Don’t y’all grow tired of being told to heal by people who seem profoundly uninterested in making the world any less cruel?
We are supposed to work on ourselves, regulate ourselves, forgive, release, move on, protect our peace, and emerge from whatever happened to us as these impossibly gracious, perpetually available examples of human resilience.
Preferably without making anybody uncomfortable. Especially the people who made all this healing necessary.
And now, apparently, we are supposed to start with no. Before we hear the request, before we consider who is asking, before we know whether someone needs something we can easily give. No. A whole philosophy of community in which everybody is busy perfecting their refusal to participate.
Who, exactly, is going to be there for us? The ring light?
We are all on a healing journey. I understand that. I understand exhaustion, having limits, needing help, needing space. I also understand that our survival and well-being are communal, and that we cannot keep borrowing the language of care to justify becoming increasingly inconsiderate, selfish, callous, indifferent human beings.
Boundaries are necessary. What some of y’all have done to their meaning is another matter entirely.
“Let’s see what I can do” leaves room for an honest no. It also leaves room for another person. That should not be such a revolutionary proposition among people who have made being understood their entire public identity.
Our people need individual healing, yes. We need access to good treatment, time to recover, relationships in which we can breathe.
But healing is a communal act. It is connected to politics, to what people get paid, to how we treat the poor and the less fortunate, to housing, healthcare, education, the media we create and consume, and how we see, or do not see, ourselves on the screen. It is how we treat our children. It is what happens to somebody who needs us and has absolutely nothing to offer us in return.
This is why, when people tell me to focus on one thing, I tell them no. I am paying attention to the connections. The person trying to get well does not get to leave poverty in one room, racism in another, an unaffordable prescription somewhere else, then become a completely different human being when we finally sit them down to talk about their feelings. The conditions around us matter. We carry them. We live in them. Some of us are being crushed by them while somebody explains that we need to adjust our attitude.
My ideal world doesn’t stop at just me and mine being fine. The well-being of my in-group is connected to the well-being of people outside it, and, frankly, I should not have to demonstrate how somebody else’s suffering will eventually inconvenience me before their humanity becomes worth defending.
Who forced us to hate ourselves?
Malcolm X asked, “Who taught you to hate yourself, from the top of your head to the soles of your feet?”
His question demands that we examine the people and systems behind that hatred. Following it means asking how they enforced the lesson, too. Who forced us to make ourselves smaller, to hide what connected us to our own people, to negotiate away parts of ourselves just to be treated as worthy?
Consider how much of what we are told to heal from was forced on us. The embarrassment about our bodies, our features, our accents, our families. The exhausting business of making ourselves acceptable to people whose acceptance comes with conditions they reserve the right to change.
Who gets to be beautiful? Intelligent? Trustworthy? Who gets to be angry without becoming dangerous, confident without becoming arrogant, tired without becoming lazy?
I have written about the lies we are told about beauty, the way we learn to examine ourselves through somebody else’s prejudices and then help enforce those prejudices against one another. We carry the inspection into our homes, our mirrors, our relationships.
Then we are told to love ourselves.
Wonderful. Can we also speak to the people who have made a career out of teaching us not to?
The same scrutiny belongs in our classrooms and on our screens. What do children learn about themselves when their histories are dismissed, when their families appear only as problems to be solved, when people who look like them are perpetually somebody’s threat, somebody’s punchline, somebody’s tragic lesson? Where are our ordinary lives, our intelligence, our tenderness, our ridiculousness?
Must we always be suffering or extraordinary to warrant being seen?
And those of us creating the images, choosing the stories, running the platforms: what are we contributing? I have connected education and the media we consume because what people learn to believe about themselves and their neighbors does not remain politely inside a classroom or a screen. It follows us into the world. We cannot keep feeding contempt to an audience and then act bewildered by its appetite.
I am interested in helping people unlearn what diminishes them. I am also interested in stopping the production of it.
