Social comparison feels like a dead bird in your chest. Somehow fluttering. Somehow brushing up against the borders of your heart, eager to leap out. Onto a page, perhaps. Wanting to be the best or better-than just to feign some semblance of actual self worth is no way to live. And yet.

I grieve the world we were not given. One where our inherent worth is protected and not precarious. Where the rich treasures of the soul are revered; not the shallow triumphs of the ego. What a heartbreak — to be conditioned to see yourself as a lack in the midst of such cosmic abundance.

When the feelings of inadequacy arise, do not rush to fix. Rush to fix that you rushed to fix.

Did that work?

Words cannot fully console, but the attempt brings a soft smile to the lips.

I went to competitive schools, at first seeking safety in winning. What I didn’t realize was, at the same time, a competitive environment was growing up inside of me. An ecosystem took root and then blossomed — of monitoring, checking, comparing, measuring, striving, trying to retain the sense that I am worthwhile.

How much of your ambition is just envy?

Try not to judge yourself. These roots run deeper than you. You can’t prune an endless forrest of unworthiness with your bare hands.

Humanize her. Or him or them. This person you have placed on a pedestal so far above you. Fleshy evidence of your shortcomings. Narcissus fell in love with his own reflection in a body of water and drowned in the body of self-absorption. We are not so different.

Without meaning to, we turn the Other into a caricature. Conjuring up who we need them to be, projecting a life of perfection onto a complex and layered human life. Social media seduces us into doing this to ourselves, and each other. To subdue insecurity into the deep, fake waters of a filtered reality. To objectify the human condition, until it becomes something unrecognizable.

In comparison, our storytelling powers are used against us. We invent a human experience filled with only triumph. No such thing exists. How must that feel? We wonder. To be so successful, so beautiful, to have that many followers, to be chosen, to have “everything figured out”, to travel so much, to have that much freedom, to have gotten into that school, to be so talented, to be thriving, to have so many friends, to be so Undeniable? (Industry reference).

What are the private longings and pains and joys beneath the surface of what I think I can see? How did they suffer to obtain those things? How would they see themselves if they lost them? How do they suffer to hold onto where their worth is now placed? (Which invites a celebrity plastic surgery discussion)

Humanize your rival or role model. Who knows of a human life with only triumph? Only someone who is not listening.

And this techno-obsessed social paradigm makes it challenging to speak truthfully and listen deeply — to really hear the deeper whispers of the human unfolding.There are many dimensions of a life. You may envy their outcomes, but not their process. They may be thriving in their career, but battling a private health struggle you will never know about. She may be proud to be a new mom, but grieving the loss of old freedoms. He might be thrilled to have sold the rights to his book to a big studio, but never be able to get back the time he sacrificed away from his family, or the impacts of over-working on his health.

Or you know what — they may be really fucking over-joyed. That is beautiful and I wish big, magical joy to all of us. But If I think of any actual human being I’ve ever met, the raw reality is much different, much more layered, and much more humbling. When you see what it took to actually build the dream relationship, business, career — you stop having a reductive envy about the having of it.

But the opposite is also true. Just as every human life suffers unknown tragedies, it also holds invisible delights. Beautiful dimensions you would not even know to envy, from the outside looking into another outside. A loving relationship with parents. A beautiful treatment of self. An ability to be present, here, now, with the world in ways that are rapidly decaying for most. A genuine heart of gold. A love of painting or poetry or piano that makes Saturdays feel like the sweetest song. These private dimensions are precious and plenty.

When I feel envious of someone, typically online, typically career-related, I place a hand on my heart. I say, Just like me you suffer. Just like me you love. I like the duality of this statement. There are aspects of their life I would not envy if I knew more. And the most enviable aspects of their human experience are probably beyond the frame of what I can see.

We are taught to compare ourselves to others not on neutral terms — but according to the value system society perpetuates through us — “success” in capitalistic, individualistic, institutionally-defined terms, Beauty in Eurocentric and patriarchal and thin and rich supremacist terms, love in a hierarchical understanding where romantic love is on top, fame and attention based on a value system that doesn’t award it to the most love-led people.

We do not compare ourselves to how loving, generous, or full of integrity someone is. We do not compare ourselves based on conditions of the soul — for these are incomparable. Only the ego can be compared, or would opt for such a horrifying possibility. I am musing on this topic, not solving. I do experience an invitation to come home to the incomparable within ourselves and within each other. Note down what you feel is incomparable about you — perhaps how deep of a listener you are, how non-defensive and receptive in conflict, how generously you give your attention to the world, how sensitive you are to the energies in a room.

Find the beauty in your spirit, the treasures of your soul, and the next time someone is Proud to Announce *Something That Triggers You* — remember that what is essential, heartfelt, and world-building within each of us is beyond the horizon that comparison can reach.

And also, of course, be inspired by humans who do inspiring things! Consistent effort over time towards a worthy cause, devotion, commitment, seeing something through — these are deeply inspiring human capacities. And also, we can broaden the scope of what is an inspiring thing to do. How we love is the most inspiring possibility and typically cannot be observed from the outside.

Try to tell people, in specific detail, what you find wonderful about their spirit and soul — helping them blossom new flowers of self-love in the ecosystem of their heart. Nourishing the flowers that try try try to stay alive in toxic soil. Reimagining what is worth celebrating in each of us — beyond the social traits and forms of capital we were conditioned to value. This, I imagine, is a small yet sacred part of what it means to compare ourselves to life instead of death. Alchemizing the pain of comparison into an insistence on affirming the innate gifts of the human spirit.

We need sweeping political, social, spiritual, and technological changes to re-make the world into one where we all feel essentially at home. Part of that work involves re-membering our inherent sacredness and infinite worth, our incomparability and immeasurability — and supporting each other’s journeys of remembrance and return.

We walk this earth always and already together. Comparison alienates us from ourselves as inherently sacred, and from each other as fellow travelers, not competitors. When we feel the pain of falling short, we can return to a broader vision of what it would take to co-create a world where the human spirit is not reduced to competition and where the soul/spirit receives the reverence it deserves.

Comparing Yourself to Life is a title I came up with at the end of this unfolding, and now I feel excited to explore it further. As someone who has intimately felt the soul-crushing, self-annihilating experience of comparing yourself to other people, I feel excited and hopeful about alchemizing this life-depleting experience into life-giving possibilities. But first, presence.

This has been a hard week. My mantra for myself this week is: Grace at every step. This life will break your heart, but if you’re wise, you’ll let it break you open. I walk with the invisible friend of pain that overstayed its welcome. One year later, me and my friend, existing in a private intimacy I would never have chosen for myself. But I am here with my heart cracked even more widely open, having the courage to choose this life of mine, just as it is. To know that this is not a mistake or a detour from what was supposed to happen — this is exactly what I have come here to experience. This here. This now. This all of it.

There are countless videos and essays about "how to stop comparing yourself to others". Something has always bothered me about this advice. It suggests comparison is a completely voluntary process, as though we just choose to torture ourselves with wishing we could be as beautiful or talented or successful as the people around us (including our friends). The idea that “comparison is the thief of joy” hides something far more sinister: that comparison is not an active choice but an inevitable consequence of a culture rooted in individualism, inequality, supremacy, and hierarchy.

I am skeptical of framing such a torturous and isolating feeling as something we could just opt out of. Similar to many popular self-help refrains (the mountain is you! you create your own reality!) it burdens the individual with responsibility for collective/social ills that no single person can simply overcome by choice. And it isolates us even further in our shame, making us think the problem is us rather than the value system, technologies, and systems that shape us (“Technology, for better or worse, affects every aspect of our lives. Our very sense of who we are is shaped and reshaped by the tools we have at our disposal.”)

