what is alive in me, like really really?
like. have beef but constructively. get to know your whole self and let yourself be wrong. no one expects you to be perfect and everyone is always experiencing discomfort!!!!!
i’m writing this exhausted so allow me. but. i feel very full of things, and most notably that thing is just general unrest with the system. i feel so teenage saying that, but i also feel that what teenagehood and early adulthood have in common is this continual refreshing and awakening to what the system is and what it’s doing. i keep waking up again and going, oh god it’s doing this too? i keep waking up again and going, oh god this word doesn’t communicate what i actually want it to. i keep waking up again and going, oh god our language is built within the walls of world that we have made. so how do we talk about getting out of it?
by system i mean general structures of our socialised lives. capitalism. democracy. patriarchy. white supremacist, colonialist structures, that we have been born into and inherited, and contain all of our other ingrained systems around inter-relating like heteronormativity and mononormativity. and are all overt as well as hidden and pervasive.
anyway anyway anyway. this is all a tangly way to say that i think my answer is community. (and anarchy). but for the answer to be community, i think we need to find a new word. or borrow an old one. all of the definitions are skewed in favour of this system, this world. (and this world is very good at dressing up the mundane at best and destructive at worse in radical, transformative language and pretending it’s doing the work). and, to truly be anti-system, the answers exist outside of it. like: my answer is doing conflict well, but to actually get at what i mean, i have to be clear about what i mean by doing well, and sometimes you do something well by letting it hurt. and in our version, in this world’s version of doing something well, that usually means INNOVATION or GOOD TIMES or EVERYONE IS FINE or NO ONE NOTICED ANYTHING BAD or NO ONE ADMITTED IT FELT BAD.
this is a tangly way to say that i think my answer is Being. noticing acutely what is around you at any one point in time and accepting it. noticing that things are constantly moving and changing and that is okay too. if we can accept that, then GRIEF and THE END and THIS PERSON DID SOMETHING HURTFUL all become a lot less overwhelming. i no longer wish to have control over my emotions. i just wish to acknowledge that when the scary ones are here, that’s part of it. i wish to acknowledge my accountability as a person who has capacity to hurt someone and my autonomy and love in acting to make constructive amends.
these thoughts are very much all bastardised versions of theory that already exists - and, if i was better read, i’d know that these theories come from native practices, indigenous practices, black feminist practices, and so on. so i guess i am writing them here as an act of processing. a written act of hoping that everyone spends time untangling their conflict responses. does the work to notice that lovingly undertaking conflict allows for intimacy and connection. if we can all gently and courageously face the uncomfortable, with all it’s ugly faces, maybe we, on an interpersonal level, can start shaking the foundations of the structures that keep us separate.