# ALOK Is Microdosing Creativity and Rejecting Norms  ## About - Author: How to Be a Better Human - Title: ALOK Is Microdosing Creativity and Rejecting Norms - Tags: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/88dad2ef-62fa-4cea-8493-f7fa3d964c70 ## Highlights > The ultimate creative act is living Transcript: Speaker 1 I would respond to say life is our training. And as an artist, it's not about where we show up on stage or on text. It's about how we show up in our lives and the rest is just an imprint of that. And I'm a firm believer that the ultimate creative act is living, which is why I was so excited to be on your podcast, because I think so often people focus on my work as an education and gender. And that's so boring and unenvicious. ([Time 0:06:49](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d63b1d5a-580f-4bcc-91b6-f92851324944)) --- > How to Tap Into Your Creative Voice Transcript: Speaker 2 Well, if someone is listening and they're wondering how to get more into that, but they're not necessarily as in touch with their creative voice in all of the senses of what that means, how can they start? What are some ways that they can push themselves to get further into that? Speaker 1 I'm a firm believer that people are already doing the thing that they want to be doing. They're just micro dosing on it. And they have to just take a more enduring course. ([Time 0:07:40](https://share.snipd.com/snip/930efa32-7093-445a-b90d-5f2875f59358)) --- > The Connection Between Comedy and Poetry Transcript: Speaker 1 And what I began to realize is I was having just as much fun writing the poems as I was riffing on comedy. And so I started to give more time for that. And then I realized that actually comedy enhances our capacity to feel our acuteness of sensation. It gets us back in our bodies in a dissociated world. It makes us aware that we're part of a larger constellation. We often are laughing not because of how funny the joke was, but because people next to us are laughing. ([Time 0:14:48](https://share.snipd.com/snip/0b8cc189-e0f8-4226-8d5d-7821b5c00eae)) --- > The Importance of Emotional Honesty in Humor and Poetry Transcript: Speaker 1 Everyone is obviously coming to humor from a really dark, more-abend place. But rather than naming that, there has to be this ironic distancing of I'm cooler than I'm disaffected, I'm unaffected by this stuff. And I find that to be utterly unabicious and dishonest. And so what poetry keeps me is emotionally honest, hey, my jokes come from these places. Let me show you these places unflinchingly. ([Time 0:16:03](https://share.snipd.com/snip/f232642b-b1df-4844-a5af-ea6097d8da78)) --- > Culture Incentivizes Not Healing Transcript: Speaker 1 The truth is that we incentivize not healing in this culture. We live in an addiction culture, we live in an escapism culture, we live in a vapid, dissociated commercial culture that teaches people that the solution to structural problems is discrete moments of rapture that distract you and numb you. And then you go back into the ultimate form of citizenship and loneliness. And that was untenable for me. ([Time 0:18:55](https://share.snipd.com/snip/7584552b-6ca7-4724-8d8e-22ec36795c4b)) --- > Insight on Hatred as a Shield from One's Own Pain Transcript: Speaker 1 And actually what I found myself saying is, I'm sorry that you're hurting. I'm giving your pain back to you because it doesn't belong to me. And that's where I began to realize in a really tangible and cellular way. The reason people hate other people is because they hate themselves and it's because hatred gives them a sheen, a shield to protect them from actually accessing their own pain. People are not people who police other people's rights. ([Time 0:21:59](https://share.snipd.com/snip/94651487-e817-485c-aa36-c285b9b59328)) --- > The Illusion of Certainty Transcript: Speaker 1 And what I found is that I don't know who I am. And that's the certainty I was looking for, that actually certainty comes from uncertainty to what we were talking about before, from a lack of allegiance to the need of having a fixed self or a fixed gender or a fixed identity, actually a sense of accultivation of playfulness. I don't know. Let's figure it out. I don't know. Let's try it out. It moves the pressure when you begin to realize, oh, I don't actually need to find certainty, that all certainty is just actually an illusion. I'm just vibing and it shifts. ([Time 0:23:28](https://share.snipd.com/snip/8e993676-f88f-428c-861f-b41514e29ed9)) --- > Owning Your Own Identity in a Culture that Suppresses It Transcript: Speaker 1 I would say I'm sorry that no one gave you a choice on who you wanted to be growing up. I'm sorry that the people who said that they loved you actually only love the character they were creating of you. It didn't get curious with you on who you wanted to be on your own terms. I'm so sorry that our culture didn't give you permission to own your own body and own your own creative expression. ([Time 0:31:11](https://share.snipd.com/snip/8081cf6c-0be0-4c12-a89e-a4c0ff705a0b)) --- > Living evidence of harm from gender binary norms Transcript: Speaker 1 And so I actually am living evidence that the gender binary harms us in all of our incarnations. Because even when I was pursuing normativity was never enough. That's the issue with normativity is it is climbing a tree that bears no fruit. It tells us that we should spend our entire life chasing after something that does not exist. ([Time 0:33:43](https://share.snipd.com/snip/922a5c4b-d399-4796-915b-88c2feeda82e)) --- > The Power of Metaphors and Connectedness Through Journaling Transcript: Speaker 1 What a metaphor does is it allows us to take two things that are disparate and recognize that there's a bridge between them. And that's what journaling can allow us to do is that all of these discrete episodes that we're having in a life, they're actually bridged and connected. All of these objects that we thought in a room that were separate, they're actually intimately connected. So the backbone of any good poem is an appreciation of connectedness. And that's something I can only access through journaling. ([Time 0:39:04](https://share.snipd.com/snip/7b3811cd-26d5-40a6-a0e9-3f21d5f9de62)) ---