tldr: don’t. your joy is enough.

And if you woke up today the way we all do lately - pumpkin spice is back! start the season for just $6.99, they said they’d stop the war again, they didn’t, it doesn’t matter anyway because the ocean is eating California, you’re never going to buy a house, rent is late on the third, your midterms are this month, the midterms are next month, a latte or a gallon of gas?, all the teachers are leaving, it is too expensive to leave, it is too expensive to stay, weren’t you supposed to be further along by now?, the account is tanking, you haven’t seen that friend in months, doesn’t the season usually change by now?, you’re tired, you’re late somehow. There’s so many notifications. They’re not the ones you want. When you peel your eyes from the screen they skip the sky and land straight on the sticker - nothing is so shocking anymore.

I know that sounds ugly and disillusioned - we are in an ugly and disillusioned kind of place. Stay with me here. Every generation has warned the youth that theirs was the last good one and that the next generation will find the bottom of our collective time & peace & goodness. And still, the next generation has found their fight. Countless civil rights movements, magna cartas, little pushings of the needle - the revolution has continued with each passing of the torch. I’ve spent much of my political life figuring out where I should push the needle from and trying to encourage others to push with me - this is the practice of advocacy as it has existed for generations. The right answer, as it has existed for generations, is to take all of this mess you wake up with every day and educate, organize, politik, engage. Engage. Fight back. Even when it hurts, and even when it feels pointless, engage - engage - engage.

A consideration: we’re running out of time. A confession: I’m finding the engagement less useful, almost useless. An argument: The practice of advocacy can change when the ocean rises this high. In a world where they are capitalizing even off of your engagement, maybe the real fight is the one to retain our joy.

I present my own life to you as a thought exercise (a writer’s breakfast). I am speaking to you from the surprisingly not-at-all unique position of a twenty-five year old woman who spent twenty-five years compromising who she was with who she was told to be. I grew up as most of us did, being told that I was to go to a good school and get a good job - ideally something meaningful, but most importantly something good and fruitful. These were euphemisms for respectable and high-paying. Well, I went to lots of school. I worked a few jobs, and maybe I will go to more school and maybe I will work better jobs. At the same time, my politics were always close to my heart - as an Indian American queer young woman, I felt that it made sense for my life’s work to be political. Because I am a part of all of these groups, I thought, it must be my duty to try to solve these problems. For twenty-five years I let myself be positioned at the intersection of what I enjoyed, what I was supposed to do existentially, and what others told me I should be doing for my material success. (I tend to write about ‘others’ a lot. I’m Indian. It was the Indians and whatever the Indians projected onto everyone else.) By way of some trauma & some living, I lost the latter earlier this year. The silver lining of your parents deciding you colored too far out of the lines is that there is no one left to tell you what to do anymore and no one’s expectations to live up to. That leaves what I’m supposed to do in this world - to this end I have always felt called to some sense of duty around political and social justice - and what I want - I’m realizing I don’t quite know, no one ever asked, I’ve always liked books and I think I might get into birdwatching.

So now, at our intersection, on day one of year twenty-six, I am repositioning with these two new elements. What do I want, and what am I supposed to do here? (Note: This is an existential question in its own right, and it is easily complicated when you’ve spent your life so far only thinking of what would make others happy or what others find “correct”. The experience of asking myself this question in its fullness and by itself for the first time felt like the beginning of my life.) I feel called to the world in the same sense that the generations before me felt called - systems are hurting people, people are hurting people, and there is plenty of education to be done. It took one graduate class for me to learn that no IGO could ever function in neutrality, and a career of UN conferences is not what I want. I’ve seen enough to know that I am not ready to surrender myself to the promise of academia - that life sentence is one I will accept when I know I have the time to make use of it. You see, I don’t foresee a life of engaging with the discourse as-is resulting in anything but another jaded queer brown woman who gave her life to the world trying to teach it. The world is not a good student - the world will throw pencils at you and make fart noises. This is not to say that there is no use to these lines of work - of course there is - but I am realizing that the exhaustion that comes with them in the face of an exploding sun is outdated gameplay.

