Next week will be my work anniversary.

Most of the people I knew a year ago have moved on to other things, but I still feel like I am drifting in between. This morning, looking at the black shape of the newly build sky-scrapper outside of my dirty office window, I thought about the phrase from Mina Salami’s Sensuous Knowledge that I heard a few days ago: some of us may be locked in golden cages, but even though the bars of the prison are gold, it is still a cage. I feel this way about the whole corporate capitalist system – even though the bars of my cage are not quite golden, they are gilded – yet, it feels more and more like prison. I don’t know if it’s burn-out, a mid-life crisis or a menopause.

I am reading Sandra Newman’s Julia, a feminist retelling of Orwell’s 1984 – I believe I have not been this enthralled in a book since reading Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land in the beginning of 2022. A strange thing is happening – I realize that I read this book through the lens of the inter-generational trauma that I carry in me. I know the truth of it through the mirrored experience of my ancestors – great-grandparents generation that lived and died in purges, forced displacements and artificial famine. Chapter 12 is particularly horrifying – it describes the famine organized by the party regime in Semi-Autonomous Zones – one doesn’t need to know all the facts to feel it resonate through one’s bones and flesh. Somatic knowledge is a powerful thing.

One of the reasons I started journaling this year is to understand the way my trauma, especially intergenerational trauma, shapes me and the ways I may heal from it. My goal this year is to gain deep knowledge, the one that will help me to understand myself and relate to others from a place of intentional kinship. I hope that with time writing will become a reflex and this reflex will bring forth a deeper truth.