Podcrushed - ALOK

Episode Date: July 26, 2023

ALOK (author, poet, comedian) wows the Podcrushed gang with their deep insights into human nature, connection, friendship, and identity. They share stories of self-discovery  and acceptance, healing and growing with compassion — all with their trademark blend of wry humor and deep wisdom. Follow Podcrushed on socials:InstagramTikTokTwitterSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

who taught you that you can only be joyous on vacation who taught you that you had to die in order to enter heaven and that it couldn't be here now these are all lessons you knew deeply and somatically when you were a child but you lost them and why did you lose them because of their fundamental challenge to the status quo it's a political process maturity because what maturity requires us to become is machinery and what a machine lacks as a soul and so much of what I'm trying to do in my life is to live soul first. Welcome to Pod Crushed. We're hosts. I'm Penn. I'm Nava and I'm Sophie. And I think we would have been your middle school besties.

Which means we're just waiting to sell you drugs. So stupid. We're not going to use that one. So earlier today, right before I came in to set up for the podcast, I went to Sight Glass, a nice little coffee shop near the Sirius XM office, and ordered a coffee, was waiting for. for the coffee and this girl kept staring at me and I was like it's finally gonna happen can get recognized all the time so he's been recognized a few times I was not recognized at our launch party

people were asking me for like directions into the party and I got like a DM after like I'm so sorry I didn't recognize you at the party so it's never happened I was like this girl finally recognized me so I'm like waiting for her to you know I'm like smiling at her like you can approach the water's warm and then she finally does approach me yeah yeah she approaches me she smiles and she's like are you waiting for something and I was like yeah I'm waiting for my drink she's like you're on the wrong side of the coffee shop you have to go over there so I have yet to be recognized

not even once I love that for this podcast that's a funny story I don't love that you've not been well I don't want to like induct you into the hall of fame which is not really a pretty hall but I do love that story I love it too

and I want this to serve as a PSA to anyone who has recognized Nava hasn't gone up to her No no no no no no we have to keep this going as long as possible don't approach Nava any of you listen to don't do it never acknowledge her you know what Navi

you know who would acknowledge you who in the in the in the in that was such an earnest who you're like who someone please who would acknowledge me well I think I'm here guys I think our guests

I mean honestly there's there's something about that word acknowledgement I feel like our guest comes with a lot of some sort of some sort of power to acknowledge others

we have aloke who is an activist an artist a scholar a comedian a writer exploring themes like gender race belonging trauma healing they're also the best-selling author of beyond the gender binary and poetry collections called feminine public and your wound my garden we had a really deep far-reaching conversation today with alok you will definitely want to stick around for this one Does anyone else ever get that nagging feeling that their dog might be bored? And do you also feel like super guilty about it? Well, one way that I combat that feeling is by making meal time, everything it can be for my little boy, Louis. Nom Nom does this with food that actually engages your pup senses with a mix of tantalizing smells, textures, and ingredients. Nom Nom offers six recipes bursting with premium proteins, vibrant,

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Keep mealtime exciting with nom-num, available at your local pet smart store or at Chewy. Learn more at trynom.com slash podcrush spelled try-n-o-m.com slash podcrushed. A 15-year-old girl who chewed through a rope to escape a serial killer. I used my front teeth to saw on the rope in my mouth. He's been convicted of murdering two young women, but suspected of many more. Maybe there's another one in that area. And now, new leads that could solve these cold cases. They could be a victim that we have no idea he killed.

Stolen voices of Dull Valley, breaks the silence on August 19th. Follow us now so you don't miss an episode. Here we use a very potent and sensitive time of life, which we can call coming of age. We call it adolescence in America. It's a time you spend in middle school. It continues into high school,

but there's something really special, particularly 12 to 15. You talk about the influence that trauma has, not just done your early life, but essentially everyone's early life, culturally and privately, and how that prevents us essentially from being who we are and from loving presently. And that's, I mean, again, that couldn't resonate more. Acknowledging that particularly as you are, gender non-conforming, and growing up as you did, you know, you've spoken directly about the pain that you, that characterizes youth.

we talk about that here a lot too because we know we'll go so in depth with that and you always speak so eloquently and everything I've ever seen and written eloquently you're just not seen all the shit stuff I guess well I couldn't get to everything you know we know we're going to go there so I want to remind myself as much that I'm also really interested in these glimpses of

of joy and encouragement and hope that you that you must have yeah because of how I think I mean, I think what you speak about more than anything is love and is ultimately something that I would characterize as hope. I don't know that you would, but... So, you know, great. So we'll toggle between these things, you know. But let's start with you at 12.

What was 12-year-old Alok dreaming about? What was 12-year-old al-lok passionate about? So when I first got the invitation to be on this podcast, I had an existential crisis because I didn't remember what I was going through when I was 12. Right, okay. A byproduct of a lot of the trauma I grew up with

is that I just have very few memories. There are like a couple of stories that I tell over and over again to prove that I was alive at that period in my life, but I largely feel dissociated from it still. Like when people tell me things, it's so distant to me. So I use it as an opportunity to text my friends from middle school and ask them, like,

what do you remember about me? and have conversations before this one and that was so emotional because I started to remember all these small things about myself like I came up with a language called Borwani which is rainbow rearranged because I wanted to create an inclusive dialect that included all people when I was 12

and was the rainbow at that point connected to no it had no connotation at all to BTQ stuff whatsoever I once my friend threw a rock at me jokingly and I gave him a lecture on pacifism and my friends reminded me that I started a process of applying to be a conscientious objector

because I was terrified I'd be recruited into the military and you had to prove that you had a predilection for peace and so I started to write peace poems that I would mail to Congress people and have convenings to talk to people about the power of peace and I was asking them like where did that come from and it came from our favorite fantasy series

called Wheel of Time, which now has an Amazon Prime TV show. But for us, part of the ways that capitalism and education forged to make me smart was we got points if we took tasks on books, and there would be a race track outside of the library with who had the most reading points. And if you made it into the 400 point club, then you could skip a day of school and watch movies at the librarian's house. Wow. and get picked up in a limo before that.

