I don't feel very creative or safe lately. Lately, so much of what I write or create feels meaningless with the current state of affairs in the background, humming like a constant threat.

I have scrapped so much content, and I usually tend to create for the practice of creating.

Then my older son asked me, “Uhma are you writing about what you are feeling + dealing with?”

That’s when I realized I have been busy numbing myself -a type of disassociation or distracting myself to avoid the overwhelm.

Some thoughts:

1) A level of safety if necessary to create

2) Safety can also be found within through practice + discernment

3) Sometimes, we must not run from the fear we feel but toward it to understand

3) Sometimes, because we don’t feel safe, we need speak on that.

Confession: I don’t feel safe lately.

In process: I am building an inner sanctuary of safety to face my fears.

Incorruptible Organizations AMA with Eric Ries. Wednesday 2/4 at 3:00 PM CT

Lean Startup author who now focuses on legal structures to protect mission-driven organizations from corruption. incorruptible.co

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Seeing ourselves and our culture in Charlie Kirk. When I first heard about the murder I didn't know how big of a lightning rod it was going to be. Then my friend Kageni challenged me to write about the Charlie Kirk event “from an integral perspective,”* and I’ve learned to listen to her challenges, even when I'm feeling scared or inadequate (like this one). (For those who don't have the context, I apologize).

Also, in writing about this human being as an object of our cultural fascination, I've necessarily moved past the well of human grief and empathy. Forgive my insensitivities, oversimplifications (mapping rather than territory-ing), many omissions, forgive if I strayed from my lane, and may we continuously reclaim our shadows to create a more loving world.

I. We are projecting so much onto Charlie Kirk that says more about us than the real tragedies. This is normal—to quote Valerie Daniel “You can't breathe without getting projected on.” But it keeps us from confronting the raw realities of grief, powerlessness, the horror and unpredictability of life, the darkness and violence in humanity. And the irony—cruel or helpful, depending on your view—is that whatever we’re unwilling to face in ourselves is destined to repeat itself.

So let’s reclaim these projections, for our personal peace, and to prevent future tragedies. All the negative and positive stuff we project onto Kirk, onto culture, onto whoever we deem the other. Eg: If I can’t stand the celebrations, I’m probably hiding from my own schadenfreude, likely hiding how deeply I’m ashamed of my desire for power and holding others accountable. Or I’m unwilling to be tender with myself when I think I'm a victim, leading to over-responsibility: exhausting for me and enabling to others.

Loving like this is fierce. I call it forgiveness. It demands the courage to challenge deep rooted beliefs we use to orient to the world, and stay present in the resistance.

II. There are at least three distinct conversations happening at once:

1. Murder is always a tragedy, including Kirk’s.

2. Kirk's complicated character. His views are taken out of context but even so were offensive and scary to many people.
   
   How do we stay present with that fear and offense? But also the way he inspired so many good things in people, including the kind of integrity and service in young men this his murderer lacked? How do we wrestle with views that appear to span the gamut from traditional christian conservative (amber) to modern defenses of free speech (orange) to post-conventional institutional critiques (green)?

3. Celebrations of his murder are vastly overrepresented online, but are part of a feedback loop that leads to more fracturing, which leads to individuals like Kirk’s killer making specific horrific unethical choices, which keeps the loop going.
   
   (Eg: his success was somewhat a reaction to the increasing cultural power of the radical left (operating from amber/ethnocentric structure despite progressive (Green) language), which is now getting amplified, which will amplify another conservative voice, which will lead to more assassinations).
   
   How can we re-align the system if we don't see we are it? Reclaiming our projections is a necessary first step if we’re highly triggered, because (a) systematically reconstructing our intersubjective meaning-making capacity demands intertribal coordination, and (b) it shows us where our actual power lies.

