Peace! See video [captioned] and transcript below.
Blueprints Vol I (00:00.696)
Contrary to popular belief, I do not always exist in this like hazy, incense, jazz-like state. I actually really like silence. I like as silent as the house can possibly be. Hi. I have lemon, ginger, basil tea– ooh, orange blossom honey from the farmer's market, because I finally got my ass up and got food.
I don't know how long it's been since I've been grocery shopping. Weeks…? I have no clue.
I'm here to think in front of you all. I'm having a onesie day, which is a day where I can't really handle new textiles. So I'm just existing in like something fuzzy. Usually it's my pink onesie; that's currently in Sierra Leone and I'm not in Sierra Leone right now. So forgive the fact that I'm very much not dressed.
I have tried and failed to create like, paywall specific content. For one, actually, let me just get some beef off my chest. I fuckin hate the word content, I hate that shit. I am not a machine for entertainment. I'm a person. What I'm doing is journaling in public. What I'm doing is like chronicling my life in public storytelling in public. I’m– I'm keeping my own archives and making them publicly accessible and available as not content. That's such a nothing word and I fucking hate it. So, I don't know if I want to call this art necessarily, although I think that there's some art to journaling, but it's really about the process of archival.
Here is the note that I have, because I have notes. The first note that you can't see says BLUEPRINT KEEPING. I'm keeping my blueprints, and I think it's important as I continue to become an adult and as I continue to become an adult that is public facing. So I wanted to talk about why I have failed at this before and why I don't actually think that I have the option to keep failing in this regard. Now you might be saying, ismatu, you're so hard on yourself. You haven't failed. Yes, I have! Yes, I have. I have attempted daily podcasts and failed, didn't keep them up. I've attempted even just like, a regular posting schedule behind a paywall to keep people enticed enough to pay and they failed. And one of the ways that I came to the conclusions that I've come to publicly, which is that I don't really want to compel people to pay because of like, “extra" or a "behind the scenes" notion or selling intimacy. I want people to support me because they don't want me to be like starving and homeless. And that's it.
That's like, I want that to be the whole motivator. The reason that I was able to think honestly about what I want and get to that point was acknowledging the ways in which I had failed. So I'm not trying to be hard on myself. I don't have a lot of moral weight to the concept of failure or not doing the thing that I set out to do. It's more that:it is helpful to me to know when I have succeeded at the thing that I said I would do and when I haven't. And what I am noticing after a year now of completely being publicly funded (with the understanding that everybody here chilling in these spaces doesn't really expect a lot from me and is really just like happy to pay in to the work that I am doing, which we'll get into in a second, the heights and depths of that work) I still have a desire to make things that are paywall specific or specific to the people that are invested enough in my wellbeing to pay for me to stay alive.
I want there to be an exchange here. And the previous mode of being motivated by these glasses are falling off because there's actually only one stem. They broke in my bag, weak ass bitch. The motivation that I previously had of I have to do this so that people will continue to pay was not a good enough motivation for me to do it.
But it hasn't erased the desire. So I had to figure out like, where is that desire stemming from? What is the root of that desire? Like what is that desire being fertilized by? That's motivation. And motivation is not a great way to compel yourself to do something for a long time. You need a habit. But at least I'm noticing that I have a desire to make a habit. So the thing that I am thinking is that I want blueprints. I want blueprints that are accessible to the general populace. And it is too dangerous at this point for me to be able to speak candidly about where I am and what I'm doing completely in real time. One, for internet safety reasons. And two, for the reasons that not everybody that sees me likes me or wants like the best for me or thinks that my projects are like good and cool and important and wants them to succeed. That is not everybody. That's probably you watching this, but it might not be.
I know people that hate watch people on the internet and that shit terrifies me. I have never been compelled to do that, but like I have to be cognizant that that is, it would be foolish for me to act like that's not the case and that I'm some like magic exception.
I've become acutely aware of the stage in the past couple months or so, like eight months, basically since Baba died and I had to be a part of his social media eulogies, this thing that I had been fearing the day that I was gonna log on and see Twitter or whatever blanketed in rest in power, Sekou Odinga. I had to be a part of that because people knew that we were close. People were already giving me their condolences in the comments and way more people that watch me only know of his existence because of me. So like I'm the person that's supposed to say, he died.
