Liberatory Imagination with Tiffany

Growing up in a conservative Christian immigrant household, I know the bliss of having someone or something to blame. It’s satan’s fault! It’s unbelievers’ fault! Not enough faith! It’s the world’s fault! If only they knew that Jesus was the way!

Ironically the bliss of knowing all the answers and being on the in is based on those who are on the outs.

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Somatically, it feels so f*****g nice to have security and certainty. Even though I’m free of indoctrination and I’m more tapped into my agency, the other side isn’t more fun…per se. To sit in the unknown and unknowable is uncomfortable at times. And sometimes I miss walking down the street looking at people and think “oh poor unfortunate souls…you have no idea what is available for you. I know the key and you don’t. Thank god he chose me.” That superiority is sweeeeeetttt.

What else is sweet is knowing who the enemy is (aka satan) and knowing who will win at the end.

There’s this part in the bible…probably revelations or something…where it describes how there’s a war happening between good and evil right above us. When we are being tempted to sin, there is a brave heart battle happening. At all times!

And so when you fall into sin, you know that the bad guys won the battle. But don’t worry! The ULTIMATE battle will be won by the good guys. I loooved that part! So freeing to just know that no matter how much I f**k up, the good guys will prevail - and that’s the side I’m on *twinkling of the eye*.

Imagine having to deal with men who have that kind of superiority plus they are insufferable men with worshippers. My religious trauma is 90% having had to deal with christian men and white women who mask their privilege with fake humility while abusing their power in disgusting ways. It makes me want to dry heave thinking about it.

Fast forward to now. It’s interesting to see the parallels of leftists with Christianity culture. I think that the critique isn’t in the building blocks of leftism (because I wouldn’t call myself a leftist if I didn’t align with it)…it’s in how infiltrated the culture can be by the thing we are fighting against.

Obviously there is a common enemy: the empire (colonialism, capitalism, imperialism, ableism, white supremacy etc.). And empire is strategic and is moving in ways that are sometimes more subversive than it looks (elite capture, CIA coups, media etc.) As leftists, we do know what the way out is. Or at least we are studying ways that people have freed themselves and we have theories of how we can be liberated collectively. *cough socialism towards communism cough*

It is natural to look for like-minded people, because it feels horrible to talk to people…and they look at you like you’re a weirdo. We also need to be coming together to learn and build relationships with each other. And so there are tells about who is in and who is out hoping to bring more people to be for liberation. There are boundaries around our values as there should be.

We have definitions between a liberal and a leftist. As we should have.

So I get how it happens! It’s so natural, because all the pieces are there to be able to replicate cult or religious thinking/behaving. Add a charismatic leader who has no boundaries and are exploiting people…boom.

But what I want to focus on is how:

being able to always blame the enemy can be the go-to tool to escape self-accountability.

If you feel uncomfortable with that and are flipping through all the dangerous ways that could be used, sit with it.

I think we get confused with words like trauma-informed and grace and cancel culture…and forget the plot. My guess is that alot of us are afraid of addressing accountability, because we are afraid that eventually the fingers will point to yourself. It’s much easier to dog-pile on a B list celebrity. It’s much harder to reckon with how you talked to your partner yesterday. It’s much easier to blame it on our trauma. It’s much harder to tend to our wounds and make sure that it doesn’t hurt other people like it did to us.

That kind of linear thinking is very colonial and christian. It’s overly simplified in ways that should have more nuance and then overly complicated and confusing in ways that are actually very clear cut.

There should be enough space where we validate the impacts of trauma and empire AND where we can tap into our agency to try to reduce harm…from ourselves.

The thing about christian culture is that it feels so good, because you get eternal assurance as well as a common enemy everyone stands against. There is no need to look at yourself, because you’re already forgiven. The only people you’re looking at is the pastor’s wife and the single mother on the praise team who both have gossip swirling around them.

I watched that netflix documentary called “Death of the Pastor’s Wife” a month or two ago, and it really wasn’t shocking how the congregation was just cool with being led by the abusive pastor. Because in the same way we like to demonize people (and let me tell you many of them actually deserve it)…we like to celebritize people too. We like to see a leader who is infallible and can rise above it all. We love a savior. And then we love tearing them down.

It’s that binary thinking. That saint or devil thinking. I think it’s really easy to apply this to ourselves too. Where we are doing everything right or everything wrong, because it’s actually really hard to hold nuance with ourselves and other people…while also holding necessary hard lines. Hard lines like holding to the values we say we have.

I love this by Erotics of Liberation:

“We fail to hold ourselves accountable because it traces us back to the way we were harmed and never received accountability or repair from our harm-doers. We never enter the space of violence by causing it. We receive it and pass it on. Meaning, we do harm and refuse to repair because that process of repair would require of us to acknowledge the wounds we’ve spent a lifetime concealing from our own selves. There is no such thing as ‘holding someone accountable.’ We hold ourselves accountable when we are ready to do so. Some people will never be. Postponing our healing until our harm-doers are ready to engage in their own self-accountability process is the antithesis of self-love. We deserve healing, always…and most importantly: now.”

