Today I spent five-and-half hours, almost an entire working day, except an unpleasant meeting, writing nine emails. Presented out of context, this may seem like a summum of inefficiency, borderline cheating my employer out of their money. But here is the catch: in the end of this day I feel happy, fulfilled, energised and productive. I have spent five hours writing to the organizations what we loved about them, suggesting what they could do to improve future funding applications and outlining our future relationship. I feel that I have invested my time and effort into building a supportive and transparent relationship. Something that I would call love. I freak people out when I speak about love in professional context and I love doing it. « Tu t’es vraiment donnée, » said Solveille, seeing the result. I love this expression. In English, you’d say « you gave it your all », but in French it’s « you gave yourself ». Sometimes (not this time, I don’t think) people say it to me implying that I am too much (I admit I am), that some distance would be healthy (they are probably right). But the thing is, something I wouldn’t admit for the fear of sounding hedonistic and hedonistic would be considered unprofessional, the thing is that giving myself gives me pleasure.

Having come to this conclusion, I start wondering why I am so much bolder, stronger and so much more empowered to seek this kind of pleasure in my work, as opposed to my personal relationships, friendly or intimate. Is it part of my religious trauma? Is it the echoes of the conditioning I received at my first job at the Christian organization, the saviourism from which I never healed? And what would it feel like to apply this kind of focus, boldness, intelligence and expansive thinking to pursuing love, commitment, intimacy and personal fulfilment?

How do we make a home for desire?

Jenny Odell. Saving Time

Today was another spacious day, a succession of summery, light, unproductive activities that one could do only on a summer weekend. Walking through buzzing Chinatown, thick with the smells of frying fish and sounds of a very good street violin performance. Sipping iced matcha smoothie with sweet tapioca bubbles. Visiting my backyard wild strawberry patch – astonished and grateful for its abundance. While my garden strawberry varieties are struggling with lack of sun and too much attention from our wild neighbours, their wild sisters are slowly conquering the garden. Their only competition are goldenrods that now grow tall and in dense. Most of the season they look like weeds and my garden, quite honestly, looks half-abandoned, but I can’t bring myself to “weeding out” the goldenrods, nor the chamomiles, nor the wild roses. Then, after everyone has settled for an evening, a walk in the forest. I went to the Lac du Moulin today – something I haven’t done in a long time. As I was circling the lake, I stopped to listen to an unfamiliar bord song, took out my phone with the Merlin app – and then, right there a miracle happened – a chorus of sounds and calls I have not heard before, coming from the birds I never saw before and didn’t see then. They were all around me, hidden in the foliage: black-throated green warbler, scarlet tanager, eastern wood pewee, american redstart, brown creeper, blackburbian warbler and my old acquaintances, red-eyed vireos and black-capped chikadees. Ever since I started listening to the birds, sounds excite me. I hear now the calls of the tree frogs, the buzz of insects, the angry cries of two rambuctious baby-racoons chasing each other up the tree, while their mother is surveying something in the direction of the lake. I am hearing the whisper of the leaves. I have just learned that there is a word in Anishinabeemowin (a verb, to be sure) that means “the leaves make a pleasant sound in the wind” – minwewebagaasin. I also say a chipmunk, two juvenile deer and a giant millipede.

Today was a spacious day. I managed whole two walks (it only counts as a walk if it has no productive or consumptive purpose – everything else is a trip). On my first walk at lunchtime I managed to reach the forest. I had a good podcast on, but kept putting it on pause and circling back to the yesterday’s therapy session. As I ruminate on it, more questions emerge, more understanding on how angry I am about things that happened to me. And maybe I am even angrier about the things that didn’t happen. I kept thinking back about the lonely lonely lonely me in my late teens and early twenties. This girl, so desperate for love and companionship, so afraid to be seen or notice any sign of affection, even less return it. This girl who wants to be kissed and touched, but wouldn’t ask for it, because she was taught that it is sin. The girl who doesn’t go on dates, who is afraid of intimacy, the girl who lives in her head, doing her best to ignore what is happening in her body.

