1. Normative ideas about The Good Life keep us tethered to belief systems that harm our wellbeing and corrupt love. This is why the work of revolution requires fully harnessing our creative capacities: one, to understand what constitutes subjectivity itself, and two, to imagine beyond its bounds into the unknown frontier of what beliefs, wants, desires, and actions we could be capable of that we aren’t yet. Question everything.
   
   Question desire. Queer and feminist theorists have this practice down pat. Thanks to them, we can knit tradwifery and Twilight and BDSM into a fabric of cohesive understanding, albeit knotted with the social realities of capitalism and gender roles and power, if we just think about it hard enough. You’ll find a kind of truth in sex, that wild arena of exposure and intimate absurdity, even if that truth is impossible to name, even if it’s nothing more than your own helplessness against hunger.
   

2. My first ideas of romance came from Jane Austen and Ja Rule, the Brontë sisters and the Boys II Men. The first time someone told me they were falling in love with me it was you, my first, after I’d written a rambling letter of my innermost fears and sadness on a night when I couldn’t sleep. We wrote/I wrote you many letters, and the self I poured into them felt my truest, my deepest, there on the page where I could make someone listen to what I had to say until I was done: a kind of power I didn’t have anywhere else. But true knowledge requires dialogue, which requires interlocutors—Socrates knew this. In the artistic and queer social circles of my twenties I learned to find myself in conversations with friends of varying closeness, form thoughts and see their impact in real time and in turn be impacted by the ideas of others. Your intellectual theories and secrets lived on in my mind beyond their contextual utterances, shaped my own subjectivity permanently, irreversibly, and in this co-constructed reality, too, is where I fell in love.
   

3. But a lover’s discourse, says Roland Barthes, is “of an extreme solitude,” driven by its own momentum and “warranted by no one.” The lover’s discourse occurs in outbursts and is not dialectical, but “turns like a perpetual calendar.” Barthes’s 1978 book A Lover’s Discourse proposes a “discursive site” where the lover confronts that whom they love, whose response is unnecessary for the discourse to happen; the book is thus fragmented into what he calls “figures” like attente (waiting), compassion, and souvenir (remembrance), arranged in a non-significant order—alphabetically—because the figures do not occur to the lover against any logic like time or the progression of love but rather as they arise in the experience of love; and the figures are named by headers in the form of such outbursts, those amorous utterances….
   

   

   
   

“Can I kiss you?”

1. For some, sexual orientation (the potential for attraction) is fixed, bounded, toward some kind of truth about a group of people (the potential objects of attraction), like gender. For others, sexual orientation is fluid and constantly redetermined in response to external factors: new data, new beliefs, a change in the other person’s truth, a change in one’s own. Attraction then follows from orientation as a filtering mechanism to ensure that people don’t walk around irrepressibly horny for everyone all the time.

2. And although a brown girl’s anger is a trauma response, the intensity of which will never match that of the trauma that caused it, it’s a destructive force whose biggest victim will only ever be the woman who contains it. I know I will find no liberation here. You read what I wrote and talked of how you understood the burden of centuries and the alienating unnameable. We stood heartbreak to heartbreak there in the backyard of the house party and I discovered something I had not known in a long time, a kinship between women who could tell the same story with just one look. You held me with your eyes and I couldn’t help myself; I asked, and you said yes, and then we did, while, unbeknownst to us at the time, your girlfriend saw from the other side of the backyard and cheered us on.

   
   Later, in the same lifetime:

   
   A kind of euphoria beyond the giddiness of too many tequila shots and the games we were playing and the post-intellectual humor of our blabberings on life. I sat on top of the new dining table, still only half a head above you all and buoyed by a sense of abundance. One of my boyfriends was in the next room, along with the girl I liked, I was texting another boyfriend, everyone knew about everyone and the faces of my brilliant friends shone before me and their laughter was resonant, familiar, magical, and in the wake of all this pleasure my greedy heart bubbled in its fullest affirmation: I love. I couldn’t help myself.

   
   “D’you wanna make out?”

   
   What followed next was what I’ll forever remember as a series of wet, chaotic collisions again and again between my mouth and the mouths of my brilliant friends, whom I’ve never been sexually attracted to except for what could count in this moment, this beyond-body feeling, this overwhelming urge towards someone, or the something in someone, that could be, in a sense, a sense of being oriented.

“I can’t do this anymore.”

1. She’s irrational, loud, impulsive, needy, bad at communicating, strong-willed, anxious, and rude—but she loves, and I love her. The intelligence in her eyes and the calm in her belly. The weight of all she senses and all she does not know. The pure, uncomplicated joy of running back to me across an open field, ball in her mouth for me to throw and for her to chase, again and again. In the beginning, the puppy troubles were as horrific as they could be, truly, but then—they were over.
   

2. You, flirtatiously, just before the breath of silence that preceded our first kiss: “I bet you’re easy to love.” You were wrong.
   

3. In The Art of Loving, Erich Fromm writes that love is an art like music and painting (also equated to crafts like carpentry and engineering), which means that it requires the same level of work it takes to master these arts: a mastery of both theory and practice, and an understanding that this work is worth prioritizing in your life.

   
   What’s truly difficult about a difficult love is managing the way it makes you feel. Raising Sunny is difficult not because she’s reactive, but because her reactivity makes me feel tired, frustrated, and angry, and I must cope through these feelings. As Fromm says, the problem of love isn’t one of finding an “object” (something or someone to love, or becoming someone to love), but one of “faculty”, skill, capability. Building this faculty requires a lifelong practice of wrestling with all parts of yourself, inside and out, including the parts you’re afraid to wrestle with, the parts of you that make the art of love so difficult to master.

   
   Both lover and beloved, I have lashed out and absorbed lashings; held griefs that were not my own; shrunken and ravaged space and time, walking out and storming in; wrung my nervous system through a man’s emotional rants late into the night; spat insults with precision; endured/ hurt without intending; known many a difficult love. If you don’t know yourself, you won’t be able to know whether a difficult situation is either worth learning to manage, for the purposes of connection and personal growth, or better abandoned, for the very same purposes.
   

4. A non-exhaustive list of difficult feelings, in no particular order: pain, sadness, frustration, shame, guilt, anger, fear, distress, disappointment, anxiety, exhaustion, boredom, hatred, resentment, grief, insecurity, resignation, discomfort.
   

5. And so I posed the question desperately, at the mouth of our love’s dissolution, though by then you were no longer listening: What kind of human being are you capable of holding? What messy heart if not mine?

“Labor of love”

1. Love is a way of reproducing life—not just in the literal, procreative sense (you don’t need love for that, silly!), but in the way of emotionally affirming our need for life and defining what to live for. In They Call it Love: The Politics of Emotional Life, Alva Gotby writes that loving, and building value systems around love, fall under other forms of reproductive labor such as clothing, feeding, providing shelter, tending to one’s health, etc. that are essential to reproducing and maintaining a workforce in order to run a productive economy. Capitalism could not sustain itself without reproductive work. It also could not sustain itself if that work were paid.
   

2. It matters that most of this work is unpaid or underpaid; does it matter who, in society, tends to do the bulk of it? Because reproductive work itself structurally reproduces inequalities along gendered and racialized lines, it marks a division within the working (i.e. non-capital owning) class that creates an obstacle to working class unity. The Wages for Housework movement in the 1970s, by demanding an end to the exploitation of the groups of people that performed reproductive work, posited the sphere of reproduction as a potential site of struggle.

   
   Love functions as a force of affect, an internalized justification for performing work that drains the worker and that she would otherwise not do. This speaks to the potency of normativity: a coercion without feeling coerced, exploitation you buy into with your whole heart.
   

3. Is everything that feels good in this world problematic, you insipid feminist?!
   

4. Writers like Gotby, the journalist Sarah Jaffe (author of Work Won’t Love You Back), and the sociologist Arlie Hochschild (who coined the term “emotional labor” to help illustrate its commodification) all write around the problem of separating love from work. The idea of working class struggle is not to be free of work, but to be free of the compulsion to work in order to survive, to fight alienation by occupying our time with genuine labors of love. What applies to the liberation of reproductive work applies to the liberation of all work: the assertion that, in a new world where our time is ours, labor can be playful, liberatory, meaningful, bringing each laborer closer to her fullest self.

“The story of us”

1. I know I’m in love when I start to imagine the other’s death. Like a sickening compulsion, my mind plays out freak accident scenarios and pens humble eulogies and simulates my (ironically unimaginable) grief, reveling perversely in this delicious dread. These false creations are controlled by the same part of my brain that hears a love song and lets me be reminded of you.
   

2. Couples therapists say that one trait of a successful couple is frequently retelling the story of themselves: how they met, first impressions, when they fell in love. By doing this, the romance that built their love is repurposed as a creative force that continues the building process. This tells us that romance, which is never more than a fantasy constructed by centuries of socialization and emotional reproduction, fulfills an essential psychological need.

   
   Like the need for novelty, wonder, and awe: So romanticize the quotidian, find meaning in sidewalk cracks, connect the stars, build narratives to make sense when there is none.
   

3. Subsume me into your projection, then let yourself be subsumed by the fantasy. I have been here many times before with lovers who needed nothing more than a small piece to fit me into the role of A Someone they have been waiting for their whole life; I’ll know I’m there when you are talking to me and it’s clear that you are not talking to me. I’ll know what’s next is that I must suffer the collapse of your own invented world.

   ---

“What do you need?”

1. A crucial tenet of non-monogamy is self-determination. In seeking freedom from predefined interpersonal structures like exclusivity, labels, and gender roles, lovers who enter into non-monogamous relation to each other are tasked with reconstructing, from the ground up, what that relation means, what it looks like to be in relation to each other, what each lover truly needs, and how those needs are best fulfilled.
   

2. Erich Fromm writes that from the moment of birth we are confronted, by virtue of our capacities of self-awareness, with an understanding of ourselves as individual and separate entities, a separateness from other humans that causes intense anxiety and shame. Therefore, the answer to this fundamental problem of human existence lies in “the achievement of interpersonal union”; in other words, love.

   
   Alva Gotby writes that much of what we understand to be our emotional needs, like investments in our ideas of family and love and romance, are constructed and historically specific. Our needs are defined by what we need to continue living in this world, such as our emotional wellbeing and our ability to perform productive labor; it follows that these needs could change if the world as it’s currently structured changes.

   
   Lauren Berlant, in Cruel Optimism, writes that what we want in life, i.e. the objects of our optimism (whatever they may be), promise to “guarantee the endurance of something, the survival of something, the flourishing of something, and above all the protection of the desire.” From these objects we invest in norms of intimacy and reciprocity, a form of social belonging.

   
   The social scientist Kristen R. Ghodsee builds out from this idea of reciprocity when she argues that all forms of love require three constituents: attention, affection, and reciprocal flow. Beyond “reciprocity,” which she interprets as merely transactional, “reciprocal flow” can withstand short-term imbalances because the flow occurs in relationships that build a feeling of reciprocity over time.
   

3. In the summer of 2023, the actor Jonah Hill went viral when his ex-girlfriend, professional surfer Sarah Brady, posted screenshots of texts between them that outlined his boundaries for their relationship. These included that she not surf with other men, model, post pictures of herself in a bathing suit on Instagram, or be friends with certain women; to do any of these things would disrespect his boundaries and be “hurtful and triggering” for him.
   

4. Articulate to yourself an emotional need, then, without judgment, trace why and where it came from and how it became truth.
   
   But how humiliating the practice of constantly identifying and sharing your needs with another person in order to help them love you! Because of this, how inconvenient it is to have needs at all! Building from scratch reveals how little shared grounding there actually is between people, how sturdy we must be in the shaky uncertainties that stem from our basic humanness, that site of first shame.

   ---

“To love another person…”

1. In math, equivalence is a binary relation between two elements that is symmetrical, reflexive, and transitive, meaning the elements are exactly the same because you can flip em around and substitute them for each other without changing the equation. a = b is the same as saying b = a, and also a = a and b = b, which means other things like a + b = a + a = b + b. You get it. I grew up in a church where I was taught that GOD IS LOVE. Then, as my adolescent brain developed upwards and outwards, yearning for the autonomy one finds in absolute truth, my faith began to fray in the face of falseness and grasp for what I knew to be real: simple math. GOD IS LOVE means LOVE IS GOD and, also, everything not-God is everything not-Love, which I think should mean that GOD does not exist as an entity outside of LOVE. Ah! There it is.
   

2. Which means that, as is sung in the closing lines of the musical Les Misérables, “to love another person is to see the face of God,” no more and no less. I lost and found my faith then at fifteen, buried in algebra homework and Leonard Cohen poetry and musical theater soundtracks. It’s the love between people that is the divine thing, that thing we call GOD, that is so mysterious and transcendent we cannot help but worship it, imagine it with us always, orient our entire characters (in the words of Fromm) towards it—and why not? Some guy who doesn’t even know me sacrificed himself for me two thousand years ago, but I watched my mother care and love and sacrifice for me every day, and at youth camp that year my body heaved within a huddled mass of my peers at the base of a cross as we all lifted our hands toward it, not all reaching and so resting on another’s shoulder or arm or head, and I peeked my eyes open to see the tear-streaked faces of the children of immigrants who shared a deep sorrow, who had just laid their hearts bare in testimony, the sick grandmothers and domineering parents and fears of rejection, reaching past their anxieties and hurt, reaching towards something we were taught to call God, and in the act of reaching found something that could not have been found without each other in this here and now, this time and place—is that not so much more real, so much better to believe in?
   

3. From the first poem I ever published: “We seek divinity, not knowing it’s here/ in our lungs and dirty laundry; we need only unravel/our harrowed orbits and lay flat to dry.”

   ---

“You don’t get to hate it unless you love it.”

(The Last Black Man in San Francisco, 2019)

1. Blinded by the full light of the sun while driving east on Fulton. Now that goodbye is imminent, I sense things as if for the first time.

   
   Like the smell of Chinese food on Broadway and the low rumble of skateboards at the park on Stanyan. Dampness seeping through my shoes, sticking socks to toes, as I walk Sunny through morning grass. On the bus, a pair of mustard-colored Converse with the inside seam busted open on the left shoe.

   
   So much on the bus. An orange being peeled by a mother-aged woman, its fibrous scent wafting across the aisle. The sickly sweetness of someone’s vape. Then rain pours against the bus windows and I remember an apartment that smelled an earthy mix of weed and tobacco.

   
   (I did love you. I am sorry.)

   
   And I remember when, after we’d broken up the first time, I found your sweater in the shared loft of the co-op, knit with black and blue stripes and frayed at the cuffs, and in the solitary dark I folded it slowly and placed it on the couch for you to find. Then I lay my head on it and discovered your scent still fresh in the fibers. I stayed there, breathing, for as long as I needed.

   
   Walking from Dolo down 18th, I encounter love spoken three different ways. Two friends, young and gender-ambiguous, take a long time to say goodbye at the intersection of Guerrero. Farther down the street: “Your knees are less scrunched up than the first time,” says a woman, encouragingly, as her daughter shakily rides her bike—no training wheels. And just half a block down from her, an old man walks his tiny dog. “There’s glass there,” he says, gently pulling the dog away from the offending dirt and towards a better spot.
   

2. I believe in the flesh and the appetites,/ Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle. —Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”

   ---

“when i say i love you, what i really mean is/ there are no benevolent billionaires”

(FreeQuency, “We Are Owed”)

1. Foolish to think that love is not political. Cuts to state funding of social services, the allowed presence of food deserts in poor neighborhoods, the criminalization of drug addicts and unhoused people, an ongoing climate crisis that destroys lives as well as the environment, financial investments into genocide and neocolonialism abroad, the for-profit capture of healthcare, transit, education, and policing—are these not all acts of supreme animosity towards our fellow human beings?
   

2. According to Berlant in Cruel Optimism, we attach ourselves to certain aspirations, hopes, desires, expectations to find a sense of “unconflictedness, belonging, and worth.” This is how we make sense of “what it means to keep on living on and to look forward to being in the world.” Moreover, as Gotby writes in They Call It Love, “We use emotion to locate our supposedly authentic selves,” which is what makes emotional reproduction so necessary to capitalism: it “naturalizes the world as it is and makes it appear as the desirable state of things—as long as we make the right choices and behave the right way.”

   
   Our emotional selves are thus imbibed with ideology. Let this be an exercise in agency: What I believe to be true about the world is inseparable from what I desire, what I fear, how I want to act, how I want to love.

   ---

“I love you.” “So what?” “So what? So plenty! I love you, you belong to me.”

(Breakfast at Tiffany’s, 1961)

1. In our monogamous culture, cheating is considered the highest crime. Nevermind that there exists a vast trove of infinitely deeper and more interesting forms of betrayal.
   

2. Audrey Hepburn turns her nose up and says: “No. People don’t belong to people.”

   
   From my very first romantic relationship, jealousy was alien me. I knew of it, of course—how could I not?—but, like most things, I logicked my way out of feeling it for myself. 1: it serves patriarchy to put women in competition with each other over a man, and 2: jealousy is a waste of energy. 2A: Whatever led to the event of betrayal, the event itself is the sole responsibility of the person that betrays—chooses to betray. I, as the partner, have nothing to do with it. 2C: If I get jealous or suspicious, either I’m wrong and my partner suffers from my distrust, or I’m right, but my jealousy would not have prevented it from happening. So much easier to trust!

   
   But the structure of polyamory pries open these convenient logics to expose conflictual truths and experiences you wouldn’t have had otherwise; it forces, through the mandate of constant self-interrogation, direct confrontation with your own assumptions, feelings, and fears. I have experienced jealousy now, and what a curious sensation it is. While I carry over some of my original logic—I have never felt resentment or animosity toward a partner’s other partner—I must sit with the sensation of jealousy and ask it what it’s trying to tell me. What insecurities within myself have I not resolved, or is there something that feels unstable about mine and my partner’s relationship?

   
   Along the spectrum of new experiences, I have also known a loved one’s happiness outside of me—and what a joyous sensation that is! It stems from a mutual respect that Fromm describes as “the ability to see a person as he is, to be aware of his unique individuality,” elaborated as such: “I want the loved person to grow and unfold for his own sake, and in his own ways, and not for the purpose of serving me.” The convergent feeling when a partner tells me about a new crush, or what they love about their other partner; the way, incidentally, I know that this act of sharing orients them towards me still; I felt this before I learned the name for it: compersion.

   
   To resolve jealousy, to experience compersion, both rely on, above all else, trust: a noun and a verb, something to be built together and something to practice, the purest and kindest form of which can only occur through mutuality, i.e. free of any possessiveness over the other.
   

3. In an interview of Communist fighters in a remote village in the Philippines, a mother of two daughters, also fighters, says, “My children don’t belong to me.”

   
   Monogamy and marriage developed as a necessity for the development of capitalism, writes Friedrich Engels. The bourgeois economy, with “the preponderance of private over communal property and the interest in its bequeathal”, depended on the form of marriage as a contract, where an owner of property (man) married someone (woman) who could birth children (the nuclear family), thereby creating a closed unit within which to maintain private ownership, whether by inheritance or by sale to another closed unit/individual. Capitalism demands that everything be absorbed into the market.

   
   But under capitalism, people are supposed to be free to make their own choices; if marriage is a contract, the parties entering it have to be thought of as freely consenting. Thus enters, “on paper, in ethical theory and poetic description,” our modern ideas of love, family, and romance.
   

4. But what to do with the lusty poetics of possession that still sound in my bones? The way “you’re mine” rolls off the tongue, the erotic feeling of belonging to someone, meaning, being known as no other can know you, being held in your fullness of being. Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester, two souls one and the same. Store it away in the fantasy; let it grow and thrive unhindered like a sweet weed, there, in the story of us.

   ---

“I hope…”

1. “Think we’ll see it in our lifetime?”

   
   I’m talking about a free Palestine. I’m talking about the rise of the working class. I’m talking about the destruction of everything we think we know and think we hold dear, a destruction made necessary by the insidious totality of bourgeois ideology, as I trail my nails in circles on your back underneath the sun. I don’t need an answer. We’re gonna do the work anyway.
   

2. My father quoting Obama in front of a church committee to defend gay marriage was not on my bingo card. He spoke of hope in the face of uncertainty; my father had the idea to remind his fellow churchgoers that we are all seeking salvation, and that the very people they wished to exclude, gay and transgender and everyone else pushed to the margins of society, just might have the answer. We don’t know that they do, but that’s the point: they might.

   
   (I remember when “love is love” meant “gay people have the right to marry” meant “love is submitting to an institution invented to discipline the working class and protect private property.”)
   

3. People rightly fear the violence of destruction; by everything we think we know and think we hold dear I mean not only structures of work and private property but the ideas and feelings that uphold our attachments to these structures. I mean internal disruption; a revolution of selfhood. Naming the invisible is only the first step. The next is to make a choice about which violences we are willing to allow: the sudden violence of true radical change, or the normative, ongoing violence of a system that continually degrades our humanity and makes authentic love impossible? Lauren Berlant writes: “Catastrophe is just what happens when you subtract what happens all the time.” Recall that revolution is a turning-around, a rotating, a revolving: beyond violence, pleasure; beyond destruction, creation.

   
   But is destruction necessarily followed by creation? Love says no: love says we can, we must start now.

   ---

“From center to center”

(Erich Fromm)

1. In my early relationships, wary of being dependent on men, I would run through my head any helpful task a partner did for me to make sure it was something I could have done for myself if he weren’t there, or that it was at least something I didn’t really need. This simulation practice became automatic, like a tic, and it made me feel safe in the privateness of my own self-assurance, even as I externally presented otherwise.

   
   To unlearn this compulsion was to grasp a more radical feminism, one that emphasized community care and interdependence and people’s need for each other. Yes, ideology had to lead me here, as did the pressures of the capitalist grind machine that suffocate energy and time and emotional wellbeing.
   

2. So too, did my experiences of conflict in community—formative and disrupting events which taught me how even mutual commitments forged by shared values can fall apart when individuals cannot overcome the conflict in themselves.
   

3. Throughout The Art of Loving, Fromm emphasizes the importance of building a strong sense of self in order to have a “mature” love. “The ability to love as an act of giving,” he writes, “depends on the character development of the person.” He goes on to say that common to all forms of love, romantic and otherwise, are four basic elements: care, responsibility, respect, and knowledge. Without a solid sense of oneself, any of these four elements can tilt towards a mode of domination, possession, paternalism, narcissism, and destructiveness.

   
   I must add—I am duly, fiercely compelled to say—that, while these modes sound cruel, the self that lies behind them is not. People hurt without intending; a lack of self, while not a personal failure, brings ruin by separating you from your good intentions.
   

4. I would never have known what self-love could look like if I didn’t have my own personal licensed psychiatrist explain it to me.
   

5. Those private, quiet little corners of my heart kept me safe throughout my life; they were my retreat in the face of alienation, doubt, conflict with the other; they were seen and touched by no one; I couldn’t describe the shape of them if I wanted. It was in them that I stored a deep loneliness that, though painful, was comforting for its familiarity. I spent my life wondering if I would ever find someone who could possibly fit in those little corners with me, sit with me there in silence for a while, then I wondered if that was what I should want. But in that aching process of learning to love myself, that slow and difficult and revolutionary practice of an art, I found windows to reach out through and doors to let in the breeze, and people came in and sat wherever they liked, explored more or did not as they wished, and what was once private was shared, and what was once small could contain the world.

My departure from California is fast approaching (eeeeek!); in contrast to the logistical demands that I thought were A Long Way Away, I’ve been letting my mind sink into untimely topics: my novel, historical developments of money, reflections on artists’ working conditions, reflections about love. I’ll be following a couple of these threads in my posts over the next few months. (We’ll see how my newsletter cadence holds up against my new grad student life.)

