I was born this way and always have been this way. But I had to muddle for years through liberalism, then socialism, before identifying anarchism and then even more specifically communalism as being the theory that puts actual words and logic behind the feeling of what I always knew was true. And it wasn’t until my mid-20s that I actually took up that search intentionally because I was so shell shocked throughout my school years.

I gratuated college in 2008 and got my first pepper spray whiffs at Zuccoti Park during Occupy. Chomsky’s Failed States and Zinn’s People’s History of the United States are what got me off liberalism. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy sparked my imagination regarding the radical multitudal possibilities of governance and Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother showed me what one person is capable of. I knew socialism / communism alone weren’t my eventual destination because the history and hierarchy always smelled of what I was escaping from, but it took me a while to find works like Kropotkin’s Conquest of Bread and eventually Bookchin’s Post-Scarcity Anarchism where I finally felt like I’d arrived home. I remember reading that last work in a Brooklyn cafe under a skylight when the clouds opened up and it was like nature saying “Yes, this is it. You found it bro.” NYC organizations like MACC and Food Not Bombs, and later on Symbiosis on the west coast, really cemented things for me.

I also credit the literary works of Ivan Illich, Ursula Le Guin, and David Graeber for keeping me hooked.