Author’s Note
This essay is part of the Tools series—an exploration of the instruments, spoken and unspoken, that shape our lives. Some are wielded in public: power, policy, media. Others are quieter, closer to the bone. Excision is about one of those: the blade we use, not to harm, but to heal by stepping away—from parents, communities, even nations—when preservation demands distance.
It begins in a personal place. Not for spectacle, and not for sympathy, but to root this exploration in lived texture. But I’ll be blunt:
The introduction includes descriptions of childhood trauma, domestic violence, and inherited patterns of harm. If those topics touch something raw for you, and you need to pause, skip, or step away entirely—you have full permission.
You DO NOT owe your pain to this page.
What follows is part evidence, part context, part preemptive rebuttal to the myth that reconciliation is the only path to healing. It’s for anyone who’s lifted the scalpel against a legacy that demanded loyalty instead of love—and chosen mercy through removal.
Start where you’re ready. Finish only if it serves you.
We don’t owe our pain to the story. We owe it the choice not to bury it, and we owe ourselves the choice to grow beyond it.
—Dom
I had a dream a few weeks ago—rare enough that I remembered it after the splash of water cleared my eyes—but it laid the groundwork for everything you’re about to read. I was standing in the living room of my childhood home, cradling a toddler whose bright‑green eyes mirrored my own. My reflection in the dark surface of the TV wasn’t quite mine. It tilted at the jaw, squared at the shoulders, carrying the latent fury of a man I once feared: my father.
In the dream, time passed, until one of many days that the anger rose like blood behind my eyes. A flyswatter—wire frame, plastic mesh, the color of old bone—sat unnervingly light in my hand. The first strike landed with the curt, metallic crack I still hear in the walls of that house when my memory drifts too close. The second strike was easier – perhaps the air parted more easily as catharsis began. Moments—or an eternity—later, as ‘punishment’ continued, the cries and pleading turned to a silence so total that it shattered like a frozen dream when, eventually, laughter spilled into the vacuum from a child’s voice where fear had once lived. I woke with that same laughter clawing at my throat, the dream and the memory flickering as I watched the fan on the ceiling spin through sleep-blurred eyes… and with a question that was not asked the first time that day: If violence can be inherited like hair color, what else do we pass along without permission?
I remember the moment I started laughing, a child scared of pain no longer. I remember the fear in my mother’s eyes, thinking I’d lost my mind. And I remember the fury redoubled in its newfound impotence.
A strong arm can’t bend that which no longer fears its ‘justice’.
But I also know that I’ve felt the same rage that I’ve always imagined fueling that arm, boiling to the point where logic, reason, and restraint intermingle with it like steam in a pressure vessel, needing only the turn of a valve – an excuse – to allow explosive release. It’s one of many reasons that I’ve decided to become the final period that punctuates my own bloodline and father’s name.
My wife and I decided long ago not to have children, for many shared and individual reasons. Biologically speaking, it’s the closest the sane mind comes to self-immolation. In the calculus of survival, we are subtracting ourselves from the long arithmetic of bloodlines. Yet that dream crystallized one of the many parts of our reasoning that burn each time someone asks when we’ll change our mind: sometimes the most merciful gift you can offer a future life is absence.
I don’t offer this story for pity. I’ve made peace with who I am—and with the hammers that shaped me. I offer this story as a personal example to anchor the conversation in something viscera‑level, because what follows is not theory. It’s part evidence, part context, and part preemptive rebuttal to all those who believe that reunion and forgiveness are the only correct choices.
What follows is an examination of a choice that feels more like consequence each time I don’t answer a ringing phone. It is bone‑deep truth lived by millions who have quietly lifted the scalpel against their own lineage, their own neighborhoods, their own countries—who have chosen, in one form or another, excision as a kind of sacrificial healing.
Recommended Listening:
The Pulling Thread
When stories of rupture surface—estranged daughters, friends blocked, voters who swear off politics—the popular diagnosis is always the same: abandonment, selfishness, betrayal. “If only people weren’t so fragile,” pundits sigh, as though fracture were a personal defect instead of a structural symptom.
But if you tug gently at any single thread of estrangement you’ll find the same fabric unraveling everywhere. Birth rates in the United States have fallen for decades, and an ever‑larger share of childless adults now say they never expect to become parents at all . Adult children are severing ties with fathers, mothers, whole branches of kin at rates psychologists describe as an “epidemic of parental estrangement”. Civic organizations—bowling leagues, churches, neighborhood boards—shrivel as social capital drains away.
