Chapter 32: Just for Funzies: Who in Here Is About to Start a Riot?

A Grandma Little Old-Lady Wisdom Before the Riot

I want to start with something a little softer.Or maybe not softer. And listen, I am allowed to say this because I am basically an old lady now in spirit. I know what feels good in people and what does not. I know what safety feels like. I know what cruelty dressed up as humour feels like. I know what a genuine person feels like, and I know what it feels like when someone is smiling at you while quietly trying to make you smaller.

Sometimes it is best to listen to what people actually want and respect that. People will always reveal thier true colours. Sometimes you need to ask people what they need instead of deciding for them. Sometimes you need to pay attention to how someone delivers a message, not just the words they use.

And sometimes, honestly, you just need to be kind and give people grace.

That is it.

Be kind.

I have watched some pretty horrific stuff happen online over the few, and all I can really say is this: not everything is what it seems.

Not every repost is innocent.

Not every joke is harmless.

Not every “subtle” message is subtle.

Not every person throwing shade is healed.

Not every person laughing is okay.

And if your only sense of self-worth comes from whether somebody reposted a fucking Instagram reel to throw shade at you, belittle you, make you feel small, or remind you that they still know how to press the bruise - then eventually you have to decide what you are going to do with that.

Because words can hurt. They can.

People love to pretend online behaviour is not real life, but that is bullshit. Online is still people. Online is still choices. Online is still impact. Online is still harm when someone knows exactly what they are doing and does it anyway.

Some people are just little docking monsters, aren’t they?

And I say that with all the love and maturity I can currently access. But one thing I have always tried to maintain is this: online is one thing, but the people I keep close to me in real life are good people. Not perfect people. Good people.

There is a difference.

We are all human. We make errors. We misjudge a bitch once in a while. We trust the wrong person. We overreact. We underreact. We speak from pain. We miss the mark. We get defensive. We project. We learn. We apologize. We grow.

That is life.

We need to forgive ourselves for our imperfections because we are only human.

But we also need to stay grounded in the realities around us.

Who actually shows up?

Who makes you feel safe?

Who can be corrected?

Who listens when you say something hurt?

Who respects the line?

Who uses influence to open doors for you and insprires you to be your personal best, and who uses it to make other people feel small?

That is the part I have been thinking about.

Because influence is not just about how many people hear you.

It is about what you do with the power of being heard.

And if your influence only works by humiliating someone else, that is not influence.

That is insecurity with better lighting.

So before I get into the riot, the misfits, the structural social work, the hard-headed child, the big mouth, the nighthawk in the crib, and the woman with screenshots who cannot leave systems alone, I want to say this first:

Be careful with people.

Be careful with your words.

Be careful with the little ways you try to make someone feel disposable.

Because some people are already fighting battles you do not understand.

And some of us have learned, the hard way, that kindness is not weakness.

Sometimes kindness is the last decent thing standing between a person and the edge.

So yes.

Be funny.

Be sharp.

Be weird.

Be loud.

Start the necessary conversations.

But do not confuse cruelty with courage.

That is not a riot.

That is just harm with an audience. So with that....

I do not have anything too explosive to share today. Or rather, pardon me, that I want to share today.

No fresh corporate labyrinth.

No payment-processor goblin jumping out of the bushes with a fake moustache and three shell companies in its pocket.

No “stop what you are doing, I found something insane” moment.

At least, not publicly.

Today is more of a just-for-fun post, which in my world apparently still means thinking about childhood nicknames, structural social work, misfits, moral conundrums, protest energy, writer’s block, and why my brain cannot see a theme park without asking who owns the rides.

Very casual.

Very relaxing.

Very me.

I have also spent the last couple of weeks struggling with writer’s block, which is deeply annoying because when I get creatively blocked, it can last a while. I tend to have this happen with creative pursuits that stop bringing me joy. The words do not disappear exactly. They just get stubborn. They stand in the corner with their arms crossed like, “No. We are not coming out until the vibes improve.”

So if the content has felt a little lame lately, sorry.

I am trying.