Wow. This does not sound real. That seems totally unnecessary that part. Major. And so I was looking which books had the most points. So I started reading all the Great American Classics because they were long and because they could give me points. And by Great American Classics, I mean Robert Jordan's fantasy series, The Wheel of Time.

And in The Wheel of Time, there's a group of people called the Tinkers, which are obviously modeled off of Roma people. And the Tinkers practice something called the Way of the Leaf, which is when a leaf falls from a tree it doesn't resist it just falls gracefully and that the people who do violence to you are the people who are doing violence to themselves and so much of my initial pacifism

is thank you to this random fantasy series and so I was just basically hanging out as like a peace activist when I was 12 so it sounds to me like you were getting that you had to be getting that from somewhere at home I mean was there encouragement of that kind at home as much as there might not have been supportive of other kinds?

So much. So my grandfather was a really celebrated novelist and playwright. Okay. And like we're talking about OG artists who used to use a feather quill pen, like dip it into ink and write in mirror handwriting because he was afraid people would read it. Wait, wait, wait. Yeah, what is that?

Yeah, he would write backwards so that no one, if they ever found it could understand or decipher it. Where was this? He would come and visit us in Texas where I grew up, but he was from India. and they would stay with us for months at a time and I remember being told growing up like oh he's in the study he's making art you can't disturb him so from a very young age I understood

that art is a place that we go for ourselves and no one else gets access to it it's sacred my grandmother his wife was a poet and she started painting in her 70s after she developed arthritis she started to take the tools from the kitchen that she was so familiar with coffee grinds spoons

and make these incredibly abstract paintings, she made thousands of them. And I would ask her, what are you doing? And she would say, this is my rage. And she would tell me, like, my entire life, I've been making things for other people, but this is the first time I'm making something for myself. I grew up with an aunt who was the first woman

and the first person of color to lead a gay rights organization in the U.S. Her name was Orrishuvad. She died last year. And so from a very young age, I learned about activism. I learned that there were queer people. I learned that what I was going through,

was a byproduct of where I was that it didn't have to be permanent I grew up around teachers and thinkers so I was shamed often for wanting to go to the mall or like hang out because my family would be like, have you read than New York Times what are your thoughts on this conflict? So I make a lot of sense

but I think the most brave work that I've done is not think it's feel. I grew up in a culture and a people that had an analysis of everything but ourselves. We could comment on everything in the world, dissect it, deconstruct it. But then when it came to our own interpersonal dynamics, our own mental health, our own sense of joy,

that was always abbreviated. Alok, I just want to say the most obvious thing in the world, but I keep thinking it as you're speaking. I'm thinking of this metaphor. You know, obviously to hear that, like, a child at 12 was so invested in peace and writing these letters is surprising. But then when I think of who you are,

it's not surprising at all because the tree is already in the seed. Like, of course, who you are was already there. the whole time. So I've just been like thinking about that. It's like beautiful to see really like the threat of your life and how it's always been there. Okay. It's beautiful in one story. It's really annoying in the other because I spent so much of my life trying to differentiate myself for my family being like I'm totally different. I'm doing my own thing. And then now there's no clarity like death. And when people die, you have to confront truths that you couldn't utter when they were alive. And I think especially when my grandfather died when my aunt died and my

grandmother died in each one of those moments I felt like I can only exist because of you and I wish I could have said that at the time but I was so obsessed with trying to differentiate myself that I couldn't you spoke about your grandparents and their art and how that was it was known as something sacred in your household and I wonder at that point in your life like early on did you already consider yourself an artist did you see yourself as yourself as connected to them in that way so I started writing poetry when I was about 12 or 13 this is the first time I'm coming out on this so I'm really excited so I started an inner name society in sixth grade

inner name yes the most trans thing imaginable where we could name ourselves and I chose the name Larry Peter Manorabi I have no idea so I convinced the entire school to call me Larry and I started to publish on my space anonymous poems under the name of Larry and I didn't understand that there were poems at the time

they were just things that I was journaling about this was the peak emo era where I'd be listening to like senses fail crying in my girlfriend's jeans like in my room just feeling like lonely but not really sure why and so I published these poems like I look in the mirror who am I

who are we you know then other emo kids across the world would be like you're a poet you're better than Shakespeare here, keep it up. And I'd be like, really, me? I'm an artist. And so then I started to submit my poems to middle school and high school poetry

competitions. But the issue is that my genre wasn't really in vogue at the time in the teenage poetry scene where people wanted to hear about grass and sunsets. I was talking about the human condition and suffering. So it was a difficult battle, but I did

have some Barnes & Noble poetry readings in like really awkward polos and chinos that exist somewhere in the ether. Wow. That's amazing. And for those, did you go by Larry? No.

I didn't for those, but online I did. Yeah. And I still have some friends that might use the word Larry for me sometimes. Wow. I also like that you have these relationships of integrity throughout that time, too, which is, you know, I mean, not everybody has that. And I feel like that must speak to something of how, like, intact you are and how, and how, confident I suppose is a bit of a that word has a lot of connotation but you know the

sense of self maybe you have the presence that you have I think Taylor Swift isn't the only one that gets to have eras and I was in my self-hating era for a long time and I used to be very mad at my childhood self for being like

why didn't you tell people what was going on why didn't you know that you were non-binary like just really absurd expectations and now the new era I'm in is trying to think about my to genius, how did you survive? Because I don't think I have the capacity to do that now. And one of the things that I really learned when I was very young

is my relationship with my family of origin and my relationship to normative love are going to be fraught because both of these projects require self-betrayal in order for me to participate in these units. I have to hide certain parts of myself in order to be loved. Friendship is the only place that I have where I get to become myself. And so I started to become a socialite at the age of six.

I was talking to everyone. I was finding ways to bridge differences. One of the memories my friends told me about was in seventh grade English. The girls were on one side of the room, the boys were on the other side of the room, and I went and sat with the girls. And I said, we're all in this together.

