Welcome to #PUNTOTalks, our monthly podcast/chikahan series featuring the voices of Filipinos from the diaspora. This series will focus on global Pinoys who embody fascinating intersections in their own identities and experiences.
Meet Jen Soriano (she/they)!
Ate* Jen is an award-winning writer, storyteller, movement leader, and community organizer living on unceded Duwamish territory in Seattle. Earlier this summer, she released her groundbreaking and genre-defying new book, Nervous.
In this #PUNTOTalks episode, we discuss her rich and powerful memoir, which explores the power of healing in community, the impact of transgenerational trauma across continents, and a lifetime of grappling with devastating chronic illness in a society obsessed with easy medical categorization, rationalization, and problem-solving.
I devoured Nervous. It was a heady and reaffirming read for me at a critical juncture in my movement work. I highly recommend it to folks who are fed up with the current capitalist system and its unrealistic expectations, and the heartbreaking reality of the Black, brown, and low-income people the system often sacrifices at the altar of productivity and results.
Nervous is a one of a kind. It opens up replenishing new pathways to explore, envision, and chart a new way forward for a more caring and humane society.
As Ate Jen says: it’s a “beach read, but a heavy beach read.”
I’m so honored to be able to share her story. Listen up!
*Ate is a Tagalog word (with Fukien origins) that means “older sister.” It’s an honorific typically used for an older female relative or respected friend in Filipino culture.
Maki:
Alright Jen, welcome to Punto!
I’m so excited that you are here. I am a big fan of your work and I consider you as one of my Ates in the movement.
Jen:
Aww. <laughs>
I love that.
Maki:
Especially since you’re Filipina and you’ve been in the movement for a while.
Tell me a little bit about yourself and how you came to write this book and what inspired it.
Jen:
I have been around the block for a while and it’s true. I am fully owning my elderhood.
Maki:
I love it! <laughs>
Jen:
I love knowing that, considering that I am the bunso (youngest one) in the family, I never got to be called ate, so I want to be called as ate now. <laughs>
So, I’ve been working in social movement building that is just organizing support for more than twenty years and I consider this book an outgrowth of that work. I have been doing what is now called “narrative strategy” or “narrative change” work pretty much the whole time. I fell into it basically because I was a journalist.
I was working at Mother Jones magazine and this was the time--the Bay Area in the early 2000s when the U.S.-based support movement for Philippine Human Rights was really starting to grow at the same time there was this new youth-led racial justice movement that was growing in the Bay.
I feel lucky to have been there at that time. Basically, since I was working in journalism, my role became: “Hey! You can write stuff so write a press release.” And that was the beginning of everything. I was like: “What’s a press release?” <laughs>
Maki:
You do all the writing.
Jen:
Just do all the writing, talk to the people who write things.
Maki:
Right.
Jen:
So, that’s how it all began. It became twenty years of being able to work with just some of the most amazing organizers, leaders, and community members and being able to tell their stories and organize stories to confront and shift dominant narratives and I feel so privileged to fall into that role.
It took me that long to get up the courage to write my own story. It is easier to support other people in telling their stories and cheer them on, than it is to actually sit with myself and tell my own story but I felt called to do it, so I did it.
Maki:
Congratulations!
I can personally empathize with that as well, because I used to work as a journalist. I still have a lot of journalistic tendencies, and honestly, I know how hard it is to own your story, step into your power, and step into your story. But I think in organizing, you can’t really avoid it. <laughs>
I am curious to know what that journey was like for you as someone covering and writing about this movement that is happening in the Bay and being surrounded by these amazing people.
How did you get from that to where you are now – where you are sharing your story – and how did you cross that bridge?
Jen:
It was a long bridge with lots of detours, I would say. <laughs> In the past twenty years, I have been able to see a lot of the people that I started organizing with back in those days and whom I started doing media training with become these national leaders.
Pretty much any sector you name, like climate justice, racial justice like Black futures and gender justice. I think for me there have been a couple ways that I have continued to try to evolve my contributions to the movement, and one of them has been filling gaps where I can, and helping to start organizations that didn’t exist that needed to fill gaps, specifically for BIPOC communities. Like the Center for Media Justice is one of them, and Reframe is another one.
I have an artist and cultural worker in me that also needs to be fed in addition to this side of me that’s like: “I like organizational development.” <laughs> You know.
Maki:
There’s all these different aspects, yeah.
Jen:
There’s another part of me that was a musician for a while, and I still am a musician, but that was my main form of cultural work for a while. I was doing music and honestly, that became not as sustainable given my chronic illness.
