Earlier this month, I found myself overcome with the most bizarre insecurity and resentment. WildSeed was about to start its first in-person retreat in almost two years. Erika was out picking up our facilitator, Leslie Mac, from the airport. I got a text from former Sacred Warren member, Reece, asking if we were going to keep our regular meeting. So I jumped on the video conference and caught up with my friend. About halfway through the meeting, Erika and Leslie arrived. After everyone said hi to Reece, they settled down to catch up on Shoresy, a Canadian TV show Chany has gotten the whole crew into. 

It was at that moment that I had such a profound feeling of FOMO. Not only did I want to be watching the show with everyone else, but I started to think “how dare they watch this episode (which I had already seen) without me?” I had a feeling that I had not had since a child: 

“Everyone is having fun without me.” 

Suddenly I was being drawn into a thought spiral of all my friends not really liking me and me secretly wishing I wasn’t there. 

These thoughts are not normal for me, especially adult me. Fortunately I have spent enough time in therapy for social anxiety and bi-polar disorder that I am pretty good at thought stopping and not identifying with every thought. Still, even though my rational mind knew these thoughts had no basis in reality, the feelings that motivated the thoughts lingered. The feelings were intense but inchoate. Was it anger, fear, resentment, longing or some mix of all of the above?  . 

Luckily, WildSeed has a culture of supporting people through feeling their feelings, processing them and releasing them. I asked Erika if she could support me in talking through what I was feeling. It turned into a 2 hour group conversation with the whole crew about well…so many things. The Spark Notes version is that I had been feeling several things at once. 

Listening To My Inner Child

First and foremost, I feel a deep existential uncertainty. At times, this uncertainty feels omnipresent. I’m uncertain of my place in society, my skills, my worth, the future…seemingly everything. I have never done well with uncertainty.  Well…with uncertainty that I don’t instigate at least.  Typically I deal with these sort of existential uncertainty through writing. I try to explain the deep context of what is happening and why. Armed with a context, I can usually see or choose my place with it. 

But with the shock and awe tactics being used by the Trump-Musk Regime, I found myself unable to make sense of it. The broad strokes were clear: 

• Trump wants to stay out of jail and be able to make people kowtow to him, but has little interest in anything resembling governing. 
• Musk also wants to stay out of jail and end the series of federal investigations into him and his businesses, while also taking control of the system to enrich himself, soothe an inner child that is convinced he is smarter than everyone else but hurt that no one likes him.  But his plan is deeper, it's part of a neo-reactionary plot to turn the state into a corporation run by techno-fascist [Trump as President of the Board and Elon as CEO]. 
• Bannon and his aggrieved populist want to destroy the regulatory state, punish the elites whose perceived cultural power they envy and turn the shame of their loss of the mantle of social hegemony into self-esteem through violence. 
• White Christian Nationalists like Speaker Johnson and Pete Hegseth want to turn the U.S into a theonomy where every aspect of society is reconstructed to follow the most puritanical reading of the Old Testament - more Republic of Gilead than whipping bankers, curing the sick and hanging out with sex workers.  

But what does this mean practically? Is the FDIC going to be abolished so we all have to rely on cash, gold and crypto to go about economic life? Are my family members in the government going to lose their jobs? Will “reduction in force” destroy the Black middle class? Will the destruction of the EPA mean we no longer have clean water and the FDA closing meaning we can’t trust produce or meat? How will we organize people against fascist if we have no healthcare, clean water or food? You know, the actual questions that matter to organizing both life and resistance. 

I have no way of knowing.

This was the second problem. It's a big problem for me because…well I’m kinda known for well...knowing. My childhood inability to tolerate uncertainty led to a hyper vigilance, which paired with an impressive ability to imagine worse case scenarios, led to planning for disasters as a coping mechanism. I am a serial, habitual planner. It’s made worse by the fact that it is a skill that really comes in handy as a facilitator and organizer. 