I was the connector. And so my entire life, I've really valued the importance of friendship, and I've understood friendship to actually be the highest and most elevated form of romance and that's been the sort of life raft that's kept me afloat so i think it's been interesting because as i speak about my childhood somebody of my friends from my past are like where are we in these stories because the truth is we were defending you even if you didn't know it and defense doesn't

look like saying don't call that person the slur defense also looks like walking down next to the hall with me or creating this space for me to just hang out and play video games. And it was those kind of pre-verbal forms of allyship that I find myself most nostalgic for in this moment, that our points of connection and activation weren't out of a sense of political solidarity, but out of a sense of human solidarity, of we're all in this small town and we're all in it together, of we know each other deeply. I remember when I first started coming out as gay, which is the only word that I had access to, which is really tragic. But I was

16, 17, and I made a list of each one of my friends, and I wanted to have a one and one conversation with each one of them. I've always been very strategic and methodical. And I would plan, like, ideal scenarios. We're getting sonic, and we're having a conversation here. We're taking a walk. We're having it here. And one of my best friends, who was

blonde, blue-eyed, Christian, evangelical, I told him while we were on a walk, and he said to me, if you had told me this a few years ago, I would have cut you out of my life, I think that's wrong, but I've just known you so long. I can't imagine a life without you. And that meant so much to me because that's really what this is all about,

is that actually if we really see each other face to face, if we understand that fundamentally our common unity is in our trauma, our fear, our pain, and our anguish, then all of that political stuff becomes easily understood. You don't even need to understand it's deeply felt. Oh, look, you're saying so many wonderful, wise things. It's, like, hard to know where to go, but I do want to pull on one thread. You talked about friendship as the highest or the most elevated expression of romantic love.

Can you say more? I really want to hear your thoughts on that. Yeah, totally. First of all, I just want to commend you for being on brand right now with throwing thread into this conversation. Yeah, that's right. Because last night, I was thinking of thread puns nonstop because of this latest app. So, kudos to you. Everything that we think is transcendental about romantic love can be available in friendships.

And it's actually quite conservative a project to say, put all of your eggs in one basket, rely on one person to give you that kind of emotional care and proximity. And I know this so profoundly because I watched my aunt a lesbian activist die last year. and on her deathbed were all of her best friends who knew how to speak unflinchingly about death because of AIDS and my mom looked at me and said I made a really bad decision heterosexuality is actually hurting us because we don't know how to create ties like this

because we don't know how to actually talk about illness and pain and debility like this because I'm embarrassed of my aging in a way that she wasn't when she had so many sores in her mouth and her face was so gone, people still called her beautiful and gorgeous and sexy and danced with her. And I've seen so many examples in my life

of how friendship actually allows us to practice how to learn how to be lovable. Because I think that was the most radical thing I've ever done. Every single thing I was taught was to minimize myself, invisibilize myself, disappear, quiver. and then I met other queer people who had the audacity to love me

and to give me permission to love myself and I think that what we do in a culture of romantic supremacy is we put that sort of like temporary high that deep ritualized elegance put into all of our pop songs and movies on this plane like it's some sort of zenith of being But when I think about the most romantic scene, it's me and all of my friends at dinner. It's being able to unfurl.

It's being able to be loved for my contradiction, not despite it. And so what friendship has continually clarified for me is that I get to change. And when it comes to my family, I'm always going to be their child. When it comes to romantic partner, I'm always going to be the romantic partner. But what's interesting about friendship is the elasticity, the ability to shift. over lifetimes and generations. I've always said that I find that it's really an issue in this culture that we don't have a day to commemorate the power and potency of friendship.

In Finland, I believe, that there's actually a friendship day. And I want us to start glorifying friendship, actually telling the stories of who helped us get through our breakups, who cared for us, how do we live today, and how is that the byproduct of the people who loved us? I love what you're saying about friendship particularly because what it highlights is

so much of what you're talking about so much of what everyone's talking about culturally now rightfully so is like is masculinity I'm not going to call it toxic masculinity because we've used that word so much that I sometimes think it's been siphoned of its meaning but it seems to me that one of the things that makes masculinity so toxic

is that one of its traits is to not have this this form of friendship that you're describing which I know by its absence in my life throughout much of it, you know what I mean? Like something that marked my youth was not having these sorts of relationships you're describing. And I guess I wonder, was there ever a point, was there ever a point when you felt alone? Or have you always had these kinds of friendships? Reality is composed of the stories that we tell about it. I'm a big believer that what we pay attention to

comes to constitute what we think of as truth So in one story I could tell you That I've always had this perverse sense That no one in the world would understand me That I'm some freak of nature The earliest memories actually that I have Are telling my parents What if I was born a duck or a goose or an alien

What if I was born in a different planet? I don't belong here The dysphoria was not just about gender it was about humanity. I didn't understand why people were so obsessed with what I saw to be foolish pursuits like power.

I knew from the get-go what we were all searching for was vulnerability and was truth. I knew that razor sharp. So I could tell that story but I'm no longer because I'm in my

I was a child of genius era. What do you think vulnerability looked and felt like to you at that age? Because that's, you know, that concept is like kind of massive. I'm just curious.

What, you know, like what would be a snapshot of that. It looked like what I was practicing, which was when I was angry, I let people know it. When I was sad, I let people know it. I didn't choreograph myself into making other people more comfortable. I just was. The main mode of being was being, not doing. It was existing in my unruly raucousness. And that's why I think that that term maturity is a weapon in our culture. Because actually we have so much to learn from young people who teach us that maturity shouldn't actually be sundering ourselves from what we feel.

Maturity is actually being able to express it. Totally. And that expression becomes the pathway to connection and intimacy. So instead of telling that story of aloneness, what I actually tell the story of, and then I found ways to communicate, I am alone. And then through my art, I found other people who felt the deepest hesitations, ambivalences, and insecurities that I did. What did it mean for me to be a precocious 12-year-old?

Actually, coming up with the name Larry, publishing my poems to find connection and then random people across the world saying I'm lonely too and then I realize the secret is that we can be lonely together and that the things that we feel most debased and embarrassed about

other people feel debased and embarrassed about so therefore we win and I learned very early on that art is urgent because it's actually the only way to get people to suspend the fatigue of the visual looking at one another and saying, oh, we're not the same,

to actually speak a common vernacular, which is we are the same. We have the same fundamental wound, which is we were born beautiful and then came shame. Stick around. We'll be right back. All right, so let's just real talk, as they say, for a second. That's a little bit of an aged thing to say now.

