We Can Do Hard Things with Glennon Doyle - 74. ALOK: What makes us beautiful? What makes us free?

Episode Date: March 1, 2022

“The days that I feel most beautiful are the days that I am most afraid.” “What feminine part of yourself did you have to destroy in order to survive in this world?” “Why have we been taught to fear the very things that can set us free?” About ALOK:  ALOK (they/them) is an internationally acclaimed writer, performer, and public speaker. As a mixed-media artist their work explores themes of trauma, belonging, and the human condition. They are the author of Femme in Public (2017), Beyond the Gender Binary (2020), and Your Wound/My Garden (2021). They are the creator of #DeGenderFashion: a movement to degender fashion and beauty industries and have been honored as one of HuffPo’s Culture Shifters, NBC’s Pride 50, and Business Insider’s Doers. Instagram: @alokvmenon

Okay, love bugs. Welcome back to We Can Do Hard Things. I just, I just need you to be in a place today where you can really, really listen because we have sort of a heart, mind shifting conversation here for you today. You know, untamed and most of my struggle in life and work is about. trying to figure out who I am, free from all the cages that culture built for me to spend my one life inside of. So for all of us who are kind of on this freedom quest, a loke, I think of as a prophet calling to us from the wilderness. Absolutely. Showing us not just how it's possible to break free of gender binaries, but how it's possible to see and break free from every socially constructed binary. that does not allow us to live out our full humanity, our divinity, our infinite creativity,

and possibility. So what I want to insist to you is that the next hour of our lives is not about us understanding a loke, but it's about us allowing a loke to help us understand ourselves and the situation in which we find each other and ourselves down here. So, Aloke is an internationally acclaimed writer, performer, and public speaker. As a mixed media artist, their work explores themes of trauma, belonging, and the human condition. They were born July 1st, 1991. So that was like last year, right?

For fuck's sake. So hopefully Alok is three in college station, Texas and grew up as the child of mona. Can you say this for me? Malia Li and Punjabi. Thank you. Immigrant parents from Malaysia and India. Alok graduated at the top of their class at Stanford University, but come on, who didn't, and earned a master's in sociology in 2013.

They are the author of Femman Public, published in 2017, Beyond the Gender Binary and Your Wound My Garden. You should know, Alok, that we have all of your, all of them in our house. They are the creator of hashtag degender fashion, which is so exciting, a movement to degender fashion and beauty industries. A loke is committed to challenging what they call the international crisis of loneliness by creating public spaces for processing pain and establishing meaningfully. connection. Alok, welcome.

I'm so happy to be here. Oh my gosh. Well, I have to ask, first and foremost, this podcast is committed to talking about hard things and also respecting each other's humanity. So first, I want to check in with you, Alok. What is hard for you right now? I think when most people think about transphobia, they imagine physical altercations, bullying in public. But I think what's most difficult about my life right now

is the intimate violence that comes from within. The people who you feel should understand but don't. And the hard thing that I wanted to bring to this conversation today was transphobia that comes from women. because I feel like it's something that often doesn't get thought about or work through, but it's actually what hurts me the most because I feel like feminism, and specifically my mother and my grandmother created the conditions for me to have the audacity to own my own body.

And I see my life and my gender as a continuation of a tapestry, of women who had the bravery to say no thank you. And for that love to be unrecipricated, I think creates a kind of grief in me that feels so overwhelming and arduous that it feels impossible to puncture, but we can do hard things, right? Oh my goodness.

Can you tell me what, when you say for that to be unrecipricated, can you tell me what you mean by that specifically? I see so much of what the trans movement being in the world is a love letter that says, I believe in your capacity for transformation. I believe in your capacity for self-determination. And then, in response to that love, we're told that we are wrong, that we're disorderly, that we're foolish, that were ridiculous, that were delinquents, that were predators, that were violent. And that's a pain that I continue to face as my words reach more people is this extreme and coordinated backlash to tarnish to tarnish me and by extension tarnish the ideas that have been here, they're ancient ideas.

Because I think what patriarchy does is it makes us publicists, right? and we find ourselves speaking it, doing it, living it, thinking it with such a fierce allegiance that if someone dare say another way of living is possible, people would rather eradicate and extinguish that alternative than confront that kind of spiritual nudity of asking who am I outside of what patriarchy wants me to be. Alok, you said, the days that I feel most beautiful are the days that I am most afraid. Can you tell us what you meant by that? Yeah.

