Most of us inherit language before we inherit choice.
WHY RECLAIM?
By the time we're old enough to question a word, we've usually been using it for years. Work. Health. Success. Family. We didn't choose these meanings. We arrived inside them, the way you arrive inside a house someone else built, with the furniture already in place.
Some of that furniture was built with care. Some of it was built to serve arrangements of power that had little to do with our wellbeing — colonial, capitalist, patriarchal, ableist arrangements that needed certain words to mean certain things in order to hold.
Reclaim is a place to notice the furniture. Not to burn the house down, and not to pretend we can start from nothing. Just to ask, honestly: did we choose this arrangement? Does it still serve what we actually value? What else might fit here instead?
Words are not containers for meaning.
They are arguments about it.
WORDS SHAPE WORLDS
Language doesn't describe the world. It arranges it.
Call something a resource and it becomes available for extraction. Call it a relation and it becomes someone you're accountable to. Same forest. Different obligations entirely.
Call a person's exhaustion burnout and the problem lives inside them, waiting to be fixed. Call it a signal and the problem might live in the conditions around them instead. The word doesn't just name the situation. It decides where we go looking for the cause.
This is what language does, quietly, all day: it tells us what counts as normal, who counts as reasonable, which forms of care count as legitimate. Most of the time we don't notice, because the words feel less like decisions and more like facts. That's usually the surest sign a word has done its work well.
WORDS CURRENTLY BEING EXPLORED
Sixteen words we keep returning to. Not definitions — invitations.
01
WORK
What if work were measured by what it repairs, not only by what it produces?
02
REST
What if rest weren't earned, but simply available — the way breath is, the way light is?
03
HEALTH
What if health were less about eliminating difference, and more about our capacity to be in relationship with what is?
04
CARE
What if care weren't something one person gives and another receives, but a shape two people make together?
05
COMMUNITY
What if community weren't chosen for comfort, but built through a willingness to stay past disagreement?
06
SUCCESS
What if success meant leaving a place, a person, or a relationship healthier than it found you?
07
RESPONSIBILITY
What if responsibility meant the capacity to respond, rather than the obligation to perform?
08
SENSITIVITY
What if sensitivity were a form of perception, rather than a flaw to be managed?
09
BELONGING
What if belonging asked something of us, rather than being something simply owed to us?
10
LEADERSHIP
What if leadership meant creating the conditions for others to be fully present, rather than being the one most present?
11
NATURE
What if nature were never something out there — but the ground we've never actually left?
12
PRODUCTIVITY
What if productivity included everything that helps something else survive, not only what can be counted?
13
NORMAL
What if normal were never a description, but an agreement — and agreements can be renegotiated?
14
FREEDOM
What if freedom weren't the absence of obligation, but the presence of a real choice?
15
RELATIONSHIP
What if relationship were the unit we measured everything else by?
16
WELLNESS
What if wellness weren't a state to arrive at, but a relationship to keep maintaining?
THIS IS A LIVING ARCHIVE
None of these entries are finished. That's the point.
A word's meaning isn't a fact waiting to be discovered. It's an agreement, made and remade by everyone who uses it. That means these entries will keep changing — through writing, through conversation, through courses and workshops, through everything we notice in the living of our own lives.
This isn't about trading one rigid definition for another, better one. It's about keeping the question open long enough to actually live inside it.
If a word here catches on something in you, we'd like to hear what you found there.