Introduction: With Love, From the End of the World "i don''t pay attention to the world ending. it has ended for me many times and began again in the morning." - Nayyirah Waheed, Salt As I write these words, the world is preparing to enter the year 2019, and it has become something of a truism among my community of queer people of colour that the end of the world is nigh. A wave of right-wing and openly fascist governments have been elected to power across the world. Economic inequality grows ever wider while wealth and power are increasingly concentrated in the hands of a brazenly corrupt few. Climate change and mass extinction are ravaging the earth but going largely unacknowledged by those with the political power to do anything about it. As for those communities of queer people, racialized people, disabled people, social justice activists, marginalized people taking back their power? The communities that raised me to believe in the possibility of a Revolution that would change and save the world? Sometimes it seems like the most painful cuts of all come from within my community: Call out culture. Lateral violence.

Puritanical politics. Intimate partner abuse. Public shaming. We know so much about trauma but so little about how to heal it. What would "community" know about saving us from the apocalypse? In 2016, I turned twenty-five years old and published my first novel, which was quickly followed by a poetry collection and a children''s book, all to relative success. I became "queer famous" that year. This was also the year that broke my heart, which has kept right on breaking ever since. This was the year that Trump was elected, that millions of people were displaced in the Syrian refugee crisis, and that 49 people - most of them queer and brown - were shot to death in a nightclub in Orlando.

In the intervening years, only more atrocities and disasters have followed. My twenty-fifth year of life was also the year that I experienced several devastating personal crises which resulted in the loss of some dear friends and chosen family members, as well as psychological trauma from which I have never recovered. For all its edgy pretentions, social justice culture had not prepared me for the havoc that abuse, mental illness, and the immense pressure of living as a publicly known trans woman of colour in the social media era could wreak upon my soul. Not only was I in pain, but my pain was publicly known, scrutinized, gossiped over. People, mostly queer and racialized people, that I didn''t know sent me emails and Facebook messages that were thousands of words long, asking for intimacy and attention and occasionally threatening me when I didn''t acquiesce. Journalists asked me for interviews about my private life - my sex life, my family, my mental health, no topic seemed to be off limits. I was stalked, in real life and online. I became terrified and paranoid.

I stopped trusting people and this thing we call "community." I stopped trusting myself. All around me, the people I loved were also in crisis - psychological, financial, medical, interpersonal. When you live in a community of queers, anarchists, and activists, crisis is the baseline and stability an outlier. Among trans women, a life expectancy of 35 is the norm. I lost my faith in community. I lost hope - in social justice, in revolution, in the world. When we lose faith in the things that matter, it is easy, I think, to turn to anger.

Anger helps us survive when survival seem impossible. I have been very angry throughout my life, and I still am, in some ways. I need to be, to live. Yet anger, and its siblings rage and vengeance, have also been poisonous influences in my communities. I''ve seen people do awful things to one another in the name of anger and revenge, and it never seems to help anyone in the end. So in the midst of despair, I have come to believe that love - the feeling of love, the politics of love, the ethics and ideology and embodiment of love - is the only good option in this time of the apocalypse. What else do we have? I mean love that is kind, but that is also honest, love that is courageous and relentless and willing to break the rules and smash the system, love that cares about people more than ideas, that prizes each and every one of us and essential and indispensable. I mean a love that is compassionate and accountable.

I mean the love that confirms and re-affirms us complex and fallible yet loveable anyway, the love that affirms us as human. I want to live in love and believe in love. If I have to die, I want to die in love. This whole world might be coming to its end, or it might just be in the midst of an enormous and terrifying change that leads to something better, but either way, I want to go through it in love with the people I love. So this book is about love, which is a sentence I never thought I''d write before. This is a book that I never thought I could write. It isn''t easy to believe in love, not after so many people and things I held so dear have hurt me or been taken from me. But then, I too have hurt people and taken things from people.

I have made mistakes and I have done worse than mistakes. I still want to be believed in. So this is love. This is a book about revolutionary love. It may be hard to believe in. It will be harder to live. I hope we choose it anyway. In love that never dies, Kai Cheng Thom, January 2019 i hope we choose love: notes on the application of justice "You have the right to tell your story [.

] You do not have the right to traumatize abusive people, to attack them publicly, or to sabotage anyone else''s health. The behaviors of abuse are also survival based, learned behaviors rooted in some pain. If you can look through the lens of compassion, you will find hurt and trauma there. If you are the abused party, healing that hurt is not your responsibility, and exacerbating that pain is not your justified right"--EMERGENT STRATEGY, adrienne maree brown i''m not a big believer in justice. that extends to the notions of accountability, restorative justice, transformative justice, and most of the related terms that have taken hold in social justice culture--though i do very strongly believe in integrity, honesty, and personal honour (while "integrity" is a word that one hears used fairly frequently in social justice circles, honesty and honour as i know them are values that come to me through my Chinese family and upbringing. as an aside, "honour" is not something you hear very much at all about in social justice, and i feel its distinct lack as an influence in activist conduct.) i used to be much more of a believer in justice. i had drunk the Kool-Aid on that, though i wasn''t ever really clear on exactly what justice meant.

rather ironically, i think a lot of people who are involved in social justice "activism"--scare quotes used because activism means a lot of different things to different people--aren''t too clear on a working definition of justice. there is a subset of folks, of course, who have thought about the definition of justice a lot, but my sense is there is great disagreement and confusion among them. and why not? justice is a pretty high-falutin'' philosophical concept. over the years of my adolescence and early adulthood, i gave a great deal of myself to the idea of justice: time, energy, dignity, health. i made huge personal sacrifices to try and live up to the leftist ideals of justice, and particularly accountability--which in the circles i ran in had to do a lot with using the right political language (which always changes) and doing all the right political things all the time, and then admitting in no uncertain terms that you were guilty and "problematic" when called out for infractions. there''s actually a fair amount of good learning in that ideology--it teaches humility and listening to the voices of people in pain, which is pretty much always good in my book. unfortunately, the enactment of "justice" in radical leftism also played out in my life as a total invalidation of my boundaries (and i am not great at boundaries in the first place). for a time, i became quite valorized in my local community as a "good" upholder of social justice because I was very good at using the right language and doing the right things, and i tended to apologize unreservedly and perfectly when i "fucked up.

" i now recognize this as a skill borne of trauma: the ability to ceaselessly and accurately scan the people in one''s environment for a sense of what will please them and to enact it, no matter the cost to one''s long term health. this skill is a brilliant short-term survival strategy, as most trauma strategies are, designed to negotiate the unpredictability and cruelty of punishment--and unfortunately, much of social justice is deeply embedded in a punishment narrative. *** "Punishment is not something that happens to bad people. It happens to those who cannot stop it from happening. It is laundered pain, not a balancing of scales."--"Hot Allostatic Load," Porpentine Charity Heartscape i''m not a believer in justice because i have never gotten it. i really am not certain that it would be good for me if i did. i gave so much of myself trying to create justice for others, and it eventually rendered me traumatized and deeply disabled.

i''m saying that as a literal statement of fact, not as a metaphor or to be melodramatic: i am now sick. i can''t do things i used to be able to do without severe physical or psychological pain. many times in social justice land, i was quite seriously taken advantage of and badly treated by white women in positio.