declaredmissing - Tumblr blog

declaredmissing · 9 months ago

Text

Theres a scene in Stanley Kubrick's film, Artificial Intelligence (2001), where the robot child is on a quest to find the blue fairy. Alongside his companion, a stuffed bear he calls Teddy, he takes a submersible to her. The Blue Fairy turns out to be a submerged attraction at Coney Island. She's sunken underwater, paint chipping. He hopes she'll turn him into a real boy.

The first time I ever went to Coney Island, it was a cold February night, my freshman year in college. I thought the blue fairy would be there, and I was disappointed to discover she was only a fiction of a Hollywood film. I thought maybe if I went to Coney Island, everything I longed for would be granted.

In Kubrick's vision, a future New York is depopulated and dystopian. When the robotic boy finally finds the blue fairy in a submersible, the entirety of the city is sunken underwater, with only the skeletal spires of the skyscrapers surfacing the water. The city has been reduced to zero in this apocalyptic vision. This is the future Hollywood cinema has given us. In Kubrick's vision, a thousand years from now, New York City will be lost in a watery grave.

Maybe subconsciously, that's why I link Coney Island to longing; you go on a pilgrimage there, you're rewarded by finding what you've been looking for. On the train to Coney Island, I can always pretend I'm going somewhere that'll change me, I won't be the same when I come back again. Sometimes I go in a dress, with flowers, I make it a special treat to buy myself cotton candy. Sometimes, I go with a bike or a camera. Or a thermos of hot jasmine tea.

At some point living in the city, I learn the history of Coney Island, how it used to be Hollywood's darling.

The neighborhoods of Jamaica Bay and Coney Island are in slowly decaying, crime riddled neighborhoods that would be the first to be swallowed by sea level rise. After hours, off season, surrounded by the projects and failed highrise developments. The first time I went, I didn't even know what the projects were.

There are development plans to build seawalls around Manhattan, instead of recovering the oyster beds. Like trying to control the aftermath according to outdated blueprints.

A friend once told me how he used to punch walls until his knuckles would bleed. He tells me he can't feel anything anymore, he insists it's not depression. They say slaughterhouses desensitize their workers to violence, but I want to know what the opposite of that could be. I've been thinking about refusal; how much I said no, as I formed myself in resistance to the world. but now I want to start saying yes. Someone once asked me what I would do in an apocalypse scenario, if the world went to hell. He told me how he often imagined himself being the last man standing. I want to tell him, we’re already here. It’s the place we’re all running toward whether we know it or not. But I refuse apocalyptic scenarios of sinking islands. No more saltwater sparrows drowning from the rising tides.

In the city, there's so much noise and chaos competing that it crowds out my inner voice. There's no space for me to wander in my mind. The city gets to be too much for me, unforgiving in its dump of stimulus, sometimes it excites me but other times I can't keep up. Sometimes, the city feels cruel, all I can think of is the wealth stored in the empty apartment condos. Sometimes the city becomes too much, and I need to head to the wilderness again, or as close as I can get. I want to be uncivilized, if to be civilized means pacing within the cruel confines of this city. But by the sea, I have room to exist. By the ocean, boundaries fall apart. I'm not so much a bounded entity. By the sea, I realize that I have much to say, that I want to say yes to.

I frequently have these dreams of walls closing in on me, how there’s no safe place for me to retreat to. When I’m awake, I always notice wings. Birds circling against skyscrapers. Crumpled feathers and smashed talons against a sidewalk grate. In the city, the buildings, tall and dark and glittering, threaten to cave in and close in on me, pressing in close enough that I run down the avenues and my fingertips brush their scorching metal. The skyscrapers are why the city burns in the summer. The concrete aids and abets. The waterways of this city are choked and polluted. This city, island archipelago, labyrinths of twisting labyrinths and narrow streets. I’m always searching for something outside of Manhattan, in pursuit of following the forgotten rivers and streams of the city. Always needing some kind of wilderness for my heart to beat, something warm and living to fill this present urban void. I still have my feral edges, always searching for a second route and alternate tunnels.

In Coney Island, the walls fall away. The ocean is always colder and cooler.

Back in Kansas, I lived near a creek that ran through my suburbs, and it was beloved to me. I remember dragging a date along so I could dip pH strips in the water and test for pollution (very unscientifically). I suppose old obsessions never die, or they just mutate into different manifestations. I want to find a way to develop a relationship to the waterways of the city.

I've gone to Coney Island enough times now that I can make the visual distinctions between the NQ/BDF trains. The F train, where I made my escape. The NQ have the better seats, the better view. The endearingly awkward style of the older models of the N train. The N train goes through the tunnel of green. The BDF pass the cemetery and the recycling plant. I go just to be alone on the trains, but also to feel that I'm going somewhere without having to do anything at all. Or maybe I go on the trains because they have windows that look out into the city. I've been to Coney Island during a thunderstorm. Been there after-hours. By myself. When it's peak crowded, and when it's deserted of all souls. Been there with the happy families, the smell of funnel cake and men’s cologne and barbecue and the rocky, salty, fishy smell of the ocean. Damp sand. A beach of broken bits of shell and cigarette stubs and kelp. Coney Island is the place my heart returns to. I love it in all its seasons; crowded with people; music pounding from boom box soundspeakers, or when it's closed in the fall and winter, and it's barren and desolate and then it makes me think of New York City underwater. When I look up, sea birds circling the air, and I think, the albatross has the largest wingspan of all the birds on earth.

A wasteland, a ruin, the oceanic connecting me to everywhere else in the world, because nowhere else in this city do I sense this – a public place, a world place, but also an earth place. Where I can be the closest to the birds circling in the sky. Sometimes, I think of the locked churches in the city I used to break into, the pigeons housed there. This city takes from you, pride and dignity and hope until you no longer exist. I want to know what I'm fighting for. I want to know I'm not alone.

I used to go to Coney Island because–I don't know. But when I was lonely, I would hope to be seen. But now, I feel healed. It feels less like an escape than it is a place I can restore myself. The ocean is the right kind of silence. The sea. The sun. The older outskirts of a young city. A wet silence, but full of so much life. I forget sometimes that the air can smell clear like this, salt and sand and breeze. The smell of beach sky water. I'm here right now, and I'm thinking that I'd like to go everyday.

And I love the colors–silver gray, metallic steel reflection, always shifting. And then the umbrellas along the beach, blossoming like synthetic flowers. Coney Island is beautiful in its cloudy days–the reflective steel surfaces of Miya Ando. the ocean as television; perspective is subjective, fluid–upon contemplation and action, the ocean reveals itself. The ocean requires, and rewards attention. The ocean as a space for reflection. If I look long enough at the ocean's horizon as the light changes, then I think of infinite infinities. Beyond the event horizon, we cannot know. I can feel the ancientness of the earth here. Shafts of light from the clouds. I wish I had a vocabulary for the colors–sea and sky are the color of subterfuge, mirage, airplanes skimming the tops of clouds. I come here to observe the flight patterns of birds. This blue is the color of how a lighthouse feels. From below, airplanes and birds look the same. Are shaped the same. To dust we came from, to dust we shall return. No cloud people in the sky above me; at least, not as I imagined. There’s no more cloud people from the tops of planes. On the tops of airplanes, I think of albatrosses. The sky people here are the birds, my sisters and brothers, my ancestors, the color light and dusk and shadow. The ocean, the water, is my favorite color.

When I was younger, I had a phase where I was obsessed with Atlantis. And when I was a child, I used to imagine people lived in the sky, a ancient and playful people with answers and ancient secrets. Maybe Atlantis because islands sink under the sea. One of my friends, with the certainty of a doomsday prophet, once told me that the crest of a wave is a harbringer of catastrophe. The identity of the Philippine Islands is one forged from resistance. Atlantis met its fall from hubris, from greed, as a colonial empire. When I go to the ocean, I hope I can rest the flowers down with my ancestors; I pretend the ocean will take it to them. Even as a lonely metaphor. But when I drop the flowers in the ocean, they return, and a little girl picks them up further down the shore.

A roommate told me that the air currents are connected–that what happens in the ocean and Manhattan also led to our Bushwick/Ocean Hill apartment. Manhattan, New York City, is also an island archipelago like the Philippines. Not far from this beach is the former State Island Warehouse in Port Richmond, formerly used to store high-grade Belgian Congo uranium ore destined for the Manhattan Project. Uranium had spilled there once, and dangerous contamination confirmed in 2008. In Sellafield, a nuclear site in England, seagulls have been known to bathe in the toxic pools.

In the stomachs of seabirds, plastics with high levels of toxic metals and chemicals accumulating-cadmium, lead, mercury, chromium, silver. The larger pieces rupture or block the internal organs of these birds. Seabirds eat plastic, or feed it to their chicks. Beached birds, found with plastic in their stomach. Albatrosses feed plastic to their chicks, mistaking them for fish eggs. Their stomachs opened, to reveal blockages of plastic.

The oil spills–jet fuels, fossil fuel, it comes back to us. The albatross is the secret of making a heaven on earth. The albatross was once a bird without legs, that had no other purpose than to fly and fly. But now, the albatross is a bird that can touch down. It is a bird that conceded to gravity. In the ocean, this is who I was before I became what the world told me to be.

Someone once told me she became an anthropologist of animal relations because her friend told her a story in passing, of a killer whale that carried her dead calf on her back for three weeks along the coast. I think of this when I see ants on the board walk, and try to set my feet down gently when I get up from the bench. Once when I was walking under a bridge in Manhattan, my friend and I saw a baby pigeon in the middle of the sidewalk, fallen out of her nest. Moving to this city has been a baptism of learning how capable the world is of both cruelty and kindness.

I read somewhere once that when sea turtles hatch, many of them die crossing the highways, drawn by the city lights. How peregrines die by crashing into skyscraper windows. Like sea turtles crawling towards the lights of the highways, peregrines smashing into the windows of skyscrapers, we’re wild things hurtling to the edge of the cliff. When I look at skyscrapers, I think of birds flying into crystallized air. Once, someone told me there used to be fireflies where he lived in New Jersey but there was a summer they disappeared and they didn't come back.

When the evening starts to close the day, I think of how I saw fireflies in the park this summer, how I coaxed one onto my finger and it glowed just before it flew away. I think of how when the locals cleaned up Versova beach, hundreds of thousands of sea turtles hatched for the first time in decades.

Hospitality. Grace. Stillness. Flight. There things that I've lost that I'm hoping the ocean will wash up and return to me. I think of light closing the day, a darkening gradient, the curve of the earth that you cannot see past when you're on an airplane. The limits to what we could ever know or see or understand. Beneath my feet, shells, cigarette stubs, earth, but not the bones of my ancestors. What other world will this ocean wash up? Everything is possible. A whale calf carcass, or kelp, or glass bottles, or maybe another world. I imagine she would be small, fragile, softly breathing. Maybe she'll come unannounced from the sky or the sea in the shape of a firefly, or an albatross, or a sea turtle. From dusk we came from, to dusk we shall return.

There is a Tagalog creation myth of how the Philippine islands were created. It begins with a bird, flying and searching for a place to land. There was nothing beneath her, only ocean.

I won't tell you how the story ends. But it begins with flight.

When the albatross wings in the air tens of thousands of feet in the sky, I wonder if she looks down and thinks, this world, so bright and sharp and gorgeous. Does she see the shimmering gold veins of cities sprawling across patchwork of forest and river, does she think, this earth I love? When she wings even higher, can she see the tops of clouds? This land, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, is made of broken cities and cell like apartments. I wonder what the word is, for the opposite of futility.

This language, of color and birds and sea and sky, gives shape to what I believe in.

An airplane born me from an archipelago to a landlocked state to another archipelago. In Philippine mythology, the islands were birthed from a bird rising in flight.

The shape of the airplanes was inspired by the aerodynamics of birds. Birds are known to disable planes by flying into the engines and shutting them down. These bird strikes, airborn collisions with birds, can be deadly. Jamaica Bay, built on a landfill. JFK Airport, built on Jamaica Bay, and making modifications to the surrounding habit to discourage birds from nesting, to 'reduce the chances of bird strikes', through resorting to "lethal control" and killing nuisance birds. In this world, birds are caught in the turbines of airplanes, propellers suck them in. Pilots only see the damage after the flight. The air currents are the veins of the world, the migration of birds is the blood pulsing through and revealing the circulation of what we extract from the earth.

Returning home from Coney Island with sand in my shoes. An old lady on the beach, looking at me as I'm setting my flowers down in the waves. I am alone, and unafraid. On the train ride home, I try to sit on the side that faces Luna Park and the ocean. A deepening, purple sky. A wilting flower bouquet in my hands, like a cluster of flames. Feeling certainty over the direction of my life, like a red thread spooling out from me. No certainty where it’s headed, but steady, unfolding, inevitable. Fate not to be resisted. Feet, don't fail me now. I take the bobby pins out of my hair as I take the boardwalk back to the station, and I wonder what the ideal way to be good in this world would be, and how maybe I'm getting closer to it.

There’s no more cloud people from the tops of planes. On the tops of airplanes, I think of albatrosses.

Mom, I’ll write you into a paradise.

I want my skin to break open, I want to solar flare into a bird. I want to stop making sense to anyone. dazzled by industrial smooth textures of steel and metal, all glittering and seductive in the rain, with their hyper light reflections. When my cat chirps when I come home, dusty and scratchy like she hasn’t made a sound in months, is that a tiny love letter?

I always want to take the ferris wheel at Luna Park. I never do. I think half of me will disappear and go elsewhere, and I’m kind of scared.

In a steel city, we can still take trains to the ocean. Maybe the end of the world is a wave that accumulates in catastrophe. Airwaves catch the sound of fighter jets, but also the heartbeats of seagulls. What is the form of the ocean? A catastrophe. What is the form of a bird? Air currents and ocean currents; these are organic networks that constitute life. What is the human relationship to all those sentient beings that came before, and those yet to be born?

Birds & myth; symbolic and ritualized; speaking to the cycle of life. As metaphysical and spiritual forms; connect them to the physical body and the inherent biology that unites all living beings during passage through this world and space. The anatomy of the language of birds. The anatomy of my body shares the same vocabulary of birds. Skyward and heavenbound. Jamaica Bay, stubborn marshlands that refuse to disappear, that buffer the rising waters. It's in these outskirts of the city, the marginal borders where the city ends, in the outer boundaries that leak into the horizon of water, where something else begins.

Maybe a world with two moons, and cherry cola skies and upside down trees. You return and you aren’t the same again. Just like how my ancestors believed in fairytales, trusting themselves to the elemental of their pilgrimages. Releasing flowers into the ocean, to honor the spirits of my ancestors.

I think of light closing the day, a darkening gradient, the curve of the earth when you're on the airplane that you cannot see past. The limits to what we could ever know or see or understand.

Going to the ocean as transformative, reorienting my way of being in the world, an alchemic process. Skyscrapers and airplanes, solid blocks of glass, passing through, blocking, mirroring, obfuscating, clouds and rain and smoke. Maybe this essay is about unifying boundaries, about drawing strength from the stillness of being. How beauty can still be synonymous with hard edges and cutting deeply. A bird's flight juxtaposed with airplane turbines, the free-standing sculptures we call skyscrapers. The blades of jet engines shredding the wings of birds.

Feathers as aspiration and longing; of power, of the ability to transcend material reality. /

in the foreground of a painting; dark water. an edge, a limit, to what can be ordered, and that around the edge, reflections and illusions are seeping.

light seems like water when it makes us aware of the flow of time / the aspects of reality that by their nature defy visual representation / the adequacy of visual evidence? how to refer to events outside the room.

Maybe the ocean is a crest of atoms, infinite infinities, not a straight story sequentially unfolding in time. The wave as an infinitely small part of a straight line. An infinitely small part of an infinite number of lines. Events and possibilities unfolding simultaneously. In this heartbeat, laughter warms the concrete streets beneath us. In Tokyo, lovers share secrets in neon hotel rooms. On another coast, fireflies illuminate a dark mountain. Gravitational waves shudder through earth. In the deep blue, whales call to their calves. Everywhere in undisclosed points, contact between beings. Invisible stars gathering against violet and the flickering apartment windows behind you like flames that never go out. Us, luminous animals drawing close. Our hands, reaching towards each other. This moment, a little piece of light I later hold up to the sun; it refracts, but there’s always a side I cannot see.

