Category: Writing

Tear up to capacity at the altar of our limitations

Yvet Youssef
Ink/Edit Nov 2024

This one is dedicated to the moon in Cancer, where it’s stationed on my birth chart, and where it’s fully lit up today, January 13th, 2025. Written last Summer, when, now that I think of it… the sun was also in Cancer. It’s clearly a theme. Emotive water signatures, ruining uncomfortable and performative parties since the dawn of time…

Sometimes water pours from my eyes involuntarily and I look for its source in my body but can’t find it anywhere inside of me. Then I look at your face, and your dry eyes, cheeks that haven’t been watered for ages, and realize these tears are yours.

I used to cry every day going to school in the morning as a kid. An early mourning ritual. I don’t know how my mom did it. There’s VCR tapes from the 90’s where I’m balling my eyes out amongst the flower girls at a wedding. On the surface it looks like I’m the one ruining the atmosphere, but I think I was just the weather girl. Picking up unspoken currents from the ether. Confused by the discrepancies between what I sensed and how things appeared to be. I cried at parties. During vacations with friends. Cried myself to sleep imagining my parents being kidnapped downstairs. I cried in church. In the supermarket. On my bicycle. Hiding in toilet stalls.

In my early thirties there were a few years where I cried every single consecutive day. If there had been an app for that I would have gotten a record level tear-streak. It was a perpetual heartbreak carousel that just kept on spinning. A mixture of my own tears and the ungrieved pain of others. Like I was channeling the sadness of everyone that couldn’t. And there was so much of it waiting in line to be processed during those purging years, it often felt like trying to drain a bottomless well.

High sensitivity, they say. “She just feels everything very strongly.” And it’s alright with me, you know. I rarely feel embarrassed about it anymore. Just sometimes a little awkward when I try to be as confidently aloof as my company, but can’t, for the life of me, muster the same level of coolness.

“You are better off,” he says, “you don’t have to live with all of these repressed emotions.” I pause for a moment. But. I do… You see? I am living with your repressed emotions. We all are. Everything you do not feel ends up pouring down someone else’s face. This is just the physics of interdependence. And maybe I’m a canary in that coal mine. “Ugh, she’s tearing up again… must be approaching a dense and uncharted psychic atmosphere, do we back-out of here, or unpack this shit?” If you push your pain down it inevitably rises up somewhere else, and often with the people you love most. I’ve lived a life working overtime processing everyone’s unmet grief in the room. Underpaid. Very few benefits.

I would not oppose a motion to establish a more equal division of emotional labor.

Tear up to capacity

At the altar of our liberation

Behold this glass bowl shrine

Filled with liquid sacrifice

And leap beyond what limits you

To offer water from your eyes

* I want to acknowledge that facing repressed emotions can seem absolutely terrifying sometimes AND point out there there are containers where you can be witnessed and supported in that process. It’s the work I do with people in Clarity Sessions, and the work many others do in therapeutic spaces. It’s possible. And it makes a difference.

* I thought I stole the line “leap beyond what limits you” from a Rilke poem, but found I merely paraphrased it: see an improperly spaced version of the poem here.

* The sound I can’t help thinking about with that last line: here

* The playlist that I listened to as I was writing this last Summer: here

Thy Will Be Done

Yvet Youssef
(Ink + edit, November 2024)

I’ve been thinking about willpower a lot lately. The power to will something into being. We witness megalomaniacal men ‘will’ their vision into being. Their violent monstrous imagination made manifest. Thousands of people die, because some motherfucker wanted it so. The whole world tilts on the axis of audacity of those who will themselves into prominence. And, conversely, the insecurity of those who feel like they are powerless.

And I’m sitting here, all thoughtful, worrying if my tiny words might offend someone. “I just didn’t want to be rude…”¹ I’m the person who will sit by the windowseat on a plane having to pee, but not wanting to disturb my sleeping neighbor. So I will not pee. You see what I mean? I WILL stay uncomfortable and unheard to protect the assumed tranquility of the other. My nervous system has learned that’s the safe route. You might recognize this behavior in relationships, and how detrimental it is in the long run.

