Radical Imagination: A New Chapter for LILIPOH by Nico Haven

Radical Imagination

A New Chapter for LILIPOH

Nico Haven

 

I know stories change the world because they’ve changed mine.

For twenty-five years, I performed as a cis, straight, neurotypical man—until 2020, when it all collapsed under the weight of inauthenticity.

In that moment of freefall, so many things in my life to that point felt fake, foreign, incompatible with a future I wanted or could envision for myself. The narrative I had at the center of that life—a narrative I had inherited from a society built upon binaries, where a boy likes GI Joes and a girl likes Barbies, and where those binaries are strictly enforced—was no longer one around which I could build.

The center would not hold, and I had to come up with an alternative. My life depended upon it.

So, being the storyteller I am, I wrote through this personal growth “Hero’s Journey” upon which I was embarking. Day after day, I sat down at my baby-blue 1963 Olivetti Lettera 22 typewriter and journaled. Through my writing, I wrestled with the big questions of my personal growth journey—Who am I? What is authentically me, and what artifices and performances need to be torn down to make way for the real me? What kind of life do I want to live?

To answer those questions, to be able to understand the present and build a new future, I needed to face my past. I processed past traumas, I confronted and built a relationship with my fear, and I welcomed my authentic queer, trans nonbinary, autistic self back from its exile. Nico was always there, was always me, but I learned at a young age that it wasn’t safe for me to be authentic, so I constructed a towering internal infrastructure of repression to survive. I created a persona self that stood in the breach and took the blows to protect my authentic self until it was safe for it to come alive.

There was a moment, at the end of a long interregnum where the two selves negotiated the transfer of power, when I sat down at the typewriter and conducted an interview of sorts: I would type out questions that my authentic self had for my former self, then I would type whatever responses bubbled up from within me. It was amid this where my former self realized that their job was done, that they had carried the torch until it was safe enough for Nico to emerge, that they could rest now. As I finished the “interview,” I felt my former self slip away peacefully.

The four-year journey brought me through metaphysical waters that were soaked with mystery and beauty, where I felt in communion with ghosts and felt attuned to the logic and movements of the Universe in a way I had never experienced before. It was through these experiences that I also discovered the poetry that had always been in my blood and that now sings out of me. The inherent beautiful mystery of poetry was a perfect compass to help me through.

I wasn’t alone on the journey, though; I was helped along by the stories of others who had gone through their own odysseys. They held up mirrors for me to see my reflection, to see that others had gone through similar things as I had and had survived—and, more than that, had thrived. Seeing creators post on social media about their experiences and showcasing their beautiful androgyny made me feel more empowered to dive into my own gender identity and presentation journey. And reading the words of writers and poets and thinkers—many, like James Baldwin, Muriel Rukeyser, Pablo Neruda, Joseph Campbell, and others with whom our lifetimes never overlapped—made me believe in the interstellar power of storytelling to connect across time and space.

Their words and stories made me feel less alone, and they also helped me embrace a radical imagination for both my new authentic life and the world in which I would live it.

“Radical imagination sees the world not as it is, but as it could be,” declares Everyday Activism Network:

 

Radical imagination is the courage to envision a future that is completely unlike the world we have today. It is limitless. It doesn’t react to or get discouraged by current realities. It imagines—without constraint—that anything is possible and that, collectively, we are capable of achieving the impossible.

…

It’s not just the ability to see a radically transformed future; it’s understanding how the past brought us to the present, and how the present can get us to that future…By being rooted in the past, present, and future, radical imagination combines hope for the future with pragmatism about the present.[i]

 

I first encountered radical imagination as a student—I’ve focused my studies and work at the intersection of social justice, community development, and sustainability, and my professional background is as a communications consultant for international sustainable development organizations—and it had been a valuable perspective through which to see and approach the world even before my gender transition journey.

Growing up as a millennial in a world that felt volatile and uncertain as it faced serious existential threats, radical imagination helped me stave off the passivity and disengagement of cynical fatalism, and it helped me envision a place for myself in that world where my individual contribution could be part of a collective effort for a better world.

And the world certainly feels like it’s changing, and the pace seems to be accelerating (especially in the past four years since the COVID lockdowns and when I was going through my personal growth journey): climate change is accelerating, armed conflict and genocide is destroying humanity and nature around the world, fascism and authoritarianism is on the rise in many nations, the mental health crisis is worsening, and attacks on healthcare and bodily autonomy are increasing in volume and severity.

The center will not hold, just as it didn’t in my former life.

And just as I did as I came out of that life, using radical imagination to revise the narrative, change the language, and broaden the horizon can break us out of what clearly hasn’t been working and envision a better, more inclusive, more human and humane world.

That’s my vision and hope for this next chapter of LILIPOH: as managing editor, I want this to be a place where radical imagination—through new ideas, new voices, and new perspectives—is fostered towards broadening our collective horizons and building a better world together.

Because the only way we build the world we want is by doing it together.

 

Nico Haven (they/them) is managing editor of LILIPOH. They are queer, trans nonbinary, and autistic, and they write novels, poetry, essays, and memoir. They are based in Philadelphia.

[i] Everyday Activism Network, “What is Radical Imagination? How To Use Your Radical Imagination to Envision a Just and Equitable World,” January 4, 2021, www.everydayactivismnetwork.org/archive/radical-imagination.