A couple of years ago, I used to be so bogged down by my education that critical theory seeped into the way I looked at everything. Everything, and I mean everything, was a text waiting to be read, analysed, unpacked, and critiqued.
My thesis. The series of events that led to me choosing my first job. My taste for certain foods. My parents’ taste in interior design. The choice of music in my brother’s wedding video. A former friend’s brief silence and what it meant for our relationship. I just always found something wrong with everything, all the time, so much so that I could barely enjoy anything. It was like an affliction.
For better or for worse, with the passing of time, mortal necessities such as having to pay rent and keeping myself warm and well-fed, have chipped away at this high ground I used to occupy. I am now less critical in general. In conversations with Aaina team members, I realise that I have lately been offering observations that are not as acutely well-thought-out or as sharp as they used to be. Maybe it’s because I am not pursuing an education that teaches me to be critical and close-read everything I see around me full-time. It’s a shame. I’m not sure how much longer my presence will be of use in the team, as I move further away from social sciences academia with each passing day.
But also, I do realise that overall I am much happier, more accepting, more content. I take myself and the world less seriously. I feel things beyond just anger and resentment. I feel the desire to build a small pretty home for myself. I feel the desire to put on makeup more. I feel the desire to be driven around by someone in a car while I sit back and relax without overthinking what the feminist implications of it are. I feel uncontainable love for my sibling and I want to cook for him and pamper him and let him be. I think about myself and my family and the people that matter to me in a more accepting way, despite all their flaws. I think a little bit less about saving the world.
This is not to say that I am glossing over or conveniently turning a blind eye to issues hiding insidiously within our families and our daily lives that need to be called out; that I have been taught to call out, destabilise, work through. I do make an effort to call them out. But I do so more gently, with more understanding of where my interlocutors are coming from. Not everyone may agree with this moderate approach, but I think it’s one of the biggest favours I’ve done to myself and my mental health — being just that bit less critical, that bit more selfish, and that bit more forgiving.
I’m sure a more radical approach has its own important role to play, but I guess I’ll leave the criticality-on-steroids to the likes of that professor guy who couldn’t help but write a paper analysing a Mexican restaurant’s menu that he chanced upon. For now, I’m more focused on self-preservation.
I guess I’m like a shitty person now.
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