anomalies as contagion: memo 06

 

in the capitalocene, they used to frequently use the phrase, "we're running out of time." they used it on the daily in any and every situation. they used it without thinking. our language reveals so much about our relationship to time because today we say, "we're being policed by time." meaning, we can find refuge.

this new phrase was only possible because several generations ago, the immortal jellyfish (medusozoa) decided it was right to share with us the genetic instructions for reshaping our relationship to time. we do not know why they decided to do so, because humans were actively destroying the world (and themselves) and many humans felt it wise to let the destruction happen so as to end it all. they (rightfully) assumed that more-than-human kin were tired, but perhaps were wrong in assuming how the more-than-human kin would respond. it's unhelpful to map human conceptions onto more-than-human bodies... like the jellyfish, for example. the jellyfish was the one who made the final call (it makes sense that they consulted others, but we're not sure how many they consulted. perhaps everyone was in on it... more-than-human kin rarely make decisions alone. that's a recipe for mutual death). the jellyfish's gift was the last puzzle piece that pushed humanity past the precipice through the inevitable-evolution. we were never the same afterwards.

the genetic technology they gifted us rewired our cells to relate differently to time. we cannot rewind time to the extent that the jellyfish can, but we can pause it momentarily. we can see fissures that become openings into a pocket in time where we may find refuge together, and rewatch the last 5-10 minutes that had just occurred. these pocket time portals do not change what happened. when we emerge we reenter the river of time just as before.

the gift was not instantaneously rolled out, however; they conducted a few waves of alpha tests among select few, followed by a large scale beta test. those that did not survive the beta test did not join us in the cthulucene. #536c was part of the initial alpha test waves.

it took anywhere from 4-7 years for the entirety of the body's cells to completely transition out of time. one of the first side effects was called shadow glitching. here's my chronographic memo describing #536c's first noticeable symptoms:

she glitched. her shadow would momentarily separate from her, lagging in spacetime. at first she didn't notice, especially if it happened in the forest or at the beach because the shadows of the trees and ever-shifting sand hid the evidence from view. the first time she noticed it was while she was walking in a part of her neighborhood where there were no trees. she jumped furtively in the air (checking first to see if there was anyone around to witness her bizarre behavior), walked in some meandering circles, staring at the unmoving dark shape on the ground. before she could squat down to touch it, it was already attached to her feet. it was quite startling and unnerving. she chalked it up to some strange physics phenomenon and lack of sleep.

over the next several years, however, she began to glitch more and more. eventually she discovered that if she aligned herself at a very particular angle with the frozen shadow, she could see a fissure in the air that she could step into/through. she initially couldn't discern any pattern for why and when they happened. she felt that she was surely going insane, but was curious nonetheless. she began to experiment: what happens if someone is near me when it happens? can they see it too? what happens if/when i step inside? how long is the pocket open for? and eventually: can i bring others inside with me? it turns out, yes, however from the other person's perspective, it just felt like she was asking them to stand somewhere specific. good thing she was clever and quickly began bringing her camera around with her as an excuse: "i'm just practicing spontaneous portraiture in different lighting contexts." her unwitting participants never caught on. upon leaving the pocket, they always experienced an intense wave of deja vu, and for a fleeting moment they might have felt more settled within themselves. slower. their cells were more aligned. few were conscious of it though (as they were not learned students of their own bodies).

the more glitching she experienced, the more shadows she left around the world. they are mostly indiscernible to regular eyes but we use special goggles to assist in adjusting the sensitivity of our eyes so that we may be more attuned to notice the shadows. frankly they're a pain in the ass to track down on their own, but thankfully i have the help of the photos she took (the person she photographed cannot be seen in the photo, of course; they are hidden within the time pocket). these shadows tell the story of just one of the layered stages of the inevitable-evolution: how humans adapted to the jellyfish's gift and invitation to become disrupters of capitalist time and visionaries for otherwise worlds. 

____________

in response to linear capitalist time, "running out of time," wanting to slow down. inspired by joshua's sharing of wanting to respond to the too-quick moments of micro-violence, and the shadows that hiroshima and nagasaki left.

anomalies as contagion: memo 05

#536c is an ancestor (seven generations back) of a friend of mine. i see my friend as a fellow weaver, but she sees herself more specifically as artist-weaver: one who uses art to weave across time. my friend graciously consented to helping me with my research, and participated in some body-listening sessions using our watery technology. we looked at what was happening in her body while she was in the midst of her art practices, and we isolated for the particular fibers and nerves in her body that were genetically mapped from #536c. these fibers and nerves told us that they were attuned to a specific dissonant frequency. when they register this frequency, they activate a system-wide response in my friend's body to create. we are in the process of visualizing the situations that might trigger this frequency so we don't have any conclusive evidence yet, but so far we think it has something to do with uneven power dynamics or relations. we also don't believe this frequency originated in #536c herself but rather her ancestors... we don't quite know yet. how did this lineage learn to create beauty in the midst of or in response to moments of incongruence, hypocrisy, harm?

