Hey, what is an Asnuma anyway?
This was posted to the original Asnuma blog on August 24, 2016.
Nothing, friends (Mom). It's nothing.
There was once a little wordsmith who was fond of carving out new words from the marble of phonemes. On a lazy weekend morning, she sat with her orange tabby cat, Tigger, and mixed two sounds together, then two more, and finally two more. When she had fashioned a gibberish word – asnuma – she called it a day. “How do you like that word, cat?” she asked. The cat snoozed in response. Despite this feline apathy, the word has rested comfortably on her tongue since.
he little wordsmith lived in a confused state, passionate about social justice but not always certain what the term meant in the real world. She whiled away the years advocating policies she now abhors, spun around wildly in a room full of opinions, failed to do the one thing she wanted: To make the world a better place. It was as though the world were on fire, and she was clutching a cask of gas instead of an ewer of water. The little wordsmith sobbed when Trayvon Martin was executed for the crime of being a young Black man, dark of skin and full of dreams for the future. She wept again for Syria, then for Honduras, for Orlando, girls around the world, mentally ill men and women gasping for air and help and understanding. The fury and confusion threatened to overwhelm her and then she reached into her drawer and pulled out her old word: asnuma. Perhaps she would do something with it someday. Nothing too radical - the wordsmith was not Cesar Chavez, after all. But something to give herself her own little corner of equality in which she could learn from her mistakes, polish up her failures, turn them into the social justice she hunted.
When the little wordsmith decided to dedicate her life to science and sociocultural awareness, the word awaited her. The word stood in the doorway, arms crossed, a grin dancing across its face. "What must I do?" the little wordsmith asked, anxiety clawing away at her as though she were made of dry straw, able to fall at the fist of the wind. "What should I do if I want to make the world a better place?"
"Listen," came a mysterious response. "Always listen."
All this time later and the little wordsmith would like to think of herself as an activist, but she has "miles to go before she sleeps." She knows it, knows that it is not enough to call herself pro-choice with her fist bunched into a symbol of power or to advocate positive psychiatry and all its beauties. And therein lies the problem -- the little wordsmith knows fully well that advocating the right thing often amounts to advocating the cruel thing by mistake.
When the little wordsmith scooped up her word to look at it, polish it up, she knew she must do something significant with this collection of consonants and vowels. And so she sat down to engineer a blog, one dedicated to social justice, science, medicine, and the arts. When she made to put the name on top of the webpage with the same tenderness reserved for the stars atop Christmas trees, she smiled. For the first time in many years, she was content.
And so the little wordsmith will fight for the following:
Mental health. There is an ongoing fight, one to recognize the existence of mental health conditions, to grant men and women the power to make their own decisions, and the hope to live openly without fear of rejection.
Reproductive rights. Women have the right to live safely.
Education. Education is not a privilege, but a right. Children and adults combined share these rights, for there is no such thing as too old to learn.
Environmental policy. Our planet is sick, and there is no reason to continue to ignore this.
The little wordsmith learns, and she listens, and she grows, and she tries with everything she has to do the right thing. Asnuma: A world worth fighting for.
