irfansap93

[irfansap93]

QUESTIONS (???)

It’s so many things to make who truly I am. One of things is when I read book. Even it’s just a book, it was healing me. I can no longer have conversation with others. I just focused on what I concern, because we’re often coming at it from completely different places. I can’t have a conversation with them about the details a problem if they don’t even recognise that the problem exists. Worse still is the person who might be willing to entertain the possibility of said fairness, but who thinks we enter this conversation as equals. I don’t.

What I wasn’t expecting was an outpouring of emotion from people who felt that by deciding to stop talking to people about race, I was taking something away from the world, and that this was an absolutely tragedy in good way. ‘Heartbreaking’ seemed to be the word that best described this condition.

My dream is that the people who turn up to my events take that opportunity to meet each others, swap details and form their local resistance.This month, I read (and not yet finish) “Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People about Race” by Reni Eddo-Lodge when I am in chapter 5, it’s about the feminism question. I took poet by black feminism, her name is Audre Lorde. She said ‘your silence will not protect you’. Who wins when we don’t speak? Not us.

Many question comes to me. It is good thing which occasionally will pervasive to my self, sometimes it will be arose aggravation. Aggravation depends on point of view of their questions. Therefore, I lived in Indonesia which eastern culture is too hip. Everything based on your ethnic, religion and so on. Your personal life will be consumed to other people. They want to know what you’ve done. They are so noisy with many perspective of your life.

I felt like everywhere, public opinion was veering towards hostility. The drawbridges came up and the atmosphere turned sharp. Every country was full, and every country had to look after their own. The world had turned inward. Politics had become punitive, rather than empathetic and generous. Refugees were dying in capsized dinghy boats in the mediterranean sea, and populist politics told us not only to look away, but somehow that people fleeing war and poverty did not need our help. We were too stretched.

Last year I had been a lot of things: humbling, elating, upsetting, overwhelming. Sometimes all the same time. It was also one of the most formatives years of my life, one where i felt like I became a fuller human being with a little bit more compassion, self-awareness and less anger. Against my wish, however, the moments keep fleeting before I could properly imprint them in my memory (taking pictures helps, of course, although it often gets too interruptive and energy consuming).

Flash news: I’m Leslie Knope (from Parks and Recreation) or at least that’s how I think of myself. In one of episodes, Leslie sat down with her boss Ron Swanson, who reminded her to never half-ass two things, whole-ass one thing. While I don’t know if I could ever whole-ass one thing, this year I accomplished the difficult task of reducing my urge to “multiplieth-ass tons of things” to just “whole ass-two things”.

In quiet, underneath my newfound ability to decline invitations, I can hear the vague sound of conviction that I recently discovered. This might be part of growing up or my training in school of government, but I can now give people advices with significantly more confidence than I ever had.