You're right on time, and we're so glad you're here.
A love letter to all who have arrived:
In the wake of October 7, the ongoing genocide in Gaza has inspired many, MANY awakenings.
The movement for Palestinian freedom has truly given all of us so much.
We are learning what it means to truly love. Some of us, for the first time.
We are learning what it means to hold each other through the intensity of such grief, and such rage.
We are seeing the very best of humanity in the faces and eyes of fierce Palestinian activists and freedom fighters on the ground, shielding their children from bullets and falling buildings.
We are seeing too, how deeply, DEEPLY skewed AGAINST humanity and aliveness colonial capitalism + white supremacy are.
The global response to the movement for Palestinian freedom is showing us plain as day… colonial powers don’t give a fuck about us.
They never did.
The illusion has broken, once and for all.
That collapsing illusion has meant that for loads of us, we are free and awake… for the first time.
The movement for Palestinian freedom has meant that so many of us are fighting, at last, for our own freedom.
The movement for decolonising and setting ourselves free from capitalist patriarchy once and for all has more traction now than it ever has.
This is THRILLING. We LOVE THIS.
Our ranks are expanding! Hooray!
Studies have shown that it only takes between 3 and 10 per cent of a population to wake up… to catalyse a full-on population-wide expansion of consciousness.
Keep going! We’re doing it!
I’ve been having a lot of conversations with relative “newcomers” to the movement.
(I say newcomers kind of jokingly there… I don’t really believe there’s such a thing as a “newcomer” to the fight for our liberations… we’ve all been fighting for it all our lives in one way or another… sometimes though, the fight isn’t conscious- more on this later 😉)
Across most of those conversations, there’s an overlaying theme of guilt.
“I can’t believe I didn’t see it before.”
“Why did it take me so long to finally wake up to this??”
“I feel like I wasted so much time.”
I’ve got a lot of feelings about this displaced guilt, and the grief that comes with it.
First of all- this is very important- this guilt and grief you’re feeling is a sign of your deep love for the movement, and for the collective as a whole.
You are seeing how much work there is for us to do, you see the suffering of your kin, you feel your own suffering… you are pulled to do all you can to alleviate it.
This pull is sacred.
Hold it. Don’t shame it or push it away, AND - do not let it become a weapon you use against yourself.
We are socialised inside of colonial patriarchy to injure ourselves out of our aliveness in whatever way we can. We are quick to seek out new ways of shaming ourselves, as a way of keeping ourselves small and under-resourced. This is INTENTIONAL.
Resist. Divest. Disrupt.
Notice yourself making weapons out of your very human emotions.
Interrupt that cycle.
Got it?
Good.
Let’s explore that displaced guilt a little deeper. Let’s contextualise it together.
There is no such thing as “wasted time” when it comes to our Awakening.
You arrived into the movement at the perfect moment.
There is no such thing as “wasted time”.
There is no “I should have been here sooner”.
You arrived here now, because now is the perfect time.
You’ve heard the saying, “when the student is ready, the teacher appears”, yea?
Lao Tsu said it. It’s used in reference to spiritual awakenings and the journey back into divinity consciousness.
The same mentality is true for anti-colonial awakenings. (The movement for our liberation is a spiritual practice too… full of spiritual parallels)
It’s about a shift in consciousness, away from the colonial, the capitalist, the hierarchical… into the collective, the cyclical, the revolutionary.
No matter how much we might want it to in retrospect, this shift can, AND ALWAYS WILL, only come at the earliest possible moment.
Your arrival to the movement, in full force, happened at literally the earliest possible moment. You wasted zero time. You arrived right when you were invited.
BUT. More importantly…
The story of your awakening MATTERS.
The time it took you to get here was no only definitively NOT wasted…
…it was actively useful and precious to the movement itself.
The story of how you arrived here, the catalysing moment that jolted you out of colonial consciousness for the first time… the epiphanies you had… the profound ego-deaths and existential crises you underwent… the tussles you went through in order to get yourself here… the struggle of it, the bliss of it… the labour it took for you to interrupt and then RE-WRITE all of your conditioning… the injuries from colonial patriarchy that are specific to YOU…
…ALL OF THAT IS PRECIOUS.
It makes you perfectly positioned and perfectly resourced to galvanise the awakening of others, and it seeds your unique and specific role in the revolution for you.
