Becoming Our Own Antidotes

The system is truly fucked up. I know this by lived experience, by education, and by what is public knowledge. The systems have failed my people. They failed my father. They failed my mother. They failed me. They failed my family. They failed other Black and Brown people. They left us for dust. They give us scraps and Band-Aids just to patch us up for a moment — nothing long term — and then they act surprised that our people are stuck in survival mode.

How can we thrive if we are always just trying to survive? If we’re taking life day by day, saying “I’m alive,” and calling that enough — that is not living. That is existing. Joy and abundance are our birthright. God did not put us here to suffer. Not my God, not your God — God is love and light; that is universal truth beyond any single scripture.

My father worked his fingers to the bone. He tried to learn, to do right, and he was still ostracized in his own community for trying to move in spaces that weren’t built for us. My mother struggled with mental illness. Her parents struggled with poverty. My grandfather was a veteran, and yet I still see homeless veterans on Atlanta streets. The promise that systems would care for them rings hollow.

I’ve studied the law; I see the loopholes. I see how systems are designed to skim and limit us. You make “too much” to qualify for assistance, but you don’t make enough to survive the grocery run. Capitalism and inflation are part of a system built to chain us. But we do not get saved by the system. We must notice the patterns and find the glitches. We must free ourselves.

Poison comes through many faucets: what we eat, what we drink, what we stream. The screens and the feeds, the artificial dyes, the fast food, the smoke, the constant noise — they all feed a culture of consumption and disconnection from our bodies. We are taught to be on “go” forever. Fast food. Fast scrolling. Fast fixes. That lifestyle keeps us numb and tired and far from the body where trauma actually lives.

And yet, if my body can find safety, maybe our communities can too.

A colleague recently told me to look into Somatic Abolitionism, the movement led by Resmaa Menakem. At first, I didn’t think I had heard of it before. But then I realized—I’ve been living parts of it already, just without the name.

I’ve spoken with my therapist about how trauma lives in the body. He’s taught me deep breathing exercises, clenching and releasing my fists, and simple ways to let go. I’ve learned to soothe my nervous system through yoga, breathwork, humming, affirmations, tapping my chest, rubbing my chin, or quietly counting on my fingers. Small rituals of presence. Small ways of reminding my body: all is well, I am whole, I am here, I am safe.

These practices have taught me why embodiment must be central to healing—not just for the individual but for communities, movements, and institutions. If trauma lives in the body, then liberation must also take root there.

White-body supremacy doesn’t only live in laws and systems. It seeps into our food, our water, our media, our air. Poison pours from the faucet, from the screens, from the smoke of wildfires. It shapes how we move, what we consume, how we disconnect from our own bodies.

But I believe—no, I know—that if we gathered as one, slowed down, and simply breathed together with intention, we could begin to heal the world. If we stretched, released, moved our bodies mindfully, we would notice the poisons. We would recognize the patterns. And we would spit them out.

We would become our own antidotes.