YESSS exactly. This is why I love Transformative Justice. It gets into the shadows where repair and true accountability are actually possible. I love that first line “We fail to hold ourselves accountable because it traces us back to the way we were harmed and never received accountability or repair from our harm-doers.” It shines light on our wounds and how it seems so unfair that people get to “get away” with things all the time…and I have to do the hard work of owning up to my s**t when thooooose people get off the hook?? Yeah. That’s hard to reckon with, but we are responsible for our words and actions. Only us. Us with all the injustice we have been through…all the trauma…all the neurodivergencies…all the etc. Yes we have to hold ourselves accountable. Because that’s what dignity looks like.

That’s our shared goal right?? Dignity for all. The opposite of empire.

I just watched this tiktok (can’t find it!!) about how it’s less about a communication problem than it is a values problem. The creator was talking about how we get caught up in how we communicate without starting with the building blocks of what we actually value. The tricky thing is that most of us would say we value the same things like honesty, but actually embodying it through the dysregulation is really really hard. It doesn’t matter how good you are at communicating. If your values are misaligned…it will eventually show. And sometimes it can be subtle. Sometimes it’s like…someone might value living life from quiet internal transformation that blooms out into action, while someone else might value more external ways of validation through career or academia. The tension isn’t how these two people communicate, but it’s the assumed premise they are communicating from. Their values.

Practicing to live out our values is everything. Going back to the above statement “being able to always blame the enemy can be the go-to tool to escape self-accountability.” When we get handed a “get out of jail free” card (boooo prisons), it’s hard not to cash it in. When we can say a bunch of key leftists words, we think that it would save us from not doing the necessary work. I WISH. All those key leftists words actually point in the same direction, which is dignity and autonomy for all - including ourselves. It’s not a general idea for the general collective. It is cutting, revolutionary, extremely practical, action forward, as tangible as the table in front of you, and as detailed as the way you speak to yourself in your head.

The question I have to ask is…am I the villain in this story? Not to fall exactly into the binary thinking I was just writing about haha. But for real, I think it is helpful to ask myself that question. Because immediately, I’m like…LOOK AT HER!!! How can she be the villain after all that she has endured and been through??…the whole empire wants her to be neutralized and a robotic worker for the system!!

Yes good. Struggle with it. And see how I could be villainous (I know I know harm-doers should not be villainized or demonized but just go with it), because I embody autonomy, power, skill, and knowledge that can definitely be used to exploit, manipulate and hurt alot of people. The things I hope to urge us on - towards liberation - are the exact same things that could do a lot of damage…and mistakes and hurt and harm can all happen as I am proclaiming that I am for liberation.

So “am I the villain?” keeps me in check. It asks me to reflect on how much I am ready to dignify myself, which will in turn show how I’m ready to fight for the dignity of others.

What does Liberatory Imagination spark in me today?

We deserve cathartic release and unity. But not the false cheap (christian) version. We deserve the real thing!! Coalition building, endurance with working with real humans, deep relationships with our chosen family, joyful movement and building, creative bliss…all those things have a price. It asks for our whole lives. Our private lives, our public lives, our creative lives, our relational lives. Liberatory imagination sparks in me bravery to imperfectly try…try to hold myself accountable at every point. Love myself enough to know that I deserve dignity that transcends making mistakes. That transcends hurting people (so scary!!). And that all begins with knowing that I am never immune to being the harm-doer.

LIBERATORY IMAGINATION is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

References:

Making Mistakes with peregrine and tiffany

I Make Mistakes with peregrine and tiffany

Owdah Awawdah

Naya al-Tanani

(Photos of the camping trip of incredible mountains, trees, body of water. And on the right, I created a piece inspired by the view with watercolors and charcoal - I used the water from Lake Louise for the watercolor.)

[ Scroll to the bottom to watch the visual version of this post ]

In September 2016, I went on a 10 day camping trip with friends through Glacier National Park to Banff National Park…it was so epic. We pitched our tents at a new location every night. I remember waking up to the scent pine trees, forest dirt, and fresh rain. The smell was intoxicating. Love the rain, but it’s hard to set up camp during rainfall and it’s not really fun when you’re cold and wet. It was way colder than we expected, and I was unfortunately a little unprepared for that part. On top of that it was kinda rough to depend on park showers and bathrooms every single day. But it was so worth the adventure being amongst such awe-inducing nature.

(Photos of me making art in my apartment soon after that trip.)

Something I revisit weirdly often is the euphoric experience when I got back. The first 24 hours back in my studio apartment were out of this world. It was like I was high! The first hot shower in a clean bathroom. The first night in my fluffy warm bed. The first change into clean clothes. The first skincare routine not from travel bottles. The first day without having to talk to anyone. I was having an out of body experience. Pure bliss.

The novelty of my being at home was so visceral for me that I can almost feel it right now 10 years later.

In that same era, I learned about hedonic adaptation (or treadmill), which is the human phenomenon of always needing to “up” our experiences to get to our previous level of enjoyment.