And by trying, I mean I am floating between research, recovery, curiosity, rage, humour, and whatever strange internal weather system powers this blog.

This weekend, I filled my cup with some interesting recent articles from FinTelegram.

Not affiliated.

Let me be clear.

Not affiliated, not sponsored, not asked, not paid, not connected.

But man.

Those humans are the real journalists.

There is something deeply energizing about reading work that reminds you what journalism can still be when it has teeth. The kind of writing that follows structures, names entities, tracks patterns, asks direct questions, and does not collapse into decorative neutrality just because the subject matter is complicated.

It made something in my brain sit up again.

Because sometimes when you are creatively blocked, you do not need another motivational quote. You need to read something that reminds you the work matters.

You need to see someone else doing the thing with discipline.

You need to remember that language can still be a flashlight.

And then, because my brain is my brain, one article sent me back to old screenshots I took in the fall. Suddenly I was back in Y2K-looking HTML, staring at old captures, page structures, terms, logos, names, and all the weird little details that make my mind go quiet for a second.

The kind of quiet where you know something just connected.

The kind where you look at something old with new eyes and think:

Oh.

Oh shit.

I am not going to speak too much about that yet.

Some thoughts need to simmer before they become public sentences.

So today, while that side quest cooks in the background, I wanted to write about something softer on the surface but connected underneath.

A strange little question for all of you. If you feel like asking yourselves.

If life were a theme park and you could only keep one thing, success, influence, or impact; which would you choose?

Cute question.

Very LinkedIn.

Very wooden-sign-in-a-mountain-forest.

Very “leadership development meets growth mindset while everyone pretends they are not reading this on company time.”

And naturally, because I am me, I could not just answer like a normal person.

I could not simply say, “Impact,” add a heart emoji, and move on with my day.

No.

My brain immediately went:

Who built the theme park?

Who owns the theme park?

Who inspected the roller coaster?

Who wrote the waiver?

Who got injured?

Who got blamed?

And why does the complaint booth keep redirecting everyone to a chatbot named Brian?

This is not new behaviour.

This is an origin story. Moving on....

Father’s Day and the Two Nicknames

Yesterday was Father’s Day, so naturally I was thinking about my dad.

Not in a neat, greeting-card way.

More in the complicated, half-laughing, half-aching way memory shows up when you are trying to have a normal day and your brain says, “Absolutely not. Let’s open this box.”

My dad had two nicknames for me when I was little.

Testa Dura and Big Mouth. (Daddies, little girl, or rather monster)

For anyone who did not grow up with an Italian father handing out personality assessments before breakfast, testa dura basically means hard head.

Stubborn.

Thick-skulled.

The kind of child who could be told, “Do not touch the stove, it is hot,” and instead of accepting that useful survival information, would apparently need to conduct a full independent investigation.

Was the stove hot?

Probably.

Did I believe you?

Absolutely not.

Did I need to verify the claim with my own tiny hand like a seven-year-old peer reviewer of domestic appliance safety?

Apparently, yes.

That was me.

I was the kid who heard “don’t touch that” as less of an instruction and more of a dare from the universe.

Do not climb that.

Why?

Do not say that.

But is it true?

Do not ask that.

Why not?

Do not go there.

What is over there?

Do not argue.

I am not arguing. I am presenting concerns.

Looking back, I can see how exhausting I must have been.

Adorable, obviously.

But exhausting.

The Child Who Needed Supporting Documentation

I was the kid who got told “because I said so” and responded, unfortunately, with follow-up questions.

I was the kid who treated bedtime like a negotiation table at the United Nations.

I was the kid who could turn one simple instruction into a cross-examination.

“Do not go outside.”

Why?

“Because it is raining.”

Is it dangerous rain or inconvenient rain?

I was the kid who would ask one adult a question, receive a deeply unsatisfying answer, and then go ask three other adults to see if the policy was consistent across departments.

I was the kid who needed proof, context, supporting documentation, and preferably a diagram before accepting that something was “just the way it is.”

That is Testa Dura.

Then there was Big Mouth.

Also accurate.

