Running, Not Living

Escape, not because I want to live, but because I don't want to die.

⚠️ Content Warning

This post contains reflections on exile, systemic erasure, identity-based violence, religious trauma, and themes of survival under threat. It includes vivid metaphors and emotional content that may be activating for readers with lived experiences of marginalization, dysphoria, or displacement.

All references to violence, persecution, execution, or suffering are metaphorical or descriptive of systemic oppression and are explicitly non-literal. This piece discusses these issues critically and symbolically, not literally.

Please read with care. You are not alone.

“Then the Lord said, ‘I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt.
I have heard them crying out because of their slave drivers,
and I am concerned about their suffering.
So I have come down to rescue them...’”
(Exodus 3:7–8a, NIV)

I’m not running because I want to live.

I’m running because I don’t want to die.

There’s a difference.

People think fleeing means hope. They think crossing oceans and abandoning your country means you’re chasing a dream. But what if you’re not? What if you’re just trying to delay your execution? What if the act of escape, of running, of fleeing, is not for the dream of a better tomorrow, but to escape the flames that lick at one’s heels? What if the act of being a refugee isn’t being performed because of some grand dream, but to avoid a nightmare?

Is an endless string of Airbnbs and couchsurfing, of hostels and roach motels, of van seats and sleeping bags, any better than being stripped of life-saving medication and left to develop osteoporosis? Is being subjected to a Christian theocracy any worse than losing my identity, losing myself in the struggle, becoming the blur between unfamiliar rooms with Nescafé pods and single-serving toiletries?

What if you’re dragging yourself across the globe on scraped knees and bruised elbows, not because there's something beautiful waiting in the dawn, but because there are howling wolves in the distance, praying to their blood moon of harvest and sacrifice?

I’m not being poetic. I’m being specific.

There are systems that want me gone and buried. They’re backed by powerful men and women in high places, behind stone edifaces and in tall buildings. On yachts. They wear business suits or high-class dresses. They smoke cigars and drink cocktails while they peer into the camera, convincing the masses that they’ve done feminism a solid by destroying my life, destroying my people, destroying trans people beside us. They do this with glee, and insist that the general public ignore our humanity and our cries.

Not because I committed any crime, not because I broke anything or hurt anyone, and certainly not because I ever plotted it, but because I exist in a way that doesn’t fit the narrow architecture of the culture I was born into. I was possibly mutated by the industrial damage done to the land and water in the name of capitalism. None of this was my fault. I just had the courage to push their scalpels away, push away their lies and their conformity. I became no one other than who I always was.

I was told I was unnatural. Dangerous. Corrupt. Even when I did everything right, I was still treated like a contagion.

And now the system has found new, softer ways to criminalize people like me: with paperwork, data trails, quiet policy shifts, unspoken exclusions, “biological” contradictions written into laws that erase me and the rest of a gendermessy world. It won’t always be quiet. But for now, it is. The tide is rising, and I’m running not toward safety, but away from annihilation, from destruction.

It means running, from being forced to live as a “man” to please their plan of holiness and biological “truth,” when I lack the physical anatomy, the psychological identity, the hormonal profile, and the sex characteristics of one. Slapping a beard on me because a half-drunk small-town doctor eyeballed a squirming infant decades ago and shrugged their shoulders, does not mean god willed it to be so. It means that a doctor made a mistake. Now I’m forced to run from that error, as it continues to haunt me, pursuing me, aided by their dollars, their bibles, their AI engines and their databases, and their brainwashed masses.

That’s not the same as wanting to live.

Living would mean joy. Rooting. Dreaming. Belonging. Loving. Being desired. Having a home, with a garden and a dog. It means making waffles for my loving partner, on a Sunday morning, before a sermon. It means being able to use the restroom I’ve always used without Baroness Falkner’s toilet vigilantes or the Heritage Foundation’s religious police spying on me while I relieve myself.

Running means surviving until the next couch, or the next reclined car seat, or the next train ticket. And that checkpoint could be a visa. A notarized document. A permission slip from someone who doesn’t even know my name. That’s how fragile it all is.

When you’re in this state long enough, you start to forget what rest feels like. What presence feels like. You function through fog and haze. You wipe the condensation off the car windows every morning, and try to see the future from a back space in the shopping center parking lot, but it’s always blurred, always cold, and always obscured by some kind of haze. You don’t live in a home, you live in a container of borrowed time that is constantly leaking, with gender critical anti-feminists poking holes in the container.

And the worst part? Everyone expects you to be grateful.

Grateful for a seat on the lifeboat. Grateful that you weren’t already dead. Grateful for the chance to work twice as hard for half the safety. Grateful to not be in shackles, or to be offered a men’s toilet to piss in, maybe, if the pub allows it, and if the she-wee seals around the right places.

But I didn’t escape.

I just shifted the battlefield to another state, another town, another city, another country, and another piece of land.

And every day I have to convince someone—a banker, a border agent, a doctor, an employer—that I am still a person. That I still deserve to exist. That I still deserve “humanity and dignity” of the kind Sir Keir says that we must speak of my people. But really, where is it? Where’s this dignity? Is it several floors down in the office where I work? A dingy, rarely-cleaned unisex toilet lit by a single bulb, with a seat covered in a sticky layer of something dreadful?

I am not suicidal. I am not safe. I am not thriving.

I am running.

I don’t know what comes next. I don’t know if the country I left will hunt me down in new ways, with their collected data and massive AI farms. I don’t know if the country I’m in will turn the tides on people like me. I don’t know if the people I love will wake up to the urgency or just keep playing video games while Rome burns, waiting for the next Steam sale to happen while I’m eating a candy bar in a metro, dozens or maybe hundreds of kilometers from the last place I unrolled my sleeping bag.

All I know is that I still have my breath. And for now, that has to be enough.

Because I’m not dead.

But no, I’m not really living either.

I'm just running.