For example: the first time going to the lake was so magical…I felt like I could do it every day and not get sick of it. So the next time, I brought my favorite chilled drink and loved it, but sitting there, I already knew that I wanted to bring a camping chair next time. So then, I do that…and then it would be cuter if I also had food. So suddenly, the magic of being by the lake without anything doesn’t exactly have the same shimmery feeling, because I need the other elements. There’s nothing wrong with bringing a drink or snack to the lake, but it demonstrates how fast our sense of awe or gratitude can evaporate.

Another way to see it is this chase for novelty, and by definition, novelty can’t really be experienced in repetition. The only way to combat it is to create a contrasting experience. In this example, to not go to the lake for a while, and enjoy level 1 again. Or go back to level 1 and intentionally invite the feeling of gratitude and awe.

Back to my camping trip, I felt euphoric in my apartment, because I was experiencing novelty. My norm for the past 10 days was setting camp in the rain, really cold uncomfortable nights, a hard sleeping mat, dirty bathrooms, cold showers, and constant socializing. So coming home of course felt like heaven. I moved my baseline.

I think our bodies, our nervous systems, our psyche, are always looking for a balance of safety through routine and novelty.

We want to feel settled in day to day life and not have to use our executive thinking all the time, because decision fatigue is so draining. AND we also want to feel like we are alive and can use our agency in experiencing new things.

For some of us, we might gravitate towards seeing the mundane as dangerous…like it’s a sign that we are getting complacent in life. The repetition of life could almost feel like our agency is taken from us. That is especially true under capitalism when most of us are forced to labor in order to have a roof over our heads. So much agency is stolen from us with that piece alone. It could feel so suffocating and depressing.

While for others, we might see novelty as threatening to our safety. Taking risks and experiencing the unknown could feel completely outside of our capacity. When life is already so unknown, it sometimes doesn’t feel worth shaking up everything without a certain outcome. This could play out with big life decisions, but it can also show up in small ways. Like saying yes to hanging out with a friend. Or finding a new hobby. This could induce feelings of anxiety and wanting to hide away.

Either way we are always doing the math on whether something is worth it or not (mostly subconsciously). If the balance is off, our bodies will feel off.

It’s so hard, because arguably for all of us we carry a physical and spiritual lineage of data…of what is safe versus dangerous. I carry what my maternal great-grandfather experienced when he was here on Turtle Island when the railroads were being built. I carry what my paternal grandmother experienced under my abusive grandfather in HK. I carry so many stories that are unsaid that it both haunts me and gives me unexplainable strength.

So as I’m figuring out how to live with integrity while also finding some equilibrium in my body, sometimes I feel lost. Intellectually, I know all the things…how important it is to take care of myself and to witness and grieve…and my body feels wobbly. Compared to a year ago, I have come really far in finding stability mentally and emotionally. And I never want to take that for granted. AND there are days like today when I’m bleeding heavily, I’m feeling tired, and my body feels shaky. This round I feel like crawling into my bed and not wanting to experience anything novel for a bit.

I came across this tiktok of the late Andrea Gibson reciting a few things on their bucket list:

To see through the lens of my spirit, and not the bruised and clouded eyes of my wounds.To wear my heart on my sleeve, and never grow out of that shirt.To be what Mary Oliver called a bride married to amazement, and to not file for divorce from amazement when my life is hard.To know exactly what parts of me are comforted by other people’s approval and comfort those parts myself instead.To know shame can’t live in the light, and let the light fall wherever I am hiding.To reckon with my trauma until it is a poem no longer written in blood.To love my body as if it were my soul’s silhouette.To break the vows I have made to my suffering.To interrupt my judgments, criticisms, blames knowing they are almost always trying to distract me from my own pain.To be guided by giving instead of getting.To live in a bungalow of kindness.To know every leaf, every river, every sunrise is a child saying, “Watch me! Watch me! Watch me!”To live like I’m kissing the universe on her temple.

That feels like the novelty I want to embody more.

There’s a sense of awe that is woven into the most profoundly simple things. There is novelty in the bravery it takes to truly meet myself. There is novelty in being soft enough to receive kindness. There is novelty in having my arms open for the possibility of deeper love.

Capitalism has instilled in our collective intuition that the easiest way to satisfy our novelty craving is to spend money. And oh baby am I sucker for retail therapy. The hit of buying things after a breakup feels healing lol! But the truth is…that kind of novelty is so cheap. A vacation, a fun night out, a splurge isn’t wrong.

But the question is: have we been intentional in carving out feelings of novelty? That helps us heal from capitalism. To help us be reminded we have agency. To give ourselves the jolt of excitement of what is possible. To provide the relief that we aren’t stuck.

(an image of a very cute wholesome breakfast spread from pinterest.)

I want to find novelty in having a slow abundant breakfast with coffee with my honey. Even if it’s every sunday morning.

(a gif of baby peter rabbit being tucked into bed by his mama after a sip of something warm.)

When it comes to finding safety in the familiar, we all need a base of predictability to feel safe in our bodies. When we can find patterns, it’s easier to know how to move. Even if the predictable is somewhat harmful, our systems eventually adapt. Like how our attraction could be based on undesirable traits of our parents, because it feels familiar and predictable (even if the behavior is toxic).

