Love as Counter-Programming

A reminder of how truth feels in the body.

Illustration by Sabine Piper

For the past two years, like anyone with a talent for words and a functioning conscience, I wrote about power. I wrote about wars, genocides, cruelty, violence, and the cost of bearing witness. That cost was high for me. I lost myself in the process. I became a shell of a human being — waking up every day to frantically research the latest atrocity that had happened while I slept, taking notes, consuming, sourcing, reliving it in my bones so I could put it on paper and pass the information on. I haven’t slept properly in two years; I was napping, researching, writing — rinse, repeat.

I stopped writing about myself, and in doing so, I stopped examining myself. I stopped caring for myself. I stopped examining the world; the art, music, and craft I had loved and written about for most of my life.

Live genocide, streamed daily on our phones, paralyzed me.

How do you write about your life, culture, movies, film, books, relationships, love, and tell all these beautiful stories while children are being shredded to pieces?

Nothing seemed to matter anymore. I was blocked, and I was angry at my government for telling me this is normal. I have been researching, taking notes, saving, listening, reading, taking more notes, writing, and reporting on what I have learned to others, to the level of mental and physical exhaustion that became my constant. My permanent state.

I’m proud of what I have built on Antagolist and how many of you use it as a guideline, and a source of information, a take, an opinion, a breakdown, through these violent times. I have built a community of great people whom I discovered throughout this injustice — and if you are one of them reading this now, I’m grateful for you and our dialogues about dignity, community, and liberation. You keep me sane.

I won’t stop dismantling these systems with my words.

What I realized, though, is that I gave myself so fully to the work of breaking down the house of cards that funds and sustains such violence that I lost myself in the process. For the past two years, I felt as though I were outside my body, looking in — waiting for the nightmare to end so I could return to myself. And to my life.

I think it’s clear to all of us that this won’t be ending anytime soon. The atrocities keep piling up, growing bolder and more blatant, and by now we’ve learned how to live with a permanent fight-or-flight mode switched on.

Joy is resistance.

Around Thanksgiving, my Canadian friend told me to watch this new Canadian show, Heated Rivalry. I instantly said no. I removed the TV from my room so I could focus on writing and didn’t have time or focus to binge-watch anything. I had too many unfinished articles to work on and barely made time as it is.

But she insisted. Life-changing, she said.

For the past two years, I haven’t been able to write about anything beyond the constant stream of injustice, death, and manufactured narratives. There was no room left for anything else while mass suffering played out in real time, normalized and justified before our eyes.

I kept waiting for something, anything, that could pull me out of that paralysis, disrupt the despair, and remind me why storytelling still matters. But for a long time, nothing did.

I never imagined that the antidote to two years of genocide, permanent war, propaganda, and political decay would be two men fucking their way toward love.

I didn’t seek out this show for comfort. I wasn’t in the mood to be softened. I was exhausted, like everyone else, bracing for the next headline confirming how bad things were getting (are).

But it touched me. It sobered me up. It woke me up.

Love as counter-programming.

What caught me off guard wasn’t the mind-blowingly realistic depiction of sex turned into romance. It was the relief of realizing my nervous system hadn’t been lying to me all along — that I still knew the difference between something real and something manufactured.

We’re told, day after day, to accept stories that don’t match what we can see. That violence is unfortunate but necessary. That dissent is dangerous. That empathy is naive. That obedience is patriotism.

It’s all bullshit. They drained the joy out of us, and joy is resistance. Tenderness is resistance. They bombarded us with so much violence and cruelty that we began to accept it as a permanent state. The depravity they hurl at us daily is what numbs us, turning us into shells of human beings.

This little Canadian low-budget show snapped us all out of this despair.

Storytelling as recalibration.

Much of today’s culture is built for speed and profit. Stories are made to be easy to consume, not to stay with us. When everything is built on narrative, honest narrative becomes insurgent.

That is why a love story between two hockey players can matter more than a thousand prestige dramas engineered to launder power. That is why we all responded so intensely to something that simply feels honest. And that is why this show landed so precisely, and landed now — not as escape, but as recalibration.

It reminds us all how truth feels in the body.

Staying sane in this time of absolute, unchecked power, cruelty, injustice, and lawlessness means learning how to see clearly without being consumed by what we see. This moment isn’t asking for panic, but for coherence. And staying sane means filling your body with joy — music, craft, art, all the beauty life can still offer, despite the depravity we’re subjected to.

Returning to myself.

I have been exceptionally joyful these past two months, even as I continue to feel the cruelty we’re subjected to every day. I continue to witness the unabashed violence our government commits at home and abroad, analyze it, and write about it — but I counter it with JOY. I make sure to take in enough beautiful things to remain human, capable of feeling happiness, desire, love, lust, wonder, curiosity, kindness, and tenderness.

And it healed me.

I have more clarity and more strength to fight the unchecked power more precisely than ever before.

And I want to continue on this new (normal) path. I opened a Patreon account to start writing about myself again — unrestricted, unstructured trains of thought that help me examine my own consciousness and reclaim my truth.

I want to return to writing about the beautiful things that keep us human — the films I love to watch, the music I listen to, the books I read. I want to talk about love, real or on screen, about connection and self-examination. I want to laugh, to be joyful and silly. And I wholeheartedly reject letting the psychopaths in power turn me into a shell of the person I was for two years straight.

Staying true to yourself and your humanity, despite the horrors being committed in the world, is the greatest act of resistance and a middle finger to those trying to make you unfeeling.

Join me in this space.

William Faulkner once said that the only thing worth writing about is “the human heart in conflict with itself.”

Whether we’re examining the real or the fictional, the truth is the same. Fiction is written from someone’s lived experience. And in a world that makes less and less sense, where violence is committed unchecked, where power toys with us through its depravity, the only thing that truly makes sense is connection with another human being.

The only thing that fully and absolutely makes sense, and is worth living for, is love.

And I, for one, want to exist in that space.

Hope you share it with me.

Head out to my Patreon, and subscribe — it’s going to be my personal space, a platform where I’ll be writing about us, me and you, and all the beautiful, joyous things still happening in this world.

I’ll also be sharing excerpts from my book (still in progress), as well as essays that will be published as part of an essay collection — all centered on love, acceptance, desire, and self-examination.

Antagolist will, as always, continue to interrogate power — examining the structures that shape our politics and our culture, and remaining a space for analysis, refusal, and the reclaiming of reality.