So, writing became more of the mode that I went to for the artistic piece and contribution to change.
That together with the fact that in my thirties, my chronic illness symptoms – I wouldn’t say that it came ahead because it actually got worse in my twenties – got to a point where it came to a crossroad: “Am I going to try and heal more?” and I am going to be like: “This is it.”
That had to do with deciding to want to try and have a kid and in the healing process, there is something called a “healing crisis” that can happen where you actually get worse before you get better and maybe after having a couple of those in my life.
In my thirties when I started to have… Oh! I see you nodding.
Maki:
I wouldn’t say that it was from that chronic illness standpoint, but definitely, I have been through some shitty suffering where I was like: “Wow! Is this ever going to get better?”
It significantly gets better. But then, it's in your head again, like: “Oh s**t, I thought it was over.”
And then you’re already better, so you’ll be like: “Oh, let’s try to work with this.” But it’s still jagged.
Jen:
Yeah, it is still jagged, it’s non-linear.
It can be really frustrating but thank goodness, there’s the parts where you get better. I’ve been really thankful for that. I basically wrote this book at the time where after coming to my healing crisis, I was like: “Okay, I think that I am at that point where I can actually try to share and put all these pieces together.”
I don’t think I would be able to do that if I hadn’t gotten to that level of functionality and health where I can actually spend time excavating my own story.
Maki:
Excavating is a great word. Tell me more.
Jen:
Ugh, gosh. So, writing personal nonfiction is really hard. It does feel like you are digging your organs out all the time.
You know, one of the biggest things about writing personal nonfiction is having to excavate a lot of not just your personal story but also family stories, so hell yeah! It’s hard.
If you feel it then you are definitely not alone. It means that you are doing the work and it is so necessary to get support from other people who are not the people you are writing about. <laughs>
Maki:
Tell me about the book. I feel like it’s a mix of different things, right? It’s a personal essay, and it is also a memoir. I think there is also a bit of a medical journal vibe to it.
I am just struck by the combination of all the elements there, I think there is also some poetry there, I just thought that was so unique -- the way to mix all of these different influences and styles that also embodies and also a sense of healing.
Anyway, I would love to know what is your process for creating a book like that.
Jen:
You already said it!
It was an embodied process and I just love hearing that because it is just like *Bzzt! Ding ding ding! * Yes! That’s what it was for me and it was a process of fighting to stay true to my body. Because what comes out when I stay true to my body is all those mixes of things, you know?
It’s a personal story. And it’s also a socio-political analysis, and it’s also historical research because I love history and I was trained as a historian. And it’s also science because I was also trained to have a world-view of a world through a scientific lens but also to be critical of science.
All of that (if I am being true to my being and body) comes out together and it also comes out in a mix of genres, like poetry and prose. I’d say overall largely that it definitely is a prose collection, but there are elements within the form in how everything’s arranged on the page where I probably borrow from poetry.
It was definitely a process of being like: “Okay body, what’s going on today?” But then also being ready to defend it honestly, with editors and publishers who wanted to put more control in it and make it less: “Let it not take up so much space, make it not so unruly.”
I feel really proud and lucky because I feel like I did fight to keep a mix of all of those things along the way, even though I was told explicitly to take it out if I wanted to work with certain people. And then I feel lucky because I did find editors and imprints to these good press that understood all of those things together could have powerful meaning.
Maki:
At some point, outside of this interview, I definitely would like to learn your process because eventually, I would like to go on this journey with my own family and my story.
Jen:
Can I add one more thing?
Maki:
Yes, absolutely!
Jen:
I was just going to add that you asked: “What was the book like?”
So, coming out of this disembodied process but also I have these examples that I followed. I would say that the two most influential examples were: Audre Lorde’s Cancer Journals and Aurora Levins Morales’ Medicine Stories.
Those are both books that are part journal, part personal essay, but then a lot of history, science, and medicine and how it interacts with Black and brown bodies and a lot of left political analysis. They were the two examples for me of how you can put all of these together and be, hopefully, a tool for other people.
Maki:
Thanks for sharing that.
How do you define healing? As a Filipino woman who is going through chronic illness and has an awareness of intergenerational trauma and postcolonial trauma and all of these different elements, how do you define healing?
Is Nervous a hopeful book in terms of being able to patch all of these things together?
Jen:
Thick questions. I was a little bit like: “Oh my god, how am I going to define healing?” <laughs>
Actually, I have a starting point. I would define healing as connection, agency, and being seen, heard, and supported.
