It comes like an epiphany or a révélation that prompts a conversion. I practice therapy like some pratice social justice. Ever situated, the daughter of post colonial heritage, mothering with singularity, sister to the marginalised, sweet cousin to religious and sexual minorities, and wife to none, how else can one pratice the art of attunement and care without attention to historical and ongoing political narratives of oppression? The systématic distribution of certain subaltern populations in certain degraded environments is just as important to note, as recognizing how some have internalized the limits of their right to exist in certain spaces like the art world (writ large). Being able to hear the subwoofer-like accounts of domestic violence that occur in the ideal-utopia of queer worlds demands more than a good third ear just as taking into the fold the profond anger and frustration of those continuelly told or made to feel unwelcome, that they are not good enough. The effects of the distribution of power across the leylines of class, gender, religion, orientation and “ethnicity” (the polite word for race) can not, should not be subsumed under a universalist dogma, one declaring the neutrality of a culturally specific episteme of knowledge.

More humanist, more critical more open to the surprise of the encounter and to the problem of learning about “this here thing called life”, existing, enduring, recreating, changing. I am closer to Viktor Frankl, closer to Primo Levi, closer to Toni Morrison and bell hooks, closer to Donald Winnicot and Franz Fanon, Carl Rogers and John Bowlby. But also a reader of Tara Brach, Derek Walcott and Val Plumwood, making ever sure to consult with Hortense Spillers or Martin Buber, Judith Butler or Elie Wiesel.