Now it’s easy to think: I am a good person for taking others into account. He is a bad person for not taking anyone into account. But these are two sides of the same coin. Self-aggrandizing and self-denial aren’t virtuous. Both of these are behavioral patterns that stem from the trauma of not being truly seen as a child. Trying to extract crumbs of love and acknowledgement through controlling the environment, either with brute force, or through silent scheming. Over-adaptation to the needs and whims of others, as well as a complete incapacity to register the experience of others, is indicative of unhealed wounding in our psyche. And many of us struggle with this.

I look at the state of our world and don’t know how to solve this immediately. It often feels overwhelming. But I can logically infer that if wounding stems from not being truly seen when we needed it, our collective medicine might have something to do with truly seeing one another now². I want to be entirely present when you share your experience of reality, and I want to be totally open to share mine with you, in equal measure. When all performative niceness and performative aloofness fall away, we are left in the center of presence. And that’s vulnerable. It’s liberating. It’s loving.

I look at the megalomaniacal men force-feeding their will to us be-will-dered spectators. But we don’t really want what they have to offer. And I wonder: Where did they find the audacity? I want some of that audacity. So I spit the spoon-fed formula out of my mouth. This doesn’t nourish me at all. And I search for my own will. One that is neither reckless nor self-effacing. My true will is always communal, interdependent. Always a shared abundance. And the commune includes me and everyone else; it’s planetary. Let us see each other, truly. Let us will a reality into being that benefits life for everyone.

¹ reference to the song: I Was Gonna Fight Fascism by Soccer96 and Alabaster DePlume. It’s painfully relevant these days. Give it a listen.

² this is what I offer the collective through Clarity Sessions – a container in which you can be truly seen and witnessed in your experience of reality. If this sounds like something that might benefit you right now, I have spaces available, just send me a message.

Magalomania

Yvet Youssef

Moral failure rocks the boat. Perpetual moral failure inevitably sinks the ship. Every flag that’s weathered down to a dusty powder throughout history knows this story. And every flag, inevitably, awaits the same fate.

Magalomania is a country that cares very little about other countries unless it can strike a seemingly benevolent but ultimately very manipulative arms-deal with them. It’s a nationstate in which many people have been struggling for generations. They live in situational poverty, but because they have been spoon-fed the fairytale that they live in the greatest nation on the planet, they are very proud of their flag. Big empty yards with eroded driveways where crooked mailboxes stand slanted next to a weathered flag that’s muttering some repetitive old heroic war-tale in the wind. Their wars are civil, though, the weathered flag insists, the good kind. Only very good wars against very bad people. No other choice, you see?

Kid’s teeth are rotting out of their mouths. The roofs of their never-weatherproof homes are leaking. The smell of old dogpiss continues to linger in the livingroom no matter how many discounted yet still overpriced faintly-vanilla scented candles get lit on the coffee table that’s always covered with ever-accumulating stacks of unopened and mostly irrelevant mail that nobody has the time to read. God bless Magalomania. Land of the faintly-free. Land of some faint memory of liberty. A fever dream in which a strangely shaped cardboard cutout of freedom is supposed to cover up a couple hundred years of systemic cruelty and exploitation. Multitudinous missteps are manually airbrushed out of the narrative by a whole army of system servants who can’t afford to lose their job, even if that means airbrushing away evidence of their own oppression. If you look very closely at its liberty fortresses you might notice deep cracks in the moldy plaster walls and frighteningly shaky scaffolding propping the whole thing up. But the hero is the hero, the fairytale implores [please, let’s not make this too complicated now lest we no longer know who we are.] The hero is the hero and the villain is the villain, and that’s not us! For we are proud Magalomanians! We can’t be. That’s not us. It’s not. Us. Is it?

Every flag, every empire, awaits the same fate. It may very well be time to build some of those communal arks, kids. Or learn swiftly how to swim.

39°C Autoethnography

Yvet Youssef

It’s been 12 hours of sleeping when I emerge into daytime from a deep dream in which I was trying to open a bicycle lock that just wouldn’t budge, and visited empty houses under construction that hadn’t been rented out for ages.
“Just let me live here!” I call out, still frustratingly fidgeting with the lock, “I can make this place look great and would love to turn it into a home, it has so much potential!” 
“No, no, no,” the old neighbors push me out the door, “the renting agency doesn’t allow that, so it’ll probably just remain vacant for another decade.”

