i'm just a nigga with a substack pt 2.

i woke up with a 2pac quote in my head. “prison didn’t change me, it made me worse”...

the question is, worse for who?

it made me worse for the empire. way fucking worse.

(preview of my next post, stay tuned.) moving on.

the ego is a prison too. in sufism this is called the nafs, and the tradition doesn’t treat the struggle against it as if its a lesser obligation. this is called it the greater jihad, greater than the fight against whatever enemy is standing in front of u with a weapon. which tells u something. the architecture of domination doesn’t only live in the state. it has a smaller, more intimate franchise operating rent-free inside your own skull. and i don’t think i’m special in that regard. however u have been made small, whatever’s been administered down to a permissible size within u, the same question is waiting on the other side of your healing, too.

but there’s a line between pride and ego, and that line isn’t fixed, it migrates depending on the day, depending on what wound is talking. i spent fourteen years having my blackness, my voice, my very presence administered down to a permissible size, by a system that required my smallness as a condition of its own coherence. so when i finally take up space, when i finally say something and people start feeling that shit, how do i discern whether that’s restoration or whether it’s the ego borrowing the language of restoration to keep feeding itself. how do i know if i’m reclaiming what was confiscated or just relocating the same hunger into a more politically respectable container. yikes. and i’d bet money u got your own version of this question sitting somewhere u haven’t looked yet, whatever your “this” happens to be.

this isn’t a rhetorical question i’m posing for effect. the trap runs in both directions. if i shrink myself back down out of some misapplied humility, and i haven’t transcended nothing, i’ve just finished the state’s work for it, voluntarily, on my own time. but let pride curdle into a need for constant confirmation, that’s not liberation either. that would just be another cage that i could get trapped in. i know that the world needs me to stay small and invisible. but that’s what i’m not gon do. but i’m also gonna constantly measure my words and actions against my principles in the best way that i can.

this idea of bad faith, where a person constructs an elaborate maneuver to flee what they are by insisting they are not what they are, and the maneuver works precisely because consciousness can never fully catch itself in the act. u can’t stand outside your own self-deception and audit it objectively, because the part doing the auditing is the same part that benefits from the deception continuing. i think about that constantly when i catch myself narrating growth instead of metabolizing it. when i catch the ego rehearsing the healed version of a thought before i’ve actually sat inside the unhealed one long enough to know its shape. the ego doesn’t resist the language of abolition. it just learns to wear it as the newest disguise in a long line of disguises.

social media exploits exactly this ambiguity, and it does so by design, not by accident. it converts the realest thing u ever said into a performance metric, and the algorithm rewards engagement, not honesty, so it has no mechanism for distinguishing the two and neither, sometimes, do i. the danger is that confidence and ego are visually indistinguishable from the outside. they wear the same posture, move with the same cadence. but pride in having survived something and pride in being witnessed surviving something are not the same organism. one belongs to me regardless of audience. the other requires the audience to remain alive, which is the whole diagnosis right there. i know y’all like that one.

so what the hell is all this even? i give myself license to come on here and talk my shit sometimes, because it just be things i gotta say, u feel me? i wake up some mornings turn on the news and i feel like im gonna explode. i’m not claiming exemption from that move just because i’ve named it. naming a trap doesn’t relocate u outside of it. sometimes im like, “why did i just say that on the internet?”. but oh well.

i’ve said this before and ill say it one mo’ gin: i’m simply a nigga with a substack. that’s the whole title, the whole credential. it’s everything and it’s nothing. i don’t epitomize the revolutionary, or philosopher no matter how long i’m on some stupid chart. and i’m not exempt from the contradiction i just spent several paragraphs describing, i live inside it the same as anyone reading this. i’m capable of error, capable of confusing the nafs for the pride and the pride for the nafs, capable of preaching clarity one week and failing my own sermon the next. i’m totally capable of just not giving a fuck. fourteen years gave me wisdom. it did not grant me immunity from myself. it definitely didn’t grant me immunity for my sense of rage and injustice. those are two entirely different inheritances, and only one of them was handed to me without my asking.

i guess we just gotta stay conscious enough to keep interrogating ourselves instead of assuming we have already passed the test. the state, for all its violence, don’t lie to u about its own motives. it wants what it wants openly. your own mind extends u no such courtesy.

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the realest abolition might be the version of u nobody claps for.

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