity. They are built on the truth that safety does not come from punishment. Safety comes from presence, from interdependence, from shared dignity.

At its core, abolitionist praxis is not utopian. It is imaginative labour under pressure. It asks you to design care where you were taught to expect force. To trust people when the state told you to be afraid. To reject the lie that punishment keeps us safe. Abolition insists that we can build new forms of response: where the first person called in a crisis is someone trained to hold pain without escalating it; where neighbourhoods are held together by mutual trust, not surveillance; where justice means no one is left behind, no matter what they’ve done or survived.

Abolition is slow. It is imperfect. It is sacred. And it needs all of us. Each time you choose repair over exile, presence over avoidance, community over compliance—you are already practicing it. You are already building the world that carceral logic said would be impossible.

Your body often knows long before your mind catches up. It flinches when power walks in without invitation. It braces itself under the weight of impossible choices. It remembers what institutions are designed to make you forget. Political clarity is not just about theory or debate—it’s the act of listening to the body’s alerts and following them back to the systems that shaped them. That tightness in your chest when the rent goes up? That’s not just anxiety. It’s the echo of housing injustice, of extraction, of generational displacement. When your voice shakes in a boardroom that only tolerates your presence, it’s not just insecurity. It’s the long reach of exclusion. It’s capitalism’s contempt for softness. It’s whiteness gatekeeping legitimacy.

To grow this clarity, begin with structural journaling. Each time you feel distress—burnout, fear, disorientation—write it down. Not as a sign of failure, but as information. Then ask: what systems are operating here? What structures are invisibly shaping this moment? Maybe your exhaustion lives alongside wage theft and ableism. Maybe your discomfort at the doctor’s office is braided with medical racism, settler-colonial diagnostics, and transphobia. Draw a line from the feeling to the structure. Begin to see your symptoms not as personal defects but as your body’s refusal to normalize harm. What felt like collapse may actually be resistance, misnamed. Your body has been trying to tell the truth all along.

This practice deepens in community. Try timeline testimonies. Gather with others and draw out your life not just through personal memories, but through shared histories. Place your first protest beside a wave of local police expansion. Note when you lost housing stability and link it to the timeline of gentrification in your city. Set the moment you stopped speaking your mother tongue beside the legislation or assimilation pressure that made it dangerous. These timelines create shared context. They expose how private grief is shaped by public policy, how internal struggle often mirrors external violence. They let us trace pain not back to ourselves, but to the forces that engineered it.

Political clarity offers a new kind of compass. It says: this ache isn’t yours alone. This grief has a genealogy. This fatigue is not a moral failing—it’s the weight of systems doing what they were built to do. But clarity doesn’t just name what’s wrong. It helps us imagine how to respond. It points us toward mutual aid. Toward reparations. Toward structural refusal. Clarity doesn’t mean things get easier—but it means we become more precise. And in that precision, we sharpen our tools. We name the harm. We reject the gaslight. And we gather each other to say: we were never imagining it. Now, we organize.

You do not have to say yes to everything. You do not have to be available all the time. You do not owe anyone access to your energy, your story, your body, or your care. Saying no is not selfish. It is not avoidance. It is a form of truth-telling. It is a form of care.

Refusing to overextend yourself is how you stay alive in a world that will always ask for more. Logging off is how you remember your breath. Leaving a conversation is how you protect your nervous system. Not responding right away—or at all—is sometimes the only way to stay intact. These are not failures. They are signs of attunement. They are boundaries shaped by love, not absence.

As Tricia Hersey reminds us, “We will not continue to donate our bodies to a system that still owes a debt to our ancestors.” Rest is not laziness. Saying no is not betrayal. Refusal is an act of ancestral alignment. It is how we honour those who were never allowed to stop working, never allowed to say no, never allowed to protect their time, their breath, or their boundaries. We do not owe this world our exhaustion. We do not owe it our disappearance.

This framework does not demand your constant participation. It does not expect you to be present when you are unraveling. It does not require you to perform care at the expense of your own capacity. You are allowed to be inconsistent. You are allowed to disappear for a while. You are allowed to choose yourself, again and again.

But care is not only withdrawal. It is also relationship. It is the tension and tenderness of being in the world with others. It is imperfect. It falters. It aches. It calls us to show up and sometimes to stay even when we are scared. Not always. But sometimes. And we learn to tell the difference together.

Care is not one-way. It is not a service. It is not something we give until we are emptied out. It is mutual. It moves back and forth. It grows stronger when we honour each other’s needs and limits. When we check in, circle back, apologize without being forced, and ask harder questions about what staying connected could look like.

Accountability here does not mean punishment. It is not a script. It is not surveillance. It means finding ways to remain in relationship after rupture. It means repairing what can be repaired and grieving what cannot. It means recognizing that harm and care often coexist in the same breath and learning to hold both without collapsing.

Refusal is care when it protects what is sacred in you. Accountability is care when it protects what is sacred between us. Neither should be weaponized. Both are necessary.

You do not have to get it right all the time. You do not have to be everything for everyone. You are allowed to be human. You are allowed to ask for care and to offer it in ways that are real, sustainable, and aligned with your truth.

Let this be a space where boundaries are honoured, where relationships are chosen, and where care is not a transaction but a practice of remembering we still need each other—even when it’s hard.

Across every corner of the diaspora, people have carried songs through fire, prayers across oceans, and rituals through silence. These are not artifacts. They are living, breathing testaments to endurance. Cultural and spiritual humility asks us to approach these practices not as tourists or scavengers, but as future kin. It is a refusal to treat someone else’s tradition as content for personal growth. It is a discipline: listening before speaking, asking before acting, arriving with offerings instead of expectations.

