Hello, sit down, have some tea
I grew up in an immigrant household. My parents were high achievers who wanted better lives for their kids and for themselves so we were born in a country different than their own birth country and we immigrated again in 2000 to a land very far away where they didn’t speak the language and where the lawyers had promised they would be able to work in their career professions but which didn’t quite pan out. In their mid-40s, they were told they needed to go back to university full time because their 20 year work experiences in countries arguably more advanced than this one within their industries, would not be taken into consideration. So they persisted, bought a house, front garden, grew tomatoes and mint and roses in the back, and tried to make the best of it anyways.
I grew up with a good understanding of working hard. We had to excel academically and there were no fantastical ideas floating in our household of being able to ‘do whatever you want’. We were a realistic and pragmatic household. So, if you were a nerd like I was, you were expected to excel, get the highest grades, a good scholarship, and a good university education. I wanted to read all day and travel the world. Our agreement was that I could do whatever I wanted once I graduated university. There is a time and a place for everything, my mother would say. She worked night shift processing payroll for a bank, after managing a bank branch of one of the wealthiest countries in the world. She loved math and finance and, coming from a rural village from a household of women, she taught my sister and I that one of the most important things for a woman was to have her own source of income and to depend on no one but herself. She was right, at least when it came to surviving as a woman in the normative systems, but maybe she was also wrong.
I grew up understanding that logic is prized over emotion. Being endlessly curious and generally fitting the neuro-normative system which is academia, I studied everything in high school and wanted to study everything in university too, and forever more. My father sat me down one day and said, look, you need to pick something. You cant just do everything but you also cant just do anything you like. If you don’t want to be frustrated for the rest of your life, pick something that you’re naturally good at but that you also really enjoy doing, and do that. Whatever you pick will be fine, just keep those things in mind. He was also right, at least when it came to finding a normal job. But maybe he was also wrong.
I understood early on that my value lay in my ability to achieve. Whether academically or socially, it was important to be really good. They taught us a lot of things about kindness and generosity and ethics. But still, if you’re naturally inclined to be a nerd like I was, then be a nerd properly. I’m naturally a lazy night owl who would rather read than anything else in the world but that looked like academia to them and to me at the time. So I studied furiously and got good grades and was the immigrant wet dream of the family. Until I went to graduate school and the program was so hard, and living in a new country alone was so hard, and working two jobs with a full time masters was so hard, and I couldn't make rent, and I was grieving my mother’s death, and I no longer understood god, and my physical system decided it was enough. We broke down, three months from graduation, and failed a course for the first time in my life. I was living on autopilot in complete dissociation and I had no idea what was happening. I was failing academia for the first time at the age of 21 and I was failing at life in general and it doesnt seem like a big deal now but it was a shock at the time. And I was very sick and alone. I called my sister one night, completely broken. I sat on the floor between the bed and the big window ledge, where I had curiously taken up smoking in my underwear in the middle of the night, and I was crying so hard when she picked up that she thought something had happened. I told her I failed a course and I was completely broke, that I had to pick between rent and food and that I was failing at life. She said to me, bless her, that’s it? It’s ok. It doesn't matter. Nothing is worth this much heartbreak! You will re-sit your exam and you will pass and I will send you money for rent and everything will be fine. You scared me, she said, I thought something happened to you.
To me, my perfectly planned life had broken open/fallen apart. I did eventually pass and I did eventually put the pieces back together but it took so long. Somewhere along the way, I stopped trusting my mind and that was the saddest thing. But I also gave up on academia. Not right away, mind you. I initially became a researcher, obsessed with publishing field work and determined to go back to school one day. But eventually, I dropped even that, although being a researcher will always be in my heart as a process. I spent years trying to live instead. Live outside of books and outside of the paradigm and frameworks I learned as a child. I needed to find my value and worth somewhere else. So I've spent the last decade since then doing that. Dissociation between the mind and body put me in a trance in a way I never want to experience again. It happened once more since that time at grad school (a story for another time) but at least I could see it happening. But since then, I've spent most of my time focussed on the processes, methodologies, and journeys of life. Trying to find out more, see what’s underneath it all. It’s been beautiful, chaotic, and playful. It’s also been hard and confusing and sometimes lonely. Unlearning pushes people away but relearning brings in beautiful people and unexpected joy.
Life is a process of unlearning and re-learning now. And I recently re-realized something I always knew. That I love to think. I love learning things and reading things and talking about things and sitting down and just thinking them through. I also love watching the brain process in the background, cross-pollinating, being confused, working through a problem, and sometimes but not always, coming up with something different all together. And then I like to research those ideas and see who has thought what about them before. Processing like making compost. Like writing a poem. Like the way the sunset light hits the tree just right and you think you’ve seen god.
So, in an effort to trust my mind again, I'm saying out loud what I've been scared to say. I’ve been scared of being a nerd again in case it triggers my a-type achievement driven ocd-based anxious ex-personality. I’ve spent a lot of years making friends with the boardroom of my mind. After that initial breakdown, I had to. It was either that, or complete loss and despair. So we made friends. They’re all allowed at the table. Sometimes I close the door on them and let them discuss without me. Other times, I turn up the volume and hear their arguments. But most of all, they know they are all welcome at the table, old and new thoughts and feelings. I try to sit with them and pay attention and listen to their wonderful insanity. It’s all allowed. The only meeting rules we have are love, joy, rest, repeat.
And in that process, I am learning to trust myself and my mind again. And I have so many questions. I’ve always had too many questions. I’m reading everything and thinking about everything and my friends are probably sick of me coming to them with a new pondering every other day. And I do have a unique love for strangers. So here we are dear stranger, friend, lover, here we will cross-pollinate. Maybe on my own, but maybe you’ll join me, in curiosity and play.
My main questions revolve around:
How do we consciously build communities of care and connection?
How can we reconcile work, passions, dreams, and dismantling the current systems of oppression?
What type of new systems do we need to move away from the Empire which currently stands?
How do we define home and love and aloneness? What is our value as a person, as a collective, as a part of the species of the world?
How can we cultivate every aspect of life to be a site of anarchist thinking and processes? What can the process of anarchy bring to each area and aspect of life?
How can we grow in love and care and connection?
Can we accept that there is nothing to achieve?
Can we accept the constantly changing path with curiosity and playfulness?
How can we act more from love and less from fear? Can we connect from closeness rather than attachment?
How do we enter a new wave of unlearning?
How do we build disruptive relationships built on freedom and agreement?
How do I cultivate self as soil - literally to grow food but also: can I maintain a soft landing space for lovers, maintain a sense of nurturing for all beings to come as they are?
How can the learnings from biomimicry, symbiotic relationships, and regenerative practices influence our human species?
And what if being truly present is revolutionary?
Here, there will be book and article summaries, reflections, longer visual-narrative essays, and sharing of some creative practices.
I hope you’ll join me.