My friend Amu has been in prison without trial since June 2025 for allegedly taking part in a direct action to disrupt the ongoing genocide in Palestine. We scheduled a time for them to call me from prison, during which we got to talk about not sitting still and small resistances growing up, refusal (its toll, its importance), prison, personhood, friendship, togetherness, the body, and what this project has been like for me so far.
In the time since this interview, Amu has joined a collective hunger strike to protest prison conditions and to demand the UK government cut ties with Israeli arms company Elbit Systems, whose factories on UK soil help manufacture weapons that are used to murder Palestinian people in this ongoing genocide. You can find out how to support the hunger strikers, including how to contact the prisons demanding they be given adequate medical care, via @prisoners4palestine. Although Amu is not a member of the Filton 24, many fellow hunger strikers are, and I also recommend following the Filton 24 campaign; the trial of the first 6 begins next week.
In the meantime, as of June 2025, 10,550 Palestinians are incarcerated by israel, including 3,563 Palestinian people held in "administrative detention" without trial or charge. The horizon is abolition—until everyone is free.
Thank you so incredibly much, Amu, for your steadfastness, your courage, your kindness, and your groundedness. I’m so proud of you!
“When the prison doors are opened, the real dragon will fly out.” —Ho Chi Minh
If you're getting this as a newsletter, click here to read the properly formatted version of this post: https://jiaqikang.mataroa.blog/blog/questions-for-my-friends-10-amu/
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The idea for this project is that I’m interviewing my friends and people I feel close to, who inspire me. There’s obviously a difference between this ‘on the record’ discussion, which will be published online for anyone to read, and the normal ‘off the record’ conversations we’d have as friends. I’m interested in the ways I might get to know you more through this slightly more ‘formal’ format and the choices you make in representing yourself. I’m also interested in oral history as a form, and in ways to preserve and archive intimacies and relationships in time and space.
Please come up with how you want to be called: name, initial, or pseudonym. I’ll be “Jiaqi Kang.”
The questions below are the 6 main questions I’ll ask you, but your answers will probably prompt some follow-up questions. Your answers can be as long or short as you want. The interview will be conducted orally, then transcribed using Otter and edited for length and clarity. You’ll get to take a final look at it before it goes up, and of course I can take it down anytime you like in the future (although it’s on my blog+newsletter which means that it will also exist in people’s email inboxes).
1. Please introduce yourself and your background, in any way you’d like.
2. How did you become politically engaged?
3. How did you and I meet?
4. What does the word ‘care’ mean for you?
5. What are some things you’re currently looking to learn, or learn about?
6. Is there anything else you’d like to say, or to ask me?
Thank you <3
This interview was conducted over the phone in September 2025 and has been edited for length and clarity. In order to perform these edits, I printed out the first draft and posted them to Amu in October 2025. (With thanks to WC for printing and RW AD AH for messengering!) Amu gave me oral feedback during a visit. All phone calls, letters, and visits are monitored by guards, so this interview took place within that context.
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Jiaqi Kang: Please introduce yourself and your background in any way you'd like.
Amu: I thought about this and realized that the things that I find most interesting are what people have chosen to learn, as a way to understand what they care about. Also, sometimes you can see what they're trying to overcome in their identity politics-ridden background.
I am from London, and both of my parents are not. That kind of makes us part of this “middle class gentrifier of north London” scene. My mum comes from quite [a] “moving around every few years within the UK” family, and she is the only one who [has] lived in London, of her family. This is a tangent already, but her great-grandparents were the builders of a lot of the residential areas in North London, from around where we lived—we didn't know until one of our great aunts died recently, and they found some blueprints and itemized lists of [building supplies] that they needed for building Crouch End, which was kind of wild, because I worked there quite a lot when I was younger. I did a lot of work in allotments and was on this allotment committee as well.
My dad's from Liverpool, and his parents were both quite staunch communists. He grew up in this household of people coming in and out of different political contexts, like Chilean refugees and lots of fundraisers. Dyed in the wool of social justice, but on an international scale kind of thing. I haven't really figured out how much I even know about my dad's life, in a way, because he doesn't really talk about himself that much.
So yeah, they both moved to London separately, and then got married. Had me and my sisters. We all went to local schools and had really different school experiences, but mostly really negative [when it came to] school authorities: getting in trouble all the time and being asked to move schools because we got into confrontations with the head teachers.
I went to a sixth form that, like most inner city London schools, was just a melting pot of lots of different ideas and ways that people are conceiving the futures that the adults around them are trying to push them into. That’s a space where I first learned about other worldviews in a more explicitly political context. A lot of my classmates were arriving from Eritrea, DRC, [the Republic of the] Congo, Somalia… It wasn't uncommon for someone to join midway through the year and speak no English and [to] need to learn all of those social cues that kids are brutally teased for not having.
There were, like, six white kids [including myself] out of 60 in my year group, and that has an intangible [effect]—to me, anyway… It does change things. I think that most of the kids, [when] I went to their parents’ house after school, for example, might be watching Al Jazeera or TV in Arabic, or cooking food that my mum wasn't cooking. The way that that kind of [contemporary multicultural] environment is romanticized… Partly, it's not wrong to do that, [but] in another way, it actually makes the racism that people in those environments picked up on and recreated much more acute. [The environment] kind of honed [certain racialisations]. It wasn't just, like, white people versus everyone else, because white people were not a big enough contingent of people for white supremacy to take place in such a clear way. It was [more prevalently dynamics] like Turks versus Kurds, and like Nigerians versus Ghanaians, [etc…] Just in secondary school. I don't even know where to start—it was such a geopolitically fraught environment.
Anyway, in sixth form, I was introduced to the kinds of reasons that all of these people were moving around. Not just an individual experience of migration, colonialism, displacement or asylum, but [also] a slightly more zoomed-out understanding of imperialism, capitalism, colonialism, white supremacy. [I] started to find the language to understand the experiences that people around me were having that I just [personally] had no real way into. You have a personal connection with someone, but there's severe limitations if you can't conceptualize what brings them to the place [where] they are and what they need that's different to you; the material circumstances that you're both in. That's where I first learned about Palestine, from this group of young Muslim women who were already campaigning for Palestine. We would have been 16, 17, 18. This is something that they were so strongly connected to and motivated by, or spurred into action for. They were talking about [Palestine] in class and between classes, giving out badges, just doing that endless legwork of political education and having—I'm sure—a lot of patience for everyone around them. That led me into this point of understanding that has only got deeper, [even if] I'm not necessarily [always] so clear on all of the details and all the research. (I feel really like, “Oh my god, I can't believe I got some of the information wrong on this birthday statement that I put out!”). The spirit of what [these classmates] were doing has kind of been a constant part of all Palestinian organizing spaces that I've been able to access up until now in my life. So, yeah, that was quite a big part, if I look back, of this kind of political education [that I had].