 ______

wondering about what is it about me that makes me frequently at odds with ppl in power. but maybe it's not me. it's the box they want to put me in

things older than ice

things older than ice, in ascending order:
koi fish in that little pond at the mall who i never thought twice to say hello to
alex the parrot who said "be good, i love you"
me, a 90s baby
most likely you
a box of my childhood knick-knacks
the first approved contraceptive skin patch
the first draft of the human genome project
Google
knowledge of accelerating expansion of universe
the civil rights act of 1964
the wisdom of our forebears
the greenland shark, who wait to become mothers
the bristlecone pine, who has seen the rise and fall of 200 empires. or more
the honey mushroom in oregon, heftier than 200 gray whales
the glass sponge, a sister in our lineage
all of our matrilineal dna from mitochondrial eve
hydras, who know not death

ice is not inevitable
ice is not permanent
ice is not indissoluble

view from the atltitude of the chthulucene: memo 04

we have the technology today to map the memory of water across multiple scales of time and space. the vibrations of its molecules tell us stories of where it's been, who it's been and who it is and who it's becoming, how it has traversed terrains of destruction and creation both. it sings of tales from other worlds, and of how we healed from the capitalocene, and how we thus have the instructions to weather other spills. we use this technology today to trace sickness and listen for medicines on the other side of the planet, but before they had this technology, they couldn't heal the 17+ million suffering from what they called long covid. they couldn't hear what the water was telling them all along, and so our kin tried to warn them first.

first to take up this task was the wise-one, an african gray parrot they named alex (short for avian language experiment. how minimizing.) his name was actually odideré, whose parting words were "you be good, i love you." humans debated this for decades, missing the point altogether. i salute odideré's courage to submit himself under their greedy dissecting eyes for thirty years; i don't know who clipped his wings to begin with. did he consent in order to undertake this humiliating lifelong assignment? was it a gesture of good faith? or was it coerced, upon which he became a martyr or saint of sorts, to deliver this message to the humans? in any case, odideré gifted them an invitation to listen and evolve, and they desecrated it with their conferences and press releases and research grants. of course they were enamored with odideré, but in their simpering reverence he remained object and not subject.

odideré's mantle was inherited by our trickster kin raccoon dog named mangut, who felt her rage spill forcefully and unapologetically in the form of a gift, coughed up from her lungs rattling with the promise of death, life, and transformation. her spittle was an ecotone, a liminal space between worlds. she was not as patient as odideré (she figured odideré gave them thirty years) and so she waited a mere two months before she jump-started the evolution of what came to be 17 million. 7 million returned to the earth and waters. like odideré, the trickster mangut invited people to transform: before she became an ancestor, she said, "you can do things differently."

unfortunately, people disregarded her invitation. while they treated odideré with a strange romanticization, they stoned mangut with stories of disgust, thus reaping the condition they called long covid. we call this hydroempathy, not unlike lauren olamina's hyperempathy. because we are all made of Water, and if Water is sick, we are sick too. mangut did warn them.

those that mangut invited for transformation through hydroempathy experienced chest pain and shortness of breath. that was the penguin of the Kawésqar peoples, dying from a swallowed mask (they called her Magellanic. but we reject this name, as he had no right to name and claim her. she existed long before he was even born). dizziness, brain fog, and anxiety was the Kawésqar penguin, an emerging climate refugee, disoriented as she tried to navigate the glitching ecotone between land and sea. humans had made both land and sea untenable, interfering with her sacred task as spiritual messenger between ecosystems. what did they expect? the depression was the world's collective grieving of 400 white storks who left us too soon, taking new beginnings with them. the symptoms were endless. the waters linked hydroempathetic people online into a network of shared suffering across, with, and within oceans.

it was out of mangut's ecotone--her maligned bodily fluids, the indigestible illness that the capitalocene bequeathed to her--that the fuzzy outline of a new world shimmered momentarily. since mangut, there were more spiritual messengers and guides who followed in odideré and mangut's lineage to continue weaving transient portals, whether or not the humans would/could listen. #536c and the 17+ million were starting to listen.

 

prompt: combine posthumanism, becoming-water, ecotone; hyperempathy syndrome; materialistic origins of ideologies (barbara fields' terrain/satellite analogy), covid, parrot, body as doorway 

anomalies as contagion: memo 03

i recently had to consult my colleague who is a historian of epidemiology in the plantationocene/capitalocene era. while researching #536c, her frequent encounters with enforcer-resarchers piqued my curiosity. my colleague told me that the enforcer-researchers were the saddest prisoners around. they were ill with a disease that can only be contracted within their own castle walls. the disease etiology is unquestionably in the fragmentation of one's mindbodyspirit, caused by a bacteria which is now extinct. the incubation period of this bacteria is debated, but emerging evidence seems to point to a positive correlation between time spent within certain castle walls and the speed of deterioration in the patient.