In this corner, surprises are a big no-no. Trauma is something that happens too fast and too big for our bodies to process and digest. It is a shock, a surprise, an unconsensual experience. It makes sense that sometimes we want to crawl into a hole and close off our senses. Everything feels like too much.

Where it goes wrong is when we accept that our window of tolerance is small…and don’t try to expand it with patience. It goes wrong when feeling safe all the time becomes the goal. For white people, I see this way too often, and it’s infuriating. Keeping their peace becomes very very dangerous for Black and Brown people. And any attempt to call out or in…white people’s tears, anger, guilt becomes the center. Their dysregulation becomes the center. It’s exhausting.

How we interpret our body’s signal for danger is KEEYYY! People like saying (aka I like saying) things like “trust your body” or “trust your intuition.” And truuuee our bodies do have alot of wisdom and we do have valuable intuition, but ONLY if we interpret the sensations accurately. Most of the time, our feelings of threat aren’t us physically being in danger. They probably come from the fear of betrayal, feeling shame, being isolated, or playing on a worst possible scenario, forgetting that there are a thousand steps for that to happen. And a tiny percentage of the time, our feeling of danger is right on.

Because I have a history of being serially cheated on, my partner could turn around to walk to the kitchen and my spidey senses would go up. And see it as a “sign.” My brain is so good at coming up with scenarios and predicting the future from one trigger. So then my wiser brain needs to turn on, and talk to my lizard brain…and say “ok you’re feeling activated. Let’s let this sensation pass. And then we can talk about it…between you and me. You know your history, and it makes sense you’re ultra sensitive. But keep it together for a few more minutes.” After that, the sensation passes and I keep on living my life.

Wanting to feel safe is so natural and human, but we get to choose how we relate to discomfort, threat, and danger both perceived and real. We deserve to allocate our energy with precision and not just by default. Life is unpredictable and change is inevitable. Danger is inevitable too, sadly. Allocating our energy intentionally so that we can build the world we want to see and arriving resourced when danger is at our doorstep…or at our neighbor’s doorstep is the goal.

Back to finding safety in the familiar, how I want to embody this is by checking my compass. Where am I going with my liberatory community? How can I strengthen my window of tolerance so that I can take big risks and do scary things that align with the world I want to see?

I went to Nat Vikistreth’s (@comebacktocare) book launch at Women and Children First bookstore the other evening. Raising Change Agents is written for guardians and caretakers of children, and it’s about how to raise young ones from an abolitionist and liberatory lens. I kept on tearing up, because it was so hopeful how Nat was talking about children and what they deserve. I’m tearing up right now thinking about how it filled me so much emotion thinking about how kids deserve to live in a liberated world. Nat talked about how they are our future, and it’s our responsibility to raise them to be able to resist empire and to build the world free of it.

She shared a framework that she uses with guardians with their kids, but I also think it is so applicable to us as adults. It’s getting down to the child’s level when they are about to make a choice…and ask whether it is liberation-smart or survival-smart. She explains how liberation-smarts is collaborative and finds ways where everyone can get their needs and desires met. That way is usually slower and needs negotiating. And survival-smarts are ways we have to behave to survive in the world as it is now. That could look like teaching a kid to be punctual with colonial time, because being on time to school or for their future job is important to survive.

Nat explained how both are important, but at home the goal is to lean more into liberation-smarts as often as possible. It isn’t usually the most convenient or quickest choice for everyone, but it upholds the values we want to instill in children and it positions them to be respected in all of their dignity.

I raised my hand during Q+A, and I asked Nat: How do you navigate the importance of routine (that provides the child with a felt sense of stability) when there might be resistance to keeping the routine (and not wanting to force them into compliance)?

She answered with the example of a bedtime routine that has 3 parts. She said that 2 of the parts should be steady and non-negotiable, but the third part can change based on the child’s preferences. So it’s giving them the agency of changing up the third part that can give them the safety of routine while also giving them some independence.

I loved her answer, because that question was for me. I sometimes go back and forth between being very rigid with myself and then letting it all go to feel free. But her answer reminded me that there is a way to be more thoughtful to give my system safe rhythms while also just enough novelty…so I can land on somewhat of an equilibrium.

I can’t wait to read the book! I’m sure I’ll be sharing more thoughts about it later.

What does Liberatory Imagination spark in me today?

We must find internal grounding so that we can do things that stretch outside of our comfort zone, because resisting empire is very uncomfortable, very dysregulating, and inevitably very dangerous. Coherence with our integrity and what we want to see in the world is the challenge. It is an honor to get closer to aligning it all.

I just read “The Hand That Will Testify” by Mohammad Mustafa:

(the image is a dusty hand of a martyred woman in Gaza, and on her finger is a prayer clicker.)

Look at this photograph. Look at it the way you would look at a mirror. A woman’s hand, gray with the dust of her own home, emerges from the wreckage. And between her fingers still warm with the rhythm of repetition and dhikr. You will see a tasbeeh. She was counting the names of God when they killed her.

Subhanallah. Subhanallah. Subhanallah.

I believe this as a description of how the world actually works. And I believe it not despite the photograph but because of it. Because the photograph contains, in a single frame, both the case for despair and the answer to it. The rubble is the case for despair. The tasbeeh is the answer. The rubble says look what they can do to you. But the tasbeeh says look what they cannot take from you.