I want to return to the beginning. Let’s imagine the timelines diffusing, the ways things could have been. Let’s not think of how it’s too late for us to start again. Let’s think of darker universes.

I took a class last semester called 'Human Anatomy and Movement."

I threw a grenade and I followed that light to the end of the tunnel, not knowing where it would take me but knowing what I wanted to live. and I don’t know where I’m going but I’ve fallen asleep on the night train because some journeys are made alone and I don’t know where I am but when I’m looking out the airplane window on the way home from Toronto and the sky is rose gold I think, I’m some measure of miles from the place I need to be. i’m at peace because I’ve realized what it means for kindness to be strength, and strength to be kindness.

garbage and birds

how birds fly

sellafield

birds hit planes everyday

staten island toxic site

NOOOO

By the ocean, I become who I was before I became what the world told me to be. Us, luminous animals drawing close. This moment, a little piece of light I later hold up to the sun; it refracts, but there’s always a side I cannot see. From dusk we came from, to dusk we shall return.

I won't tell you how the story ends. But it begins with flight.

They say slaughterhouses desensitize their workers to violence, but I want to know what the opposite of that could be.

I think of how the albatross has the largest wingspan of all the birds on earth, so they can glide on the air currents for hundreds of miles at a time.

When I was a child, I used to imagine people lived in the sky, and I called them the cloud people. I imagined that when they looked down below, they were filled with wonder at what they saw. When I sit on airplanes now, I look at the tops of clouds and I wonder what the cloud people see.

There is a Tagalog creation myth of how the Philippine islands were created. It begins with a bird, flying and searching for a place to land. There was nothing beneath her, only ocean.

It's said that the story of Plato's Atlantis was a warning, that it met its fall from hubris, from greed, as a colonial empire. One of my friends once told me, with the certainty of a doomsday prophet, that the crest of a wave is a harbringer of catastrophe. Or maybe the wave is an infinitely small part of an infinite number of lines, infinite moments radiating out simultaneously.

Everywhere in undisclosed points, contact between beings.

Maybe the end of the world is a wave that accumulates in catastrophe, or maybe the ocean is a crest of atoms, infinite infinities, stories unfolding simultaneously and out of sequence.

0 notes

declaredmissing · 2 years ago

Text

you can't find the sun in a locked room; in this blinding absence of light

I’ve been wanting to write for a while, but I’ve been struggling to piece fragments of my thoughts into something coherent. I’ve been at the crossroads of a difficult decision in the last month, and it was hard to write in the midst of feeling that I need to completely re-evaluate beliefs and illusions I had been clinging on to.

But there are some things I’ve been thinking about lately, that I want to share. I’ve been working my way through a few books, some that I’m reading for the first time, some that I’m returning to and re-reading for comfort: Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Friere, Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine, Walking with the Comrades by Arundhati Roy, Dear Meg: Advice on Life, Love, and the Struggle, Politics in Command: A Taxonomy of Economism by J. Moufawad-Paul, A Prayer for the Crown-Shy by Becky Chambers, and Freedom is a Constant Struggle by Angela Davis.

I’ve been thinking lately of a passage from Pedagogy of the Oppressed, where Friere wrote, “The oppressed suffer from the duality which has established itself in their innermost being. They discover that without freedom they cannot exist authentically. Yet, although they desire authentic existence, they fear it. They are at once and at the same time themselves and the oppressor whose consciousness they have internalized.” I’ve been thinking of this especially next to a quote by Ghassan Kanafani, a Palestinian writer formerly part of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine: “You can’t find the sun in a locked room”.

What keeps me hopeful and resolved to leave my current situation is thinking of what the sun looks like – that I could be happy, and that happiness does not look like this.

I have finally decided that I need to get out. Slowly, I’ve been trying to dismantle entire beliefs and illusions. I’m still struggling to see things clearly, to see through his words that had over time been lodged inside me so deeply I couldn’t discern what was me and what must be scraped out. What’s right and wrong, what’s a normal way to treat a person, if I’m overreacting or being overly sensitive – I didn’t know anymore. I didn’t know why I still felt so distressed and unhappy and anxious around him, when he had been so nice to me lately.

My mother tells me, flee him. It was hard to resolve to make that choice, for a long time. I so desperately want to stay in “stability”, not wanting to disrupt and upheave my life, but that is precisely what keeps people clinging to ultimately oppressive relationships, situations, and systems.

In the numerous times I tried to walk away, I was told that I was giving up. That I was a coward. That I was running away. That I didn’t know what love was. That I wasn’t willing to do the work like he was. I stayed because those words reached me at my deepest insecurity: I wanted to be brave in love. I didn’t want to run away. I let him define for me what it means to love. Over time, I stopped remembering why it was worth leaving. He told me, “you think the grass is greener on the other side?” He told me, “You think it’s better in another relationship, with another person? All relationships have their problems.” I started to feel like I needed to stay and try harder because he told me that “love is not easy” and this is what “the work” supposedly looked like, and I believed him instead of trusting my gut feeling that this is not, in fact, what work in love looks like.

I reached out to people to ask them if what I was experiencing was normal or okay. One of them told me, I know it’s painful to walk away, but you deserve to be happy, and you would be so much lighter feeling free.

Instead of thinking of what it could feel like to be free, I thought, what if he really changed this time? I thought, What he did wasn’t that bad. I’ll wait to see if it gets worse. But even as I write this I remember when I told my friend months ago, “I’ll wait and see if it gets worse,” and she said, “Is what he did already not bad enough? What would it take?” When she said that, I realized that I was adjusting what was acceptable.

I have been struggling to find the courage and resolve to choose freedom when it would also mean uprooting so much about my current life. I would think, is my situation really that bad enough to make that risk?

I called my mom, telling her my fear. She talked to me for hours, talking me through every anxiety and hesitation I had. She told me he broke my spirit. That she noticed something was wrong even in the few months we had first started dating. That I had already lost my spark, that something was missing when she would talk to me. She told me, repeatedly, that despite all the work I do fighting for a cause and for a better world, in my own personal life I am being subjected to this. She tells me that I am in a prison, that he has drawn me into it, into the small world of his.

I forgot that a fundamental part of caring for myself is recovering my voice, my ability to write the world for myself. To clearly define my reality. All this time, I had been letting him define what it means to be brave, what it means to love. In times like these when I feel stripped of language and my ability to articulate myself, or to even think of myself, I remember The Audre Lorde Questionnaire to Oneself:

What are the words you do not have yet? [Or, “for what do you not have words, yet?”]

What do you need to say? [List as many things as necessary]

“What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?” [List as many as necessary today. Then write a new list tomorrow. And the day after.]

If we have been “socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition”, ask yourself: “What’s the worst that could happen to me if I tell this truth?” [So, answer this today. And every day.]*

This weekend, I have been trying to recover my reality. I read quotes I have collected on a document, reminding myself what is important to me and what my values look like in practice. I try to reach out to people that make me feel like me, and that remind me better ways of being in the world, of what it’s like to be a good friend. I’m rereading and highlighting sentences from Dear Meg. I write in my favorite journal, allowing myself to vent my pain, but also making an effort to write down the things I enjoy and that I’m looking forward to. I’m looking forward to seeing my family in Christmas; to my muay thai classes; to write and make art and become more me when I am out of this current situation.

I also reach for other small things to comfort myself. A jasmine and ylang ylang candle, the warmth of a paper lantern, attempts to sketch and paint again and to see the world in layers of color. Wrapping a scarf with a mosaic of colors – threads of coral, sand, and cool sea greens – around my neck. Carrying a highlighter with me and my pale lavender journal at all times, reminding myself that what I see and notice and feel is worth putting down on paper. Sending postcards and letters in the mail to people I love, walking to the library and putting books on hold, reading the books people lent me. Reading books that remind me of who I am and what I’m interested in and enjoy learning.

Last month, I finished reading This Blinding Absence of Light, a narrative fiction about the experience of prisoners in concentration camps in Morocco. I thought maybe it could tell me something about how to endure the darkest circumstances; but the story told me nothing about resilience or hope, only what happens to the human spirit when you realize there is no possibility of getting out.

For anyone reading this I want to ask – what is it that makes you brave, and that gives you courage? What do you reach for to pull yourself out in your lowest moments?

I told someone else how hard it was to leave this neighborhood that I loved so much, especially the river that gave me so much grounding when I felt like I had nowhere else to go. She said to me that was a beautiful thing, the ability to love something so much and find beauty no matter where I go even in painful moments like these. And that makes me think – I could be okay no matter what happens to me, no matter where I go, if I am able to do this.

I hope when I feel conflicted again, I can read this and remember it is worth struggling for the choice to feel free on all fronts. I also want to return to this when I feel tempted to isolate myself and withdraw from other people; to remind myself in the moments I most doubt myself and my own reality, any courage I have comes from remembering the words of the people who love me.

0 notes

declaredmissing · 2 years ago

Text

draft one leaving my ridgewood living alone era

I finally moved out of the first apartment I lived in after college, after having lived in it for almost two full years.

It was the apartment that saw me through my first full time job, for 1.5 relationships, and the adoption of my cat Suki. It was here where I learned to write professional emails and sort out my bills and apply for a credit card and to cook without a microwave and oven and where I grew up as a woman in her early 20s.

Here, the novelty and excitement of coming home to an apartment of my own. Fantasies that this was where I’d become the woman my 16 year old self dreamed of. The thrill of turning the key in the lock and knowing this was an entire space of my own to return to dance, to slide around the hardwood floor in my socks, to shadowbox, to arrange my furniture just as I pleased, to eat on the floor without anyone questioning me. But living alone also made me weird, allowed me to grow and warp into a feral antisocial creature. There were stretches of time where I could disappear and not tell anyone, where I would sleep in and no one would know. The one time I was sick and had to stumble into the kitchen to somehow feed myself, I had never felt more alone. I wanted the noise of living with someone else, not the resounding silence. The comfort of knowing someone was in the next room if I wanted to share or rant about something silly.

I’m moving out now, from familiar routines and sidewalk landscapes and the peculiar ergonomics specific to that apartment. A bedroom I never finished decorating and that looked half-lived in because of this persistent feeling I would move out someday. The distance from the door to the living room. The windows that face north east. Balancing my kitchen utensils and cutting boards on a small sliver of counter space and always breaking dishes because there was never enough room. The pigeons that would coo from outside the window facing the inside shaft. The resident landlady that would pop out at any noise like a perpetual watchdog. The habits of drawing back the curtains in the morning, then closing them in the evening so the neighbors couldn’t see me. I’m a 5 minute walk from the community library shelf, from the asian grocery store I recently discovered, from nomad cafe and cute cat cafe and just around the corner from norma’s. All these ordinary things I had taken for granted in the fabric of my daily life.

This is the end of coming home to the same four walls, the same view from the window, the same lighting and arrangement of temporary furniture, the rooms that held the person I was in my early 20s.

Instead of moving everything all at once, I decided to painfully carry my things to my new apartment ten minutes away. I wanted to slow down and take my time to decide what to take with me into my new life – to take stock of my archive of items accumulated from my post-Kansas life. Slowly, I give away the furniture I formed attachments and memories to. A dresser I hated, because I always thought I’d move soon. The wooden side table that Mikhail had found on the curb. The mattress and bedframe I had ubered from Midtown and that would put me in tears to dismantle and put back together.

And so I’m exiting a very specific chapter of my life, though I haven’t really been able to come to terms of everything that had happened to me – that I had happened to – since moving into this apartment and starting my post college life.

The nagging, persistent feeling, that beyond the particular architecture and memories I attached to the neighborhood, beyond the familiar streets, there was something more I was closing this chapter to.

My years in that apartment represented the peak of everything my 17 year old self had wanted back when I was applying to colleges and dreaming of saving the world and getting the hell out of Kansas. Living on my own in a beautiful apartment in New York City, on my way to becoming a lawyer, making my parents proud.

But it was also in the same apartment where I came to a reckoning with what really mattered in my life.

I was a lonely girl, living in that apartment at 23. After my breakup, I was prepared for a difficult year of being lonely and alone. But I was also grateful for the gift of solitude to form myself privately. I was committed to a year of choosing to be feral. Red socks, combat boots, my military jacket with the left pocket coming undone at the seams and virtually unable to hold anything, clomping and stomping around in mismatched attire. I was somewhere between rescue and recovery, trying to learn how to compose songs again, how to have a little more faith in my ability to figure things out on my own. While living at that apartment, I joined a clumsy quiltwork temporary band of not-musicians, and no one wanted to sing so I became the singer, and I would stitch together lyrics on loose leaves of notebook paper. Lyrics about testimony, dynasty, sailors reeling in islands with nets and seabirds flying back home on the trade winds, bearing witness and mending copper seams.

It was a time of struggling to retain a sense of fully existing in the world again. My job at the law firm had chopped up and decimated my sense of self. I had forced myself to repress the pain of being in that job, and as a result, I wasn’t able to feel anything else either. I tried to make music with the violin and piano and my rusty voice, reading writers dear to me, writing for myself, writing my opinions forming opinions on art and movies and books I experienced. I tried to practice compassion and patience, pursuing my research interests, to finding languages to disappear in and find freedom through. Learning to create private and beautiful moments of solitude, where I exist to no one but myself. Slowly, enjoying just existing is what let me start to heal. Slowly, to wrestle freedom and a lightness of being for myself.

And at the end of all that self reflection, it leads me with the hard questions. To confront all that I had been turning away from.

All for what – because I want to connect with others. I don’t want to be alone.

To find out what, exactly, about my life? To recover my ability to love.

“The most important thing a human being can learn is how to be a human being, is how to be. How to be with what there is. How to be when emotions arise, how to be with those emotions. When thoughts arise, how to be with those thoughts and recognise that you’re not your thoughts and you’re not your emotions. … and you work on yourself and you create a space in your life so that when you’re engaging with another human being you can actually be with them exactly how they are, not have an agenda, not have resentment, not have resistance, not have anxiety, not be reactive.” — Gabor Maté, The Biology of Loss and Recovery

… just stood there in the living room looking around at all I’ve collected— taking inventory of what’s gotten in without invitation and what I won’t let leave.

— Ryann Stevenson, from “HOST,” Human Resources

0 notes

declaredmissing · 2 years ago

Text

wanting someone older and wiser to save me

There was a night I fell asleep crying and heard my sister’s voice in my head, “it’ll be okay, little moon.” I realized how much I missed the best friend I used to have in my sister. That relationship is lost, and I don’t know how to recover it or where to go from there. When I find myself missing ‘my sister’, I wonder if I’m really longing for an older figure to reassure me that everything would be alright. I don’t know how to be that person for myself. There’s a person I’m afraid of becoming, and I don’t know why.

I dreamed last summer of a human rights lawyer walking into the house with the broken refugee family, taking the little girl away and saving her when the girl was about to jump. How explicitly my subconscious was telling me I long for a mother, for a hero, for some magic person to provide me unconditional love and protection and kindness. A dream showing me how I wanted to rescue others before myself. I wanted someone else to rescue me, because I didn’t trust myself to be there for me.

There’s a little girl, standing at the edge of a window, about to jump in the pool, and she wants someone older and wiser and kind to sweep in and save her. She’s my daughter, and she’s me, and she’s the little girl inside my mother too, inside probably every woman I’ve ever known.

Self-destruction used to be the only language I knew when I needed help. In times I felt the most rage, I felt driven to prove I was more willing to destroy myself and go further than anyone else would. Dumping my journals and writing in the trash can, letter opener to my skin, to my paintings. Ending friendships, cutting my ties to the world. Erasing myself was the only way I felt I could exert control in a life where I otherwise felt helpless. It was my attempt to speak, to beg people to see that I wasn’t okay, to ask them to care, but in a manifested in a cry for help that didn’t speak at all. I wanted someone to stop me. To tell me I was too valuable to be lost. But there’s no wiser or older figure who’s going to sweep in and reassure me of my value. Realizing that left me with a deep and aching loneliness, but instead of turning others, I decided to contain the pain, and this reduced me to being isolated and weaker. I searched for security by deciding to enter a ‘men’s world’; safety in self control and self restraint.

