first draft thoughts: on revolutionary love and existing outside of myself

Threadings.

[The Preview]: Oh, then in regards to mutual aid, I keep faltering with this series because I can't, like… I think I need to find a balance between what I wanna talk about and what I feel like the public needs. Because I keep curriculum planning and then realizing we are way behind as a public where I thought we were when it comes to understanding the importance of mutual aid and what it does.

I really wanted to jump into the how-to, which is the mutual aid by Dean Spade is just a book of how-to. And then I realized we were missing a lot of the why. We are doing all of this work and being in community with one another because we are designed to be compelled by community, not because we are trying to win a battle. Yeah, like the winning the battle stuff is important. That's cute and that's...

It's not insignificant.

It's just that if our goal is to win, my question is win what? Win against tyranny, win against oppression, win against all these things. Do we see how that still centers the oppressor in the first place? We're not actually thinking about like, what is it that you want to win? Past beating them. You want, you know, OK, I understand we want the satisfaction of victory. What is victory? What does it actually look like to win?

What does the world look like? What do people's day to day look like? What does it look like for the most vulnerable in our societies when we win? Because then we have to start thinking about building. That's a, it harkens a bit to what I said earlier about when I ask my groups, okay, so like what does community look like? What do you want community to look like? And I get a lot of, “well, I don't want this. I don't want to feel this. I don't want that.”

You haven't actually told me what it is that you wanna build. You've told me what it is that you wanna avoid. And that is, it can be helpful, but you don't lay a foundation with negative space. We lay a foundation packed solid on what it is that we do want.

ismatu gwendolyn (00:01.134)

Hello, oh no, I don't have my notes near me. Now I've started this, I gotta get up. I want a little tea. You know what, just give me a second. Let me situate myself.

[ismatu putters around the apartment]: Notes. Tea mug.

[ismatu, muttering mostly to themself]: Beyoncé do be right about some things. It does feel good to be alive. I will not hold you.

ismatu gwendolyn (00:55.121)

Welcome a little bit of Pistachio Tea, in which I'm cheating on the love of my life and drinking white coconut. Mmm. Oh, that's delicious. Ohhhhhh, that's so good. Thank you, God. Alrighty. So.

I am here because I am time blind, and sometimes I think I'm doing great and then I wake up and I realize I have not posted in a month. Again. Oops! There are so many moving parts to my life and I'm beginning to figure out a cadence that works well, and the cadence is Ismatu, you have to put down your perfectionism. It's past like, do what you say that you'll do. It's past, people want to hear from you anyways.

It gets into more of you cannot always be curated all the time. You cannot always put out your magnum opus. You cannot always write THEE essay or pen THE script or whatnot. And I know that this doesn't need to be the goal because every now and again I get [distinct feline noises of tomfoolery] that's my cat lemon deciding that she also needs to make herself known.

Every now and again I get a, “I appreciated this essay so much!” from an essay that metrically did not perform that well. I can base my entire, like, not quite my life. I wouldn't say that I'm that sold, but whether I think something is good or did good or what have you based on how many eyes were on it and how many people saw it and how many comments I got. And that can be...

not even can be. It's quite a rollercoaster because every time I put something out, I'm like waiting, bated breath. Do people like it? Do people fuck with it? Do people think it's cool? Am I lame? Am I gross? I don't know. So every now and again, I get an email that talks about an essay that I thought that nobody saw because, I don't know, Substack told me nobody saw it. So I was just like, okay, well, I guess that's not it. I think I keep looking. It's like, um...

Being a content creator is a lot like trying to pan and strike gold. Like you don't really know what's gonna pop off and resonate with people until it happens. So, I think that I'm in a space where I have to put down my perceptions of what other people think is good and what other people think is correct or beautiful. And I just have to go with what I… want.

What I want, as it continues, is a life that resonates with me. And what I want is the freedom to be able to put my first draft out there somewhere, at least the first draft that makes it to me wanting to share my thoughts without having to worry about whether it is the various kinds of Good Enough that I erect for myself. So last weekend, over this past weekend, I wanted to write an essay about love and the attention economy and how those things upset one another. I've been talking a lot in the groups that I run about community. What makes community, what makes it good, what we're scared of. Often when I ask people, so what do we think when we want community? When I say, what do you need from a community to be able to be expansive, to not shrink? We often start naming what we don't want because oftentimes our experiences in community are far more traumatizing than they have been helpful. So I've been thinking about this essay.

