I Got A Promotion!

“You’re a mixed up bitch,” a friend texted me, and it felt like recognition.

I liked the title immediately. It said something I’ve felt but rarely said out loud. I don’t operate in straight lines, I don’t stay in a single frame, and I’m not especially interested in becoming someone who picks a side and camps there. I’m not sure whether it’s that I can’t collapse into one version of myself or that I won’t, but either way, it doesn’t happen. And recently I’ve stopped trying to make it happen just to make other people more comfortable.

I think it’s entirely possible to admire aspects of Islamic philosophy and ethics while also wanting to obliterate the cruel, brainwashed men who hurl queer people off rooftops in its name. I can love the rhythm and poetry of the Quran and still fight for the freedom of every woman who’s been silenced, shamed, or disappeared by the institutional structures built around it. I can appreciate the beauty of someone’s faith and still hate what gets done with it in the real world. To me, what matters most is not just recognizing that tension quietly but saying it out loud without flinching. Both sides. Always both. Speak the fuck up.

I have no patience left for tribal loyalty disguised as principle, or for the smug “my God is better than your God” pissing contests that pass for spiritual debate. Just say you don’t know. Try to live with it. Sit in the mystery for more than five seconds without reaching for a team jersey or a doctrine. Your certainty is killing people. It’s starving children, mutilating dissenters, poisoning rivers, burning books, and building prisons. You don’t know shit about God. No one does. Not the Pope. Not the rabbi. Not the guru with the podcast and the juice cleanse. And if anyone tells you they do, I suggest holding on to your wallet and your ass.

It’s possible to laugh at a TikTok trend and still feel a genuine wave of grief for the way it’s restructured our attention spans. It’s possible to believe in vaccines, in masks, in science and public health, and still have deep suspicions about the corporate and political machinery that profits from them. It’s just as possible to piss on the stupid, misinformed anti-vaxxers without pretending Big Pharma is pure. You can invest in defense stocks and fund disability rights. You can love the idea of your country while being gut-sick over what it does in your name. These aren’t contradictions. They’re reality, if you’re paying attention.

There’s room to admire Taylor Swift’s business instincts, the discipline, the empire, the genius of knowing exactly how to control her image and revenue streams. And you can still find her music unlistenable, shallow, even disgusting. There’s room to be totally enraptured by the cosmic, grief-soaked beauty of Alice Coltrane’s sound and still wince at the spectacle of her spiritual journey, which sometimes feels less like a transcendent path and more like another sad Western hunger for borrowed wisdom.

You can love something and want to smash part of it. You can make a home in a place and still want to flush half of it down the toilet.

You can vote Democrat and still tell them they’re cowardly, corporatized, and dishonest. You can hold both. I believe in saying both. Always. Staying silent about the part that doesn’t fit the narrative is what I fight against.

Some people choose a single story. A clean identity. A simple set of values they can laminate and hand out at parties. That’s fine. It has its own kind of beauty, maybe even a kind of peace. But I’ve never been able to stay there for long.

I live in the unresolved overlap, where emotion and analysis constantly interrupt each other, where love doesn’t erase harm, where disgust doesn’t negate grace, and where clarity is a process, not a product. I don’t believe complexity is weakness or incoherence. I think it’s what makes reality bearable and sometimes even beautiful. I don’t want to be distilled into one version of myself. I want to stay porous. I want to say, without shame, that I am both logical and reactive, spiritual and skeptical, joyful and exhausted, generous and cold. I want to remain mixed.

Being mixed up doesn’t mean being confused. It means refusing to edit the truth just to keep things symmetrical. It means knowing that people, systems, movements, songs, memories, and relationships carry more than one meaning at the same time. Trying to clean that up for public consumption is its own kind of erasure.

To me, perfection isn’t about polish or alignment. It’s about capacity. It’s the ability to hold complexity without running. It’s being able to feel grief and still function, to feel rage and still listen, to feel disgust and still show up. It is the opposite of branding. Branding tries to distill the self into something consistent, marketable, and predictable. Presence refuses that. It stays available to the truth, even when it contradicts yesterday’s truth. It is Thom Yorke’s voice. Depressing and exhilarating, fragile and massive, grounded and floating in the same breath.

There are people who never change their minds and call it strength. There are others who change constantly and call it evolution. I don’t care what they call it, as long as they’re not lying. Movement is honest. Certainty, a lot of the time, is hiding. And sometimes it’s not just hiding. Sometimes it’s complicity, or violence, or the willful narrowing of what the world is allowed to be.

I think that being mixed up is not the same as being broken. It’s to stay close to reality, even when reality doesn’t make sense. It’s to hold what’s real even when it doesn’t match your aesthetic or your politics or your personal brand. It’s to keep changing without needing to explain.

I believe in science, and I’ve also seen what it erases. I’ve met too many credentialed know-it-alls who weaponize data and treat doubt like stupidity.

I believe in justice, and I also know I’ve gotten it wrong before. But I’ll still call a DOJ appointee a corrupt piece of shit if she deserves it.

I believe in peace, and I understand why people cling to their guns. I believe in love, and I still set boundaries. You can love your sister and still call out her bullying behavior. You can love someone and stop them when they’re doing harm. I believe in something larger than us some days, and on others, I believe in nothing at all.

I believe people can change, and I still hold them accountable when they do. As long as they acknowledge the change, I’m good. There’s no neat way to sum that up. And that’s the point.

‘Mixed Up Bitch’ just sits right. I promise to live up to it.