bali

there is something strangely comforting about getting on the wrong train. at first you think you'll just ride it out. maybe it'll circle back. maybe you read the map wrong. maybe the city will forgive you for not paying attention. it doesn't.

the day before pride, four of us ended up taking BART in the wrong direction. i remembered a town where the liquor stores had a reputation for looking the other way. no one questioned it. two friends stayed at the station while megan and i volunteered to make the walk.

thirty minutes.

it didn't seem very far.

i had walked the same route the day before.

my friend will had been there. my girlfriend too, all short hair and oversized clothes, the kind of person strangers mistook for a fourteen year boy. i remember almost nothing about that walk.

this one i remember block by block.

at first it was only a honk.

then someone leaned halfway out the window of a car.

then another car slowed beside us.

a group of men outside a park stopped talking long enough to watch us pass.

someone looked us up and down.

someone told us to keep sucking the lollipops.

honking.

windows rolling down.

voices i never saw attached to faces.

by the time we reached the liquor store i had counted ten.

ten interruptions.

ten reminders that someone had decided our bodies belonged to the street before they belonged to us.

i remember turning to megan somewhere between intersections and asking what felt like the most obvious question in the world. "they know this doesn't work, right?" they know women don't hear a stranger yell from a truck and suddenly fall in love, right? they know no one has ever thought thank god that man shouted at me. so why do they do it? the question followed me home, because the strange thing about catcalling is that almost every woman can tell you about it. the stranger thing is when those stories usually begin. twelve, thirteen, fourteen. girls who are still wearing backpacks too big for their shoulders. girls waiting for rides after middle school.

people often talk about catcalling as failed flirting but that explanation has never made much sense to me. failure implies the goal was connection. but connection requires curiosity, catcalling requires almost none. you don't have to know someone's name. you don't have to wonder where she's going, you don't even have to stop driving. you only have to make sure she knows you noticed. i keep thinking about how different that walk felt from the day before.

same sidewalks.

same liquor store.

same summer heat hanging over the pavement.

only one thing had changed.

the first day i had walked beside people who made me seem less available. less isolated. maybe less interesting? the second day there were two girls dressed for pride.

pigtails.

rainbows.

lollipops.

an outfit that was supposed to feel ridiculous in the joyful way children understand ridiculous. a costume built from bright colors and sugar. but it became an invitation for commentary. i don't think it was really about the lollipops. i don't think it was even about us. i think it was about recognition. recognizing vulnerability, recognizing youth. recognizing that there are people in the world who have learned to measure power not by what they can build but by who they can interrupt. the younger you are, the less certain you are of your own boundaries.the younger you are, the more likely you are to freeze instead of speak. the younger you are, the more likely someone believes you have been taught to smile through discomfort rather than challenge it, that matters. because vulnerability has always been read by some people as permission. permission they decide exists. catcalling is often dismissed as harmless because it usually ends where it begins.

a shouted sentence.

a horn.

a laugh.

but it lasts longer than the sentence, it cements as a recalculation. whether to cross the road, whether to look down, whether to walk faster. whether someone else's eyes have quietly become another thing to plan around.

as im posting my writing on tumblr to clear my brain out, i really wanted to rework an old essay i wrote for my philosophy class. the original was written during our eastern philosophy unit, we had to choose an issue that was important to us and use two philosophies we learned about to help solve it. as a d1 woker and (hopefully) future public defender i of course wanted to write about prison abolition and the horrors of the american carceral state. but i was exhausted of making the case of why prisons are obsolete over and over again. i want to explore beyond that. so this paper was written with the presumption we have already established that and want to move forward from that point onwards. this isn't a roadmap or a blueprint, but simply some threads connecting daoism and confucianism to the anti-carceral struggle. these are simply little crumbs to start the process. i seek the total dismantling of the prison system. this essay doesn't reflect my proposed end goals as i don't fully know how we get all the way there. i'm literally just a teenage girl with some ideas! in wu/wei fashion i rewrote this to be more lose in structure than my original MLA paper, let the lines flow and stand out where it seemed natural to me. anyways without further ado!

american prisons are full of ordinary objects. plastic trays, concrete walls, fluorescent lights, metal bunks bolted into place. somewhere a guard is filling out paperwork. somewhere a cell door closes. somewhere a person is waiting. the remarkable thing is not that prisons exist, it's how natural they have come to seem. angela davis writes that prisons have become our default solution. poverty arrives and we build a prison. addiction arrives and we build a prison. mental illness arrives and we build a prison. homelessness arrives and we build a prison. the cage waits at the end of every road because we have forgotten how many other roads once existed. elizabeth bruenig notices something similar when she writes about capital punishment. the state kills people, but it does so through forms and procedures and official language. violence arrives wearing a necktie. it acquires a filing cabinet. eventually it begins to look reasonable.

this is how institutions survive.

they stop appearing strange.

they become furniture.

if the american carceral system is as deeply embedded as davis and bruenig suggest, then change becomes a question not only of policy but of imagination. how do we learn to picture a society that does not reach instinctively for punishment? what habits would need to change? what relationships would need to be rebuilt?