I am on a lifelong journey to radically accept my emotions and treat them with curiosity rather than judgment. I have come to view emotions not as individual experiences to be managed but as collective symptoms to be understood. Symptoms of:

• What it might means to be alive at this time (since our emotions are in a sense an expression of our aliveness)

• What our cultures value and do not value (we don't compare ourselves based on how loving or in service we are to our communities)

• How social structures either support or go against our inherent nature (comparison feels terrible because it is underpinned by a set of social relationships, values, and systems that promote human suffering rather than wellbeing)

I love this Gabor Mate quote from The Myth of Normal:

“If we could begin to see much illness itself not as a cruel twist of fate or some nefarious mystery but rather as an expected and therefore normal consequence of abnormal, unnatural circumstances, it would have revolutionary implications for how we approach everything health related.” ― Gabor Maté

Comparison, then, is an expected and normal consequence of abnormal, unnatural circumstances. Such as:

• We are collectivist species either living in or greatly influenced by individualist cultures, values, and aspirations (e.g., the idea that the purpose of your life is to become your best self (intentionally designed to be an elusive project) rather than contribute to your community)

• We survived by collaborating, sharing resources, and looking after one another rather than being made to compete for resources in a matrix of manufactured scarcity

• We have abnormal, unattainable beauty standards rooted in Eurocentricism and elitism — and we equate a person’s proximity to this standard with their value and worth as a human being. We are not allowed to present as the animals we are, and our ability to access love, respect, dignity, and material resources is tied to our level of Beauty capital

• We are unquantifiable, divine beings made to live a quantified existence where worth can be measured in followers, likes, and dollar signs. Surveillance capitalist technology companies have in many ways taken over our sense of self for their own ends. We are now exposed to millions of people when we were not meant to know more than 100, and the addictiveness of these platforms steals our very life-force (attention) from us. We all participate in a collective performance of self that alienates us from ourselves and from each other (we are envious of a fantasy of a life, not the life itself, but the distinction matters less and less) Can I just say, I love this quote by Byung-Chul Han in The Disappearance of Rituals:

  • "The society of authenticity is a performance society. All members perform themselves. All produce themselves. Everyone pays homage to the cult of the self, the worship of self in which everyone is his or her own priest."

This quote is very enticing to me and invites a whole other discussion that I will resist for the moment (in what way are you (am I) performing yourself? producing yourself? in what way do we only compare ourselves to productions of selves and never the self itself? can we ever even access the “true” self in a world like ours? who would we be in another kind of world? and other questions… again, enticing).

But the overarching point is that: social comparison, and the shame that accompanies it, is a symptom rather than a cause of our suffering.

And what are we told to do in response to comparison?

Philosopher Bayo Akomolafe says: sometimes the way that we respond to crisis is the crisis itself. In the face of comparison, we are told (and I have told myself and others the same) “you are on your own path". There is one way in which this advice is soothing, reminding us to stay focused on our own journeys rather than relegate them to the mere shadows of other people’s. But there is another sense that when we try to comfort ourselves and each other in this way, we are simply responding to individualism with more individualism. Because the fact is, we are not (fully) on our own paths. We are a fundamentally and beautifully and inextricably interconnected, inter-dependent species, and we are touched and moved and affected and (dare i say) influenced by one another. The fact that the only comfort and reprieve we find from our alienation from each other is further alienation is its own kind of crisis, like a room of infinite mirrors, emblematic of our entrapment.

Audre Lorde predicted such a response when she said:

“The true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations which we seek to escape, but that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us, and which knows only the oppressors’ tactics, the oppressors’ relationships”. —Audre Lorde

I find myself asking…

• How can we re-learn how to relate to each other and to ourselves in a way that rejects “the oppressors’ tactics, the oppressors’ relationships?”?

• If the world whispers pathways of change and possibilities to us at all times, what is it trying to tell us through social comparison?

• How can we respond to the crisis of unworthiness and alienation with something more connective and less further alienating — less of a crisis itself?

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Who Knows?

Knowledge — what we can Know, who Knows, how, what kind of Knowledge matters, how it is recorded and legitimized — is deeply political. In the western imagination, it is not knowledge itself that is necessarily glorified — but a particular kind of it that seeks to make obvious and necessary things like hierarchy, war, power, and competition.

History teaches us tat the colonizer demeaned indigenous ways of Knowing, cosmologies, and cultural understandings in ways that are still deeply present today. It was “I, the white man, think therefore I am… and you, the native savage, do not think therefore you are not.” Knowing and a specific kind of Knowing became tied to personhood and Being itself.

This remains today with people assuming that Black and Brown people are less intelligent than white people unless we effectively perform what is associated with whiteness, with the same true when it comes to patriarchy/sexism, and many other forms of hierarchy. Highly subjective and manufactured (but framed as objective and natural) claims on “intelligence”become a tool that the powerful manipulate to justify their dominance over the subjugated (true of ablism, elitism/classism, anti-fatness, ageism, and many more).

Overall, the Western imagination has to overstate what is Knowable in order to justify its tyranny over our shared reality.

An invitation to the unknown: 

In an infinite universe, the unknown is fundamentally and inherently greater than the known. That we could claim to fully know or understand why we are here, what we are “meant” to be doing, and how our lives should unfold is a kind of hubris that cannot be separated from the colonial consciousness that shapes our understanding of reality and ourselves. A more humble approach to our predicament would be to acknowledge that we simply cannot have all the answers. To accept being lost as a deep kind of consciousness that connects us to how strange and absurd it is to be alive and conscious.

We do get some benefit from the process of trying to Know; trying to discover and learn and understand is a deeply human yearning and practice. The problem is how the certainty and arrogance with which this is done and how it is weaponized to uphold supremacy, colonialism, and hierarchy. There is, on the other hand, deep wisdom in uncertainty.

On feeling lost

Part of the reason we never feel invited to see the WISDOM of this deep state of consciousness is because our consciousness and understanding have been colonized to believe it is inherently a higher state of being to know exactly where we are going, who we are, why we are, and so forth. How many things have we claimed to truly “know” in our lives that we evolved to know differently or otherwise? Knowledge is more like an evolving and changing species than a fixed state of things. We can only know-now, and we can only know-some.

In the current paradigm, we must either BE confident, or fake it. There is no room for un-confidence in white supremacy, patriarchy, hierarchy — and I feel called to turn this on its head. What if there is more wisdom in a lack of confidence in a lack of Knowing than there is within Knowing itself? 

Let’s take a second and really think of how the universe works.

Think about the fact that I could die writing this or how strange and wonderful this planet we live on is. How much is so uncertain and how many things feel so absurd. How we can go from complete certainty to uncertainty within seconds. How five year plans never quite pan out.

Right now, I’m being kept alive by forces I don’t fully understand — or need to. I’m not fully sure how I came to be in this exact moment and this exact reality. I’m not fully sure — I cannot fully wrap language nor understanding around — what this reality even is or could be.

What this summarizes to is the idea that there is DEEP WISDOM in BEING LOST. In claiming this state as our own, and not as a detour away from something better. It’s a deep state of consciousness that brings us in deeper touch with the very nature of the universe — and of ourselves, as the universe experiencing itself.

Being lost is not an inferior state

That is what I wish to share with you today. 

It doesn’t make us problems needing to be solved or souls needing to be found. It’s actually core to our identities as complex and wonderful and strange — as members of and mirrors into the cosmos. 

So when we are feeling lost at sea, even the metaphor proves the point — we are emulating a deep truth of the ways of nature, the strangeness, the eeriness, the vastness of it all. The way all nature tends towards entropy, chaos, rebirth, renewal, growth, stagnation, an endless cycle. The way you can never fully say with certainty what’s about to happen next…

We don’t know which way to go because WE DON’T KNOW WHICH WAY TO GO. And that is in and of itself a kind of wisdom.

Sometimes we don’t know who we are, because it’s all kind of very completely strange that we can even contemplate such a thing to begin with, and that simple answers are expected.

The Beauty of being lost

I know: the experience itself is deeply uncomfortable, painful, despairing — and causes many people to even end their lives. 

So I am not glorifying the experience, especially in a World not designed to hold it. But what I am saying is that if we zoom out of the subjective experience of being Lost and look at it from a zoomed-out perspective, we see that it is when we are lost that we are seeking some of life’s deepest answers.

If we never felt lost, we’d never ask life’s deepest questions. And we’d never seek out the voices that might lead us to deeper truths. This can be dangerous: cults, abusive leaders, and scams can find us in this state. 

But so can wise spirit guides, sages, friends, communities, books, creators, poems, and poets — who have the exact words that our soul was seeking to hear. This is a beautiful experience, and it brings to mind the famous saying: When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.

To change the world, to usher in a new paradigm of Being rooted in love, liberation, community, pleasure, mutual care, and abundance for all — we need new answers.

And that means we need new questions. 

We quite literally NEED to be lost.

When we are lost, and we are willing to acknowledge it, we are at our most potent as a collective. What we are witnessing with the global mobilization of support for Palestinian lives — once inconceivable given the power of Zionist propaganda fueled by Israel and its allies — is an example of what happens when we are willing to acknowledge our collective bewilderment — and turn to DIFFERENT and more aligned voices for ANSWERS.

As global events, Covid-19 and the murder of George Floyd offer similar lessons. Think of the false states of Knowing that were upended by those experiences, the false states of certainty, of direct relationship to hierarchy. What was once known by so many to be their truth and their reality became unacceptable — and in that void, new voices were able to pierce through.

