Hello dear ones!
Welcome to my weekly newsletter CARESCAPES. It’s such an honour to have you here as I embark on my journey to move away from posting daily on Instagram (more on that in another newsletter) and into a practice of knowledge sharing, vulnerable reflection, and community care that is nourishing and sustainable. Each week I’ll be sharing thoughts, feelings, practices, and actions in an attempt to answer the question: in a world that seeks to oppress and divide us, how do we care for ourselves and others?
Before you dive in, I wanna share a couple of invitations:
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THOUGHTS
I feel like I owe you a definition of “carescapes.” If you’ve read my writing before, you know I love to look at the etymology of words. Care has such a fascinating etymological history, IMHO, coming from the Gothic kara, meaning trouble, grief, care; and the Old Norse kör: bed of trouble or sickness. It wasn’t until the 1500s that “care” came to describe the act of protecting, preserving, or guiding oneself or others: to take care of.
These earlier definitions of care capture the ambivalence evoked by the word. The authors of The Care Manifesto note how the etymology of the word “reflects a reality where attending fully to the needs and vulnerabilities of any living thing, and thus confronting frailty, can be both challenging and exhausting” (27). María Puig de la Bellacasa’s book Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds further illuminates how care is a vexed topic with competing definitions when she asks: “But what is care? Is it an affection? A moral obligation? Work? A burden? A joy?” (1). We’ve been taught that care should produce a “warm pleasant affection or a moralistic feel-good attitude” (Bellacasa 2), which leaves many of us not knowing what to do with the feelings of exhaustion, frustration, and lack of desire that may come up when providing care. What do we do with these ambivalent feelings?
I want to share a bit about my own ambivalent relationship to care. In the wake of my mother’s death when I was 11, as the oldest sibling I was tasked with caring for my younger brother; and, as my father began to experience the symptoms of ALS, I’d come to care for him too. I made all of the meals we ate. I did the vast majority of the chores. I made sure that everyone was cared for. These practices of care weren’t consensual. I was expected to provide this care, and to place the needs of others always before myself. If I didn’t, I would be punished. This left me in a landscape bereft of care for myself. I became troubled by care. I developed what I’ve come to call a kind of “caregiver trauma.” When I started to become sick at the age of 31, my ex-partner’s mom, who I was seeing for zen shiatsu massage therapy, suggested to me that my chronic pain was my body’s way of telling me that I was exhausted from the two decades I’d spent caring for my family.
Despite this trauma (or perhaps because of it), some part of me always understood that care was something that we all deserved. As someone whose Cancer sun lives in the 8th house of sorrow, trauma, and grief, I’ve always felt that it was my calling to provide care to others. But I needed to learn how to do it in a way that was sustainable. I needed to create an understanding of care that wouldn’t trigger my nervous system. What I needed were new carescapes.
When I use the word “care,” I’m referring to “our individual and common ability to provide the political, social, material, and emotional conditions that allow the vast majority of people and living creatures on this planet to thrive – along with the planet itself” (TCM 6). Care is also a practice, one that we undertake each and every day. -scapes denote a picture or representation, a wide view of something. When I use the word carescape, I’m talking about scenes or pictures of care that go beyond the paternalistic notion of state care that we inherited from colonialism. Carescapes offer us new imaginings informed by older models of care that were based in the community prior to settler colonialism.
Carescapes are queer because of their investment in utopian longings for something better. In his book Cruising Utopia: the Then and There of Queer Futurity, the late José Esteban Muñoz describes queerness as “a longing that propels us onward, beyond romance of the negative and toiling in the present. Queerness is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing [...] Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world” (1). Carescapes are spaces of hope and grief. When we open ourselves up to possibility, we find ourselves grieving all that we have been denied. We’re imagining better futures because the present just isn’t enough. For these reasons, it feels important to retain the etymological meanings of care as grief, sorrow, and mental anguish. Queerness can hold space for the ambivalences living in our carescapes.
Carescapes are also inherently crip. Folks living with disabilities, chronic illnesses, and neurodivergent bodyminds have always been dreaming up new forms of care that reject charity and are rooted in mutual aid. Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha refers to these forms of care as “care webs” in her book Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice: “The care webs I write about here break from the model of paid attendant care as the only way to access disability support. Resisting the model of charity and gratitude, they are controlled by the needs and desires of the disabled people running them” (41). In her essay “A Modest Proposal for a Fair Trade Emotional Labor Economy,” Piepzna-Samarasinha explains that “fair trade femme disabled care webs are reciprocal” (145) but that doesn’t mean that everything is 50/50: “In disabled communities, we talk about the idea that we can still offer reciprocity to each other, even if we can’t offer the exact same type of care back” (146). When I talk about carescapes, I’m thinking about how we can hold space for the fact that offers of care can ebb and flow, and that doesn’t need to result in scarcity of care because there are so many of us practicing “promiscuous care” (TCM 40) within these carescapes.
