an actual blog post
i am four weeks into The Artist’s Way at the moment. it’s a self-help book for people who are creatively blocked, except that (as is necessary for that unblocking) it gets pretty intense! some of that intensity comes from its insistence on revisiting childhood, past trauma, and spirituality. the last of these is something i’ve been thinking about lately, so! meandering post ahead.
spirituality
spirituality is a word that provokes a lot of reactions.
fundamentalist christians like my parents may associate it with pagans and other people more dangerous than atheists because of their dabbling in the occult. atheists, especially those whose reaction to religion comes from a childlike place (either of underprocessed hurt/harm or just of immaturity), react to it with scorn or revulsion. people like me, whose histories with conversion therapy or with alienation from our cultures and stories have closed many doors for us, may be asked about spirituality gently by a trauma therapist and shut down entirely.
gratitude
but: i had a conversation with a much more atheist-aligned friend about the concept of “gratitude”. it’s not the most useful phrasing for a very useful concept!
i’ve effectively kept a gratitude log for years now, as part of the bullet journal that is my most important disability aid (being that i have approximately six medical conditions that affect my memory). for me, that looks like this: every night, i write down one “cool” thing, and one “good” thing — that is, one thing i am proud of, even if it’s “washed my hair” or “had a hard conversation”, and one thing i am grateful for, be it “my friends were kind to me” or “buttons exist”.
gratitude is a loaded word for that kind of practice. it implies some benevolent force to thank, in a way that trips up a lot of neurodivergent, non-religious people. i’ve heard it called “celebration”. i prefer to think of it, as the Artist’s Way sometimes does, as “attention”.
attention
attention is crucial to creativity — that is, it’s crucial to being a whole person. i have an attention deficit! i have a cognitive deficit, made worse by my other current medical issues. attention, the way i mean it, is best captured perhaps by one particularly viral Jordan Peterson post: there are cathedrals everywhere for those with the eyes to see, he posted, with a photograph of a plastic water bottle refracting sunlight.
bad messenger, good message. i got myself through high school by carrying my camera in my hand during each four-kilometre walk home, letting my frayed focus flit to flowers forcing their way through fences. i turn my eye day by day to small things i am thankful for, small things i have accomplished. in naming them i am creating a self who is capable of finding joy, courage and pride in even the worst of days.
the world is full of so much pain and so much joy, as my wife said to me on today’s walk. there is too much of either for us to hold. but the quiet moments of turning our attention to things outside ourselves are what reminds us that we’re human, connected despite our most nihilistic or misanthropic tendencies, to everyone else who has ever breathed the air we breathe.
connection
and that’s what spirituality is, i think. the twee ways that gratitude practices are framed by coaches who make money off brush-lettered journals don’t help: the more you are thankful, the more your “positive energy” attracts more blessings, or whatever, like some inherent magnetic force.
i don’t think that’s what it is, at least not for everyone! but i think that the more you are willing to see the good in people and things and yourself, the more those qualities persist in your awareness. over the years, that commitment to a base level of gentle attention has made me a more resilient person. the change is internal; the way people respond to you differently as you change, of course, might be external.
spirituality (again)
one of the forms i fill out in ACC sensitive claims therapy to assess progress asks me to rank various aspects of my life by how satisfied i am with them. the last question is how satisfied are you with your spirituality?
it’s always been a hard one for me. it used to be optional, and i always skipped it then; now, it’s not. and i think there’s a growing understanding that a significant part of being a whole person is about belief and conviction and capacity for emotion in collective ways, but we don’t have a better word for that. i think revolutionary optimism fills that box. believing in your friends and having regular communal activities fills that box. spending a lot of time in ancient cathedrals and art galleries and perfectly secular heritage buildings moved by the very human work of creating awe fills that box. being moved in any way by the continuity of human existence and your place in it fills that box.
spirituality is about seeing the world reach out to you just by being as alive as you are, and reaching back.
