Practicing Humanity

Exploring practice

Listen to an audio of this piece HERE (also, me singing badly at the end)

The new year has always come with a lot of pressure for me. Though not normally superstitious, I can’t help but imbue the first of January with a special power to “be better” – lose weight, get better grades, develop better habits, find a new job, etc. On top of that – someone once told me that how we spend new year’s eve is a sign of what the new year will bring. So there is extra pressure to look good, go out, be happy, be social, have fun! If I didn’t, I would be friendless and alone and a shlub for the entire year.

The first new year’s eve that I chose to spend alone, maybe 10 years ago, I still got fully dressed up – hair done, makeup, cute outfit, the works. I posted selfies on social media, disguising the fact that I was alone. I lied to friends who invited me out, saying I had already made plans with someone else. Fast forward to this year - I spent new year’s eve watching a movie, contemplating going to sleep at 10:30 pm, and not noticing midnight had rolled around until I heard fireworks go off in the neighborhood. Oh how times have changed!

As I think about 2022, I am trying not to hold on to some of the residual promise that 2021 never brought – it feels futile to bring that same energy to this new year. It feels weird to bring that same hopeful energy to anything. This year has been strange – we had vaccines and a better understanding of COVID, yet new variants have been sweeping through our communities. Despite all of the rhetoric of community-mindedness and care, capitalism and oppression still dictates how we see our time, value, and personhood. So the pressure to set a vanity goal has not only seemed strange to have in the current socio-political climate, but also antithetical to my own anti-capitalist, unlearning, journey.

What I am trying to bring into 2022 with me has been the idea of practice. I have always understood practice in two forms -  as a child and as an adult. As children, we practice something to get to a goal. For black and brown children, that practice meant to prove ourselves against or at least comparable to our white peers. Whether multiplication and periodic tables, musical instruments, or athletics, practice was the tool to transcend the color of our skin, to reach goals of achievement, recognition, and opportunity.

As an adult, we think of practice as the doing – but as the perfect replication of doing. We should be able to practice meditation every day, without fail, perfectly, no matter what happens. The inability to do that is failure. For myself, when we discuss academia as practice, there is no room for the academic to be wrong, make a mistake, try something that takes them nowhere. Because childhood practice is the process of making mistakes in order to get achieve a goal, whereas adult practice is the process of doing 100% perfectly every time.

But that’s not practice. That’s not even doing. The idea of doing is to do, not to do the best, or even to do good. It’s just to do. This year I have explored the idea of practice. We use the term so frequently – we practice meditation, yoga, creativity, soccer etc. A doctors practice, a practicing lawyer, the practice of anthropology. But we hardly interrogate our use of the word practice. Or the value of practice. In a capitalist system that wants us to believe our only worth is the value we create for capitalism, practice is valueless. It is in the worst interest of capitalist structures to practice. Only to “practice” as the doing of something perfectly and exploitable, for the sake of profit.

Black and Brown people in this country have been told for generations that our only space here is as producers. Cogs of a capitalist machine, from slavery as disregarding humanity for productive worth, to the myth of model minority as based on Asian- Americans being hyper-productive. This is a white person’s nation, birthright, and we are allowed to exist based on what we can provide to enrich their nation.

Have you seen Squarespace commercials? They are horrifying. Turn your hobbies into hustles. It would be crazy, these commercials contend, that you do anything in your waking hours without capitalizing on it. The doing must have value within capitalism. A musical commercial shows people waiting for their boring 9-5 to end so that they can start their ‘5-9’ (sung by Dolly Parton, a take on her classic 9-5, a song that called out the inherent inequality of working within capitalism), the side job that gives them joy, their hobbies that they’ve turned into hustles.

Even Oscar the Grouch’s misery and trash are commodified through Squarespace, but that’s a whole other dystopian nightmare their marketing team seems to think is fun and cute.

Doing for the sake of doing, practice for the fun of practice, has been the most enriching thing I have done for myself as an adult. For the last 6 months, I have tried to keep the pressures of capitalism at bay by giving myself permission to just do, to just practice, to enjoy and learn and make mistakes.

And so this year I have made no goals, no resolutions, just reminding myself that practice in and of itself is valuable. The doing, with no goal, no objective, no monetization, no consuming, is important. As people of color, we need to constantly need to remind ourselves that our value does not exist only in what we can do for others, or what we produce for capitalism. I want to practice my own humanity, outside of the capitalist and supremacist models that would have me believe that my humanity is worth less than my productivity in upholding a system. For 2022, revel in the knowledge that you are worthy, not because you’ve turned your hobbies into hustles, but because you exist.