My fast-paced, community-oriented, demand-heavy organizing life I’m leaving behind for now. Or so I keep telling myself.

Two main threads: love and money.

Three of my romantic relationships ended this year alone! That’s the poly life for ya. One ending in particular was disorienting because it shook my entire belief system to its core. As I move my way forward through all forms of love and as I close out a chapter in my life, I’m setting an intention this month to revisit my beliefs around love and how they’ve changed or stayed the same over the years.

For example, I recently reread my piece on hetero love and feminism from 2024 and found that I still resonate with a lot of my old conclusions. (I will never be able to escape the twisting hell that is Men!) I also still resonate with the redemptive visions of love I found in my 2023 essay on depression and capitalism. But for this month’s piece, I want to make space for newer reflections on polyamory and queerness, Marxism and intimacy, friendship and time. The personal, as always, is political!

Some readings I picked up:

Radical Intimacy by Sophie K. Rosa ($20 at Booksmith)

The Art of Loving by Erich Fromm ($20 at Green Apple)

A Lover’s Discourse by Roland Barthes ($11 used at Green Apple)

Read more

Upbeat theme music swells, and THE ZOHRAN MAMDANI SHOW appears in the air in front of me in his signature orange font. The man comes out—he’s looking slightly disheveled in his suit and bike helmet, like he just got to the studio and went straight on stage. He grins and waves. Everyone cheers. The women next to me wave their posters and I feel uplifted in spite of myself. I’ve been to concerts for artists I’m not a huge fan of before; I know how to get with a vibe.

What follows is a series of taped segments: aerial shots of the Grand Canyon (is that our man in the chopper?), the story of a daughter reunited with her family. It’s entertaining. It’s sincere. The show is pretty good.

Figureheads are historically a strong force for social movements, and this is what I’ve been trying to wrap my head around lately. Political celebrity is one thing—inevitable, due to the nature of the system. In this area I find myself toeing the emotional line that I did in the dream of wanting to stay critical but also wanting people (and myself) to just enjoy things. But outside of politics, in community and organizing spaces, in radical circles and niche social spheres, how should we think about influential individuals?

The same generation imbued with the anarchistic spirit of the early Internet gave us a wave of decentralized mass movements: the Seattle WTO protests, Occupy, the Arab Spring, Black Lives Matter. These case studies prompt us to reexamine the basic assumptions of the twentieth century, where we learned how a strong, charismatic leader—on the right and the left—could mobilize mass movements but also prove to be their fatal flaw. At the most basic level: on one hand, a group that wants to reach a wide audience needs a representative, someone to not only communicate their ideas publicly but to make them resonate. On the other hand, a group too dependent on individual leaders may struggle to sustain itself when those leaders are gone.

Alicia Garza, one of the cofounders and most public figures of the Black Lives Matter movement, writes about how her group struggled with this tension: “In order to win our campaign, we had to operate on the same terrain that our opponent did — which meant we had to take our fight to the media,” she writes in an opinion article for In These Times (2021). This meant appointing someone from the ranks of organizers, from among the campaign’s leaders, to the task of representing their vision and values on TV outlets, the radio, newspapers, and, of course, the Internet. Like with many civil rights leaders, appointing Garza to this role was partly strategic (i.e. due to various factors, she was well-suited to be a public figure), reminding us that the rise of a leader is rarely purely organic, but intentional on the part of the group.

There’s a tension here between the values of collective organizing and the necessity of having individual public figures to raise awareness for the work. “Even though we knew that to win we needed to reach as many people as possible,” Garza writes, “we were still uncomfortable with what that meant.” She touches on a few of the pitfalls of being a public figure, like the dangers of celebrity and putting someone on a pedestal, but this one I’m particularly interested in:

Another critique is that placing too much attention on individuals furthers the aims of the systems that we are trying to dismantle. Capitalism follows the logic of individualism, which teaches that we must compete against one another to survive. Capitalism monetizes everything, creating a dynamic in which absolutely everything, including movements, can be bought or sold. When an individual becomes the face of a movement to the wider world, the movement can be perceived through a capitalist lens: The individual becomes a victor in a competition for leadership and visibility, reaping the benefits of the labor of the movement.

I think of Howard Zinn’s theory of history as an inherently ideological field that can either be studied through the lens of great heroes or through the lens of the masses whose stories are often untold. I think of the famous pamphlet “Organization Means Commitment,” written in the 1970s by Grace Lee Boggs but originally published anonymously and only attributed to her many years later, when it was necessary to determine reprinting rights—as a writer who may sometimes lend my skills to community or organizing projects, the lack of a byline makes perfect sense to me.

The idea of uplifting the individual falls under the logic of capitalism, which is why I’m not too uncomfortable with political leaders like Zohran Mamdani and Bernie Sanders who, though progressive, still represent a movement that must operate within a “legitimate”, capitalist system. The concern is with any mass movement that must go deeper, further, more radical, to the root of injustice. For any organizing effort that sees capitalism as the origin of all oppression, how should it work towards the end goal of dismantling it without inadvertently replicating its oppressive structures?

I’m talking about all the oppressive structures that follow from capitalism: racism, patriarchy, ableism, heteronormativity, etc. Because when we elevate one person, it says something about all the preconditions—cultural, material—that make it possible for that person to be elevated. To put it concretely: Though Cesar Chavez was a hero in the struggle for farmworkers’ rights, he still embodied the oppressive system of patriarchy. Even while having Chavez as a leader helped the movement dismantle other forms of power, it ensured that patriarchal forms of power remained intact.

What does this mean for organizing on the left? It’s a reminder that capitalism is not just an economic structure or a social relation, but a logic. A way of thinking. It’s this way of thinking that produces forms of power that contradict the end goal: freedom for all people.

These are not new questions. There’s an idea that arises from anarchist traditions of “prefigurative politics,” which is a mode of organizing that aims to build the society we want to see in the here and now, rather than build it after we do the work. For example, if we envision a fully democratic, egalitarian, non-hierarchical, and inclusive society, then the group doing the work must be structured in this way as well. (Co-ops, as an example, aim to work this way.) It’s effective in the sense that it mobilizes people by showing them what a new world could look like and the part they can play in it.

Prefiguration (and anarchy in general) doesn’t necessarily mean pure structurelessness, but it does contrast with more rigid forms we’re accustomed to seeing on the left today and throughout history. There are arguments in favor of rigidly structured organizations insofar as their effectiveness in mobilizing, growing, and sustaining a mass social movement in the right direction, for the long term.

Again, these are old questions, dating at least as far back as the days of Marx and Bakunin: What are the actual effective means of bringing revolution?

I think there’s a lot to be said for innate human psychology and the real questions it poses for how people relate to each other (which is all organizing is about, at the end of the day). Some people prefer to work within a hierarchical structure because it brings clarity. Some people want to commit to abolishing all forms of power, starting at the interpersonal level. The obstacle that Alicia Garza and her co-organizers faced was that, even though appointing a public figure seemed at odds with their collectivist values, it became necessary when confronted with the real-world problem of… well, having to operate within the real world.

So why is the world the way that it is?

I want to work backwards from the power of storytelling. While the phenomena of “celebrity” has real, harmful downstream effects (R.I.P. Princess D), we can still learn from the human urges that give rise to this phenomena: how we narrativize others and ourselves; how we crave heroes and leaders; how we connect to them in a way that, for better or worse, sustains the network of human connections that comprises community.

In an article published in the Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, social psychologists Scott T. Allison and George R. Goethals argue that hero narratives, both fictional and non-, bring psychological benefits that are important to human development. These narratives fulfill two crucial human functions, “epistemic” and “energizing,” and serve as “highly effective delivery systems for imparting complex truths and for elevating humans toward a higher emotional and behavioral state.” This higher emotional state then inspires us to act. The authors cite examples from both Western and non-Western literary traditions to show the universality of hero narratives, even as they differ drastically in form across cultures and history.

When a narrative highlights an individual person’s life journey, challenges, and triumphs, we form an emotional attachment to that person that, whether positive or negative, wouldn’t have existed otherwise. This emotional attachment is the beginning, and really, I think, the core of what we’re trying to understand. It helps explain how someone can become a “hero” in our eyes, no matter the scale—i.e. whether we’ve ever met them or not—or at least influence us toward our personal aspirations; it’s because our identities become enmeshed with that figure in a way that extends beyond rational thinking.

If this tendency is indeed a psychological need, the question remains of whether any mass movement can succeed without any of its leaders attaining “hero” status and the “elevated emotional state” that comes with it (the “energizing” function that Allison and Goethals mention, the momentum toward action that comes from a feeling of inspiration).

I’m thinking of the creation of cultures and subcultures as they naturally form. For example, as one dives deeper into leftist political learning and organizing, you encounter certain names over and over again—titles of books, the names of influential individuals. It’s almost an experiment in how prestige organically forms; since many leftists are “self-taught” (American public education is hellbent on indoctrinating us the other way), we rely on repeated encounters with a name and a face to build familiarity, which builds trust. So too, does it build trust among people in your direct circle, creating a shared set of artifacts that you can identify with others. Around this shared familiarity, a group can build knowledge, humor, values, boundaries: culture.

But are there any purely good ways, in any kind of domain of any size, for a figure to gain influence? I think about Noam Chomsky, the left’s version of an intellectual celebrity. His analysis of the world is surely worthy of its influential status, but, when I first started reading him about ten years ago, I felt I had encountered him at a stage in his career when the fact of his influence seemed to speak louder than what he actually had to say. Fair enough, I thought, for someone with such a long career, but I still felt slightly annoyed during the documentaries Manufacturing Consent (1992) and Requiem for the American Dream (2015) every time the focus shifted to his personal life, taking screen time away from discussing his ideas. I felt a similar twinge when watching an interview on YouTube where the interviewer seemed endlessly fascinated by Chomsky, and by the end asked him what novel he was reading.

Gabriel Rockhill, in an interview discussing his book Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism?, talks about Chomsky’s prestige to invite us to examine: “Who owns the intellectual means of production and what are the dictates that they carry forth in the systems that they oversee?” Individuals operate within these systems with some agency, but that agency is still shaped by what is possible within the system. So when we think of how someone so subversive to the mainstream, like Chomsky, is able to gain the influence he has, we need to consider him in the context of institutions of knowledge production like MIT, where he holds Professor Emeritus status, and how they can dictate the outer bounds of knowledge, even of dissent.

At the highest level of irony, Chomsky, a self-identified anarcho-syndicalist who believes that power and authority should always be critically examined, will sit in the private jet of a billionaire who uses his power for the utmost evil against humanity.

*

There’s a line between admiration and idolatry, and a line between innate human tendencies and higher-level human needs. How to bridge that gap in a mass social movement is beyond my current knowledge, but I’m uncomfortable with the idea of the solution being purely individual: for each of us to think critically about the people we admire and, simultaneously, to constantly examine how interpersonal power dynamics arise in harmful ways. It’s a difficult but doable project; we can all start with our own personal relationships, right now. I want to know if doing that internal work is enough to hedge against the dangers of celebrity, charismatic leaders, and the way the collective identifies with public figures at a level beyond rationality—to the point where we justify their power after the fact, to where we either intensely love or hate them in a way that doesn’t regard them as human.

At an interpersonal level, I’ve always been fascinated by the stories people tell about themselves. (Everyone’s a main character, right?) The story is a filter, a way of arranging truth. I’m paying attention to the act of self-reporting, that way of sharing ourselves that’s purely within our control but still inevitably in dialogue with the external world. I knew a boy at nineteen, an aspiring music producer, who spoke of his past with the framing and narrative techniques I recognized from lyrical rap. I look for what people aren’t saying: what they think is relevant for others to know, what forces must have shaped the way they’ve retold and edited their story over the years.

We narrativize ourselves out of a yearning to connect and from this, I think, as a way to resist our own mortality: as a way of enduring.

Allison and Goethals, in their article, mention that followers play a creative role in the theater of leadership, shaping who the leader is. I think this shows how utterly inescapable is the collaborative aspect of personal identity formation. We do build ourselves up, but the end result (if there can be an end) is a person who must live in meaningful and authentic relation to other people. Once the act of forming the individual runs counter to this, the process corrupts, and things fall apart.

My fiction fixation lately is Us Fools by Nora Lange (2024), a novel about two sisters, Bernadette and Joanne, growing up in a poor farming family in the Midwest during the 1980s financial crisis. What pulled me in was the premise of an intimately personal story set against a sociopolitical context, and the opening scene of an eleven-year-old girl jumping from a roof. What kept me was a prose style that was near baffling.

I can remember standing over her lying on the concrete, like an important figure presided over a nation, and feeling not enlarged and maximized, but naive—only Joanne could make injuring yourself appear like a scene you might want to be a part of. My older sister was getting herself off when she should have been extremely uncomfortable, and maybe even bleeding internally.

This was on the second page. For most of the novel, the narrator, Bernadette, is recounting her childhood, and her observations as a child are dense with external stimuli. There are no mental breaks, no space to get your bearings; the younger she is in the memory, the fewer her internal thoughts or emotions. The prose gains lucidity in her older years as she develops her own opinions and desires—a character development technique that makes me think of The Bell Jar, a first-person narrative that starts out with the most lush, sensory prose and gradually loses its poetic style as the narrator falls deeper into depression.

Lange’s dialogue particularly strikes me. Entire conversations are conveyed in summary, so singular lines of tagged dialogue stand out, and the lines are abstract and surprising, carrying within them the character’s state of mind and internal fixations. The author makes no attempt at writing dialogue that sounds realistic. She seems more intent on using it to manipulate rhythm.

“There’s nothing more original than nothing,” Sylvia said of waking up to her dead boy that day.

It would be the last our mother would speak of DNA, she warned.

I remember feeling constipated and our father gearing up to suck the lender’s ego-laced cock like we had practiced on the drive over. Jo had said we must appeal to the man’s inner humanity. “That small part of his masculinity that remembers his first wet dream,” was how she phrased it. Our mother nodded along, approvingly.

I struggle to find the words to describe the writing style. The wit is sharp, the tone detached, even when conveying distressing things like a miscarriage, resulting in a narrative voice that’s both sardonic and brimming with feelings unfelt. You could think of it as the voice of tragedy. The thought process seems to meander through endless free associations—a back cover review calls the novel “at turns hallucinatory and ruminative”—but upon rereading I’m catching certain details, like a taxidermied owl, recurring in different places. What I thought was randomness was actually evidence of an author who knows the world she’s built very, very well.

At the underwhelming Thanksgiving table, my sister stood up and said she felt like a miscalculation. Worse, like the latest season of a sitcom that had petered out seasons ago—everyone knew the show was intolerable but watched anyway. If that wasn’t a metaphor for the news in America, she said, then what was.

Those visits to the doctor made our parents anxious. Our father would find something to drink. Our mother would mumble “no good deed goes unpunished” and pull her hair out. Their skin flaked off and even though the flakes of skin were imperceptible to the human eye, you could smell them like you could a nervous, overheating animal. The truth was we could not afford medical treatment.

Jo looked around and said our house was like an emptied bladder. Joanne pulled out her eyelashes and said they were covered in microscopic face mites. Waving the black slivers in front of me: “A face mite, like this one here, doesn’t have an anus. So, its poop accumulates in its body until it dies and decomposes on your face,” she said, her eyes bulging like a feign.

Writer and linguist Julie Sedivy writes that her scientific training has not only boosted her writing craft, particularly at the sentence level, but has also attuned her attention to all the ways language can amplify pleasure. Psycholinguistic studies make use of eye tracking experiments, as one example, to try to gauge how language comprehension occurs in the brain. When reading a sentence and a participant’s eye movements sputter at a certain point, or go back over some words, it can reveal information on what patterns humans expect and what happens in language processing when those patterns are disrupted. These kinds of insights, for Sedivy, invite more creative exploration on how to subvert expectations to produce aesthetic qualities—delight, joy, disgust, surprise. It’s poetry.

I like what she says about language and the human condition:

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The piano arrives with the scent of another home. This scent is not unpleasant. In fact, it smells middle class. And that is what the piano announces, once positioned in our dining room. Dada da dum—middle class! Let the lessons begin.

—Eula Biss, Having and Being Had

The yellow linen curtains are coming down. The rugs are rolled, the bed frame disassembled, drawers and shelves emptied, beddings boxed up, Polaroids and photo strips filed away, walls cleared, mugs wrapped in paper. The wooden kitchen table went to a young couple moving into the Outer Sunset; the gold-trimmed nesting tables to a neighbor’s sister (exchanged for a plastic bag of three small lemons); the kitchen rug and Target coasters to a woman who left her toxic husband; the dresser and three-pronged floor lamp to a friend who just bought a condo; and my pride and joy, a towering set of DIY painted bookshelves I slaved over for a month, to a close friend who adores them.

Five years is a long time. It’s the longest I’ve ever lived in one dwelling since age seventeen, the year I went to college and my family lost our house to the bank. I moved into this apartment in January 2021 with my partner at the time: one bed one bath, 550 square feet, hardwood floors, new appliances, a designated parking spot, and within a two-block radius of three different bus lines downtown. Thanks to the months I lived with my parents during lockdown, I had saved enough to set aside a budget for furnishing—and yes, for the first time in my life, I was earning a salary. I could afford more space than I’d ever been able to before, and I would be making a home with someone I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. I approached the project of furnishing this apartment like the milestone it was. I was obsessed.

In 2015, at the peak of Pinterest, the writer Alexandra Lange described the Pinterest home as “not an object in a landscape, but a landscape, mostly an interior, of vignettes.” As an image-based digital platform, Pinterest emphasizes “moments” within a home—an entryway styled just so, an armchair perfectly positioned within a 2:3 frame. The vignettes tell the story of whomever lives in that space, while “the types of images pinned to house boards, often further broken down into rooms, and parts of rooms, transform designing and making a house into a series of smaller and smaller purchases.” It feels surreal to talk about Pinterest now that it’s been properly enshittified into an AI slop gallery, but by 2021 the platform, while at least usable, had become heavily commercial, with screen space occupied by ads and images with direct links to retail listings. I hate to say that I found the ads useful, but I did.

Vignettes were indeed the starting point for my home project. My Pinterest boards—one for each room of the apartment—were purposefully curated collages of moods, decor styles, color palettes, and self-uploaded pics of furniture pieces, digitally arranged so I could see how they would look together before buying. The real magic, though, was in bringing the vision to a three-dimensional space. My tape measure and scaled layout sketches were my best friends at dozens of thrift and vintage stores, home goods outlets, garage sales, and Marketplace meetups. The apartment wasn’t just a place to look at, but to live in; my Virgoic spirit found its sublime expression in the overlap of aesthetic and functional demands. Whereas a blank canvas is terrifying, nothing is more thrilling than a constraint.

Constraints included lifestyle considerations and architectural obstacles and storage needs and, of course, compromises of taste: I was nesting for two, after all, in a space that would inevitably reflect the life and character of a twentysomething couple with a future together. “Can I run this by you?” I would often say, directing his tepid gaze to yet another Wayfair listing. “I just want to make sure you don’t hate it.” And so the challenge took on an additional dimension of emotional mediation, tucked neatly into the endless cascade of micro-decisions this project demanded of me. I welcomed it with the religious fervor of female sacrifice: a role fulfilled.

our home is shrouded in marigold & the scent 
of brand new liquor that won’t last
the night: a gilded domesticity

—here, lines from a poem I wrote years ago, about an apartment with yellow curtains and a man with always one foot out the door.

you a folded hand & me stretched flat
on the floor, offering my belly again
and again and again

you, unfolding—another drink—
you don’t know
how quiet this house is

Another constraint in this nesting project: The apartment should not only be a reflection of our (my) tastes and needs, but of my consumer ethics. An avid environmentalist, I was determined to buy secondhand as much as possible. But I was impatient. Blank corners bugged me—I wanted the project done soon and done right. I spent hours scouring Facebook Marketplace, messaging sellers, coordinating pickups; I would log off work and immediately drive to various Goodwills before they closed. I’ve written in previous posts about my complicated relationship with consumerism and the irony of values-based buying: how projecting moral values onto the act of purchasing creates a sort of double bind where, in attempting to replace wastefulness with intentionality, I reproduce materialistic ways of thinking by obsessing over each object, infusing even more meaning into an essentially empty act.

In “System of Objects” (1968), Jean Baudrillard offers a definition of consumption as something beyond just purchasing and possessing material goods—an object that fills a need is not consumed, by his definition, nor is an object that, when purchased, delivers any kind of satisfaction. For Baudrillard, industrial consumer society consists of two systems that interact unevenly with each other: on the one hand, a complex, fluid, abundant system of human needs, and on the other, a system of manufactured products which, due to technological organization, is more ordered, coherent, codified, classified.

In the act of buying, “the latter imposes its own coherence and thus acquires the capacity to fashion an entire society,” so that objects induce human desire rather than the other way around. The linguistic system of objects and the advertising of them tells us what we want, and tells us how what we want defines who we are.

“Which is not to say that objects are mechanically substituted for an absent relation, to fill a void, no; they describe the void, the locus of the relation, in a development which actually is a way of not experiencing it, while always referring to the possibility of an experience…. Leather couch, phonograph, bric-a-brac, jade ashtrays: it is the idea of a relation that is signified in these objects, ‘consumed’ in them, and consequently annulled as a lived relation.”

Because true consumption manifests in the idea of a relation rather than in a concrete, real-world or “lived” relation—in a way “not experiencing” while “always referring to the possibility of an experience”—consumption is endless, bottomless, unable to be satisfied. Advertising mobilizes the internal conflicts of the unconscious in a “general schema of gratification/frustration” where objects being advertised serve as vehicles for “the perpetual rechannelling of conflicts” without actually liberating our deep, innate drives.

It was in this way that I was consumed by the idea of my relation to things, things that, with ethical intent or not, I traded for money in an exchange that would be endlessly conflictual and alienated, a kind of censorship through abundance.

A year after moving into the apartment, I landed a new job with an even higher salary; ten months later, I was living alone. I stretched to fill the spaces where-once-was-another: the other half of the closet, the other side of the bed. I was expansive, expressive, larger than I’d ever been. At a material level, inhabiting this apartment on my own meant I’d benefited from the financial privilege of making emotionally-driven life choices without having to give up any substantial comforts. At a spiritual level, it meant I was free.

To shower when I pleased. To watch whatever I wanted on TV. To leave and return at will, to stay in without explanation. To talk to walls and sing to countertops.

And this thing we chase called freedom is the postmodern dilemma, the blood pact with capitalism, made possible only by playing by the rules. Buy into the system—literally—and you will be free. Anything you wish to do with your life requires the security that only capitalism can provide. Of course, reality will reinforce this belief just enough to convince you of its truth and when the cracks begin to show it will be too late, there will be too much stuff to lose.

If Baudrillard were to write of consumer society today, he would see a world not so much changed as sped up, a world of prolific, lightning-fast media where advertising has bled into so many different and banal contexts that the line between the real and the idealized has all but disappeared. For the rise of consumption he blames not repression from external forces but the expression of “unconstrained” individual choices; in other words, freedom.

Unlimited choices in career, consumer goods, leisure time, social relationships, and mobility are all implied in the freedom to express one’s idealized self. Also implied is the freedom of transcendence of the soul, which is found in artistic or otherwise creative expression.

Herbert Marcuse writes in One-Dimensional Man (1964) that high art once represented a “Great Refusal” against the status quo when it was separate from, and therefore antagonistic to, broader society; its presence in the everyday, however, has subverted this subversion, having been “brought down from the sublimated realm of the soul or the spirit or the inner man, and translated into operational terms and problems” by being made available for mass consumption.

