I am still writing. I have moved from Blogspot and Medium to Substack like everyone else but it feels like I am sending my writing off into a black hole so I am posting here in case I can snag a reader or two.

I finished an essay about a month ago titled "What if We All Worked Less?" I started the essay on maternity leave, when I had a week to myself before my daughter was born. In that week, I read two books in one week (!) and wrote a draft of this essay, as I was trying to work through what was to come and exactly how I was going to manage being both a mom and working full time. i.e. How could I do it all?

I kept writing and tweaking the essay after I became a parent, as I was living my question, juggling parenting and working full time. It took writing the essay to find an answer to my conundrum that seems obvious and easy enough though in our society feels impossible to find: part time work! Wouldn't it be nice if I could go down to part time work and afford a mortgage payment with my partner? We will see. 

After publishing the essay, I came across a quote from David Cain posted on Substack that the 40+ hour, five day work week is too much for all us. He sums it up, or reiterates what I was trying to get at with my essay, and I guess I will leave with that here: 

"The eight hour workday is too profitable for big business, not because of the amount of work people do in eight hours... but because it makes for a such a purchase-happy public. Keeping free time scarce means people pay a lot more for convenience, gratification, and any other relief they can buy. It keeps them watching television and its commercials. It keeps them unambitious outside of work."

Here's to hoping I can find the time for some of my ambition outside of my work - for reading and maybe even writing, even if that is just an essay a year.

I've always dreamt of my own home.

This is a common dream. In my house, I would grow a vegetable garden and plant fruit trees and native plants. I would have a compost bin full of rich soil in the backyard and water barrels beneath the gutters. I am thirty-one now and the dream has evolved. It's a little less romantic but now I would like to have a house that is well insulated, where air leaks are sealed, where I can electrify everything and power the house with solar.

The idea would be to live without harm, to live in relation with the earth's limits. It's a goal that probably stems from deep-seated anxiety or Catholic guilt. It's also a goal that just makes me happy.

I've been intrigued by homesteading since I was young, and now it's evolved more into a passion for green building. Last year in the pandemic, I learned about R values and building science in Martin Holliday's Musings of an Energy Nerd (I like the idea he spurred of the "Pretty Good House"). This year, I have found myself watching webinars (!) in my free time on green building: here, here, here, and here.

Meanwhile, I am a renter. A renter who finds herself moving quite a bit, who hasn't yet figured out where to put down roots and grow that vegetable garden.

The key thing I tend to forget when I am thinking about this dream is the financial part. All of this is fun to daydream about, but the reality is that it's expensive. Home prices have skyrocketed in the last few years in places I would like to live and so if I am ever able to afford a house, I most likely will not have money left over to pay for an induction stove, a new heat pump, electric water heater and solar panels.

This is the reality of most all homeowners though, I imagine. Home repairs are costly and done over time. I'm not any different.

The thing is, even if I were to finally have a house of my own and in time, convert it to an energy-efficient home where I grow my own food (with the house being an engine of production, rather than an engine of consumption), I would still only be a drop in the bucket. The house would be personally satisfying but in reality, it would just be one house with a smaller footprint when what we need is everyone to reduce that footprint on a national scale.

This point has been made and argued a million times over. Do individual actions make a difference? And the most satisfying answer I have found to this question is from an interview with writer Eula Biss. The interview, interestingly enough, is about vaccines but it is also about how public health has a lot of commonalities with climate change too.

 "There's this amazing fact that's a little mind boggling to me," Eula Biss says. "You're more likely to catch an infectious disease if you're a vaccinated person in a totally unvaccinated community than if you're an unvaccinated person in a totally vaccinated community." Pause. I'll let you read that over again. "Vaccination is not all that effective if only one person does it, but it's incredibly effective if nearly everyone does it."

"The challenge of vaccination has some interesting commonalities with the challenge of addressing climate change," she goes on to say. "I was in South Africa last year, when Cape Town was approaching Day Zero -- they were going to run out of water entirely. But Day Zero didn't happen, because the city so effectively reduced their water usage. And that was because of collective action. People were not flushing their toilets, or were flushing them every seven to nine uses and using reserve shower water to flush." 

"One person doing that doesn't actually make a difference at all, right? Like I can not flush my toilet, and it will have zero effect. Just as one person vaccinating really doesn't do anything meaningful for disease worldwide. But everyone in a whole city not flushing their toilets has a real, measurable effect."

The ah-ha moment is that individual actions work when they're done on a collective scale. Like vaccines! Like masks! And well, yes, I know... it's a bit sad to see how that message resonates with a portion of the American population.

Policy changes are not as exciting to talk to about as house buying but they do give me hope. They feel like concrete steps toward the collective action we need. Since delving into environmental activism four-plus years ago, I have seen real changes happen, and they've all happened from policy (from the government regulating, subsidizing, and incentivizing behaviors).

I've witnessed a community in Millcreek, Utah pack a city hall room, sit through multiple city hall meetings, and demand that their legislators commit to go 100% renewable by 2032 (the legislators after some time, said yes). I have witnessed a coalition of cities in Utah sign a bill that demands that Rocky Mountain Power powers their municipalities with renewable energy by 2032. I have seen solar farms installed, finally, because of this work.

