“Resolution for 2018: To find my way back to the world: the world which felt limitless, expansive, and bright on my best days because it’s still here and so am I.”
I have that quote stuck right above my desk. It’s the first thing I see when I pause the world around me. It’s a pat on the back for having made it this far and a reminder for creating a tunnel vision to keep moving on. This year would be about forgiving myself, of letting go of those who once served me but instill nothing but pain today, of building a world which brimmed with love and possibility, of testing my limits and making a conscious effort about learning everything which ruins our world. Of re-growing.
The generic advice given about moving on [from heartbreak or a life event] is to immerse oneself in work. Well, it didn’t work for me. I drowned myself in technical courses last quarter. As amazing as it was studying hash tables, having my brain hashed by pushing myself when I clearly was not ready and was avoiding all my internal issues with external distractions was not so amazing. So, I tried something else this quarter. I took a break and pursued everything that appealed to the core of my being: social justice, building for social benefit, teaching and music.
What seemed random selection: Race, Class, Gender in the U.S., Laptop Orchestra, Teaching Assistant for Introduction to Computer Science, and Community Based Engineering Design felt more like a combination envisioned by the Universe. Initially, this selection made me very uncomfortable. I was the only one who had no music experience studying in a music class, 12 year old me believed U.S. had no class system and wished India didn’t have a caste system only to have a Sociology class rattle my belief systems 7 years later, genuinely didn’t have the confidence to troubleshoot someone else’s code but now can offer in-depth explanations for every line of code they write, and I had never seen an auger in my life but am halfway through building a Little Free Library for a public elementary school.
Slowly the dots connected. I walked out of my Sociology class learning about racial formations, gender identities, and discrimination against the LGBT community into my Laptop Orchestra class where a guest composer, Eve Beglarian, was speaking of her long-term project of narrating the oral history of a small town near the Mississippi River by interviewing Southerners, including women of color, and a man who served in the army and recently came out as a woman. She recorded the siren mounted on the dam of the Mississippi river which sounded to indicate optimum water levels and produced a piece out of that recording and surrounding sounds called “Dancing of the Sirens”. She played that piece in class and explained how she plans to narrate her research in a similar fashion.
It was humbling, thrilling, and beyond fascinating to see the extent to which electronic music could be employed. I walked out of that class to teach Computer Science students and shamelessly advertised my Laptop Orchestra class as a unique application of programming. I walked out of that class into the elementary school my team was to build a library for and learned about the majority low-income student population. Upon further research on the need for such a library, I realized the strong ties between low-income, race, and literacy and reflected back on my Sociology professor’s comment about those ties being variables in the class system equation to perpetuate structural oppression.
Which brought me back to the question that has plagued me since I was a kid: how do you end systemic oppression?
It’s been a busy few months, but most importantly, it’s been the best adventure I have been on so far. I am more conscious and educated about social issues. While I realize how messy every country in the world is, I also see plenty scope for peace and advancement. My self-esteem is boosted, my priorities seem clear, my pain holds no power over my passion, and the world seems a lot brighter. My best days are here.