That sublimation (borrowing Freud’s concept) is therefore reversed into what Marcuse calls “desublimation”, with the incorporation of high art and aesthetics “into the kitchen, the office, the shop; its commercial release for business and fun” that results not in transcendence but in “immediate gratification”. It is “desublimation practiced from a ‘position of strength’ on the part of society, which can afford to grant more than before because its interests have become the innermost drives of its citizens, and because the joys which it grants promote social cohesion and contentment.”

Marcuse’s grouchiness and nostalgic posturing aside, I think it’s fitting to think of transcendent values incorporated into everyday life by way of not just pop culture but also advertising and, subsequently, consumption. This desublimation describes how I felt my own creative energies redirected from their sublimated flow into acts of shopping, buying, and owning: the most human parts of myself—the storytelling instinct, the yearning for aesthetic truth—wielded in service of some vision of freedom that I had somehow, unintentionally, internalized.

What both Baudrillard and Marcuse are grappling with is how our desires are never truly our own. They were both writing at a time of rapid industrialization, which allowed the working class to gain a level of affluence they’d never had before; both describe the democratization of consumption as rife with internal contradiction; both rely on the Freudian premise of innate psychological needs, deep libidinal energies seeking an outlet, to try to answer the question: How exactly does capitalism corrupt the human?

In Jennifer Egan’s novel A Visit From the Goon Squad, Sasha is a kleptomaniac addicted to the thrill of theft, to the gleeful tingle of being in possession of an object that doesn’t belong to her. Later in the novel we travel back in time to encounter Sasha as a teenage runaway in Naples, in a room she rents in exchange for sweeping the courtyard of a rundown palazzo. Her uncle has found her there on a mission to bring her home. His eyes take in the tiny room, her narrow bed and meager possessions, small trinkets from her travels displayed on the windowsill, and realizes “with merciless clarity” “how alone his niece was in this foreign place. How empty-handed.” Dangling on a string in front of the window is a wire hanger bent into the shape of a circle.

Sasha’s uncle tries to convince her that she can’t do this alone. Sasha refuses the call. Instead, they sit in silence and watch as the sun sets in a “riot of dusty color”, and he would forever remember “the jolt of surprise and delight he’d felt when the sun finally dropped into the center of her window and was captured in her circle of wire.”

Now he turned to her, grinning. Her hair and face were aflame in orange light.
“See,” Sasha muttered, eyeing the sun. “It’s mine.”

What can one gain from a room of one’s own? The most basic tenet of material security, that starting point to a life of agency, is ownership. This is the slippery slope to the drive to consume: what do we really need in order to be free, and what do we give up in order to gain? So many voices insist on answering this question for us as our highly industrialized historical context presents choices as limitless as an Amazon search results page, clouding the difference between “need” and “want”.

Home ownership, for example, is a type of material security widely understood to unlock personal freedom. (Let’s put aside for a moment the near-impossibility of buying real estate in this generation.) It provides housing stability for oneself and one’s family, which makes it easier to build the life you want. Owning a home also entails more income by way of equity and a return on investment should you sell, plus an opportunity to build credit, all of which can be used to access more of the things you want. A house is thus revealed to be a commodity interchangeable with other commodities on a market, with an assigned value susceptible to inflation and perversion beyond its basic use as a human dwelling.

In his 1872 pamphlet “The Housing Question,” Friedrich Engels writes that the housing shortage in the urban centers of Germany, prompted by a rapid influx of factory workers, is not a question of a lack of housing access but of the entire capitalist mode of production; it must be seen as a symptom rather than a problem to be solved in and of itself and, therefore, could only be addressed by abolishing the “exploitation and oppression of the working class by the ruling class”—in short, proletarian revolution.

But revolution takes far longer than housing reform. Can we not grant the proletariat, the renter class, the means to financial security and stability by expanding their access to property ownership in the meantime? Engels is adamant that this isn’t the freedom that bourgeois thinkers believe it to be. The working conditions of the proletariat, which include having been driven from farmland into factories and working alongside others in a collectivized production setting, are precisely what gives them the mobility and organizing potential needed to overthrow the ruling class. On the other hand, “give them their own houses, chain them once again to the soil and you break their power of resistance to the wage cutting of the factory owners.”

Quoting an article from the Spanish newspaper La Emancipación, Engels underscores that “the cleverest leaders of the ruling class have always directed their efforts towards increasing the number of small property owners in order to build an army for themselves against the proletariat.” Before and since the time of writing in 1872, revolutions throughout history have been undermined by the parceling out of land to create a new property-owning class “which has become the most reactionary element in society.”

To recognize this in today’s society, we needn’t look far: NIMBY homeowners who oppose any community development that might negatively affect their property values, or business owners loyal to policing and surveillance apparatuses that promise to protect them—thus rendering ideologically useless any Black Lives Matter or ICE OUT poster that may adorn a window. The cost of protecting such landed interests as these is, in the long run, a deepening of the worst social harms and the gap between haves and have-nots. This gap, as I hope I’ve made clear thus far, is not just material. It’s psychological. It’s all the more insidious for making perfect sense within its own logic.

Private property is just one version of the golden handcuffs. We have employer-funded health insurance, retirement funds invested in the stock market, reliance on institutions for education and resources, highly industrialized infrastructure, advanced technology, and unlimited consumer choices. You don’t have to be wealthy or a property owner or even a capitalist to be psychologically co-opted. This is particularly true here in the imperial core, where the comforts that gild our daily lives—already constantly eroding—are only made possible through the economic, political, and violent oppression of other populations around the world. In this way our chains are also weapons.

Marcuse writes of a “loss of conscience” that is the result of “the satisfactory liberties granted by an unfree society”, and how this then allows “for a happy consciousness which facilitates acceptance of the misdeeds of this society.” This, I believe, is not a call for needless moralizing about why the things we enjoy are bad, but it does demand a full accounting of what exactly is at stake in our pursuit of freedom. If happy consciousness is “the token of declining autonomy and comprehension”, then the only way to exercise real autonomy is to rewrite our beliefs about freedom, resist the false truths of the status quo, and fully re-comprehend, in devastating thoroughness, what we have and what we want.

This is a critical opportunity to sit with our own existential discomfort, the tension between value and desire. When the coping mechanisms are gone, how do we reclaim sublimation? How do we hold ourselves through simultaneous destruction and restoration? The answer to the first question is to never underestimate the strength of creativity in the face of uncertainty. The answer to the second is that we don’t do it alone.

In my stubborn and muddled search for freedom I found a certain defiance and inevitably had to let things go. My job and financial stability. My savings. My lease. The collapsible kitchen shelf to a young Nigerian man’s organizing project; the shoe cabinet to a friend entering girlhood in her late thirties; the futon, springs broken and fabric shredded by a puppy’s boundless energy, to Recology. In the final weeks of moving out, as I packed items into boxes or sold or gave them away, I was surprised at how intimately I knew them—I thought there would be more junk. But no, apart from a few exceptions, each thing was recognizable as fully and truly mine. And now they will live somewhere else.

I’m currently working on my essay for this month, but here I’ll share a piece I’ve been wanting to share for a while. My application for the MFA fiction program at University of Tennessee-Knoxville required a “critical writing sample of up to 20 pages” in addition to a creative writing sample, supposedly to check your competence in academic writing. Unfortunately for me, I haven’t written a college paper in over ten years and had to start from scratch on a tight timeline. So I took an old Substack post and dressed it up in the guise of proper academia, Works Cited and all.

If you read that post, you’ll recognize most of the references and points I make here, but I was pleasantly surprised with what I learned in the process of writing this that didn’t make it into the original. The original ended as more of an exploration, whereas in this essay I found a strong argument I can get behind. I was able to bring in topics that were so big I was afraid to touch them, like the non-profit industrial complex, post-Cold War aesthetics, and artists’ living conditions. I found myself saying “fuck it” and not try too hard to sound academic. I let my argument be directly confrontational to establishments—in context, hardly a threat to old UTK, but I’d like to pretend this is the reason I ended up on the waitlist despite receiving glowing, personalized feedback for my creative writing sample. (I did end up getting accepted, so I’m not a threat after all.)

Please excuse any bad formatting. The footnotes and superscripts didn’t transfer over properly, so I’ll link the full, properly formatted PDF at the very bottom of this post. Enjoy and tell me what you think!

The Bite of the Dog is Fast: The Inevitability of an Artist Revolution

PEN America stands at the intersection of literature and human rights to protect free expression in the United States and worldwide. We champion the freedom to write, recognizing the power of the word to transform the world.

—PEN America website, “About Us”

The literary community recognizes the necessity for voices centered in the cultures, imagination, and worldview of writers of color… Their narratives document the lived experiences of people of color, providing us with not only a way to better understand ourselves and our role in the world, but also how we, through the written word, are able to create change. Change of mind. Change of being. Change of practice. Change.

—Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation website, “Our Story”

It was just over a hundred fifty years ago that Abraham Lincoln chided Harriet Beecher Stowe for starting a war, and about a hundred twenty years ago that Upton Sinclair singlehandedly created the FDA. Today, it’s hard to imagine a novel as kindling for more than a burning on a campus. Stories spread into ways of knowing, and creative expression blossoms into new forms that inch ever closer to truth, but sometimes, still, art feels like a dialogue confused about whom to speak to. Is it presidents? The masses? Writers, painters, poets, sculptors, photographers, performers alike, in times of crisis, wrestle with their craft to name the unnameable, as they do best and as is the best they can do, for the world is changing—or, more accurately, it has become unchangeable.

Artists from marginalized backgrounds in particular recognize the power of creative expression to address historical injustices, challenge harmful narratives, and speak dangerous truths. They grapple with questions of responsibility and contradiction, and hope that point of view can be a light in the dark. And yet, bound by aesthetics, shrouded in codes and symbols, art is chained by that which makes it liberating. If art is an expression of the human condition, it is surely made with a recognition of the conditions under which it is created: a world of hierarchy and systems of domination where every facet of modern life is annexed by the market. Because the social realities of late-stage capitalism have transformed the horizons of possibility and imagination, art has been rendered powerless in its potential to reach beyond itself. An artist’s only hope now is to rethink her role in society as one in relation to the structures of power it is built upon, the very same ones that pose an existential threat to her art, and to channel her energies in direct confrontation to them.

The first step in awakening these energies is to thoroughly lay out how these structures of power operate; first, how they pervade the horizons of interpretation such that even stories of subversion and rebellion are neutralized. I use some of the most famous examples in pop culture to illustrate this point, since our concern is with the relation between art and the popular imagination. I will then examine the irreconcilable pressures under which art is created, from increasingly difficult living standards in the U.S. to channels of resource distribution for artists, like non-profits and institutions, that attempt to ameliorate these pressures but only further subjugate the artist. I hope to push beyond despair towards a concrete solution: a more arduous path than even the most complex artistic composition, and all the more rewarding for its promise of true transformation.

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I don’t doubt that she dreams, that she is running faster than the wind through an open field. I can see the promised rapid eye movement flicker beneath the liquid pink of her eyelids. What I care about is that her overworked nerves are finally given a chance to process the endless bombardment of external stimuli she receives every day. She is a highly energetic, constantly vigilant dog, and I can’t help hoping she’ll wake up calmer after such an intense reset. When she falls into her deep sleep on my stomach, in the gap between my legs, or in the crook of my arm, and begins twitching against my body, it feels profoundly intimate. I absorb the kicks and convulsions with love, as mothers do.

Adult dogs need about twelve to fourteen hours of sleep per day. This is fairly easy for them to accomplish, I should think, given their lack of high-level obligations and their subsistence needs being satisfied by poor souls who have to work for a living.

I sleep enough for a dog, but way too much for a human. I easily sleep for ten hours at night, feel fully rested upon waking up, and still need sleep in the middle of the day. My friend tells me ADHD could actually just be a circadian rhythm disorder, but I am no night owl or early bird—I am an afternoon troll, begrudgingly coming alive between the hours of 11 a.m. and five p.m. to cram as many tasks as I can manage before the drowsiness takes over again. I’m falling asleep as I type these words. I may lie down for a bit and continue later; or, more likely, never get my creative flow back and have to try again another time. The mind wants to keep running, but the body shuts down. The flow is forever lost.

*

How did I ever manage a nine to five? My inability to avoid losing time and mental energy to sleep is my greatest weakness in life. A former coworker of mine would often come to our meetings with new drafts and solutions that she’d ideated overnight, driven to work by her crippling insomnia; the way she described her condition, it sounded miserable, and yet I envied her. I know it’s wrong, but I’d still rather have the disease that makes me work too much than too little. As Plato allegedly once said: “Asleep, man is useless, he may as well be dead.” Thanks to the May Day socialists, who fought and died for our right to rest, we get eight hours for work, eight for sleep, and eight for what we will, and even then the greedy animal of my body keeps demanding more. For many years, the explanation was the depression—easy. Of course. But now that I’m better, I must accept that maybe I’m just hopelessly inert.

In the last few months before leaving my corporate job, my coworkers and I often commiserated over the intimidation tactics the company was using to exert pressure on and, eventually, justify canning our entire team. It was a period of high stress and desperation, as a text exchange from that time shows:

K: if we could get the whole team to do a sick out id be down
E: I think sick out needs to be an escalation if we’re not heard
E: I don’t think anyone WANTS this so out of hand
K: like are they just dense and misguided or is this all a fucked up devious strategy to get rid of the whole team
E: Everyone on this team is scared for their jobs and it feels like these are steps you’re setting up for us to purposely fail
Me: just woke up from my distress nap lol
Me: yes to all of the above

I remember a teamwide announcement happening earlier that day, and I remember feeling overwhelmed and lying down on my couch and closing my eyes. Some people can’t sleep when they’re stressed. As a self-diagnosed Very Sleepy Girl, my body simply has a different response—one that I don’t love, but that I nevertheless have to try to arrange my life around.

The problem is I separated from my body a long time ago. As a child, as soon as I learned to read, my imagination ran through pages and pages of The New Book of Knowledge, Roald Dahl chapter books, stories about witches and pioneer girls, while my body huddled stubbornly static on the couch or stomach-down on my bed for long hours. By the third grade, I could finish the thickest Harry Potter book in a day. In class one day, my teacher, a wan blonde-streaked woman, traced the shadow of my side profile on a piece of paper on the wall while I stood upright, dutifully on my mark, a taped X on the carpet. The wall was lined with the shaky silhouettes of my classmates who had stood on this mark before me, but the lines being penciled around my shadow were steady and clean. “Oh, how still you are,” my teacher breathed. “If only everyone could be as still as Aiya.” I didn’t realize I had become so well trained. I’m fidgety now as an adult, restless when I need to focus, but I always remember my adolescent body as a slow, sluggish thing.

I remember long sedentary summers and after-school lethargy. Last September, I subbed for a high school English teacher for a week. High schools are logistically the least challenging job assignment—no teaching involved, just handing out worksheets and enforcing the phone policy—and yet they take the biggest toll on me. Being back in a high school classroom, with its hard metal chairs attached to laminate desks, rigid bell schedules and timed breaks, constant deadlines and percentages and comparison, the faces of dozens of teenagers worn down with unmet need, I felt my body slip back into a sixteen-year-old version of itself. I was fighting sleep by fifth period. Every day that week, I came home and napped for hours; when I woke, I could hardly find the time or muster the energy to do much else besides eat dinner and get ready for bed. I remembered this portion of the day was supposed to be my homework slot all those years ago, and I remembered the daily cycle of guilt associated with the failure to accomplish.

What I yearned for, even then, was an escape from the relentless daily schedule and the pressure to perform. To escape from the world, to check out, to slip away, to break free, to elude, to disappear. It was my constant daydreaming and distractedness as a child, not hyperactivity, that helped drive my adult ADHD diagnosis; the charitable analysis of my sleeping habits would be that the effort of making hundreds of micro decisions every day wears me out.

The philosopher David Benatar, an anti-natalist, argues that because human life is so marked by suffering, it’s better to never have been born at all. We are constantly uncomfortable, always hungry or thirsty or needing to go to the bathroom; we’re too hot or too cold, we itch, we get sick, we cramp. Every day we face a barrage of frustrating experiences, like sitting in traffic and filling out forms, that are nevertheless unavoidable and necessary. Moreover, there is an asymmetry between pleasure and pain: when something is bad, it’s very bad and it’s painful for much longer than when something is good. Death is also bad, says Benatar, so suicide is not the answer. Therefore, according to him, the “existential vise” of life and death can only be solved by not having been born.

From a certain perspective, I could say that my entire purpose as a writer is to grapple with this general malaise, both the mundane and the existential. Nietzsche might say that art offers an escape by letting us make meaning of the suffering (though Benatar might respond that it’s merely a way to cope). Arthur Schopenhauer, the intellectual predecessor to Benatar, once described sleep as a little death, each day a little life, and believed we are at our happiest when we’re just about to fall asleep, because in those moments we are closest to non-existence.

In sleep, we find the possibility of escape from discomfort, no matter how temporary.

In Ottessa Moshfegh’s 2018 novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation, the unnamed protagonist is unsatisfied with her post-grad life, disdainful of her friends and the world around her, grieving her parents’ deaths, and enduring emotional abuse from an on-and-off boyfriend. With the help of a quack doctor who’s far too eager with the prescription pad, she decides to “hibernate”. I knew in my heart—this was, perhaps, the only thing my heart knew back then—that when I’d slept enough, I’d be okay.

Things were happening in New York City—they always are—but none of it affected me. This was the beauty of sleep—reality detached itself and appeared in my mind as casually as a movie or a dream. It was easy to ignore things that didn’t concern me. Subway workers went on strike. A hurricane came and went. It didn’t matter. Extraterrestrials could have invaded, locusts could have swarmed, and I would have noted it, but I wouldn’t have worried.

Reading this book is an exercise in tolerance, for the narrator is as unlikeable as anyone can be. She comes from a WASP family and is young, snobbish, and effortlessly attractive. She lives in a nice apartment in the Upper East Side; she fails her way into an art gallery job and has to try very hard to get fired. For her hibernation to be possible, she lives off her inheritance and (infuriatingly) unemployment checks. Her privilege encases her in a bubble, the perfect solitary retreat from which to reset, get “sorted out,” and then emerge “renewed, reborn.”

Only someone who isn’t needed and doesn’t need anyone could ever conduct such an experiment. For people who have a real stake in the churn of history, hiding away is impossible. I decided long ago, as a tenet of my revolutionary and artistic practice, that I would give my entire being to the fullness of life and of love; rather than rejecting the ugliness of people and live in fear of heartache, it will be a starting point from which to investigate the ugliness in me and to find my way towards radical acceptance. It’s painful, this practice of vulnerability, and draining enough to ensure my status as a de facto narcoleptic, but, unlike Moshfegh’s narrator, I don’t have the luxury of being jaded. The pervasive horribleness of the world demands full accountability, as do its sincerest delights. There is no opting out.

*

Lately I’ve been carrying a weight, difficult to name, a curious thing folded in on itself a hundred times like croissant dough. In a few months, my life is going to drastically change. I’m moving to another state for two years. It’s here. And this weighty folded thing, it insists on flavoring the supposedly banal—the westward views from the top of my hill, the swaying eucalyptus trees, street corners infused with memories—with bittersweetness. My protracted farewell to this city feels less like closure and more like breaking open. In my journal entry from March 28, I write that “I am reminded of the Deep Sadness that lives inside of me, a beautiful bloody thing that is the result of love. I am a historical ruin.”

It’s a heaviness I’m proud to carry. A poet’s heart beats in me yet, I think to myself triumphantly, ruefully, when my bus rumbles down a close friend’s street and I feel a sharp pang. Everything looks different when you’re viewing it backward and forward at the same time. And I just have to carry this with me now, wherever I go. A couple weeks ago, I rolled out of bed at a decent hour, determined to clear my growing to-do list, and managed to complete two important tasks before noon: settle my budget and send an email. Within minutes of typing out the email and hitting send, my shoulders slumped, and I found myself staring blankly into space for a long time, overcome with something. Not the usual drowsiness, nor fatigue from the effort of executive function, but a different kind of weariness, which irritated me because the next thing on my list was to hit the gym.

To get out of this funk, I went for a walk. My neighborhood was sunlit and teeming with life. Summers ago, in the throes of my deepest depression, I couldn’t leave the apartment, not even to walk Sunny, without a buzz—alcohol was my easy ticket out of existence. That version of me is far in the past now, and on this day the light was blinding. I passed the Catholic church, the archery shop, the business center, the bakery, the bank. Twentysomething girls clad in athleisure sat on a bench together and tore at thick, crumbly bagels out of brown paper bags. A bank teller I recognized strode briskly to her car to feed the meter. Further down, by the shrubs that grew around the church, a man wearing a baseball cap held a coffee cup in one hand and pushed a stroller with the other. The elderly, the professionals, the children, dog walkers, nannies, waiters, neighbors, I saw them all, their earnest intentions and all their desires, and I couldn’t look at a face without thinking about how everyone around me is trying, always trying, and trying so hard. The entire walk lasted two blocks. When I returned, I collapsed on my rug and sobbed.

April 17

I am so thick with feelings that there is truly no space for anything else. Only the bigness of grief and mystery and goodbye

The price of being awake is consciousness.

The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas writes, in his 1935 treatise On Escape, that the need for escape is not necessarily the poet’s evasion of “lower realities” nor the desire to break with restrictive social conventions; rather, it is “the quest for the marvelous, which is liable to break up the somnolence of our bourgeois existence.” By this he means that the bourgeois spirit fancies itself self-sufficient, that imperialism is, in a way, a search for security, and that capitalism’s work ethic “aims less at reconciling man with himself than at securing for him the unknowns of time and things”. The bourgeois capitalist needs certainty. However, the “very fact of being” is found in the insufficiency inherent in the attempt to satisfy need. At the very root of need is not a lack or a deficiency of human existence, but rather “a plenitude of being”.

In his 1981 annotations for On Escape, Jacques Rolland emphasizes that, for Levinas, the fact of being, of existence, and the urge to escape is just as much a meditation on the body as it is a contemplation of suffering, pleasure, and need. Levinas speaks of a nakedness that is revealed in the phenomenon of shame, which is founded upon our inability to break with ourselves, forcing us to claim responsibility.

The necessity of fleeing, in order to hide oneself, is put in check by the impossibility of fleeing oneself. What appears in shame is thus precisely the fact of being riveted to oneself, the radical impossibility of fleeing oneself to hide from oneself, the unalterably binding presence of the I to itself.

He relates this sense of shame to nausea, which is a state of in-betweenness that precedes vomiting, and similarly binds us. “There is in nausea a refusal to remain there,” a critical instant in which there is nothing more to be done, and this, he writes, “is the very experience of pure being.” Whether nausea in this case is meant to be taken literally is up for interpretation. I think the idea resonates on multiple levels for its viscerality—as if the soul were like a body, marked by a simultaneous revulsion from and enchainment to itself.

I spent all of last week, the second to last week of April, bedridden and ill; my symptoms were suspiciously COVID-like, though I didn’t bother to test myself until I got better (negative), and instead focused on sleeping as much as humanly possible. Every muscle ached and my throat was on fire; sleep promised not only a relief from the pain, but the promise of healing. The more I slept, I thought, the faster my body would recover, and I could go on and do the things I needed to do. An illness like this is an arresting force. Never are you more riveted (to use Levinas’s word) to yourself, transfixed, immobile—trapped.

