living my life™

True love is a different story. When it happens, individuals usually feel in touch with each other’s core identity. Embarking on such a relationship is frightening precisely because we feel there is no place to hide. We are known. All the ecstasy that we feel emerges as this love nurtures us and challenges us to grow and transform. Describing true love, Eric Butterworth writes: “True love is a peculiar kind of insight through which we see the wholeness which the person is – at the same time totally accepting the level on which he now expresses himself – without any delusion that the potential is a present reality. True love accepts the person who now is without qualifications, but with a sincere and unwavering commitment to help him achieve his goals of self-unfoldment – which we may see better than he does.” Most of the time, we think that love means just accepting the other person as they are. Who among us has not learned the hard way that we cannot change someone, mold them and make them into the ideal beloved we might want them to be. Yet when we commit to true love, we are committed to being changed, to being acted upon by the beloved in a way that enables us to be more fully self-actualised. This commitment to change is chosen. It happens by mutual agreement. Again and again in conversations the most common vision of true love I have heard shared was one that declared it to be “unconditional.” True love is unconditional, but to truly flourish it requires an ongoing commitment to constructive struggle and change.

Dominique Jackson as Elektra Abundance in Pose (2018). 

Costume design by Lou Eyrich.

hey sydney kids come help my mate and sister bhenji with her gender affirmation surgery this saturday 12th of may!

also you can donate to her gofundme here: https://www.gofundme.com/bhenjisgenderaffirmationsurgery

you can’t fix it or get better. lean into the fact that your position relies on exploitation and violence. who you are was shaped by that, it shapes all of us. you can’t opt out of it, your life is geared towards benefitting from racism, western colonialism, antiblackness. learn to take it less personally and to listen without inserting yourself into narratives and situations. learn that if white supremacy ended and people of colour were liberated, you would probably have to lose things: assumptions of superior beauty, intelligence, success, capability. these are all conditional entitlements.

read as much from the perspectives of people of colour, especially in the areas that you live in. see if you can find local histories of the indigenous people(s), any forcibly transported or displaced peoples, migrants and immigrants. if your whiteness grants you easy access to a national identity, problematise that – why should you get to belong when others don’t? and if you live in a settler colonial country, why should you be proud of being a part of a history that denies indigenous peoples sovereignty and self-determination? 

on a more internal level, be prepared to feel very uncomfortable, ashamed, guilty, by interrogating all of this. learn to ride those feelings and to understand that you are doing your best, but that you ALSO MUST continue aspiring to do better. resist the urge to disengage. learn not to judge yourself or to internalise the judgments of others, these things are counterproductive. you don’t need to prove your worth, but you do need to stretch your capacity for empathy, compassion, and humility in order to fully orient yourselves towards justice. sometimes shame, guilt, regret are important for us to feel because they teach us that we don’t know everything, we can and do make mistakes, we can actually do horrible things sometimes, we can be complicit in horrific things. imo white people need to learn to take a certain level of shame on in order to humble themselves and understand that so much historical injustice has happened for their benefit. be honest with other white friends about this process and notice when you might be trying to make yourself feel better through thinking you’re a ‘good ally’ by working through these feelings. understand that you can never be a ‘good ally’ – all you can do is learn to decenter yourself when appropriate.

ugly xmas sweater but for makeup 💋