Keynote: “Resilience, Liberation, & Embodiment”
» This blog post is a copy of my remarks as the keynote speaker of San Diego Pride’s 2024 Youth Leadership Summit.
Thank you all for being here, thank you for letting me speak to you, there is no place I’d rather be than in a room full of my community: young, queer, change-makers.
When San Diego Pride reached out and invited me to speak to you all in early October, I was deeply honored. I was excited for weeks. Then early November came around, and that excitement turned into abject horror. Horror because I watched this election unfold and I grieved for our country, our world, and our community. Horror because I worried I wouldn’t find the right words to say to you.
Here is a reality, no matter how you feel about politics. These next four years are going to be bleak. We are facing unprecedented disasters—natural and unnatural—compounded with the escalating threat of autocracy and white supremacy. People and our leaders hate us for how we present, who we love, the color of our skin, our last names, our families, the languages we speak, and the supposed criminals we have become. And they want to use us and our bodies to further their selfish and malicious agenda for the future.
My message today is about three things: Resilience, Liberation, and Embodiment. In our remaining time together, and I hope throughout YLA, these messages will find unique ways to be spoken and to be heard. Please keep your ears and minds open to ponder these messages, and see how it fits with your worldview.
Remember when I said I was afraid I wouldn’t find the right words? The week after the election this time around, as a 22 year old, I did three things:
Drink a bit of wine (but of course, drink responsibly),
Be in community with my loved ones, friends, and colleagues, and
Return to the words of my favorite authors, because they lend me strength.
The three books I will pull from today I highly recommend, and each author helps me communicate the three things: Resilience, Liberation, and Embodiment.
First: Resilience. What comes to mind when I say that word? Maybe you think of someone you admire, a role model, someone who is strong. I agree. I think of my abuelita, my tita, from my mom’s side of my family. When she lost her first husband in a duel, her in-laws forced her off of the farm in México and left her and her children to fend for themselves. She moved to the border, cooked and sold food from 6am to 3am every day, and began the process of immigrating her children—and eventually herself—to the United States. When she successfully moved to LA, she fell in love again, remarried, and had my mom—the youngest of 10 children. Tragedy struck when my grandfather died to a heart attack in his mid-thirties, then she was alone again to provide for and raise the family. Tita is my living proof of resilience, and every day I see her strength echoed in the spirit and fortitude of my mother.
These stories are deep, meaningful, and teach us a lot about resilience. But there’s something missing. There’s something distinctly American and Western about these stories. We are taught that to survive, we need to dig deep, work hard, and fend for ourselves.
Here is where I turn to Emergent Strategy. Author, afrofuturist, and collector of stories, adrienne marie brown, turns to nature as a teacher of resilience. Here is an anecdote from Naima Penniman about how nature guides us to practice resilience:
“When Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast, almost everything lost its footing. Houses were detached from their foundations, trees and shrubbery were uprooted, sign posts and vehicles floated down the rivers that became of the streets. But amidst the whipping winds and surging water, the oak tree held its ground. How? Instead of digging its roots deep and solitary into the earth, the oak tree grows its roots wide and interlocks with other oak trees in the surrounding area. And you can’t bring down a hundred oak trees bound beneath the soil! How do we survive the unnatural disasters of climate change, environmental injustice, over-policing, mass-imprisonment, militarization, economic inequality, corporate globalization, and displacement? We must connect in the underground, my people! In this way, we shall survive.”
The oak trees remind us that steeling ourselves, turning inward, and becoming successful in spite of everyone is not resilient enough. In fact, in times of hardship and crisis, we need to grow closer, not apart. We need to spread outward and realize how intertwined our fates are so that we may begin to intertwine our roots. And just like a hurricane can’t bring down one hundred oak trees, so too can the one hundred of us in this room withstand the forces of hate that brew like a deadly hurricane.
That’s the thing about my abuelita’s story. I know that if I could ask her about all the grueling hardships she’s faced in her life, she would tell me that it was all worth it. Not for herself, but for her family. Because I know that her daughters and sons were right alongside her, on the trek to the border, in the foodstand, in the home. She wasn’t alone, she had deeply intertwined roots as much as she had deep ones digging down. And now that she’s losing her memory, it’s her family that’s taking care of her, feeding her, raising her spirits. She was never alone, and neither are we.
Liberation. What do I mean by liberation? Dr. Roger Kuhn is a Poarch Creek Two-Spirit Indiqueer activist, artist, sex therapist, and sexuality educator. He wrote the book Somacultural Liberation, which is among my favorite approaches to describing liberation. Somacultural means two things: soma-, as in somatics, as in relating to the body, and cultural.
It took me a long time to begin to understand my body. If you’re like me, when someone asks “How are you?” my default answer is “Good!” And you have to ask me two or three more times before I really take stock of how I’m feeling and what my body is feeling.