Her body, in the meanwhile, is a battlefield. It carries the weight of fat-shaming when she was a child. It is subdued by the expectations of purity culture. When her big love ends in rejection, she puts the blame on her body. She condemns it, because it’s too fat, because it is not lean or elegant. So she decides to transform it, not through love and attention, but through relentless discipline and judgment. It starts innocuously enough with regular jogging. Who’d be against that? Then she discovers the gym, she starts eating less, she starts cutting out fats, then carbs, then practically everything, until her diet consists of quartered apples, low-calorie bread (who invented this abomination?!), low-calorie cheese and/or luncheon meat, sugar-free chewy candies and abominable amounts of diet drinks loaded with aspartame. She loses weight, she thinks about food, food, food all the time. And the thinner she gets, the more she fat-shames herself.

What scares me, when I look back at her, is that no one comes to her aid. No one asks what is going on, as she melts away physically. No one, except her parents, confronts her, and their intervention brings no results. No one even tries to advice her or offer help. Why, I ask myself. Maybe, because people around her are just as deluded as she is. They too believe that what is happening to her body doesn’t matter. In their eyes, she is a picture of success. She is top of her class, outperforming everyone academically. She also out-prays, out-bible-studies and out-christians everyone around. Her version of Christianity, the evangelicalism, is highly performative. She is even planning to go back to her country and join the evangelical ministry (my mother was shocked by this decision, but ultimately relented – how I wish now that she didn’t).

I have a picture of me around my early “missionary” period. On the picture, there are bunch of Irish teenagers, the “missionaries”, and a few staff of the local evangelical student ministry – barely out of adolescence themselves. I am one of the staff. I am twenty-three, I have short boyish hair, dyed jet-black with a red streak à la Run, Lola, Run. I am not just thin, but emanciated. I don’t look confident, or happy, or having the slightest understanding what the hell I am doing. If anything, I look part-scared, part-aloof. If I could find some way to go back in time and talk to that girl, I think all I’d say would be “Don’t fuck up your life.”

On my second walk, at sunset, there was just so much of sweet, simple, calm goodness distilled in a short quarter or an hour. First, the sunset itself and the pink bellies of the clouds in the sky fading from dark blue to light blue to orange over the water reservoir. The branches of the trees, alight with the last sun-rays. The joy of walking. The podcast: Ross Gay speaking of sorrow, wilderness and joy. The gardens, all abloom. The particular freedom of Friday evening multiplied by the freedom of summer quickly approaching solstice. The aliveness of it all.

WordPress says that I haven’t journaled for four days, but it feels much longer. It feels like so many things have happened. Some projects I have been working on for months have finally moved to a new stage. I was given new options for finishing my Reconciliation certificate – another process getting unstuck. I have found that a few timid wild strawberry plants on my back yard have grown into a patch. But most importantly, and quite unexpectedly, I went to my first therapy session. It didn’t feel cathartic, but afterwards I felt lighter and calmer, as if the emotional and somatic storm has calmed down and constant inner dialogue has paused. I know better to believe that this condition will last, but I do have my next appointment, so I am not afraid. It is a long journey and I am curious who I will find at the end of it, or along the way.

I have to pause and hug myself for all the work I am putting in this year into healing. I have to pause and admire how everything in inter-related. Would I have sought therapy if it wasn’t for that fateful conversation with Nicole and Stephanie back in April? I may not be good at self-love, care and liberation, but all it took are a few little gestures in that direction: signing up for a community of practice (deciding that yes, it is for me and it is worth time and money), gradually opening up to discuss things like sex, pleasure, religious trauma, anger, my relationship with my body, slowly building habits of self-care and self-love, dancing. There is so much happening and I know that the feeling of drowning is going to come back, but maybe I start feeling the current.

I was thinking over my experience on the bus back home and realized that what felt so serendipitous about it was that Maya’s invitation fell square to the time and place when I was free and in the city – I didn’t have to move things around or agonize about the response and making things work – I just had to accept. Which made me think about the way things usually happen:

usually, whenever I receive an ask or an invitation, I FEEL OBLIGED to accept it, even if it doesn’t work with my schedule or doesn’t feel right for me. Every time, I feel like I am rearranging my life to meet the expectation of whoever wants anything from me. And as I do it, I feel stretched between desire to please, resentment, guilt for feeling resentful and mental overwhelm from having to arrange the logistics of my life around the priorities of people who have no idea that I feel this way. The powerful thing that happened during the therapy session today was when Maya asked me to say no, loudly, with a gesture, like I really mean it. The she asked me how it felt. It took me a while of scanning, searching, listening to realize that it felt spacious, as if I reclaimed a little more space. We spoke about boundaries and how saying no helps us to claim our agency. This! The more I think about it, the more I understand how often I refuse to claim my agency: to say no, or to say yes, to ask for what I want, to ask for help. Instead, I choose to do everything myself, to take on me more than I can carry, to never ask for what I need or want and I systematically end up feeling defensive, guilty, unappreciated and overwhelmed.