Unwilling to be totally unproductive, I took my books to bed, kept Levinas on my pillow. In my lucid moments, I attempted to comb through the philosopher’s dense prose, but the effort of parsing just a sentence or two put me right back to sleep. A win is a win! My dreams were absurd and full of water; I often awoke sweating. As the fevers subsided, I eagerly awaited my emergence from isolation. It was lonely there. And then, in the midst of the discomfort of illness, of the matted dampness in my palms and feet, my external self was plunged in emotional turmoil. It came suddenly, this distinctly nauseating force, more intense than the most violent flu for its promise to rip through the entire fabric of your reality forever: heartbreak.

*

he is barely out the door when I’ve grabbed my drowsy meds and retreated to my bed, back to my sickly cave with the curtains drawn and the spread of pharmaceutical paraphernalia across my dresser. It’s day five of my illness, around 11 in the morning. I will sleep heavily, I vow, and when I wake, nothing will have changed, but at least a lot of time will have passed. That is how I will get through this.

But after about two hours of lying under the comforter, waiting for sleep, every inch of my apartment is still marked by a cavernous loss. A lack so tangible I feel it in my stomach. I close my eyes again and hope. Two o’clock rolls by, three—why can’t I sleep? I call a friend. I cry, crack jokes. She comforts me. For about an hour we talk and scroll, the silence intermittent, punctuated by non-sequiturs and texts of tidbits from the Internet—an intimate kind of phone call. “I’m falling asleep,” she eventually admits. I tell her I’m jealous and say goodnight, even though it’s the middle of the afternoon. I try to read myself drowsy. It is therefore our intimacy, that is, our presence to ourselves, that is shameful. It reveals not our nothingness but rather the totality of our existence. Suffering dilates time; this is the longest day of my life.

we are echoing back and forth now in my head, my pleas for connection and his diagnosis of what went wrong between us. From under the sheets I argue with a ghost. You want me to be quieter (quieter), softer (softer), I can be quieter (quieter), softer (softer). My torso is curled around the tight black and white swirl of Sunny, whose head rests on my side, the two of us a clumsy yin and yang. His words were stern—actually, he sneered—no, he jabbed, he spat. Metamorphosis occurs during sleep, molecules rearrange and transform, words become harsher in hindsight, man becomes cockroach. He doesn’t read your work. This part is meant to be skimmed, like a dream; milky half-consciousness dissipates over the fresh memory of our conversation and I am revolted from the inside. Our depths smother beneath ourselves; our innards ‘heave’. I know nausea of the heart better than I know nausea of the stomach. The way the blood turns cold in my fingertips and toes, those places that death first touches. The way my insides curdle, like the edge of a paper that recoils when burnt, but the ground of suffering consists of the impossibility of interrupting it, and of an acute feeling of being held fast. In the original French: rivé. My appetite all but disappears.

When Schopenhauer said we are happiest at the brink of sleep, he also said waking up is all the more painful: to be confronted, once again, with the harsh truth of existence. On day six of my illness, I awake from a midday nap to the most excruciating despair upon finding myself, once again, in an irreversibly changed world, one shifted off its axis, my present and future stolen from me. I want to sleep again. I want to escape reality the way Moshfegh’s narrator does, the way only white people can—with an “I’m triggered” and a peace out, never having to face anything they don’t want to. Shame is founded upon the solidarity of our being, which obliges us to claim responsibility for ourselves. It is related to everything we would like to hide and that we cannot bury or cover up. When my coughing has waned and my body cannot sleep anymore, I throw on a mask and get on a bus downtown with no destination planned. I end up at the public library and work on this essay until it closes; I find and check out a book on my wish list, a collection of short stories; then I wander aimlessly around the neighborhood where I used to live.

Eddy Street smells richly of piss, the way I’ll always remember it. And there’s the Sudanese cafe with the best shawarma wraps that thankfully survived the pandemic. A gray bodega cat greets me as I stop to purchase my first meal of the day: a bag of SmartFood white cheddar popcorn. The sun is setting; the wind picks up. “She looks sad,” says a man into the air as I pass, both he and his companion caught in blissful oblivion, and down the street slaps a beat rattling car windows.

Eventually, a mild curiosity leads me down a familiar path. I drift between sidewalk tents and tweakers and listless dogs, past the tiny dive bar and the barber shop, until I’m standing in front of the apartment building of someone who, years ago, once loved me. He doesn’t live there anymore. The metal gate is the same, and the heavy wooden door behind it with the patterned glass panels, and the black box that holds the keypad is exactly where I left it. A sensation squeezes around my chest and holds me there. I do not cry; I am frozen. I let it hold.

The terrible irony of sleep is that we can never enjoy it; we’re unconscious while it’s happening. This, too, is part of the binding contradiction of being. To attempt to grasp the full truth of ourselves is a practice in wakefulness, in moving through shame and acceptance, in carrying every stone, break, and goodbye our body has ever collected. In the mysterious relief of sleep my elastic heart contracts, then, upon waking, balloons into something impossibly expansive. This thing I am bound to, and I am always waiting.

Today is the deadline for accepting grad school admissions offers, and I’m proud to say I’ve officially committed to the MFA program at Oregon State this fall. (I did receive two other offers pretty late in the game, but I’m not going to think too much about that. Lol.) The faculty and current students in the fiction track at OSU have been nothing but lovely to me the past couple months, and the small cohort size, relatively low teaching requirements, and proximity to home make me feel pretty comfortable.

Today is also the deadline for taxes, but there’s nothing to say about that.

April is National Poetry Month! I’ve been dealing with a lot of feelings about a lot of things, so thank god for poetry. Here are some of my favorites I’ve read this month. I’m not ashamed to say I found some of them on Instagram.

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Stop 3, Presidio—Lombard Gate—under the shade of a tall oak, my comrades and I are reading a poem by H.T. Johnson entitled “The Black Man’s Burden”, a response to Kipling, 1899. My favorite bit to talk about is the poet’s final warning to the White Man for his imperialist wars of aggression: on you or your children/will reign God’s judgments fierce. “I’ll admit,” says someone in the group, “I’m not religious, so it doesn’t resonate with me.” So for discussion purposes I realize I must clarify. “I’m an atheist,” I say. “I am saying that the argument is weak.” We laugh; we lament a systematic devastation so thorough that the poet’s invocation of God Almighty’s justice rings desperately hollow; we are on the same page again.

To constantly affirm where I stand is cumbersome, it weighs down conversation. What’s more interesting to me is how beliefs take hold. I want to talk about God because it’s important to other people. I want to talk about why God is important to other people and what it means for God to be important to other people. Call it empathy if you want, but the full truth is I hate being bored.

I keep reaching outward; the further left I lean, the less I pause to think about how I got here. I am thirty years old and I’ve read too much, I’m in too deep, and there are too many questions to chase—hence the structure of this newsletter, the meandering trail of a consciousness blossoming in multiple directions with no final form. But a recognizable shadow will flicker here and there to remind me of all the places where I was wrong.

“Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention,” writes Paulo Freire, “through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other.”

With a revolutionary society as my new horizon, my subjectivity takes its place alongside others with whom I must build that society. The question of how I got here, then, is relevant insofar as my concern with the subjectivity of others—a concern that is both theoretical and practical—is a daily reckoning. “No one is born a revolutionary,” Freire writes. It is not the case that someone who was born poor will, by mere virtue of their material conditions, come to conclude that the capitalist system must be overthrown. On the other hand I, a middle-class daughter of literature, developed much of my worldview in the abstract. What radicalized you? was once a favorite Twitter question, to which responses have varied from personal accounts of systemic injustice to reading specific texts, but of course there is no single moment of radicalization, and it is not born of experience or theory alone. Radicalization is material reality accompanied by a framework of interpretation.

How do we arrive at this framework?

Or in other words, as Michael Zweig poses in chapter three of Class, Race, and Gender (2023): How do we know what we know?

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A lifelong progressive organizer and educator, Zweig writes in this chapter that he follows the dialectical tradition, which takes as its premise the existence of a material world independent of our thoughts. “The scientific method reveals the material basis of dialectics, whose principles are shown to be correct when they correspond to the realities in which we live,” he writes. I don’t have the space to explain dialectical thinking here, even in its simplest terms, but what’s important is that Zweig calls out dialectics as a belief system, and is therefore just one of the many ways we can structure our understanding of the world.

(Conceiving of dialectics as a belief system, of course, poses a new problem in the form of “the claim that Marxism, nationalism, racism, liberalism, anarchism, conservatism, nativism, science, creationism, and what have you, are all beliefs of equal standing.” How then, should we evaluate which belief systems will bring us toward a more truthful worldview?)

That many progressive thinkers find it necessary in the first place to name their mode of analysis, to be forthcoming about their subjectivity, speaks to a politics of consciousness. It stands in contrast to much of the American education system, which relies on the charade of positing ideas and facts about the world as if they are politically neutral.

One of the first assignments in my AP US History class in high school was a critical comparison between two historians. We were given two readings, side by side, to analyze their contrasting views of history through their narrative techniques. One historian was seen to have a more positive outlook on historical events; the other was negative, despairing, pessimistic. “Which perspective do you prefer?” our teacher asked. He emphasized how even factual information can be presented subjectively, and that in our pursuit of interpreting history it’s helpful to read multiple interpretations and decide for ourselves.

I don’t recall the name of the first author. The “pessimistic” author, whose significance I did not grasp until years later, was Howard Zinn.

“History is the memory of states,” wrote Henry Kissinger in his first book, A World Restored, in which he proceeded to tell the history of nineteenth-century Europe from the viewpoint of the leaders of Austria and England, ignoring the millions who suffered from those statesmen’s policies. From his standpoint, the “peace” that Europe had before the French Revolution was “restored” by the diplomacy of a few national leaders. But for factory workers in England, farmers in France, colored people in Asia and Africa, women and children everywhere except in the upper classes, it was a world of conquest, violence, hunger, exploitation—a world not restored but disintegrated.

—Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States

Comparing the two historians in class that day was a way of framing a debate; in an attempt to hone a practice of interpretation, the premise of this juxtaposition was that both accounts were factual but differed in the emotions they evoked; the political implications of either side, however, did not enter the debate at all.

I’ve heard often through the years that accounts of social conditions under capitalism are too depressing. Sarah Jaffe, for example, writes in Work Won’t Love You Back (2021): “The compulsion to be happy at work… is always a demand for emotional work from the worker. Work, after all, has no feelings. Capitalism cannot love. This new work ethic, in which work is expected to give us something like self-actualization, cannot help but fail.” Reading this would understandably produce feelings of despair and helplessness, maybe even an urge to dispute—what if I actually do love my job? one might ask. Are we truly without agency at all in such a system?

(To stop reading there, however, would rob you of the transcendent hope this so-called depressing framework of interpretation has to offer, as Jaffe goes on to say: “How do we begin to break the love spell that work has us under? We might begin by understanding that love is a thing that happens between people.”)

Indeed, reading about the oppression of factory workers in England, farmers in France, and working people today is a pretty bleak endeavour, as is, perhaps, taking stock of all the ways in which alienation plagues your everyday life. What, then, is our guiding light towards truth and knowledge—comfort?

Studying history in college is what radicalized me, I tell people now. It was South Asia in the sixteenth century, it was women in China in the twentieth, it was the American civil rights and Chicano/a movements, it was the ability to follow throughlines from the beginnings of modern empire to the fracturing of nations to the makings of an unjust society. It was no mistake that Marx began with history. Eventually, after a few of these college courses, I came back to visit that US History teacher (he’s still one of my favorites) to tell him that Howard Zinn was right.

To arrive at this point meant abandoning the liberal project of, in Zinn’s words, “the apparent objectivity of the scholar”, to become unafraid of being wrong—or, rather, to reset my compass of truth. In doing so, I began to rely more on what I thought I’d abandoned long ago: leaps of faith.

*

But before I was a history student, I was a feminist. A classic witch. A suburban Jezebel. As teenagers, my friends and I taught ourselves to hate marriage and love lipstick, shaping our views within a cultural zeitgeist of choice feminism that seemed the only way to grapple with an immature sense of historical progress that was actually neoliberalism in disguise. In any case, feminist thinking wired my personal framework of interpretation to produce political views that were, crucially, tied to my lived reality as a ((hetero-cis-)female) human being, from self-image to self-expression to romantic love. Patriarchy, along with its intersections with race and queerness and capitalism, was everywhere I looked.

With the feminist adage the personal is political operating as a main framework of interpretation, we can see how personal testimony in the age of social media got so out of hand. Discourse around sexism, racism, and other forms of oppression becomes messy and moralizing under the panoptic gaze of Each Other; it affects how we deal with other people, how we live our values, how we shape our narratives. The near-total collapse of context, facilitated by the Internet, in turn facilitated a collapse and reimagining of social relations between individual people, whether through the defamiliarizing screen or in direct physical proximity. The lines blur into nonexistence.

In 2019, I was in a community college classroom taking a night class in fiction writing. We were analyzing the short story “Cat Person” by Kristen Roupenian, which is about a young woman in college who dates, and eventually has sex with, an older man. Published in the New Yorker in 2017, on the heels of #MeToo, it immediately went viral for its depiction of modern dating and sex, consent, and power dynamics. In our classroom, it split the table: the man in the story, it was generally decided, was a predatory asshole, and she only slept with him because she was afraid of turning him down. There was textual evidence to support this interpretation, but still I (a grumpy old feminist by then at the ripe age of twenty-four) felt the despotic, moralizing weight of Each Other pressing down on us in that room, foreclosing full honesty. There was something in this judgment that didn’t seem to honor the breadth of Roupenian’s story, and I felt that to resist such black-and-white thinking, to sit with discomfort in the gray, was not only the point of the story, but the point of literature.

There are simply truths that cannot be made sense of otherwise.

In my statement of purpose for my MFA applications, I sum up why I want to write fiction thus:

I was born in a former US colony. History shaped not only the material conditions of my life but the meta-narratives that informed my understanding of it, and this is my obsession: how we produce and believe the messy, mythical, and contradictory stories we tell ourselves, how these stories constitute a layer of reality that hovers somewhere above our own.

By observing how stories of the immigrant experience in turn came to define the immigrant experience, I realized the construction of my own identity can’t happen in a silo. Like political consciousness, it must arise out of constant dialogue with the world, which requires vast leaps of faith in the knowledge of others. On race and resistance in America there is no better point of reference than Black history and the radical tradition; capitalism and class struggle, as well, is a lens through which to make sense of contradictions in identity politics, the frictions across personal testimony and emotional realities, the origins of people’s desires and fears.

A leap of faith: the material world as a source of truth.

It’s a gut-pull, a premise I don’t have the patience to dismantle. My messy search for meaning in the modern world has led me through curiosity of postmodern analysis to a growing lack of patience with some of the French philosophers and their insistence on the infinite openness of interpretation, as if material reality has no bearing on the construction of meaning. On one hand, we benefit immensely from, say, Michel Foucault’s writings on power in interpreting systems of oppression. But consider: the 1971 debate between Foucault and Noam Chomsky on human nature, in which Foucault claims that the need for power is what drives proletarian uprising. Chomsky, who believes in certain biological truths—the innate creativity of the human mind—claims that there is an objective sense of moral justice behind class struggle, a reason to take power not simply for its own sake.

Floating around in relativity and abstraction is exhausting. Without a grasp on the material world, how can we claim to know truth at all? And if we cannot claim to know truth, then how can we claim that it matters? So it follows, maybe, that truth must not matter, right, and I, as a believer in revolution and the change that must come with it, simply do not believe that is true.

One last thing on this that I’ll share is Ryan Ruby’s historical account of the new literary criticism after World War II. After 1946, he writes, prominent figures in literary academia began to propose that “...an ‘author’s intent’/ was, at a minimum, unknowable/ And would be, moreover, irrelevant/ To any appraisal of a poem,” an idea which Ruby calls “An act of critical commodity/ Fetishism so brazen one wonders/ How it achieved hegemony” except for the fact that media at the time was entering “the context of no context”. He compares this mode of literary interpretation to a concurrent development in history: neoliberalism. They both share:

A commitment to a politics
of pure nonreferentiality,
whereby words (in the case of the former)
and money (in the case of the latter)
are turned into floating signifiers
of value (semantic, monetary)
through their respective deregulations
of syntax and foreign exchange markets.

Perhaps it might be useful to return to the historical period of Enlightenment (1600-1800s) here, as influential as it was in advancing the scientific method and ideals of universal freedom. Without the theories that came out of this tradition, some would argue, we would not have the means to investigate the world today, even in the critical way of leftist philosophy. How else would we know about gravity, the moon, photosynthesis?

Silvia Federici, still, insists on a historical interpretation of this period of “progress”. In Caliban and the Witch, she argues that the Mechanical Philosophy of René Descartes (Treatise of Man, 1664) and Thomas Hobbes, with its obsession with the mechanics of the body, was the birth of a new “bourgeois psychology” that saw the human body as separate from the soul, as something to be disciplined and mechanized—priming the justification for its use as a tool for capitalist productivity.

Even science, the earth, the inalienable fact of life, must be contextualized in our search for truth.

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*

For any way of thought to become dominant, a conceptual apparatus has to be advanced that appeals to our intuitions and instincts, to our values and our desires, as well as to the possibilities inherent in the social world we inhabit. If successful, this conceptual apparatus becomes so embedded in common sense as to be taken for granted and not open to question.

—David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism

David Harvey’s explanation on how neoliberalism became so widely accepted was formative for me in understanding how we fail to see beyond it. The construction of a “common sense” is now the obsession of my intellectual curiosity: what are the “intuitions and instincts”, the “values” and “desires”, that the logic of the oppressor is so successfully able to co-opt and colonize? Through this, I hope to gain an understanding of how to dismantle these logics—not by disparaging people who buy into them, which they don’t necessarily deserve, but by understanding the reasons and extent to which these logics are enmeshed with their belief systems. This, I’m learning, is just as much a journey inward as outward.

Sometimes reading a really good book, the kind that runs your pen and highlighter ink dry, feels like an awakening not unlike that of Kate Chopin’s Edna Pontellier after kissing a man who is not her husband. (Sometimes a kiss will do that, too.)

But eye-opening moments are mere footnotes in the development of knowledge, which again is an ongoing dialogue, a dynamic process, facilitated by acting upon the world and learning from those actions. This is yet another case for a leap of faith into a materialist dialectic: it will prove to be the theory most suited to practice, or rather the framework that best collapses the delineation between theory and practice, the “rationality,” as philosopher Jacques Derrida writes, that “manifests itself as much in the form of theory as in the form of practice,” a synthesis of symmetrical forces necessary for changing the world.

I started this project with the idea that forming my titles as questions would help communicate what I want to do with my writing: investigate. This practice has done so much more than that for me. It has allowed me to approach writing as a means of discovery, rather than as a way to form an argument, and lets me legitimize a space where I can synthesize new thinking without the pressure of coming to a conclusion. When I look back on my own essays, the one point of self-criticism that keeps coming up for me is my tendency to pull too much from other sources, resulting in a voice that seems unsure of itself. (As a mild corrective, you’ll find that I littered this post with links to my past work. I have now become what every writer dreads: self-referential.) The truth is that I don’t believe any of my thoughts to be original. There is nothing about my curiosities that arose in a vacuum.

Using questions to drive an essay forces me to investigate the origins of that question in the first place, to track down what ideas I must have been exposed to and from whom, and take this exposure as a starting point. Endless conversations with voices in my head, voices from the Internet; voices from my everyday life who, in turn, reflect voices from the Internet; voices from the news; voices from the past that rise, like ghostly steam, from page and ink. The clamoring in my head begs incessant pursuit of meaning to make sense of it all, and the more I learn, the more I learn I could be wrong. The only way closer to truth is by learning which questions to ask.

Share Are the Kids Alright?

Given my heavy use of quotation, I think a reading list is in order.

“The Black Man’s Burden” by H.T. Johnson (poem in response to “The White Man’s Burden” by Rudyard Kipling)
Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire
Class, Race, and Gender: Challenging the Injuries and Divisions of Capitalism by Michael Zweig
Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone by Sarah Jaffe
A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn
“Cat Person” by Kristen Roupenian (short story)
- Further reading: How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell
1971 debate “on human nature” between Michel Foucault and Noam Chomsky
- Further reading: Problems of Knowledge and Freedom by Noam Chomsky (lectures)
Context Collapse: A Poem Containing a History of Poetry by Ryan Ruby
Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation by Silvia Federici
A Brief History of Neoliberalism by David Harvey
Theory and Practice by Jacques Derrida (lectures)
The Awakening by Kate Chopin. Just for fun.

It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of the n…

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Thirteen years after Edward Snowden’s shocking exposure of global government surveillance on civilians’ private communications, we live trapped in an even more advanced web of government and corporate technologies that coalesce to mine our most private selves with unprecedented sophistication and impunity. Nothing surprises us anymore. We know all about cookies and targeted advertising, third-party data brokers, smart device data collection, and the injustices of inadequate privacy regulation and Big Tech’s unchecked profit motives. Thanks to Snowden, I came of age with government surveillance as a known fact, joking around with fellow Tumblr teens about the FBI agent in our laptops listening to us cry ourselves to sleep.

(The newest version of this running joke is the Internet meme of whispering search queries into your boss’s phone when they’re not around: “THERAPY.” “THERAPIST NEAR ME.” “HOW TO EMPATHIZE.”)

So far, it seems, our only weapons against unilateral surveillance from powerful entities are to cope à la memes or retroactive justification that sounds like “the targeted ads are helpful” and “it’s okay because I have nothing to hide.” Anti-surveillance resistance groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Fight for the Future, and S.T.O.P. are faced with the rough challenge of exposing the social harms of this advanced, dark, Orwellian web without 1) sounding like conspiracy theorists, and 2) empowering everyday people to take action against our surveillants.

I refuse with all my heart to believe that we’re simply too uninformed about the extent of surveillance tech’s reach, or too apathetic to want to know. But why is it so hard to do anything about it? It’s no longer enough for me to hear general statements we already know to be true: That conditions under capitalism have run us too ragged to act; that the powerful are too powerful. To answer this question, I want to try to explore the precise psychological conditions converging within each of us that result in a deep vulnerability that we must learn to accept.

*

In the confessional of a Catholic church in London, a woman in her mid thirties, played by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, breaks down in a rare moment of raw honesty.

I want someone to tell me what to wear every morning. I want someone to tell me what to eat. What to like, what to hate, what to rage about. What to listen to, what band to like. What to buy tickets for. What to joke about, what not to joke about. I want someone to tell me what to believe in. Who to vote for and who to love and how to... tell them.

I just think I want someone to tell me how to live my life, Father, because so far I think I’ve been getting it wrong.

The TV miniseries Fleabag is the story of a modern woman struggling to love others and love herself. She jokes at being a bad feminist, she grieves the deaths of her loved ones, she sleeps with strangers and steals from her stepmother, she gets angry and she hurts people and she never stops searching for love. Deeply alone, she often turns to the camera to give the audience her real thoughts via some cheeky quip, as if needing reassurance of an external presence, a witness to her true self.

In her 2020 book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff makes reference to a “second modernity,” a new society that stands in stark contrast to the modernity of previous generations, marked by traditional social roles, structures, and limitations. In the second modernity, traditions are questioned and the structures dismantled; in their absence, we live our lives with the assumption of unlimited personal freedom and self-determination—and the anxiety that comes with it.

I wrote a bit about this anxiety a year ago, this feeling of exhaustion from constant decision-making. We are the horoscope generation, the Youtube-It-Yourself generation, the fitfluencer generation, the WikiHow generation, so desperate to learn the ultimate right way to live our lives and, unlike previous times in history, have just enough world knowledge at our fingertips in history to believe we can.

