I AM NOT BUILT FOR THIS WORLD AND THAT’S EXACTLY WHY I’M TRYING TO SAVE IT (or: the valentine you write after your ninth nervous breakdown)

I’m sorry but no I’m not okay and I don’t want to log off. I want to scroll until I rot. I want to post until the pixels blur and the fourth wall breaks and a hand reaches through the screen and touches my face and tells me it’s not too late to become the person I would’ve been if the world weren’t so goddamn broken.

Like, you try being the type of person who cries at union rallies and also alphabetizes their Spotify playlists by heartbreak intensity and not feel like you’re simultaneously overqualified for utopia and deeply underprepared for Tuesday.

Do you know what it’s like to spend ten years studying leftist theory just to end up making TikToks about how gaff tape is a metaphor for capitalism? I have campaign dreams and art school nightmares. I have credit card debt and a God complex. I know how to flip a room of volunteers into a frenzy and cry about the Valdaro skeletons in the same afternoon. Like, pick a genre, bitch.

The truth is I was forged in the fires of 2000s-era message boards and the emo blogosphere and somewhere deep in my marrow I still believe a well-timed line can save a life. Maybe not mine, but somebody’s.

And if you think that’s dramatic, good. Good. Let it be dramatic. Let it be theatrical and unnecessary and over-the-top. Let it scream in Helvetica Neue Ultra Extended on a neon background. Because I am done pretending to be chill. I am not chill. I am a walking contradiction held together by caffeine, socialist conviction, and an endless parade of half-burnt-out field organizers who just needed someone to text them back. (I did. I always do.)

I want the movement to feel like a house show. I want our strategy meetings to feel like a group chat you can be vulnerable in. I want our comms plans to come with soul and style. I want every single campaign to include a button that says “THIS IS PERSONAL.” Because it is. It always was.

I’m done pretending that spreadsheets and Slack channels can contain the full immensity of what it means to want more for people. Want everything for them. Want them to be able to walk outside and not fear the air. Want them to die old and loved and fed. Want them to dance without shame. Want them to want again.

And I know — I know — I’m not supposed to take it personally. But I do. I do take it personally that the world is this cruel and this stupid and this numb. I take it so personally that we were handed all this love and potential and joy and instead we got Amazon warehouse shifts and bipartisan genocide and some guy named Brad who calls himself a “centrist.”

I want the revolution and I want a ribeye steak and I want my crush to text me back. I want everything, and I’m tired of pretending I don’t.

Because maybe that’s what we’ve forgotten: that wanting everything is not a flaw. It’s not a weakness. It’s the most human thing there is. That ache? That hunger? That reach? That’s the only thing that makes this worth it.

So yeah. I’m gonna keep writing slogans like they’re lyrics. I’m gonna keep believing a union can be a love letter. I’m gonna consider the typeface for the pitch deck. And when people ask why, I’ll say: because beauty is strategy. Because softness is a weapon. Because the realest organizers I know cry at sunsets and still show up to do the work.

And me? I’m still here. Still annoying. Still sincere. Still haunted. Still building something that looks a little like hope and a little like a scene kid’s Pinterest board.

Call it cringe. Call it too much. Call it Ian-coded.

But don’t call it apathy.

Never that.

- Ian