These weekly newsletters are my attempt to offer some different visionings of carescapes, along with tangible practices and actions you can take to build carescapes into your lives. I want to give myself permission to meander around the idea of care, to not always be explicit about how what I’m thinking through or feeling is connected to care, in any of its senses. And yet, I trust that these newsletters will always be their own love letters to care.
If you’re dreaming up your own carescapes, tell me – and the other folks reading this newsletter – about them by commenting!
FEELINGS
My emotional state this past week – and really, this past month – is captured in the following memes:
PRACTICES
This week in my Close Friends Community on IG, I asked folks to share their go to practices for caring for themselves. Here are five hot tips, along with some different ways to engage with these practices. I’ll share the care for others next week, and you’ll find care for the collective in ACTIONS.
CARE FOR SELF
Water, water, water. When was the last time you had a glass of water? Or even just a sip of water? I keep my water bottle near me at all times as a reminder.
Solo dates. The world is still a scary place and for many, winter is upon us. But I will forever preach about the importance of solo dates. Order yourself dinner! Do your nails! Go sit in a coffee shop!
Rest. Can you give yourself permission to not set an alarm one day? Can you get into bed early with a book? Can you luxuriate in the comfort of your blankets and pillows?
Co-regulate with the natural world. Taking a walk. Touching a tree. Sitting and watching the waves. And when I can’t access those, I take a bath because water is still a co-regulating force in whatever form.
Create! Did you know that creating helps activate our vagus nerve and bring us into our window of tolerance? Collaging is my go-to creative practice and you can download free collage kits here.
ACTIONS
There are so many things we can do to help heal our communities and the world. To help avoid overwhelm, I recommend starting with one actionable step, and starting small. Each week I’ll share a different actionable step we can all take.
Practice mutual aid.
Dean Spade defines mutual aid as: “collective coordination to meet each other’s needs, usually from an awareness that the systems we have in place are hot going to meet them … They directly meet people’s survival needs, and are based on a shared understanding that the conditions in which we are made to live are unjust” (Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next) 1). Mutual aid is not the same thing as charity. Spade explains how: “Charity, aid, relief, and social services are terms that usually refer to rich people or the government making decisions about the provision of some kind of support to poor people—that is, rich people or the government deciding who gets the help, what the limits are to that help, and what strings are attached” (21). I highly recommend checking out Spade’s Mutual Aid Chart, where he breaks down the differences between charity and mutual aid.
So what can you do to practice mutual aid?
You can follow #mutualaid on IG to get posts in your feed. Some are calls for financial support, others are calls for food, goods, and other services. Even if you can’t offer funds, you can still save and share those posts on IG so that they get boosted in the algorithm and are seen by folks in your network who might be able to make a contribution.
Each week I’ll share a different call for mutual aid here. This week you can support Shirnique’s call to buy an item off of her daughter’s Amazon Wishlist for Christmas. Or you can send funds directly via Cashapp: $Shirniquemurray91 or PayPal: PayPal.me/AyaMurray5
Thanks so much for reading CARESCAPES — your support means the world to me! Will share those invitations one more time!
If you love this newsletter and have the means to make monthly contributions, you can
If you feel called to screenshot parts of this newsletter that are speaking to you and you wanna share it on your social media, PLEASE DO! If you could tag me that would be extra special <3
Don’t be afraid to leave a comment! I LOVE engaging with folks and learning more about you!!
I love the etymology of carescapes! This was fun to read 💖
Hi Margeaux, I am so grateful for this newsletter and have added a couple new books to my to-read list after reading! I organize with a mutual aid network in my neighborhood, and I spend a lot of time thinking about how we can create the world we want to live in through mutual aid. It's so common for mutual aid networks to slip into known charity models, and I'm trying to examine that in myself and resist it in our collective, and I'm excited to learn from you as we navigate that.
Your own personal history with care really resonates with me, and I appreciate you sharing it. I'm curious to maybe talk in this space in the future about experiences receiving care and how difficult that can be for those of us who have strong caretaker histories or identities... or Cancer placements in our big three.