I've been thinking about this a lot because there's been a lot of negative self-talk in my head recently. When I look at photos and videos of myself, I'm so cruel. the first thought that populates is you look like a freak. You're disgusting. Why do you do that? Why are you wearing that wig? Why are you wearing makeup? And I think people are surprised to hear that

because they see images of me as this like fierce, independent, incandescent light. But I want to remind people how insidious misogyny is that as women and trans people, it's going to take our entire life. to develop a self-image outside of what men have taught us to see ourselves as. And so I have to literally sit and love on myself in that moment and remind myself, why am I doing this?

Is this fear my own? Is this hatred my own? And it's not because when I was filming the project that I was filming where I look at the video later, I was so happy and I was so free and I felt so beautiful. and I would catch glimpses of myself in mirrors or iPhone screens and be like, I've come so far to be here and it's so glorious to be here. And then, in the aftermath, I find myself so mean. And I think that that's because I've been punished for my beauty my entire life.

And by beauty, I mean looking like myself, which I think most people don't know, that's what beauty actually is. And so I've developed a knee-jerk response that's actually an antagonistic relationship to my beauty. When I feel most beautiful, I'm most afraid not just because of what other people will do to me, but what I'll do to myself, how I'll censor myself, how I'll look at that video and say, you are a fool, so tone it down. And how I'll tone it down and how easy it'll be to blame it on someone else, but to know ultimately I made the decision. Yeah. Damn. I get like a slightly different version of that.

First of all, I love beauty is looking like ourselves. Is that what you said? Beauty is looking like ourselves. So I went on a show recently and Alok, my little dream was to go on a TV show with no makeup on. Because every time I go on a show, I just ask them to put all the makeup on because I get very scared of looking like myself. So it's like different, but the same. and I was scared to do it because I was scared to look at it later myself. Not what other people were going to see, but what I was going to do to myself seeing myself

on a screen with nothing on. So yeah, I get that. I get that. I wanted to ask you a look. I feel like for so many that are in this, clearly this unprecedented attack on trans people is killing trans people and killing all of us at the same time. And it's sometimes heartbreaking how far we have left to go. But as a fellow gender studies major, like yourself,

I resonated so much with how much you talk about, how empowering it is to know our collective history. And you say my faith comes from what was before. Can you just talk a little bit to us about the tool that is, erasing our histories and presenting it as new, disconnecting us from our histories and how that disconnects us to the direction where we would otherwise be going if we were. Because you said your ideas are not new.

They're ancient. Yeah, I mean, I just got word. The Texas state legislature where I'm from has included a politician there's included my book beyond the gender binary and a list of 850 books to ban in Texas public education. And that is just such an example of what I mean. It's that they disappear us. It's not that we're new. It's that censorship has been an organizing strategy for hundreds of years.

It looked like cross-dressing laws that made it illegal for people like us to exist in public. Like Abby, you and I would have been thrown into prison for just being outside. Women would be beaten for wearing pants. And when I tell people that they're so shocked that they don't even know that. And how did people get through the cross-dressing laws? They went outside anyways. They did something very hard. They knew that they would be criminalized.

And I have documentation of people who were arrested 20 to 40 times, who in courts of law said, I know who I am. I'm neither a man nor a woman. I have evidence of that from the early 1800s. But why is it that those stories don't reach us? Why do I have to go to university to go into archives to find those newspaper clippings? Why did it take me being an adult to learn that there were people like me who ran New York City Nightlife in the early 20th century?

We called herself fairies and girl boys, androgens and inverts. We had so much language and so much love. Why, why, why? And then I realized, oh, it's because when we have connection to ancestry and especially queer ancestry, then we know that there have been people who have felt the same pain that we did and they still lived a glorious life so that we could. And that intergenerational connection of queer people is why I do the work that I do. I know that in my life, I might not see the end of transvobes.

but I might be able to create something that allows the next generation to feel like they can live a life that's worth living. I want a gift possibility because that's what my transestors or my trans ancestors did for me. And so much of what I'm doing in the work is in tribute. It's a living memorial to an ongoing pulse

that says, let's do this decent human thing of being ourselves in a world predicated on our job world predicated on our disappearance. And also for you particularly culturally and for so many folks culturally, being disconnected from your cultural roots through colonialism, the way that the long history of third sex, all of it that was a part of your culture before colonialism, can you talk a little bit about that because but for European rule of many cultures, there, there wouldn't have been this struggle. I mean, there would have been celebration of who you are. So. Yeah. Totally. You know,

