all things move...
- Lauren Jane
- May 5
- 6 min read
Something has happened. We all feel it. There is a hole in the world.
I have been struggling to put words together, I think in short sentences that unravel, declarative statements that become incoherent volumes. Nothing is cleanly divided, begins or ends as it should. The only place I know how to begin is here: There is a hole in the world and I want it to stop.
We are at war, and my partner isn't with me, we are at war and I need to find the right website to file a complaint. We are at war and lines are too long at the passport office. We are at war, and running late for our next lawyer call. We are at war with unstable fascism and no one is coming to save us. We are at war, and more than one lawyer has said that our situation is 'dystopian nightmare', and I see it as a warning to everyone, a tail-end scenario for our freedom to exist as we are. I am living a story that merits the plot in a William Gibson novel - maybe one of the ones the Canadian government wants to criminally charge us for bringing into Canada: a plot unlikely and disastrous.
We are at war, and I am in pain. I feel pain for all the people the CBSA is harming. In 2019 the CBSA conducted investigations after allegations of misconduct, leading to substantiation of 35 complaints with follow up including termination. In 2025 that number had risen to 259 founded cases of officer misconduct - issues ranging from improper and illegal searches to sexual harassment ( I'm bad at math but I think that's a 400% increase). We are at war as the CBSA unmistakably targets Sex Workers, Artists, Readers, Autistic people, and narrows the conditions under which collective freedom can be sustained.
I am in pain in a literal sense, as I struggle with auto-immune disease, chronic pain, CPTSD, and exhaustion. We are all so exhausted. Trauma reorganizes time, compresses horizons, and redirects my attention from creation and love and reading to endurance, withstanding, holding on, paying lawyers and screaming until my throat is raw and red.
There is a hole in the world and it's easier to break your heart once by convincing yourself every person you meet is a monster than having your heart broken a thousand times over and over as people and circumstance and the relentless motion of reality hurt you.
It works as an act of self protection, right? Cynicism as armour, pessimistic certainty as defence against the risk of vulnerability and the endless flow of opportunity for hurt and harm. But openness and vulnerability allows for deeper connections, compassion, and a more profound understanding of yourself and others. And every person who digs the hole in the world deeper, does so by digging one themselves first. In the hole in the world art, and books, and poems and fucking are threatening. For stories and art and transgressive sex to exist we must have individual expression and ambiguity that these things represent, so their existence contradicts the rigid control and narrow defination of personhood required by all regimes.
So many of us exist in contradiction just as we are, and we are not ready to acknowledge what we are losing, or already lost. Not ready, not yet. not yet....
But there is grief in my marriage. My partner is living injustice, they are living oppression and false accusations and harrowing threats from a powerful government. They are grappling with the absence of us, the absence of freedom, the absence of peace.
Kindness is the only way forward.
I wrote this in my journal during my miscarriage in the summer of 2024. I was waiting for my partner to come and hold my hand and help me cry and fight and walk and fuck the guilt and the confusion and the desire for different endings out of me. And they did. I am trying to be the kind of partner they were for me then, and the bar is quite high. They show me, again and again, through living example, a truth I learn over and over in so many ways: all things move.
You have to let yourself be moved.
We are all dragging ourselves along, trying to keep up with whatever version of normalcy we can reconstruct each day. We are crying and writing emails. We are watching movies and I chose seven dishes I hardly ever use to smash in the basement because rage lives in me and needs to be let to run. I don't know how to grieve this but the CBSA has forced me into a grief state, and I am rarely living fully in the reality of the moment, the day, because that would mean killing the illusion that I'm dressed up as an ordinary person - and I need it.
We are at war, and while I was waiting for CBSA agents to release the documentation that said we were smuggling obscenity, documents they didn't want to give us at all, I heard them say "how did they pull a defence together so fast" because they do this all the time and most people don't know how to fight, don't know they can, can't afford to retain legal council...
They do this all the time because there is a hole in the fucking world. And in their hearts. And maybe in yours too. Maybe in mine.
The disorder and oppression of the world is not easily understood or solved, it's always moving and changing and to find hope, to become anything, we must make peace with the complexity of who and what we are. You have to let yourself be moved.
Maybe it's 5 a.m., and your eyes are sore as a timeline scrolls past and you hunt sleep, but there is a bit of a poem, a scrap of vulnerability, a few moments of throwaway beauty that briefly connects you to something... a glimmer of something you almost recognize so it fills your dream as you fall asleep.
Beauty can stick to you like that, but without engagement, it can't grow into anything. If you only think about it once, passively, as you wait for the water for your tea to boil, wait for the train, wait to get off the train, wait wait wait ... it will die inside you. You do this one thousand times a day. We all do, over and over.
And what do we have now? Architecture, Abstract Expressionism, French New Wave cinema, Photo Editing Apps, Self Service POPs, Microbes that eat Plastic and no more animals, and only like, five kinds of bird? And it doesn’t matter at all that nocturnal atlas moths know the light of the moon; that does nothing to stabilise or disrupt the economy, it can not motivate the electorate, it can't unban books. The moths die anyway. Everything dies anyway, but still. Something can move you.
You have to let yourself be moved.
And when we do, there is no limit to the number of miserable endings our humanity can survive. Even now, years later, when I thought my partner and I would be holding hands in our home, possibly planning a family or Sunday dinner, the armed will of my government tries to crush love out of my life with the brute force of ignorance and fear and unquestionable power, and still I am so full of love it fills every choice I make.
The earth is dying, and we are all going into the dark, and power scrapes more out of our lives every day, and there is no one coming to save us, so can we be serious for a second? Right? We are all a few moments away from stepping into a bear trap and needing to chew off our own leg to be free. And you would, wouldn't you? Would you chew off your own leg to be free? To love who you love, to fuck how you want to fuck. Why not just read the fucking poems, take the fucking photo, watch the fucking porn? Hell, why not write one, why not make it? What's the worst that can happen - I promise you, whatever you think that is, its going happen anyway. Because we are at war.
I am concerned about the condition of our souls. I am concerned we are all going to let something die without ever mentioning that it is screaming.
I don't know how to fix it on my own, but I need you to know the insidious choreography of everyday life continues, even as the world is dismantled beneath our feet. We can stumble and weep our way through these routines, one thousand fake days and weeks, or we can move, cry out that what is happening to us is grotesque, horrifying and must be opposed.
But you need to let yourself be moved.