Dhikr: Remembrance of Allah

In the face of such evil, Palestinians are steady in their devotion to God. That kind of faith confronts me with the call to never forget why I need to stay steady, work with my body, and work with aligned people so that we can show up for what actually matters.

We must be grounded in the repetitive act of remembering what this is all about. We must never forget our agency and our collective power. From our lives inside our home to global movement, it is our responsibility to never lose sight of what this is all about. Coherence. Some of our seasons will look very quiet (doing the low-to-the-ground work of gaining strength and relational endurance) and other seasons will be very much above ground and action-heavy. It takes faith to take a forward step every day fine-tuning our rhythms and our agency.

How to support me (thank you in advance):

* Buy me a cup of coffee. Every bit counts! You can venmo me at @tiffanywongart with note “From substack!”

* Check out my visual podcasts

References:EnneagramBook: Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir by Akwaeke EmezeBook: Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-SamarasinhaTiktok about Portland Protestors

/ To watch this post via video, scroll to the bottom! And more adlib commentary /

Imagine a door, and behind the door there’s a simple dark room with nothing inside. Before you go into the room, you have to lay these things outside the door:

* All your achievements (school, career, creative projects, goals achieved, etc.)

* All the things you do that you’re proud of (being a loving partner/parent/sibling/child, spiritual growth, acts of service, generosity, studiousness, ways you’ve sacrificed etc.)

* What people love about your personality (humor, charm, boldness, etc.)

* Desirability (how you are perceived from a conventional standard)

And the inverse:

* All of the achievements you don’t have and the goals that aren’t realized

* All the things that you are not proud of (mistakes, betrayal towards yourself and others)

* What people don’t like about your personality

* Ways you don’t fit under desirability politics

Lay each item on the ground outside of the room. Stack them up. Unload it all.

And then I invite you to open the door and enter the room. Where all you’re met with is the stripped-down you.

As you sit with this version of you:

How do you feel?

Are they familiar to you?

What is it like to be in their presence?

What sensations do you feel in your body?

Observe and take note.

All the things outside the door aren’t necessarily you or not you, but in this room you are met with nothing to point to…no plus or minus points that indicate your value. There’s nothing that you can stack to make a case to prove to yourself that you’re a good person or bad person. There’s no math you can do.

So what does it feel to really sit with yourself? What does being in your own presence feel like?

Is it uncomfortable? Does every second feel tense? Do you feel like getting up and exiting the room?

Does it feel amazing to not have all the stuff distracting you from you?

Does it feel void?

Does it feel like a mix of comforting and confronting?

We all love talking about how it’s important to love ourselves. And how we can tell if other people love themselves or hate themselves. And how people’s partners reveal how much a person loves themselves.

But can we be honest with ourselves? Without all the evidence of our sainthood or depravity, do we actually love ourselves unconditionally?

Can we afford ourselves the nuance of being human, where we free ourselves from being net positive?

The energy of getting to net positive ruins the whole damn thing.

There’s nothing to net positive to! That comes from a deeply punitive Christian god (or at least that’s where it stems from for me) where it’s this constant proving or performance of being a righteous and dutiful human.

The thing about proving is that it cancels out the authenticity of a good deed. It nixes the chance of a soulful generosity. It robs us of acting from a deep root of liberation and love.

It’s like giving a gift expecting something back. It robs the giver of the pleasure of gifting from joyfulness, because there are strings attached…and resentment is around the corner if the other person doesn’t obey according to the unspoken rules.

Ironically, if we are going to do the math of our actions and hope to be net positive, the act of trying to be net positive is a negative!

I just came back from 3 weeks in Thailand, and it’s given me an opportunity to look at my life from a different angle. I’m taking inventory.

As I’m witnessing the horrendous attacks in Iran and the murder of so many children and adults, as I’m witnessing the violence against Black and brown people here in the belly of the beast, as I’m watching US/Israel commit mass murder through Palestine and Lebanon and Iran and the list goes on…it’s so clear. The path is totally unknown to me, but the clarity I feel in my body is unshakable. Imperialism and systemic greed is destroying everything physically and spiritually, and nothing is more important than opposing it and painstakingly carving out a new way.

As long as my eyes are fixed on the north star, my role in the broader movement towards liberation for all is fixed. All I have to do is get low to the ground, stay rooted, and make decisions from a place of deep love. (Ew I’m throwing up writing this, but I mean it!)

My true self love where I don’t exist to prove my worthiness or goodness, allows me to generously step into my part (even though it’s murky right now). It gives me permission to do it quietly or boldly or loudly or invisibly…it doesn’t matter, because I’m not doing the math from an internal or external level. What an honor to practice functioning from a place of possibility.

Those things outside of the room are really important. It IS important for us to try our best to be responsible for our time here on earth, to be accountable, to cause as little harm as possible, to do art that shifts perspectives…all those things are what makes up a life. AND where my motivation and drive come from will determine the texture of my path.