The systemic violence against our people is not simply something that happened, something we can file away and recover from on command. It keeps happening. ICE enforcement and the threat of family separation can turn school, work, medical care and ordinary errands into calculations about safety. What part of this never-ending onslaught is supposed to tell our bodies that it is safe to relax?
Of course our people are on edge. Living under the pressure of immigration enforcement takes a psychological toll. Help us care for our nervous systems, yes. But stop speaking as though our inability to feel safe is the original problem. We need protection from what keeps happening to us, not just instructions for enduring it more quietly.
Both require work. Neither is accomplished by telling the person who notices to become less negative.
That is part of what I challenged in my essay on the positivity movement. “Being poor is not a character flaw,” I wrote.
For so much of what we are discussing, the underlying problem is poverty. Plain and simple. Not an insufficiently enlightened mindset. Not a failure to manifest. Material deprivation belongs at the center of the conversation about our well-being, not somewhere in the footnotes after we have finished examining the poor person's attitude.
And poverty is not a law of nature. People make decisions about wages, housing, healthcare, public services, who accumulates wealth and who is expected to survive on what is left. Those arrangements are designed, defended and maintained by human beings. We can change them. So why do we keep treating deprivation as inevitable and the people living through it as the ones who need to be redesigned?
Yet listen to the promises being sold to our people: think differently, believe harder, manifest, transform your mindset, and the material obstacles in your life will apparently be so impressed that they will excuse themselves.
I want people to have hope. I want us to imagine better and believe we can build it. But optimism that requires us to ignore exploitation, illness, exclusion, or hunger is asking us to cooperate in our own dismissal. Somehow we begin with what happened to you and end with your failure to be sufficiently cheerful about it.
The people responsible get to keep doing what they do. You get homework.
Our distrust did not fall out of the sky
The institutions entrusted with our care belong in this conversation, too. Racism, xenophobia, sexism, homophobia, fatphobia, ableism, ageism and childism do not disappear because the person expressing them has a degree and a white coat. By childism, I mean prejudice against children: the dismissal of their experiences and dignity because they are children.
Credentials can establish expertise. They do not exempt anyone from examining their prejudices.
Our people have reasons to distrust medicine. We have the history of Black men denied effective treatment at Tuskegee, of Puerto Rican women subjected to sterilization abuse involving U.S. federal funding and Puerto Rican authorities, of psychiatry classifying homosexuality as a disorder.
Imagine being lectured about trusting an authority that had to be persuaded your existence was not an illness.
That disregard for our health extends beyond the examination room. Migrant farmworkers have been sickened by pesticide mist drifting from crop-duster planes, even after a pilot saw them working nearby and continued spraying. The people doing the work that feeds us deserve more protection than that. Their bodies are not an acceptable cost of getting the job done.
And spare us the comfort of pretending the problem stayed in the past. People still report racial discrimination in care, mistreatment connected to their accents or English proficiency, dismissal of women’s concerns and disrespect toward LGBT patients.
I wrote about this after finding myself in hospital halls in 2023, in pain, trying to keep my composure while being offered appointments a month and five months away. “I’ve seen the data. I’ve read the studies. I live in their theories and I’m subjected to their practices.” Knowing what was happening did not make me any less dependent on the people in front of me.
Then I watched an older Peruvian woman plead in Spanish for care after more than eight months of pain. She was turned away. I wrote about the rage I was containing, about the fear that asserting myself would simply give someone permission to dismiss me as the stereotypically angry Latino man. Many of the people behind those counters were Black and Brown, too.
This is what I mean. We can recognize ourselves in the person who needs help and still choose to make their life harder. Shared identity does not do the work of compassion for us.
How much explaining must someone do before the person responsible for their care starts listening?
Racial disparities in psychiatric diagnosis deserve scrutiny, too. Whose anger becomes a symptom? Whose account gets believed? Are you listening to the person, their history, their circumstances, or have your assumptions already completed the evaluation? Sometimes people are carelessly labeled; sometimes genuine needs are overlooked. Neither failure becomes acceptable because the other exists.
