My Year of Unrest and Realization

An Ottessa Moshfegh-inspired mash-up of chats, captions, and insights of 2024

Wrapping up and looking back at 2024, I see genocide, I see ecocide and like my 5 year old has a bad habit of blurting out: I see fuckshit. This is my year of unrest and realisation.

Realising who to revolt with, who to join forces with when the apocalypse is here (it is here…). Realising who truly cares about dignity and selfdetermination for all, who aren’t too caught up in their own fragility and privileges to truly care. Realizing I’m over being a many-faced people pleasing friend slut — done idolising people who can intellectualise the meaning out of anyone’s suffering. Realising that freedom is a constant struggle, that intersectionality isn’t merely a fancy word to showcase a feminism that is nuanced and expansive, that Angela Davis explains it very succinctly. Realising that saying something uncontroversial can get me policed, by people I thought were my allies. Realising that no left-wing newspaper subscription or “communist” party ballot can hide you from your de-facto racism, when you’re drowning in colonialist coolade. Realising I am no nice girl, but I forever strive to be soft. Realising I am emotion lotion, that’s my calling, a hope-keeper, I believe in us babe.

Angela Davis

Realising the hopeless don't revolt, revolution is an act of hope. In therapy, I’m either working on behalf of structures or on behalf of my clients. To revolt on behalf of community is, in many ways, to embrace hope, isn’t it? We’ve mastered submission but know so little about hope. We submit to the nuclear family, to consumerism, to individualism. We lack communal spaces, shared songs, and even permission to feel anger. Realizing hope is our collective homework—yours and mine.

Realising we must confront our fragility and commit to change. Realising we can be unrelenting in our unrest. Realising, realising, realising that our systems aren't built for hope, let’s change that, shall we?

This year of unrest and realisation has shattered our hearts. I re-read a book from the nineties called 'We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy — and the World’s Getting Worse.' It's a conversation between psychoanalyst James Hillman and screenwriter Michael Ventura, discussing how therapy can be a cell to prepare for revolution. They suggest that we should connect our psychological lives to the world's problems, and redefine the self as the interiorization of community. Or else therapy is futile at best, harmful at worst.

Hillman said something that stuck with me. He said:

“I think we’ve also lost shame. We talk about our parents shaming us when we were little, but we’ve lost our shame in relation to the world and to the oppressed, the shame of being wrong, of messing up the world.”

Realising that perhaps the way to initiate a revolution from our privileged position is to stand up for our depression and shame, rather than dissociate from it or retreate into 'inner work.' Realising we need to reclaim the shame, shall we not?

This year of unrest and realisation has been a litmus test for so many questions of morality. My poetic friend once said we should use our hearts like bodybuilders use their muscles: let them break and grow back together, bigger and stronger. Our heart is our muscle of empathy, and it needs practice. We are responsible for strengthening this muscle.

This year of unrest and realisation, we’ve been hard at work with our heart push-ups – bearing witness, hearing accounts, thousands upon thousands, from Palestinians in the midst of rubble, listening to the voices of children who’ve lost everything, an excessive, continous exercise of the heart muscle grinding us to a halt, making us less effective friends, partners, parents, colleagues.

Realising I'm okay with this internal disarray because it bears testimony to the fact that I'm a human responding to a sick world. I'm not becoming desensitized to it, nor conforming to it; I'm breaking my heart for it. Again and again and again, and that's how it should be. That’s my year of unrest and realization.