That dates me, doesn't it? But no, real talk. How important is your health to you? You know, on like a one to ten? And I don't mean in the sense of vanity, I mean in the sense of like you want your day to go well, right? You want to be less stressed. You don't want to get sick. When you have responsibilities, I know myself, I'm a householder.

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at the best price. Hello, you just talked about creating art, putting it on the internet, and then finding community that way. And that I've been wondering, did you feel there was a separation between that community and the community? It sounds like you really had at school, too, and in your real life, not real life. The internet is also your real life. But was there a disconnect or was there some crossover between the? those two worlds? That's a really great question.

And this is something I've been really trying to unpack with my middle school friendship cohort, because in some ways, I actually felt closer to random people I was talking to online than them because there wasn't the same pressure of having to see them. I could choose opt in and opt out. So I actually first started to talk to people about questioning my gender and sexuality who I'd never met before, before I even clued in with my friends. And they were the people who I was practicing. with being like, okay, I'm thinking about telling my friend, do you think I can do it,

I'm in a report back. And those relationships were actually so sustaining to me that I think it was maybe eighth or ninth grade. My Zanga site got taken down. And I remember feeling so sad. And going to school and trying to explain to my friends, it was called Waste of Paint Productions, named after a bright eye song called Waste of Paint. And I remember going and telling my friends, like, waste of paint was taken. They're like, oh, you spend so much time doing that, because I used to do graphic design too. Why was it taken down?

Was Zanga down? Okay, so I'm really going back to all the millennials listening. You're going to really remember this. Yes. So back in the era, I was internet famous from the age of 13, which makes me make a lot of sense, just under the name Larry. And back in the Zanga in MySpace days,

you would do these things where you would be on something called whore trains, which is really horphobic and slapphobic language, where all the scene kids would basically post a status with each other's things, being like, follow my friend so-and-so. And that was technically against the policies of these websites. So it's always a looming threat. You'd always have your backup account in case you were going to be come for. And remember, I grew up in an Indian household where my parents didn't allow me to post any photos of myself online.

And your grandfather wrote backwards, just in case anybody might read. So we just literally were super anti-surveillance before that was she. Like, nobody, my skepticism of surveillance dates came from my mom being like, why are they asking that information on that form? Like, every form we were given from schools, like, let's just try to fill in the least amount of information possible. But so I wasn't putting photos of myself. I was putting something, I think, more honest, my feelings and my truths, and then that was taken. And I had to start and build back. And I remember communicating my friends, and they didn't understand it.

I remember communicating to the world, they didn't understand it. And now when I look back, it's like the reason it is. hit me so much was that I didn't have to compartmentalize myself when I was online. And I think that that's such a trans experience of why avatars and video games are so helpful for so many of us because there are actually places that we can be more free than our own lives. You say so much all at once, which is an impressive trait. And an obnoxious one, please. Yeah, both be true. We're non-binary here going, okay? I do love what you said earlier. about you're not sure that you could endure now what you endure it as a youth i mean i think

everything you say feels to me universally applicable and i it my understanding of what you say about the non-binary the trans experience the queer experience you seem to get to that place where it's true of all people yeah i think it like welds something new and kind of like creates bonds between people there's there's great potential there and so that's what you do. But then this thing about youth being almost so hard that adults can't endure it. I just love this idea that what we're going through then is so hard that we couldn't do it. Maybe it's just we couldn't do it twice, you know? So here's the secret, right? Oftentimes when I'm on podcast interviews like this, when I'm navigating public culture, people will operate from the misconception

that I lack power and privilege. And I want to recalibrate to say the ultimate power in the world is authenticity and the ultimate privilege in the world is love. So in fact, I'm more privileged and more powerful than many people who would think that they are powerful and privileged. And true power doesn't require having to prove it. It's just about being.

Actually, the people that we often call powerful are the most profoundly insecure people. and they're telling on themselves constantly because if you truly believed the thing that you believed living it would be enough but the proselytizing of it the insistence on policing it the proliferation of over 500 laws

to jurisdict the boundaries of the gender binary are already revealing the bluff it's all made up so you're saying that it's biological as you have to pass laws to prove that it is which suggests in fact that it's not And so the truth is, if we live our lives recognizing that the goal is not conventional success, because that's another name for loneliness, but the goal is actually presence, that fundamentally reshifts our ideas of what maturity are.

I was present in myself when I was younger. I genuinely was there. I wasn't a character. I wasn't a fictional story. I wasn't a projection. I wasn't what other people wanted me to be. I was the meest me. and then I got disciplined

not just into gender but into human, into adult here's how you go, here are your conventions. It's very shocking to me that people look at me and they say like oh you're power clashing you're wearing all these things that aren't supposed to go together and I'm like

who taught you that but let's extrapolate that larger who taught you that you can only be joyous on vacation who taught you that you had to die in order to enter heaven and that it couldn't be here now. These are all lessons you knew deeply and somatically when you were a child, but you lost them, and why did you lose them

because of their fundamental challenge to the status quo? It's a political process maturity, because what maturity requires us to become is machinery, and what a machine lacks as a soul, and so much of what I'm trying to do in my life is to live soul first, and to live soul first is to resist the temptation that is constantly being promised to us, that being understood will somehow confer stability.

that's not where we get stability stability only can come from the unknown and I think children actually demonstrate a capacity to be amazed by the unknown and not to need to contain it this obsession we have as adults of saying is that a man or a woman is that good or bad

is this here or there that's actually intellectually underdeveloped what is a true developed advanced way of navigating the world is saying that the world is vast and unknowable and I'm okay with it so what's your relationship to spirituality growing up because what you're saying is as i understand it a profoundly spiritual perspective

it requires i mean that wonder that mystery of the unknown that appreciation of the unknown and then also i would imagine culturally you had a lot going on yeah too so so maybe talk a little bit about that and then also how you experience it now i was raised hindu um but didn't really feel that much affinity there then i became a cynic which i is its own church. Oh, yeah. And I was really invested in the project of evidence and proof, very skeptical. At what age was that?