Painfully accurate.

I was the kid who said the thing.

The thing everyone else noticed but knew not to say.

The thing that made adults freeze for half a second.

The thing that made my mother probably wish the floor would open.

The thing that made my dad look at me like, “This one is going to be a problem.”

Not because I was cruel.

I was not trying to hurt people.

I just had not yet learned that society runs on a delicate operating system of silence, politeness, denial, and pretending obvious things are not obvious.

So if something was unfair, I said it.

If something did not make sense, I asked.

If someone was being ridiculous, unfortunately, my face usually filed the complaint before my mouth even opened. I'm very freindly but I have resting bitch face like hard.

And then my mouth opened.

Big Mouth.

Accurate.

Tiny Nighthawk, Possibly Possessed

There was also the nighthawk thing.

Apparently, I was never exactly aligned with what polite society calls a normal sleep schedule. My parents used to say I was on a completely different timetable than the rest of the world.

Which still feels rude but accurate.

In an ideal world, I would not start work until 11:00 in the morning. Minimum. Maybe noon if we are building a society around truth and justice.

By all accounts, I used to stay awake between 1:00 a.m. and 3:00 a.m.

Not crying.

Not screaming.

Not even necessarily upset.

Just awake.

Sitting in my crib.

Laughing.

Babbling.

Conversing with myself like I had a full committee meeting scheduled and attendance was mandatory.

I did not like to nap during the day either because apparently rest was beneath me and I had very important baby business to conduct under cover of darkness.

My family, understandably, thought I might be possessed by the devil.

Which still tracks.

Not the devil part.

Obviously.

Probably.

But the rest?

The late-night thinking.

The inability to shut the brain off.

The laughing to myself in the dark.

The private conversations with invisible concepts.

The sense that somewhere between 1:00 and 3:00 a.m., my mind opens a second office and starts taking appointments?

Yes.

That part tracks.

Tiny Testa Dura.

Tiny Big Mouth.

Tiny Nighthawk.

Sitting in the crib, refusing daytime naps, running commentary for an audience of one, terrifying the household, and preparing for a lifetime of asking questions at inconvenient hours.

Some babies sleep like angels.

I apparently sat in the dark and workshopped material.

Dad’s Disclaimer

At some point, when I was a teenager, I think my dad realized there was only so much steering he could do.

The man had clocked the pattern.

This was not a phase.

This was not a cute little stubborn streak.

This was an operating system.

I was going to do things my way.

Not because I did not love him.

Not because I did not respect him.

But because some part of me needed to test life with my own hands, my own consequences, my own bruises, and my own ridiculous commitment to finding out whether the stove was, in fact, hot.

Eventually, his approach became less “do not touch the stove” and more:

“Okay. Go. Trust yourself.”

But with the very clear Italian father disclaimer attached:

“If you fuck yourself, don’t come crying to me.”

Which, translated from Dad into formal English, means:

You are free to make your choice, but you are not free from the consequences of your choice.

Or perhaps more accurately:

If you are going to make a stupid decision, you are going to look stupid. Up to you how stupid you want to go.

There is wisdom in that.

Brutal wisdom, yes.

But wisdom.

He was not really telling me not to trust myself.

He was teaching me the cost of trusting myself.

That is different.

I learned that confidence without discernment is just chaos in a cute outfit.

I learned that rebellion without analysis can still walk you straight into a trap.

I learned that doing things your own way is powerful, but only if you are honest enough to study the wreckage when your way goes wrong.

And yes.

Sometimes I looked stupid.

Spectacularly.

With flair.

With witnesses.

But I learned.

The Misfit Collection

Maybe that is why I have always had a soft spot for misfits.

The strange ones.

The brilliant ones.

The bruised ones.

The ones who do not quite fit.

The ones who learned early that society loves a square peg until it has to admit the hole was the wrong shape all along.

Recently, I connected again with someone from elementary school.

I will save the details. If they ever come across this, they will know who they are.

But it made me think about childhood. Difference. The quiet violence of not fitting.

When we were kids, we shared a common problem.

