Rejané Claasen

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Learning as I Go

I write from inside a collective experiment most of us didn't agree to but are participating in anyway. The names for things we inherited that no longer behave as promised: family doesn't always shelter; work doesn't always dignify; love doesn't always arrive with safety. What remains is partial, unstable, and still necessary. We're making lives with each other in the gaps, assembling care, loyalty, and meaning without reliable precedent. With no blueprint, we're learning as we fail.

These journeys don't announce themselves as crisis. Instead, it looks like ordinary fatigue. It looks like people measuring their words because rent is due and tempers are short. It looks like two souls finding comfort in the other while negotiating what can be offered without feeling foolish the next morning. It is care that happens in pieces. Care that happens with apologies attached. No one comes to explain how much is enough. You learn by giving too much once and remembering how it felt.

I am interested in how we learn to live together when the rules are no longer inherited. How kinship gets built without guarantees or bloodlines to fall back on. How intimacy changes when it has to carry economic weight, emotional weight, and political weight all at once, and how it buckles under that load. How work seeps into identity until we can no longer tell where one ends and the other begins. How identity stops being something you claim once and becomes something you negotiate, defend, and revise in relation to others who are doing the same.

The characters I write aren't exceptional. They aren't heroes. They're ordinary people trying to stay in relation when relation has become almost impossible. They survive meetings that go nowhere, double shifts that hollow them out, shared apartments where privacy is a fiction, long text threads that substitute for intimacy, unspoken expectations that calcify into resentment. They survive the slow, unglamorous labour of figuring out what is owed and what can no longer be carried without breaking. This isn't apocalypse fiction. This isn't about the end of the world. This is about the middle of it. The long, disorienting middle where the old world is dead but the new one hasn't arrived, and we're all just trying to make it through Tuesday without losing ourselves or each other completely. That middle. That's where my people live.

01_ Pluralism as Practice

Pluralism, as I write it, isn't a principle. It's survival work. We do it unevenly because some of us have been doing it all our lives while others are just discovering it exists. Some of us learned young that the world required us to speak multiple languages, inhabit multiple selves, make ourselves legible to people who would never bother to understand us. Others are learning it now, late and badly, only because their comfort finally demands it. This isn't a fair experiment. It never was. It asks everything of those who have already given everything. It exposes the old hierarchies even as it pretends to dismantle them. And still, despite this, we keep trying. That is what interests me. Not the theory. The trying. Apart. Together.

02_ Shifting Ground

I pay attention to the costs. Who absorbs them. Who gets to opt out. Who is expected to be flexible, generous, legible while others are permitted to remain fixed, stingy, inscrutable. The math has never been equal. It was designed not to be. But cost isn't where I stop because cost alone doesn't explain why we keep trying. What holds my attention is what we keep attempting together despite knowing the terms are rigged. The quiet negotiations that shouldn't have to happen. The fragile agreements we build knowing they could shatter. The moments when shared life almost works, and the moments when it fails, and the fact that we return to it anyway. That stubborn, foolish, necessary return. That is what I'm watching. Not whether it's fair. Whether we can bear to keep building it anyway.

03_ Briefly, Imperfectly

I don't write to offer reassurance. I can't afford to, and neither can you. I write to stay with what is happening long enough to see it clearly, to refuse the comfort of looking away. To notice the ways we're building something in real time without knowing whether it'll hold, what it'll cost us, or whether we'll recognize ourselves when it's done. This isn't neutral observation. This is the work of witness when the ground is moving and most people would rather pretend it's solid. I'm trying to see what we're doing to each other and for each other before we have decided what story to tell about it. Before we've made it clean.