My eyes slowly open to perceive a daylight that’s still too bright for my brain. I pull the covers over my head and notice the pungent odor of sweat and flu and the exorcism of a viral invader. I smell like an animal, I think to myself. My first instinct is to recoil in shame. Uncover the sweat drenched blanket to let some air in. But I don’t have the energy, so instead rest in this faunal cavern for a while longer: I am an animal. This is my animal body working overtime to keep me alive. I haven’t eaten for days. Last week I thought: I feel a little oversaturated, I should really do a fast… Then Tuesday morning I yelled through the window at my housemate who asked how I was doing: “I’m semi-ok, not a hundred percent… sometimes I just wish for a real fever, you know? Just to just get it over with already!” She yells back: “Fevers are really good to reset your system!” If only my manifesting skills would work so well for my soul’s deepest desires… Within 6 hours I was projectile vomiting into a bucket with a shaking body that could not warm itself, heart racing, body aching from every possible angle.

I am this animal body. My mind is crystal clear from not eating for days. I have noticed this phenomenon on several occasions when I was unable to eat for stretches of time. The first 24 hours are horrendous. Every vile thought comes floating to the surface of the toxic cesspool of mind. Horrible thoughts. Self-depricating thoughts. And a dread befalls me: After all this journeying and healing in this world, this type of shit still comes up? This is still part of my subconscious? What’s the point of anything then? Exhausted and deflated from that first 24 hour delirium, I involuntarily fall into another 12 hours of sleep cycling.

Upon awaking it’s almost as if that toxic top layer of mind is skimmed off and discarded. That’s what they call a purge. Such that in the 36th hour of forced fasting a clarity is distilled. A hallway I’ve named *Crystal Mind*¹ which I suspect is the reason why so many religious disciplines prescribe fasting as a spiritual practice. It’s not the martyrdom of agony of those first 24 hours. That’s hard work, but that’s not where the gems are located. It’s the space that opens up after the struggle that’s light and luminous and unlike any other state I have experienced in multitudinous mind-bending adventures. Crystal clarity. Sharp focus. Weightlessness. Boundlessness. It’s such a bright cerebral sensation that it makes me question whether our modern overly-processed food is purposefully designed to weigh us down with oversaturated sluggishness. The mind wilts under the influence of simple carbohydrates… That much is obvious.

I stay undercover since there’s no physical energy yet to move. I notice my animal body becoming a planet. The blanket forms a dense and humid atmosphere. This morning dew. A flu dictating the temperature like a sun god. I notice hot salt-water springs bursting from the plains of my skin at random locations. Accumulating momentum and dripping down my body. If I would lay here for long enough these streams would turn into riverbeds, eroding their meandering movement into flesh. Steam rises. Microorganisms grow. I might be fertile soil for a mushroom now. Tectonic plates test each other’s boundaries as they effect one another’s positioning. Left Hip Bone Mountain tilts a few inches to the side as Right Kneecap Ridge demands a little more altitude. A careful and catastrophic dance. Subtle shifts, bombastic upheaval, depending on distance from which it is perceived. And from the very core of this particular planet a deep rumbling can be heard. Low and ancient. An emptiness that recalls the driving force behind this game of existence: Hunger.

I check with my animal planet body if it could receive some nutrition yet. No, not yet. But a hot shower and some sunlight through an open window might be nice. I heed the simple yet strenuous call. Drag myself wobbly like a newborn deer to the waterfalls of clean civility. I let the salt pools transform into sweet water droplets. I let the sun hit the bare skin of my solar plexus and notice how solar plexus, the chakra center for our identity, sits right at the height of stomach. You are what you eat, they say. I am deep space emptiness right now. I hear the neighbors quarreling and the song from their radio goes: “eeeeven aan mijn moeoeoeder vragen.” I feel the sudden urge to take immediate dominion of my own sonic experience. Sound can be invasive, it often gets under my skin. I can help myself with noise canceling melodies of my own choosing. Coma Salv is suggested, a new song by Sega Bodega, and as usual, the algorithm is suspiciously on point. A fever playlist² quickly assembles itself as my fingers move across buttons I know very well.

My mother comes over on her bicycle. I didn’t ask her to. She brings me figs and oranges (that come all the way from her garden a few neighborhoods over. Not the oranges. But the figs. A miracle.) Suddenly 30 years get subtracted from our timeline and I am nine and innocently talking from the pillow cave I made of my couch. I’m simultaneously hyper-aware of my present day reality in which I can’t help but miss being a mother to my daughter who hasn’t found an opportunity to be born as of yet. I haven’t found her a portal. I wonder if that’s selfish. Have I been too picky? Too slow to act? Or are these just the complex parameters of our time, of my life? I’m sorry, I feel like saying. My mother found me a portal in time and space through which to come forth. She helps me remove the soaking wet womb of atmospheric covers from my bed and changes the bedlinnen. Naturally. Thank you, I feel like saying.