it's so funny to me that people accuse us as trans and non-binary people of imposing this gender conversation on them when the real imposition was dividing billions of complex divine nuanced souls into one of two categories man and woman and that was an orchestrated project of colonialism across the world and what is now called the United States in Canada and where I'm from called India where European settlers indoctrinated indigenous peoples into the idea that they had to be men or women as defined by your American culture. Otherwise, they were heathen, degenerate, and wrong. And this looked like the extinguishing, like attempted genocide of gender variant people across the world. So what they do is they tell you that there's only two genders and they get away with it

because they kill, disappear, a race, discredit, and delegitimize all of us who for hundreds of years have lived alongside you. And what that's done, I think, perhaps even most insidiously, is it's made our own people tell us that us being queer is a marker of our whiteness or assimilation into the Americas. When I was a kid, I didn't think that I could be both queer and Indian because I was made to believe that being Indian meant

I had to be straight, I had to be cis, I had to be married. You know, one of the stories that I like to tell is that when I pierced my nose, my grandmother, who lived with me at the time, said, how could you do this to me? And which she was feeling, the surface, is that in our culture, which is so family-oriented and collectivist, that I was betraying her by prioritizing me.

But I think I want to have a higher-level conversation because that's what I'm always trying to, or attempting to do in the world. When she said, how could you do this to me? What she's also saying is, how could you show me that freedom is possible, because it's easier. It's easier to believe that this prison is a home.

It's easier to believe that this misery is the only way to live. And in watching and witnessing you own your own body, I have to confront the ways in which I've outsourced that ownership to other people, to culture, to identity. And so so much of what the trauma I experience from my own people, I know at the root comes from these histories, of unprocessed trauma from colonialism, from so many of the violences wrought on them that made them feel like they were never enough.

That line, how are people so traumatized that they mistake freedom as a threat? Yeah. And doesn't everybody on some level experience that from their parents? Right. Like, how dare you show me what's possible? I've already lived most of my life. How dare you show me now what could have been. It's totally true for me.

I think that the truth of so many of us queer folks who had parents who in one way or another or grandparents say, how could you do this to me? It is this freedom that we choose. And it's like they look at it. at us with this disdain that they couldn't make the same choice themselves on some deep, like cellular level. Women especially, you know, I think my mom probably being the parent of seven of us children probably looks at the way that her baby, the youngest child, can go out into the world and try to break so many of these culturally constructed norms. And I don't know. I just think that you are a fucking revolution aloke and what you just said just is so true. And for all of

the parents out there, children are a revolution. And they should be seen as so. And, you know, you, what you just said about, um, there was something that you wrote that really spoke to me. And it goes along with, with what you just said. Um, how could you do this to me? It's like when you first told your grandmother that you were trans. To me, that's so important, too, because I never got to tell my grandmother. I was too afraid. You were braver than me. And there's a part of me that feels like, oh, sad that she didn't ever know me. Even, and now that I'm like strong and an adult and not like needy of their approval, being known, even if, right, like, even if it does come with trauma, I still need to be known by our family.

And so I just want to read back to you what you wrote, how could you do this to me? And he said in her eyes, my journey was about hurting her, not about healing myself. She eventually passed on without ever seeing me as myself. And at her funeral, I had to dress as the man she wanted me to be.

I wept for her and for me. Can you talk about that? You know, Glenn, in reading your book, one of the things that really stood out to me was how impoverished our definition of love is, how we've accepted conditional acceptance as love. And that one of the most powerful things we can do is to say love has no buts or ifs or contingency plans.

It's a complete devotion to the other, right? And the love that I grew up with felt so conditional, felt you had to be excellent. You had to be happy. I remember I wrote a poem about being depressed as a young person. And my grandmother should have been in a campaign for iPad because she would just be Googling me nonstop. So she discovers this poem.

She calls my mom who calls my aunt, who calls my sister, who calls me. And she's so upset. not that I was depressed, but that I'm speaking about it in public, right? And then the way that we talked about depression in my family was, of course, we're all depressed, but that's why we work hard. So, and so what I really started to realize is the reason that the love was conditional for me is it was conditional to themselves. They wouldn't love themselves unless they were excellent. My grandmother literally worked so hard all of the time. And the only time I ever saw her free

was when she developed disabilities when she was older and couldn't labor in the same ways. So she was forced to lie in bed. And then being in bed, she started to paint. At the age of like 76, she started to take coffee grinds and spoons and things from the kitchen and make abstract paintings. And she made thousands of,

of paintings and she would say, these are my real children, right? And so I saw the myth of patriarchy. I saw how she was most free at the end of her life when she wasn't what society called beautiful. I saw how that she was the most beautiful when she had her sleeves rolled up and was making these paintings. And that's why I came to the funeral. I came because I knew that people are complicated and I loved her and my love wasn't

contingent on her accepting me. Damn. Fuck. I love that. I love that. It's like the very thing we want. The very thing we want from our parents or our people, we have to give it unconditionally back to them. Ugh.

