First, and most significantly, Interim Judgement granted!
Back in May, Zucchini and I filed for divorce. Just as how our wedding was cheap and low-key ($40 at ROM, 2 unemployed friends as witnesses, didn’t tell anyone else) we decided to file it online ourselves to avoid paying for a lawyer. Naturally, it wasn’t as simple as it looks. The “Divorce eService” back-end had multiple glitches and I had to keep writing in to the service provider, CrimsonLogic (“Simpler trade. Smarter tech.”)
Then, we had to visit the CrimsonLogic Service Bureau (SB) at State Courts multiple times to either upload documents that were already submitted online but were not filed due to apparent technical errors, or that were additionally requested at the last minute.
Going to SB became a regular ritual and we spent many Fridays people-watching there. People who go to SB represent themselves legally; they don’t have lawyers or legal knowledge, and are as stressed out as you can imagine anyone under those circumstances are. There is a lot of impatient sighing, leaping up from seats, snapping at counter staff, minor panic attacks, and at one point, a to-be-divorced woman had a meltdown and bawled. To make it all worse, the waiting room TV plays Channel News Asia ad nauseum.
After four months of this Kafkaesque existence, our uncontested divorce was finally approved by our District Judge. She was a bored-looking woman who processed our Zoom hearing mechnically; it was likely one of thousands she had to get through that day. Basically, she was the counterpart of the po-faced Registry of Marriages solemniser who, 7 years ago, made us “man and wife” (despite my repeated requests for her to use less patriarchal terms).
So, our marriage ended just as it began: under the auspices of a miserable bureaucrat.
And how have I been feeling? Well, like a broken dam. It was a difficult couple of weeks for everyone as years of trapped emotions rushed out with much hydro power. I didn’t only grieve my unborn relationship with Zucchini — the perfect, consummate, Sternberg-style tripartite relationship that I wanted — I also wound up confronting that fact that Avocado, too, will never meet my inflated expectations.
In The Language of Emotions, Karla McLaren ascribes to sadness the role of “your psyche’s water-bearer”, which:
helps you slow down, feel your losses, and release that which needs to be released […] so that you may release yourself and others from contracts that aren’t healing, and settle into the flow of deeper and more fulfilling relationships
After a whole lot of release, the thought “I’m definitely going to be disappointed!” is often in my mind. It is weirdly cheering and puts a skip in my step.
It’s like when you go to a thrift store: if you’re looking for something in particular, you’re almost bound to come away unsatisfied, but if you have no expectations whatsoever, you can find delight in just about anything.
~
The other major development: I’ve taken a baby step into community organising — my chosen form of activism.
For the past 5 years, I’ve been dissatisfied with what I was doing, flying around and around, trying to land on something. At first I was attached to the idea of writing, because that was my sole “professional” competency. But when I tried to apply writing to social justice, it seemed like I was just adding more unwanted crap to an overwhelming amount of content in the world.
The next attachment I had to get rid of was the idea of meaning in employment. I joined the most ideologically-aligned organisation I could find — Beyond Social Services — only to learn that it, too, had lately succumbed to the machinery of the state and anti-human logic in the name of “professionalising the sector”.
I grew disenchanted about doing meaningful work within the established system. During this time, I started going to many meetups and events. They were initially a form of recreation and way to meet my social needs while unemployed.
Then, unexpected inspiration struck as I found myself “collecting” people with left-leaning sensibilities (if not outright sympathies). Certainly a few are self-identified activists, who occupy the ruling elite of civil society. But I connected much more easily with the plebeian folks with day jobs — engineers, teachers, healthcare workers, civil servants, researchers.
The middle-class seems grossly under-engaged; many want more meaning in their lives without having to quit their jobs and lifestyles wholesale. Some report a sense of loneliness in their natural social circles: the co-workers who only talk about travel and Labubu. They get by, but life is not stimulating enough. They want more. Given their high level of collective privilege and resources, they should be better engaged to create cultural change.
The great agitator Saul Alinsky talks about organising the middle class, too:
What I do see in Proxies for People is the organization of the middle class, enabling them to get involved and-forgetting the corporations for a moment — helping them to overcome the sense of frustration, confusion and almost despair that is so widespread in the country and that is contributing to the drift to the right. Getting a lot of people active, first as citizen stockholders, shall we say, and then in many other ways, is, in my mind, as important as making changes in the corporate arena.
I don’t want to reveal too much about my projects and jinx them But I want to say the process of learning and doing something new — aged almost 40!!! — is so fun and confidence-building. I had never thought of myself as a “people person”, but right now I feel hopeful that I might become one with time and devotion.
Interdependence and communalism, which I had previously dismissed as irrelevant, have become important to me at this stage of life.
I have drunk the bell hooks Kool-Aid. Here are her words I now live by, from All About Love:
While communism has suffered political defeat globally, the politics of communalism continue to matter. We can all resist the temptation of greed. We can work to change public policy, electing leaders who are honest and progressive. We can turn off the television set. We can show respect for love. To save our planet we can stop thoughtless waste. We can recycle and support ecologically advanced survival strategies. We can celebrate and honor communalism and interdependency by sharing resources. All these gestures show a respect and a gratitude for life.