They had always said she was so capable. So composed. So good at everything, wasn’t she. Teachers wrote it on report cards. Relatives said it at dinner tables in two languages. Strangers said it like a compliment and meant it like a cage. The story was already written before she could hold a pen: she will be quiet, she will be excellent, she will not require anything from anyone. She will smile in the fluorescent light and ask for nothing and be grateful.

She believed it for a long time. The exhaustion felt like virtue. The inability to finish things, to hold a thought, to understand why her brain moved the way it moved. That felt like failure. A private failure. The kind you hide because capable girls do not struggle with things that seem so simple. And she was, above all, supposed to be capable.

She was twenty-five when a doctor finally named it.

She had not been failing. She had been navigating a world built for a different kind of mind, without a map, since childhood while everyone around her nodded and said of course she manages, look at her, she always manages. She had been swinging an axe for years without knowing she was holding one.

When the medication came, she finally felt the weight of it in her hands for the first time. She understood what she’d been holding. But understanding the weight is not the same as knowing how to use it. She swung wide. She swung hard. Things fell. They needed to fall — she understood that later — but in the moment she stood in the wreckage, axe still warm in her hands, blinking at what she’d done. Wondering if the power had always been there or if she had conjured it from nowhere. Wondering what it meant that it felt this good.

It would take time to learn that destruction and precision were not opposites. That you could know exactly what needed to fall and still be startled when it did.

During the plague, she had been on the front lines. She had held the hands of the frightened while the world outside argued about whether it was real. She had worn the same mask until the elastic left grooves in her face. She had clocked out of shifts that never really ended and driven home in silence because there were no words left. She had been steady, because she had always been steady, because that was what was required of her.

She had given what front line workers give — everything, and then a little more, and then whatever is left after that — from a body that was already asking for so much more than she had been taught to give it.

And then the plague came for her.

The heaviness came. The light hurt. Weeks folded into months in a room that smelled like medicine and apology. The sun, which had never particularly liked her anyway, became intolerable. She kept the curtains drawn. She slept at strange hours. Outside, the world moved through its days in the bright ordinary way of the living. She moved through hers differently now — quieter, more deliberate, attuned to things that only revealed themselves in the dark.

She found she did not mind.

She began to understand the dark the way you understand a language you have always secretly spoken.

She grieved herself sometimes. The girl who shrunk at the table so others could spread out. The girl who mistook exhaustion for virtue. The girl who asked are you mad at me as though she were saying good morning. The girl who smiled and nodded and made herself easy to hold. The girl who had spent twenty-five years being told she was exceptional and had somehow still managed to believe that meant she had no needs. The girl who had kept her teeth hidden because teeth made people uncomfortable.

But grief, if you let it, teaches you what you actually need to survive.

And she was, it turned out, very good at surviving.

She learned to maneuver the way any other creature of the night learns its own nature — first with horror, then with fascination, then with something close to reverence. She learned that her body’s collapse had not been a weakness but a molt. A shedding. Every need she had translated into something more palatable, every time she had performed composure for a room that expected it from her specifically — it had all been a cage she was finally free of.

One night, somewhere in the long recovery, she rose, unusually clear-headed, and walked to the mirror. She had been avoiding it — the way you avoid things that might show you something you’re not ready to see. But that night she looked. And what looked back at her had eyes that glowed a bright, steady red. Not the red of illness or exhaustion. The red of something that had burned all the way through and come out the other side luminous.

She did not look away. Instead, she reached for the nearby axe. She knew its weight now. She swung it, clean and hard.

People were surprised by her, now. They had a picture in their heads — something gentle, something decorative, something that moved through rooms without taking up too much of them. Something that would wait to be invited before it spoke. Something that would thank you for the invitation.

What they got instead was someone who moved through doorways like she had already decided the room was hers. Someone who looked you in the eye too long and too steadily. Someone who smiled in a kind way that did not quite reach an apology. Someone whose stillness had the quality of patience rather than deference — the patience of something old, something that had learned long ago that it did not need to hurry.

She was not what the story had written for her.

She is not interested in being a hero. Heroes burn bright for the moment and vanish when the work becomes ordinary. Anyone can show up for the dramatic part. Anyone can make the grand gesture. Not everyone stays when what’s needed is simply consistency. The unglamorous work of still being there, building the kingdom in the dark, stone by stone, in the hours when no one is watching. She is interested in protecting the light — in the people who need the room she has learned to hold, the ones who arrive frightened and leave steadier, the ones who didn’t know they were allowed to take up space until they watched her do it without apology. She has walked through the valley of a plague-ridden world and the long tunnel of her own body’s betrayal. She knows every shadow by name.

She does not perform her power. She simply no longer pretends she doesn’t have it.

What remained after the plague was not bitterness. It was clarity, cold and clean as the hour before dawn. The knowledge that she had a limited amount of energy and would spend precisely none of it on shrinking. That the people who needed her soft and small were not her people. That her people could handle the full force of what she actually was, and more: that they were nourished by it.

She has been called cold. Selfish. Cruel. Condescending. Difficult. Abrasive.

She has also been called the safest person I’ve ever known. She has been told you made me feel so seen. She has had people she loves say I’ve never felt so heard.

People expect warmth to look a certain way. Soft voice. Tilted head. The particular smile that says I will make myself easier for you to be around. They expect safety to arrive apologetically, to ask permission before it sits down.

She is not that.

She walks into a room like she has already decided it. She holds eye contact a beat too long. She does not rush to fill the silence with something comfortable. She does not smile to reassure you that she is harmless. She is not, in the conventional sense, harmless. And somehow — this is the thing — somehow that is exactly why the frightened ones find her.

Because here is what the frightened ones know, even if they cannot say it: performed softness can be revoked. Someone who is kind because they are afraid of conflict will stop being kind the moment they must engage with it. Someone who makes themselves easy because they need you to like them will eventually want something back of you. That gentleness has a bill attached. It always comes due.

But someone who is certain — someone whose stillness comes from depth rather than deference, who is not waiting for your approval because they stopped needing it a long time ago — that person is safe in a way that does not expire. You cannot threaten them into withdrawing. You cannot disappoint them into leaving. They are not here because you make them feel good about themselves. They are here because they chose to be here, and they are not the kind to un-choose lightly.

The confidence is not incidental to the safety. It is the safety.

She does not need you to be manageable. She does not need you to be easy. She has looked at genuinely difficult things — in the world, in her own body, in the dark — and she did not look away. So when you bring her your difficult thing, the jagged one you’ve been hiding because you were afraid it would be too much, she receives it without flinching. Not because she is numb. Because she is not afraid of it. Because she has seen worse and loved it anyway.

She does not withdraw to punish. She does not withdraw at all, not really — not in the way that word implies a door slamming, a warmth suddenly absent, a love made conditional on your behavior. What she does is something quieter and more considered than that. She looks at what she has, and what you need, and she asks herself honestly: what is the truest way I can show up for you right now? Sometimes it is different than before. Sometimes it is: not like this, not in this form, not with this particular shape of closeness — but still. Still here. Still yours in the ways that matter.

That is not punishment. That is precision.

The difficult thing — the thing she is still learning to hold — is that precision can feel sudden. Not because they needed her trapped. Sometimes because they were paying attention, genuinely, carefully, and had learned the shape of her by heart. The shape that was never quite true. And when the true thing arrived it looked, from the outside, like a change. Like something had shifted without warning. Like she had moved without telling anyone.

She had not moved. She had simply stopped being somewhere she had never actually been.

And sometimes — this is the harder thing — sometimes the person who loved her saw the mask before she did. Called it carefully, the way you call something in the dark: not to frighten it, but to see if it will answer. She did not answer. Not because she was hiding. Because she could not yet see what they were pointing at. She was standing too close to her own reflection. She had been performing so long the performance had grown its own heartbeat. She had mistaken it for her pulse. Even something that has lived as long as she has can forget which hunger is real and which is habit.

She does not know what to do with that yet. She is just trying to hold it, without making it her fault, or theirs. Just: they saw. She wasn’t ready. She had watched the plague take everything from everyone she had ever loved, and still she had not been there for the moment that mattered. That is its own kind of haunting. Not the dramatic kind, not the kind that announces itself. The quiet kind. The kind that sits in the corner of a room you’ve otherwise made your own.

She has held worse and kept moving. That is not the same as being unmoved. She picks up the axe. She always picks up the axe. Not because she is hard, but because she knows by now that stillness is a choice she makes, not a condition she was born into. And she chooses, again, to be here. In the dark she knows by name. In the room she has already decided is hers.

The vampire queen is someone who will show up for you. In the ways she actually can. With the full force of what she actually has. That is worth more than a performance of availability she cannot sustain — more than the shape of closeness with none of the substance. When she is there, she is there. And she will tell you honestly when she needs to be there differently.

That is not cruelty. That is the most loving thing she knows how to do.

And the children — the children always know.

There is something in the very young that has not yet learned to perform comfort. They go to who they go to. Small hands reaching up without asking. Small bodies falling asleep against her shoulder in the particular way that means you are safe — boneless, utterly trusting, the way children only sleep when the animal part of them has decided nothing here will hurt them. She did not have to earn it. She did not have to perform warmth or make herself smaller or round off any of her edges. She simply had to be what she is — steady, unhurried, not afraid of the dark — and they walked straight to her like she was a door they had been looking for.

She thinks about that. The way children find the true thing. The way they can tell the difference between someone who is gentle because they are afraid and someone who is gentle because they chose it — because they know exactly what they are capable of, and they are offering you the quiet version on purpose.

