09 sept 2026

me / calexico, CA

affirmations, peace & contentment

In the basement of the music school building, there’s a hallway that looks like the inside of my mind. Cobwebbed corners and roach traps included, lined with azure doors and white brick walls. 

A saxophone serenades me as I float down the corridor. I feel inadequate. 

I don’t think what I went through matters. It was so long ago, everyone else has moved on, and intellectualizing my experience doesn’t change the past. It rules my present.

I feel inadequate.

I am not without, but I feel inadequate. 

I’ve always felt this way, with no clear end in sight. Even now, I can’t think of a time I didn’t feel the compulsion to change. It took a while for me to realize things would always be different; the epiphany was quite recent.

Mom had a cousin that was a mental health professional: a therapist and social worker, meditation teacher and spiritual guru. He wrote about Buddhism and generational trauma, and I thought it was cool he could call out harm inflicted by internal family dynamics without completely cutting them off. He was a recovered addict, so everyone had their opinions. I didn’t care.

I met him once, or at least one time that I can remember. We had gone to brunch with extended family for an occasion I won’t even pretend to remember, then to his mom’s house— my grandmother’s estranged sister. I must’ve been thirteen or so because I’d just been diagnosed with depression and I could feel tacit pressure from my mother for our meeting to go well. I think she would’ve wanted us to have a valuable conversation that inspired me. Unfortunately for all of us, I was an asshole.

We didn’t talk much that day, but I’ve since learned that he was an ally, and he loved trans people. They used he/they pronouns. They joined the Hare Krishnas in the 90s. He loved learning so much. I sometimes think they would’ve agreed with me that knowledge is freedom, but I still consider how their life ended.

He overdosed last May. Fentanyl poisoning. We own a copy of each of his books, all three of them unread. I’m terrified to start. In no trivial way, I think about their last moments. A choice was made that day, and if I think about it long enough it gets harder to deny that intention and outcome were one and the same.
He was a very knowledgeable man.

…

I realize now that it takes more strength to surrender than it does to withhold.

I realize now my inclination to conflict. My tendency to change only with purpose outside of myself. To be liked, to be loved, to be cared for. Between childhood instability and genetic predisposition, there is destiny tied to my failure to embrace love, even when I earned it.

In some way, people tried. They loved me as they were taught. Either with condition or without, I was loved, and maybe I still am. Many of those people I love back and always will— but I’ve abandoned the impulse to love in the present.

I see the problem that lies before me and feel helpless. I’ve tried everything except letting go.

And I had heard of people who believe attachment to anything is the fault of our human nature. That connection and attachment are different. I don’t understand it. It takes an incredible amount of self-assurance to detach from the things we feel connected to. To that I’d add that those who regularly provide this advice are only planting the seeds of new thought whose blooms can never guarantee the fruit of experience. We enroll ourselves in schools of thought with the expectation that in the end there must be some huge cumulative test, but I don’t believe there is one. I don’t believe life is a test, and I don’t believe in peace on Earth.

There is a small difference between peace & contentment that I’ve come to know as acceptance. I am not supposed to be at peace. I believe it is impossible for my soul to be at rest while on Earth, and that's okay. If I am lucky, peace will come at death and there will be no reason for judgement or testimony. Peace is equal. Deserving is reification. Fairness is a social convention. My pursuit of contentment begins with accepting that it isn’t necessary. Life is not fair, love is not fair, peace is not promised, and I don’t believe it’s possible. My only testament is to live.