My only ambition is to be strange and alive

On letting go and letting be

Penda’s Fen (1974) dir. Alan Clarke

“What is one thing you want to accomplish this year?”

I was standing naked in a circle of a dozen other naked people, facing a wider circle of even more naked people. It was the final day of Bodyfest, a weekend of mind/body/spirit activities and workshops at a naturist/nudist park. After two days of yoga, breathwork, guided meditations, life drawing, volleyball, Wiccan circles and a naked dance party with glow-in-the-dark body paint, we had one of our final sessions – Naked Soul Circle, a “relationship discovery circle” led by an intimacy coach and energy healer. Those of us who identified as followers made an outward-facing circle and those of us who felt more aligned as leaders made a wider circle surrounding them. We faced a partner, were given a conversation prompt, and after thirty seconds to a few minutes, the inner circle shifted to face another partner. We were asked to share things like how we nurture ourselves, where in our body we feel joy and shame, and more vulnerable prompts like, “What is something you don’t want this person to know about you?” When asked to share what I want to accomplish this year, I froze. Not because I didn’t know, but because my immediate, habitual answer to that didn’t feel right. “I want to finish the novel I’ve been working on for six years,” I wanted to say. But I realized that I don’t actually want to finish it. I don’t care. I’m not writing to finish something, I’m writing to write something. I don’t want to “accomplish” writing, I want to be writing. Be creating. Be-ing.

“I want to connect with my power,” I ended up saying.

One of the few moments I had my phone with me during Bodyfest

All my life, creativity has been tied to accomplishments, ambitions and goals. Early on in my graphic design career, a handful of projects I had been a key part of won some regional awards. None came with a pay increase or even an internal feeling of accomplishment. Hard work only begot more hard work. More sacrifice, more burnout, more dissociation. Eventually it all just stalled, stagnated. I looked to writing instead, immersing myself in worlds I had created myself, putting relationships that existed only in my mind above real-world ones. The cycle went on: sacrifice, burnout, dissociation. Only this time without my name being printed on something (“…yet,” I kept telling myself). I kept chasing it, convinced it would all be worth it. I didn’t need to be present now, I could be present in the future. I didn’t need to be a body now, I could be a body then.

It seeped into the few personal connections I could maintain as well. Friendships orbited around creative project goals: launch a podcast, quit our jobs, launch another one. Romantic relationships fell prey to the Relationship Escalator: move in together, get married, buy a house, buy another one. Unable to look anywhere but forward, I lost touch with the ground beneath my feet. Cue global pandemic and a forced slowdown, instead of waiting for my toes to feel it, the ground rose up to smack me in the face.

There’s one thing that the AI adherents fundamentally misunderstand about art and creativity. It’s not impressive to me that an algorithm can write a poem or paint a picture. A static finished product is so fucking boring. The value of creation isn’t in the end result, but in the process. And afterwards, what it inspires. Art is barely even about expressing who you are. It’s discovering who you are becoming. Creation changes you. Creation is change. Whether you are personally invested in the process or engaging with someone else’s creation, you will change. I am not the same person I was when I started my novel. I am not the same person I was before I first watched The Shining. I’m barely even the same person I was a week ago.

How could an algorithm understand that? How could capitalism ever value the process, the beingness of anything? This is the same economic system that values a tree only when it’s dead. I don’t want to be cut down and sanded, conformed to someone else’s vision to help drive another percentage of profit. I want to grow in community and beauty, as long and high and strange as I can until it’s time to be re-absorbed into the soil I sprouted from to feed and inspire the next generation. I can’t finish my novel when all I want is to finish it. I can’t love someone when all I want is to be in love with them. I can’t be when all I want is to do.

Doing is extractive. It’s drilling into finite resources for temporary gain. We burn out as the forests do. Capitalism is an inability to be—to sit with yourself, with your community and to be content; to be here, be now. Surpluses aren’t natural. Profit is a mythical motive. Nothing else in nature is in such relentless pursuit. Nothing is so alienated from itself.

I’m burned out of my graphic design “career” for different reasons now. What is the purpose of this brand strategy beyond higher quarterly profits? Why am I making logos and stressing over fonts while the ocean is boiling and people are being burned by pavement? Likewise with my novel: how less hospitable will the world be when I finally finish it, and what place will it have in it? What use do climate refugees have for fantasy novels?

I don’t have answers for these questions. I don’t think there are any. The reality—and cruelty—of this destructive economic system is that I have to participate in it in order to survive. But I don’t have to internalize and embody it. I recognized that my obsession over finishing my novel was the same obsession capitalism has with profit—there was no actual depth beyond simply achieving something in order to achieve the next thing. Like capitalism, I couldn’t value the process of creating.