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I'm at the beginning of putting these ideas into words. So just be patient with. me because I don't have all the right words yet. But I have been just rethinking or re-under understanding freshly some ideas about gender that I've had. And a lot of my, this little inner revolution started by watching the turfs. Okay. What are the turfs for those who don't know? Can you describe, can you give me a definition? Trans exclusionary radical feminists, but like how to describe it. Oh, okay.

So the, well, look, you're, tell me my mouth. No, Amanda, I would love for you. If you're looking at like social theory, there's this idea of distinctiveness threat, where if we, anytime we place our identity very specifically in a group, then the uniqueness of our individualality becomes. under threat when the boundaries around that group in any way become malleable. So for these radical feminists that have defined themselves completely as woman, and that is where they find their strength and their identity, instead of viewing the world from a mutual fight,

the way that in fact trans people and feminism align in our fight, they see trans women as the most threatening of all to them because they, if you can pass as me, what even is my identity? I have to put these walls very much around. Okay. So if, if, then I'll try to explain it this way. So watching them, I realized, oh, yikes. Like, if that has anything to do with feminism, then I need to rethink what I mean by feminism. Because in Untamed, I write woman, woman, woman, woman, woman, woman, woman, woman, woman, women, women, women, all the time. I look, I googled it once how many times.

I'm like, holy shit. I like really identified with that word, Ben, you know? And now when I listen to things, I'm starting to think differently about it because I'm thinking, oh, if you, like a turf, if I'm a turf, if you, if your most important thing is protecting your idea of what a woman is, then that's an over-identification with an identity. Like, I don't get that. Like what I mean by feminist is I'm on the side constantly of whoever is getting the most fucked at the time. Like if that's, that's it, right?

So if that, if that, if a bunch of feminists are protecting women as they see them at the exclusion of someone who is actually more under threat at that point, then I'm not with them anymore. Also, alok, I can't find inside of myself when I get really still. I can't find I can find this thing that is like a wild moving faith inside of my identity like my real self I can find like creativity

I can find that energy that's always I can't find any gender like I can't find on the inside of me I can only find gender on me like I can find it like in my shirt and on my jewelry and in my old remnants of Botox

where I've like injected misogyny underneath my Like, I can find gender on me, but not in me. And I have friends who, like, I have a close transgender friend who can find gender inside of them. And that's what they're expressing. So my question to you is, this idea of, like, gender is a just, it's a mandatory performance, but not born in us. Is that how you experience gender or do you experience gender as a real true thing inside of you that you're expressing on the outside? And also does that question make any effing sense to you?

Okay. First of all, Glenn, and it's never about making sense. It's about making sensation. Okay? Like, it's about what things make us feel, whether or not if they, because in order for something to make sense, it has to pay allegiance to an idea that already existed. And we want to make new ideas, you know?

So we have to be speculative and experimental, and that's why I'm a poet. Poetry is a laboratory for new ways of, loving, thinking, and dreaming, because in poetry, there are no rules. And that's why I think everyone is actually a poet, because it's the anarchy of form where for the first time in my life I had permission to say, make it up. And I brought that attitude everywhere I went. I'm going to make it up. So first I wanted to say to what we were talking earlier about turf is, you know, it's not just trans women. It's trans and non-binary people are positioned as a threat that's

undermining the feminist campaign because what is happening is they'll say that this gender theory is erasing the material reality of sex-based discrimination. So it's this idea that trans people are making it up and what's real is being a male or a female, right? And first of all, all language is made up. So when people say to me, you're making up new words like that. It's like plot twist, the word made up was made up. Like, okay.

What you're upset about is that trans and non-binary people for the first time are speaking for ourselves and not being spoken for. Because what power and especially patriarchal power is is the monopoly of the right to speak for other people. And so what is so threatening to these terms is that we are saying I'm not actually a metaphor. I'm not a discourse. I'm not an idea. I'm not an opinion. I'm a goddamn human being, right? And what TERFs are fighting for is not actually freedom.

It's the ability to do what has been done to them to someone else. Yes. And that's why I find it so difficult for me because feminism should be about liberation from the need to even have power because there's so many more interesting things we have to do, Like take naps, okay? Like power is not the goal.