We were different.

Not different in the polished way people use the word after someone becomes successful and everyone suddenly pretends they always recognized the genius.

Different in the awkward way.

Different in the way that gets noticed.

Different in the way other kids punish.

Different in the way adults sometimes mishandle because it is easier to reward conformity than understand complexity.

I think I was able to code-switch a little better.

Code-switching means changing how you speak, act, present yourself, or move through a space depending on where you are and who you are around. People code-switch for many reasons: culture, class, race, gender, trauma, neurodivergence, queerness, survival. Sometimes it is a skill. Sometimes it is armour. Sometimes it is what you learn when you realize the room will be safer if you become easier to misunderstand less.

I could fit in a little better when I had to.

Not always comfortably.

Not always honestly.

But I could do it.

They took more shit for simply being themselves.

And I respected that.

Even then.

There is something powerful about a person who cannot or will not fold themselves neatly just to make other people comfortable. There is something sacred about the kid who refuses to become a square peg trying to jam itself into a round hole.

As I have moved through life, I have noticed I collect misfits.

Not as projects.

Not as trophies.

Not because I want to save anyone.

Because I like them.

Because I understand them.

Because people who do not quite fit are often the most interesting people in the room.

And maybe, if I am being honest, because some part of me has always looked at the wounded, angry, brilliant, misunderstood people and thought:

These are my little angels.

Not in a superior way.

Not in a “let me rescue you” way.

More like my nervous system recognized something familiar.

I could understand their anger.

I could understand the jagged edges.

I could understand why someone became sharp when the world kept handling them carelessly.

I could understand why someone learned to fight before they learned to trust.

I could understand why someone would rather look difficult than be erased.

I could look at people and think:

I know why you got this way.

It is okay.

I am not afraid of you.

I just need to know where the line is.

That has always been one of my strange gifts.

I could often feel where the line was.

Not always perfectly. Let’s not get carried away. I am still Testa Dura and Big Mouth, not a licensed emotional border collie.

But I could often sense the difference between someone being dangerous and someone being wounded. I protect those people at all costs.

Between someone being cruel and someone being defensive.

Between someone being impossible and someone being trapped in a shape the world forced them into.

That does not mean harm gets excused.

It means harm gets understood.

There is a difference.

Diversity as an Education

Because I enjoyed diversity immensely, I learned from people.

Not in the tokenistic, corporate-poster version of diversity where everyone smiles in business casual and pretends the meeting had meaning.

I mean real diversity.

Different cultures.

Different upbringings.

Different family systems.

Different survival strategies.

Different languages.

Different wounds.

Different religions.

Different politics.

Different ways of carrying grief.

Different ways of showing love.

Different ways of hiding fear.

I wanted to know what made people laugh.

What hurt them.

What shaped them.

What culture taught them.

What family gave them.

What systems denied them.

What language they carried.

What shame they swallowed.

What pride kept them standing.

I learned that nobody becomes who they are from nowhere.

I learned that anger usually has a biography.

I learned that silence usually has a history.

I learned that survival strategies can look ugly from the outside and make perfect sense from the inside.

I learned that people are complicated, and complicated is often where the truth lives.

So yes, I like the philosophers.

I like the thinkers.

I like the dorks.

I like the people with courage.

I like the people who see things sideways.

I like the punks standing in the middle of the street with self-esteem issues and a moral compass sharper than half the executives in expensive suits.

I like the quiet person in IT who looks like they are just fixing the printer but is actually carrying the emotional depth of Dante Philosophy and the observational skills of a spy satellite.

I like meeting the football jock and clocking them as a closeted gay before anyone else has caught up.

I like the ones who survived being underestimated.

I like the ones who know what it is like to take shots to the face just for nearly existing.

I like the ones willing to chain themselves to a tree when everyone else has decided the forest is already gone.

I like the ones organizing the protest because they have swallowed enough polite nonsense and finally decided the table can, in fact, be flipped.

I like shit disturbers.

A shit disturber is someone who asks the question everyone else was hoping would stay buried.

I accept this category lovingly.