III. Reclaiming our projections through collective dream analysis (sociosomnia).

What if we see America’s reaction to him like a dream that we can interpret? Here’s one view: our culture is in a tizzy around free speech. We seem to both love it and be so terrified of it that we want to cancel and “kill” it. We’re trying to find orientation and values in the chaos of a post-truth world but we don’t yet know how to say “yes, all these points of view are valid (green) but some are more valuable, relevant, and true in this context than others (teal)."

#TTT
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*The spirit of "from an integral perspective" in this context is making sense of competing claims to truth without demonizing anyone, but being willing to take a stand for goodness and values. To paraphrase integral grandpappa Ken Wilber, if we assume no one is smart enough to be 100% wrong, then how to we stitch together a coherent sense of what’s happening from all the partial truths and fragmented perspectives? In this particular post I’m relying a lot on adult developmental psychology, but the overall theory has a variety of other helpful meta-frames for understanding how seemingly totally different values relate.

#UpTrustFeedback grab bag

1. I can't write two posts at once.  It shows a current draft if I try to write a new draft in a new tab.  But also it says "can't post, no content", because somehow it hasn't sync'd properly.  I'm currently getting around this by just posting the first one knowing I can edit it later.
2. You just lost some text that I had drafted as a comment [EDIT: maybe it's still there but I can't find it].  This is a result of two distinct failures in how your app is set up:
   1. You didn't use `onbeforeunload` to keep the page from changing when there was drafted text that hadn't been used. "Are you sure you want to..."
   2. I wasn't intending to change pages! I held the Cmd key while clicking on Home, which, if you use links in an ordinary way, would have caused that click to open the link in a new tab. But you're doing some fancy extra javascript, and so it didn't, and instead it just navigated to Home in the same tab and lost my comment draft.
3. I just now tried to use cmd+[ to de-indent the list item, and this navigated to a completely different screen, which would have lost the text again if you guys weren't pretty good at saving drafts.  Please don't violate standard keyboard shortcut expectations by doing something that looks like it completely loses all of my work!
4. If I put a title, it shows up as small bold text at the top of the post.  But if I put a header in the post, I can make the post have a title, visually.  But the "title" is not it.  This is confusing and weird.
5. In general, there are too many options.  Like formatting is kinda nice but it evokes the idea that we're gonna be all fancy.  As an extreme example, why on earth am I choosing whether a link should open in a new tab?  Just have some sane default and don't present me with so many choices.  (Good sane default is "new tab for off domain, same tab for same domain")
6. The lil icon buttons below the post are too tiny.  Also it's confusing to have the reply count distinct from the button to make a reply. I keep wanting to push the reply count button instead.
7. Why are you summarizing all emoji reactions as eg ♡ 4 ? That's not a very good way to summarize 🤔🤷😤😒.  Pick a non-heart more neutral icon, or show the actual reacji! (I'd recommend the latter, as it's much richer).
8. Don't call what we write or read here "content" 🤮  The word has much of its history in advertising and marketing—it's the thing that's not the ads, around which ads can be placed.  That starts us off with a framing that what we write doesn't matter, it's just stuff that fills the space.  Instead be willing to talk about things as "perspectives" or "takes" or if you don't want to be so bold, just "posts".
9. If you can't edit a post after people have reacted to it (which is fairly sensible!) then it should tell you that when you hit the EDIT button, not the SAVE button (after making said edits)
10. Lots of random other lil things
    1. sometimes the title of the page is stuck on a different post name than the one I'm on
    2. inconsistent use of cursor:pointer when hovering over buttons (notable, it's absent from the profile icon in the top right)
11. no way to follow specific people? maybe this is intentional? you want to magic-algo things?  but it's sad—I see someone say something interesting and I want to like...  not lose track of them. and maybe the way to do it is to updoot more of their bops, but it feels somehow unsatisfying, and annoying if I'm like "cool I'm done gonna sign off for now"
12. if I hit the feed again, either show me something I haven't seen before or say "that's all for today", but don't just show me the same few posts I saw before