A step-by-step guide to visualize your future

Practicing our imagination to envision a liberated reality

Is there a lifestyle you have glorified?

An embodiment, an idea that you’ve pedestaled?

Maybe it’s a person. Someone you think of as a guiding star, whose path shows you that your dreams are possible too.

Image by Arno Smit via Unsplash.com

During the 7 years I spent working full-time in corporate environments, I slowly watched friends quit their jobs to work for themselves, to freelance, to invest time and energy into their own projects. I admired the way people created their own schedules, the spontaneity of being able to take a trip anytime anywhere whenever they pleased.

I admit that the admiration sometimes turned into envy. Wouldn’t it be nice? Lucky them. Why do they get to do it?

I don’t regret these thoughts because these pulls are what helped push me into my own practice of designing my lifestyle. I also intuitively knew that I wasn’t ready to be on my own. The pandemic pushed me into my calling, as it did with many others.

Before I quit my job last September, I wrote “SUSTAIN MYSELF AS A FULL-TIME ARTIST” in bold capital letters and printed it out on a neon pink sheet of paper, and taped it on my wall to glance at when I needed a reminder of the direction I was heading.

I am often thinking about what it means to be an artist. To turn it from something elusive and farfetched to something that feels accessible and shapeable.

I wrote in my journal the other day: AN ARTIST IS SOMEONE WHO USES THEIR IMAGINATION TO REFLECT REALITY. A reality, their reality, a future reality.

I am often thinking about this because I am the daughter of an artist, which means creativity is in my bloodline, and also I am the daughter of a devout conservative Christian which means there were restrictions to how creativity could be expressed.

Much of my adulthood since leaving home for college has circulated around finding my own voice, after 18 years of being conditioned to suppress it. Voice as it relates to desire, to pleasure, uncovering unblocking access to the innate imagination that I was not allowed to explore.

I think being an artist is also a practice of liberation. Thinking for yourself means gathering your own sources, building your own conclusions based on intuitive guidance. Creating your own logic, which isn’t fully your own because you’re building from the paths of intuition and magic developed before you and it’s also your own because you’re curating the sources and choosing the direction.

My first major practice of manifestation led to me creating my own role at the company I was working at, an effort to fit myself into a place that I felt I no longer belonged. Maybe I never belonged, but I spent years force-fitting myself. At the time, I didn’t see any other choice.

During this time, I was receiving signals, feeling intuitive hits of the path I wanted to create. I started unblocking my imagination. I began seeking circles of support that didn’t limit me with their limited imagination. Which helped me liberate the way I thought about my future. I caught myself every time I said “that’s not possible” or “I have to choose” or “I can’t” and redirected these thoughts towards something more empowering.

A PRACTICE OF FREEDOM DREAMING

Freedom dreaming is a phrase coined by professor Robin D.G. Kelley that I first learned from this essay by artist and filmmaker Tourmaline.

Freedom dreaming is important because we cannot stop at the demands to dismantle oppression. When I learned about this concept, it helped create a discipline of hope (as abolitionist Mariame Kaba reminds us). Without a vision to move towards, the labor of resistance can tire us out before we get a glimpse of the destination.

How can I practice freedom dreaming?

I say practice because there’s a clear difference between the first time I started visualization exercises and the current practices of visualization I engage in. And even now, some days it’s still hard for me to tap into my imagination when I’m feeling hopeless.

1. Identify a source of inspiration. Maybe it’s a visual, a film, a feeling, a word, a song, a phrase, a situation. Sometimes (most of the time), my inspiration comes from a frustration.

2. Build a scenario from this source, using all of your senses. If I’m frustrated by my loneliness, I think about what it would feel, look, sound, smell, taste like to feel fully embraced, supported, and connected.

3. Indulge in this world as you build it. Connect with it. Feel its reality, know that if you are envisioning it, it exists somewhere in some timeline in some realm. Connect to its possibility. Explore your imagination in whatever way feels most supportive to you. Write it down. Type it out. Narrate it in your voice notes. Say it out loud. Share with a friend. Recite it to yourself in the mirror. Speak it in your head with closed eyes and deep breaths. Look up “high frequency music” on YouTube. Play your favorite playlist. Light a candle. Sit next to your essential oil diffuser. Whatever exploration looks like to you, allow yourself to indulge in it.

Another way to prompt the act of visualization is to ask: what would it be like for me to experience my heart’s deepest desire? Or even more simply: what does joy look like for me?

This weekend, I felt a kind of loneliness that comes from chronic depression. I felt like I didn’t have the words to voice what I was feeling and I got in that weird cycle of thinking there’s no one I can call because I would be a burden to them (for any friends reading this, I know I am not a burden and I know you care about me! my depression brain just doesn’t believe this when I’m in the pits). So I kept it to myself, which I think is okay to do sometimes. I needed to process it myself, to explore its roots and redirect its rhythm.

