TED Talks Daily - Sunday Pick: ALOK is microdosing creativity and rejecting norms

Episode Date: March 31, 2024

Each Sunday, TED shares an episode of another podcast we think you'll love, handpicked for you… by us. Today: an episode from How to Be a Better Human, a podcast that shares the small ways and big ideas that can change your life for the better.ALOK doesn’t call themselves a multihyphenate – but how else to describe the internationally acclaimed author, poet, comedian, and public speaker? Whether they are exploring belonging and the human condition, or fighting to degender the fashion and beauty industries, ALOK is always tapping into their creativity. Today, they share their approach to the creative process, how art has helped them accept the beauty and pain of life, why poetry and comedy need each other and so much more.For the full text transcript, visit go.ted.com/BHTranscripts  

TED Audio Collective. You're listening to TED Talks Daily. I'm your host, Elise Hu. Today, we have a special treat, an episode of another podcast from the TED Audio Collective, handpicked for you by us. You're about to hear an episode of How to Be a Better Human that features poet and comedian, Alok.

Alok is a gender nonconforming artist whose work challenges our preconceived ideas of gender, and we think hearing from them is a great way to commemorate Trans Day of Visibility, which happens to be today. In this conversation, Alok talks about redefining our idea of beauty, raking free of gender norms, and maintaining joy in a world that often seems filled with hurt. I think you'll like it. You can check out How to Be a Better Human wherever you get your podcasts, We'll get to the episode right after a quick break. Support for this show comes from Airbnb. If you know me, you know I love staying in Airbnbs when I travel. They make my family feel most at home when we're away from home. As we settled down at our Airbnb during a recent vacation to Palm Springs, I pictured my own home sitting empty. Wouldn't it be smart and better put to use welcoming a family like mine by hosting it on Airbnb?

It feels like the practical thing to do. And with the extra income, I could save up for renovations to make the space even more inviting for ourselves and for future guests. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at airbnb.ca slash host. AI keeping you up at night, wondering what it means for your business. Don't miss the latest season of Disruptors, Thank you. old questions like why is Canada lagging in AI adoption and how to catch up. Don't get left

behind. Listen to Disruptors, the innovation era, and stay ahead of the game in this fast-changing world. Follow Disruptors on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform. I want to tell you about a podcast I love called Search Engine, hosted by PJ Vogt. Each week, he and his team answer these perfect questions, the kind of questions that when you ask them at a dinner party, completely derail conversation. Questions about business, tech, and society, like, is everyone pretending to understand inflation? Why don't we have flying cars yet? And what does it feel like to believe in God? If you find this world bewildering, but also sometimes enjoy being bewildered by it, check out Search Engine with PJ Vogt, available now wherever you get your podcasts.

You're listening to How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy. Beauty is one of those words that I think many of us feel like we know when we see it, but also feel like doesn't apply to ourselves. Or let me not speak for you. That's definitely how I feel. We've all heard the phrase, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But that's not really true, right?

Beauty is often uncomfortably standardized and limited in who it applies to. It's thin bodies. It's light, clear skin. It's fashionable clothes that double as a display of wealth. But today's guest, Alok, does not buy that. They don't buy that one bit. Alok is on a mission to redefine what we think of as beautiful, to help us all to accept ourselves fully and completely, and to break down the rigid, societally constructed rules around gender. Beauty is less about what we look like, and it's more about what we feel like.

Beauty for me is about presence, being able to be located here and now, not what anxiety makes me do, which is dwell in the future, and not what depression makes me do, which is stagnate in the past. Beauty is fundamentally about being myself, not even just looking like myself, being myself, which means that beauty shifts over time. What I found to be beautiful five years ago is not what I find to be beautiful now. And that means that we have to make standard that there is no beauty standard, that actually each person is their own complex universe

and offers and templates their own form of beauty. We're going to talk much more with Alok in just a moment, but first a quick break. Don't go anywhere. Today, we're talking with Alok about beauty, self-expression, and creativity. Hey, everyone. My name is Alok, as in tell me a joke, Alok. I use they, them pronouns, and I am a comedian, a writer, and a poet. You work in so many different ways, whether it's writing nonfiction, poetry, speaking, comedy, acting, fashion. I'm curious to know, what are the threads that you see tying together all of your work? I think it's really true that the only identity I've chosen for myself is artist.

