Hello darlings,
I’m sending you love and warm hugs today, topped with fresh pastries that leave lots of sugar dust on your precious face. As I type these words and recoil slightly, I’m reminded how the feminized archetype of being a nurturing figure is demonized in our society. I reclaim my “right” to be nurturing, to stay soft in a world that wants to harden me. To feel everything in a world that wants me numb.
A paradigm shift towards care and love is much needed. I like being around people who are soft and nurturing. Who check in in ways other people might find excessive. I like being this person. I also sometimes fail to be. If the world was not built for people pleasers, should we aim to temper our desire to please people, or change the world? Should we not want to to harness this pro-social tendency for good?
The problem is not a soft nature but that our society was not built to accommodate it. It was built instead to exploit and manipulate and torment us for our softness. The world needs sensitive people. Like the earth, whose variety and diversity sustains it, we need to be able to tap into the full spectrum of emotions, energies, and states to have the kind of biodiversity that makes us stronger as a collective. If only we were taught how to communicate and relate through and across these dispositions. To understand our nature and the nature of others, and how and why it evolves, and what to do about it, and when to do nothing.
The self-help industry is a nod to the fact that we are most profitable when we are conditioned to fundamentally view our nature as problematic. This is buttressed by the colonial paradigm that insists we are separate from and superior to nature, because if we were taught to see ourselves as of nature, we would be called to accept our inner wholeness and perfection and ask more questions of the toxicity of our environment instead.
Below you’ll find some of my favorite things to read this week. I say “this week” as a manner of speaking because I hope we are resisting urgency culture as much as we can. I notice that I probably sound annoying and remind myself I’m allowed to sound however I want because this is my newsletter and shame can visit me but I won’t allow it to stay.
May the words of these essays find you when the time is right. For many of you, that time will be Never, and that is okay (Cries in essays I started reading but did not finish… cries in lemme just scroll down and see how much I have le— oh fuck, that’s a lot. Where was I again? I’ll come back and finish [Narrator: she would do no such thing]).
For this series, I aim to share words that shift paradigms; words that offer a refreshing and striking way of being, seeing, thinking, feeling, that challenges the status quo. I think that’s part of the essence of why people follow me on the inter webs, so I want to honor that and amplify the words and work of fellow beings trying to write their way to new futures.
This is a list of 7 essays and some reflections on each. The first 2 will be free, and the remaining 5 will be a gift to paid subscribers.
Yes, I feel weird about this. I type an explanation and delete it, then type it again… Would writing be more honest if we could see these footprints peppered through the text? Is the writer finding her words (internal focus) or deciding what would be best to say (external focus)? Wherever one meets the other is decided.
Also — and the kind of also that offers no connection to the prior subject whatsoever — am I more free when I explain myself or when I don’t? For me, an over-self-justifier-especially-when-self-conscious, most likely when I don’t. But you don’t know that, so not explaining may block the intimacy we’re able to form. But now you do, and I’m choosing to explain anyways. So that says something. You decide what.
The thing about the word “content” is that it makes it sound like the writing, the video, the podcast, the Instagram post, fell from the literal sky. “There is so much content out there” is a disturbingly disembodied and almost anti-humanist framing of the state of digital media. Human beings are pouring their labor, time, and energy into educating and entertaining us for free. Tech companies are exploiting human beings to moderate said content.
We should not remove the humanity and personhood of content creators and moderators from this endeavor. Between creating TikTok videos, writing here, and podcasting, I even used to feel weird about calling what I do “work”. Because this work (of online content creation) is mostly done by women, it is belittled and minimized, and because the work is set up to be exploited by Big Tech companies such that it is irregularly compensated, particularly for Black creators, it is seen as “not really work”.
