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This syllabus exists because you asked for it.
After I posted my first viral video asking, "What does a system look like that loves you back?"—the DMs started coming. Emails. Comments. Messages from strangers who said they'd been asking themselves the same question but didn't yet have the language for it. People telling me they were lonely, that their friends had disappeared when things got hard. That they didn't know how to be in community anymore. That grief had left them isolated, and they didn't know how to find their way back.
I kept thinking I could respond to each person individually, that I could give everyone the answer they needed. But here's what I realized: this isn't a personal problem. It's a structural one. We're living through a loneliness epidemic that the U.S. Surgeon General has declared a public health crisis. We're navigating a world where approximately half of U.S. adults report feeling lonely, with health risks comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. We're being asked to function in systems that demand self-abandonment as the price of survival—systems that tell us to go to work while genocide unfolds on our phones, to meet deadlines while people disappear across borders, to stay productive while our rights are stripped away.
The world is not built to love us back. So we have to make one that does.
This syllabus is my attempt to create something beyond myself—a foundation for those of us who are tired of being told that connection should be easy, that love is just a feeling, that we're broken because we're struggling to stay present in a world that feels fundamentally unsafe. It's for those of us who need more than self-help advice or wellness hacks. Those who need actual infrastructure for care, for community, for the practices that make staying possible when everything is designed to make us disappear.
What This Is:
What This Is:
This is a public syllabus about love as action.
Not love as romance. Not love as a feeling you wait to have. Love is the intentional, daily practice of extending yourself toward growth—your own and each other's. Love is the thing that orients you when everything else has collapsed.
Drawing from bell hooks' definition of love—"the will to extend oneself for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth"—this curriculum explores what it means to practice love in a time when love feels impossible. When we're all holding more grief than we thought we could carry. When our nervous systems are stuck in threat response, when the systems around us practice cruelty and call it policy.
hooks taught us that love is composed of six elements: care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect, and trust. She taught us that "love is as love does"—that it's an action, a choice, something we practice rather than something that happens to us. And she taught us that we were never given a roadmap for this. That most of us don't know what love actually is because "schools for love do not exist."
Until now.
This syllabus is for that school. It's the curriculum we were never taught. It's ten modules designed to answer the questions that keep us up at night:
How do I build community in today's day and age?
What happens when everyone I love leaves when I need them the most?
How can I be a good friend?
How do I love in a loveless world?
It's for anyone who's ever felt too lonely to function, too dysregulated to connect, too scared to try again. It's for those of us practicing staying when everything tells us to disappear.
Why This Matters Now
Why This Matters Now
I wrote in my Substack piece "Returning to the Nervous System":
"We're all being asked to figure out how to keep breathing when breathing feels like betrayal of everything we're losing... In a time of grief, what we're craving most is an abundance of love. And we don't know how to build it."
That's the truth we're living with. We don't know how to build the thing we need most.
But here's what I learned from a year of falling apart and trying to come back: grief will teach you your capacity. The depth of your pain is evidence of how much you're capable of loving. And right now, we're all hurting. The collective grief is ambient, constant, accumulating—genocide unfolding in real time, people disappearing, rights being stripped, the planet burning while systems prioritize profit over life.
That grief is also evidence of our collective capacity to love. To care about each other. To refuse to abandon one another. To build something different.
Love didn't save me from grief. But it oriented me inside it. It gave me a direction to point myself when everything else was chaos. And I believe—because I've lived it, because I've practiced it, because I've watched it work—that love, practiced intentionally and collectively, can orient all of us, not toward a perfect world, but toward a more bearable one. Toward a world we're building together because the one we inherited is trying to kill us.
A Note on Accessibility:
A Note on Accessibility:
Nothing here is locked behind a password or paywall. No credentials required. No institutional gatekeeping. This is intentional. Knowledge about love, about care, about how to survive and stay in community—that's not something you should have to pay for or prove you deserve.
Please share this widely. Link it. Remix it. Use it in your trainings, your own syllabi, and your organizing. Give credit where it's due, but don't let anything stop you from accessing what you need.
If you want to see more behind-the-scenes work or support the creation of spaces like this, follow me on social media or subscribe to my Substack. Your support makes it possible for me to keep creating freely accessible resources while also, you know, paying my bills.
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