Still wrestling with existence.
I've done my best (and continue to strive) to understand my "placement": what roles I want to take on, what spaces I can occupy, what worlds do I want to participate in. I try to have this be represented in how I appear (physically, verbally, emotionally) and stand behind with people who are permitted less access than I and holding those with more actually accountable (beyond name-calling, subversion of oppression is one of the most reliable ways). I do my best to diversify my streams of education. I communicate more directly to the issues of systems I refuse to accept and on methods of insurgency (in whatever shape that takes - labor organizing, protest forming, organizational building, direct aid). I acknowledge constraints and constantly look and work with people I hold space with to see what more can be done.
What I refuse to do - to be - is complacent. The chilling effects of the retaliation of the coalition of NAFTA nations that opened up the world to a new form of forced labor through corporate-sponsored violence and migration from undesirable locations of the West (from Haiti, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, regions of Turtle Island, South America and the regions of Eastern Europe) into their lands to maintain a system of labor all the while demonizing said people has been something I seen hold elder millennials and young GenX people (folks born between 1965 to about 1985, more specifically) in a particular inability to demand more through direct action (notwithstanding the nature of action that happened in that time period). They have seen, lived through and felt the violence that I can only piece together today by reading, watching and listening to them. What I constantly choose to discard is the learned hopelessness and fear that leads to non-action (like resorting to voting as a form of revolution or demanding reform of systems that were crafted by proto-capitalists, slave owners and rapists). I wrote on my site about the role that literature has in revolution but I am also afraid that either we have now made it the limit of how revolution can be perceived to be - through the perspective of representation politics and respectability (to whiteness) or the apparatus of consent management we live under globally has successfully halted any sort of action collectively beyond it by reducing any sort of critique into bickering - across the spectrum.