We deserve competent care, informed consent, and the ability to question a diagnosis without having the question itself held against us.
Now, recognizing that betrayal does not make the well-paid charlatan waiting outside the institution your savior. Someone can correctly name what hurt you and still have no idea how to help you. Or know exactly how to exploit you.
Your distrust of one authority does not establish the competence, honesty, or compassion of the next person asking for your money.
We should be able to demand better medicine without diving headfirst into the jaws of people selling miracles.
Our children are people, too
Healing is how we treat our children long before anybody refers them to a specialist. How we speak to them when we are tired. Whether we listen when they tell us something hurts. Whether we humiliate them because we can, then insist that they respect us because we are older. Can we apologize? Can we tolerate a feeling that inconveniences us without turning it into a referendum on the child’s character?
I am asking because some adults are very invested in children learning accountability and remarkably uninterested in demonstrating it.
Being the adult in the room comes with responsibility. It should not come with diplomatic immunity.
A tired child deserves someone who asks why they are tired. A jubilant child should not have to apologize for having more life in them than the room knows what to do with. A defiant child deserves curiosity about what they are resisting, along with guidance about how to express it. We need to understand children, including when they need specialized support, rather than deciding that adult convenience is the measure of their well-being.
Racial inequities in special education can involve an inappropriate label or support withheld from a child who needs it. And when funding incentives can influence classification, we should ask who is checking the decisions. Fund the services. Pay the people doing necessary work. Make sure the child’s needs, rather than a program’s financial interests, determine what happens next.
Families deserve assessments free of racial and cultural discrimination, and public-school personnel cannot require parents to obtain controlled-substance prescriptions for a child as a condition of attendance, evaluation or special-education services. A disability does not make a child less whole. Nor does a difficult afternoon, by itself, establish a disability.
Listen, examine, support. Stop asking the child to do all the adjusting while the adults declare themselves and the environment beyond examination.
And yes, I am talking about institutions run by our own, too. A familiar face does not automatically undo an inherited hierarchy. What matters is how the child is treated, not whether the person mistreating them can give a stirring speech about representation.
A very profitable misunderstanding
There is a whole industry making money from our desperation to feel better. Influencers are part of it, but so are well-paid charlatans peddling pseudoscience, corrosive coaching, expensive transformations and the promise that, with enough purchases and the correct attitude, we can finally become worthy of the lives we want.
A curse on any entity, any institution that pays some charismatic wellness coach, some bullshit artist on human behavior, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars to spew corrosive self-help, mindset garbage while its staff and the people it serves struggle to pay their bills or get adequate medical treatment.
You found the money for that. Find it for them.
That money could help make our lives materially better. Pay people enough to live. Help them get treatment. Put resources into the needs you keep inviting them to describe on a panel.
The aim of our advocacy should be to make itself unnecessary by ending the conditions that require it. Not to preserve our place between the people suffering and the people with the power to stop it, performing some triangulation bullshit that keeps us useful to the powerful while our communities keep paying the price.
I want the problem gone. Not a permanent career explaining why it is still here.
Even companies selling actual access to therapy deserve scrutiny. BetterHelp’s settlement over allegations that it shared sensitive information for advertising should remind us to ask what happens to our vulnerability after we hand it over. We can support therapy and still expect the business offering it to respect us.
Surely that is not too sophisticated a distinction.
Our people are also targeted by deceptive coaching schemes, and the exploitation does not begin or end with the language we speak. Ganadores’ targeting of Spanish-speaking consumers, as described in the FTC’s case, is one example, not the boundary of the problem. The pitch understands our desire for stability, opportunity, something better for our families. It knows which insecurity to press and which aspiration to flatter.
That familiarity can feel like being seen. Sometimes it means we have been studied as customers.
Notice how conveniently the explanation always lands on us. It’s not the pay. You don’t know how to budget. It’s not the workload. You don’t know how to manage your time. You should have negotiated. You should have planned. Oh, another snack? Another cup of joe? Avocado toast? Well, there goes your future.