I guess [sixth form was] the longest I've been in any institution. Since then, it's just been a hodgepodge of, like, four months here, five months here, nine months here, at four different universities. Lots of moving around and traveling and different work experiences, but fundamentally not believing in or trusting institutions—[yet] still wanting the resources that they offer and the respite from constant wage labor [you’re] otherwise sent into. When you're in prison, you're really grateful for having lived such a full life, [which] tides you over in this period where they try and deprive you of all meaning and joy and fullness. I'm like, “I've actually had a pretty good go of it.”
JK: And you will continue to.
A: Totally, and I kind of am now!
JK: Thank you for that. I always find it really interesting when people grow up with very politically active, left [wing] parents. Do you think that your dad sustained that after he grew up, or was that more just the environment in which he grew up?
A: He, interestingly, wanted to become a banker when he left Liverpool and came to London—which he didn't do. He actually started working for this Russian news agency company, [where] he worked, I think, from when he was, like, 17, 18. It was a news agency that kind of began in the Soviet era and then carried on until the sanctions against Russia [took place upon] its invasion of Ukraine. My dad and my mum's bank accounts were [actually] frozen, and he continued to go to work, but then it was clear that he was never going to get paid. And now he's got a job at Marx Memorial Library. So he's got lore!
My granddad had a mental breakdown due to the demands of the Communist Party in Liverpool and the way that they exploited the labor that they needed from the people that were willing—if not necessarily able—to give it. I think has given [my dad] this really strong cynicism, which I think he wishes he didn't have. I think he wishes he could commit to really believing in one kind of political system or one ideology or framing of the world, but he's never… Him and my mum, actually, both were quite careful. Maybe [this was] also because of his experience with that, because his mum continued to do that kind of background work of drudgery: to make people endless sandwiches, and go to all of these meetings, and take all these minutes, and send all the minutes out, and set up the hall and pack down the chairs… Just seeing a lifetime of that labor—he's definitely completely [been] shaped by it, but I think it's also left its own scars. There's always that classic: people that were the children of the most radical people you ever meet probably want to, like, become MPs, or do something really rogue. You resist your parents’ lives in some way, or it skips a generation; that kind of vibe. But having said that, one of my earliest memories, and my first memory of my grandparents, is going to hand out flyers for the anti-war march against the war in Iraq.
JK: Wow, that's a really sweet memory to have with your grandparents. I met someone who is an artist… This is kind of proof against that thing of like, “You will rebel against your parents and become Kamala Harris,” because she's this artist called Maggie Wong in the US, and her parents were members of the League of Revolutionary Struggle. [Wong] calls herself a “red diaper baby”, which is so cute—she says that she has memories of crawling around under the table while her parents were in meetings. Her art right now is kind of exploring some of that childhood, which I think is really interesting, and something that I personally have absolutely no relation to, because I feel like my experience—
A: Have you been in some kind of political space with your mom or with your parents?
JK: No, definitely not. My mom has more progressive beliefs, but [my parents both believe] that there is no point in actually trying to express yourself, or trying to speak up or standing out in any way, because you will probably be punished and face repression. There's no point.
A: And if they weren't worried about the repercussions of it? What underlying beliefs…?
JK: I don't know… In [the summer of] 2020, me and my brother and my mom, [through the discussions we were sometimes having at home] we kind of were all like, “Oh, we're abolitionists now.” But even though my mom talked to us about that stuff, I don't know how seriously she takes it. My parents don't go to protests. They have no interest in that kind of stuff. My mom has always been someone that really cares about engaging sincerely with what her kids are interested in [which is why she was engaging with us about police abolition]. When I've been able to get an idea of what she [personally] believes politically, I'm usually kind of like, “Oh, cool.” Like, pleasantly surprised. But I think, for her, it's more like stuff that she keeps in her heart. [She might be] like, “I know that this is probably right or this is probably how it could ideally be, but I don't speak up about it. Don't get into trouble.”
I think that that's also really shaped by my parents [coming of age] in Reform-era China. My parents’ lives were completely changed by the Tiananmen Square protests. Even though they were not part of it, it was the summer that they took their university entrance exams. They were both really good students who wanted to go to Beijing for university. But then, following the massacre, there was this huge tightening of quotas, and basically all the universities in Beijing suddenly were like, “We’re taking, like, one student from your province for the whole cohort.” My parents, who, at that point, had decided to become girlfriend-boyfriend, they were like, “Oh, well, we just want to apply somewhere that will accept people from our province.” So then they applied to [a university for finance and economics] and became accountants.
In terms of their upbringing, the legacy and the silence around the traumas of high Maoism, the Cultural Revolution and all that… China as a country was just like, “Great, now we're just gonna move on.” [A lot of things maintain tension as ‘public secrets’.] I think that is really [echoed] in the way that my parents deal with politics, or even just any kind of conflict or anything that is difficult. [Also, maybe this reluctance to see themselves as having political agency is because they are] coming from peasant backgrounds and village, rural backgrounds, where they have never thought that they matter, as “the people.”
[Sometimes] I feel as though there [have been] many moments in my childhood where I feel like the lesson that I learned was that I was punished for trying to speak up, or trying to stand up for something. My mom would be like, “Even though, privately, I actually think that you're right, you just have to let this go, or you have to apologize, or you just shouldn't do anything.” After I was arrested for the sit-in last year, and then, later, I dropped out, I think I was stressed out about my mom’s opinion in particular. Whether she thought that I was shameful in some way—obviously she does not approve of any of those things [such as disruptive protest, direct action, civil disobedience, and dropping out of school]. I had this emotional outburst—which is kind of the only way in which we can be honest with each other, if there's some kind of outburst—I was like, “I feel like you're just not proud of me because I've dropped out and stuff.” She was like, “Actually, I composed an email to send to the proctors when it was going to be the student disciplinary panel in which I tried to [ask] them to drop the case. I wrote about how I raised my child to stand up for what's right.” It was really touching [and surprising]. She didn't manage to send the email out because she couldn't figure out who to send it to, what email address to put it to. But she showed it to me, and it was actually really moving. In the email, she was like, “How could you punish a student for doing what is right, and standing up for what is right?” I would never have known that there was even a possibility that she would see it that way, rather than just like, “You've thrown all these opportunities away.”
