lynkbellahues
| Forum role | Member since | Last activity | Topics created | Replies created |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Member | Feb 6, 2011 (15 years) |
6 years | 1 | 1 |
- Forum role
- Member
- Member since
Feb 6, 2011 (15 years)
- Last activity
- 6 years
- Topics created
- 1
- Replies created
- 1
Bio
Laborly thrown into the world in 1982 and raised in a relatively multicultural working class northern New Jersey suburb, I am a living being in a body who labors with relatively light skin color and a neurodiverse gender nonbinary pansexual identity. I practice a differently abled anti-racist queer marxist feminism with critical loving-joyousness—in short, liberatory marxism toward becoming my fullest authentic self. That’s my chosen everyday existential experience which arose from my cultural experiences with schooling, music, sports, and the anti-oppression class struggle to make a socialist world.
My creatively critical transcendental framework, which really isn’t “mine” in any formal way, is still in-formation. It aims to poetically analyze and clearly narrate past and present life as a relatively liberated being inside myself. This means struggling against capitalism and its dominantly harmful forces whiteness, cisheteropatriarchy, bougie-ness, and the insaned actions those forces produce. Those forces consistently but not always get structurally projected and interpersonally reprojected onto my body, itself illustrating the material ways each work to shape interpersonal relations within unequal social conditions which are also shaped by those racial, gender, sexual, class, and unhealthy psychological forces. My effort to form a scientific materialist framework also means reading broadly and particularly to synthesize different radical traditions with various critical methods of knowing to understand.
I reside in NJ’s largest city, Newark, and have so since late August 2007. Participation in many social and political activities with different working and middle class folks here have profoundly and positively shaped my ways of sensing, thinking, doing, and being. Still here, the city’s become my second hometown.
Currently, I am in the educational process of becoming a mental health counselor. I aim to help working class people across identity lines to get free from childhood and adulthood traumas. At best, in general, this work heads toward living a critically self-defined life with a meaningful and productive orientation.
This blog, as the tagline under the matrix and the mess says, is a digital space where I intend to practice my loving being to write toward truth and liberation. Its purpose is to personally explore the literary, reportage, and archival possibilities of the blog form, hopefully toward unexpected and positive results like building new caring relationships with others, discovering new self, social, and historical knowledge, and continuing to exist on this planet in conscientized ways.
To be clear, nothing which appears in this blog ought be read as composing reasonable grounds to infer or predict what my actions as a mental health worker doing therapeutic labor might be like in motion. Not there yet, I'm not precisely sure what that is or means. Yet, like employment and unemployment experiences under capitalism demand, splitting the personal from the professional appears a virtual requirement of life, terrible as the latter has felt when performing a self for managers and fellow workers which isn't my fuller authentic self in motion. Although that describes one type of dehumanizing experience of work under capitalism, it also makes possible responsibly pursuits of self-affirmations which heal as they rehumanize. This, for me, is one of the hardest contradictions to resolve, perhaps because talking about it seems equally as hard.
At the same time, as second-wave feminists across class and identity lines in the 1960s and 1970s demonstrated, the personal is the political—a point I embrace because it’s a truth-principle which matches my experiences. Yet I also wonder, practically so, whether the pedagogical and the scientific precede both the personal and the political, objectively in describing and explaining how we actually live, with our subjectivities struggling to identify such because of the rapid yet slow pace of how everyday life works from human biology to an organized working day to a bar for a drink on a Friday with co-workers, on one hand, and because capitalism’s many alienations keep us from pursuing answers to that critical wondering, on the other hand. Whether that’s the case or not, what it might suggest, if valid and sound, is how the pedagogical and the scientific are themselves also always personal. This may be so even as they are separate from and connected to the political because persons and sciences offer more or less precise knowledge in different pedagogical styles for bettering or transforming governance of social, cultural, and economic life (even if that means the mythological goal of "making American great again" as if there's a general past the whole US population ought want back again).
Terrible as politics tends to be in mainstream and marginal life, from my standpoint, I hope the validity and soundness of science and pedagogy preceding the personal as political proves correct. Perhaps it could lead to the end of all the wars which humanity seems to horrifically find its way into yet which never seem to fully resolve themselves. In this sense, I believe pedagogy and science, specifically in their caring forms, connect to the personal in ways which can guide therapeutic actions to a world without terrible and horrific politics or perhaps, better, to a world without politics at all—i.e. whether in itself as a means to organize and regulate life or as extension to wars between nations, classes, genders, ethnicities, and human bodies with different skin colors.
This is my serious way of saying (without enough or any humor) don’t hold what I write on this blog against me. As the artist and scientist Michelangelo said in their late 80s during the 1560s, from somewhere inside what became the Italian republic, “Ancora imparo”, or, in English, “I’m still learning”. That holds true here as well as it does for all living beings from womb to tomb. I’ll assume such for you too if you choose to share comment or critique as caringness or uncaringness with me. I invite each, tho I prefer the caring over the uncaring, the more free from repressive everyday norms and thus the more positively weird the better.