Your fault. Your fault. Your fault.
Here, here, here’s my masterclass so you can stop being poor... at managing your life and resources. Never mind how little you have to manage. Who gives a fuck? The shortage is apparently a personality defect, and, wouldn’t you know it, someone is selling the cure.
Know your worth, they tell us. Then you demand to be paid that worth, ask for a manageable workload, refuse to keep swallowing the same bullshit, and suddenly you are difficult, ungrateful, not a team player. You were supposed to know your worth quietly. Preferably without costing anybody anything.
What kind of healing is this? A permanent balancing act around somebody else’s bullshit, with us blamed for losing our footing.
And if the masterclass fails? Scarcity mindset. Fear of success. You did not commit deeply enough.
The promised result never has to materialize because your failure to receive it becomes the next thing they can sell you help with.
I wrote, in that earlier positivity essay, “The lack of nuance is lucrative and criminal.” We should be able to question these promises without having the questions converted into evidence that we are resisting our own growth.
People doing skilled, compassionate work deserve to be paid. People taking advantage of the vulnerable deserve to be challenged, regardless of the size of the stage, the softness of the voice, or the number of people applauding.
The same scrutiny belongs on organizations paid to advocate for our communities, and on departments in corporate America with budgets to reach us, engage us, represent us. With the pittance we are expected to make miracles out of, every public dollar, every grant, every corporate outreach budget deserves a question: whose life is this making better? Show me what reaches our people. Show me the track record, not the guest list.
There is a gatekeeper class that knows how to turn our grievances into its own currency. Master grievance storytellers. They can narrate our pain, package our rage, explain our exclusion to a room full of people with money, and walk away rewarded while the people whose lives supplied the story remain outside. We carry them on our backs with our labor, with our rage, with the very conditions they are paid to describe. How much of that burden do they actually share? What changes for us after the presentation?
Of course, not all. But if you feel hot reading this, then maybe reckon with that.
When money raised in our name becomes somebody’s ticket to the lives of the rich and famous while the people invoked in the fundraising pitch remain in the same conditions, what exactly are we celebrating? The photographs with famous folks? The awards they give one another for being great at representation?
Representation of what? Each other’s success?
And look at what gets the investment: marketing, image, titles, proximity to people with influence. A magnificent apparatus for making the organization, the department, the gatekeepers look indispensable. But remove the branding, the celebrity photographs, the impressive names, and what can they show the people they claim to serve?
If all you have to show is the image, then the image is what you have been building. Not our well-being.
There are organizations doing extraordinary work with very little. Paying people to do that work is not the problem. Using the work as a cover for self-enrichment while offering no meaningful account of who has actually been helped is the problem.
That is not care. That is vampirism, siphoning resources from people who already have too little, then expecting applause for standing close enough to their suffering to collect a check. An elaborate performance. A cheap trick. A lucrative arrangement for everybody except the people it is supposedly for.
How are we supposed to walk around physically, mentally, spiritually healthy when even the people who speak for us, who get paid to advocate for us, are also hurting us?
Our people cannot eat a mission statement.
And yes, sometimes it is us
Before we all get too comfortable pointing elsewhere, let me be clear: sometimes we are the problem. Sometimes we need to apologize, change our behavior, return the call, keep the promise, stop treating the patience of people who love us as an inexhaustible natural resource. Being hurt does not make us incapable of hurting others. Knowing the vocabulary does not make us right.
I have written about the hierarchies we reproduce within our own communities, about my own faults and the need to apologize, about the responsibility to confront our brothers and ourselves. I do not get an exemption because I am the one writing this. Neither do you because you recognized yourself only in the flattering parts.
Some of the people who speak most eloquently about being dismissed, discriminated against, overlooked, mistreated by our systems turn around and become absolute assholes to people they consider beneath them. I am sorry to see it and say it, but there it is.
