The talk was an introduction to somatic practices and an invitation into somatics as a tool in our design practice, particularly in the cultivating of self-care, belonging, human-centered design, and making for systemic complexity.

In the research for this talk and in my years as a somatics practitioner and UX designer I've come across more resources than would ever make sense for a single workshop. For those curious to deepen in any of the areas touched on in the short workshop that Thursday night in Atlanta, here are some breadcrumbs.

Resources

Books

• Haines, Staci. The Politics of Trauma.
• d.school. Design for Belonging.
• Meadows, Donella. Thinking in Systems.
• Thomas, David Dylan. Design for Cognitive Bias.
• Johnson, Dr. Rae. Embodied Activism.
• Hemphill, Prentis. What it Takes to Heal.
• Brown, Brené. Daring Greatly.
• Höök, Kristina. Designing with the Body.

Articles

• Cognitive Bias Cheat Sheet
• Repairing the Harm of Digital Design Using Trauma-Informed Approach
• Why We Need More Somatic Culture In Design

Websites

• Deceptive Design
• Systemic Design Framework - Design Council

Organizations

• HmntyCntrd
• Strozzi Institute
• The Embodiment Institute
• Center for Humane Technology

Slides for the talk

I'm living in Atlanta in the summer of 2020 right now, and even as I exist here in this place and time, I can sense the turning point of history and it gives me a sense of spiritual motion sickness. I have no idea where we will be a year from now. But 2020 is about looking at where we've been, and hoping that deep looking can lead us to some kind of clarity, some kind of wisdom.

Secoriea Turner was one of three people gunned down on University Ave on the 4th of July. Rayshard Brooks Peace Center has been torn down in response, last night I was up late into the night feeling my stomach in knots, talking with friends who watched our sacred spaces of grieving, our altars thrown into trash bags. Racial injustice, the space we need for healing the deep wounds that systemic racism has left in our collective body...it's big and transformative spaciousness that's needed. But it feels right now like the call for "order" will win out for now over the call for "peace".

In Healing Resistence: A Radically Different Response to Harm by Kazu Haga he calls this "negative peace". The quiet that comes from forcing those suffering back into silence. For those in power, it feels like a solution, and for those outside power, it's a deepening of trauma.

Right now political leaders have a gunned down 8 year old to point to, gunned down near the Peace Center for their responses that are about to escalate to squash the demonstrations, the non-violent and assertive calls for peace, true peace, a peace planted in justice. Kazu Haga is a Kingian Nonviolence trainer, trainer in restorative justice, and mindfulness.

I'm in agony when I think of the inner chaos bubbling over into violence, violence that ends lives while the sky's lit up with fireworks, celebrating another year of American independence. Scapegoats exist because killing them is easier than atoning for systems that have existed eroding our collective soul for hundreds of years.

I'm noticing how stories are being told right now. Mayor Bottoms is weaving a weary and sympathetic tale of wanting justice, wanting peaceful protest, but willingness to sacrifice the movement in the wake of the death of an 8-year-old baby. Her tone is "enough is enough!" I'm noticing that news articles say "Saturday night" and avoid mentioning the 4th of July. After all these years working in brand management, I'm seeing clear as day protestors being painted with broad enough strokes to bleed "peace protestor" into "baby killer" but the 4th of July is being treated cautiously. Don't wanna hurt it's image. People need fun right now, amiright? It was Saturday, a Saturday night. Don't want to say it was the 4th of July... that may paint a weird picture.

The optics problems that freedom fighters will always have in the midst of the fighting is an optics problem that only abates with time. Those who control the stories do so much to control our eyes.

I don't feel like I have to defend movement in Atlanta right now. If anyone believes those marching in the Movement for Black lives in Atlanta isn't in unfathomable grief over the death of a 8 year old Black girl, they are choosing to believe that. They are consuming stories that make that even feel possible to them. We do not get to bow our heads and stop the fight to honor state-ordained grieving for this child. We cannot confuse order with peace.

Transformative justice fucking hurts as a process because it tells you your scapegoats are not gonna save you from future hurt. That the urgency felt isn't gonna get us anywhere any faster. That urgency isn't the same as caring. This process is hard and long and winding. And "justice" isn't placing the "right" people in cages because putting people in cages...doesn't change the forces that pushed them there. Do I want to create meaning here? Does my grief ask to be contained into a neat story where the assholes who shot up University Ave are brought to "justice". Yep, absolutely. I long for that simplicity. But this work isn't simple. Justice demands we acknowledge our interconnections. Our integrity means we don't just throw some people away. As long as we accept the belief that some people deserve to die, that will always lead to more death. Everyone deserves healing. I believe that. I challenge myself with that belief everyday. It is my practice to try to embody that belief. And it's fucking hard. I'm in grief. I'm in mourning. I'm in the practice of loving abundantly when all I wanna do is constrict and hold the world at a distance.

