Reflections

Someone recently told me they hoped I was “finding my way.” I told them that the idea we are meant to find our way is itself an illusion. The next response lingered with me—not just because it was misunderstood, but because of how quickly it was reframed into something comforting. A poetic sentiment. "A beautiful dream." The Illusion of Finding Our Way That moment mirrors how we often engage with the world. We don’t just consume information; we search for patterns that make u

I served as an aircraft mechanic in the U.S. Navy from 2016 to 2021. Back then, I didn’t think about what I was breathing in or standing in. You clean and maintain the aircraft. You handle fuel and you wash gear. You are standing around and handling materials used to treat and prevent corrosion and preserve the aircraft. That was the job. Nobody explained what those chemicals were, and nobody warned us about what they could do. It wasn’t until those first few years after gett

I took an interest in the recent situation at the University of Oklahoma involving a student named Samantha Fulnecky. In her Lifespan Development psychology class, she was assigned a 650 word reaction paper responding to a research article called Relations Among Gender Typicality, Peer Relations, and Mental Health During Early Adolescence, which looks at how gender norms affect the mental health of middle school kids. Instead of engaging with the article , Samantha turned in

Three years ago I went through something that forced me to confront myself in a way I had not before. It was not my first encounter with this kind of attachment, but it was the first time I began to recognize that something deeper was happening, something I did not yet have a word for. I was so attached to someone that when it ended, it felt like the world fell out from under me. I stopped eating, I stopped going out, and I stopped doing anything that resembled living. I was

Something I do when the weather starts to change, animals start to hibernate, and many spend longer nights at home, is bake Pan Ranchero. It is a practice that has been passed down from my father, from his father, and so on. As I gather all the ingredients in my narrow apartment kitchen and begin to make the dough, the process and the smell reminds me of a moment in my life that I hold dear. I had just completed a record-breaking deployment of 206 days underway on the USS Dwi

From Revolution to Rhetoric During my attendance at the 40th annual Printers Row Lit Fest in Chicago, I stumbled upon a vendor selling revolutionary books. One that caught my eye—and ultimately inspired this reflection—was Thomas Sankara Speaks: The Burkina Faso Revolution 1983–1987. At the same booth, a person approached me representing a newspaper called The Militant. Their pitch was simple: “For five dollars, you can sign up for a year of The Militant, it gets delivered ev

In recent years, three seemingly separate debates in the United States have begun to intersect: the criminalization of homelessness, the sanitizing of slavery in classrooms and museums, and the expansion of prison and detention labor. These trends share a common thread, dehumanization. Together, they risk normalizing modern servitude under the law. Criminalizing Poverty Across American cities, local ordinances continue to punish people for basic survival. Advocates with the F

As a people, we used to tell our stories over a fire. These stories were not simply for entertainment; they were a way of working through our everyday lives and the trauma that came with it. It was a way for tribe to come together to learn lessons and to better understand one another to keep us united in our efforts to survive and keep our humanity. That being said, there has always been a moral to our stories; it has always been WOKE. Now, in our efforts to return to this wa

"Only a fool lets somebody else tell him who his enemy is." ― Assata Shakur I have been given the time and opportunity to become friends with a man who lives on the street. Every time I see him and his dog around, I stop and chat for a bit or I'll wave if I'm in a hurry. Very recently, I saw him and I sat down and we talked about life. He told me that as much as he appreciates the small things I do for him, what really mattered were times like this, where all I offered was my

In the article These Women Tried to Warn Us About AI by Lorena O’Neil, the reader is given concerns over the media used in the learning of large language models (LLMs), drawn from the experiences of five women, Timnit Gebru, Rumman Chowdhury, Safiya Noble, Seeta Peña Gangadharan, and Joy Buolamwini. Their concerns specifically highlight the judgments that were made in the selection of datasets the LLMs were trained on, as it often leads to biases and harmful responses. It al

When I first started All Over Most in 2018, it was just an idea. An idea that we, as a people, must band together as a tribe and see everyone as our equals. When the pandemic came along, I halted production and didn't think I would come back to this, but a lot has changed since then. Mainly, I was introduced to this quote from Thomas Sankara, "We must choose either champagne for a few or safe drinking water for all." As those words echoed in my mind, I took a look around me a