In response to my own fear, I decided to develop a tough skin to protect myself. I found myself looking up to fictional figures with traditional masculine traits – self control, determination, cool, emotional discipline, and mastery. Self-sufficient, independent women, who are fucked over in many ways but refused to be helpless. Alienated with no support system, but plenty of rage to fuel them. Aimee, Lisbeth Salander, Aomame, Lara Croft. They had a voice, and they had power, even if it was in a sense dressing over deeper wounds, to protect the softer parts of their underbelly. I thought rescuing myself meant being untouchable. Being able to defend myself. To not be scared anymore. I wanted to be both weapon and armor itself. The kind of girl who could walk home alone at night and have nothing to be afraid of.

Emma Berquist in her article True Crime Is Rotting Our Brains observed, “So many true crime shows advise women to trust their instincts, but how can we trust instincts that have been hijacked by induced anxiety?” She worried that being primed to read danger in innocent situations “are not sensible reactions, they are the thoughts of someone who has been deeply traumatized.” I wonder how much of my instincts for survival are led by misreading the world. Defaulting to believing this world is a dangerous place, and in my body, I am not safe here. I often think of the police officer I dated, who was alert and guarded and could sense in every gesture or open space, the potential for danger. I related to him. I understood him. I wanted to become what he did in his response to fear.

Much of the criticism against women’s self-defense are objecting to how women must prime themselves to signals of danger. How we must be the ones to train and protect ourselves, instead of questioning society and demanding that society as a whole must become a safer place. It skews our perception of danger.

We are primed with our hands holding our keys in the the way that alert, vulnerable women do walking alone at night.

Many of my heroines are driven by anger, of experiencing women in their lives being abducted or murdered. Who they become is from the effect of these stories on their psyche.

Our very culture skews crime and violence to embed fear within us. I’ve been thinking of other insiduous ways it does this, encouraging us to mistrust each other, read danger into each other, in the name of encouraging safety, being alert. As a smokescreen to distract us from the deeper causes of violence. Heightened fear became the underlying landscape driving me to muay thai, combat sports, self defense. When I walk alone at night, every stranger could potentially whip out a knife. They warn of this in kali, demonstrating how casually one could stab you, as if it were a normal thing to expect. If, according to Berquist, “crime stories are a fundamentally conservative way of looking at the world,” what would a radical way of looking be? What would be the opposite of ‘fear-stoking propaganda’? What would it mean to practice self-defense as a way of truly finding power in oneself, rather than it being a reactive way of seeking power, like a man buying a gun?

I’ve been thinking about it what it means to take agency for my own life. There are days I feel like I’m just barely threading myself together; that I’m only just holding on to the strands that bind me. I think of how I’ve grown, since I first commuted to Brooklyn to learn Muay Thai, wrapping my hands on the train. Looking for courage. Looking for armor. Combat sports has become my lifeline when I don’t know what else to do with myself. It’s hard earned confidence. Focusing on the bag is a way of channeling my anxiety to a certain outcome–I know how to practice. I know that this isn’t wasted effort. The concentration and energy feel productive. There’s no confusion. Each strike is its own reward.

I found some kind of fulfillment and reward through the repetition of kicking a bag. Driven to perfect my roundhouse kick, fueled by the thrill of a perfectly executed kick. I learned to build habits and structure through long term persistence and self-forgiveness. It was the best thing I did for myself at that time in my life where I was going through a personal crisis.

I found survival in the drive to keep working, with a laser-like intensity, on something even after I’ve lost immediate interest. Learning what rules I do want to form for myself. Reward in my tenacity in itself; not to be recognized or to feel safer, but in the sheer joy of seeing myself improve. Survival in discovering my ability to stick with something even when it was hard.

Turning to martial arts and starting to fully grasp just how powerful I can be – how overwhelming it is to lean into something new, to be bad, to persist–and then to be truly whole-heartedly empowered by the results. Training myself to not be disappointed so easily by my failure or clumsiness, at how my body simply did not know yet. To not feel frustrated that I was getting it wrong, or that it wasn’t coming together or feeling easy yet. Enduring hardships and learning the grace to bear them well.

Finding agency through martial arts hasn’t solved my life problems, and it doesn’t make the world objectively less dangerous.

Now, I just want to live from joy and wonder; to run towards, not from.

But with tenderness and infinite patience, I’ve learned, along the way, that no one else is going to do it for me. It’s a hard lesson to accept. I grew armor as a kid, learning to rely on myself, but at heart, hoping someday someone would care for me. I held on to that fantasy, and my anger came from the injustice of feeling that was withheld from me. I struggle to accept that no one else is going to tell me the words that I want to hear, but it’s hard for me to feel like it’s okay to say those things to myself. But I hope to let go, to accept with grace that my belief in myself should not be dependent on others believing in me. There will be people who love me, who treat me kindly, generously, but if I’m able to unfailingly protect myself–be sacred to myself, treat myself like I would be my own daughter–then I’ll never be breakable.

focus on the evolution in my perception of/relationship to martial arts.

The moment I decided to box was when I watched Tomb Raider, and Vikander, the underdog, was hurling herself at her opponent and refusing to give up. And I thought, maybe I could have it in me too. Croft, or the way Vikander played her – was vulnerable but also tough. She was someone who chose the hard path. Scrappy and resourceful and uncertain. And I identified with her. There is something triumphant and hopeful to be found in a character who, at the end, discovers just how truly powerful she is after emerging through crisis.

0 notes

declaredmissing · 2 years ago

Text

The Downfall of Elisabeth Holmes and the Desire to Change the World

The story of Elisabeth Holmes is a lesson in hubris and ambition. I’ve been thinking about this lately, after binge-watching the Hulu series of Elizabeth Holmes. She used to be a media darling, praised for being a leader of female empowerment. Cultural narratives valorized Holmes as a youngest female self-made billionaire, mesmerized by the strength of her conviction in herself and in Theranos. But her fraud was exposed, and she quickly fell from grace.

Her story is one of a brilliant, intelligent person driven by absolute entitlement and the audacity to believe in your own delusions. She represents the refusal to be wrong, a desire to preserve one’s world view at all costs.

There are some who explain Holmes as having good intentions gone wrong, but how do we measure a “good intention”?

Elisabeth repeatedly asserted that her dream was to change the world for the better. In a CBS article, she was nine years old when she wrote to her dad, "what I really want out of life is to discover something new, something that mankind didn't know was possible to do.” She added that she “grew up in a family of people who wanted to make a difference in the world”. Perhaps one’s natural response is to admire the ambition, but I stop and wonder at vagueness of her dreams. Such an emphasis on “difference” completely sidesteps the question of why we want to make a difference to start with.

The extent of her fraud – and the harm her defunct blood tests would have caused – was only a natural consequence of such lofty visions. She wanted to make a name for herself, and the applause for being perceived as a genius. The technology of Theranos was only the means, not the ends.

What makes it so difficult to acknowledge you made a mistake? What gets in the way of humility?

Some have speculated that her instinct to shut down doubt and criticism was because she tied her own sense of self to the company. No wonder then the stake was so great; no wonder it was so difficult for her to admit failure and her own limits. The fiction of her accomplishments was central to her very sense of self and identity. She may not have been the sociopath that the internet condemned her as, but I suspect that she was a person deeply unhappy with herself, who felt like she needed to go to such lengths to create such a persona. To admit she was wrong would be catastrophic for the grandiose myths she had built to protect her sense of self.

Her ambition to “revolutionalize healthcare” was unmoored from the impact of her actions. She cared more about the fiction she created than how her lies impacted the lives of people in reality.

Her dream was to be a visionary who “made a difference”, instead of creating technology that actually worked.

0 notes

declaredmissing · 2 years ago

Text

the logic of the guillotine – ARAK and changing the world for the better: reflections on the trial of elisabeth holmes

Having to educate myself, remold myself, but also to have admit that I’m wrong. There are versions of myself that I’m embarrassed of.

I did not care about who was wrong and who was right. I did not even care: when people settle their accounts, guilt is easy to find, and justice is the right to do whatever we think must be done, and therefore justice can be anything. The same is also true with guilt. As long as I did not know anything I could not take either side, and I would not get involved. Indeed, I had already gotten involved, by my silence, but that was an involvement that did not contradict my beliefs, and I could always justify it with the reason most convenient for me, if I ever learned the truth. —Meša Selimović, Death and the Dervish (translated by Bogdan Rakić & Stephen M. Dickey)

The butcher paper from the EC retreat is still on my bedroom wall, where the question “what does it mean to remold as a revolutionary?” ****is boldly written in sharpie. The outdated jargon isn’t exactly trendy, but the urgency and relevance of the question hasn’t changed over the decades. The more involved I am in organizing, and the more I try to become what I need to be to be a better organizer, I realize how much this demands me to change as an individual as well. And by that, I mean that I’ve come to learn that what I practice as an individual reflects what I believe social change on a larger level as well.

I’ve been thinking about this lately, after binge-watching the Hulu series of Elizabeth Holmes. She used to be a media darling, praised for being a leader of female empowerment. But her fraud was exposed, and she quickly fell from society’s grace. I was fascinated by her hubris and her audacity to believe in her own delusions. I quickly became interested for what she reflected about society, and from the fear that I might be like her.

The story of Holmes is a lesson in how ambition can warp you. It made me wonder, what makes it so difficult to acknowledge you made a mistake? What gets in the way of humility? She had delusions that blinded her, but the force of her belief in a vision is the same quality that also has powered so much necessary change in this world. I think about the story of Holmes, next to Snowden; two brilliant, intelligent people, who faced difficult choices in their lives. Their stories led me to think about the role of self-doubt; how Snowden asked himself, who am I, while Holmes was driven by absolute entitlement. She represents a warning of what happens when self-confidence turns into a refusal to be wrong, and when self-belief turns into the desire to preserve one’s world view at all costs.

Watching the series of Holmes was difficult. It led me to confront my own relationship to ambition, my childhood dreams to change the world, and the resulting self-doubt when I started to contend with my own hubris. Cultural narratives were thrilled to valorize Holmes as a ‘girlboss’, charmed by the way she preached conviction and self-belief. I had that, in aces, when I was 17 and applying for college. Like Holmes, bopping to hip hop in her car, I was also fueled by empowering musical anthems. I recognized **myself in her, and it was painful. I sympathize with her, at the same time fearing my own capacity to be a delusional and controlling tyrant.

When I was younger, I wanted to be a hero. I was filled with a sense of my own destiny and fate to change the world. My role-models came from the Royal Diaries series; Catherine the Great and Lady Redbird and Cleopatra were my inspirations. I thought I could be president. I also had genuine passion for learning. I think back to my excitement to discover bioluminescence, to grow mangroves, to discover the ‘global system’ of the world. I’m proud of my younger self for having this spirit, this desire to live a bright and shining life. But at the same time, I staked my sense of self on the specialness of my dreams, instead of thinking about the actual impact of my intentions. This escape into a fantasy risks delusion, an inflated sense of my own unique signicance.

When I was a little girl, and even a teenage girl, I wanted to save the world. I crafted a destiny for myself. I wanted to be a scientist that studied snow leopards, because I read in a National Geographic magazine that they were vanishing. I tore out the article and pinned it to my wall and told myself, I wouldn’t let them disappear. I think this moment captures the energy and direction of my ambition; the good intent, but also the misdirection. Wanting to save the world, but from an attraction to a glamorized image of what I thought was worthy of saving.

There are some who explain Holmes as having good intentions gone wrong. But I think her downfall was the natural consequence of what I suspect were the natural consequence of her desires; fame, wealth, recognition. She didn’t want to create a product that actually worked. She wanted, above all, the applause for being perceived as a genius.

Beyond the drive for money and power, she also had attained a status and title she became highly attached to, that became central to her identity. And she may have let it define who she was to the point where when Theranos was challenged, her own sense of self was threatened and her natural response was to go to extreme lengths to defend and protect her position. She may not have been a cruel or ‘bad’ person. It may simply have been that she was driven by the fear of losing her status, title, and her very sense of self and identity.

There were speculations in the media that Elisabeth’s instinct to shut down doubt and criticism was because she tied her own sense of self to the company. No wonder the stake was so great; no wonder it was so difficult for her to admit failure and her own limits. She wanted to make a name for herself, to be accomplished and wealthy. The technology of Theranos was only the means, not the ends.

To admit she was wrong would be catastrophic and painful consequences for her sense of self.

I’m no better than Elisabeth. I’m also struggling with myself, and my unconscious assumptions that I already know everything. As a teenager, my well-intentioned but misplaced self-righteousness came from thinking there was nothing to change my mind about.

Throughout the years, I wrestled with my relationship to ambition. Growing up, I wanted to be invulnerable. It was a metaphor for being superhuman; able to protect others, and myself, with the ego of a hero instinct. I wanted the confident will and energy and appetite of my heroines, but because I was afraid and insecure, it manifested in me as swagger, bravado, ruthless ambition.

I was convinced that I had arrived at the right answers. I was proud of my ambition, and motivated from the desire to persuade others to see the way I did.

I’m embarrased to look back at the inspirational quotes I’ve collected for myself. I’m realizing it’s time for a reckoning with the corporate feminism style of empowerment that I’ve been internalizing. The problem with these girl boss anthems is that they valorize the biological goodness of women, which is a myth. “Women are still people, which means we can respond in similar ways to the incentives and privileges of power that sometimes make male bosses tyrants or harassers or wealth-hoarders. Slotting mostly white women into the power structures usually occupied by men does not de facto change workplaces.” When I pick apart the language of these seemingly harmless girl boss quotes, they quickly reveal a misinterpretation of self-confidence; self-confidence as entitlement, the ability to take and insert. These quotes internalize neoliberalist drives to win and succeed at all costs. Essentially, they want women to harden themselves to excel in a man’s world. And by molding ourselves by adapting the values of the oppressor, by becoming those who dominate instead of the dominated–is a moral failure.

I wonder what image and sense of self I’m protecting, and what narrative I’m trying to preserve–what ideal self, what version of who I could be, am I wanting to protect at all costs?

I want to be a good person, and so it makes it hard when people challenge me and implicate that I’m not being a ‘good person’. It’s hard to hear the criticism, but if I shut it out so that I can preserve my image of myself, I’m not going to change in a way that would treat people better.

Elisabeth repeatedly asserted that her dream was to change the world for the better. But ‘the world’ isn’t a monolithic entity. Better for who? Change what world? What is ‘the world’, according to Holmes? Because her ambition was unmoored from the impact of her actions, her ambition ultimately led to her replicating masculine power. It was enough for her to be perceived as a visionary, instead of thinking about how to truly address what “this world” is that she is trying to change – such as the accumulation of wealth in just a few of the country’s millions of hands and the broad abuses of power that afflict the daily lives of most people.

Cold war propaganda has left us afraid of revolutionary arrogance and ambition in changing the world.

But In ARAK, Mao writes, “If we have shortcomings, we are not afraid to have them pointed out and criticized, because we serve the people. Anyone, no matter who, may point out our shortcomings. If he or she is right, we will correct them. If what he or she proposes will benefit the people, we will act on it.” For revolutionaries, it is simple: if we are serious about the intentions we are committed to – to serve the people – we must also be willing to change ourselves on an individual level as well. It is always about being receptive to meaningful criticism, to challenges to change ourselves in ways that would treat others better.

So many idealists I know, people who are genuinely kind and compassionate and driven by the belief that the world can be better, have over time been tempered by the realization of how small a role we play as individuals. We don’t believe that any of our single lives, by ourselves, can do anything, but we hope that we can contribute work that will make it easier for generations that follow to build upon our work; and we believe that our work is made easier by those who went before us. We see ourselves woven into a fabric where we are all trying to be a piece in this puzzle, this longer story in history that is beyond our short lives. To reduce the significance of our individual lives is what allows us to stretch our imagination, to think more about the long-term impact of our sacrifices than if we’ll be recognized for our work or not.

ARAK teaches us that it is only by practice that we can better serve the people. We must also have the courage to make mistakes. It’s offered me a way for knowing how to risk being wrong, because it’s the opportunity to correct – from being in the world, from doing. There is no such thing as perfecting ourselves in solitude, because the invulnerability of failing no one means shutting oneself out from the world. To isolate is unsustainable. It is a kind of self-imposed death that held me back from truly living.