Today my migraines have been bad. Looking at screens aggravates them and I work in tech as a designer. I have to plan around my meetings and deadlines, take frequent eyeball breaks, take medicine, and just power-through to get my work done. In addition to the pain, I now experience dread whenever I know computer time is approaching. I am experiencing a sense of profound loss since computer screens were the first places I tasted any freedom in my life, and they have held so much promise for me ever since. I'm glad my body has started to be sanctuary for me in the last few years, so I'm not losing my ONLY resource for comfort, despite feeling like I'm losing a significant one. I'm grateful for audiobooks and screenreaders for their role in giving me access to the love of words that's so fundamental to my well-being and growth.

Earlier today my friend who has non-24, a sleep disorder which means that her circadian rhythms are irregular and thus makes her biologically anti-capitalist, was struggling with the same heartache that comes with butting up against the expectations of a time-based urgent culture, where when and how we show up is often used to create narratives about how much you care, how much you respect the people who may have been waiting on you, etc.

There's finally a medication for this rare disorder, but it's only just been FDA approved and it's $1800 bucks a month. She's already been denied coverage by insurance once.

The thing about her disability is that she's able to live & grow if she can just sleep when her body is tired. But after 4 years of loving her and seeing up close how much she has to power through to have a basic level of overlap with the expectations the world has of her, it becomes pretty evident what oppression looks like in somatic terms.

Today she said this to me, and I really, really needed to hear it:

"It's clearly how their system is designed, and how the players are programmed to behave, but with a gentle reminder that I am a person, I have different constraints to accessibility than most, and that I really am trying my hardest, things seem to tend to work out"

Every place I visit I look for the ramps. I look for the cracks in the sidewalk. I look for the restrooms, I look for the AC. I look for the electrical outlets. I look for the distance from public transit. I look for hours of operation.. In those little gestures of access or lack thereof I can see the faces of my family that can or can't share them with me. Accessibility in spaces is access to love. Access is love.

September 18, 2019 Transcript

"Hey

Today I think I want to talk about Spectrum. Spectrum was a trans community choir that started in 2015 in Atlanta. It was founded by Geena Phillips, and I first heard about it at a friend's birthday party. Which was the same party where i met my fiance and a lot of things started coming together in finding the seeds of what would become my beloved community and family in Atlanta. One of the things that is bringing spectrum to mind right now is yesterday I had a really bad depressive episode. I was feeling pretty despondent. It was a really hard experience to feel that love of life and of living just drained out of me, like there was a leak somewhere. So I found myself just sort of listlessly trying to ease the pain. Distracting myself never works, keeping myself busy is like my avoidant past coping strategies. But those sorts of things in trying to live more embodied, more mindfully they do not work even to distract myself. in many ways they make things worse. so what i decided to do was tell my family i was having a hard day. I allowed myself some time to complain and contemplate and write and finally what i decided to do was, i told Anya that i wanted some cigarettes and I wanted to watch the Steven Universe movie again. So we have an agreement to create some friction and some harm reduction...to prevent a practice of smoking that I don't want to get into a habit of...I'm not allowed to know where the only cigarettes that I like come from.

So Anya loaded me into the car, put a blindfold on me and drove me around in circles to confuse my sense of direction. Which I found kind of a compliment because I have a terrible sense of direction even with my eyesight. She holds the cigarettes for me, I'm not allowed to hold them, and this is an agreement that we have together.

We talked for a little while. She made space for me to just fall apart a little bit. To just speak how overwhelmed I was feeling, and where I was feeling that in my body. She shared her own experiences of being overwhelmed. And I felt very connected. I still felt very depressed. And I want to point that out. That feeling loved, and held, and cared for, and accommodated was helpful, but didn't negate my depression. *soft laugh*

So went home, smoked a cigarette, face planted into the couch. Breathed deeply into myself, my fingers and my toes, the first parts of my body that I forget about when I'm very much in my pain. And after I'd been breathing deeply into myself I decided I wanted to watch the Steven Universe movie again & turned around... There's a room in my house called the Cuddle Pit. Which is a full size mattress and a sectional Tetris-ed together to make just one giant cozy place that's impossible to escape even when you have the energy to escape. I did not, so I was trapped in the cuddle pit. There's a TV above a fireplace mounted on the wall. And that's where we started this movie.

And the movie begins with the saccharine end of most stories which is the Happily Ever after, and very quickly things go to shit. *soft laugh* And so many narratives are subverted. But eventually there is a song, which is a pep talk song that Bismuth sings to Steven. After Steven is encountering this huge ordeal he's got to face, Bismuth sings this song which is really a reprise or reinterpretation of "We are the Crystal Gems" but really through Bismuth's lens. And Bismuth has always always struck me as a revolutionary but very much in the fight modality. Buddhist Peace Fellowship talks about the Be Build Block framework. [Learn more about that here]