I think that we are in a society, especially in the United States, that is very much set up to break all of those indicators of healing and wellness to promote isolation and set up connection.
There is this weird agency thing in the American story that is very much about individualism. At the same time, that is in direct denial of community agency and of agency on the part of communities who are on the other end of power dynamics where they are essentially being thrown under the bus, oppressed for the good of trickle-down capitalism or corporate welfare, you name it.
Community agency – particularly among communities who have been targeted and deliberately stripped of agency – is a process of healing. This is why mutual aid has been such a powerful and necessary thing: not just for material aid but also for folks from marginalized communities to be like: “We are going to help ourselves.”
We have the agency to do that.
I think the piece about being seen and heard is… I think everybody can identify with that probably in very personal ways and obviously in the political landscape, it is exactly what is stripped when you are marginalized: your voice, your presence, and the notion that what you care about counts.
The way that the book is structured, it is hopeful because it basically tells a story of the first half of us facing ways that trauma can be layered on our bodies because of how systems of oppression disconnect us from our sense of agency, safety, and healing.
The second half of the book is about how even though there is that condition, it’s not just in our past, it continues for those of us who are Black and brown, gender, nonconforming, poor, working-class, undocumented on and on.
Even though there are conditions set up to continue to oppress communities like this, there are also lessons from our ancestors that we carry in our bodies that if we can tap back into those lessons – which is also a process of healing – they can really guide the way that we relate to each other so that we can heal relationally while we are also trying to change the structures around us that need to be dismantled in trauma.
Maki:
Yeah, instead of reinforcing the structure of oppression.
Like if you are trying to build a new world and build a new way of being, it’s hard to divorce yourself from the way things are usually done, according to capitalism and hyper-productivity.
I’m personally very struck by this idea of healing and creating your own systems versus depending on the current system.
It’s healing through finding these connections and finding these communities of care – while you are also trying to dismantle the system.
Jen:
Yeah, and that’s one of the things that I’m trying to do through the book. Which is some of what socio-neuro scientists and trauma therapists are learning about the nervous system and use it as a guide to what are some principles that can help us re-organize our relationships and our structures and society towards wellbeing for all.
When you look at what makes a healthy nervous system and by a healthy nervous system, I am talking specifically about a part of the nervous system that is called the “autonomic nervous system” – that is very implicated in trauma response. That’s the part where we don’t have any conscious control over it, it’s like the part of Western science that we don’t like to think about, because Western is all about: “I think, therefore I am.”
Maki:
It’s very cognitive and rational, like…
Jen:
Like: “mind over matter.” You know like: “there’s a will, there’s a way.” And all that.
That is in our nervous system, the majority of what it does is actually beyond our conscious control.
A lot of what it needs is actually things that sound pretty great for our whole society. It needs to be interdependent with other nervous systems, right?
For orphans, there were studies after wars that if they are orphaned and they are not touched and they don’t have interaction with their nervous systems, then they will die. So, they need to be interdependent and interact with other nervous systems, they need to be in conditions relative to where you can feel safety and agency and enact the agency.
Our nervous systems like integration. They are our circuits to be integrated with each other. They are also this fluidity of going back and forth between different states like states of agitation and states of rest.
Also interestingly, you probably heard the phrase: “neurons that fire together, wire together.”
Maki:
No, I have not.
That’s beautiful.
Jen:
It is basically a little saying to describe how your neural circuits can change with practice. I heard a thing in the Huberman Lab Podcast, which is a really popular—honestly like, a self-improvement neuro-science podcast. <laughs>
Maki:
I am subscribed to like…ten. <laughs>
Jen:
But basically, it’s like the way that change happens is through agitation, which of course, as an activist you know.
Maki:
Working in community organizing… that is like: “Oh, agitation. We got to agitate.” <laughs>
Jen:
But there is another part of it. It happened through the agitation, right?
The practice of stimulating that nerve in the neural circuit, but the actual change – the physiological change, only happens when you are at rest. So, rest is also important right?
Maki:
So you just mean that the constant state of agitation, you actually have to be able to process all of that and integrate it and work on it in your own time.
Jen:
Yeah, exactly. In the book I geek out about that stuff all of the time. <laughs>
Maki:
I’m so excited!
Well, actually I was curious about the book’s title Nervous, because it feels like the word nervous and similar words like anxious or agitated, scared, or worried just take on this connotation especially in today’s world that is like: “Oh, we are just a bunch of nervous, depressed, anxious people.” Because of how fucked up everything is and our systems are grinding us down.
