essays

If you’ve been around here for a bit, you know that I subscribe to the Culture Study newsletter from Anne Helen Petersen. I think I started for her commentary on toxic jobs (heh) but the stuff she writes about communities of care is what I can’t get enough of lately.

I could pull quote just about the entire newsletter from last week, about why it’s hard to accept help:

You haven’t been around examples of healthy community or dependence — particularly within your family — and don’t have models of what it means to safely ask for help. This is particularly true for people whose independence is, in some way, a trauma response, but I also think it’s true of people who grew up in homes where the adults were solitary or isolated, or where everyone in the family talked shit about other members of the family who asked for help.

But the meat of the article is a document template for outlining what help you would need and want most (food, errands, a walk, etc.). Then you can send your answers to your friends and family and they can fill theirs out and suddenly you’re not in the loop of “What can I do?” “Oh nothing, it’s ok.”

In summation, THIS:

It’s wrong to think of community as tit-for-tat, I-give-so-I-get, but offering care invites engagement….and accepting care models vulnerability. We cannot assume that others don’t have space to care for us, just as we cannot convince ourselves that we do not have space for others. You are not a burden; you are beloved.

I saw an essay in Elle last week by Ann Friedman that echoes my question of, “How can I make my life feel more like vacation?” From “What Comes After Ambition?“:

I know a few women who are fantasizing about fundraising a seed round or making partner. But most of my friends are running the numbers to figure out if they can afford to quit without another job lined up, or go down to four days a week without taking a significant salary hit. They are applying for positions that don’t require overtime so they can be more present for their children, their elderly parents, the causes they care about, their own creative practice. Some are thoroughly burned out and want to work less for the sake of their own health. Still others spent much of the past two years collecting unemployment, and found the experience more radicalizing than demoralizing.

A woman interviewed for the story shares her criteria for a job and honestly, I think I’m gonna steal it:

“Am I doing something that brings satisfaction? Do I feel like I’m learning? Do I feel like I’m contributing? Do I feel like I’m connecting to other people? Do I feel like I have flexibility in this new way we live and work? Am I given not only responsibility but autonomy? Am I in a place that aligns with my values?”

Journalist Lyz Lenz wrote a beautiful newsletter this week “about Wordle, and roses, and trying to live.” Just go read it–she works in Rebecca Solnit’s book about Orwell, word puzzles instead of the news, and being so tired of trying to make it all better. This part right before the end is perfect:

Anarchist and political activist Emma Goldman once said, “I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody’s right to beautiful radiant things.”

Some days, I feel as if I am living and working so desperately. The world seems so perilous and fraught, and I’m meat and flesh and nerve endings trying to find a way through it all. And life, if it is worth living, isn’t all tirades and rage against the machine. It’s wine in Rome, it’s roses, it’s puzzles.

This is an older Anne Helen Petersen newsletter, about self-perception and the labor of beauty and how video calls make it all so much worse.

I’ve been thinking about Botox for a year now: It was going to be for “when we went back to in-person” and then it was going to be for “when I get a new job.” I still haven’t gotten it; instead I immediately turn my “self view” off when I join a meeting. But I was on a different call platform yesterday where I couldn’t find that feature and…yeah, this is pretty much exactly what i did:

I stopped wearing make-up on a daily basis a few months into the pandemic, and have come to recognize that make-up-less face as wonderfully my own. Yet on camera, it looks more tired than I feel: more wan, more hollowed out. Sometimes, when I’m on a call where I need to be impressive, I’ll put on a face of makeup, which makes me feel more “put-together” — which is to say, more in control — but somehow I still look more tired than I feel. In these cases, I often spend the call self-adjusting: if my cock my head this way, if I raise my brows this way, if I concentrate on keeping my mouth closed and not letting that little bit of front tooth stick out, then, then, will I feel more like myself?

Virginia Sole-Smith sent a newsletter yesterday that hit a lot of pain points for me–I’ve been working on my ableism but it’s still so hard to think that my health is just mainly…out of my control. But in the context of the pandemic, it’s really useful to remember that we can “do everything right” and still get sick [emphasis from the author]:

Healthcare mental load, and Covid mental load especially, means there are always things to research and buy and new therapies or treatments or routines to try. These tasks are important. They might genuinely help. And all of these tasks reinforce the understandable but ableist framing of health as simply a matter of willpower, which we see all the time in the discourse of disease. We talk about “beating cancer” and forget that this classifies anyone who dies as a loser. Kids with cardiac conditions are often called “heart warriors,” a term I hate because I don’t want my child to be a soldier in a war against her own body. We have to let go of the idea that sickness equals failure and remember that being able-bodied is the part that’s temporary.

[…] Because here’s the universal truth about health that we keep having to learn over and over: We don’t have as much control as we think.