Everything else was superimposed on me. And what I like about the term artist is that it's flexible and elastic enough to contain chaos. As an artist, my job is to follow what charms me. And I'm so much less concerned with form than I am with flow. So I've never really understood this term multi-hyphenate that's become really in vogue, because I'm just kind of going wherever I'm creatively inspired to go. And I feel like the artists that I look up to are people who were not just gender nonconforming, but genre nonconforming. The way you describe your creative practice just now makes me think of something I wanted to talk to you about. I found it really moving to hear in previous interviews that you talk about this idea

that nothing about us is fixed and that it's kind of a delusion to think that something is fixed. How does that creative practice fuel your personal and emotional growth as well? I would respond to say life is our training. And as an artist, it's not about where we show up on stage or on text. It's about how we show up in our lives. And the rest is just an imprint of that. And I'm a firm believer that the ultimate creative act is living, which is why I was so excited to be on your podcast And I see that as our larger project as artists on this earth, is that most people don't get to feel the fullest extent of their grief, of their wonder, of their curiosity. But our kind of job is to really go and follow that inkling, there's something more here. Well, if someone is listening and they're wondering how to get more into that, that they're

not necessarily as in touch with their creative voice in all of the senses of what that means, how can they start? What are some ways that they can push themselves to get further into that? I'm a firm believer that people are already doing the thing that they want to be doing. They're just microdosing on it and they have to just take a more enduring course. So notice the creative acts that you already have in your given day. They might be small and subtle, like choosing to button all the way up on a shirt or not. And really notice why you're making that creative decision. And there's already a vocabulary there for because it makes me feel better or I don't know. And I don't know is the most prolific creative site

because you have to suspend that desire to have a cognitive kind of comprehensive approach and instead surrender to it just feels right. Then really try to bring that vocabulary and to other decisions that you're making in your life. Are there other places that you could show up with absolutely no knowledge of why you're there, but you feel like it? You know, a couple of weeks ago, I went to a walk-in improv class, which is another really great title for waking up and being alive. And it was people from all walks of life,

like a 50-year-old corporate business dude and people who were in improv troops in college and they take it seriously and competitively, which that's the hottest flex that there ever was if you won a college improv contest. And I was sitting there and I just was full of such a deep love of these people because I'm like, what kind of person does it take to just take three hours on a random day

to go and do this thing? That's not at all about necessarily your job, but you were just curious about it. And so I guess what I'm trying to say is get curious about the moments of the day that you're often just curious about it. And so I guess what I'm trying to say is get curious about the moments of the day that you're often not curious about. Notice the things that you're already doing and expand them. In your book, Beyond the Gender Binary, you have this moment where you talk about how you often lead creative writing workshops and you ask your students to answer the prompt,

what part of yourself did you have to destroy in order to survive in this world? So I guess I want to do two things. One is, why do you ask students that? And then ask you to answer that question as well. I ask students that because I think every act of art is both one of triumph and grief. Grief because you have to confront emotions that you weren't attending to in the world. Often when I'm writing, I find things surfacing from the past that I was like, I didn't know that I had an issue with that. I didn't know that I felt that way about it. But then also joy, because that is rid from my body. There's a cleansing kind of ritual there. And so for me, the ultimate binary that we're trying to obliterate here is between destruction and creation. I

actually think destruction is a form of creation and creation is a form of destruction, that we have to clear space in order to make space for something new. And that's a metaphor for what the creative act is. And so in my writing workshops, I think a lot of people come in wanting to learn about how to write a better metaphor or stanza. But I always began with like, no, actually, how do you process grief? How do you talk about the things that amaze you about the world? Those kind of emotional skills actually are what lend themselves to a creative process. There are a lot of people who can teach you the technicalities, but that's not what I'm interested in. I am more interested in actually getting in touch with why we make this and why