Being and Building being a lot less familiar to a lot of us in movement work and social justice action work than Block which is kind of active defense, that fight, direct actions. And Bismuth to me is so much the warrior. And I really resonate with that kind of power. For most of my life I've been more of the Build mentality, but not enough of the Block. There's only so much you can do to address harmful systems if you're not demolishing and blocking and destroying those harmful systems as well. There's only so many bandaids you can put on something if it's designed to hurt folks. This song by itself has become a real resource for me. And that's started to bring to mind some of the feelings that I had in the first community space that I had to spend time with other trans people that wasn't a support group, that wasn't a crisis center of some kind, that wasn't even really about gender. It was a place for folks that identified as trans and their allies to come together and sing. And voice is very loaded for me in my community, it's very loaded for a lot of the people I love most in the world. So having a space where we were not holding the external judgements and the misgendering of our voices, and the inhibitions we have around the human instrument of our voice, of our resonance, where we had permission and support in exploring gender affirming ways of sounding, of exploring with breaking down what gender even means in terms of voice, really defining for ourselves what it was that we were doing. And the experience of making music together. Just that by itself, having space for that very very human desire to express in unison through sound. I can't even describe how healing that was for me.  It doesn't seem like a coincidence or an accident that those relationships that were fostered there opened me up to a kind of vulnerability and healing that has laid down the foundation of everything that I care most deeply about right now in my life. It helped expand my capacity for social justice work. It expanded my capacity for speaking publicly about my identity. It created a place of belonging for me that helped me heal from the lack of belonging I felt in my family of origin and in my professional communities, and everywhere where it felt important that I stay closeted. It did so much for me. And ultimately it was a relatively short lived experience. We performed a hand full of times but just the spiritual healing of coming together with the intention of joining voices was really, was really powerful.

So now, I'm about to start having more open meetings for QTJAC and a lot of what I'm thinking about right now is what is the role of healing in this work. I think that when we talk about accountability, our mentality because of our culture is very much like well "How do we establish policies to keep people safe, to create safer spaces. How do we create policies that are surviver-centered. It's very much this focus on codifying the behaviors we need to have to create spaces of safety. That feels a lot like commandments, like the law, like these contextless and disembodied policies which requires enforcement, which requires enforcers, which requires police, and so much of the work of transformative justice comes out of prison abolitionist work, and those legacies and that theorizing around what is the role of police in community, what is the role of the state, what does accountability look like from a harm reduction standpoint? what does accountability look like from a community safety perspective? And I think it's becoming more and more clear to me that we can't have transformative justice if we are not addressing the things that are keeping us hurting. It's very hard to expect healthy responses from people who are not well. And it's very damaging to act as though these traumas are held within the context and timeline of an individuals life. So many of these traumas are holding not just in collective as queer people, as POC, as femmes, as women...there's so many different kinds of trauma that we hold in collective that affect our behaviors as individuals. And at the same time our behavior as individuals shape the collective. We have to turn towards the things that have damaged us, the things that have damaged people who are doing harm. And providing nurturance and healing for folks given understanding of where their pain is coming from and what structures are operating on them and what things are dehumanizing them and damaging them. Those things are not in conflict with holding them accountable. Those things are not in conflict with supporting survivors in their healing. One of the things that I feel would be really nice for QTJAC is having these spaces of fellowship and trust and healing that don't come exclusively in the context of a community accountability process. I think that within CA processes, the desire/need for delineation of what harm has happened and folks being identified as person who was harmed or survivor, and person who has done harm. as necessary as that is for a process and to create infrastructure for a process, it really have feel dehumanizing, and it really creates this substrate where it's very easy to apply our internalized sense of what justice looks like from our culture which is very punitive. So as soon as you have someone who is labeled as person who has caused harm, and you're only getting together around CA processes, you don't have a community of practice outside of that context, very quickly it starts to feel like well oh "this is the person who is the perpetrator, the criminal, the person who is bad" and we're trying to pull away from that in creating a culture of accountability that centers nurturance over punishment, that centers love over fear. And this is love defined clearly as an investment in one's own and another's spiritual growth, and care is a part of that, and respect is a part of that, and responsibility is a part of that [ from all about loveby bell hooks]

So right now I'm thinking about this thing that we've said a 1000 times in my polycule and in community with other trans folks in Atlanta is we need to have a singing circle. And I would love the focus of it to not be so much performances or even culture building or even making art, but for the focus to be specifically healing. And I would really like to revisit what a love-based love-ethic based Steven Universe song group or song circle (it doesn't have to be SU, but I'd totally be down for a Steven Universe song circle) what that starts to look like.

So yeah, that's the stuff I'm thinking about today. The day after being extremely depressed and being brought out of it in part by the loving kindness of the people around me, and music.

Okay, bye, hope everyone has a beautiful day. "

The past couple of weeks have been absurd in how chaotic and tumultuous they’ve been. That’s the first thing I need to stay. Yesterday was a harvest moon on Friday the 13. Right now we’re at the end of the first week of September [actually second week, it was early]. And Good Grief. Right now a lot of my family is homeless, injured, houseless, uninsured. A lot of things are going on. About a week ago my Roger had a car accident and injured their foot and has been in the hospital and in recovery until their surgery the day before yesterday. And yesterday we, myself, Clark, Sam and Ryan helped them get up two sets of stairs, well really 3, 3 sets of stairs to get to their bedroom with very limited leg mobility. So it was…it was one of those things that felt supremely daunting. And it’s kinda what I want to talk about in my little journal entry for the day.

