Yes, you can be deadly serious, but can you be deadly SILLY?
You can wear your pronouns and your politics and you can tell the difference between the two, but can you wear the clothes you actually want? The lipstick that doesn't suit you? Can you shave half your face and leave the other half wild? Can you scrawl on your arm in sharpie just for the look of it? Do you even own a tutu?
Knowing how to fit in and when to fit in is a tool in the box but letting that take over how you act and look and feel when you're not breaking in is the highway to normalcy.
Remember, we become what we pretend to be.
When was the last time you gave yourself permission to be silly?
This is not intended to make light of Current Circumstances. I know what dead bodies are. I know the end result of too much entropy.
But I worry, for me, and for you, that we are eating too much bread and not growing enough roses.
I worry we fell too far into the trap of defining ourselves in terms of our fights, that we forget what it is to exist outside of external purpose.
I tried, for a year, to not be in the fight. Any of the fights. I was exhausted. I was not getting my spoons back. And so I thought I would live simply. I would work a normal job and I would buy things with the money I earned and I would try to see what that dream thing is I keep hearing about. And for a while there was a romance to it. There is something good about being connected to your labor, something special about high viz tee shirts and dirty hands. There is a value in customer service voice, and the theater of work. But I found the deeper I went the more the mud sucked under my feet, and the scrabble to the top brought no joy no rewards but more and worse work, more getting yelled at more unpaid hours more emails to archive more projects and no time and no budget and worst of all no understanding from above that if something is worth doing it's worth paying someone to do, and if you don't want to pay someone to do it you would take if off the damn list of things to get done. My spoon drawer stayed empty, hit crisis. My stress stayed the same but the causes and solutions were stupid. I was more and more powerless.
This is my coming out of the cave. One shaky step at a time. I don't know what I'm doing and I don't know if I'll survive but what I do know is that we all die anyway. I don't want to die contributing to the creep of fascism, I don't want to die making someone else rich. There is no reward for keeping your head down and they cannot hammer every nail that pops up. Let me try. With fully informed consent. Knowing that my chances are next to nil. Let me extract my body from their machine, my labor from their pool. Let me breathe unconditioned air. I will make my wax wings and I will brave their fly swatters and I will sing in the shower and speak to strangers and pick up every shiny rock on my long walk to wherever it is I am going. I will put on my armor and I will find a new sword and I will stand where bodies are needed for something better than what we have. I will break out my bullhorn and I will lead when the chants falter and I will hand the mic to scared neophytes who don't know their own voice yet and I will coax it out of them with sweetness and whispers and whoops and hollers.
And I know, I will fall. I know that recovery is not a straight line. I know that progress is incremental, steps are taken back. I know I will land flat on my face. It's already happened, already happening.
Remember, you will die here. Remember you are already dead. But you do not have to die alone and you do not have to die in service to what you hate and you do not have to die having never lived.
These are omelet making times. And whether you are the one making the omelet or not a lot of eggs are getting broken and chances are you're going to be one of them. But listen to me, really listen. Sometimes an omelet needs to be made. And every single egg that breaks along the way matters. Everything that you are matters. The smell of lilacs in May, the burning pavement under bare feet, the taste of chlorine, of sea salt in the air, the touch of mist on a gray day, of mud between your toes, it matters.
Let the sun shine on your face.
Put down the work.
Find accomplices
Start planning
And for the love of the Goddess, get a little silly about it.
We're going on a jailbreak.
You can wear your pronouns and your politics and you can tell the difference between the two, but can you wear the clothes you actually want? The lipstick that doesn't suit you? Can you shave half your face and leave the other half wild? Can you scrawl on your arm in sharpie just for the look of it? Do you even own a tutu?
Knowing how to fit in and when to fit in is a tool in the box but letting that take over how you act and look and feel when you're not breaking in is the highway to normalcy.
Remember, we become what we pretend to be.
When was the last time you gave yourself permission to be silly?
This is not intended to make light of Current Circumstances. I know what dead bodies are. I know the end result of too much entropy.
But I worry, for me, and for you, that we are eating too much bread and not growing enough roses.
I worry we fell too far into the trap of defining ourselves in terms of our fights, that we forget what it is to exist outside of external purpose.
I tried, for a year, to not be in the fight. Any of the fights. I was exhausted. I was not getting my spoons back. And so I thought I would live simply. I would work a normal job and I would buy things with the money I earned and I would try to see what that dream thing is I keep hearing about. And for a while there was a romance to it. There is something good about being connected to your labor, something special about high viz tee shirts and dirty hands. There is a value in customer service voice, and the theater of work. But I found the deeper I went the more the mud sucked under my feet, and the scrabble to the top brought no joy no rewards but more and worse work, more getting yelled at more unpaid hours more emails to archive more projects and no time and no budget and worst of all no understanding from above that if something is worth doing it's worth paying someone to do, and if you don't want to pay someone to do it you would take if off the damn list of things to get done. My spoon drawer stayed empty, hit crisis. My stress stayed the same but the causes and solutions were stupid. I was more and more powerless.
This is my coming out of the cave. One shaky step at a time. I don't know what I'm doing and I don't know if I'll survive but what I do know is that we all die anyway. I don't want to die contributing to the creep of fascism, I don't want to die making someone else rich. There is no reward for keeping your head down and they cannot hammer every nail that pops up. Let me try. With fully informed consent. Knowing that my chances are next to nil. Let me extract my body from their machine, my labor from their pool. Let me breathe unconditioned air. I will make my wax wings and I will brave their fly swatters and I will sing in the shower and speak to strangers and pick up every shiny rock on my long walk to wherever it is I am going. I will put on my armor and I will find a new sword and I will stand where bodies are needed for something better than what we have. I will break out my bullhorn and I will lead when the chants falter and I will hand the mic to scared neophytes who don't know their own voice yet and I will coax it out of them with sweetness and whispers and whoops and hollers.
And I know, I will fall. I know that recovery is not a straight line. I know that progress is incremental, steps are taken back. I know I will land flat on my face. It's already happened, already happening.
Remember, you will die here. Remember you are already dead. But you do not have to die alone and you do not have to die in service to what you hate and you do not have to die having never lived.
These are omelet making times. And whether you are the one making the omelet or not a lot of eggs are getting broken and chances are you're going to be one of them. But listen to me, really listen. Sometimes an omelet needs to be made. And every single egg that breaks along the way matters. Everything that you are matters. The smell of lilacs in May, the burning pavement under bare feet, the taste of chlorine, of sea salt in the air, the touch of mist on a gray day, of mud between your toes, it matters.
Let the sun shine on your face.
Put down the work.
Find accomplices
Start planning
And for the love of the Goddess, get a little silly about it.
We're going on a jailbreak.