ARAK is about not just learning with humility, but alsothe ability to discern, to filter the data and determine what you are learning for. Over the past year, I was trying to learn what it looked like to trust my instincts and the worth of my dreams, but to also be able to question my instincts as well.

The downfall of Holmes and the hubris of desiring to change the world offers a concrete way for me to think through this dilemma. Marxism is a revolutionary science; and science itself is the pursuit of truth.

In scientist Hope Jahren’s memoir Lab Girl, she writes that “a true scientist doesn’t perform prescribed experiments; she develops her own and thus generates wholly new knowledge. This transition between doing what you’re told and telling yourself what to do generally occurs midway through a dissertation.” It is a lesson that also seems to expand to the challenge of taking responsibility for your own life, and the shaping of your own values and principles. It’s difficult, and terrifying, and it’s hard work. But achieving results demands excellence and the patience for the long process of doing this work. There’s **no skipping steps.

I’ve also been thinking about Edward Snowden’s autobiography, Permanent Record. His struggle with ethics, his humility and reflections on his younger self, provides me a model for how to be wrong. His pursuit of morality was interlinked with the desire for truth, but also humility, the grace of being willing to learn. I’ve been thinking of the development of one’s character as the experiment we pursue for our entire lives–the development of the strength of our individuality, and internal resources, the ability to discern truth and sift through the data to arrive at a working premise. In science, the answers and data you find are framed through the questions that you ask. In a similar way, my intentions and principles shape the questions I ask, and therefore, how I make sense of the data and decide where to go from there.

ARAK has offered me a compass for distilling these principles of being a true revolutionary.

Without ethics and morals, a loyalty to truth, without a rigorous process of examining all the data, without allowing room to learn and make mistakes, one is allowed to barrel on unchallenged. The person I want to be is someone committed to minimizing the harm I might inflict upon others; to extend the relief of kindness to others, where I can. But I’m learning that I’m not going to be able to get it right every time, so I need to find in myself the ability to muster the courage to admit I will make mistakes, no matter how painful the consequences of being wrong. To be able to recognize that I’m capable of hurting others, that I might make mistakes and do so inadvertently, and to be willing to acknowledge deeds I’m not proud of.

In moments of self-doubt, I reassure myself that it’s a good sign recognize when I’m wrong, and to be willing to learn from it. It gives me a strange sort of courage, to give myself the permission to change my mind. Reminding myself I’m allowed to make mistakes, that I’m allowed to fail, gives me the kindness to try. To experiment. To partake in the grand adventure of life. Whenever I feel defensive, I try to remind myself that it’s a sign I am being challenged in a good way; there is something valuable to be learned from every other human’s worldview, and that I haven’t arrived at the answers yet myself.

0 notes

declaredmissing · 2 years ago

Text

teeen superhero dynamics

Been thinking about a favorite photograph that I’ve fallen in love with lately. She is a woman, draped in all black, her hair and entire body covered except for her face and hands. She is beautiful, and the expression on her face is defiant, confident, and confrontational, but also holding a shade of vulnerability and melancholy. I wonder how she got there, standing in the crash of the waves with her back fearlessly to the sea. Rather than fall from the force of the water, she stands strong and unaffected. She is alone in the image, like a mythic figure. I wonder what she survived; it is as if she was walking out of the ocean, born again somehow. An array of experiences inform our own gaze. I wonder how my own life/readings have led me to perceive this photograph in the way that I did. The fuller context of this photograph is a socio-political-economic tragedy. The photograph is part of a photo series named *[Listen: Giving Voice to Iranian Women](<http://magnumphotos.com/arts-culture/newsha-tavakolian-listen/>)*, by Newsha Tavakolian. Photographed in Mahmudabad, Iran in 2011, and envisioned as an imaginary CD cover for Sahar in the Caspian Sea. In the series, Tavakolian photographed six professional Iranian women singers and created fictional album covers. In postrevolutionary Iran, many talented artists are rendered voiceless as women are banned from solo performances in public. But somehow, I connected to it, and related to the figures; the feeling of being rendered ineffective and voiceless, reduced to the margins. There is no political restriction–my timidity and self-doubt is an internal struggle. But the photographs make me feel more empowered in my own life, to imagine myself standing in the same spot as these women. I see myself reflected in the woman; I see myself standing there in the water, looking back at the camera with that same sharp and defiant expression. When I think of what it means for us to look at ourselves, to photograph and image ourselves, I recall Ayesha saying it was narcissicistic. But I see it as visual agency, a question of authorship and who gets to determine how we represent ourselves. There is another image, a young woman standing in the middle of an empty road with bright-red boxing gloves. I think of the power I feel when I put on my handwraps, gloves, shin guards, muay thai shorts. I remember Coach Reese telling me, Sam and Ayesha how boxing saved her life when she was in a dark place. Tania telling me, on the first day I met her, that MMA/jiu-jitsu saved her life when she was struggling through depression and anxiety, and that coach had been through it too–to ask him. What is it about combat sports, that saves our lives?

“There is something so special about teen superhero team dynamics, from Power Rangers to magical girls and everything in between. / I help you fight evil. I let you sleep on my lap when we get back home. I know everything about you, things your parents never will. We've almost died together. We study for tests together. We are discovering ourselves. I hope I still know you in ten years. You turned evil once. I still got you a birthday present.”

“The truth is that the heroism of your childhood entertainments was not true valor. It was theater. The grand gesture, the moment of choice, the mortal danger, the external foe, the climactic battle whose outcome resolves all – all designed to appear heroic, to excite and gratify and audience. Gentlemen, welcome to the world of reality – there is no audience. No one to applaud, to admire. No one to see you. Do you understand? Here is the truth – actual heroism receives no ovation, entertains no one. No one queues up to see it. No one is interested.” — David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

Myths are stories about people who become too big for their lives temporarily, so that they crash into other lives or brush against the gods. In crisis, their souls are visible. – Anne Carson, “Tragedy: A Curious Art Form”

between rescue and recovery / 04.09.22

On earning to struggle with my own fear that paralyzed me. Fear has been the pattern driving my instincts in life.

Hands in my lap, between my 18 and 23 year old self, having to ask permission to leave the house late at night. Growing up means reconciling the child in my adult self, and the adult in my childhood self. The part of me that pleads to be protected, to be made to feel safe, that wants to be worthy of empathy, kindness and protection. To reconcile that with the part of me that believes I can only depend on myself for protection and safety, that others are not to be trusted, that the way to survive in this world is to be self-reliant.

A long time ago, when I first started combat sports, I confess I had this image of myself in my head that this would be the way I could be invulnerable. It was a metaphor for being superhuman; able to protect others, and myself, with the ego of a hero instinct. Much of this idea led to my starry eyed idealization with a police officer I met. For years, I wasn’t able to stop thinking of him. His ability to self-mythologize was magnetic; his story overcoming the odds to become a superhero in the police force, a hero able to rescue others. It collided, I suppose, with my own self-mythos. Which is why I was so enamored with the idea of him.

I wanted the yes energy of my heroines, their will and energy and appetite, their ability to not be sunk by disappointments. But it collided with the parts of me that were ruthless and ambitious, and afraid and insecure, all at the same time. One of the biggest changes from my past self is the egoistic hero instinct in myself. I can’t say I’m selfless, or that I’m convinced I’ve changed, but I’m aware of it and I’m wanting to change. Throughout the years, I wrestled with my relationship to ambition. Now, I just want to live from joy and wonder; to run towards, not from.

We are primed with our hands holding our keys in the the way that alert, vulnerable women do walking alone at night.

Many of my heroines are driven by anger, of experiencing women in their lives being abducted or murdered. Who they become is from the effect of these stories on their psyche.

Finding agency through martial arts hasn’t solved my life problems, and it doesn’t make the world objectively less dangerous.

focus on the evolution in my perception of/relationship to martial arts.

on psychological domination: I wonder what the difference is between rescue, and recovery. It seems obvious that self-preservation, the instinct to survive, means to walk away from situations that felt unbearable. But it’s not so obvious when you don’t know how to recognize what a cruel situation is. When it doesn’t occur to you that it’s possible to ask for more – and that you are deserving of more.

In that moment I left him, walking away was the rescue. Not just rescue from a relationship where I was exhausting myself, but also from a version of myself I knew deep down was just a shadow of who I could be. But it left me at point zero, alone and lost and not knowing what I’m made of or what I want to be. So now I begin the process of recovery–to fully allow myself to grieve and repair my wounds, when before I would just hide them and limp on. Like an animal who gnaws her paw off in a fox trap and goes on, determined but blinded with pain. Recovery is what comes after the escape. It’s the drawn out limping with no promises, searching for rest and hoping that along the way with time–against mortal limits–the limbs grow back. The fox molding the missing paw with clay and earth, learning to create and not just sever.

With tenderness and infinite patience. I’ve learned, along the way, that no one else is going to do it for me. It’s a hard lesson to accept. I grew armor as a kid, learning to rely on myself, but at heart, hoping someday someone would care for me. I held on to that fantasy, and my anger came from the injustice of feeling that was withheld from me. I struggle to accept that no one else is going to tell me the words that I want to hear, but it’s hard for me to feel like it’s okay to say those things to myself. But I hope to let go, to accept with grace that my belief in myself should not be dependent on others believing in me. There will be people who love me, who treat me kindly, generously, but if I’m able to unfailingly protect myself–be sacred to myself, treat myself like I would be my own daughter–then I’ll never be breakable.

0 notes

declaredmissing · 2 years ago

Text

The contradiction of airplanes in the sky

Whenever I’m in an airplane, I think of the contradiction that experience it embodies, and how it seems to be a metaphor for modern life. There’s so much wonder in flying thousands of miles into the sky, and yet we do it in a cramped, claustrophobic quarters that dilute or negate the magic. That’s what living today is like, is it not?

But of course, despite myself, being in an airplane always makes me feel wine-drunk with awe. When I flew back to Kansas last winter of 2021, I watched the sunset from the JFK airport and thought about the cycles of disappointment in love that I’d gone through that year, and thought about who I used to be, with my naive optimism and defensive arrogance protecting a shaky self image. At that time, I cringed to remember my past self.

But looking back now, I think of how I was just 22 and trying to figure it out. How much I love the boundless naive optimism that I carried with me throughout all the different selves I became, and how natural it seems that I would end up in Anakbayan – and how much that experience changed me. It affirmed my stance of joy as defiance.

There’s a word in tagalog that we use to refer to each other in the movement – “kasama”. It loosely translates to ‘together’, and ‘with you.’ What binds us in the movement is a current that’s deeper than political affinity – it’s shared vision, a shared history of “filipino and not-filipino.” The variable we share in common is that we’re all taking a gamble, staking our lives to a future that remains dark.

When I joined the movement, I was shocked to see people my age quoting Mao, identifying as radical anti-imperialists, and re-enacting guerilla theater of rebels. Up until then, I thought that organized resistance was a dead pipe dream of the 60s. To discover that it was real, even if only in the margins, shifted everything that I thought was possible.

I gained a specific kind of optimism that comes from seeing what revolution looks like in practice. It’s a feeling I haven’t found a language to quite articulate or describe or understand yet, though I think it has to do with resisting the state of psychological domination our culture is paralyzed by.

Of course, this spirit of optimism isn’t a constant. There are times I often look around and think, we really are just a small group of ragtag organizers. When I first joined, there would be times I would question the worth of our work in the larger scheme. It was easier to be a cynic than to dare to hope. Years after joining, I told my kasamas that this felt like the only sane space to me, and they all exchanged incredulous looks. And I understand, because actually, it does seem to feel that you have to be a bit insane to pursue the unrealistic and improbable.

To be radical is to change the parameters of what we can fight for. That was the most critical question in college, that I’ll always carry with me in my heart. What does it mean to be radical? Years later, as I’m writing this, I have an answer. To decide to eliminate the chair itself.

This work – the work of revolutionaries – goes against the dominant culture, which is why it’s so fucking difficult to do in isolation. It isn’t praised, or popular, or funded, or accepted in the mainstream, which makes it easy to question ourselves every step of the way – which can make us doubt ourselves – if we lose an inch of conviction. I admire my kasamas deeply for the courage it takes to ask for more than what’s realistic.

I think part of our optimism comes from – and is part of – the way we feel part of history. We share the understanding that the work we do in our lives goes beyond the brevity of our lifespan. There’s comfort knowing that even if change doesn’t happen in my lifetime, we’re building on the groundwork that generations before us have set, and generations after us will continue to build on, and whatever we accomplish, no matter how small, it won’t have been for nothing.

There are some who compare this kind of faith to the kind you find in organized religion, and that brings with it warnings of the dangers of idealizing any kind of ideology. The fear of being absorbed into an ideology is what made me initially hesitant to join a movement. But I’ve been part of a church before, and to me, there’s a clear distinction between political work and being a christian, even though they’re also familiar. It’s about committing to a value system and world view. The difference is that while I think political ideology offers a way to transform my values into action, by no means do I turn to it for either a blueprint or final answers.

There was a deep, fundamental change in my life finding the movement. I think my stance of optimism has somehow come from the gradual radicalization of my politics, and how that led me to recover hope and the spirit to fight. I found a home for my values, and an alternative to aspirations for material success and personal ambition that wasn’t just protecting my own individual happiness for the time I’m alive.

I think I write about this because I wonder what leads people to a movement. What radicalizes someone. Because I’m interested in what kind of spirit counters the fatalism of capitalist realism. A word for the opposite of loneliness. Because the words kasama and political home didn’t exist in my language a few years ago. For all the ways I’ve changed since accepting ‘revolutionary’. My shifting perceptions of the words “radical” and “revolution”. Paradigms upended. Wondering about the common variable behind the emotions of joy, agency, self-determination, the willingness to struggle, optimism, hope, faith, these supercharged euphorias. Courage and strength, all entertwined with love and rage and compassion and kindness. The seedling of an understanding that if we want a revolution, we have to understand how these emotions all can be transformed and channeled into revolution. Into people power. There’s an answer, somewhere, in the optimism that comes from seeing other people care and believe, just as much, in what used to seem to be an untenable fantasy: revolution. Genuine change within our lifetime. That what we dream of is not to much to ask for. But we have to start with naming what we are fighting against, and what we are dreaming of. James and I joke, without really saying it, that the answer is revolution. What is to be done with this world? Where are we going?

I’ve been thinking about the premise of my conclusion in college – how the word utopia is an ancient Greek pun on “ou-topis”, meaning “no place”, and “eu-topos”, meaning “good place”. It was originally coined by Thomas More, and implies that a perfect political state cannot actually exist. I have no masterplan for saving the world. I don’t have the details of what an ideal world would look like. But we always ask each other, what do you want for your community? What are you fighting for? As if these questions are worth asking, are serious questions to consider, and not frivolous at all. I do think we are entirely capable of asking for a different present, of dreaming for the way that we can live right now.

Hannah Arendt believed, above all, that if we could say, I don’t want to live this way–and that if we projected these longings into the world–we could work to address the lonelinesses we inflict on others; the isolation that drives us to destruction and our desire to dominate. In her biography of Lessing, you can find Lessing’s notion of love threading throughout her work; the kind of love that simply says “I want you to be”. She believed that in order to rebuild cultures from the politics of exclusion and division, ones that make truth and justice meaningful in the world, communication and changes in modes of thought had to happen between two people. She believed we could imagine only by understanding, by living and knowing together.

___________

Somewhere outside the invisible net cradling earth, satellites are spinning in the yawning empty black and the pulse of cities is so far away. People are dying from a pandemic, in the antiseptic halls of hospitals. In future dystopias, a love song waltzes from an underground bunker.

It’s spring now, and I find myself caught in the still warmth of an evening where I have absolutely nowhere to go. The busyness of the day fading to twilight, bright shadows thrown up against the skyscrapers of Manhattan. It’s an alien feeling, the relief to realize I have no obligations. I stand for a moment in Brooklyn as bodies rush past me, looking at the sky, looking at people, a still point in a crowded intersection, feeling for the first time in a long time that I longer have to be anywhere. A breeze on the back of my neck, the air tasting like lemon and sticky asphalt, and no one knows who I am.

