Wohlig: The Quiet Comfort of Finished Words

A reflection on exile, survival, truth-telling, and the quiet victories that leave markers for those yet to come

A reflection on Leo Herrera’s Post and the queer hero’s journey: survival, truth-telling, and expression as acts of defiance, legacy, and connection across exile, memory, and time.

Introduction

The traditional telling of the hero’s journey rests on a simple promise: departure, ordeal, and triumphant return. It is a structure so deeply woven into Western storytelling that it is often taken as a kind of universal truth. The hero leaves home, faces trials, and earns the right to come back — changed, yes, but welcomed. Yet for many queer people, and for immigrants, artists, and all those who live at the margins, the journey does not follow this neat arc. There is no home to return to in the form it was once known. There is no guarantee that transformation will be met with celebration. Instead, the journey becomes something quieter, lonelier, and, in its own way, far more radical: a passage through exile, survival, truth-telling, and creation.

Leo Herrera’s Post (2024) offers a luminous map for this other kind of journey — one not of conquest, but of persistence. Early in the collection, he names what so many feel but rarely hear spoken aloud: “At its heart, the Queer experience is an immigrant experience. We leave behind our birthplace, family, culture.” It is a line that lands with both tenderness and weight. To come out — to name oneself fully — is often to cross an invisible border, leaving behind not only safety but the very frameworks through which life had once been understood. It is an act of both liberation and profound loss.

This reframing demands a new understanding of heroism. It is not a matter of vanquishing foes and returning to applause. It is the quieter, harder work of living without the validation of the old world, of building new spaces where none existed, of surviving systems that would prefer our silence or disappearance. Herrera’s Post does not offer easy victories. Instead, it honours the ongoing work of existence itself: the stubborn, daily acts of survival, the reclamation of language, the fierce and necessary labour of creating something true. In the journey he sketches, the triumph is not in returning unchanged, but in refusing to be erased — and in leaving markers for those who will follow after us, still finding their way through the exile we know so well.

Exile: Leaving “Home”

The word “home” carries a weight that is often invisible until it is lost. For many, home is presumed to be a place of safety, a place where one’s earliest language, rituals, and ways of belonging are formed. Yet for those of us who find ourselves marked as other — by queerness, by difference, by an unwillingness or inability to conform — home can shift almost imperceptibly into something else. It can become a place of negotiation, of vigilance, even of danger. The walls that once sheltered us may begin to feel like borders that confine. The very structures that raised us become the first places where we must hide.

Exile, then, is rarely a dramatic event. It happens slowly, often beneath the surface of everyday life. It is the glance a parent cannot suppress, the tightening of a friend’s voice, the whispered warnings to be careful, to be discreet. It is the gradual recognition that to be fully oneself is to invite rejection, whether explicit or unspoken. And so, many of us leave — sometimes physically, more often emotionally — stepping away from the places that first named us as theirs. But exile is not only an act of leaving; it is an act of being left behind, of becoming unintelligible to those who once claimed to know us best.

Herrera captures this reality with piercing clarity in Post, writing, “At its heart, the Queer experience is an immigrant experience. We leave behind our birthplace, family, culture. We live outside “the system,” earn less, depend on clandestine economies, off-the-books gigs, sex work. Language is life and death: the way we are talked about, how messaging reaches us, the new words we have to learn and teach. Queers and immigrants are used as interchangeable political weapons. We’re huge parts of mainstream culture but our rights are easy to strip. “Reform” usually means criminalization and over-policing. Humans become “issues” and a system of apartheid separates our health and rights from “real” citizens. Our customs, loves, even our funerals, ripping in the gravity of two nations. Refugees in our own country. Yet our impact is undeniable because our ancestors learned the real victory is a better life for those who come after us.” It is a truth that cuts across identities: the queer child navigating a school that weaponises silence, the immigrant labourer celebrated for productivity but reviled for presence, the artist applauded only when their work is stripped of its sharpest edges. To be visible is to be vulnerable. To belong, truly belong, is not a right, but a privilege perpetually under threat.

In this context, coming out is not a moment of simple celebration. It is not the festive crossing of a finish line. It is a step into the unknown, an act of courage taken often without a map, without a guarantee of welcome on the other side. The territory ahead is unmapped because it must be created anew, each footstep an act of defiance against the erasure that exile demands. To come out, to step away from the false safety of partial acceptance, is to begin the long, difficult work of building a life on one’s own terms — not in the spaces we were given, but in the spaces we dare to imagine.

Survival: Living in the Borderlands

If exile strips us of home, survival demands that we learn to navigate the borderlands — the in-between spaces where full citizenship, full humanity, are always just out of reach. Survival in these places is not passive; it is an active, relentless craft. It requires new economies, new languages, new tactics. It demands an ability to read rooms, to shift code, to find ways to exist in systems that were never built to include us. It is the daily negotiation of risk and necessity: what must be concealed, what can be revealed, where a foot can safely be placed and where it cannot.