I keep wanting to pull it forth before it's ready. One of the reasons that I think I need to start talking more and sharing more first drafts or maybe first drafts with you all [the patrons and substackers] and then second drafts when I have a little bit more teeth on the subject before it turns into an essay is because writing these essays is like giving birth. I just straight up can't rush it. I am bringing something into the world that is bigger than me and my timelines and what I want.

So, I’m trying to figure out a way to be able to let people in on this process of thinking without having it be so formed. There have to be some places for my scrambled egg thoughts, you know? I'm thinking about this essay about exceptionalism? about the attention economy, about what love looks like in community, how these things interrelate with one another. What I'm finding is being in online spaces, talking about sincere community work, that people assume that I am some sort of exception.

They assume that what they perceive as charisma or friendliness is just some like innate ability that God struck me with rather than many, many years of trying and failing and trying and failing at friendship. I've said before, or rather I think I said in a video that's rendering right now to upload, that I bring a lot of thoughts from my journals when I was like 15 and 16. I'm finding that where we are as a general public is was talking about in my journals when I was a teenager, when I was 15 and 16. I was thinking and ruminating a whole lot about love and the lack thereof. And I was deeply lonely. I didn't want to be lonely. I was hoping that there would be a day where I had space to breathe, to be around people that liked me when I expand and when I shrink, space to not be around so many pedestals.

Just space. Space to take if I wanted it, space to give if I wanted to give, space to be in sincere community with other people that didn't expect me to be any type of way and that could love me no matter what hue I was that day. You know? I was thinking a lot.

I'm thinking about this 15 year old self now, who was deeply lonely, who had a lot of trouble with friendship, who continued to be rejected, who had friends that lasted in the moment that didn't happen in adulthood, who had to start over in college, who was scared over and over, who had to start over again and again in college settings, in graduate school settings, in professional settings.

Who made myself skilled at the wants of friendship because I spent many years lonely thinking and dreaming of what it could be like to want this thing that I thought was impossible.

I'm sitting here now on the other side of really beautiful friendship that I talk about a lot on the internet. And I'm finding that people think that I am the exception. I'm finding that people find me exceptional. “Well, Ismatu, it must be easy for you because, *insert thing here.*” I don't know what I have done— or I do know what I have done. I've trained myself to be good on camera. I've trained myself to be charismatic. I've trained myself to say hi to strangers. I did all this work to make myself super, super friendly so that I wouldn't have to deal with all this aching loneliness that I felt for most of my life. And now people see exceptionalism. Well, it must be easy for you when it was not easy. When I know, especially as an autistic person, right, that all of these traits can be learned.

I'm also thinking about brilliance and how often we're sold the idea that brilliance is again like a lightning strike from God Almighty and not something that you hone. That brilliance is the presence of intellect that can't be taught or some sort of aptitude for knowledge that can't possibly be taught, rather than the continual returning to oneself even after the systems that we have in place try to divorce you from your own internal community.

There are these two things: the friendliness, the charisma, the ability to be well explained, and this perception of brilliance or intelligence that is making me seem exceptional, like other people cannot possibly do what it is that I do. And I don't know how to push back against that without sounding like I'm Cinderella outgrowing her glass slippers. You know?

Especially because one of the reasons I talk about Beauty is because it gives me a lot of structural privilege in terms of navigating social circles. And one of the reasons I talk about Beauty is because it is not easy to be an autistic, introverted person in the body of somebody Beautiful. Because when you are capital B Beautiful, people also expect you to be a certain level of poised, or confident, or charismatic. They don't expect you to be awkward and painfully shy. And I wasn't actually shy, I was just um...

crass, I'll say? lol. I didn't have strong understandings of what you should and should not say. I ended up being rude a lot, and I didn't mean to be rude. I just, I don't know, didn't understand the normal waxes and wanes of conversation. I didn't understand that most conversation does not actually want you to be honest about your honest opinion. I didn't understand that even when you must be given and able to provide an opinion, it has to be soft and bubble wrapped, because that's not how I wanted other people to interact with me.

