In senior year of high school we read bartelby the scrivener by Herman Melville. I think it was around this time of year. I liked it only after the fact, because I remembered it.

I certainly don’t think Melville was writing with the communist tradition in mind, lol. but high school me liked that book a lot.

I have a weird allergic reaction on my neck and I think the eczema I don’t take care of on my hands is spreading to my face.

It’s funny to me that I can identify a pattern with such ease but beginning to change it feels impossible, literally insurmountable.

At least I’m recording it, right?

Cami told to be wary of falling into ego-centric heroics. She’s right. She’s right.

But at the same time, am I wrong? I think all of us raised in a bourgeois context need to be class traitors. And that looks like having fewer assets than our parents. Rejecting and redistributing inheritances steeped in exploitation. It looks like making a concerted effort to starve the system and live in discomfort (see: Marx and the Middle Classes).

I really don’t want to “return” to the life I had as a child. Being raised in a cushy middle class lifestyle while watching my parents deeply unsatisfied, in debt, perpetually betraying themselves and using work or commodities to escape the pain.

While half of our family was legitimately starving in Venezuela, and the other half was steeped in their violent European oblivion — all while my grandfather hid a secret family and god knows what else. All the while I was getting traumatized by isolation, unfettered internet access, early childhood sexual assault, and more. Which would destroy my sense of self and open me up for abuse.

And now pause. Think about the level of abuse that others had to endure for me to have access to the material reality I had.

Poor people walk around this country with the complex PTSD that comes from being in a literal warzone. And we treat them like they’re walking around with a disease that we have to avoid at all costs.

Ok. I understand that systems-thinking can quickly spiral. I can say all this shit but it’s still more impactful to volunteer, send money for mutual aid, and attend organizing meetings.

I’m looking for clarity and love in the wrong places, I know, I know.

I still just want to be wholly understood and embraced. But maybe that’s already happening and I’m too ungrateful or distrustful to believe that is the case.

I think I just need to move back home. Go live with my grandmother. Record the stories. All I can be right now is a family historian. But I still have to do work so………………. ugh, I’m gonna go do that now.