I ask my animal planet body: Can you eat something now? Maybe a mandarine. Maybe a fig. I eat both. And then one more mandarine. How are these so good? How does this grow on trees? They are so ridiculously beautiful!

Well. Maybe… Sunlight. Water. The time and space to simply be and grow into themselves. A continuous process of becoming. A giant floral and faunal collaborative dance with the elements.

All the while this unfolds I am writing these lines in the background of my mind. It’s a compulsion I’ve know since I was nine. Trying to remember. And trying to remember my dream, the hues and colors of it. Wondering what it means to wrestle with a lock that simply doesn’t want to open. The frustration of not being able to change systems of bureaucratic decay. Being pushed away. Where am I barking up the wrong doors to open for a sense of belonging? Oh, lord knows I’ve tried. It’s a waste of time.

What is simple and within reach? Mary Oliver writes as a directive³: “You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”

I can take care of my animal planet body. One mandarine and one fig. This meandering and inevitable dance with sickness and health. Who knows what’s around the corner. There are portals to be born through, to be born anew, carefully placed in the *everywhere* of each new moment. This field of *now* is fractal. Emerge from the slumber of sluggishness. Clear your mind from clutter. Detoxify. Treat exorcism like a verb. Marry a discipline of regular exorcising. Like sleeping. Like sweating. Like howling. Like dancing. Literally light up your solar plexus. Rest your soft animal body in the fresh blankets of quiet unassuming care. Allow it in. And when a hunger finally rises to the surface, any hunger, rumbling, low and ancient, feed it with what is ripe and ready and nourishing around you.

¹ *Crystal Mind* is a ~very temporary~ waypost on the pilgrimage that is embodiment, it’s not a destination. We need real food to live well and healthy lives!

² That fever playlist: right here.

³ The full Mary Oliver poem: over here.

Bridge and Anchor

Yvet Youssef

I wrote this piece several years ago, stored it in my notes, and as with most of my writing, never shared it with anyone. (I once heard a Richard Rohr lecture¹ about the Enneagram describing this type of behavior as a typical 4w5 tendency and felt slightly called out… been working on balancing those wings…) My Brother (4w3) took part in a beautiful documentary that was just released titled ‘Vaders’² (Fathers). It features an important aspect of our shared Egyptian family history and upbringing. Watching it reminded me of this writing. So, here it is, like an archeological dig from the folds of time, dedicated to our ancestors:

*Notebook doodle from early 2010

My Frisian Maternal Grandmother was a writer. She observed her surroundings and wrote poems about that which she could not quite accept about the world she lived in. My Mother is, in essence, a language-inspired educator, a theater maker, an avid reader and organizer. They are the critical thinkers. The sense-makers. The women who ensure everything works out, gets arranged, and retrieved, and put in its right place. They have the map and a plan. My left brain is a Woman being practical and fair and resourceful.

My Coptic Egyptian Paternal Grandfather was the keeper of the sweetest heart. It was trudged upon and obscured by the circumstances surrounding him, but his essence carried quietly over to his two Sons. They in their turn struggled with the confusion of having such sweet hearts in such a cruel world. My Uncle died in a car crash in 1994. The pain of losing him remains a perpetual ache on my Father’s face. Yet the pureness of a heart cannot stay hidden forever. In moments when you least expect it, it shimmers through; laughs and cries from a spirit of deeply sourced Truthfulness. They are the dreamers, the philosophers, the idealists. My right brain is a Man in mystical divine rapture.

I carry within me lineages of Dutch pragmatism and Egyptian romanticism in equal symbiosis. Growing up in the Netherlands felt alienating and soulless. Visiting Egypt felt unnecessarily chaotic and maddening. Children of two worlds find themselves at home in neither. Children of two worlds are here to help build a new one.

***

Every descendant is an anchor. An anchor in time and space, hooked into the soil of this very moment, and attached to the floating spirit-ark that carries our ancestral lineages. Those lineages are complex and multifaceted. Just a few jumps into recent history, let’s say 200 years, and we are already talking about a group of 32 embodied souls directly responsible for our lives. Without them we simply would not be here. The odds were remarkably stacked in favor of our existence. And the further back we travel in time, that number of souls grows exponentially and wildly large.