I’m just curious about the title. Why Nervous, and why try to reclaim it?
Jen:
A really, really good question.
I think it actually gets into a lot of really deep stuff because the whole first essay in the book is about—basically condemning the fact that especially in women or non-binary people in centuries have basically been put down by saying that we are too hysterical, too nervous, too emotional, and too anxious, right?
It’s like the whole first essay.
And at the same time, it makes sense to be anxious and nervous in the world that we live in. On another level, the title is meant to show what we all have in common, which is the bodies that we inhabit in this world. All of our bodies are innervated; we are all literally, physiologically nervous.
Our nervous systems are the governing centers of our being even probably at the spiritual level – but in ways that scientists will probably never understand.
And so, the title was:
Naming the fact that I personally have a bunch of different nervous system conditions and exploring a bit into that.
Drawing something in common in humanity that says: “We all got nervous systems, let’s talk about it.” You know?
They are amazing, they protect us and help us survive, and they helped our ancestors survive.
The whole book starts out with an epigraph from Karina Walters, who is a Choctaw social worker who also studies historical trauma and the quote is: “Historical trauma is a story of love.” And the idea there is that our ancestors fought to survive because of love for future generations and those lessons are carried in our nervous systems.
It was also honestly, a bit of a reclamation that is like: “Look yes, many of us are labeled and dismissed as being too emotional, anxious, histrionic, or nervous.” But you know what?
Some of those people are actually canaries in the mine and maybe babaylans and shamans or people who carry an extra weight of the oppression in society, and also the memories of our ancestors.
Just because people have been persecuted and misunderstood doesn’t mean that we should ignore the fact there is nervousness and anxiety. Honestly, those conditions make sense when our society is so sick.
Maki:
Wooh, oh my gosh. So much to unpack there, I feel like I have to—
Jen:
I know. That’s why I was like… <laughs>
Okay. You asked!
Maki:
Yeah, one phrase that is reverberating in me right now is: “collective anxiety.” How does your book attempt to address that?
I would also be interested to know if you think this is something that Filipino history has been riddled with. Like this anxiety, this sense of not being able to process and constantly grappling with who we are.
Jen:
I do think so.
There is a collective anxiety that many of us carry, and what I am hoping for in telling this story, and being able to talk about the things that I raised in the book is shifting culture within our own communities towards where we can collectively process that anxiety.
Even though it might be collectively held, I don’t think it’s collectively healed.
It comes out in different ways in people and we still have to deal with it on our own. Still, largely we have to deal with it under this very Western framework of what a lawyer calls: “neoliberal medical healing.”
You have to do it on your own; are the things austerity-based? We might go bankrupt if you actually try to heal yourself and what I am hoping for instead, is at least starting with a culture shift where we can all say: “It’s okay to not be okay.”
I think there is this double-edged cultural thing going on for us, where we (by we, obviously going to take it civilly, right?) We don’t identify with it, with the we.
I’m not trying to speak for you. But I think in the Filipino communities that I have been part of—we’ve been pretty badass about laughter and joy, silliness and being stupid and all of that, you know?
That is a huge strength and superpower, and that should never change.
Maki:
Yeah.
Jen:
In time, I think there can be pressures to always be that way and there can be times when that type of culture can be used to deflect away from what actually hurts.
Kevin Nadal, this Filipino-American psychologist has actually a term around that’s called “smiling depression.”
I’m just hoping that we can talk about it more and have it be normalized for people who feel anxious and messed up and in need of help – and that we can then create more and more of the services, structure interventions, policies and practices that we need to be able to collectively address collective anxiety and heal.
Maki:
Whoo. Wow.
Is there anything about our culture and history as Filipinos/Filipinx—back in the Philippines but also in the diaspora that predisposes us to this condition, the smiling depression, where we need to pretend like everything is okay and laugh the pain away?
Jen:
I think 381 years of colonialism predisposes us to that.
I think it is a very deep and powerful coping mechanism. I also think it is a very deep and powerful weapon as well.
There is an essay that is called “381 Years” in the book, which is set up in a balagtasan battle like this conventional colonizer on one side and a clapback on the other side and one whole section is basically about humor as a weapon.
It makes sense, and really, that is the overall message of this book. Like what our body has learned from our ancestors, it all makes sense because that is what allowed us to be here on this Earth and it also helped them survive so these lessons get passed on epigenetically.