Maybe when I was in college. I was very invested in empiricism, data, fact-checking, and then I moved to New York, and that's the first time in my life I began to really live fully as myself, publicly, and I began to experience violence like I had never known. had never known. When I was presenting as myself on my college campus, people by and large knew who I was, so it's like, okay, there's a look. But when I'm walking down the street in Brooklyn, and I'm being followed home and someone saying, if you don't take off that dress, I'm going to kill you. You have to start thinking about things differently. And actually, what I found through

my poetic practice, was I began to love the people who were hunting me. And that was so strange. I didn't understand that at first. I thought, that's ridiculous. Why is my poetry saying something very different than what I should be seeing. And so then I kept writing. And then I began to realize that my working definition for art is creating something with my hands

that I don't recognize with my eyes, that I was just a vessel for a deeper truth. And what I began to realize and become astonished by was that the people who were hunting me were also grieving the same thing as me. That actually they had been taught that in order to be a man

and in order to be a woman, they had to kill the me inside of them. And when I'm saying the me inside of them, I'm not just saying gender nonconformity, I'm saying wonder, I'm saying amazement, I'm saying spirit, I'm saying soul, and I began to realize that the true travestity, perhaps like the way of the leaf taught me a full decade before, was that the violence that they were doing to themselves, and that actually I had no choice but to be free, that my job on earth was to be free. And there was no rational framework to understand that. Everyone in my life, by which you mean, my parents, my friends were like, we're worried about your safety. Why would you continue to do this if you're, and I said, you want to know what safety is? Safety is being able to look at myself in the mirror and saying, I love you. Safety is not what other people are saying about me. Safety is self-security and I refuse to sacrifice that.

And so I'd go outside and I'd go outside and I experienced abuse and violence and vitriol. And I'd post photos online and experience abuse, violence, and vitriol. And every single day, I felt the temptation. to make myself smaller, and there were some days I did. And then I began to realize the only vocabulary for this is found within spiritual traditions. That's the only place where this makes sense. Because in spiritual traditions, it's not about making sense.

It's about making sensation. It's actually about going beyond the realm of what we can comprehend. And it's actually about recognizing that there's a basic spiritual solidarity that we all have with people before any of this stuff. And so then I began to immerse myself in Christian mysticism and Buddhism and so many different traditions. And this is now 20s?

Maybe 20s. But I think it really crystallized for me, maybe in the past five years. And I began to realize, wait, the true transition that I'm asking the entire world to do is not gender. That's the precipice. It's from the false self that's created as a way to please the world towards the true self. And as Thomas Burton teaches us, we're all haunted by the false shadow of ourself, right? What did he write again? He wrote seeds of contemplation.

he is a Catholic mystic and from him I learned a lot about how to speak about this is universal to your point because I think the way that social justice really taught me was I'm speaking about a particular nexus here of gender, race, sexuality

and that's not ambitious enough what we need to really think about is what is morally bankrupt and corrupt in the psyche of straightness of whiteness of cisness to be okay with violence that suggests that there's something not right there. So we are destined to lose if the political program is supporting me and not

actually asking the majority of the world, why do you believe that you're worth misery? Why are you so afraid of your own freedom? Who taught you that ambiguity is something ominous and not something beautiful? Those are the larger stakes of this project. And so now as I'm stepping into it more, spirituality is the only reason I'm alive, because spirituality reminds us the crucial distinction between existing and living. Existing is that dissociative self that I grew up in for so long a shell. Living is every single day,

I'm so excited to be here, and everything I mobilized for comes from an appreciation and a zest for beauty. So then would you say, because again, like, you know, you talk about growing up in this dissociative state and, you know,

I don't want to freeze you in quotes out of context from the past, but sometimes it's all we have to go off of when we're preparing, right? Like, you know, you've said something, in the context of what you were sharing, it was so relevant and made sense. But you said, you know, you were born hating yourself and born hunting yourself. I think that might have been in a man-enough podcast interview. So, again, that kind of... I don't think I would ever say that I was born those things.

I would say that I was born free, and then I was taught to hunt and hate myself. Right, yeah, right. So that's why I was trying to say I don't want to freeze you in some kind of... Because, again, contextually, it made a lot of sense. But I guess what I'm thinking of of what you're saying is like, do you think that coming, do you think that the, do you think what puts you in, and I'll say us, because I think we all have it,

but then some of us at home are forced further and further into dissociation. Yes. And then some of us aren't. Right. It's not impossible for any of us to not be passed down dissociative habits from our parents. It's often called culture. Exactly. It is called culture, right?

I don't know if you've ever read Gabbermante. Of course. Yeah, so we had him on the podcast. I listen. My greatest regret of that interview is not asking him more personal questions. Yeah. Actually, I really wanted to go so. I wanted to go for three more hours with him.

But, so yeah, I'm just thinking of like, so would it feel just, again, getting into your family life, your early life, I guess we've heard a lot of it. but would you say that that dissociation was encouraged mostly by culture? Being of the Indian diaspora like I am is such an interesting case study and how material acquisition doesn't translate into meaning. When I was growing up, my grandmother would say to me, we need the basics in life, rice, roti, and righta. And I'd say, what does that mean?

She said, an Ivy League education, personal problems, property and millions of dollars. Wow. Which one is which? What are the basics here? And then I began to understand her family was traumatized by partition and being displaced. And as refugees, they bought into the idea that actually a stability comes from things like being able to own a house. And then I look at my grandfather and I'm like, you survived a refugee camp, got out, made this life for us.

I'm so grateful, but the term PTSD wasn't even around when we were doing that. Then I look at my parents' generation, and I'm like, that's where I start to get a little frustrated, because I'm like, okay, this is where we have to start interrogating those narratives. And then I look at my generation, and I'm like, this is such an opportunity of time. There have been so many developments in trauma psychology and neurology and all these things now for me to understand the lies that are being told. And my family is the evidence of that, that it was always about, not being able to sit in our emotional presence

and the only thing that's made us be emotional with each other we grew up not being physically affectionate with each other not saying that we loved each other our love language was acts of service which is kind of cute but also very confusing when you see all the white kids having their parents say that they love each other and being so demonstrative about it and be flinching at that and still often flinching at that

being able to not feel in my body just being able to be a mind And now I have so much compassion for my family and by extension, my people, because these all make sense as trauma coping strategies. It's so much easier to rationalize the world than it is to feel it. And it is so much more courageous to feel pain than it is to intellectualize it. So now the work that I'm trying to do is to love, not judge, the behavior mechanisms that I was taught in my family and to realize the limitations of them that actually this pursuit of material acquisition, never yielded what we thought it was. Like I said, my grandfather was in hospice

for almost 10 days with no food or water. And every single nurse said, how is this possible? And I said, he was a refugee, which meant that he was used to being hungry and not drinking. And she said, you know, when people take this long, it's because some part of them is unwilling to let go. And I began to realize in that moment, this is a lesson I'm being taught.