[…] If it’s possible to delay or prevent infection, we should try to do it. But we can take on those personal responsibilities in an effort to protect ourselves and others without accepting the blame if they don’t work. If they don’t work, it’s not because we weren’t perfect enough or worthy enough. It’s because we were plunged into this pandemic and led by a tyrant who refused to accept science. And because, even now, with ostensibly pro-science leadership at the helm, we are seeing key public health plays fumbled in the name of economics and political capital.

I don’t know about you, but I needed to read something like this. She’s talking specifically about kids getting sick and internalizing this narrative that they did something “wrong,” but I think a lot of conscientious adults feel the same way–when in reality, it was our systems failing us as we got sick, not our own vigilance or moral goodness.

Anne Helen Petersen’s latest newsletter is about a childfree woman she grew up with (Harriet) and now being that childfree example for her friends’ kids:

Most of my childhood memories of adults are snapshots and flashes, and my snapshot of Harriet is that she was always happy and rarely doing the things that other women were doing. While other women in my parents’ friend group were rounding up children and making sandwiches and drinking a Coors Light while we were out on the river, she was just drinking a Coors Light out on the river. She never wore dresses, never spent time on make-up. Everyone else I knew went to church. Harriet didn’t. And because she didn’t have children to distract me when we visited her house, I spent time staring at it: it was filled with light, covered in pine, uncluttered by toys.

She makes the point that having that example of something beyond the expected norm is so important, but also this:

Representation matters, but policy that makes other choices viable matters more. That means: policies, programs, and safety nets that make it easier to be a single parent, that don’t pretend that most homes have someone who can stay home full-time, or that schools hours are the same as working hours, and that make it possible to age with dignity and without fear, even if you don’t have children to care for you. It means conceiving of more collaborative ideas of family and community and care, and hanging out with people who aren’t related to you, in the same exact life stage as you, or have made the same exact life choices as you.

I get the free newsletter from writer and former journalist Lyz Lenz (I’ve talked about her here bef0re). I deeply, deeply love how angry she is, and how she can skewer what’s wrong with the world on the point of her anger

Today her newsletter talked about dating (which, thank all the gods that I don’t have to do that and I have a partner who believes in mutual respect and a fair division of labor). It’s funny, it’s angry, but this part stopped me:

I recently found myself…in a situation where I didn’t want to be…And I found myself in the situation of once again doing a mental and emotional calculus: What do I put up with? What do I just handle? How long can I suck this up and deal with it before I break?

And my dear friend Katie texted me to tell me, “You didn’t just survive a pandemic to put up with this. You didn’t go through a year of hell to put yourself back into it.”

I think so many people are going through this right now–with jobs, with politics, even with the little things around the house that have always bothered you but you just didn’t change. I know I am. And so every time I think, “Well, it’s not terrible” or “It could be worse,” I’m going to instead switch to: “You didn’t just survive a pandemic to put up with this.”

Australian journalist Jess Hill writes in The Guardian about the converging crises of 2020, about lack of control, and about power and patriarchy. Great writing, great points, and an absolutely perfect final paragraph.

“It” won’t ever be over, because “it” is not just one thing. It is not the catastrophic fires of last summer (or the ones yet to come), it is not climate change, it is not racism and police brutality, it is not the ongoing epidemic of domestic abuse and sexual assault, it is not Trump or Brexit or Bolsonaro, and it is not the coronavirus – though all are emblematic of the mess we’re in. None of them are it – they are all branches from the same diseased tree, and the real problem is in the roots.

The roots are old – dating back around 12,000 years – but what grew out of them is not an inevitable feature of human evolution; in fact, it’s actually threatening our survival as a species. “It” is, in short, the shift we made from societies built on the principle of balance to what we have now: a dominant culture obsessed with “power-over” and control.

[…]

The original Greek word for apocalypse – apokalypsis – does not mean “end times”. It means “to unveil”. This is the apocalypse we are living through: a process of unveiling and revealing. Patriarchy is not inevitable. It is not sustainable. If we are to survive and thrive as a species, we must first reveal it, and then undo it: in our systems, and in ourselves.

I hadn’t read any Helen Macdonald before I came across this essay in the Times Magazine about swifts. The writing is astonishingly good–a mix of science, research, memoir, and meditation. It all hangs together so well it was hard to pull out a quote, kind of like just humming the tune of a Bach fugue and leaving out all the rest of it, but this is from near the end:

…surely some of us are required, by dint of flourishing life and the well-being of us all, to look clearly at the things that are so easily obscured by the everyday. To take time to see the things we need to set our courses toward or against; the things we need to think about to know what we should do next. To trust in careful observation and expertise, in its sharing for the common good. When I read the news and grieve, my mind has more than once turned to vesper flights, to the strength and purpose that can arise from the collaboration of numberless frail and multitudinous souls.

It’s not that long, so give it a read: The Mysterious Life of Birds Who Never Come Down (I think the Times editor got their hands on the title for the web; I believe this is actually the first essay in her next book Vesper Flights and is titled as such in the book.)