[0.1] THE RADICAL BADDIE

the thesis for this project and an exploration of THE RADICAL BADDIE archetype

Radical simply means ‘grasping things at the root’ - Angela Davis

🌱 My Roots

My family comes from Garhwalis, or more broadly Pahadis (“of the mountains”), an ethnolinguistic catch-all group of ethnically mixed people residing in the foothills of the Himalayas across Nepal, Northern India, Kashmir, and Bangladesh.

Garhwal was occuppied by the British from 1815 until India’s independence in 1947. During this time, my more recent ancestors with their relative caste privilege, were afforded privileges and opportunities through the British such as opportunities for employment and education in English.

While my ancestors were in survival mode trying to take advantage of whatever slim opportunity they might have in this new world order, we slowly over a few generations lost touch with our Pahari culture, spirit, and traditions.

Even though my sisters and I have largely lost touch with our indigenous wisdom, I believe we can find our way back to it and integrate it with the identities we hold today. The image above came from a matrimonial site for Pahari women and it delights me to no end how it captures the “sweet and salty” spirit of the women in my family. We may lose things through the trauma of enduring colonization and capitalism, but we also have gifts and resources from our ancestors in our bones.

Growing upper middle class in Toledo, Ohio is probably how my ancestors might have envisioned paradise for their descendants. Temperate seasons, access to nature, safety, cleanliness, order, predictability. Heat in the winter and AC in the summer. More than enough money to get basic needs met with enough left over for treats and special occaisions. Never worried about getting food on the table. A high quality education alongside the time and money to afford extra-curriculars like sports, dance, and art classes.

My ancestors’ wildest dreams 😂 Pic found and captioned by my sister Shivani

For me, Toledo was less paradise and more purgatory. It’s funny because it’s only now as an adult that I can see both how privileged *and* painful it was for me. While most would describe my childhood as precious and protected, my internal experience was tortured - anxiety-ridden, stressed, lonely, confused, emotional highs and low lows. An insatiable thirst for life, fun, and adventure. Often agitated by authority. So many rules to be followed!

I thought that by leaving home and becoming an Adult Woman, I’d *finally* be able to be the best version of me - confident fashionable weird creative emotional and left alone in peace (lol).

Instead I found out exactly how much of a shit show it was outside of my family’s bubble of protection.

☠️ The System

Rupa Marya has also written an incredible book alongside Raj Patel called Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice. In it they unpack how our biological systems are inflamed by the injustices of our political and economic systems.

We are in the midst of a man-made policrisis. We are facing an avoidable climate apocalypse, but our window of opportunity to do something about it is slimming.

White Supremacy, Patriarchy, and other hierarchies of social supremacy have separated us from our selves, from each other, from our planet. The vast majority of the collective are oppressed, exploited, marginalized, and made vulnerable to varying degrees within the system.

We have access to knowledge, technology, wealth, and abundant natural resources for ALL of us to live happy, safe, productive, and creative lives.

Instead, we’ve invented whole sectors of meaningless work that only make the rich and powerful, more rich and powerful.

The collective suffers the double whammy of both struggling to survive under the rules and authority of The System, while believing we can’t do anything about it [also see double consciousness].

Capitalism’s kryptonite🧪 what makes it powerful *AND* its greatest weakness, is the spell it has on us feeling disconnected from our own magic 🔮

We believe our best options are to flow alongside The System and not rock the boat. We suppress our intuition and instead pursue what our families and communities and institutions expect of us. We lose touch with our creativity and critical thinking.

We don’t have spiritual systems that inspire and empower us. Instead we’re ruled by our and our parents’ fear, shame, anxiety, grief, and despair. We spend more time fighting each other from the relative safety of our tribes, instead of cultivating collective liberation.

The spiritual crisis of our time is how few of us even have a conscious spiritual practice at all. I’d argue neither the intellectual agnostic nor the blind faithful are either conscious or spiritual.

I’m obsessed with this podcast. Upstream’s tagline is Unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics - so good. This is one of my favorite episodes that changed how I think about politics and spirituality, and how they might strengthen each other.