When we are lost we are seeking the ones who can speak into the void with answers that resonate with who we’ve become in the process. With the deeper consciousness we have cultivated in the interim.

On death and rebirth

Here’s another way being Lost is beautiful. To the Western mind, death happens once, at the end of life. In many indigenous traditions and understandings, death is acknowledged as PART of life. Death and rebirth are cycles we move through all the time.

If we look at it through this lens, when we are lost, a version of us has died. We can no longer relate to our reality, lives, friends, jobs, or whatever it may be, the way we used to. That is a kind of death, without getting lost or attached to our associations to it.

Even if externally nothing has changed, internally, a whole new Being has taken shape. They cannot relate to their reality in the way they used to. As such, they are reborn — a new consciousness, a new relationship to reality is taking shape. This process of death and rebirth is what we then reduce to the state of being “lost” and seeking to be found. A beautiful process has taken place, yet we are not invited to see it as such.

And to the point of not glorifying the experience, we can turn to nature for many images of how painful the process of being born or being hatched into a new birth is. When we think of a being cracking open from an egg, or the caterpillar becoming the butterfly, or the baby screeching, there is an element of pain, of screaming, screeching, feeling a kind of suffering in the experience.

That is another way to look at what we are going through when we feel lost. We are cracking open into a new Being, and that process is always deeply uncomfortable. The world we used to exist in is no more, and we are cracking open into a new relationship with the World and with ourselves. There is much to mourn, but clearly as in all cycles of birth, there is also much to honor and celebrate.

It’s especially daunting when we are made to face these emotions alone. Certainly, as hunter-gatherers we felt lost all the time, but we held that feeling together, in community. As says in her beautiful essay (they are all beautiful) on collective experiences of difficult emotions: we can hold almost any difficult emotion, so long as we hold it together in community. 

In a world of isolation and loneliness — of soulnliness, what I call the existential state of aloneness we feel even when physically surrounded by others — who are we to grieve our old selves with, and celebrate our rebirth with? Most people around us, we feel, simply “do not have the range”. More truthfully, we don’t have the emotional depth of connection around us to really hold these emotions together. We face the void all by ourselves, and the tears and despair and suffering becomes unbearable. Like a baby being born in an empty room — with no one to witness, caress, and hold them through their crossover into the next realm.

Since our rawest emotions are the same ones we’re socialized to grapple with alone, when we feel lost we find ourselves confronting the depths of solitude. There is much to mourn about this. There are far more connected possibilities for how we might sit with and even celebrate this experience in a different World.

Conclusion

By now you may feel the whisper of what lies beneath this conversation: that perhaps it is not being lost itself that is so awful, but our severe (mis)education around what it represents, and the loneliness we confront in the experience of it.

To all the people feeling lost, I hope you can hear further whispers of the cosmos beckoning for you to feel resonance with it. With all the mystery, the chaos, the magic, the unknowable in our midst. What else feels lost in the world? What else doesn’t fully understand its purpose, and seeks a level of certainty or Knowing that goes against the way of nature? As we contemplate cosmic consciousness — the idea that we live in a vastly conscious universe and we are not the only ones with consciousness here — we might find the lost among us are many.

I love you, and I will leave you here. I look forward to experiencing you below in the comments, to learn what has resonated with you, and what has been made clear or unclear in our collective journey to embrace the wisdom of not Knowing. 

with love and gratitude,
Ayanda 

To dive deeper, sideways, diagonally, and upwards into this topic, listen to my most recent podcast episode:

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First it occurs to me that “comparison is the thief of joy” (or at least how it’s used) puts the onus on the individual rather than the culture, framing comparison as an active choice we make rather than an unavoidable symptom of our time. It’s socially and colonially constructed — social media, beauty standards, oppression, hierarchy, supremacy, capitalism and the quantification of self, colonialism and the stripping away of deep and ancient spiritual truths that ground us in love, community, earth consciousness & magic

Also, we do it because on some human level we must. All the theory in the world cannot save us from that deeper spiritual truth that we were not meant to have so much difference to notice between us and each other. We are a collaborative and collectivist species after all

Second, when I am facing that distinct digital dimension of comparison, I start to wonder about people who might compare themselves to me. I’ve done this with people with a large following online so it would be the wrong kind of delusional to assume people have not done the same. What are they imagining I’m experiencing, and am I experiencing it? I leave it to you

Third I flip this on its head. What am I imagining this person I’m comparing myself to feels? Why don’t I consider that the feeling of not-enoughness within me is within them, and they are in turn feeling tortured by their own felt deficiency or unworthiness, at times triggered by someone else?

Fourth I imagine what it would take to have a world without this feeling. what collective truths could birth such a world into being? we are love, we are abundant, we do not reduce but amplify and expand each other, we are eternal, we are magical, we are abundant — this is not a phrase we say but a reality we live — we belong to each other, we radiate each other’s love — so someone shining is you shining because we are one, we are different manifestations of universal love and belonging

Fifth, (and this is new because I haven’t always had a journalling practice) I journal. I used the following prompt: What is she allowing herself to experience that you feel called to but are not admitting to yourself? Envy is the other face of desire after all

Finally, I dance. I move the energy through and around my body. I bring myself back to my capacity to experience joy. This is new and highly recommended. In fact I am writing to you from the first time I have ever done it. Put on a song and let some joy through the crevices of your Being, reminding yourself of your capacity to experience it. What a gift. Here’s what I just danced to 15 mins ago. And now I am insisting on pressing send, because if I save this to my drafts, it will never leave

all my love to you sunshines and starbeings,

Ayanda

Noticing a pattern with getting stuck on perfectionism with my writing, I allowed myself to share something a lot more “raw” and stream of consciousness than I usually feel invited to. This is because of my fear of being seen in a more unpolished (read: honest) state, as an “overachiever” since childhood, where my perfectionism began. What can you invite yourself to experience in your own creative expansion?

Join me this Sunday for my Creative Fear MasterClass, where we’ll connect to and through the fears, resistance, perfectionism, and avoidance that show up in the creative process — and learn how to alchemize fear into loving, aligned action

Creative Fear MasterClass

i am sending love to you today and amplifying some voices and pieces that speak truth to the ongoing genocide and violence happening in Palestine, the DRC, and Sudan. i would love for people to share anything we should read, donate to, or give our attention and witnessing to in the comment section below. view this only as one of many points of entry.

on that vein, i know there are many other nations suffering genocidal, imperialist, and/or colonial violence that also deserve our attention, such as Haiti, Myanmar, China (against Uyghur people) and much more. if you have information and/or organizations to uplift, please do share in the comments.

i also know there is pressure to look away, to move on, to erase, to forget — and i’m so proud of (and also, truthfully, surprised by) the sustained attention that this moment has shown is possible. may we never stop talking about genocide and colonial violence until they become collective nightmares and memories of the past. As Indian author and revolutionary Arundhati Roy says in words I come back to again and again:

i am sending love to you always. <3

7 readings that moved me:

1. Our boys & men deserve to live, not just our women & children by Dr. Ayesha Khan of

2. ‘Like a horror movie’: The men defending their homes in Sudan’s bloody war by Anson Zhang for Aljazeera

3. There Is No Revolution without Madness. by

4. The Congo: From Leopold to Kabila: A People's History by Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja

thank you to for amplifying these two books written by Congolese people, The Congo: From Leopold to Kabila: A People's History by Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja and The History of Congo by Ch. Didier Gondola rather than the previous book I had highlighted, which I included the critique of below:

5. Critique of Cobalt Red: Cobalt Red: a regressive, deeply flawed account of Congo’s mining industry by Sarah Katz-Lavigne & Espérant Mwishamali Lukobo

6. With what are you apologizing? by Panashe Chigumadzi

7. Poem: Modern Sudanese Poetry by Safia Elhillo

Organizations:

You can learn more about the ongoing catastrophes and what we can do to help from my dear friend Alex at — Alex is an incredible being and resource for all things love and liberation and I hope you will check out his Substack for daily information and education to birth the world we know we are all capable of living in.

DR Congo 🇨🇩

Congolese-led organizations

⁠Panzi Foundation⁠ is renowned for its work in treating survivors of sexual violence. The foundation supports survivors of gender-based violence. 

⁠HEAL Africa⁠ Based in Goma, HEAL Africa runs a hospital and provides health care, training, and community development programs.

⁠UCOFEM⁠ (Union Congolaise des Femmes des Médias): An organization focused on women’s rights and gender equality.