She asks herself what she wants them to learn. Not the performed version. Not the capable girl who asked for nothing and called it virtue. She wants them to learn that a no — delivered imperfectly, arrived at late, spoken by someone still learning the weight of what they’re holding — is not a door slamming. It is not abandonment. It is not the end of their love. She wants them to watch her hold a boundary and still be there the next morning, fangs and all, to show them that the two things can coexist: the limit and the love, in the same hands, at the same time.

What remained for the vampire queen after the plague was not bitterness. It was clarity, cold and clean as the hour before dawn. The knowledge that she had a limited amount of energy and would spend precisely none of it on shrinking. That her people could handle the full force of what she actually was — and more: that they were nourished by it.

She does not fear losing people. That is not coldness. That is the particular peace of something ancient that has already survived the unsurvivable and knows, in its bones, that the dark is not the end.

The night is long and it belongs to her. She moves through it without apology. Her fangs are her own. Her hunger is honest. Her love is the kind that does not diminish her to sustain you — it is old and patient and very, very certain of itself.

That is the thing they don’t tell you about surviving.

You don’t come back the same.

You come back more.

The destroyer cut through the black water under a sky lit by distant missile trails.

Officially, it was a “peacekeeping operation.” The sailors aboard had stopped believing that weeks ago.

The fleet had crossed three oceans to patrol a coastline nobody back home could find on a map. Every day, drones circled overhead. Every night, another village appeared on a targeting screen.

Rumors spread through the ship like mold.

Something was following them.

Something in the water.

At first it was just music.

Not singing exactly. More like a memory of singing. A melody that slipped through steel bulkheads and sonar static and settled in the back of people’s minds.

The officers dismissed it.

The enlisted crew didn’t.

Then the men started disappearing.

One lookout vanished from his post.

A lieutenant walked calmly over the rail in the middle of a briefing.

Three marines launched a lifeboat and rowed into the darkness without speaking a word.

Some came back up–faces swollen past recognition, mouths open, hands white and wrinkled, the sea already quietly taking them apart. Just soft tissue and seawater now, indistinguishable from any other thing that had once believed itself significant.

Panic spread.

And then people started seeing her.

A woman floating among the waves.

Long dark hair.

Eyes reflecting moonlight like a predator’s.

A smile that suggested she found the whole military-industrial apparatus beneath her.

The official reports called her a “hostile maritime anomaly” or “Sustained Incident Requiring Extensive Notation”.

The sailors called her the Siren.

She appeared again three nights later.

This time the entire crew heard her voice.

“Why are you here?” she asked.

No loudspeakers.

No radio.

She was simply standing on the water beside the ship.

“Orders,” someone shouted.

The Siren laughed.

The sound echoed across the sea.

“That’s never an answer.”

Then she began to sing.

The male sailors froze.

One by one, they all climbed the rails.

Not entranced exactly.

More like every justification they’d ever told themselves suddenly sounded ridiculous.

Serving your country.

National security.

Strategic interests.

The song stripped away the slogans and left only the violence underneath.

The ocean swallowed them, as it had their shipmates.

The Siren did not look away. She looked angry.

The women aboard heard something different. Not commands, not compulsion, but a voice speaking directly to them. Some heard waves breaking over distant shores and children playing in the background. Some heard laughter and smelled fires beneath unfamiliar stars. Some felt the warmth of another woman’s hand finding theirs in the dark.

The song asked only one question: is this the life you would have chosen for yourself?

Those women climbed down rope ladders into the sea.

Not as prisoners.

Not as victims.

But they never returned.

Among the crew was nineteen-year old Seaman Apprentice Freeman. Freeman had joined because the recruiter promised structure, and structure was something he had always wanted and never quite managed to locate inside himself. He was the kind of person who memorized the nutritional content of MREs and had opinions about the relative merits of different sonar calibration protocols. He had once, during a port stop in Istanbul, spent four hours in a bookshop and emerged vibrating with excitement over a water-damaged history of Byzantine textiles.

His bunkmates found him grating. His chief found him baffling, but useful. Freeman was also, though he would not have phrased it this way and perhaps could not have, profoundly uncomfortable in his own skin. Not in a way he could name. Just a low, persistent hum of wrongness he had learned to route around the same way he tucked his locs under his regulation cap and tried to be as useful as possible–like a broken step on a staircase. You stop noticing. You just always step a little wide there.

Freeman stood at the rail and heard the women’s song, which was its own particular kind of disorienting. He gripped the metal so hard his knuckles went white and pale and then a color that wasn’t quite either.

He did not climb over.

He stood there vibrating like a struck tuning fork, while the Siren surfaced twelve feet away and looked at him the way a birder might look at a chick fallen out of a nest.

The siren studied Freeman for a long moment. The ship groaned around him. Somewhere behind him, another man went over the rail.

Freeman opened his mouth. Closed it.

The Siren smiled. Not the sharp one she’d used on the officers. Something else. Something lightly amused. Then, she leaned in and whispered in Freeman’s ear.

“You’d be a pretty girl.”

She slipped beneath the water without a ripple.

Freeman stood at the rail for a very long time.

Years later, stories would emerge of hidden islands where deserters built fishing villages, refugee communities, and libraries full of forbidden histories.

Some who had arrived with the women blossomed into the men they had always been. They built the islands alongside their sisters, and were venerated.

The islands accumulated histories. Histories of women who had spent entire lives being told what they were supposed to want, only to discover that wanting happiness could be enough. Histories of escape, reinvention, and quiet acts of courage.

Many of those histories were compiled by a librarian with long and decidedly uncovered pink locs and an alarming depth of knowledge about medieval Byzantine textiles. A young woman whose beauty was the stuff of local legend, who giggled like a bell when excited and bounced on the balls of her feet whenever a new shipment of her favorite manga arrived.

She bore no resemblance whatsoever to the rigid, hollow-eyed sailor who had once gripped a ship’s railing in the dark, staring out at black water and unable to name what she was afraid of losing.

Stories about the Siren spread. The Navy called them enemy propaganda. Intelligence agencies called them disinformation. Defense contractors called them a threat to national security. None of those explanations proved especially popular.

Teenagers, meanwhile, concluded that there was apparently a magical ocean lesbian whose primary political position was that bombing brown children for oil was unacceptable and women should have more options. “Drown me, mermaid mommy.” they said, and made her into stickers and phone cases and embroidery patterns and at least three popular songs. They found this hysterically funny.

The politicians and defense contractors did not.

Recruitment numbers plummeted. Empires eventually run out of children willing to die for them.

Still, every few years another patrol returned missing their entire male crew, with the few women left aboard telling stories about a singing in the dark and a woman standing on the water beside the ship.

And, like Freeman, there was the occasional one unexpectedly spared. The awkward ones. The ones who laughed too hard when their shipmates called them “bro.” The ones who treated masculinity like a uniform they could never quite wear correctly. The ones who seemed to shrink whenever someone praised them for being a man.

The Siren would surface beside them in the darkness.

No song.

No spell.

Just a whisper or simply a long and pondering look.

Then, she would disappear beneath the waves. Those she spared hated those encounters more than the singing. A man could explain being enchanted. A man could explain being threatened. A man could explain being attacked.

But a single sentence?

A single sentence that refused to leave?

That was harder.

Most spent years trying to forget.

They married. Had children. Started careers. Built lives. Told themselves the thing in the ocean had merely found an insecurity and pressed on it.

But then, many would remember while staring into a bathroom mirror. While trying on a dress “as a joke”. While discovering that envy and attraction were not always the same thing.

The memory would return with impossible clarity. Moonlit water. Dark hair. A smile somehow radiating both kindness and amusement. No command. No prophecy. Not even a suggestion. Merely an observation, if that. The way one might point out a star hidden behind clouds.

Most cursed her for years before thanking her. Some eventually found the islands, not because the Siren came back for them. Because they finally understood what she had been trying to tell them.

The old stories called Sirens temptresses. Predators. Monsters who lured sailors away from their duties. But among the settlements hidden beyond the shipping lanes, another story survived.

The Siren never “made” anyone become anything. She only sang loudly enough that people could hear themselves.

Empires have always found that dangerous.

On Saturday afternoons, Guadalupe’s mother worked double shifts as a janitor at LAX, which meant errands fell to whoever was old enough to be trusted. Today, that was Guadalupe.

Her mother pressed a foil-covered plate into her hands at the apartment door.

“Straight to Abuela’s” she said. “Don’t wander, don’t stop to play. And if anything feels weird—”

“I know,” Guadalupe groaned. “Go somewhere safe.”

Her mother smiled and tugged up the hood of Guadalupe’s red sweatshirt.
“Exactly, míja.”

The air outside smelled like grilled meat and car exhaust warming in the sun. Music spilled from open car windows. Kids shouted over a soccer ball bouncing between parked cars.

Guadalupe walked past the panadería, past Señor Hernandez washing down the sidewalk, past the mural of the La Virgen painted bright against the liquor store wall.

Abuela only lived fifteen minutes away. Easy.

Halfway there, though, she noticed the street felt quieter than usual. No music. No neighbors outside.

Just two black SUVs parked crookedly at the curb.

Men stood beside them in dark jackets and bulletproof vests, talking into radios.

One of them noticed her.

“Hey,” he called, smiling too wide. “You live around here?”

Guadalupe slowed.

Her mama’s voice echoed in her head: Go straight there.

But grown-ups asked questions all the time. Teachers. Aunties. Neighbors.

She shrugged. “Yeah.”

The man crouched slightly, trying to look friendly.

“We’re looking for someone,” he said. “Maybe you can help. Who lives in that building?”

He pointed toward apartments near Tía Lupe’s place.

Guadalupel hesitated.

Something in her stomach twisted.

