Things I’ve Learned This Year: 2022 Edition part 2

Hey there! As promised, this is part 2 of the things I’ve learned this year. Each year, I take a moment to reflect on all the lessons I’ve learned, realizations I’ve had, and just general bits of advice I’d like to take with me into the new year — and I write it all down, and share it with you :)

If you’re just joining me, you can check out part 1 of my Things I’ve Learned This Year: 2022 Edition, and you can also check out my 2021 Edition as well.

And now, let’s get to it ;)

Let people be wrong about you. If someone misunderstands your intent or misconstrues something you say, or forms an opinion about you based on that, it’s ok. It’s not the end of the world. It affects you much less than you might realize. There’s a certain freedom in relinquishing the responsibility of making sure every single person has the right perception of you. Because it’s not really something you can control. People all see things through a very personal lens that’s shaped by their own thoughts and backgrounds and experiences and biases. It’s liberating to just allow people to be wrong about you, and trust that your own perception of yourself is enough. People’s perceptions of you is not your responsibility. The way people react to you is not your responsibility.

The way someone treats you or perceives you has way more to do with them, and not as much to do with you at all. As long as you know who you are, and you know your values and you’re self-aware — you don’t have to feel like you’re a bad person if someone misunderstands you. And the really funny thing about life is that the right people often do find you, and they stick by you even on your bad days. The right people will get you. They’ll extend grace towards you. The right people know who you are as a person, and their opinion of you doesn’t change at the drop of a hat. The wrong relationships are the ones that feel like you’re walking a tightrope, where you have no room to stumble or be human. The right ones make you feel like you can just be. Whatever someone else’s opinion of you is — it’s not your problem. You don’t need to make it your problem.

You don’t have to be “fully healed” in order to be in a relationship. If I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard this platitude thrown around by pop psychologists or people on the internet, I wouldn’t need a day job. This feels like a sort of emotional ableism. As if to say, you’re only ready for a relationship if you have a sEcUrE attachment style. Which is crazy because a lot of us do have trauma from our experiences that affect our attachment style. And often, people with insecure or avoidant attachment styles develop secure attachment styles when they’re around people who have secure attachment styles. While it’s important to develop a strong relationship with yourself and learn to be secure on your own, there’s only so much you can do by yourself. As human beings, we’re wired for community. We need community, in some form. And the only way we truly learn how to have healthy relationships of any sort, is to have relationships with other people.

So it’s unfair to say that only people with nO iNsEcUriTiEs are deserving of relationships, and everyone else are second-class citizens of the emotional hierarchy. It’s one thing to be insecure in a toxic way — like the insecure “alpha males” with podcasts who demand that all women submit to them while simultaneously taking care of them like children. But, it’s a completely different thing to be insecure in the normal, human way. As humans, we’re all a little insecure. We all have things about ourselves that we think could be better. And that’s ok. We can work through those insecurities, and a lot of us are doing that work.

People also often treat healing like baking cookies. Like there’s a definitive ending to the healing process; that you can’t be in a relationship until you’re a fully baked cookie, after which you get to find another fully baked cookie to be with. But the healing process isn’t like cookies. It’s more like the scientific process. You do the work, you draw your conclusions with the knowledge and resources you have in the moment — but you also allow room for change and growth, as you learn new things and come into new knowledge and gain new experiences. The process of scientific discovery is never truly over. And it’s the same with healing. It never really ends. And really, the only person who can say whether you’re ready for a relationship is you. It’s all in how ready you feel. If you feel ready, then you’re ready. What does “fully healed” even mean? I think too many people deny themselves the beauty of connection with others, in search of this elusive state of being “fully healed.” We’re all human, and we’re all healing. And sometimes, finding someone to heal with is one of the best things we can do for our healing journeys.

Our current society doesn’t really allow for true self-love, healing, and happiness. And so first things first — if you’ve managed to survive and find a little bit of happiness in our current world, that in itself is nothing short of a miracle. And you should feel proud of yourself for having the strength and the resolve to do that. Not enough people talk about how hard it can be to find joy in this world. Cultivating joy and love and healing in a world so hell-bent on promoting the very opposite of those things — is the most radical act of defiance you can do.