once the patient was symptomatic, the disease process proceeded as follows: symptoms started with dissociation and subsequent delusions and paranoia. without appropriate interventions at this stage, the patient quickly succumbed to blindness, deafness, and compulsive logorrhea in the form of unsolicited monologues (more like diatribes) sprinkled with an alarming number of neologisms. eventually, they either became immobile or had severe ataxia. their delusions and paranoia, at this point, would've been so severe that they've been reported to feverishly chant the phrase, "i must prove myself. you must prove yourself. it's coming for us." they also were frequently defensive and resistant to attention from healers and caretakers. it was almost as if the bacteria rewired their brain and immune system to launch allergic reactions at the slightest hint of anything that might remotely make them well again.

their disease made them very difficult to be around, and they often experienced social isolation as a result. the affected tended to congregate together (we don't know if this was by necessity, if it was inevitable due to living within those same castle walls, or if the disease actually attracted them to each other). in any case, it is baffling because they also greatly disliked each other.

my colleague reported that we don't believe the disease was necessarily transmitted from person to person, but if an unaffected individual interacted with symptomatic individuals within castle walls for an extended period, the likelihood of contracting it increased exponentially.

this data made me all the more interested in #536c and others like her. how did they avoid this illness? did something make them immune?

(several days later, my colleague realized that attributing the disease etiology to castle walls was perhaps a spurious association. it was beyond the castle walls, too. maybe the bacteria proliferated in castle walls was a special strain, but it turns out it was rampant everywhere. there's a reason it was called the capitalocene, after all.) 

anomalies as contagion: memo 02

the enforcer-researcher insisted on linearity. it was simpler, cleaner. less scary, easier to control and manipulate. this was evidence that he could not hear the trees, could not commune with the skies. we do not know what he liked to think of himself as, but we do know that his actions were that of disassembly, not of creation. i'd venture to guess that he thought of himself as an undercover agent researcher. i don't know what revolution he was waiting for, though, because he waited until the castle walls crumbled and by then it was too late. i suspect/theorize that the more fear laced around and choked one's veins and arteries, the less likely they were to experience the inevitable-evolution. they would be left behind. a fading remnant of the anthropocene. people walk past their figures in museums today with disinterested nods and pursed lips as they hurry to more interesting exhibits.

the exhibit curators, to no fault of their own, have done little work archiving interactions between the fearful ones and those who eventually evolved. how did they interact? impact each other? in some notes i found of anomaly #536c's written frustrations, i believe that the enforcer-researcher did not know that the more he insisted--the more pressure he sought to exert on her to mold, to constrain, to corral--the more fecund of an environment he was inadvertently constructing for her evolution. a happy accident, surely. others he successfully molded to learn the language of compliance. of survival, but of the sad sort. she, however, already had the ingredients within her; she did not know that she was activating a dormant script written from within the pressures of the hydrothermal vents by ancestors who knew what it meant to birth impossible life. in some ways, we have the enforcer-researcher to thank for helping to unlock the script that set us free. an inheritance he unfortunately could not enjoy. perhaps we ought to rewrite the plaque in his exhibit, to thank him for playing a role in our ancestor's inevitable-evolution.

anomalies as contagion: data for mapping the inevitable-evolution towards geomatricene

here in the geomatricene/cthulucene, researchers are poets, storytellers, artists, witches, weavers, healers, prophets. we creatures cannot fathom a time when researchers were soldiers, enforcers, tax collectors, thieves, mercenaries, court-jesters. but they were. a strange time, to be sure, the anthropocene (aka the plantationocene, or the capitalocene: an era confined within linear time.

i call myself weaver. here is of one the threads i would like to illuminate of someone i found to be a strange anomaly. over time more and more anomalies revealed themselves to me, and so i began collecting data to weave with. it was as if these anomalies were a contagion that eventually led to the inevitable-evolution (this name is contested. people argue whether it was preordained or manufactured. prophetic, consequence, or cyborg. i subscribe to those in the combination camp).

the transition from the anthropocene to the geomatricene/cthulucene is blurry, of course: we don't subscribe to static categories as researchers used to. the transition is especially blurry if you map the data linearly (an archaic methodology--only storytellers interested in studying linearity practice this methodology these days). these days we map everything cyclically. much more elegant. and alive.

the glitches these anomalies made were simultaneously small and large, and the people of in-time did not have the multi-scalar technology that we do today to map the connections of impact. here is my memo for one thread of the fabric, an anomaly i call #536c who is an ancestor of a coweaver of mine (although they marginally prefer artist over weaver):

that day she realized in her reflections on her re-entry into the orbit of the machinery that she was listening across spacetime -- listening circuitously [she did not know the shape of cyclical listening yet--the brains of those in the upside down (what they called the global north) had not yet evolved enough to register spiral temporalities] listening to trees, hearing the echoes of insight and wisdom from those who came before her. [i am unsure the origin of her anomaly. was it genetic or environmental? more research to be conducted on tracing the contagion's journey. perhaps there is no singular patient zero, but multiple. in any case, that day was likely not her first symptom of the anomaly, but it might be her first serious engagement with it. after all, today we have evolved additional senses and during the anthropocene they only had five. sometimes they toyed with the idea of a sixth, mostly in jest. they didn't know the emergence of the proto-sixth sense was already well underway in the ama, haenyo, bajau, and moken (subspecies) within the homo (genus) hydroians (species)--mostly in the littoral biomes of chrysia--what the thieving researchers called the orient or asia. frankly in my humble opinion it was the soldier researchers with their violent and backwards ways of unbeing who delayed--or rather, obstructed--the revelation of the sixth sense]. 