So I make plans. I have plans for everything. Aliens, zombies, fascist takeovers…but which plan do I put in place for this? Not just for me and my family but, as an organizer who tends to like to operate on the biggest scale, on a society wide level?

Super fucking unclear right now. 

Lastly, I have been dealing with a series of relational ruptures in my biological and chosen families that have hit me to my core. Without going into details, these ruptures have made me question my ability to support the people in my life. 

For me, if I can’t support you and can’t help you move through the world, then why would you want me in your life?  What else do I have to offer? I know, it's a bit of a stretch but to my inner child this logic makes perfect sense. 

It doesn’t help that I am also dealing with the fact that I’m no longer one of the people who are on the front lines leading protests. I’m simply too jaded, arthritic and tired for that life. After dealing with long COVID twice, I simply don’t have the same energy I once did. Further, a major movement rupture in 2019 caused me to take several steps back and re-evaluate my role in movements. 

I believe, intellectually, that building movement infrastructure and narrating alternatives is the place where I can best contribute. But part of me misses being in the whirlwind. I miss the intense power-with that comes from being a frontline movement leader. I miss being the kind of person who people felt they needed to check in with even though the anarchist in me knows that dynamic limits a movement's vitality. I miss being asked to be interviewed on national television, even though I often turned those requests down because they never gave me the space to be more than a sound bit in their pre-existing narrative…but it's nice to be asked.

Luckily Erika was able to ask me and the team to come up with grounding truths that could help me locate myself in the hurricane of this moment. Those truths are deeply personal and I would prefer to keep them close to my chest. But I can share that grounding in these collectively sourced, personal truths while in a community of shared risk and love helped me accept the uncertainty of this moment. It helped me come to terms with the fact this isn’t the moment (and maybe there never really is a moment) for a grand plan to fix everything. 

Sometimes you can only do the next right thing. Sometimes you just have to survive the hurricane in a way that allows you to shape what comes after. 

As my friends constantly have to tell the little boy in me who thinks a good plan can save him from bad things in the world:

The world is simply too complicated, beautiful, weird, powerful and dynamic to ever be planned for completely.

A plan to fix everything is as much a fantasy as the idea that I will some day wake up an X-Man (something I also believe despite knowing it is not logically possible. What can I say, 12 year old Aaron is an emotionally compelling guy.) It's probably not a coincidence that comic books, big history and technofascism are getting big at the same time. It's the ID of all of us insecure nerdy supposedly "gifted" boys responding to the existential threat of climate change and the failures of capitalist-liberal-modernity. 

Healing Our Collective Inner Child

Over the past two weeks as I have been trying to process and accept these truths I have continued to try and better understand this current moment. I came across this TikTok by Cy Canterel talking about collective narcissism. It references The Psychology of Collective Narcissism by Agnieszka Golec De Zavala. 

According to the poster, collective narcissism is an attempt to manage existential dread or anxiety (sound familiar?) by splitting off an idealistic image of an in-group they belong to (like frontline movement leaders?) with all the positive values they wished they had (youthful energy, certainty, community trust, a defined community role, power with?) and projecting their negative feelings of shame onto an out group (like all of my friends who were having fun without me?). 

This strategy stems from the belief that their in-group is both special (which I definitely feel front line movement leaders are) but are not fully appreciated by society (also strongly agree). Now the person experiencing collective narcissism then tries to eliminate their anxiety by eliminating the out-group they have projected all of their negative feelings onto. So…that’s where we part ways…

I’m not suggesting that what I was feeling was some form of collective narcissism. But as a pretty charismatic nerd who is very comfortable with power and silently pines for a past when I was a bigger deal than I am now, I can’t help but see myself in the emotional motivations of my ops. I also believe that it's hard to solve a problem you don’t understand. Further if you define opposition as evil in a way you could never be, you will overlook the emotional and material realities that created your opposition. In doing so, we risk re-investing in those emotional and material realities in our attempt to eliminate evil. You can’t out cruel or out dehumanize fascism. 