Begin with your own roots. Ask: What did your people sing when they were in pain? What did they cook when someone was sick? What stories did your elders whisper at dusk that held more than meaning—they held survival? Choose one fragment that lives in your lineage, however faint. Tend to it. Learn its rhythms. Let it guide how you show up elsewhere.

Then, when you find yourself moved by a ritual that isn’t yours—whether a healing circle, a drumming ceremony, or a prayer in another tongue—pause. Don’t ask, How can I incorporate this? Ask instead, What can I offer? Begin a practice of lineage exchange. Not trading. Not blending. Just naming. Just witnessing. Share what lives in your line, and invite others to do the same. Not for performance, but for relationship.

In community, this practice becomes interwoven ceremony. Not fusion. Not flattening. But co-presence. Picture Palestinian poetry echoing beside Caribbean drumming. Picture Two-Spirit water ceremonies held alongside diasporic altar-building. Each tradition distinct. Each voice carrying its own cadence. Together, they form a kind of choreography—not aesthetic for its own sake, but a map of solidarity. A declaration that our survivals are linked.

Cultural and spiritual humility is not just about reverence. It’s about responsibility. To tend the sacred without stealing it. To honour difference without demanding access. To let healing travel across bloodlines, across borders, through tension and trust. And in doing so, we don’t just participate in restoration—we begin to shape ceremonies powerful enough to hold the future.

Before we design care at scale, let’s remember the smallest ways it already lives around us. Care refuses a single form. It shapeshifts—bending to meet the contours of need, curling into the places the world forgot to hold. Sometimes, it’s a friend showing up with ginger tea after your body breaks open. Sometimes, it’s infrastructure: a mutual-aid network organizing rides for elders, a community fridge filled by neighbours who give what they can. Sometimes, it’s subversive softness: an encrypted chat pairing strangers with peer responders, or a healing collective offering plant medicine and bodywork in a room stitched with quilts, candles, and history. Care can live in the quiet corners too—a bathroom stall poster explaining how to ask for help, a playlist titled for when it’s too much, passed hand to hand like medicine.

It is always more than kindness. It is architecture. It is refusal. It is the deliberate act of designing a world where fewer people fall through.

Start where you are. Notice the care already moving around you: the person who holds the door when your arms are full, the group chat that answers grief with memes, the neighbour who checks in just because. These gestures ripple. Write them down. Study their frequency, their weight, their softness. Ask: What makes them feel like care? What makes them last? Then ask again: How do I replicate this without turning it into performance? How do I give without needing to be thanked? How do I receive without apology?

Care is not a service. It is a choreography of interdependence. It asks us to be students of one another’s needs. To stay present even when we can’t fix it. To build systems that remember what it feels like to be dropped. And if we do it right, care stops being the exception. It becomes the rhythm of our daily lives. A pulse. A shared promise: I’ve got you. Let’s keep each other.

In the quiet between waves, return to questions that don’t demand answers but offer openings. Let them sit beside you like trusted companions—nudging, witnessing, unfolding.

When was the first time you felt forgiveness instead of shame? Trace that moment gently. Who offered it? Who stayed long enough to see you as more than your mistakes? What gestures made you feel whole again? Consider how you might extend that same holding now—not as performance, but as practice.

Think of a political act you performed without knowing it at the time. Maybe it was wearing what makes you feel beautiful in a space that punished joy. Maybe it was choosing to rest when the world demanded grind. What did that refusal protect? What truth did it declare?

Imagine a future ceremony—one you will lead to honour survival. Not just your own, but that of your kin, your lineage, your people. What symbols will you gather? What words will you speak aloud, and which will live in the breath between them? Will there be song, stillness, movement? Let the vision come. Let it teach you what kind of world you’re building.

Reach back into your ancestry. Name one lineage of resistance—a person, a ritual, a story, a sound. Let its pulse guide you. What might you do today—in cooking, in writing, in care, in refusal—that honours that inheritance?

These aren’t tasks. They’re thresholds. Not destinations, but portals. Each one an invitation to deepen your intimacy with survival, to tend to the root systems that shaped you, and to write the next chapter of collective care with intention, reverence, and fire.

This framework isn’t a conclusion—it’s a threshold. An opening into a constellation of practices that hold one shared truth: care is not a luxury. It’s a collective act of defiance.

If you’re carrying something tender or unresolved, you might begin with a one-on-one session—a space where you don’t have to explain yourself, where showing up is enough. Or maybe you’re drawn to a peer circle, where ritual holds space for story, and solidarity becomes felt rather than theoretical. You may find yourself pulled toward mutual-aid networks that trade extraction for reciprocity, building infrastructures of care without shame or gatekeeping. And if your hunger leans toward the intellectual, the spiritual, or the speculative, reading circles await—where Afropessimism meets abolitionist praxis, and queer world-building offers not an escape, but a map.

Whichever path you choose, let this be your reminder: you were never meant to do this alone. Survival isn’t a solo act. It’s a thread woven through countless others, each one a gesture of resistance. Every time you reach out, show up, or hold space, you help keep the fire burning.

If this guide spoke to you, share it. Pass it on. Return to it when you need to. Let it spark something—a conversation, a ritual, a refusal. This isn’t meant to sit still. It’s meant to move, to be lived with.

You’ve reached the edge of these pages, but not the edge of your becoming. Come back as often as you need. Reread. Rewrite. Ritualize. This document lives because you do. And when survival is shared, it becomes something more: it becomes practice. It becomes promise.

And you already carry the proof.

This framework is shared under a values-aligned Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license.

Before sharing, citing, teaching, or adapting this work—especially in institutional or professional contexts—please read the full use and licensing statement:
👉 Values-Aligned Use Statement

Care is not neutral. Neither is this work. Let it travel with intention.