My Hips Don't Lie or: Burnout, Codependency, and the Moment My Body Refused to Keep Going.

November 9th, 2016, the morning after Trump’s first election, my body revolted.

I literally could not walk.

Like Jacob, I had spent the night wrestling with G-d and came away with a lightning strike in my hip and a limp I couldn’t ignore.

For fifteen years I had been protesting injustice and bigotry. I had been begging the government to care about the marginalized, to lift oppression, to stop being so goddamn awful.

I had marched hundreds of miles, tried to educate and convince relatives, caucused for progressive candidates, made signs for countless protests, trained as a street medic, started collectives, learned first-hand from Mexican revolutionaries and indigenous resisters, and on and on.

Until that November moment I had at least some hope in what I was doing, even though it kept feeling like I was banging my body repeatedly against brick walls as I tried to make change.

Trump’s election put me over the edge.

I had learned to function on adrenaline bursts and reactive lashing out at injustice. I had internalized a belief that my value was dependent on how much of the world’s grief I could hold. I believed that if I didn’t hold it all for everyone, I would be responsible for every horrible thing to happen on the planet.

My body had been telling me this couldn’t be true for years, but I had become an expert at overriding every signal to slow down. I couldn’t slow down because if I did, I was terrified I would get lost in my grief and never be able to get out of it.

My hips could no longer bear the lie that I was okay. They refused to let me continue in futile resistance to a system that was built on genocide, slavery, and injustice. My hips demanded I try something new.

Our bodies often know the truth before our minds. Our minds, so clogged with our trauma, our programming, our rigid and limited beliefs, our hundred open tabs, keep us from living fully embodied in our truth. We carry impossible burdens and expect our bodies to keep going under the weight. We end up with chronic fatigue and autoimmune conditions. We live with persistent anxiety and spiritual disconnection. We live lives that feel too small for the visions of our free and wild souls.

The lightning in my hips, my own wrestle with G-d, forced me to look at myself clearly. I had to change.

The body never lies.

The body always speaks truth about the stories we are living inside of. And for most of us—especially queer folks, activists, descendants of trauma, empaths, and sensitive visionaries—our bodies carry entire histories that were never ours to carry.

For years I had been hauling grief, racism, misogyny, homophobia, violence, and the cruelty of the empire inside my fascia like I had a moral obligation to store it there. I felt my value was measured by how much I could endure, how much I could carry for other people. Somehow I got the idea that if I just hold a little more, maybe the world will hurt a little less. I distracted myself from my own grief by carrying everyone else’s.

That’s also what codependency teaches us.

And here’s the thing no one said out loud in my movement years: Activists can be deeply, profoundly codependent with the State.

We organize our entire nervous systems around its moods and threats.

We brace for its next violent outburst like children cowering at a father’s raised hand.

We contort our lives around what it will or won’t do.

We beg it to care about our pain.

We believe we can fix it if we just love harder, fight harder, suffer harder.

My body knew this long before my mind could articulate it.

Trump 2.0 exposed the codependent relationship I had with a government I had been trying to rescue. I’d been trying to reason with an institution that benefits from our exhaustion. I was trying to transform a system that has no interest in changing. My hips were the first to revolt against that arrangement.

When I began to do massive inner work, I discovered a different way to exist in the world. I stopped moving from adrenaline, and started focusing on my own frequency and embodiment.

This is the daily work I trust now.

I’m not saying we stop taking action. I’m saying the location of our action must change.

When our activism is fueled by burnout, fear, martyrdom, and the belief that the State is in control of our lives, we recreate the very dynamics we’re trying to dismantle.

When we move from sovereignty, when our bodies are aligned with liberation rather than panic—we take action that is cleaner, clearer, and more potent. We stop trying to get the government to behave differently, and we start behaving differently ourselves.

We make the State irrelevant by building the New Earth we want to see.

And yes—there are life and death moments when ICE shows up at our neighbor’s house, and making the government irrelevant feels more challenging, more immediate. But these are the moments when our embodied sovereignty and divinely inspired action is needed the most.

When we place our bodies between ICE and our neighbor, that is not burnout activism. That is not codependency. That is not begging the State to love us.

It is spiritual clarity. It is collective protection. It is a living boundary.

That is a community declaring, “We decide the rules here. We decide who we protect. We decide what future we are building.”

It is not about carrying the weight of the world; it’s about carrying our principles in our bones and moving in alignment with them.

The difference is everything.

Burnout activism says:

“If I don’t do this, the world will fall apart.”

Embodied liberation says:

“When I stand in my truth, the world reorganizes around me.”

Burnout activism says:

“The government is the source of harm, and I have to convince it to stop.”

Embodied liberation says:

“We protect us, and we can create something that makes the government obsolete.”

Burnout activism contracts the body.

Embodied liberation expands it.

As I continue to let go of codependency with the State, I feel my power, energy, and creativity returning to me. I feel more life force in my connections, in my community, and my vision of what is possible, and my role in that vision keeps getting clearer.

My hips had to break the pattern for me. They had to drag me out of a cycle that was eating me alive so I could learn that Liberation is an embodied state before it’s a political one.

And when enough of us embody liberation, the world cannot help but change.