I haven’t posted anything on this blog experiment since before my household had our run with covid last month. I didn’t even write in my journal for weeks after being sick; it’s only been this week have I sort of returned to the practice. None of us were seriously ill but we were definitely sick and it really knocked all of us in the house on our ass, even with vaccinations. It’s been a sluggish return, and I’ve also been super impacted by the Minneapolis Police murder of Amir Locke two and half weeks ago as one of many recent losses this city has carried. The grief is a heavy blanket and the pain is palpable. I’ve also returned to a round of doctoring trying to get back to addressing my Long Covid and ME/CFS which is an activating and energy-draining experience for me. Altogether, it’s been a month of drawing in, instead of expanding out. I haven’t felt as expansive or radically imaginative or grounded or principled as I always strive to be. I’ve just existed, floating on a current.
I’m using this post as something of a reset, perhaps a reentry, perhaps just a reconfiguration. For myself and for the 8 of you out there who read my thoughts with any regularity. The idea for this blog came from a place of trying to create a container for finding my own voice and then weaving it into the choir of public thinkers who have helped, are helping us hone our imaginations and build worlds (my incomplete lineage is listed here). I thought, at the start, my musings would largely be about labor and work, disability, and my own Long Covid experience. Not that I could ever pin myself down to just one or two domains, that’s just what was really on my mind at the time.
To no one’s surprise, the stuff I actually think about ranges much wider than that: radical imagination and “imagination battles” (adrienne maree brown); Audre Lorde’s ‘politic of action’ and how that, for me, is largely about cash-based mutual aid; abolition and possibility and wildflowers and fatness as possibility; debility, capacity, and the right to maim (Jasbir Puar); and emergence as a strategy for apocalypse. I’m not sure what it all adds up to but Audre Lorde talks about her “work”, (not her job or what capitalism calls work, *her* work and her ‘politic of action’) as the thing she must do to live actively in her principles. This resonates.
Someone I look up to and respect deeply said to me recently, “I am always inspired and astounded by your work specifically, Rachel.” Deeply moved by the comment and its specificity, still, weeks later, I wonder what is my work? What is it that I do, contribute, think about, activate on that is 1) uniquely mine and 2) captures what Audre Lorde means when she talks about her work. I don’t have the all quotes handy now but Lorde raises “her work” in numerous essays and journal entries, it’s a prominent theme in many of her writings. This quote might be the most well-known:
Because I am woman, because I am Black, because I am lesbian, because I am myself — a Black woman warrior poet doing my work — come to ask you, are you doing yours?
Audre Lorde, the transformation of Silence into Language and action
So perhaps this post is helping me refocus on what is, specifically, my work. Especially since my work has changed! a! lot! in recent life. I’m 35 and disabled and I don’t have a career anymore and the work of that career was never mine, it never poured back into me. Meanwhile, there is a whole community of people both here in my own city and in every city and village, doing the collective work. I want whatever is my work to pour directly into the work of world-building. I tweeted recently, “I’m really trying to stay focused and stay useful on this app. I can offer space for possibility, ‘an abundance of witness’ (Shira Erlichman), thoughtful questions, and a fuck 12 attitude. Abolition is our only course forward. Clear eyes, full hearts.” This feels like a sturdy first brick of the foundation to a new work that is mine.
My work is about rejecting the familiar comfort of despair in apocalyptic times (this quote from Raymond Williams as posted on IG by Verso Books rattles around in my chest cavity). My work is about carving out space and presence from nothing and absence: space and presence for questions, imagination, public mourning, collective care, collective experimentation, and the possibility that’s always available to us as working, racialized, poor, and oppressed people. My work is also about observation and documentation and noticing patterns and keeping a record. My work is seeking abundance in a world of saturated in scarcity. My work, to some degree, has always been about “amplification and ranting” as my Twitter bio has read since 2013. My work is an offering of care, radical openness, and is based on empowered public sharing as an antidote to shame as as a light in the dark. My work is critical but, hopefully, done right, more useful than navel-gazing. What do our accepted paradigms fail to account for? What will be the consequences of the actions we take now and their impact on the futures we shape? Who is left out of dominant narratives? Which powers push us toward fear and individual survival and which powers push us toward mutual aid, collective problem solving, community defense, and the abolition of all forms of policing and control? What actions foreclose possibility and what actions expand possibility?
And then my work is also about how our bodily knowings and somatic languages help us orient to the power of pleasure, care, comfort, satisfaction, safety, and cooperation. How our personal efforts to support our nervous systems and our trauma responses are embodied efforts, not intellectualized ones. How learning to access the well of “sparks joy”, contentment, and relief from discomfort, is also the same well that will lead us toward abolition and disability justice and the expansive imagination they require.
My work, then, is not so much a theoretical framework, a specific domain of research or knowledge, or a career trajectory, but rather trying to create radical, generative space in whatever formation I find myself in, alongside other world-builders. Yeah. That sounds right. I feel a little more clear of purpose, now.
To sign off, for now, a quote from Dean Spade’s Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (And The Next), an excellent little book I read this month and something I consider required reading for anyone interested in my work, their work, THE work.
“As we deliver groceries, participate in meetings, sew masks, write letters to prisoners, apply bandages, facilitate relationship skills classes, learn how to protect our work from surveillance, plant gardens, and change diapers, we are strengthening our ability to outnumber the police and the military, protect our communities, and build systems that make sure everyone can have food, housing, medicine, dignity, connection, belonging, and creativity in their lives. That is the world we are fighting for. That is the world we can win.”
Dean Spade, Mutual aid: building solidarity during this crisis (and the next)