thinking abt @SaraNAhmed's work as on most days, to be a feminist is to disrupt the status quo, the equivalent of the one who drops a plate shattering the peace. "When you expose a problem you pose a problem." You become the disturbance. That's why it's not easy to be a feminist.

Practicing feminism in your life is an exercise in learning to challenge & negotiate power constantly - an exhausting, anxiety inducing, soul crushing process - power operates in the smallest & subtlest ways in the stuff that makes up your everyday, pay attention to the mundane.

while the term itself has been so diluted that anyone pays lip service to gender equality assume it, but the invitation of feminism to think deeply about power, read feminist theory, pay close attention to the machinations of power at micro & macro levels seems to be missing.

challenging power, at home, at work, in the street, no matter what context, takes a toll on your body. even before you discover the vocabulary for it, speaking up, w paying close attention to your disturbed gut, to voice it is v hard. Be kind to yourself. https://twitter.com/SaraNAhmed/status/1333801664130629633?s=20

Speaking as someone who is still struggling to practice kindness to oneself, or embodying kindness in the political & personal life, I recognize it's extremely hard. It requires moving away from pre-existing scripts & learning to observe in your life, paying attention to details

Kindness is not niceness, it's not keeping the peace, it's being empathetic & resonant to the experience of hurt / neglect / violence, interpersonal or intergenerational, to break from the system, to do it in such a way that you make spaces more open, enable more people into them

the problem with positivity culture is that it's ignorant, *be nice to everyone* *compromise* assumes everyone is on the same plane, it's unthinking, uncritical, masks power - it refuses to look, to understand. It masquerades as honouring emotion, but it's actually a cop out.

at the same time, theory that doesn't engage with emotion, affect, doesn't see they're imp. is a failure. If you spend your entire life reading & thinking abt power, but fail it to see it in your own life & spaces, what have you even learnt? We need to cultivate diff faculties.

Going to therapy has been one of the best decisions of my life. It has not only effected change in my emotional life, it has transformed my politics. I used to prize certainty in my ideas, still do but I've learnt to embrace doubt more. To listen more carefully. To take time.

To read btwn the lines. To understand affect, value emotion, to note complexity in a moment, before I rush to judgement. It has made things very difficult & messy, showed how the my own rigid code of right & wrong could be harmful, challenged the very basis of my legal training.

Social media, esp Twitter, is not quite conducive to understanding or translating complexity, nuance or contradiction. I get why it's appealing, esp. since the overton window is so far right, basic values one wishes could be taken for granted have to be screamed from mountaintops

when you're fighting barbarity & cruelty of this proportion, the small daily problems of power, imbalance & injustices get drowned. You tell yourself you're lucky, these are good problems to have these days. But I refuse to concede that ground. We cannot afford to normalise this.

when I think abt how in 2020, I'm drawing on the work of socialist & lesbian feminists from decades before who answered questions that we are still asking - they weren't heard in their own time & are still not - but it gives me hope, to learn to aspire to this tradition