The most courageous people are the people who can look at death and say, thank you. obviously you fight but then when you realize that you reach a point and you can't you surrender because you have trust and faith whereas my grandfather never had trust and faith in that and so that was such a calculation

of gratitude for the material circumstances that he created and now the next dimension is how do I when I die how do I make every decision so that when I die I die with dignity and glory and so now it's really annoying for my team trust and believe

when I'm like is this rooted in my dignified death in glory. I'm not interested. Then my world compass is different. You actually just gave me the way I'm going to decide my next project. I know my team is going to be thrilled to hear that one. No, no, it's good. Look, what are your beliefs about what happens when we die? What might happen when you die? Let's go ahead and take that

one. Yeah, sure. I would say I don't know. And that's enough for me. Yeah. Good answer. Yes, great. But what I do know is that nothing ever is eliminated. What I do know is that the lie that fascism teaches us is that it's possible to eliminate something and I know this as a survivor of attempted cultural genocide.

For centuries, people have tried to obliterate gender non-conforming people from the earth and yet they lost because me being here is evidence of that fact, me being able to find my transcessors in history, my trans ancestors is evidence of that fact. And that's always really important for me to describe these atrocities as attempted because they're never actually successful.

And even in the ruins, even in the trash, there's still a kernel of possibility, right? If I could go from being in small town, Texas, flinching at the site of my femininity, refusing to allow any audio or video recordings, like this of me because I was deeply embarrassed of my femininity to wearing a casual seven-inch pump and miniskirt in New York City. That's a testament to the fact that miracles do exist. And one of I think the most miraculous and hopeful gestures I see in the world is the stubborn

grit, glamour, and tenacity of life force. And notice there how I don't say trans people because it's about life force. The way that we win is not by diagnosing how political programs like white supremacy are violent and evil, but rather how beautiful we are, how life-affirming we are. It's not about what we're resisting, it's about the kind of proactive world that we're fighting in.

And so I think that when I think about death, what I actually think about is smiling. I think about humor. I think about Sylvester, the queen of disco, who, after he got HIV and AIDS, everyone was reporting that he was dead and he did this famous press interview where he said,

you're only going to know I'm dead when I call you and tell you myself. I think about the ability to laugh in the face of death, and I think of that as the ultimate power. And we'll be right back. Fall is in full swing, and it's the perfect time to refresh your wardrobe with pieces that feel as good as they look. Luckily, Quince makes it easy to look polished,

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you think of this notion of calling people in instead of calling people out and if that's something that you you know respond to or agree with kind of what have you learned in the process about what does help people come in and what actually pushes people further away like what might actually counterintuitively not work in the theme of eras which this is not a sponsored podcast by Taylor Swift although I wish it were

and when we're thinking about manifestation here we're going to put that on the table I used to really think separatism was chic you know I had my era of saying I don't trust cis people I want to be around trans people of color and that was so important to me but that's not where I'm at anymore

where I'm at now is actually identity is not prophecy and there are interruptions to those scripts every day and what I'm interested in now are who are the people who are willing to show up for a better and more beautiful world

that's my common denominator that's my universalism and that's been a long time coming for me and it's often I have this knee-jerk reaction where I'm like doubtful or cynical, and then I realized that's an older version of me that's trying to surface, I fundamentally believe that we need each other. And I think that the most profound truth in the world is that the way that we become our best

selves is through each other. That's what I templated with friendship, is that I had to find other people who became my lighthouses. And so I operate from the premise that every person has a quiet genius that is absolutely essential to winning, and it might not look like I'm really damn good at articulating things, but I'm quite awful at plumbing, you know? Disastrous. I can put

together an outfit like nobody's business, but when it comes to most logistics in the world or glam. Hello. And so we have to be part of formations. We have to be part of formations. And we have to admit the vulnerable truth is that we need each other.

And so I believe that criticism is essential when it's rooted in a commitment to one another, when it's rooted in return when it's rooted in the capacity for redemption when it's rooted in the capacity for transformation how dare i say i saw and witnessed my own transformation and then say but i don't believe in other people's because i have changed so too can the world i really really that's beautifully said it's the only beautiful thing you've said i'm really trying to impress you what do you think

of the word encouragement as opposed not that it's some kind of binary but yeah words all distinguish something they identify something allegedly allegedly yeah there actually have some questions in there what you think about language as much as you love it it must hate it yeah i love the way you just said that uh you believe in criticism when it is a i don't know exactly what you said but basically when it's empowered by love right it's like in love i find myself overusing this word because it's just so damn good which one love oh yeah it's so damn good you use it well i got i got to commend you and encourage you um i have been trying to

use the word more and really understand what it means. The last two podcasts I've been interviewed on, I've spoken about the Bell Hooks book All About Love, which continues to blow my mind as I'm like, this is an iconic book, and yet it's not really understood or practiced by hardly anyone,

because it's difficult, we know that. But I think you speak about love in a way that actually gives it specificity. It's not easy to do it, I think it's bandied about, like, I mean, like you were just saying. Well, what I came to realize, thanks to people like Bell Hooks, who was in conversation with Thomas Merton, who was in conversation with so many other people that I've referenced

and been inspired by, I began to realize that there's a paradigm in this country, that what we're facing is a contrasting definition of gender. There's a contingent in this country that says that gender is what the doctor tells you it is, and that that's somehow inscribed, tattooed, on your chromosomes, your hormones, which is just not scientifically correct. And then there's a legion of us

who believe that gender is much more elastic in polyamorous. And I don't indulge that dialogue anymore. I'm interested in debating it. I'm not interested in corroborating it because it's a diversion. In fact, it's a weapon of mass distraction. What the true difference is is a different standard definition of love