she felt it surround-sound style, bass rumbling in her bones, the hairs in her spiral snail cochlea attuning to alien frequencies, the hairs on her skin rising like little antenna. in her writings transcriptions [they are not really original writings. because what here is new? they are but reverberations. although unoriginal, she was, however, contributing to the forthcoming inevitable-evolution. that is no small feat.] about more-than-human kin and her curiosities about what-could-be/what-ought-to-be/what-is-in-other-worlds/what-is-but-just-not-here/yet/, she felt she was on the right path. where it led, she did not know. but she knew another her was already there [my coweaver, the artist]. so in her bones, she began to sense the diffraction of indeterminate futures, a static shadowy glitch signifying diagonal dimensions she had no access to. little did she know what was to come. [is this a primitive precursor for sense evolution?]

that day she also learned that scientists are working on generating artificial gravity so that they may better accommodate human life in space, if temporarily. if a scyborg is only analytically meaningful when it is momentarily entangled with the machine, she realized then that maybe, in the time she is in the machine's gravitational vacuum (because there is no air, no life) she might assemble/magnetize with others to manufacture and magnify artificial gravity. for some life for herself and others. glitch, virus, specter, wraith. a wench with a wrench. ready for some calculated mischief. [is it in the magnetic, spiral assemblage that the anomaly was transmitted? but of course it is.]

___

in response to Esther, la paperson, Gumbs, Haraway, & Barad

this started as an attempt to describe what it feels like to read someone's work only to hear echoes of your own. the rest fell out of my brain (gushed out, birthed; unbidden, feverish, like a bewitching) in response to the following questions: in the same vein as what our past selves might think of our present selves, what might our descendants, say about us? can/will research(ers) evolve and if so, what do they know that we don't, or that we are on the verge of beginning to know? or beginning to be? what is the scale of impact beyond our immediate technologies of knowing? 

harvesting fog

 it's called "fog harvesting" when redwoods condense moisture from the air (what witchcraft?) to both absorb and to manufacture rain for the life sheltered below. what lessons might we learn from this ancient technology? it teaches us of intra-dependency rather than inter-dependency; the trees, the fog, the understory perhaps are not individual units but is blurred life, singular. do they mourn when melting glaciers halfway across the planet make air, less air? hot air, less air, rising waters, less oxygen, more fury, less life. can the trees grieve if there is no moisture to cry with? hot air rises like the way greed bloats to colonize the space in our lungs. the way greed tells us it is giving us more (it is a cancer) while giving us less (it is a toxin).

can the trees mourn if there is no life to mourn for? can they live if there is no grief? can we grieve in order to live? out of their/our grief, can we manufacture something to nourish more life? can we harvest the fog in some science fiction cyborg manner? is it life that we will then create or something else altogether?

 

fugitivity, refusal, subterfuge, sabotage, infiltration, strategy, renegade, insurgency, outlaw, refugee, elusive, evasive

not a soldier redux: sorceress; and on scale

grief doesn't make me fragile -- you can come near me, the specter of grief is not a fog you'll get lost in or a ghost who wants to make you look silly or a toxic poisonous cloud. grief is that which holds up my spine. i will not disintegrate at your touch. maybe, actually, my relationship with grief is an invitation and portal to life. i am not a soldier but a sorceress, and grief is the magical dust that allows me to listen, commune between worlds. come, breathe: grief will not fight you. she will wait until you're ready. grief is the watercolor that makes visible the presence of an absence -- it allows us to see colors others cannot see, yet. one day we all see the colors. it hurts though, as your eyes adjust; it may take some time. i'm sorry it hurts and i'm sorry it takes time. she's not trying to hurt you, though, and eventually when you let her in she will refashion you so that you may travel through time: time will stretch, stop, speed up, distort, rewind. you will become otherworldly. and then others, too, will think you fragile when it is actually the brittle ones, the fearful petrified ones endanger of extinction, who cannot traverse the metaphysics of time. you are not brittle -- grief has made you fluid and solid and air: you exist in multiple states and spaces and times! how wondrous and painful and beautiful.

 __

what is empire in the presence of the ocean?

a sand castle, hastily erected, promptly overwhelmed by waves of judgment. the ocean heeds the verdict of the moon who tells her that the sand is liminal and ever changing, not to be corralled or petrified into prison walls. prison walls, too, will one day be reclaimed by the earth as the sea reclaims the sand. recently, i learned that nations are using sand to suffocate coral to lay claim to territory. how granular do they want to get in measuring coastlines? they call it land reclamation. i call it death which begets death. because did they know that as coral reefs die, the algae that give them their vibrant color (read: life) flee, leaving whiteness (read: death) behind. even the corals know the language of white supremacy culture. after all, the chemicals in coral polyps (which are marine invertebrates, animals, relatives) contain medicines for cancer, neurological disorders, inflammation. did the despots and tyrants, the machinators of death, think more-than-human kin would help them erect empire? silly. the coral warned us what would happen on our death rampage - and here we are, fighting ocean and moon and earth to rush towards ruin. who do we think we are? maybe we are the ruin and refuse. may grief have mercy on us. maybe grief will have mercy on us. maybe, grieve.

