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And as xenophobia, a virus whose symptoms are always felt before they’re detected, springs up everywhere from muttered asides to national policy, it’s getting harder to find relief. Throw in garden-variety micro-aggressions (“where do you really come from?”) and achieving a state of wellbeing starts to resemble a marathon with no finish line, a clumsy stab at lightness in the face of a crushing ache.

— A new column, for SBS Life, on why people of colour should prioritise self-care as the return of Pauline Hanson sinks in.

But although following your desires and cultivating a meaningful work life are worthwhile and important missions, there’s something dangerous about the way “do what you love” elevates entrepreneurship over working a day job and constructs the decision to go freelance as a moral choice. Sure, leaving an IT firm to launch your first startup or resigning from your lucrative finance gig to write the novel that’s burning inside you can mean carving a career built on independence and autonomy but your success isn’t just down to talent and tenacity; it’s also a matter of race and class privileges that include the ability to speak English, access to money and resources, a network of professional contacts and, if you happen to be a mother, the means to afford childcare so that you can meet the around-the-clock responsibilities that self-employment often demands. A 2013 paper by the University of California, Berkeley, found that successful entrepreneurs were disproportionately white, male and highly educated, in the century’s least surprising news.

— A column, from a couple of weeks ago, on why the mantra ‘do what you love’ irks me for SBS Life. 

This wouldn’t be an issue if minimalism wasn’t among the defining mindsets of our time. The fact that our online lives are being shaped by the around-the-clock noise of social media (Twitter! Vine! Snapchat!), has seen us devote our offline lives to fantasising about an existence devoid of clutter.

Whether that means worshipping Marie Kondo, the Japanese lifestyle guru who urges us to bin any possession that fails to “spark joy”, subscribing to the Tiny House Movement, a global campaign that asks us to swap suburban bungalows for a matchbox-sized residence or, better still, a treehouse or caravan (the Facebook page for Tiny Houses Australia has 34,000 followers) or elevating Kyoto or Stockholm, cities that understand the magic of a spartan interior and solitary houseplant, over unruly outposts such as Sydney or Adelaide.

— In Defense of Maximalism, for SBS Life. Read it here.

And from Apple’s Siri, the chirpy virtual assistant who can help you schedule meetings and find directions to Amazon’s Alexa, who can plan dinner and organise date night like a dutiful secretary, we’re inundated with AIs with female voices and female names. It’s a reflection of a world that sees women as servile, domestic creatures whose feelings are overlooked and whose labour goes widely uncompensated. “Our machines are projections of us. They’re dreams or metaphors for our own anxieties,” says Sophie Mayer, a film studies lecturer at London’s Queen Mary University in a January 2015 article in The Guardian.

— In case you missed it, my column on whether or not robots can solve our gender woes for Daily Life. 

But although desirability has played a starring role in Beyonce’s career, ‘Lemonade’ expands this definition of female power before exploding it from within. The visual album, which samples Malcolm X’s 1962 speech “Who taught you to hate yourself?” and is laced with haunting spoken word written by the poet Warsan Shire, intersperses images of Beyonce spitting verse in a fur coat and grinding in the red-lit gloom of the club with scenes in which she floats, grief-stricken, underwater, destroys everything around her grinning with manic energy, strides through a field flanked by naked women wearing crowns that channel the Egyptian queen Nefertiti and presides over the mothers of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner and Michael Brown.

— My column on Beyonce’s Lemonade and how the witch hunt against ‘Becky’ misses the point for Daily Life. 

I know it’s not easy being an artist. I know the gulf between creation and commerce is so tremendously wide that it’s sometimes impossible not to feel annihilated by it. A lot of artists give up because it’s just too damn hard to go on making art in a culture that by and large does not support its artists. But the people who don’t give up are the people who find a way to believe in abundance rather than scarcity. They’ve taken into their hearts the idea that there is enough for all of us, that success will manifest itself in different ways for different sorts of artists, that keeping the faith is more important than cashing the check, that being genuinely happy for someone else who got something you hope to get makes you genuinely happier too.

– It’s always a good time to re-read Cheryl Strayed’s Dear Sugar column ‘We Are All Savages Inside.’ 

via GIPHY

Early today, my boyfriend woke me up to tell me that Prince was dead and in my hazy half-sleep I mumbled that this confirmed that he was actually alive. Artists talk about leaving behind a legacy but legacy insists on a retroactive greatness. Prince, whose music is somehow both everywhere and nowhere (it’s hard to stream even his biggest songs, thanks to ongoing battles with his record label) has always made immortality feel like the more extraordinary achievement.

As I got ready for work, I listened to ‘Little Red Corvette’ and it struck me that the death of someone whose artistry transcended the earthly trappings of race and gender, is a reminder of how little it pays to be cowed by the world. Growing up with MTV, where Prince writhed in purple fumes and hot-pink glitter, showed me that tastefulness is a boring ambition and being too much – even if no one ever gets you – is maybe worth aspiring to instead.

When I first started practicing yoga, I admired how effortlessly my classmates could spring into a headstand and move from cobra to downward dog. But it was their ability to tap into the signifiers of ethnicity without fear of being ridiculed, laughed at or dehumanised that I envied a whole lot more.

As you get older, you become brave enough to make decisions that improve your quality of life. In the last year, I’ve resolved to get eight hours’ sleep, avoid working on weekends and prioritise my yoga class no matter how busy I get. I’ve also stopped caring whether or not the choices I make play into some racist fiction about how someone of Indian descent should be. Kerrie made me feel like I wasn’t a whole person but if I take responsibility for it she’ll always have the last laugh.

– I wrote about high-school racism and how I stopped being cynical about yoga for SBS this week.

 

More insidiously, it plays to the lie that if working class people hold down service jobs and are on the poverty line, it’s because they’re not savvy or educated enough to excel. That’s why a 40-year-old single mother working a minimum wage cafe job will inspire less empathy than Girls‘ Ray, whose extended stint making coffees is down to systemic problems such as, say, a bad economy or generational failure to launch. For all its inclusiveness, if Master of None expanded its portrayal of millennials beyond those who can afford sprawling lofts and time to dish on relationship dramas, the show would be considerably less charming.

– I wrote about the ways in which millennial sitcoms overlook the working-class experience for Daily Life this week.

Image credit: Kristoffer Paulsen

Last year, I had the pleasure of working one of my favourite writing projects to date — the first-ever Broadsheet Sydney Cookbook, published by Broadsheet and Pan MacMillan imprint Plum Books. I co-wrote the book with food journalist Jane De Graaff and was lucky enough to interview some of Sydney’s brightest culinary talents including Rockpool’s Neil Perry, Bulletin Place’s Adi Ruiz, Billy Kwong’s Kylie Kwong and Iceberg’s Maurizio Terzini. The book, which features over 80 signature recipes from Sydney’s favourite restaurants, cafes and bars as well as gorgeous photography by Will and Hannah Meppem, is available to purchase here.