Herrera speaks directly to the brutal mechanics of this survival in Post, writing, “Only people are illegal. It’s never illegal pizza, illegal ramen, illegal chicken when we cook your food, it’s not illegal strawberries or illegal lettuce when we pick it. It’s not illegal roofs, illegal stucco or illegal fences when we build your homes, it’s not illegal childcare or illegal mopping when we’re working in them. It’s not illegal taxes when we pay those either. We’re only illegals when we need to be seen as American people and not cheap labor.” It is a searing indictment of a system that is willing to extract our labour, our creativity, our resilience — but not willing to recognise our full humanity.

The parallel to the queer and trans experience today is unmistakable. Across the United States, laws are being written to criminalise the mere fact of existence: to treat the use of an authentic name, an affirmed gender, not as a rightful expression of self, but as a species of fraud. Language, once a tool for survival, becomes weaponised against us. Where once “preferred name” and “preferred pronouns” suggested a polite request, now the very act of self-naming is cast as deception, as something suspect, something punishable. The borderlands expand — no longer only geographic, but inscribed upon the body itself, turning acts of authenticity into acts of resistance by their very nature.

In such a world, to survive is already a victory. It is to refuse the narratives that frame our existence as inherently fraudulent, deviant, or criminal. It is to carry forward with the knowledge that legitimacy — the right to name ourselves, to be recognised without compromise — is not granted by the systems that marginalise us. It is claimed, again and again, in small, stubborn acts of life. Survival is not mere endurance; it is the quiet, ferocious insistence that we are real, that we are here, and that no law, no label, no border drawn by fearful hands can erase that truth.

Truth-Telling: Language as Resistance

Language has always been a battlefield. It is through language that we are recognised or erased, celebrated or criminalised. For those of us who live at the margins, words are not simply a means of communication; they are the terrain itself. They decide whether we are seen as human or suspect, neighbour or threat. Herrera captures this brutal reality in Post when he writes, “Language is life and death: the way we are talked about, how messaging reaches us.” There is no poetry in this truth. It is the raw physics of survival.

When the state calls you “illegal,” the way is cleared for your exclusion, your harm, your erasure. When they call you “deviant” or “fraudulent,” your existence becomes something that must be corrected or punished. Across the United States today, this mechanism is laid bare: laws that treat the use of an authentic name or gender not as truth-telling, but as deception. In California, for now, I am allowed to be myself—my name, my gender, my language of self-understanding recognised by the structures around me. Yet I know that in Texas, in Florida, and in more than half the country, that same authenticity could be framed as criminal, as fraud. A simple statement of who I am, which here is mundane, there becomes a contested act—a risk.

For me, language has never been just a tool or a performance. As a gestalt language processor, it is the architecture of my memory, my emotion, my being. When I speak German, I do not translate myself into German; I am German, in that moment, in that emotional register, in that social landscape. When I speak English, it is the English of a Westie, shaped by cadence, culture, and memory, not an overlay but a complete shift. These are not code-switches. They are not masks. They are true, living gestalts—each a fully formed way of being that rises to meet the moment.

This is something rarely understood by those who think of language as interchangeable parts. My speech is not a collection of words plugged into sentences; it is the surfacing of whole emotional geographies. Words like wohlig do not surface by calculation; they arrive because they fit — because they carry within them the full, embodied memory of what it means to feel safe, at ease, whole. They rise layered with context, tone, and lived experience, not summoned but recognised, like an old friend appearing at the door. In moments of survival, when the world demands usefulness, compliance, transaction, I might reach for words like nützlich — efficient, precise, detached. But wohlig stands in opposition to all of that. It is the language of comfort, of belonging not because one has earned it, but because one simply is. To speak truly, for me as a gestalt processor, is an act of fidelity to that inner geography. I cannot say what is false. I cannot summon a phrase that betrays its own meaning. Every word carries a weight, a temperature, a memory. To speak wrongly would be to tear the threads that hold me together. And so, in a world that urges performance, that rewards those who bend and blend, I speak instead from the living archive inside me — not as resistance for its own sake, but as an act of staying whole.

Thus, reclaiming language — insisting on using my own name, my own pronouns, my own gestalts — is not an act of preference; it is an act of existence. My name is not preferred. My pronouns are not preferred. They are mine — as intrinsic to me as breath, as memory, as the languages that live within my bones. To speak them is not a request for accommodation but a declaration of reality. It is an act of art, in the deepest sense: to shape a world where I can live without having to lie about who I am. Every truthful word spoken in defiance of a system that demands distortion is a stitch pulled through the torn fabric of selfhood — slow, steady, and stubbornly real.

In a society increasingly hostile to our truths, to stand and speak in our own languages — whether in Gaelic, English, German, Spanish, or the silent grammar of the body — is not merely an act of rebellion. It is an affirmation of being. It is a refusal to allow others to name us into silence, to trap us within scripts written by fear and ignorance. Every time I speak my name, my pronouns, my gestalts — every time I choose words that carry the full weight of who I am — I weave another line into the tapestry of my existence. I do not speak to please. I do not name myself to make myself more palatable. I speak because I am. I claim myself because no one else can. And in doing so, I make visible the truth they would rather not see: I am here. I am real. And I will not be erased.