“Just do your research,” we tell each other, because of how badly our institutions of education and knowledge have failed us. Read all about how this particular cleaning chemical is more harmful than that one. Do THIS every morning to lose weight faster. Invest in THIS stock. Ask Reddit if you’re the asshole. Left to our own devices, we develop all kinds of neuroses—not only do we feel like we’re being watched, we feel like we need to be watched. Otherwise, how will we know we’re doing it right?

Technology promises a salve even as it widens the wound: The more personalized a tool is, the better it can help us face life’s challenges. GPS apps, for example, have evolved over the years to incorporate live updates on transit times, street closures, construction, nearby police presence, objects on the road, high traffic areas, and ETA by the minute for different types of travel. Fitness trackers have become sophisticated enough to detect nuances in physical activity, body temperature, heart rate, sleep quality, blood oxygen levels, and calories burned, promising all the benefits of a personal nurse and fitness coach available at every minute of the day, wherever you go.

At my old tech jobs, I often sat with designers, product managers, engineers, researchers, and marketers to brainstorm ways to reach the absolute ideal of that which is most elusive and righteous: the user experience. “Pie in the sky” means to think about what the future could hold if there were no technical limitations. The answer always landed on some form of personalization: The most value comes from being able to thoroughly address the user’s goals and problems, which inevitably requires learning as much as possible about their specific situation.

A few months ago, I wrote this about how we erase ourselves: There’s a kind of relief with relinquishing a problem to a wizard who can make it disappear with a wave of a wand. We trust the experts of their field, throw ourselves fully into that trust because, unlike faith, there’s a logic behind it.

The logic includes giving the “experts” what they need in order to do their job: information about you, your past, your preferences, your habits, and your physical and digital movements. In return, we receive benefits. One less form to fill out; one less password to remember; one less delay. A smoother, more frictionless life in a world full of unrelenting pressure and instability.

For Zuboff, it’s essential that the second modernity converged with the rise of neoliberalism in order to explain the gargantuan enterprise of behavioral data mining. She writes: “The disciplines of competitive markets promised to quiet unruly individuals and even transform them back into subjects too preoccupied with survival to complain.” As market logic became the absolute authority on how to structure society, down to every last piece of the individual human experience, the second modernity’s promises of personal freedom are undermined by the vast economic and social inequalities produced by the so-called free market, a baffling contradiction resulting in existential crisis.

Throughout her book, Zuboff analogizes tech giants like Google and Facebook to the violent birth of capitalism through primitive accumulation, to the European colonizers that arrived on the shores of the “New World”, and to the robber barons of the Gilded Age—all different examples of a class of plunderers who were able to exploit historical conditions to seize power over a population ill-equipped to stop them. This analogy is useful to bear in mind, but not my main focus here. What I really want to understand is the psychology of the plundered, us and everyone we love, so that we can better understand what it will look like to take back our agency.

In Part 2 I’ll talk about the liberal foundations for our “common sense” understandings of safety and security. This is relevant to explore our personal relationships to surveillance apparatuses in the prison and military industrial complexes, from national borders to our own neighborhood streets. I’ll try to get this out soon, but I have a lot going on right now. <3 Be sure to upgrade to paid!

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The last thing I published was my September post on the function of art (and the artist) in revolution. I still think about this constantly as I reflect on my activities over the past very busy and chaotic few months—my reason for not having time to write a new Substack. Mostly, I’m thinking about “work” again.

What counts as “work”?

I left the corporate world a year and a half ago. My life now is just as I expected and nothing like I planned: savings depleted, every minute spent either being creative or earning money to buy time to be creative. Precarity is a constant struggle, but it’s a dynamic life, a freeing life, and I’m glad I chose it. My most valuable work, when I pour my spare time into art and community, is unpaid, and the fact that it’s unpaid says something about our society and what it values.

Scratch that. Our society does value art (you watch movies, don’t you? play video games? read books? like to tell people you appreciate poetry even if you don’t understand it? same!), it just doesn’t believe that artists should be paid enough to live. If you really have to quantify what we do, maybe my contribution to society isn’t as valuable as, say, a garbage collector, but it’s certainly more valuable than some executive at a for-profit health insurance company.

I promise I want to keep writing my monthly essays! One thing I’ve been thinking and learning about lately is the vast surveillance-industrial complex; as I learn more about the machinations of surveillance capitalism and infrastructure, what I’m really wondering about is the emotional pull I feel towards allowing myself to be surveilled in my everyday life: website cookies, targeted advertising, Spotify algorithms, fitness tracking, security cameras, the FBI agent that hides in my laptop. In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff presents the idea of a third modernity, a generation born with too much personal freedom than we know what to do with, something I’ve heard articulated in different ways about the postmodern condition. I suspect there might be something here about the cultural urge towards documentation that I wrote about in July 2023.

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But while I try to find time to write the essay I want to write, here’s an informal recap of what else I’ve been doing and thinking about lately.

Grad school

All I needed was for one writing instructor to recommend doing an MFA in fiction (as opposed to the many who don’t) for me to seriously consider it. I don’t doubt that everything they say about the limitations of an MFA is true—can good writing truly be taught?—but what is guaranteed is time to write, which is what I’ve been fighting for all year. So I decided to throw my hat in the ring. I’m applying to about 20 programs across the country, all of which are fully funded and therefore highly competitive. I gave up most paid work for over a month to focus on applications. The process is grueling!

How do I reconcile my political values with the production of my art? This question drove my last Substack post, and it drives my stories and the process of writing them. My writing sample includes a story about a girl whose boyfriend turns into a giant squid, which began years ago as a way of processing complicated feelings about my long-term relationship and eventually morphed into an expression of discontent under the conditions of modern working life. (A professor from University of Tennessee emailed me personally to say he enjoyed reading this! I’m still basking in the validation.) Where page count allows, I’m also including an excerpt from my novel reworked as a short story: a Filipino family loses their house to the bank in the aftermath of the 2008 market crash, and the eldest daughter grapples with the shame and inescapable ruin of financial debt through the lens of superstition, curses, and myth.

Excerpt from my personal statement:

I want to write stories about people who work and people who love, about how the twin injuries of capitalism and imperialism manifest as an ache in the body, a break in the soul.

The MFA application process has helped me artistically by forcing me to articulate my literary interests; talking about myself is teaching me about myself. Still, I’m haunted by my own suspicion of institutions. Filling out a college application form is sickening. Multiple personal statement prompts ask how I will contribute to their mission of promoting diversity and inclusion, a vomit-inducing little song-and-dance that I am forced to take seriously. The number one writing program in the country is known to be highly problematic for writers of color—and this is kind of the moon I’m sweating to reach in the hopes of landing among the stars of brick-walled, status quo-upholding academia.

(After resisting at first, I did apply to Iowa ((LOL)). On the 2.5% chance I get accepted, I vow to read Workshops of Empire by Eric Bennett.)

There’s a very real chance I won’t get into any of the programs I applied to. This happens to people. Accepting this reality forces me to rethink what it means to apply: that even though you’re praying for a particular outcome, you can already win a slice of what you want by going through the process itself. Fiction, like many crafts, is something you can only learn by doing it over and over; once you stop doing, you stop learning. This is work.

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Organizing

From January to October, I was on the organizing committee for Circuit Breakers, an annual conference put on by the Tech Workers Coalition and Collective Action in Tech. This committee was an amazing group of volunteers who met every week to plan event logistics, create a program, reach out to keynote speakers, review session proposals, and design web pages and social graphics and flyers. I was but a small part of this and am so grateful for the experience.

I also spent this year getting involved with the Bay Area chapter of TWC, participating in book clubs and rallies and, more recently, joining a campaign to get Flock Safety out of the Bay. This group of leftist tech workers has given me so much hope and inspiration and an outlet for all my rage against the system. I love them so much. If you’re interested in labor organizing in the tech industry (you don’t even have to work in tech—I don’t anymore!), please join us! TWC is a global org with several chapters around the country; it’s not focused on a single company or issue, but rather a community of workers at tech companies who care about climate justice, workers’ rights, Palestine, AI, etc. and want to do something about it. We have members here from tech giants like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. The Bay Area chapter is active and hosts social meetups and general meetings once a month—we have our own channel in the Slack.

Excerpt from a journal entry reflecting on the conference:

These are emotionally charged issues but a room full of organizers is calm, collected, measured. They socialize without overextending themselves. They do not cry or gush or express emphatics*. I believe this must be an indication not of emotional repression but high emotional regulation. We need this so much. We who believe in placing human relationships above all are the ones who understand when to be professional and warm, to communicate, not to take things personally, and express our intense emotions and passion in the appropriate avenues. I believe this contributes to militancy. Liberal hysteria is put in a whole new light for me: the correct feelings** are not given an outlet. They implode within themselves and are quite frankly now confusing to me. Revolution is the greatest anti-depressant. Grief and anger fuel us but do not consume us.

* An adjective used incorrectly.

** ‘Correct’ was a weird word to use; I think what I meant was more along the lines of ‘well-intentioned’.

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As I reflect on what my life has become, I don’t feel euphoric. Each day, each hour, each moment appears before me and I have to figure out the best way to spend it. At multiple points over the past few months, I caught myself thinking: I haven’t taken a job assignment in a while; if I haven’t been working, why do I feel so busy? Each time, it surprised me to arrive at the conclusion that I have been working. Far from content, I’m stressed, constantly struggling, thinking about what’s next: I believe, genuinely, that I am quite happy.

Excerpt from my MFA application personal statement:

Life on the margins has taught me what the craft books couldn’t: that all writing is a manipulation of time. Time to read and flirt and join a picket line. Time to eavesdrop on bus conversations and take your dog to the beach.

My financial situation is highly irregular: inconsistent paychecks, savings, support from loved ones, CalFresh food stamps, MediCal insurance. You will have noticed by now that I’ve placed a couple Pledge buttons throughout this post. A pledge means that, if I were to switch to paid, you’d be down to subscribe to my Substack for $5/month or $50/year. (If I get all of you, that’s grocery and gas money for me!) This gives you access to my monthly essays, titled as questions to present my thoughts as inquiries into the world around me. They take a lot of time to research and draft and revise and polish. I also still want to write “check-in” posts halfway through the month, which are more informal thoughts around culture and media (but still take a lot of time to write); if I switch to paid, these may remain free.

Since starting this Substack I’ve resisted switching to paid until I feel confident that I can produce consistent, quality posts. Unfortunately, I couldn’t do that this year, but if you enjoy what I do write, just know that it’s the product of the time I spend reading, learning, asking questions, spending time with friends, watching movies, listening to podcasts, cleaning my apartment, driving to work, conversing with strangers, taking care of my body, taking breaks, making food. If my writing brings value to you in any way, please consider helping me buy time to keep doing it.

A quick wrap of some of my favorite posts from the past:

• August 2024: about AI through the lens of capital and labor

• December 2024: about revolutionary movements in the Philippines during my trip there to visit family

• February 2024: a feminist exploration and very personal essay on finding romantic love as a heterosexual woman

• February 2025: on the value of literature outside of just enjoying stories and words

I don’t have very many followers, but I have to say how incredibly happy it makes me when one of you tells me what you think of my posts. Even just one person’s feedback is enough to keep me going. Please don’t stop! I love knowing who I’m talking to. If you know a friend who would enjoy the kind of stuff I write about, please share.

Share Are the Kids Alright?

I hope your 2026 is full of devoting time to the things you value. I hope we continue to practice envisioning and moving towards a society where everyone can thrive. May your imagination be radical and your love be abundant.

We can’t imagine life without music and literature and paintings and films, yet career artists must constantly justify their own existence, define their worth in pleas for project funding and living wages. In this justification, we always come back to the power of stories, a means of spiritual escape, discovery, inspiration, a way to expand and challenge existing narratives. But the idea that the onus of creating meaning rests solely on a piece of art is completely backwards; rather, art is the expression of a meaning that already exists in the world, in the hearts of humans.

To this point, Trotsky reminds us that these human feelings, this shared psychology, arise from social conditions. Artists need not speak directly to these social conditions in order to create something political, historical, situated in a social context. “It is not true that we regard only that art as new and revolutionary which speaks of the worker,” he writes, “and it is nonsense to say that we demand that the poets should describe inevitably a factory chimney, or the uprising against capital!” Rather, artistic creation is a necessary urge arising from individuals who, like everyone, are tied to their environment and material conditions.

Luckily, we have no shortage of creators who see the environment around them, including the injustices of the world, and use their art to expose and enlighten. Across creative fields, from Toni Morrison and Octavia Butler to Ryan Coogler and Green Day, they use art to deal with issues of class, race, gender, religion, nationalism, imperialism, greed, oppression in all forms. The question remaining, then, is what role these artists can play in changing the status quo that they’re challenging.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about stories that directly speak to radical or subversive themes, stories that depict mass uprising and revolution. The psychology of the individual is a necessary starting point for political exploration, but collective action is the logical conclusion. The parallels to the real world are clear. During the political unrest in 2020, many people online pointed out the hypocrisy in enjoying stories like The Hunger Games trilogy, where a violently oppressed majority rise up against their oppressors, but denouncing protest actions in real life. How can people hate Peacekeepers, the militarized police force of the fictional Panem, but defend riot cops?

Such stories have proliferated popular culture and media for a long time. The entire cyberpunk film genre centers around themes of corporate control, counterculture, and rebellion. Sci-fi, dystopian, and speculative fiction are particularly well-suited genres for exploring truths about the world. Allegory is powerful because it gives us freedom; alien settings provide a certain distance from the subject matter that should allow us to see the world more clearly. These stories portray the multifaceted realities of living under an authoritarian, technologically advanced, profit-driven, and heavily militarized force of oppression. The impact on the popular imagination, however, is reflected less in the political radicalization of audiences than in merchandise sales.

I wonder if there’s something inherent to narrative structures that allows for audiences to so readily decontextualize or depoliticize material. It brings to mind Roland Barthes’s “death of the author,” the idea that a creator’s intentions have no bearing on the meaning of a text: interpretation is completely up to the audience. This is often hailed as the most liberating idea to influence literary criticism. This also makes it easy—and, unfortunately, not technically incorrect—for rightwing-incel-Reddit bros to co-opt the red pill/blue pill metaphor from The Matrix.

George Lucas himself said that Star Wars was about the Vietnam War, where the Rebels represent the Viet Cong and the Empire represents the United States. (The latest Star Wars TV series spinoff, Andor, falls closest in line with the franchise’s anti-imperialist origins.) But the most popular interpretation of the Empire is as a metaphor for the Nazis, an irrefutable enemy in American history, illustrating how a fictional villain can be just familiar enough to be recognizable, but strange enough for us ignore the mirror it holds before us.

There are less superficial reasons to critique the death of the author. Many postcolonial writers have spoken to problems with erasing the author’s intent from your interpretation of their text; as Wiradjuri poet and activist Jeanine Leane writes, “This view aptly sums the long trajectory of European appropriation, blindness to its own cultural standpoint, western literary colonialism, and the consumption of minority cultures by invading, colonising powers.”

Lest this sound too abstract, consider the typical academic writing workshop, where work is critiqued by peers who are encouraged to interpret it without input or explanation from the writer. For a writer of color, this results in a literal silencing whereby she is unable to contextualize her work within the worldview of her marginalized position, thus leaving the work up to interpretation by white peers who may be unaware of certain political realities. If a reader must look within themself for meaning, then the natural consequence is that they bring with it all their existing knowledge, experience, and assumptions without necessarily having to expose the reader beyond what they’re comfortable with.

George Lucas created his story with a specific perspective on a geopolitical situation happening in the real world. Death of the author, in this case, means that we have the freedom to ignore that political reality. We have the freedom to enjoy Star Wars as an action-packed fictional universe, a hero’s journey, an underdog’s fight against a historically decontextualized authoritarian force.

What the villains created by Suzanne Collins, George Lucas, George Orwell, etc. all have in common is the total control of a vast population, whether by surveillance, manipulation, or physical force. Such unilateral exertions of power are despised across the political spectrum in fiction and in the real world, where such instances have existed in both left-wing and right-wing regimes. When consuming fiction, therefore, anyone can “rage against the machine” because anyone gets to define what the machine is.

But say we close the gap of ambiguity even more. The TV series Andor does a pretty great job of this, with its depiction of rebel resistance against a fascist imperial power; it stands apart from other sci-fi creations in its assertion that the apocalypse is already here, just unevenly distributed. The horrific and meticulously rendered mechanisms of empire reflect the realities of oppressed people around the world: indigenous populations forced off their land, their water poisoned and rituals ridiculed; aggressive policing and incarceration of civilian populations; a militant resistance movement that recognizes the need for violence to fight violence. And the show is run, written, and produced by Disney, a major corporate media conglomerate with billions of dollars’ stake in maintaining the capitalist/imperialist status quo.

Unlike the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century, our facade of a liberal democracy would hardly dream of censoring art that doesn’t align with the politics of the ruling class. (Not that art doesn’t get censored at all in the West, but we have just enough of it to maintain the illusion of free ideological exchange.) Under neoliberal capitalism, critique of the system is not suppressed; on the contrary, it is co-opted by capitalists and widely disseminated. This is the argument Mark Fisher makes in Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

“What if you held a protest,” Fisher asks, “and everyone came?”

Stories that critique capitalism, he writes, “perform our anti-capitalism for us,” which is what philosopher Robert Pfaller calls interpassivity. In fact, anti-capitalist messaging is a key feature of capitalist ideology and necessary to its survival. It relies on us, the audience, overvaluing our inner subjective beliefs at the expense of external action; so that as long as we believe capitalism is bad, we can consume art and media with impunity, we are “free to continue to participate in capitalist exchange.”

Capitalism is what is left when beliefs have collapsed at the level of ritual or symbolic elaboration, and all that is left is the consumer-spectator, trudging through the ruins and the relics.

At this year’s Superbowl halftime show, Kendrick Lamar proclaimed that “the revolution is about to be televised!” As a rapper whose entire body of art explores complex psychological realities within systems of racism, capitalism, and patriarchy, he relies on this to be true. Revolution, in order for Lamar to make a living and continue making his art, must be able to be televised, bought, sold, streamed, and downloaded. This isn’t an indictment against him, but rather the crushing paradox lived by any artist who carries a painful awareness of their own oppression, an awareness that inevitably shapes their artistic output.

The example Fisher uses is that of Kurt Cobain, who “knew that he was just another piece of spectacle, that nothing runs better on MTV than a protest on MTV.” His death by suicide “confirmed the defeat and incorporation of rock’s utopian and promethean ambitions.”

Music, film, poetry, novels, painting, fashion, photography, sculpture…. Nothing is exempt from this paradox.

A more optimistic interpretation of Pfaller’s idea of interpassivity would be to think of vicarious consumption as emboldening, in much the same way that education is. Art and education are twin realms in the sense that the awakening of one’s consciousness is as much active as it is passive. Educational programming, in fact, is considered essential to revolutionary practice: fortifying your knowledge of social conditions and unlearning the myths and structures around you goes hand in hand with taking more direct, tangible action. But can art serve a similar function? Should it?

This would require that a work of art awaken its audience’s consciousness in an unambiguous way, resulting in art that feels flat, preachy, didactic, more like propaganda or the Christian artwork of a darker age than anything actually interesting. To demand that art be more political in content, more revolutionary in its message, is to demand that it shed the aesthetic elements that make art what it is. On the other hand, even artists who masterfully blend aesthetics and politics, like Kendrick Lamar, are subject to the leftist critique that “televising the revolution” isn’t good enough, that his appearance on a multimillion-dollar high-profile NFL event, sporting $1,200 designer jeans, negates his own message. To demand that art serve a revolutionary function in addition to the merely symbolic, therefore, is to demand that it go beyond itself, to cease to be art at all.

If we were to believe that art can speak truth to power, theoretically, then it must involve some kind of material threat to current social conditions—conditions which allowed for its creation. Thus enters an existential contradiction.

I think of a podcast interview with an activist in the fashion industry I heard a while back whose background was in fashion design and who once dreamt of designing a clothing collection that was ethically made and environmentally sustainable. But as she became more deeply entrenched and educated in the issues she cared about, she realized that creating new clothes at all, no matter how it was done, was part of the problem. She abandoned her career as a designer to devote her life to activism.

In March 2024 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, eight artists who were featured in an exhibit altered their own work in a pro-Palestinian protest. These alterations ranged from draping huge banners reading CEASEFIRE NOW over their work, to spray painting protest messages directly onto their sculptures. Their demands were that Yerba Buena boycott Israeli institutions and stop censoring artists who speak out for Palestine in their art.

Recently, a particularly frustrated social media post has been circulating that calls for more effective tactics in the Palestinian liberation movement: We need to bite the hand that feeds us, it said. For artists who are fed meager scraps, which we have to beg for, from the duplicitous hand of capitalism—charitable funding, institutional support, the nonprofit industrial complex—this may pose an existential threat to our art.

I’m writing from the usual feelings of rage against the capitalist machine but with a newfound despair at my own material conditions, better informed now after a year of trying to live as an artist. In service of devoting time to my creative writing I traded stability for life on the margins, a high-earning corporate position in exchange for precarity and part-time jobs that demand all of my physical and emotional capacity but not my creativity. I’m learning that life as an artist means daily tension between basic existence and the need for transcendence. The outlet I’ve found for all this rage is in political organizing, doing what I can to change the fundamental social conditions at the root of this tension, and on this front it seems my art is useless. I’m more likely to lend my creative talents to propagandizing lately because, as it turns out, past me was right: trying to write poems about love when a surprise medical bill threatens your ability make rent this month is going to be difficult, actually.

What I truly need, of course, is unlimited time. Money buys time, so I work for wages, and it spreads me thin, just as capitalism promised, the fated scarcity haunting my every move. Am I doing enough with what little I have? How can I do more? Yet despair and hope coalesce in the knowledge that even though art can’t help us, humans will continue to create because we can’t help it. Sisyphus is depressed and enraged but one must also imagine him happy.

I recently attended a political conference on the fight for human rights in the Philippines. The subject matter was heavy as organized groups reported on the latest, literal bloodshed in the U.S.-funded fascist regime, the violent repression of political dissidents, the struggle for land sovereignty, the injustices faced by migrant Filipino laborers. But before a word of this was spoken, the conference began with a song.

We peruse the Conrad’s full spa menu of hot stone massages, facials, aromatherapy, body scrubs, detoxes, and hair and scalp treatments. I choose the 90-minute hilot massage, “an ancient Filipino traditional healing treatment,” because I figure I might as well go full tourist for a grand price of 6,500 Philippine pesos (USD $115). The massage room is large, candlelit, with a rectangular white bathtub in the corner and floor-to-ceiling windows with views of the night sky, the amusement park rides along Seaside Boulevard, the dark expanse of the bay. The white cotton foam-padded slippers are so goddamn soft I want to steal them.

The ancient Filipino traditional healing treatment begins with a bubble bath where my hands are too wet to use my phone so I don’t know what to do for twenty minutes except stare at the opposite edge of the tub. Then the massage therapist, a calm Filipino lady who looks to be around my mother’s age, returns and rubs a Himalayan salt mixture into the back of my shoulders. Her voice is like a lullaby; she talks me through each step of the hilot with the patience of one who has explained it hundreds of times to foreigners (which, by all measures, I am). She pours warm coconut milk over my neck and it dribbles down my back into the bathwater, and then I’m left to soak like a cooking pan in a sink for a few more minutes. The bubbles gather around the tips of my knees like soda fizz.

After I rinse off, it’s time for the massage. I’m new to massages, shy around the impending intimacy of a stranger’s touch. I become acutely aware of my body and how little I actually know of it, and, more broadly, aware of the knowledge gap between a novice receiver of a service and the expert who delivers the service, performs it like clockwork—they often do their best to guide you, but they don’t know what you don’t know.

