It’s 7.30am on a Saturday. The baby is on the floor, grasping for toys. My son is rummaging in the fridge for ingredients to add to the French toast he says he will make himself. My daughter is wrapped in a blanket on the sofa, hanging upside down like a bat, reading a library book. The kitchen is momentarily fragrant and sparkling (I have just wiped everything with a citrus scented cleaner), the coffee maker is percolating, and the dishwasher that I forgot to run last night is humming. My husband is already checking cricket stats and grumbling audibly about Pakistan’s performance. It’s freezing outside, but the bright winter sun is streaming through the blinds in the playroom. It’s the most unremarkable of days, and I am bowled over with gratitude.
I used to have grander dreams for myself, as I’m sure you did too. None of us ever imagined we would be called upon to meet and survive this unequivocally shit moment in the apocalypse, but here we are. This newsletter began with an essay about how climate change was in the margins of our consciousness, and only four short years later, the polycrisis is here, and yet, and yet, so is the dawn of a new paradigm. I’m learning-with alarming speed-that true liberation lies in releasing my attachment to the constructs I’ve always used to make sense of the world. Here, in no particular order, are things I am programming myself out of being mindlessly attached to-
Stuff. I’ve never been one to hoard, but I do love beautiful things, and I like to believe I have a good eye. I have a Thrift Gift, and most of my home is furnished and decorated with objects I like to believe I rescued, from flea markets, from curbs, from the obscurity of unloved things. But/and/also, a lot of my joy is connected to admiring the things I have brought home so tenderly. What does it mean anymore: home/stuff/joy? I don’t know. Maybe it deserves more interrogation.
Pretty. The idea of it, the pursuit of it, the admiration of it. I think about the contours of people I love, and I can’t remember whether their skin has large pores or not, or if their clothes are flattering. I love myself at least as much as I do any of them, and I am liberated through the knowledge that very many of them don’t care if I am or ever will be pretty. I find every moment devoted to the pointless pretty pursuit is a moment that could have been better spent, and the more I spend my time on building community, the less time, money and thought I waste on hair dye or eye cream. Unexpected bonus: my algorithm doesn’t sell me these things anymore.
Productivity. A notoriously difficult idea to give up for someone like me, and I’m not sold on the idea of more rest or relaxation, not in these times, which call for hard work, and a lot of it. The part that I am rejecting is the idea of working in service of the capitalist machine, of contributing to the alienated mass of humanity, and the idea of its superiority and authority. What this looks like in practice is allowing my children mental health days when they don’t go to school, simply because they don’t want to. It means trusting them when they want to use their energy to create something, instead of whatever I had scheduled for them. It means rejecting the idea of sleep training my baby, which is to reject the idea that selling my labor is more important than my instincts or my child’s needs.
Stuff, again. We don’t need 20 rolls of toilet paper or three types of shampoo. We don’t need two flavors of mustard. We don’t need a separate gadget for every kitchen function. Would it be terrible to make a DOGE joke here? Anyway, I’m not a bad DOGE, I’m a good one, if the government is my pantry and bathroom cabinet.
Prestige. Accolades, titles, reputations…call it what you will. Higher ed is crumbling all around us, leaders of industry, education and Congress are capitulating to the worst actors, and research funding is being decimated overnight. I don’t plan to lose any sleep over how my work is ranked by failed institutions. Cultivating my own metrics for excellence is an interesting challenge. It also requires that I be more discerning about who I receive wisdom from-are they centering liberation? Are their politics sound? Are they conscientious about how they engage with the world? This may or may not correlate with fancy degrees.
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It is now Tuesday afternoon, no longer cold outside, and still sunny. It’s taken three days and approximately 11 micro-naps from the baby to write this, so I’m going to hit publish. Until tomorrow’s epiphanies: solidarity, my friends.
Congratulations! I didn’t have these realizations till I was 50.