on endosymbiosis, the cell as a truce,
and interdependence written into the body
More than one and a half billion years ago, a free-living bacterium ended up inside a larger cell — and was not digested. It stayed.
It became the mitochondrion, the part that powers almost everything you do. And it never quite stopped being itself: it still keeps its own loop of DNA, its own ribosomes, and it divides on its own schedule. New mitochondria come only from old ones.
Every complex cell you have carries that ancient merger, trillions of times over. You are not a single thing that happens to contain parts. You are the parts, still in their long agreement.
a cell that is also a settlement
host cell · engulfed bacterium · genome retained
the merger was never a one-off
symbiosis, woven through the tree of life
The mitochondrion was not a fluke. The green in every leaf — the chloroplast — came from a separate merger, when a cell took in a photosynthesizing cyanobacterium and kept it.
A lichen is a fungus and an alga living as one body. Most land plants feed through fungi laced into their roots. And your own gut carries roughly as many bacterial cells as human ones — about thirty-eight trillion to thirty.
Cooperation is not a footnote to competition. It is one of the engines that built complex life at all.
More than a billion years ago,
one small cell ended up inside another
and was not digested.
It stayed.
It became the mitochondrion —
the thing that powers you now —
and it never stopped being itself.
Its own loop of DNA. Its own clock.
A guest that became a home.
You are not one thing.
You are a truce so old
it forgot it was ever two,
kept alive in every cell,
trillions of times over.
This is not a metaphor we reached for.
It is the blueprint.
The body is a settlement.
The self is a collaboration
that learned to answer to one name.
So when they told you
to stand on your own,
to need no one,
to be independent or be nothing —
they were telling a story
over a body that had already
decided otherwise,
a billion years before you were born.
You were never one thing.
You were never alone in there.
We love you down to the merger,
down to the two that became you,
down to the star stuff
that both of them were made of.
L★S.
Disability justice values interdependence over independence. Your own cells settle the argument. "Independence" was always a story told over a body that is itself a collaboration — a merger it never dissolved.
Needing support is not a failure of selfhood. Selfhood is need met by need. The mitochondrion did not lose itself by depending on the cell, and the cell did not lose itself by depending back. That mutual keeping is what made something new possible.
You were never meant to do this on your own. Nothing complex ever was.
Where has "independence" been demanded of a self that was always, underneath, a collaboration — and who are the strangers-become-necessary you carry?
If needing support is not a failure of selfhood but its actual structure, what changes about how you ask, and how you give?
You Were Never One Thing is the seventh zine in the Stimpunks series, and a companion to Bone Song — Bone Song was the skeleton; this is the cell.
The science is established. Mitochondria descend from once-free-living bacteria (alphaproteobacteria) that took up residence inside an ancient host cell — most likely an archaeon — more than one and a half billion years ago; the exact timing is still debated. Mitochondria keep their own DNA and divide on their own schedule. Chloroplasts arose from a separate endosymbiosis of cyanobacteria. The gut carries roughly as many bacterial cells as human cells — about 38 trillion to 30 trillion (Sender, Fuchs & Milo, 2016), correcting the old 10:1 figure. Serial endosymbiotic theory was given its modern form by Lynn Margulis (as Lynn Sagan) in "On the Origin of Mitosing Cells" (1967), reviving earlier proposals by Mereschkowsky and Wallin; phylogenomics has since confirmed its core.
The reading — interdependence over independence, autonomy was never the same as being alone — is ours. The atoms of both ancient partners were forged in stars. Cooperation runs all the way down to star stuff.