A self-critical rant on Radical Gratitude

and surviving Hopeful within capitalism and the hard work fallacy before I could begin to be Angry and rebel against the system.

I'll be honest: I have a huge issue with the very video I filmed and shared this week.

The Radical Gratitude under Capitalism? That one.

Because as much as I clearly perceive myself as always having been the same person with the same core principles (and to a degree that's true) I also grew A LOT since leaving Italy (a country still by majority white, racist and fascist) and a lot even more when Brexit radicalised me and made me look at patterns until I fucking saw the architecture of the white cis het patriarchal able and for the wealthy system.

The lies of individualism and hard work to succeed? I was raised on them like everyone in the neo liberal hell that were the 1990s. Season that with coming from a family of farmers who managed to become owners of their own land just through the Keynesian economy applied to Italy up until the 1970s, you can see how they deluded themselves it was hard work and how they taught me the same.

So that when I was hitting glass walls everywhere because I was weird (autistic undiagnosed until last year), fat, mixed race, femme, I was just told ad nauseam "it's in your head, stop victimising yourself and work harder then!"

My mother. My white mother told me that.

I didn't shake it off until I got to the UK and suddenly I wasn't the only one with an Arab surname in my village, in my school, in my everything everyday. Suddenly at least 5 other people in my office had the same surname and they were British, no questions asked.

Really I wasn't properly radicalised about the very real system of privilege and intersectional oppression until I read "why I’m no longer talking to white people about race" by Reni eddo-lodge. Numbers and statistics upon statistics to counter my mother's shrugging and victim blaming me because she never bothered understand, let alone teach her mixed race kid, how the world works, because it didn't affect her white a$$.

With this premise, think about this fucking freak of a child who, to their understanding is "only" fat, no acknowledgement of race, no acknowledgement of potential Neurodivergence because as a child it just helped me learn things by memory and my mother loved bragging about that, think about this child that for some bizarre reason, no matter the pushback that began at home, still fucking hoped, genuinely.

It's fine, I'm a good person, I'm trying my best, I just haven't found people that understand me. I just have to keep trying to reach them.

I am genuinely sad for myself as a child having that silly belief made from thin air without understanding how everything was rigged against me, still just fucking hopeful without anything to fuel that hope until they were at least 16 years old. For 16 years they were beaten black and blue, psychologically and physically and they just shrugged and went "it's fine, they just are not my people." How the fuck did they keep believing I genuinely cannot tell you. To this day it’s a prime topic I discuss in my therapy sessions.

So back to the video, while recording it, while reading my old journal entries to explain how I was thinking and surviving, I could feel the grinding and clashing of how wrong my thinking was, conceding to the hard work fallacy of capitalism, of individualism, of personal responsibility as if there really was "no such thing as society, only individuals and families" (fuck you Thatcher). Yet she fucking survived. Ignorant and naive as she was she survived enough to begin learning about the larger system and realise that it's not that she didn't find her people before, it's that Italy's culture is intrinsically racist, patriarchal, ableist, and when the majority of people are those things, wrong as they are, if you point them out you will be lynched.

That stupidly naive kid kept her head down, had a natural fawn response to everything and even people pleasing as she was she got beaten to serious injuries both physically and psychologically until she managed to escape abroad.

I know how cringe it is to hear a fat queer non binary autistic immigrant of colour speak of how success is in their hands if they work hard.

But I also understood, looking again at all the beliefs that allowed to grow as old as I am now, that when you are at the fringes of society and don't understand the system exists enough to see the framework is rigged, you could just as easily become angry. Anger is the feeling when something is unfair, unjust, but as I were, I could not tell you why it was so.

Anger is an energy to push back. But as a 13 year old there was little I could do to push back. Until I managed to escape abroad in my 20s there was little I could do to push back. If I rejected the system while the system was already rejecting me I wouldn't have found a way to escape. Without finding an escape through the system I would still be isolated living with my abusive mother being her carer because "I owe her my life".

The energy I needed was the energy to push forward. The energy to push forward is Hope. Yes, hope to be better, hope to excel amongst others (competition) is the carrot that capitalism dangles in front of our faces. It's rigged and untrue. But without any kind of hope that I could have any semblance of control, that I could use my tooth and nail to try and find somewhere something better than the animal-like treatment i got in my birth country, -where I dared being born non white-, without that hope to push me through, the truth is I would not have gotten this old.

So there. There is the explanation as to why, cringe as it might sound in places, I still published "Radical Gratitude". Because growth as a process doesn't mean I always knew how the world worked let alone my place in it.

Now I can afford to be angry and push back and I do it daily, because what else is there to do if not talking about the oppression and abuse I let the system made me believe was normal for me to receive, in the hope that calling it out prevents more kids like me to go through this and just take it?

I couldn't afford Anger when I was under the thumb of my mother, when I was under the thumb of Italian Society. I had to be hopeful something slightly more decent existed. Which is probably why, even in the UK, it took me almost a decade to begin with activism: because problematic as it is, compared to italy it was heaven for someone like me. Now I can afford anger hoping to change things even more for the better for those that will come before me, in a place that allows for that change. Italy doesn't. Italy is still fascist at heart don't let the postcards about art and pasta deceive you.

I needed Hope and Anger at different times of my life. That's the core of that video.

Yes, capitalism weaponizes them both, so we might as well weaponize them back to get to a point where we can be angry and push back against the capitalism system. before we have the autonomy to do so? we need the hope, even the one built on the hard work fallacy if it’s all that we can have to believe in tomorrow.