I always come back to this, but how are we supposed to have longevity in our communal effort for local and global liberation…if we can’t stand our own presence? The consequence needs to be held with weight. If we are leading from a place where we can’t be in the same room with ourselves, it means that the accountability, the boundaries, the wisdom, the care is off. We have the honor of doing things messily, and I’m not discounting that. There is no perfect moment where we are all healed enough to be in community. But we have to try to do our part.

Self accountability means that you have to go into that room even when no one is watching. No one will affirm you or shame you into it…

It takes drawing from our root to do practices in private so that when we are in relationship and community, there’s more possibility for true care and reciprocity. We need this more than ever right now.

A phrase that keeps on circulating my system after coming back from Thailand is “I’m exactly where I should be right now.” I am exactly in the right place both physically and spiritually.

When I go through that door after I slogged off all the stuff, I feel light. My presence is like sitting amongst a cute swirly airy cloud and my body is firmly rooted to the ground. I don’t always feel like this, but right now I do.

Feeling deep soul peace in the middle of such empire violence is bizarre. I hope to protect this rootedness with my life and for it to guide my every move.

I have so many other thoughts about how truly loving yourself will attract people who want to outsource their worthiness…and also how jealousy looks like love bombing at first. But that’s for another time!

What does Liberatory Imagination spark in me today?

A liberation that isn’t a far-off abstract idea. I want to see the full thing. The small ways it radiates in how I speak to myself, my chosen family, my community. In seeing strangers walking down my sidewalk and knowing they have everything they need. In witnessing the blooming of plant life in my neighborhood. I want to see it SO BIG! I want to know in a house across the oceans where kids are getting ready for school that they are generously afforded a vast future of creativity and discovery. I want to see systems that are put in place not to make the elites richer and more powerful, but truly for the people, where their health is prioritized and their future is abundant. I long to see it and right now I need to be attuned to what is asked of me.

How to support me (thank you in advance):

* Buy me a cup of coffee. Every bit counts! You can venmo me at @tiffanywongart with note “From substack!”

* Subscribe for free (all my posts will be available to the public), but set up a monthly or annual recurring payment with me directly on venmo - @tiffanywongart. Attach the note “Recurring substack subscription.”

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The thing about being able to see your own inner child and younger parts, is the ability to see other people’s. I can see when their inner children are scared, insecure, ashamed, and ultimately wanting to be seen and loved unconditionally.

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To be in relationship with other humans, whether it’s in friendship, partnership, or in shared spaces, is bizaaarrrre. It’s universes colliding together, bumping into sharp corners and finding soft landing spots. It’s touching atmospheres and seeing if it will blow up everything in a 10-foot radius or create the most spectacular connection. It’s constant rotation with gravity pulls from different sources.

It’s a miracle that any universe collision works. Especially over time.

I was born into universes. The universes had so many desires and dreams about the direction they wanted to go towards. And my mini universe was in instant orbit. So natural and so easy.

All I needed was physical care and the most infinite and expansive love.

Love that had no bounds.

Love that wasn’t transactional.

Love that transcends history.

Little did I know that colliding with universes isn’t as easy as that, even though every new universe deserves it.

One of my coping mechanisms is the collection of knowledge and escapism through reading.

IF I knew enough, I would be protected. IF I went far away into another world, I would be protected from this dimension. And for a second, it does!

That knowledge has helped me understand myself so much, and is such a great jumping-off point. And the worlds I escape into teach me to expand my imagination to what is possible. But when I close that book and click off the essay, I’m left with the present elements and what is in my orbit…and all the other universes I am in relationship with and the universes I am witnessing.

Right now one of the books I’m reading is What My Bones Know by Stephanie Foo, which is about healing from complex PTSD. Reading it is almost spooky. It’s about Stephanie, who is a child of Chinese Malaysian immigrants in the Bay Area. The child abuse she survived feels so familiar…too familiar. Stephanie is brutally honest about how confusing it is to figure out what was real, how severe things actually were, what was normalized, and how much of it has been embedded into her personality.

In college, I went to therapy for the first time. I spent the first month or two recounting my childhood, which was in a haze. I barely remembered anything, and it slowly started coming back to me in bits and pieces. At one point, my therapist stopped me and said, “Do you realize you keep on saying, ‘but it wasn’t a big deal’ over and over again after you tell me an alarming story?”

I’ll never forget that moment, because I started to hear myself say that all the time. My nonchalance was embedded deep into my personality, and I still see it all the time to this day. One time I was having lunch with friends at college, and I mentioned something violating happening to me on the train - my friends stopped me in my tracks with concerned faces and asked why I was laughing while telling that story…I was just assaulted. It didn’t even occur to me that it was anything, because it wasn’t a big deal.

Just like it wasn’t a big deal, because I knew other immigrant kids having muuuuch much stricter and angrier parents.

I watched a tiktok recently that was so basic, but resonated deeply. They basically said that we can respect a person’s dignity and have compassion for all that they have experienced - AND choose to do it from afar relationally.

If you were conditioned as a woman, you were taught that love is self sacrifice. ESPECIALLY if you’re dealing with a man. We were taught that there is virtue in seeing the soul of a person beyond their defensive mechanisms. We were taught that our love can transform people (times 100 if you were a Christian…because you were also taught that God’s love through you can change people.) I CALL B******T.

