xychelsea (#Chelsea_Manning)
▻https://zyan.scripts.mit.edu/blog/xychelsea
We sit back down and talk for most of two hours without pausing. We talk about life in prison, where she spends 40 hours a week working in a wood shop and somehow finds time to take college correspondence courses, read journals, write a column for The Guardian, and work with lawyers on her appeal. We talk about her growing interest in post-quantum cryptography and the collection of books building up in her cell. We talk about the last time we met and what our mutual friends are up to nowadays. We talk about our complex relationships with family. We talk about my shoes (which she likes a lot) and the kind of music that she used to DJ. We talk about where she would live if she weren’t in prison. We talk about how she find motivation to keep going every day, even though some days her life feels unfair and hopeless. Many times, I am speechlessly awed by her curiosity and perseverance in the face of extremely messed-up, depressing circumstances.
I bring up her recent appeal to reduce her sentence from 35 years to 10 years, and she seems worried that it didn’t receive enough coverage in the press. She hopes that the world hasn’t forgotten about her.
xychelsea part 2 | discrete blogarithm
▻https://zyan.scripts.mit.edu/blog/xychelsea-part-2
Chelsea is a former soldier, a celebrated whistleblower, a role model for millions of people around the world, a pioneer for transgender rights, and a hero who will be remembered forever in American history, but right now she is just a small figure in my arms, scared like the rest of us and wanting nothing more than to go home.