That made me so aware of the fact that I'm being perceived. It made me so aware of the stage. I call it The State (trademarked). And here were these like fears that bubbled up again, which I don't want to sell intimacy. That feels like sex work. And that's just not the relationship that I want to have with anyone watching.
I don't want to feel, I don't want to give people the false idea that they know me more because they've paid for the privilege to– that's just not true. And I also, at the end of the year (did y'all know it was December? Why didn't anybody tell me it was December? It's crazy)– at the end of the year, I'm finding that I'm still in these cycles of like, burnout and exhaustion and burnout and exhaustion, except for my periods of burnout are getting longer and longer because I'm doing the job of like five people by myself. I handle all my communications. I handle all of my various projects, the administrative work and the on the ground work. And I write, produce, publish, edit and promote all of the things that you may or may not know about. It's too much for me to do by myself. And–
There's a note here that says "I am so autistic, LMFAO.” So then I go nonverbal, I don't have a desire to see anyone, I don't wanna talk to anybody, I don't wanna be on the phone, I don't wanna answer texts, like I can't do it. In working in communications, the first place that I'm burned out is communication, but then that's like really tumultuous for like my family and friends who want to know how I'm doing and for like projects that know, need or would like updates for me as to how things are going on my side. Like I get to a point where I'm just like, if I see a WhatsApp notification, I'm going to chuck my phone into a brick wall. So then I just like dissolve into ether and then I blink and then like two months have passed. This isn't sustainable. This is not a good way of going about things.
I want to be in the habit of recording my thoughts, even if it isn't like live, even if it isn't like on a phone or within an email, even if it isn't as productive, I'll say, as I would like it to be, because the process of recording my thoughts, whether like online and video in written form, is really helpful for the process of review and tracking my growing and changing. Not just for me either. I am in the regular habit of journaling. Lots of people on on Substack, that site that I used to be on, MashAllah, I'm so happy to not be there anymore. Lots of people on Substack have said that Substack is just like where they go to journal. ...My journals are where I go to journal. I don't ever, just like people don't skip leg day, I do not skip journaling. And that's a good thing because I can't remember most of this year. If you asked me what I was doing in March of this year, I would not be able to just like tell you.
If you asked me what I was doing in July or in October, it's December. I could not tell you where I was or what I was doing in October off the top of my head. I would have to go look. I have actually no clue.
And it like, you see how that's a problem?
So in transferring my Substack, the essays and the entries that I had written on Substack, so many of them are just like me learning about my life and documenting the process of learning about my life. And I find it helpful. Like I am like, this is so– I'm so happy to have a record of this. Because there's no way that I could have, I can't even tell you what I was doing two months ago. I can't tell you what I was doing or thinking or feeling two years ago. I have no clue. So I'm happy to have this and I'm happy to have a record of what I wanted and wished to share publicly. It's so helpful. I've been slacking on my blueprint record keeping because of this fear of selling intimacy and I don't want to do that. And because of this like distinct awareness of the stage that I'm being watched and that I'm being perceived.
And that I cannot control how people receive me and that the vast majority of people that are watching me, I will never know how they feel or how these words impact them. I will never know. Most people, even if they watch it, will like, you know, take what they want to take, move on with their own lives. And I'm here performing. This is a performance. It's just a performance that I'm doing in my robe and my bonnet and my askew glasses.
I don't think that performance is bad. I don't think performance is a bad thing.
There's something like artificial in this tea. And I think it might be the honey, which is so sad. I think that orange blossom flavoring might be, that is so sad. Okay. I don't think performance is a bad thing. I think I just need to be explicit about the fact that I'm performing and….
...And also, like in reality, if there's a camera on me, I am cognizant of the fact that I am being watched, even in this home that I'm staying in. I'm in the United States, which means that I'm not, I don't have an apartment in the States anymore. So I just got an Airbnb and there's a Google home here and I'm cognizant of the fact that I'm being listened to. So anytime that there's like a camera on me or a microphone on record, I am performing.
