This journal originates here.

Just like many of us originate somewhere.

But it’s not like this journal did not exist before - that no ideas, website pages, or electronic glares ever crossed paths with what this post comes out to be. As an artist and as a person who was displaced and re-placed multiple times, I am fascinated with the terms ``origin” and “origin story”. It’s all very personal, I know, to define these things, and I too, like many folks who traveled across oceans, am hungry to know where origin lives in me.

however. 

There is something that comes before and after ... origin. It’s important. It’s what can make origin a method that extends beyond a place or person or thing.


While we all try and hold onto our origin stories, however unclear they may be, I’d like to tell you this: Being a diasporic person - or simply being one that navigates change, does not mean we are subjects of endings. Everytime we move or make, drag along our ancestral threads, or invent new ones, means that a whole new origin story is being created.


By embracing nuance, by following the soft contours of memory, by enticing meaning with my hands,  I came to believe :


︎︎︎   That the origin story is an evolving entity - telling it is clumsy but it must be attempted. Stories about where we come from change over time - some things are forgotten, and new influences are acquired. They evolve alongside us.

︎︎︎   It never finishes and never begins, and its incompleteness is what gives us hope.

︎︎︎  We will always originate as long as we make.

︎︎︎  My confusion will be someone’s definition.