strange bedfellows

The Meal of Lord Candlestick by Leonora Carrington

Before I was a writer I was a very sad girl. 

 In my early twenties I spent a not insignificant amount of time consuming self-help/life-coach style material. Think Brené Brown¹, Martha Beck (both intelligent and useful imo), but also more random She-EO girlboss personalities whose names I forget now. My inroads into this sphere was a fellowship at Teach For India. As part of being a transformative teacher in under-resourced classrooms, TFI made Fellows engage with Life Maps, Design Thinking, Adaptive Leadership and other such tactics beloved by upper management at corporate firms.

 Around that time is when my sincere love of lesson-planning, goal-setting, rapid experimentation and pivoting emerged. Each of our classrooms, filled with kids at a learning-level far below their actual grade, was like a little start-up. Fellows threw everything at the wall to see what worked. Before starting Mutual Aid India or workshopburi, I was leading an arts-based learning project named Riyaaz and being incubated by serious social-entrepreneurship programs. A self-starter, things-doer type, in retrospect this TFI-born mindset probably helped me when I decided in 2017 to pursue writing professionally.

At the time I was working in the dev-sector and waking up super-early to listen to literary podcasts. I listened to every episode of On Being with Krista Tippet, and V/S with Danez Smith and Franny Choi. I looking for poetry and literary instruction in these conversations, but in the process I became deeply influenced about the kind of person I wanted to be. Which is to say: an artist. A good one. 

Now, some ten years later, I find myself at a really strange intersection of content: tarot and the manosphere.

What links the two? Archetypes and fitness. We might interpret fitness rather broadly here:  The desire for self-knowledge, self-actualization, guidance from an established tradition. 

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