We were tired of waiting for justice or care, tired of having to face interconnected brutalities alone. For me – and I think for all of us – GEM was about creating a home where we could speak from our bodies, and tend to the wounds that we are told to forget/minimise. We started by trying to pitch our own tent, build our own home that we could take comfort in and be protected within (at least a little).

But we were trying to build and carry another structure while everyone has also been trying to survive multiple apocalypses. We began to notice a familiar pattern: GEM kept getting bottlenecked around a few people, who were then trying to hold everyone together, to smooth over any cracks, and build the foundation for a collective context. And this is heavy, knotted work: there are so many different pains, spikes and heartaches that can and did rub up against one another. Since we hadn’t learned how to move as a collective, we fell back into the carelessness that informs the world we live in. We began reproducing another tent/home structure that allows for gendered and racialised labour to remain in place and unchecked (and Audre Lorde already told us: the Masters tools could never dismantle the Masters house). We cannot keep asking ourselves to do more, push for more, even as we’re feeling our bodies breaking under the pressure of racial capitalism.

So then Wasi asked: what if we let go of the tent, to make sure that no one has to hold up more than they can bear? At first, this idea terrified me: it requires us to believe in the possibility of us resting within our wider world. Yet at the same time, we are painfully aware of the breathtaking cruelty that this world can show to those of us positioned as acceptable collateral damage. And for me personally – given how fragile my health has felt lately – it still hasn’t felt safe to see anyone other than my immediate family. Honestly, I’m still reeling from witnessing so many people default to (state-sanctioned) carelessness over any kind of collective responsibility during multiple crises. It felt (and feels) near impossible to imagine comfort and ease outside in the open, with no walls to try and shield us from the brutalities that we’ve had to face for too long.

But as we began learning how to speak and feel into our embodied truths, another way of being started to seem possible. What happens when we let go of the comfort found in structures that have already been tried and failed? Instead of building more borders, what would it mean to create conditions for all of us (within and beyond the collective) to be able to rest out in the open, underneath the stars? How might we tend to ourselves and each other in the midst of all this horror?