You know something else is possible.
Maybe you can’t quite name it yet. You just know you don’t love the world as it is. And, if we’re being honest, you don’t always love who you’ve had to become to survive, succeed, belong, be loved, or be considered “good” within it either.
You can see glimpses of something different.
People building relationships that don’t require them to disappear. Lives that aren’t organized entirely around productivity. Communities rooted in care instead of performance. People taking up space, changing their minds, choosing differently, making “weird” decisions, experiencing joy, and generally seeming a little more free.
And maybe you’ve thought: Okay...but how do I even get there?
Hi. I’m Weeze. Welcome to Liberatory Lens.
This is where we figure some of that stuff out together.
We question the things we’ve been taught to call normal.
I’m fascinated by the invisible rules we inherit. The ones that tell us what a successful life looks like. What makes someone good. Who deserves safety. What counts as knowledge. What bodies are valuable. What relationships should look like. Who gets to belong. What makes us worthy. How much we’re supposed to produce. What we’re allowed to want.
Some of those rules are obvious. A lot of them aren’t.
They’re tucked inside our families, workplaces, relationships, institutions, politics, identities, traditions, aspirations and sometimes so deeply inside us that we mistake them for truth.
Liberatory Lens is a space to pull those things apart with curiosity.
Not so I can hand you a new set of rules. But so we can ask better questions:
What did I inherit?
Where did it come from?
Who does it serve?
Does it still belong to me?
And what becomes possible if I choose something else?
That’s the work here.
A little about the person holding the lens.
My name is Louiza, but you can call me Weeze.
I’m a sociologist, strategist, liberation educator, TEDx speaker, founder and professional side quester.
My work has been featured in places like The New York Times, Forbes, and BuzzFeed, but credentials are only one part of what informs how I see the world.
I have spent years studying systems, socialization, power and liberation; and just as much time being a human being inside all of those things.
My work lives at the intersection of liberation, education, healing & razzle dazzle.
I don’t believe liberation is purely intellectual.
We can understand systems beautifully and still reproduce them. We can have all the right language and still abandon ourselves. We can critique the world and never imagine another one.
And we can do an enormous amount of healing only to discover that healing without possibility leaves us really good at understanding why we’re stuck.
I’m interested in what comes next. The messy part. The curious part.
The part where we start deciding what we actually believe, who we actually want to be, what we actually want, and how we build lives, relationships, communities and systems capable of holding those answers.
I think of that as becoming architects of possibility. (You can watch my Tedx by the same name here)
So, what happens here?
A few different things.
Through the Lens is where we think together. Essays examining the personal, cultural and systemic things we’ve been taught to accept as inevitable and what might exist instead.
The Resource List is where we learn together. Each month I curate educational resources around a particular liberatory theme.
The Deep Dive is where we go further. We go deeper on the month’s Resource List with another resource and pull the theme apart, add context, complicate it, and figure out what it might actually mean for how we understand the world. Here is where you will also find questions designed to help you engage critically rather than simply consume information.
You’ll also occasionally find But. And. Also.—because very few things worth talking about are as simple as the internet would have us believe and A Question I’m Sitting With, where sometimes I have thoughts but absolutely do not have an answer.
In other words:
We’ll learn some things. We’ll unlearn some things.
We’ll probably realize we were wrong about some things.
We’ll ask better questions.
We’ll practice being honest about what we actually want.
And hopefully, we’ll become a little more capable of imagining, and building, something different.
One last thing.
You don’t have to arrive here already knowing the right language.
You don’t have to have figured yourself out.
You don’t have to perform enlightenment, politics, healing, liberation, or certainty for me or anyone else.
You are allowed to be messy here. You are allowed to be curious. You are allowed to contradict yourself.
You are allowed to realize something you believed for twenty years doesn’t fit anymore.
You are allowed to want something you’ve been taught you shouldn’t.
You are allowed to not know yet.
Curiosity without shame. Rigor without perfection. Liberation with somewhere to go.
That’s what I’m trying to build here.
If that sounds like somewhere you’d like to spend some time, subscribe.
Come think with me.
Let’s see what else is possible.
Learn More & Connect
You can learn more about me and my work on my website
Watch my Tedx Talk
Learn about my foundation: The Asafa Collective
Connect with me on instagram @accordingtoweeze (and threads cuz I have too much fun there)!