Abolitionists talk about prison abolition not being a destination, but a process—a continual (re)imagining of a world without the need for prisons. “It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,” Mark Fisher writes in Capitalist Realism. It’s not easy to imagine this world. It takes effort and creativity. Hope, too, doesn’t come easy. “Hope is a discipline,” writes abolitionist Mariame Kaba. It’s something we need to practice.

Writing can be hope. Creating can be hope. Queerness and transness is hope. I’m embodying the imagined reality outside of the restrictive scripts I was born into. And it’s work. It’s discipline. It’s doing—but in the purpose of being. And it works! It’s proof that better things are possible.

I’m done with dissociating. I’m over numbing myself. I want to connect with my power.

I was thinking about my intuition when I said that. All those dissociative years, my body was screaming for help. It knew what it needed. My body, my gut has never steered me wrong—the only crashes and detours were from me ignoring it. But now I’m thinking my “power” is also my ability to be. My existence as a continual act of creation. My strangeness. My aliveness. Writing, designing—these are acts of communication and creativity. I’m not going to let capitalism’s grind culture and profit motive steal those gifts from me. I’m not going to let it stifle my imagination and hope.

A week before Bodyfest, at the same naturist park

Something embarrassingly obvious occurred to me recently: life is allowed to be simple and life is allowed to be strange. For both many reasons and also no reason at all, I was in a low mental health period for a few weeks in July. I noticed that two of my happiest days were spent writing and at the naturist park reading, relaxing, swimming, chatting and reading tarot. That’s what I want to be doing with my life—creating for the sake of creating and being naked outside, connecting with the earth, magic and likeminded people. I enjoyed that writing day because it was fun—dreaming up characters and worlds and watching them interact. It doesn’t matter if no one else reads it, I read it and I enjoyed it. Isn’t that enough? At the naturist park I found that none of the things I had been stressing over felt that important. All that mattered was being connected and enchanted. Embodying my creativity, my power. Finding and creating meaning and continuously becoming myself.

They say your twenties are about discovering who you are but I feel like I always knew. I just spent my twenties wondering if I was wrong. I tried to be anything other than what I was—a trans writer, naturist and mystic. Nothing else I tried on felt comfortable. And no goal or dream was authentic. I thought life had to be cluttered and complex and that I had to be ordinary and digestible. It’s no wonder I was consumed by dissociative goal-chasing.

I can centre my life around a few weird things. I can be simple and strange. I don’t have to chase anything other than more of that. I don’t need to have a dream job—I don’t need to have dreams at all, besides what a more authentic me and what a better world could look like. I have no one to be but myself. I have nowhere to go but where I am.

I have no other ambition than to be strange and alive.

Power doesn’t come from hierarchy or accomplishment—at least not transformative, liberating power. Magic isn’t ability or competence. And meaning isn’t this single, enduring thing. We’re powerful when we’re embodying our own unique beauty, strangeness and aliveness. Our magic is our be-ing. And meaning is how we grow in it all; it’s what we discover at each stage in the process. It’s what and how we change.

None of this is handed to us either. Like imagining a world without prisons, like transition, it’s something we have to continually seek and embody. Feet on the earth, imaginations active. Be-ing isn’t passive. It’s not submissive. It’s fiery, transformative, life-giving motion.

I can’t help but find tree metaphors in everything. Rooted in power, branching and fruiting with magic, and inviting/investing meaning in the way our leaves and roots interact. In the forest there is no goal but to live. And even when that becomes untenable, it’s to die in order to allow more life. Everything is used. Everything is valued. Every being, no matter how strange, has a place.

The next question in the Naked Soul Circle was “What’s something you struggle with?” My answer was putting expectations on myself. I think it’s residue from all that goal-setting. It’s been getting easier to shake off though.

“I think I’m beginning to understand that the quest is the point. Our sense of enchantment is not triggered only by grand things; the sublime is not hiding in distant landscapes. The awe-inspiring, the numinous, is all around us, all the time. It is transformed by our deliberate attention. It becomes valuable when we value it. It becomes meaningful when we invest it with meaning. The magic is of our own conjuring. Hierophany—that revelation of the sacred—is something that we bring to everyday things, rather than something that is given to us. That quality of experience that reveals to us the workings of the world, that comforts and fascinates us, that ushers us towards a greater understanding of the business of being human: it is not in itself rare. What is rare is our will to pursue it. If we wait passively to become enchanted, we could wait a long time.”

– Katherine May, “Enchanted”

I’ve been meaning to share this playlist with every post I’ve written here over the last few months. It’s a collection of songs that have been inspiring embodiment, enchantment and earth connection that I try to update regularly. Enjoy ✨