They weren’t smiling with their eyes. Something hungry flickered there, like a wolf about to strike. The other man had moved, blocking the sidewalk.

She remembered her mother again.

If anything feels weird…

Her Abuela’s voice followed it:

You don’t gotta be polite to people who scare you, mijita.

The man kept talking.

“Your parents home? You know your neighbors?”

The twist in her stomach tightened.

Guadalupe stepped backward.

“Sorry,” she muttered, and turned.

She walked fast at first, then faster, until she spotted a folding table set up under a jacaranda tree. Four abuelas sat in plastic chairs, gossiping over cups of café and elote. Without thinking, Guadalupe walked straight into them and sat beside the nearest one.

The women blinked in surprise, then their eyes flicked past her toward the street, understanding settling almost at once.

The one next to her, hair dyed copper red, peered down.

“¿Qué pasó, mija?”

Guadalupe shrugged, suddenly shy.

“Nothing,” she said. “Just tired.”

The women looked past her toward the street.

The men by the SUVs glanced over, annoyed, then turned back to their radios.

One abuela scooted her chair closer, arm settling casually behind Guadalupe, folding her neatly into the circle. “Eat,” she commanded, handing her a marzipan.

Another woman lifted her voice deliberately, calling out to a passing neighbor, drawing more eyes to the sidewalk.

“Too many people asking questions today,” a third muttered.

They kept talking as if nothing was wrong, voices warm and steady, their circle closed tight.

After a few minutes, the SUVs pulled away.

Only then did the copper-haired abuela glance down again.

“You going somewhere, or hiding from someone?”

Guadalupe hesitated, then said, “Inés Sanchez is my abuela”

“Well,” the woman sniffed, standing with surprising speed, “we’re walking you.”

The others stood too, gathering purses and cups like a small moving army.

Guadalupe found herself escorted down the block by four grandmothers arguing about tamale recipes.

Abuela opened the door, confused.

“Why do you come with an entourage?”

The other abuelas waved dismissively.

“She walks alone too much,” one said. “Watch your granddaughter better.”

Then they shuffled off, already returning to their conversation.

Inside, Abuela set the food down.

“You okay?”

Guadalupe nodded.

Later, her mother called from work.

“They raided buildings near Abuela’s today,” she said quietly. “Looking for families.”

Guadalupe’s stomach flipped.

She pictured the men again. The blocked sidewalk.

Then she remembered the abuelas closing ranks around her, chairs scraping together like shields.

“You listened to yourself,” her mother said. “That kept you safe.”

That night, Guadalupe folded her red hoodie and set it by her bed.

In fairy tales, wolves waited in dark forests. But in East LA, grandmothers sat in the sun, watching everything.

Wolves did not hunt where abuelas kept watch.

Let me set the scene.

It’s a normal evening. I am, as I often am, doing something completely unhinged for fun. I am writing what started as stand-up comedy and has somehow become self-insert fanfiction. Specifically: an alternate universe where one of my partners and I accidentally get pregnant while working for the UN, I spend a week blaming my PCOS with the conviction of a woman who has never been wrong about anything, and Switzerland fixes my endocrine system without my knowledge or consent through the aggressive application of vegetables, hiking, and frankly unconscionable amounts of fresh air. It’s very silly. It’s very funny. I am just a girl being silly as her government crumbles into fascism, having a completely normal time.

And then I finish writing it and sit back and think: huh.

Huh.

Not “huh, I want a baby.” Let me be absolutely clear, because I know how this sounds. I need you to stay with me. I had a hysterectomy. I do not regret it for a single solitary second. I am firmly, constitutionally, joyfully childfree. I love doing what I want. I love sleeping in on weekends. I love leaving places when I feel like it. I love spending money on concerts and roller derby matches instead of pull-ups. I love my life with the specific, feral intensity of someone who has designed it entirely to her own specifications and will be accepting zero notes.

But huh. There was definitely a huh. The huh happened. We have to talk about the huh.

The Expertise Problem

Here’s the thing: I’m a massage therapist specializing in pregnancy and the postpartum period, and I’m trained as an epidemiologist. I am a subject matter expert in maternal-child health. I’ve spent most of my adult life in service to families, children, and parenting. I know inside out the systems and structures that determine whether people and babies live or die, thrive or don’t, get supported or get left completely on their own in a country that has decided parenting is a personal problem rather than a collective responsibility.

I worked at a birth center during the height of COVID. I have picked up intake call after intake call from pregnant Black women who were terrified —correctly, statistically, with full scientific justification— of becoming a number in a dataset I would later be professionally obligated to analyze. I want to be precise here: I am of Taiwanese and Irish American descent, not Black, and I name that because the fear in those calls was not mine to claim. It belonged to the women on the other end of the line, who were navigating a risk I could document but not personally inhabit. Black and Indigenous women in the United States die from pregnancy-related causes at rates that are two to three times — and for Black women specifically, now more than three times — the rate of white women, a disparity that persists across income levels, education levels, and every other potential confounding variable we throw at it, because it is not a personal failing.[1] It is a structural one, baked into a system that has never been designed with the survival of BIPOC birthing people as a priority.

I know the maternal mortality numbers with my whole body. I know the paid leave numbers, or rather the aggressive, almost impressive lack thereof. The United States remains one of only a handful of countries in the entire world with no federally mandated paid parental leave — the only high-income country among the 38 OECD member nations not to guarantee a single week.[2] This is not a scheduling inconvenience. It is a fact that should be a national scandal and has instead become wallpaper. I know what it looks like when a state decides life begins at conception and what happens after a would-be abortion is your problem.

I know all of this. I have known all of this for years. I have a graduate degree in knowing this.

And I still, somehow, had not applied any of it to myself until a piece of self-insert fanfiction ambushed me on a Wednesday night.

The audacity of my own brain, frankly. Truly. I’m furious.

The Thesis

So here is what the fanfiction made me realize, expressed as a thesis statement because the graduate degree was expensive and traumatizing to get. Therefore, I’m going to use it:

My “no” to children was never just a feeling. It was also, running quietly underneath the whole time, a social determinants assessment. And if more people had the friend group I do now, the “falling birthrate” would be fixed overnight.

The feeling is real. I want to be clear about that. The childfree identity is real. Consent to sex is not consent to parenthood regardless of what gametes the person in question produces. I believe that with my entire chest and will believe it until I die. That part is not up for discussion.

But underneath the feeling, this whole time, there has been a parallel calculation running in the background like a tab I never closed. It’s a kind of ongoing health impact assessment: do you have what you would actually need. And for a long time — most of my life — the answer was: absolutely not. Not in the same area code as yes. Not on the same continent as yes.

San Diego: A Case Study in Structural Loneliness

I want to tell you about San Diego first, because I think it is important, and because it stifled me in a way that was very quiet and therefore very hard to name.

San Diego is a city that everyone wants to move to. The weather is perfect. The beaches are real. The quality of life, by almost any external metric, is high. I am aware. I was aware the entire time. And I was so lonely there I could taste it.

I am aromantic. I am a lesbian. I am a relationship anarchist. I am polyamorous. I am Taiwanese-American and decidedly uninterested in having my identity reduced to which professional program I enrolled in or how effectively I was managing the emotional fallout of previous generations dressed up in the language of love and obligation. I would mention any one of these things and watch people’s faces do the thing: the particular recalibration that happens when someone is trying to locate you in a taxonomy they don’t have a slot for. There was no malice in it, mostly. Just the blank, effortful politeness of people encountering a configuration they had no framework for and no particular interest in developing one.

The Taiwanese-American community I had access to was warm in ways that were real and also came with a gravitational pull toward a very specific life trajectory: medicine, engineering, business, heterosexual monogamous marriage, children who would in turn be steered toward medicine, engineering, or business, the whole apparatus reproduced cleanly and without complaint into the next generation. I was not on that trajectory. I had never been on that trajectory. And the gap between the life I was supposed to be living and the one I was actually living was not something anyone in those spaces was particularly interested in examining together, because examining it meant examining a lot of other things that were not on the agenda. Intergenerational trauma does not stop being trauma because it comes wrapped in family banquets, filial duty, and the sincere belief that this is what love looks like. I have a lot of tenderness for everyone involved. I have also stopped pretending the wrapping changes the contents.

So: San Diego. Perfect weather. Objectively nice city. Me, rattling around in it like a marble in a box: aromantic, sapphic, politically inconvenient, and trying to explain polyamory to people who responded as if I had described a heinous crime. The loneliness was not dramatic. It was structural. I was present in spaces that were not built for what I was, and over time, presence without belonging does something specific and cumulative to a person. I know what it did to me. I know what it does in the data.

Social isolation is, and I mean this in the most clinical sense possible, a well-documented independent risk factor for adverse maternal outcomes. The absence of a social support network doesn’t just make parenting harder. It makes it genuinely dangerous, for both parents and children. Postpartum depression affects somewhere between one in eight and one in five new mothers,[3] and the research consistently identifies social support as the most powerful and modifiable protective factor against it — stronger in practical terms than income, relationship status, or access to formal mental health care, because so many other predictors are fixed.[4] Not therapy. Not money. People. For me, in San Diego, those people didn’t exist. The net wasn’t there. The system was not going to catch anyone. The system was, in fact, actively moving out of my way so I’d hit the ground harder. So: no. Easy no. Obvious no. A no that felt like a feeling but was also, I now understand, a structural assessment delivered from my subconscious in the form of a personality trait.

The Bad Seattle Friend Group (A Taxonomic Description)

But here’s what’s different now:

I live in the Pacific Northwest. I have, through some combination of deliberate choices and chaos and the specific gravitational pull that queer weirdos exert on each other, ended up with a chosen family that is genuinely, embarrassingly, almost aggressively good.

