Failing Gloriously

Wood-floored hall of library (specifically Poets House in NYC)

 
If I had known anything about teaching interviews, I would have bowed out. Or at least that's what the talking head version of me, filled with hindsight, says from on high. I had aced the first interview, I thought. They were enamored with my writing and the previous teaching jobs on my resume. But this is a story of the second interview.

My second interview was in a windowless gym separated by rolling dividers for the three grade levels. I walked to the back where there was a table set up with a few older-looking folks who were the teachers, two folks who were kind but didn't pay me much attention. The 'classroom' itself was a bunch of circular tables where a few teenagers were stationed, the majority black and Latino.

I was meant to facilitate the warmup activity. There was a game we'd played in a summer program I facilitated where kids are divided into three groups, line up, and they get to write one word of a sentence on a big piece of paper on the wall. The game is timed, and you have to pass the marker to the next person - you can play it where the firs team who finishes 'wins' or the team with the best/funniest sentence 'wins'. I should have known when the paper kept falling down from the dividers that this wasn't going to go well.

Trying to get them into a line was the first thing that failed. And then there was the passing of the marker; most folks were more focused on their phones and I am a terrible disciplinarian. 'Clap once if you can hear me!' and 'Would you put that phone away?' don't really work when you're nervous. I must have looked panic-stricken when I turned to one of the other facilitators; to their credit, they tried to bail me out.

I realize now that there was no reason for them to trust me. I didn’t look like them and I didn’t come from their neighborhoods. And since I was a newbie, they could do whatever they wanted without much consequences. Picture the most sitcom-like experience you could have as a teacher – a substitute teacher at that.

I burst out onto the darkened street afterward, my toes curling in my shoes from embarrassment. It was the first time I felt like I had gone out of my body to watch myself tank so badly. But something about it was also hysterical to me. When I got on the train, I couldn’t help but smile. It went so badly it was funny. There was no way in hell that I was going to get the position. And yet the world hadn’t tumbled into a fiery abyss behind me. I had only metaphorically died of embarrassment.

I’ve felt like I spent a whole year and a half unlearning the idea of perfectionism. During college, it was a prized skill no matter what group I was in – even amongst artists and activists, achievement was highly correlated to your value. And before that it was a survival tactic: if I did a lot of stuff, it meant I didn’t have to be at home very often. But after school ended and I couldn’t get a job for five months, I had to find a new strategy.

I’m still not all that great at appreciating my failures but now it’s easier to see them as experiments, moments that I can put in my back pocket for later. When, later that year, I attended my first birth as a doula, I tried to keep this experience in mind – though I may have been embarrassed or unprepared, I did all that I could with what I had. Even if I was failing, I wanted to fail gloriously. And be easier on myself in the process.

Incidents and Inspirations

I've had a bit of downtime from working on events -- the last major one was the huge success of the Feminist Zine Fest (you should definitely check out the photos and interviews with our rock star zinesters that I put up). It's taken me a few weeks to recover from having worked on an event where we estimate that, conservatively, 350+ people showed up and there were 40+ tablers, two readings, and a workshop to wrangle. I'm going to miss the team this year while I'm out traveling! They're really the ones that made this whole thing possible.

Apart from being wiped out though, I have been going through old notebooks to look for the gems of my writing that I might want to craft into stories. I write a lot. A lot. Looking through my old files on my computer and the number of notebooks I go through in a year, hardly any of it actually gets processed into useable work, for the obvious excuses: I don't have time/energy/interest or this is hard/I'm not a good writer/someone's said this before/[insert predictable self-doubt]. But the exercise of going over things has brought to my attention that I actually, sometimes, like my writer voice. And that I actually have one, something that my teenage self couldn't really imagine.

It's brought up a lot of interesting memories as well. Like the time when I printed out nearly 170 pages of written material and presented it to my middle school English teacher for his review. The man asked me "what themes do you have?" When I couldn't answer him, he smiled, gently took the binder, and I never saw it again. But I was undeterred. That same year I had the audacity to send out big tan envelopes with the manuscript (unedited) to agents and editors, all of whom I'm sure thought I was quite cute to at 14 be sending a novel in for review.

I'm interested in getting some of that confidence back. The unintended consequences of having grown up and gone through a creative writing program at college means that I study my words carefully. I worry about things that don't really matter. Essentially, I stop myself before I start.

Lately I've been trying to force myself into genres that I don't particularly like because they seem 'more important' somehow. Sure, I'm an activist and do a lot of other great work for the world, but I realized that even if I got paid to write about those experiences, it would still come out closer to fiction. But sometimes it feels like there's a huge pressure to have my work be useful for society, as LuLing Osofsky says so well in this episode of The Rumpus' Make/Work podcast.

Other people do critique well. And it's fine to not be them. There is space for all of us out here.

Aside from FZF, it seems like this past month was the Month of the Interview for me -- check out the Barnard Center for Research on Women's podcast where I talk zines alongside my lovely zine co-conspirator Jenna Freedman. And also take a look at this video from the a fundraiser I participated in called Colors of Healing, a self-care bazaar where we sold our handmade things to send young queer/trans people of color to the INCITE conference this year.