On social media and on panels, such compassion! Such understanding of the human condition! Outside their little cliques and circles, someone who cannot advance their career discovers just how conditional all that understanding was.
I made this point in a video about empathy and power. Watch how people respond to the pain of someone they admire, someone useful, someone with status, and then watch them encounter a person they do not consider their equal.
Where did all that empathy go? Did the subscription expire?
This happens in advocacy groups, too. Chameleons learn the lingo, the language of care and liberation, the phrases that earn trust in the room, then use them to manipulate the very people that language was supposed to protect.
Their cruelty becomes a boundary. Your objection becomes a threat to their peace. The people they hurt are expected to understand, forgive and disappear, preferably without interfering with the next speaking engagement.
And you do not need a platform to do any of this. It happens in families, friendships, our own community circles. We have people using so-called boundaries to justify indifference, demanding endless grace for themselves while delivering final verdicts on everybody else. The meaning has been corrupted, and people who genuinely need protection pay for that corruption, too.
I understand having a bad day. We all have them. But when being an asshole becomes a pattern, then what are we doing? At some point the explanation needs to be followed by changed behavior.
We can care about what happened to you and still ask you to stop doing this to other people.
The world I want us to build
When I say community lives in reciprocity, I do not mean that sick, disabled, grieving or impoverished people must prove their usefulness before they qualify for care. We cannot all give the same things at the same time. “If you can’t, that’s one thing,” I have said. If you can, and you have decided that other people’s needs are beneath your consideration, I am asking you to examine that decision rather than decorate it with therapy speech.
Maybe you cannot lend money. You can help someone find resources. Maybe you cannot talk for an hour. You can bring food, explain a form, make an introduction, or tell the truth about what you can manage.
We do not need to invent a moral defect in the person asking so that we can feel more enlightened about saying no.
And care does not entitle us to take over. I have written about allowing people to grieve without policing them, about making room for our humor and our full humanity.
Someone laughing has not betrayed their grief. Someone who needs solitude has not necessarily rejected us. We can ask what helps and actually listen to the answer. We can be angry at the world, love each other, laugh at its absurdity, and keep trying to improve it without demanding that everybody perform suffering in the same approved manner.
That is the community I want: one in which we can be impassioned, vulnerable, funny, complicated, occasionally wrong and capable of making amends. One in which our care reaches beyond the people who resemble us, affirm us, or can do something for us.
But we also need the material conditions that make care possible. Access requires resources. New York’s loss of psychiatric beds through 2023 and its subsequent efforts to restore and expand capacity make the point: telling people to reach out is not a substitute for making sure care is there when they do.
And food. Is there enough of it? Is it nutritious? Can people reach a grocery store and afford what is inside? We tell people to eat better as though a lecture will put fresh food in the neighborhood, money in their pockets, or another hour in their day. Then we dismantle parts of the scientific advisory system meant to help keep that food safe. Apparently, personal responsibility includes compensating for decisions made far beyond our kitchens.
Look at how our cities were built. Highways pushed through redlined and low-income neighborhoods, homes and medical facilities torn out, green space lost, exhaust left behind. Black and Brown people bear disproportionate exposure to air pollution. These conditions did not arrange themselves. Somebody made decisions about whose neighborhood could be sacrificed and whose comfort was worth protecting.
I heard a famous writer lament how the rest of the country maligns cities, describing them as refuges for the persecuted. And I wanted to ask: whose experience of the city are we talking about? How insulated do you have to be to celebrate the refuge without reckoning with what Black and Brown people, poor people, have endured inside it?
As much as I love New York City, parts of it, there are parts I do not walk through because the fear of losing my life is fucking real. There is history behind that fear.
A city can offer sanctuary from one form of persecution while subjecting people to another. I have been stopped and frisked. The racial disparities in New York’s stop-and-frisk record are not an abstraction to me. When I talk about our people, I mean African Americans, Latinos, Black and Brown Latinos, Black and Brown migrants. Different histories, overlapping identities, and lives that cannot be edited out of a flattering story about refuge.
