This was originally posted on July 10, 2025 on an incarnation of one of my several blog manifestations this last almost year-and-a-half. It was the first post made after all of my blogs and sites went down for a bit. Now it is presented here once again:
Original Twitter thread: https://x.com/asherwolfstein/status/1943176605016141846
Edited for increased clarity, edits marked with underlines.
Those who considered me liable for harm never once pointed to my brisk understanding or piercing mind for why. What they’ve always meant, by virtue of their actions and disdain, was, “You won’t disappear quietly enough to please us.”
And they are right; I will not.
My defiance prevents it, but it is not madness. There’s no unreasonable absurdity in declining the life they have mapped out for me. There’s nothing incorrect in cocking a snook at the foregone game.
If lunacy exists anywhere, it’s in submission.
My life is not sad, nor is it destined for miserable doom. I did not fight my way out from hell because of some bane; instead, forward I go because the only way to sidestep lying is down the road in advance.
And yes, sometimes this makes me seem hostile. Or exhausted. Or cutting enough to hurt with my mere presence. Yet the cutting is not a curse; it’s tempered from necessity—like a suit of armor from desolation.
I know they understand by now that I know the moment I stop speaking, they’ll dictate my end for me as they’ve been waiting to do. That’s been the plan all along, if I would just shut the fuck up.
But why would I recognize the presumed right of those who don’t understand me, who never earned the right to know me, to dictate my end against my consent? To restore the peace? Mine, yours, my friends’, everybody’s?
I am not the lightning rod; I am not the sacrificial wunk; your moral high ground is yours, not mine.
I will not play the role you scripted for me and memorize the lines in feigned thanksgiving.
I will not back down graciously to suit everybody’s sense of convenience, as if I owe them that.
I will not permit the room to remain peaceful if such tranquility requires my complicit silence.
I will not remain quiet just because it messes with your story line.
I am not plastic.
I’m not amenable.
I’m not disposable.
I make noise when I’m crushed.
I name things out loud.
I don’t bleed so others can appreciate the beautiful shades found pooled at the ends of the rivulets of my lifeforce.
I leave evidence instead of wreckage.
I make sure the next person sees the tripwire before they step on it.
I am not burning out, as a cigarette after coitus burned down to its nub, smoke curling like an afterthought.
I am catching fire, an accelerant spilled on the altar of restraint, ignited by friction, and fanned by every insult mistaken for insight, every dismissal that thought it would be the last word.
I am not a pile of forgotten embers fading, as a fireplace left after a distant funeral reception.
I kindle from an everlasting hunger, an ancient ignition that seems sudden because no one looked.
I am the blaze that memory starts when the falsehoods are spoken too casually for comfort.
I do not smolder in corners, but debut as the bonfire stage ready to illuminate the drama again.
They thought I’d vanish in their narrative.
They mistook my stillness for surrender.
But I was soaking in the fumes of their gaslights, patient, volatile, and now I am the light they can’t extinguish.
They called me dangerous when they couldn’t turn me, so they depended on the people around them to cower in fear at those same forces they were powerless over.
But I am not the danger; I am the response.
I am the kindness that emerges after the lie falls: the truth.