is that many people believe that respect has to be earned and that respect is only conferred to people for doing I believe that respect is given to all for being and I believe that love I was taught meant I had to betray myself in order to belong but I believe love means I get to become myself in order to belong and when we work with that definition

with a more expansive definition of love then the gender stuff becomes irrelevant because it's wow someone else is living their truth and their beauty. That's amazing. I'm not implicated by that. And so I return to love continually because I do feel like right now we are distracted in all these many struggles and antagonisms when fundamentally what's needed is education of the heart, not the mind. And obviously that's a false binary. We need to be sharing information. We need to be debunking, etc. But what I find called to, especially in this moment as an artist, is to teach people what Bell Hook said to create

laboratories of love. Where do people go to learn how to love? Certainly not the internet. Television? Maybe? I'm going to use this as a transition. We do have a question we ask every guest, and I want to ask you. It feels silly to ask you, but it's part of the podcast, which is just for people to share about their first

crush or first love and first heartbreak. My first crush and my first heartbreak. Oh, my goodness. Okay. so growing up i was an extreme bright eyes fan i used to celebrate connor over's birthday on february 15th every day and print out cards and spread the word and tell people that they need to celebrate he's a song called february 15th happy birthday to me

that i would stream the number of times of his birthday on that year wow wow dedication i was so madly in love with my rock icon and I had the opportunity to connect with him a few years ago and to be like, do you realize that you influence an entire generation? Like the way that I warble my voice is directly responsible to your affect. And he said, no, I had no idea. I was not online.

I was playing that. And then I was like, crestfallen. So I'm going to foreground that as both my first love and my heartbreak. But both were essential for me realizing that I was the rock star I was seeking. in what way did you connect with him was it online how did you have the opportunity during the pandemic bright eyes put out a new album and i still love the span with all my heart and so i message them the PR team and i was like can i please help promote this album and i had a vision so interview magazine um commissioned me to interview conrobers with our laptop screens looking up at the sky taking a photo of us with a photographer And it was me and Connor Oberst looking at the same sky. And what I wanted to symbolize with that portraiture in that interview was what I've been saying in this podcast,

which is arts capacity to connect us, despite seemingly insurmountable differences and distances, that here I was, I moved back to my childhood home for the beginning of the pandemic, here I was in that same town with a bright-eyes album, and I was brought back to being 13 and crying myself to sleep. and I return to that music and I return to him

and I return to this idea that actually if I think of the sky as my home we're all in this together every single thing on this earth is part of my home and in that moment I think of the pandemic

when there was such a profound opportunity for unity such a profound opportunity to recognize that what happens over there and fact happens over here I wanted to do justice to that and it was very special It's a very awful photo of me because there was no makeup crew on my side.

The Wi-Fi in my backyard was really not giving, but we made it work. That's amazing. Oh, my gosh. I was just thinking, like, Penn and now are going to be so mad at me for asking that question because it's just like a silly question, but everything you touch becomes meaningful. Yeah. It's really incredible. We have one other question we ask everyone, which is, well, we have two.

But do you have a memory, something that's quite universal about the middle school period is like doing bizarre things. You know, is just sort of like figuring out who you are. Do you have a memory of something that you did that was like particularly cringy or awkward or embarrassing that, you know, is also just like a universally shared thing, things that we remember and we laugh at now? I mean so many. Okay. So I was a model minority and I was really afraid of lowering my GPA if I took all of the, you know, the required PE requirements. So I found a way to do a course called Individual Sports by Correspondence

as a way to get my P.E. Credit met without having to get a grade. So this was a bowling and tennis course that I had a book for. And I had to learn about the theory and history of bowling and tennis. Wow. And go to the local bowling alley and get them to sign off that I was like practicing my form and technique. and this is just an illustration of the efforts that nerds will go through to maintain GBA

and if I could just even bring half of that sustenance and vigor into my professional life now I mean nothing's holding me back that's true that's amazing yeah in one of your interviews you referred to a phenomenon called disenfranchised grief which is when the people around you don't think that you have a right to your pain and I was wondering if you could elaborate on that concept

and also we probably have listeners who are experiencing that, which is like even more grief. It's like alienation from your grief. And I wonder what you've learned about how to move through it if you're going through that particular kind of disenfranchised grief. To be human is to be in pain. And to be courageous is to admit it.

Courage doesn't come from the pretense of strength. Courage comes from the admission of porousness and permeability and vulnerability and actually all of us have such profound grief from being born free and punished and manipulated by shame

from being made to feel like we could only be loved if we compartmentalized, disappeared or even practice self-immolation except it's easier to demonize individuals than it is to implicate cultures and systems

so the context of the word disenfranchised grief as it applies to my work is I believe every single human has disenfranchised grief from being gendered because every single one of us was told this is what a man should be this is what a woman should be

oh you have that interest that's not masculine enough oh you have that interest that's not feminine enough and when you're young you're so confused by that for me it looked like my love of dance people would say to me it's feminine to move your body my love of fashion they'd say it's feminine to care about what you wear and so i started to wear all black and i started to hide myself and then i got rewarded for that and that's what's confusing about it is that even though you're suffering externally people are rewarding you for it so your childhood brain says okay i guess i

have to hide in order to be worthy of love and so then we don't think of it as grief anymore and in fact it gets glorified in our culture through gender reveals through Mother's Day through Father's Day through the market which teaches us that there are certain articles of clothing for men for women certain colors certain emotions through media such that it's impossible for people to even reconnect with that fundamental wound such that they say things like you as trans and non-binary people you are just selfish because you're trying to call for the end of a gender binary system because it's just impacting your minority to which we laugh with delight

and say you're mistaking your wound as a mouth actually we are doing this out of genuine benevolence love and compassion because we know that the reason you hate us is because you fundamentally hate your euness

that was an appeal to your show pen thank you and so what disenfranchised grief allows me to actually understand is that behind the veneer of rage and vitriol of righteousness and politics of indignation and right-wing mobilization is a pain that is looking for witness so the reason that i respond to compassion to all of this vitriol is not because i want to be the

better person it's because i want to win and because i know what's actually happening here powerful people like i said are not people who feel the need to police other people what these people are actually saying is i have pain here and it is so much easier to pinpoint this on trans people people who we don't know, than it is to implicate my family, my culture, my society, myself. Totally. Imagine the guilt of being made to find out that all of the mechanisms that you precise to disappear yourself were not actually necessary. This is what I think about with body hair all the time.

