The Real Revolution: True Confessions from a Recovering Critical Theorist
For a long time, I observed marriage as a way of improving one’s financial situation or doing what was considered “respectable” (regardless of how you felt about the other person). I come from a ‘get married, have 2.5 children, buy a house and drive to your job at a corporation every day’ kind of place. Never in my life growing up do I remember anyone really talking with me about what is supposed to be the precursor for marriage … love. I was told once or twice to be careful of love, to stay away from it, to fear it, that I’d figure it out. I observed marriages and relationships as circumstances through which people suffered in order to receive approval for doing what they thought the people around them expected so that they would receive approval and respect. Maybe the marriages weren’t that bad, but they often seemed to be the cause of more suffering than celebration. And I wondered … is this love? If so, it wasn’t something I wanted in my life.
Over the past several years, I’ve experienced a lot of turmoil and I have changed — a lot. Most of that time, I was working on my doctoral dissertation — a process that research has proven is a significant catalyst for suicide attempts, breakdowns/breakthroughs, and a host of psychological and psychiatric disorders (according to this international study — which has been distributed widely; this research in the UK; and this study from UC-Berkeley, among others). Given the data, I could blame academia for being the cause of problems easily and conveniently. Not that this wasn’t a contributing factor, but academia didn’t so much “cause” problems in my life as it did illuminate and magnify problems that were already there, that had been there for a very long time, and that needed to be healed.
A lot of people write dissertations in which they attempt to solve other people’s or the world’s problems. All the while, however, how many of us do this without actually addressing our own? My dissertation, I am happy to admit, ended up being a practice of healing. I don’t recommend using a doctoral degree as a path to healing your psyche. There are much less expensive and less stressful ways — which is one reason why I became a life coach. But there are also much more expensive and stressful ways to approach your need for healing, such as marrying the wrong partner or having children. Academic isn’t the path for everyone, but I own it as mine. I completed a dissertation about liberation. I defended it successfully and at the end, I got a degree. But more importantly, in the end, writing about liberation brought me liberation.
Before I committed to the dissertation I defended, I had been working on a different concept for quite awhile and I ended up having to change that dissertation quite drastically. For a long time, I claimed this was because I was forced to. And yet, the real reason why I had to change my dissertation was that the previous one was unsuccessful, and it wasn’t working because it wasn’t my dissertation. It was an amazing idea suggested by someone else, but I wasn’t suited to carry it out alone given my own gifts, talents, resources, and time restraints. I enrolled in a self-directed program because I wanted to write my dissertation, not supplement someone else’s work, but I had veered too far away from the truth of my own existence. I spent too much of my time standing up for everyone else and not enough time standing as myself. I’m not sure I knew how to stand as myself — even though, as discussed earlier, I was hell-bent on always standing by myself.
My dissertation was an act of healing — but it wasn’t the dissertation or the doctoral process preceding it that triggered the healing or guided me to the topic that I chose to explore. Both I and my first dissertation were stalling and falling apart more than I could really see at the time. But perhaps the scariest and most honest thing I could write is that, as everything was falling apart, I fell in love with someone really for the first time. I fell in love more deeply than I thought was possible — for me or for anyone — and it changed me. My entire rational existence crumbled and my intellectual self was changed forever. The love I felt as a result of the connection between another person and myself continues to change me every single day, even though that person is no longer in my life and hasn’t been for some time.
This is a terrifying public confession. But there it is — a piercing sword, a soothing salve: The Truth. And so, this is what I wish to say to the world, to anyone who doesn’t know or hasn’t heard this before, as I hadn’t …
Love can be really hard and complicated, but if you’re lucky, you’ll meet someone whose very existence will change yours entirely. Your understanding of what you know and/or believe to be true about the world and, most importantly, about yourself, will change. And when that happens, that will be love. And that is the point. Love is the most valuable journey you can take. This doesn’t mean that the person will stay (whatever that means), that they have to, that they’re meant to, or even that it’s best for you if they do. What happens with the other person is none of your business, because the journey of love is not about another person. Love has taught me that the only person whose choices I can make are my own. It has also taught me only to choose people who choose me. I have discovered that even when you walk this journey next to another person, your experiences will be different because youare different. You must respect and honor those differences — with your Beloved and with everyone else. The value is in the third space — the space that exists between you, the space that is given meaning because you came together with another.
There was a person within me living beneath the facades — the person I am in my soul. My Beloved saw her and reflected her back to me — my entire soul — with one sentence, with one glance, with one breath, with one touch. You can find authentic love from meeting another person — but the love isn’t from them. That person is simply a catalyst for finding the real love that already exists within you. The journey of love is not about what you receive from another person, but about eliminating every possible hindrance to creating and expressing infinite oneness with that which is greater than you. In the end, the point of love is to bring you into union with god — or however you define that which is greater than you — in all of the infinite ways in which god and creation can be expressed. In order to accept the call to this journey, you have to accept that something is greater than you are — because, just like every other human being in the history of the planet, neither you nor the person with whom you fall into love are, or ever will be, perfect. The entryway into love has been an entryway into a journey towards unfaltering acceptance of my truth, the truth of my Beloved, and ultimately, the truth of everyone I encounter. This might sound a bit dreamy — but in reality, it’s felt like putting my heart through a meat grinder — and sometimes worse, depending on how much strife I really wanted to inflict upon myself and other people.
