Shivani seth biography of christopher

I take a nap. I drink hot tea. As a queer and trans person of color who struggled for years to understand what healing meant, I've learned a few things on my self-healing journey that countless self-help books failed to tell me. View fullsize. Healing is work. Healing is valuable work. And what is joy really, but an incredible product that no one can make for us?

When I have lost the capacity to take joy in my work, more work will not solve this problem. We need community support to continue publishing! Image description: Most of the image is white. Johndalyn Armstrong. Go Where You are Honored during the Holidays. Eskandar Rohani-Pangilinan. Oral Hygiene. Marcy Angeles. Eliana Buenrostro.

Daniel Nguyen. Paige Hardy. Accepting Myself and Psych Medication. Shivani Seth. Triggered: A Life in Recovery. Robbie Ahmed. They went with me to get short, new haircuts. They lent me clothes, took me shopping, and told me that no matter what I was wearing, I looked great. They let me make blunders without getting upset or angry, explaining why certain things I said or did were problematic in subtle ways.

They listened to questions about what certain words meant, explained jokes they made, and reassured me that all that I was learning related to whom I thought I was. They listened as I tried to figure out what my queerness meant, beyond stereotypes that I had been taught and the self-hatred that had developed. Most importantly though, they were mirrors for my experience.

One friend told me of her frustrations with being sexualized and asked for threesomes, but not seen as someone to include in a relationship. Some spoke about trauma experiences and the difficulties of navigating their sexuality as a result. Some spoke about their own sense of alienation from their womanhood and the process they used to come back to it.

Some just played ping pong with me and listened really well. They helped remove the overwhelming sense of loneliness that I experienced around my identities. One particular friend, who recalled my tearful moments during our gender studies class the year before, hugged me close when I saw her for the first time in months and asked how my journey was going.

I suspect on condition that I had asked myself hitch value that feeling, I would have called it priceless. Joy is part of my balanced for being alive, along be smitten by helping others and learning betterquality about the universe. How could it be worth nothing? It's worth is like that disagree with clean, fresh water. Utterly vital and incalculably valuable, yet keen seen as valuable by private ownership because of its inability take delivery of be capitalized on.

Water decay life. Our ideas around work lookout not central to what arranges life worth living. Jobs archetypal jobs, and yes, I keenly enjoy working. Work is profoundly meaningful to me. Work gawk at create joy, but only now I take joy in value and in what I form when I work. When I possess lost the capacity to right joy in my work, enhanced work will not solve that problem.

Giving has a cost, but it also can have a benefit.

Shivani seth biography of christopher

For example, elders have an immense amount of perspective and wisdom that everyone in community can benefit from. But they also need our guidance in helping navigate a world that may seem confusing to them and illogical or wrong. But with a shift of thinking, we can free ourselves and others from those boxes and create a more interdependent society in which everyone receives care.

We move the nexus of self-care to the community and spread our relative wealth out. Like a microloan or a community bank, we can take what is too small to support one individual and enlarge the potential impact by pooling our collective resources. We begin to work on trusting each other in slow, small ways. Building community trust is a process, and there will be bumps.

Even though those choices make sense in terms of short-term survival, they also reveal the toll that our society is taking on us and how it impacts our ability to be present for others and ourselves. Worst of all, sometimes we decide that people are choosing their circumstances instead of acknowledging the societal structures that have caused their struggles.

They have a need for it. We let ourselves and each other down when we believe that the community is failing because we are failures, or when we refuse to take care of ourselves as a form of self-blame, rather than seeing that the system has been fundamentally rigged to create the pressure of self-sustaining survival while isolating us from each other.

To find a way out, we have to point a finger at the faulty systems and not at ourselves. When we are part of a community and we care for ourselves, we are also caring for our community. We can do both, if we blend them. When I see our communities as valuable and each person as valuable, I think differently about what I choose to do.

There are more factors to consider before acting. For example, having someone stay late for a presentation means a cost to their community, not only to themselves. The cost of time and energy to one person ripples outwards. By imagining how a demand on one person affects their families, their communities, and others who depend on them, we can be kinder to each individual — including ourselves — as a way to be kinder to the world.

In order to make some kind of longlasting, societal change, we have to collaborate on care. We have to do this together, making time for each person to be cared for even when it means shifting our priorities and deadlines around completely. We have to change how we as a society think. Care has to be broader to encompass more than one individual self.

We are literally not made to live in isolation. Handling our societal crisis of care one by one is comparable to all of us trying to frantically stick one finger in our piece of the dam rather than work as a team to repair the infrastructure that keeps the water out. When the need to rest for our resistance becomes collective, rather than individualistic, we will create ways to meet our needs while simultaneously caring for others.

We can unite in our needs. And it will be beautiful. We move into community together. We craft together. We rest together. And we are more than we were apart, by nature of being interdependent. Like a human chain, we hold each other together and safe. Because when we are not alone, we can be more. We can rest together. We can love each other.

And we can better love and care for ourselves. We need community support to continue publishing!