How Do You Stay Human in an Ordinary World?

“When the world forgets how to care, doing the right thing becomes an act of rebellion.”

I’ve kept that line close, not because I want to turn it into a slogan, but because it’s the only way I’ve been able to make sense of how I keep going. The cruelty I’ve seen isn’t subtle—it’s loud, it’s shameless, it’s on display for anyone who doesn’t look away. Whole populations written off as expendable. Whole communities erased while the world scrolls past. Families torn apart and reduced to paperwork. Children made disposable, their suffering debated like policy. The sick and disabled treated as acceptable losses, their lives dismissed through denial dressed up as policy. There’s nothing ambiguous about it. And yet what makes it even more unbearable is how quickly that cruelty gets normalized, how easily it’s explained away, how often people demand silence in the name of comfort.

I think one of the biggest things I’ve noticed—across political lines, across ideologies—is how selfishness and apathy have grown rampant in the past five years. People take risks they never would have before, and not just with their own lives. I could sit here and argue causes: repeat COVID infections stripping something away from us, or politics pulling off the masks we used to wear to seem decent. But maybe the cause doesn’t matter anymore. The harm is still happening every day.

I don’t have a solution. I don’t have a way to fix it. But I do know I don’t want to join it. I don’t want to add to the downfall by choosing apathy, or by numbing myself until cruelty feels normal.

That’s where I found myself needing a compass. Not to tell anyone else how to live, but to stop myself from collapsing into apathy. I call it "Ethicism" (click to read), but it’s not a philosophy I’m trying to brand or spread—it’s just the shape I’ve traced around how I try to stay human in a world that’s forgetting how. For me it means caring without asking if someone is “worthy,” naming what’s true even when people would rather not hear it, and refusing to make goodness transactional. I don’t do those things because I always succeed at them, or because they make me feel heroic. I do them because every time I don’t, I lose something of myself. That’s what Ethicism is for me—not an answer for the world, but a way to keep myself from becoming part of what’s breaking it. A guiding light so I don’t lose my own way.

Part of why I needed that compass is because I know what happens when care gets replaced by control. Years ago I poured myself into advocacy, believing that representation and rights and dignity were worth the fight. And then I watched as those same spaces that preached care turned hostile toward anyone who didn’t fit the mold. Parents, professionals, even other autistic people—if they asked the wrong questions, they weren’t disagreed with, they were destroyed. I watched colleagues smeared, reputations dismantled, friendships vanish overnight. I lived through it myself, until I finally disappeared.

For a long time, I thought that disappearance meant I’d lost my voice. But what I really lost was the illusion that advocacy could be performed without care. In the quiet years that followed, working in direct support, showing up for people in ways no one would ever tweet about, I started to rebuild—not a platform, not a following, just an understanding. That the messy, complicated, exhausted people I was supporting mattered more than ideology ever did. That if your advocacy doesn’t make space for those people, it’s not advocacy. It’s performance.

And performance doesn’t only happen in movements. It happens in relationships, too. It happens when someone wins you over with flattery and harmony, but what they’re really loving is the version of you that performs, not the one that needs to be seen. It happens in conversations where you name harm and the other person doesn’t deny it outright—they just shift the ground beneath your feet. “That’s not what I meant.” “You’re overthinking.” “You know I’d never do that.” Suddenly it’s not about what happened, it’s about whether you’re even allowed to feel it. The original issue disappears and you’re left defending your right to notice.

That pattern—the conscience trap—may not scream like overt cruelty, but it does its own kind of violence. It erodes trust. It teaches you to second-guess your own clarity just to keep the peace. It breaks the feedback loop that makes relationships real. And over time it convinces you that maybe silence is safer than truth. I’ve seen it online, I’ve seen it in friendships, I’ve seen it in supposedly rational spaces where every harm is reframed as just another perspective. And I can’t live like that either.

So I keep naming it. Not to accuse, not to shame, but to re-anchor myself in reality: harm happened. It matters. I don’t need permission to care. That’s what Ethicism means to me in practice—not a perfect set of principles, but a way of refusing to let either cruelty or ambiguity strip me of my conscience.

I don’t share this as a prescription. This isn’t “the way.” It’s just the way I live and the way I love, the way I stay sane in hard times. I don’t know if it changes the world. Honestly, I doubt it. But it keeps me clear. It keeps me human. And for now, that’s enough.

🕊

Note: I reject violence in all its forms. Nothing I write here is a call to arms, or a celebration of harm. These posts are warnings, not endorsements—an attempt to trace the patterns of power and propaganda so we might break the cycle, not fuel it. My writing is rooted in grief, in clarity, and in a stubborn refusal to give in to nihilism, cruelty, anger, or resentment. My love is for all people in this world—even those who would wish me harm.