There are people around you, right now, who will see themselves in your story of awakening.
They will recognise their own struggles with colonial conditioning in the way you’ve tussled with your own.
They will see YOU in your freedom, and the part of their soul that hums and buzzes with aliveness will be MIRRORED in it.
A lot of this kind of awakening happens unconsciously; we can only really be aware of it in hindsight.
I had a life-threatening and long entanglement with anorexia nervosa. There was a time when I truly believed that my recovery disqualified me from being a “proper” feminist.
(It sounds weird to say now, it seems to obvious! At the time, it really, really wasn’t!)
I thought that I would never really be taken seriously as a feminist if I had such a violent history of being “duped” by patriarchy.
I saw my disordered eating and addiction as proof that I’d gone all the way in on patriarchal consciousness. I thought, “who is going to take my feminism seriously? I’ve already proven how susceptible I am to colonial patriarchy. How can I possibly be someone who champions our collective freedom?”
Again, all of this was mostly unconscious at the time.
It only showed up as a weird kind of free-floating anxiety, the kind that has you editing your words and sanding your eccentricities down into something more “palatable” (read: bland as fuck)
I couldn’t name these fears while I was in them.
It wasn’t until I started reading brave and bold accounts from career feminists who were in recovery themselves that I realised……..oh.
This doesn’t impede or disqualify my feminism at all.
In fact, it bolsters it.
All of sudden, because of the work of those activists who had been injured by colonial patriarchy in ways that mirrored my own… I was a little more free.
The same thing happened with my alcoholism.
And again with my family of origin trauma.
Everything that I was unconsciously assuming was an obstacle to my liberation… suddenly became regenerative fuel for my liberation.
All of this only happened for me because I saw my own colonial injuries in the minds and bodies of others who were carrying the torch for my freedom, and the freedom of everyone.
So again I say to you my dear friend…
…your story matters.
How you came to your awakening matters.
Everything you’ve worked through to get here, everything you’re assuming was in the way of your freedom…
…all of it is sacred. And all of it will free others.
I promise.
Our stumbling journey into our awakening will always plant the seeds for our role in the revolution.
I choose to believe that none of this shit is coincidental, or accidental.
I choose to believe that we are all here with a specific purpose to fulfil, a specific role to play in the movement for collective freedom.
I choose to believe that each and every one of us is perfectly positioned, perfectly resourced, perfectly acclimated, perfectly suited in every way to the unique role in the revolution that no one else but us can fulfil.
My chosen belief system around all this definitely crosses over the rational lines and strays into the occult, the mystical, the a-little-bit-whacky.
Have no whackiness whatsoever with this if that’s your jam, it’s still true.
(But definitely feel free to hop on board and get whacky with it if you like!)
Whatever our story was, whatever our path into Awakening involved… ALL OF IT planted the seeds for our specific roles in collective liberation.
Nothing is incidental.
Humour me here, let me get into what I mean by this.
The quick-view version of my own Awakening story:
(and the tussles I went through to get here…)
As I said up there^, a big part of my past is my history of debilitating eating disorders, addiction, and all-round disembodiment.
I was raised in a patriarchal house by a deeply colonised mother, with food and body stuff of her own, and I learned from her that the only thing I was really allowed to do with my body was to hate it.
I was bombarded on all sides by the perfectionist conditioning of white supremacy and capitalism, and I swallowed it all up like the good little consumer and commodity I was socialised to be.
(Quick side note here: purity and perfectionism culture are foundational pillars of white supremacy. More on this in another post I think. But important to just plop in here as an overarching theme…)
My spirit fought me on this full-spectrum disembodiment, as wild spirits are wont to do when they go so long being ignored, but at the time I was still too numbed out and brittle to hear it.
Eventually, this all metastasised itself into stage three endometriosis.
STILL I would not listen to my spirit.
STILL I was entrenched in colonial consciousness and the puritanical perfectionism of white supremacy.
I called myself a feminist back then, but I had no idea what that word meant.
I was fighting, campaigning, protesting. Totally ignorant of community care, of intersectionality, of any reality at all that wasn’t prescribed to me by colonial patriarchy.
The very best my deeply colonised imagination could come up with during those years of my early so-called “feminism”, was how to better emulate my oppressors.
How to more effectively participate inside of capitalism.
