I'm Theo Kitchener and I believe I know how to catalyse global system change! Of course, we'll need you and all your mates and eventually almost everybody else, to actually make it happen. System change happening will never be about me, but I wanted to share some of my story here, so you can start to understand me, and why I believe that together, we can reverse climate change, end oppression, find fulfillment for all, and much more.
After high-school, I travelled around Australia and began to understand how fucked the world was. I find suffering in others extremely upsetting, so I was really quite distraught about everything I was learning. I also got a shockingly inspiring glimpse into the awesomeness of festival culture, and realised that society wasn't anywhere near as amazing as what it definitely could be.
About...
So when I was 21, while writing a letter (remember those!) to an ex, sitting on a rock, by a babbling stream full of people playing in the water and making music nearby, I decided to commit my life to changing the world. Ever since, figuring out how to make utopia a reality, has been my special interest.
Over the years I've founded and co-founded at least twenty projects (I keep remembering more, lol). I'm an eternal optimist and a systems thinker, so I'm always learning from what didn't work, and planning what to try next that just might. In retrospect, it was extremely naive to think any of my earliest projects might have changed the world in the way I hoped they would, but over nearly two decades, my ideas have become far more strategic and useful.
It's a bit odd, but I've always just had faith that I would eventually figure out how to change the world. It's probably to do with three things: having been one of those 'gifted' kids, with my parents always telling me I could do anything I put my mind to; having inherited a mixture of unrealistic optimism from my mom, and successful practicality from my dad; plus being autistic means I can be somewhat naive and very single-minded.
Regardless, it's meant that I've never given up, no matter how much it's seemed at times, that radically changing the world just isn't possible. I can understand why other people believe that it isn't. There really are a huge number of massive barriers in the way, and none of the strategies people are currently utilising appear likely to work. A wise friend of mine once said that I'm kind of crazy for continuing to always believe that I'll eventually figure it out, but that it's always people who seem crazy at the time, who eventually change the world, so maybe it's for the best. I definitely do see things and think in ways, that most people don't because of this irrational faith.
Meanwhile, I'm a big nerd, so learning, dialoguing, synthesising, and sharing about important and tricky ideas brings me great joy. So whether I manage to achieve what I intend to or not, I'm happy doing this work.
As my various projects didn't work out how I'd hoped, I worked through many different political issues and barriers, and kept adapting around them. The last big barrier I came up against, five or so years ago, was no longer being able to believe that we could change the world without dealing with trauma. It just causes so many problems within the left, and I could see that in my own activism as well. I'd always known this at a surface level, and up until then had tried to deal with it at a surface level, but it just wasn't enough.
Although I'd always had a lot of gusto and had started many projects and so on previously, none of those projects had taken off or been effective to the degree I was hoping for. I realised I could envision a version of a system change campaign that could work, but it wasn't something I felt remotely capable of pulling off, let alone something I even felt safe going anywhere near. I could also see though, that if I were to work on myself enough, that I might be able to go there.
I decided to take a break from activism and trauma healing became a huge part of my political special interest. I've had a really hard time with life, including dysfunctional family stuff, bullying at school, homophobic harassment, long term depression, highly conflictual relationships, chronic health issues, substance abuse, social anxiety, gender stuff, workaholism, not knowing about my autism until my late thirties, and more. So while I'd been in therapy since my early twenties, the idea of throwing my all into experimenting on myself, and hopefully actually healing, felt very appealing!
It's been five years of going deep around healing stuff, and it's paid off! I've managed to largely work through my shit and build a pretty awesome life for myself. Nothing's perfect or anything, but things are already mostly great and I have the psychological tools to work through whatever comes up, so things are constantly improving as well.
I now have a beautiful home, secure and awesome friendships, good relationships with my family, and after a long string of unhealthy relationship times, am finally in a healthy committed relationship! I have a really great work-life balance (with hobbies for the first time even), and am dancing, singing, laughing, relaxing, and spending time in nature pretty much every day, often even with a skip in my step! I'm loving playing with my radical self-expression, gender, queerness/bisexuality, sex-positivity, kink and general silliness. I've got way more energy, am having more fun, and am getting way more done.
I don't have that half-dead feeling anymore, I'm less serious, and can even be really funny sometimes now! I'm drinking far less, watching much less tv, not going into shut down/freeze mode all the time, am sleeping better, amazingly no longer have any active addictions, health issues, conflict, drama, or social anxiety, and I feel resilient enough to deal with any future issues as they arise.
I'm excited to be finally starting to launch the projects and businesses I've been too scared and incapable to get going for years now. Over that time, there have been a lot of false starts as I kept thinking I was ready, but ended up not quite being there. I can't know for certain of course, but this time feels different. I'm definitely at least ready for the first two parts of what I want to do - coaching around personal liberation and changing the world and Radical Potential, an online course supporting change-makers to live wonderful lives and become more powerful agents of change. I'm guessing by the time I've got everything ready to launch the bigger projects to come after that, I'll be emotionally ready for them as well. It's all a process!
Along the way, as I intended, I've learnt how healing trauma actually works. What the underlying common elements are in all kinds of healing practices, and the various ways of accessing them. I'm really excited about sharing my understanding of healing, so that it doesn't need to take anyone as long as it's taken me to work through their shit and get to have an awesome life. We should have been taught this stuff in primary school!
All this growth has also meant that I now have a far healthier and more politically strategic approach, to many of the toxic norms of social justice culture. I'm less scared of rocking the boat, have stronger boundaries, am far less judgemental, and am far more open to being wrong and learning from others.
Without giving up on radical utopianism, my ideas have become less idealistic and more realistic. It's been hugely empowering and exciting, to let go of social norms around things like cancel culture, lifestylism, the left-right binary, burnout culture, overly idealistic organisational structures, activist culture's rejection of money, as well as spirituality, etc. and find creative, effective and anarchistic solutions to the underlying problems.
It feels like all those more healing-related shifts alongside and integrated with my previous political shifts, mean the system change strategy I'm working on might just have a pretty good chance of actually working this time! In my opinion, the radical left has a lot of great ideas, but shoots itself in the foot constantly, through both ineffectiveness and counter-productivity. If we can overcome those tendencies together, I believe we can reverse polarisation and build a powerful mass movement that can win on the changes we really need.
Of course, I have no idea whether or not I have indeed cracked the necessary code for healing/changing the world, so my next step is to put my current ideas into practice and find out. If not, I trust I will grieve, adapt and continue learning, as I've done every other time, until hopefully we are able to transform the world someday. I believe though that there is enough adaptability built into the latest iteration of my plans/theory, that we will be able to adjust as we go.
I've been dreaming about a better life, a better culture, a better system, a better world, and refusing to give up on finding a way. After nearly a couple of decades of experimenting, dialoguing, researching, feeling, and getting creative, I think I've been able to bring together the strategies and tools and ways of thinking that could make self-actualisation and utopia possible for all of us. I have so many exciting ideas, I'm really looking forward to sharing them!