Our Power is with the Sacred Feminine 🌺 & Indigenous Wisdom 🌎

We all reach forks in the road over our lives where we have two options - choose the more weathered, safer path or the riskier road with potential promise of treasure in the clearing outside of the dark forest.

It’s not our fault entirely that we choose the safer route more often. The rise of Capitalism and Patriarchy in our relatively recent human history sent our magic, the Divine Feminine and Indigenous Wisdom, violently into the shadows.

It takes time to become aware of our conditions. To feel pain that we may have been suppressing. To process intergenerational trauma and cultivate a spirituality of our own. But The System wins when we think we’re not capable of doing this work of becoming the most embodied and integrated versions of ourselves.

This project is all about going left at the fork and taking the path into the darkness, into the forest, facing our fears and our shadow 🖤 We train, prepare, and go with our power and magic securely in hand 🔮✨

The Sacred Feminine 🌺 is our light and our intuition, keeping us divinely guided, protected, and reminded of our purpose. Indigenous Wisdom 🌎 helps us heal and gain strength, equipping us to confront the monsters that we inevitably must slay along the way 🗡️

And!!! We don’t do it alone. We walk this road alongside other healed and awakened baddies 💖

Our collective’s Dark Night of the Soul is the tunnel through which we wll find spiritual and political liberation - if we choose to take the less weathered fork in the road.

Good thing it’s not just me guiding us on this journey. We have a whole pantheon of RADICAL BADDIES illuminating our way.

Profile of The Radical Baddie 😈✨

The Radical Baddie as an Archetype

Across these categories and sub-archetypes of The Radical Baddie, there are many more symbols, stories, and examples that exist.

This energy isn’t constricted to gender. Roy Kent, Pedro Pascal, Tom Hardy, Hasan Minhaj, Trevor Noah, Eric Effiong, Lil Nas X, Bassem Youssef - all are Radical Baddies.

Folks in the LGBT+ community are so often brilliant representations of Radical Baddie energy because we’ve done the work of identifying the Masculine and Feminine energies running within ourselves and what is most authentic for us to embody. We’re not attached to arbitrary gender, sex, or relational constructs. We do the work over and over again of constructing identities most authentic to ourselves.

Once you understand the multi-dimensionality of the Radical Baddie, you’ll begin seeing the archetype everywhere.

We each know and love Radical Baddies in our life, at work, in our communities. They’re our fiercely devoted grandmothers, our take-no-shit mothers, our sheroes. They’re the devilishly creative and compassionate. They’re the disciplined and principled in their faith and work. Radical Baddies are also Bad - makers of good trouble, being labelled disruptive and evil by The System.

Radical Baddies dance with duality and find power in what’s been relegated to the shadow - our sensuality, our imagination, our criticality. Our madness, badness, and wildness 👹😈🐺

Who are the Radical Baddies in your life? How do you see this archetype show up in the collective?

Coming Up Next

Today is so special - The Radical Baddie’s launch day 🥲💖🐣 If you’re reading this on Monday November 6th, 2023 thank you for being here for the birth of this big baby! You can learn more about the project here:

🧙🏽‍♀️The Wizard Behind the Curtains

What else you should know about me, arohi bhatt (she/her), your co-pilot on your Radical Baddie journey:

• Former non-profit Learning/DEI practitioner turned MBA turned anti-capitalist cutie 👩🏾‍💻🌸 Learn more about my work at arohibhatt.com

• Queer, Neurodivergent, Zillenial (millenial but Z at heart)

• Midwest raised, Miami grown, & Bay Area planted

• Highly Sensitive & Big Feelings (CPTSD survivor + late-diagnosed ADHD)

• Midwest-raised, Miami grown, Bay Area planted

• Yogini, Dancer, and Profane Spiritualist

• Currently studying: indigenous and ancestral herbalism with Tierra Rituals, tantra, play, intuitive movement

• I’ll probably trigger you 🤪🥰😈

💌 Coming Tomorrow 11/7: In the Beginning, God Was a Woman 🌍

Thank you for being here 🙏🏽 I’d love to hear from you! Leave a comment with questions, reflections, what you’re excited to hear more about.