It's not about overthrowing one system of domination to have another, right? It's about ending the need for domination. And that brings me to love because what I found and when I'm, I also have been so concerned by the uptick, you know, the United States where I'm having this conversation is not like the United Kingdom or TERFs have institutional power in the same way, but they're winning the idea wars. So oftentimes their narratives become the first ways

that people encounter people like me. So they're told that we are some violent danger, menace to society. And I see people being like, do you actually know trans people in your life? Or are you just, where are you imbibing this from? And you would think it would be very strange when the Republican Party,

a notoriously anti-woman establishment is opportunistically resourcing the rhetoric of protecting women and girls when it comes. So funny now. It comes to black people, immigrants, Muslims, and trans people, right? And so what's so scary about TERFs is that they're resourcing the language of feminism so that we're all like, yes, empowering, yes, totally great. But when the sand actually settles, what you see is some. far more sinister. And so what I found when I'm reading this stuff is what it is, it's a case of

unprocessed grief and pain and rage. And that's why I manifested wanting to meet you years ago because you in another life could have been a turf. Every incentive was there for you because you experienced so much brutality and injury from men. And you could have said, womanhood is the only way, elevated that, exalted that. But what you did is you dug a little bit deeper, and you started to realize a kind of marrow that's much more spiritual than that, that actually says patriarchy is an escape room, and it doesn't matter who your character is.

We're all just trying to get out. And actually, it's about possibility. You write imagination over indoctrination, right? And so only by doing that healing work can we actually say, I don't want to hot potato my oppression and misery on someone else. I actually want to end the hot potato. And then to your final question there about what I feel about myself, personally, I experience gender as it's defined by other people,

as an obstacle to my spirituality. But gender as it's defined by me is an exercise in my spirituality. And let me explain. They see gender as what I look like. I don't see gender. I surrender to it. They say gender is about how I act, my mannerisms, all the things in the outside, my body. I see gender as a connection to my divinity.

And so what people don't remember when they don't learn history is that a lot of what we now call feminine garb was actually ceremonial wear. that people would wear to receive God. And it actually was about spirituality. So the way that I dress is not because I want to be seen as a woman or be seen as non-binary. It's because I want to be a receptacle. I want to be a vessel for my purpose on earth. And that when I am dressed as myself, when I am myself, then I can channel truth and speak it. But for so long in my life, I was dissociated.

I was a shell, and I think y'all were too. And what my gender journey was about is less about finding my gender and more about being able to walk on the earth and feel it, being able to speak with a kind of conviction where my words actually landed. How I got there is what other people call gender, but what I call healing myself. Okay. Okay.

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are trying to put into context what a loke was just saying about I could have been a turf in another life. and understanding that we don't do to other people what we are trying to escape from ourselves and we don't leave people behind. It reminds me very much of the mistake white feminists have made for so long. It reminds me of Elizabeth Cady Stanton. It reminds me of we are women.

We will identify more as women than anything else, which allows us then to when we are fighting for the vote to leave behind black people, to leave behind, like, which happens again and again and again because they didn't identify with a more marrow part of the soul, which would have connected all of them and not let them leave each other behind. It's the same thing in some ways, not always, but in some ways with gender, correct?

It's actually, yeah, and you know, historically, one of the things that often gets lost is Elizabeth Cady's Shantins and Susan B. Anthony's would tell black women and indigenous women, you're not ready for feminism yet. You have to look like women as we define it and go through what we experience. So actually, what a lot of people don't know is white women would go to indigenous reservations

and teach indigenous women how to iron, how to wear blouses and corsets. And the idea would be you have to experience sexism so that you can experience feminism. So rather than going to indigenous and black women and saying, can you teach me how to be free, white women said you have to experience my misery and we see the exact same stuff with Terfs now

where they say, you can only be a feminism if you do this, this, this, this, this, if you've been through this experience, it's that same sense of entitlement. But what I really am pushing back against in my work is I can't reason people out of hatred. If I have to make an argument, a critical treatise on why,

I should not be attacked on why I should be able to breathe, then you do not care about this conversation. So we have to go deeper. And the reason we have to go deeper is because we are not responsible for the pain, but we are responsible for the healing, right? And so what I want to tell Terfs and what I want to tell,

and that's what I began with saying that travesty of transphobia from women is I am so sorry. I am so, so, so sorry for the cruelty and misogyny in the world. But that does not give us permission to wreck that same damage elsewhere. We have to do the work to interrupt these cycles of violence and insist on a more dignified and beautiful life.

