Hello dear ones,
What a wild week it’s been. This time last week, I was on a plane, with my two cats, on our way to LA where I’ll be living for the next two years — if not longer. I wanted to share some reflections on the magic of community, and how hard it is to receive care. Before I share a few reminders, I wanted to give you a heads up that I extended presales for anchored: a deck for healing until July 4th. Here’s the card that I made for community:
And now, a few reminders before we dive in:
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Thank you, as always, for being a part of the CARESCAPES universe! It’s such a deep honour to have you here with me!
I have a long and complicated relationship to care and to community. When I was eleven, my mother died from cervical cancer — leaving me to raise my younger brother and take on the role of surrogate mother. Not long after her death, my father started to drop things, a cup slipping out of his hand and shattering on the kitchen floor. He’d go to see his doctor and then a neurologist. No one could tell him what was wrong. The muscles in his arms started to atrophy from disuse.
By the time I was seventeen, I had to help him drive: my hands on the steering wheel when we had to make a sharp turn. At my high school graduation he attempted to jump down into what we called “the pit” in our gymnasium. Without the weight of his upper arms, he fell and landed face down on the floor. As the people around us gasped and ran over to help him up, I stood there mortified while he smiled and tried to shrug it off. By age eighteen, I was feeding, bathing, and clothing him. Eventually, he’d get a diagnosis: a rare form of Lou Gehrig’s disease.
I know now that the trauma of being a caregiver is one of the things that made me sick. And so I have ambivalent feelings about care. When I read Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s book Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, I found myself getting angry when she proclaimed that it is our duty to care for one another. Resistance, I have learnt, is a lantern that can illuminate our trauma. I am relieved to learn that one cannot speak about care without acknowledging that care evokes great ambivalence. As The Care Collective notes, “the word care in English comes from the Old English caru, meaning care, concern, anxiety, sorrow, grief, trouble – its double meanings clearly on display. This 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.”
María Puig de la Bellacasa’s Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds 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?”We’ve been taught that care should produce a “warm pleasant affection or a moralistic feel-good attitude.” But, as Bellacasa notes, feminists have worked hard to complicate such a definition of care, as it supports the ongoing exploitation of the emotional labour and care work performed by women and femmes. When care is thus framed as an obligation, it will certainly leave us with some bad feelings.
My sun sign, Cancer, is in my 8th house of grief and trauma. Astrologer Chani Nicholas writes that people with this astrological placement are destined to be therapists and caregivers. They 60 may also suffer from trauma caused by care: a lack thereof in the wake of grief and trauma, an overburdening of care, or, as in my case, both. And so, while I carry this caregiver trauma with me, it is despite and because of this trauma that I am deeply invested in dreaming up forms of care that are not shaped by a lack of consent and the absence of reciprocity. What I needed was a redefinition.
“Care,” writes kamra sadia hakim in care manual: dreaming care into being, is “intentional and informed giving and receiving of abundance.” Caring, it follows, is “the act of consensually delivering care.” For The Care Collective, authors of The Care Manifesto, care is “also a social capacity and activity involving the nurturing of all that is necessary for the welfare and flourishing of life … Care is 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.”
For Joan Tronto and Bernice Fischer, care “includes everything that we do to maintain, continue and repair ‘our world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, ourselves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web.” In this way, I wish to evoke senses of the nonhuman found in the word web. Just as humans create webs of fabric, spiders weave webs for their survival. It should maybe go without saying, but care webs are not about catching prey. Rather, they’re about catching you as you fall.
My phrasing of “webs of care” is inspired directly by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s discussion of “care webs” in her book Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice. For Piepzna-Samarasinha, care webs are the structures of support created for and by disabled and sick bodies that not only enable them to survive, but to thrive. Piepzna-Samarasinha asks:
“What does it mean to shift our ideas of access and care (whether it’s disability, childcare, economic access, or many more) from an individual chore, an unfortunate cost of having an unfortunate body, to a collective responsibility that’s maybe even deeply joyful?”
It’s vital that these care webs reject the logic of charity that is part and parcel to the neoliberal understanding of state-sanctioned care, and build instead from a deep commitment to solidarity. Within these care webs, those giving and receiving care understand that the process of care is reciprocal, it is a form of mutual aid which “does not connote moral superiority of the giver over the receiver.” In other words, care webs are non-hierarchical and interdependent.
It might not be surprising to hear that I struggle to ask for and receive care. My caregiver trauma is terrified of being a burden; and my upbringing taught me that the only person I could depend on for care was me — there was no community care, no care from extended family, in the wake of my mother’s death, or after my father got ill. Getting sick changed all of this — forcing me to learn, the hard way, that I needed others. Barely able to get out of bed or off of the couch, friends would drop off food for me, come over and cook me meals, accompany me to doctor’s appointments. When my father died, leaving me to figure out how to plan a funeral when you’re poor, my friends crowdfunded for the service to help me cover the expenses. These webs of care were vital to my survival. We were never meant to do life one our own.
