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Fellow human's questions

I received several wonderful questions from a fellow human as a response to a video my partner and I shared recently. I wanted to spend quality time with these questions, to reflect deeply on them.

I will be interested to hear how you keep your milk from leaking without a bra or pads.

Producing milk and breastfeeding my child are some of the things I look forward to the most. Both my grandmother and my mother breastfed their children. I plan to breastfeed for at least a year. I plan to do it in public too, including the university and conferences. Undoubtedly some fellow humans believe that academic conferences are not spaces for babies and breastfeeding, but I disagree. I am not only an academic, but also a mother. And a biological body. An animal. In Denmark, it's not unusual to breastfeed in public, and when I see fellow humans breastfeeding their babies, I feel empowered to do the same, too.

I also look forward to experiencing and navigating all the challenges that come with breastfeeding. Many fellow humans suggest that a bra is a necessity when one breastfeeds. I don't question their experiences, and I believe that individuals should do what feels right to them. Yet, I have tried to wear a bra (or rather, bras, as I've tried different ones) when I was much younger, but it was not something for me. I felt much more comfortable without a bra on both physical and psychological levels. So I decided not to wear it, ever. I decided not wear bras in pregnancy either, or when I breastfeed. The basic tops that I wear have a close fit, and if the leaking problem becomes severe, I will see if I can insert a cloth (such as a basic flat cloth diaper) inside the top. All my basic tops are write, which shows wet marks very quickly. Perhaps I will switch to black ones. I have observed fellow humans embracing milk stains too, and I found it incredibly inspiring.

Having said that, I can only hope and make plans at this stage (I've just stepped over the 26 weeks mark). I will write about my experiences in this autoethnography, including the situations where something didn't go as planned. While I hope that everything will unfold as I envision it, it certainly might not be the case. For example, I was hoping to stay away from medication as much as possible during my pregnancy. But I had hyperemesis gravidarum, and medication was something that helped me survive in the first trimester-beginning of the second trimester.

I have a sincere question about how you plan to handle the situation as your child grows older and wants other items that he sees his friends having?

I receive this question very often. I intend to get to know my child first. My mother and stepfather experienced the opposite situation with both me and my brother, which they found very difficult to navigate. They expressed love and care via gifts, via buying things for us. They would always try to find out what my brother and I wanted, to give us ideas of what is out there in terms of toys and technology, to tell or show us what other families had, to bring new things into our lives. Both my brother and I found it overstimulating. We wanted to spend quality time with our parents, to talk, to go for walks. We loved nature and our pets, but we didn't love stuff. We preferred to play with household objects. With shoe boxes and sea urchins and corals that our grandparents had. I would stare at books with pictures for hours before I learned how to read, and when I learned how to read, I wanted to read books. I wanted to do craft and collect flowers and leaves to press them in between the pages of the books. Maybe my child will be like me and my brother, or maybe not. I certainly intend to show to my child, from the very beginning, how wonderful nature is, what he can find in nature, what is edible. But if he prefers human-made toys, then I will have to navigate his preferences in a way that honours his authenticity.

Also at what age do you think you will allow your child to make his own decision about whether he wants to follow extreme minimalism as you do?

I don't plan to impose extreme minimalism upon my child. As a child, I was not an extreme minimalist. I certainly didn't want furniture, toys and a lot of clothes, but I always brought back home many objects from nature. My room was always full of twigs, flowers, stones, even bugs. I would make toys for my pets from whatever we had at home (e.g., shoe laces and paper for cats). I had many books and many plants. I had art supplies. I would not prevent my child from doing similar things. After all, he is not me and certainly does not have to follow my exact path. Having said that, I plan to have dedicated spaces in our home where I can practise extreme minimalism, and also spaces in our home where he can allow his preferences to unfold and thrive. This is not to say that I am ignorant of my own influence on my child. But I hope that I can influence him positively and offer an example that I didn't have (but would very much like to have) growing up.

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Some things I left behind

Calendar, busy-ness, waking up early

In my late teens-early twenties, I still thought that it was important to fill up my calendar with various things to do and various events and places to be. This attitude to my time was something I inherited from my family of origin. For both my mother and stepfather, it was difficult to imagine doing nothing, to have a day free from any activities. They loved always doing something and going somewhere. In my late teens, my day would typically look like this: I would get up very early in the morning when it was still dark outside. I would then go into town to meet my classmates to discuss projects, then we would attend lectures. Afterwards, I would go to a gym or a theatre or to some extracurricular activities. In the evening, I would be studying again or hosting guests. I would usually go to bed after midnight. I would rarely sleep more than 6 hours.

