I’ve built myself into an annoying little box.

If you haven’t noticed, I have shifted into a process with youtube primarily focused on live streaming. This was because this is significantly more accessible for me to actually keep up with…she says.

But at the moment I have been struggling with approaching this flexible format with just as flexible preparation. I have been working on a video to go over and talk about the Congo situation for an extremely long time. I’d say I’ve been working on it since about June 2024. And I believe that my number one problem and the number one reason why it’s been taking me so long work on is that there’s so much pressure in my own head to make this some sort of penultimate video that will give you all of the information that you need to know about Congo.

And a while ago I was really helped by just realizing that that’s not my place.

For pretty much any and every political topic, I do not have the time, knowledge, resources, energy, anything to be a leading voice. Even topics where I do have the knowledge, like mental health, I still think people would be missing a lot if I was the sole voice that they were listening to on the topic.
As I have been delving deeper into politics and revolutionary studies, one key thing that constantly jumps out is the idea of toxic individualism. And especially relevant to this conversation is how that individualism is applied to revolutionary moments. Because if you’re convinced that the civil rights movement happened because of MLK, then whether you are loud because you view yourself as the next Martin or you are quiet because you know you’re not him, the system has succeeded in warping your perspective of what revolution needs and looks like.

So when I say that it is not my place to be a leading voice on the topic of The Congo, that does not mean that I don’t want to talk about it. But rather that I want discuss it on my platform as if I am talking to a handful of friends, community members, etc with room to touch back on the topic as more things happen, and correct myself whenever needed.

And that mindset change has done a lot in terms of helping me to reengage with the research that I’ve been doing.

But the next obstacle that I’ve been struggling with is now how do I do all this research, gather all of these notes and then mash it all together into, basically, a script that I can read in a process that doesn’t become it’s own barrier of entry.

Well I found a plugin on obsidian that I think it helps a lot with this issue, but that leads to one more issue that I did not realize until it was too late.

I should not leave all the, for lack of a better term, essay writing for the very end.

The plugin that I found is called Lineage and it allows you to essentially make a bunch of cards that you can add notes to and sort them in order based on what chunks of the essay, story, whatever you’re writing it belongs to.

The beauty of that is that I can I take notes on the article and immediately start plugging them where those notes belong and I immediately have a pretty good view other things I want to look into for the piece. And by doing it this way, by sorting the notes as I finish articles, I’m not leaving a punch of work for myself at the very end.

Unfortunately, I did not do that.
Again, didn’t even think of it until it was too late.

Which brings us to our last problem, I feel terrible about how long it’s taking to get this out.

But ultimately I feel like the root of this problem is the same route as problem number one.

I think there’s a part of me that sees this stream as The Thing that is going to remind people about The Congo or inform people about The Congo.

And I need to stop that!

The perspective that I need to have is one in which I view myself as a voice joining the choir. It’s okay if there are times where I am just supporting their voices. Because if we were all singing at the same time, it would be silent when people needed a chance to breathe.