Sorry, I feel like I've gone on such a tangent. I think it's so crazy to encounter people whose parents were much more active about that kind of stuff. Because in my family, it was always encouraged to just be quiet.
A: Thanks for sharing, and thanks for having such good questions [without which] I probably wouldn't know these things. I think [what you talked about] was one of the biggest ways that white privilege manifested itself in my school education, because I would get told off for things all the time, but I didn't get physically punished by my parents. That led to an instance where some of my friends did something wrong and then blamed me because they knew that my parents wouldn't beat me. There's these different ways that that shapes your relationship to your friends…
My parents basically would have our backs if we had issues with authorities. My mum was a teacher in a secondary school and then she was at the same sixth form that I went to, [though] she wasn't working [in] the same building that I was in at the time. She was a textile teacher, a home economics, food tech teacher and a fine art teacher; [she] was also involved in the Board of Governors at the schools that we went to. So she knew what was going wrong within the school. There wasn't ever this sense of, “Just listen to your teachers, they know what's right; don't have a big mouth,” and whatever. I have this memory of my teacher in secondary calling up my parents during class, in front of the class—bringing up my whole bio with all of the details on the projector. [They were] phoning my dad to try and get my dad to tell me off in front of the class and do this kind of public humiliation ritual, I don't know. My dad was just like, “Why is your teacher phoning me during class time, in front of the whole class? Like, that's not appropriate.” Both of [my parents had] quite a healthy… not necessarily mistrust [of authorities], but definitely [they were] not willing to take the word of some authority figure for it, especially not over the word of their kid. I mean, the teachers hated us.
JK: But it gives you this confidence that you're going to be supported and that you're going to be believed, which is so important.
A: Yeah, that you're going to be supported, you're going to be believed, and you might always be right. There's a chance that you, over an adult, could be right. I don't really know how people cope with it… I think everyone has a strong sense of justice. But then [maybe] that's stamped out of you, or you just learn not to trust yourself or whatever. That's a group effort.
It's interesting, now, seeing the position I'm in—being in prison—and how my parents respond to the different narratives and the different weapons of the state around that. My mum watches a lot of cop dramas, and I always wonder how that shapes her understanding of the police, because obviously it does. And then, being in prison and the prison guards being really convincing…
When my parents came to visit us after two people died in a week, and [subsequently] they kept us locked in for 20 hours a day, five days in a row, I had a visit with my parents [where] I was [two or] three hours late, because they just kept us locked in. In that time, the visiting staff prison officer kind of persuaded my parents that she was one of the good guys. [When I finally arrived], I came in in this really emotional state, because prison isn't good for people. My mum was in this mode of, “I can see you're upset. And also here's this really reasonable, really supportive-seeming officer who's sorting things out.” I was like, “There is no such thing as a supportive officer, and there is no such thing as a good one!” It's a very small stumble, in a way, of someone's ability to critically look at a situation and understand that everyone who wears a key in a prison is part of the problem. Even if they seem receptive, even if they seem emotionally supportive, even if they're giving you your medication, even if they're giving you skills, even if they're helping you with your English, blah, blah… The consequences of you not doing what they want you to do, i.e. being locked up more, being punished… [Your] ability to be in a good relationship with those people is off the table. That kind of understanding of things is limited if you see the people that are agents of that system as humans.
JK: Because you have to kind of trade your own humanity in order to enter into that kind of system [as an agent of it, e.g. becoming a cop or a prison guard].
I feel like I have these people-pleasing tendencies. I've somehow developed this instinctive belief—my body reacts in this way—where sometimes I feel as though, “Yeah, if I just can keep everyone happy, then I will probably survive right now.” I've been trying really hard to not do this, and notice when I'm doing it, and try to figure out when I'm doing things that I actually want to do.
When I was arrested, I was trying to be very… I didn't say “Thank you” or “Sorry” or anything like that [to the police]. But then when my solicitor came to meet me [in custody], the first thing she said to me was, “Wow, everyone in the police station has just been telling me what a polite and nice person you are.” I was like, “What the hell?” I wasn't trying to be aggravating or rude, but I was trying really, really hard not to do anything that might make it seem like I was being nice, or compliant. I was trying to just be neutral. I didn't speak. I was really bothered, and I remain really bothered by that. It's like, “First of all, why did they think that? And why did she say that to me?” It's obviously related to the really specific privileged context in which we were arrested for our sit-in: we were non-Black Oxford University students [engaging in a minor act of civil disobedience and clearly all sober]. That informed the relatively mild treatment that we all got. But I'm bothered by it because I'm like, “Oh, can they just, like, smell it on me? Can they just smell that ‘people pleaser’ on me?”
I don't know—I think it's something that is actually so political. I know that, for me, a large part of it comes from being an immigrant and experiencing so much shame [growing up], the constant knowledge that I need to make myself really small and disappear, to not attract attention, and to make these very judgmental French [Francophone] white people happy, which is actually impossible anyway.
When you're thrust into [a carceral] environment, it's hard because you still want to maintain your own humanity, and that involves maybe some kind of ability to see the humanity of others…? But also, that's not how it works; that's not where the context has put you. [Seeing the humanity of the guards will do nothing for you.] I don't know if that makes any sense.
A: As you're saying, if you don't feel safe, then you are in that state of fawning. You have to resist your own ability to see people's humanity [and therefore succumb to their ideological framework, succumb to your own subjugation], and you have to push yourself into a state of more precarity than your body is telling you you can deal with. And then, to maintain that requires a kind of vigilance. I think that's one of the ways in which, if you haven't really ironed some stuff out in your head about your politics, then you will just… not really slump, but you will be molded by those compulsions. Someone in here characterized the relationship between Bronzefield’s staff and the prisoners as: “It's like the prison is holding a gun to your head and then saying, ‘Be my friend.’” The almost desperation in the need for social niceties does tell you so much about what they will use to control you when physical violence is not as explicitly on the table as it used to be, or as it can be in a moment if you don't play by their rules.