we show up. And then in terms of that question for myself, I feel like I have a different answer every time that it's asked, which is fun. So let's see what I say today. I've been thinking about the word wonder a lot. And when we call something wonderful, meaning full of wonder, what that means is that it actually enhances our capacity to understand the profound unknowability of the universe. Wonder is a site that we can go as adults, where we cease to have any vocabulary to describe what's in front of us. And I think as a young person, I was continually amazed by everything, the way that the sun worked, the mechanics of a black hole, the way that love

worked. I felt like I had a zillion questions for my parents. And then my parents, who are academics, were like, go read. And reading enhanced my capacity for wonder because I would go pursuing a question and then find more questions as answers. And I think as an adult, that practice of wonder making is seen as immature. We're taught the world, once again, is finite and discrete and identifiable. And so I feel like I had to destroy my intimate relationship with wonder and amazement in the world. And that's something that I'm trying to bring back. It makes me think there's a poet who I love, the poet Sarah Kay, and she has this wonderful poem about, it's bad to tell someone else's joke.

It's impossible to tell someone else's poem, but I'll butcher it anyway. She has this moment where she's describing seeing a group of birds flying in the shape of a larger bird. And she says, the universe has already written the poem that you're trying to write. The work of art is to get back into seeing the amazing, unbelievable beauty that's out there already, that she's trying to reclaim that through her work. It really makes me think of that. Well, first, I would offer Chris that trying to retell a poem is the joke. So thank you so much. There you go.

Okay, well, hey, if we're going to talk about the line between poetry and jokes, that actually perfectly ties into one thing I wanted to talk to you about, which is to combine both of these worlds. A comedian mentor of mine, Mike Kaplan, has a moment on stage that he does a lot where he tells the audience, if you laugh, it's a joke. You decide. If you laugh, it's a joke. If you don't laugh, it's a poem. Either way, I'm saying something. So I wonder what's your process like with your poetry? How do you think about what makes something a poem versus an essay versus a joke versus something you're going to try and communicate in another form? about extremely intense emotional experiences. And my audience felt flummoxed.

It took a very particular kind of person to come and sit for like an hour of like endurance performance art where you're having to confront your deepest like repressed trauma. And so I started to tell jokes on the stage and to improvise them as a way to make us ready to receive deeper conversations about grief and death and loss and

loneliness. And what I began to realize is I was having just as much fun writing the poems as I was riffing on comedy. And so I started to give more time for that. And then I realized that actually comedy enhances our capacity to feel, our acuteness of sensation. It gets us back in our bodies in a dissociated world. It makes us aware that we're part of a larger constellation. We often are laughing not because of how funny the joke was, but because people next to us are laughing. And there's a delight and joy in being part of something greater than ourselves. Maybe comedy is our contemporary dance form, because we used to come together. I was just reading this fascinating book

on the history of public joy. And one of the points that the scholar makes is that we went as a people from having collective joy, like carnival or sort of riotous joy together in the streets to the audience format, where only the performer is the one performing and we're supposed to be sedentary and watching. And I was like, that is so true. But also within that, we're still

continuing that tradition of collective joy in the way that we laugh together. And so what I began to realize is my issue with a lot of mainstream comedy, and I'm saying mainstream because there are obviously comics that defy this, is that everyone's obviously depressed and like everyone is obviously coming to humor from like a really dark moribund place but rather than naming that there has to be this ironic distancing of like i'm cooler than i i'm disaffected i'm unaffected by this stuff and i find that to be utterly unambitious and dishonest. And so what poetry keeps me is emotionally honest. Hey, my jokes come from these places. Let me show you these places unflinchingly.

It strikes something that I've been struggling with or trying to accomplish, but I, you know, it's an ongoing effort for me, which is to, to, to prioritize the idea of warmth over cool. That warmth is welcoming. That warmth makes people feel like you're accessible to them, that you can share that. Whereas cool keeps people at an arm's length. And I think it's so easy to want cool, right?

To want to have the most followers and to be praised. And that actually makes people, it makes it harder to directly connect with other people. So I've been trying really hard in my own life to remember that that's not what I want. But it's hard. Society pushes you really towards wanting the other one.

