LOVE IN A F*UCKED UP WORLD, How to Build Relationships, Hook Up, and Raise Hell Together by Dean Spade

File Under: First Aid

Who like me, after the shift to hate language in Meta’s own policies or any other legitimate reason, is going through a social media detox right now? 

As I watch my body reach for my phone over and over before I remember I’m not doing that anymore, and like a gift basket from The Universe, Dean Spade’s Love in a F*cked Up World arrives in my hands. 

It’s been a tough winter at minimum. The information coming at us is engineered to serve the domination maneuvers in their playbook- they want us stunned, frozen, unable to act in resistance. We need now, more than ever, a grounded solidarity with our own selves and each other.

The author gets right down to business: “The reality is that shit is very, very fucked up and intense right now, and we need skills for being with each other in distress just as much as we need skills for being with one another in delight.”

Immediately, I can put to use the “What Else Is True” worksheet Spade includes in the first chapter. Whether this book gives you new ideas and practices or if it is just the queer reframe of so many mainstream therapeutics you’ve already internally translated, this is definitely part of what we need right now. It’s grief work and transformative justice, and building capacity, and being with what is, and accountability, and goddamnit we got this. 

I want you to go out and buy or order this book today because Audre Lorde wasn’t  messing around when she said,

“For the Master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that place of knowledge inside (them)self and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives here. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.”

You are enough. What you are doing is enough. Keep gas in your tank and keep going. I love you.