After the experience of being so overwhelmed trying to provide care for so many people who need housing, who need …just emotional support for with the hard shit they are going, who need healing of all sorts, who are in the middle of CA processes either as people who’ve done harm or people who’ve come forward with the harm and need support. There’s been a lot of pain that I’ve gotten to hold very closely over the last few months.

And what I’ve started to find and what my work in creating the TJ collective has really shown me is, burnout is a fact of our culture. It’s an epidemic of our culture. And like most traits..most maladaptive traits, it seems to be pretty related to trauma. And burnout, one of the traumas it seems related to is this idea that if you ask for help and the help is not enough, then you’re the problem. So people do tend to ask for help for a little bit. But if they ask for help and they are let down, they experience other folks not having the capacity frequently enough and they frame it as being let down. It becomes harder and harder and harder to coordinate for assistance to ask for help. And that contributes a lot to burnout. Even for people who are very mindful, who are taking care of themselves. Who are all about their self care, who are thinking very intentionally about their healing. There’s only so much we can do on an individual level. And that’s…for me at least that idea was very terrifying when I started researching burnout back in June of this year because I wanted to prepare for the community accountability processes I was hoping to support in. and I knew that the work was going to be heavy. Everything I know about harm has prepared me for that much, and I also knew because of the harm we were handling, it was likely I’d be trigger…multiple times. That my capacity would vary a lot because of my own past and how I relate to this kind of harm. I felt that it was important to try, though. And setting myself up as a system instead of as an indivudal who would just push through and just get by through brute force, through y’know “character”, that sort of individualist idea that no matter how battered & broken you get you can heroically stand the trials of whatever it is that you’re trying. I didn’t think that heroism would serve the people I was trying to support, and it definitely wouldn’t serve me. So burnout is one of the things I looked into very deeply before I really starting this work. And one of the things that was very important to me in addressing an underlying complicator in what I was starting to see as a necessary measure to account for burnout was I had to let go of a lot of the ideas that are deeply informed by individualism and capitalism and white supremacy. And that thinking of myself as both more powerful as I am, and less powerful than I am. And what I mean by that is not seeing myself both a part of collective and at the same time seeing myself as responsible for the collective. It seems like something that really serves the status quo. It makes us less effective if we see ourselves in this way where we both to both save the world and not be a part of the world.

So what I started to unpack for myself was the deep need that I had to becoming more comfortable with collective care and for collective effort and how to hold space and how to navigate that and how to be attuned to when I was resenting things that came from not working very well in spaces with other people. I didn’t want to feel dependent. So I started to think about what interdependence looks like…and what it could do, what it could do for movement work and for myself and for my family for all the people I was looking to support.

And because my situation supporting my friend recovering from surgery. It seemed very very easy. They expressed a lot of gratitude in receiving care but for me it felt very much like a naturally emerging characteristic of just loving this person. So I wanted to spend time with them, and so when they needed help moving from one place to the other, getting food, having water, having some cuddles or conversation. None of those things felt like work…and I hadn’t have minded if it had felt like work. But I wanna call out that it felts so effortless to me. And when we needed help getting them from the car to their bedroom that was up 2 flights of stairs, or really 3 flights of stairs, I…it didn’t cost me anything to ask for more help until we had enough until we could do it safely. It turns out that I reached out to Clark, who reached out to Sam, and on of Clark’s friends reached out to her boyfriend (Ryan) and all of these people showed up and got this done, that seemed dangerous and impossible and very daunting.

I’ll turn away from help, and this small part of me resents that that person wasn’t able to help me enough. A much larger partof me resents that I needed help in the first place. And I feel weak and I feel foolish for making myself vulnerable, ‘cause my problem still hasn’t been solved. And now I feel weak and that’s where I stop. I struggle, and maybe I’m able to succeed, but I suffer through it. I also internalize this message that when you need somebody they won’t really be there for you or they won’t be enough. And that’s one of the most damaging this that still happens in me when I’m with other people. And I’m starting to be able to identify it. What I want to do is move away from that avoidant individualist story and simplify things a little bit. And this is something that I learned from my nibling Rohan who is almost 3.

They were climbing a rock wall at a park in Pine Lake [, Ga]. And when they were on their own they climbed the wall by themselves, I watched them, I was watching very carefully because it looked terrifying to me, and they made it to the top. I watched them climb it three or more times before I was nearby. And when I was nearby and they went to go climb it again they asked for me to hold their back. And there was a part of me that was just so moved. Not only had she done this many times, fearlessly, successfully, but there was a part of her that asked for help not because she was weak, but because I was there. Because it gave us a chance for connection. It expressed that she trusted me. And it made me feel like we belonged. That we belonged together. And that we had each other. And that’s why she asked for help.