There is a very hardcore science that shows possible mechanisms for how these types of lessons get passed on through the drumline and evolutionarily, it makes sense.
I think ancestrally and spiritually, it makes sense, right?
We don’t really need these things in corroboration to know that: “Right, that ancestral wisdom lives on in us.” So that we don’t have to re-learn everything that they learned in their lifetimes and we can survive faster in the face of threat.
But then, where it gets to be difficult is when we don’t actually need those responses anymore. Like when we’re in an environment where we can pause, then we can try to rewire and re-circuit to be able to look at what hurts and actually try to heal it, as opposed to just having to keep moving on.
Maki:
Yeah, wow. Oh my gosh. <laughs>
I’m just sitting with that. I feel like I can personally resonate with being in a place where I’m safe – physically and psychologically and all of the things – but I still feel like I’m on fire. Or something’s looking at me weird, and I’m triggered by certain things in the environment. In the past, I just kept pushing through it.
I feel like recently at least in movement circles, I have seen the shift—or maybe it has always been there? I haven’t been in the movement as long as you have, but I feel like in general, there has just been more of a concerted effort to really take a pause and heal yourself.
As movement workers, as organizers, and as artists, it is so hugely important to be at rest and in healing, instead of just pushing, pushing, pushing.
Jen:
Exactly, and that’s what gives me hope. I think you are absolutely right.
I think that we are actually in this healing generation.
Maki:
Love that.
Jen:
It’s really hopeful. I think there are ways that we have to be careful about how we are centering healing in organizational spaces. While there can be quite a bit of healing that happens – just through basically what I write about in the book – like non-medical interventions that are about relational collective rituals, right?
Collective action and organizing can be one of those. Creating art and music and being integrated with nature. Like all of those things can definitely help heal, and there’s a role for professional help.
Knowing where those lines don’t cross, like not trying to set up healing spaces in our professional territory is kind of like the devil-in-the-details thing.
But what is hopeful is exactly what you have said: people grappling with it and wanting to center healing and refusing to maintain the status quo of sacrificing our wellbeing and our bodies at the altar of a cause. But ultimately under capitalistic expectations of work, right?
Maki:
Right.
Jen:
It’s really hopeful, well-grounded in a political analysis as well with a different type of healing that is not consumption-based production or output-based. <laughs> I think that’s where the hope lies for me.
I think I am definitely looking to others to really fill in the details of how that works to play a role in that as well.
Maki:
I think this book is already so powerful in this sense that it really delves deep into the role that the human body plays and that physiology plays. That you can’t divorce what you are feeling in your body, that pain you are feeling in your body and the weight from other things that are going on in your life.
[When you’re] in a Western society where the mind is prioritized more than the body and the heart and the community – [your book] just feels like a more revolutionary way of thinking.
The work has been around for a while, but I feel like people are being really intentional about it, and your book is different in the sense that it really lifts up — at least to me, it seems to uplift the Filipino experience, the diasporic experience — as a central agent of this healing process and this embodied process.
I don’t think anyone has ever looked at Filipino/Filipinx history in that way, or at least tried to integrate these different sorts of elements into it. There have been personal stories that have been told. But I think – really grappling with the enormity of colonialism, imperialism, and oppression and how that reflects in the Filipino body – that’s different.
Jen:
Thank you for that reflection back. That’s really affirming to me, and I do feel like I’m just weaving together things, so maybe the weaving part is new.
Maki:
Yes, I think that’s what it is.
Jen:
It’s amazing to build on Leny Strobel’s work on decolonization and Kevin Nadal’s work and also EJR David’s work on colonial mentality—but then weaving it together with other pieces of personal history, and also the neuroscience piece and the organizer-activist framework meanings. <laughs>
I’m hoping it doesn’t sound that it’s all that’s been said before, so thank you for that.
Maki:
What would you like people who are not in movement spaces to take away from your book? Or just people in general?
Jen:
That if you do feel nervous or anxious or struggle with mental health or chronic pain or any mysterious chronic illness, then it’s not your fault.
That’s probably the most fundamental message. That it’s not your fault that we are not troubling for our pain.
That instead, we can tap into our own agency, right?
The environments around us and basically in somatic approaches like generative somatics… they think about the width of this horizontal access of our bodies that say: “This is our community.” And if I am getting this right, that our backs and what’s behind us is our ancestors and from the front forward, that is our longings, desires, visions and goals.
I wrote this book to really share about pain that felt like it was bigger than me.