Every descendant is also a natural bridge between the difference of two separate bodies. An intricate marriage of two genetic codes, passed down like an ever expanding puzzle through time. When I stop to feel the weight of that, I suddenly feel very responsible for my own life. Because my own life isn’t just my own life. It’s a culmination of immense labor and love through the ages. When I write, I write for my Grandmother. When I dive into the deepening waters of spiritual expansion, I am grabbing my Grandfather’s hand to take him with me.

We sometimes desperately seek anchors outside of ourselves, outside of our own histories, trying to hold on to external sources for stability. Temporary and flimsy as though they may be. In doing so, we risk dissociating from our own essence and disowning our ancestors. We may begin to feel disconnected, like strangers to ourselves and to this world. As such we block the flow of our own particular life-force. Many indigenous cultures the world over have always prescribed staying connected to our ancestors. That’s for a reason. It’s their trauma and their gifts we get to work with. Acknowledging that paves a path towards our freedom.

When we amplify differences outside of ourselves, between me and you, or us and them, and blame them for our troubles, we reject the complex contradictions already within us. When we deny the paradoxical nature of our own psyches, we block the possibility of integration. Integration leads to liberation. When you can look every part of yourself in the eye, no matter how ugly or uncomfortable, can pour each part a cup of tea, lend it an ear to hear what it needs, you no longer have to expend any energy hiding or pretending to be perfect when you are not. Oh, the relief.

We can only become solid bridges to one another, in intimate relationship, when we have recognized and accepted that we hold every duality already within the confines of our own being. That awful trait that drives me up the wall with frustration in a loved one? Ah, that’s mine too. I do that too. Or; I do the equally annoying extreme opposite to compensate. In that group of 32 souls of recent ancestry, every dark natured violent asshole and every impossibly sweet and generous heart is represented. Without a doubt. Sometimes in the very same person.

Everything I reject in you, hides in me as well.

Everything I revere in you, resides in me as well.

This is how wholly we are. How ingeniously complete. This is how I anchor myself in my own life. How I bridge difference within and around me. We are all in this together, portals of consciousness doing deep inner work alongside one another in this precise and precious moment. That work, it ripples beyond the scope of our understanding: Horizontally through our own generation, and vertically through every past and every future.

And all of our ancestors are watching from the hallways of history, hoping, wishing, dreaming us into being. I can see them, some cheerful, some still hiding in shame. I have conversations with them now. Pour them cups of tea. There’s a resounding call ringing through those hallways of time, much like that last line in one of my favorite Rilke poems³. I stretch my arms open toward the sky, feet anchored to the Earth, my fingers reaching, the call echoes: “Give me your hand.”

¹ That particularly uncomfortable Richard Rohr lecture on the Enneagram 4: Here.

² The trailer of the documentary ‘Vaders’ with Eloi Youssef and Lakshmi Swami Persaud: Here.

³ The Rainer Maria Rilke poem that made me lose my shit and weep the first (and second and third) time I read it: Here.

Morning Pages: Mannen – Mei 2024 (Dutch Rarity)

Yvet Youssef

I’ve been fully dedicated to Julia Cameron’s ‘The Artist’s Way’ in the past months. It’s a great guide and the daily writing assignments are a much cherished part of my morning routine. Almost all of my morning pages are in English, except for maybe 2% of the entries. In week 9 of the course, the assignment is to read back all the previously unread morning pages. This one came through on May 28th, 2024, and struck me in the re-read as a pretty complete piece. In Dutch! A rare breed! For English entries just scroll down, or, as time progresses, up. For now, this stream of Dutch consciousness around the theme of masculinity:

Mijn hoofd doet zeer achter aan de rechterkant. De druk geeft een hoofdpijn die overal doorheen gonst, maar vooral door jou. Ik wil je alleen maar vasthouden. Armen in elkaar gedraaid alsof er nooit meer de noodzaak is ze uit elkaar te knopen. Het maakt niet uit. Mijn buik is moe en mijn armen zijn moe en mijn ogen zijn moe. Ik wil opeens, Nederlands. Dat komt omdat ik Eefje de Visser heb geluisterd en zij Nederlandst zo mooi. En het komt omdat jij Nederlands nooit opgeeft zelfs als ik je telkens weer in het Engels. Ik vraag me telkens af hoe jouw hersenen dat doen. Ik ben moe. Ik denk, zoals men dat in het Engels zegt: “onder het weer.” En het weer is de afgelopen weken zo laag dat het nogal verdrietig is. Zo laag bij de grond dat alles constant nat is. Slakken wandelen slijmerig naar binnen. Geef me een slijmerige slakken knuffel. Geef me je tijd. Leg je hand op mijn hoofd zodat deze pijn verdwijnt. Geef me je eerlijke liefde.