It’s funny how we can know something intellectually, in theory, and find it impossible to know it emotionally, somatically, to put it into practice. I’ve found this to be true of community care. Despite having benefited from it in the past, and knowing, deep in my heart and my value system that we need community, we are all deserving of care, I still think that each time that care is extended to me will be the last time that I need it. And so, when I was accepted to grad school in the US, and would be figuring out a cross-continental move, I thought I could do it all on my own.
Turns out that being up against three violent institutions — banks, school, immigration — is not easy when you haven’t had access to generational wealth. And I say that with my white, educated privilege. I can only imagine how brutal it is when you’re a racialized immigrant whose first language is not English. First, I learnt that my university required me to have the amount of my tuition in my bank account before they would issue my visa (an amount of $56,000 minus the $23,000 financial aid I received). Then I learnt that it was actually the full amount of living for the first year of school: a total of $86,000 USD.
I already knew that I’d need a student loan. What I didn’t know is that because my school is in the US, a loan from my bank would require a co-signer. The assumption is that you’ll have a family member to do this with you — but all of my family is dead, poor, or estranged. When my best friend offered to be my co-signor, I felt immense relief, gratitude, and shame.
If you’ve ever lived in poverty, you know this feeling well. Shame is the feeling that structures the affective life of the poor, where feelings of not being good enough are woven into the everyday fabric of one’s precarious existence. I felt shame whenever I saw my friends’ parents take them shopping; their parents could pull out credit cards and fill bags with clothes without having to think about it. I felt shame when a pipe burst in my childhood home; we couldn’t afford to fix it and so my boyfriend would help us squeegee the water out of the carpet. I felt shame when my brother recently reminded me that we didn’t have heat in our home one winter; shame for having repressed this memory while he lived with it. And I felt shame when I had to share what was happening on Instagram, as I tried to get enough money together for my student visa to be approved.
I also know that the only way for me to move through the shame is to name it, write about it, and share it. In an interview with Tin House Magazine, Leslie Jamison describes shame as “not just something negative but some kind of arrow, it’s pointing at something.” For Jamison, such a realization felt liberating because it turned shame into “something to follow, like a path—rather than simply something to be paralyzed by, or try to dissolve, or become second-level meta-shamed by.” Following the path of my own shame, I realized that this shame isn’t actually mine—it’s externally imposed by a capitalist world that views vulnerability as a weakness and poverty and disability as signs of your lack of humanity.
How do we hand back the shame that was never ours to hold? We do it through community, with the support of the webs of care that we’ve built. I know that having access to community is a privilege; that so many are left to float, to drown, all on their own. This is one of the great heartbreaks of our contemporary moment.
We deserve a world where community care is the norm. With community care, no one person is solely responsible for the care of another. We build collectives in which everyone is supported. In my largely queer, largely femme community filled with trauma BBs and sick babes, we understand the radical potential of interdependence for building the queer utopia that we may never see, but need to imagine. We deserve so much more. We deserve the magic of community care.
One of the questions I’m consistently asked is: How do I find my community? Here are some tips that have helped me:
Go to events. You all have at least one thing in common: you want to be there. If the idea of striking up conversation with strangers makes you feel like dying, go to something with a facilitator, like a workshop. That way you’ll be guided through connecting with your peers. I also love going to book launches, art openings, and talks with people whose ideas and vision inspire me. These events can be online or IRL. And if you have a pal, invite them to come with you as a buffer — though sometimes I find that when I go with a friend, I won’t push myself to talk to new people because I have them there.
Get clear on your values. Our values are the “why” behind why we love the things we love and do the things that we do. Being clear on what my values are helps me a) select what events I want to go to; and b) helps guide my conversations with new people to see if we’re aligned. For example, one of my core values is learning, and so I look for people who get excited learning about new things, like to ask questions, and don’t pretend to know everything. (I have a whole workbook “Aligning Our Actions With Our Values” if you need some support here.)
Try out the apps. I know that a lot of the apps out there are for dating/romantic and/or sexual connections, but A LOT of humans (myself included) are now using them to make friends. I’ve made new friends through Hinge, Lex, and Tinder! Just make sure that you’re clear in your profile about what you’re looking for re: connections, and share what kind of friendships you’re wanting to foster. Here’s a little of what I’ve written: nonbinary femme witch/switch, they/them. writer, educator, weirdo academic, and artist. super into talking about feelings, attachment theory, chronic illness, astrology, books, transformative justice. moving to LA this summer to attend CalArts. am looking for queer community, people to make art with, collaborations, long conversations about the things we love. bonus points if you’re trans/like to fuck with gender.
A dear friend of mine is organizing a GoFundMe for their sister-in-law, who’s just been accepted into graduate school but cannot afford the cost of international student tuition. As I prepare to begin at CalArts as an international student, I can really, really relate to this access barrier (all of the sales from anchored are helping to pay my tuition and living expenses). Education should be without barriers.
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Whew was this good timing for me right now. Thank you for your brilliance friend.
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