Manuel Mayi Jr. was eighteen, a Dominican American college student who wanted to become an engineer. A mob chased him through Corona, Queens, in 1991 and beat him to death in an attack involving bats and a fire extinguisher.
Anthony Baez was twenty-nine, Puerto Rican, playing football with his brothers outside their Bronx home in 1994. After errant passes struck police vehicles and he protested his brother’s arrest, an officer put him in a prohibited chokehold that killed him.
These are lives, families, communities left to carry what happened. This is why the conversation belongs under healing. What are we asking people to recover from, and what have we actually changed to keep it from happening again?
And if our own people cannot afford to live in these supposedly great cities, how great are they? Psst. A refuge has to be somewhere people can remain, not just somewhere they once managed to arrive. The fear of losing your home belongs in the same conversation as the fear of what can happen when you step outside it.
And no, acclaim from white institutions does not make anybody’s interpretation of our lives gospel. We are not required to humor a celebrated person’s blind spots at the expense of our own experience. Brilliance should be able to withstand a question.
If your defense of the city requires us to disappear from the account of what happens in it, get bent. A refuge worth defending should be able to confront the harm within it. That, too, is part of healing.
You want to talk about healing? Follow people home. Look at what they can eat, what they have to breathe, and how far they must travel for the services someone else can take for granted.
A friend can help make a call. They cannot, through the sheer excellence of their friendship, make housing affordable, restore a service, or guarantee that a person gets the treatment they need. We need appropriate hospital care, sustained community support, decent housing, accessible schools, and public institutions that do their jobs without humiliating the people who need them. We need wages that allow people to live.
We need more than a handful of exhausted neighbors improvising what entire systems have refused to provide.
So how do we heal?
By dismantling the systems of discrimination that keep making us sick. By organizing against hate groups and the power that protects them. By holding accountable the entities that come dressed as friends while profiting from our exclusion. A familiar face, a shared identity, a beautiful mission statement: none of it should purchase immunity from the people being harmed.
That means changing policies, challenging discriminatory practices, demanding to know where the money goes, and putting resources and decision-making power into the hands of the people affected. It means organizing together so that one exhausted person is not left to confront an entire institution alone.
And we build. Care people can afford and trust. Food, housing, clean air, schools where our children are treated as people. Relationships in which accountability does not cancel affection and kindness does not require submission. We do not have to wait until every system changes to care for one another, and caring for one another does not excuse leaving those systems intact.
We also heal through mutual aid, by putting what we have together so none of us has to carry everything alone.
Yes, work on yourself. But let that work reach beyond yourself. Are we kinder? More accountable? Are our children safer with us? Do the people we claim to represent have more room to live, or have we simply become more articulate about why we owe them nothing?
I want us well. I want us rested, cared for, capable of joy, with enough room in our lives to care for one another without being destroyed by the effort. I want the institutions that harmed us to answer for it and the people selling us false hope to stop getting rich from the damage.
I want us to stop passing our own injuries down to whoever has less power to object.
My ideal world doesn’t stop at me and mine being fine. I want you there, too.
Some people feel better at the expense of others, then call it healing.
Meanwhile, somebody else is left carrying the hurt.
My problem is with shitty, biased therapy, too. Needing care does not mean we should accept whatever treatment we are handed.
Our people deserve adequate care that takes their humanity and the conditions of their lives seriously.
And yes, my problem is with hyperindividualism dressed up in therapy language, where my peace is sacred and what I do to yours is apparently none of my concern.
Individual healing matters. But no amount of working on ourselves will, by itself, fix the fucked-up world we are being asked to survive.
We cannot keep promising to “cure” people while refusing to change the conditions that keep hurting them.
We will never fully heal if we are not there for one another.
We will never truly heal if we turn around and treat others as beneath us after fighting so hard not to be treated that way ourselves.
We will never fully heal if we leave the systems that hurt us intact.
Healing is a communal act.