#4 LAB: Send Out Ripples

Defective Detective

How do we live in reality right now?
What are our reasons for the things we do? How do we align our actions with our values? How do we should up as our authentic selves? How do we practice sustainable activism? How do we form community? How do we work with internal and external chaos and uncertainty? How do we survive late stage capitalism?
These questions all have a larger impact for disabled, neurodivergent, immunocompromised, and chronically ill people like me. The disability community includes members from all other oppressed groups. Millions of people with Long Covid have now joined us. Covid is a mass disabling event. Climate crisis, pandemics, fascism, and eugenics are intensifying.
Public health and most of the people we love have left us behind. I am full of grief, rage, and despair. What does the future hold for us?
Embodiment is the opposite of oppression. We can uproot our conditioned strengths and limitations. We can trust our bodies to be a compass towards our true and dynamic strengths and limitations. Even if that body has pain, trauma, illness. Through increased connection to our bodies and true selves, we can regulate our emotions and energy better. We can find ways around the limits of language, through creative expression and safe, consensual touch. We can seek the clean pain of full awareness of ourselves and reality.
We can use our emotions, attention, and social connections for our benefit instead of being exploited through them. We can let ourselves be messy and confused and still.. we can act. Creativity and rest are resistance. We can practice accountability to fight the perfectionism of white supremacy. There's no real comfort in denial, avoidance, and apathy.. it's only dirty pain.
Our actions are a vote for the world we want to exist in. Some of us are waiting to find out if we will exist in that world at all.
🎨♿ Special Interest Leaves - a chance to contribute your interests to disabled art!
📚 Books, Books, Baby

Sacred Contracts
Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense
How Emotions Are Made
The Wheel of Consent: the Art of Giving and Receiving
Four Thousand Weeks
The Quaking of America: An Embodied Guide to Navigating Our Nation's Upheaval and Racial Reckoning
🔦 Other Resources
CAT-Q test for autism masking and social camouflage
Insight Timer - app for meditations (search Renee Sills or Yoga Nidra)
Psychedelic integration guide and tattoo artist Bear Cunningham