what is empire in the presence of a bristlecone pine? 

a wave of army ants "swarm raiding" the jungle floors like the rabid violent carnivorous hivemind that they are, flushing out terrified prey. their worker ants, however, only live a few months to a year. they may even catch themselves in a "death spiral," following each other's pheromone trails until they are dead. like ice agents of empire--violent, temporary, futile--decaying itself from inside out. the bristlecone pine has 5000 rings of slow life. how many death spirals has she seen in her lifetime and what can she teach us about how to survive empires? an astronomer in her own right after 5000 years of conversing with the skies, what does she know about the heavens and its own spirals of life and death? if i were to mirror my body to the bristlecone pine, to lean against her gnarled, architectural trunk, what would i hear? she, indomitable and witty, whispers to me the medicinal genetic code for resisting the disease of it all. and to have some sly style while doing so.

so much

i didn't know that my body could hold so much. daily needles, manufactured egg development, mega bloating. an empty sac--is it empty or just too small to see?--waiting, grief, emptiness, fullness, lostness, crying, so much crying, so much waiting, the strength and knowledge to push, to expel--am i allowed to say no? stay. when my womb is silent and opaque and mysterious and inaccessible to me, how do i stay connected to my center?

 ________

"Might we strive to leave some beauty for those who come after us? What kind of individual and collective healing work do we need to do? By interrogating our forebears and embarking on Sankofa journeys, in our healing we might make some beauty to help ourselves and our descendents navigate a hostile world… some beauty as a shield, weapon, salve, refuge, technology, map, paintbrush, magic spell, theory, portal. And in the beauty of our healing and our noticing and listening, are we not already sending vibrations across time, weaving gifts for those who will come after us, and seeding otherwise worlds?"
 
just because you cannot fathom otherwise ways of being and relating, of refusing without disconnecting, of setting boundaries without splicing yourself, doesn't mean i am chained to the shape of your scars. just because this is the language you feel you must speak to make yourself known doesn't mean i too must mangle my tongue and distort my vocal chords to sing (die, conform, assimilate) with the choir. who are you yelling at, anyways? are they listening to you? do your appeals work? do you feel safe? i suppose you are surviving. or you believe you are surviving. do you feel free? 
 
where are you gesturing at me from so urgently and seriously? i cannot hear you behind the windows you stand behind. there is a door, you know. if not a door a window or a crack, or imagine you can phase through the wall to join me outside. i'm here playing.

i'm learning from Black feminists who teach me how to terraform, submerge this topography of domination. did you know, in their blood they synthesized alchemy to grow life from the refuse? or despite of it. lesson one was how to send our nerves into the ground and get online with mycelium networks. fungi know all the secrets of composting death to engineer life (maybe they are the real scientists). lesson two was how to grow gills in my neck and filters in my ribs, to breathe through the deluge of tears and oil we juiced from the blood of glaciers and fossils. lesson three was how to hollow out my bones so that i am more air than water, so that i may listen to the hum of electricity in the air, an invisible grid and magnetic compass which maps out freedom in all directions. don't misunderstand, though: hollow bones do not mean emptiness. they have lattice for structure and strength, coursing blood for substance and oxygen as spirit and life--that alchemy, remember? antigravity, antidomination. and always we commune with the trees, they teach us theory. they drink sunlight and exhale freedom into our lungs.

september 2025

i heard an ad in a podcast episode recently that mentioned the term, "pluralistic ignorance." it describes a phenomenon in which an individual mistakenly assumes their private ideas/attitudes/feelings are different than that of those around them. misperception of others' beliefs, conformity to the (incorrectly) perceived acceptable social norms.

if everything is perception is anything real? in any case. i am less than a week into my doctoral journey. i am unsure what to make of the dissonance i feel in my chest every time we are asked to introduce ourselves by our research interests. is that what hints at the contours of this bubble that is an individualistic rat-race of careerism and self-importance? or is it the large words people use like "fungibility" (wtf), or the esoteric gems like research group, QEs, etc. etc. maybe it's the lack of eye contact and the subtle eye rolls and dead eyes. and speed at which everyone seems to be moving: too fast to notice the person next to you, too fast to breathe, too fast. is everyone aware that everything is a performance, a farce, or am i being holden caulfield? lol

i think i need to work on the muscle of humor, dgaf-ness, and wit. perhaps in making light of the clownshow i may find some redemption and fun. i need to improvise and play with jazz; hear an internal rhythm that is my own amidst the caca-phony (lol! good one) and be both immovable in the current and nimble. or be able to navigate to quieter waters. or develop the muscles necessary to swim upstream. to swim slower, to breathe deeper, to listen harder.

i will continue to observe the social drama even as i participate in it and/or am shaped by it. everyone is a universe. i need not live in anyone's but my own. may i always come home. 