If I’m devoting my present-life to this work… (this aside makes no sense to add beyond pontification, which I do love, so I will add that future-based commitments regularly overestimate our capacity to know who we will become. They are often a form of temporal dishonesty because they use a stable present to make a claim on an unstable future. “I will always be here for you” is an epistemologically dishonest statement because the speaker cannot possibly know the conditions their future self will face — internal or external — that might threaten the integrity of this statement. Better to say “I can’t imagine” not being here for you, because imagination implicitly nods to its own limitations; intrinsic to the concept is the notion that there are possibilities outside of it)
…I will have to get used to charging people for it. I want to believe in abundance. I trust that there is enough to go around — that there are enough people willing and able to pay that can substitute those unable to. But I can’t just hope. I have to act in accordance with that hope. I have to give the energy to the universe I hope to get back. That means creating things for free and extra things not-for-free that people actively want to pay for.
So, while I feel some type of way about paywalling information, I want to make sure I am offering enough lovely creations for people who can afford it to feel good about spending money on this work, and gifting it to people who can’t. TSJ will remain free, see you on Sunday, and the podcast will return very soon, which will also be free! Yay :D
Importantly, if you want to be a paid subscriber but can’t afford it, please email me or comment below and we will find a way to get you covered and gifted. And if you would like to gift subscriptions to readers, please do so here! Love you all. Fearful I made the intro so long that no one will read the body. But. I release myself from the need to control the outcome of what happens next. Or at least that sounds like the container of a feeling I would like to experience the substance of. Here are 7 paradigm shifts that I’m loving this week.
1. The fallacy of “Precolonial Africa”
This essay blew my mind and I still don’t fully know what to do with it. The author, Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, who I highly recommend following on Twitter here, also wrote the book Elite Capture which I’m dying to read. Here’s more from his essay: “Of course, the ‘pre’ in ‘precolonial’ supposedly designates ‘a time before’ colonialism appeared on the continent. But how do we deign to describe a period from the beginning of time to the moment when the European, modernity-inflected colonial phenomenon showed up? It accords more of a mythological than a historical status to the arrival of modern European colonialism in Africa and its long and deep history. The ‘precolonial’ designation, in practice, even excludes two earlier European-inspired colonialisms in Africa. After all, for those of us who know our history, Roman and Byzantine/Ottoman colonial presences on the African continent were not without legacies on the continent, too.”
2. Palestinian resistance is a continuous endeavor
I want to see Palestinians free from apartheid, genocide, ethnic cleansing, and occupation. I loved this essay, and also sharing this awesome podcast episode with Nooran Alhamdan for anyone trying to learn more from Palestinian people and thought leaders. So as not to leave it at sharing this work, since “people can’t eat ideas” or likes or comments, I also want to share an organization called Care For Gaza doing amazing work to get much needed resources — like beds, housing, infant formula, and home appliances — into the hands of Palestinian people under Israeli occupation. You can see their work and how it is impacting Palestinians’ lives here and you can donate here via PayPal, if you have the means, or share their profile to your social media.
As a Black South African, I have benefited from the decades’ long anti-apartheid struggle by and for Black South Africans against the South African apartheid regime. I feel called to do and say more about the cause of Palestinian freedom and resistance. And also I’m trying to find ways to support Black South Africans as well, particularly women given the epidemic of gender-based violence in SA, where the rate at which intimate partners kill women is five times higher than the global average (please email me if you have ideas! organizations! actions! that you think I can amplify here!!)
On the cause of Palestinian freedom, I am reminded of the Audre Lorde essay I share relentlessly on transforming silence into language and action: “And of course I am afraid, because the transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation, and that always seems fraught with danger…In the cause of silence, each of us draws the face of her own fear — fear of contempt, of censure, or some judgment, or recognition, of challenge, of annihilation. But most of all, I think, we fear the visibility without which we cannot truly live.”
In paradigm shift #3 (below the paywall), which dives into the pitfalls of the soft life, I also re-share the mutual organizer OpenYourWallett (shared in my recent post on despair) and include a call for support from all who can provide it! Here’s their GoFundMe to raise money for Black Queer and Trans folks.
Free subs: quick reminder to email me if you want a gifted subscription and can’t afford it! Love you. Miss you already! See you Sunday! okay bye now omg I feel like I’m leaving my kid at the first day of school and I feel emotional <3<3<3
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