All the reasons I (WE) have to live

New Year's Anti-resolutions for Collective Liberation

I wrote these anti-resolution, collectivist resolutions at the start of 2023 inspired by the biggest lessons in liberation that came from 2022. This year has brought a lot of distress, ego deaths, tough lessons and hopeful moments of connection in community. I’m still learning to carry all the complexity.

I know there is a lot of pain in the world right now that we can’t even fully wrap our minds around— pain we’re carrying and unfathomable suffering bore by our kin from Palestine to Congo to Sudan & beyond. However, there is also indescribable, breathtaking beauty, communal joy, creativity, culture, care and abundant love all around us that is worth fighting & living for.

Accepting that I wanted to die was the thing that led me to ask “well what do we all actually need to live?”

Today, I want to share with you my 2024 resolutions for collective liberation inspired by the lessons I learned in community this year that have still kept me tethered to life. If you’re struggling in any way, I hope this ignites a flame in you, however small or big it may be.

In 2024, I hope:

1. To live… by rooting to community and culture

Over the years, by understanding how my pain is part of a collective struggle, by witnessing the suffering of our communities resisting colonialism, by organizing for our communities’ to have the right to live… that is how I’ve gradually come to accept that maybe I deserve to live too.

The more I saw myself as an individual, the less I wanted to live. The more I realized that we were only ever meant to do this together, the more I wanted to live. The more I saw myself as a part of a greater whole, a collective, the more I committed I was to life itself. I’m not alone. My suffering is part of our collective suffering and that realization freed me. I didn’t have to “love myself”, or chase individual success & happiness, or fixate on fixing myself… none of that was ever possible. We deserve to live with dignity, safety and abudant care. Figuring out how I can play a role in our fight for freedom is what has kept me alive so far.

By Ellie Yanagisawa

I think of myself as a uprooted seedling— torn from my native soil, severed from my community, separated from my mother-land, kept away from my culture, cast 10,000 miles across the world, left to fend for myself in concrete jungles, on a foreign land, forced to speak my colonizer’s tongue, forced to dress in my colonizer’s garb everyday, empty… no wonder I wanted to die. But then I saw how our communities despite the oppression they bear found moments of joy worth living for. As they cooked together, prayed together, shared tea together, danced together, sang together, practiced their cultural rituals together… they were alive together. That is life. That is the only way we are meant to live. So in 2024, I hope to better root into community and more intentionally engage in my cultures as a way to pursue life itself.

2. To find, build and sustain reciprocal friendships where in the process of struggling together, we can co-create joy as well

In the last 3 months, I’ve lost a lot of relationships over my firm commitment to advocating for a free Palestine. However, I have also gained many incredible, life-giving relationships. In this iteration of heartbreak & loss, I have realized that I don’t want to be in relationships that are dissociated from the reality of our collective suffering. I don’t want to numb myself and pretend like everything is okay. I want to be in relationships where we can be devastated, wrecked by collective suffering. Hurting together, letting ourselves fall apart with each other is the only way that we can also truly experience happiness together. I don’t want to solely intellectualize & theorize liberation, I want to be in friendships where we can practice liberation through our rituals of cooking together, feeding each other, praying together, grieving in community. I want it all. It was never the struggle that was too much to bear, it was the isolation. But I’ve been truly humbled by witnessing our collective capacity to bear pain together and by extension our capacity to create joy together.

To go back to my analogy of seeing myself as an uprooted seedling. I imagine this seedling sitting up, in tears, in pain and looking around shocked to see so many other uprooted seedlings, similarly cast away in some way— either far away from their colonized homelands, severed from society, or separated from their indigenous lands and being forced to witness the destruction & pillaging of their lands. The seedling realizes that even if the idea or dream of a free motherland is far away, it needs to root into something right here to live and all of these other uprooted seedlings are struggling to figure it out too. So why not root into each other? Why not root into our cultures right here even if it is not on our own land? So the seedling casts it’s own roots, however temporary, into the soil beneath it, into the seedling next to it, into the tree near it, and slowly it manages to breathe again. It is only by losing friends over my passion, dedication & commitment to our people’s freedom have I realized the type of friends I need.

I want to be in relationships with people who care deeply about the collective and are actively working to ground themselves into community. I want to be with people who are utterly devoted to figuring out how they can be in service of others, people working hard as hell to find their role in community— not for the sake of receiving individual recognition or status or wealth but merely because that is the only way we can live… together. I want to be with people who are figuring out how we can support each other’s day-to-day survival.

In the last 3 months, as we’ve organized for Palestine, I’ve been held in community in ways that felt like home for the first time since I’ve moved to Nashville. Surrounded by other migrants, other members of Arab, South Asian, Indigenous, Brown and Black communities, people who have been through hell and suffered, I mean truly suffered and are still finding ways to preserve & practice joy despite it all… that is where I have found hope. I found home in the meals we cooked for each other. I found life in these meals simply because we fed each other dishes that represented a piece of our homelands, made of ingredients/ spices/ herbs/ vegetables that are indigenous to our soils, dishes that carried deep reverence within our communities, dishes that persisted over 100s of years despite colonialism, that came to be because countless people put their love & care into fine tuning them.

I found love in the handmade crochet sweater my friend gave me for my birthday. I found hope in the late night conversations with friends where we vulnerably shared stories of our pain and connected threads between our struggles. I want to keep building relationships with people who have understood their pain, not as an individual crisis, but as a part of a collective struggle. I’m no longer the only one pouring my heart out, showing my unhealed raw wounds, only to be met with blank stares or pitiful sighs of “oh no I’m sorry you went through that”. I’m grateful that in the last 3 months, by fighting for a free Palestine, I’ve met people who tell me “You know what, I feel you and it reminds me of what I went through…” as they proceed to show me their wounds & jagged scars. In 2024, I will continue to try to forge bonds where we can hold our pain, sadness, hopes and dreams… all in community.

These friendships have shown me that care is a practice, not just a feeling or sentiment. It is tangible actions. Care— I’ve eaten it, I’ve worn it, I’ve been held by it, I’ve been healed by it, it is everywhere, even in the ground beneath me.

3. To focus on what we’re fighting for and not just on what we’re fighting against.