Sometimes it's like: Is it worth it? To feel unsafe and uncomfortable and on edge all the time in yourself because of the way that you're being? [Because your behaviour is] what's perceived as being rude to people, or non-compliant? Is it worth that? You have to really believe that it is [worth it] in order to maintain it to any degree. Having people back me up on that front, having a bigger vocabulary than some people, and having the resources available to me that mean that [for example] I don't have to work a job in prison to have money (and if they cut my finances, I have good enough relationships for people to spend their money on me); English is my first language, blah, blah… There's lots of ways that those decisions, and the commitment to being uncomfortable, or making other people uncomfortable, becomes easier.
And even then, it's really hard, especially if you have to switch between [on the one hand] dancing and singing a prisoner's name and wishing them a happy birthday, having your breakfast and rubbing sleep out of your eyes—going from this relatively friendly environment of solidarity and cohabitation to then [on the other hand], stone faced[ness], [committing to] not interacting with a guard, or demanding that someone do something for you and then not thanking them. [It] is quite a brutal switch, because you're basically imposing the reality of prison on yourself. In that moment, you have to choose to be in prison and not pretend like you're not. But the risk of not doing that is that you then have the responsibility of untangling “what is prison and what isn't” in yourself rather than externally. That is the price: if you don't do it outside of your body, you're going to do it inside. From what I understand about social justice and how it plays out in our nervous systems—all of this research that goes into why people pleasers have certain kinds of autoimmune diseases—that is, for me, a cost that I am not willing to pay. I hope that I can also take on some of that responsibility from other people around me, and encourage people to see that when they are just quiet and compliant and keep their heads down, actually, they're internalizing the prison system.
All of us, in some way, whether you're in prison or not, are internalizing carceral frameworks of how to treat each other and how to be in the world. Here, it's just really explicit, but it happens in workplaces. It happens in universities. It happens on the street. It happens in interpersonal relationships, like [with] parents. It's everywhere, but here it's really like, if you speak to someone in a way that they don't like, they'll just lock you in a cell so you can't speak to anyone in any way. It's just much more concrete.
JK: It really is the materiality of that refusal. I really like what you said about how, even though you must refuse, it means that you're putting that in your body. I just think what you said is really, really, really, really well put. Thank you.
I feel like we've actually covered this, but if there was anything you wanted to say for this second question of, “How did you become politically engaged?” that you are wanting to say right now?
A: No, except, I just really celebrate the question. It seems like a bit of a cliché, when you're in certain spaces and people are like, “What radicalized you?” People maybe shy away from the question a bit, but I think it is a good one. I want to know the answers that people have to it more often.
JK: It's been really interesting to see how people interpret it, because I picked “engaged,” rather than any other word. I often think about one of the first protests I ever went to, which was actually an anti-Steve Bannon protest at the Oxford Union, and how hard it was for me [in my life] to actually step into protest, even though I really wanted to. How it felt to be in that crowd, and how much it affected me, and how much [this question is] related to not just political conviction and political opinion, but also imagination. Being able to imagine yourself [doing certain things] and being able to wield your own agency, and also imagine yourself in relation to others. I have these markers that are really important to me, where I feel like I learned [a lot] through these very spontaneous moments.
People have responded differently [to the question]. A lot of people have talked about Tumblr, which was really big for me as well, I don't know if it was for you. Going on Tumblr and being like, “Wow, people are talking about all this stuff in these ways that I didn't know it was possible,” and stuff like that. [People have talked about] different sorts of movements, periods of history, in the past 20 years, they really engaged with. [One interviewee] pointed out that the question itself is also a bit leading, because it says, “How did you become?” which implies a before and after, and implies it as something that you've already arrived at—it's already happened, and you're evolved now, which is also an interesting kind of thing. It's hard to phrase it in a way that doesn't engender these kinds of expectations about narrative, about how we narrate ourselves.
A: But also it's: how did you get to where you are now? Not that it means that you have to go any further, or that you wouldn't go any further.
JK: I think this whole series is me just shaking my friends by the shoulders and being like, “I love you so much right now, please tell me how you became this person. I want to know everything about you!”
So how did you and I meet?
A: We met last May. My first clear memory is of you and [your girlfriend A] chain smoking while we waited for pizza, at the end of [the] day [at] camp [around the] beginning of night shift. There were lots of people around, and then… Maybe not in that moment, [maybe] another moment afterwards [was] a post-yurt debrief, in that kind of context [where] it seemed to me that it was lots of people getting to know each other for the first time. I realized that some people knew each other from before, from different university-coded spaces, rather than standing on the curbside at like 11pm, smoking and watching out for fascists.
JK: I think I remember that too. [It was that] weird period of time where there are so many people whose faces you recognize and whom you've seen, but that you know so little about. I think I only found out your name after we had had a couple conversations or interactions already, and I remember you were like, “Oh, I'm dating a farmer…” And I was like, “They're so cool. Who is this person?” It was such an intense time. I don't know if I can come up with an analogy to describe what it's like to… Maybe Brownian motion, to be like, “Oh, I bounced past this molecule a few times and suddenly I know things about them, just from the way that we've sort of floated past each other.” I think that's really lovely.
A: I think there's also that fun element of there being a digital version of you that I didn't know was the physical version of you until later—these two parallel lines of getting to know someone that then converged. And then you're like, “Oh shit. Cool. Like, this tracks.”
Can I ask you a question?
JK: Yeah, sure.
A: What do you think would be different if we’d known each other for longer, or if we were in person [right now], if I wasn't in prison, or if you were in prison?
JK: Wow, that's a lot of different things. I think so much would be different. I feel very constituted by my relationships, for better or for worse. And I think that if we'd known each other for longer, we would have just chatted so much more shit. I feel as though we definitely did not get to talk this much before you went to prison. Not for lack of desire, just mostly lack of opportunity. I was away for a year, and then also you were not necessarily always in Oxford during that time, either. I think we would have eventually had the opportunity to have all these kinds of conversations, but obviously you being in prison has hastened that chance. I'm grateful to get to know you better and get to speak to you and find out all these things about you, and find out all the different connections that we have, the mutual connections. The way that friendship spreads and emerges, pops up in unexpected and wonderful ways, across a whole city or [the] world.