I don't think that that's a bad thing. I don't think it makes the work that I do here or the work that I perform for you all less genuine. I think it's just going to be helpful for me to state that both for myself and for everyone watching that, yes, we are in like my living room or my kitchen in this case. And there are still like layers of distance between us where this is still a one sided. No, no, that's not what I mean.
I think it's gonna be helpful for you to remember that this is a performance and that means that I can set and communicate the terms of that performance. There's an artist called Neema, calls herself a guerrilla theorist. I don't even wanna say calls herself, is a guerrilla theorist and her work inspires mine a lot. She's a really beautiful artist statement on her website that talks about the fact that take back the internet, which is her app, is a performance, is a public performance that is meant to do this, that, and the third. And I was like, obviously I should do that. Obviously I should do that.
I don't think I need to be afraid of the stage or afraid of perception. I think that I need to be cognizant of, and also explicit about the fact that this is a performance, no matter where you're encountering me. I also don't wanna limit these blueprint keepings just to people who can pay US dollars for them, because that excludes a majority of the world, and there are so many people who are watching this that are in places where any amount of US dollars is untenable. So I will make all of these free quarterly. You're just gonna get like a quarterly drop of everything that I was doing in like quarter one, two, three or four of the year. Great.
There's still a question here, which is, ismatu, why do you need to do it in public? And I think that's because I'm supposed to. Like, this is where we get real woo woo. Sorry. But I think that there are some callings on my life that are just, quite frankly, bigger than me. And one of them is being a public example of what it might look like to navigate adulthood differently under capitalism, both in the ways that, like, we've been taught unilaterally, like everyone.
more or less has heard, know, life isn't fair. That's just what we have to do. is that things are just the way that they are. For clinicians, that looks like, no, even though you want to have things for free and health care should be free, you can't do it because of this, that and the third, you know– one of the reasons that I felt a desire, a strong, it wasn't even desire. It was like a, it was a pounding headache. I felt a headache and insomnia until I relented to the idea that I shouldn't charge for therapeutic services or shouldn't really charge for anything.
One of the reasons that I wanted to do that and do it in public was because I wanted to prove that it was possible, both to myself and to everybody watching, like this isn't something that we have to relent on.
Now I'm also thinking about what it looks like to be a celebrity that does not get bought out, essentially.
Trust the people and the people become trustworthy from adrienne marie brown means that I have to trust you all with my blueprint keeping. Even if I can't do it exactly in real time, I think I need to be able to produce something or a set of some things that let you in on how I'm doing and how things are going that like, I don't wanna use the word humanized, because I haven't been crazy about the concept of humanity lately or what it means to be human, but that make me tangible.
and palpable to you, not as something or someone that exists as a content machine or to entertain you or to leave you with loose feelings of inspiration, but as a person trying and failing at things and trying and failing and trying and failing at things.
What does it look like to have public figures that we can trust? It goes past integrity, a willingness to make themselves precarious. The cell of being like famous or well known or visible is that you can create enough.
safety for yourself such that you don't have to depend on the rickety systems that everybody else does, such that you can lean into privatization. And then they do that. No matter what their art was about, whether they were always about, you know, stacking dollars or whatever, or if there was like a liberatory tilt to their art, it always goes that once they get the opportunity to not have to be amongst the people anymore, they do. One of the reasons that I decided to be donation-based was because I could feel myself becoming something different than just like a regular person... in that I was walking around my neighborhood in Brooklyn and people would see me and physically scream. And that's not what you do when you see like a neighbor or a friend or an acquaintance. That's how you treat celebrities. I spent probably the first like eight to 10 months of that existence just staunchly denying the fact that that's happening and that that exists and that I might be in a different class of personhood now that.