Our current society is a capitalistic one. And I really don’t think that people can truly thrive in a capitalist society. Because capitalist societies aren’t designed for that. In our society, wellness equates simply to productivity. And what people call responsibility looks a lot like conformity. When people say that “you’ll be fine as long as you’re responsible,” what that really means is “as long as you stick to the status quo.” When employers talk about prioritizing mental health, the benefit they claim is that “mental wellness improves productivity.” Everything that’s done to help individuals is all done in the name of productivity — not because human beings simply deserve to be healthy and happy. So many of us live in really isolated ways. Instead of communities, we’ve exemplified the nuclear family. And this dynamic is reflected in how we live and in the values we hold. Asking for help is seen as a weakness, or worse, an inconvenience to others. We glorify over-independence; we glorify the women who can “do it all.” (Funny enough, men have never been required to “do it all.” Most cis het men have generally moved through life with the expectation that they’ll have a partner to help them, or to handle all household and childcare responsibilities, as well as the emotional and mental labor that comes with this, while they do….spreadsheets? LinkedIn influencing? FiXiNg tHe cAr? KiLLiNg bUgS? Idk.)

I used to wonder what was wrong with me, because doing it all always left me feeling so drained. But it wasn’t until I started delving more into decoloniality, that I realized that “doing it all” is a colonial construct. Individualism is a colonial construct. Maximizing productivity is a colonial construct. The nuclear family is a colonial construct. Race is a colonial construct. And so, for us to heal as a society, for us to heal as people — we really need to start doing the work to decolonize the way we think about things. When you look at indigenous cultures, they are community-based. They are matriarchal. And it’s common to assume that a matriarchal society is just the reverse of a patriarchy, but that’s still seeing things through a colonial lens. That’s still seeing things through the eyes of the patriarchy, which is a colonial system.

A matriarchal society isn’t the patriarchy in reverse, because a matriarchy isn’t a product of colonialism. A matriarchal society has never needed the patriarchy’s hierarchical system of domination. Matriarchal societies are egalitarian and founded on maternal values. The way many people have developed their worldview is just like in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, where people are stuck seeing the shadows on the cave walls, thinking that the shadows are their reality and not realizing that there’s a source where the shadows come from. Too many people are stuck thinking that the only choices we have are the ones that currently exist in our society. That the only choices are either being the oppressor or being the oppressed — not realizing that there is a third option that liberates all of us. Because oppressive systems oppress the oppressor, too.

Too many people look at all the different social issues we struggle with, all the different forms of oppression we struggle with, and treat them all like they’re separate. Those people, while they have the best of intentions, are still seeing only the shadows. They’re not seeing the source of the shadows. We can’t truly dismantle any system of oppression unless we come at it from a stance of decoloniality. Because then, we see that all these systems of oppression are actually closely connected to each other. And that they all come from the same source: colonialism. Only through decoloniality do we begin to see the source of the shadows on the cave walls. So we have to start by decolonizing the way we think and decolonizing our worldviews.

And a big part of what that looks like is prioritizing community over individualism. Instead of putting pressure on ourselves to do it all, we need to create communities and support systems to help us carry the huge loads and responsibilities that come with life. Life is hard, and it wasn’t meant to be handled by one person — or even two people. The only way to manage life and not feel burnt out and exhausted, is by having a community. It’s by having community support and systems that help people access the things they need — education, food, housing, childcare, healthcare. Communities are what allow us to develop self-love; communities are what allow us to heal and find happiness. Not whatever bullshit our current society is trying to shove down our throats.

Power corrupts, and it may not be meant for humans. I don’t know if this is a hot take or not, but I stand by this statement 100%. I think power is incredibly corrupting. It has the capacity to corrupt even the most kind-hearted people. Colonialism started because of a hunger for power. Capitalism continues because of a hunger for power. Every oppressive structure we have in place today continues to be upheld because the oppressors have a hunger for power that cannot be satisfied, because they cannot feel good about themselves unless there are people who have less than they do. And I’ve seen the ugly side of what power does to people when given even just a smidge, just a taste of it. Look at how middle management acts. They don’t even have any real power at a company, and they know this — but having people that report to them, having people who they can choose to fire or promote or demote — that gives them an ego boost. It’s like a consolation prize. They know they don’t have power, they know they don’t have influence — but this one small thing they have control over — they cling to that. And they abuse it whenever they feel small. Whenever they need a reminder that they have something their direct reports don’t have.