My mother died when I was 17, and I moved to another country soon-ish after. I still remember the beautiful, overwhelming, newfound sense of freedom to decide for myself what to do with my time. For a while, I still felt guilty for failing to fill up my days with activities. I was wondering if I was indeed living a fulfilling life. Was I lazy? Was I on a path of healing and authenticity? 

These days, in my mid-thirties, I finally healed from the internalised need to constantly do stuff. I try to keep my calendar as empty as possible. There are still important meetings, deadlines and appointments, but so many fewer of them compared to 10-15 years ago. I am protective about my time and my time with my yet unborn baby. If I have an important meeting on a certain day, I will never have another one on the same day. I will not visit my friends and relatives on that day either. This allows me to fully recharge and include into each day the things that I love, such as reading and writing. 

I don't any longer try to wake up as early as possible to do more. For many years, starting from the first day at school, I woke up with my alarm. These days, I live without alarms as much as possible. I live with the rhythms of nature and my body. If I schedule meetings and lectures, I schedule them for late mornings or early afternoons. In my industry (academia), we very rarely perform tasks that are genuinely urgent, and scheduling a meeting a few hours later than planned makes a big difference to my mental and physical health. 

Imposed aspirations

I was brought up to believe that university was the only legitimate path in life. Afterwards, I was expected to have a good career (read: a well-paying job and fast progression), live in a large apartment filled with many things. I was expected to play a musical instrument and have children in my 20s. Now, after being in academia myself for many years, I do not believe that this is the only path in life. I will never frame university education as the only way to succeed in life to my own child. I had intentional breaks in my career, and I loved them. They were the times of intense and deep spiritual growth and healing. Perhaps I didn't earn as much as I would have done otherwise, if I didn't take these breaks, but an extremely minimalist lifestyle is much less expensive than, for example, the lifestyle that my family of origin envisioned for me. One day, I realised that I simply didn't need all the stuff that money could buy. That I could pursue a truly nurturing, fulfilling, authentic, simple life rather than a life filled with shopping for a new kitchen every now and then, face creams that would be getting more expensive as I aged, bags, cars, and foreign holidays. I could live in a small apartment and enjoy every square metre of it. I could enjoy free glasses that I got from our local byttestation (swap shop), whole, home-made foods, stones and shells from a local beach as decorations, books borrowed from a local library, wearing the same simple outfit every day.

Early in my life, I realised that I didn't like music. My mother played piano, and my stepfather played guitar. Many of my family members did the same. I was expected to do it, too. Personally, I found all sounds, apart from nature's own music, overstimulating. Later in life I was told by a psychologist that I had sensory processing sensitivity. I loved to paint, read and write. I went to an art school, but left it after some time because I realised that I much preferred doing art for myself, as a therapeutic activity. I didn't need formal art education for that.

I postponed having a child until my mid-thirties. I wanted to wait until I was genuinely ready, that I was on a path of spiritual growth, that my life's philosophy was in place, and have a child with a person I could envision staying with for the rest of my life. Having said that, I also had many fears and misconceptions in relation to becoming and being pregnant and having a child. I will say more about this in the coming months. 

The need to justify myself

Early on my path of sustainable minimalist living, I felt that I had to justify myself. While I am happy to explain, with gentleness and care, why I practise certain things, I no longer feel the need to underpin every practice with justification. For example, in my early twenties, several fellow humans were often saying to me that I needed a car. These days, in such situations, I prefer to set boundaries after referring to my ecological (or spiritual, aesthetic, health related or financial) commitments. 

Reproducing hierarchies

Growing up in a hierarchical society, even as someone whose political stance is anarchist, has certainly had an effect on me. Towards the end of my PhD, my supervisor plagiarised my work. While I had no doubt that reporting him would be the right thing to do, I also had challenges with the action itself. Will it prolong my PhD journey? Will the university take his side? Will my funding be withdrawn as a punishment for confronting someone "above" me in the academic hierarchy? I empathise with my younger self, but these days I would not hesitate to report an incident such as this immediately. And this is what I always advise students to do, too. Dismantling internalised hierarchies feels incredibly important, and it goes both ways: I do not treat professors as humans "above" me and I don't treat students as someone "below" me. 

Feeling shame about being frugal

When I was growing up, many fellow humans in my social circle considered frugality a negative word. They associated it with not being able to afford something, which they perceived to be an indication of a lack of success in life. I am critical of this approach. I try to live a frugal life. With my partner, we invite into our life the items that will last us a long time. When something that we usually buy in our local cooperative supermarket is on sale, we buy multiples of this item. We generally try to avoid buying what we need at full price. We do what we can to avoid food waste. We forage when we can, repair items, borrow items, and don't mind small imperfections manifesting on the objects that we use.