This is not about whether I am right. This is about how I see the world from my perspective.

Because I am just one person, whatever fragment of my thoughts I have to share will be wrought with ignorance of YOUR experiences as a human being.

It will also be wrought with hypocrisies. I am not afraid of being called a hypocrite. In fact, I take that as a compliment because it attests to how many of my paradoxes and contradictions I am holding and grappling with, which I find incredibly interesting.

What I am afraid of, however, is the standardization of human experiences.

I am afraid of any accusation that I am “objective” or that I am “ethical” or that I am “good” or that I am “right.”

What does that even mean?

“Objective” according to which standard?

“Ethical” according to which philosopher?

“Good” according to whose definition?

“Right” for whom?

And when I am following somebody else’s rules, where am I?

If I don’t know where I am, who is showing up to the conversation?

Many of my beliefs and perspectives are informed by fear, and I don’t mind that.

I do not have that fear is a bad thing because, again, I don’t find it interesting to see something as good or bad, better or worse. This kind of binary is at the crux of supremacy culture where one thing is universally better than another.

And so when I say that a lot of my fear arises out of white supremacy, I also don’t have that white supremacy is an inherently bad thing, either. It just means that my fears result from my experience of white supremacy, and that informs the way I want to show up for or against the things I like and don’t like.

Here’s the unlikely experience where I found the spark to write at length about this today: the vast majority of people who give me unsolicited feedback are white.

Some examples:

Experienced moms telling me that it will “get better” if I just “hang in there” and “keep showing up.”

Older men who tell me that I should “keep doing what I’m doing” and “ignore the haters.”

Experienced polyamorists that tell me “this is how I can be happier” and how “I’m just not doing it right.”

And it all boils down to the same thing: the reality that I am experiencing right now is not satisfactory and must be improved.

My humanity, as it is right now, is not “good enough.”

Especially when I did not ASK for it. I find that teaching and learning is a sacred exchange that I engage with with consent and on my own terms.

None of this is to say that these comments are oppressive for me. These are just pixels on the screen that we will all forget about in short order.

But what this DOES do is inform of the greater supremacy culture where we must “always be striving to be better” or “having more” or “being more kind and patient and virtuous.”

When these voices become so loud and persistent, it erases the oppressive realities that others experience. These voices turn a blind eye to the reality that “improvement” is an extracurricular luxury for many of us because we are so busy surviving and barely hearing our heartbeat in a supremacist world that attaches our worth to how “good” and “improved” we are.

Which is one reason I detest the idea that I have to be “good enough” for anything.

In resistance to the culture that decides FOR me who I am and what I should be doing, I decide to behold the truth of what is real right now.

It’s why my priority is around what feels the most truthful, regardless of who or what prompted that experience.

(And sometimes, I desire a different experience. It just doesn’t mean that the experience I desire is better or worse. I do not have to have any additional story other than that I want something.)

So I decide to engage in ongoing examination of any shame that shows up to my system, especially given the systemic power differential where white people in the US and Western empires have been dictating the code of ethics for as long as it has reinforced their colonial roots.

Meaning, the foremost reason for settlers colonizing Indigenous land was that they had a “moral duty” to assert their dominance and commit violence.

They relied on what they believed was “ethical” and “right” instead of being truthful and congruent about how they wanted to be better and more powerful than other people so that they can have more than others.

And ethics soon became the ultimate weapon of shame against our own sovereignty because the following generations inherited the belief that whatever widely accepted ethics superseded our own spiritual compass around how we actually want to love the most truthfully and expansively.

…which, ironically, is why people are violating ethics all the time. They are chasing forbidden pleasure as the antidote to shame…which is, again, not a bad thing. Just rarely effective at getting us the kind of experience of love we are looking for.

Our DNA has been whitewashed into oblivion so that we ignore what actually feels true and real because “doing the right thing” and “becoming better” is the ultimate gateway to belonging.

…so much so that we do not even know what it looks like to find belonging in one another by actually being truthful about where we are.

So when we are looking for sustainable human relationships, standardizing the human experience via the approach of “ethics” doesn’t work. At most, it has severe limitations on its effectiveness.

The question is, what do I want, and what is working and not working?

…outside any inherited conditioning of what I “should” desire and what “should” work?