International organizations

⁠UNHCR⁠

⁠International Rescue Committee⁠

⁠Doctors without Borders⁠

Sudan 🇸🇩

Thank you for collecting, researching, and amplifying the below ⬇️⬇️⬇️
Community-based Mutual Aid Groups: These grassroots networks, evolving from neighborhood activist networks, have been leading the local humanitarian response, providing meals, sheltering displaced people, supporting hospitals, and securing food and water supplies.

Sudan Doctors Trade Union: This union reported on the state of healthcare facilities and has been a part of the medical response during the conflict. Learn more here:

Sudanese Resistance Committees: These committees, which played a role in the protests against former leader Omar al-Bashir, have been involved in filling gaps left by international aid groups, particularly in terms of providing shelter and securing basic needs for the affected populations.

International orgs:

United Nations World Food Programme (WFP): The WFP has been instrumental in providing food assistance and addressing food insecurity in Sudan.

Muslim Aid: Established in Sudan in 1991, Muslim Aid has been offering emergency response and aid programs, including healthcare, economic empowerment, and water and sanitation facilities.

European Union Humanitarian Aid: The EU has set up an air bridge to deliver essential aid, including water, sanitation, and shelter equipment, to Sudan, handing over supplies to organizations like UNICEF and the World Food Programme for distribution.

Palestine 🇵🇸

Medical Aid for Palestinians⁠ is on the ground in Gaza where they are working to stock hospitals with essential drugs,disposables and other healthcare supplies.

⁠Palestine Children’s Relief Fund⁠ is the primary humanitarian organization in Palestine. They deliver crucial, life-saving medical relief and humanitarian aid on the ground

⁠The World Food Program⁠ has been distributing fresh bread, canned food and ready-to-eat food to those who sought refuge in United Nations Relief and Works Agency shelters in Gaza

⁠Doctors Without Borders⁠ is providing support to hospitals and health facilities in Gaza

⁠UNRWA⁠ is providing medical support, trauma relief, and food assistance on the ground in Gaza

Please do share more!!! Free Haiti, Free Puerto Rico, Free Congo, Free Sudan, Free Palestine.

all my love <3

Ayanda

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hi angels,

i hope you are well! for those following my podcast, i’ve been deeply fascinated by the creative process and the fearful emotions that stop us from creating.

I’ve seen some amazing comments from members of our community on this topic, and I am eager to dive deeper into your experiences of creative fear so that I can:

• meet and get to know more of you on a deeper, one-on-one level (me, a cancer!)

• create content that really speaks to the experiences you’re having

• I would love to create an online course on this topic, but I am terrified!

I want to eventually create what I crave most, which is a system to confront fear (that never seems to go away) in community with others. I am, unsurprisingly, afraid.

(Note: Showing Up Together returns this Sunday. Email coming your way later today!)

Luckily, I know I am not alone in my fear. I’m eager to dive into YOUR specific experience of creative resistance. How it shows up for you, what dreams it stops you from pursuing, how you’ve overcome it when you have, etc.

There is no need to prep for the conversation — just come willing to chat and share.

if you have ideas but face anything like: fear, overwhelm, avoidance, insecurity, unworthiness, perfectionism — I would love to interview you.

If I am speaking to YOU, here is the link to find time with me:

Schedule interview

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hello darlings!

i’ve missed you! I come bearing fruit! today we are talking about the myth of inclusive beauty. it’s a dominant myth in beauty culture and the beauty and entertainment industries today.

this film is so inclusive! this brand is so inclusive! sounds suspicious to me.

luckily on this plot of the inter webs, we love unpacking social myths rooted in the colonial imagination.

we love waking up from the matrix, and realizing we were still asleep. and we love learning, unlearning, and relearning about our social conditioning. I hope this will be at least one of those for you.

you can watch my podcast episode on Spotify or YouTube and read a summary below. promoting my work is my least favorite thing but here we are, we are doing it, we are continuing to proceed to keep going… in service of you, the collective, and my offering to the flea market of life (I discuss this in episode 18: Overcoming creative resistance).

The myth of inclusive beauty

it’s dishonest to call something exclusive inclusive. today to be seen as beautiful, you must be or have proximity to the Eurocentric beauty standard. whiteness or proximity to it, thinness or being “slim thick”, and the appearance of wealth are all central to the beauty ideal. this handpicking of individuals is not actual inclusion. and the fact that it gets away with being called that proves how deeply manipulative this industry and culture is.

perhaps what is most terrifying is how these standards exist among and between each marginalized group. the beauty hierarchy never feels far away, with little to no safe space from the pressures of beauty and desirability politics.

this diagram was something I first created in a Tiktok a year or so ago. even as the beauty ideal appears to become more “inclusive” (the arrows of expansion), it is a selective inclusion that prioritizes proximity to the original Eurocentric ideal. this creates an illusion of inclusion, but the underlying logic has not changed to become radically (ie at its root) inclusive at all.

I always say this (narrator: I had not heard her say it) but in the colonial matrix, dominant ideals are labeled the opposite of what they are so as to escape culpability and make it psychologically confusing to diagnose social conditions. who has imposter syndrome? is it us, or is it the criminality that is dressed up as legality? the barbarism dressed up as “civilizing” native peoples? the war and violence dressed up as democracy and freedom? hmm…

similarly, inclusive beauty is an imposter! it is really exclusive beauty with different rules to get into the club, but rules nonetheless, and OG invitees (ww that are the beauty standard) with prime seating.

I said I would talk about Euphoria in the podcast and proceeded to forget. But essentially it perfectly demonstrates the algorithm of selective inclusion, ie of exclusion. proximity to whiteness and thinness are always prioritized. anti-Blackness reins in the form of colorism, erasure of dark-skinned women and femmes, and anti-fatness (to learn the connection between anti-Blackness and anti-fatness read Sabrina Strings’ Fearing the Black Body and Da’Shaun Harrison’s Belly of the Beast). ablism is always the case. there must always be mostly white women — and they must be thin. if anyone is fat, they cannot be dark-skinned, and they cannot be very fat.

Barbie is an example of how inclusive beauty is a false inclusion because of the rules or price of inclusion which are often rooted in Eurocentricism, but even more so because of how power operates in the film. Taking as a measure for power air time and interior life explored, the power of whose story and interiority deserves to be known has not changed and remains with the thin, white, Eurocentric representation of the beauty standard. this is because…

this is the classic Black best friend trope, where the deeper interiority of Black (especially Black fat) characters is erased in service of the white lead. this is usually true for supporting characters of color and fat characters. it’s not that surprising that this ideal upholds the power of the white main character, because…

we can’t have inclusion in a fundamentally exclusive system. the beauty industry has no interest in including us. it would be more accurate to claim its goal is to destroy us. destroy our sense of self, destroy our self-worth, destroy the love that can exist between us as people are picked as friends and lovers based on their beauty capital rather than their personhood. with respect to capitalism specifically, all of us here know that…

The heading of the above chart is: “These 7 companies control almost every single beauty product you buy”

“These executive leaders will help map the future of the worldwide cosmetics industry.” well, doesn’t that continue to be terrifying.

if beauty were truly inclusive it would be (genuinely ie spiritually) additive to our lives rather than reductive and soul-crushing. inclusive beauty cannot exist under a logic of capitalism where growth and profit must be achieved at all costs, including the cost of our very Being. true inclusion would demand a world structured in an entirely different reality, where no one could make money off of producing and selling the solutions to our insecurities — solutions that do not work, by design. as such…

in what way do you think inclusive beauty is a myth? how has it impacted you?

i’d love to hear from you in the comments!

thank you for being on this journey with me! I overcame creative resistance in service of the collective today. I am on a GoogleMeet call with my best friend. we are body doubling. in community, we can <3 sending love to you and all my appreciation <3

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This essay is very powerful and precious; I love it. When I read Pleasure Activism by adrienne maree brown (amb), one of the many ideas that struck me was that we don’t need to view our desires as fixed realities — including the lack of desire we may have for ourselves. Desire, like all things in nature, is adaptable. To an extent. In community, we can learn to see ourselves as desireable, even if we are not written into society’s definition of Desireability. And, also in community, we can learn to align our desire closer to the kind of world we want to see, by desiring people who don’t look like the people we were taught to find desireable. Is desire adaptable? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

The goal here is not to shame our desires or view them as inherently problematic, but to ask the deeper questions about Desire beyond mere consent. We can interrogate with curiosity and non-judgment why we want what we want, and what we may come to want in a liberated future. Or what we observe others want, in general, or from us.