On my way to Coney Island, I accidentally dislocate the chain from the gears with my shoulder, and so I stop in the middle of the sidewalk to lock it back in place, wipe the grease from my fingers onto my backpack. Beyond the language of nuclear radiation and retreating shorelines, there’s a place where we go on and survive.

despite how difficult it is, how widespread futility and cynicism are, we are all suffering together and finding joy somehow, and there’s comfort in that.

2 notes · View notes

declaredmissing · 2 years ago

Text

letting go - confronting emptiness and simplicity

The practice of minimalism has been a recurring theme in my life this year, both in my obsessive organizing and spring cleaning rampages. For me, there is an appeal to the idea of reducing things to only what is truly essential in order to focus on living my life according to what feels like my personal truth. I’m trying to break the spell of my squirrel hoarding habits, my anxiety related to a preoccupation with maximum control and order, the tendency to anticipate and overprepare, that leads me to collect and accumulate an excess of possessions I don’t actually process or use. I live my life as if I’m in constant expectation, as if this were the pre-life, instead of trusting myself enough to be able to handle the beginning and to see it through. I looked back through past journals earlier today while killing time before work at Bryant Park, and saw thoughts I had jotted down about dreaming periods and allowing myself periods of unfragmented thoughts.

I think the popularity of minimalism has much to do with the inundation of things in our life. Hypersaturation, space junk, a flood of information and images and newness cluttering and crowding our minds and making us feel exhausted. I think of the architecure of sacred dwellings, how simple and bare they are, and I think they hint at what emptiness has to offer instead. Physical empty space also makes me aware of other kinds of emptiness; blank pages, plain fabrics, my interior. Capitalism encourages us to shied away from the emptiness; it wants us to choose easy, to rush to fill in the void with more things, instead of confronting it.

Emptiness brings me clarity and truth; it lets me see what’s really there. Emptiness and stillness is also potential. In physics, in the silence during a conversation, in taking out my earbuds and just hearing the soundscape of my neighborhood, the soft voice of my thoughts that I tend not to hear when my music is turned up in competition of the racket of the city. It’s also why I’m drawn to wearing inconspicuous clothing, to plainness and simplicity in decoration; the opposite of distracting. To turn towards emptiness is, for me, a search for repose from the visual noise I’m confronted with on a daily basis.

The movement of minimalism tends to be associated with the rigid discipline and extreme-self-restraint of ascesis. The “that girl” aspiration becomes toxic when it attempts to aspire to resisting every absolute impulse or ‘temptation’, and calling that absolute strength. It parallels (and has a foundation) in an idea of protestanism sainthood that is about miraculous physical and mental strength, but I find that inhuman and lacking soul. The aesthetics of minimalism also become bland and dispiriting when it trends towards elimination and reduction of any kind of ‘human-ness’ or ‘soul’. I think that is the difference between the architecture of a temple, wrought of stone, flooded with light, and the architecture of the sleek interior of a retail store on fifth avenue with glaring synthetic lights. I can’t put a name to the difference; what it is that differentiates the feeling inside these spaces. One kind of space makes me feel reverence and awe, and makes me feel compelled to turn inwards. The other kind of space makes me feel unwelcome, compelled to fill vacancy through purchase and defining myself through exterior signifiers. One space reminds me of my own humility; another space tells me I ought to aspire to “more”.

I’m not sure what it is exactly, but I’m drawing a relationship between dreaming periods, silence, emptiness, humility, and soul. I think of how part of the oath we take as revolutionaries is a commitment to living a simple life. There is obvious class practicality to this, but I think the more subtle implication is how simplicity also allows one to continue seeing what is important; to allow us to aspire to a cause that we truly believe in.

The ritual of processing was a form of ‘discard’ I learned in my practice of minimalism. Getting rid of things taught me how to let go with intention; and letting go with intention meant not just throwing things away, because I would only repeat the same mistake of buying the items again unless I also eliminated the need for the item as well once I discarded it. I had to learn the lessons too. I started a practice of consolidating my monthly journal entries and writing. It was overwhelming, sifting through all that I experienced. It didn’t feel like much was happening on a daily basis, or that I was changing all that much, but I saw that through increments, I did grow as a person, like shedding snakeskins or molting out of fur.

0 notes

declaredmissing · 2 years ago

Text

spring cleaning – trying to let go of the life I hold (spring 2022)

I used to have a ritual in Ridgewood of going to this local Thai restaurant once a week, and ordering moo yang and thai iced coffee. The restaurant is a ‘hidden neighborhood gem’ on yelp, “great for dates or group hangouts”, neither of which I was participating in. The first time I go by myself, the waitress asks, “a table for one?” when I walk in. I like the idea of that, and that’s when I decide to start making a habit of it.

As I wait for my order, I stare at the painting across me, a sketch of buildings and empty streets. I wonder what city the artist was looking at, why no one was there. I watch the rain falling out the window, I try to block out the club music playing on the speakers. The one other person in there is a man, eating alone, and I pray he doesn’t approach me to make conversation as I’m waiting for my food.

I’m trying to be okay with silence and stillness; to feel like everything is enough, that I always have all the time I need. To not feel hurried. Once again, the days are growing closer to the question of my lease renewal. Last April – this time of year – the feeling of precarity underscored my life. That, along with deep reckonings about what I wanted for my future, led me to start contending with the likely reality that this might be the last year I’ll be living in this apartment. I ended up renewing the lease for another year, but now, I feel like it’s time to draw this period living here to a close.

This will be the last month of this very specific life. Coming home to the same four walls, the same view from the window, the same lighting and arrangement of temporary future. Last year, I decided to stop trying to feel comfortable settling in this apartment, and to get ready to move. It’s probably why for a full year my apartment has had this sense of being half-settled, like I never really fully moved in or decided to claim this space as mine.

I daydream of an ideal apartment space, what it would look to surround myself with the things I love and that bring me peace. To have only what I need. Shedding excess to figure out what matters to me.

Spring is coming, and once again, it’s time to sweep out the things I’ve accumulated in my life the past year. It’s hard to assess what I really need and don’t need. Most of my excess of belongs are books, clothes, or remants of hobbies. A pair of rattan sticks, a box of sheet music, a suitcase of paint, empty sketchbooks. When I sell or give away items, it feels like I’m giving away the possible selves I could be; like I’m discarding my potential. When I buy things, it feels like I’m creating the possibility of becoming who I want to be. A jumprope, a camera, a guitar, a bike, boxing gloves. And my clothing. There are belongings that fulfill practical day to day functions, and belongings that set an expectation for the self that I desire to become. In my experiment to reconfigure my relationship to my belongings, I’ve started by assessing what I actually needed, versus what desires had been manufactured culturally. I’m still finding it difficult to give up the sophisticated minimalist aesthetic I find myself drawn to. The perfect that girl. Having that aesthetic is not going to make me the person I associate with those clothes, but becoming that person – and deciding if I even want to be that person – is the part I’m trying to figure out.

The difficult part of learning this mindset is unlearning what I’d been taught to think I need, and how that extends beyond my possessions but to what I plan for the future as well. And so I’ve been giving away my belongings one by one, shedding the past, shedding futures I’m closing the door to.

Spring cleaning was a method of processing that was really for thinking hard about what values or assumptions influenced what I felt that I needed to buy or keep. Developing a system for my belongings felt like cleaning the house in my mind. But in my fervor to discard, I wonder if my aspiration for less was really an attempt to reduce my complexity, to parse the world into simpler components, to instill order, because I’m so overwhelmed by what surges within me.

0 notes

declaredmissing · 2 years ago

Text

minimalism as a form of aesthetic, than a process

I’m interested in what happens when everyone starts wearing and doing and buying the same thing. You could argue on the one hand that mass accessibility encourages a democratization of taste. But if everyone wants something because of the power of adveritsing and the glamour we come to associate with the desired object, is it really democratizing taste?

An aesthetics driven by profit drives us towards homogenization and flattens out individuality. Brands decide what should be stylish or trendy, which is why we find ourselves wanting the expensive and unattainable. Seduced by the promise of luxurious or glamorous lifestyles associated with influencers, we aspire to look like them, rather than exploring the inventive resourcefulness that comes from operating with limitations. Luxury expresses nothing but an intensification of the surface, the obsession with self-appearance and expression through the labels of our clothes. Collective taste is heading towards the homogenuous, I think in large part to influencers being a main force behind determining collective desires. Our commodity / material culture is exhausted, and has nothing original to offer anymore, and so it recycles trends and flattens out individuality (despite promising the opposite). As an aesthetic, it quickly came to be recognized for the bland and washed out, hypersmooth surfaces, stripping away texture and color. It’s a popular, trendy aesthetic for being clean, transportable, easily digestible. Like perfumes we think are classy, but are actually just dull and bland. (Give me something distinct and unusual, even if unlikeable!) I think we do it because we don’t want to risk. The millenial aesthetic of the clean and everyday is safe, but that also comes with the risk of being generic and characterless. Nothing special to spur the imagination. Pleasant, but overwhelmingly dull. Blandness isn’t interesting, but the convenience and low-profile aesthetic has the advantage of being widely appealing and inoffensive. Think AirBnB, and the sleek homogeneity of website templates and coffee shops. They’re popular because they have wide appeal; because they’re inoffensive, because they’re safe, because they avoid the risk of asserting any sense of personality.

I think minimalism has gained so much momentum and popularity with our culture because of what it promises and represents. It rose as an alternative to a culture of excess and materialism. But instead of fulfilling that promise, it seems to have turned into something else. It’s invaded our design. There was a backlash against minimalism for stripping away individuality and personality, and for being wasteful and unattainable. I think this happened when the philosophy of minimalism fell away from the visual aesthetic of minimalism. It became about an aesthetic of reduction and nothingness, rather than a philosophy of having enough. The aesthetic quickly became commodified so that you had to buy minimalism, rather than it being about a reorientation to our relationship with possessions.

I don’t want to have an image in my head of how things should be, or the proper procedure, or how things ought to be arranged. I want to figure it out myself, the hard way, through trial and error and imagination and invention and adapting in response to my immediate environment and through what I have. That, to me, is the development of individuality and unique style.

0 notes

declaredmissing · 2 years ago

Text

there is a signal problem

This has been a difficult winter. I find myself impulsively wanting to download Tinder, to bring someone over to my apartment. I tell myself that I just want to have fun again. I’ve moved on over Roshan, I know my boundaries. Mission accomplished, I’ve done the work. But at the same time, when I imagine myself actually swiping and shopping through the marketplace of men, I already feel exhausted. It’s time consuming to filter through the men, to build up camaraderie through text messages, to plan a date.

It’s hard, to resist the impulse to procrastinate and distract myself. It’s hard to sit with myself, with my mess, with my cruel perceptions and harshness to myself, and just how disheartened I feel from past conversations.

I’ve been thinking of a conversation with a friend, at a restaurant in Chinatown. She asked me what I planned to do when I retire and it startled me, to realize people really still do frame their lives around retirement. I still feel like I’m living from crisis to crisis, and I’ve stopped believing at some point there’d be such a thing as retirement in the future. I feel trapped between either choosing retirement or...I don’t know what the other option is. And so when people ask me how I am, how my life is, but I don’t know how to find the words to describe my life or my frustrations. It just sweeps me with numb sadness and paralysis and hopelessness, and I hate that feeling of being trapped, and so I’d rather not talk about my life at all.

I once told someone about how I lived my life collecting memories in anticipation of being imprisoned.

Capitalist realism is a kind of prison. We face little deaths every day. It’s so easy to lose our lives, bit by bit. To grow numb and not even realize it. To forget who we are. Capitalism takes and takes from you until you no longer exist. That’s murder. But what is a life?

Psychologist Judith Herman observed that “the ultimate effect of [psychological domination] is to convince the victim that the perpetrator is omnipotent, that resistance is futile, and that her life depends upon winning his indulgence through absolute compliance.” I feel like I have no choice, but I know that’s not true. A friend once asked me if I felt like I was in the driver’s seat. I said I wasn’t sure, and he told me he thought I was. They were words that cut a door into my prison, with the effect of setting me free, but also setting me accountable and responsible for my life. It didn’t offer me relief. Liberation is uncomfortable. to realize at the end of the day that there’s so much I can choose even though it doesn’t feel like it. What choices do we have? What can we do?

I often (unproductively) mull over these dreary pessimisms, especially during my commutes to work. There is one morning commute to work, where there is a delay on the B train. We’re stuck between 7th Avenue and Columbus Circle. There is a signal problem and we’ll be moving shortly, the conductor repeatedly tells us. The passengers resign themselves to being late for work. This is a situation we cannot control. I think of my friend asking me, are you in the driver’s seat?

My hands are restless in my coat pockets, taking stock of inventory. The essentials: $2 rose lip balm, claw clip for my hair, tangle of wire earbuds. There’s no service in these parts of the tunnel, so I’m listening to songs downloaded on my phone. I listen with distraction to Is This You or Is You Ain’t, by Louis Jordan; jaunty blues that don’t really seem to fit the gray mood of the subway car, and my anxiety of being late. With nothing else to do, I tilt my head back to study the ceiling of the train, the way I so often do when I’m outside and I’m looking at the stars. But there are no stars here.

The motion of looking up, which I rarely do in New York, makes me think back to my birthday last December. I had returned to Kansas feeling obliterated by the polluted skies of New York City, and I told a dear friend, James, that all I wanted was to see the stars. He drove me to an open field late at night, and we stood there and tilted our heads back to gaze at the stars, waiting for our eyes to adjust to the darkness.

We spend my birthday night driving down empty stretches of highway, enveloped in the black silence and stillness of the Midwest, his headlights opening a slim field of vision on a narrow road. Kansas to me is the other face of America; haunted, rural. Miles and miles of asphalt, dim far away lights, road signs, lonely gas stations, empty parking lots, the generic design of corporate parks. I told James that New York is a sensory deprivation tank, how I love and hate it, and he asks if I saw the deer we just drove by.

James connects his phone to his car’s speakers, and plays songs from my teenage years. Born to Die by Lana Del Rey, Go Outside by Cults, Take Me Out by Franz Ferdinand, Stolen Dance by Milky Chance, Float On by Modest Mouse. Lorde, Shrike by Hozier, 90s Russian rock.

When we arrive at the open field he’s taking me to, it’s so cold, we touch the tip of each other’s red noses to prove it and he apologies for not bringing a blanket.

I stand there, breathing the clean air of cornfields and asphalt and the crisp clear night. So sharp and real and vivid. Squatting down to try to identify the type of grass. It’s enough for me, to be standing in this field, breathing the clean air. Even if I don’t make history. It isn’t futile or useless, if my life is only ever ordinary, and if it’s composed only of moments like these.

With my fingertips, I draw smiley faces on the back of his car. He teaches me how to longboard, running next to me holding my hand, a sky full of stars, tumbling into an open field. Trying to teach him how throw a roundhouse kick, spinning circles, it’s like we’re kids again. We talk of the memories we attach to sites and places, and the history and memories a landscape accumulates. We talk about climate change, and how the angle of the moon is what makes it look so big.

It’s Christmas and the tag is still on his sweater that he was gifted earlier that night.

Stargazing and skating in the church parking lot with James and thinking of how my fear traps me. Shakily stepping onto a longboard, in an empty church parking lot at night, taking his hand as he helps me balance. “You have to trust yourself more,” James said. And that’s a lesson I think I am still learning. Something about trying even when it’s scary and even when you’re bad at it. Something about the north star shifting every thousand years or so.

On the drive back home, James rolls down the window, plays 400 Lux and turns the volume all the way up. He knows it’s my favorite song; he’s referencing a memory from when I returned to Kansas years ago that was just like this on the highway, where he rolled down the car windows for me and stepped on the accelerator and I stuck my head out, giddy with the joy of going fast, holding my hands out to catch the wind, hair whipping back on my face.

I’m trying to remember how it feels to be 16, even as I’m trying to grow into the feeling of being 23.

Hands in my lap in the passenger seat of the car, rolling down the car window so I can stick my head and hand out and the air smells so clean and fresh, and I say how I wish I could eat the stars.

400 lux will always be my song for star strewn skies and air that tastes like grass and rain, and reaching out my hand to catch the blur of street lights, for the closest to flying I can. Gannets never go blind, and they certainly never die.