And I promise you it's possible. And that's why you're so irritated by us because you see also another thing that Terfs do is they comment on our appearance. They say, oh, you're a mockery. You're like a joke. You disgusting. They're doing the same sex as tactics,

Expend it where in the early 20th century, when women were advocating for the right to vote, men would publish images to scare women from choosing the right to vote by depicting them as ugly. What did ugly mean? Wearing pants, having a beard, being masculine. So the idea would be like, you're no longer desirable if you have political autonomy. What are the terms doing now to trans people? Look at these ugly people. I was literally just tagged in a meme the other day. Trans rights activists are ugly, turfs are beautiful. I was sitting there being like, what? And this in the name of feminism? And I think I really want to not to like sort of harp on this, but this is an urgent crisis. So often when I speak about this, people are like, this makes no sense. It's counterintuitive.

If you experience depression, why would you further it? I want to interrupt that logic. If you experience depression, of course, of course you want someone else to because you want someone else to feel that pain. Yes, right. It is. Well, and you've internalized it so much. I mean, those early white feminists, it's not that they were thinking consciously, I want you to feel the pain I felt. They were thinking they had so internalized the patriarchal model of model womanhood that they were actually looking at indigenous women and saying you are actually not women yet until you match this, right? So we have so internalized the trauma and the systems, these artificial definitions, we have become

them so much that we can't even interact. We have to bring you into patriarchy then to free us from patriarchy, which is the danger of white feminism, right? That's the whole thing like white feminism is so freaking danger. because it's just about bringing more people along into this death trap that we are in and getting a few of us a little bit higher in the hierarchy that already exists instead of doing what Alok said, which is how do we get free from this need for power in the first place?

I want to talk about beauty a little bit because I think this is a touch point that probably most people listening will understand because they felt it on a daily level. Um, you said in, in grammar lessons, I fucking love your poetry loke. I love it so much. It's, the body is three-dimensional language. Beauty is the harshest editor. Can you talk to us about how all of us are controlled and dehumanized by beauty?

in the way that the world defines it, not the way that you define it. Beauty standards. You know, I'm so glad that we're speaking when I'm 30 years old, because if we'd have this conversation five years ago, I would not be ready to say what I'm about to say. I've gone through a profound transformation in my political analysis. I spent the bulk of my life and my career detailing the ways in which I was discriminated against how insidious.

and violent these systems of oppression were. And now I'm kind of bored of that work because I realized the reason I was being discriminated was not because I lacked, but because I loved was because of my power. I was only interpreting my life through their lens, which made me feel like I was wrong, when in fact I was a marker of everything that was right.

So I began to revisit, what was it that people called ugly in me? They called my body here ugly. They called my skin color ugly. They called my features ugly. They called my femininity ugly. And if I trace all of those insults where they land, I love women. I love femininity.

I love queer people. I love butts. I love sex. I love all of these things that they are using to degrade us so they don't degrade me anymore. They're just testaments to my beauty, such that when I started to do this, work, what I began to realize is it's not what we're fighting against. That's the basics. We're fighting against violence culture. Of course, we're fighting against hostility, transphobia. But what are we fighting for? I'm fighting for beauty. And a lot of people get confused by that because the only

definition of beauty, like love, that they've inherited, is so basic and flat that they just associate beauty with that commodity that we're told if you access, then you're, you're not. You're you get power. That's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is beauty means your soul's fingerprint on the earth that no one else in the world can have your beauty. It's when I'm speaking to someone and I'm like, I could talk to you for the rest of my life because finally I can breathe again. The world for me is a series of drowning and then having conversations with people where I can finally breathe again. And the reason I can breathe is it's because it's you. It's not that imprint of what you've been told, the cookie cutter sheet that says, hi, I only know myself from my

identities. So the work of beauty work for me is actually deep healing work to say, who am I outside of what I've been told I should be? Beauty is about that attitude of showing up and saying, I'm worthy of being here. It's unruly. It's riotous. It pisses people off. And once you find that beauty in yourself, you see it.

And so now what I was trying to track in my latest book, Your Wooned My Garden, is I'm so much more happy and joyous because I see so much beauty everywhere, despite every single attempt in the world to erase dissent. The season shift.

That's a form of descent. The flower blooms. That's a form of descent. We rise up. That's a form of descent. I go back to putting on my wig and my makeup, even though I felt I was going to throw it in the closet. That's a form of descent.

Beauty is the natural orientation of the universe. The universe rioted first. And we're just following its lead. Or maybe it's Mabeline. Okay. Your wound, my garden. I need to read something from it. So this is from

Aluk's latest poetry collection. I don't even want to call it a book. A sensation called Your Wound, My Garden. One day, when I die, rewind the heart attack. What power precipitated it? unfurl the tumor, what policy prescribed it, dissect the culture, not just my corpse, diagnose the world, hold one big stethoscope to it, listen. Alope, can you talk about the cycle of trauma?

