My twenty-fifth year of life was also the year that I experienced several devastating personal crises which resulted in the loss of some dear friends and chosen family members, as well as psychological trauma from which I have never recovered. In the intervening years, only more atrocities and disasters have followed. This was the year that Trump was elected, that millions of people were displaced in the Syrian refugee crisis, and that 49 people – most of them queer and brown – were shot to death in a nightclub in Orlando. This was also the year that broke my heart, which has kept right on breaking ever since. In 2016, I turned twenty-five years old and published my first novel, which was quickly followed by a poetry collection and a children’s book, all to relative success. What would “community” know about saving us from the apocalypse? We know so much about trauma but so little about how to heal it.

Climate change and mass extinction are ravaging the earth but going largely unacknowledged by those with the political power to do anything about it.Īs for those communities of queer people, racialized people, disabled people, social justice activists, marginalized people taking back their power? The communities that raised me to believe in the possibility of a Revolution that would change and save the world? Sometimes it seems like the most painful cuts of all come from within my community: Call out culture.

Economic inequality grows ever wider while wealth and power are increasingly concentrated in the hands of a brazenly corrupt few. A wave of right-wing and openly fascist governments have been elected to power across the world. Introduction: With Love, From the End of the WorldĪnd began again in the morning.” – Nayyirah Waheed, SaltĪs I write these words, the world is preparing to enter the year 2019, and it has become something of a truism among my community of queer people of colour that the end of the world is nigh.

I Hope We Choose Love by Kai Cheng Thom