Professionally.

With footnotes, when required.

The Hacker, Allegedly

And then there is the hacker.

Let me be careful here.

When I say hacker, I am not talking about someone committing crimes behind a keyboard.

Obviously.

We do not associate with hackers here.

Scouts honour.

Wink wink.

I mean the older, broader spirit of the word.

A hacker is someone who understands systems well enough to question them.

Someone who sees the rules and asks who wrote them.

Someone who looks at a locked door and does not automatically assume the door is moral just because it has a lock.

Someone who studies the machine, not because they worship it, but because they want to know how it works.

That is the hacker mind.

The outsider mind.

The misfit mind.

The mind that refuses to take the surface as the whole truth.

Misfits often become system analysts before they even have language for systems.

When the world does not naturally make room for you, you study the room.

You study the exits.

You study the people with power.

You study the unwritten rules.

You study who gets forgiven and who gets punished.

You study what can be said out loud and what must be translated.

You learn to survive by noticing patterns.

And pattern recognition is a dangerous gift.

That is why so many of the misfits become brilliant.

Not always polished.

Not always easy.

Not always compliant.

But brilliant.

They become technically sharp, politically aware, creatively feral, emotionally perceptive, and occasionally just a little bit terrifying in the best possible way.

The underdog learns differently.

The outsider sees differently.

The person who has been mocked, excluded, underestimated, or shoved to the edge of the room develops a kind of intelligence that does not come from leadership seminars.

They know what power feels like from underneath it.

They know what silence costs.

They know what it means to be misread.

They know what it means to be told they are too much, too weird, too loud, too intense, too sensitive, too difficult, too angry, too strange.

And then one day, if life is merciful or hilarious, those same traits become the toolkit.

The intensity becomes focus.

The weirdness becomes creativity.

The sensitivity becomes perception.

The anger becomes justice.

The refusal to fit becomes the ability to imagine something better.

Five Years in the Structural Social Work Cooker

And that is where my education comes in.

People sometimes hear “human services” and think it means soft skills.

Helping professions.

Community work.

Advocacy work.

Crisis support.

Program delivery.

Case management.

Being the person in the room who knows how to keep everyone from emotionally combusting.

And yes.

It can be all of that.

I have done community work.

I have done advocacy work.

I have done behind-the-scenes grunt work.

I have sat in meetings, supported people, read policies, challenged systems, built coalitions, and tried to make impossible situations a little more survivable.

But at the core of my educational foundation, I studied something very specific:

Structural social work.

And the word structural matters.

There are several different schools of thought under social work and human services. Some approaches focus more on the individual. Some focus more on therapy. Some focus on behaviour. Some focus on families. Some focus on institutions. Some focus on policy. Some focus on community development.

Structural social work is its own particular flavour of being slowly cooked for five years until your brain can no longer look at anything without asking who built the system, who benefits from it, and who gets blamed when it fails.

It is a very unique brand of academic seasoning.

You do not come out of structural social work looking at crisis the same way.

You stop seeing people as isolated problems.

You start seeing patterns.

You start seeing policy.

You start seeing economics.

You start seeing power.

You start seeing who is protected, who is exposed, who is believed, who is dismissed, who is funded, who is punished, and who is quietly expected to absorb harm so everyone else can keep calling the system functional.

Structural social work does not ask only:

“What is wrong with this person?”

It asks:

“What happened to this person?”

“What conditions made this harm possible?”

“Who had power?”

“Who lacked protection?”

“Who profited?”

“Who was blamed?”

“What institutions allowed this?”

“What would need to change so fewer people end up here in the first place?”

That is why the phrase the personal is political matters in my feild.

It means private pain often has public roots.

It means addiction, poverty, debt, shame, trauma, exclusion, and despair do not float around randomly in the air. They are shaped by law, policy, money, access, corporate design, social norms, family systems, regulation, labour, housing, race, gender, disability, class, and power.

It does not mean people have no responsibility.

That is where people misunderstand it.

Structural social work is not a free pass from accountability.

It is not saying, “Nothing is ever my fault.”