So now, I am starting to approach help a little bit more like Rohan. And now, instead of [asking for help and feeling like a failure when I need more help] or feeling weak, or like I don’t deserve to ask for help in the first place, or like I need too much help or like I’m too much…I want to decolonize myself from that story. I want to reject that story. And I want to feel Rohan’s story.

When you have the chance to ask for help, where it might help, even if you don’t “need” it, ask for it. If that’s not enough help for you to succeed, ask for more help. And keep doing that until you’ve succeeded.

And that’s nurturance culture to me.

K! I’m gonna try and take a nap for like an hour before this Tinkergarten class, and I hope everyone has an awesome day <3

in the 12 years since, i've changed. i worked in digital marketing for a few years, i started working at brand and digital agencies. i entered and left and re-entered and re-left marketing, consultant and hr business. and I started organizing locally for queer liberation, for economic & racial justice, for abolition and transformative justice. and i watched my friends & co-organizers get banned on fb for telling white supremacists to take a seat on social media. or for sharing pictures of their tiddies in private fb messages. the number of times i've had a black trans femme friends get banned for saying "white people" is absurd. facebook is now a place I begrudgingly use due only to its ubiquity, despite acknowledging that it's net harmful in my life and the lives of lots of other marginalized folks trying to organize for social change.

there are other tools. for events, for groups, for sharing messages, for video chats, for chat, for creating and sharing original content. i know, i've worked in tech for my entire adult life at this point. i do tooling and operations consulting for a living, and like alice, "i often give myself very good advice, but very seldom follow it." after clarity conf in 2019 this year in san francisco, and after meeting with javi from the bay area transformative justice collective one of the things heavily on my mind is both what accountability in tech looks like for bad actors like facebook, and what self-accountability looks like, for people like me who feel like hostages of a ubiquitous system of convenience, who seem to have forgotten we actually have the keys to our cells in our pockets. literally, in many ways.

two of my good friends have completely divested from facebook, so when I was using fb events to schedule a party and went to try and add them to the event, I noticed they were no where to be found. first i filled with envy & then joy (they escaped!) , and then it occurred to me...this is the moment where facebook's lie of convenience is revealed. it's only convenient if i'm operating in economies of scale...where it doesn't matter WHO i'm inviting as much as HOW MANY i'm inviting. Sure, there are more people who can quickly receive my event invitations on facebook, but if all the specific people I care about inviting aren't on facebook....facebook isn't a viable tool for community organizing. those two friends clarified to me how facebook wasn't just failing to reflect my network of care, but how it had been silently pruning my network of care to only include people on facebook.

so, i did what i always do. i talked to people about it. and this time, every single conversation that i've had (so far) all 125 of them, i start with this message

Hi [friend's name]. Could i have your phone number and email address? I'm divesting from facebook and would like to be able to contact you in other ways.

Over the past couple of weeks I've touched base with so many people I had been maintaining a relationship of osmosis with, where i felt connected mostly through absorbing the memes they reshared and declarations of their political outrage, grief, or annoyance, and their occasional joys. But mostly my friendships felt like indirect meme osmosis. turns out all those friends have been living lives all this time!

when I think about staying off of facebook the fear that if I'm curious about someone I won't have a window into their life has started to transform into excitement...i can use the physical pang of longing for my friends to reach out to them, and hear from them, and maybe plan to see them, and share embodied space with them, and hear their stories one on one, in private, in resonance together. we can connect. i so so miss connection with so many of my Facebook "friends". how did hyperconnectivity do this to intimacy and to all our physical cues of connection and nurturance hunger? how did a text box read in solitude come to be our way of sharing grief with our community? i get so much bad news alone on my phone. i've learned to swallow the heat behind my eyes that preambles grief because you can't just break down into sobs over a facebook post on the train, even if it's a story of a mass shooting or perhaps that your family member passed away. how did facebook come to redefine how we even conceptualize of "community"?

I decided to UX my own needs for contact info. as a community organizer most of the time i'm trying to build strategic containers for work to get done, and I need people with specific skills, special interests, at a variety of intersections. i also need my contact info to serve me to map the intersections of my social groups, and i need my family and communities of care represented, and my organizer and fiscal partners represented. and i need all my blood kin and folks who haven't even been on facebook all this time represented.

since I'm working with data that needs to be filtered easily in a variety of ways that needs to be easily accessible, I decided to use airtable to create my new contact book.

by making use of the multiple select custom field "groups" i can create tags for each of my contacts. those tags can then be used to create focused views of my contacts. this is an example of what it would look like to create a view that filters the contacts to only display people i've tagged as part of my "pod". these filters can create as many special views as you need. maybe i want to convene with all my latinx, queer organizer contacts, even though they haven't all met before. being able to see this kind of data about my contacts makes me more effective and intentional in the way i build social bridges and target outreach efforts.

i've since discovered that Signal works internationally for a lot of the same reasons WhatsApp does. i've transitioned to using signal whenever it's available and speaking to the people in my life about the transitions i'm making and why. i'm hoping to learn and build from dialogues around this work, and i'm relishing every step i take out of facebook land.

