the thread, the questions, the beliefs

For the last year or so, I've been exploring a few of the defining questions (Regina Anaejionu calls them the Big Specific Questions) and core beliefs that shape my body of work — across birth/sex/death work, across conflict midwifing, across transition design.

These are as-yet works in progress — I haven't wordsmithed, I haven't polished, I haven't made palatable for the public.

But they're the questions that haunt me.

They haunt me when I'm trying to make sense of ICE shooting a white woman legal observer in broad daylight -- when I'm trying to bear witness to the brazenness with which this administration wreaks havoc and violence on its constituents.

They haunt me across the parallels -- that we saw a live-streamed genocide for over two years, that we scraped through five years of pandemic and a mass disabling, mass traumatizing event -- the context that birthed a society inured to such violence.

They haunt me across these macroscopic scales as well as the microscopic ones, the little microcosms of interpersonal violence cut from the same cloth. (As Feminista Jones put it: "ICE agents are personifying violent misogyny....They shot her in the face bc it is arousing.")

so — the questions I wrestle with:

If we live our lives at the intersections of privilege and oppression, and if we learn our lessons about conflict and safety from control and subjugation — what does it look like to build relational skills, steward power well, and design new ways of being together, instead?

What does it mean to be human together in liberatory ways when everything we’ve learned about conflict has been shaped by domination?

core tenets

1. I believe that equity work is inherently joyful work -- that the work of reimagining systems (that were never designed for us) to be anti-oppressive, equitable, and even maybe matriarchal instead -- wise systems, where wisdom found at the intersection of logic and emotion -- is INHERENTLY joyful, inherently vulnerable, inherently creative, inherently imaginative, and demands joy and vulnerability and care and all the rest.

2. I believe that relational skills are one of the key skills necessary to build those new worlds and new systems. I believe that we aren't taught to navigate conflict well -- we are taught how to oppress each other and extract from each other, rather than work and play generatively together. I believe that in the current system, we learn our deepest lessons about conflict from the ways in which we have been oppressed -- and then when we go to navigate conflict with someone else, the embodied ways that we know are often just replicating the harm we've seen done -- instead of transforming that pattern into something new. I believe we have to WORK actively towards transforming that pattern into new ways of being together. I believe that relational skills are NECESSARY, vital, to systems change -- I believe that transition design demands relational skillbuilding.

3. I believe that when oppressed people harm each other in oppressive ways, it is even more of a betrayal than when a non-oppressed person does it, because we are meant to know better -- we expect better from each other. It is a different kind of colonial violence that even our brains and relationships have been colonized - that our internal worlds have been colonized. I believe that the resulting betrayal can be debilitating, because it becomes a compounded trauma -- not just the single shockwave of marginalization, but a ricochet reeling of grief, to recognize that our kin has chosen the path of the oppressor -- has chosen to oppress us where there once was intimacy and care. I believe this manifests on every possible level -- at the intimate scale of intimate relationships (sexual violence and patriarchal violence at the hands of a queer POC partner, for example), and at the global scale of geopolitical conflict (Black and brown men enlisted in ICE) and even genocide (Palestine, Kashmir).

I want us to learn the relational skills to embrace generative conflict -- to go from conflict avoidant to conflict resilient -- SO THAT we can do the work of reimagining and rebuilding (rewilding) equitable transition design.