If disconnection were a disease, it would already rank among the leading causes of death in modern life. And yet, as the sociologist Émile Durkheim warned more than a century ago, to free a person from all social pressure is not liberation but demoralization: “Man cannot become attached to higher aims … if he sees nothing above him to which he belongs.”
The story our culture likes to tell is that such exile is new—some glitch introduced by smartphones or partisan newsfeeds. The truth is older and rougher: withdrawal is a survival tactic baked into human social DNA. What is new is the scale. Family, commons, polity—three pillars that once braced our sense of belonging—are rotting simultaneously. When the beams groan, stepping outside may be the only way to avoid being crushed beneath the roof.
The Familial Fracture
Children Unborn, Parents Unheard
A generation ago, choosing not to reproduce was an eccentric footnote; today it is reshaping demography. In a 2024 Pew survey, nearly half of U.S. adults viewed the trend toward fewer children as a net negative for the nation, yet a growing minority deem parenthood an optional or even irresponsible project in a world of climate volatility and economic precarity . If birth is an act of hope, abstaining can be a form of pre‑emptive mercy—a refusal to draft a new consciousness into a rigged game.
Layered atop this is the quieter phenomenon of going no contact with one’s own parents. One study found 26 percent of young adults estranged from fathers, six percent from mothers . Critics paint such decisions as unforgiving, but forgiveness is meaningless without transformation—and transformation is rare. As bell hooks wrote, “True love does have the power to redeem, but only if we are ready for redemption.”
When the other party is neither ready nor willing, the sane response may be distance.
Dating Dry Rot
Romantic estrangement follows similar fault lines. The voluntary celibacy or “black‑pill” discourse that thrives online is less about libido than about risk management. When the models of partnership we inherited feel rigged toward exploitation or outright harm, opting out becomes another species of boundary. Sociologists who reduce this to commitment‑phobia miss the deeper calculus: for many, intimacy costs more than it is worth in a marketplace where affection is algorithmically gamified and betrayal livestreamed.
What unites these familial ruptures is not cruelty but conservation. Every severed thread is also a tourniquet—tight, painful, lifesaving.
The Withering Commons
Step outside the house and the air feels no less thin. Robert Putnam’s famous metaphor—Americans bowling alone—is now a four‑arm story: fewer volunteers, fewer union members, fewer worshippers, fewer voters at the town‑hall microphone. The loss is not nostalgia for small‑town picnics; it is the evaporation of what Durkheim called mechanical solidarity, the sense that your existence is interwoven with the fates of proximate others.
Where solidarity fails, suspicion flourishes. Neighbors become zoning adversaries, coworkers default to competition, city councils fracture along lines as narrow as the width of a bike lane. The result is what architects of civic life describe as adversarial pluralism—a landscape where every public good is litigated like a zero‑sum lawsuit. The belief that every benefit given to one party must be taken from another.
The workplace has not escaped the entropy. Professions that once offered lifelong identity—teacher, lineworker, journalist—now flicker like doomed stars: underfunded, disrespected, or algorithmically outsourced. A Deloitte survey last year found that more than 40 percent of employees describe their primary relationship to work as transactional rather than affiliative. The corporate covenant—loyalty in exchange for stability—has been broken so often that its ruins are a meme.
Communal excision, then, is less an act of renegade individualism than an allergic response to institutions that no longer recognize the individuals who animate them.
The Political Abyss
If the family is a cracked window and the commons a sagging porch, politics is the yawning basement hole where the supports have rotted clean through. Social platforms promised a marketplace of ideas; they delivered a passive-aggressive battle royale. Every swipe demands allegiance, every like extends the outrage cycle, every algorithm grooms our adrenal glands for the next hit. Loneliness, Hannah Arendt warned, is the spiritual prerequisite of totalitarianism—a void that craves the counterfeit companionship of mob solidarity. Contemporary analysts draw the same arc: an epidemic of isolation drives citizens toward identitarian extremes that soothe belonging by offering an enemy to hate.