Gister deed ik een regressie hypnose op het thema ‘mannen’ en waarom ik ze zo moeilijk kan vertrouwen en waarom ik me aangetrokken voel tot mannen die vermijdend zijn. De regressie ging terug naar mijn 12 jarige zelf nadat ik mijn ouders ruzie had horen maken, ging luisteren, en mijn vader hoorde dreigen dat hij voor de trein ging springen en hoe verschrikkelijk veel pijn dat deed.
Dat hij me achter zou laten. Dat ik er blijkbaar niet genoeg toe deed. Dat ik niet belangrijk genoeg was om te blijven.

Mannen laten mensen in de steek, de overtuiging. Mannen laten mij in de steek, de overtuiging. Ze zijn niet te vertrouwen, de overtuiging. De man waar ik later het meest van hield op de hele wereld liet mij vallen. Zo hard en onverwachts dat het na al die jaren eigenlijk nog steeds niet te geloven is. Dat is geen overtuiging. Dat weet mijn lichaam. Voorzichtig. Zet jezelf niet te veel open. Gooi jezelf niet zomaar achterover in zijn armen.

Wat je ooit wel vol vertrouwen en overgave deed in zo’n verbindingsoefening, toen hij, God mag weten waarom, je niet opving en je hoofd vol tegen het raamkozijn knalde. Je in de gonzende hoofdpijn in foetushouding, met je armen om je eigen hoofd, je ogen hard dichtgeknepen ze niet open wilde doen omdat je het niet wilde zien. Hem niet wilde zien. Dat je dit ergens registreerde als vreemd ongeluk en voorafschaduwing maar toch met hem trouwde. Jaren later keek hij toe hoe je op grootse hoogte worstelde met zijn schaduw, en in plaats van het beantwoorden van je roep om hulp gaf hij je het laatste duwtje de afgrond in. Voorzichtig nu.

Oh, ik hou van ze. Allemaal. Zing “Om Namah Shivaya” met tranen over mijn wangen, maak een diepe buiging, vol verlangen. Ik ben warm en lief en ik zie ze graag, die mannen. Ik zie ze graag vol leven hun hele leven vol leven. Ik zie ze graag lachen en huilen en voelen en creëren en koken en repareren en in conflict hun eigen centrum bewaken. En eerlijk zijn. En vol van liefde een arm om iemand heen slaan.

Wil je je arm om mij heen slaan en me even vasthouden want ik heb dat zo gemist en zo lang niet gekend. Omdat ze vast zaten, die belangrijke mannen in mijn leven. Maar ik heb ze zo nodig gehad. Moest het zo vaak alleen doen, zelf oplossen, dat ik nu heel krachtig ben, maar ook bang om je binnen te laten. Bang om weer, teleurgesteld en verlaten, te wachten tot je weer bij zinnen bent, en soms gebeurt dat gewoon niet. Loop ik met mijn hart onder mijn zielige arm, kopje onder, mijn verdere leven in zonder jou. Ik zal er niet minder door leven, boven het weer, voet aan de grond. Maar liever loop je met me mee en houd je mijn hand vast en geef je mij een knuffel en leg je je andere hand op mijn peinzende hoofd en rust me even uit.

The Magical Other is a Myth I Believe

Yvet Youssef

1. Friends as mythic heroines

My Friend is a lens that helps me see myself more clearly and I am the Eye that beholds her beauty. My breakfast in the morning is an amalgamation of external influences. The beet smoothie, the oats with a pinch of salt, the sunflower seeds, the caraway, the raw cacao, the chia, the chai mix in a ziploc bag from Carbondale, the lavender syrup rose water matcha late… I’ve invented nothing, I just blend it all together, and remember with each ingredient: The moment you have shown me your particular ways is the moment I’ve changed mine. It’s so obvious at breakfast time. It’s much more subliminal in the ethereal waters of Being, how you’ve changed the ways I’m seeing, how you existing in my orbit adds an invisible structure to my days that keeps me anchored in my center.