I thought that the paragon of feminist virtue was being able to compete inside the theatre of my own - and all of our - subjugation, to the same degree that my white male counterparts could.
How very barren and sad my so-called “feminism” was back then.
I was angry though. My feminist rage started very early. But YEESH was it misdirected.
I can almost track the progress of my own awakening into anti-colonial and primordial feminism by noticing where my rage was being channelled.
My early years, from maybe when I was about 9 until I was maaaaybe 20, my naive, ignorant, but still very ferocious feminist anger was directed at those who would stop me from taking my seat at the proverbial table.
I would look at this world that colonisers and capitalists had built, and fiercely lament the lack of female representation and inclusion.
(Not knowing of course that true feminism is to dismantle the whole table entirely, and probably the house it’s being set in as well)
Then my endo diagnosis happened (which was a huuuuge fucking stroke of luck in itself inside of a patriarchal system that pays no attention to the bodies of menstruating people, let alone the pain and suffering of women and femmes), and my anger morphed -
I was angry that I was sick, I was angry that so many were sick, in a world that didn’t seem to care.
Please note here though, that I wasn’t angry about living in a world that had no honour for, or understanding of, wombs.
I was angry that I lived in a world that decided my having a womb precluded me from participating inside of capitalism the way my white cis male counterparts were.
I was your classic “ugh having a menstrual cycle is THE WORST.
How am I supposed to climb the capitalist ladder and prove my worth to my oppressors through my constant productivity if I’m always in so much pain from my gross disgusting menstrual cycle???
Why oh why won’t someone fix this so I get get back to solidifying my place in the hierarchy??”
It’s all very cringe in hindsight.
Anyway.
Fast forward a few years…
I stumbled into menstrual cycle awareness work out of sheer desperation.
My pain was debilitating and unending - at that point I would have tried anything to alleviate it.
(And try anything I did - binge drinking kind of worked for a while…)
Cycle awareness work broke my whole world open.
I felt as though I was finally learning the life-changing, and life-saving, knowledge I’d been denied for so long.
My anger was shifting.
Suddenly, all my rage was directed at a system that intentionally keeps women and menstruating people totally misinformed and ignorant of the ways our bodies work - teaching us instead to emulate cis men, pretending we don’t have menstrual cycles at all - totally ignoring and dismissing out (widespread, normalised) pain and suffering.
I was furious that I’d grown up in a world that taught me having a menstrual cycle is supposed to hurt, and there’d be nothing I could do about it.
Still very white feminism-ish, but this time with a “your cycle will actually help you in becoming more productive and more effective inside of capitalism!!!”
Ugh.
Fast forward a few more years…
Eventually my cycle awareness work radicalised me fully.
It taught me that we live in a world that not only dehumanises menstruating people, but all people.
It showed me how tied our understanding of “health” and “normalcy” is to productivity, efficiency, detachment from emotion.
And how inside of a paradigm like that, there could be no “health” at all.
Cycle work taught me how to untangle the oppressive myths our culture indoctrinates us with, one season at a time - and it held me as I recovered myself from colonial patriarchy’s clutches on my spirit.
Cycle work was my rite of passage guide OUT.
In time, with my cycle as my anchor, my disordered eating dissipated entirely, I got sober, and my endometriosis resolved itself completely.
I’ve since built a body of work out of these explorations - sharing the teachings of our cycles as our Rites of Passage guides OUT of colonial patriarchal indoctrination… and INTO the primordial truth of who we are.
Archetypal mythwork + radical cycle reclamation = collective liberation.
Do you hear me, my friends?
All of this is a very long-winded way of saying…
My journey towards my anti-colonial awakening, every single step of it, planted the seeds for what has become the role in this movement I’m living into right now.
If just one of those many pieces hadn’t fallen into place the way they did, my work would look completely different.
I’m not saying this in a “it’s all meant to be, everything happens for a reason” way.
I’m saying that if you look, you can choose to see the “reason” in your own path.
Everything that brought you here, matters.
Your story matters.
Everything you’ve learned and unlearned, it’s all come together to form the lens through which you now get to see the world.
A lens which is unique to you, and therefore immeasurably precious.
Grieve the time lost, yes.
Goddess knows I do.
But remember too - you’re right on time, and we’re so glad you’re here.
Big love x