CHAPTER FIVE
Part Five
I am not getting "better"
When I think of the ways I explore my second practices... I sometimes think of them as many voices around a table talking and sharing and gossiping. Sometimes I use them as a Wheel of Fortune type creative and research prompt. A sustainable invitation for creation that isn't a goal to be achieved but an open exploration into the unknown. Sometimes they are intentional experiments with unique expressions and spontaneous nuances. Micro ecologies of their own. Sometimes I use them as delicate applications to create a bigger picture with. Porous, delicate, merging and collapsing thresholds of expression. Always it feels like tending and growing a sustainable garden with local, raw, fresh bodymind ingredients.
Second practice... second practices... second practicing... are like using seasonal ingredients every day. What is fresh and available this morning of my invisible bodymind? Let's use those.
Every morning I wake up and want to practice... I map and attune to my invisible bodymind needs.
I centre the practitioner.
I follow my second practices so I can explore safely and generatively with care and creativity.
I hold spaces for lots of second practice expressions and explorations and observations and surfacing and letting go.
I am quiet and slow and soft and heavy and grounded with the growing and the harvesting.
Some days and weeks the response is not to create at all.
I don't want to put any pressure or expectations on my creating.
I really want it to keep being fluid and full of reciprocity and sustainability.
Creative movements that centre the practitioner's lived experience; person and process over production.
My daily changing disability symptoms are like a local weather.
My own process atmosphere.
My expanding everyday unseens are cross pollinating a second practice ecosystem.
My own unique ever changing practice ecology and atmosphere emerges more every day.
I call how I move with creativity now, sick-licle.
I define how I make.
The more I create this way I have the creative excitement and curiosity of when I was a kid. With second practices and exploring possible embodiminded sustainable second practice assemblages... there is no wrong or right. No prescriptive approaches. There is just exploring and experimenting with and within what you need and want and what you are curious to explore with. Your everyday ways of resisting what is resisting you. You can bring in whatever you want and whatever needs to be in the middle with you. Take out of your middle whenever and whatever you want and need. Assemblages can change all the time.
Embracing embodiminded sustainability and second practices gives me ways of noticing, hearing, effecting and being affected by my own unique ways of processing, synthesising, meaning forming.
This type of affect over one's own experience in disability studies, and anthropology, is called Worlding or World Making and World Building.
"[...] the idea of 'worlds' stress how experiences of disability may incite everyday creativity, provoke new ways of understanding human difference, and take place in specific locations [...]. The idea of 'disability worlds' clearly supersedes a framework that too easily pathologizes people with disabilities as 'suffering subjects', instead embracing the creative challenges that disability brings to social life, despite enduring difficulties" (Ginsburg & Rapp, 2022, p.6). When breaking down the term for her book, Activist Affordances, Arseli Dokumaci says "“activism” means world-making" (2023, p.5). Exploring with my second practices is world making. Second practicing is world making.
When it comes time that I have to begin exploring what this work might be as a shareable space... the space you have been moving through... second practice is an ecology of its own. Fuller and thicker than I ever imagined it to be. I have collected fifty seven second practices and nine orbiting modalities. With second practicing... I am creating more often. I am not getting "better". Second practices is not making me better. There is no "cure". It is just my way of moving when creating is now more sustainable and so much more of me is able to participate in creativity than has been allowed to before.
This is all an invisible bodymind response to one of my project questions three years ago, "what emerges as design practice/praxis when the designer is centred in the creation cycle?".
I believe that the answer to this question will look differently for everyone.
Everyone has an invisible.
Everyone has their own unique everyday unseens.
Everyone has their own lived second complex and personal intersections of otherness.
And this is why I imagine second practices and second practicing assemblages will look different from person to person.
The topology will be different every time.
The ecology extravagantly different with every person.
Second practicing offers a bespoke responsivity with people's unique seconded creative cultures.
This project does not assume another's support needs.
I don't want to dissolve one framework and suggest and prescribe another one.
The only point that remains the same for anyone who might like to explore their own second practicing eccentric growths of attunement and doing is that the beginning and the core of the exploration is the practitioner, not the practice.
And that is what I hope for with second practice as a praxis offering.
That individual second practices can be doors, windows, explosions into...
Places of access for learning and unlearning.
Places of access for rediscovery.
Places of access for embodiminded sustainable doing and undoing.
Places of access for decentralising and re-evaluating commercial practice.
Places of access for decentralising and re-evaluating commercial conventions of practice.
By centering the practitioner we can follow, surface, harvest, name, explore and use our unique agency and autonomy needs in work systems and environments while we are waiting too long for systemic and workplace accommodations. To help build a base and a bridge from the practitioner out instead of the workplace in when defining accommodation needs.
I hope each of us can help transform stigmatised, shameful and hidden experiences by radically re-imagining diverse, embodiminded sustainable, accessible and nuanced support and practice methodologies of self, creativity and care. A gentle rehabilitation of the existing industry efficiency paradigms.
We want to take care of ourselves and we want to create.