On this ceiling of this B train, there are no stars. I study the way the panels are fastened together, and I think of how stars bolt the fractured sky from falling into pieces above our heads. I wonder–if I could name the pieces of my world, maybe I could stitch together a language to hold my life. A language that doesn’t allow my job occupation to define who I am, or the decisions I can make.

It’s lonely in this city. It’s been a long time since I’ve had a real and genuine human moment like I did on that cold December night, and I think that’s why that memory feels so luminous and significant to me. A memory that, I suppose, that I’m carrying with me as I’m stranded in the sterile brutality of New York. A memory I’d take with me to prison.

I think of the humans as a body, our cells signaling to each other, calling on each other to jolt us back into feeling. There is a signal problem, but the train will be moving shortly.

Am I in the driver’s seat? Or am I in a train, waiting for my life to start, to be jolted awake?

I try to remind myself, whatever I feel in this sensory deprivation tank, there are people standing in a cornfield together looking up at the moon, and teaching each other how to longboard in an empty church parking lot. I hope we’ll all be okay, as we grow older and find it more difficult to feel the same way we used to.

0 notes

declaredmissing · 2 years ago

Text

to the sea

I discovered that enchanted territory for the first time during my first year in college. February, the heart of winter. Eighteen and wide eyed, and still swept up in the romanticized glamour of New York. I once watched a film where Coney Island was underwater, and that was what I imagined the first time I went there. Past the abandoned parking lots and the desolation of an amusement park in the off-season, and my imagination was swept up in the Coney Island of Spielberg’s film Artificial Intelligence.

The protagonist of the film is a robot boy who longs to become human, like Pinocchio. On his quest, he sets off on a journey to make his appeal to the blue fairy of Coney Island. When he arrives, she is only a statue submerged. The myth dissipates for the audience, but not for the robot. That’s what I always imagined when I’d think of Coney Island; the spokes of the Ferris wheel, rusting and eerie in the shifting light of the water. The wooden statue of the blue fairy rooted in the mud, paint chipping, frozen smile splintering. Everything silenced.

My very first impression of Coney Island–a boarded up and shuttered and desolate amusement park–quickly made it synonymous with the failed American dream and collapsed utopian aspirations, but also the place where you could journey to have your wishes granted, to finally become human.

Over the years, Coney Island became many things to me, but a stubborn, tender love that remained that was born from this first impression.

Taking the Q train to Coney Island for what feels like an eternal hour becomes, for me, a mythic journey to become human again. A journey to a place where I’ll find the answers. It would become the park I'd flee to, to find solitude and freedom. That I'd run to when I was lonely, where I would take the trains to the end of the line when I needed the ocean. It was the final destination, every time, when I needed to get out of Manhattan. Where I would ride my bike on the boardwalk, teeth rattling in my jaws from the uneven slats. Where I would dress up, tuck roses in my hair, buy cotton candy and sit on the benches and look at the sky.

There is a poem titled“diaspora blues” by Ijeoma Umebinyuo, which captures the unanchored feeling of belonging nowhere.

“So, here you are too foreign for home too foreign for here.”

The immigration narrative is the same repeated story, shared experience, of how our parents sacrificed so much for us. Caught between the desire to be true to ourselves, and the guilt of feeling obligated to make our parents proud, to make their sacrifice worth it. What do we owe our parents? For the longest time, I thought I had the best compromise in college; to become a human rights lawyer. I would make them proud by taking on a respectable profession, and I would also be following a “dream career”. Idealistic, starry-eyed, younger me.

My friend tells me his mom just packed her bags and left. She got fired from her job, told them she was leaving, and left. That simply. But you don’t do things like that without the desire building in you for a long time. Maybe my mom wanted to be the girl who moved to a different city, changed her name, never looked back.

Once, my mother asked me to write her a story where she’s not in this life. "Write me a story where I run away and I start somewhere new," she asks me. "A life where I escape and I'm on my own, far away from everything here." No one in my family was buried in this land. This is not a country our history or stories are in.

Growing up, I resented sharing my writing or my secret dreams or accomplishments with my mom. Somehow, I felt that she wanted my life, and so I wanted to keep it away from her. My therapist at the time wondered – does she aspire, or is she just proud of me? I couldn’t tell the difference. How can I tell the difference when my mom tells me that she wishes she could trade lives withe me, just for a day, wishing that she could be going to college in new york city with her whole future ahead of her. I was oblivious to the fact that my mother contained an entire internal world of her own. As a teenager, it started dawning on me that she was out of place in Kansas. But only recently did I start trying to comprehend what it might really feel like to leave behind a world you know, that is familiar to you, with people that speak your native language, to an unfriendly and lonely place called the midwest.

No one in my family was buried in this land. This is not a country our history or stories are in. Sometimes I go to Coney Island because the city gets to be too much. I don't know if I invented this ritual so I can run from this city, or because I'm trying to run towards something else, or because I need some kind of anchor in such an unfriendly city. I've inherited my mother's longing for a home to ground her feet in. My mother and I long for a homeland, but this is our land now.

At night, I can see the glittering skyline of Manhattan from far away. It always pulls me in, orienting me, even though it no longer makes me feel the way it did three years ago when I first move to the city. I long for a homeland, but this is all I have.

I've inherited my mother's longing for a home to ground her feet in. This is a story about a girl who runs away.

I frequently have these dreams of walls closing in on me, how there’s no safe place for me to retreat to. When I walk through the city, I always notice the severed wings, the crumpled feathers and smashed claws of pigeons, carcasses crushed against sidewalk grates. The buildings, tall and dark and glittering, threaten to cave in and close in on me. The skyscrapers are why the city burns in the summer. The concrete aids and abets. In this city, there's so much noise and chaos competing that it crowds me out of my own mind, relentless, unforgiving. In the city, all I can think of is what I have lost.

Once, my sister, my mother and I, lying on a mattress on the floor because we couldn't afford a bedframe yet. It's a hot summer day, and my sister and I are supposed to be napping but we're bored and restless. My mom tells me and my sister that we can't roll off the mattress. "We're on a ship in the clouds," she explains. "If your limbs hang off the ship, the sky pirates will shoot at us!" Storytelling was her way of making things bearable for us; her way of shining an ordinary world.

When I was a child, I would imagine people living in the sky, and I called them the cloud people. I imagined that when they looked down below, they were filled with wonder at what they saw.

My mom doesn't tell us stories anymore. When she comes home from work, she only has energy for watching the television. Years ago when I was in highschool, we would fight all the time. I would often come home from school, missing her joy, missing who she used to be, and feeling like I'd lost her even though she was there right in front of me. I didn't know how to say this. My words came out as accusations.

Years later when my mother visits me in New York City, her face is filled with child-like wonder as I introduce her to my apartment and tell her about the classes I'm taking. As she's unpacking her suitcase later that night, she says softly, "I wish I were in college like you, spending my days studying and exploring the city."

Later that night at the dining table, she becomes animated as she's telling stories about me to my roommate. Then the conversation shifts. "She's always scolding me for watching the television. Her and her dad, they won't give me peace. But they don't understand. I come home, I'm tired....the beautiful world is in the shows." I sit there next to her silently, wondering why she never told me this before. If this is her way of telling me because otherwise, she feels that I don't hear her.

No cure for a generation of grim forecasts and daily disasters. Kerala flooding until it’s the same old song, another boat overturned and lives lost at sea. Coral reefs dying, songbirds tangled in nets. Within a few generations, the Philippines will be underwater, and there'll be no home to return to. Many of the CO2 emissions causing ice glaciers to melt and make the sea rise are from 'superpowers' like the United States, and yet its those on the periphery that will take the fall.

In Manhattan, there are projects to build sea walls instead of recovering the oyster beds. The ocean will be redirected to overflow in coastal neighborhoods–Brighton Beach, Sheepshead Bay, Broad Channel. These will be the first to be swallowed by the sea. JFK Airport was built on Jamaica Bay, marshlands that are our only buffer to the rising waters. These marshlands were built upon landfills, landfills that have been leaking detritus that wash up onto the shores of Coney Island.

Not far from this beach is the former State Island Warehouse in Port Richmond, formerly used to store high-grade Belgian Congo uranium ore destined for the Manhattan Project. Uranium had spilled there once, and dangerous contamination confirmed in 2008. During the Cold War, the Manhattan Project was an American led effort to gain the nuclear advantage as a global power. These warehouses, leaking radiation, are the aftermath of the pursuit of atomic superiority. Radio contamination, poisoning our streams, and yet seagulls still bathe in the toxic pools. Beached birds are found with plastics with cadmium, lead, mercury, chromium, silver, lining their stomachs. Albatrosses feed plastic to their chicks, mistaking them for fish eggs, the larger pieces rupturing or blocking their internal organs.

My mother sometimes tells me about what it’s like in the Philippines, and then she apologizes, says she has no one else to talk to.

After I read the UN Report released by the ICPP, I lay half awake at night seeing islands sink into the sea. I’m nestled in the safety of an apartment far enough from sinking shorelines, but my lungs are feeling like they’ve flipped upside down, my body is confused how to respond to these rising statistics. There’s no medicine for a body’s reaction to calamity reports. I wake up in the dark of the morning in a disoriented fumbling panic, squeeze my eyes shut, wait for the world to stop, but it doesn’t. I don’t know how to stop the ache in my stomach, the resounding roar in my head. The confusion of my body being torn between the violence there and here.

Who are we diasporic children living for? We feel obligations to our parents for the sacrifices they made for us, but what is the best way to continue their legacy? I wonder what I might flower into if I felt there was space for my own dreams too. If I could discard the guilt that I am betraying my parents by running away into my own future.

That same day, I go to my anthropology class. It’s the morning after the news of drone strikes in Syria and my professor asks the room, “How do you cope with it?” “You don’t,” says one kid. “We’re all screwed.” Another student yells out, “cardio.”

The next morning, I stumble out of bed, lace up my sneakers, sprint into the sharp cold air. Running to forget rising sea levels, to deafen the acrid chorus of the news, we have failed. To lean into the steady timeline of my heartbeat. Focus on the oxygen bleeding out of my lungs, the knife slicing through the numbness and my feet slamming on the pavement so I don’t think about the saltwater sparrows drowning from the rising tides. People tell me I feel too much but I’m afraid of what I’ll turn into if I don’t and so I keep running.

It's said that the story of Plato's Atlantis was intended to be a warning–that the moral of the story was that the colonial empire met its fall from hubris and greed. A friend once told me, with the certainty of a doomsday prophet, that the crest of a wave is a harbinger of catastrophe. Someone else told me there used to be fireflies where he lived in New Jersey but there was a summer they disappeared and they don't come back anymore. Like sea turtles crawling towards the lights of the highways, peregrines smashing into the windows of skyscrapers, we diaspora children are blinded wild things hurtling to the edge of the cliff. They say slaughterhouses desensitize their workers to violence, but I want to know what the opposite of that could be.

I feel entangled with the desires of my mother, unsure how to separate them her desires from my own. It’s too painful to think of how closely and attentively she follows my life, and so instead, I sever all thought of it. I don’t look back. I keep running. I keep leaving. I don’t know how to return. I don’t know how to see.

Once in this city, a baby pigeon in the middle of the sidewalk, fallen out of her nest, screaming helplessly. I didn't know what to do. I walked away and left her there. Sometimes I go to Coney Island so I can escape this city. Or maybe because I'm trying to run towards something else, or maybe because it's supposed to be the happiest place in the world.

Dystopia in the lonely lights of a theme park’s after hours, an event horizon ribboning the black ridge of the ocean. An edge like a jagged rip in space, marking the sinking shorelines that this place would someday be condemned to. the boardwalk plays sentinel, marks the border between city and sea, commands the mark where the shorelines ought to cease sinking. Faded beacon of a golden age, or a shell, about to split into something we cannot know.

During a thunderstorm, my roommate reminds me that Manhattan and Brooklyn are part of an island archipelago; everything is connected. When I sit on airplanes now, I look at the tops of clouds and I wonder what the cloud people see.

The part of me that sees with western eyes imagines a New York City submerged by the ocean in a thousand years. The other part of me, carrying the inventive storyteller of my mother and the immediate violence of submerged islands, is trying to build a raft to take us elsewhere, somewhere real for us to land.

There is a Tagalog myth of how the Philippine islands were created. It begins with a bird, flying and searching for a place to land. There was nothing beneath her, only ocean. With her, she carried the world.

I don’t credit my mother for leaving a world she knew, for the strength and courage it takes to stand up for herself in a foreign land.

On an impulse in August, I take the A train to Jamaica Bay's wildlife refuge. As I’m walking there from the station, someone stops me and asks if I’m looking for the falcons. I don’t know what he means, so I shake my head. But later, when I’m standing alone in the middle of the refuge, in the echoing expanse of marsh and silver water, I realize it’s the season for falcon watching. I like that idea, of a pilgrimage to a marsh bordering the edges of a city, to search for raptors blading across the sky.

I start looking for this feeling when I go to Coney Island. By the sea, the city walls fall away. I have room to exist. I forget sometimes that the air can smell clear like this, salt and sand and breeze. When I look up, sea birds circle the air. From below, they look like airplanes, and I think of how the shape of planes were inspired by the anatomy of birds. I think of how the turbines catch birds and shred their wings and pilots see the damage only after the flight.

I don't know when it starts to become a ritual, but every Sunday, I take the train to Coney Island and bring flowers with me. I give them to the water, as a way of thanking the people who came before me, my mother's mother and her mother and for the ancestors I don't know. I nod to the seagulls, I pay my respect to the ferris wheel and hot dog stands and the crumpled litter, I feel affinity with the oblivious beachgoers. I used to always imagine Coney Island underwater. I imagined that’s what it would be, a thousand years in the future, when New York City is drowned by the ocean and there’ll be nothing left of us to prove we were here but the skeletal bones of skyscrapers.

Moving to this city has been an education in learning how capable the world is of both cruelty and kindness. I've been thinking about refusal; how much I said no, as I formed myself in resistance to the world. but now I want to start saying yes. I refuse apocalyptic scenarios of sinking islands. I want to say yes to stories where the islands live and go on. As I sit on the bench at Coney Island, facing the sea, I think of how I saw fireflies in the park this summer. How I reached out my hand and coaxed one onto my finger, how she glowed before she lifted her wings and took flight. I think of how the news once reported that when the locals cleaned up Versova beach, hundreds of thousands of sea turtles hatched for the first time in decades. Maybe the wave is an infinitely small part of an infinite number of lines, infinite moments radiating out simultaneously and out of sequence.

In this heartbeat, the laughter of happy families warms the boardwalk. On another coast, fireflies still illuminate fields. In the deep blue, whales call to their calves. In this city, pigeons shuffling in the church altars of abandoned churches, and raptors blading in a blue sky. Someone in Brooklyn told me she became an anthropologist of animal relations because of a story her friend told her in passing, of a killer whale that carried her dead calf on her back for three weeks along the coast. I want to tell my mom, our bloodline runs from the cloud people. An airplane born us from an archipelago to a landlocked state to another archipelago. From the sky we came from, to the sea we'll return.

I wonder if the best way to fight for my parents is to just – be the person I’m supposed to be. To not run away. To not leave them behind. To fight for the future we were supposed to have, that was stolen from us.

I want to tell my mom, our bloodline runs from the cloud people. An airplane born us from an archipelago to a landlocked state to another archipelago. From the sky we came from, to the sea we'll return.

There are things I've lost that I'm hoping the ocean will wash up and return to me. But maybe it'll bring me other things I didn't ask for. Everything is possible. Driftwood, or plastic bags, or glass bottles, or maybe another world. I imagine this world would be small, fragile, softly breathing. Maybe she'll come unannounced in the shape of a sea bird.

The albatross was once a bird without legs, that had no other purpose than to fly and fly. But now, the albatross is a bird that can touch down. She is a bird that conceded to gravity. When the albatross wings in the sky, I wonder if she looks down and sees the shimmering gold veins of cities sprawling across patchwork of forest and river, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Does she think, this earth, I love? When she wings even higher, can she see the tops of clouds? When she lands, I wonder if she also has love for Coney Island, the smell of funnel cake and men’s cologne and barbecue and the rocky, salty brine of the ocean. Love for a beach of broken bits of shell and shards of glass and cigarette stubs and kelp. Maybe the albatross is the secret of making a heaven on earth.