I want to have more time with you in person. Something that we talked about recently that is really important to me is cooking together and sharing meals. Right now, I'm looking at a poster that [A] bought when we were in Marseille at this Palestinian cafe that says Free Palestine. If we eat together, we stick together. It’s a posterized version of a photo [depicting], I think, a feast amongst the rubble in Gaza. I don't know where the original [photo] is from, but it's a really striking poster. I really believe that: if we eat together, we stick together. I always want to cook for people, and cook with people, and eat with people, and do the dishes. It's really corny—the me of a couple years ago would have been like, “You know how Mao said that the revolution is not a dinner party? But the thing is, the revolution involves dinner parties. It involves conversation. It involves passing the salt…” Now, I feel like I can't evoke that without a hint of irony, because I feel like I was so naive, even just two years ago, in terms of what I often felt to be the gap between my political ideals and beliefs and convictions and my actual material engagement with stuff. That gap was often just because I didn't even know how to get involved. So much of it was related to social anxiety as well, which is why I find it so cool that you just kind of rocked up off your boat and were like, “Hey guys, I'm here now with the encampment.” Eating together is something that I'm really excited for.
What were some of the other scenarios? If I was in prison… I don’t know. There is a lot of romanticization and valorization of being a political prisoner that often [might have] to do with a desire for some kind of absolution for those of us in the West—as though if you ‘give up’ this freedom, you can be above critique in some way, because you've done the ultimate sacrifice, which I don't think is a very healthy or politically useful way to look at incarceration. I'm very afraid to go to prison. [If I did,] I think that I would also want everyone I've ever known to write to me and to be able to talk to people.
No matter what, I'm glad to have met you and to be with you in whatever form is available.
A: Likewise. That “people that eat together stick together” [phrase] really reminds me of my friend J who is one of the most incredible organizers I've ever met, but also one of the best cooks. She has this print that says, Build longer tables, not higher walls.
JK: That's really nice.
A: It's really, really good. I think the encampment, the way that it was set up to meet all of a person's physical needs—or [to] endeavor to do that—is what allowed it to be a space that I could access at the time that I arrived. I had, like, £1 that someone from the Oxford binder co-op had given me to get from a trans boxing class [in Temple Cowley] to the center of town. I didn't have a phone charger or my wallet, and my phone was dead. I had just dropped my boat off in Banbury, and my [then-]girlfriend had left me to go and hang out for the weekend with her friend. So I was without food or shelter or money or contacts for my friends, or phone battery or, like, clean clothes—I was just in this weird state of having absolutely none of the things that I needed, and then arriving at a space that endeavored to meet all of those needs in the name of a solidarity action. That [Palestine solidarity space] was the thing that I was more concerned about, in a way, than any of those other physical things—although obviously I'd be lying if I said that I wasn't a bit worried about where I was going to sleep.
Within, like, an hour of being [at the encampment], I had food, water, a place to stay. I bumped into a friend of mine in the queue to sign in at the welcome tent. It's mind-blowing. Someone had lent me a phone charger.
I wonder what it would be like if people wrote about all of the snack breaks and toilet breaks and fresh air breaks and chats with their friends that they were having as intermissions in the political manifesto that they were writing. I think it would be easier to see how linked material wellbeing and political commitments [are].
JK: I want to know what people were eating and what was going on [between the lines] of written words…
A: Everyone overcomes shocking physical, material conditions in order to do really admirable shit. But also, if someone's got food poisoning or long COVID, no way is that not gonna impact some of their writing. And I want to know about that.
I'm reading [Natives by] Akala and he’s talking about all of the people that [wrote] about freedom, that owned slaves. Why do you have to read someone's biography [which tells you about the contradictions in their life] in order to give yourself permission to disregard a lot of their [seemingly good] politics? Can't we do those things a little bit more abreast, if we don't separate the political and the personal in such a weird “mind versus body” type of [way]?
JK: Everything is political. Everything is personal. There's different things to navigate. Something that I'm always afraid of is that I'll get too into that [‘the personal is political’] thing, and forget about my own positionality in the imperial core; [I’ll] focus too much on myself. I feel like I often don't really know where to draw the line: [on one hand] it's important to pay attention to my feelings. It's important for sustainability, even if I don't want to do it for me; I can tell myself that it's actually because we all need to take care of ourselves so that we can actually have longevity and be able to expand our capacity. But [on the other hand] sometimes I [remember] that meme that's like, “I think that you guys are thinking too much about yourselves.”
At the end of the day, what keeps me going, and what I think is important… I think back now to your grandmother setting up all those chairs, taking them down, making all the sandwiches, typing up all the minutes—that's grueling work, often so gendered, that often goes really unacknowledged. But that is the stuff of life, and that's what needs to happen. Who's gonna do it, and how are they gonna do it?
A: 100%. This farm that I've been part of in Dorset, they've got this apple pressing week coming up, which has been causing some saltiness in the [Amu support] group chat—which I really apologize for. I've tried to guide someone to have a word with the person [who is] centering themselves and taking up people's time… Anyway, they had a prison staff member try and come to one of their events; someone that works as a nurse at a prison is trying to be involved. I think actually what the ask in that group chat was for me to write something [that would help] make the abolitionist politics of the space more explicit [using] my specific circumstances. Yeah, okay, I'm happy to do that. So I've been thinking about it, and I was drawing a bit of a blank, because last year, when we did the apple pressing, there was a lot of conversation about collective responsibility. There was a lot of posturing around who does the work and who takes care of these day-to-day details. We're all kind of anti-work anarchist types; also, all of us resent doing domestic labor that we've been socialized to do, blah, blah, blah… But while other people were having those conversations, me and two other people ([J] and a friend of mine) were slipping out of those meetings to go and do the actual work until 3am. Everyone went to bed, having their heads full of these really lofty ideas and collective responsibilities, while the responsibility that they have collectively signed up to do is being done by three individuals. I was so upset by it, because I really want to believe that, when it's clear that there's a certain amount of work that has to be done in order for things to function—not just in a way that suits someone's really high standards, but just [in a way that] meets our minimum needs—that people will actually show up in the way that they need to, or even in the way that they have [been] on paper.
[I ended up] being in this slightly managerial position, because I was seen to be one of the people that would know what work needed to be done. I refuse to be your manager. I won't let you put me in a position that I haven't signed up to be in, because you haven't done the thing that you signed up to do.
JK: —[just] because you want to cast yourself in this [passive role and have someone else manage things]; you want to give up the responsibility that you committed to.
A: I think that that is the thing—as you're saying, about people in prison being romanticized. People are really willing to absolve themselves around certain kinds of responsibilities when it's convenient, or even when it's not convenient… Enabling that is so dangerous. It would be better if I wasn't in prison, obviously, and it would be better if those people [on the farm] listened to what they needed to do when it was being explained, and then also didn't shirk the labor that I was doing [but that] they wanted to be seen [doing]… It relies on hierarchy, it relies on you acknowledging that someone else has control and power over you, for you to be able to be comfortable [being passive] in that setting. If you're in prison, or if you make someone else your boss, then you don't have to take any personal responsibility. You don't have to take the blame or think of criticisms for yourself because you're acting within the structures that we've all been taught are correct.