aug 2023

 resilience, n.;
1. the capacity to withstand or to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness
2. the ability of a substance or object to spring back into shape; elasticity

is resilience to double down and take the beating, take the abuse? to grow callous and tough to protect oneself, not realizing that in your quest to protect your soft insides you have lost softness after all. that you've gone from fossilized to petrified. perpetually terrified, not quite living. or is resilience to "spring back into shape" as if nothing happened. to say, i'm alright, everything's fine -- i am just as i am [read: before this abuse]. if that's what resilience means, i don't want it.

i do not owe the institution any part of me; the institution does not define or validate or permit my existence.

july 2023

maybe with time i will get better at this: better at not self-gaslighting. maybe it won't take hours of self-soothing and relying on friends, trader joe's impulse snack buys and binging tv episodes to try to numb the poisonous chattering in my brain.

they grasp for my hands through bars they erected, saccharine smiles break across their face as they apologize for not opening the gates. they gesture to their shackles and shrug. little do they know that they were the ones who built it all; who hold the keys that lock us out; who wrote the rules that they won't name.

i don't want to be resilient. i am squishy and soft. i have not been hardened around the edges. i am bruised and maimed by words you say and don't say (to my face). refusal to forego softness in a world that wants to chisel and berate you into weaponized self-destruction is radical. i am not a soldier.

april 2023

i wonder why i started writing in middle school and why i eventually stopped. life stages drew me away; i had stretches of respite and consistency when i did not have to struggle so much. but in times of need i can always return. writing was a space for me to put on paper thoughts which were convoluted and unceasing in my head--to act as a corral for the chaos, a garden i could tend to and put into orderly rows, something i could control. so that i would not feel so powerless. so that when i looked in the mirror, the chaos i felt so keenly would be seen and captured and not dissipate as those around me ignored its existence.

mom could never see my chaos; or, i suspect she could, but couldn't acknowledge or engage. so when i needed someone to validate my reality, i remember the searing, "look at your face. look at how selfish and ugly you are looking at me." blaming me for my anger, deflecting responsibility: when i needed a safe place to land she launched the bomb back into me to detonate with questions: "am i overreacting? am i selfish? is my anger not sanctioned?"

"do not be quick to anger," they tell me, [even when the white pastor calls you an evil spirit, or when the asian male pastor backs the former up and accuses you of being divisive, or when a principal calls you a wonderful educator and also tells you that you need to do more. when an uncle plays the DARVO card on your family--widowed mother and three children--turning the matriarch and what feels like an empire of siblings against you. or when you know you are doing a better job connecting with students and then the white female teacher returns prematurely from maternity leave to resume yelling at students. when a national organization ending in bs and starting with a "p" says you and your colleagues are too "radical."  or when three white female teachers gang up on you and call you "arrogant." when the principal and induction mentor warn you to "not make people mad." when the assistant principal says "it was an honest mistake" and when the dept head says "don't mistake incompetence for malice" when the one class they say they hired you for magically disappears. when the dept head says "it won't be what you imagined in college and maybe you have to let that go." and finally when the superintendent comes to you personally and says, "it takes a certain kind of person to do this" and all but commands me to let go of my class, to play the long game--he'll support me he says, the students need me here he says, during this meeting in which the superintendent of one of the largest districts in OC comes to meet a teacher on a temp contract--leaning back in his chair, right leg propped on his left knee, hands resting behind his head and elbows reaching out like an animal making itself bigger. who is the threat here? you tell me]

i will be quick to anger. i will identify harm when i see it. i will speak truth to power, i will defend the powerless. why not for myself? i will not be your doormat, your wedge, your acquiescing educator to get you ap pass rates, your token diversity. it is an uphill battle though, and while i am quick to anger i am not quick with my words. i am, unfortunately, quick to self-detonate and self-gaslight. to look in the mirror and ignore the chaos that i feel. sometimes i need a safe place to land when i am not safe for myself: an army of friends who will stand in place to mother and to tell me i am not crazy. to give me permission to identify abuse, to sanction my anger and hold it tenderly.

do not tell me to quiet my anger; she is my friend, a sounding alarm that points the way, a shield to protect me when i won't protect myself. my anger tells me i am worth it and names abuse for what it is; she tells me i can say no to them. that i can say yes to me

i suppose that is why i read and write. to validate my experiences. to write myself into existence; when archived, nobody can gaslight me otherwise. my archive is my truth.

depressive episode

if i were trying to sound articulate or artful in describing depression, and if my audience was someone else, i might try harder to string words together. but this is for me and for future me, so:

i began feeling depressive symptoms in october and they lasted through to december, worsening over time. i started meds end of december. this depressive episode was the most severe i've ever experienced: i had no control over my brain; it was always on overdrive, ruminating obsessively over how anxious i felt over all the blurry/undefined tasks i had not done yet. at night i had heart palpitations and couldn't fall asleep for hours, watching the light behind the window blinds change color over time. i'd wake up hours before my alarm in a panic, and hate myself for waking up. getting out of bed was difficult on the weekdays, impossible on the weekends; 8am filled me with dread for the whole day and i was sure that in no time it would be 8pm and i wouldn't have accomplished anything i intended to do. i couldn't remember where i left off in any of my classes, and couldn't concentrate on lesson planning for more than 5 minutes. after my work day i'd take a nap or lie on the couch until it got dark - it was easier to be asleep and unconscious than to be awake and exhausted. eventually walking up and down five steps was exhausting and my legs felt heavy and weak. i had no interest in my plants, could not focus on books or shows, (did i watch anything in the fall?), did not want to exercise, did not want to cook. 4pm felt like a death sentence - it was dark, ever present zombies of my brain more active as i just waited for the day to be over. every morning was a death march waiting for bedtime. january wasn't much better.