It is saying, “My choices happened inside a structure, and that structure deserves to be investigated too.”

That is the part that never left me.

Structural social work teaches you to work within systems and outside systems.

Within the system means you learn the rules. You learn the forms. You learn the policies. You learn the official complaint routes. You learn the regulators. You learn the language institutions recognize.

Outside the system means you also understand that systems often protect themselves first.

So you organize.

You document.

You educate.

You translate.

You expose patterns.

You build pressure.

You make the invisible visible.

You stop treating repeated harm like a series of unfortunate individual accidents.

And if you do structural social work long enough, you learn one of the most important lessons in the field:

The best day is not the day your caseload is full.

The best day is the day fewer people need the service at all.

That is the difference.

The point is not to build a prettier waiting room inside a burning building.

The point is to ask why the building keeps catching fire.

So yes, I may talk about community work and advocacy work because that is where a lot of it shows up in real life.

But the root of it - the lens, the wiring, the part of my brain that cannot look away from systems - is structural social work.

That is the framework.

That is the training.

That is the part that got cooked into me.

And honestly, once you are cooked that way, you do not uncook.

You just change kitchens.

The Professors Who Burned the Lens Into My Brain

During that time, I had a few professors who were absolute boss-level shit disturbers.

And I mean that with love.

These were not people who taught theory like it was decoration.

They had worked in the field.

They had seen the machine.

They had watched institutions chew people up and then ask why the person was bleeding.

They were the kind of professors who could explain policy, poverty, addiction, violence, capitalism, class, trauma, colonialism, and power in a way that made you realize the world was not broken by accident.

A few things they taught burned through my brain and never left.

The personal is political.

That one changes you.

It means the thing a person is ashamed of may not belong only to them. It may be connected to power, policy, exploitation, exclusion, and systems designed by people who will never sit across from the person living with the consequences.

Work within the system, and outside of it.

That one also stayed.

Because if you only work inside the system, you can become trapped by its rules.

If you only work outside the system, you may lose access to the levers that can actually move something.

So you learn both.

You learn the form and the protest sign.

The policy manual and the public pressure.

The complaint route and the coalition.

The meeting minutes and the megaphone.

The best day in your career will be the day you no longer have a client to service.

That one is probably the most dangerous sentence they ever gave me.

Because it destroys the ego.

It reminds you that helping is not supposed to become an empire.

The goal is not to be needed forever.

The goal is fewer people harmed.

Fewer people in crisis.

Fewer people requiring rescue.

Fewer people being processed through systems that should have protected them earlier.

The goal is not a full caseload.

The goal is liberation.

And yes, somewhere in there was also the deeply inconvenient idea that society may need to be restructured along more collective, equitable, democratic, and yes, socialist lines.

Not the cartoon villain version of socialism people scream about when they want to shut down thought.

I mean the basic idea that people should not have to be destroyed before they qualify for help.

That survival should not be a luxury product.

That harm should not be profitable.

That systems should be judged by whether they reduce suffering, not by how efficiently they process it.

These were not cute classroom quotes.

They were operating instructions.

They got under my skin.

They made it impossible for me to look at a person in crisis and see only an individual failure.

They made it impossible for me to look at a repeated pattern of harm and call it coincidence.

They made it impossible for me to hear “that is just how the system works” and accept that as an answer.

So when people wonder why I cannot leave certain things alone, part of the answer is simple:

I was trained not to.

The Moral Conundrum

That is where this blog started.

Not from a clean place.

Not from a perfect place.

Not from a place where I get to stand outside the harm and point at it like a detached expert.

I was harmed too.

That part matters.

I started this blog with a moral conundrum.

A moral conundrum is what happens when there is no clean answer. It is the space between harm and responsibility. Between shame and truth. Between what happened to you and what you may have participated in while trying to survive it.

It is the uncomfortable place where two things can be true at the same time.

I was harmed.

And I still have to account for myself.

I am trying to write my wrongs.

Not right my wrongs.

Write my wrongs.

There is a difference.