But it’s not just middle management. As a kid, I even had some teachers who abused their power. I had teachers who 100% had a power trip and would use that to massage their own ego. My mom was a teacher in the same school district where I was a student — so often, my teachers who didn’t like my mom, would take that anger out on me, even though I was their student. I had teachers yell at me in front of the class, for the most inconsequential things. I’m talking things like the way I sat in my chair in class. Literally my sitting position. I was a small kid, and I often had to sit on my knees just to be able to see properly over my desk. And my 5th grade math teacher used to yell at me for sitting “wrong.” Like, surely this bitch realized that I sat that way because I couldn’t fucking see over my desk. But she was one of those teachers who knew she was in a position of authority relative to her students, and so she’d find reasons to lord this authority over the students she didn’t like, or over the students she wanted to put in their place.

Any person in any kind of authority position — they might think to themselves that they’re a good person and they’d never abuse that authority. But in moments of weakness, in moments where they feel small or in moments where they’re reminded that there are people far more powerful above them — they’re just as susceptible to abusing their authority in order to remind themselves that, “hey at least I’m not like the people I get to control.” And so, I don’t know what the solution is. Because we can’t not have people in authority; we can’t not have leaders and teachers and congresspeople. All we can do is choose people who want nothing to do with power or money, people who want to help but don’t care for the perks of that kind of power. That’s how you know that they’re meant to lead. Though even then, we can’t say that power wouldn’t ever corrupt them, either. But right now, that’s really the best we can do.

The answer to so many problems is universal basic income (UBI). (Yes, I know that this would come from taxes. But first off, tax the rich, and also, this is a good use of our taxes. Also, we have the wealth in this country; it’s just a matter of reallocating it.) I think the reason so many of us strive to either find our dream career or turn our passion into our career — is because in our current society, it is the only way to experience a semblance of freedom and agency and joy in our lives. But that freedom is just an illusion. Any society that requires you to sell your labor to live is not a society in which its people are truly free. True freedom would be having immediate access to our basic needs without needing to earn it. None of us asked to be born, yet society makes it seem like they’re doing us a favor by allowing us to purchase the things we need in order to not die.

So, I really do think we should be pushing for UBI. We need that social safety net to be able to access our basic needs without needing to sell our labor. (And might I add, many people sell their labor A LOT, and yet still cannot access their basic needs.) Under UBI, you could still work if you wanted to—and I suspect most people do want to do something that they enjoy — but if you can’t work for some reason, or if you leave your current job and are in between jobs, you also won’t starve or go completely bankrupt. There’s still room for upward economic mobility, but people would have their basic needs met.

Having your basic needs met has implications that are much farther-reaching than people realize. Most mental health issues like depression, suicide, anxiety — in large part stem from a lack of physical resources, like housing, food, money, healthcare. Talk therapy and the 988 hotline can only do so much to address these mental health issues — but they can’t fix the root cause. You can’t therapy your way out of poverty. And therapy itself remains largely inaccessible to a lot of people. If people had the income needed to access their basic needs, we’d see a drop in depression and anxiety rates. We’d see a drop in crime rates. We’d see a drop in mortality rates. We’d see a rise in education rates. We’d see an overall improvement in quality of life. I think we have the means to put this in place, but the powers that be (aka, the billionaire CEOs and the politicians in their pockets) want us to keep working for them, and keep making them money.

Money corrupts everything and everyone it touches. And the only way we heal as a society — the only way we heal from the mistakes we’ve made and the injustices we’ve upheld — is if we create a society where money is de-centered. (This goes right back to decoloniality. Money is a colonialist construct.) As I said in my last Things I’ve Learned post, capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy are all interconnected and all tie back to colonialism. Freedom and healing can only come in a post-colonial world. In a world where we are actively undoing colonialist thinking, colonialist systems. Money is at the heart of colonialism. If we de-center money, we start to dismantle every other system of oppression too.

Beauty is a bad investment. This is something I’ve struggled with for a long time. I think it’s impossible not to struggle with feeling inadequate in this regard, because we’re inundated with so much subliminal messaging about how your life is just better when you’re attractive, about how you’ll get all the things you really want if you’re attractive. I spent a lot of time this year deconstructing and unlearning Eurocentric beauty standards. Realizing that I’m not ugly; I’m just not white. And also realizing that beauty standards are so fleeting and so temporary. It’s really not worth it to shell out thousands of dollars on cosmetic surgery just to fit an unrealistic beauty standard that will probably, definitely change in a few years. For a little while, I somehow found myself on Plastic Surgery TikTok, and it was so crazy to me seeing people like Kendall Jenner or Blake Lively before their cosmetic surgery. While their surgical enhancements were really subtle and natural and well-done, they also were beautiful before all of that. They didn’t need to do all of that. And it was this reminder to me like, oh that’s what human beings look like. They don’t look like what we see on social media, or in movies or TV.

