My name is Ra’il, I’m a Black trans semi-professional loudmouth, and I am entirely burnt the fuck out.

If you know me, you probably know me from some mix of: co-creating the hashtag #YourSlipIsShowing, curating digital spaces for the study of Black history/culture/performance, doing mutual aid visibility work, my work as a writer, editor, and independent researcher or maybe my photography. If so, you also probably know how rough the past decade has been on me, mainly because of the work that I’ve done. Death threats, doxxing attempts, plagiarism, forced extraction, deliberate misgendering, erasure of my labor, lack of payment, the death of my hashtag co-creator and the resulting survivor’s guilt. . . it’s been a lot. And this has all been happening in a context of intensified fascism that has a particularly antiblack, transphobic edge to it. AND all of that is before the difficult personal, physical and mental health news I've received so far this year.

So, perhaps unsurprisingly, I’ve officially reached official burnout, co-signed by a therapist and everything. This has been the type of burnout that makes feeding myself and being coherently verbal on a regular basis difficult, let alone job hunting or art making. It’s been a deeply demoralizing and destabilizing experience.

Thankfully there is a path out of burnout, but it is going to take a vast reorganization of my current life, and it’s going to take a lot of rest, and that’s where this GoFundMe comes into play. Making goal will allow me to:

-- Cover rent for 6 months

-- Prepare for & recover from my first gender-affirming surgery (in May)

-- Give me space & time to figure out self-employment (no one is hiring Black trans people right now)

I am still here on this earthly plane only because of the communities that I have been so fortunate to be accepted into making it a point to support me when so many other systems failed to do so. I’m asking again for that same support but I also wanna say thank you from the bottom of my heart for getting me this far. I’d like to keep going.