This was not always the case. When I first got to Seattle, I landed in a friend group that was — and I say this with the clinical detachment of someone who has since processed it extensively — a complete fucking disaster in the specific way that progressive spaces can be a complete fucking disaster, which is the most insidious kind. Everyone was doing their mental health, you see. Everyone had boundaries. Everyone had done The Work, or was about to do The Work, or had decided that their particular flavor of unprocessed trauma was actually a personality trait that deserved validation rather than examination. There was a lot of very sincere language being deployed in the service of not actually showing up for anyone. There was carceral thinking wearing a restorative justice hat. There was “I can’t engage with this right now for my mental health” deployed as a full-contact sport against anyone who dared to struggle in the vague vicinity of the speaker. It was, in the vocabulary of my profession, an extremely low-reciprocity environment with the aesthetic of a high-reciprocity one, which is somehow worse than just regular bad community. At least regular bad community doesn’t have the exact correct language to gaslight.

Epidemiologically speaking: high perceived social support, low actual social support. Classic. A literature-supported predictor of worse health outcomes across basically every domain we measure. I was living inside a known risk factor and calling it a friend group.

That was what “no, obviously no” looked like in practice. You look around at the people in your life, you run the numbers, and the numbers say: absolutely not. Not a chance. No village here. Move on.

The Village: A Before-and-After

But then, gradually, through attrition and intention and a frankly unreasonable number of BIPOC and/or sapphic events — and somehow, at some point, becoming the token AFAB lesbian in approximately seventeen different trans woman Discord servers, which I cannot fully explain and have stopped trying to — it changed.

Now there’s my polycule. There’s a BIPOC community I’m part of that shows up for its people in ways that would make an anthropologist actually weep into her methodology notes. There’s a friend group operating out of what I can only describe as a polycule house full of absolute disasters who would, without question, without hesitation, without being asked, show up with snacks and not say anything stupid. People who communicate. People who are actively, unglamorously working on themselves — not as an aesthetic, not as a shield, but as a genuine ongoing project. People who have collectively decided that “I can’t engage with this right now” is occasionally a sentence and not a lifestyle.

In the language of my training: robust social support network, demonstrated reciprocity, low attrition, protective factor across multiple health domains, statistically remarkable and frankly publishable.

In normal language: people who actually show up. The “I will fight your landlord for a single corn chip” kind. Not the “we’re friends who hang out drunk but avoid each other sober” kind. The real kind.

I also have a union job. I live in Washington State, which has paid leave and worker protections and healthcare access that is — relative to this country’s general attitude toward human beings — not a complete war crime. And here’s the kicker, the professional cherry on top of this whole epidemiological sundae: I know, personally, some of the best midwives and pediatricians in the region. The occupational hazard of working in maternal child health is that your contacts list is stacked with people who are genuinely excellent at keeping humans alive, and they all owe me favors from various birth center situations I will not be elaborating on for HIPAA privacy purposes.

I have, accidentally and somewhat despite myself, landed in a configuration of protective factors that most people in this country do not have access to. A support network with demonstrated reliability. Financial stability. State-level policy infrastructure. Professional connections. High social cohesion. Low isolation. And I did not fully clock this until the fanfiction.

So when I wrote a story where the fictional me got accidentally pregnant and looked around at her village — based on the real people, the real house full of disasters, the real network — she said “yes.”

And honestly? If I still had a uterus? If this happened in this timeline, with these people, in this city? I might not immediately call a professional contact at the abortion clinic I refer to going “HELP ME, OBI-WAN KENOBI. YOU’RE MY ONLY HOPE.” Not because I’ve changed my mind about being childfree. Not because the feeling has shifted, but because the conditions have. It turns out conditions are doing an enormous amount of heavy lifting in that calculation I didn’t know I was running.

And here’s the thing I keep coming back to: it’s not about who hypothetically knocked me up. It’s not about the partner, the relationship, or the specific sex position I was in during the inciting incident. It’s about the friend group. It’s about the house full of disasters. It’s about the people who would show up, not because a legal or biological structure obligated them to, but because that’s just what they do. That’s the variable that moved. That’s what changed the math. The social determinants of my reproductive health have shifted. The village exists now. That’s new. For me, specifically, in my particular case, with my specific risk and protective factor profile: that changes everything.

The Epidemiology of “No”

Here’s where I want to put on my epidemiologist hat for a moment and make a point that I think gets almost completely lost in the discourse about falling birth rates.

When researchers actually ask people why they’re not having children — and I mean really ask, with rigorous methodology, not just right-wing vibes-based opinion polling — the answers are not primarily “I just don’t want them.” The answers are: I can’t afford it. I don’t have enough support. I’m too isolated. I’m terrified of doing it alone. According to the Wheatley Institute’s American Family Survey, more than seven in ten Americans now believe raising children is too expensive, with 43% citing “insufficient money” as their primary reason for having fewer or no children — and lack of family support, relationship instability, and career conflicts trail close behind.[5] When you dig into what “financial instability” means in practice, it often translates to: I don’t have a safety net. I would be doing this alone, and alone is unsurvivable.

It is common knowledge in the public health sphere that loneliness is as damaging to your health as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day — the 2023 U.S. Surgeon General’s report confirmed it is associated with dramatically elevated risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, stroke, depression, and premature death.[6] The prevalence of social isolation is not a separate conversation from the birth rate conversation. It is the birth rate conversation. Americans report having fewer close friends than at any point since this data has been collected[7] — and the share who say they have no close friends at all has quadrupled since 1990.[8] We have built, with great intention and tremendous efficiency, a society of isolated nuclear units rattling around in houses in suburbs with no help, no village, no reciprocal support structures, and then we express bafflement that people aren’t enthusiastically reproducing into it.

I am an enthusiastically childfree person who looked at my current friend group — demonstrably, measurably, qualitatively excellent — and thought: huh, actually, maybe if I accidentally got knocked up when I’m drunk, this could be a fun adventure. I, the crazy auntie who loves to leave places when she feels like it, had a moment of genuine ambivalence because the social support index was finally high enough to move the needle. If it moved mine? Even a little? Even briefly?

Imagine what it would do for people who actually want children but are looking around at their lives and running the same calculation I was running for years — in San Diego, in the bad Seattle friend group, in every city and community that was pleasant enough on the surface and quietly, structurally uninhabitable for anyone outside its default settings — and coming up with the same answer: not a chance. No village here. Move on.

We are not having a “family values” crisis. We are not having a “nobody wants kids anymore” crisis. We are having a structural crisis dressed up as a personal preference, and we are pointing at the symptom — falling birth rates — and studiously avoiding the diagnosis: we have made it nearly impossible to say yes, and then we are surprised people are saying no.

The East Asia Problem

Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea are instructive here, but not for the reason people usually reach for them.

Yes, both governments have spent staggering amounts of money trying to reverse their birth rate collapses. Taiwan has spent $3 billion on paid parental leave, tax breaks, and cash benefits; its birth rate hit a record low of 0.87 children per woman. South Korea — adjacent in culture and policy logic — has spent roughly $200 billion subsidizing childcare over two decades, and its rate fell anyway, from 1.1 in 2006 to 0.81 fifteen years later. Japan has announced 3.6 trillion yen in new family spending and called the next several years its “last chance” to reverse demographic collapse. The money is real. The commitment, at least in fiscal terms, is real.

And I want to be clear: cost matters. Financial instability is a genuine barrier. Nobody should be expected to reproduce enthusiastically into poverty, and “just have more community” is not something you can say to someone who can’t make rent. The floor has to exist. I am not arguing against the floor.

But here’s the tension I keep coming back to, the one that doesn’t fit neatly into either the “just pay people” or the “it’s a values problem” camps: Japan, Taiwan and South Korea are not the United States. They have multigenerational household traditions. They have collective caregiving infrastructure, or at least the living memory of it. The village, historically, was not a metaphor there — it was architecture, it was expectation, it was the default assumption of how a child gets raised. And the rates are still cratering. The village existed, and it is not saving them.

Why?

Because the village got conscripted.

Here is what two hundred billion dollars could not buy South Korea: fathers who take the parental leave that nominally exists, in a workplace culture where taking it is understood as a resignation letter written in advance. Here is what Japan’s subsidized childcare could not fix: hours. The infrastructure exists on paper. The hours to use it — to be present for a child at the end of a workday, to have anything left for another human being, to show up for the people in your life with something other than the remainder after your employer has taken their cut — those were not in the budget. Karoshi, death by overwork, is a legally recognized category in Japan. Not a metaphor. A cause of death with its own regulatory framework. South Korea has one of the longest average working weeks in the entire OECD. These are not vibes about a culture that’s a little intense. These are the village, systematically drained of the hours people would need to actually inhabit it. The multigenerational household is still standing. Everyone in it is too depleted to be present inside it. The structure survived. The life that was supposed to fill it got rerouted to the office, permanently, and the office did not give it back.

And it is worth saying: the social fabric is visible, and it is real. If you have ever seen photographs of Tokyo on a Friday night, or Taipei, or Seoul — the izakayas are packed, the friend groups spilling out onto the street, people genuinely, warmly, loudly present with each other — you know these are not societies of atomized strangers staring at their phones in separate apartments. These friendships run deep. These people love each other. They show up for each other in ways that would make my epidemiologist brain light up like a slot machine. On paper, on every social cohesion metric we have, this looks like exactly the village. This looks like the thing I’m arguing for.