All of this to say, I wouldn’t be who I am without you, Friend. Wouldn’t stand on my own two feet so firmly. Wouldn’t be so sure about what to eat for breakfast. Or if I’d spur myself into motion without sensing the reverberating echoes of your incredible life being lived by none other than you. Specifically. It’s a miracle to know and be known by you.

I see us like a constellation of celestial bodies attuned to one another’s evolution. And my bowl of oatmeal as a devotional practice. I know how that sounds. And I know you understand exactly what I mean.

2. Dating as Odyssey inward

I try to figure out the shape of who you are. And sometimes I focus so intensely I forget I am also a part of our meeting.

On dating apps I’ve seen dozens of people announce they’ve got their lives in order, they are just looking for that last puzzle piece to complete the picture. 

I look at the shape of who I am. These natural borders, irregular like dried up river beds from tears, corners bent and chipped away, craters from meteor impact, broken up and sewn together with light from the stars. Nobody with their life ‘in order’ has the type of puzzle I could possibly fit into.

And anyway, Love doesn’t allow herself to be reduced to a puzzle piece that completes an image of a comfortable existence. Whoever keeps such a fantasy has never known Love, or really just wants a static prop for the theater production of their life.  Love will mess up your whole puzzle to leave it unrecognizable when she’s finished, she discombobulates the scene, table and all, up in the air in irreverent enthusiasm. Want order? Do not fall for her.

I trace your outlines with my finger. Imagine your expanse. Somewhere our puzzled eyes meet and even though our maps are written in entirely different languages, our landshapes wrap peninsular limbs around one another. Already changed by your borders and boundaries. Already shape shifting to reveal more of who I am. You imagine my expanse and the Earth quakes under my feet.

Reconsider: Absolutely. Everything.

Yvet Youssef

This piece was last edited in the fall of 2022, nestled somewhere in the hundreds of pinned notes on my phone. I have pinned so many notes the pinning has lost all functionality. I found this by accident, and I thought: yep, I sound like a pirate sometimes, but, still feeling this. There was just one gap in the flow which I stitched together with a line about the reason for these words hiding in the digital dungeon of forgotten notes for so long…

Everything is bullshit to me
It’s like I’m half-plugged in and the screen is glitching so much I can’t immerse myself in the story

I read articles and advertisements from yet another person thinking they can beat the system by selling me a subscription to their 5 week self-help affirmation-station-program and I want to scream
And I do
I say OHFUCKOFF to the screen
Nobody needs that!
Nobody

It’s all desperate attempts at surviving late stage capitalism with some extra cash in pocket
When we actually need a radical revolution and overhaul of our entire way of living
We need to fry our brains free from the conditioned delusions around what it means to live together on this majestic planet

Everything you believe around
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N
G

All of it in the blender and fried to a crispy crystal clarity

But instead we try another mindfulness e-book with ideas that are just watered down extractions ripped from an ancient Buddhist text
Empty and acontextual and ignoring the fact that our whole system is collapsing causing everyone to feel unstable and burned-out and you can’t fix that with 5 minutes of guided meditation before another insomaniacal night

That’s right, I’m angry. Been angry for as long as I can remember at the half-baked nonsense we are sold as truth© (“this message is brought to you by an entirely corrupt white-collar-criminal business that cares only for its own megalomaniacal $growth$ trajectory”)
And how millions upon millions of people just continue to tryyyy and believe it
“Just the way it is”
“Oh well”
“That’s just the way it is”

No – it’s not just the way it is
What type of escapist and unaffordable retreat has your divine agency fled to?
It’s just the way we created it to be
This > Soil and Soul destroying absurdist psychosis-inducing bureaucratic death machine <
Is. Our. Invention.

