Last spring, I arrived fashionably late to the Great Resignation Party. I quit my job after nearly a year of… not quite anguish, but angsty stomach pains.. we’ll call it ‘panguish’.
I needed to make sure that the work I was doing — amplifying Indigenous voices calling for protection of land, air and water — was carried on well after I was no longer in my position as Director of Communication with RAVEN. It’s worked out ok: they’re still killing it. And it’s Giving Tuesday so … please donate if you can.
The week after my last day at RAVEN, I jumped on my bike and rode 120 km up the east coast of Vancouver Island, hopped a ferry to the Sunshine Coast and rode down in a lovely loop back to Horseshoe Bay. Along the way, hunks of worry, calcified preoccupations and amorphous stress just .. slid out of my brain and onto the side of the road.
Sorry if anyone stepped in it.
My urge, after this purge, was to throw myself as passionately into the Next Big Thing as possible, to keep up the breakneck headlong hurling pace that I thought was required to propel activist mind bombs into the world.
But. My lord. It has happened. I am fully 52 years old, and discovered that the faltering thread of wisdom that I had haphazardly been following all my life had grown into a cord.
A thick thing.
A bottom line.
And that bottom line? it underscored that the nervy, frenetic embodiment that I had come to believe was necessary to compassionately respond to the many evils and injustices of the world was NOT, in fact, very helpful and definitely unsustainable. I heard a voice reverberating through my whole being. It was tender, but firm. The voice gently repeated a little mantra:
Settle. The fuck. Down.
So instead of any headlong plunges, I went swimming. I visited friends on walks and enjoyed tea dates that had no timeframe. I read weird short stories and ridiculously thought-provoking ethnology. I cleaned up my yard, built some compost bins and did some watercolour painting.
(ps read, and subscribe, to this newsletter on Substack).
But yeah, I had URGES. Like urges to start new businesses. To 3-D print octopus tentacles that could be stuck with powerful magnets to machinery. To run campaigns. To make podcasts. To pick up research I’d left off when I last ran headlong into all-consuming Work.
The tender voice said: Not yet. Keep breathing. Just exist. Feel it.
I gave myself a deadline of September 1, at which point I was going to have to get back to work in order to, you know, eat. September came and I sent out a few emails – maybe you saw them. They said ‘HIRE ME!” in various flowery ways. People did (thanks).
And: I called up some of my absolute total heroes and have been having some pretty incredible conversations about what might be possible on this much more tranquil shore that I’ve made camp on.
Through it all, I’ve kept this document called “Amusing”. I’ve realized that the ideas, musings, late-night scrawled revelations, and essay outlines that are collected in that document are not all going to get fleshed out. That was kinda the point. Rather than dive into the first thing, why not come up with a basket of ideas, and then build out the one(s) that continue to be irresistible months and maybe even years later???
So: this newsletter is getting a reboot so that some of that Amusing non-business can be shared. IT IS NOT GOING TO BE A PLACE TO MARKET ANYTHING. You are safe from funnels, calls to action, and offers here.
We have all been coached ad nauseam to turn every little thing that we love and cherish into a side hustle. Well, guess what: I ain’t doing it. The Amusing Manifesto will continue to accumulate ideas that are radical, fun, deeply weird, pleasurable… and free.
The revolutions will not be monetized.
Truly. I’ve just experienced the non-profit industrial complex take over my life, and shift not only my own personal activism but entire movements. I’ve seen radical spaces be coerced away from free-form, anarchistic rivers of vibrant life into atomized, digital ‘communities’ where no one actually meets anyone and ‘taking action’ translates into surrendering your email in exchange for a promise that ‘your voice’ will matter….
And that enshittification of the public square that Facebook, X, and the like have caused has taken well-meaning, upset, gorgeously interesting people and flattened them into data points on some planners ‘engagement spiral’ .. while the Power that we should be grabbing is instead profiting from our neutered “change-making”.
Well. None of us is flat. The world is a fantastically textured place, and stories spring like glorious dandelions out of every gap in the concrete. This is all shorthand and will be expanded in future editions but for now: I’m going to give as much away for free as I can. I’m going to talk about shit I learned in 25 years of trying to bridge the digital divide, developing and running campaigns to stop pipelines and protect really sacred places, transferring millions of dollars to Africans who didn’t need westerners to tell them how to spend it… etc etc…. I’m going to write, speak, destroy and design, and show up wherever I think I can be of service.
AND: I am also going to share cool/provocative/outrageous/vital things that YOU are doing. Some editions of this newsletter will be fangirl interviews: let me know what you’re up to, yeah?
In hopes this tossed pebble can send out slightly bigger ripples, what I think I’ll call “Amusing: A Manifesto” is going up on Substack. You can subscribe, but more importantly please share and let people know if you think it’s a good read.
We’ll get to more meat, less meta, in future editions. For now; thanks for hearing my honest blurtations. I hope they inspire some replies. Tell me what you are up to, what you are ready to tear down, what makes you quicken your step. I love love love love love that we are going to swear here, we are going to confess, and we are going to braid some of our bottom lines together and get juicily potent.
To our common future, beautiful brethren!!
Go gently, but keep your s(words) sharp.
xx
andrea