When I met love, I encountered every imperfection, every pain, and every trauma from this life, previous lives, and my ancestors. This force has broken me apart as many times as it has had to in order to break me open, because that’s the price of admission I was willing to pay for saying yes to this journey. And even though it’s been challenging, I hope that if and when you’re given the choice, you too will say “yes” to the journey. When you say yes, you don’t know what will happen. There’s no guarantee that the person will stay. But then again, there’s no guarantee that you will stay either — with that person or on this planet. By saying yes to love, I opened myself to receiving the greatest gift I could imagine — the opportunity to put myself together in exactly the way I want, the opportunity to live my life. I have been given the opportunity to create the life I imagined, the life that only I can live. I have been given permission to live my purpose and serve the world exactly as I know I’m meant to. And to be very honest, I don’t know if I would be this magnificent person living this magnificent life if the person who brought me to love had been willing and able to weather the storm that he (not I) saw coming, regardless of what he did.
When love showed up, I couldn’t lie. Everything was exposed, whether I wanted it to be or not. The journey of love has been the journey of returning to the truth, to my truth. Even when I veer off the path, the truth always finds me through love. And it’s annoying. But I surrender, because it’s the only option. It was the only option on the Autumn morning I realized I had to break up with my other dissertation. I paced back and forth, asking myself, “What do you really know about more than anything? You’ve been in school forever, but what do you really know?” And most importantly, “What are the most important ideas you’ve encountered since you’ve been in school? What are the ideas you want to share with the world? What are you most qualified to write and talk about? What has changed you most?”
Radical Political Theory.
I sometimes self-identify as a recovering critical theorist, because I became a critical theorist around the age of 12. My dissertation was an act of healing because it required me to recover from critical theory — which, for me, was not only a theory. What you do is an extension of who you are, so for me, criticism? Criticizing? It became a way of life, a way of being, a way of treating the world, a way of treating other people, and a way of treating myself. There was some humor in it, but nothing’s really that funny when you’re in pain. The truth has value. But if the truth doesn’t include the recognition that every one of us has imperfections and is also worthy of belonging, it’s not the entire truth. Anyone I know can sit and go on and on about how shitty the world appears to be sometimes, but like Che Guevara said, “The true revolutionary is guided by feelings of great love.” Luckily, my expertise was radical political theory, which I understand as a style, a way of being, a desire to escape oppression and forge emancipation more than a particular set of beliefs or a single all-emcompassing way in which those things happen. Luckily, it’s more than critical theory.
A new dissertation was conceived, and as I moved through my dissertation’s gestation period, my beliefs changed, as did my way of being. As my beliefs started to change, the narrative in my dissertation changed. As I healed, the narrative in my dissertation healed. I was moving away from critical theory and towards a theory of love. I was moving away from my critical research methodology and towards a research methodology of love. I was moving away from us v. them, from black vs. white, from cut and dry, and into oneness, into fluidity, into flexibility, into hybridity. I was integrating. I sat in my room sobbing while paging through Chela Sandoval’s The methodology of the oppressed at record speed, as if no other theory had ever been written. Because, for me, at that time, in that moment, there was no other theory than the one that stated:
“Revolutionary Love Occurs outside Ideology. To fall in love means that one must submit, however temporarily, to what is ‘intractable’, to a state of being not subject to control or governance … It is only in the ‘no-place’ of the abyss that subjectivity can become freed from ideology as it binds and ties reality; here is where political weapons of consciousness are available in a constant tumult of possibility. But the process of falling in love is not the only entry to this realm, for the ‘true sight of originality and strength’ is neither the lover nor the self. Rather, it is the ‘originality of the relation’ between the two actors that inspires these new powers, while providing passage to that which I call the differential” (Sandoval with quotes from Barthes 142).**
There were other theories — Caribbean theories, theories of creolization, poetics, hybridity, Queer theories. They honored past truths while allowing the possibilities for different futures to remain limitless. As personal theories develop, new futures are imagined and re-imagined, narratives of the past start to change. Parallel to what I was reading, I was imagining and re-imagining my own future and the future of the content of my research. And as I did that, my narratives of the past changed too.
The dissertation I birthed — like all offspring — was an extension of my life. It emerged from my own life, my own experiences, my own network of friends and associates. Therefore, a new relationship developed between the shifting theory of my life and the shifting theory of my dissertation. As the strategy, the methodology for my life shifted, so did the strategy for my work. I developed a methodology of revolutionary love as decolonization. Theory ceased to exist, because I had developed into a unified front based on one thing I knew to be true, no matter what — that this intense force called love was the ultimate source of my decolonization. And nothing else would ever be the same.
To love is the unifying destiny of every human being on this planet, because when your methodology is love, you can’t help but be anyone but yourself — which is your only real responsibility in this life. Love is the only thing that can and does save us from the destitution of our own imperfections. So, there it is — a piercing sword, a soothing salve: The Truth. Love is the only real revolution.
** Sandoval, Chela. Methodology of the Oppressed. University of Minnesota Press, 2000.