Affirm: I love myself and I am complicit in perpetuating a failing system that kills and makes people ill and destroys the planet

No need to get defensive about it, we are all in this together, and we don’t know what to do except maybe
Stir some shit up!
Say NO
Be NON-NICE
Unpleasant
Unlikable
Uncomfortable even
Be honest

And by all means necessary
Crack your brain all the way open, glitch out, fry up, spinn off your axis

Don’t repeat the same thing over and over expecting a different result, we all know by now Albert said that’s the definition of insanity
Do you know that picture of him wild haired, big eyed with his tongue sticking out? Like that

Give me recalcitrant non-compliance in the face of outdated nonsensical and shame-driven norms
Normality™ is a capitalist distortion of reality
A ploy
An insidious brainwash soap bar that removes all the protective natural oil from your psyche until it’s so squeaky clean you can barely even recognize yourself
Making everyfckingbody think something is wrong with them

Is there something wrong with me? While I carefully consider the possibility from every angle in a variety of individualized therapies, I will keep these words to myself for years because I’ve been educated to obey the cynical little white man censor in our hivemind saying things like: “too much,” “unkind,” “not scientific enough,” “too emotional,” “not spiritual enough,” “unprofessional,” “not nuanced enough,” “too complicated,” “self-indulgent,” “immature,” “unrealistic,” “offensive,” “and, eeergh, evidently… entirely hypocritical”
Oh, God forbid we hurt anybody’s feelings but our own

There is nothing wrong with me. My Spirit is a messy divergent and sensitive wilderness. There’s nothing wrong with you. You are a human Being

We’ve never meshed well with the overculture that would give our true selves a plethora of pathologies if we would allow it. I am not sick. To the contrary. And I am not interested in submerging myself in the stagnant waters of victimhood, diminishing ourselves in conflict avoiding and *alwaystriggered* unresolved traumas
Tired
Done
Enough
That pain underneath is serious, just never a justification for inaction, passivity, or half-living
Accept my compassion for your suffering
Do not expect me to drown in it with you
That’s not what Love does

Give me, instead, the untamed madness that lives in the center of your heartfire and let me hear your soundwaves crashing into the shores of this godforsaken empire of denial

We need you at the helm of this ship
Roaring so crazy and wild we all end up belly-laughing on the floor because it’s so true and pure
And, holy shit, it’s actually real for once

A safety net with a hole the size of your body

Yvet Youssef

Feel free
Feel free to mourn
Feel free to grieve
Feel free to scream at the powers that be perpetuating the conditions for this grieving
Feel free to rock your body back and forth to a rhythm played for immediate peace

Feel free to shake your head so hard you just might lose your mind
There’s not a lot of time
There’s a safety net with a hole the size of your body at your disposal
Such is this human condition
It will inevitably kill you

And if you are so lucky to have some say in how it is going to kill you
Feel free to dance defiantly to the tune of your own liberation

You see, the oppressed become the oppressor, like Freire said, until somebody steps out of that loop with fierce determination

There’s only one path towards collective freedom and it is paved by you stomping your feet to the beat of your own liberation

So dance
Grab the hands of anyone willing to join the movement
This cannot be forced
It is just an invitation extended to every living thing

That’s you
Every living thing
Feel free
Feel free to mourn
Feel free to grieve
Feel free to scream at the powers that be perpetuating the conditions for this grieving
Feel free to rock your body back and forth to a rhythm played for immediate peace

//

///

//

These words were in part inspired by the trance inducing performance of Natural Information Society @ Le Guess Who 23, which Joshua Abrams closed by stating “this is music for immediate peace” and I felt that completely.

(posted first on IG in dec. 2023)

Waveform

Yvet Youssef

My organic intelligence weaves a web of words for you to wander about. A way to know yourself through the mirror I Am. You. Showing me the path towards myself as we meander around one another. Carefully carefree in fields of friction and ease. You don’t have to say “please” it’s already yours. We take a deep breath knowing we exist. What animates us is this, respiration, the ebb and flow of spirit. Our evolution is spurred by mistakes. Mutations. May this annul your anxiety. I misspelled: “No worries, it’s all God”. A profundity in error.

If it’s true, it’s unerasable. Unavoidable. Unrelentingly tugging at the ruffles of your composure. No need to wonder about that. Everything is already changed because of you.
Your beating heart transmitting unerasable ripples that touch everything forever more. It’s a responsibility if there ever was one. A frequency you get to fine-tune with every movement. A waveform shaped like one hand waving at another hand waving, signaling a mutual acknowledgement of Being. A bandwidth expanding in accordance with your courage to be known.

I swim in the billowing ocean of it All, hands open, humming harmonies with everything I’m lucky enough to notice. I have noticed you ripple through me, and it moves me in every possible direction forever more.