# Disneyland For Racists

Here's the tricky thing with stressful or slightly traumatic events in your life: if you don't resolve those events through meditation, therapy, or whatever - those events tend to haunt you until they're resolved.

And a lot of those things won't go away. They keep prodding you, over and over, bothering you and distracting you from work.

So by 2021, I realized I had a huge backlog of those stressful things, to the point where I couldn't work. I couldn't bring myself to finish the last few credits before transferring to a four-year university. I couldn't go through with accepting an internship at a construction firm. I couldn't maintain relationships, I basically felt like a small, nervous rock.

Anyway, my parents weren't supportive of my idea to just take an extended, indefinite break to resolve all of that. So I found a friend in Windsor, Colorado who basically offered me a free place to stay for a while.

I used that time to relax, and unpack like, more than a decade of trauma.

And you know, after a while I unpacked enough to the point where I was able to go back to school. So eventually I signed up for a coding bootcamp so I could find a job to make money.

And I also tried getting involved in local politics.

[Windsor Diaries Chapter 1](https://hackmd.io/uxHReNa-TLSmhclrRhuKMg)

[Windsor Diaries Chapter 2](https://hackmd.io/@standardyang/wdc2)

[Windsor Diaries Chapter 3](https://hackmd.io/@standardyang/Hy7pl9FTo)

[the Windsor podcast](https://soundcloud.com/standard-yang/windsor-diaries-episode-1)

It didn't really work out so well. As it turned out, my friend in Windsor was one of the kindest residents in the town, and the average resident was far more selfish.

The town as a whole really didn't care about affordability. Like, they said they did, but they weren't willing to sacrifice much to get there.

But I did manage to find one idea that the town board liked, a policy that has a good chance of being implemented, which would make it slightly easier to get to affordability.

In a nutshell, a lot of the locals didn't like density because of parking spaces and traffic, and they didn't like buses because it was associated with poor people. So I pitched something that kind of did the same thing that buses did, but I didn't call it that. This idea would reduce traffic and reliance on parking spots, so people would be slightly more likely to support density.

[Windsor's Driving Infrastructure (Video)](https://youtu.be/REiWCjGQQZQ)

I was pretty proud of myself for doing this. I had already run it by a few people in local government, and they said it had a good chance of passing.

Of course, it didn't change the fact that Windsor was still going to be lonely for me.

1. My loved ones still couldn't afford Windsor.
2. There was only one coffee shop in town that was brave enough to have an LGBT pride sticker on their window, and they got death threats from locals for putting that up.
3. In five years, there was only one black local who got slightly involved in politics. She was run out of town by locals who threatened to lynch her.

So I decided to leave for Denver to live closer to my friends, knowing full well that I did

- more for the town's environment and affordability than many of the liberals who claimed to care
- more for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness than many of the local conservatives who were too busy spreading hate speech

Best of all, I did it at a third of their age, and much less wealth than them.

There was nothing else for me in that [shadow of the American dream.](https://hackmd.io/@standardyang/S1P-VQuyn)