Mom, I'll write us into a story where the islands were birthed from a bird rising. I'll write you a world for us to live in, maybe not a forever place, but one where something else begins. We'll take a train to the ocean. We'll trade our hands for wings. We'll look at the tops of clouds, we'll come back and we won't be the same again.

0 notes

declaredmissing · 3 years ago

Text

dispatches from an insurrecto

Watching Miss Sloane, Delikado, Bad Genius. Reading Insurrecto by Gina Apostol, Travels Around the World by Nawal, listening to Florence + The Machine’s Dance Fever. Discovering Ashley Nicols, First Nation fighter in Canada. The structure of the novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, and the way Roy described her process of writing it.

May has been a month of re-experiencing spring for the first time; cool sunlight on my skin, watching the trees blossom, the air smelling of soft rain.

This time around last year, I was listening to the demo of a song someone had shared with me, temporarily titled audio_3005. White flower petals were floating in the wind from the trees, and I was watching dogs tustling with each other in the dog park across me. I remember this time around last year, standing on one of my favorite bridges on Manhattan. I like standing in the middle of bridges, looking down at the cars rushing beneath me.

A year later, and something about the changing of the seasons reminds of audio_3005 again. This time around, I’m standing beneath the crabapple trees in Brooklyn, casting shadows like magenta clouds, and their pink petals carpeting the pavement. I’m walking from Muay Thai class with a new friend I made. My ex messages me out of the blue, but I feel nothing for him anymore, and I’ve broken up with yet another person since then but my heart is starting to feel larger and brighter this time around. Audio_3005 is a song that reminds me of time circling in loops, how something as simple as the air smelling like spring rain can bring a tide of memories rushing back and I realize I’m not the same person anymore.

This spring, I’ve been searching for peace, and rest. In some ways, like in the words of Florence Welch, it’s hard not to be affected by the optimism of spring. I’ve been listening to her latest album on the train today, and at work. I want a spring full of quiet sunday mornings, and reading on a park bench outside at the playground, and playing jazz records in my apartment at night and making thai iced coffee with eggs and garlic rice and sugared blackberries. I don’t feel rushed at all, I feel absolute stillness in my heart. I can watch people have picnics and not feel lonely or envious. To sit on the rocks and feel the gentle breeze of the wind on my face, and there are no sleepless summer nights because I go to bed with no worries and I can finally rest well.

At the start of this month, I’ve been looking for rest, my nerves on edge after my sister’s visit – the slightest thing terrifying me and making me want to hide under the bed. I take the L train to Williamsburg, thinking that sitting by the river would be the cure. But I feel stressed by the people in Williamsburg. I don’t even know them, and they’re all strangers. But the wealth and privilege and sheltered bubble was pervasive. The clothing, the coffeeshops and stores, signaling lifestyles that felt entirely inaccessible to me, and I was repelled. Only a certain kind of demographic can afford to live in Williamsburg, to enjoy it and to fit in with the culture. Walking through Williamsburg made me think about the prospects of what my future living in New York might look like, a path I might slide down too easily, and I felt queasy at the thought.

going to florida’s apartment in the afternoon, and it’s that crazy building I would always see when I walk on flushing avenue. being awed by the lobby, and the paradise-like enclosed courtyard that lava the little black dog was supposed to poop on. it was like a different world, and I felt like one of the ‘poor’, shut out from and unaware of these luxury buildings. I was still hot and sweaty and sticky, because I had gotten off a stop early at Central Avenue and walked to their place from there, my iced coffee melting in my hand.

This May, so many of us have been struggling with housing. Landlords have been raising rent, and so many people I know are having to move or are struggling to stay where they live now that post-covid prices are skyrocketing. Even in Kansas, housing costs have risen. Sensing these changing prices, I started contending with the likely reality that this might be the last year I can afford to stay in my apartment in Ridgewood. That this would be the last year I would have of this very specific life I hold, and I became determined to be intentional about it.

I used to always tell people that I would probably continue living in New York for my 20s, because everything and everyone was here. I had this idea that I would be able to disappear here, or exist in a multiplicity of ways. That it was so easy to uproot yourself from one circle that you were never tied down, you could erase yourself and start over as many times as you wanted. I loved the idea that I could experiment with the kind of person I wanted to be.

I’ve discovered what kinds of lives I don’t want. I know that I don’t fit in with the yuppie culture of williamsburg (too much like sterilized violence, a homogenous aesthetic and appeal, a particular class of wealthy young families). But I also don’t fit in with the alternative underground music/art/indie/fashion scenes of Bushwick or hipster Brooklyn. I feel like I just don’t fit in with ‘the youth’, period. my sense of style is like that of a kindergarten art teacher. I don’t go to any of these things young people go to. I don’t listen to the music that young people listen to, no matter what genre. I don’t dance, I don’t go out period, I don’t go to raves or clubs or bars, I don’t use tik tok so I don’t get cultural references or humor. I’m alien out of sync in every way. I don’t want to go out to bars, I don’t want to wear clothes that don’t feel like me, so I’m fine with it in a sense. But it also makes me wonder, what exactly am I doing here in New York, if I’m not making the most of the environment and the scenes around me?

I’m learning to accept that I don’t have to find complete belonging and acceptance from my kasamas. Maybe I’ll always feel diasporic and alien, because no one’s experiences and desires and interests will completely align with my own.

Compulsively following the Hard-Depp trial because it’s easier to cringe at someone that seems so obviously a terrible person, than it is to try to think about the work it would take to become the person I want to be. I thought about the people I admired, and when I watched interviews of Emma Watson, I was shocked to see someone so openly the mannerisms of myself I tried to repress; open passion and enthusiasm and childlike eagerness and shiny eyed optimism. I tried to suppress those qualities in myself, but by watching her, I realized that the warmth and genuine sincerity of her presence were exactly what drew me to her, that made her the kind of friend I wanted.

Ever since the break-up, I’d been trying to find everything I hadn’t realized I had been searching for in a relationship. Meaning, belonging, a sense of narrative and purpose, likes and dislikes and opinions and human connection. I threw myself into organizing, but I came to realize that it can’t be a substitute for the totality of who I am, nor should political work be the sum of life. I found myself feeling discouraged at times when I felt like I still didn’t fully ‘belong’. I came to realize that yes, while they are kasamas, these people also ultimately don’t know the entirety of who I am, nor do I have to be transparent about every aspect of my life.

Political work never replaces intimacy or individuality; I’m allowed to keep parts of my life private, from media and from my organizing work. I’m allowed to be a complicated and complex person with multiple different lives and identities outside of the movement. Who that person is, I’ve been trying to figure out.

I feel in between worlds at times, and not sure how to describe what abstract circles of community I do feel like I would fit into. Being disconnected from social media comes at a cost of being out of sync, out of step, out of trend, with the world. I wonder, where are the people I can kick it with? Militant. Insurrecto. Brown girl, or yellow girl, or mestiza? Blood of the colonized and colonizer.

I feel like my mind is an attic, that I hide myself in the landscapes of certain stories. The subtle muted tones of earthquake bird, the simplicity of whisper of the heart, the rioting chaos and compassion and multiplicities of the ministry of utmost happiness. I experiment with these different influences through the multiple avatars and personas I hold on the internet–subpoenas, oceanhill, february face. But I’m the sum of all these parts.

I decided that by the time I’m 30, I’m going to be good at something. Whatever it is I need to be able to walk by myself and not feel afraid; to have the confidence where I’m not constantly scanning my surroundings for danger and missing everything else. To be able to be alert, but experience life too. To learn Mandarin and integrate with sectors in the Philippines, and then apply to law school. I want to make my family proud, but I also feel like that perhaps this is my niche; what I could be good at, what I’m interested in, where my interests and strengths lie.

Being 23 is my year of being lonely and alone. A year of claiming feral; clomping and stomping around in mismatched attire. Red socks, combat boots, my military jacket with the left pocket coming undone at the seams and virtually unable to hold anything. It’s a year for learning who I am, and what I’m made of. Muay Thai, kali, making music with the piano and violin and my voice, reading Arundhati Roy, writing for myself, forming opinions on art and movies and having favorite fictional characters and studying Manarin. Curating a excellent mind, cultivating my attention, a sense of individuality, a practice of compassion and patience. Pursuing my research interests, and finding languages to disappear in and find freedom through. Learning to create private and beautiful moments of solitude, where I exist to no one but myself.

At the beginning of May, I still had the impulse to go on Tinder and have a ‘hot girl summer’, but then I remind myself of what I would feel when I go on there; how much time it would take finding someone I’m compatible with, and how much time I would have to spend on dates that go nowhere. A time-consuming and expensive past time, when I need to be investing the time and money into figuring out who I am, in becoming good at something, and recovering some baseline stability, learning to trust myself and feel like I’m an en route to a life I can be proud of. I want to have a clearly defined image of myself in my head before I start getting involved with guys again, because I know it would lead me to think more of the other person instead of the person I can be. I would start perceiving myself through the gaze of someone else; if I was pretty enough, loveable or fun or desirable enough.

With this May, the national elections in the Philippines, and then the unsurprising but disappointing triumph of Sarah Duterte and Bong-Bong Marcos. The news was shadowed by the war in Ukraine, the Amber Heard and Johnny Depp trial. News this month – the uvalde shooting, the subway shooting, the buffalo massacre, the war in ukraine, the philippine elections. Feeling disheartened by the heatwave in India and Pakistan, the freak heatwave in New York this weekend, the notifications of polluted air on my weather app almost everyday. This world is exhausting and frightening and it makes me angry but I also feel despair, and numbness. What can we do?

For a week, kasamas held vigils at the Philippine Consulate on fifth avenue, and I would walk there after work, dodging clouds of cigarette smoke on the block from the station to the consulate – which for some reason had an abundance of jewelry stores.

Last year, I met my neighbor on our rooftops when I was awkwardly practicing kali and he was sitting on a lawnchair facing the city skyline. This May, I see him again at the vigils. I come up, and he remembers me. I gather a brief re-impression of him; a Puerto Rican radical leftist who first started organizing when he went to Chicago for a conference on the Young Lords, committed to revolution and committed to organizing. In my head, I suddenly imagined fictions of us dating, the excitement and newness of dating someone I met from coincidence, with shared politics, whose world overlapped. We made plans to get coffee, and very soon, I discover he has more in common with my ex than he does with me. A crush is very often just that; the inflated ideal of a brief impression. But I’m older and wiser now, and I’m not so easily charmed by the things I used to fall for.

At a picnic in Central Park’s Strawberry Fields, we listen to elders share stories of martial law. We sit on blankets and share Jollibees and pansette and lumpia and people are line dancing, finding joy even as we know what the next six years might bring. On post-it notes, we write our migration stories and what brought our families to America. We’re asked to answer the question, “what do you want for your family and community?” and Sam and I look at each other. “What do I want for my community?” She wonders. Despite all my years organizing, I realized it was the first time I had been explicitly asked to answer this question. So often, we’re asked, “how do you want to change the world? what do you want your future to look like?” but the question of wanting something for others rarely surfaces in our everyday language; and it feels so different from asking, ‘what do you want to do to change things?” And I think, I just want us all to feel free.

I feel proud of this path I’m walking. It’s difficult; it involves learning about the parts of myself I don’t like, the secret shames and insecurities I didn’t even realize I’d had. I’ve been trying to learn what patience means to me this month, to myself and to others, and after these few weeks I’ve come to realize that time and compassion are critical elements. Time and compassion for myself, and for others.

There’s so much I have to unlearn for myself–to unlearn cynicism, fatalism, self victimizing but also my instinct to minimize my pain, the ways I diminish myself without realizing it. I have to unlearn the instinct to desire external markers of success, because society has led me to believe that it’ll make it easier to get my ‘dream job’. Learning to remold myself, to admit that I’m wrong, to contend with the versions of myself that I’m embarrassed of.

I hope this summer I can learn patience, and grace, and to learn how to admit that I’m wrong. To prefer others to be right. To forgive my mother and let go of my expectations of her. To not try to control the conversation; but to consider where others are coming from. To figure out what leads me to reach for distraction. To be a better friend to others. I want my heart to feel lighter; and I hope this summer, I can make it my mission to give things away, to reduce my life to the things I really need, and to figure out what I truly want and how to become a person that can navigate a situation according to my values. With patience, grace, the will to listen, the preference that others be right, with joy and spirit and trusting in the intentions of others.

Thinking of the nomadic life, silence, solitude, and enoughness. Wanting to learn to be okay with silence, and with less. To contend with the concept of enoughness. Configuring a dream apartment. Ordering a stool, storage container, hooks from Ikea. Giving away the blue couch, waking up an emptier room and feeling freer. Thinking of ‘minimalism’ as minimizing notifications and clutter in every way, and daydreaming of an ideal apartment space; – a tatami mat, a floor cushion, a futon. a large art easel for my paintings. candles, and a piano.

Developing new routines. Summoning the motivation to wake up early–thinking of Aomame, thinking of being 23. A breakfast of saffron rice and eggs, and stretching while waiting for the food to settle. Going to the playground to jumprope and practice kali. Learning to cook cumin chicken. Lifting weights when girl in red comes on randomly on a playlist and I start feeling emotional about 2021. Nights with a sandalwood candle, the warm glow of my a single lightbulb.

Verdent green trees, and giving away my belongings one by one. Like shedding snakeskins.

Staying after class to barrage Alex with questions, and meeting people at Muay Thai who come and go as if the gym was a subway station, and being fascinated by these chance encounters with completely random people. Rizsky (the Indonesian I thought was Filipino), Sophia with the kick that clocked my jaw because I didn’t know how to hold the pads (but I learned quickly after that), Dev who studied biology. I’ve been meeting people, even though the conversations and connections are fleeting. Conversations with kasamas on the train, about combat sports or making a career in art.

I’m struggling, but I show up. I go to muay thai, I initiate conversations, I jump rope, I’m learning to do things alone and on my own, I’m finding feelings that I want to write songs about, I’m learning to listen better, I’ve become a stronger and more articulate organizer. I’m staying away from social media, it’s become easier to stop perceiving myself through the male gaze, I’m forgiving roshan, I’m not as neurotically worked up about work. I’m learning to like myself more. Not ‘like’ as in to idealize or inflate what I’m capable of, or to invent an image of perfection of myself. But like as in, to enjoy being with myself. The process of becoming.

The train’s reflection shimmering in the puddles. Nights sitting on my carpet running my hands over the keyboard, clumsily playing a Chopin waltz, and trying to memorize the first page of paper bag by Fiona Apple. Sheet music scattered on the floor around me, and spilling out of their manila file folders. Nights jumproping in the playground, low haze shrouding the ground, light mist dewing my skin.

Lying in the low, staying home, ordering thai takeout that makes me happy – coconut pudding, chicken sekuwa. Reading Insurrecto while eating english muffins for breakfast with goat cheese and salmon, reading Nawal’s writing on the train, carrying Arundhati Roy’s essays with me when I go out and highlighting and underlining and memorizing phrases and composing speeches in my mind, reciting and learning the words by heart.

When I was walking to Nomad, seeing two birds dancing with each other; stopping beneath a tree to continue watching them. A small feather wafting down to me, I stretch out my hand, and catch it; and tuck it within a piece of paper, once I get to the coffeeshop.

Someone on the train asked if I had a pen he could borrow, and then if I played music, and uploaded it anywhere. “I’m off the grid,” I said.

Making saffron rice, facetiming mom, the free icecream sandwich at the nomad. moving my books from their temporary piles against the wall in the living room, to the bedroom.

going for a walk around the neighborhood when I come back home, sniffing the cool spring air, munching on strawberry pocky when I get back home.

Spending a Friday night embarrassing myself in therapy, and then ordering moo yang and thai iced coffee at the local thai restaurant (a ‘hidden neighborhood gem’ on yelp, great for dates or group hangouts, neither of which I was participating in).

Watching the rain fall through the window as I wait for my take out order at Chachawan, staring at the painting on the wall, of buildings and empty streets, and wondering what the artist who sketched it was looking at. The club music on the speakers, the waitress who asked, “a table for one?” when I walked in. Thinking, next time, yes. a table for one. The one other person in there is a man, eating alone, and I pray he doesn’t approach me to make conversation as I’m waiting for my food. Using my inverted umbrella for the first time, and I wonder if Chachawan is going to be my regular Friday night ritual after therapy.