On the topic of theorizing about desire and sex beyond consent, I recommend the book The Right to Sex by Amia Srinivasan, in which she provocatively asks: “What would it take for sex really to be free? We do not yet know; let us try and see”.

🍄Essay: You Can Say Yes to Pornography and Accountability (amb). Trigger Warnings!

Let’s imagine the end of all oppressive systems. The idea that what is desired and desireable in that world would look the same as what is in ours seems logically impossible. This is because many of our desires — for people, actions, and experiences— are rooted in oppression, either our own or someone else’s. We can observe this without shame.

My favorite invitation is: “What do you want to be turned on by?” I have never been asked that question, and it has stuck with me. I invite you to respond to this invitation in the comments if you like! How do we move “toward the desires we want and need to cultivate to break the intersecting cycles of harm we are in?”

This idea goes beyond consent to interrogating why we want to consent to what we consent to, and what we would need to want to consent to in a liberated future. A fascinating idea: desire exists in and through the imagination, and we are being invited to reimagine our imagination! I love it.

💛 Collecting wisdom

My goal for this newsletter is to learn and explore ourselves and the world together and gather our collective wisdom in loving community with each other. I am a student of life and learn best in a classroom with curious and loving individuals like you.

There are not many safe spaces on the internet to have this conversation and learn from each other’s perspectives and experiences, so I’d love to create one here in the comment sections. I love seeing you respond to each other it literally warms my soul deeply. I will also be responding to as many as I can!

🍇 Food for thought

I would love to hear any thoughts on what comes up for you as you read these essays or summaries, and what you think reimagining Desire could look like.

What comes up for you in general?

How do we reimagine and liberate our desire from the oppressive scripts we’ve been born into? Can we? Have you had experience doing this? How?

(How) are you learning/have you learned to desire yourself if you are not the beauty standard? Any advice for others?

What is your version of utopia of desire and love in the future?

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thanks for all the amazing comments recently! so proud to be in community with you all. still making my way through responding bc trying to savor rather than rush thru your comments but feeling all the feels rn!

quick update — i will be sharing hand-written notes + Notes App vibes with paid subscribers. here’s an essay I wrote earlier this year on the colonial beauty paradigm. at the time I was like, is this good enough to share? Well, wtf…

on my podcast I recently asked: is it perfectionism or self-repression? both — but while we increasingly know perfectionism is a tool of white supremacy and patriarchy, “self-repression” makes it a lot more obvious!

as discussed please email me if you want a subscription but can’t afford it! love you all <3

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full essay <3

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Friends,

Today I am taking a break from TSJ because I’m feeling sad today. I’m experiencing the anxiety of visa and immigration issues, the overly familiar shame and self-blame of “why didn’t you do the hard thing sooner” which I am trying to meet with compassion, and also a general sadness/loneliness/anxiety. I thought about just not posting anything today and meeting you all tomorrow. But that ended up feeling like a missed opportunity to welcome The Unwelcome and use it as a point of connection.

So today I will ask YOU all, how are you today, really? With no pressure to view any feeling as more valid than another (shame, joy, peace, fear, anxiety, excitement, despair, grief, romance, togetherness, loneliness, craving, longing, envy, glee — we are not here to judge, but to listen). If there’s something you’ve been trying to do or not do, such as:

• accept your feelings instead of judging them (me),

• sit with difficult emotions instead of avoiding them (one of my besties)

• ask for help even tho it makes you v uncomfortable (me)

Please USE US/this space to practice if you want! We are with you, or at least, we are trying to be! Rather than a top-down comment section, I’ve been LOVING seeing you respond to each other, and I’d love to keep that going here! If you have anything you think could support/affirm/validate/help the commenter, please do share! I will be responding as well, just not today, today I am going to do what I can to take and seek out care. Sending you love!

In loving community,

Ayanda

I enjoyed this essay by Professors Rosalind Gill and Shani Organ on “the cult and culture” of confidence. The idea that the answer to being systemically, socially, and culturally oppressed is to be more confident is so wild and heinously dishonest. What I also dislike is how it’s typically privileged white women selling this kind of confidence to everyone else and profiting from the vulnerabilities of other women imposed by capitalism, consumerism, racism, harmful beauty standards and much more. I just remembered that last year I posted a Substack voice note titled You Don’t Need to be More Confident that you can find here. I can’t remember what I said but I know I said things ;).

2. Self-love, similarly, individualizes a structural problem

The essay above makes a similar argument to Da’Shaun Harrison’s take on self-love in their book, Belly of the Beast, which is very powerful. Highly recommend the book if you haven’t read it yet. They are also a wonderful and prolific podcast guest and you can listen to a podcast on their work by searching for their name wherever you listen (great hack in general when you’re interested in a book but don’t have the time/energy/space [yet? ever?] to read it).

Last year, wrote an incredible essay summarizing and reflecting on Da’Shaun’s thesis on self-love, titled “Self love literally can never save us”. That self-love individualizes a structural problem, placing the burden of the solution on the individual rather than the society and social structures that creates, maintains, and necessitates the harm.

Threadings.

12| Self love literally can never save us.

Listen now (24 min) | an essay I dreamt was entitled “I love, therefore I am.” Introduction Da’Shaun L. Harrison has penned one of my favorite texts in the past five years. I have read it three times in nine months and I have become more and more delighted with the person that I …

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3 years ago · 15 likes · Ismatu Gwendolyn

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3. McMindfulness: When Capitalism goes Buddhist

I really enjoyed this video by YouTuber @elliotsayshello discussing how mindfulness has been appropriated and co-opted to serve a capitalist western agenda. I particularly loved how he breaks down the three core tenets of Buddhism, and how the West has rejected all related to ethical action, being of service to the community and to the earth. I had been thinking about this and I love that this video found me at the right moment. I’m adding the book that the video summarizes, McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality by Ronald Purser, to my TBR. Here’s a quote from the book:

4. The downsides of self-control

I enjoyed this essay by Samantha Lapka on some of the downsides of too much self-control, which is usually seen as an inherently good thing. In particular I found it interesting that much of our humanity is tied to our inability or refusal to “control ourselves”. And the idea that we often regret times when we choose “discipline” over fun and freedom. What’s missing from this essay to me is how religion and western philosophy have shaped the gospel of self-control and self-discipline to begin with. The self-controlling, self-disciplined white European is contrasted to the unhinged “savage” native who needs the white European to bring control and order (seen as virtues) to the wild native subject. Self-control should be understood within the context of coloniality.

5. What is coloniality?

I enjoyed this overview by on core theses on coloniality by the Latin-American scholars who defined and elaborated the concept such as Peruvian decolonial sociologist Aníbal Quijano and Puerto Rican de-colonial philosopher Nelson Moldonado-Torres. The self-control essay lead me to think about the hidden paradigm implicated within it that is never named. Coloniality passes through us wearing an invisibility cloak. The essay takes for granted that “most studies say self-control is a good thing” — never questioning who produces knowledge (coloniality of Knowledge), and for what purposes (coloniality of Power). Here is another resource on coloniality by FutureLearn, based on the work of the same Latin American decolonial school:

That’s it! I hope you enjoy this free issue of Paradigm Shifts. Thank you for being Here. Sending love!

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I LOVE THIS ESSAY by SO MUCH! I love the idea that difficult emotions can and should be held in community, not just with other people but with nature as well. I love how she challenges the self-help industrial complex. And I love her work more broadly — couldn’t recommend enough that you subscribe to Cosmic Anarchy Substack. An incredible resource that I found recently and wish I had sooner!

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Hello darlings,

I’m sending you love and warm hugs today, topped with fresh pastries that leave lots of sugar dust on your precious face. As I type these words and recoil slightly, I’m reminded how the feminized archetype of being a nurturing figure is demonized in our society. I reclaim my “right” to be nurturing, to stay soft in a world that wants to harden me. To feel everything in a world that wants me numb.

A paradigm shift towards care and love is much needed. I like being around people who are soft and nurturing. Who check in in ways other people might find excessive. I like being this person. I also sometimes fail to be. If the world was not built for people pleasers, should we aim to temper our desire to please people, or change the world? Should we not want to to harness this pro-social tendency for good?

The problem is not a soft nature but that our society was not built to accommodate it. It was built instead to exploit and manipulate and torment us for our softness. The world needs sensitive people. Like the earth, whose variety and diversity sustains it, we need to be able to tap into the full spectrum of emotions, energies, and states to have the kind of biodiversity that makes us stronger as a collective. If only we were taught how to communicate and relate through and across these dispositions. To understand our nature and the nature of others, and how and why it evolves, and what to do about it, and when to do nothing.

