Mutate Habitus

Habitus—the economized guide to narrowing down everything into a box.

Habitus— the key to understanding how everyone who lives in that box has an individual experience.

Habitus—the chicken pen that you live in, the hand that feeds you grain, the other feathers in your coop, the place you sleep at night, the foxes that watch you.

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What is habitus? A way to define or to show that definitions mean nothing? Everything is habitus, the people, the parenting, the food, the culture, the body.

I inhabit my body while my body inhabits its habitus. It is multiple, I am a first child in a nuclear family, I am a queer with very few queer friends. I stand with my chin tall. I’m not overly beautiful, but not overtly ugly. I consume media with a majority of my generational peers.  I can’t afford lunch, but I’ve been overseas. I’m expected to get married and have children.

 I am a writer in a big city.

How does my writing engage habitus? Through aesthetic values, I brand myself in my individual style, cut and copied from writers before me.

I dislike long and overbearing sentences that hold no information in them that is gleaned to me as interesting. I prefer short. Punchy.

I like multi-faceted characters. I try and write interesting and relatable people with an edge of humor. I like moral conflicts in a story and try to avoid having my characters ever be too 'good', by the traditional standards.

I dislike heteronormative and conforming, but my style is very cookie cutter. In my state of old habitus, consistent conforming to the norm was key to a good story. Over and over again a recycled romance is spun in my hands.

It’s unsurprising, considering in my old habitus all I would ever consume was paranormal YA romance. We are talking twilight levels of straight teens with angst issues. It was good if it made me feel good.

I have changed habitus. Schooling has changed my habitus, though I feel like the potential to change had to already be under my skin. An appreciation of arts and culture from my mother perhaps?

Breeding a new habitus becomes easy when you welcome change. The re-calibration of my habitus was a smooth transition from the comfortable to the unknown.  Consuming new media, from cultures, bodies, and mind vastly different to my own.

The next step to transformation of habitus would be movement of self. Consuming more media that influences the creative output is a way to travel the world without leaving my environment.

However, confronting things and experiencing a consciousness unlike my own is how I would want to mutate my habitus.