To “right” a wrong suggests repair. Balance. Some clean moral accounting where the damage can be neatly measured and paid back.

But to “write” my wrongs is something else.

It is to sit inside the discomfort and give it language. It is to look at the thing I would rather bury and say:

No, you are coming with me.

We are going to examine you under the light.

We are going to pull apart the wires.

We are going to ask where the power came from.

I made choices.

I was also harmed by systems that know exactly how to exploit people when they are vulnerable.

I am responsible for my recovery.

I am also allowed to ask why recovery is expected to happen in a world full of predators, loopholes, offshore routing, behavioural manipulation, regulatory fog, payment tricks, and polite corporate language that sounds clean enough to eat off while hiding the machinery underneath.

That is where the blog lives.

In the tension.

In the contradiction.

In the refusal to make it simple for the sake of making it palatable.

Success, Influence, or Impact?

So when I saw that little theme-park question -success, influence, or impact it hit differently.

Because my relationship with success has always been complicated.

I have never been much for status.

Especially not the self-grandiose version.

Look at my car.

Look at my house.

Look at my watch.

Look at how cool I am.

Look at how successfully I have arranged my life into a showroom nobody asked to tour.

Fuck that.

I am not saying I hate success. I do not. I like competence. I like excellence. I like seeing people build something real. I like watching someone who came from nothing get somewhere beautiful.

But status for the sake of status has never really moved me.

Influence matters more.

Real influence.

Not influence as a follower count.

Not influence as optics.

Not influence as a polished headshot and a caption about leadership while the intern is crying in the bathroom.

Real influence.

The kind that opens doors.

The kind that builds trust.

The kind that gives someone language before they even know they need it.

The kind that says, “You are not crazy. The structure is real. The pattern is real. The harm is real. And no, you are not the only one who noticed.”

That kind of influence can create impact.

And impact is what I keep coming back to.

Impact is not a buzzword.

Impact is not a grant-reporting metric.

Impact is not a cute caption.

Impact is what happens when something changes because the truth became harder to ignore.

Impact is when shame turns into analysis.

Impact is when analysis turns into language.

Impact is when language turns into action.

Impact is when one person reads something at 2:00 a.m. and thinks:

Wait.

Maybe this was not just me.

Maybe I am not crazy.

Maybe there is a pattern.

Maybe I can ask questions too.

That is the work.

Even when the post is just for fun.

Even when I am not dropping anything explosive.

Even when I am floating in research, dealing with writer’s block, reading FinTelegram, and looking at old screenshots like:

Oh shit.

Who in Here Is About to Start a Riot?

So no, today is not a bombshell.

Today is a character-development episode.

A little Father’s Day reflection.

A little origin story.

A little Testa Dura.

A little Big Mouth.

A little nighthawk baby apparently laughing in the dark like a tiny possessed philosopher.

A little love letter to the misfits.

A little wink to the people who understand systems maybe a little too well.

A little reminder that sometimes the people who were called too much, too weird, too intense, too difficult, too loud, too angry, or too strange grow up to become exactly the people who can see what everyone else was trained to ignore.

And if this work starts a few necessary conversations?

If it makes a few comfortable people uncomfortable?

If it gives one person language?

If it helps one person stop blaming themselves long enough to ask who built the machine?

Then good.

Because some riots do not start with broken glass.

Some start with a question.

Some start with a pattern.

Some start with a screenshot.

Some start with a harmed person finally refusing to stay useful, quiet, and ashamed.

Some start with a hard-headed little girl who grew into a woman who still cannot leave the stove alone until she understands who built it, who sold it, who profited from the burn, and why the warning label was written in invisible ink.

So who in here is about to start a riot?

Probably the woman with the screenshots.

Probably the woman with the human services degree.

Probably the woman who learned a long time ago that the personal is political.

Probably the woman who still loves a good protest, a good mystery, a good misfit, and a well-placed question that makes the room go quiet.

Probably Testa Dura.

Probably Big Mouth.

Probably the nighthawk in the crib who was apparently laughing in the dark long before she had words.

Allegedly.

“Who in here is trying to start a riot?”