The self-help industry is a nod to the fact that we are most profitable when we are conditioned to fundamentally view our nature as problematic. This is buttressed by the colonial paradigm that insists we are separate from and superior to nature, because if we were taught to see ourselves as of nature, we would be called to accept our inner wholeness and perfection and ask more questions of the toxicity of our environment instead.

Below you’ll find some of my favorite things to read this week. I say “this week” as a manner of speaking because I hope we are resisting urgency culture as much as we can. I notice that I probably sound annoying and remind myself I’m allowed to sound however I want because this is my newsletter and shame can visit me but I won’t allow it to stay.

May the words of these essays find you when the time is right. For many of you, that time will be Never, and that is okay (Cries in essays I started reading but did not finish… cries in lemme just scroll down and see how much I have le— oh fuck, that’s a lot. Where was I again? I’ll come back and finish [Narrator: she would do no such thing]).

For this series, I aim to share words that shift paradigms; words that offer a refreshing and striking way of being, seeing, thinking, feeling, that challenges the status quo. I think that’s part of the essence of why people follow me on the inter webs, so I want to honor that and amplify the words and work of fellow beings trying to write their way to new futures.

This is a list of 7 essays and some reflections on each. The first 2 will be free, and the remaining 5 will be a gift to paid subscribers.

Yes, I feel weird about this. I type an explanation and delete it, then type it again… Would writing be more honest if we could see these footprints peppered through the text? Is the writer finding her words (internal focus) or deciding what would be best to say (external focus)? Wherever one meets the other is decided.

Also — and the kind of also that offers no connection to the prior subject whatsoever — am I more free when I explain myself or when I don’t? For me, an over-self-justifier-especially-when-self-conscious, most likely when I don’t. But you don’t know that, so not explaining may block the intimacy we’re able to form. But now you do, and I’m choosing to explain anyways. So that says something. You decide what.

The thing about the word “content” is that it makes it sound like the writing, the video, the podcast, the Instagram post, fell from the literal sky. “There is so much content out there” is a disturbingly disembodied and almost anti-humanist framing of the state of digital media. Human beings are pouring their labor, time, and energy into educating and entertaining us for free. Tech companies are exploiting human beings to moderate said content.

We should not remove the humanity and personhood of content creators and moderators from this endeavor. Between creating TikTok videos, writing here, and podcasting, I even used to feel weird about calling what I do “work”. Because this work (of online content creation) is mostly done by women, it is belittled and minimized, and because the work is set up to be exploited by Big Tech companies such that it is irregularly compensated, particularly for Black creators, it is seen as “not really work”.

If I’m devoting my present-life to this work… (this aside makes no sense to add beyond pontification, which I do love, so I will add that future-based commitments regularly overestimate our capacity to know who we will become. They are often a form of temporal dishonesty because they use a stable present to make a claim on an unstable future. “I will always be here for you” is an epistemologically dishonest statement because the speaker cannot possibly know the conditions their future self will face — internal or external — that might threaten the integrity of this statement. Better to say “I can’t imagine” not being here for you, because imagination implicitly nods to its own limitations; intrinsic to the concept is the notion that there are possibilities outside of it)

…I will have to get used to charging people for it. I want to believe in abundance. I trust that there is enough to go around — that there are enough people willing and able to pay that can substitute those unable to. But I can’t just hope. I have to act in accordance with that hope. I have to give the energy to the universe I hope to get back. That means creating things for free and extra things not-for-free that people actively want to pay for.

So, while I feel some type of way about paywalling information, I want to make sure I am offering enough lovely creations for people who can afford it to feel good about spending money on this work, and gifting it to people who can’t. TSJ will remain free, see you on Sunday, and the podcast will return very soon, which will also be free! Yay :D

Importantly, if you want to be a paid subscriber but can’t afford it, please email me or comment below and we will find a way to get you covered and gifted. And if you would like to gift subscriptions to readers, please do so here! Love you all. Fearful I made the intro so long that no one will read the body. But. I release myself from the need to control the outcome of what happens next. Or at least that sounds like the container of a feeling I would like to experience the substance of. Here are 7 paradigm shifts that I’m loving this week.

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1. The fallacy of “Precolonial Africa”

This essay blew my mind and I still don’t fully know what to do with it. The author, Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, who I highly recommend following on Twitter here, also wrote the book Elite Capture which I’m dying to read. Here’s more from his essay: “Of course, the ‘pre’ in ‘precolonial’ supposedly designates ‘a time before’ colonialism appeared on the continent. But how do we deign to describe a period from the beginning of time to the moment when the European, modernity-inflected colonial phenomenon showed up? It accords more of a mythological than a historical status to the arrival of modern European colonialism in Africa and its long and deep history. The ‘precolonial’ designation, in practice, even excludes two earlier European-inspired colonialisms in Africa. After all, for those of us who know our history, Roman and Byzantine/Ottoman colonial presences on the African continent were not without legacies on the continent, too.”

2. Palestinian resistance is a continuous endeavor

I want to see Palestinians free from apartheid, genocide, ethnic cleansing, and occupation. I loved this essay, and also sharing this awesome podcast episode with Nooran Alhamdan for anyone trying to learn more from Palestinian people and thought leaders. So as not to leave it at sharing this work, since “people can’t eat ideas” or likes or comments, I also want to share an organization called Care For Gaza doing amazing work to get much needed resources — like beds, housing, infant formula, and home appliances — into the hands of Palestinian people under Israeli occupation. You can see their work and how it is impacting Palestinians’ lives here and you can donate here via PayPal, if you have the means, or share their profile to your social media.

As a Black South African, I have benefited from the decades’ long anti-apartheid struggle by and for Black South Africans against the South African apartheid regime. I feel called to do and say more about the cause of Palestinian freedom and resistance. And also I’m trying to find ways to support Black South Africans as well, particularly women given the epidemic of gender-based violence in SA, where the rate at which intimate partners kill women is five times higher than the global average (please email me if you have ideas! organizations! actions! that you think I can amplify here!!)

On the cause of Palestinian freedom, I am reminded of the Audre Lorde essay I share relentlessly on transforming silence into language and action: “And of course I am afraid, because the transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation, and that always seems fraught with danger…In the cause of silence, each of us draws the face of her own fear — fear of contempt, of censure, or some judgment, or recognition, of challenge, of annihilation. But most of all, I think, we fear the visibility without which we cannot truly live.”

In paradigm shift #3 (below the paywall), which dives into the pitfalls of the soft life, I also re-share the mutual organizer OpenYourWallett (shared in my recent post on despair) and include a call for support from all who can provide it! Here’s their GoFundMe to raise money for Black Queer and Trans folks.

Free subs: quick reminder to email me if you want a gifted subscription and can’t afford it! Love you. Miss you already! See you Sunday! okay bye now omg I feel like I’m leaving my kid at the first day of school and I feel emotional <3<3<3

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hi earth angels,

I hope this finds you at ease and at peace. Recently I’ve been feeling a deep sense of despair, brought to a peak by the white supremacist, anti-Black, anti-poor, and ableist lynching of Jordan Neely. May he rest in peace. But by now these words are almost insulting. Despair in particular is an emotion that I struggle to write about. It feels very final and incurable to me. When despair visits me, it feels like rock bottom. I feel frozen, and since I’m working on reconnecting to my body and the embodiment of my emotions, I let myself freeze and be immovable. I do not rush to ignore the inner part of me that longs to be icily frozen still. I feel the being beneath my skin, beneath the outer layer of my consciousness, itching to move. but I don’t let her. I feel and am helpless and frozen. and I let myself sink into the hyperreality of that feeling.

Yesterday, I was in a cafe writing a piece for you on romantic friendship, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that everything I had to say was worthless and meaningless. There are so many words. So many words. I am surrounded by words. Do we need more? I kept asking myself. We do, of course. But which words? That’s what led me here. I often think to myself, How can we go on in such a cruel world? A world of war, violence, poverty — all things that do not have to exist. And yet I know we must go on. Those of us who can.

Even as I say these things to you, it feels difficult for me to wrap my arms and words around despair — or to feel like I’m doing so sufficiently. and that frustrates me because it’s as if I have to lean on the word to do the heavy lifting of my experience of it. no explanation can transcend the finality of the word itself. If you ask me about excitement, or fear, I can tell you all the flavors of it; all the textures. But if you ask me about despair, my response becomes circular.