but february there was a beautiful sunset and i enjoyed that - i had not felt enjoyment in months. doing laundry and touching the cold water to rinse the detergent off the cap no longer felt like dipping my tired hands in ice. i made a banana bread. flowers i didn't expect to grow pushed out two tiny yellow flowers, and my accident snow pea plant outgrew its trellis. by march i was able to lesson plan for longer. i made some cowboy cookie dough. i went on walks by myself, and my brain began to quiet. by april i was doing things i typically enjoyed doing. time slowed, my brain slowed, i was able to stop thinking consciously about regulating my breathing.

the things that got me through this episode: one episode of breaking bad a day for structure. one walk a day and pokemon go. my pills. emmanuel cooking for me. siblings meeting with me every tuesday night. yoga, at first. consistency. and time.

feb, mar, april check in

 feb
-first time i picked up dumbbells
-movie nights with esther chata and ebi
-went biking with emmanuel, david, & hannah
-got groceries by myself for first time

mar
-got j&j vaccine
-started webtoons, gardening, reading, and baking again
-researching stanford??
-said no to willard bc fuck that
-finished breaking bad
-spontaneously bought macodes petola
-gym reopened
-started tending to my plants again

april
-got to spring break, started better call saul
-trying to finish attack on titan, jujutsu kaisen, boku no hero academia
-

jan check in

 -first full month on meds
-insurrection, inauguration, gamestop, lol weird month
-doing yoga with adriene
-started watching breaking bad
-mostly able to get through the days
-generally baseline
-started css and r slowly

dec check in

 -finished the semester
-read The Mountains Sing & Know My Name
-vegas yikes
-did html online course
-picked up meds
-zoom with family

oct, nov check in

 oct, nov

-i honestly don't remember much of the past two months. depressive episode with bad anxious symptoms
-most days i wait for the day to be over
-nice biking trail behind house
-demy & jon's wedding was a nice getaway
-most if not all of my thought processes are pretty much 100% the same as 2018-2019 first year teaching
-started "doable" devos - aka minimum effort. some things that came out of devos: god rescued me from having to be a perfectionist. i worship (value) competency at the expense of my wellbeing
-emmanuel built out the computers
-since adolescence i've had a hard time being present in whatever life stage i am. somehow i subconsciously expect myself to have accomplished the equivalent of someone who is at least 10-20 years older than me. why do i do that
-intention: start explicitly writing out my subconscious expectations for myself

watched queen's gambit, kipo, started she-ra; his dark materials is back

jul, aug, sept checkin

 july
-in a rush to move out; found a place, visited, applied
-designed a shit ton of things for t.c.
-invited to join are
-west asian meeting
-wrote article with xitlaly

aug
-moved out
-interviews!
-stressful month with e & e; conflicts and therapy
-stupid design contract addendums
-got hired and started teaching
-esther moved out

sept;
-stressful last minute designs for t.c., gseis, labor center, nail salon
-idk how tf i'm doing anything

work that is sustainable is: joyful, meaningful, collaborative, relational, interdependent, healing, reflective
work that is unsustainable is: forced, frustrating, bitter, lonely, painful, stagnant, triggering

things i have had to stand up for myself for this year:
-microaggressions from white male teachers
-had my job stolen from white female deficit minded teacher
-pbs censorship
-efci censorship and dehuamnization
-parent censorship of my personhood
-students sexually harassing me
-clients violating design boundaries
-

april, may, june checkin

april:
-super busy design month: data for democracy housing brief, learned after effects for students deserve animated designs, curriculum censorship bullshit, design recipes for me & emmanuel, labor center figures for workers & learners report
-photoshoot for demy & jon
-lots of cooking

may:
-design: work on 80+ pgs of unseen costs
-meet with curriculum team to heal and organize
-Liberated ES planning meeting
-murder of george floyd

june:
-white censorship bullshit from efci
-june 7-june 21, sleeping1-4am everyday working on nail salon, unseen costs (88 pg + 25 pg)
-extreme stress: weight loss, eczema, nausea, headaches, etc.
-anniversary photoshoot


quarantine binges:
westworld season 3
punisher season 2
dark
midnight gospel
kingdom
avatar & korra
killing eve
the great
love, victor
gentefied