On Anti-Violence, Artivism, and Healing: A StoryCorps Interview with Purvi Shah!

For the second half of this month, I put up a firm "On Vacation" sign and put my NYC life on hold. Back to the west coast, back to my family, and back to reading a book a day. So much of my past few months have been about producing -- more workshops, more writing, more editing, more jobs, and more meetings. Going back home allowed me the opportunity to take things at my own pace. I got to be a "student" again, this time of my own health and healing.

I've returned to NYC refreshed and hoping that I can carry on with that student mentality; though we talk about sustainable movements and self-care so often, it's a slippery state to hold on to! In the coming weeks, I'll be writing about what I've learned on my spiritual self-care as I've been fasting during this Ramadan, but for now I want to reflect on some learning that I did before packing my bags:

Take a listen to this conversation between me and Purvi Shah, a facilitator of the Movement to Power workshops hosted by the South Asian Women's Creative Collective (SAWCC). We're talking about anti-violence, creative expression, and our own relationships to healing in this wonderful piece for StoryCorps. And, while you're at it, check out the beautiful workshop video made by Shruti Parekh!

Flashback: Writing and Speaking Gigs of Late

I've finally landed in Seattle, after several high-octane weeks - writing, working, interviewing, and speaking. Spending time with my family has been a nice change of pace; downtime really feels like downtime when in the Pacific Northwest, unlike when I take a few moments to close my eyes every night in NYC.

In celebration of the work that I've been doing, however, I wanted to give thanks for all the spaces I've occupied over the past few weeks, online and off. I have been blessed to be involved with so many passionate people and am honored to work alongside them.

This is me right now.

I've finished at short serial mystery over at SpliceLit, a magazine run by the amazing Veda Kumarjiguda.

I was invited to speak on anti-violence at the Bangla Boi Mela, and presented an interactive workshop about types of violence and how they affect people structurally, interpersonally, and internally.

I have done a very personal StoryCorps interview with the brilliant Purvi Shah, facilitator of the Movement to Power workshop at SAWCC (audio to come!). We discussed the relationship between arts and activism, anti-violence work, and our own relationship as South Asian women to finding different healing modalities. I really enjoyed this talk because it consolidated a lot of things I care about into a brilliant 40 minutes!

I have spoken on zines, zine fests, and feminism for the BCRW podcast, to be released soon. As I say often, I sometimes forget that most of the zinester world is not women and trans people of color - and that a lot of feminism also doesn't represent us either! I delved deep on this podcast into these ideas, with the wonderful Michelle Chen.

As[I]Am is in the process of growing our staff family and bringing on new content creators in the next several weeks, as well as doing a logo and site redesign (it's looking so fancy, y'all - I can't wait to share!).

I'm excited to say that the work I've been doing in the past few months has been exactly what I want to be doing. I'm learning a lot and moving with communities that I want to be a part of. But phew! I am so glad that I get a break for a couple weeks to sit and contemplate my next move. In the meantime, I'll be sending everyone love and postcards from out west.

What Does Progress Mean to You?

A video on progress that I edited for the Washington Bus. Animations and all.

I've made it! The long haul to the East Coast is finished, which means two things:

1. I will be resuming regular daily blog content tomorrow.
2. I am thinking endlessly about how to make myself more connected to this NYC community as I have during the summer to my Seattle community.

As I prepare for both of those things (as well as the coming hurricane), I will be thinking a lot about progress and change. Hence, I present to you a video I edited on what progress means to each of the Summer Fellows in my program over the summer. This video is reposted from the Hella Bus blog. Enjoy!

Project x Project: It's Hard Out Here for a Transcriptionist

Whoops! This post is a little late, but I will still count it as a daily post because it's the wee hours of the morning, which, in my head, are counted as the late hours of last night.
Anyway, this post is about expanding your horizons and how it can be so very frustrating at times.
Take the example of my brief stint as a transcriptionist. I have been working with an interview for my forthcoming post at Refuse the Silence*, and I found it extremely difficult. I was omitting words and going back over things four to seven different times just to get things right. My punctuation was all flubbed and I had to do some serious editing to bring it up to the standardized interview transcript state. Thankfully, it is now quite well done and I feel happy about the work that I put in.
The point of this story is that, in trying something new, my experience was less than perfect. It was downright mediocre in the beginning. And I think that applies to anything and everything you first try at. I was also listening to a podcast today that told me about the history of home economics (actually, it's a fascinating topic), and I found that the most intriguing part was the assumption that women did not automatically make good homemakers - they needed science and depth of analysis. That agrees well with my personal viewpoints, both by breaking the stereotype that a woman is a natural nurturer and by showing off one of my favorite self-motivators: you have to try things.
Try and fail. Try and succeed. Try and do an ok-not-quite-perfect job. But just try them out - maybe you'll make a method and set a trend.
That's what I'm telling myself about pretty much all my projects right now; from grant proposals to NaNo to knitting myself a skirt, there's no harm in first trys.

*If you are interested in reading this interview that I did with a certain awesome Barnard administrative director, please look out for my post in the next week or so at Refuse the Silence.