JK: That's really important, and I feel like that applies to so many situations, even innocuous ones. Ultimately, it's a desire to be able to give up responsibility, because then you can give up accountability.
A: Totally. We're overloaded with the illusion of choice, and therefore we have to make loads of fake decisions all the time. I do have a lot of compassion for that vibe of, “I just don't want to have to make a decision.” Or, “Just tell me what to do.” [There is more] tolerance [for that] in certain spaces. That's hard. In some ways, that's just not what we need to be about. We need to see this kind of workplace attitude of, “You see it, you own it.” If you see that there's an issue there, then that's your responsibility to take on and figure it out.
One of the wonderful things about Fivepenny Farm is that everyone is jobless and really struggled to work in a standardized [setting]. There is a lot of [situations where] people [are] starting a job that they can see me doing, and then getting distracted, or running out of steam, or needing to rest, and then another batch of people later on [are] encountering what is a half-finished job for lots of valid [yet] sometimes really infuriating reasons. [Then those people are] picking it up and finishing it. The dopamine… There's different motivating factors [behind] why people are doing the things that they're doing, and why they're showing up in the way that they're showing up. It can be really beautiful, and it is really transformative, whether people lean into the idea of, “We're actually trying to build something that can sustain us all and that requires a lot of work,” or whether they're just there and [are more] like, “Let's hang out and eat loads of really good food and sit in a wood fire sauna.”
JK: They’ll be like, “Who made the food? Who's gonna do the dishes?” It goes back to that question of “[Everyone wants to have a revolution] but who’s gonna do the dishes?” I've always thought I would love to do the dishes, actually, but maybe that's just because I often feel as though I don't have that much else to offer. Sorry, I just had a flashback to how when I was a kid, every time there would be a huge fight [in my family], I would go and do the dishes. Wow, that's crazy. I think it's just because there's always these small things that you can do and you can feel satisfied with your task no matter what. I've always found fulfillment from that.
Ever since I got back from Provincetown, I've been mostly focused on doing different kinds of support work, which is never-ending, but which is also about honoring and maintaining and reflecting on what I already have, instead of necessarily going off to find some new thing and start from scratch and feel really heroic. I don't know. But then I also wonder if I'm just hiding by doing that, and maybe I am a little bit.
A: Yeah, it's hard to know.
JK: What does the word care mean for you?
A: Partly, it is a word that's pretty loaded. I used to work in the health and wellbeing sector, so I think there's a way that care has been weaponized for capitalism, individualism, and also a way in which it's just so broad… It's wages for housework and emotional labor and weaponized incompetence and all of these things that come out when you break down what care looks like in different settings. It’s [got] a spiderweb of meaning attached to it. I don't even know where to start.
JK: Maybe another way of putting the question would just be: What forms of care have felt meaningful for you lately? What frameworks through which have you been thinking about the idea of care lately? If that makes any sense. It could be in stuff that you've been reading or stuff that you've been experiencing or hearing about, or just stuff that you think care isn't. Or what you think is overblown or that the discourse gets wrong about care.
A: I find myself always struck when people are really, to me, visibly tending something. Like if someone is interacting with a plant in a certain way, or setting out objects, picturing almost an altar—people just moving with intention, slightly more slowly. I think I can be quite impulsive, and sometimes that means that my movements end up being quite destructive in some way, [or it’s because] I’m trying to maximize some kind of efficiency. I'm doing things that I think are important, but I'm not necessarily doing them very carefully. There's an element of carefulness in some people's movements, and the way some people eat, the way some people take time to answer something, or think about things before they say them, that I admire, and [that] I find myself wanting to work towards a bit more.
For me, the ways that I experience care on a personal level, and then the way that I want to act out care are completely boundless. I feel it in every moment, all the time, towards everyone and from everyone. I guess it's a way of never feeling alone or never feeling isolation, [and being surrounded by care] is a threat, isn't it? It’s a threat to the hegemony… But there's lots of ways that people are prevented from being able to feel things or experience care and all of the grief that I think we should all explore. What happens when your ability to care is warped and weaponized against you? People having baggage [is something that] sometimes we maybe belittle a little bit. It's actually just this social… I don’t know if it's a [social] failing, because it's not like it's happened and then it's over, or that [what’s they’ve experienced] is necessarily totally bad or whatever—but we should take responsibility for the fact that we create a society in which a 15-year-old, for example, thinks that it's a good idea to stab a young trans woman 30 times, or put a baby in a plastic bag at an allotment. [That’s] just a couple of people that are in this prison: stories where they're physically in prison, but the factors that have led up to their imprisonment are not something that they've been born [into]. It wasn't inevitable that those things happen, and it wasn't inevitable that those people [end up in] prison. The way that I'm able to think about [fellow prisoners] are a result of the ways that I [myself] experience care. There's also surprising things: maybe they do actually share a lot of the ways that I think about the world, and care about things and people in the way that I do.
I think I thought about care in this kind of “self care” context before I came to prison, [in] initially a very idealized way—and then [in] a very cynical way. Now, I don't think that there is a kind of care that isn't collective, that isn't hinged on… I can't even extricate it from everything else.
It's also the prison staff. This idea of a “duty of care” is much more present in my mind [in this] setting where there has to be legislature in the name of care, because otherwise it's not a guarantee. Even when it's in legislation, it's not a guarantee.
In a much more straightforward way, like the ways that my friends have anticipated my needs and gone above and beyond to meet them from outside prison; the thoughtfulness involved in holding me as myself and maintaining the mirrors around me that all of my friends are, that make me feel more like myself—[more like myself than] I might do on the outside, even—is completely astounding. And then all the people that I'm meeting in here, who have much less reason to give a fuck, because they've got so many of their own problems around them all the time; we might only know each other for a week or a day or an hour. There's no guarantee, or there's not necessarily a future, and there's definitely not a history, but there is just this kind of extendable present moment in which people decide to give a fuck about each other all the time. [People] take on board the ins and outs of someone's meeting with their solicitor, and their upcoming court date and their bail applications. And stand in the lunch queue for each other and share soap and cream and offer everything that they have, and more than they have, more than they're supposed to have, as well, to each other. It's an act of defiance. It's a form of resistance, but it's also just way too big a word.
