A smile at a stranger, a run through the park

A small dose of mushrooms had opened pathways in my mind, and a new neural connection was firing over and over again, solidifying a link between my transness, my love for running, my move to California, my affinity for nature, and this birthday tradition of getting off the grid with the people most precious to me. Associations rippled and rattled between all that makes me who I am and all the ideas in which I deeply believe: authenticity, compassion, connection.

There’s nothing I love more than having vulnerable, expansive conversations about the experience of being human. Baking in the sun with fourteen of my closest people, we inevitably slipped into a conversation about the state of the world. Finally, our moment had come to say more than “Hanging in there—how about you?”

Our truest selves are welcome in this environment, so we cracked open. The lack of viable leadership in our country, and the swift turn from democracy to oligarchy, has unnerved each of us. The dignity and rights of those who do not fall in line are hanging in the balance. It’s not the best side of the bed to wake up on.

There is division within countries and war between them. The tech explosion and rapid rise of artificial intelligence move to occupy and monetize every ounce of our attention. Inextricably, our entire planet is heating up. These dilemmas are crystal clear, but the answers often feel much murkier.

Tortilla chips cracking between my loved ones’ teeth, each of us offered our two cents until we were rich with visions for a better future. We decided that we must continue to self-reflect, to gather, to be kind to one another without discernment, to speak up, and to engage in small and large acts of resistance. Scanning the beautiful faces that surrounded me, I wondered what this moment had to do with transness, with veganism, with running. I felt a spectacular convergence—a togetherness—enveloping everything. At the core, it dawned on me, was autonomy.

The word autonomy comes from the Greek auto- (self) and -nomy (from nomos, meaning law), and it first came into use in the 1620s. In short, autonomy means self-governance.

German philosopher Immanuel Kant sought to create a moral basis for life grounded in reason and opposed to selfishness. In the eighteenth century, he elevated autonomy as the highest challenge of reason, because it requires individuals to act according to their own self-determined principles rather than being externally governed, coerced, or driven by impulse.

The opposite of autonomy is heteronomy—the condition of receiving the law of your action from outside yourself. If you are heteronomous, you are determined by forces in your life that are not your own free, rational choice. Following tradition for tradition’s sake, for example, is a form of heteronomy.

Nearly eight months after that conversation in Sacramento, I was sitting in the shade in a front yard in Los Angeles, sharing these musings with a close friend and favorite thought partner of mine, Renfred. A fellow retreat attendee, deeply familiar with my obsessions and ruminations, he nodded. Tactfully, Renfred prompted me to consider new ideas and angles I had not yet explored—like what true autonomy for everyone might reveal about human nature. He also asked how running and autonomy converse with each other in my mind.

In recent interviews and writing explorations, I have come to realize that running was my first experience of freedom as a young person. Whether aimlessly in the backyard or more intentionally around the neighborhood by middle school, it was my escape from the rules and ideas that governed my household and my family members.

I describe my family as relatively homogeneous in their systems of belief. They vote the same way and share norms that do not seem to apply to me. On one family trip to Florida, they revealed that they had all gotten America-themed tattoos. I am, without question, an outlier.

I was a scrawny kid. I often retreated to my bedroom in the chaos of my childhood home, where I was scorned for perpetually having my headphones in. Running became a space where I could think and feel freely. Without opposing forces, my true self could simply exist. In this way, my solitary movement became a kind of truth. It was during my runs that I began to form my sense of individuality, authenticity, and autonomy.

Fast-forward to a few months ago, on the steps of the Supreme Court. Inside, teenage plaintiff Becky Pepper-Jackson defended her right to run on her team; outside, I defended her right not to have to defend her rights. The outdoor section was divided squarely down the middle—anti-trans protesters competing with advocates for trans rights, everyone screaming into their respective microphones. The anti-trans sentiments sounded illogical and regurgitated, whereas the humanitarian testimonies were personal and specific.

In 2025, nearly one thousand anti-trans bills were introduced in the United States. Now, amid ceaseless attacks on trans rights and trans bodies, it is through running that I continue to retain my autonomy—my sense that the only person governing my body is me. If, fully impacted by the coercion of headlines and legal measures, I were to succumb to the belief that being trans is as horrible as it’s made to seem, I do not think I would be alive.

This year, at a meditation retreat in Northern California, I sat on my cushion and felt the sun illuminate only me through a single window, like a spotlight. I was struck by the serendipity, and by the Buddhist framing that through meditation one can experience happiness regardless of conditions. This sentiment feels akin to autonomy, in that it requires stepping away from impulse and coercion and finding clarity and peace within the self—within intuition.

This is what is required of trans people, as the heteronomous route attempts to govern away transness altogether. At the core of the hatred directed toward trans people is the threat we pose to the very structures that limit us—the fact that we represent a possibility others are too confined even to approximate. The fear is not of transness itself, but of what transness reveals about the way we are otherwise living.

Autonomy is not selfish. It involves a thoughtful consideration of which actions do the most good for the most people. Perhaps that is why transness is indivisible from community.

Conversely, consider this additional example of heteronomy: the instant in which you open your phone and your mind goes blank. You meant to do something, but suddenly you are elsewhere—in your mail app, in your Instagram app, checking Strava. What just happened? You lost your autonomy. You were externally governed, even coerced, into succumbing to mere impulse. How many times a day does this happen to each of us?

While I taught high school, I was gentle when our media literacy lesson turned to phone use. Part of the lesson involved having students self-report screen time and incentivizing those who could reduce it week to week. One student reported an average of fourteen hours of screen time per day. I was aghast and likely failed to conceal my shock. Surely, this meant that almost every second in the classroom was consumed by an alternate, two-dimensional reality instead of life itself.