Yet it wasn’t always zero‑sum. Mid‑century America fought bitterly over policy while sharing an end‑state: a safer, freer republic. Eisenhower and Kennedy sparred on tax rates, not on constitutional legitimacy. In 1964 Barry Goldwater reminded supporters that “opposition, in all legitimate fields, is not disloyalty.” The phrase loyal opposition—borrowed from Westminster—assumed a baseline of common purpose.
Today’s rhetoric inverts that premise. Party platforms are marketed as survival kits; victory is framed as the last line of defense for your children. Headlines scream “Democrats Want to Destroy Suburbia” or “Republicans Plan a National Handmaid’s Tale.” Losing an election, we are told, is moral apocalypse. The underlying message is simple: for us to win, you must lose everything.
This scorched‑earth framing is algorithmically optimized. Internal Meta research shows anger drives engagement far better than joy; cable news and fundraising emails learned the metric long ago. When power depends on perpetual outrage, coalition becomes sabotage.
In healthier seasons, political debate resembled a family argument over dinner: heated, messy, but anchored in mutual dependence—tomorrow we still shared the roof. Now the table itself is kindling. Cede even a sliver of legitimacy and your own base threatens primary challenges or cancellation. Compromise is painted as capitulation, nuance as treason.
The abyss is therefore self‑deepening: each cycle of fear justifies harsher tactics, which breed greater fear. Estrangement from the polity becomes rational—another tourniquet applied to stop the psychic bleed.
Collapse and Catharsis
The Hidden Invoice
Estrangement carries a ledger invisible to spectators but crushing to accountants of the soul. There are birthdays unacknowledged, deaths learned through third‑hand whispers, crises navigated without the safety net of communal reciprocity. Psychologists link chronic loneliness to reduced life expectancy on par with smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. The invoice arrives in cortisol and empty chairs.
The Necessary Cut
And yet, sometimes the cost of connection outweighs even this. Trauma specialists speak of the second injury—the harm that follows initial harm when victims are forced back into unsafe environments under the banner of reconciliation. Against that backdrop, cutting can be cure. Think of a farmer pruning diseased branches to save the tree, or a surgeon removing a gangrenous limb. Viktor Frankl, survivor and psychiatrist, reminds us that “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response.” Choosing distance may be the only response left that honors life.
A Toolkit for Self‑Suturing
If excision is the blade, what is the needle that follows? Boundaries. Replacement communities. Acts of chosen loyalty. The rise of mutual‑aid networks, fandom micro‑tribes, and queer found families attest that humans will build connective tissue wherever the body politic fails to supply blood. These are not escapist fantasies; they are field hospitals on the outskirts of a collapse we are still too polite to name.
After the Severing
The scalpel has done its work. What remains is a room gone suddenly quiet—no monitors screaming danger, no drip of anaesthetic. Only the faint pulse of possibility. In that stillness it becomes clear: excision was never an act of destruction for its own sake. It was the removal of rot so something uninfected might begin.
Healing is not synonymous with reunion. Sometimes it is a respectful distance, a border stitched with firm intention. As the philosopher Parker Palmer writes, “Violence is what happens when we don’t know what else to do with our suffering.” The choice to step back—whether from a parent, a neighborhood, or a nation—can be the first non‑violent answer to pain.
Look again at the space your absence carved, and you may discover that the jagged lines of loss outline a space for new connections. Found families, chosen alliances, commons rebuilt from shards of shared values rather than blood, proximity, or ballot color. Kintsugi artists mend broken bowls with gold not to hide the fracture, but to illuminate the story of impact and survival. Your fault lines can do the same.
None of this negates the cost. There will be anniversaries when silence weighs heavier than any accusation. There will be mornings when you scroll a feed and feel the undertow of rage tug you back toward the abyss. On those days remember the margin between stimulus and response: a span wide enough to choose again—each time—to protect what still bleeds clean.
Ultimately, the wave of excision sweeping modern lives is brutal—sometimes horrific in its immediacy—but often as necessary as the surgeon’s extraction of a malignant mass. You carry the scar for the rest of your days, but you carry it into days that exist only because the cancer is gone. Pretending the wound never happened would defeat the whole purpose and invite the rot to return.
So go—carry the mark of the health you chose. Let it remind you of the warning signs you now recognize and the hazards you can sidestep. Let it steer you toward those who enrich, appreciate, and bring joy. The scar is proof of harm endured, yes—but also of harm escaped, and of the fuller life safeguarded on the other side of severance.
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