Intertwined Liberation
What does it mean to fight, heal collectively?
There was a time when the only way for me to survive was to write it down.
Before I researched trauma in depth, before prose gave structure to my grief, I wrote to anchor what was left of my severed mind(s) onto this earth—marking down the bruises spreading across my child’s cheek, the restless ants climbing my legs, the shadowed hallucination of a man pouncing on my left.
I didn’t take these notes for an audience, certainly not for profit, and not even for the certainty that anyone else would ever read them.
I wrote to make sense of the rupture. I wrote to hold onto reality, wishing and waiting for the storm to pass.
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about those words, stacked inside dozens of notebooks, leaning dangerously on my desk.
I think about how lonely I felt writing them, and how their transmutation—from scattered notes to structured essays and books—has nothing to do with the willpower of a woman who singlehandedly overcame her demons (whatever the fuck that means).
Rather, I see them for what they are: communal blueprints of my healing, my resistance.
To me, the recognition of trauma—my own, and the stories I choose to write—is not personal, let alone neutral. It is shaped by conversations, books, and the people who guided me, whether they knew it or not: therapists, zine writers, diary keepers, radical researchers.
Through these readings, I learned that the first paper on incest, written by Lisa Hirshman and Judith Herman, circulated underground for a year before it was published. The truth, when it first emerges, is often unwelcome. As Herman reminds us in Trauma and Recovery: “Denial, repression, and social dissociation operate also on a social level. The study of psychological trauma is an underground history.”
So will the study of the establishment of authoritarianism in the United States.
Buried histories always resurface. Murmurations of small voices, organizing in concert, reconfiguring their own survival into something collective. A string of aching, collectivized voices.
The Power of Underground Histories and Organizing
I’ve been fascinated lately by the production of analogue writing.
Zines, diaries—these have long been the refuge of those whom history erases. In their article “Blueprints for Survival: Zines, Self-Publishing, and the Queer Archive”,
writes about how self-publishing is an act of survival in a world that seeks to erase us:So much of our history has been misrepresented, obscured, appropriated or even deliberately erase or destroyed. Even by those within the community who seek to rewrite the past. Zines and other self-published media are powerful tools to document our movement, ensuring that the contributions of trans, queer, and nonbinary people cannot be denied.
There is something radical in choosing slowness, in choosing depth, in refusing to make one’s survival into something marketable.
Similarly, in her essay “The Craftsman”,
describes craftsmanship as an act of resistance, a slow and deliberate process in an era that demands disposability. There is defiance in this.
As for my notebooks, my diaries, they are an act of devotion, a refusal to let experience dissolve into nothingness. It is not meant to be efficient, nor easily consumed.
Keeping a record, like community organizing, is an act of survival. The same forces that demand efficiency—capitalism, colonialism, white supremacy—are the ones that tell us our pain is individual, that our struggles are separate, that our survival depends on competing rather than collectivizing.
But movements grow in the spaces between. They always have.
The first trauma studies emerged from the stories of rape survivors and combat veterans—two groups separated by circumstance but united in the way trauma reshapes perception.
Judith Herman saw these commonalities early: trauma is not just about what is lost, but about what is deliberately severed—connections, language, the ability to make sense of what happened. It is not a personal failing to struggle with these things; it is the nature of trauma itself. And the way out is rarely solitary.
Trauma, War, and Survival Across Movements
The recognition of trauma is never neutral. Some histories are erased outright; others are rewritten by those in power.
From 2010 to 2015, I wrote a dissertation about French-speaking Quebec poets who, between the 1960s and 1980s, sought to define their identity through analogies with other struggling communities. They longed to situate themselves as a wounded nation, often drawing parallels to Jewish history, colonization, exile.
In retrospect, these comparisons were not always adequate. To borrow suffering is to risk erasing its singular weight.
Quebec, in its longing for recognition, has often framed its history as an invisible war—never acknowledged, always criticized. And yet, in defining itself through borrowed pain, it has often failed to recognize its own power in the matter.
I wonder today what it would look like to hold the little Quebecer in our arms and tell them a tale not of grievance, but of resilience. To say:
Yes, you were wounded.
But survival is not just what was done to you—it is what you create in response.
This is the throughline between the personal and the political. Between rape survivors and combat veterans, between the solitary act of keeping a diary and the shared act of circulating knowledge in resistance networks. These movements—feminist, abolitionist, decolonial, climate justice—are interconnected not because they share a common enemy, but because they recognize a common refusal: to be erased, to be made silent, to be made complicit in their own oppression.
In a Yes! Magazine article I recently read—“Murmurations: What Climate Justice Can Learn from Black Liberation”—Quinton Sankofa writes:
If we are going to create a sustainable future with life-affirming, regenerative economies, then we must fight for global reparations—not only cash payments but also an opportunity to repair our relationships with the land and with one another.
We must earnestly study our planet and develop responses to the crisis that are rooted in regeneration, care, and cooperation with the purpose of creating ecological and social well-being. Traveling the path of Black liberation and ecology will increase our chance to survive as a species in the face of catastrophic changes to our ecosystem that have just begun.
The power of murmuration is in its collectivity—each individual responding not in isolation but in relation to the movements of those around them.
The forces that have driven climate collapse are the same ones that built the prison-industrial complex. The same institutions that bury Black history are the ones that build oil pipelines through Indigenous lands. This is not coincidence—it is the logic of empire. And the resistance to it must be equally interconnected.
What Liberation Looks Like
There is no single path to liberation. No blueprint, no manifesto that can encompass it all. There are only the small, insistent acts of refusal—the refusal to be erased, to be silenced, to be made complicit. And there are the murmurs—stories passed down, knowledge shared, communities built from the ground up.
Perhaps this is why we write.
Not to be seen, not to be celebrated, but because the act itself—like flight, like survival—is worth everything.
I think about the murmuration of my own writing—how scattered notes turned into structure, how books, conversations, and voices wove together into something larger than I imagined. Healing, like resistance, does not belong to one person alone.
Zines will outlast policy. Murmurations will outmaneuver empire. Diaries will hold memory when institutions refuse to. And we, in our small, unremarkable acts of care, will shape something larger than ourselves.
This is how we win.
So much energy right now being spent on how to fight authoritarianism, how to resist. But you're absolutely right, we have the blueprints already, from those who have gone before. This essay has me thinking about how we are preserving our knowledge for future generations....