JK: Thank you for that. That's something to really think about. When there's no past and no future, there's only now. The way that I've rephrased it has made it sound really corny, but it was not corny when you said it.
Some of us, who are your friends, have felt sometimes a bit uncomfortable with the way that campaigns to support political prisoners will kind of frame political prisoners as exceptionally not deserving to be in prison. Maybe [these campaigns don’t] always take an abolitionist stance of, “Actually, no one should be in prison.” It can be really hard for people that are in prison [in] non-political prisoner contexts, [incarcerated for] reasons that are often invisible to the general public. What has been very heartening: I really am glad that you are forwarding the details of some of the people you meet who could do with some extra money; we now have this group where we're [sending them money and] trying to make sure that [they’re] all getting similar amounts of money. A mini admin support circle has emerged. I'm really glad that you thought to broadcast [your fellow prisoners’] details. We who want to support you, also want to support them, because we have these resources and we can do that.
A: I don't necessarily talk about it that much, because I know that it's not really the point for you guys, but the fact that I have really good friends is, in the context of this, just a known thing. You know: “I have short hair. I have amazing friends.” Because I have a cell full of photos and enough material… I give people photos and poems and stuff that people send me, little care packages of zines and dried leaves maybe Qesser has given me. [Note: On 2 November, Balfour Day, Qesser and Amu both began their hunger strikes from inside HMP Bronzefield. Although they began their hunger strikes together, Qesser, a Brown Muslim woman, is facing much harsher and more neglectful treatment from the prison compared to Amu.]
There is kind of a sense of abundance that comes from just me having you as friends, let alone the fact that, then, you as friends are also extending that solidarity and network to people that don't know you and [who] you don't know—which makes such a huge difference.
The other day, I went to Charlotte who was locked in, and I was like, “How are you doing? I heard you're locked in, and you flooded your cell. Are you all right? I've made you this hat [for] when you're out.” And she was like, “I'm not being funny, but get your friends to get me out of prison.” Part of me took that seriously and wanted to be like, “They would if they could, they're trying!” or whatever. I mean, obviously, if my friends could get people out of prison, I probably wouldn't [be here]! I just really love the [attitude of], “I've had enough! Call your friends.”
JK: That's so cute.
A: The idea that my friends have the power to pull people out of prison, that they're like, a trusted source, a trusted set of people to go to in a time of crisis. What a good reputation.
JK: I love what you said about abundance. [Another mutual friend] was chatting to me a couple weeks ago about how sometimes she feels as though she doesn't have that, that she needs to extend herself even more so that she can give even more love and even more care, because she feels sometimes like that she doesn't have enough of it to give, that she isn't doing enough. I was kind of trying to be like, “I think that maybe even the word ‘extend’ is not the best word to use. Maybe it's more about ‘abundance.’ It's maybe more about this notion that, ‘I have so much love that it just spills out and impacts the people around me without me even necessarily extending it on purpose, because it's just so much.’” Actually, with the allotment that [she] has been working so hard on, that is literally an example of it. She has planted all these vegetables, and there's so much of it that she has to give it away, and she has to give it to her friends. That is the abundance. It's not saying that it isn't hard work, or that it isn't a lot of effort. But I guess, for me, I feel like my identity or the way that I see the world is constructed very textually—words are very important to me, and so I would want to be like, “Let's not even use the word extend. Let's try to think of it in a different way, through different words. And maybe that can help us reframe some of the things and reframe how we look at the things that we already have and what we're already doing, and how we can make that more expansive without burning out.” So: abundance. I love that.
I'm so glad that you share these poems. Oh, I wanted to put on the record that I love, that me and Jon now have a correspondence because he liked my handwriting, and I'm so happy about it. I'm like, “Oh, yay, let me write more things by hand and write more poems and share more of that.” So that's really nice.
A: I love that. I can't explain to you how happy I am when my friends become friends with each other. Really strong point of joy.
JK: What are some things that you're currently looking to learn or learn about?
A: Prison abolition. I just got these printouts from [another mutual friend], [Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s] Golden Gulag and [this friend’s] work on Starbucks unionization, which I'm so excited to sink my teeth into. Also reading the English legal system textbooks. Natives by Akala.
I really would love to learn Arabic. The Prison Education Trust wouldn't fund me because I'm not sentenced. And I was like, “Can you just make it easier for me to fund myself? Can you write me [something]?” I'm excited to learn more about my friends, and I'm excited to learn what the trees outside the walls of Bronzefield are like when I get out eventually and see them from the outside, and to learn more about the constellations. A million things I’m curious to learn and a million things I'm glad that I have learned in the past.
I love all of my skills. I was just thinking earlier about how glad I am that I know how to knit and crochet, and how that’s thanks to the unwaged—unacknowledged, quite often—labours of women around me, like my grandma, my neighbour, my mum; how much that feels a kind of ancestral thing to my hands and to my nervous system. And also how much the way I think about things and the way that I remember things is shaped by the motion of needles and hooks and yarn, and the shapes that they make in space, and the way that each centimeter of fiber goes through your fingers like a million times, and the intimacy that that gives you with the material world—but then how that also becomes internalized, and it's part of your inner landscape.
JK: Wow, that's beautiful. Thank you. Is there anything else that you would like to say or to ask me?
A: I have a lot of questions.
JK: Oh, my god, okay, I'm gonna try to keep it brief, because I feel like I ramble way too much.
A: I'll read out these questions as I've written them. Maybe just take some stuff that stands out. How does surveillance change how we talk to each other? What sparks your curiosity about a person? Is there anything you find difficult to talk about? How do you know if you're dissatisfied with an answer? Do you feel a distinction between an incomplete answer versus an answer that you don't like / disagree with? And then kind of as a follow up to this was: Do you believe that people will say what you want them to eventually, with the right information? What were your intentions before you started these interviews and the interview process, and have they changed? How has doing interviews changed how you talk to people or get to know them outside of the interview framework?
JK: Wow, thank you for these questions. Surveillance has definitely changed, impacted how we talk to each other. There is a lot of stuff that I don't feel able to say or feel scared to say, or if I say it, I will lie awake at night being anxious about it. But I also think that it's an interesting constraint. I've always been very interested in what's unsaid and what is in gaps; the materiality of silence or of absence. So I'm interested in how different constraints can really shape what's communicated.
