Happy 2024! ✨🪩✨ Welcome to a Year of Living Plurally

Cheers to you and yours as the new year begins! 🥂

Ash Chudgar here. At some point in past few years, you subscribed to my email newsletter — a newsletter that has never existed until this very day! I’m writing, finally, to welcome you to a little experiment I think you will enjoy.

I am calling it a “Year of Living Plurally”: a year-long practice of curiosity about the many forms of diversity, multiplicity, and community we encounter in our daily lives. Here’s the idea:

• 💥 As 2023 ends, it’s painfully clear that the radical individualism of late modern life is a disaster for pretty much everybody. Alternative ways of life can be difficult to imagine, let alone work toward.
• 🤔 That’s why I am obsessed with plurality. In recent years, experiences I’ve had — learning about justice movements, helping with organizing campaigns, becoming an Internal Family Systems practitioner, discovering the vastness of neurodiversity, and more — have led me to think that “living plurally” might be a healing and liberating way of life.
• 💡My working hypothesis for 2024: By deliberately paying attention to plurality whenever I can all year long, and sharing what I encounter with you, we might be able to imagine new forms of healing and liberation for ourselves and our communities.

Let’s be plural together

As a newsletter subscriber, you’re part of the experiment! Every week or so this year, I will send you a newsletter to share some observations about the multiplicity I encounter in myself, my day-to-day life, and our cultural environment.

• 🎁 I will give you stuff to try. Each newsletter will include a little invitation for you — a practice to try out, a question to ponder, an article to read, a writing prompt, something to try if you want to.
• 🗣️ Write back whenever the spirit moves you. If my hunch about this topic is right, folks will sometimes be moved to write back — and if you do, I’ll incorporate what you write to me in a future newsletter (with your permission, of course). Argue! Agree! Ask for advice or offer it! Tell me what you want me to write about next!

The more you share about your own Year of Living Plurally, the more plural our shared experience will be, and the more we’ll learn together.

Content warning appetizer

The kinds of thinking I am going to do this Year of Living Plurally may or may not be what you want landing in your inbox. By way of warning or enticement, here is a little sampling of the topics I am planning to write about:

• Partswork! Practical tips and theoretical reflections about caring for the diverse community in your own head, drawn from my own inner exploration and my work as an IFS practitioner. (Members of my own internal family will undoubtedly contribute)
• Fandoms and other joy-centered communities, and why I am so sad that Twitter is ruined
• Piles of money: How do they grow? What do they want? Some helpfully weird ways of thinking plurally about capital
• Timely LGBTQ+ questions, like: Why does the existence of sexual and gender diversity make right-wing people so violently unhappy these days? Why is there so much white supremacy in gay porn? How can watching Drag Race change your life?
• “Fellowships of common suffering.” I spent many years in Alcoholics Anonymous, which has made me think a lot about how people heal (and get hurt) in communities
• Being a good community. To be human is to be a community: a vast environment of teeming microbes, a quarrelsome mental committee, a collection of genetic influences. What might it mean to care for the communities inside us?

If all this sounds interesting, stay tuned — so much more to come!

You can unsubscribe any time, and I promise not to be cross if you do. 😘

That’s enough from Ash on New Year’s Eve! My husband made a fire in the fireplace and we’ve got champagne in the fridge. Wherever this evening finds you, I wish you and everyone you love a year of healing and liberation, inside and out.

Cheers!
Ash