Something something... the indomitable human spirit... ?

Are the kids okay? They will be. (Originally published to Substack January 30, 2026)

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Written mostly before recent events in Minnesota which is certainly an even more apt topic to reference regarding the indomitable human spirit. Hopefully you’re finding some time today to protest/strike in your own way. This is the Reddit r/Minnesota Master List of resources for several options. Blood donations is one of the ways you can help which also intersects with my personal obsession with The Pitt rn. Peruse and see if there’s anything of interest.

Protests are happening all weekend in Los Angeles, LA Times compiled a few and names some businesses that will be closed or donating proceeds. For anyone looking to move, Silver Springs on Melrose will be donating all proceeds from today (Friday) to the National Immigrant Justice Center.

Ok now back to me I guess? And, like, my rich inner world???

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Something something… the indomitable human spirit. I don’t know where I first heard that phrase, but, lately, it seems like the human spirit is both incredibly domitable and indomitable all at once. We’re always trying to find ways to make the human condition submit to our desires. Through holistic treatments or the more standard emotional suppression, I look around annd everyone is trying to beat their experience into something smooth and small. I know I don’t have control, but I see left and right people who are looking for answers and I wonder if I’m setting myself at a disadvantage. Like they’ll get to the pearly gates while I’m turned around with my fingers stuck in my ears. I quit religion. I quit red pill blue pill. I quit putting all my eggs in anyone else’s metaphorical baskets. I decided some time ago that I was done seeking answers. I spent my whole childhood trying to understand why people were the way that they were and holding space for them, even if it hurt me in the process. I learned love can’t fix things and that love hurts, sometimes more than it helps. I landed on my own set of commandments without any threat of eternal damnation or salvation.

My dad came to me the other day, by which I mean we were in the car on the way to the airport. He said an old friend and mentor from work was reaching out to him who had screwed him over years prior. He wanted to know if I thought he should take the call. He did not know the nature of the call. I love a moral query, but my dad doesn’t usually come to me for advice like this. I asked him why he thought he’d want to accept the call? To ask him why he did all the things he did to him like screwing him over, lying to him, not standing up for him when he wasn’t there to defend himself? It sounded to me like he wanted him to own up to everything he did and apologize. I hadn’t pegged my dad as such a dreamer! Like father like daughter I guess! I’ve dreamt of a quite similar situation. A perfect world where the person perfectly acknowledges all the wrongs they’ve wronged and provides a more than adequate apology that fixes everything and justifies my hurt. I learned, after many failed attempts, that that doesn’t really happen and you certainly shouldn’t bet any skin on that pony… or whatever. So, I told him I’ve been learning how to let things go. That anger was making my life worse and that by holding onto the anger in order to prove a point, keeping the wound open to prove harm had been done, I was making myself miserable. I wasted half my waking hours pretending I wasn’t in pain. It made me tired and angry. I asked him to consider if the conversation didn’t go as planned, how he’d feel. That his expectations only encompassed a few slim variations on how that situation could go. Would the conversation, regardless of outcome, bring him some closure? Did he want to have a relationship with him? Was it worth working on? If no, then I said why bother? What kind of retribution was he guaranteed? None. He was more than likely going to end up disappointed and no less damaged than before. Maybe I was projecting.

There’s an episode of Bojack Horseman called “Good Damage”. I think about that episode a lot. To give you a loose idea, the episode centers on Diane Nguyen, a Vietnamese-American writer and friend of titular character Bojack. At this point in the show she’s left Los Angeles and lives with her (literal) Buffalo boyfriend in Chicago after divorcing her (literal) Golden Retriever husband, and distancing herself from the tumultuous cast of characters in Los Angeles— including Bojack himself. She’s recently gone on meds for her depression, and she is working on a memoir about her life, specifically her relationship with her father and her difficult upbringing. She gets lost in her thoughts. She jumps from idea to idea, back to the first, into criticizing her writing, into her characters criticizing her, crossing out her idea, back to idea one over to idea nine, and "oh why is Todd (another character) here?”, back to idea one. She can’t stop trying to write but she can’t write. At one point she even stops taking her meds because she feels they make her too flat to write about everything that’s happened to her. To help ease tensions between her and her agent, who’s been pressing her for pages, her boyfriend secretly sends in a few pages she had written (in the midst of her spirals) about a teen detective named Ivy Tran who solves crimes at the mall. Her agent loves it. The scene is as follows:

DIANE

Princess Carolyn. Princess Carolyn, wait. I understand you’re trying to be helpful, in your own pushy, self-absorbed way.

PRINCESS CAROLYN

Oh, thank you.

DIANE

But I don’t wanna write a middle-grade fiction detective series.

PRINCESS CAROLYN

I think you do, though. Because when I was reading it, I could tell you were having fun.

DIANE

Yeah, but I’m not writing a book to have fun. If I don’t write my book of essays now, I never will!

PRINCESS CAROLYN

So? Don’t write your book of essays.

DIANE

I have to!

PRINCESS CAROLYN

Why?

DIANE

Because if I don’t, that means that all the damage I got isn’t good damage, it’s just damage. I have gotten nothing out of it, and all those years I was miserable was for nothing. I could have been happy this whole time and written books about girl detectives and been cheerful and popular and had good parents, is that what you’re saying? What was it all for?

PRINCESS CAROLYN

I... I don’t know, Diane. All I know is that this book about the girl detective is fun. I liked it. I like thinking that my daughter could grow up in a world with books like that. Or if my daughter’s not a reader, a lucrative film adaptation.

DIANE

When I was a little girl, I thought that everything, all the abuse and neglect, it somehow made me special, and I decided that one day I would write something that would make little girls like me feel less alone. And if I can’t write that book...

PRINCESS CAROLYN

Then… Then maybe write this other book. Maybe this book does that, too.

DIANE

Yeah?

It feels cheap to eat up so much of the real estate on my Substack with someone else’s writing, even if that someone is a far better writer than me, but I learned a lot from Bojack Horseman. A lot of my beliefs about the world are direct quotes from the show. A lot of what I learned about how to be an emotionally regulated adult came from watching those characters. In trying to make the world submit to me, to apologize to me, to right its wrongs, I made myself less. I made myself bitter and crotchety by eighteen. Bojack Horseman helped me see the path towards a happier life and find the words to understand it. Even in those anthropomorphic animals, you could feel the indomitable human spirit. I don’t want to carry my pain anymore. I want to be happy.