I have strange dreams this month, dystopian dreams of wandering the labyrinth of a elite school where I got accepted into but no one really trusted each other. A dream where I knocked over an ancient civilization – with walls like a colloseum – and wandered the empty, eerie stone interior. The withered bones of faded plants, empty stone pools, beautiful but blank statues of animals carved of stone. A dream of space expeditions landing on a lush, tropical planet, with a jungle taking over the ruins of an ancient civilization, and I’m running, escaping monsters I cannot see.

I think of my childhood fantasy of people living in the clouds, and my dreams now of crumbling civilizations.

0 notes

declaredmissing · 3 years ago

Text

between rescue and recovery

I decided to develop a tough skin to protect myself. I became drawn to fictional figures with traditional masculine traits – self control, determination, cool, emotional discipline, and mastery. Self-sufficient, independent women, who are fucked over in many ways but refused to be helpless. Alienated with no support system, but plenty of rage to fuel them. Aimee, Lisbeth Salander, Aomame, Lara Croft. They had a voice, and they had power, even if it was in a sense dressing over deeper wounds, to protect the softer parts of their underbelly. I thought rescuing myself meant being untouchable. Being able to defend myself. To not be scared anymore. I wanted to be both weapon and armor itself. The kind of girl who could walk home alone at night and have nothing to be afraid of.

We are primed with our hands holding our keys in the the way that alert, vulnerable women do walking alone at night.

I wonder what the difference is between rescue, and recovery. It seems obvious that self-preservation, the instinct to survive, means to walk away from situations that felt unbearable. But it’s not so obvious when you don’t know how to recognize what a cruel situation is. When it doesn’t occur to you that it’s possible to ask for more – and that you are deserving of more.

0 notes

declaredmissing · 3 years ago

Text

the right to be wrong

reflections on the trial of elisabeth holmes

Having to educate myself, remold myself, but also to have admit that I’m wrong. There are versions of myself that I’m embarrassed of.

I’ve been thinking about this lately, after binge-watching the Hulu series of Elizabeth Holmes. She used to be a media darling, praised for being a leader of female empowerment. But her fraud was exposed, and she quickly fell society’s grace. I was fascinated by her hubris and her audacity to believe in her own delusions. I quickly became interested for what she reflected about society, and from the fear that I might be like her.

When I was younger, I wanted to be a hero. I was filled with a sense of my own destiny and fate to change the world. My role-models came from the Royal Diaries series; Catherine the Great and Lady Redbird and Cleopatra were my inspirations. I thought I could be president. I also had genuine passion for the world; I think back to my excitement to discover bioluminescence, to grow mangroves, to discover the ‘global system’ of the world. I’m proud of my younger self for having this spirit, this desire to live a bright and shining life. But at the same time, I staked my sense of self on the specialness of my dreams, instead of thinking about the actual impact of my intentions. This escape into a fantasy risks delusion, an inflated sense of my own unique signicance.

There are some who explain Holmes as having good intentions gone wrong. But I think her downfall was the natural consequence of what I suspect were her true desires; fame, wealth, recognition. She didn’t want to create a product that actually worked. She wanted, above all, the applause for being perceived as a genius.

To admit she was wrong would be catastrophic and painful consequences for her sense of self.

I’m no better than Elisabeth; I’m also struggling with myself, and my unconscious assumptions that I already know everything. As a teenager, my well-intentioned but misplaced self-righteousness came from thinking there was nothing to change my mind about. I was convinced that I had arrived at the right answers. I was proud of my ambition, and motivated from the desire to persuade others to see the way I did.

I wonder what image and sense of self I’m protecting, and what narrative I’m trying to preserve–what ideal self, what version of who I could be, am I wanting to protect at all costs? I want to be a good person, and so it makes it hard when people challenge me and implicate that I’m not being a ‘good person’. It’s hard to hear the criticism, but if I shut it out so that I can preserve my image of myself, I’m not going to change in a way that would treat people better.

Elisabeth repeatedly asserted that her dream was to change the world for the better. But ‘the world’ isn’t a monolithic entity. Better for who? Change what world? What is ‘the world’, according to Holmes? Because her end game wasn’t to think about systemic change, her ambition ultimately led to her replicating masculine power. It was enough for her to be perceived as a visionary, instead of thinking about how to truly address systemic racism and sexism, the erosion of labor rights, or the accumulation of wealth in just a few of the country’s millions of hands—the broad abuses of power that afflict the daily lives of most people.

That’s what I fear of any ambition to change the world. Revolutionaries risk replicating this in a movement, but also on an individual level as well. If I want to preserve the image of being a good person, I might shut out meaningful criticism, threaten those who challenge me, instead of changing myself in a way that would treat people better.

I’ve been struggling to put myself out there and risk being wrong, knowing my beliefs might be imperfect and my future self might regret who I was. But perhaps that speaks more to my present cruelty to my younger self. My first instinct, when I was embarrassed to be wrong, was to retreat. I decided to build secret rooms where I would perfect myself in solitude. This kind of invulnerability led me to shut myself out from the world. But I found out soon enough that to isolate is unsustainable. It was a kind of self-imposed death that held me back from truly living. And so to hide from risking being wrong isn’t the answer; we have to have the courage to make mistakes, as well.

The question is, how can one learn with humility, but also the ability to discern and not just believe everything? How do I filter the data? What could it look like, to to trust your instincts and the worth of your dreams, but to also be able to question your own instincts as well? Holmes’ downfall is a fascinating way for me to think through this dilemma of how to filter the data, because science itself is about the pursuit of truth.

I’ve been thinking about Edward Snowden’s autobiography, Permanent Record. His struggle with ethics, his humility and reflections on his younger self, provides me a model for how to be wrong. His pursuit of morality was interlinked with the desire for truth, but also humility, the grace of being willing to learn. I’ve been thinking of the development of one’s character as the experiment we pursue for our entire lives–the development of the strength of our individuality, and internal resources, the ability to discern truth and sift through the data to arrive at a working premise. In science, the answers and data you find are framed through the questions that you ask. In a similar way, my intentions and principles shape the questions I ask, and therefore, how I make sense of the data and decide where to go from there.

Lately, in moments of self-doubt, I tell myself, “I reserve the right to be wrong.” It gives me a strange sort of courage, to give myself the permission to change my mind. Reminding myself I’m allowed to make mistakes, that I’m allowed to fail, gives me the kindness to try. To experiment. To partake in the grand adventure of life. Whenever I feel defensive, I try to remind myself that it’s a sign I am being challenged in a good way; there is something valuable to be learned from every other human’s worldview, and that I haven’t arrived at the answers yet myself.

0 notes

declaredmissing · 3 years ago

Text

dispatches of an insurrecto

May has been a month of re-experiencing spring for the first time; cool sunlight on my skin, watching the trees blossom, the air smelling of soft rain. I remember this time around last year, standing on one of my favorite bridges on Manhattan. I like standing in the middle of bridges, looking down at the cars rushing beneath me. This time around last year, I was listening to the demo of a song someone had shared with me, temporarily titled audio_3005. White flower petals were floating in the wind from the trees, and I was watching dogs tustling with each other in the dog park across me.

A year later, and something about the changing of the seasons reminds of audio_3005 again. This time around, I’m standing beneath the crabapple trees in Brooklyn, casting shadows like magenta clouds, and their pink petals carpeting the pavement. Last year, a boy took off my baseball cap to try and kiss me by the Hudson River, and I ducked his attempt, mortified. This time around, I’m walking from Muay Thai class with a new friend I made. My ex messages me out of the blue, but I feel nothing for him anymore, and I’ve broken up with yet another person since then but my heart is starting to feel larger and brighter this time around.

Audio_3005 is a song that reminds me of time circling in loops, how something as simple as the air smelling like spring rain can bring a tide of memories rushing back and I realize I’m not the same person anymore.

At the start of this month, I’ve been looking for rest, my nerves on edge after my sister’s visit – the slightest thing terrifying me and making me want to hide under the bed. I take the L train to Williamsburg, thinking that sitting by the river would be the cure. But I feel stressed by the people in Williamsburg. I don’t even know them, and they’re all strangers. But the wealth and privilege and sheltered bubble was pervasive. The clothing, the coffeeshops and stores, signalled lifestyles that felt entirely inaccessible to me, and I was repelled. Only a certain kind of demographic can afford to live in Williamsburg, to enjoy it and to fit in with the culture. Walking through Williamsburg made me think about the prospects of what my future living in New York might look like, a path I might slide down too easily, and I felt queasy at the thought.

I used to always tell people that I would probably continue living in New York for my 20s, because everything’s here. I guess by everything, I meant, everyone; all kinds of people here. I had this idea that I would be able to disappear here, or exist in a multiplicity of ways here. That it was so easy to uproot yourself from one circle that you were never tied down, you could erase yourself and start over as many times as you wanted. I loved the idea that I could experiment with the kind of person I wanted to be.

There are many different ways to exist in New York, and so many kinds of people I can be; I don’t have to limit myself to the lives I see around me. It’ll just be harder, and I’ll just have to find my own way; a life that’s not so clearly and explicitly written out. This month, I’ve been trying to find genuine human connection, a sense of belonging, a sense of meaning. I’ve been realizing that I can’t find meaning alone in the movement, nor do I have to. That I’m allowed to have other hobbies and interests as well. That I’m allowed to be a complicated and complex person with multiple different lives and identities outside of the movement. Who that person is, I’ve been trying to figure out.

I realized, uncomfortably, that I was compulsively watching the Heard/Depp trial because it felt easier to cringe at someone that seemed so obviously crueler and ‘worse’ than me, than to try to think about the work it would take to become the person I want to be. It was also a shock to recognize how I had been watching Amber so much I had started to emulate her mannerisms. (Which no doubt were cobbled together imitations of the person she wanted to be perceived as). I decided to look up interviews of Emma Watson, and was shocked to see someone so openly the mannerisms of myself I tried to repress; open passion and enthusiasm and childlike eagerness and shiny eyed optimism. I was envious at how adored she was; I felt bad for wanting to be her, it was proof that I wasn’t good enough for myself. Being awed by her presence; this is the friend I want, the warmth radiating from even her digital presence, feeling like I would be safe talking to her and that I could trust her.

It’s hard to think straight about the kind of person I want to be and what I value, when I also want to belong, and to feel like I must be doing something wrong if I’m not finding people I fit in with. But these people in the ND movement ultimately don’t know the entirety of me, and I don’t have to be transparent about every aspect of my life either. I’m allowed to keep parts of my life private, from media and from my organizing work. I feel in between worlds at times, and not sure how to describe what abstract circles of community I do feel like I would fit into. Being disconnected from social media comes at a cost of being out of sync, out of step, out of trend, with the world. I wonder, where are the people I can kick it with? Being a lonely alone girl. Being 23. Militant. Insurrecto. Brown girl, or yellow girl, or mestiza? Blood of the colonized and colonizer. Being 23 is my year of being feral; clomping and stomping around in mismatched attire. Red socks, combat boots, my military jacket with the left pocket coming undone at the seams and virtually unable to hold anything. I want to be free to be as crazy and unhinged as possible.

Learning who I am and what I’m made of; filipino martial arts and muay thai, making music with the piano and violin and my voice. That likes to read Arundhati Roy, and write personal stories and prose for myself, and has opinions on art and movies, that has favorite fictional characters. That needs to get her violin and piano repaired. That wants to study Mandarin. That wants to curate a cultivated and excellent mind, and an individual sense of self, and a sense of compassion and patience. That has research interests I want to dive into and pursue. That has private, beautiful moments of solitude as well, where I exist to no one but myself.

Deciding that I want to apply to law school in a couple years. I want to make my family proud, but I also feel like that perhaps this is my niche; what I could be good at, what I’m interested in, where my interests and strengths lie. Before I apply to law school, I want to learn Mandarin and to integrate with sectors in the Philippines first. Deciding that by the time I’m 30, I want to be really good at something. I want to feel that I’ve mastered something. By something–muay thai, and filipino martial arts. To be able to walk by myself and not feel afraid. For that to a strong enough confidence that I’m not even scanning my surroundings for danger; I’m alert, but I’m not able to focus on other things. I’m able to experience life. I want to experience that in languages too; languages I can disappear in, find freedom in, exist in a different way in.

I think of the stories and landscapes I like to hide myself in; the subtle muted tones of earthquake bird, the simplicity of whisper of the heart, the rioting chaos and compassion and multiplicities of the ministry of utmost happiness. The multiple avatars and personas I hold on the internet. subpoenas, oceanhill, february face.

With this May came the unsurprising but disappointing triumph of Sarah Duterte and Bong-Bong Marcos. The news was shadowed by the war in Ukraine, the Amber Heard and Johnny Depp trial. News this month – the uvalde shooting, the subway shooting, the buffalo massacre, the war in ukraine, the philippine elections. Feeling disheartened by the heatwave in India and Pakistan, the freak heatwave in New York this weekend, the notifications of polluted air on my weather app almost everyday. This world is exhausting and frightening and it makes me angry but I also feel despair, and numbness. What can we do?

This May held the national elections of the Philippines. For a week, kasamas held vigils at the Philippine Consulate on fifth avenue, and I would walk there after work, dodging clouds of cigarette smoke on the block from the station to the consulate – which for some reason had an abundance of jewelry stores.

I still find the impulse to go on Tinder and have a ‘hot girl summer’, but then I remind myself of what I would feel when I go on there; how much time it would take finding someone I’m compatible with, and how much time I would have to spend on dates that go nowhere. A time-consuming and expensive past time, when I need to be investing the time and money into figuring out who I am, in becoming good at something, and recovering some baseline stability, learning to trust myself and feel like I’m an en route to a life I can be proud of. I want to have a clearly defined image of myself in my head before I start getting involved with guys again, because I know it would lead me to think more of the other person instead of the person I can be. I would start perceiving myself through the gaze of someone else; if I was pretty enough, loveable or fun or desirable enough.

I want my heart to feel lighter; and I hope this summer, I can make it my mission to give things away, to reduce my life to the things I really need, and to figure out what I truly want and how to become a person that can navigate a situation according to my values. With patience, grace, the will to listen, the preference that others be right, with joy and spirit and trusting in the intentions of others.

Running late to muay thai because of the Small Trial Prep call with Dan Small, taking the L to the A transferring at Broadway Junction this time, being disoriented at Nostrand. the little girl swaying to the balloon figure, and the older woman with her hiding a smile, making eye contact with me. alex dodging my knee ( “I was just scared of you!”) and then realizing he was worried about my knee mis-aiming and making contact with his balls. Asking the new person if he was Filipino (but he’s Indonesian and his name is Rizsky) and meeting Sophia for the first time and in the burnout her second kick catches me off guard and my chin takes the impact. barraging alex with questions after class, the awkwardness of trying to demonstrate the round kick while my gym bag is on me.

Conversations with kasamas on the train, about combat sports or making a career in art.

Reading Nawal’s writing on the train.

Carrying out Arundhati Roy’s essays with me on the train, highlighting and underlining and memorizing phrases and composing speeches in my mind, reciting and learning the words by heart. Jump roping in the playground night, in the haze set low over the ground, light mist dewing my skin. The train’s reflection shimmering in the puddles.

Nights sitting on my carpet running my hands over the keyboard, clumsily playing a Chopin waltz, and trying to memorize the first page of paper bag by Fiona Apple. Sheet music scattered on the floor around me, and spilling out of their manila file folders.

When I was walking to The Nomad, seeing two birds dancing with each other; stopping beneath a tree to continue watching them. A small feather wafting down to me, I stretch out my hand, and catch it; and tuck it within a piece of paper, once I get to the coffeeshop.

Someone on the train asked if I had a pen he could borrow, and then if I played music, and uploaded it anywhere. “I’m off the grid,” I said.

Making saffron rice, facetiming mom, the free icecream sandwich at the nomad. moving my books from their temporary piles against the wall in the living room, to the bedroom.

going for a walk around the neighborhood when I come back home, sniffing the cool spring air, munching on strawberry pocky when I get back home, and listening to florence welch’s album dancing fever. Discovering 90s russian rock, the song snaeha by pan ron.

I think of my childhood fantasy of people living in the clouds, and my dreams now of crumbling civilizations.

0 notes