The Bracelet Slinger Blog

Now that I’ve completely demolished my life down to the absolute bare bones of my principles and truth, I am admittedly pretty shy about opening the shop back up. It’s all out there now...most of it, anyways. Enough to feel like I’m a human and not just a bracelet maker trying to look good and make a buck. I feel I have radically used my voice to the point that somebody who goes against...

As humans, we need a mirror to see what we look like - without a mirror we wouldn’t know what our face looked like, how our outfit looked, if we had pepper stuck in our teeth.  But our physical appearance is not all we need a mirror for.  Our feelings need a mirror as well.  Our brains need validation to reflect back our feelings so we can “see” them and make sense of them and find our place...

It’s going to be as intense on the way out as it was going in. But this time, it’s in reverse - the undoing of it all. Fighting the bad with the good takes the same magnitude and force, but from the opposite direction. Temper tantrums and generations of unhandled trauma dumped onto a helpless child backfiring through words full of rage and painful truths expressed through...

What did you think it was going to look like? Doing the work? Calm, cool, and collected? A drink and a cigarette? A tear or two? A yoga pose? Art without feeling? A self help book about being present? A handful of shitty relationships? And one day you’d wake up and know what real love was? That’s how you thought undoing abandonment at birth without even giving a damn...

This is how I break. Middle fingers, IPA’s, a lot of “fucks!”, screaming for freedom from behind the glass, fighting for me, fighting for you, rage, tears, spilling my guts all over the goddamn place from digging out the bullets of trauma. It’s messy. It’s as painful coming out as it is going in. I’m human. Not a fucking object. And this is all of me. And I put myself back together with bracelets, vegan tacos, stars, sunrises...

Truth is the purest weapon.  When you use it, fights for you.  And you won’t need any armor.  Those who fight against it are fighting against themselves.  

The truth is in the art.  It’s in the music.  It’s in the poetry.  It’s in the wildlife.  It’s in the sunrise. It’s in all the things that moves the soul.

As humans we need mirrors - we need a reflection to see ourselves.  Validation.  It gives us a map of our experiences so we can clearly see where we’ve been - so we can figure out where we need to go.  But sometimes we don’t have accurate mirrors on the outside - within our environment.  That’s when we have to go in.  Be our own mirror.  Build our...

We know how white supremacists think because you raised us white. We once thought just like you. We saw brown people through white eyes. And then we grew up and realized we weren’t being treated white. We were being treated by the color of our skin - not just out in the world, but right under our own roof as you called us your children. We know you think you’ve convinced us that we’re white. We know you think you’ve done us a real favor. We know exactly how you think you’re...

People tell you not to waste your energy being angry. They want to shame you for it. Make you look crazy and feel out of control. And all of a sudden it’s not the thing that made you angry that is at fault, it’s yours. But anger is as necessary an emotion as fire is to survival. It’s your insides telling you something is extremely wrong when the outside is trying to hold you down. It’s your insides going...

Not an object. Not your model citizen. Not your invisible race. Not your doll. Not emotionless. Not quiet. Not under your control. Not your baby. Not your pet. Not your fetish. Not your mathematician. Not here to raise you up. Not your toxic positivity. Not your enabler. Not your silver platter. Not your cheap labor. Not your target for your white ignorance. Not your daughter. Not yours.

Sometimes on the trail, right before you’re about to get to camp...there’s a moment of feeling like, “I should be there by now.” You begin to question your steps. Wonder if you made a wrong turn. It’s always when it’s right around the corner. And you have to push through the doubt - sometimes for a mile or more. But when you get there it reminds you...

In the mornings and in the evenings I go to the dried-up riverbeds that are mostly unstirred by humans. They’re like a desert highway for wildlife...and the thousands of footprints give off the same energy as a highway on a bustling weekday morning with everybody rushing to get to work on time. There’s something about being in the riverbeds that feels safe. Something that pulls you along and pulls you deeper into the desert...