two ancient chinese traditions offer different answers. confucius looked at social disorder and saw broken relationships. daoism looked at social disorder and saw too much control. one proposed ritual. the other proposed release.

for confucius, harmony emerged through li: ritual, propriety, the repeated practices through which people learn how to live together. ritual often gets reduced to just ceremony, but in reality it's a way of shaping character, a way of teaching people how to belong to one another. this feels far removed from the modern prison. the prison is built around separation. separating people from communities, separating punishment from repair, separating harm from the conditions that produced it. through a confucian lens, reform would begin by changing the roles people occupy. the incarcerated person becomes more than an object of management. the correctional officer becomes more than an enforcer. the court becomes more than a sorting machine. every role shifts slightly toward care. practical changes follow, parole hearings become opportunities for restoration rather than procedural checkpoints. resources move toward education, mental health support, and restorative justice. even prison architecture would have to change. a building designed to cultivate human dignity cannot resemble a warehouse for unwanted people. here is hope in this vision:

it assumes institutions can learn.

it assumes habits can change.

it assumes that enough practice can transform a culture.

whether those assumptions are realistic remains an open question.

laozi might have doubted them. where confucius saw the possibility of better institutions, daoism often saw the danger of institutions becoming too powerful in the first place. wu wei, non-forcing, is sometimes misunderstood as passivity. it is closer to restraint. a refusal to grip too tightly. laozi warns repeatedly about governments that mistake control for wisdom. the more force they apply, the more disorder they often create. the prison is less a solution than a symptom. mandatory minimums, cash bail, aggressive drug criminalization, these are all examples of forcing. they compress complicated human lives into legal categories and then punish the result. a daoist response would begin by loosening that pressure, the state steps back.

prisons shrink.

policing retreats.

communities regain the space to respond to harm in ways that do not rely on cages.

this means dismantling the economic incentives that sustain incarceration. ending prison labor exploitation, eliminating private prisons, reducing the militarization of police departments. it also means trusting alternatives that already exist at the margins. restorative justice circles, housing-first programs, unarmed crisis teams, forms of care that emerge from communities rather than being imposed upon them. the strength of wu wei is its refusal to imitate the violence it opposes.it understands that domination cannot always be cured by a gentler form of domination. but it asks something difficult in return, to surrender the fantasy of control.for a society accustomed to equating punishment with safety, that can feel unsettling. it requires faith. not in institutions, but in people.

if the goal is simply to improve prisons, confucian li offers valuable guidance. if the goal is abolition, daoist wu wei reaches further. a system built around cages cannot be transformed solely through procedural refinement. violence does not become justice because it acquires better manners. but abolition cannot survive on dismantling alone. after the prison, there must still be a community. after the cage, there must still be relationships. this is where confucius returns. ritual matters. not because it solves every problem, but because people need practices of repair. they need ways of returning to one another after harm. they need structures that encourage cooperation without relying on coercion. perhaps that is where these traditions meet.

after four months in intensive outpatient i like to look back and remember how anorexia ran my life to see how far i've come. in many ways it ran me better than i ran me. but i wasn't functioning for a rich and fulfilling life, i was functioning for my delusions that thinness was divine. i remember when i thought hunger meant something. not medically or biologically, i mean spiritually. there was always a number somewhere. on a scale, a nutrition label, scribbled in the corner of a notebook beside statistics homework and half-finished grocery lists. numbers appeared everywhere, the way angels used to appear in paintings. the rituals came naturally; counting, dividing, some bargaining. anorexia is not a disease at first. diseases arrive with symptoms. anorexia arrives with revelations.

if i skip breakfast i can have coffee.

if i have coffee i can have dinner.

if i have dinner i can make up for it tomorrow.

the prayers changed but the structure stayed the same. people talk about it like it's a desire to be thin. this is like saying the goal of religion is kneeling.

kneeling is only the ritual.

the goal is transcendence, the goal is to wake up one morning and feel untouched by gravity, by appetite, untouched by the animal fact of being alive. thinness was just the evidence, the proof of devotion. there were commandments.

foods that were clean and foods that were unclean.

days that were righteous and days that required repentance.

moments of weakness followed by promises to do better.

i knew girls who could tell you the calories in an apple faster than they could tell you the date. girls who carried gum like rosary beads, who could spend an entire lunch period discussing food without eating any of it.

we were all waiting for something.

the revelation, the miracle.

the moment the static would clear.

outside, life kept happening. football games. graduation ceremonies. songs on the radio.

california afternoons burning gold around the edges.

inside there was only the faith. i think that's what people miss. hunger makes promises. that's why it survives. it tells you there is a version of yourself just beyond reach. cleaner, lighter, more worthy of love. if you keep going you'll find her.

so you keep going.

and the promised land keeps moving.

five pounds away.

ten pounds away.

always across the river.

i don't remember many of the numbers anymore.

i remember the feeling. i remember the certainty. the way an empty stomach could feel like virtue. the way suffering could start to feel earned. everyone else seemed trapped by ordinary human needs while i was trying to become something holier than human (which is another way of saying less human). the church of anorexia has no stained glass, no hymns, no god waiting at the end of the service.

just a voice asking for one more sacrifice.