I didn't understand how to make an object of my body and how to not wear exactly what I was thinking on my face and on my person. It was very off-putting. The reason I learned to walk in an area of poise and grace and benevolence is because people continued to make it known that was the expectation of me. I'm realizing that in an effort to make myself some sort of palatable, I've also dehumanized myself a little bit to the experience of being painfully awkward and terrified of doing and saying the wrong thing.

Then in addition! right? that's essay one, that's like, ruminating at me and I can't tell if these two essays are interrelated or not. I have one more that's just been chewing on me and it's this idea of— oh no, and it's an entirely different notebook. It's this idea of revolutionary love. I'm reading through In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love by Joy James.

and it has a chapter called Oshun's Flight. I think I might just read Oshun's Flight and talk about it and release it tonight because I'm sick of not creating. I'm sick of being in this silo where I have to do and say everything perfectly and write the most beautiful essay in the world in order to feel like I can take space on my podcast. That's absurd! But Oshun's Flight is about...

It's the preface to the rest of the text, Revolutionary Love, which revolutionary love is a concept that Joy James expands on past the captive maternal. What does it look like to be engaged with a love that might cost you your life? What does it look like to be so compelled by love for oneself and one's community that you are willing to go past inconvenience, to go past what is easily accessible? and move towards what might cost you something quite significant? What does that feel like? How does that unfold? And how can our communities possibly survive without it? So… hold on, let me put myself on a cute DND so I don't keep pinging. Because that's my bestie. Once I get one of those, I'm like, oop. Uh, let me just...

Ahhhhh. I also feel like a weenie (!!!!) because I keep saying, I want to talk about masturbation online and then I keep like, pussying out!! because I know that it's going to be taken in like a sensationalist manner because anytime a particularly a woman folk, a queer person talks about sex, it's taken in this sensationalist manner. But I continue to say that my target audience is me when I was 15. I want to be making the stuff that I wish that I was looking at and reading and writing when I was 15. and I had all these questions about the world that the adults around me either couldn't answer or I didn't feel like they were being honest. I didn't know what masturbation was when I was 15. I grew up in a house where nobody talked about it. Um, I- I go on a little bit about this in the Get Unready With Me video that is literally rendering right now if it's not already done.

It's a whole series that I keep thinking of that came to me during this year's Ramadan because I realized how depressed I was when I was hungry. I realized that food is not only a mood regulator for me, it's literally masturbatory, the way that I go about food and eating food, the way that I engage with making things that are delicious or eating things that are delicious.

it literally is an orgasmic experience. I think the way that I go about multiple aspects and areas of life are orgasmic. I think this is A, because of my relationship to food, I grew up food insecure, so it kind of makes sense that I like heavily pleasure seek in food and how that doesn't have to be a bad thing. And B, I also had a really delayed sexual debut because of the heaviness of Christianity that I grew up in. I would say that I'm on the later side of average because I started having... I had gone through the gambit of what most people consider sex when I was like 22. I had checked off what boxes people might naturally conceive of. There was plenty that I hadn't done, but yeah.

So, and that was like, it was also very interesting becoming a stripper before I started having sex in general. It's just like, I wanna talk about sex in public. I understand that I'm gonna have to put it behind a paywall for a multitude of reasons, but I also keep feeling myself like shy away from these subjects because, ah, respectability, because I'm pussy? I don't know. Because I keep thinking that maybe I'm doing too much?

…Says who?

Ismatu, you right. Says who?

Oh, then in regards to mutual aid, I keep faltering with this series because I can't, like I think I need to find a balance between what I wanna talk about and what I feel like the public needs because I keep curriculum planning and then realizing we are way behind as a public where I thought we were when it comes to understanding the importance of mutual aid and what it does.

I really wanted to jump into the how-to, which is the mutual aid by Dean Spade is just a book of how-to. And then I realized we were missing a lot of the why. We are doing all of this work and being in community with one another because we are designed to be compelled by community, not because we are trying to win a battle. Yeah, like the winning the battle stuff is important. That's cute and that's...

It's not insignificant.

It's just that if our goal is to win, my question is win what? Win against tyranny, win against oppression, win against all these things. Do we see how that still centers the oppressor in the first place? We're not actually thinking about like, what is it that you want to win? Past beating them. You want, you know, OK, I understand we want the satisfaction of victory. What is victory? What does it actually look like to win?