Or at least that's what we're praised for trying to go for. Absolutely. And I feel like that's the internet aesthetic too. And the internet being earnest is the worst possible betrayal of your time on earth. You have to be sardonic. You have to be distanced and dissociated. I think another way of saying cold is dissociated. And another way of saying warmth is lucid and interconnected. And that's why I've always seen emotions as the ultimate terrain of politics.

Because if we were actually emotionally lucid, then it wouldn't be seen as an act of allyship to care about other people. We would be saying, there's no utility, there's no joy, there's no pleasure in existing in a world that is profoundly unequal. I want a better world for all of us, because what's happening to other people impacts me. That's what warmth actually is a vocabulary for is for interdependence. In a keynote speech you gave recently, you said, I believe healing is political. I believe healing is one of the most courageous choices we can make. I wonder if you'd be willing to talk a little bit more about that and how we can make that political choice. Listen, healing hurts.

And it's that paradox that I think wakes me up every morning is how can something that is so necessary and so vital and so ultimately enriching be so difficult and troublesome and vexed right now? How that makes me have to constantly be rooted on this earth while dreaming of like, okay, it's going to be a little bit better in the future. And then knowing We live in a vapid, dissociated commercial culture that teaches people that the solution to structural problems is discrete moments of rapture that distract you and numb you. And then you go back into the ultimate form of citizenship and loneliness. And that wasn't tenable for me. It made me feel hollow. It made me feel like a living ghost. And so I needed something richer. And what I found is that dissociation doesn't

just protect you from feeling different emotions, difficult emotions. It also insulates you from experiencing joy. And so my argument for why we heal, even though it hurts, is that it's enhanced my capacity to find pleasure and joy and wonder and amazement. That yes, it's incredibly difficult to confront patterns that we don't want to confront, especially with the people that we love. But also it's allowed me to experience love and to know what love actually is. Wow. We're going to take a moment to let that sink in, and then we will be right back after this short break.

Support for this show comes from Airbnb. If you know me, you know I love staying in Airbnbs when I travel. They make my family feel most at home when we're away from home. As we settled down at our Airbnb during a recent vacation to Palm Springs, I pictured my own home sitting empty. Wouldn't it be smart and better put to use welcoming a family like mine by hosting it on Airbnb? It feels like the practical thing to do, And we are back. This is something that I find really inspiring about the way that you engage with the world, especially because we're at a time where there is a really powerful and concerted attack on trans and non-binary people who are visible in the media. And you make yourself very visible.

And as a result, you give a lot of people comfort, but there's also a lot of hate and vitriol coming your way. And I can only imagine the amount of work this takes, but you seem to publicly at least respond with love and humor and maintaining of your joy for living and for the world. You know, my first book of poetry, I wrote in the spaces that I was harassed living in New York City. So people would insult me or call me disgusting, and I would stop what I was doing. And there on the subway or there on the bus stop, I would sit and write. And what I thought would happen was that I would say, screw you, like, how dare you do that to me?

But actually what I found myself saying is, I'm sorry that you're hurting. I'm giving your pain back to you because it doesn't belong to me. And that's where I began to realize in a really tangible and cellular way, the reason people hate other people is because they hate themselves and is because hatred gives them a sheen, a shield to protect

them from actually accessing their own pain. Powerful people are not people who police other people's rights. That's the lie of every supremacy. Every supremacy is ultimately an insecurity installation that requires monopolizing and homogenizing the world because people can't accept themselves. So actually, I began to demystify that the reason people were pursuing me so ruthlessly was because there was something unresolved in themselves, that they were telling on themselves, that they were actually saying, I am not as powerful as I'm pretending to be. I have to shout. I have to resort to violence. I have to police other people's bodies because these are distraction rituals from allowing me to actually confront the fact that I don't know what love is, that I don't know who I am. People who know who they are don't feel the need to police other people. And so instead of

trying to seek external validation, I began to accept myself and I began to know who I was firmly and irrevocably. And what I found is that I don't know who I am. And that's the certainty I was looking for. That actually certainty comes from uncertainty to what we were talking about before, from a lack of allegiance to the need of having a fixed self or a fixed gender or fixed identity. Actually, a sense of a cultivation of playfulness. I don't know. Let's figure it out. I don't know.