Expression: Creating After Survival

Survival is not the final victory. It is the beginning of another, more difficult task: expression. It is one thing to live through exile, to endure the daily erosion of being othered and unnamed. It is another thing entirely to gather the fragments of that survival and shape them into something that speaks. Something that endures. Expression is how we transform pain into memory, memory into meaning, meaning into legacy. In a world that would prefer we pass unseen, unheard, undocumented, expression becomes a kind of monument — a refusal to disappear.

Herrera captures this necessity with characteristic clarity in Post, writing, “Artists: Unfinished work can cause anxiety, irritability, fatigue and depression. Art is like a tumor: if we don’t get it out, it can make us sick. That script, novel, painting, song, piece you keep giving a thousand excuses not to finish... it doesn’t have to be great, it doesn’t have to be good, it just has to get done.” It is not polish that matters. It is not perfection. It is the act of giving shape to what lives within us — before it consumes us from the inside out.

For me, this is not an abstract idea. It is daily, visceral, necessary. Every detailed gestalt that forms in my mind — whole, layered, alive — demands to be freed, to be anchored into the world. I cannot carry them all indefinitely. They press against the edges of my being, crowding thought, clouding emotion, until they are released. This is why I write every day. Why there are now over twelve hundred posts on my Substack — thousands upon thousands of words, not polished into perfect sculptures, but given form, given life. Each entry a capsule of complete meaning, stored for a time when it may be needed. Each one a clearing of internal space, a making of room for what still waits to come.

These finished pieces — these gestalts externalised into text, into language — contribute to something deeper than catharsis. They contribute to the feeling I can only describe as wohlig: that rare, precious sense of comfort, ease, and quiet belonging within myself. Each piece completed is not merely an archive for others; it is a reckoning with myself. It is proof that what I carry is real, is worth preserving, is no longer festering unnamed inside me.

Expression is not a luxury. It is not an indulgence. It is a fundamental part of survival’s second act — the act of meaning-making. When the world refuses to memorialise our existence, we build our own memory. We tell our own story, without waiting for permission, without waiting for the perfect moment. The work does not have to be brilliant. It does not have to change the world. It only has to be true — and it must be done.

Final thoughts …

The real victory was never about returning home crowned in glory. For many of us, the notion of return is a myth — home, as it was, no longer exists, or never truly did. The true triumph is in making something new, something enduring, that others can inherit. It is in survival, yes — but more than that, it is in truth-telling as construction, expression as living memory. It is in the stubborn, daily acts of preserving the self against erasure, and in offering those acts as a light to others still finding their way through the dark.

Herrera, in Post, writes, “Our impact is undeniable because our ancestors learned the real victory is a better life for those who come after us.” His words echo far beyond the immediate context of his work. Post rises from a world I have never personally inhabited — a scene, a lineage of grief and resilience, shaped by histories and geographies not my own. Yet the astonishing thing — the profoundly beautiful thing — is that his being done, his offering of this work to the world, reached me across those distances. His truth spoke in a language I could hear, and in reading it, I was able to gather those meanings into my own hands, to weave them into the fabric of my own becoming.

This, too, is heroism: not the conquest of enemies, but the reaching across space and time to connect. To make meaning where meaning could so easily be lost. It is this fragile, luminous network of connection that reactionary forces now seek to destroy — by defunding libraries, by sacking staff who dare to carry books like Post, by silencing autistic, queer, and trans writers like me who dare to be visible, to be unashamed. They understand, even if they will not admit it, that it is not just the bodies they seek to erase — it is the memory, the lineage, the possibility of connection itself.

In such a world, every act of truthful creation becomes an act of profound defiance. To write, to speak, to document, to be done — even when unfinishedness howls in the background — is to build a bridge that might one day carry another across a chasm they cannot yet imagine crossing. It is to leave markers, constellations, signs by which those yet to come might navigate.

The queer hero’s journey is not linear. It does not end in triumphant homecoming. It is circular, communal, unfinished — a constellation of exiles becoming artists becoming ancestors. In Post, Leo Herrera gives shape to this truth, not through a polished narrative arc, but through a tapestry of poems, lectures, prayers, and grudges — fragments offered in the order they were lived, not in the order a tidy story would demand. His posts, first scattered like seeds across the uncertainty of the COVID pandemic years, grew from small gatherings to millions of eyes, from private reflections to protest signs carried in the streets. Collected in print, Post is not only a defiant act of preservation against the erasure of queer narratives by tech giants — it is a testament to the power of unfinished, authentic becoming. The seeming randomness of the collection is not disorienting to those of us on similar journeys. It feels like coming home to a language we have always known: a language of gestures, ruptures, arrivals without fanfare, departures without warning. It is comforting because it is true.

We are, all of us, in the slow, stubborn process of building a world where our truths are not only spoken but remembered. A world where our digital ephemera are not swallowed by forgetting, but anchored in paper, in memory, in community. And in every finished piece, every unhidden word, every connection made across silence and time, we win a victory that cannot be undone.