When I have cis women get so upset with me, how dare you say that you're not a man when you maintain your body hair? And I'm like, thank you for telling me how you've been hurt by the same culture as me. By the way, you shouldn't have to have removed your body hair in order to be seen as feminine or womanly. That's not my fault. That's the fault of white supremacy. That's another podcast.

I want that one. Nora, what do you think? I guess disenfranchised grief is another way of saying the human condition. And what the antidote, what the ceremony that's required for disenfranchised grief is to create public cultures where people are, allowed to feel ambiguity, public cultures where people are allowed to come and say, I don't know, I'm not sure, I'm confused, I'm becoming, and that's what I hope to do with my art, is to make every conversation, every interaction, every joke, every poem, a home for that

becoming, a home to say, I don't care who you think that you are. What I care is about something so much deeper than that. It's that you're here. And I don't think people know how to receive that love because disenfranchised grief makes them feel like they have to mask. And I mean that in terms of masculinity and mask in order to be worthy of love. And I'm saying I really don't care. And I wish, I think going forward, what I want in this country more than anything, is practices of mourning and ritual of mourning. And I feel this very acutely with so many recent deaths in my life, how profoundly unjust it is, we live in a world that people can't take off time for heartbreak,

how profoundly unjust and violent it is, that we exist in a world that doesn't provide trauma-informed therapy for all people. And so I'm going to channel my rage and my grief into creating a society where mental health is physical health, a society where people can come with all their battle scars and be witnessed in them. So as I understand it, that's a spiritual perspective. I'm just curious, just on a daily more practical look, Like, do you meditate? Do you pray?

What's your kind of relationship to that? I see writing as prayer. Yeah. And I have a... And so much of what you do is obviously, I mean, work should be that, you know, our craft. And I see speaking a sermon. Right. And my biggest inspirations are people who speak sermon because it's less about what you're saying and it's more about how you say it.

And it's actually the work. It's not the preparation for the speech. It's the preparation of the life. so that when you deliver the speech, it's actually embodied. And so now what I've started to do is when I'm giving a keynote, I don't prepare. I show up and I channel exactly what I want to say in that moment. And it's thrilling and destabilizing and terrifying. And then I look back afterwards and I'm like, how did I do that?

And that's where the faith is. All I get to do is show up and tell the truth. And that's the hardest work I've ever done in my life. but it's the only work that feels meaningful to me I think that truth is hope so even though it can feel very bleak right now everything that's happening to me my community I have a lot of fear about the impending election

about how the people I love and the people that I am are being villainized I have a lot of fear about what that's going to mean for our physical safety and the only way that I'm able to get through that to thread through that fear is remembering that even telling the truth about it of how bad it is, is a form of hope. So I'm not going to ever go into any interview

and say that this work is easy, that this life is glorious. What I am going to say is that glory comes from the truth speaking, even if it's painful. Taking that right into our last question, right into 12-year-old aloke, if you could

if you could go back and say anything what would you say I would say don't let people steal your belief in magic because people are going to use this word impossible and beat you with it

your entire life they're going to say that the things that you dream of that the things that you want that the things that you are are impossible and impossible is a foot soldier to the status quo impossible is the original drag queen story hour being told over and over and over again so that it becomes to be seen as fact

and not actually the lack of faith have faith that the very reason you're on this earth at this moment in time is because you're anointed and so is everyone else have faith that divinity is not just there available when you die it's there available when you put in the work and what the work is is love

and so love yourself so that you can love the world and recognize that the reason you're being punished is because you love yourself is because of your power, your imagination your grasp on what this is really all about when they dispossess you of your magic they dispossess you of your hope so hold on to your magic

read books that teach you how to do it read histories that teach you about people who did it before you remember that you're part of a divine continuum of people who recognized that miracles happen every day if you take the time to notice them Is anybody writing that one down? Look, there's this quote that I really like that says companionship with the righteous

cleanseth the rust from off the heart and I think about that sometimes when I can feel there's like a rust accumulating I think about okay who should I call Who should I, like, see? And I feel like it really does help. I feel like this conversation helped cleanse the rest from off the heart. So thank you. Thanks for having me.

You know, it's become a practice for me, and this doesn't have to make it into the cut, to really affirm everyone. Because I just feel like I was saying before, I spent so much of my life thinking that criticizing systems would end them. And then I realized actually that just feeds them. It's what Tony Morrison taught us when she said, that one of the fundamental and chief violences of racism was distraction

because it kept people having to authenticate themselves, legitimize themselves, prove themselves, not have fun. And I've been really recognizing now that all the work of criticism is a distraction in some ways in my life. And I want to affirm, and I just wanted to say, I'm so grateful that you're carving out a space for these kinds of conversations. At first I had an existential crisis around middle school. I love how much you...

I love that you couldn't remember. but then you really dug up, you dug up, like, evidence. And I, that's why I knew it was meant to be. And that's why I know that this conversation was meant to be because it allowed me to talk to some people I hadn't talked to in a long time. And it allowed me to remember that I've been on this path for a long time. I had forgotten about Borwani, the rainbow language.

And then when I found out about Borwani, I cried because I was like, oh, my God, I've been doing this stuff. I forgot about my pacifist lecture with the rock, you know? And so that was so helpful because it is so easy to be non-binary and still narrate my life in binary ways of I was closeted and then I wasn't. I was repressed and then I wasn't. I was in Texas and then I was in New York. And the more honest truth is I was free in so many ways and freedom looked and took so many different forms. And so I think that this podcast entered my life in this particular moment in this time to remind me that I have

to be more kind in the way that I describe my childhood. Wow. So I really appreciate that. Yes. Thank you so much. Thank you. I'm always paranoid.

That is rolling, right? It's good to double check. It's good to double check. I've had to redo podcasts multiple times. There are two people we've lost the video, too, in this once. One time we lost audio, too. Yeah. Oh, that was that true.

Well, then it just becomes conceptual art. Stitcher.