a few years later i've found a felt sense of home in my body. i don't have a list of boundaries I carry around and communicate, but rather trust i can name the boundaries as I feel them shifting in context. i've surrounded myself with people i trust to care about my boundaries.

however, in growing more comfortable with my boundaries and trusting that they will be acknowledged, honored, and accommodated by the people i love most, i've started to identify something that feels like a meaningful distinction. sometimes the category i'd described as "emotional safety" was actually "emotional comfort". i was so used to existing in distress or numbness that the closest I could approximate to not distressed was peacefully comfortable or delighted. i want to emphasize that for me this state of rigidly rejecting anything that was remotely uncomfortable was an important step in my healing. if you're still grasping for an answer to the question of "how does it feel to have a boundary", aim for comfort. it's easier to do this work if you're grounded somewhere that can come to feel like home. if you're in an active state of distress, trauma work, etc, the distinction may feel extremely tenuous and it may be triggering to even try to draw those lines. don't push. don't guilt yourself. it's easy to use these distinctions as justifications for blowing straight past your delicate boundaries. so, if you feel like you have a solid grasp of what boundaries mean and do for you, i invite you to chew on my thoughts. if not, i've written about boundaries too! that may be more useful for you right now <3 (and boundaries are so magical and you so deserve them. they are the necessary infrastructure for loving yourself and other people at the same time in a generative way)

safety: a sense that you will not endure distress or danger. it can also describe the mechanism by which this sense is achieved. my boundaries are a safety. my choosing people i trust is a safety. having containers for communication is a safety.

an expectation of control, is not a safety, but a comfort. And it can undermine the safety of others. since restricting the agency of another may be cutting them off from their own safeties.

comfort: a sense of not experiencing any hardship or distress. or when used as a verb, it can mean to attempt to diminish the hardship or distress of a situation for yourself or others.

for me to comfort someone doesn't require that i negate the hardship, but rather that i impose no additional hardship while witnessing them. being witnessed, by itself can be comforting. creating space to ask for help can be comforting.

here's where the distinction starts to feel meaningful for me. right now the discourse around boundaries and self-care seems to land on people's minds as standing aligned with capitalist individualism. where the only thing needed to justify providing no aid or comfort to someone in community that you care about is "boundaries" or "self-care".

i don't feel the need to justify anything. the experience of my body is a fact of my experience. and the need and desire to create meaning in collaboration with the people I'm communicating with is also a value i find liberating in my intimacy.

so, if someone in community needs emergency housing and I feel that felt sense that i've learned to feel as a boundary being pushed against i ask myself, is this a need for safety? or a need for comfort?

temporary discomfort is something i'm well adapted for. I can survive just about anything for 2 weeks. ongoing discomfort starts to trigger developmental dysfunctions, not so much due to how long it goes on, but how unpredictable it is.

things i like to have clearly defined

1. Safety vs Comfort
2. Love vs Romance
3. Responsibility vs Interdependence
4. Loyalty vs Autonomy
5. Respect vs Dignity
6. Boundaries vs Rules
7. Virtues vs Values
8. Stress vs Stressor
9. Humanity vs Intellect
10. Family vs Kin
11. Accountable vs Guilty
12. Solidarity vs Trauma Bonding
13. Support vs Idolization
14. Guess Culture vs Ask Culture
15. Feelings vs Story of Feels
16. Felt-sense vs Self-talk

(^^ uh-oh sounds like a series of posts in list form ^^)

faqs

These are all things that I've heard from the people that I love. This is something that comes up consistently enough across enough relationships that it's not about anyone in particular. This is something all the people I've gotten closest to in the last decade eventually touch on with me, and I think it's partially because we have a lot of trauma in our culture around care relationships. So, if this is something you've felt with someone or someone has said to you, I hope my thoughts can support a dialogue about it. Turn towards the hurt. It's information. Please make meaning for the information together as a practice of honoring each other in your full humanity and complexity.

You do so much for people, I don't want to be a burden. How do I avoid making your life harder?

I seem busier than I actually am 80% of the time. This is partially because of my ADHD. It may seem like I have a thousand projects that must be of relative priority and on a reasonable timeline because of the number of things that seem relevant on any given day. Trust me, I spend a good bit of my time laying around reading or meditating because without this I collapse into shaking, anxious weeping Zen who can't sleep. One of the gifts of a body that feels intensely is that it won't let me neglect the basics of rest, boundaries and restful activity. What you may be seeing as active and depleting activity, may actually be my way of resting. Processing emotions with friends is restful for me the majority of the time. Giving advice is restful and nourishing. Dancing, spinning fire, helping with tech problems, research, and spending time embodied with people I like all feel meditative and fulfilling.
Please trust me to establish and communicate my boundaries as you approach them. Support me in being accountable to myself by reminding me to check in with myself about my capacity, but don't push when I say I've checked in and decided I do have the capacity. I feel this profoundly as a denial of my capacity. As someone with capacity that is actually severely diminished by my health, I cherish being present and capable for my loved ones when I can. I feel distress when trauma keeps me and my loved once at arms length. I want us both to learn how to help each other, and I can commit that if a process of mutual aid has failed us, we can adjust the process without having to pull away from helping each other completely.
So, you're absolutely not a burden, my love. We're in this existence together, and we move through inhale, exhale, helper, helped. It's the rhythm of living. My hope is you can feel safe through the cycles. I'm building and healing towards that myself, and thank you for sharing this hurt with me. Keep asking until it feels answered. That's what I want relationship with me to feel like...a space where the questions you have can be asked and we can figure the answers out together. Thank you for being puzzled with me. <3