Let's try it out. And it removes the pressure when you begin to realize, oh, I don't know. Let's try it out. And it removes the pressure when you begin to realize, oh, I don't actually need to find certainty, that all certainty is just actually an illusion. I'm just vibing and it shifts. And once I became comfortable with my vibing, I began to realize how deeply uncomfortable people are with a lack of certainty, with ambiguity, with simultaneity, with the capacity for infinity, how people retreat into the need for discrete categories as a trauma response, because they feel like the world is chaotic. They need to know and anchor themselves in something fixed. But like Sarah Kay's poem of

the birds, everything is in motion. And that's a lie. So the people who are committed to the architecture of certainty are committed to the lie. And so once I began to realize I don't want to live a lie, I don't want to, I already did that for 18 years of my life. I already lived a lie and I saw where it brought me hollowness and spiritual death. And so what I actually found is that I love these people because they represent parts of me and myself, places that I've hated and judged myself, places in that I've hid from pain. And I can see myself in them and I can see who I would have been if I didn't allow myself to love myself. It's interesting to me to hear you frame it like that, because it is objectively,

you've probably heard much more hate from strangers and from people than you did at the beginning. And yet you've been able to transmute that through your work and through your poems and your all of the different ways in which you express yourself into love and generosity and kindness, which is, yeah, to me, one of the highest possible uses of art is to transmit the disgusting filth of the world into something beautiful and worth taking in. Thank you for noticing that, Chris, because I noticed it in myself, too. If I was to look at what I'm writing about now 10 years ago, I'd have been like, what are you saying, you idealistic sellout, like believing in love? Are you kidding me? Love anesthetizes us from experiencing the true primordial pain of being alive. But now I look back and I'm like, I was depressed. I just was really depressed. And I think we need to destigmatize saying that. I was extremely

self-hating. I genuinely believed that I was destined for a perpetual life of misery and loneliness, because the only narrative that I received was that I was always going to be on the margins, that I was always going to be the laughingstock, that I was always going to be the disposal of other people's self-making, what gets left on the cutting room floor. And then I realized I can't change other people's perception of me, but I can change my perception of myself. And that's how we heal, is we can't eliminate suffering, but we can shift our relationship to suffering. We can't end the atrocities in the world, but we can shift how we allow those atrocities to impact us and to shape ourselves. And what I began to actually work on myself was cultivating an enduring joy that was not incumbent on other people's whimsy. So other people can come and go like a bad storm. But my anchor,

my rootedness is that I am sacred and anointed and that you are sacred and anointed and that depression is a visitor and that grief is a visitor because my ultimate passion is aliveness. And that's been templated to me. And the fact that the sun returns every morning, which means that no grief can be indelible and permanent because transformation is everywhere you seek it. I love the way that you've put that. And it's so beautiful. And I'm sorry to almost sully it with like such a technical question. out there and they're in one of those moments where they really are feeling this, like, I am on the outside and I am judged and they're constantly facing harassment or they're feeling

marginalized for any one of thousands of other reasons. What are some of the practical steps that someone can do to build that in themselves with the understanding that, of course, everyone is unique and this you can't really be a one-size-fits-all but what's something that's worked for you history i am a forever student of history and one of the lies that gets told about trans and non-binary life is that we're new when in fact we've been here for e, and we've had so many different words to describe ourselves across time. And when I started to meet my transestors, my trans ancestors, people who were criminalized for existing in public, and people who still went outside anyways, and I began to ask myself that

existential question, why did my transestors continue to go outside, continue to document themselves? I recently had the opportunity to go to an exhibition in Munich, Germany, of queer life in Germany prior to the atrocities of the Holocaust. And I just wept when I saw how much art, how much literature, how much self-portraiture, how many flyers, how much evidence there was there of a vibrant and resplendent queer life that wasn't even underground in Germany. And then I felt the cruelty of history, how it continually erases us from ourselves, makes us feel like we're unprecedented, which is a form of wounding of people

