The goal of the YTYR project is to promote personal development, reflexive skills, and insight around how we make meaning of ourselves and our worlds. This awareness process is a powerful tool you can use throughout your life to consciously make choices that support congruent, sustainable growth and self-awareness.

YTYR aims to develop more effective critical perspectives to help us understand why we make certain choices or give up our interests and power to social systems which work to marginalized or erase our experiences. This process is fundamental to disrupting and healing the individual and collective trauma of oppression and marginalization. While our society may still award power to those who dominate social narratives and oppress others, true and sustainable power resides within our ability to deconstruct these agendas and develop more congruent relationship with ourselves. There is much power to be found in the interrogation of social narratives and how they influence and inform our lives. Such power allows us to live our most authentic lives while allowing others the same dignity.

What does YTYR do?

Through writings, videos and podcast YTYR creates a safe space to explore, learn, and redefine how you create meaning in your life outside the tyranny of social expectations. It provides you with support to find meaning and fulfillment in a world that often tries to silence or erase your experience and voice. By developing greater awareness and critical reflection into your own values and identity you can find a truer sense of self and live a more satisfying, authentic life.

YTYR explores how we create meaning in our lives, contesting that there is one singular or exclusive truth. Instead, we look at identity development as a social learning process. Social knowledge is inherently unstable: constantly shifting and changing with people and place. Socially constructed categories such as race, gender, sexuality, etc. carry with them outdated expectations which are neatly packaged as truth for a myriad of political reasons. The social construction of knowledge works as an invisible system in place that shepherds us in the ‘correct’ direction and we perform to the pressures of these expectations. Because these expectations are multiple and often conflicting our performances are determined by the many cultural influences of our world. YTYR helps you to learn to recognize how this kind of social learning can obstruct our freedoms to choose who we want to be.

Our identities are not permanent or fixed but are instead dynamic and changing based on our experiences and relationships. Our sense of self is created, fostered, and advanced by the social narratives we are taught in childhood and we use these narratives to help us understand our place in the world. The stories we are taught through social learning then become the stories we tell about ourselves. Our identities are forged through outdated social narratives of constructed categories such as gender, race, sexuality, and other intersecting cultural identities. We are taught to take on the roles assigned to us through the historical understandings of our families and social institutions such as schools, religion, and media. But are those roles really right for us? Do they empower us, or do they obstruct us? Are they our truth? Are they our reality?