We Can’t Afford to Shame Our Visionaries

A Love Letter to the Ones We Lost, and a Call to Do Better

(image by Dalia Shevin, who is out there somewhere and so appreciated by me)

More than twenty years ago, my friend Sera jumped off a really tall bridge and committed suicide. She was 23 years old. She was brilliant and badass and fucking beautiful. She was also intensely tormented by her childhood demons like so many of us are. When she died, she broke a lot of people’s hearts.

At the time, I was living in a collective punk house with a bunch of other people from my same subculture. I was 27. After I found out she was dead, I stayed in my room for three days and wrote a story about her called Too Close to the Sun. It was the most intense thing I’d ever written. It was about Sera, but it was really about me—and how I’d been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, how I’d been suicidal myself, and how I desperately wanted to figure out how to stay alive and live a life worth living.

(from a photocopy of an old newsprint slug & lettuce article - love to you Chris Boarts Larson)

Until Sera took her own life, I’d never talked publicly about my mental health struggles. But her death was a wake-up call. The people in our extended network of activists and artists and weirdos were permissive about all kinds of behavior—recklessness, substance use, political extremity—but if someone was really psychically struggling, they often struggled in silence. Or they ended up using the language of the day—whether it was psychiatry or critical theory—to talk around the pain instead of into it. The result was more confusion, not less.

Sera’s death propelled me, heart first, into one of the most important chapters of my life: organizing with The Icarus Project. By the end of 2002, I was driving across the country by myself, facilitating “radical mental health” workshops in infoshops, collective house kitchens, and people’s living rooms. I had a set of questions I asked and the goal was to get everyone talking to each other.

I made a bunch of new friends, including Jacks McNamara, who ended up co-founding the Icarus community with me. Neither of us had ever done anything like that before, but we were propelled by this idea that if people in our communities had better language to talk about madness—and more trust in one another to hold that pain—then maybe brilliant people like Sera wouldn’t have to die. I still believe that. And I think we saved a lot of lives with the work we did.

One of the things that haunts me about her death is that Sera was living in an activist house with people who were incredibly judgmental and harsh. I’ve had to come to terms with the shaming nature of many leftist spaces—at least the ones I’ve known. There’s often this brittle group-think, this moral purity culture, that excludes people who don’t use the proper language, or who don’t know how to play by the social rules. In my day, so many of the people who came to those scenes looking for safety ended up getting hurt.

Sera was a badass, but she was also really insecure about herself. She was an upper middle class white woman doing solidarity work in economically and socially marginalized communities, and she didn’t always know how to navigate that. She would hide parts of herself that didn’t fit the mold. She internalized a lot of guilt, a lot of shame.

I speak from experience. Me and Sera shared a lot of the same insecurities and vulnerabilities. We both carried around the sense that we had to be perfect to belong. That if people really saw us—our privilege, our brokenness, our contradictions—they wouldn’t love us. And that pressure can be crushing.

Twenty years ago, I didn’t yet have the language to name what was wrong in our activist spaces. I just knew it hurt. I didn’t have the critique I do now: how call-out culture and rigid ideological purity, often disguised as “accountability”, created an atmosphere of surveillance and fear. How instead of building resilient, welcoming communities, we built brittle ones—quick to judge, slow to forgive. Places where complexity and contradiction were liabilities, not inevitable parts of being human.

In a time when authoritarianism is rising all over the world—when fascism is no longer a distant threat but something unfolding in real time—we desperately need movements that are emotionally intelligent, strategically flexible, and spiritually grounded. We need spaces that can hold people as they grow, not cast them out for failing to arrive fully formed. But too often, the left has turned inward, purging itself instead of building power. We’ve lost too many people—not just to suicide, but to burnout, exile, and disillusionment.

I don’t know what Sera would make of the political and cultural turns of the last two decades. I think about that a lot. But if she’d stuck around, she would’ve had the chance to wrestle and evolve like the rest of us. To figure out where she fit. To fight her demons. To age. To change. To love and be loved.

All these years later, it still tears me up that she felt so alone. That she didn’t get to see what came next.

This is a love letter to the ones we lost. A reminder that we can’t afford to shame our visionaries, or discard the complicated ones. Behind the brilliance there’s often pain—and if we want a future worth living in, we have to create cultures where that pain can be spoken, held, and transformed.

We can do better. And we have to.

(from Navigating the Space Between Brilliance and Madness which you can read here)

Be in touch! We’re still out here!