In that sense, I got to really, truly embody and feel and know that these challenges that I have are not my fault and not my signs of weakness and in fact, they are actually signs of wisdom.
To be able to feel more supported and more like you’re healing and leaning into these things that are outside of us. Like community, our ancestors, and our agency to change the environment around us.
I think this is where I am hoping that folks can be able to focus more – because there is so much on our side that tells us to blame ourselves and that we are not enough. The messages—that’s not true. <laughs>
Maki:
Yeah, that’s true. That really resonates a lot, actually. <laughs>
I’m trying to think, yeah. I don’t know, I usually have a follow up question but I am just so—
Jen:
It’s a lot! <laughs>
Maki:
I know, yeah!
I’m trying to see where the conversation takes us.
Yes, I did have a question going back to ancestral wisdom and practices, and before we jumped on or before we started recording.
We talked about our mutual friend/organizer extraordinaire – our Kali warrior and goddess – Imee Dalton. And how she reclaims the practice of Kali for healing and you based one of your essays in the book to her.
Tell me more about that, this part of the ancestral wisdom that you are trying to tap into.
Jen:
That essay is called “Bayanihan,” and it’s about how culture heals and how culture can literally save lives, that is what it is about.
It weaves together the stories of four Pinays; Imee is one of them and I am the other one and there are two others.
Content warning! If folks don’t want to hear this next part you can—
Maki:
We can put a—
Jen:
You can step away.
I guess it gets heavier than the other stuff, but basically, it tells the stories of four of us that have suicidal ideation and actual suicide attempts.
It tells the story of how each of us has found fairly different approaches to healing but that all of the approaches to healing can metaphorically be thought of as a Bayanihan ritual in which the actual ritual was when villagers put a nipa hut on their shoulders to move the nipa hut from a lower flood zone to a safer ground away from flooding.
So, the metaphor in the essay is about how we each found our types of Bayanihan rituals that helped us find higher and safer ground.
Maki:
Love it.
Yeah, I am just trying to honor what you have already said and sit with the feelings that this conversation has brought up within me, because I feel like I have also been through similar struggles.
Is there anything else that you wanted to say and to just express to the folks who are coming to this for the first time and are like: “Oh, what is this book about?”
Or a takeaway sounds so weird, but you know what I mean. <laughs>
Jen:
I would tell them what my friend called it, and that it would just be in the review.
Maki:
Okay, okay.
Jen:
Like: “It’s a beach read, but it’s a heavy beach read.”<laughs>
Maki:
I love it.
Jen:
I think people come to trauma narratives with certain expectations and some people are like: “Oh, I’m not touching that with a ten-foot pole”.
A lot of people are like: “Trauma! That’s my jam.” <laughs>
And I would just say that I really hope the book will not be like a slog. <laughs> Who has time to slog through anything, you know? <laughs> I would hope that people pick it up and be just like: “Okay, I’ll give this a try.”
And another way that I think about it is: I wrote this as a love letter to interdependence, because I feel like I really did start to heal and I could feel my body as being part of a body of other people in the community, so it’s a love letter to that.
There is some other cool stuff in there and it's also a love letter to music. I don’t know, the rest you will have to find out for yourself. I would love to know everybody else’s takeaways. <laughs>
The last thing I would say is there is also practical stuff, there is an audiobook too for people who would rather listen to it, and there is an e-book.
Also, I would love to shout you out, because I think this is the exact thing that I was hoping would come out from the book.
Which are conversations with the people I want to reach most – just give me props that you would do this on the side of the labor of love or major election victory or you are doing this on your day off and I don’t want to glorify working all the time. I am just saying this is mutual aid, right?
This is aiding people in their healing and it starts with conversations like this and staying connected, so I appreciate you.
Maki:
Thank you, Jen.
I appreciate you for being brave enough to share your story and to offer a possibility of healing through narrative and just weaving these different elements together.
I am just so excited to be in a relationship with you and with all these other folks that I have interviewed so far that are really trying new things to—I’m trying to say—“evolve the culture.” Or move it along.
Jen:
Fluidity is good! Moving is good, better than stagnant right?
Maki:
Yeah, but in a way that is really intentional, helpful, and tapping into the root of what makes Filipinos special, which is that interdependence and collectivism and that part and that spirit.
I just think there is something really special about that.
Thank you so much, I really—I’m feeling all the feels! <laughs>
Jen:
I know, right? But I do feel like it’s growing a capacity to feel all the feels because that’s it, you know?
That’s being human.
#PUNTOTalks with Jen Soriano