I feel focused, energized, motivated, and like I’m doing exactly what I’m meant to be doing right now. I think getting laid off last summer has changed my brain more rapidly and in greater magnitude than I can really fully appreciate. I mean, mainly, it’s radicalized me on a personal level.

Going to protests as an undergrad felt very fringe-participatory, like, oh I’ll go or I won’t, I don’t really know what’s going on but also no one does and also we have a computer animation final coming up that I’m going to absolutely bomb.

Then COVID-19 breaking months right after I ended a years long relationship and began my graduate studies woke me up a little, but still in a very liberal mindset. Bang your pots and pans at 7pm for health care workers! Believe science! Fuck Trump! Vote Bernie now more than ever!!!

Then Black Lives Matter movements in summer of 2020, disillusioned with the upcoming election, and for the first time, having my feelings and thoughts have some sort of organization with my one sociology in education class, like yeah this isn’t just some Tumblr University shit. Still no cohesion though, no throughline. Come November, Instagram felt downright silly, like what are we even doing here. That’s not me on IG, that’s not me in that photo, that’s not me even as I was posing for that photo. We are not talking, interacting, communing, teehee-ing on there, we’re not. I fell off and enjoyed it.

I stewed and then enjoyed a single, out-of-body year working remotely for a Canadian company feeling entirely crazy while simultaneously trying to convince myself I was actually so normal and this is fine. That yeah we can start a union charter for tech workers, just me and a comrade I met months ago both in New York working for the same milktoast ass company. I remember telling Fiona, days before, “Dude I wish they’d just lay me off” followed with a ’lol’ or ‘haha’ of some kind to couch my actual full chested desire. And then it actually fucking happened! And it was probably the best thing to have happened to me at the time and I knew it then too. I knew everything would change and be different and I would be okay and tried to internalize it all at once.

It took a session talking to a career coach, Prapthi’s old co-worker, to admit that I wanted a low stakes job. Now that I have one, despite commuting 45 minutes twice a day, five days a week, working 8 hours at the office, I feel like I have more time than ever. For myself to rest, exercise, think, plan, learn, organize with my community, spend time with loved ones, do the things I want to do. (I could absolutely not do this while I was working remotely full time. I was terrified of taking a break to go on a walk because … because I don’t even know why anymore, but the terror of not coming across like I was hard working enough was petrifying.)

I cannot imagine sitting on my chair, frozen and unable to just fucking skip work to protest for Gaza or not staying a few hours longer at the pantry. I could barely show up for myself.

My desire for action, for change still feels disorganized but there’s some direction. A personal desire for self-possession, agency, and liberation. And an extension, bidirectional, for the self-possession, agency, and liberation for all.