I feel like I contribute nothing in our relationship. You're better off without me.

caring for yourself is a contribution to our relationship. it's a contribution to the world. your needs for care being met are not a debt you owe to me or the world or anyone. please don't try to give me things I didn't ask for, particularly if you don't feel like you have them to give. your pain is not how you earn my love. you have my love. we can move in and out of the motions of presence and absence in each other's lives if we need it, but I'd like to think you'll trust me to make choices about what I need and want myself. If you mean you feel like you'd be better off without me, you don't have to justify it by blaming yourself. Blame and innocence don't really serve me as much as making sure if harm is happening that we stop it from continuing. I don't feel harmed. And I want you if you want me. And it's okay to not want me right now. I won't punish you for needing space for any amount of time. Let's talk about ways you can and want to express care for me, so it doesn't feel so imbalanced to you. What things are you valuing highly that I do for you that feel heavy to accept? How can we shift that?

You should write a book.

Please just follow me around and write down the things I say and write the book for me. I don't think of myself as a writer, and your saying I should write a book makes me feel like you have a better idea what it should be about than I do. (And thank you, you appreciating and valuing my thoughts and feelings heals a part of me that was very afraid of rejection for so very very long and still is. thank you for giving me this memory as a resource when I'm feeling insecure)

I feel like you don't love me anymore.

My heart shrinks knowing your body is reading how we're together in this way. Thank you for sharing this truth with me. I wanna learn how to love you in ways you can feel better. Do you have any clarity about things you'd like to try shifting in our relationship that can strengthen our connection?

I feel like you're moving way too fast. I don't want you to be disappointed.

What expectations do you feel like I have? Aside from a general expectation we'll have continued contact or that we'll communicate if contact needs to cease for a longer than incidental amount of time, I'm open to renegotiating any of the things we've already committed to each other. Can we get specific about what specific things are making you feel dragged along in my enthusiasm? Do we align in the significance of those rituals? (example: You made me a key to your house! Do you think that means I want you to move in? Cuz it just means I trust you with a key to my house and expect you will text me before you use it. I'm most likely to ask you to come let me in when I inevitably lock myself out.) When I'm imbuing a gift with meaning with you, you'll know by the soliloquy that accompanies it's delivery to you, and I'm much prefer that we co-create the meaning of symbolic tokens. I don't use the pre-made romantic significance of most things, and I will try to be mindful of the way things may be loaded.

1. Everyone deserves healing, and we need healing so we can love. Love is a part of healing.
2. To love is to be in the process of your own growth & the growth of another.
3. You were born whole. And like all interconnected beings, need others to stay whole. Connection is a human need. You need connection like you need breath, air, nourishment, shelter.
4. Understanding your own edges, your boundaries, is essential to understanding connection.
5. Approach nurturance of your connections with curiosity, over coming to them with an inflexible agenda. (People over structures)
6. Stay embodied and collaborative in following your desires.
7. A love-ethic does not co-exist with abuse of power. Care, affection, entanglement, responsibilities may be shared, but if power and control are unspoken motivators in your connection, it is not loving; you cannot be in growth from this place.
8. Turn towards harm. Everyone harms, everyone can change. Do not excuse, justify, or ignore harm. If it is to be transformed, it must be given name together. It is not enough to name it to yourself.
9. Every body deserves safety.
10. We must acknowledge how power is held in society to understand the harms we are vulnerable to in the personal.

A holon is a word from Greek that indicates something that is both whole and an essential part of a whole. A seed is a holon which is both contained within a forest, which contains many trees, which contain many seeds, and can contain a forest within itself. It honors the fractal nature of forces operating in accordance with their purpose. Relational, or relationship (h/t to relationship anarchy), holarchy is a philosophy of love that posits that by operating free of external forces, each autonomous individual in loving connection strengthens the loving collective, the holarchy. Relationship holarchy is not a set of rules or codex of behaviors, but a system designed to plan for the unexpected with resilience, and prioritize growth through autonomy. It trusts living and loving beings to inherently tend towards growth when liberated. If you believe that without rules that make you suffer you’d fundamentally be destructive, decolonizing yourself from this belief is part of the work of healing.

When I look at a tree and I see how the branches grow out I think about how life, nature, the forces of physics seem so often to choose the path of least resistance. Water will move from one area of higher pressure to one of lower pressure, and this phenomenon of capillary action which allows giant red woods to get water to the highest branches also causes my sinks over run in every sink when we clog the pipes in one sink.