That’s in large part because American culture is so obsessed with divorcing how our body feels from how “we” feel. We can live the majority of our days, weeks, and months forgetting to breathe. Not only are we really good at ignoring the persistent headaches, the upset stomachs, and the killer cramps, but we are taught that they are the enemy of our success. We either need to toughen up, self-medicate, or get better at ignoring.
So that is the “cultural” component in the American context. Therefore, somacultural refers to the fact that our individual and societal beliefs, ideas, practices, and values shape how we treat and control our bodies.
Here are some examples. A queer person’s choices about their body are shaped by overlapping and contradicting cultural forces. Who they can hold hands with, how they dress and present, and how they speak are expressions of the body that can be compelled by society. As a queer person, my body can be directly assaulted by a homophobic person, or I can be compelled by internalized beliefs to conversion therapy or to “stop having gay thoughts.”
Bodies being controlled can look like being forced to carry a baby to term because of social, political, and cultural rules and expectations. It can also be the acceptance of Black, Brown, and Indigenous bodies being locked away in prison or forced into manual labor. And in history and the present, committing genocide against indigenous peoples—which to some people is considered acceptable because white people resisting occupation is righteous revolution, but people of color resisting occupation is terrorism. That is, among many things, an expression of dominant cultural norms.
So liberation is always, first and foremost, about our bodies. As Dr. Kuhn says, “Oppression requires coercion of the body; thus, liberation requires freeing the body.” And equally powerful, “Although written history has always favored the story of the oppressors, liberation will always favor the oppressed.”
And then we arrive at embodiment. And here is where I’m cheating a bit, because embodiment is not a separate category, but rather it is an answer to the question, “where do we go from here?”
In many ways Jenny Odell and I are similar. We are both half-Asian, grew up in Cupertino, have relationships to Stanford (she lectures there and my dad lectures there). She wrote a book called How to Do Nothing, and in it she writes: “in a time of shrinking margins, when not only students but everyone else has ‘put the pedal to the metal,’ … attention may be the last resource we have left to withdraw.” She is interested in a “mass movement of attention” and the power we possess when “people regain control over their attention and begin to direct it again, together.”
I remember one of my favorite parts of working at a boba place in high school was washing the dishes. Now, I hate washing the dishes. But for some reason, when my hands got to work on the boring, mundane task of spraying down a heap of tea-making equipment, my mind wandered. I had some of the most creative, fun, and durable ideas at that wash station. And it’s all a part of what Odell means by “doing nothing.”
So we have a starting place for what to do: reclaim our attention. She doesn’t mean mass quitting social media and doom scrolling, but something deeper than that. When we stake out a bit of our attention for ourselves, we foster a space to reimagine our world. Reclaiming our attention allows us to be bored, to be curious, to be crazy, to be revolutionary.
adrienne marie brown also states this in her own way: “What you pay attention to grows.”And she also has her own ideas about embodiment: primarily, fractals.
Who here is familiar with fractals? They are shapes and patterns we keep finding in nature—like the snowflake, or some types of flowers and succulents, or, if you’re a math nerd, the Fibonacci sequence. The interesting thing about fractals is that no matter where you start or end, the pattern continues. It looks the same if you zoom in or zoom out. She says:
“How we are at the small scale is how we are at the large scale. The patterns of the universe repeat at scale.” She also says: “Grace [Lee Boggs] articulated it in what might be the most-used quote of my life: ‘Transform yourself to transform the world.’ This doesn’t mean get lost in the self, but rather to see our own lives and work and relationships as a front line, a first place we can practice justice, liberation, and alignment with each other and the planet.”
What I take away from amb’s words are that we need to embody our visions of a better planet. We need to be fractals, within ourselves, starting change at our smallest levels that reverberate through our relationships, our communities, our worlds. We need to reclaim and then pay attention to ourselves, to find what liberation means to our bodies and practice it, before we can ever hope that we will wake up someday and suddenly be living in paradise.
Because ultimately, every day we do not embody resilience, liberation, and the future we want to see, we are making an active choice to affirm the systems of injustice we are working so hard to upend.
And in the words of Dr. Kuhn: “What can we do to ensure [liberation]? Keep breathing, of course; the rest will evolve.”
So, to wrap up, resilience teaches us how to survive (together; interdependence). Liberation helps us identify what we are fighting for (somacultural liberation; freeing of our bodies). And embodiment gives us a roadmap for how to practice resilience and liberation in our everyday lives (intentionally reclaiming our attention; become the fractals; and remembering to breathe).
I realize this is a lot to take in, and at the same time, there is so much more to cover. You will have countless guides, teachers, and friends on your journey, because we will not and cannot do this alone. If you need me, I’d be happy support you on your path. Feel free to reach out to me on instagram or linkedin or something, and I’d be happy to have a chat.
Finally, just know that I am so inspired by each and every one of you for existing, for being here, for choosing to learn and grow and fight in the face of hardship. I need you, your community needs you, because together we can craft a beautifully resilient, loving, just future. Thank you.