The artist in me needs to make this emotion generative, if not for myself then for you; for us. If I stare despair in the face, if I invite it in, if I let it show me what it wants to, and have its way with me, then perhaps something meaningful can come of it. This to me is the power of embracing the spiritual realm of existence. If Despair has taken me as its host, then I have to satisfy her in order for her to leave. Something my therapist encourages me to ask of emotions I experience but don’t like (eg envy, anxiety, despair) is: what does it give you? What does it want from you? In a spiritual sense, personified and solid, what is Despair asking of me?

What I came to is this. I’m 27, and I’m not the first person to go through despair. So how can I use it to connect to people — to you — and how can I use it to connect to elders who have had to face the ebbs and flows of hope and despair for many more decades? Today, I turn to the words of older love warriors and revolutionaries and thinkers who have been in this fight for justice and joy for decades and decades. I know there are so many more that I have not included here, but I’m working on my perfectionism, so I’m stopping at three that moved me. Please comment your fav words below if you have any to share!

Today I am thinking of all the precious beings suffering under the weight of white supremacy, slavery, colonialism, capitalism, imperialism, war, poverty, and much more. Today, I am thinking of all of us imagining, fighting, organizing, speaking, trying to bring about the kind of world where violence and marginalization are impossible. for the past couple of days i’ve just been crying and feeling like there is like no point in anything. but I know I can’t linger on this latter point for too long.

if we see our despair as part of our love, and our love as a call to action, then let our despair not leave us in complacency. one tangible act those with means can do is support mutual aid efforts that go directly into the pockets of poor/impoverished people, as we work towards a world where these power differences don't exist. you can learn more about mutual aid here.

I want to uplift the work of activist OpenYourWallet, an account I recently found on Twitter. They funnel money into the pockets of Black LGBTQIA+ people. Support their GoFundMe which is currently at $30 out of a goal of $100K! Or Venmo: @OpenYourWallet, or CashApp: $itsOYW. If you have the funds, please deeply consider taking action vs. considering taking action. And I want to do the same for Black South Africans as well so I’m trying to find ways to do that. Let me know if you have any ideas!

Let our despair propel us to action. This is just one suggestion. And for those in need of help or boosting an ask, please reach out to me or the comment section and let us try and help you. Sending love your way. Here are some quotes from elders. Please share more quotes you find solace in in the comments!

Cornel West

“…poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world… By poetry [we mean] all human beings who muster imagination and empathy to conceive of an alternative reality given the nightmarish catastrophic driven realities most of us have to come to terms with, which means to live a life of a certain kind is to be a poet, an artist of life, an artist of living, one who through one's deeds and actions and witness exemplifies an imagination and an empathy that is subversive in terms of relating to the past, which has fortitude and courageous in the present to pass onto the next generation, some wind at their back.”

Angela Davis

Nelson Mandela

From my journal

Some ideas I’d love to discuss in the comments! How does despair affect you? What does it feel like? What do you do in response? Do you escape or address it, and how? Whose words do you cling to or reach for? What do you tell yourself that helps you and might help others? Have any words or movies or books or shows or poems or podcasts or songs or playlists held you through despair? How can we help each other? Please comment below with anything!

My cousin told me she watches X factor audition fails or a comedy show.

here is my first coloring exercise. it was quite soothing! but of course not a cure lol

Thank you for being here! Sending you all the love! May you be held emotionally and physically by love and community. If not today, then some day. soon.

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• Comment/like/interact <3 Thanks for all the love so far!! It means the world!

The new year marks the earth’s complete revolution around the sun. Yet we are seldom invited to explore the underlying wisdom of this planetary process, rather than our culture’s self-serving projections onto it. Far from urging radical change, the earth’s new year signals a moment of completion and return. The cycle it began 365 days, 5 hours, 59 minutes and 16 seconds ago, is now complete. The earth has, in a sense, come home to itself. Returning to the position and memory of a past self, there are neither regrets owed to the past nor revisions to the future. Rather than advocating change, this process can teach us alignment with our past selves and the radical acceptance this would entail. Indeed, our planet’s revolution is bursting with interpretations and lessons that our culture leaves unexplored.

Resolution as return

Each new year, the earth reaches a brief moment of resolution. It has resolved its annual orbit around the sun from an unfinished to a “finished” state. This, of course, is only inteligible if we allow the arbitrary start and end dates we impose onto earth time, something that manifests in different ways across cultures. Notwithstanding the limitations of the Greogrian calendar, what emerges is that the earth’s annual resolution may be quite different from our own. The former marks a kind of return and reconciliation with the position it found itself in a year ago. The latter is a kind of solemn promise to change into better subjects of the social (dis)order. We are not asked what we want to keep or return to this year, only what we want to change. What could return represent to you, and what does it offer?

As a child I was obsessed with writing and with the idea of becoming a writer. I lost that dream in adolescence and never looked back. Over a decade later, I find myself writing again for reasons I could only pretend to fully understand. In a sense, I have come home to myself; come home to an earlier vision I had for my future that I strayed from for twelve or so years. Why don’t we celebrate this kind of resolution at this time of year?

While easy to take for granted, it is quite profound to have a nature. To reliably be a certain way. That uncanny moment when you reunite with an old friend and you find something in them surprisingly unchanged by all that’s happened to both of you. Maybe they still do or say that thing they’ve always said or done. It feels like a coincidence, like this present version of them has somehow collided with the past. As if by mere chance this person happened to hang onto themself, and isn’t that a wonder. Sometimes this is gratingly annoying, and worse, toxic and violent. I won’t focus on this here, because today I accept that it’s not in my nature to.

What parts of you are growing tired of being denied and rejectd, and are instead craving the soothing balm of acceptance? How can we see the new year as a chance to align with instead of fight ourselves? So encouraged are we to flee from ourselves that acceptance seems to corrupt what the new year is all about. With that I will say to my younger self: thank you for setting your intentions so clearly. You’ve allowed me to look back with sharp focus and feel a distinct connection between us. In 2023, here’s to becoming who we’ve been, and being who we’ve become.

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Each year, we look ahead with great anticipation to what tweaks we will make to the machine-like qualities we’ve been coerced into identifying with. For some this is a fun ritual, and I am all for fun rituals. I always find myself seeking new (and old, in the same cyclical way of the earth) ways of seeing. And with that I’ve come to believe that we gain a lot from animating nature. From letting the earth, sea, birds, trees, wind, talk to us. Our species’ distinctive arrogance calls this technique personification, as if we are the only beings with consciousness and alive traits. So, while many cynics will claim the earth can’t do anything, I maintain that one of many interpretations of what’s happening this new year is that the earth inviting us to return to ourselves and embrace the inherent bend of our nature instead of fighting it. An invitation to consider that perhaps we were not put on this planet to change our nature but to discover and nurture it. In particular, the most life-giving

version of it.

To that point, it goes without saying that we all have aspects of ourselves that are important to change and heal – particularly those that cause harm to others, ourselves, and the earth. Violence, greed, abuse, bullying, extraction, exploitation, are not floating out there in “society”, and neither are racism, classism, ablism, and so many more. They live and breathe in each of us, in different ways. In response, the work to challenge and unlearn ingrained patterns of power and injustice is critical. But as you know, these are not quite the self-improvement projects we are encouraged to undertake this time of year. And these deeper forms of social and spiritual change must be sincere commitments that are not subject to the whims of the new year.

My point is not that there’s nothing we should aim to change about ourselves, but that we can reimagine the new year as an opportunity to do something quite different. An invitation to take a pause from trying to change — a goal so ingrained in us by now we don’t really need a reminder of it — and radically accept ourselves instead. How fun would it be for all of us to meaningfully entertain all the ways we want to stay the same this year?  How do we come home to ourselves in a culture hellbent on convincing us there is something inherently wrong with us? 

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Resolution as vowing to change

The kind of resolution we’ve been met with since near birth is very much by design. First, it’s much more profitable. Capitalism needs you to see yourself as deeply and inherently flawed, to ensure a lifetime value of reliable and growing cash flows. Whatever you want to do more or less of, there’s an app, product, or service, that can help those who can afford it. In a capitalist system, growth at all costs, including our sense of self, is key. And diet culture, rooted in anti-fatness, reigns supreme this time of year.

Second, this shallow take on what the new year represents also helps individualize societal issues such that people are left feeling personally responsible for socially-caused conditions. Health is not an individual choice unless you can afford for it to be (both figuratively and literally). Racial, gender, class, and ablist oppression preclude or jeopardize true health. What do we do with all the hardships that will find us again, as they reliably do every year, because they are outside the control of the individual and inside that of the society? Lastly, the status quo version of the new year keeps us self-centered, always focusing on the I, instead of the Us. We are rarely invited into community understandings of what a new year could represent. 