belief
as Ramshackle Glory says: maybe god isn’t the right word, but i believe in you. my primary belief system is perhaps described as revolutionary optimism, or just as prison abolition. it’s a willingness to look the worst things humanity has done in the eye, and refuse to believe that that’s how we have to be. it’s not idealistic, despite all the criticisms prison abolition gets.
which is weird to me, incidentally: so, so many people assume that to believe that prisons do more harm than good, that we can do better, one must have never experienced harm. one must be a hopeless ingenue, tripping through the world with no awareness of rape or abuse or torture. every prison abolitionist i have met has had the rigorous, grueling intellectual work it requires — to build a moral framework that doesn’t conveniently silo away “bad people” or “bad things” into a box so one can feel safe and keep living a thoughtless life — change them fundamentally. every prison abolitionist i have met is someone who has learned some modicum of grace, even my socially-inept autistic self, through believing harder than most people in our world in the power of community.
maybe we’re the most spiritual people around. maybe we stand against the cultural wasteland of the imperial core: fundamentally, i think the extremists who shoot shit up, whether staunch atheists or fundamentalist religious types, are the people who are not spiritual. that detachment from people and community that leads one to see the world as captured in their manifestos is not about religion or lack thereof. it is, however, about that lack of connection or care or awe or any kind of positive feeling about humanity.
mental health
and the media calls that mental health. calls these shooters isolated, but doesn’t go any further than that. diagnoses them with something that doesn’t involve saying that society itself is sick, rotting, cancerous. that we can’t fix this by pretending jail fixes them, that only crazy unwell people become symbols of how broken we all are.
to pivot: the Artist’s Way demands that i revisit my contentment with my spirituality. my therapist demands that i evaluate my satisfaction with my spirituality. i hear the word and get a bit twitchy, until i talk about it with people who are twitchier about it than i am. then i’m suddenly explaining my tarot practice (which i should get back to), the ways i understand it: tarot is a potent self-reflective tool, if used unflinchingly to approach and not avoid truths. it is a powerful social ritual of care. reading for others requires an empathy and articulacy i wanted to develop. reading for myself allowed me to get some of the benefits my parents get from prayer, in that you are making your desires and fears apparent to yourself.
and that makes it clear where you’re malnourished, unwell. where the lonely, starved parts of yourself live. where the parts that overflow with idea and thought and joy do, too.
ease
i’m still a clumsy, blunt, awkward little fucker. people often read me as angry, as aloof, as disrespectful. i’ve made my peace with the parts of that, as the serenity prayer says, that i cannot change. i will never understand all the social cues that everyone thinks i should.
but i am a person who moves through this world with ease that i have also been told others admire. emotional depth; social grace. perhaps it is idiosyncratic, or baffling, or just plain weird. perhaps it speaks to the doors that are shut to me, as much as it opens others.
that question on that therapist’s survey sends me into a moment of blinding grief every single time i see it. i think about a decade of failed conversion therapy attempts. i think about the immense amounts of sexual, physical and psychological violence i’ve sustained over my lifetime. i think about sitting down with my therapist, in our first few sessions, and being asked to name my values. i think about rising to the challenge and choosing things i knew i did not have: integrity and grace.
i think about developing them, as i developed my gratitude practice, one decision at a time. i think about graciousness as less about understanding the intricacies of social situations, and more about allowing everyone dignity and room to breathe. it’s something that’s only possible with the hard work of recovery, of naming the person you want to be, and becoming them.
change
prison abolition saved my life. it’s as simple as that. i entered university as someone who was still closeted at home, struggling with complex PTSD and religious trauma so potent that i had been convinced since my preteens that god had put me on this earth simply to suffer. that i had given the devil a foothold, and i was irrecoverable. as messy as my student comrades were, our unity around that one point meant that i knew they shared my belief that everyone, no matter how broken, deserved human rights. deserved community. deserved the chance to be part of a story bigger than themselves, a communal change for the better.
that faith in all of us, that demand for ideological consistency, those things forced me to believe better about myself. they forced me to believe that i, personally, could be better. could do better, have better, demand better from and for the world. and i still do.