There’s a kind of relief that comes with relinquishing a problem to a wizard who can make it disappear with a wave of a wand. Like rolling your office chair back while a weary IT guy takes control of your computer. We trust the experts of their field and throw ourselves fully into that trust because, unlike faith, there’s a logic behind it.

Face down in the spa room, as I relinquish my body to the expert prodding of the massage therapist’s hands, I remember the time, years ago, when a bacterial infection entered my then-new cartilage piercing in my left ear. In my panic, I sought out not a doctor but a body piercing specialist. (The original piercer was in a different town, so I entered the first tattoo salon I could find on my way home from work.) With the pleading eyes of a leper at Jesus’s feet, I asked the piercer if it is indeed infected, and could he give me anything to treat it, and should I book an appointment so as to respect his time? I perched gingerly on the cushioned bench while he examined my ear with gloved hands. I awaited his divine verdict. He pushed his thumbs against the tender bulge and squeezed, hard. It burst.

After the flash of pain, relief.

As the massage therapist rubs oil into my muscles, I feel myself tense at the hard pressure. The police voice in my head, which sounds suspiciously like one of my parents or both combined, tells me the hard pressure is what’s supposed to happen. Stop resisting! Stop tensing up—it defeats the purpose of the massage! I breathe and remind myself I don’t know any better. I focus on letting go. Then the therapist asks if the pressure is okay and I manage to squeak out a request to go lighter; she immediately complies. I tell myself I would have made the request even if she hadn’t asked.

Next she lathers me with coconut oil and I suddenly smell like desert. She places banana leaves on my back, then a hot towel over the leaves, and the heat seems to sink through each layer of skin into a place deep in my chest. She presses on my head, my temples, my jaw, my forearms. At the beginning of the massage I had indicated my areas of tension, after some hesitation, thinking I had none. It’s an awareness of my body that has taken years to cultivate, along with the effort to ask for help when something is wrong. At immense emotional peril, I am succeeding.

One of the great pillars of my worldview, one so large that for years I could not see it, is that discomfort is normal and necessary. You have to step out of your comfort zone to reach your goals, whether it's learning a new skill or experiencing life in a different country. Swallow the friction.

I have one of those friends who’s great to travel with. An adept navigator of the rigmarole of itinerary planning, flight and hotel booking, and airport best practices, this friend has an easygoing disposition that makes her well equipped for the unavoidable stressors of abrupt plan changes, making decisions, making mistakes. This disposition has taken her far in life. Sometimes, when she and I catch up, we talk about relationships. We talk about men and their emotional reactiveness, their stress and resentments, the fact of their maleness having shielded them their whole lives from the accountability of self-regulating around others. She herself is not emotionally reactive. She has the superpower of turning herself to stone to deflect any angry explosion—come talk to me when you’ve calmed down. She has been in a relationship with a man for a long time. I think to myself that must be what it takes to be in a relationship with a man for a long time. Is it fortitude, or endurance?

*

I spoke automatically and with such fervor that I did not realize that the men were still talking and laughing until my dry mouth, filling up with blood from the cut, almost strangled me. I coughed, wanting to stop and go to one of the tall brass, sand-filled spitoons to relieve myself, but a few of the men were listening and I was afraid. So I gulped it down, blood, saliva and all, and continued. (What powers of endurance I had during those days! What enthusiasm! What a belief in the rightness of things!)

This excerpt is from the novel Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. In this scene, the narrator, a young Black man, recites a speech in front of a panel of white men who abuse and ignore him. When he finishes, they award him with a college scholarship.

Last week I participated in the VONA (Voices of Our Nation Arts foundation) fellowship for writers of color, where I learned about how the traditional writing workshop structure centers whiteness. My instructor, the wise and incomparable Jennine Capó Crucet, cited Workshops of Empire by Eric Bennett (University of Iowa Press, 2015). The book demonstrates how the creative writing discipline was shaped by post-Cold War by institutions to shape the literary canon; their goal was to foster literature that prizes the interiority of the individual as one disconnected from community, politics, and ideology—to protect minds against collectivist thinking and thus uphold liberal capitalist ideals.

To counter this tradition, Jennine’s radical redesign of the workshop, where open-ended questions guide the discussion, structurally prioritizes the writer’s intent, identity, politics, background, and contextual knowledge by encouraging readers to approach the work from a place of curiosity rather than critique.

This is far from typical. Here’s how it usually goes. You hand off your work to a group of readers. You do not explain yourself or communicate your intent behind the work, and you give as little context as is necessary. You sit back while they take turns giving their honest impressions. You sit and absorb. You are, quite literally, silenced.

This mode of critique is institutionalized in MFA programs across the country and it has shaped what’s possible, publishable, and celebrated in the American literary tradition. And if I, as a writer, want to get better at my craft, then I listen to the experts. Right?

But artists do not live in or create art in a vacuum. To sit in complete silence while well-meaning readers freely indulge in the act of projecting their own personal knowledge, or lack thereof, to your art, treating the art as if it stands outside time and society, is a mode of erasure familiar to any marginalized person who has ever had to endure being misunderstood. No wonder the MFA program has frustrated and alienated so many writers of color. And so as I reflect on all the workshops where I willingly accepted the process because that was “simply what was done,” I wonder how I made it through; why I made it through; and, in making it through, how much of myself I was losing.

I often think of all the ways my upbringing incentivized my fitting in without the word “assimilate” ever having to be uttered. Don’t draw attention to yourself; don’t speak out of turn; get along with others. When my sister and I were children, women would approach my mother in public and remark with awe at how well-behaved her girls were. Not a single tear or tantrum—how still we sat! If I struggled in school, the only explanation available to me was my own inability to conform to correctness, rather than, say, the possibility of a flaw in the teacher’s methods, or in the environment around me, or in the academic system as a whole. Any incompatibility should be amended by simply making yourself compatible.

I was taught to arrive at the doorstep of society and, like a great American pioneer, fix my gaze forward and outward but never backward, never in. The word “assimilate” was implied by the kind of society I was shaping myself into, one built by capitalism and imperialism, one that doesn’t care who I am.

A month ago, I thought I was going to write an essay about endurance. Now I realize that there are different types of endurance: there’s the kind forced by outlandishly cruel circumstances where you have no choice but to endure to survive, and the other kind that is so normalized, so readily accepted, that you don’t even realize you’re making a choice. Often, one blends into the other.

How do we know when discomfort is an opportunity for growth, and when it’s an indication that something is terribly wrong?

Sometimes we don’t know until the veil of illusion is lifted. My circle of queer, BIPOC, neurodivergent, and fantastically beautiful friends reminds me of how slim the allowance for acceptability in this world is, how it keeps us clamoring for our basic humanity along the margins. It’s no exaggeration to equate a lack of authentic self-expression with imperialism. We learn through life experience that if we don’t look right, act right, love right, we’ll be punished. The suppression of the self is a protracted unification of the psychological with the physical, like muscle knots forming in the neck from watching your own back for so long. The body is no mere metaphor—it is the beginning and end of violence.

The life-saving imperative for marginalized people is to build our own safety in communities where our bodies can be free.

The well-behaved child, now an adult, reveals her true self through her body when she’s writing. She’s a sight in the coffee shop, a nuisance by her own standards: shoes off, legs tucked under, now squatting upright, playing with her hair, knee bouncing double-time, now pacing around the table, now bent over her chair as she types. What’s invisible is the choice she’s making: she knows she’s an oddity, a distraction to others, but moving around helps her focus. The child once praised for her ability to sit still is learning what it means to let go. The adult’s well-behaved inner child still endures pain, discomfort, friction in the name of keeping the peace, abiding by her teachings, but she’ll fight to honor herself too, clumsily, gracelessly, even if through no means other than writing her way into existence.

I wish I could be more efficient; do it all. But like many creatives who struggle with some form of executive dysfunction, I have to choose.

Lately, I’ve had Hadestown on repeat. Hadestown, a musical that premiered on Broadway in 2019 and won the Tony for Best Musical that year, is a retelling of the Greek tragedy of Orpheus and Eurydice and set in a world inspired by Depression-era New Orleans. The music is incredibly full of life and combines genres like jazz and folk and rock and blues; I’ve seen it live once, at the Orpheum Theatre (an apt venue), and it’s also visually stunning.

So many interesting themes intersect with each other—the power of music, class struggle, poverty, love. Right now, the aspect of Hadestown that I’m dying to talk about is what it has to say about art under capitalism, and the role of the artist.

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As with all retellings, what draws us to the story is the fact that we know how it ends. “It’s a sad song,” sings Hermes, the story’s narrator, in the opening number, “but we’re gonna sing it even so.” In the Greek tale, Orpheus must lead Eurydice out of Hades on the condition that he cannot turn around to look at her; but, just as they reach the exit, Orpheus loses faith and turns around, sending Eurydice back to the underworld forever.

In Hadestown, Orpheus is a struggling musician, described as an idealist with the gift of song: “He could make you see how the world could be in spite of the way that it is.”

And this poor boy, he wore his heart out on his sleeve
You might say he was naïve to the ways of the world
But he had a way with words
And the rhythm and the rhyme
And he sang just like a bird up on a line

The character foil to Orpheus is Hades, who in this story is an industrial capitalist who runs the underworld like a factory. In “Chant” from Act I, Hades sings to Persephone about the work he’s been up to while she was gone for the summer: building a foundry where he “fashioned things of steel/Oil drums and automobiles” and a power grid with silver screens and cathode rays, fashioning the whole of the underworld into what Persephone contemptuously calls a “neon necropolis.”

“I conduct the electric city!” Hades growls, mad with power.

The rest of the characters are caught between these two opposing forces. Persephone represents the abundance of spring and what love is supposed to be; Eurydice is a “hungry young girl” who has a remarkable love but needs food and shelter. Lastly, the souls of the underworld are zombie-like laborers, doomed to sweat in eternal service.

I read the worker chorus as representative of not just real-world factory workers, but everyone who labors for a living: in coffee shops and corporate offices, in delivery and retail, in tech and marketing. The song “Why We Build the Wall” is a call-and-response anthem between Hades and his workers that not only expresses the drudgery of modern working conditions but the circular logic that is fabricated to justify it. This recalls Mark Fisher’s idea of “capitalist realism”, which describes how capitalist ideology permeates every aspect of human existence to convince us that there is no alternative to capitalism. Hades’s workers in the underworld are therefore just like us: aware of their own misery, but unable to imagine a world where life could be different.

WORKERS:
Because we have and they have not
Because they want what we have got
The enemy is poverty
And the wall keeps out the enemy
And we build the wall to keep us free

What do we have that they should want?
We have a wall to work upon
We have work and they have none

HADES:
And our work is never done
My children, my children
And the war is never won

That's why we build the wall
We build the wall to keep us free

If the tragedy of the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice is in the fate of the lovers, the tragedy of Hadestown is in the fate of the workers.

Act I: In the dead of winter, Orpheus struggles to finish his song, which is supposed to make spring come again. But they’re still poor, and Eurydice is hungry, and she ventures out in a storm to find food and firewood because, as we know all too well, you can’t eat poetry. In desperation, she makes a deal with Hades to live in the underworld.

In Act II, the opposing forces of Orpheus and Hades reach a confrontation when Orpheus arrives in the underworld to bring Eurydice back. When despair is nigh and it seems Eurydice can’t be saved, Orpheus the dreamer sings his lament: “If it’s true what they say/Is this how the world is?/To be beaten and betrayed and then be told that nothing changes.”

As Orpheus sings, the workers hear him and echo his song. He realizes that his struggle is bigger than himself and sings a message for all of them to refuse to accept the world as it is, to instead dream of how it could be.

I believe that we are many
I believe that they are few
And it isn’t for the few
To tell the many what is true

This is a major turning point in the story, which has taken on a completely new layer now: hope of freedom not just for Eurydice, but for everyone in underworld. Eventually, Hades agrees to send Orpheus and Eurydice on their way out, with a challenge. And the workers sing: “If he can do it, so can she/If she can do it, so can we.”

And we all know what happens.

Orpheus fails to lead Eurydice out, and by extension extinguishes any hope of a new life for the workers. Orpheus’s song taught them to hope, and then their hopes were dashed. It seems unfair. Of course, one can always imagine a secret continuation of the story where the workers rise up against Hades, but we can just as easily imagine a world where the work goes on uninterrupted and the workers continue to sing the songs of revolution while they toil for the rest of eternity.

Art has the power to expose the cracks in the wall, but it can’t do much more than that. We knew the story would end this way. Why tell it? Why should we, the audience, care about Orpheus’s song and his vision of a new world when we know it won’t save anyone?

Freedom is a constant struggle. So goes the refrain that anyone involved in collective, grassroots movements is all too familiar with. I know of hardly anyone who is more intimate with failure than labor organizers. Political activists lose all the time. It took years to win the eight-hour work week; the struggle for Palestine has been going on for decades. People involved in the grunt work of fighting for a better world must find ways to spiritually sustain themselves day to day. One of those ways is storytelling.

But the creation of art is also riddled with constant failure. People dedicated to their craft sacrifice precious time and resources to produce what the world might deem inconsequential: a painting of a flower, a poem about love. Poor Orpheus was too busy working on a song to hear Eurydice calling his name.

Art isn’t political only when it carries a revolutionary message; art is political because the process of its creation goes hand in hand with revolution. Art and revolution go hand in hand because they both require an amount of sacrifice that goes against rationality, a constant tension between the despair of knowledge and the hope of change. They require endurance. They represent love, anger, dreams, desire—the purest expression of our humanity. The only reason I can think of to continue with either art or revolution, even in the face of inevitable failure, is that we literally have no choice.

Just like art, liberation from oppression, injustice, and capitalism requires so much more work than many of us realize. It’s also the greatest gift we can give ourselves.

“Is it you?” she says, eyes wide, like she’s been waiting for him.

Their romance is bound with all the convictions of fate and fantasy. Somewhere in Time (1980, dir. Jeannot Szwarc) employs many of the familiar tropes of your typical time travel love story. The love is meant to be because it’s already happened; not even time, that most powerful and mysterious of Earth’s forces, can keep Richard and Elise apart. They defy Elise’s manager, the film’s apparent villain who insists the romance will ruin Elise’s career. They make love. They declare their undying devotion to each other and resolve to get married. But, Elise says, they must buy Richard a new suit, for the one he has chosen is ridiculously out of style.

Of course, the true villain in this story is reality. Richard starts to show off his current suit and, in one of the pockets, he finds a penny minted 1979. It breaks the hypnotic spell. Realizing what’s about to happen, he reaches out desperately for Elise, and she cries out his name, but he’s gone before their hands can touch.

He awakes in 1980 and tries again and again to go back to no avail. Stricken, he wanders the hotel grounds in shock and despair. Days later, the hotel staff finds him on a chair in his room, gaunt, unresponsive, on the verge of death.

This is not a happy ending. Richard’s catatonic state at the end represents an anguish beyond reach, a loss so total it consumes him. There are many films that involve travels through time—the 2011 film Midnight in Paris directly critiques the notion of romanticizing the past, with its characters coming to the realization that the present will always be “a little unsatisfying”. On the other hand, Somewhere in Time’s Richard Collier is not longing for the false idea of a bygone era but a real, flesh and blood person whom he can never be with because of the physical limitations of time. The absolute unreachability of this desire is what kills him when he loses it. The pain of this kind of longing, the hopeless loss of something you will never have, is what distinguishes the feeling of nostalgia from the simple act of remembering.

C.S. Lewis names this longing as “the desire for your own far off country,” the “secret that hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence.” This faraway place works well as a metaphor; the term nostalgia itself is derived from the Greek words for “return home” (nostos) and “longing” (algia). Nostalgia was once thought to be a physical disease, curable with medical treatment; it was mostly experienced by people displaced far from their home, like students, migrant workers, and soldiers.

But in fact we’re more likely to conceptualize nostalgia as longing for a different time. The mysterious machinations of time, its relentless forwardness, serves as a far more powerful barrier than those of space. Consider another time travel film, Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, and the moment where Coop returns to the spacecraft to find that, in his absence of only a few hours, decades have passed on Earth. He breaks down in tears as he watches video messages of his kids—they are now adults who have grown up without him. The pain of this loss is as boundless as a black hole: Coop can theoretically return to Earth, but he can never get that time back.

As Svetlana Boym writes in an essay for Hedgehog Review, epidemics of nostalgia arise throughout history most often after periods of great change. “While many nineteenth-century thinkers believed progress and enlightenment would cure nostalgia,” Boym writes, “they have exacerbated it instead.” Of all currently living, millennials are the most marked by nostalgia. Not only have we lived through so much technological progress in such a short span of time, it is because of this technology that we are able to document the nostalgia itself, resulting in the creation of a collective identity based on a feeling. We gave birth to the “Only 90s Kids Will Understand” meme, which traded on the cultural language of the internet to produce a shared narrative that can never now be extricated from that language: images of Lisa Frank stickers, early Nintendo, Frosted Flakes commercials—in short, consumer goods of a certain time.

For nostalgia to truly work, you have to briefly come into contact with a representative object of that time and place, whether through fragment or fraud. The triggers are sensual; music, smells, and taste are particularly effective, but visual triggers are easiest to reproduce and chase. This is what aligns nostalgia so readily with the driving forces of consumerism. Disney adults are not only bent on reclaiming a sense of childhood, but are also eager to swipe their credit cards to participate in an ongoing cultural experience, to form new memories by revisiting the past. The newest trends lately are marked by nostalgia for the 2000s and 2010s, with fashion and pop culture of those years resurfacing in our collective imagination. These highly visual representations of the past serve as a security blanket for generations of young people grappling with the fact that they will never be as young as they are right now.

The researcher Christine Bacho says that nostalgia is a way of adapting to discontinuity, to orient ourselves in times of chaos; similarly, Svetlana Boym writes that nostalgia represents a “longing for discontinuity in a fragmented world” and a “defense mechanism in a time of accelerated rhythms of life and historical upheavals.” Given the turmoil of the past decade, is it any wonder we crave the time before? I’ve never felt a stronger pull for the rose-colored past than I did when I binged the entirety of Gossip Girl, the soapy teen drama that ran from 2007 to 2012, during the pandemic lockdown. As I watched I knew true escape from the horrors was futile—but the mere promise of it was addicting. I loved the longing I felt among the flip phones and sideswept hair and bodycon dresses, the visual markers that stood in not for the kid I was when the show aired, but who that kid wanted to be.

Similarly, music from the summer of 2014 pulls me back not to a time of freedom, but to a time of dreaming. It was my first summer living away from home, and I was working two jobs, and I knew what I wanted out of life even if I couldn’t live it yet. I was nineteen and I could almost touch it; it was just within reach; I had hope. Remembering that summer makes me nostalgic for the yearning that captured my imagination during those days of hard work and loneliness.

A few years after the pandemic, as I moved on from Gossip Girl to its older sister, Sex and the City, I became fascinated by Francis Fukuyama’s idea of “the end of history,” particularly as interpreted by Mark Fisher in Capitalist Realism. Fisher describes how capitalist ideology reproduces itself by convincing us that there is no other alternative. Resistance to it has been co-opted, and popular media actually strengthens capitalism by critiquing it without subverting it. We have reached the final stage of historical evolution as a society.

Ideology is dead! says Zizek. Resistance is dead. Real art, art that exists outside the logic of capital, is dying faster than ever. In an article for n+1, Will Tavlin details how Netflix’s business model yields movies made for “casual viewing”—what he calls TNM, the Typical Netflix Movie. The TNM is characterized by the flat, oversaturated aesthetic of the Netflix studio’s powerful digital cameras, along with too many drone shots, redundant CGI, and cheap editing. Studio executives tell writers to write dialogue that narrates what’s happening on screen so that viewers can multitask. And outside the world of Netflix, we’re still inundated with studios’ low-risk, high-reward bets on franchises and reboots and sequels that guarantee box office sales and keep audiences in a backwards-looking time loop where, it seems, every story that can possibly be told already has been. And so, with no sense of irony, I turn more and more to old movies, relishing the textured film shots, creative direction, and scripts that feel fresh and original because they reference real life rather than their own predecessors.

This nostalgic expression is as deceptive as any other. Somewhere in Time, for example, is not a good movie. It’s 100 minutes of gratuitous melodrama and mediocre writing. Bad movies and profit-driven movies and bad, profit-driven movies have existed in every era of cinematic history. But when I immerse myself for those 100+ minutes in a setting from twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty years ago, at least I can pretend there’s still a future.

Marcel Proust believed nostalgia is a longing for the curiosity of childhood: we miss who we were before we formed the habits and rituals that define our adult life, which are antithetical to creativity. I believe the longing for the past is akin to our desire for time outside of time, the desire that drives our search for leisure. True leisure, rather than existing as a scheduled time block on our calendars, is completely free from the industrial logic of the workplace, where every minute in and outside work must be tracked and optimized. We aren’t truly at rest until we feel as though the rest period will never end; unlike the predictable tick of the clock, leisure is a subjective and emotional experience. What we’re searching for is that coveted feeling of flow that captures you when you’re lost in time, preoccupied with something that fills your soul.

It makes sense, then, that Richard Collier, who had booked the hotel stay because he was struggling to write, was all the more susceptible to the obsessive pull of Elise McKenna from 1912. He poured all his need and desire into the power of self-hypnosis and the pursuit of Elise, and when he returned his heart and mind were as if stuck in another dimension entirely, that “far off country” of C.S. Lewis. In the same vein, nostalgia is creative energy with nowhere to go. How else can we conceive of this irresistible urge to escape via the past, the depth of the ache for something lost?

Humans must create, and so the powerful force of nostalgia is as inevitable as the passing of time. We turn it into a vehicle for moving through time, as signs from the past are revived and decontextualized: Y2K fashion and emo-themed dance nights and tradwives and the myth of an America that was once “great.” In her essay, Svetlana Boym makes the distinction between two types of nostalgia: restorative and reflective.

Restorative nostalgia stresses nostos (home) and attempts a transhistorical reconstruction of the lost home. Reflective nostalgia thrives on algia (the longing itself) and delays the homecoming—wistfully, ironically, desperately.

The latter, she says, “dwells on the ambivalences of human longing and belonging and does not shy away from the contradictions of modernity.” It is fragmented and flexible, individualized and imaginative. Rather than serving as a blueprint for reconstructing what was lost, reflective nostalgia “does not pretend to rebuild the mythical place called home; it it is ‘enamored of distance, not of the referent itself.’”

The bleak mandate of capitalist realism will have us believe that there is no alternative to capitalism, that everything we have ever had is all we ever will have. Resistance to the malaise of our times requires imagination. Our salvation, therefore, and as always, lies in art, and in how nostalgic longing will determine what society can look, sound, smell, and taste like. It rests on our ability to seek and create worlds that resist mere symbolic reconstruction; to transcend time by embracing transience and entropy. To yearn without wanting. To press forward; to move on.

More specifically, we’re going to talk about fashion, the mythologies it sustains, the conversations it carries with us, its audience. I’m aware that I’m talking about fashion like it’s this supreme, omniscient being in the sky. That’s because fashion isn’t just about shoes, clothes, personal style; it’s an industry, a culture, an art, with its own history and canon. Its patron saints are mythologized in both high art circles and pop culture. Halston, Lagerfeld, de la Renta… Stanley Tucci’s character in The Devil Wears Prada imperiously states that what these artists created was greater than art “because you live your life in it.” (He pauses. “Well, not you, obviously,” he says to Anne Hathaway, gesturing dismissively at her drab outfit in a satirical nod to fashion snobbery.)