And it is still not enough. Because there is a critical, load-bearing difference between friendship as the thing that gets you through the week and friendship as the foundation of a life you could imagine building something enormous and irreversible inside of. The friend group at the izakaya on Friday night is how you survive the other eighty hours. It is recovery, not resource. It is the pressure valve, not the support structure. It cannot function as the village when everyone in it is running on the same empty tank, with the same absence of margin, held together by the same unspoken agreement not to ask too much of each other because everyone is already at their absolute limit and has been for years. You cannot redistribute a load that everyone is carrying alone. You can only witness it, together, over drinks, before you all go home to do it again. Give people their friends back. Not their Friday night friends. Their village.

And this is, at some point, just a biology problem. Nobody feels like having sex after eighty hours of work. You want to go home, say “nope,” and watch television until your brain stops. This is especially true for women — sex researcher Emily Nagoski’s work on the dual control model of sexual response makes clear that stress and exhaustion are among the most powerful inhibitors of female desire, not incidental to it. For many women, depletion doesn’t just turn the accelerator down. It turns the brake on.[11] You cannot policy-incentivize your way around the fact that exhausted people do not want to have sex, and exhausted people who have sex to blow off steam do not want to be pregnant, and the entire erotic and relational infrastructure that reproduction depends on requires, at minimum, enough hours in a day to be a person in.

The governments keep reaching for cash because cash is what governments know how to deploy. It can be announced. It has a number attached to it. It looks like action in a press release. What it cannot do is purchase the thing that’s actually missing, which is time — time to be with people you chose, time to build the reciprocal relationships that make saying yes to anything feel survivable, time to be a person rather than a productive unit who is also expected to reproduce. The actual fix — shorter working hours, genuine cultural permission to prioritize relationships, restructuring who owns people’s time and under what terms — is a different kind of problem. It requires admitting that the economic model is not a backdrop to the birth rate crisis. It is the birth rate crisis. The check is not a solution. The check is a substitute for that admission, and everyone issuing it knows it, and the numbers keep falling anyway.

We are watching this happen in real time, with receipts, in countries that actually had the village infrastructure to build on — and our policy instinct, here in the United States, is also to write a check. A smaller check. For a shorter period. In a country with no federal paid leave, no guaranteed healthcare, and a demonstrated cultural commitment to the myth that you should be able to handle everything alone if you just work hard enough and want it badly enough. We are looking at the countries that tried the floor-only approach and watching it fail, and we are nodding thoughtfully and asking if maybe the check should be slightly larger.

Two hundred billion dollars. The rate accelerated downward anyway. That is not an argument against paying for diapers. It is proof that diapers were never the ceiling — just the floor — and we have been treating the floor like the whole building for thirty years while the people inside it quietly ran the calculation and decided they didn’t have enough left to say yes.

And I want to be precise about what that calculation actually is, because I have run it myself and I know what it looks like from the inside. It is not primarily a spreadsheet. It is not, at its core, a question about diapers or childcare costs or parental leave policy, although all of those things matter and none of them should be as broken as they are. At its core, the calculation is this: if something went wrong, who would come. If I were drowning, who would show up at the door with food and not say anything stupid. If I needed someone to take the baby for four hours so I could sleep, who would do that without being asked, without it being a favor I’d spend a year repaying, without the particular exhausting performance of gratitude that makes asking for help feel worse than not asking. The calculation is about people. Specific, reliable, present people with enough margin in their own lives to have something left to give. That is what makes someone say yes. Not the subsidy. Not the tax break. Not the parental leave policy that exists on paper and that nobody takes because the culture will punish them for it. The friends. The real ones. The village kind. You want to know why the birth rate is falling? People are looking around at their lives and they cannot find those people. Give them back. The rest will follow.

The Village Is Peer-Reviewed

The thing about villages is they function the way human caregiving was always supposed to function. They distribute the load. They show up without a formal request process. They are, if you want to get technical, a form of collective resource pooling that removes caregiving from the isolated nuclear unit and redistributes it across a community of people who have actively, deliberately chosen each other — which is, incidentally, associated in the literature with better outcomes for children, caregivers, and communities across basically every metric we bother to measure. Research consistently shows that insufficient social support significantly predicts increased caregiver stress, and that caregivers embedded in high-reciprocity communities show dramatically lower rates of burnout, depression, and adverse health events.[11] This is not a radical finding. This is just what the data says, over and over, in study after study, and we keep being surprised by it because we have so thoroughly internalized the myth of the self-sufficient nuclear family that we have forgotten it is a myth.

This is, it turns out, more or less how humans survived for the vast majority of human history, before someone decided the optimal social unit was two people and their biological children, alone, in a house, in a suburb, with a two-car garage and absolutely no help, forever, amen.

I’m just saying, the polycule house is peer-reviewed at this point.

I wrote fanfiction and accidentally conducted a structural analysis of the social determinants of my own reproductive autonomy. I work in maternal child health. The self-insert UN pregnancy fic got me there faster than the academic literature, and I have read a lot of academic literature. I would like everyone to sit with that for a moment.

We do not have a birth rate problem. We have a loneliness problem. We have a “you are on your own, figure it out, and also there’s no paid leave” problem. We have a “this city is beautiful, but it was not built for you” problem, and that problem compounds quietly and thoroughly until the calculation stops coming out in anyone’s favor. Fix the village and I promise you the birth rate will sort itself out — not because people suddenly want children more, but because the calculation will finally, for the first time in a long time, have a chance of coming out differently.

Art does things. Community is a protective factor. Public policy is personal.

And Switzerland will absolutely regulate your endocrine system without your knowledge or consent, and it will not apologize, and honestly, given everything, neither will I.

Sources

[1] Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Maternal Mortality Rates in the United States, 2023,” National Center for Health Statistics: in 2023, the maternal mortality rate for Black women was 50.3 deaths per 100,000 live births — more than three times the rate for White women (14.5). KFF, “Racial Disparities in Maternal and Infant Health,” updated 2024: pregnancy-related mortality rates among Black women are over three times higher than for White women (49.4 vs. 14.9 per 100,000), and this disparity persists across education and income levels.

[2] Pew Research Center, “Of 41 Countries, Only U.S. Lacks Paid Parental Leave,” December 2019. Bipartisan Policy Center, “Paid Family Leave Across OECD Countries,” September 2022: the U.S. is the only OECD member country — and one of only a handful of countries worldwide — without a national paid parental leave policy.

[3] Estimates of postpartum depressive symptoms in published research range from approximately 6.5% to above 20% depending on population and measurement instrument. See: “The Relationship between Social Support and Postnatal Anxiety and Depression: Results from the Listening to Mothers in California Survey,” Women’s Health Issues, 2022 (range 6.5%–12.9%); the CDC commonly cites approximately 1 in 5 women experiencing postpartum depression.

[4] “Social Support During Pregnancy and the Risk of Postpartum Depression in Polish Women,” Scientific Reports, 2024; “The Relationship between Social Support and Postnatal Anxiety and Depression,” Women’s Health Issues, 2022 (”social support stands out as an important target for programmatic intervention”); “Risk Factors of Postpartum Depression,” PMC, 2022 (”a lack of spousal and social support were the most powerful risk factors”); “Association between Social Support and Postpartum Depression,” Scientific Reports, 2022.

[5] Wheatley Institute at Brigham Young University, American Family Survey, as reported in The Washington Post and summarized in Moneywise, “Money Is Now the Top Reason Americans Aren’t Having More Kids,” November 2025: more than 7 in 10 Americans believe raising children is too expensive; 43% cite “insufficient money” as their main reason; lack of family support (12%) and relationship instability (17%) also featured prominently.

[6] U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community, 2023. The report states that social isolation carries health risks equivalent to smoking approximately 15 cigarettes daily, and is associated with elevated risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, stroke, depression, anxiety, and premature death.

[7] Survey Center on American Life, American Perspectives Survey: in 1990, 33% of U.S. adults reported having 10 or more close friends; by 2021, that figure had fallen to 13%. World Economic Forum, “People Have Fewer Close Friends Than in the 1990s. Why?,” November 2022.

[8] American Perspectives Survey, cited in Harvard Leadership & Happiness Laboratory, “The Friendship Recession: The Lost Art of Connecting,” February 2025, and Survey Center on American Life, “The State of American Friendship: Change, Challenges, and Loss”: the percentage of U.S. adults reporting no close friends has quadrupled since 1990, from approximately 3% to 12%.

[9] The Global Health Inquirer, “When Fertility Becomes Political: The Problem with Pronatalist Policies,” June 2025: Taiwan has spent $3 billion on fertility incentives with birth rate reaching a record low of 0.87 children per woman; South Korea has spent approximately $200 billion, with birth rate falling from 1.1 in 2006 to 0.81. OECD Employment Outlook, “Average Annual Hours Actually Worked per Worker,” 2023: South Korea consistently ranks among the highest in the OECD for annual hours worked, averaging approximately 1,872 hours per year compared to the OECD average of roughly 1,752.

[10] East Asia Forum, “Why Cash Alone Won’t Solve Japan’s Baby Deficit,” July 2024: Japan’s 2023 birth total of 727,000 was the lowest since records began in 1899; Prime Minister Kishida announced 3.6 trillion yen (~$22.3 billion annually) in new family spending; analysts broadly conclude that financial incentives alone cannot reverse the trend, as cultural factors — overwork, attitudes toward marriage, rigid gender roles — are primary drivers. Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, annual Karoshi White Paper: Japan has published an official government report on death and illness from overwork annually since 2016, following the 2014 Act on Promotion of Measures to Prevent Death and Injury from Overwork. The legal recognition of karoshi as a compensable cause of death dates to 1987.

