Oh I have an immediate existential level issue (doing mostly fine!) that subreddit communities were really helping me work through and now Reddit is down and I am suddenly aware of how little I can speak about my situation without prepping people in my life first to hear it and I am just.... 😐

Had to work very hard to not say the obvious answer here. I'm gonna treat myself with a quick Hades break.

this is far from unique but given my dismantling of self-policing and all the anxiety that i "needed" to work and push through everything I believed was important, i've been extra resistant to dive back into things that i recognize as products of internalized prejudice and hyperindividualism/toxic positivity. i still work and do mutual aid support because i care about my relationships to our communities and the goals of all the groups i associate with, but i can't focus for as long. i drift more. i don't keep track of tasks and goals by associating them with my pain anymore. i come back to the keyboard and feel disgusted and resistant to the whole process because i know that what brought me here, speaking the way i do, using these various toolsets, was a multigenerational colonized mindset that drove me to self-injury, burnout, and (hopefully not permanent) disability. the constant and dynamic physical pain has been a hell of a teacher, a constant constant reminder of what the violence i've done to myself in a bid for self-improvement. at my core i know i did it for reasons i still believe in, but the ideology i adopted (or rather was forced to adopt to survive and try to thrive) could never help me reach my real goals. individualism is no solution for collective societal problems but it is a recipe for deeper alienation and trauma. I cannot unsee it. I feel it in every muscle, in my sometimes twisted guts and strained joints and ligaments. i feel it in the moments of reprieve when things are aligned enough not to hurt too much. i feel it in the calm moments i used to steal but not simply let myself have to be present to our animals and plants and just breathe.

i don't really wanna work today. or any day. capitalist labor has the stench of the very thing that kept me from my own liberation and any lasting joy for so so so long, kept me from accepting my deeper identities, my ancestral histories, so as to gain the kind of power that would supposedly empower me to help others. until i slowed down, it felt like everything i was doing only deepened the wounds i wanted to heal. i'm writing this to get it out of my head for just a second because i need to be able to confront this feeling directly and heal even this, let it breathe, give it a chance to take the space it needs to work through me in ways i never let this or any of my feelings speak to me before. this is my process to become okay with radical self-acceptance and revolutionary action.

i believed for most of my life that i was broken and that the only way out was to turn myself into the kind of person who this society needed to save it from itself and the kind of child/grandchild who could do that and still honor them and their sacrifices, etc etc etc. I believed I needed to sublimate all my unspoken desires for connection, self-acceptance, and a healthy world into my personal ascendance and the rewards that come from that. i sometimes lapse for a bit and panic thinking that i need to somehow personally make all the right choices like Paul Atreides to take on all the right responsibilities to keep the world from collapsing just so i can let myself exist and be loved. reading this after writing it helps me see how absurd the notion is but that feeling was how i coped for so long. how i got here.

buddhist ecosocialist therapy has helped so much. rooting myself in my endless truths in an entire ecosystem of frameworks and contexts has helped me feel real and immutable. researching my people's culture beyond what my family attempted to show me allowed me to see it without their trauma and various kinds of erasure and biases. all these things have made it easier for me to just be in the moment with my loved ones, pets, and friends. it's helped me to stop holding a metaphorical gun to the back of my head to move and do more and stop being "lazy" and not settle for being unskilled or uncharismatic or whatever whatever whatever that's all noise now. it's all just noise. and that's the noise i see buzzing when i get to my desk, and i feel like now is the time to create a new set of terms, a whole new social contract in which i am a stakeholder at the table, a co-creator, a subject, and yet still only a small small small part of the larger whole where my voice matters.

in some ways i'm grateful for the path and the kind of society that forced a person like me to push so hard that i've been able to both become multi-disciplined and educated beyond the horizons of my family's more humble beginnings and to discover the medicine for all my many wounds, but it's also the society that plucked my people from the healthy vibrant lands and original cultures they once had and made us into the image of our colonizers. what i get from this hindsight all depends on the framing and all those framings yield different but inseparable truths. i'm tired. i'm full of life. i'm angry. i'm finally feeling unburdened by intergenerational karma that is still here but no longer pinning me down. i feel responsible for things that are the size and shape of myself. i can break any role i want however i want. i can respond to the world in ways that are more appropriate and far more powerful than what i've been told i could given the power i thought i had. but i never asked for all the suffering that got me here and i certainly don't want a world that's built on an engine of socioeconomic suffering and violence that keeps people from ever feeling alive and safe. healing the world still means changing it but it's not just on me to do it.

i guess all this is to say i am unpacking the bad and trying to find a way to root back into this world as it is, a world that i never asked for but is absolutely still the world that's here. it is neither good nor bad to do so, merely the only thing to be rooted in. it feels like that's really the only thing left for me to do if i wish to express myself and my spirit in response to this world. to no longer feel apart from the universe or like i needed to chase untangible and impossible things to feel like i'm okay. my path is one of flow and acceptance now, and even this rage is a gift that i can learn to love and let go.

Getting used to a new toy. Please forgive the whatever who cares it's 2023

by some bizarre twist of bad consumer product systems, i was indirectly alerted that my brother returned the physical copy of EEAAO I gave him for christmas using the gift receipt, which is absolutely within his right and i support him, but immediately after that his recently renovated basement flooded from all the rain and i know in my heart that's related. i warned him to watch that movie. i told him.

paul atreides, perceiving countless futures and trying to avoid human extinction realizing he has to choose from the tiny handful of paths where he never gets to say "if that's a shy halud i'd hate to see a regular one"