Andrew Suseno describes an Indonesian philosophy called gotong-royong, which translates roughly as “collectively sharing the burden.” In the context of Moving Rasa, this means that identity—being a man, being Asian American, being any particular thing—doesn’t have to be carried alone. The burden of identity, with all its prescriptions and expectations, can become collective rather than individual.

“The identity of man, of being a man or being any identity can be expansive and can be self-determined by a collective. […] When we get together in affinity space, […] we’re able to speak through silence and taboo topics that have purposefully been made taboo to keep us isolated and to keep us not organized.”

Suseno talks about walking into challenging spaces—maybe a white-dominated environment practicing competitive dynamics—and not feeling alone because he carries his Southeast Asian collective group with him. He speaks not just with his voice but for Southeast Asian men, for BIPOC men. After the challenging interaction, he can return to process it with his community. The collective makes him more resilient, more courageous.

This makes intuitive sense as a story of support. But what’s actually happening when a burden gets shared collectively? The unanswered question lurking beneath Suseno’s description is: does sharing a burden simply distribute the weight, or does it fundamentally transform what the burden is?

The distribution model is straightforward: you’re carrying something heavy, I help you carry it, now we’re both carrying it but each of us holds less weight. Applied to identity, this would mean that when multiple people share the burden of, say, being a man in a culture with narrow masculine prescriptions, they can pool resources—share coping strategies, offer mutual support, validate each other’s struggles. The burden itself remains the same; it’s just divided among more people.

But Suseno describes something that doesn’t quite fit the distribution model. He says the burden of identity on an individual basis looks like “I’m a man, I got to hold it together by myself.” But when it becomes collective, identity becomes “expansive” and “self-determined.” Not lighter through division, but different through collectivity. The burden apparently changes shape.

Consider what happens in affinity spaces as Suseno describes them: people discover common experiences, speak through previously taboo topics, collectively self-determine what their shared identity means. This isn’t distributing a fixed burden. This is discovering that what felt like an individual failing or personal struggle is actually a shared condition—and that realization transforms the nature of the difficulty itself.

When you think you’re the only one struggling to meet masculine expectations, that struggle includes shame, isolation, the sense that something is wrong with you specifically. When you discover others share this struggle, the shame component can dissolve. The expectations don’t disappear, but they shift from personal deficiency to collective challenge. The burden literally becomes different.

There’s a third possibility that Suseno’s description hints at but doesn’t fully articulate: maybe the collective doesn’t just redistribute or transform the burden, but enables a different relationship to it entirely. When he says he carries his collective into challenging spaces, he’s not describing them helping him carry a weight. He’s describing something more like borrowed strength, or amplified agency. The burden is still there—the challenging dynamics of the space, the need to navigate them—but his capacity to engage with it has changed because he’s not metabolizing it alone.

What remains genuinely unresolved is whether these three possibilities are actually describing different mechanisms, or whether they’re all aspects of the same process we don’t quite have language for yet. Does the collective transform the burden, or does it transform the person carrying it, or are those the same thing? When Suseno says he brings his collective with him, is that a metaphor for internalized support, or is there something more literally collective happening—some way that the presence of others, even when they’re not physically present, actually redistributes or reshapes difficulty?

The practical question embedded in this theoretical one: if you’re carrying a burden that feels crushing and individual, what specific practices would help you discover whether it’s shareable? Affinity spaces are Suseno’s answer, but that raises more questions. What makes a space genuinely collective versus just a group of individuals in a room? How do you know when you’ve moved from distributed burden to transformed burden? What does it feel like in your body when isolation shifts to collectivity?

Gotong-royong offers a compelling vision—burdens shared rather than shouldered alone—but the mechanism by which sharing actually changes difficulty remains an open question worth sitting with. Maybe that’s precisely what movement practices like Moving Rasa are for: discovering through embodied experience what can’t quite be explained in words.

This field note references the Movers Mindset podcast episode “Rasa with Andrew Suseno,” published February 7, 2024.