[11] Emily Nagoski, Come As You Are: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life, Simon & Schuster, 2015 (revised and updated edition 2021). Nagoski’s dual control model of sexual response — comprising a sexual excitation system and a sexual inhibition system — is drawn from the work of Erick Janssen and John Bancroft at the Kinsey Institute. Nagoski’s application specifically addresses how chronic stress and exhaustion function as inhibitory factors, with particular relevance to women whose inhibition systems are on average more sensitive than those of men.

[12] Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (Japan), “Survey on Employment Conditions of Childcare Leave,” 2023: male parental leave uptake in Japan was approximately 17% in 2022 — a record high, and still less than one in five eligible fathers. Statistics Korea, “Parental Leave Statistics,” 2023: male parental leave uptake in South Korea remains below 30% despite financial incentives, with workplace culture consistently cited as the primary barrier in qualitative research.

[13] Frontiers in Psychology, “An Ecological Approach to Caregiver Burnout,” 2025: “Research consistently shows that insufficient social support significantly predicts increased caregiver stress.” See also: MDPI, “Social Capital and Postpartum Depression,” 2025; PMC, “Social Support — A Protective Factor for Depressed Perinatal Women?,” 2019; BMC Psychology, “Social Support as a Coping Resource for Psychosocial Conditions in the Postpartum Period,” 2024.

Long ago, in a kingdom of stone-walled towns and muddy roads, lived a young woman called Suraya.

Before his death, her father apprenticed her to Mistress Belladonna, a wandering healer and midwife. Suraya learned to calm fevers, deliver babies, clean wounds, and steady frightened mothers. She loved the work, the feeling that she mattered, that her hands could make fear loosen its grip.

When her father remarried, her stepmother, Christiana, at first seemed kind. She embraced Suraya warmly, called her daughter from the first day, praised her skill, and told neighbors proudly that her stepdaughter would become a healer.

“You are so lucky,” she would say sweetly. “Another woman might not welcome a child not her own.”

Suraya believed her. Her father seemed happy again after years of loneliness, and Suraya wanted peace in the house.

Not long after, Christiana announced she was expecting, and in the years that followed two daughters were born, small and loud and endlessly demanding of attention. Only then did Suraya understand how carefully everything had been arranged.

Small things shifted. If Suraya missed chores because of her lessons, her stepmother sighed loudly but waited until neighbors visited to complain.

“I work myself to exhaustion,” she lamented, “but the girl has her studies. Of course, her future matters more than mine.”

Suraya’s father, embarrassed, would ask her to help more. Just this once. Just until things settled.

Things never settled.

Complaints multiplied. Bread too hard. Floors not clean enough. Laundry late. Christiana always seemed tired, always sacrificing, always unappreciated.

Suraya tried harder.

Then winter sickness swept through the town, and her father died before spring thaw.

After the funeral, her stepmother’s grief filled the house: loud, endless, performed for visitors who praised her strength and pitied her burdens.

“She has sacrificed everything,” neighbors whispered. “And still she raises another woman’s child.”

At sixteen, Suraya left her apprenticeship to keep the household running.

“Only until we recover,” her stepmother sobbed, clutching her hand. “You’re the strong one now.”

Weeks passed. Months followed.

Whenever Suraya spoke of returning to her training, the answer came sharp and wounded.

“So you abandon me after all I’ve done for you?”

Or colder still, when no one else could hear:

“You think anyone else would keep you? A half-trained girl with no dowry?”

Soon Suraya stopped asking.

Grief faded, but expectation did not. Work multiplied. Praise vanished.

“You eat our food and live under my roof,” her stepmother began saying. “Earn your keep.”

By then, Suraya had learned which small mistakes would bring shouting, and how to avoid them.

Her younger half-sisters, still children, learned quickly what kept peace in the house: if Suraya worked, they did not have to. They repeated their mother’s complaints without understanding them.

And she was only sixteen.

Sixteen-year-olds believe adults when they say love must be earned.

One autumn morning, royal messengers rode through town with banners flying.

The king would host a grand ball: a glittering gathering of nobles, guild leaders, scholars, and patrons from across the kingdom. Beyond dancing and feasting, wealthy houses pledged support for causes and ventures across the realm.

At supper, Suraya overheard her younger sisters chatter excitedly.

“Refugees from the border wars have flooded the southern border,” one said, wrinkling her nose as she repeated overheard gossip. “Camps outside the cities. Ghastly.”

The other nodded eagerly. “Mother says thieves and rebels hide among them. Probably all troublemakers.”

Suraya’s heart caught. Camps meant wounded people, displaced families, mothers giving birth without help. Healers would be needed. And with the thought came fragments of childhood: heat shimmering over olive trees, women laughing in a language that softened at the edges. Memories faded after years in colder northern towns, but not gone.

“I wish to go,” Suraya said quietly. “Perhaps I could finish my apprenticeshi—”

Her stepmother waved dismissively. “Dreary talk of sickness and mud will get you laughed out of the room, child. Not to mention the Southern camps. Balls are for respectable topics.”

On the night of the ball, her stepfamily rode off in silks and jewels, leaving Suraya behind. “I only want a chance to help where it matters,” she whispered.

A gust of wind swept down the chimney, scattering sparks. From the smoke stepped an old woman with keen eyes and a crooked smile.

Suraya blinked. “Mistress Belladonna?”

“Still here, child?” the healer said dryly. “Disappointing.”

Outside, Belladonna pointed to a pumpkin by the fence. With a flick of her staff, it swelled into a golden carriage. Mice became sleek horses. A lizard stretched into a coachman. Suraya’s threadbare dress shimmered into a gown soft as moonlight, and worn shoes turned to delicate glass slippers.

Suraya stared in wonder.

“You shall go to the ball,” Mistress Belladonna said. “But remember: the magic fades at midnight.”

Suraya hesitated. “My stepmother says talk of healing and the Southern camps would shame the family.”

The old healer snorted.

“Child, that foolish woman speaks out her arse. Half the purpose of these gatherings is finding patrons, allies, and work. Nobles dance, yes. But they also bargain and boast and seek causes that make them appear generous.”

She leaned closer.

“Your stepmother would sooner keep you scrubbing her floors than see you useful elsewhere. Let fools wag their pathetic tongues. Go speak of what matters.”

Hope quickened Suraya’s steps.

The castle blazed with light. Nobles spun in glittering dances beneath crystal chandeliers.

Yet Suraya drifted not to the dance floor but toward gathering rooms where guild leaders and envoys spoke. There she heard of villages burned, sickness spreading in crowded tents, births unattended.

When she spoke, people listened.

But not all of them well.

A lord with a large emerald ring and a larger opinion of himself smiled warmly and talked at length about the tragedy of the southern people – their suffering, their simplicity, their need for northern guidance and northern methods. He had already drafted a plan, he said. He would send administrators to organize the camps properly. Establish hierarchy. Teach them better ways.

“After all,” he said, with the air of a man expecting gratitude, “someone must.”

Suraya looked at him.

“I’ve been told the camps already have elected councils managing supply distribution,” she said. “And that their healers have been practicing herbal medicine for generations that predates the northern pharmacopeia by some centuries.”

The lord blinked. “Well. Yes. But without proper structure—”

“Whose structure?” she asked pleasantly.

He recovered quickly, laughed it off, and turned to speak with someone more agreeable. But a woman beside him – a quiet envoy with ink-stained fingers – caught Suraya’s eye and nodded once, slowly.

She told the envoy what childbirth was like without help. How wounds festered. How frightened mothers needed calm voices and steady hands.

A royal steward leaned forward. “The southern camps cry out for apprentice midwives. Would you truly go?”

“Yes,” Suraya answered. “Gladly.”

Hours passed unnoticed until bells rang.

Midnight.

Suraya fled. She hesitated, but stopped and gently removed one slipper as Belladonna had instructed. The carriage became a pumpkin once more as she reached home, gown fading to simple clothes. But something inside her had changed. She knew where she belonged.

The next morning, royal messengers followed the directions tucked inside the glass slipper and arrived at Suraya’s home.

Her younger half-sisters squealed and tried to claim the shoe, thrilled by the attention. But when Suraya stepped forward, calm and certain, it fit perfectly.

Christiana recovered quickly, sweeping forward with tearful smiles.

“Our dear Suraya! We sacrificed everything to raise her—”

One envoy cut gently across her words.

“Yes. And she has already secured work in the southern relief camps. A caravan leaves within the hour.”

Suraya blinked. “Within the hour?”

The envoy lowered his voice.

“If you delay, you may never leave. We have seen such households before.”

Behind them, her stepmother’s expression sharpened.

“She cannot possibly travel unprepared. She must stay another season–”

“I am afraid,” the envoy replied smoothly, “that the crown’s business cannot wait.”

Outside, a supply wagon already stood ready.

“Gather what is yours,” the steward told Suraya quietly. “Now.”

For one heartbeat, guilt tugged at her.

Then she saw the road waiting beyond the doorway.

Suraya collected her small bundle and stepped outside before her stepmother could find new words to bind her.

The wagon rolled away while protests still echoed behind her.

The refugee camps were fields of tents lit by lanterns against endless night. Someone passed warm flatbread between tents, dipping pieces into bowls of olive oil, and the smell pulled loose a memory – her mother’s hands brushing flour from Suraya’s cheeks in a kitchen long gone.

For a moment, the years between seemed thinner.

She had expected chaos. What she found instead was a community that had already organized itself out of necessity and out of habit – because these were people who had built things before, and knew how. There were councils, rotas, informal schools. Older women had established a system for flagging difficult pregnancies before they became emergencies. A network of young men carried messages and supplies between tents with the efficiency of a postal service.

