Month: September 2023

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24 September, 2023 — Leave a comment

“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live! Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow, as if I had given vent to the stream at the lower end and consequently new fountains flowed into it at the upper. A thousand rills which have their rise in the sources of thought burst forth and fertilize my brain. You need to increase the draught below, as the owners of meadows on Concord River say of the Billerica Dam. Only while we are in action is the circulation perfect. The writing which consists with habitual sitting is mechanical, wooden, dull to read.” Thoreau’s Journal: 19-Aug-1851

This blog was created in 2011, the month I turned 16 — 24 March 2011, exactly 12 years and 6 months ago, as I write this piece. I was an aspiring illustrator for most of my childhood, but I slowly came to enjoy writing because I liked reading. And I liked reading because I liked wondering, always did, the particular type of thrill that you get out of the potential of spiralling that comes with every move of the freedom of the mind, it has always been a personal favourite. Perhaps because I felt so restrained growing up? I had very little room to exercise the liberties of being myself, except in my head (and then on the internet). Blaming over-controlling parents is the easy way out; deep inside, I think that my mum and dad believed that I could not be trusted with a private world, because I didn’t seem like a child who could be trusted with becoming the person they thought I should be, with the values they thought I should champion.

On the outside, I was a smart, hardworking and polite young girl, but I was disgustingly curious, annoyingly talkative, visibly proud and extremely greedy. I was happy to be rewarded by the systematic benefits of being me, but just as prone to flipping the table and voicing out ambiguous thoughts. I wanted to be respected really badly. I was very selfish, and I had to be intentionally taught to share my things, to think twice, to control the imp of the perverse and be kind, and to love my family. I gave authorities the benefit of doubt and I was the favourite student in every class, but I learned to take it away easily, and provoke conflict where it was due — I remember having discussions with my Bible school teachers as early as 7 years of age. I have clear memories of being asked invasive questions about my inner thoughts, since I was young, both by parents and church leaders. Those who paid attention to what I was saying knew that I was a problem to solve, because I longed for a life of adventures and discoveries that were not aligned with the lifestyle I was expected to cultivate. Unsurprisingly, I was bad at bonding with other kids, to my absolute horror, because I was taught by my favourite TV shows that no amount of hard work matters if you don’t have friends.

The saving grace was that I am, and I have always been, extremely sensitive. At some point of my teenage years, I realised that this was the reason I had developed a sense of empathy and understanding towards others, and a reasonable idea of the type of person I wanted to become. Life had its ways of teaching me about what it meant to have a humble, loving heart. Still, even into my late teens, many horrors persisted. I felt really misunderstood in my curiosity, and the things that I liked, but nothing hurt more than being misunderstood in my sensitivity, especially when I cried. It was not something I could control, but it made people question everything else about me. The thing I hated the most (maybe I still do) was being treated as someone less intelligent due to my sensitivity. The silver living was realising that, when I was open about my struggles, I could form bonds with others, even those with whom I had previously found nothing in common to talk about. Oversharing helped me navigate the struggle of making myself understood, of showing my parents and leaders that there was nothing to worry about, that I wasn’t hiding anything serious. It’s not that hard to understand why — nothing speaks louder, to a believer, than the act of confession; admitting to my faults in a loud voice was the way to convince other of my radical commitment to being truthful. Crying all the time without shame made people question my intelligence, but it never made them question my honesty. And that sounded like a good start.

Becoming a writer gave me power over my thoughts and feelings. The stories I read enabled the freedom to imagine the life that I wanted to live; writing my own gave me full control over the fate of characters that represented different sides of me. Multiple novels were started, but never finished; I lacked the interest to go until the end because, at some point, I would realised I was only writing to make sense of something, not to complete the story. This blog was born out of the need to keep track of what I was doing, and it proved to be the right venue to put out shorter projects, and experience people’s responses to my thoughts and feelings; my poems and short stories articulated the difficult things about how my brain worked. The obsession with details and figuring out how they related to the full picture of things I wanted to understand, the appeal of darkness, the unresolved ambiguity of joy, my simultaneous distrust of and longing for peace.

Making things absurdly clear, even through fiction, was the easiest way out of the constant state of fear that, over the years, accumulated into generalised anxiety. The first miracle was to find out that others felt the same; experiencing that sort of feedback was the closest I had ever been to hope that the struggle of living inside my head could amount to something else, other than stress and late night fights about my inability to come out of my shell and experience the world like the normal person I was supposed to be. Of the many horrible memories I keep, I remember the terrifying, pressing threat of silence. Nothing scares me more than the fear that I cannot chill because, if I don’t always look closely enough, I will blink and miss out on how things are quietly aligning to bring about chaos. And there is so much chaos, there is so much drama, it seems to follow me wherever I go, and I don’t know if it’s just bad luck, or if I’m the bad luck myself.