What does the world look like? What do people's day to day look like? What does it look like for the most vulnerable in our societies when we win? Because then we have to start thinking about building. That's a, it harkens a bit to what I said earlier about when I ask my groups, okay, so like what does community look like? What do you want community to look like? And I get a lot of, “well, I don't want this. I don't want to feel this. I don't want that.”

You haven't actually told me what it is that you wanna build. You've told me what it is that you wanna avoid. And that is, it can be helpful, but you don't lay a foundation with negative space. We lay a foundation packed solid on what it is that we do want.

I think contemporary widespread political education online lashes like heat in a frying pan. It's all about like what do we do and not why do we do it? Because you can have the what and like the what is very it's viral bait. People really do (and me included, I'm including myself and people), we love to feel productive. We love cosplaying productivity without necessarily doing something attached to the things that we're learning. So the how-to's, the tutorials, the book lists, they help us to feel really productive, but they don’t necessarily translate to actionable items that take place in your real life. So I'm slowing down. I'm talking a lot more about like, okay, so what does it mean to make friends? What does that look like? And that's way slower than I thought that I was going. And I owe people videos. Like I have attached to the how-to stuff. I have videos attached to this. I wanted to highlight Juju Bae's podcast, a little Juju, because they're doing a fundraiser and that's been going on for months and I've been wanting to make this stuff like for literal months.

it’s like, a six month video that's overdue, but I wanna put it in a context that it will thrive in, which means I gotta get through the why before I get to the how. I wanted to highlight the University of Michigan because their grad students are on strike and it's like a strike girl summer. Hey, everybody's striking. You get a strike, I get a strike, he, she, me, we get a strike, we love it. I'm feeling like these things should have been done forever ago, but I'm also feeling like I don't know that they would have the traction that I want without this basis of why do we do this? Why am I highlighting these people in particular? Because I'm in direct community with them, you know?

[a medium strength negro sigh]

I'm overwhelmed. And at many points in time in this journey of existing in a real time.

I feel like I'm in over my head because I don't have answers. I'm learning in real time, not because I'm learning this material for the first time. I'm learning about how people interact with this material and I'm changing course as I go. That's overwhelming and I feel like I'm doing everything wrong and I feel like I should be moving a lot faster than I'm capable of.

[a moment of consideration]

In all, today I feel like a weenie. So we will try again tomorrow.

ah.

[a therapist tries at self-regulation]

I'm doing my best, and my best is all I can do. I'm preparing for this big push surrounding Revolutionary Healers and a third university as possible in August. So I kind of have a deadline to be able to get some of this stuff done.

So I'm gonna get it done. A lot of this feels insurmountable, but many things feel insurmountable until they're done. I don't actually think this is about proving to myself that I can do it. I think this is about proving to myself that I am exactly who I think that I am… and not even me, right? I'm continually blown away by how big I am.

I recently had a sound engineer say that they've been dreaming of an opportunity like this because I'm bringing them on to a couple different projects and I was like, wow, me? The subject of dreams?

the material of answered prayers? Me?

[ismatu unto themself]: Yes, bitch, you.

I feel so itty bitty. I feel like a beetle. I feel like a worm. And then I'm sitting on a patio with a new friend having dinner and I hear my name. I'm like, what? I look up and someone is waving at me. So excited to see me— in the way that like, you wave at a friend when you're in the fifth grade and you unexpectedly see a friend from school at the grocery store and you're like, hiiiiiiii, Emily!!!

She's going, “Ismatu!!! hello!!” I was like, hi!! She was like, “I watch all your videos online, I love them!” I was like, oh, thank you!

I can't feel myself outside of me, but it appears as though everyone else can.

[a moment of consideration]

I am so alarmed//I am so grateful.

It lets me know that I must endeavor to keep trying and past trying. Trying and then consistency and then from consistency into blooming. And I think it's actually the blooming that scares me because I have so little control over buds and blossoms. That would mean that I just have to let myself unfold in public where people can see me.

I am beginning to realize that that's not altogether a bad thing.

Thank you for listening. I always let my tea get cold, so I actually started with a cold tea this time. I'ma catch you in the next one.

ismatu g.

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