Emmanuel Modupe (he/they)

The Less Domesticated I Become, the More I Choose Us

I have spent much of my adulthood learning that I am a terrible house cat.

People have tried to hand me perfectly respectable lives and I keep finding open windows.

Marriage. Monogamy. Gender. Careers. Parenthood. Voting. There are so many things we are taught that good, responsible people are supposed to do, and I have spent years asking myself an increasingly annoying question:

But do I actually want this?

I have learned to vet my choices.

I want to know whether something has passed through the furnace of my own discernment before I call it mine. I want to know whether I am choosing from desire and conviction or moving from guilt, shame, obligation, fear, and the promise of social approval.

Eventually, I had to apply that same scrutiny to voting.

I have been told that voting is my civic duty. That people fought for my right to do it. That responsible people vote. I have watched people who fiercely believe in autonomy suddenly become comfortable with shame and coercion tactics when someone does not vote, or does not vote the way they believe they should. That has made me raise my eyebrows on several occasions.

I am not interested in convincing anyone not to vote.

I am interested in whether my choices are actually mine.

Strangely, questioning what I was told to care about did not make me care less about other people. It made me care more intentionally.

The less interested I became in being a good house cat, the more interested I became in being a good neighbor.

I care about mutual aid. I care about learning about racial disparities in healthcare even when I am not the person experiencing them. I want friendships that receive the material devotion our culture usually reserves for spouses. Give me friendship anniversaries. Emergency funds. Shared resources. People who know who to call when something happens to me. I want us to consciously choose what responsibilities we are willing and able to hold for one another.

Recently, I cried watching Black young people protect their Latino neighbors from ICE. They poured water on agents, stood alongside their neighbors, and refused to decide that someone else’s danger was none of their business.

That is the kind of civic engagement that moves me.

Their neighbors did not need to share their identities for their liberation to become worthy of participation. They simply decided: what happens to you concerns me.

I want to practice that kind of relationship before catastrophe arrives.

I dream about houses close enough together that we could build tiny bridges between them.

I imagine grocery shopping and cooking together. Susu economics. Money intentionally circulating through our communities. Children surrounded by constellations of people who have chosen responsibility for their flourishing. Care work distributed according to capacity. Friendships with rituals, ceremonies, investment, and infrastructure.

I want to know what happens when we stop organizing our lives around isolation.

Maybe the question stops being, “How am I supposed to do all of this alone ?” and becomes, “What could we create together that none of us could create alone?”

This is where democracy becomes interesting to me.

I do not want institutions to be the primary place where I practice my politics. I want my politics visible in the architecture of my ordinary life.

I want sovereignty within myself, consent within my relationships, care within my community, and solidarity with people whose lives may look nothing like mine.

Vote if voting is an embodied expression of what you believe. But what I am more interested in is what happens after you leave the ballot box, when nobody gives you a sticker for practicing your values.

I have stopped waiting for the macrocosm to teach me how to be free. I want to practice freedom at the smallest scale available to me and let it ripple outward.

Maybe I was never meant to become a better house cat.

Maybe I am learning how to live in a pride.

Another world does not only need people who believe it is possible.

*It needs people already practicing how to live there.