Fashion is a lot like sex: it is frivolous and fetishistic and all at once rife with meaning and meaning’s absence. It can be superficial or profound, fluid or obsessive, playful or dangerous; it contains experiences of empowerment and rejection, provides a space to confront, reflect on, and subvert your desires. It is also an artistic arena where the symbolic cannot be compartmentalized away from the material; whereas critique of an oil painting need not mention the environmental impact of the global demand for oil paint, a runway collection of polyester resort pieces doesn’t enjoy the same freedom.

The intersection of fashion and the world is what inspired me to write the first version of this essay back in 2021. I was an aspiring sustainable fashion blogger, emphasis on blog, with the hopes of creating content about ethical consumption supplemented with longer-form pieces on fashion and politics. The blog, now long abandoned, soon became more focused on political ideas with fashion as the entry point, rather than the other way around—picture Naomi Klein quotes on capitalism alongside Instagram photos of thrifted ‘fits.

Can I still be a feminist in Louboutins? The existential crisis was prompted by the purchase of my first (and still only) pair of Louboutin heels, secondhand, from TheRealReal, an online luxury consignment retailer. 85-millimeter block heels, white leather straps criss-crossed in the front and one around the ankle with a tiny silver buckle, red soles slightly scuffed, at the low price of $389 (whereas a comparable style would currently retail for $895).

By then I was a few years into my first high-salaried job, a turning point in my professional career that I celebrated by indulging in my lifelong love for fashion. My purchases were still dictated by principle: I only bought secondhand (because the environment!), and, now that I could afford designer goods, I had to consider my relationship to brand names. I was embarrassed by logos and often opted for high-end pieces that didn’t have one on full display; it had to be small, subtle, hidden, if it appeared anywhere at all.

But that shiny streak of lacquered red exposed me. What did it mean to own this pair of shoes? What did wearing them say about me? It didn’t mean I appreciated the brand for its creativity or craftsmanship—it was a pretty but simple pair of sandals. It certainly didn’t mean that I had reached a level of personal wealth high enough to afford them. What it did mean, however, was that, despite my growing class consciousness and dissatisfaction with capitalism, I still wanted to. Those shoes reminded me that even our most private desires are successful manipulations of an external reality we cannot control, a world of rules and codes that make no sense.

*

By the time those red bottoms made their way into my closet the Louboutin craze was well past its heyday. Those famous stilettos had spent the better parts of the 2000s and 2010s scuffing club dance floors everywhere, standing at least 120 millimeters high and available in shiny patent and suede, pointy and platform, sequined and studded, both painful and sexy. Louboutin shoes were declared by the Luxury Institute as the Most Prestigious Women’s Shoes in the years 2007, 2008, and 2009; in 2011, Digital Luxury Group found that Louboutin was the most searched-for shoe brand online.

Louboutin shoes belong to a category of luxury designer objects—Chanel classic flap, Rolex watch, Gucci belt, anything with the Louis Vuitton monogram—coveted not just for their aesthetic or their high price point, but for the overt brand logo on display. Adorning everything from multi-thousand dollar handbags to monogrammed pantyhose, the logo sends one message and one message only: I can afford this.

Logomania, a phenomenon now understood as a trendy obsession that rides the waves of the global economy, experienced its true birth in the 1980s when the clothing designer Daniel Day, famously known as “Dapper Dan,” created streetwear with fur, diamonds, and luxury brand logos on full display. He came not from the great fashion houses of Europe but from the streets of Harlem. He sold stolen clothes out of a car before opening Dapper Dan’s Boutique in 1982. He recognized the power of the logo and incorporated the monograms of high fashion brands such as Louis Vuitton, Gucci, MCM, and Fendi into his designs, a modus operandi which many have likened to hip hop sampling.

“The label is everything,” Dapper Dan once said. “The label is the thing the gangster clientele use to let the other gangsters in the street know, ‘You ain’t got what I got.’ The label or logo sets you apart.” His buyers were not the moneyed elite, who constituted luxury brands’ typical clientele, but hustlers and rappers, an array of hip hop stars on the rise like Salt-N-Pepa, LL Cool J, and Erik B & Rakim.

Thanks to Dapper Dan, logomania defined streetwear—its presence in high fashion today is the result of influence from the streetwear aesthetic.

The obsession with logos among the aspirational introduces an interesting framework for the class analysis of fashion: the poor and marginalized crave status in such a unique and forceful way that forms an integral part of their collective experiences, storytelling, cultural production, and aesthetic. Cardi B’s 2016 anthem “Bodak Yellow” evokes hip hop braggadocio by documenting the former stripper’s rise to success with a number of materialistic trophies, including Louboutins: “These expensive, these is red bottoms, these is bloody shoes / Hit the store, I can get ‘em both, I don’t wanna choose.” She declares: “I used to live in the P’s / Now it’s a crib with a gate / Rollie got charms, look like Frosted Flakes.”

In the world I come from, a world of middle class, first-generation immigrants, logomania is so ubiquitous as to be acknowledged as a cultural stereotype. Women who spend their first nursing paychecks on Louis Vuitton bags, civil engineers and radiology techs who idolize Adidas and Nike sportswear; a cousin who worked at a high-end clothing store once told the story, rolling her eyes, of a Filipino couple who walked in and balked at the price of a shirt, complaining out loud that “it doesn’t even have the logo on it.” For immigrants, whether in the hood or the suburbs, the logo is not just a sign of class mobility, but a ticket to America itself: the dream, the myth, the promise that you can force your way into belonging with just the right pair of glass slippers.

*

People of all genders can aspire to status and its signifiers, but stereotypes still hold: it’s (cis) women who are the fashion industry’s obsession, and so the industry must constantly grapple with evolving ideas about women and their status in the world. The same period that birthed logomania also saw the rise of the women’s “power suit,” with extreme shoulder padding and cinched waists that created a rigid, intimidating silhouette. The power suit, though inspired by menswear, was always unmistakably feminine, but it was less a statement of gender fluidity and more a statement of the changing faces of power. Riding on the coattails of second-wave feminism, women of the ‘80s wanted to say that they could keep their femininity and still be taken seriously—to be as smart and powerful and rich as a man—but power in this world, as well as freedom, was still defined as enterprise.

This is the predecessor to the #GIRLBOSS, who has no comparable uniform aside from perhaps the stilettos Sheryl Sandberg wore on the cover of Time in 2013. Feminists of the past few decades, wary of the bra-burning, anti-sex reputation of feminism, have insisted on personal choice as the reigning philosophy of female dress. In the 1990s, variations of the third-wave feminist movement known as lipstick and stiletto feminism emphasized embracing femininity and sex appeal. But as I wrote in a previous essay on beauty sickness, a feminist politics of personal choice is easily susceptible to critique—can our choices ever truly be our own in this world?

One particularly fitting case study is the fictional character Claire Underwood, the Lady Macbeth to the U.S. Senator Frank Underwood in Netflix’s House of Cards. Played by a brooding, clean-cut Robin Wright, Claire is smart, power-hungry, and, as noted by Megan Garber for the Atlantic, seemingly permanently clad in stilettos (specifically Louboutins and Manolo Blahniks, according to the character’s stylist). “The shoes, which at once elevate Claire and constrain her, function as both a defense mechanism and a power play,” Garber writes.

“They emphasize the thin lines between control and the lack of it. They emphasize aesthetics over practicality. They suggest privilege but also a kind of willful subjugation—an acquiescence to discomfort, to the dangers of walking in heels, to beauty standards that have been largely determined by men. They are shoes fit for a moment in which femininity is both a source of power and a source of its opposite.”

Women’s complicated relationship to stilettos are reflected in Christian Louboutin’s own conflicting statements about the nature of his work. Whereas he once declared that he wanted to create something that “made women feel confident and empowered,” he has also admitted that “the core of my work is dedicated not to pleasing women but to pleasing men.” Besides the red sole, Louboutin heels all share a key design element: an exaggerated curve in the arch, resulting in the calculated maximal optimization of sexiness and, by all accounts, pain.

Similarly, the acquisition of wealth and status for the modern day woman, while individually satisfying, is fraught with the inherent contradictions of freedom. A climb to the top in a man’s world is often narrativized in the language of empowerment, of breaking barriers and overcoming adversity, encapsulated in a single word: #GIRLBOSS. In 2013, Catherine Rottenburg theorized that we are witnessing “the rise of neoliberal feminism,” particularly, the emergence of a new neoliberal feminist—not just female—subject. This subject is “not only individualized but entrepreneurial”; she takes classic liberal feminism and, just as neoliberal ideology does in every domain, co-opts its ideas and recasts them in the logical mold of the market.

This subject willingly and forcibly acknowledges continued gender inequality but her feminism is so individuated that it has been completely unmoored from any notion of social inequality and consequently cannot offer any sustained analytic of the structures of male dominance, power, or privilege.

Neoliberal feminists, Rottenburg concludes, politicize their plight yet “individualize the revolution”. This extreme individualization creates a deficient position from which to critique systems of power.

But feminism is the fight for freedom, and freedom is not power. Freedom is fluidity. A feminist politics of fashion operates within and in constant tension with patriarchy, which presumes the existence of a binary of genders and their strict rules. A queer politics of fashion, however, presumes no such thing. The stiletto will always be a source of discomfort and constraint, even if the wearer has chosen it of their own free will; true liberation is in the ability to take it off. In the same way, the signifiers of “typical” femininity or masculinity (dresses and tuxes) aren’t oppressive as long as the wearer can choose which signifiers to identify with at any given moment without threat of judgment or dehumanization.

Fashion, for its expressive capacity, has always been at the crux of gender discourse. Alok Vaid-Menon, a gender-nonconforming writer, performer, and activist, gave a talk for Business of Fashion in 2019 on “fashion’s genderless future.” The vision of what they’ve termed the “de-gendering” of fashion is not about so-called unisex clothes (which are usually designed to be bland and masculine-coded anyway), but about separating gender identity from clothes altogether.

(Catch a glimpse it in New York City, where the French luxury department store Printemps just opened the doors to its first U.S. location. On the shop floor, clothing racks aren’t separated by brand or gender, reflecting consumers’ growing desire for flexibility in style regardless of labels.)

Queerness therefore does individualize the revolution, not through the neoliberal feminist mode of liberation via self-optimization, but by situating the individual as a site of theory and practice, to critique cultural norms while actively subverting them. “Our beauty cannot coexist with the lives that they are living because we reveal that it is not we who wear the masks,” Alok says. Authentic gender expression holds a mirror to the rigid value systems we take for granted and tells us that we don’t have to just say no to our oppression, we can create a new world beyond it.

Who am I as a woman if not feminine? I am cisgendered and have therefore always defined my womanhood within the limited imagination of the patriarchal status quo. Whether I respond to this status quo by rejecting certain elements of what’s “feminine” while celebrating others, it seems I am still operating under the assumption that the category “woman” exists, and that a foundational aspect of my identity rests on my belonging to it. The prospect of a world where such a category does not exist at all is, on a personal level, somewhat frightening: frightening in the way that the total and complete destruction of the self is frightening, in that with it comes the liberatory potential to reconstruct something new and unimaginable.

The real promise of degendering fashion, then, is the decoupling of the visual signifiers of gender from the real-world fact of gender (as determined by each individual). Feminine doesn’t have to mean woman, masculine doesn’t have to mean man. Sociologist Stuart Hall wrote that societies and cultures use visual signs and codes to impose a “dominant cultural order”, “dominant” meaning a pattern of preferred readings for codes that “have the institutional/political/ideological order imprinted in them.” The project of queer politics is to emphasize the arbitrariness of these preferred readings in order to critique dominant ideology.

Many visual codes exist in fashion. A sweater means “a warm garment”; it could therefore also mean “winter is coming.” (Such mappings of meaning are essential in advertising.) A gold watch means wealth; a gold Cartier watch, however, means not just wealth but knowledge of a higher order, a certain proficiency in culture, retail, names, artists—in short, the language of the elite. “Rules of taste enforce structures of power,” Susan Sontag once wrote (which I’ve quoted before in my essay on beauty). Can structures of power be undone the same way? If we can strip a code of dress, the skirt or lipstick or stiletto, from its preferred reading of womanhood, can we strip a high-end logo from the affluence it signifies?

The thousands employed in brands’ marketing and legal departments certainly hope not. They spend millions of dollars in lawsuits and take-downs of dupes and fakes, their entire careers centered around preserving the integrity of a symbol. But the desires of the aspirational persist.

For some, the conspicuous logo is a trophy; for others, it’s cheap, garish, as tacky and overplayed as a pair of Louboutin So Kates; for still others, it represents the quintessence of streetwear, that aesthetic tradition that bloomed alongside hip hop music as the cultural language of the underrepresented. Logomania is hip hop, street, bold, authentic.

The irony of Dapper Dan, the movement he created and the clothes he designed, is that acquiring one of his pieces was not the same as buying from the prestigious fashion houses themselves. In fact, his business was far from legitimate, subject to multiple lawsuits and complaints from luxury brands before finally being brought to its knees by a raid by Fendi in 1992. In his designs, the logo was taken from its original context (the luxury fashion house) and reappropriated, given a new meaning, redefining what it said about who was allowed to bear signs of affluence and how they were allowed to do it. But even when decontextualized and reconstructed, the logo, the visual code, must be understood through its original meaning, that of cultural dominance, in order to make sense within the discourse.

The Soviets believed that luxury did not have to be antithetical to communism. The beauty of the communist system is in its power to democratize luxury, to say that everyone has the right to a bottle of champagne. But in order for this logic to hold up, the champagne must be de-branded, plucked from capitalist modes of production, robbed of the exclusivity that, under capitalism, is a defining feature of luxury.

I’ve thought about what would happen if, in this vein, everyone was able to afford the logo—if we had people walking the streets in red bottoms, wearing Birkins and “Rollies.” But it would be a fantasy, I think, to claim that such democratization of a logo is a sufficient fuck you to capitalism. It’s a logo, the entirety of a brand’s narrative and real-world associations distilled in an arbitrary symbol, the creation of which rests on the necessity of carrying that narrative forward. The story you tell yourself about your relationship to the symbol might have very little to do with its meaning in the world. “Reality exists outside language,” Hall writes, “but it is constantly mediated by and through language and what we can know and say has to be produced in and through discourse.”

If you see a pair of red soles on the street, you either know what it means (or what you think it means), or you don’t. If you do, you might judge it negatively or positively, and the wearer can never be free from that judgment. If you don’t—perhaps you don’t live in the world of fashion, or, for some reason, you’ve never experienced the cultural marvel that was the 2010 film Burlesque—then you are not the wearer’s intended interlocutor. But either way, codes, if you speak the language, can never be meaningless.

I have always been a teller of stories. When I was a young girl, my mother carried me out of a grocery store as I screamed about toes in the produce aisle. Concerned women turned and watched as I kicked the air and pounded my mother’s slender back.

“Potatoes!” she corrected when we got back to the house. “Not toes!” But no, I had seen the toes, pale and bloody stumps, mixed in among those russet tubers. One of them, the one that I had poked with the tip of my index finger, was cold as ice, and yielded beneath my touch the way a blister did. When I repeated this detail to my mother, something behind the liquid of her eyes shifted quick as a startled cat.

My father returned from work that evening, and listened to my story, each detail.

“You’ve met Mr. Barns, have you not?” he asked me, referring to the elderly man who ran this particular market.

I had met him once, and I said so. He had hair white as a sky before snow, and a wife who drew the signs for the store windows.

“Why would Mr. Barns sell toes?” my father asked. “Where would he get them?”

Being young, and having no understanding of graveyards or mortuaries, I could not answer.

“And even if he got them somewhere,” my father continued, “what would he have to gain by selling them amongst the potatoes?”

They had been there. I had seen them with my own eyes. But beneath the sunbeam of my father’s logic, I felt my doubt unfurl.

“Most importantly,” my father said, arriving triumphantly at his final piece of evidence, “why did no one notice the toes except for you?”

As a grown woman, I would have said to my father that there are true things in this world observed only by a single set of eyes. As a girl, I consented to his account of the story, and laughed when he scooped me from the chair to kiss me and send me on my way.

—Carmen Maria Machado, “The Husband Stitch”

The Problem

In the New Yorker article “Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds”, Elizabeth Kolbert explores scientific findings on the failures of human reasoning. Stanford experiments in the ‘70s and more recent studies by various cognitive scientists and psychiatrists place the blame on sociability as an evolutionary adaptation. Humans’ ability to cooperate in groups is our biggest survival advantage, but it’s also a skill that’s difficult to maintain, and the immense effort of maintaining it is responsible for, among other things, common logical fallacies.

As Kolbert writes, summarizing the research, “Reason developed not to enable us to solve abstract, logical problems or even to help us draw conclusions from unfamiliar data; rather, it developed to resolve the problems posed by living in collaborative groups.”

This article was published (and went viral) in 2017, after the first Trump election, which had left so many of us self-proclaimed well-reasoning individuals shaken and confused—and COVID hadn’t even happened yet. When Trump was elected I was in college, studying linguistics and history. History was my minor but often my favorite subject of the two. I’ve always loved stories, and in the study of history I was comforted by the long story as built through facts, dates, people, causes, effects, and observable events. I also enjoyed expanding my perspective of time beyond my own lifespan.

I drew on this lengthened perspective to help make sense of the events in Ferguson, 2014; I happened to be studying the history of the Civil Rights Movement at the same time. I was predictably frustrated, then, by the discourse I saw playing out on my feeds and on TV, leaving me to wrap my head around what I didn’t know then would be the greatest fallacy of my adult life: If only people were more educated on the truth, there wouldn’t be so much arguing.

What a noble, epic myth.

We now know that facts don’t change people’s minds; in fact, I would go so far as to say we should abandon the project of changing people’s minds altogether. Think of how your perspective is determined not just by what you know, but how you know what you know; by the structures and institutions that raised you; by the emotional experiences of your childhood; by your material conditions and position in space and time; by your social connections, upheld only by millennia of evolutionary adaptation; by your tolerance for friction and the spectrum of commitment to your own convictions; by your perception and interpretation of natural phenomena; in short, the combined factors of environment and free will that comprise your identity. Moreover, having any of these things in common with someone else may correlate with but won’t guarantee a commonality in perspective.

Not only do facts matter very little in shaping our worldview, they also account for a very small percentage of all knowable things. I’m not just referring to the STEM/humanities dichotomy—the idea that the study of science, math, technology, etc. are deficient without supplemental study of philosophy, sociology, history, etc. (though I do believe this to be true). I’m talking about the production of human knowledge itself.

In an episode of the Jacobin Radio podcast, neuroscience anthropologist Dr. Danielle Carr discusses an article she wrote on Bessel van der Kolk, psychiatrist and author of The Body Keeps the Score. The book, published in 2014 and rising to popularity in more recent years, has been influential in how we think and talk about psychological trauma; in particular, how trauma is physically embedded in our bodies. Dr. Carr places this thinking, what she calls “traumatic literalism,” in the context of a long history in the field of neuroscience of attempting to track the physiology of pathologies like depression; this history begins around the same era (the ‘80s) that PTSD became an official diagnosis.

While observable changes in the brain do indeed occur after exposure to chronic stress or a traumatic event, Dr. Carr explains that traumatic literalism must be understood at the intersection of two historical trends: 1) after the War on Terror, the rise of PTSD as a diagnosis and as a narrative used to “frame American empire within a particular language of moral injury”; and 2) “the development of a sort of neoliberal mode of subjectivity, political subjectivity, that is based off one’s identity being defined by different modes of injury,” which happens across the political spectrum. On this second point, she notes that van der Kolk’s book became particularly popular during COVID and the new racial discourse, during which white people (in lieu of practicing actual solidarity) sought ways to fit into it by attempting to racialize themselves, essentially creating “a re-articulation of whiteness within the idiom of liberal politics of inclusion.”

In spite of the advances in science and technology that occur in seemingly linear progression, we repeat the stories we tell ourselves.

As I become more radicalized—a process bolstered by, yes, consuming endless nonfiction sources of information on history and politics—and spend more time in radical spaces, I stray further from the conviction of my younger days that the most factual opinion is always the correct one. Systems of power are tangibly, observably real, but they are not built on science and reason (though science and reason have certainly been appropriated to justify them) and won’t be changed thus. Racism isn’t rational and therefore can’t be dismantled by simply educating people on how it works and undoing its workings. Revolution doesn’t happen by convincing the capitalists and their apologists of the internal contradictions of their own logic.

The education is still worth our time. But our time is better spent focused on fostering what we already have, which is everything we need to change the world: the human connection, our collective knowledge, and our care for each other.

In all of our education, whether it’s in institutions or not, in homes or streets or wherever, whether it’s scholarly or whether it’s experiential, there is a kind of progression. We move from data to information to knowledge to wisdom.

—Toni Morrison, “The Source of Self-Regard”

As far as the project of revolution, we seem to have reached the outer bounds of the Age of Information and its promises. That liberal faith in the power of science can take us far but cannot save us. In Living by Fiction, author and essayist Annie Dillard quotes the physicist Sir James Jean, who once wrote, summarizing a series of scientific findings: “The world begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine.” As Dillard points out, it’s one thing for a philosopher to say this; when a physicist says this, it’s another thing. The only place left for us to go is inward, to the founding basis of our humanity.

I am shamelessly biased in my belief in the power of literature, but hey, this is my newsletter. Literature shaped who I am. I’ve been reading since age three, reading the classics since age ten—it is my first and greatest love, and it brings me joy to arrive once again at this final arena of human wisdom: stories.

As a bit of an aside, I’m always wary of the perception of the study of literature as an elitist pursuit. This is not completely unfounded. The academic study of some literature can get quite high-minded, along with other humanistic fields. I would still say fiction is more accessible by your own wit and self-study and far less abstract than, say, philosophy. Recall that Of Mice and Men is about working class people, written by a man without a college degree. For as long as you know how to read, and even if your reading abilities are impaired in some way, there is fiction that will resonate with you for the simple reason that you are a human being, living in a society with other human beings.

Oral storytelling, of course, is also a vibrant and crucial part of the literary tradition. Since, however, stories have been written down for centuries, reading is a necessary entry into all that the world’s collective knowledge has to offer.

The Solution

Be wary of “the power of the story”.

As a copywriter by trade, I’ve been hired to help tell the stories of brands and their products, and to write content that their customers might find useful. The measures of success are external: engagement, clicks, conversion rates. The tools to achieve this success are a whole set of writing techniques in service of giving information to people who want to know but don’t want to read.

In journalism, storytelling techniques serve to deliver important information. This could include putting a human face to a crisis, like following the victim of a wildfire, and using literary devices, such as descriptive detail and simile.

When giving advice to a friend, we might tell a story to better illustrate a lesson learned or communicate sympathy. We might tell a story to entertain, or build emotional connection, or explain our perspective, or prove a point. The rise of personal testimony as a narrative form is widely popular now in the social media era. On a public platform, via caption or tweet or comment thread discussion, it functions like interpersonal sharing but with a wider audience, and so often aspires to journalistic goals: to elevate the importance of one’s experience to a level of universal understanding.

Stories on such platforms are structurally flat by nature and by necessity. They follow the same, predictable narrative beats, and must always justify their own telling. Even that oft-spread cliche “reading teaches empathy” underpins the assumption of the story as teacher, with the promise of imparting upon its reader an important skill like “empathy” or “critical thinking”.

The impact on audiences of these types of stories is on the way we read: to search for the conclusion, to pass judgment, or to gain a new piece of information that we can perhaps impart upon someone else who should know it too. But there’s a difference between what’s worth knowing, and what’s worth reading. Fiction is the form a story takes when it cannot be summarized. This is what differentiates it from the kind of storytelling that has a specific function.

