Digital worldbuilding as an act of decolonization
A digital garden grows: reclaiming curiosity in the ruins of productivity culture
My Notion looks very different these days. When I began using it back in 2020, I was still caught up in looking for ways to be more productive. That was the language I used and it came from many years of trying to figure out how to combat my long-term procrastination and avoidance. As a child I was labeled lazy and I bought into that until an old friend of mine said to me “There’s a reason people are lazy” and we went on to discuss (over the course of many years until she passed away) the many reasons why someone might present as lazy and it turned out that for me, it was learned behaviour from growing up in a volatile environment - I kind of learned how to play possum as a way to avoid negative attention - this freeze response would become a knee jerk reaction to really any kind of stress.
Pathologizing aside, I have a history of really struggling to just sit down and focus, work, produce - whatever - for any length of time. I have certainly experienced what some people call a “flow state” but it’s unpredictable and while I can sometimes create the conditions, there’s no guarantee that what worked yesterday will work today. I’m still learning about what this behaviour means, how I can address it and how I can run and grow a business with shifting energy and rhythms. Probably the biggest progress I’ve made with trying to navigate my life around this is to meet myself with compassion and kindness; if it’s just too hard to sit still at my computer, I’ll find something else to do and let it be what it is.
What I am certain of is that I’m not meant to be a machine. That even though I strive to create and be creative, I have to balance this with decades of capitalist conditioning. I have to be cognizant of my motivation when I’m working in and on my business. Am I desperately grabbing at financial opportunities because I’m worried I won’t get my piece of the pie, that someone else will snag it and I’ll miss out? Am I trying to work really hard so that I can gain social respect and acceptance? Or do I have something to say that feels important to come out, knowing that if it lands for just one other person, maybe I can help them feel less alone and frightened?
What emerged this year when I turned my attention toward the foundations of my work (educational trauma, decolonizing knowledge and metacognitive learning) was that one result of constant avoidance and procrastination as a response to trauma is a loss of learning and deep curiosity. I’m told by therapists and psychologists that not being curious (both socially and in my own isolation) is a survival mechanism that I developed to keep attention off me and thereby create some semblance of safety for myself. There’s a sadness to this, yes, but I’m very tenacious. When I find true meaning and value in something, I’m dogged in my pursuit even as I engage in sometimes quite long periods of inaction.
I’ve written a lot this year about decolonizing education, learning how to learn and reclaiming curiosity - pursuing these ideas and making connections between these concepts and my own experience is what led me to understanding more deeply how institutionalization is inextricably tied to self-blame. Ever blamed yourself (consciously, unconsciously) for not being enough in some way? That’s actually a sure-fire signal that it’s not you, it’s an oppressive system in full effect, designed to produce this exact result - to keep you an obedient productive money-maker - and rooted in one of the OG forms of oppression - colonialism.
The transition into mid-life and being perimenopausal has reduced the number of fucks I give. What this looks like in everyday life is my growing refusal to accept the normal condition of things as it pertains to what is on offer to me and people like me. I’m tired of the perceived second class citizenship of womanhood, queerness and being POC - an unrelenting, multi-millennial barrage of disenfranchisement. I have come to strongly believe that the joy and power that comes from these intersecting identities is rooted in deep ancestral knowledge that supercedes and is in fact superior to the greed and false might on display. I carry in my veins an unbreakable connection to everything I need to be and feel whole and liberated.
So what the heck does this have to do with Notion?
Earlier this year, I fully scrapped the vast majority of my Notion workspace. It was a collection of databases and dashboards that I thought I was supposed to have - they were based on the productivity culture I was aspiring to - the one that was steeped in capitalism where my body and work were part of a machine that could never achieve the promise - the American dream of meritocracy and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. It was a rigid digital container that mirrored a familiar image of corporate life instead of the creative person I really am.
What I created in its place was something far more delightful. What once was a vast and intricate structure that boundaried my work became just a couple of central dashboards that supported creativity, discovery and play: a Digital Gardening dashboard and a dashboard where I write emails, essays, play around with new ideas and build all of the infrastructure around my workshops and group programs.
It’s not as much about Notion itself as it is about Notion being a tool I found to create a digital environment where I can worldbuild; it’s not just where I work, it’s where I continue to learn about myself and what I need to reconnect to my inherent curiosity. It’s part child space and part grown up space. The childness of it is fun and pretty and cozy. There’s a little bit of my teenage self that craves being cool. There’s the adult me who loves to play the professional. They’re all roles, yes, but they’re also parts of myself that show up at different times, wanting to be seen and heard and catered to.