I’ve been spending more time with people now that I’m vaccinated and I also…BOOKED MY FIRST OFFICIAL MODELING GIG which I am still processing because I think I am not yet (almost!) ready to accept that I am worthy of being seen as beautiful. Part of my brain tells me very cruel things like your legs are too short and thick and stubby! you have weird proportions! you have acne on your tummy, no model has acne on their tummy! no one would call you beautiful if they saw what you look like when you get out of bed. your eyes are boring without makeup, especially mascara (hello childhood trauma of being made fun of for my eyes). you are mediocre pretty at best. if you get booked, it’s only because they had no other Asian options.

Sheeeeeesh! Mean, right? I would never talk to someone like that. Yet my brain thinks these thoughts. Not out loud, but in this subtle volume that I can’t hear until there’s a spotlight on the noise and all the thoughts are activated at once. Then, I’m forced to confront them. Being photographed on camera in an official capacity, getting paid to do something I never thought I would be pretty/skinny/desirable enough to do has me updating my practice of confidence and it is very jarring to think that I’ve come “this far” in my journey of loving myself and then disassociate when I receive external validation because I’m so used to having to settle for self validation. I digress, this is a share for another day another time…

Anyways, the point is that I have been venturing outside the safety of my room— or as my life alignment coach has called “my womb”— and now that I have more language to understand my hypersensitivity and autism and neurodivergence, I am learning how to translate feelings into needs and I am learning how much space I need in between social interactions. I am learning how to be okay being someone who needs a lot of time to rest and recharge. Without doubting myself, without feeling guilt, without thinking that I’m doomed for forever for being neurodivergent and hypersensitive.

I have been wanting to watch Miyazaki’s Spirited Away because I hear it is a cinematic classic and I had the space to on Saturday. I cued it up on HBO Max, heated up frozen furikake fried rice on the stove, seasoned some frozen broccoli in the air fryer, brewed some elderberry echinacea tea, and sat through the entire movie with only one pause which is not common for me.

I think the film helped me get closer to my freedom dreaming. The magical elements, the spells, the fantastical storyline, the details in the vibrant imagery. I shared this image on IG Story while laying in my bed processing my feelings from the film:

Text reads: Watched Spirited Away for the first time today. When I have a big backyard in my home in Cali, I’ll play Miyazaki films on a projector and invite friends over. My chef will cook us healthy nourishing bites and we’ll have pockets of people sitting in silence, napping, journaling, discussing the symbolism & messages of the imagery, and jellyfish dancing*. Some will leave without saying goodbye, some will spend the night, some will be back the next day. I will have lots of people to snuggle with and we will love each other note for what we do or what we offer but who we are.

Cried a little today because I feel like I don’t know who I am lately. I feel afraid to be alone, afraid to be with people, though I’m expanding myself to do both anyways. I’m having a hard time communicating, and having a hard time communicating that I’m having a hard time. When I feel loopy & have a hard time finding meaning in the present moment sometimes I vision dream about the future. This has kept me going many many times.

*jellyfish dancing is when you move your arms and torso around like a dancing sea creature. It’s also a form of stimming I do.

I loved this visual of friends laying out in my backyard with optional acts of entertainment. Some entertaining themselves, some entertaining each other, some watching a form of entertainment. It felt so real to me, and I know that whenever something feels real, it’s because it exists in another timeline another realm and I am feeling the reality of it. So I am choosing to look forward to meeting this reality.

Still from Studio Ghibli's Hayao Miyazaki-directed film Spirited Away

Another thing I’d like to share related to the idea of luxury, as a reminder of this phrase Liberated Luxury that came to me while I was engaging in acts of freedom dreaming last year, is that I am in a gentle practice of merging the elements of luxury and liberation, reshaping what both mean to me. Luxury as it is currently defined socially is tied to capital, riches, elitism. The idea is that we need money to access luxury. Liberation as it is currently defined socially is freeing ourselves from oppressive systems and forces, an act of transformation that serves collective good.

I want nice things, I want to see people who have been historically kept from nice things to access nice things and I also want to see us shift luxury away from the material and into the sensory.

I want luxury. I want extravagance. I am a Leo moon AND rising bb! I want indulgence!

I also want change. Responsibility. Intentionality. I am a Capricorn sun bb!

The latest episode of Pose (s3 ep5) was my favorite Pose episode next to the second to final episode of season 2 when they go to the beach. These episodes showed trans POC indulging in extravagance and it felt expansive. To see people who have been historically excluded from engaging in acts of elitism (defining here as spending riches, being pampered, wearing expensive things). It felt cathartic to see this family share their riches with each other in shiny scenes dipped in gold jewels and fancy fabrics. They felt regal, in their own rightful way.

I began this newsletter to experiment and explore what it means to live a life of luxury while simultaneously honoring the values of liberation. We’re taught we have to choose. I don’t want to. I want abundance for people who have been forced into scarcity. I want excess so I can circulate capital and spend in places most c1sh3t yt folks would never think of spending in. I want indulgence so I can sustain myself through consistent joy instead of fearful urgency. I want access to healing modalities stolen from my ancestors so I can address trauma from the root up, so I don’t have to settle for simply numbing the symptoms.

This is why I dream. To move towards luxury, to reshape luxury, to liberate myself, to liberate the collective.

This is why I dream, and this is why I invite you to dream with me.