So, here is my first healing homework (that I give to myself): to reclaim my agency, or, if I can’t do it, gesture towards it. Start in the easiest way: by saying no when it feels right and liberating and when it is possible to do it with love. Eventually, it will lead me to saying yes (although even now I cannot imagine myself telling someone loud and clear what I want).

The alternance of rain and sun continued all weekend. I have to admit that this is my favourite weather. I love change, the poignancy of transitions, the transience. This is the first time I remember not being tired in the past weeks.

The news this weekend is awful. Another massacre in the Gaza refugee camp, the win of French fascists in the European elections, the dissolution of the parliament, and the never-ending war back home. I have long given up on waiting for better times, but I am still to learn how to consciously live in the times we have. I have stopped feeling angry with people who don’t feel the same pain as me at the same time, but I need to learn what I can offer them instead.

wasn’t such a bad day after all. We got rains after a heat wave and a rollercoaster of dark skies and light and rainbows (we only saw a small one, but Griffin sent me a picture of a giant ark that seemed to embrace all of the city). I heard and then saw a northern mockingbird and then got soaked, looking at my youngest child running on the empty bmx trail with other little, fearless and careless kids. It is hard to reconcile this reality with what I hear and read and fret about.

There is no picture for the day, although the peonies are everywhere and the sunset was a beautiful peach colour. I’ve been good at keeping my morning yoga routine for the past three days and this morning I took it outside, under the green canopy. It’s funny how priorities change. The two things that preoccupy me most these days are finding a therapist and a yoga practice.

I think I am getting better at acknowledging my feelings and somatic responses and engaging with them without being swallowed by them. What I feel now with regard to my work is foremost lack of joy and lack of feeling. I think two things are happening: I get increasingly frustrated with constant and casual appropriation of my knowledge and ideas – this robs me of intellectual satisfaction of having produced and shared knowledge. The other side of it is constant squeezing, urgency and scarcity that robs my work of joy and meaning. I do not know what to do with it.

MA said today that I have to be ready for people to be resistant and unsettled by my work. Although I did not know how to respond at the moment, I call bs. Nothing in my work is particularly radical or unsettling, nothing is novel, but the people who gave themselves right to judge it have no intellectual capacity or interest to engage or learn beyond surface level. And I no longer want to subject myself to their judgment.

Something else I thought today: I am no longer willing to engage in non-reciprocal relationships. I am no longer willing to share my knowledge and to do emotional labour for no recognition.

It’s time to set boundaries.

I took a day off, a very hot day, and went for lunch with Griffin. Griffin gave me a piece of glass from a hundred-year old glass factory explosion as a birthday gift and promised to help me to look for a therapist without me asking. Because with Griffin I never have to ask. They told me about queer talent shows they are working on and we spoke about my religious trauma and their time in Paris. As we were walking back through little Burgundy, we saw this tea-rose coloured peony – the colour I never saw before on this flower. I do not interpret everything as a sign, but I am deeply grateful for the ability to see the connections and patterns.

In four years since I have planted peonies, this is the first time two of them opened on the day of my birthday. Everything feels a little rushed this year, a little too soon, but also right on some sentimental schedule that makes the events of the middle of my life and a continent away fall in rhythm of the early summers of my childhood. I always loved having a birthday in the beginning of the summer: the long days, the whisks of poplar pollen floating in the air, the peonies and the first strawberries, the feeling of endlessness, of all the things that lay ahead: picnics, seaside vacations, summer reading, evenings on the terrace. I am glad I have not lost it. I am glad that four people who wrote to me for my birthday are the ones who knew me forever, who knew the younger versions of me. I am glad that something incredibly deep, child-like, wondrous remains between us.

People ask me what I did for my birthday. I say that I went to watch the bull-frogs and played on the swings with my kids. The ones who understand this are kin.