We were groomed to be abused and to bear it. By men. By authority figures. By work. By empire.

Can I write a paper about how this and that happened to this person, and this is why they do this and that? YES. They are a universe! And that doesn’t entitle anyone to be in relationship with me. (Community is another thing, and I’ll elaborate on that another time.) I’m not only talking about abusers, but people who have poor boundaries and are energetic vampires.

This orientation applies not only to the people above, but also to the people I DO choose to be in close relationship with. The more I love and know my people, the more I see the landscape of their universes. And the more they see mine. It’s a scary thing to be known and loved and possibly rejected. Yet we try, because loving connection is one of the most fundamental human needs.

When I’m witnessing my boo in dysregulation, I see her inner child. I can SEE her. When the inner child makes her way out, I see the baby hairs and the bangs. I see the dark watery eyes. I want to scoop her in my arms and hold her. Tell her I’m here and everything will be ok. Give her sweet kisses on the cheek and ask her if she wants to play a game.

Sometimes I see her inner teen. I see the rage against injustice and wanting autonomy. I see the platform boots and torn black tees. I see through the stomping and can recognize her deep longing for tenderness and respect. I want to say F**K THIS S**T! Go slash those tires and burn the house down while you’re at it.

But I can’t and I shouldn’t.

I know what it’s like to want someone to come into my life and say, “I got it from here. All your healing. Just give it to me. You’re finally safe, and I’ll never leave.” That was a fantasy I was fed since I was a little girl about my future husband. EW. THE PROPOGANDA!!!

Even though I know that’s unrealistic from anyone, there’s truth that we actually do heal through relationships. The key is how we do it. It’s not fair to hand over my triggers and trauma over to someone and say, “LOVE ME FOREVER” without self-accountability. No one owes me unconditional love, but my parents and myself. Actually someone saying they unconditionally love me is a red flag…please have some boundaries.

So when I see my boo’s younger selves, I’m invited to ask myself: how can I love her - the present adult version of her - so that she can reparent her inner children well? My role is to support her to show up for the inner children by making mature adult decisions…not from reactivity of the younger parts. Reparenting means giving our inner children stability in the present and love while acknowledging their big feelings. It means respecting their boundaries and building trust.

Ultimately, my inclination of wanting to reparent other people’s inner children comes from conditioning and is also a mirror to myself.

It pulls me to ask myself: you care so much about other people’s inner children…what about your own? How have you let your younger parts run the show? How attuned are you to them?

It’s so much easier to see someone else’s universe and be like: I can solve all of your problems if you just do xyz. Haha! I love the audacity!

It’s so much harder to look within myself and hold myself accountable. Recently, I feel a bit neglectful of my inner children. I’ve been lethargic in my bed a lot…very reminiscent of depressive episodes my mom had when she was my age.

From just a couple of bits of what I know about my mom, it makes perfect sense how she behaved and coped. AND it was still wrong to treat children like she did. I can hold the complexity of her universe and feel compassion and condemn abuse.

Not all hurt people hurt people. Just because we are all traumatized doesn’t mean that we have the right to traumatize and abuse.

What does Liberatory Imagination spark in me today?

Deep honesty with ourselves. How can we build and invest in a liberated world if we don’t know our own internal landscape - our own universe? If we don’t heal intentionally and do the hard painful work it takes to deepen our love, how can we expect it to work out when our universes collide with other universes? Let me tell you, it doesn’t work! It might work short-term, but actually building people power takes interpersonal maturity and self-accountability. Without this, it’s just liberatory fantasy…a fictional image without any chance to

become reality.

How to support me (thank you in advance):

* Buy me a cup of coffee. Every bit counts! You can venmo me at @tiffanywongart with note “From substack!”

* Subscribe for free (all my posts will be available to the public), but set up a monthly or annual recurring payment with me directly on venmo - @tiffanywongart. Attach the note “Recurring substack subscription.”

LIBERATORY IMAGINATION is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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12.5.24 Journal entry

“I feel the lowest I have since starting my SSRI. It’s freaking me out. I feel so lost. I’m afraid of losing my resiliency, my boo, my sense of self and drive, my purpose. I feel like I’m just here floating. I hate it. I’m so lucky to have everything I need and more, but I’m struggling. Struggling.

My spiritual spark is gone. I don’t recognize myself anymore and I can’t believe it’s come to this place. I feel like people are just moving on and achieving things and I’m left behind.”

I felt this nagging in my spirit, and it didn’t make sense until I pulled out my journal from a year ago. It’s boring how we all say our bodies remember, but it suuuure does. At this point, it barely feels consensual! Every f*****g month my body remembers a trauma from 1, 2, 3, 5, 35 years ago. God damn being alive is exhausting.

As I read my journal entries from last december, my body involuntarily ached right behind my sternum and a sob rose up. I forgot. I forgot how deep in the grief and sadness hole I was. I forgot what it was like to look in the mirror and see a shell of a person. Not one ounce of motivation within a 100 mile radius.

Witnessing genocide in Palestine broke me in ways I had no idea were possible. The documentary-worthy betrayal and violation that my ex committed against me…who even knows how it has changed my DNA. It baffled me that anyone was able to get up in the morning and do work and take care of kids and have fun.