Closing thoughts

What could it mean to come home to oneself? A deep breath, a centering, a grounding. Journaling, dancing, singing, resting. A love letter addressed to yourself or to your loved one. A group circle of friends expressing what they radically accept and perhaps even love about themselves. An acknowledgement of the stubborn parts of our nature that will in all likelihood remain, some of which have kept us safe along the way. Perhaps the new year is not actually inviting us into change as much as into acceptance, alignment, and return; a kind of radical resignation to our innermost nature. The things you hope to do again are just as important, if not more, as those you hope to start doing. The things that are good enough as they were, are perhaps all we can hope for. Revolution has a double meaning. There is the radical change, and there is also the circular motion that always culminates in return.

On approximately January 1st each year, our precious earth finds itself in roughly the same place it was the year prior, like the satisfying image of two circles approaching each other that reach a moment of blissful overlap, or eclipse. This moment of eclipse offers a metaphor of alignment: a kiss hello, where present and prior self embrace. The earth’s new year suggests a brief moment of completion and closure; of wholeness and integrity. Perhaps then, a new year happens each time we find ourselves in a moment that brings us home to ourselves, that feels uncannily familiar to who we are and who we’ve always been.

Each time I look up at the moon, a quick succession of images of prior moments I’ve spent doing so come to mind. I have traversed distance in between, lived a life, but when staring and breathing with the moon, i find myself united with all my prior selves who have done the same. Growing up in South Africa and living in the US, the moon brings me home to myself and to the gratitude I feel to be alive and safe and reunited with it and with myself. Each time I am with the moon, I feel a familiar combination of awe and bittersweetness. I am reminded of the company I’ve experienced the moon with — both the cynical friends who have met my moon-induced excitement with a kind of disdain and dismissal, my childlike wonder uncool and overly spiritual, and others who have matched my reverence with their own. Both these kinds of people have taught me who I am, and who I look forward to returning to being. The linear distance I have traveled in between these moments of moon-watching is merely the circumference of a circle that has led me back to myself. 

So I wonder, this year, how will you come home to yourself? How will you help those you love feel at home within themselves? How will we find completion and alignment in ourselves and in each other, just as we are, blissfully becoming who we’ve been and being who we have become?

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Further reading:

• Phrenology and “Scientific Racism” in the 19th Century

• Scientific Racism

• Phrenology and physiology

• Vaught's Practical Character Reader

• 13 Disgusting Facts About Phrenology, The Pseudoscience Used To Justify Racism

• The Myth of Popular Culture: Why ‘Highbrow’ & ‘Lowbrow’ Don’t Work

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Listen to my podcast episodes on this topic:

Every day, we ignore the Ugliness that beauty relies on in our culture to exist. Beautiful faces hide the Eurocentric beauty standards that allow them to be celebrated as such. Beautiful features hide the cultural appropriation of the Black people who are denigrated for having those same features. Beautiful clothes and make up hide the exploitation of the global south women and people that permeates the fashion and beauty supply chains, as well as the destruction of our planet. Beautiful compliments hide their cruelty in plain site: “You’re not fat! You’re beautiful!” Indeed, every day, we ignore the ugly truth: that beauty as we know it today would not exist without the massive pain, exclusion, exploitation, and harm that brings it into being. When will we learn to look past the illusion of beauty? When will we learn to recognize the Ugliness of Beauty?

When we define beauty as a privilege operating at an individual level, we miss the structural ways it shapes our society, values, and norms. In the words of Da’Shaun L. Harrison in their phenomenal book, Belly of the Beast, as they reflect on the conceptual shallowness of so-called “pretty privilege”: “Privilege insinuates that there is a possibility that you can opt out, and that if you don’t feel pretty, then you can’t possibly benefit from Prettiness or suffer the violences of Ugliness. Desire/ability politics and Desire Capital, however, suggest that one does not need to feel pretty to be Pretty; one does not need to feel beautiful to be Beautiful; one does not need to feel ugly to be Ugly. How one benefits or suffers from the subjugation of particular people is not determined by their feelings; it is determined by the identities they embody.”

Beauty is a prism of meaning. Its ubiquity in our language makes its impact difficult to discern. But what I am most interested in interrogating is Beauty as a social heirarchy, a form of capital, and in particular, as a social paradigm that we use to make judgments of ourselves and of each other that insidiously ensures that we stay ideologically rooted in belief systems that uphold white supremacy, colonialism, and capitalism. So long as each of us feels on some deep level that we are not beautiful enough, that we could always be more beautiful, and that being beautiful is a goal that someone - not just us but more importantly, all the workers involved in the products whose marketing materials we beg to be included in - should suffer for, we will always be caught within capitalist and consumerist modes of thinking that alienate us from our innate value as human beings.

Reimagining who is beautiful is important and has benefited many of our abilities to feel represented. However, expanding who is let in does nothing to challenge the consequences of being shut out of the definition of beauty. Beauty functions as a social hierarchy that affords power and privilege to those who have it, and disposability and disregard to those who don’t. Beauty, as a social construct, is fundamentally heirarchical, and we cannot diversify and include our way out of that reality. It shapes our thoughts and values in insidious ways: we applaud Beautiful people for things normal people do all the time: being kind, generous, thoughtful, funny. We mourn the death of Beautiful people in specific ways (“such a shame she died. she was so Beautiful). We are deeply fascinated by the lives, thoughts, and actions of Beautiful people.

While the problem thus far has been defined as an exclusive, white supremacist beauty standard, I argue that that is only part of the problem (yes, a big part!). Beauty has seeped deep into the psyche of public consciousness even within marginalized communities — who we admire, adore, believe, hire, and in turn who we find repulsive, disgusting, unworthy, and unlovable is too often intimately connected with who we do and don’t find beautiful. This is dehumanizing: it strips “un-beautiful” human beings of their inherent humanity as human beings, and it elevates “beautiful” human beings to god-like figures in our culture.

While we do the important work of deconstructing eurocentric beauty standards, I feel it is equally important to deconstruct the extreme consequences of beauty in our society. Why do people need to be beautiful? While it is important to learn to see the beauty in everyone, it is equally important to question why we need to see people as physically beautiful at all. Why do we need a person to be beautiful in order to view them as worthy of love, respect, adoration, and in our society, jobs, money, fame?

Two things can be true at once: as we work towards inclusion and representation we should push for more radical inclusion that goes beyond those with Desire capital, and we should do the important spiritual, philosophical, and socio-cultural work of de-emphasizing the need to be beautiful to be valued in society.

How is this process of inclusion going, really? Who has actual power in fashion today? In film? In media? The process of inclusion has favored those who are most palatable to the beauty standard this inclusion pretends to be undoing. We say shallow words like “inclusive beauty” and proceed to only include marginalized people who fit very specific standards of beauty that are just as exclusive. When Black women are included in pop culture, we are either sidelined as sidekicks or only allowed to fit a specific mold of acceptable Black womanhood. Colorism, fatphobia, transphobia, homophobia, and ablism strangle Black women’s hopes of the radical inclusion we deserve. Black non-binary and queer people are sidelined. What’s more, representation is no stand-in for true access to our needs, and in some ways society’s hyper-focus on the optics of things has distracted many people from their reality.

What happens when marginalized people are included? If they’re Black or Brown, colorism limits how dark they can be. If they’re queer, they’re white. If they’re trans, they’re white and thin. If they’re fat, they’re not very fat. And they’re almost always young and able-bodied (and probably the child of someone wealthy). The terms and conditions for being included among the Beautiful point towards a more sinister truth: that we cannot reform our way out of the need to create a much more radical world where how you look is one of many aspects of your Being and certainly not the most relevant. What this comes down to is a simple yet unrealized truth: People should not have to be beautiful. To be trusted, to be valued, to be seen as interesting or important, to be loved and adored, to have access to love and opportunities and fame. It will always, always leave people out to assume they should.

Beauty is inherently exclusive. The public discourse on beauty often fails to acknowledge this uncomfortable fact. The global beauty industry is the furthest thing from inclusive, and there is a lot more we should demand that it be. While the project of abolishing eurocentric beauty standards is important, it should not erase the more radical call to abolish beauty as a) a global industry run by white western men profiting off of the exploited labor of poor Black, Brown, and Asian women, and b) a gatekeeper of worth and livelihood.

I love you sunshine! You are precious.

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