The rules are changing. Our oppressors are able to put information in our brains before we consent to it. On some level, they have access to our inner worlds at their discretion. Our ancestors could organize, have inner circles, speak in code that built their communities. Not all of this is lost, but, like, if Donald Trump wanted, couldn’t he probably get access to your texts with your best friend before you finish reading this? Your records are public, and so is the group chat where Jane Doe’s dignity was offered for the taking, and do you know who your neighbors voted for? Do you know who your family voted for? Technology is closing the gaps, and the increasingly material dangers of climate change lead me to believe that the ruling class - the 1% of the 1% - is playing a planetary-scale waiting game. Generations have screamed that the world is falling apart but ours is…physically ending. The ocean is actually eating California. They overdose us with information and pressure - bills jobs violence poverty shame justice(thelackof) groceries rape life death pregnancy men women children - they problematize everything for us while they cash in. While that methodology - problematizing, and then capitalizing on our engagement with the problem - is not new, I argue our tried counter of traditional advocacy is becoming less meaningful. If there are 100 years left in the world (hyperbole - thought experiment, stay with me) and I spend 60 of them as a professor, or an organizer, or a [meaningful career within the existing structures for advocacy], are the next 40 years that my work outlives me worth the first 60 years of another queer brown life given to collective suffering? Time is running out. And as it does, if my oppressor is finally getting close enough to look me in the eyes, he will not have the satisfaction of seeing tears and tiredness. You see, he thinks that this ends with us all crying while he takes off in a spaceship and finds another planet’s soul to drain. I do not claim to know the exact usefulness of anything, but if we’re all burning then I think we should make sure he burns first. He should see us dancing through the flames as he goes.

My call here then is for a new form of advocacy - one that embraces and accepts an ending world with closing boundaries. In this system we operate under, his goal is to take your peace. But the oppressor is the one who fucked this all up, and so the oppressor can cry for it. They want you distracted by the chaos so you do not see their bulbous, groping, greedy hands - show them that your life is not about what they are doing. Your purpose does not involve their reach. In these circumstances even joy becomes political, and choosing it is difficult - they have designed choosing joy to be difficult. It is easy to think that someone walking down the street, unbothered, eating an ice cream cone, is doing nothing. In today’s date, there is advocacy even in reclaiming that moment to be yours, rather than of work or worry. The scramble you wake up in - the ugly disillusionment - that is them winning. It can be true that the world is fucked but do not let them put the burden of fixing the world on you. We heal - by connecting with each other, by leaning into joy, by having a good time here. That is how we win - by waking up in peace.

A few ways I am trying to practice this, so that it is not all talk:

  • I am in love with my boyfriend in part because of his whimsy, which he treats with a seriousness that embodies this advocacy. He has been very dedicated to decorating his car lately. I have decided to give this cause the same seriousness I give my creative endeavors, and it has resulted in a lot of joy.

  • Often I think these days that I should be making spreadsheets for some of my goals. When I have this thought, I go ride my bike outside instead.

  • I grew up drinking black coffee - sometimes a little cream or sugar - because it was a simple and cost-effective order, and later on in life because I realized it was nutritionally efficient. I have been ordering flavored coffees and want to make a homemade syrup.

  • I am starting a new job that I am slightly underqualified for, and I don’t want anything else. The express purpose of this is that I would like to not be too involved at work so that I retain energy for creativity.

  • I’m going to try harder with Halloween this year.

  • Although it is the hardest thing I have ever done, I am not explaining myself to those who feel they deserve an explanation. When this feels less joyful, although it is a pursuit of joy, I treat myself to an edible. This reminds me of the joy.

Read and write and talk and work, have your joy. Find and keep and enjoy your joy. It is the weapon and the war.