I surrendered to the waves washing me further into the sea. That was the only thing that made sense.

Underneath it all, I remember so vividly that I knew for sure that things would change. I knew change was constant. I couldn’t feel it, but I knew my purpose here on earth in this lifetime. I knew the cold fact that I (and I believe all of us) have the responsibility to do our part in demanding the dignity of all humans, where no one is left behind. While I was drowning, I knew where the water would lead me.

I’m about 2 or 3 here in this photo. The feeling of excitement at that age is like champagne bubbles traveling up to the surface so fast the container might not even make it in one piece! All I can do is jump up and down flapping my hands.

“I don’t remember the last time I was excited,” my mom said this right before a family trip, and it has crystallized into a core memory.

As a young kid, I learned that paying the cost of excitement towards something I was looking forward was too costly. Like clockwork, important dates like birthdays, holidays, and trips were high risk days. I could almost predict that something would set off my mom, and things would be canceled. Even if things weren’t canceled, the tone of the day was probably tense. In the miracle chance things weren’t canceled and she was in a good mood, I would hold a tense smile braced from it all falling to s**t at any moment.

Every day was a negotiation, a bartering, a betting if it was worth feeling excited about.

Being braced and then bored that things didn’t work out has been seared into my body. Every time the other shoe drops, it deepens the track.

Fast forward to now, my body remembers and is braced.

For the past 15 years, I’ve been slowly working on healing my nervous system to be open to the possibility that things could actually work out. I could actually experience safety within myself and in relationships.

Slowly working on my capacity to receive true care and love. Slowly working on showing up for myself first. Slowly working on separating things not working out from it being some kind of punishment.

Talking about punishment, one way christianity has really fucked with me is carrying the weight that everything bad that happens to me is some kind of lesson from the heavens. Somehow, if I were more obedient to God or more faithful to the bible, things would work out more often. That’s such a sad and twisted way to see things, being that the people don’t choose to be poor, unhoused, or have their land colonized. God is so much more expansive than being a bully waiting to teach me a lesson.

Sometimes after enjoying a few days with my boo, I look around as we are dozing off…astonished and terrified that things are working out. It’s a miracle. I mean, it is a miracle our souls found each other, but the fact that we both have chosen each other out of love for ourselves threatens so much of my wiring.

It’s an offront to my baby-me assumption that nothing is worth being excited for.

It’s offensive to this deep body wiring that I have rooted and safe friendships where I feel seen and known.

It erodes the assumption that being bored of things not working out is better than hoping.

My besties, my boo and I try to get out of town a few times a year, and EVERY TIME there’s a part of me that freezes. My inner child is like “you won’t get me this time…it won’t work out and I’m already over it.” And then when we are almost home after a cute time away…I’m confronted with how it turned out exactly how I dreamed. The first time, and then the second…the third time too.

This kind of love and connection with soul-aligned people stretches my imagination of what is possible.

When they say love heals, I had no idea how treacherous it would feel. The battles that I had and have to fight in order to feel at home and at ease in my body are dramatic…like a sword fight where you gasp at every movement because you can’t tell who will win. And sometimes I lose to the fear and the potential loss. But sometimes I win and I get the satisfaction of feeling settled in my body even if it’s for 30 mins.

I have been fighting for my life in order to feel safe within myself…let alone in the company of other people. What a wonder.

Free falling last year into not knowing when things will change was healing. I let things fade away trusting that change is constant. I let go of trying to smile my way through the crumbling. I let go of trying to hold onto the semblance of myself. In turn, I squeezed out of that version of me and revealed a translucent skin me that is more vulnerable to different possibilities. Things haven’t all worked out and they will continue to defy my wishes, but all I know is that it won’t be every time.

The next time I’m called to fall back into the water, I’m going to surrender quicker.

Not out of doom, but out of deep trust.

What does Liberatory Imagination spark in me today?

I wrote this in my substack “Today my Body Remembers,”

A future where we can be soft puddles. Where tenderness is abundant and afforded to everyone. Where vulnerability is respected and honored. Where ingenuity and creativity aren’t spent on how to survive, but on art. Where a leisurely pace is just the default. Where communion with the land is a common delight.

Yes! And where being braced converts to being alert for more possibilities.

One thing I have learned is that our nervous system reads stimuli in a very unbiased way, whether it is dangerous or not. The stress of running away from danger and the stress of running for fun read similarly to our bodies. The stress of confronting someone is similar to the stress of flirting with a crush.

Liberatory imagination sparks in me the ability to discover more possibilities. I don’t need to deny my body, my lived experience, or my defense mechanisms. I just need to get rooted in who I am and what life is about, and jump off tracks I’ve grown out of.

How to support me (thank you in advance):

* Buy me a cup of coffee. Every bit counts! You can venmo me at @tiffanywongart with note “From substack!”

* Subscribe for free (all my posts will be available to the public), but set up a monthly or annual recurring payment with me directly on venmo - @tiffanywongart. Attach the note “Recurring substack subscription.”

LIBERATORY IMAGINATION is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.