Literature is not practical. It is not the Solution to some Problem that exists out in the world. It is stubbornly, admirably, joyously and utterly useless.

When I was in college, I had a horrible boyfriend whom I fought with all the time. As a lifelong reader of novels, my unfortunate training encouraged me to see the truth in his perspective and emotions, even as his insecurities and misogynistic views ran me ragged. Needless to say, this didn’t serve me. At the same time, I happened to be reading Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. It was a difficult book for me to understand, but at one point I remember the protagonist’s mother recounting the moment of her father’s death. Earlier in the book, the protagonist’s father, a greedy, selfish man, had described this same moment, but it vastly differed from his mother’s account; and so here I was with two conflicting firsthand accounts of the same event, painting two completely different impressions of one person. Something clicked for me then, somehow, and I felt myself in the presence of a profound and inarticulable truth.

Reading is an intensely creative act. Maybe F. Scott Fitzgerald did just choose a random item for Gatsby to knock off the mantelpiece in his nervousness to see Daisy, but that mantelpiece clock would go on to inspire generations of English teachers to insist on its symbolizing Gatsby’s futile desire to rewrite the past. To say whether this symbolism was intentional or not is to discount the role of the reader as an active participant, not just in the story, but in a broader worldview and cultural tradition. Fitzgerald did not invent regret, nor did he invent the literary use of clocks to represent the concept of time; these are mere testaments to the shared humanity we bring to the page.

The medium of the page, as well, is what lends to the creative energy of reading: without the distraction of multiple sensual stimuli—sound, color, movement—we have little more than the writer’s prose (and the shared understanding that a flower is a flower) as a blueprint for constructing the world of the story for ourselves. Images, then, are received on the same playing field as the interior of a character’s mind.

In her speech turned essay, “Literature and Public Life,” Toni Morrison writes that public life is degraded because of the way we consume it primarily through media, in what she calls the “Age of Spectacle.” There are good stories across all forms of media, of course. The specific features of literature, however, allow for greater expansiveness and true, internal transformation.

Literature has features that make it possible to experience the public without coercion and without submission. [It] allows us—no, demands of us—the experience of ourselves as multidimensional persons.

…As a simultaneous apprehension of human character in time, in context, in space, in metaphorical and expressive language, it organizes the disorienting influence of an excess of realities: heightened, virtual, mega, hyper, cyber, contingent, porous, and nostalgic.

In written literature, unlike its visual counterparts, a story is freed from the demands of spectacle. Compare, for example, the many reincarnations of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: it’s the spectacle of horror that endures, whether to realist or comical ends. But the original story lures us in with spectacle to bring us to its core, a deeply troubling investigation into the meaning of human life and the consequences of creating it, spanning a six-chapter monologue from the creation himself.

So the scientist can do the thing, the book says, but should he? Jurassic Park poses the same question, quite literally, but the movie conceives of the consequences as external and apocalyptic. The world of Black Mirror, with its cookies, does a closer job of relating the ethical exploration, but it still must rely on visual storytelling and action-filled, digestible plots. Even the meme-ified summary of the novel’s core question won’t help you better understand it; it’s not enough to just know that “Well, actually, Frankenstein is the monster.” The only way is to read it for yourself.

How can I move thee? Will no entreaties cause thee to turn a favorable eye upon thy creature, who implores thy goodness and compassion? Believe me, Frankenstein, I was benevolent; my soul glowed with love and humanity; but am I not alone, miserably alone?

Lastly, literature is a balm. The expansive potential of the form releases you from the disorienting cognitive demands of the world: Do the right thing! Improve yourself! Say what you think! Pay attention to this! Know better! When you’re frustrated with other people or the cruel injustice of systemic violence, the pages of the book function as a safe space to experience and internalize these things, to immerse and distance yourself at will. To be forced, or rather, allowed to hold multiple truths at once. While, as Morrison said, literature demands that we arrive at it as our full, multidimensional selves, it demands no more effort than is worth expending.

Anyone can read and enjoy and have an opinion of a story, but the creative act of reading still involves contextualizing the story within the real, ugly truth of the world. Elaine Castillo’s book of essays on critical reading, How to Read Now, which I’ve frequently referenced in previous newsletters, is full of great reminders of this. In her essay, “The Children of Polyphemus,” she digs deep into the famous French story of Cinderella to uncover the pumpkin, a squash variety not native to Europe but to the indigenous Taíno people of the Caribbean, whom the French colonized and, through both violent conquest and the cultural production of folk tale, erased.

In my junior year of high school, after finishing The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, I walked into AP English the next day to give the teacher my initial reaction: “Oh, Tom Sawyer makes me laugh.” He had played a stupid game, but things turned out alright in the end, so I shrugged it off as Tom Sawyer’s legendary commitment to immaturity. My teacher gave me an odd look. In that day’s class discussion, she cast Tom’s mischief in a different light. Tom knew but concealed the fact that Jim, who was fleeing enslavement, had been a free man for months, so the perilous escape plan Tom had put them all through in the last few pages revealed something more sinister than childishness: the cruelty of playing with a vulnerable man’s life for one’s own entertainment.

I realized my initial reaction had been disastrously, morally wrong. Not because I reacted incorrectly, but because I had failed to place the story in its proper context: a world where, if you believed Jim deserved freedom, then to see someone treat him this way should inspire outrage. At a naive sixteen, I had knowledge without understanding. This novel revealed to me my own blind spot from my privileged position in relation to the legacy of slavery and its horrors; reading it with others helped fill that blind spot in.

This is the creative work of reading fiction that is worth struggling for, and the reason we must bring our full selves, in all our curiosity and humility and relation to others, to the page.

A brief note on genre. Mostly every novel I’ve referenced so far is pretty standard high school curriculum (and, as such, mostly written by white men). As adults, there is no longer a need to trudge through something you feel you’re “supposed” to have read if it’s too difficult or the story doesn’t interest you; maybe nineteenth-century prose isn’t to your taste. Just understand that all literature—American, Latin American, English, Indian, modernist, Romantic, epic, science fiction, experimental, magical realist, beat, pulp, contemporary, fable, meta, folktale—is a living, breathing collection of human knowledge.

If it helps, the way I choose what to read is similar to how I choose movies. Out of pure curiosity, just because I love movies, I’ve tried to learn a bit about film techniques and analysis from informal sources, like YouTube videos or reading reviews; I’ve never formally studied film and I’m no Richard Brody, but it has helped me become a better viewer. This helps me pin down what I like to watch, which, regardless of subject matter or whether it’s a blockbuster or indie, tends to just be whatever will hold my interest. Brushing up on your literary analysis to whatever level you want is worth it if only for the humble goal of increasing your enjoyment of the art. In other words, your reading skills will define your taste.

But read whatever fiction you can, as much as you can. Practice the sensation of living in a story for story’s sake, and perhaps open a reading guide on the side, if there is one available; or just talk back to the characters in your favorite color ink; or spend an hour reading the same paragraph over and over; or cast it aside halfway through if you’re particularly bored or disgusted; or spend a year on a single book because you got too busy with other things. Then, when you’re finally finished, pick up another.

Appendix: reading list

Nonfiction

Living by Fiction by Annie Dillard

The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations by Toni Morrison

How to Read Now by Elaine Castillo

Fiction

What I’m currently reading: Pay As You Go by Eskor David Johnson. Excellent, fun, shocking, delightful.

I opened the door and there I saw it: a toilet with a porcelain sheen and an open, waiting mouth. My goodness. I was trembling with weakness now that the end was in sight. Dropping my pants I shuffled toward it, pushing my underwear to the side and gripping my spurting penis as it let loose just in time. Ooh. Aah. I was peeing. I sighed and shuddered, going stupid with relief. It was such a long piss that I felt myself growing dizzy, hunching a little given the slope of the ceiling beneath the stairs. The lady was somewhere behind me shouting back to the voice upstairs and freaking out—I hadn’t even closed the door—“…yes, I don’t know! No, he’s still here! I’m looking at him right now but I can’t do anything…!”

I cannot read this, as someone who has been trying for years to become a morning person again, without some frustration. It is precisely the dark of the morning that creates a barrier between me and that single most important act of the day, getting out of bed. Someone who has accomplished what I want to accomplish—write—has done so by finding comfort in something that I find unbearable. Of course this spawns envy.

The writing routines of others haunt me. I once went to a panel of debut novelists, one of whom had two small children and a full-time job as an engineer. She told the audience how she would wake up at 4 a.m. to work on her novel, and her husband would handle the kids. Haruki Murakami runs to boost his creativity. John Steinbeck locked himself in his study and wrote every day for four months until he finished The Grapes of Wrath. Stephen King did a shit ton of coke.

The eternal struggle of figuring out how to discipline creativity into productivity, two seemingly oppositional energies, is really about figuring out how to balance your life. In the last year of my twenties, I’m reflecting on a decade spent trying to figure out how to live my life The Right Way.

I entered adulthood at the beginning of the 2010s, the era of monetized Internet content and life hack listicles and time lapse videos, all bent on earning your engagement by oversaturating your brain with digestible information on the best ways to clean a microwave, organize your cosmetics, build a gym routine, and make entire meals with an air fryer. Hacking your routine has become its own dopamine hit: Research shows that a simple X every morning releases a hormone that reduces Y undesirable outcome and/or leads to Z desirable outcome. The path to your best life is just a Google search result away.

The barrage of self-improvement content existed long before the Internet, of course. The 1960s and ‘70s were “the golden age of self-help”, when pop psychology books abounded promising to fix issues with loneliness, productivity, parenting, weight loss, leadership skills, dating, and relationships. This NYT article, written in 2004, notes that the self-improvement craze correlated with national panics like the Vietnam War and nuclear crisis, as if the yuppie suburbanites felt they could fix the world by fixing themselves. I wonder what the author of the article would write about the current self-helpscape and what it says about the world’s crises today.

After all these decades, seeking out the best or smartest or most efficient or most effective way of doing something really comes down to the same fundamental question in disguise: How do I become the person I want to be?

So it’s 2019, and I just turned twenty-four and landed my first high salary job. My material needs are met and I can invest time, money, and energy towards my personal goals. I take a fiction class, I do meal prep, I make a budget sheet. I care a lot about the environment, so I research ways to be a more responsible citizen—even if the products are a little more expensive, even if the everyday tasks become a little more time-consuming—because I have that privilege now. Outside of work, I negotiate time and mental energy invested in exercising, eating healthy, financial goals, creative pursuits, extracurricular commitments, my relationship, my friendships, and oh how the standard set by my younger self has exhausted me since.

A couple years ago, I did something I swore I’d never do in my life: I read a self-help book.

You’ve probably heard of it: Atomic Habits by James Clear. I was surprised at how helpful it was at breaking down how habits form and why common habit-forming techniques don’t work. Clear describes how bad habits feed themselves in a downward spiral: shame and anxiety trigger the coping mechanism. “You feel bad, so you eat junk food. Because you eat junk food, you feel bad.” He says this is why shaming someone for not doing the thing is ineffective.

“Self-control is a short-term strategy, not a long-term one,” Clear also writes, pointing out the limits of self-control and willpower. The actual solution is to change your environment—remove the triggers and make it so you don’t have to practice self-control as often. The book places a strong emphasis on creating systems that set you up for success, which is a familiar philosophy in this tech-centric world: the rationalist fantasy that everything just comes down to good design.

My daily routine took on a new and frightening layer of complexity when I adopted a puppy. There were so many considerations, rules with clear consequences if you didn’t follow them, all these right and wrong ways to do things. Ironically, learning about raising a dog helped me make more sense of how to hack my own brain: with training. Don’t let your dog practice bad behavior. Strategically pair triggers, actions, and rewards. Use positive reinforcement. Don’t punish your dog.

If you want to improve an area in your life, the first step, as I’ve written before, is often documentation. Keep a food journal if you want to eat healthier, track your spending if you want to become smarter with money. You teach yourself to notice what was previously unconscious with the goal of improving it.

It’s interesting, revisiting Atomic Habits knowing what I know now. Chapter 2, “How Your Habits Shape Your Identity (And Vice Versa),” goes into the three layers of behavior change: outcomes, processes, and identity. Shifting your focus from what you want to achieve to, instead, who you want to become, inspires the intrinsic motivation needed to make a habit stick.

Your identity emerges out of your habits. Every action is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.

This understanding will haunt your soul. In fact, all this sound wisdom will come together to create the perfect little garden from which to grow new neuroses. Your brain is trained now. Every moment becomes a negotiation. Decision gives way to destruction. You freeze.

For anyone who struggles with mental health issues, to hack your routine, to “find what works for you,” means figuring out how to function around your most sabotaging tendencies, like procrastination or attention deficiency or feelings of hopelessness. My official diagnosis was persistent depressive disorder (PDD), which is depression that’s mild and chronic enough that you think of your sadness as just one of your personality traits. Low energy and low self-worth were the contingencies that I learned to build my routines around.

But it’s one thing to build contingencies around an external obstacle, such as a bus that’s late half the time; it’s another thing if the obstacle lives inside you. My depression wasn’t severe enough that, theoretically, I couldn’t function if I didn’t really try. Sometimes the gap between value and action, between wanting to do and doing, is so small and yet insurmountable. If I: 1) decide that something is important to me, 2) know how to do it, 3) am able to do it, and 4) do not do it, how much of that is due to my environment, and how much of it is me?

This is how I reported to my therapist one session that I was upset because I had spent multiple days trying to get a prominent stain out of my bedsheets. The stain had set because I couldn’t bear to do laundry. Days went by, then weeks. I was there when the stain happened and I knew at that moment that the faster I acted, the easier it would be to get out—it’s just science. X action produces Y outcome. I knew this would happen if I didn’t do the thing, and I still didn’t do the thing, and therefore this happened. So why am I crying?

Being kind to yourself often translates to offering up an explanation outside of your control. Of course you don’t have time to write, you have a toddler to care for. Of course you don’t have time to work out, you work two jobs. This line of self-talk offers a kindness, a relief, but could easily reveal itself as the same blame game in disguise.

When it comes to writing routines, I always remind myself of what the famous writers had that I don’t. In a previous essay, I mentioned how Gertrude Stein’s partner managed the household, and Virginia Woolf had servants. John Steinbeck, whom I mentioned earlier, was able to write every day for four months because his wife, Carol, was handling everything, having put aside her own career to support his. So then: resent not having a wife and write off an art career as impossible. Or do the tough thing, accept my situation, try harder (and likely get frustrated when that doesn’t work), and—god forbid—stop blaming capitalism.

The descent through this chaos of cursed knowledge to rock bottom is slow but not invisible. Now equipped with the power of self-observation, you know it’s happening but cannot stop it. How do you speak to yourself when the mind tricks don’t work anymore—when “I’m doing this as a favor to future me” turns into “Fuck future me”? When you reach the bottom and your bones begin to creak with every laborious movement the same question: what’s the point?

In countless conversations with my therapist, we’ve gone round and round on the things I wish I could do better in my life and how to rewire my thinking. Yes, I’ll be kinder to myself, yes, I’ll redefine what an accomplishment is, yes, I’ll practice deep breaths, yes, I’ll rephrase that, yes, yes, yes, fine, fine, fine. Managing your mental health is its own chore with its own set of contradictions. Yes, stop blaming yourself for circumstances outside your control. But also yes, no one is responsible for you except you.

The last self-help book I picked up was How to Keep House When You’re Drowning by KC Davis, a licensed therapist. (I listened to it on audio while doing chores, which was truly an excellent way to experience it.) The book reaches out for your hand to impart a gentle reminder: you can let go of everything you were taught about household chores and self worth.

“How you relate to care tasks—whether you are clean or dirty, messy or tidy, organized or unorganized—has absolutely no bearing on whether you are a good enough person. Care tasks are morally neutral.”

How to Keep House is full of actionable tips on how to get your laundry done, how to get organized, how to do the dishes, when you’re completely overwhelmed or at your lowest point. Davis offers a bare minimum hygiene routine when you struggle to find the energy to shower, and at one point suggests that if the dishes have really, truly piled up to a point beyond saving, throw them away. In Chapter 22, “good enough is perfect,” she writes: “Perfectionism is debilitating. I want you to embrace adaptive imperfection. We aren’t settling for less; we are engaging in adaptive routines that help us live and function and thrive.”

What this way of thinking ultimately does is train you to center your own health and happiness in carrying out everyday tasks. The central thesis of the book is: you don’t exist to serve your space. Your space exists to serve you.

Run the dishwasher twice: so goes the oft-shared Internet wisdom about abandoning the fictional shoulds. In a viral Tumblr post, a woman shared a therapy session where she confessed that she’s overwhelmed by her dishes because the dishwasher doesn’t clean them properly, so she always has to scrub her dishes before putting them in. Her therapist said: “So run the dishwasher twice.” To run it twice means to break the rules. It means fuck The Right Way of doing things if it’s preventing you from living your life.

Here’s how I run the dishwasher twice. When Sunny needs to go out in the morning and I don’t have the spoons to change out of my pajamas into outside clothes, I walk her in my pajamas. The nefarious outside germs will contaminate the fibers of my bedclothes and I’ll have to choose new pajamas tonight—so what?

My gym is a ten-minute walk away—in fact, I pay a very high membership fee in order to access a gym that is only a ten-minute walk away—and yet, on the days when the prospect of the eight-block walk before the real exercise even begins makes my skin crawl with no no no sometimes the only way to pull myself from the edge of defeat is to remove the walk. So, I drive.

Also, I use plastic. I use so much plastic! I gave up on washable produce bags and reusable paper towels and silicone ziplocs, and I donate clothes to thrift stores even after years spent reading about how problematic that is. Sometimes I throw recycling in the garbage. Sometimes I throw compost in the garbage.

Climbing out of my lowest depressive period has been a masterclass in existential choice. How many rules am I willing to break, how many shortcuts am I willing to take? And how long before a shortcut becomes a “bad” habit?

What happens to my physical health if I never wash my fruit or rinse my rice, if skipping those steps are better for my mental health? What if I ignore stains on my clothes and crumbs in my keyboard? What if the pursuit of adaptiveness over perfection, while it gets the job done, results in the impression of a life barely kept? What if a friend sneaks a peek into your inner life, sees the trash bin full of frozen meal containers because you decided with full confidence that you didn’t want to spend your energy cooking if it made you dread getting out of bed, and says to you, with genuine, loving concern: You can’t live like this.

One thing we all have is the simultaneous desire and fear of being witnessed. We try to help each other by sharing advice, knowing full well it likely won’t work for someone else’s very specific context and situation the way it works for your very specific context and situation, but the act of sharing and the hope that sparks in the receiver’s mind is a separate, more important thing. So we develop some kind of Stockholm Syndrome for the platitudes we hold in common: Find what works for you. Trial and error. Celebrate the small wins. Progress isn’t linear.

A comedic take on self-help is the HBO show How To With John Wilson, a series where documentary filmmaker John Wilson walks around New York City with a camera, makes cultural observations and interviews bewildering people under the guise of tutorials and life advice. In S1E4: How to Cover Your Furniture, John embarks on a journey to figure out how to protect his furniture from his cat’s endless scratching; among other (wild and hilarious) things, he comes away with commentary on protecting precious items to the point of not using them at all.

The appeal of the show is in the curated absurdity of what John manages to capture on camera, showcasing the subtle brilliance of his filmmaker’s eye. The punchlines are often audiovisual: the line of narration “...they still let the pigs go wherever they want” is paired with a shot of two cops across the street before the camera innocently pans to the actual pig on a leash behind them. Each episode’s unpredictable narrative twists subvert the promise of its title; whether or not you actually learn how to do the thing, you end up more entertained by following this awkward guy around and seeing what he sees.

Since quitting my job I’ve directed my creative focus less on building a writing routine and more on the sensation of the writing process, moment to moment. Many writers have been sharing their thoughts about this lately as a response to the use of AI writing tools, which all promise to make it easier to get your ideas into words: The problem is, the struggle is the point. It’s supposed to be frustrating and uncomfortable and full of mistakes. For me, sometimes, putting down a complete sentence is like pulling teeth, particularly painful because there’s no guarantee that the effort will yield anything. It’s what writers do because we don’t just care about the end result, we care about how we get there, even if we don’t get there at all.

Earlier this week, I was walking through SoMa and thinking about my plans for the day. My inner monologue went something like this:

I’ll go write in the cafe for a little while, it’s one o’clock now, so maybe I can spend a couple hours there. Which means if I leave around three, I should get home by four and I’ll have time to go to the gym before it gets too dark and I won’t feel like going. (Museum of African Diaspora. Tiny dog across the street.) After I walk Sunny of course. Then maybe I can write more later. Only if I feel like it, though, I won’t commit myself to it. But remember how nice it feels after doing those things. Maybe pick one: go to the gym. That’s all I have to do. Anything else is a bonus. (Two more blocks, then a right. There’s Howard. Sentro Filipino, ‘s’ because that’s how we spell it, explain that to a Spanish speaker—) Should I stop by the grocery? No, just go home. One thing at a time. Check in: calm, focused, not feeling rushed. I’m glad I got up early this morning. It’s so nice, actually, to get out early in the morning. (Nice outdoor space that way. Yerba Buena. Rumbling of the Muni, high-pitched screech. Look at those suits, professionals. Wonder if they’re happy.) So much done already and I am less stressed now than I would be otherwise. I should do this every day—no, don’t say ‘should,’ because then I’ll be disappointed if I can’t. But also if I want to feel this way more often, I do need to push myself a little. Not too much, though, let’s be kind—

Then something stopped me in my tracks. In the middle of my path, sprouting out of the concrete sidewalk, was a silver metal sculpture a hundred feet tall. It started wide at the base and trailed upwards through the air, twisting and curving in a measured but nonsensical cadence, narrowed in diameter until it came to a sliver, at the end of it a tiny point that seemed to pierce the sky. I stared, trying to make sense of it, who made it, why was it there, what did it mean; my eyes followed the crooks and bends, absorbed the sunlight glinting off the metal.

And I found something close to joy in this monstrously perplexing thing because it did what art is supposed to do, it struck me out of my rhythm, confronted me by reckless force on this unremarkable afternoon and pulled me inside out.

Paradoxically, good habits are by nature mostly unconscious, so you don’t notice when you’re doing something well. If after all these years of boomeranging between success and failure I’ve finally managed to do the dishes regularly, make my bed, find a writing routine, it’s only because I got to a point where I had no other choice. The question of how to master the dreaded inevitability of our constant maintenance, habits, chores, goals: It’s not a question of who you are as a person. It’s a question of the meaning of life.

The writer Annie Dillard says this about the dead of winter, the season of decay and what gift it brings us:

There is not a guarantee in the world. Oh your needs are guaranteed; your needs are absolutely guaranteed by the most stringent of warranties, in the plainest, truest words: knock; seek; ask. But you must read the fine print. “Not as the world giveth, give I unto you.” That’s the catch.

Did you think, before you were caught, that you needed, say, life? Did you think you would keep your life, or anything else you love? You see the needs of your own spirit met whenever you have asked, and you have learned that the outrageous guarantee holds. You see creatures die, and you know you will die. And one day it occurs to you that you must not need life. Obviously. And then you’re gone…

All the productivity hacks and mind games and narrativizing and self-talk don’t obscure the fact that the true experience of life cannot be summarized. It demands to be lived in detail. This is my secret to writing, to reading, to moving through time.

Lest I descend into platitudes at this point I’ll let my friend, the brilliant poet Giovanna Lomanto, end things here:

and what does it mean to love in a time like this,
says the nihilist, who also believes
we might as well love in a time like this.