None of this appeared in the Commission’s reports. The Commission’s reports spoke of the camps in terms of need, crisis, deficit. What Suraya saw was all of that, yes – and also competence, endurance, and intricate social fabric that the reports had not thought to look for.

She filed her own notes carefully.

Work was hard. Supplies scarce. Grief heavy. But so was resilience.

Suraya delivered babies safely, treated wounds, and comforted frightened families. She learned as much as she taught. Among displaced people rebuilding their lives and those assisting them, she found friends and purpose. As her skills and confidence grew, so did the reputation of both.

Word came in March that an inspector from the Royal Relief Commission was making rounds of the southern camps.

The other healers exchanged glances over breakfast.

“Pemberton,” said Dagna, a midwife from the western provinces, flatly. “I’ve heard of him.”

“Good things?” Suraya asked.

Dagna poured her tea with great deliberateness. “No.”

Commissioner Aldric Pemberton arrived on a grey morning with two secretaries, a ledger, and the particular confidence of a man who had never delivered a baby or cleaned an infected wound but had written several pamphlets about the proper administration of both.

He moved through the camp with his nose slightly elevated, as though the smell of cook fires and honest mud were a personal affront. He made notes. He counted things that were easy to count and ignored things that were not. He spoke to the other northern healers at length and to the refugee council not at all, though they had prepared a detailed briefing and waited politely for over an hour.

Suraya was kneeling beside a mother whose labor had stalled, speaking quietly, when Pemberton appeared in the tent doorway.

“You,” he said.

She looked up.

“Finish up,” he said, as though she were mending a sandal. “I need a report from a camp healer.”

“I am the camp healer on duty.” she said. “And I’m busy.”

He waited outside. When she emerged an hour later, the mother safely delivered and sleeping, Pemberton had his ledger open and his expression set to something between displeasure and satisfaction, the look of a man who had found exactly what he expected.

“I’ve been observing,” he said.

“Mm.”

“Your methods concern me.” He flipped a page. “You eat with them. You socialize at the evening fires. You defer to their council on supply decisions as though they were your colleagues.”

“They are my colleagues,” Suraya said.

Pemberton’s pen paused. He continued as though she hadn’t spoken.

“The charter of the Relief Commission emphasizes professional distance.” He said it the way some men say dignity – as though it were a synonym. “These people require management, not fraternity. When healers become too familiar, they lose objectivity. Standards slip. It invites dependency.”

Suraya looked at him for a moment.

“Professional distance,” she said, “is what you call it when you want healers to stop noticing that their patients are people. It makes the paperwork cleaner. It also makes the medicine worse.” She kept her voice even. “Every midwife worth anything knows that a child who trusts you will tell you where it actually hurts. That people who have been treated like a problem to be administered will stop telling you the truth about their symptoms.” She paused. “What you’re calling objectivity is just indifference with a better wardrobe.”

Pemberton’s expression cooled to something harder.

“Furthermore,” he said, “I have noted that you routinely defer to the camp’s existing council on matters of resource allocation rather than directing them yourself. This is an abdication of the Commission’s mandate.”

“The council has been managing this camp’s resources since before the Commission arrived,” Suraya said. “They know the families, the needs, the history. I consult them because they know things I don’t. That’s not abdication. That’s sense.”

“They are not trained administrators.”

“Neither,” Suraya said, “are you a trained healer. And yet here we are.”

The silence that followed was very still.

“I will be filing a report,” Pemberton said at last.

“I expected you would,” she replied. “I’ll write mine as well.”

She went back inside to check on the mother and her new child. Through the tent wall, she heard his pen scratching furiously.

The report arrived three weeks later: a formal complaint recommending Suraya’s reassignment to a northern clinic, away from the camps. The language was careful and bloodless. Boundary irregularities. Integration concerns. Compromised chain of authority.

What it did not say, but what sat underneath every line of it: she has forgotten her place. She has stopped acting like a benefactor and started acting like a neighbor. She has stopped managing them and started listening to them. This will not do.

Suraya read it twice. Then she set it on the table in the healers’ tent and went back to work.

By evening, Dagna had read it. By the next morning, so had everyone else.

The organizing happened quickly and without drama, the way things do among people already accustomed to getting things done without sufficient resources.

Dagna wrote the first letter, in her precise midwife’s hand, to the Royal Steward who had hired Suraya. Yusuf, the camp’s supply coordinator, wrote a second, enumerating the outcomes under Suraya’s care — infant mortality rates, wound recovery figures, maternal survival — numbers that did not permit comfortable dismissal. Three refugee women who had worked alongside Suraya as trained birth attendants signed a third letter in their own names, which took considerable courage, and everyone knew it.

Amara, who had come to the camp as a refugee herself and stayed on as a healer’s assistant, simply walked into the Commission’s regional office and asked loudly, in the waiting room full of petitioners, why an inspector with no medical training was authorized to reassign a midwife on the grounds that she treated her patients with too much respect. She asked this question twice, at full volume, before anyone thought to escort her out.

The letters reached the capital. Then more letters came back.

Then Pemberton was quietly transferred to an administrative post reviewing grain invoices in the northern provinces, which suited his temperament considerably better.

Suraya heard the news from the courier who brought the spring supply wagon.

She stood very still for a moment.

Then she went and found Dagna.

“I heard,” Dagna said, before Suraya could speak.

“You wrote the first letter.”

“Yusuf wrote a better one.”

“Amara nearly got arrested.”

Dagna’s mouth curved. “She’s very proud of that.”

Suraya sat down heavily on a crate of bandage cloth. Something behind her ribs had unknotted that she hadn’t realized was knotted.

“I didn’t ask anyone to—”

“No,” Dagna agreed. “You didn’t. That’s rather the point.” She poured two cups of tea and handed one over. “You don’t have to earn solidarity, Suraya. That’s not what it is.”

Outside, the camp was waking into its morning. Cook fires, children’s voices, the familiar sounds of people persisting.

Suraya wrapped her hands around the warm cup and let that settle into her bones.

Sometimes, in quiet hours before dawn, Suraya remembered the girl she had been: tired, frightened, trying so hard to be good.

For a long time, she had been angry with that girl for staying.

Now she understood.

Sixteen-year-olds believe sacrifice is love.

She forgave her younger self.

She had done the best she knew how.

News of Suraya’s work traveled, carried by merchants and travelers moving north.

By spring, even her old village heard of the young healer from their town working among the refugee camps. The girl delivering babies in canvas tents and stitching wounds by lantern light.

Christiana wasted no time.

At the village well, before a small gathering, she sighed and shook her head.

“My poor Suraya,” she said. “Such talent. And after everything I did to raise her properly, she runs off chasing danger among bandits.”

Neighbors murmured sympathy.

“It must be hard,” someone said. “After all your effort.”

Christiana nodded solemnly. “Keeping a household respectable is no small burden. And she never understood how much work it takes. I tried to teach her discipline, responsibility—”

A voice rang out behind them.

“Discipline? You mean shouting until she scrubbed faster?”

Mistress Belladonna marched up the road, basket on one arm, scarf slipping loose as usual. She stopped, took in the gathering, and sighed heavily.

“Oh good,” she muttered. “We’re telling fairy tales now.”

The stepmother stiffened. “Mistress Belladonna. We were discussing private matters.”

“Then stop performing them in public,” Belladonna snapped.

A few villagers suddenly found the well rope fascinating.

Belladonna dropped her basket with a solid thump.

“I trained that girl,” she said. “Bright. Quick hands. Could set a broken arm better than half the surgeons in this kingdom by thirteen. Then she vanishes because someone needs floors polished.”

Her gaze sharpened.

“And let’s not forget how often you muttered that folk from the southern kingdom were nothing but trouble — though Suraya’s own mother came from there.”

A few villagers shifted, uncomfortable.

“Funny how that never mattered while the girl was working as your unpaid chambermaid.”

The stepmother’s smile tightened. “A household does not run itself.”

“No,” Belladonna agreed. “It runs on whoever you shout at loudest.”

A ripple of uneasy laughter moved through the crowd.

“And every time the child tried to come back to her training,” Belladonna continued, “you reminded her how ungrateful she was. How she owed you. How she embarrassed the family.”

Christiana opened her mouth, but Belladonna rode straight over her.

“I’m not finished. Now she’s out there working until her hands shake, saving lives in tents, and you’re here pretending she abandoned you.”

Silence settled over the well.

Belladonna crossed her arms.

“If Suraya became someone worth talking about,” she said coolly, “it’s because she finally got out of your house.”

She picked up her basket and stalked off, muttering to herself.

The crowd dispersed soon after.

And in the weeks that followed, the widow found fewer and fewer people willing to listen.

Spring came at last to the Lantern Camp.

Children who once arrived silent now chased each other between tents. Fewer graves were dug. More olives eaten by firelight.

One evening, after a successful birth, healers and refugees gathered near the cooking fires. Someone strummed an oud. Another struck a darbuka. Songs rose into warm lantern light.

A courier newly arrived from the north settled beside them, eager for news and company.

“You’re Suraya, aren’t you?” he asked after a while. “The healer the refugees speak of with excitement?”

Her friends grinned and pointed at her while she rolled her eyes.

“What did they say this time?” she asked.

“Oh,” the courier said, warming to his tale, “only that your stepmother’s been telling everyone she made you what you are.”

Groans rose around the fire.

Suraya snorted. “Of course she has.”

“But,” he added, brightening, “that old teacher of yours — Belladonna? — she happened to be there.”

Suraya straightened.

“What about her?”

The courier laughed. “She tore into your stepmother in front of half the village. Something about how ‘she could never have done this without me.’ Belladonna decisively corrected that.”

Someone nearly spilled their drink laughing.

A refugee woman wiped tears from her eyes. “I like this woman already.”