Okay, because really what you're talking about so much lately, what I understand that you're talking about is how all of this, all of this political, all of this oppression, all of this anger, the turfs, all of it has to do with trauma that happens to us and then we keep precipitating. So can you talk about the cycle of trauma in terms of how we oppress ourselves and each other and the toll it takes on our bodies, on our politics, on our freedom? So I know a lot of listeners suffer from the same thing. I suffer from 24-7 chronic pain. and when we look at the data, it's predominantly women and trans people who navigate autoimmune disorders, chronic pain, and chronic illness. And I wrote that book because I was spending so much time in clinics.

I went to dozens and dozens and dozens of doctors, and I was like, what's wrong with me? Like, I shouldn't be in pain. And we did all the scans, and we did all of the tests, and everything made people say, You're perfect. You're healthy. You're great. And then I started to realize, oh, my gosh, it is easier and more cost effective to blame me for my injury, my pain than it is to actually say, this is misogyny.

And I actually believe misogyny makes us sick. I actually believe that when I'm walking down the street and people are laughing at me and taking photos of me and spitting on me, that when I'm logging online and people are saying, lies about me are literally just trying to fear monger as a way to make me into something that I'm not. That has a toll on my body such that it manifests as physical pain because our body is trying to teach us, hey, this is not right. This is not safe. And so what I started to do is say, oh my goodness, I might never get safety out there, but I have to give safety to me. And so what pain allowed me to do for the first time my life. And Glennon, you write about this and I really

resonated with that. It's not that pain is the problem. It's that suffering is the problem. And so pain actually said stop. And so I stopped everything I was doing. I started looking at my life. And I said, why did I mistake latent dissociation and a kind of suicide death drive workaholism as being alive? No. I want to live. so fully with so much vigor and zest and glamour that when I die, because inevitably that's the only thing that we know, I'll say, okay, cool, great. Next six venture, I'm there. No regrets, no remorse.

And so pain actually allowed me to start thinking about trauma, but then to start thinking about healing. I didn't just stick there and diagnosing the wound. Why am I experiencing pain? What is this going through? I started to ask, the only reason I care to ask these questions is because some part of me is fighting for me saying, you want to be free, you know? And so I think like many people suffering alongside with, and I write about the zero wound by garden too, it's like what preposition do we have to pain? It's there. Am I next to it? Is it in me?

Actually, in some ways, taught me that all of the models that told me that life was going to be good when I was. was younger, I believed I'd stop being bullied when I grew up. When I, when I was younger, I was told you're going to meet the love of your life. Life is going to be picture perfect. Fuck that. Actually, life is going to be full of pain and so much confronting self-doubt and you'll feel like you made it and then you hate yourself again. But alongside that is so much beauty. And so what I wanted to do in that book and the reason I called it that title is to show that suffering is a visitor. My natural orientation is love, care, peace, but then depression comes in, suffering comes in, and it's saying, notice me. The pain is saying, submit to me, and I do that, and then

it goes or it doesn't go, but that doesn't matter, because what matters more is that I listen to it. It's a new year, and instead of trying to reinvent myself, I've been asking a simpler question. What would actually support me right now? And honestly, a big part of that answer is my home. I want my space to feel calmer, more functional, and a little more like a place that can reflect my goals and energy for this year, which is why I've been turning to Wayfair. It's truly a one-stop shop for everything your home needs this season. What surprised me most was how easy it was to find exactly what I wanted in my style and within my budget. whether you're organizing kids rooms, upgrading your work from home setup, tackling clutter, or just trying to make weeknight dinners easy.

Wayfair really does have everything. Your home doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to support the life you're living right now. Get organized, refreshed, and back on track this new year for way less. Head to Wayfair.com right now to shop all things home. That's W-A-Y-F-A-I-R.com. Wayfair. Every style, every home. So all of our love bugs who are listening, okay, right now, the whole pod squad.

We do something called the next right thing each week. Okay. So what is the next right thing, aloke? Something little. We call this we can do hard things, but we don't want it to be hard. What is the next right thing that we can do to face or free ourselves from the effects of trauma? If trauma is where we, all of this comes from. Or to interrupt the cycle. You know, if we're, if we have inherited our grandparents' trauma and our trying, like, how do we step into that cycle? Mm-hmm. Forgiveness, self-forgiveness.

when you are being most cruel internally, you have to have some other voice in there being like, that's not nice. Would I allow anyone to say this to my friend? Never. So that's where you're going to intervene and say, this is intimate partner violence, me against me.

