Subversive Pathways: Your Life as Transformative Design

By Madeleine Rose Olson

Conforming is neither sustainable nor forever as the nature inside of us starts bursting from our ribcages. At some point, the courage arises to forge our own pathways, emerging with its own wildflowers from the terra underneath, sprouting, twisting, and evolving in the most elaborate ways.

Madeleine Rose Olson shares the jou

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Release date: May 3, 2022
• ISBN: 9798885042307

Book preview

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Subversive Pathways

Subversive Pathways

Your Life as Transformative Design

Madeleine Rose Olson

New Degree Press

Copyright © 2022 Madeleine Rose Olson

All rights reserved.

Subversive Pathways

Your Life as Transformative Design

ISBN

979-8-88504-121-8 Paperback

979-8-88504-751-7 Kindle Ebook

979-8-88504-230-7 Ebook

To my family for helping me cultivate the rhizome.

For Grace—for our collaboration in placing the next stepping-stone for each other by conjoining our many mosaic life pieces. I’d like to think puzzles invite improvisation and collages invite contradiction. We both are composing larger pictures.

For Dad—for cultivating what it means to build a home and take care of a rich and turtling garden where intricate roots can grow, heal, and wrap a haven nest around themselves. I have seen what it means for the gardener to brush the noise down to a shaven silence and watch the marigolds set on fire and get reincarnated as the sun.

For Mom—for showing me that being a designer is far more intuitive, imaginative, and resilient than we thought. You have embodied what it means to be a builder and path-forger of yellow beat maturation. We will shower all curious things to bloom resplendently and grow because rain in the sunshine is the most wonderful thing.

Contents

Introduction

Part 1.

Modularity

Chapter 1.

Building: Systems are Arbitrary

Chapter 2.

Agile: Design Thinking as Our Operating System

Chapter 3.

Paradox: Paradigms in Our Own Thinking 

Part 2.

Dynamism

Chapter 4.

Messy: Momentum Built Out of Multiple Movements

Chapter 5.

Autonomy: Creating Our Own Permission

Chapter 6.

Legacy: Your Life in Full Circles

Part 3.

Resilience

Chapter 7.

Breaking: The Battle is Inner Work

Chapter 8.

Healing: Intuition as a Source of Truth

Chapter 9.

Authority: Power Rooted in Our Humanity

Acknowledgments

Appendix

I always wanted to connect the dots, mesh the otherwise separated and be fluid. I’m anxious I must only pick one. or two. major/s. categories. Why this urgency to assign a label/s based on what my interests are? Why my claustrophobia to disassemble restrictions set by the institution’s mandate? To disassemble, block, by, block, and swim. Flo͞oid—I interpret F: fleeting / L: flexible / o͞o: weightless wind / I: dipping above surface level / D: defying resistance—carrying the flowing wind to land, assert, present. To say, I’m a major/ity in exploration. To say, major/s are high walls, chisel them down. To say, major/s are colored as multiple chords, blending tones, musical, heart string chords, and the numinous. I understand the need to label to forge identity. That you and I can group into the same box, find commonality, and shut the lid. One name can be an identity, perhaps. One name can pacify identity dare I. Say I am writing to revolt against a/the major/s of study but I don’t understand its meaning too often. I stretch meaning when the word of tight restriction can tangle me in trying to loosen myself, and swim.¹

—Madeleine Rose Olson / MRO

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1 stylistic imitation inspired by Whereas, Layli Long Soldier.

Introduction

The biggest risk to your life is not taking any risk at all.

Halfway through sophomore year in undergrad at Mount Holyoke College, I handed the Registrar’s Office a piece of paper that would sentence me to the unorthodox course of the next three years. This form noted my official declaration as an English major, and I couldn’t have felt more misplaced at that moment.

During that time of year, my social media notifications kept pinging off as my peers eagerly announced which major department they had chosen. The registrar had signs for every single discipline as a celebratory prop reading, I just declared my major in_____ ! It was a rite of passage to hold up those signs and have your picture taken, slab that photo onto the departmental bulletin board, and get assigned your corresponding advisor. 

The rule went as follows: Declare your major by spring semester of your second year or else you are not able to continue enrolling in classes next semester. I couldn’t believe it.

No doubt, I was tremendously ecstatic for my friends, but somehow that excitement didn’t translate to me. Isolation. Restriction. Tension. Claustrophobia. All of it became of me on this day. It all felt very cultish, like that scene in the movie Divergent when people are divided, applauded, and validated to join a faction. I realized in this moment I didn’t actually have a home.

Oh, how I dreaded each and every week marching us toward this doomsday deadline. The air felt heavy and tightening all of a sudden during my walks between classes, as if trying to shrink me into definition. I never liked wearing labels that already existed. If I hadn’t had my Chaucer’s Literary World English course in ten minutes, I would have rushed back to my dorm, turned on a hot shower, and scrubbed away the identity I had just been stamped with.

Oh, how I despised the college for making me assign a label to my interests, giving limited nomenclature to my metamorphic pursuits in creative expression. Don’t get me wrong, I understand the need to label when forging an identity—that you and I can group into the same box, find commonality, and shut the lid. Labels benefit us by framing the world into discrete and recognizable terms. Without a label, we call people undecided, exploratory, and undeclared, as they need to be defined to make them more identifiable. What people didn’t seem to realize was how they were harming identities that didn’t fit into existing, proctored taxonomies. Labels can be empowering but also limiting when you realize you’re everything, all of the above. I always wanted to connect the dots, mesh the otherwise separated, and swim.