it’s remarkable what people will say to you when you’re an open prison abolitionist. i’ve heard stories from strangers of jailing rapists, and not reporting fathers, and wondering about the suicides of violent ex-partners. part of this work is becoming someone who has room for that, to glean from someone’s stops and starts what absolution they’re looking for. often it’s this: nobody else understands how conflicted i feel. everybody looks for a tidy story of good and bad, someone to root for and someone to condemn. the people who hurt me are connected to me forever, and that’s not always a simple or evil thing, and i need to tell someone a little about it before i burst.
and: my god, my god. to hear someone reach out, and be able to reach back. to have the capacity for kindness in the face of horror, and see it reflected back. to know that every person who rises to their personal challenges is strong — that together we’re strong enough to bear everything that comes our way, to demand a better future. that’s the thing i’m most grateful for, now and always.
what’s on my plate
whew! here’s the smaller moments of joy, the smaller things i turn my attention to that make me glad i’m alive.
drawing: this month, i was so fortunate to be at the auckland launch of Everything That Moves, Moves Through Another. perhaps next month i’ll put up the full comic i wrote for the anthology — i’m very proud of it! it took me several drafts, and eventually turning to using inking pens directly in a 1B5 book instead of hitting undo on my tablet to make it work. there was so much confused hurt and memory to my experience of being mixed-race that i had to commit to the story i wanted to tell before i could tell it.
it’s not drawing, but visual-art wise, i’ve started carrying my camera around again. i bought a new lens, a bag that isn’t a backpack; in combination, they’ve made it possible for me to do what i did as a teen and pull my camera out when something catches my eye. this has resulted in some pretty okay photos! i’m relearning the unabashed ability to make art in public, as street photographers must, and the more mundane ability to post-process RAWs. here’s a few pics from this month: K Rd after the anthology launch; PAPA‘s protest outside Mount Eden Prison; the Toitū te Tiriti hīkoi.
writing: i’ve stepped back into fanfiction for the first time this year! nothing i’ll share here, but it’s been a joy to engage with other people’s creative work that way again. it feels like healing.
reading: the Artist’s Way, of course, but this month i also read Everything is Beautiful and Everything Hurts, which is a read that pushes on as relentlessly as the marathon at its core does. it didn’t captivate me, but it was an enjoyable, compelling read.
gaming: hilariously, i’ve gotten back into Microsoft Solitaire before bed, or Inbento on the Switch.
music: i bought a capo and a strap for my guitar. my testosterone-changed voice is still settling, but i’ve had at least one joyful singing-along-while-doing-the-dishes moment with my wife this month, and that’s better than having a voice that doesn’t crack. finding its footing, in all its awkward glory.
this month’s song is a Ramshackle Glory song that’s been on my mind as the US elections keep coming up in the news cycles. in its own ways, i think this song and album resonate with me the way No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive did when i first read it as a young adult — within the ostensible nihilism, it has the same hope and faith that i’ve talked about so much in this post.
crafting: i finished some very thick alpaca slipper-socks with silly wide toeboxes, which have been fantastic on colder days. i much prefer being as close to barefoot as possible at all times, and these make my feet hurt much less (and affect my coordination less) than soled slippers or boots. i’m also partway through a cable-knit vest, which i’m hoping to finish before my trip back “home” with family late next month. there’s a lot of hemming/altering and some new ideas for self-drafted clothes on my plate, but we’ll see what gets done!
joyful things: obtaining a couple of beautiful pieces of very old furniture off trademe that fit perfectly into the lives we’re trying to build. prints by local artists. leeks and mushrooms. friends who’ve moved abroad and still reach out, between timezones, to connect. friends with whom i can pick up as if we never stopped, years on, even if we keep forgetting to reply to each other. the wonderful, dedicated, honest, messy prison abolitionists i organise with, whether i’ve known them for a decade or a week.
poem of the month
no poem this month, unless you count the post above as its own, weird poem. i think it counts if you want it to.
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