When nature, through its foundational acceptance of entropic principles is capable of amazing things, human ingenuity neglecting to note the wisdom of the natural world will work against ourselves all the goddamn time. I think I’m saying I wish my pipes were designed better, but this is a post about relationships. When I look at the social blueprints for relationships printed en masse in the media, I think about my clogged sinks. Structures that don’t respect the nature of the substance, fail the substance. Love flows freely when the structure is designed for its natural flow.

Growing up in the culture of individualism in the United States, and falling on the “codependent” side of the supposed “codependent”, “narcissistic” duality, I felt that loving myself always came at the expense of what others were entitled to from me. I thought that loving someone meant that I would suffer for them if they needed me to. My partners who fall on the “narcissistic” side of that duality were more likely to believe that they were entitled to love, and to be without it was a source of suffering.

We were both very wrong and very right. What was totally wrong was the duality, or the belief that any of us linger permanently in one camp over the other in all our connections. This was individualism. Interdependence sounds so very complicated within the context of individualism where we say things like “Put on your oxygen mask FIRST before helping others.” It’s really more like “it’s important that you breath and it’s also important that others breath.” These things aren’t in competition like individualism benefits from positing.

For others to breath, we must also breath. And for others to breath, we must breath. We are interconnected and all benefit and all suffer from the benefits and harms of the systems in which we engage.

Love is an ongoing process that we can systemically enable. We don’t have to think about love for it to emerge, but if we heal, understand our capacity, find our way to feeling in our bodies, understand our desire, turn towards harm and remain accountable, and trust our intrinsic wholeness and goodness, love emerges.

aside from the plane commute and 80s day, AKQA san francisco felt a lot like AKQA atlanta to me.

I had dinner with a wonderful friend and metamour who id never met in person before. the biggest pull for me on the west coast are definitely a few individual beating hearts. but their call is mighty <3 we had ethiopian food together in SoMa and talked about kink, accountability, luncheons, normativity, good dogs and my dad and his butter sculptures. sharing physical space with this wonderful luminous human was wonderful, i felt myself anxiously mourning the passage of time and the uncertainty around when we'd share space again. i take solace in speaking with them almost daily in our polycule's discord server. in conclusion, cuties be cute.

i slept in til about 8am on Saturday, and got to feel like a morning person on this coast. I recorded the first section of Fumbling Towards Repair to make an audio reading accessible to the members of QTJAC (queer transformative justice atlanta collective). reading accessibility has been on my mind lately as I feel myself exhausted from synthesizing so much written material over the last 3 months of this intensive study of community accountability. between my dyslexia and eye strain, reading this much is more than i want to continue asking of my body, but my curiosity and hunger for the content mean audio resources have become deeply appreciated gifts.

aside from the physical accessibility needs that audio meets for me and others, there's also a certain humanizing quality to hearing some of these ideas explored in active dialogue. i was talking with my beloved partner ada yesterday about tools and myths. roger and i discussed sapiens, a book about humans and the power of myth, and it's had me thinking about the power of story and what other tools i have when I find that a story is no longer serving me. feeling into my body has been the most grounding tool as I allow myths that don't serve me to dissolve around me. turns out when the web of myths that profit structures over bodies starts to disintegrate, my body is still there, solid and grounded, touching earth, waiting for me to return home.

i followed ada's recommendation to visit wicked grounds, a kink-community coffee shop near Folsom St. i stayed and chatted and read and connected with so many beautiful human beings before and after a wonderful class on D/s taught by shay and stephanos in their first class at the Annex next to wicked grounds. one person who really opened up was name mischa, a life coach supporting men in their desire to be better, we spoke about accountability. i watched him greet and appreciate his salad before eating it. i remember thinking "this is what prayer looks like when done with your body". i had a flashback to times i'd nervously talked to strangers because I believed I had something that could help them. i had a flashback to times i'd nervously talked to strangers because other people told me i had something that could help them. and i felt these two histories converge in this moment. i witnessed as mischa was moved by the fumbling toward repair workbook page he'd turned to. i told him about mia mingus and the bay area transformative justice collective. and i wondered about how a cis white man would feel held in a movement space in san francisco.

community accountability tends to feel like the intellectual and active labor of POC women and gender-non conforming folx. I was intentional in inviting cis men into the collective in Atlanta because I've witnessed how masculinity is being painfully reckoned with not just by cis men, but the amab enbies in my life, and i would like to make explorations of masculinity with trusted men a part of my healing work and my belief that no human is a monster, and that every human has resources to contribute to collective that only they can purvey. i want to have a diversity of capacities represented in QTJAC. and i am going to work to support safety without relying exclusively on exclusion of folks with the kind of power that has so often been used as weapons against women, femmes, and gnc folx. in other words, AND STEVEN!

i'm about to read a bit more of the workbook into an audio app on my phone in my quiet hotel room before i find my way back into the noise of a vibrant familiar new place.