Later that spring in my Literary and Cultural Theory course, I read Eve Sedgwick’s book Epistemology of the Closet, in which she unpacks classification and categorization as a violent act against non-normative identities (Sedgwick, 2017). I loved this reading, and it became my North Star in believing that I, too, could somehow strip away this false costume and start acting according to what felt more transient to me.

I wanted to combine performing arts with digital media, spoken word with nonlinear text, and moving image with the design of sound, space, and light. I wanted to synthesize the dramatic, visual, and technological arts in an interdisciplinary way that put these overlapping impulses in methodological conversation with each other. I wanted to be limitless in my direction in a way that any traditional double, triple, or quadruple major would never expect of me. That day at the Registrar’s Office, I began hearing my artbeat inside the letters heartbeat emerging from its cage.

You see, while getting interpellated and becoming kin to a designated academic department became a big milestone in everyone’s academic careers, I wanted nothing more than to lift that heavy stone off my chest, chuck it as far as I could, and evaporate into more fluid air. Subversive thoughts were broiling inside of me. The traditional major system was cheating my identity. If I could creatively bend the curricular perimeters gating me in, I could depart this entanglement and hoist my own creative sails into artful movement rather than anchored stagnancy.

Welcome to the department, Madeleine! the chair of the English department had greeted me in his office.

I had taken numerous courses in the discipline up until now, so it made the most logical sense at the time to declare my major in English.

Thank you, Professor.

Oh no, this won’t last, I was really telling myself. Intuition slowly told me I’d break up my relationship with the department eventually.

The truth is that I only declared my major as a placeholder. I was brewing up something much bigger. I think it would have been hilarious if I had instead declared an Economics, Mathematics, or even a Statistics major, all of which were subjects in which I had absolutely zero knowledge, just for kicks. I mean, my declaration sheet would still count under the registrar’s major declaration requirement needed for continuing on to the next semester, would it not? There were no rules otherwise.

Later down the road, after the breakup, the English department and I would be friends again. I’d take several more literature and writing classes, become a course mentor for several Introductory Literature Studies courses, and even win departmental prizes for my writing. But at this particular moment during sophomore year, I already knew what I had just done was fool’s play. I was starting to play the system.

The trajectory that followed was far from lighthearted wit, though. What I never could have anticipated was how, for the next few years, I would confront fraught relationships with institutional authorities, interpersonal confrontations, and inaccessible curricular design structures along the subversive path I had chosen to take. I never anticipated having serious conversations with my mother about dropping out during the lowest points of my life when my college experience became a place of exclusion, loneliness, and misinterpretation of what I was trying to do.

My greatest battles exposed my dissemblance to the norm, leaving me naked and untamed. Transcending into the radically authentic self requires your complete risk-taking, your promiscuities, and your inflamed art and soul lying unapologetically on the drawing table. I learned that while I was trying to curate my own masterpiece out of many disparately rare pieces, too often others assumed my story was an exhibit up for public voyeurism and critique.

This book is not a victimhood narrative of my personal experience, but rather a retrospective piece on embracing unorthodoxy in the present as I understand what the experience of creating my own major allowed me to do. If Mount Holyoke College was the place that enabled me to start provisionally creating in my undergraduate years, Georgetown University became the place in graduate school where I could finally acknowledge my life’s work as transformative design. This story is about what it means to break against constraints collapsing our personal abilities to succeed by designing what hasn’t been conceived yet.

Eight months later, I finally felt the impulse to share, like my peers had, my own announcement of what I was doing. I created my own creative manifesto after declaring my own created major. I was taking my biggest risk yet by inventing something when I had the chance to play it safe within an existing structure. There was no guarantee of what future employability of where this pathway would lead, yet this was the beginning of unlocking all the stunning opportunities that have come to fruition in my life so far. I majored in being subversive and unafraid of my truth.

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@madeleine_olson Social Media Instagram post photo, November 10, 2018.

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@madeleine_olson Social Media Instagram post accompanying caption, November 10, 2018.

I learned that sometimes we get to hold subversion as a shared gift to the world. It is a way of behaving in lost and stolen exchanges. A glass conversation. An indigo chance. As if paint untold the story of silence over color on the untouched canvas. A stroke of burnt shade, the temperatures we are now inside this momentum to save temptation. I cared about my divergence, and upon shedding what no longer served me, the game changed.

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I wrote this book to find out whether embracing unorthodoxy is unique to me or part of a larger impulse. What I have discovered contradicts how we have been conditioned to approach innovative vision and success.

Most of us believe the following about designing our own successful pathways:

Pursuing our life goals in defined, categorized, and clear-cut trajectories is what will lead tosuccess.

Expertise in our domain is required before we can start creating, building, or producing something of ourown.

Being good in one (or a few) things is better than being mediocre in manythings.

Adhering to logic, rationale, and the psychological ego is the only way to inform our decision-making.

The problem with these views is they limit our agility as humans. In fact, these assumptions are quite antithetical to the processes of design thinking.

Over the past year, I have researched and interviewed some of the most influential thought leaders in entrepreneurship, life coaching, and creative design whose stories have become some of my greatest inspirations. I have been fortunate to have conversations with some of today’s most inspiring modern path-forgers, including Emmy Award-winner Mario Armstrong, Forbes speaker Haley Hoffman Smith, conscious leadership coach Sagrid Tasies, hypnotherapist and mindset coach Lydia Bachmeier, and countless others.

What I have found is that their pathways resonate