to unbuild walls

or: on life's strangeness, writing, and walls

Aug 11, 2025

Where Is Hadrian's Wall Located — The ruins of Hadrian’s wall.

Dear Beloved,

It’s been a year and a half since my first newsletter came out. At the time, I was unemployed, food insecure, and racing against an eviction notice.

So, I said fuck it.

I wrote something, threw it like a fish into the internet’s depths. I talked about a book series I’m drafting. Started a website. Threw some pretty photos together on social media and talked about some of my work. For the first time, I jumped over the wall between me, a writer, and all you, readers.

Today, I’m happy to report that I’m writing from a bigger apartment. I’ve celebrated one year at a new job and look forward to the next. There’s no eviction notice on the door. We live closer to family. My partner is no longer working until midnight, or literally running to catch the last bus. I have air conditioning for the first time in 5 years. There is food in the fridge. I’ve published a few things. Somehow, we went from 2 cats to 5 cats and a dog. .

If you had told me 2 weeks ago that we would have a dog this summer, I would have laughed. But life is weird. Unexpected things happen - and sometimes, they’re nice things like a new puppy.

*Obligatory new puppy photo. We have had her for 2 weeks, and she is already twice this size.*

Life is strange. My little corner is quiet, a bit more comfortable than it was, but the world is in chaos. What’s good now feels like it’s hanging from a thread, dangled in front of me by some strangers with too much money and no accountability.

When I write this newsletter, it feels strange to share about writing or what I’ve published or works in progress. It still feels stranger when I write about the troubles of the world and lecture an invisible reader on community building, organizing, and autonomy. Who are you to know about my life? Who am I to tell anyone about wider, systemic issues?

Who are you? Who am I? Who are we to do anything?

It feels weird but necessary. Necessary to make art and talk about it. Necessary to share mutual aid campaigns and poetry and how-to guides. Necessary to scream about against oligarchy and cry about the world and carry pain with you and celebrate a few vicious victories. Necessary to look at history and learn. Necessary to keep a conversation going and going and going. To keep evolving, to keep changing.

Since my first newsletter, seedgiver has evolved - and I with it. We will keep changing. The latest change will be to unbuild the walls around us.

Change is freedom, change is life.

It's always easier not to think for oneself. Find a nice safe hierarchy and settle in. Don't make changes, don't risk disapproval, don't upset your syndics. It's always easiest to let yourself be governed.

There's a point, around age twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.

Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I'm going to go fulfil my proper function in the social organism. I'm going to go unbuild walls.

- Ursula K. Le Guin

Hadrian built a wall, too.

The Roman emperor wanted to “keep intact the empire,” which he asserted was as a “divine instruction.”1 The wall was constructed on stolen lands, stretching 73 miles across the British Isles. To “separate the barbarians from the Romans,” the wall was built in response to unrest and rebellion across the empire. The Roman province “Britannia” was conquered

Empires love their walls. To define people, label us, put us in neat little squares, and organize us by a cannibalizing hierarchy.

Many of us kick each other down in a race further up the empire-made hierarchy. Scratch and fight to be on the “right” side of the wall. Only those who sacrifice everything - their community, their families, their time and labor, their decency - have a chance. Even among them, few do. Empire only rewards the worst among us: The ones who betray us.

In the US empire, The Wall™ at the US-Mexico border is a physical manifestation of colonialism. Signed off and funded at the discretion of two small men (45/47 and 46 both). It is a pathetic effort to maintain tyrant-made lines in the land, borders that never meant anything. It’s another attempt to separate the "Romans” and the “barbarians,” an “us” and an “other.”

Like Hadrian’s wall, this wall, too, will crumble. Like the Roman and British empires before it, the US empire will fall.

Unlike the former, there won’t even be ruins left of the American empire. It will be dust under our descendants’ feet.