What makes me curious about someone? I think I'm curious about everyone, but I'm definitely more curious about people if I'm close to them, or if I find out stuff about them that I didn't necessarily expect. I'm kind of curious about everyone. I would like to know! I used to be really addicted to reading Humans of New York. I've always been really interested to find out what people think matters. I think that everyone has something interesting [to me], but they don't always express it. It doesn't mean that I think everything is great. I'm very critical about the fiction that I read, for example, and I've read a lot of fiction where I've been like, “Wow, this person has, like, nothing interesting to say.” [At the same time] I don't think that [that comment is] strictly true. It's more that I think everyone has something interesting to say, but sometimes what they think is interesting is not what's actually interesting about them. If that makes sense.
A: Do you feel curiosity as a physical sensation? How do you experience a light bulb in your brain, information you want to follow?
JK: I think it's one thing that leads to another, that leads to another. Maybe for me, curiosity is more like my regular state. And what would change sometimes is suddenly not wanting to talk about something anymore, if I feel that I'm bored, or if I feel as though we've kind of exhausted the possibilities… I have a really good friend of mine, and she's really wonderful, and she's a real thinker. She can think about something forever. Sometimes when we're talking about something, after a while, I'm like, “I'm ready to tap out.” I'm like, “Okay, I feel as though I've lifted the stone and looked underneath it. And I'm happy with having understood both of our perspectives on this and talked about everything. I'm ready to move on now.” But she wants to keep talking about it, and I'm like, “Why?” Sometimes I’m just like, “Okay, I'm gonna go to bed now.” So I think that's funny.
Also the question of: When am I satisfied with an answer? I don't know. If I could, there are things that I would want to keep talking about forever and ever. What interests me the most about stuff is when people talk about themselves, actually, and their own stories and their own memories and experiences, and how that informs everything. It is trite, but to me, everything is political, but everything also has some kind of personal angle. I want to know what's political and what’s personal for people. I'm very, very nosy. Sometimes I get tired sooner than I run out of curiosity. Sometimes I'm like, “Okay, I'm tired right now, but this is something that I will probably think about and revisit.”
And there are a lot of stories that people have told me from themselves that become kind of reference points for me. I think of other people's stories a lot, and sometimes I want to [tell] them [to someone], but then I'm like, “Maybe it's not my place”—but they've become these important images and stories like for me, and I think that that's really nice, and I really like that.
Are there things I find difficult to talk about? Do you mean in my life or in these interviews? I guess both.
A: I guess I'm interested in your interest. I'm wondering why you want to follow the things that you are interested in following and why you would be less interested in going somewhere. Like, why is that? Why do you stop? Do you feel the conversation going somewhere that you don't want to follow? Or do you find that maybe there's certain conversations that you're less interested in having with certain places, certain people, this feeling of like, “Oh god, we're going here,” you know?
JK: Yeah, I think so. I think it often depends on what I already know about the person and what we've already talked about. I think the things that I would find difficult to talk about are things that feel like they're going to be kind of a dead end, or they're not necessarily going to lead to new discoveries. I don't know if that makes any sense. I love to talk about everything, and for me, it depends so much on the context and the constraints. So like, in this interview, I would only not want to talk about something if I was like, “I don't think that this should go on the record. I think that we could talk about this a different time and maybe it doesn't really fit into the concept for the interview.” But there's always stuff that I want to talk about later, or there's probably always going to be a context—especially with my friends who I already love and want to know literally everything about and eat their brain—where I want to find out about this thing that they alluded to briefly, that I didn't get to ask about.
Ultimately, that's what this project is about. I've always wanted to do something like this. I have done interviews in other settings, I've done interviews for my magazine where we pick someone who's doing notable creative work, and then we go and do this interview, and also they have to be Sino. I really love doing these, whether it's with people that I know better, or people that I know less, and I love the excuse… I've created an excuse for myself to go and interview whoever I want, and interview the people that I love and be like, “Literally tell me everything about you.” I wish we could sit down for 24 hours straight and you just give me the bio of your whole life, day by day, every single memory that you've ever had. And then, tell me also how you think those memories are relevant to you today.
When I was working on this fiction project that I've decided to stop working on for now, back when I was in Provincetown, I interviewed my friend about a common experience that we had, which was in 2019 to 2020, we were both part of Oxford Against Schwarzman, the uni campaign that was protesting the Stephen A Schwarzman 150 million pound donation to Oxford Uni to build a humanities center. [My friend] was one of the main students involved, and for a lot of different reasons the campaign didn't [succeed]. Now the humanities center is almost finished, and it's called the Schwarzman Centre. There are a lot of ways in which it didn't necessarily work out the way that people wanted it to, and I was thinking about definitions and valences of defeat and success in political work; about emotions, especially emotions like shame… Well, shame is a big one for me. So I interviewed [my friend about his experiences. It was actually the first time we had properly debriefed about it in that way.]
That was technically research for my novel that I was working on at the time. But I realized that I liked doing the interview, doing that talk and excavating that which we have never really talked about—our common experiences. What were we both feeling at the time? I found that so much more interesting than the novel that I was trying to work on. [Then] I wanted to do that with everyone. For me, the topic remains around how people see different ways of being politically engaged, and what their feelings are about it, what they've done and what they want to talk about, and what their narratives are.
Finally, do I feel that eventually people will say what I want them to say. I first thought you were just asking me this [just in the context of] my life. But in the context of the interviews, there's nothing that I really want them to say—if I know someone well, sometimes I want them to bring up a specific thing in the interview that I already know about them, which I would prompt. But otherwise, I really want to follow the person and do what they want to do. Some people have been much more brief and to the point, which I also think is fine and great.
A: I think it is a great concept as well, giving people the gift of an intentional conversation where they're given permission to waffle.
JK: I love it. It's actually so fun and soothing to go back to the transcript and turn it into something that makes sense—delete all the filler words and stuff like that. It's those little calming tasks that I really like, just putting things where they're supposed to be.
I'm interested in oral history and different kinds of specific forms of text. For example, oral history, prison letters or the epistolary form. These are all specific forms that come with their own possibilities and affordances that I'm interested in thinking about.
Thank you so much for doing this with me and for taking this much time out of your evening.
A: No, my pleasure. It's been really a delight. Today has been a bit of a weird day. I think it's hard to feel like yourself in these kinds of contexts. It's nice to be able to delve a bit more into what has led me to to believe what I believe, and to know the people I know, and to care about them in the ways I care about them, which—that's what life is about, I guess.