Moving towards essays was a result of the process of moving away from fiction and closer to non-fiction — which, in turn, was a result of the process of moving out of my own shell, and starting to experience the world for myself. To each their own, but, all things considered, I have learned to find real life more appealing than the world of imagination, even when things don’t go as well as I would have plotted them to. Surprisingly, I still read as much poetry as I did before, but I don’t remember the last time I felt comfortable articulating something in a verse form. Maybe because poetry thrives on the things that are left unsaid in-between, and I am desperate to elucidate every single thought that’s plaguing me right now. This is a season, I am sure, but it’s the one in which we have been, for a few years now, overthinking things in their raw state, regurgitating and then taking them in again, exactly as they came. It’s disgusting, and it might not end anytime soon. It surprises me how easily I used to wrap ideas up in a few paragraphs, and now I cannot do without a handful of very long ones, too much contained in each sentence, way too personal not to be uncomfortable unless I make a conscious effort to sound less burdensome.

Why do I do it, then? I mean writing as I do it these days. The second miracle is love; in spite of all the misery, my life is overflowing with love, from all the people in my life who have witnessed the mess of me, every single thing about me which is not likeable, every vulnerability that makes me an easy target to be deemed unloveable. This is where I stand right now, because I am not particularly fond of this season; if I’m being very honest (which I usually am), I don’t publish as much as I used to nowadays because I don’t feel as okay with my unfiltered thoughts, not as I used to. I ran out of some of the brave attitude of writing down things before I had made total sense of the best way to put them out, the right way they made sense together; I hate rereading something and realising I could have said something better if I had waited as little as a day, or a few hours, before deciding to put it out for everyone to read. Not that a lot of people read it, but I like the praise of having said the right thing, and it takes a lot of thought to say even a small thing that could sound right to someone.

This piece started as a simple journal entry to think away the things I was overthinking after my weekly therapy session. I journal three to four times a day these days, and I am writing so much because I am hurting so bad, I lose sleep and I waste precious mental space overthinking every decision and incident that has led me to this moment, and writing the mess down is the only thing that helps. I am thinking about the reasons why I do the things I do, the reasons why I became the person I am, and there are so many other things that I could have said to make this entry make better sense, there are so many sentences that can come across the wrong way if someone is willing to misunderstand what I’m trying to say, and this is precisely the side of me that I hate the most these days — the confusing, verbose, messy, disorganised person that I am without a filter. Like a thunderstorm. One of the biggest illusions I had back when I was just an imaginative child was that, as an adult, I would simply know who I was, once I had the freedom of experimenting more to figure it out. I am not that old, but it’s safe to say that the process has not been as enlightening as I wish it had, at 28 years of age, but I have a lot to be grateful to my habit of registering everything in written form.

When I look back, I experience the anguish of realising I still haven’t moved on from some of the same issues that have been plaguing my stubborn little head. The inner child, the melancholic teenager, the anxious adult, they are all one and the same, every difference between one and the other just makes it more obvious that they all stem from the same self. I think of Henry David Thoreau’s words, that some of us were not born to be forced; I wonder if things would have been easier if I had not been so resolved to breathe after my own fashion. My biggest crime, since I was just a child, has always been the imp of disobedience; for the most of it, I am at peace with being unwise, if that’s the price I pay for doing what I want, what I feel like I can afford doing. And I am still terrified of myself most of the time, because of the losses that come with every choice, because most of them do not seem worth the risk, but I still push some buttons and go for the ride. And then I cry about what’s been lost, I cry myself to sleep, but I will do it again.

If my love for making sense of the details that make up History has taught me anything, it’s that there is no amount of past that could ever convince us not to make the same mistakes when experiencing the world for the first and only time, at every single moment of our life. And it is not that I am making a joke out of God’s Grace, but it’s only that I have seen enough of the world to be assured that there is more than one righteous way of walking down the path of Truth, and I must find the one that’s meant for me. I am nothing but the unreliable narrator of this unfiltered account of a stream of thoughts that might, or might not, go well with the rest of the story that I will not stop telling, not until I’ve figured out the one thing I can’t stop thinking about: how to stop thinking, and go to sleep.

Photo by Florian Klauer on Unsplash

How to be a Founder — Speech @ Ars Electronica Founding Lab Day, 6 Sep 2023.

6 September, 2023 — Leave a comment

This speech was presented as part of the Founding Lab Forum of Ars Electronica 2023. As one of the students of the Founding Lab Summer School, a partnership between IT:U and Ars Electronica, I joined the Conference Task Force. We were in charge of preparing a keynote speech for the conference day, to introduce the students and our own vision for the University of the Future. I was given the opportunity to talk about our values. You can watch the full session on YouTube, my part is between 15:12 and 22:34. Special thanks to all the friends from the Conference Task Force.