*

I don’t have that white supremacy is about how “you are white, so you think you’re superior, so you’re a terrible human being, so you need to do better.”

What I have is that white supremacy refers to the phenomenon that we EACH are ALL legacies of the rotten historical roots that presume that there is a superior way of being over another in ways that European white settlers enforced into being.

…which makes it easy for us to believe that an uncomfortable human experience makes us less human or inferior.

…which makes it difficult to love because the shame blinds us from witnessing the evolving and beautiful works of art that we are.

…which makes it difficult to locate the person that is showing up to the relationship.

I don’t know about you, but there is no love without YOU.

So my selfish desire - for the vision that I have in the kind of love I want to see more of in this world - is for more of YOU to be here for the world to experience more of.

Whenever we find ourselves thinking that we’re doing it wrong or need to be better or whatever the fuck, does it feel accessible to note that the voice is not ours but an inherited one that takes us away from how we actually want to love?

When you think that you (or someone else) “should improve,” I invite you to ask: is this the kind of love that *I* WANT to experience? Do I want to engage with the kind of love that hinges on someone’s improvement, or do I want to engage with the kind of love that follows my spiritual compass that directs me to my ever-evolving will and my capacity outside the reductive binary of GOOD or BAD?

Talking about white supremacy is never about blaming white people. Yes, I will feel unsafe around white people because I experience the most acute form of supremacy culture with them. But that doesn’t mean that I am ~so harmless~.

As a straight person, for example, my existence is already contributing to queer oppression because I am benefitting from the power structures that make it easier for me to access care and resources in ways that queer and trans individuals cannot under the status quo.

As long as I am benefitting from queer oppression, I am perpetuating it.

This doesn’t mean that I must be ashamed of myself. I find that to be another narrative of supremacy culture that requires me to believe that I am inferior for “causing harm.” (Which, I find ironic, because supremacy culture often has us more fixated on what is more blameworthy rather than actually tending to the harm.)

This does mean, however, that my identifications, my decisions, and my preferences are part of the collective experience. Which allows me to think critically about the ways I WANT to show up for humanity and the experiences of those I know nothing about.

The invitation to consider our internalized white supremacy hinges on the same premise.

This is not about blaming anybody’s whiteness. It is about directing our attention to our ability to love more powerfully outside the minimizing, oversimplified, and whitewashed paradigms of rightness and ethics.

…and bringing more of YOU to the conversation. Whether you are white or not.

What are your preferences? Your nightmares? Your dreams? Your desires? Your terrors?

And is it okay that we want different things?

Where do we decide to expand our capacity for discomfort if it means we can behold the other and connect more deeply on own mutual and sovereign terms?

To end, I want to note that white supremacy and colonization is not just a US and Western thing. Of course.

Colonization has been a historically persistent thing. My own family experienced Japanese colonization and survived a war torn Korea.

So I come to the US pretty tired of all this colonial way of thinking that has erased so much culture and connection from our roots.

Which is why I use my post-colonial privilege to reflect on the ways my experiences as a Korean and as a Korean living in the US informs and confirms the collective stories on how white supremacy affects the way we love today.

I don’t like the argument that colonizers have “advanced humanity in so many ways” because we will never have access to what would have happened had there been no pattern of colonization and domination in our history.

I may not even have been born.

And I don’t have that that would have been the worst case scenario. Nature is already violent.

And disrupting nature with “all these advancements and technology” rooted in colonial thinking has turned the only planet we have even more violent and unsustainable.

So here we are today.

Knowing that we cannot erase love from our humanity no matter how hard we try, I decide to love even when the resources I want are not available.

I decide to love by using so many of my privileges to express, be “wrong,” to experiment, and evolve at my own pace.

Every day, I resist that I must be anything different.

To that end, I behold myself as I am. And I behold you as you are.

And experiment with relating through differences as they arise.

If we aren’t looking for the “right” answers - if we aren’t looking for answers at all - what is the thing that feels most truthful to behold right now?

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If you haven’t heard from me in a while, I am mostly on Instagram these days coaching polyamorous humans on loving well on their own terms. I very much enjoy working with individuals, and I have also been increasingly enjoying working with partners who want to relate through difference in real time. You can find more of my work on Instagram or find a way to work with me on my Linktree.