I can readily dismiss any rhetoric that insists young people are worse than adults. For one, the human brain is not fully developed until at least the age of twenty-five. Unlike adults, teens were born into a world of screens that ping and light up. Many of their habits may have emerged from the iPads placed in front of them as toddlers—because nothing else would quiet them.

Besides, the argument is useless. In a society whose rulers thrive on division and profit from our ignorance and complacency, part of being autonomous is learning to outsmart the headlines—to resist the title fights, to avoid reaching for the lowest-hanging fruit, to be sharper.

Rather than blame liberals or conservatives—rather than blame parents or children—what would it look like to demand accountability from the richest people in our society, those cashing out on all of our minds? To disagree with them instead of each other?

If the average person works eight hours a day and spends five hours on their phone, the sun has already risen and set. How much of our lives are we actually living autonomously?

The attention economy works because it immobilizes us. It plants ideas in our minds and does everything it can to ensure we never look away.

So are we really mad at each other? Are we sure it’s trans people ruining our lives? Immigrants? Or are we so distracted, so compelled, that we have lost sight of who we are, what we value, and how to live accordingly?

My yearly birthday retreat is the happiest part of my life because it instills hope—that even amid devastating conditions and systems we fundamentally oppose, living according to our own values is still possible. The weekend is a reminder of the world we can create when we reclaim our autonomy and collectively dissent.

A key pillar of Kant’s philosophy is the categorical imperative—a backbone of morality grounded in autonomy. It urges us to ask: If everyone in the world took this action, what would be the result? Kant argues that rational beings have the capacity to act in ways that serve the good of the world.

When I consider the potential of groups of friends and chosen family putting their phones away for a weekend—to truly see one another, to connect deeply, to envision and commit to a gentler, more loving world—it becomes obvious: yes, this is the way forward.

Living in alignment with the good of the collective is the path to a better world. This, however, is not a prescription or a fixed set of laws. The categorical imperative demands agency. It calls us to make autonomous decisions, using our own morality as a compass. It asks us to walk away from the noise and return to ourselves, one moment—or one mile—at a time.

As I sat unpeeling the layers of Kant’s moral philosophy, a loved one pushed back: “If the key is autonomy, then why follow the categorical imperative?”

For Kant, the categorical imperative is a supreme moral principle. It does not impose external governance; rather, it reveals how rationality and morality can form a kind of internal governance—if we are willing to pay attention. Perhaps the purpose of life is not to do whatever we want, but to live within our own values.

Democracy, in practice, might be understood as collective autonomy. Not brute resistance, but participation: I don’t want you to tell me what to do—I want a hand in deciding what we, as a society, choose.

Part of what feels so immobilizing about government in the United States (and elsewhere) is the dissonance between external law and the desires of the people. Take, for example, the recent ICE raids in Minneapolis. In December 2025, the president initiated “Operation Metro Surge,” sending 3,000 federal immigration agents into Minnesota—the largest operation in the Department of Homeland Security’s history.

This initiative resulted in the senseless murder of those who stood in solidarity with their neighbors, as well as the detention of a five-year-old child and further targeted attacks on the Minneapolis community. In response, local churches, schools, coffee shops, and even a sex toy shop opened their doors as collection centers, redistributing resources to immigrants sheltering at home.

The resistance of Minnesotans—the turn toward love and community in the face of violence—fills me with hope. It reminds me that the heartbeat of humanity is not housed in the White House. It is among us.

What if we followed that instead?

As a child, I fell in love with the song “March to the Sea” by Twenty One Pilots. After a lyrical meditation on the thoughtless march of humanity, the singer hears a voice inside his head: “Follow me instead.”

During a day of silent sitting and walking meditation, instructors introduced us to three personality types in Buddhism: those conditioned by desire (lobha), by aversion (dosa), and by delusion (moha).

During the Q&A, a student raised her hand and asked, “That’s it? Those are the three? Is there another option?”

During the Q&A, a student raised her hand and asked, “That’s it? Those are the three? Is there another option?”

The room laughed—in relief, in curiosity. The instructors explained that these are conditioned responses, and that through practice we can choose something else: to center love, and the well-being of ourselves and others.

We might understand these conditioned responses as another form of heteronomy. Enlightenment—like moral clarity or self-actualization—emerges from autonomy. Kant believed autonomy alone was sufficient grounds for equal worth and respect.

Under capitalism, even the illusion of scarcity becomes a coercive tactic, designed to divide us. Artists, innovators, and disruptors play a vital role by using creativity to break through systems where most expression is tightly controlled and polished.

And yet, countless acts of care and cooperation suggest something else: that human nature is, at its core, good—especially when resources are distributed in ways that allow everyone’s needs to be met.

As AI takes root in our society, the question of human purpose becomes unavoidable. When we reclaim autonomy, we become most human.

Choosing each other—sweaty shoulder to sweaty shoulder in a backyard each July—is an act of resistance. An act of autonomy. We self-govern according to our values: authenticity, compassion, connection. We dream together, and we move—deliberately—toward the world we want.

We leave in tears because of the relief: a temporary escape from heteronomy, a glimpse of autonomy, like a candle lit in a dark room. The challenge is to carry that light forward, rather than stepping back onto the hamster wheel.

Autonomy is more than acting on desire; it is acting on principle. It is, as someone once told me, simply “standing on something.”

I choose to believe that at our core we are loving, social beings. If we sit with our anger, our hatred, our fear long enough, we may find that each of them resolves into something like love.

Love is a biological need. Hate is taught. It is not what we would choose if we were truly autonomous.

Liberation from systemic coercion is no small task. But we can begin today—with a smile at a stranger, a run through the park, a plant-based meal, a day off social media—any choice that comes from a rational, moral self.