FOREIGN FEELINGS PODCAST
Foreign Feelings Episode 4: Lonely Phone World
Show notes for people who don’t belong
Episode 4 features Mariam Assad, whose mother tongue is Arabic, Maryam (her name has been changed to protect her identity) whose mother tongue is Farsi, and Henna Virtanen whose mother tongue is Finnish.
…am i the only one who does not know what asmr videos are? i just went down a rabbit hole on youtube listening to very gentle and calming asmr videos especially one by @gentlewhisperingASMR. holy shit.
…my mother didn’t stroke me or give me a lot of physical touch as a child. she was afraid my father would get jealous (weird i know). My father didn’t touche me because i don’t think he knew how to touch the female body without anger or sexuality. so now there are asmr videos. good things can come out of video shorts.
so… phones, eh?
what do you do to keep yourself from becoming lost in the world of digitalization? one thing i am trying to do is to meditate and connect to myself before i touch my phone in the morning. it’s so damn hard. I accomplish this about 2 out of 7 days.
i’ve also asked my daughter to write in a journal and answer two questions before she touches her phone:
how do i feel in my body?
what do i want?
she hates doing it. but i always say, ‘you will thank me later.’ or ‘it is important for a woman to ask herself how she is feeling and what she wants before asking the world around her how she is feeling and what she wants. i hope my daughter remembers this.
and then we talk about toxic individualism. i find this to be a tricky thing to untangle with learned helplessness. i think the balance is to be brutally honest about what love is without lying. love without lying. lying to yourself or lying to the other person.
Love the truth first, love yourself second, love others first
the truth is we need each other and we don’t NEED each other. I have been thinking a lot about this lately: Capitalism has fucked us up the ass with this one. Capitalism has taught us to fight for our individualism when it comes to food, shelter and material wealth. But Capitalism has taught us that we need other people to make us feel happy, joy and love. I think it is the other way around: We need each other for material goods (money (yes!) food, shelter) and we do NOT need others to feel happy or joy or love. Happiness comes from a connection to the self.
i’ll just leave that there. like a smelly diaper.
Foreign Feelings: Our differences make us The Same