when you make them feel unprecedented. We all deserve connection to ancestry. It's actually vital. There've always been people who went against the grain. There've always been courageous people. And it's that James Baldwin quote, you feel like you're the only person in the world who experiences your heartbreak. And then you read that actually reading history gives us access to our true ancestors, people who felt the same pain. And then I think the second thing that you have to do is you have to actually connect with other people who are going through what you're going through and learn how to love them. And so before I could love myself, I began to notice how much I loved other transgender nonconforming people. I would never allow the vitriol that I allowed to myself to be extended towards them. I thought they were precious and beautiful and sacred people.

And so then I began to realize my own bluff. How can I believe that this person is worthy of dignity and then deny that to me? And this person who I respect somehow respects me. This person who I love somehow loves me. And so I found self-love through a practice of friendship. I've heard you say in so many interviews that when you speak about the harm of the gender binary, people think that you're talking only about harm done to trans and non-binary people, but you're not, you believe it harms everyone. And what you're talking about just now, this is not a path forward

just for a specific group of people to health and to connection and to joy, right? This is the blueprint for all of us, right? Connection, history, care, vulnerability. These are necessary for every single person on the planet. So if someone is new to this idea, maybe this is the first time they're really engaging deeply with it.

How can they think about the ways in which that limits their own experience? I would say, I'm sorry that no one gave you a choice on who you wanted to be growing up. I'm sorry that the people who said that they loved you actually only loved the character they were creating of you and didn't get curious with you on who you wanted to be on your own terms. I'm so sorry that our culture didn't give you permission to own your own body and own your own creative expression. And I want to say that with me and this conversation, whenever we're together, you get to figure out who you are. You get to experiment. You get to

play pretend. And I won't judge you. I'm just excited to be around you. And then I would notice what sensations come up for you in that. What griefs that have not been attended to come up in that. What potential for expansion come up in that. And then my response would not be, what are you thinking right now, but what are you feeling? Show me. That's why I'm an artist is because it's actually honest. That's why I'm compassionate is because it's actually honest. That's why I'm compassionate is because it's actually honest. It doesn't make me a better person. We are a creative species who never felt like it was enough just to have shelter and food. And so when we're offered expansion, which is what a world beyond the gender binary is, permission for expansion,

permission to be transcendent, permission to be unknowable. People shut that down. It has nothing to do with gender. It has everything to do with the denial of people's creative and intimate autonomy. Something that you write about in the book and that I find was really eye-opening for me

is the idea that even if you wanted to live within the binary, that it's an impossible standard to live. The first character I was ever cast as is as a straight dude. And I tried to be that for like 18 years. I was really bad at it. It was a bad casting decision. And back then, growing up in a town in Texas, listening to Coldplay meant people said that I was gay. Like those were the stakes of the gender binary. You like an incredible musician who creates a song called Yellow that for the first time in your teenage adolescent life allows you to cry as a dude, but you can't tell anyone that. So you're just like, yeah, I mean, it's like that he's really talented at a guitar or piano or

something. You have to find some way around that. And so I actually am living evidence that the gender binary harms us in all of our incarnations, because even when I was pursuing normativity, it was never enough. That's the issue with normativity, is it is climbing a tree that bears no fruit. It tells us that we should spend our entire life chasing after something that does not exist. And that's why I have empathy for the people who are so triggered, because that's what they are, by non-binary life, is because you are seeking stability, but ultimately you're never going to get it. That sense of safety will never come externally. It only can be granted internally. You draw a really important distinction between normal and normative too.