The text of the speech was slightly edited for a prose format.

For the last two weeks, at the Founding Lab, we have spent all of our time together, sitting through lectures and working and discussing in the workshop rooms with our facilitators and workshop hosts, or just having meals, having a drink, catching the tram, going back to the dorm, walking through Linz. I must say that, when I got here, I was a bit insecure about how much I could really contribute. But, as the days went by, we shared about ourselves and our experiences, our journey and the things that have gone well and the things that have gone wrong, what excites us about what’s coming, but also what frustrates us. And I slowly realised I did have something to add.

Maybe my sampling is biassed, but it seems like many of us came here with the desire to look for insight into what we should do next. I certainly did. We are all adults of a certain age, with so much to learn, but some of us are still coming to the realisation that the uncertainty of life doesn’t end with your teenage years. What we all have in common is that we are people who have chosen to stay in-between the imaginary boundaries of what our practices should be. And this sounds beautiful, but it’s complicated in practice, particularly for the Digital Sciences. They are collaborative by nature, they cannot be sustained on the shoulders of individual efforts, they are born collective, not just inter, trans or cross-disciplinarian, but post-disciplinarian.

I have been a church leader for many years. One useful thing I’ve learned from the religious context is that we should always be thinking about the intentions, motivations and values at the root of the things that we do. And I’m talking about affections and intimate beliefs, what drives us, what kind of inner world we are cultivating in our own journey. The starting point of the things that we do, and making sure that they are coherent with the outcomes we want to see. I care a lot about the practicalities of the work, but I wanted to give a speech about the type of heart and mind that you should have, if you want to be a part of the people who will build the future of which we are dreaming, right now. Shaking the structures of a world that thrives on exclusion and exploitation, to build our post-disciplinary table, where everyone gets a seat and a say in the conversation, with justice, equality, accessibility, care.

But, I have got to be honest. Recently, I had to admit to myself that I am still not as understanding, open and reasonable with differences, not as I thought I was. Of course, I am not talking about tolerating differences that threaten the core values of the university that we want to help bring forth. I’m talking about the things that we bring to the table when we take our seat — the way we talk to and about others, our beliefs about life and work, priorities, methodologies, manners, facilities, equipment, skills, vision, willingness, hard work, funding. I study Social Sciences in an Engineering school, which is just as hard as it sounds, and I am constantly challenged by my peers, because I still have a bunch of hierarchies in my head, about the ways of living and working that are good and valid, and the ones that are not. Maybe some of you relate to what I’m saying, but I hope that there are more of you who can teach something about the type of respect, compassion and flexibility we should have to meet others exactly where they are, for who they are, and do something together.

The bottom line is that we want to work not just for personal gain, but to bring about change. The frustrations and limitations are multiple, there are so many things that we aren’t happy about, but we will achieve very little if our good intentions don’t match the nature of the things that we are trying to build, and if our actions don’t follow our intentions. It’s in the big things but it’s also in the details—how we see each other, and how we treat each other—, which influence the dynamics of everyday life in our shared spaces. The way we negotiate how much we are willing to give, and how much we are willing to lose, who is willing to compromise, and give up some of their resources, in the name of others. Communicating for resolve, and not for conflict, being open about what works and what doesn’t work, standing strong on your ground of what you think is fair, and being open to being wrong, or recognising that not all disagreements will have a clear answer. Dealing with different ways of expressing ideas and thoughts, respecting that some people need more space than others. Acknowledging each other’s hard work. Being less judgemental, more patient in figuring out other people’s boundaries, and being mutually open to negotiate them. I don’t believe in good or bad matches, I think that anything is possible, as long we want to see it work out.

I am very people-centred, I care about the connections we make the most, but the thing I loved the most about being here was watching how us, as students, and the Founding Lab team, adapted to each other. How the Austrian punctuality made room for other approaches to being on time, and the students who were late at first made the effort to leave the dorm a bit earlier. The team’s commitment to being transparent about the limitations, and what were the things that mattered the most. It wasn’t all perfect, but it was sufficient, and it filled me with the right kind of hope. As such, I wholeheartedly believe that there is a way for all of the challenging things that we want to work on from now on. Let’s be even more specific, ten years from now, in the Summer of 2033, I want to be able to look back to this exact moment, the Founding Lab, and have the clarity of a decade to be so glad that I came, and proud of the things that will come to exist because we have come together. Some results will take longer than that, some experiments will fail, not all strategies will thrive, but I hope that, as founders, we will be patient, without losing our passion, and the hope that the things that we want to build will be possible one day because, today, we have chosen to sit and listen, and act.