is this what you want?
Is This What You Want? (ITWYW) started during Pisces season in 2021 by community care facilitator Christa Lei. Initially, this newsletter was intended to serve as an email based wishlist for Christa over cute things that they wanted to buy, or have bought and consumed. Inspired by the late Things I Bought That I Love, by Mindy Kaling, the first iteration was to be light-hearted and fun. It was a place for levity and lightness to the highest degree.
Deeper into the pandemic, and further into Christa’s practice, it became clear that this needed to be more than just a place for consumerist desires— it needed to serve as a place to write, process and grieve what living in the United States has been like for anyone marginalized. More than that, the current iteration of ITWYW acts as a journal, a place for raw thoughts to be pondered and held.
The newsletter moved to another platform, and returned to Substack in Feb 2024, where the current iteration focuses on disabilities, patient advocacy, death work, queerness, polyamory through their lens.
Who is Christa?
Christa Lei (they/them) grew up on native Hawaiian land as the youngest child of Filipine immigrants. They studied Community Psychology & English at Depaul university, where they graduated with honours. Their professional experiences revolve around healthcare: specifically, patient advocacy, casework/care facilitation, and clinical research. Their intersectional identities as a fat, neurodivergent, disabled, queer, polyamorous, and third-culture person inform their personal and professional work. Their dedication to providing safer spaces for people like them led them to the formation of NYC-based queer futurisms collective, of which they are a founding member. A multi-modal and experienced creative, Christa creates and facilitates spaces for interdisciplinary praxis via community care. An emerging writer, their writing is published in Saffron City Press. Along with their lived experiences as a crip queer person, they have additional professional training in embodied social justice and death doula work (Going with Grace.) In their spare time, they dance, sing, write, travel around the world, point out all the puppies on the street, preach the gospel of Shrek, and create shared futures with their chosen family, including their loving spouse and two dogs in New York City.
Paid vs. Free
A free subscription gets you access to free posts, and podcast episodes.
A paid subscription gets you my eternal gratitude, and other special Paid subscriptions are only $7/month, which all things considered, is pretty wild. You also get more access to continued series, a paid podcast and further projects in development.
