Honoring the ancestors and all those who came before us. Every one of us carries a maternal lineage stretching back through countless generations. Every human being was born of a mother, and we inherit our mitochondria almost exclusively through our mothers.
With so much atrocity in the world, I find some of the most shortsighted responses come from those who choose to discredit victims rather than examine the conditions that produced their suffering.
You can work toward solving a problem, or you can spend your energy complaining that someone dared to complain about it.
I've joked that the internet is for 12-year-olds. Increasingly, it seems that the most controversial voices are rewarded for their verbal excesses. Outrage and dehumanization have become entertainment, and the people producing it are paid to keep everyone emotionally agitated.
I'd rather remain obscure than adapt myself to an unhealthy mechanism.
I don't identify as a feminist, but I love and respect many feminists and the work they have done and continue to do. There is a difference between disagreeing with particular feminist ideas and opposing the fundamental principle that women deserve a voice in the conditions governing their lives.
We should remember where we came from. Much of that history is extraordinarily dark, and anyone who believes feminism alone is responsible for our present difficulties is overlooking an enormous amount of history.
I grew up relatively sheltered from many of those horrors. I didn't fully understand until recently how many injustices were once considered normal. But being sheltered from history doesn't relieve us of the responsibility to learn it. Understanding what came before us is essential to making informed decisions about what comes next.
The pendulum of human affairs will continue to swing. My hope is that people learn to respect life, autonomy, and human differences rather than pursue the illusion of power through increasingly unhealthy forms of control.
The desire to dominate others is not evidence of strength or maturity. And whatever private gratification someone derives from control should not become the organizing principle of public life.
What troubles me most is not disagreement. Disagreement is necessary. It is how we investigate our assumptions, develop perspective, and sometimes discover that we were wrong.
What troubles me is the failure to honor life while arguing about who deserves respect, dignity, and autonomy.
We can disagree and still behave like adults. We can acknowledge suffering without surrendering discernment. We can honor our ancestors without repeating their mistakes.
Or we can continue behaving like children, playing men against women, rewarding controversy, and profiting from the very conditions contributing to our collective decline.
I would rather contribute to something worth inheriting.
Human beings inherit more than the circumstances of their own lives. We inherit histories, assumptions, opportunities, and limitations that influence what becomes possible.
In Where I Come From, I explore this inheritance personally, reflecting on identity, loss, confidence, and the gradual development of responsibility.