My point is - what separates me from them? I reject the idea that I am just morally superior to them. I also have to be honest that their understanding of the problem is very similar to mine, where we diverge in our proposed solutions. The more I think about it, the more I see fascism as the weaponization of a fairly common, unskillful strategy for managing uncomfortable emotions that arise from the failure of essential social systems by political opportunists who think the law should protect but not restrict them. 

It seems more likely what separates fascist from non-fascist is the accessibility of other strategies to deal with those uncomfortable emotions and the mobilizations of alternative strategies to resolve the material conditions that give rise to those feelings. 

In other words, they don't have a habit of turning to a community in which they find belonging, love, material support and people who can remind them of their place in the world when they lose sight of it. The difference is beloved community and liberatory collective action. Like I have found/co-created with WildSeed. It was this realization that comforted me. 

[I want to be clear, I didn’t develop that habit only through warm and fuzzy experiences. I also sometimes fucked around and then found out. The same will inevitably be true for the fascists. They have to be shown that their current strategy is not going to be tolerated.] 

I don’t know which of my master plans to fix everything is reasonable, practical and actionable by me. I have a strong sense that none of them are even two out of  three. 

But I do know that WildSeed’s work to help people find belonging, love, material support and people who can remind us of our place in the world when we lose sight of is a necessary, if not solely sufficient, anecdote to emotional mechanisms of fascism. 

I also believe that the movement infrastructure we are building will support movements in dismantling its structural mechanisms as well. 

How WildSeed Is Rising To Transform These Crises Into Possibilities

So I’m really excited for the programs that were envisioned and planned for this moment at our retreat. We are hoping these programs will help anti-fascist organizers in crisis while helping others ground in their purpose and unique medicine. We are hoping to seed the context in which we organize with structures that provide material support that sustains us and a community that grounds us in deep, resilient and loving truths. 

This includes a Wellness Cooperative to help resource non-profits doing work to make the world a better place at a price that funds our more radical work - Revolutionary AfterCare for organizers in crisis, a Votary to support organizers with the material support and group accountability for a life long commitment to collective liberation and new training to support our community in finding, accepting and pursuing their purpose in this moment of fire and uncertainty. 

Together they are not the solution. But I firmly believe that they are important contributions to various solutions we are going to need to shape what comes after all of this. We are still dotting the I’s and crossing the T’s of our program roll out so I won’t spoil the details now. 

But I want to share our narrative messaging that I believe captures the heart of how WildSeed will be moving forward. It was written  by our amazing facilitator, Leslie Mac, who expanded on the frame used by Alexis Pauline Gumbs (which we learned of through our friends Change Elemental)

Foot on Land, Foot on Water

Wildseed: Standing Firm, Moving Forward

At the Wildseed Society, we are navigating two worlds at once — one foot planted on land, firmly responding to the urgent realities of our time, and the other foot on water, moving toward the liberated future we are building together.

One Foot on Land: Meeting the Moment

We recognize the immediacy of the crises facing our people — political, economic, and spiritual. We stand with our communities in the now, providing the tangible resources, tools, and spaces of care they need to navigate today’s challenges. Whether it’s addressing burnout, supporting safety and security, or developing sustainable infrastructures for organizations and movements, Wildseed is here — meeting people where they are.

One Foot on Water: Creating New Possibilities

At the same time, we are building beyond the limitations of the current system — imagining, cultivating, and living into new ways of being that are not dictated by existing oppressive structures. We are resourcing those ready to take the next steps toward self-determination, experimenting with liberatory frameworks, and fostering community spaces that reflect the future we all deserve.

Wildseed: Moving at the Speed of Community

We understand that transformation happens at many speeds - and we hold space for them within our community. Some are working to fortify what exists, while others are ready to step into something completely different. Wildseed is committed to holding both — providing stability while nurturing emergence.

Together, we are not just reacting to the crisis — we are reshaping what comes next.

I’m excited to share how you can join us in the coming weeks.