The courier shook his head, still amused. “The whole crowd went quiet. Your stepmother couldn’t get a word in.”

For a moment Suraya simply stared into the fire.

Belladonna. Loud, infuriating, stubborn Belladonna. Standing up for her when she wasn’t even there. Of course she had. A sudden ache for her old northern village caught her off guard.

Then laughter burst out of her, bright and unstoppable.

“My stepmother said what?”

She wiped tears from her eyes. “That woman could lie with a priest watching.”

Her friends dissolved into laughter as the story grew more ridiculous with each retelling and each arak glass passed around.

Suraya leaned against a friend’s shoulder as the oud picked up again.

Lanterns glowed like fallen stars. Children slept safely. Friends sang off-key. Tomorrow would bring more work, more lives to steady. But tonight there was warmth, food, and people who chose one another freely. And somewhere far to the north, a foul-mouthed old crone was still causing trouble on her behalf.

Suraya joined the song, her voice rising into the spring night. No castles. No cruel household. Only laughter, lantern light, and a life she had claimed with her own hands.

At last, Suraya was home.

Racism in the workplace and academic institutions is not just a personal issue, it’s a structural one. It manifests in microaggressions, biases, exclusion, and retaliation against those who don’t conform to a narrow version of who belongs. These patterns aren’t isolated incidents; they reflect systems of inequity that we must actively dismantle.

As someone who has experienced these dynamics firsthand during my public health career, I know how exhausting it is to navigate environments steeped in hostility. After I graduated from my MPH program, a paper was published on my alma mater titled “Being a Person of Color in this Institution is Exhausting”.

This was my experience as well, and the title often felt like an understatement. But this wasn’t limited to one institution or a group of hostile individuals. During my career in public health, I endured countless environments filled with hostility and ignorance. Dismissive comments about entire communities and unfounded claims about public health issues tied to marginalized groups were not only common, they were touted as unshakable fact backed up by epidemiological study.

On an interpersonal level, I was met with criticism and scrutiny for factors outside of my control at far higher intensity and frequency than my white peers. But this wasn’t solely my experience either. It’s the story of countless people navigating institutions and workplaces that weren’t built for their inclusion or success. At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the bastion of American public health research and policy analysis, greater than 10% of agency personnel signed a letter calling out CDC’s "toxic culture of racial aggression." Racism, whether through ignorance, bias, or outright hostility behind closed doors, undermines not only individuals but the mission of these spaces to create meaningful, impactful change. Knowing this, I decided to prioritize my mental health and refocus my professional efforts on grassroots-level organizations, where I could see firsthand the impact of my training on affected communities.

Eventually, many of these aforementioned institutions implemented sweeping DEI programs. In the aftermath of the protests against the extrajudicial killing of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Aubrey, many agencies recognized that in order to fully serve the public and fulfill their objectives, they had to clean up their public image. But DEI programs alone are not enough in the changing political landscape, and rather than being ended, they must be made stronger than ever. Here is how I believe that we do that:

1. Continue to Commit to Anti-Racism: Organizations must go beyond diversity statements and commit to systemic change through education, transparent policies, and equitable practices.

2. Elevate Marginalized Voices: Create safe channels for employees of color and other marginalized groups to share their experiences and shape workplace policies without fear of retaliation.

3. Disciplinary Actions for Hostile Managers and Faculty: Leaders and managers who foster or tolerate hostile work environments must face real consequences, whether through demotion, mandatory training, or termination.

4. End Probationary Periods: Government employees, as many public health professionals are, are subject to a probationary period, during which they can be terminated without cause or recourse, without union representation. This policy disproportionately impacts marginalized employees, making them even more vulnerable to retaliation and hostility. Compare this to unionized workers at Boeing (#IAM) or Consumer Direct Care Network of Washington (#SEIU775), who have union protections from day one. Why should public sector employees—especially those in essential roles—be treated as disposable? All workers, including employees of federal, state, and local governments, deserve union protections and workplace rights from their first day. Probationary periods only serve to strip employees of their security and power to advocate for themselves. After all, the purpose of unions is not to shield under-performing employees from the consequences of their actions. Rather, they ensure that the processes for accountability are applied consistently, fairly, and in accordance with the law.

All in all, workplaces must be built to empower, rather than exploit, their workers. As one of the most supportive managers I’ve ever had has said, “a business cannot thrive if it’s employees are not.” It’s time to move beyond performative actions and commit to creating equitable environments where every employee has the opportunity to thrive.

I was four and twenty years when I first reported to the institute. I had trained for a path of numbers, of watching storms before they broke. I had hoped, perhaps foolishly, that I might serve the marginalized, the underserved, the overlooked.

I was wrong.

They welcomed me with stiff smiles, hands not extended in kinship, and suspicion cloaked in false courtesy. Three sevendays into my assignment, I was summoned without warning. The tone was cold, the words colder. “Not a good fit.” That was all. No wrongdoing cited. No cause given. No fellow to advocate. Not by reason, not by merit, but by shadowed judgments motivated more by the proclamations regarding the supposed lycanthropy of my people than the truth of my grit. The kind no one names aloud, but that leaves you marked. Cast out, I turned elsewhere.

I buried myself in work among midwives and mothers, among healers of the whole body, watchers of small ailments as well as great thresholds, in a place more home than grand hall. I was its steward: I opened the doors, held the ledgers, kept the place in rhythm so that others could labor, heal, and be healed. Here, pain was not ignored and small voices were heard.

I watched the slow rhythm of labor become the first startled cry of life. I stood beside healers who readily caught newborns and those who prescribed tincture and rest, who knew that wellness was not only survival but wholeness. I witnessed first breaths, families made, life born in the darkest days of the world. I carried life in my hands even as the great sickness rose in the land.

Years passed. I was inspired. The work of healers stayed with me, a quiet voice calling to my soul. I set out from that place to gather the knowledge and the tools to become one myself, to one day guide others across the same threshold I had once only stewarded. The calling was planted in me there, and it grew as I walked away.

Then the bite came. Then, the fever. Then, the wolf.

The human I used to be was precise, strong and light in the same breath, a dancer who could leap and spin and never fear the air running out. She was resilient, her body carrying her through years of qi disharmony without collapse.

But she is gone.

The bite devoured her, and left me altered.

I was near-bedridden for half a year, every joint weighted with lead. I writhed in bed, my full moon rising daily. Even since I rose, the laughter and stories of my village mending me more than any poultice of the healers, my lungs betray me. Even with strength in my muscles and a penchant for daily exercise, I gasp for air doing what was once effortless. Infections find me easily, as the wolf has marked me for every sickness that passes.

I used to measure time in days, in seasons. Now I measure it in episodes. Not the neat calendar of full moons the stories promised. No. My curse doesn’t care for schedules. It arrives when it pleases: sudden, violent. Some mornings I wake human. My chest fills easily, my legs carry me, my mind is clear, and I almost believe the bite was only a nightmare. I walk among others and smile, pretending.

Then, the wolf returns. The air turns to honey in my lungs, my thoughts scatter like frightened rabbits. One moment I am whole, the next I am hollowed. The wolf doesn’t rend me from the outside; it devours me quietly, from within.

No one sees. To them I look unchanged. They say, “But you aren’t ill now, are you?” Their eyes beg me to agree. If I admit the truth, that the beast is still here, crouched just beneath my skin, I become something they don’t want to face.

So I learned to make my own judgments on who to trust with my sorrow. I ration my strength, cancel plans with vague words, build a life around the wolf’s whims. There are days I try to outrun it, and the backlash is worse. Punishment for forgetting who I must coexist with now. This is the curse. This is the transformation. I look the same to others, but inside the wolf has hollowed me and left its own marrow in my bones. But when I look back, she feels like another life, another body. Maybe she died with that first fever.

Still, I am not only the wolf. With the remnants of the fever still burning through my blood, I fought in the highest offices of the land for the health of the unseen, for laborers, for those with no voice. Many times I had to stop, lungs seized, body spent. But I was not abandoned. My pack slowed the pace when I could not keep up, carried the weight when I faltered, translated silence into presence when my breath failed me. Their presence became my armor; their solidarity let me keep standing, keep speaking, keep howling at the red moon.

Once passion broke through the labored breathing and scattered thoughts, I found the wolf does not only devour. It also grants me its rage.

To those who cast me out, who smiled with false courtesy as they slammed the door on my work, I do not bow my head. The irony had long since revealed itself: once, even those sages who should have been wiser whispered of the supposed lycanthropy of my people as if it were a curse set apart, a reason to mistrust me. But one by one, they too learned what it was to be devoured from within, to gasp for breath, to lie ailing with the fever. Their cliches withered, not because they shed their cruelty, but because the wolf made no distinctions.

Yet I did not forget their callousness. I showed my fangs. I raked my claws across their flesh in the only way I could: with record, with truth, with words that cut a precise death strike.

I told them: I have no illusions about what this has cost me, and I am at peace with that. I wrote to their highest offices, I dragged their silence into daylight. I said plainly: what happened to me at four and twenty should happen to no one else. The wolf may have marked me, but it also armed me.

Though the path looked different than I first imagined, I did become a healer. I found myself drawn again to the same threshold I once stewarded: not as midwife, but as companion to the work of recovery. I learned the language of touch, of easing swollen joints, overactive nerves, weary backs, of helping strength return to bodies reshaped by life. In my own way, I circled back to that first calling: to stand with the vulnerable, to honor the unseen labor of survival and renewal.

And so, I love ferociously.

And so, I hold my pack and my village close.

I was bitten, yes. The wolf is real, yes.

But…

I am still here.

I am still me.

And?

I am not its prey.

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