Blueprints Vol I (18:18.604)
my social status has changed, even if I economically am in the same boat, that I have a lot more social capital than I want to realize that my reach is a lot farther than I care to think about. Now that I don't live in like a constant state of cognitive dissonance about those ideas anymore, I would like to expand. Like I wanna, I'm like, well, if I'm gonna do that shit, I'm gonna do that shit. Like if I'm gonna be a celebrity, I'm gonna be (A) everywhere. I'm gonna fucking everywhere. You're gonna see me on newspapers and magazines. I'm gonna be sitting on CNN. You're gonna see me everywhere, if that's the case, for one. And for two (B), I wanna prove that visibility and precariousness do not have to lead to you selling out because to be visible is to be precarious. Like it's not safe. It's not safe up here. It's not safe having my face and voice be public record in any means or metric. I'm not safe.
From the state and I'm also not safe from people having an idea of me that is more or less than what I actually am or projecting their ideals onto me. Like all of that creates precarity. So what if instead of taking this precarity as a valid excuse to just like sell out, I instead did something different than that? There's a lot, I have so many ideas that I have just been like trying quietly in the background.
because you know, seedlings are fragile. didn't wanna, you know when you have like too much emotional investment in an idea such that if one person says one mean thing, you're just gonna be like, fine, fuck it. Like that's where I was. So I was not about to play with my emotions like that. But now that I'm in a space where I actually like can share about some of these seedlings that are growing into very beautiful fruits, I want to. Now with all that being said, right, with my stated goal of sharing blueprints being: what does it look like and feel like to become an adult that resists the systems, not just in a personal way, but also in a celebrity way, in a celebritic way? How do you conjugate that? Anyways, I got this email that I'm very excited to share with you.
I don't wanna read the whole thing because this person sent it to me and I don't want you to feel like if you send me an email, I'll just like immediately take screenshots of it and send it to everyone. But someone who will call M said that they failed in the last assignment that I gave them, which was in, I think this was in October, it's ringing some bells. I'm pretty sure this was in October. I was on live talking about entering back into the modeling world as an adult. I'm thinking about how to do that as a liberatory adult and someone who wants a new blueprint for what celebrities look like, move like, act like, rather than watching people get famous and then immediately join the bourgeois and like be like deuces, you know?
And I came to the conclusion that anything that I put my face on is gonna act like an endorsement for me. So how do I go about that? Well, and TBH, I kind of already knew the answer in the back of my head, but I wanted to see, I wanted to take a pulse on just the public. Live is a great way to do that. It's a sample size of 100, of people just randomly tuning it, randomly selected for people that already know you, it's great.
So I was talking about this and said, you know, I think that I would have to have brands that I simply would never model for, but then I can't be too picky because the industry is the industry, et cetera. And I said the phrase, I want you to tell me that I'm wrong because in my mind, this math was not math-ing and I knew that it wasn't math-ing, but I wanted to see what people would say. Not to say that I wanted to test you, but like I was really wondering like, so how much can I get away with? How high is the standard?
My standards for myself are way higher than the standards that other people set for me. And I think that's a travesty, quite frankly, because I can do better. And also, I think that there's a certain point of power and visibility and authority where you can constantly do better. There are always notes. The standard is never high enough, quite frankly. And the goal here, to be clear, is not perfection. However, the road leads ever upwards. Like, you can constantly be better than you were yesterday. So.
This person said, you know, I spent that entire live trying to justify why you were right, rather than leading into like the ways that I kind of felt like you were wrong. And it took me a couple of weeks to think about that, but I thought about it and I'm here. they said, you know, wouldn't it be, you said in the case against sponsorships that you weren't ever gonna sell your word. So isn't selling your likeness like very akin to selling your word? Cause that's how it's gonna be taken.
And I said, yes, actually that's the conclusion that I came to directly after this live. When I was like, I'm surprised that nobody really helped me to task about these desires that I already had set. I don't think I can ever do a print advertisement. Like I just can't see it. And I can't imagine someone like a Fannie Lou Hamer in an advertisement for anything. Like it just doesn't make any sense. I don't know that I would ever do that. Now I am against commerce and I have things that I have a desire to sell.
