There’s things I wrote when I was 13 that still exist on the internet. Me and my oldest friend, Arooj, cried with laughter this year when we found my LiveJournal. I’m glad she was there to revel in the mortification of it all because I might never have written publicly again if I’d allowed myself to be consumed by embarrassment. She reminded me of how much she had loved reading song lyrics I wrote as a distraction from boredom at school, and how much they'd spoken to her even if we were two naive teenagers.
On reflection now I think during my first decade of writing on the internet I was never really expecting anyone to read it, it was just that I lacked understanding about privacy. I was mostly just writing to process my own thoughts on something that felt simpler and cleaner than writing by hand. But when I hit publish on my blog post about Rape I realised the power in being witnessed, and in inadvertently witnessing others through my words. As a result of this revelation for a while I got stuck using writing as a way to unravel trauma and ended up laying bare that process for all to see. And while much of it was informative, when I was running Collaborative Future I also became addicted to rage writing. Writing became a way for me to process all the things that made no sense, a way to express the absurdity of the system with clarity and confidence. It was both liberating and exhausting. Until all of a sudden it dawned on me that writing had become a distraction from getting shit done, and then I lost my capacity for it. I needed to see real-world change, and that required me to be head down and deep in it. I think giving myself space from desperately publishing my inner thoughts is what enabled me to actually achieve setting up a housing co-operative.
I had come to realise that change wouldn’t happen through words on a page, and I had learnt that sometimes it's best to process your shit privately rather than vomiting it out into the ether. I knew that we were all consuming too much, and that the internet was a big energy suck drawing us away from a revolution. But there was something about writing that still called me. I became more careful about the time I allowed content to percolate: I took 5 months reflecting on my abortion before I published anything about it - and I still return to that piece of writing now to remind myself of why I move through the world in the ways I do. In that piece I had articulated possibility, without shame and without rage. It became a beacon of joy for me to know I was able to hold all that nuance as a human, and to choose an existence that really resonated with me.
This feeling perhaps became a guiding force for how I began to write on Ray the Spirit. I started writing from a place where I really felt for the first time what Toni Cade Bambara had meant by making the revolution irresistible. I had finally found a way to align all of my activism and work through my writing, and the joy that people have expressed to me from reading my writing over the last few years has made me realise it’s more than just words on a page. So many autistics have found solace in the ways I’ve described autistic meltdowns, and it’s made their lives easier when it comes to trying to explain their needs to partners, friends, employers. So many people in the co-operative movement have talked about using my writing as a way to rally people around the change that could be possible within the housing system. People have shared how they slowed down and reshaped their relationships - professional, platonic, and romantic - in response to some of the content I’ve written about relationship anarchy and the role of love.
My writing has become a resource. It catalyses energy within me and within others, it grounds people, it reassures people, it helps them move through the world with more ease. When existing in a constant state of transition and flux it roots me to my past and helps me unfurl the future. And it is why I was delighted to come across the term ‘Narrative Infrastructure’ for the first time through this Blis Collective research. As someone who wants to see words translate to action, understanding more deeply how we can create narratives that seek to do precisely that is huge. What’s more is this research made me reflect on how I show up in solidarity with my writing - how am I ensuring I’m not only giving voice to the issues that relate to my lived experience but that I also work with others to shift who is centred in the narrative infrastructure that surrounds us all? I would love to move beyond simply sharing my own stories and beliefs, and to support others to access the power of narratives and story-telling. For me the act of writing itself is a flow state that comes with ease - that’s not the case for everyone and there are so many more people that deserve to have their stories told and their futures woven into the narrative infrastructure that plays a role in the shaping of our world.
I would love to be of service to people that have something powerful to say, and to do that through processes that do so much more than just putting words on a page. Some of the ways I want to do this include:
Supporting groups to write collectively in a way that provides nuance around particular shared human experiences, and creates connection between people pursuing change within their field.
Mirroring people back to themselves so that they can move towards their visions with more confidence. Rather than simply being a sounding board can I take conversations and turn them into written language that people can either root themselves in or rail against.
Ghostwriting or editing for Black, brown, and disabled people, offered freely as part of my commitment to reparative practice — putting my skills in service of amplifying stories that deserve greater space in our shared narratives.
It is through telling our own stories that we reclaim our humanity. It is through the process of another human committing with care to the telling of your story that healing can be found. It is through that interplay between storyteller and scribe, scribe and reader that we will discover and be able to articulate more of the truth underneath what we are feeling and experiencing.
If you’d like to explore ways we could write together, get in touch via ray@and-breathe.org, and if you like my writing you can support me by buying something from my giftlist.