feb & mar check in

feb
-started off month with working out, cava for lunch @ woodbridge plaza, plan out invoice for labor center, finished Ibram Kendi's book, got yogurtland, studied cset, sign up for roth ira, watched comedy with jon & demy. in the midst of knowing i have a shit storm coming up
-started long term subbing at lorin griset. met students, agonized, brainstormed, pushed through with resistant students, formed positive relationships. learned from last year
-worked out with alicia
-PBS video calls for lesson
-worked on infographics for workers & learners project
-released data for democracy immigration brief
-took cset!
-read educated
-updated design portfolio
-created logo for save CA ES

mar
-last few PT sessions, still not healed
-school closed starting march 13 (end of quarter 3)
-found out mrs ells is a fucking asshole and is going to kick me out of my job
-during school closure, i: designed for ucla labor center worker & learners small infographics, made several edits to PBS lesson, designed data visualization for housing brief for data for democracy, designed logo for liberated ethnic studies model curriculum coalition, created covid-19 for students even though i'll be booted out by fucking ells, and more
-ran at least 3 times a week
-cooked farfelle w/ mushrooms, spinach, caramelized onions; made egg tarts, made chunky veggie pasta, made creamy chicken rice soup
-cut each others' hair
-read glass castle and the hate u give
-binge watched dark on netflix

a school

the first couple times i subbed at this school, i had to say little more than "okay folks, we're gonna get started" to get everyone's eyes and attention. it was a nice change. i could relax a bit, sit in the chair, get some other work done while they self-managed. when i subbed for an econ/wh teacher for three weeks in january, however, i began to make some observations. or perhaps the observations were made of me.

the first incident was with the teacher i was subbing for. "are you ryan?" offering my hand. "i'm eunice, nice to meet you." "can you give me five minutes to finish this email?" of course i said yes. is asking someone to wait a power move? i don't know. he explained his unit(s) to me, sifting through messy piles of papers on his desk. eventually the students came in and i sat to observe his lecture. "if you get A's it's bc you are increasing your brain capacity and making your brain worth more so if you're a doctor and get paid more it's bc you deserve it bc you invested in your brain." and "if you get knocked down in the field, what do people call you? that's right, you said it, not me." and "i'll be out this month, this is your teacher, euniece."

if my insides weren't dying yet they were now. i sat next to him to review the econ project. "to clarify, my name is eunice, and i go by ms. h in the classroom." he apologizes and corrects himself to the class. could that have been avoided? i don't know.

for the next couple weeks, i stressed much, slept little, planned my ass off unnecessarily. partly because his lessons were shit, partly because it was my only way to resist what i perceived to be an ideologically hostile environment. i taught the students that economic markets were different than economic philosophies, and that marx's ideas were a utopian reality intended to fix perceived wrongs. it was the best i could manage, especially because whenever i said marx, a collective shiver seemed to arise through the room. it was like i said voldemort or something. in the world history class, i asked students whether it was okay for someone incompetent to declare war. at which point a student heatedly said, "that's your opinion. i happen to think he was right in the suleimani strike."

through those weeks, it was small moments that quickly began to erode my sense of well-being and safety. moments like these:

"i taught in south central la." raised eyebrows, downturned mouth, a reactive "oh wow."
or, while working in the faculty room: "hi tiff!" a white male. "i'm not tiff." "oh.... all good... all good... you looked like tiff from behind..." where was the ownership? apology? i don't know.
or, another, "euniece." from another white male.
or, a white male with dreads in the lunch room.
or, an older white teacher: "we should really send you to africa. that'll teach you to complain." what the fuck?
or, "i student taught at valley. that was a school." to which i pursed my lips and did not respond.
or, getting in my car and seeing a tesla in front of me driven by a student.
or, "freedom writers." after my introduction. to which i say "i don't like that movie."

jan check in

-finished stupid ucr extension graphic design course
-had couple days notice to sub for 3 weeks for an econ/wh teacher at mater dei, was stressed af to plan for an incompetent capitalist teacher
-joshua tree trip: no itinerary, just did whatever we want. was great. hiked, climbed, took photos, ate pizza, rested at airbnb
-experienced a ton of weird microaggressions at md, felt the upper/middle class culture killing my insides
-finished brief #2 immigration for data for demoracy
-found out i'm doing labor center's workers & learners brief
-got chosen to be part of team for pbs' asam documentary lesson building
-called, interviewed, chosen in a day to cover for lorin griset until june
-revamped budgeting sheet

i feel insecure about not having my own classroom, but i'm reminding myself that this year i am doing a ton of stuff to better myself as a teacher:
-took english methods course
-took ucr extension graphic design course to get supplemental auth.
-studying for/planning on taking cset
-even did ux/ui course on top of all that just to learn for kicks

and now just to keep track for next two months:
-data for demoracy
-ucla labor center
-ucla gseis staff directory
-pbs/aaaj lessons
-study for cset
-lorin griset long term subbing lesson planning

nov & dec check in

nov
-just working n stuff
-prof john recommended me to prof cecilia
-dogsitting
-miss my students, sad i'm subbing

dec
-white elephant with rainbow squad
-watchmen, mr. robot season 4, his dark materials
-reading books
-nanor's wedding
-visit sd friends
-bought a baby monstera
-gardening with michael