However, that's not me selling my word. I've done a thing and now here you may purchase it if you wish to. It's very different than I've been given money to put my face on this thing because these people know my reputation or know what I stand for, et cetera. And it will look, it will make their brand look good. How is that different from a sponsorship? I agree with the sentiment. The only thing that I'm going back and forth about now is the runway because...
that for me, and again, I would like to be told that I'm wrong. I wanna be part of the art and fashion is such a beautiful art form. Couture is not about necessarily selling the clothes on the model's body. It's literally the runway is to think about how the clothes look when they're in motion. To be part of the art in that way makes me really happy, though the amount of brands that I would walk a runway for, very, very small, very small. I can think of two off the top of my head and one is a Sierra Leonean designer, so, you know. But I am willing to be told that I'm wrong.
And they also asked about unsustainability because I had said something like the way that we're currently going about funding is unsustainable. It is. It is unsustainable. Now, the point of this experiment was to figure out whether people would be compelled to pay to keep me alive for nothing other than that the reward is keeping me alive, because I was going to do the work anyways, it was going to be free anyways, you are personally gaining nothing. However, I wanted to understand, are there people who would be willing to just help me stay alive while I do this work? It was a phenomenal social experiment, and it's been the way that I've existed for the past year, existing entirely off donations, whether recurring or coming through direct US-based payments apps, such as Cash App and Venmo.
The answer, think after a year of this, I've come to a conclusive decision that like, yeah, people will be willing to just keep you alive for the sake of it. And because you're doing work that they believe in. And I appreciate knowing that. The reason that this is unsustainable is because it is only enough to keep me alive. It is not enough for me to hire help. And at this point, operations are big enough such that I need help. I need administrative assistance a year ago, quite frankly. Like I am so quick to miss an email because.
I get 40 of them a day. I don't know what to do. It takes me away from the work that I actually want to be doing, which is caring for my family, providing therapeutic services, and writing, because I have to handle all of the budgeting and the administration and the taxes and the registering of new economic vehicles because my job is not straightforward anymore, and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I need to be able to hire people.
And this is enough to keep me alive. I have now found that if people have like sight of you and investment in your particular personhood, some people will be encouraged enough to keep you alive because of who you are to them and because of the work that they're doing. It only keeps me alive and it is not able to expand to other things that I find really important that don't have the same face time as I do, such as this universal basic income project with the Sierra Leonean Association of Ebola Survivors. I understand that the vast majority of people watching this at any point in time don't really understand why that's important outside of like, it's something that we should do. And that's okay, it's my job to explain to you why. It did take months to me for me to get over the heartbreak of realizing that you all like me because you can see me, but that does not mean that you see the rest of the people in the global South the way that you see me.
I refrain from moralizing, quite frankly. As I have said many times before, I am not motivated by morals. I'm motivated by strategy. So it doesn't do me any good to sit here and say that that's not fair or that you're bad people or whatever the fuck. The Western world really does insulate you to what you can see. The world becomes what is accessible to you because of visibility. So I don't really fault you for this. However, the way that we've been going now is not sustainable because it only applies to me. I'm the only one that you can see. And I don't make enough to be able to just pay for the whole thing outright and upfront. So I need to expand. Additionally, in the beginning of this, said, I want blueprints, not just because I think that they'd be useful, but because I have a desire to engage in exchange. Like I actually do want to give you something for the benefit of supporting me.
And that desire hasn't gone away. I've just needed to figure out the motivation for that desire. So now that we have come in a bit of a full circle moment, thank you for listening to me sound this out. This isn't very sexy. It's just, you know, like thought work, but this is the thought work that goes behind the products that you see, not the products, the fruit that you see at the end of these thought trains. So I'll edit this such that it's a little less clunky. But I already have my conclusions set out and I will harken back to this video when I give you these conclusions. But yeah, it's less that it's not sustainable because I don't think that people care enough about me. It's not sustainable because I need you to care about more than just me and we don't know how to do that. So, that's a skill that I have to teach you, but I also don't have time to keep burning out in the process of teaching it to you. I need to give people some incentive to give some money. That's all right.Not a moral thing. and I'm honestly happy to be participating in exchange. Okay.
This tea is really disappointing. Let me look at this honey, because I feel like someone lied to me.
Blueprints Vol I (30:03.384)
The orange blossom in this honey that I bought is artificial. And I'm so sad about that.
Anyways, have a good day.
PS. IT WAS THE LIP GLOSS I WAS WEARING!!!