No human being looks perfect. And how harmful is it that we expect ourselves to look perfect when it’s not really in our nature to be perfect? If we’re inherently imperfect, we’re setting ourselves up for constant disappointment by trying to meet a standard of perfection that’s simply impossible. We don’t need to be perfect, regardless of what society tells us. Perfection is overrated. All those things that those celebrities fixed with their cosmetic procedures — I’d never even perceived those things as flaws in the first place. Imagine how different our world would be if we looked at our “flaws” as things that simply made us human and unique.

It’s a difficult thing to learn to love the things about yourself that for so long, society made you believe were “flaws” or “ugly.” And making you believe that you’re ugly is on purpose. It goes hand-in-hand with capitalism. Because capitalism thrives on a population that believes that they’re not enough. But if society can convince people that Golden Goose sneakers are cool, then we can certainly convince ourselves that the way we look is just fine, and that we don’t need to change a single thing. Learn to love what you have — it’s hard work, but it’s a lot cheaper than cosmetic surgery. (Less risky, too.)

Happiness is found within us, not achieved by means outside of us. I want to proceed carefully with this one, because a lot of people weaponize statements like this in an effort to prevent systemic change. They’ll be like, “Well rich people can be depressed too,” and use that as an excuse for why improving wages or putting policies in place to help address poverty “wouldn’t necessarily fix quality of life,” even though it obviously would. So, this is more like something you can use as your chainmail to help energize you as you practice your activism, as you fight for change, and as you move through a world that is fundamentally broken. Like I said earlier, we live in a capitalist, consumerist society — and it loves to remind us of how much we lack and how inferior we are, and that’s why we need to buy this self-improvement course, or buy these products to change our appearances, or work even harder so we can afford to buy all the things that we’re told will make us happy. And so this year, I’ve needed this reminder time and time again— that happiness and self-worth starts on the inside. That we get to decide we’re worthy; we don’t need to wait for other people to decide that we are.

I don’t necessarily buy into things like manifestation in the way that The Secret presents it — I find that a lot of that type of thinking veers dangerously close to victim-blaming, lack of accountability, and delusion. But I do think there is merit in the idea of believing that you are worthy of good things, believing that you are worthy of happiness. The version of manifestation that I do believe, is that anything you want has to start with you believing that you are good enough for it. It has to start with believing that you already have all the tools you need within yourself to achieve that thing. And most importantly, it has to start with believing that you are already enough as you are, in the present.

Often when I see people tout self-improvement, it comes from a place of insecurity and self-hatred. They want to manifest all these things like money or a killer bod or a fancy-sounding career because they are unsatisfied with who they are in the present. They want to change themselves into someone they think they would like, someone they think other people might be impressed by, because they don’t like themselves as they are now. They want to first feel admired by others, so that they can then love themselves. They think they have to become somebody worthy of love. They do the self-improvement thing with the goal being self-love — because they cannot love the present version of themselves. But they’ve got it ass-backwards. If you start your self-growth journey from a place of self-hatred, then you’re already defeated. You’re never going to feel happy. And you’re never going to find self-love. Self-improvement cannot come from a place of self-hatred. Your journey has to START with self-love. It can’t be the other way around. You have to find a way to fully love who you presently are. Self-love is the starting point, not the destination.

When your journey has that foundation of self-love, that means that your self-love is unconditional. Because you can love any version of yourself, even if this current version of yourself isn’t the best one. And that’s what love is. Love doesn’t ask anything from you. It’s unconditional. And your self-love has to be unconditional. If you only allow yourself to love yourself if you’ve achieved a specific income, appearance, or job — you don’t truly love yourself. Self-love involves radical self-acceptance. It involves meeting yourself exactly where you are, right at this moment, and accepting and loving all of it. Believing that all of it is worthy, before any of the improvement stuff. Because that’s what we all truly want, deep down. We want to be loved unconditionally. We want all the parts of ourselves, even the parts we’re ashamed or embarrassed of, to be loved and accepted. We want to be loved not because of our achievements or our looks or our money or our reputations. We want to be loved simply for who we are as human beings. By learning to love and accept ourselves unconditionally, we can then learn to love and accept others, too.

And that’s it. The things I’ve learned, the things I’ve reflected on, this past year. It’s been a ride. I hope at least some of this has resonated with you, and some of this gives you something empowering to take with you into the new year. Happy Holidays, and Happy New Year, everyone.