And I'm coming in and I'm saying not today. And even if it feels absurd, it's really about stopping and in your head being like, no, I'm not going to tolerate that. And what I fundamentally believe is if we do the work of self-forgiveness and self-compassion, that unlocks an unbridled compassion for other people, because we see the ways in which we're flawed, we're idiosyncratic, we're self-sabotaging and ridiculous. So so are there people. And so people always ask me, how did you learn to love all these people who are so mean to you online? It's because I realized I could have been them in the same way that I was saying you could have been a term. Maybe I could have been a term. And my first response isn't to say like these people, these bigots.

That's not right. It's how did I get out of bigotry? The way I got out of bigotry is someone loved me. and maybe that someone was me. Yeah. And you know what? Another next right thing we can do is read a loke's poetry. I mean, when I listen to you just now talking about poetry, I realized, you know, Abby knows, I can't, I have to start my day with poetry.

I can't even, I don't want to leave the magic space too fast. I'm just going to say words because you told me they don't have to make sense. I'm just going to say some words, okay? Like, I don't want to forget about magic right away. And poetry is where I can stay in the magic. And I guess I mean where people are just showing me their true beautiful selves without the representative that's staying inside of all the structure. A poem is like a love letter from the marrow that you were talking about. It's like even sometimes when I'm reading a book and I love books.

But even books feel too structured sometimes, right? It's like not a new, fresh thing. It's like the first time I read Untamed to one of my dearest friends, Liz Gilbert, I had written it in an entirely different structure, a structure structure. And she was like, what is this shit? And I'm not even exaggerating. That's basically what she said, right? She was like, you're writing. She's just like, what is this?

Yeah, wasn't free enough. And I do think that poetry, if you start to read. read poetry or to allow yourself to write poetry. It's just a way of freeing that beautiful, the beauty that Alok is talking about that's been beaten out of us. It's a way to wake it up, right? Can I be honest with you? Please. I feel like I was put on this earth to be a poet, and it's so hard because no one wants to read it. And so everything else I do is about how do I get people to come and watch me perform a poem, which is the hardest cell. It's like, it's like, hey, everyone, like, come and confront all of your deepest repression and trauma through poetry, right?

And it's just difficult because I feel like, you know, we have to sugarcoat the medicine because people mistake the medicine as poison and the poison is the medicine. But I truly feel so frustrated when all these people believe all these things, when all of these things, when all you can do is go read a poem and then for the first time it will teach you education of the heart. That's what poetry does is actually how to love more. Because when I read poetry, I'm constantly expanding and stretching because what poetry actually teaches me is that we're all in this world together and we're seeing the same things and experiencing similar things and we're all in different worlds at the same time.

And that I could read your poems. And to be honest, when I was reading your book, it's the poetic lines which speak to me the most. Every time I'm reading, it's those zingers. It's the other stuff, it's like all just like, it's setting up. The ace shot. Wow, I just made a sports metaphor. Oh, my God.

Oh, my God. Wow. It's really those lines. And that is how I write. Is I write backwards. I have the line because I'm a poet. And what a poet does is take. a really complex idea, strip it apart, strip it apart, strip it apart, strip it apart, strip it apart,

landed in that line, and then everything else is decoration. Yes! It's like maybe the best compliment you could have ever given my wife. Because my secret dream is to be a poet. But what if you already are one? I keep telling her. I don't know when she'll finally listen. Maybe now she will.

Now that a look told me, I believe it. I'm changing my bio tonight. We are going to end this conversation with Alok, but don't be too sad because Alok is coming back on Thursday to answer some burning questions from our pod squad of poets. We love you. This week when things get hard, don't you forget that we can do hard things? We'll see you back here soon. I give you Tishmell. and Brandy Carlisleon.

Through fire, I came out the other side. I chased desire, I made sure I got what's mine. And I continued to believe that as I'm because we're adventurers and heart breaks on map A final destination They've stopped asking directions To places they've made We'll find

We can do a heart A brand new star Sometimes things fall I continue to believe As people are free And it took some time But I'm fine Because we're adventurers

And heartbreaks On that destination We've stopped asking directions To places they And to be loved The fun can do hard Venturer Never been

And two can do We Can Do Hard Things is produced in partnership with Cadence 13 studios. Be sure to rate, review, and follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Odyssey, or wherever you get your podcasts. Especially be sure to rate and review the podcast if you really liked it. If you didn't, don't worry about it. It's fine.