So normative is telling someone you should do something. That's a social judgment. Normal is just what is statistically observed in a population. That's about quantity. And so what I'm trying to get people to move beyond is gender norms, not gender. And I think people often don't get what the difference is. I'm not saying that every person on earth has to be non-binary. That would be, in fact, reinstating another hierarchy of norms. What I am saying is that there is no standard definition on what it means to be man, what it means to be woman, what it means to be trans, what it means to be non-binary. There's just your self-definition. So there are as many ways to be

a man as there are men. And each one of those incarnations are valid. That's the difference. As I'm not erasing people's gender, I'm actually giving permission for people to describe what gender actually means to them. Something I want to make sure that we acknowledge is that There is a playbook as old as history that when someone speaks compellingly and charismatically and movingly, and they are from a group that is under attack, that no matter what they do, no matter how perfectly they walk that line, they will be tarred as dangerous and as criminal and as somehow not worthy of being listened to. And I'm very aware that in this moment, there's a real attempt to do that to you. And when people can't do it to you with your own words, they're even doing it by putting other words in your mouth, by misattributing things to you. So I want to just give us a space to acknowledge that and how hard that must be. That can only happen because of how powerful you are, right? Like that's where that

comes from. And yet that must be an incredibly difficult thing to deal with right now. It's to be made dangerous. Yeah, it's deeply painful and deeply difficult because I think the lie that I was told as a young person was that if I was extremely smart and if I was well-educated and well-read and well-argued, then I would be safe. And as an adult, I'm having to realize that's not true. I've done all the things you were supposed to do. I went to elite universities. I got degrees. I did all the reading. I've read all the science, I can argue convincingly and compellingly, but it doesn't matter because people are uncomfortable with my body. And so people are looking for ways to legitimize their discomfort. So they will defame me, they will

say that I've said things that I've never done, they will say that I believe things that I don't even believe in. And what I began to realize is the only way to live knowing that you're going to be misunderstood, knowing that you're going to be misaligned, knowing that you're going to be maligned is mercy. I understand why people need to create trans and non-binary people as villains, because that's easier than confronting the pain of the gender binary. It is easier to make a straw man as the boogeyman than it is to confront the intimate and ritualized violence that constitutes the status quo. And so if anything, it recommits me to love, to love so incandescently

that people don't feel the need to demonize complete strangers and instead can actually address the real crises that this earth is facing. I would love to kind of come back to poetry because I do feel like your work and your creative work ties everything together here so beautifully. What's an exercise that everyone who is listening can do to start a poem or to bring some of that poetic observation, let's call it, into their daily life. Yeah. I'm a strong proponent of journaling.

Maybe we'll call that the transgender agenda that people are saying is taking over the country. We're actually saying, hey, everyone, journal and sit with your feelings. And what journaling actually allows us to do is to develop an intimate vocabulary of noticing. So journal, like you're writing a novel of your own life, set the scene, go into every single detail. What did that boring office room look like? Why was it boring? What were people wearing? How did it make you feel? Notice. And then what you begin to realize is that the way that we're already seeing things is the poem. Because what poetry is, is a vocabulary of interconnectedness. What a metaphor does is it allows us to take two things that are disparate and recognize that there's a bridge

between them. And that's what journaling can allow us to do is that all of these discrete episodes that we're having in a life, they're actually bridged and connected. All of these objects that we thought in a room that were separate, they're actually intimately connected. So the backbone of any good poem is an appreciation of connectedness.

And that's something I can only access through journaling. Well, Alok, thank you so much for being here. It has been a complete pleasure talking to you. And I really appreciate you making the time. Thanks so much for having me. That is it for today's episode of How to Be a Better Human. Thank you to today's guest, Alok. Their book is called Beyond the Gender Binary.

I am your host, Chris Duffy, and you can find more from me, including my weekly newsletter and information about my live comedy shows at chrisduffycomedy.com. How to Be a Better Human is brought to you on the TED side by Anna Phelan, Whitney Pennington-Rogers, and Jimmy Gutierrez, who all appreciate connectedness. Every episode of our show is professionally fact-checked. This episode was fact-checked by Julia Dickerson and Erica Yoon, who keep me on the right side of accuracy. On the PRX side, this show was put together by a beautiful team with impeccable fashion, Morgan Flannery, Rosalind Tortosilius, and Jocelyn Gonzalez. And of course, thanks to you for listening to our show and making this all possible. We'll be back next week with even more How to Be a Better Human. better human.

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