In my home state of Illinois, I have seen legislation (first the Future Energy Jobs Act and now the Climate and Equitable Jobs Act) bring solar to a state that no one would ever think would be a great candidate for solar. These bills seem ineffective, but they are not. Now that I am back in Chicago, I see solar everywhere thanks to the incentives put in place from the new legislation, and when I left here four years ago for Utah, that was not the case.

This fall, I spent my time calling my senators to pass Build Back Better, the climate legislation we need on a federal scale. It is still sadly stalled, DOA because of one man, and the loss is unbearable. The hard part about this work is, we have to rely on people in power, rather than just focusing on our own self. That means I have to show up to community meetings. I have to call and write and sign petitions to hold people to account (wouldn't it be nice if getting them to work in our best interests wasn't so hard?). 

Living within the climate space, I am constantly reminded that we have about ten years to turn this ship around, and the reality is that it might take another year to get a down payment ready. But the really interesting thing to me is that because I haven't been able to put my focus and attention into caring for my own home, making the changes I want to see in my own dwelling, I have had to look for another outlet. I had to channel that energy somewhere, and so in the past few years, I channeled it into activism.

When I look back, I actually find that I have been more effective as an environmentalist as a renter, than a homeowner. Because as a renter, I had no choice but to focus on my community rather than my own plot of land.

Social media loves the individual action.

I follow a zero-waste brand online and while I don't knock the movement, scrolling past the posts do make me squirm a little. There is a call to buy a lot of trendy, reusuable things and underneath it all, a sense that that alone will save us. This type of environmentalism makes me uneasy but I do get it. It's easy to glamorize. It's shiny and speaks to a side of ourselves that I don't think will ever fully subside. I'm human and a very imperfect environmentalist. I like things too.

While focusing on lifestyle changes can be productive, the posts mainly make me want to scream because they put the onus on individual choices and fail to mention anything remotely political. The world will change, I thought, not when we focus on lifestyle choices alone but when we spend some of our energy collectively pressuring the government and corporations to stop pursuing destructive and unsustainable practices.

And this (unfortunately to say) is hard work.

I thought of this a lot when I was reading Jia Tolentino's "Trick Mirror" this summer. While reading, I realized that the tendency to glamorize the individual action and downplay collective organizing has been done in the feminist space as well.

In her essay, "The Story of a Generation in Seven Scams", Tolentino talks about girlbosses and what she calls "the social media scam". She investigates the power women portray on social media and writes, "A politics built around getting and spending money is sexier than a politics built around actual politic."

"[With white feminism], instead of expanded reproductive protections and equal pay and federally mandated family leave and subsidized childcare and a higher minimum wage, we got the self-congratulatory empowerment feminism that corporations can get behind... We got a bottomless cornucopia of privatized non-solutions: face serums, infrared saunas, wellness gurus like Gwenyth Paltrow."

It made me laugh at the time but it's also true. We have serums (sold by women so feminist) instead of subsidized childcare. Great. When I go online, I'm often sold something, at times it will even be sold as being aligned with my feminist or environmentalist values. Less often will I go online and see actual political action (though depends on who you follow).

Jia Tolentino puts it succinctly: "The problem is that a feminism that prioritizes the individual will always, at its core, be at odds with a feminism that prioritizes the collective."

This line made me think of my dream of the house. I know, it's okay to dream. It's okay to want to house, but I remind myself often, an environmentalism that prioritizes the individual will always be at odds with an environmetalism that prioritizes the collective. In other words, if I really want to see our way of life drastically change and shift toward a more sustainable model (and I do!), I won't get it by prioritizing myself alone. I have to think of my neighbor and my community too.

I get it. The reason actual political action or organizing isn't glamorized is because it's hard to glamorize. It's slow work. It's unpaid work. It sometimes leads to amazing victories, but only sometimes.

After Trump was elected, I started getting involved with a local environmental organization and to be frank, the meetings were chaotic. Occassionally, they were a balm. Occasionally they were invigorating, being surrounded by people who cared about the same things that I do but often, it just meant that I spent my free time on Zoom after work and listened to people talk over each other or get sidetracked. And yet, in organizing, I have been able to make bigger changes than I have ever thought possible (see here and here). 

Recently, I read a tweet that said, "The revolution will be imperfect" and it gave me a sigh of relief. Once I realized that activist spaces and organizing meetings wouldn't be perfect, that they wouldn't be optimized and efficient, I breathed easier. It's okay because it's numbers that we need. Organizing is a team project, which I'll admit, is my least favorite kind. But it has to be a team project. There is no other way. We need the most amount of people making the loudest noise possible. 

All of this makes me think of Eula Biss' words once again (I know I am quoting a lot of people here but these thoughts have been swirling around in my head for a while). I keep coming back to a quote from her that has stayed with me since I first read it, that shifted my view on everything in one small paragraph. In her book "On Immunity" Biss talks about a realization she had when reading about the environmentalist Rachel Carson, saying:

"If one feels at least partly responsible for one's own health ... but understands one's body as a complex system linked to other complex systems, including the community and the environment, the task of controlling all the factors that might affect one's health becomes overwhelming."

"Feeling responsible for everything and powerless at the same is a good description, I think, of the emotional state induced by citizenship in this country," Biss writes.    

These words hit me when I read them. Feeling responsible for everything and powerless at the same time is very much my state of being. 

"Our representative democracy endows us with empowered powerlessness. This is a problem of governance, but it is also, as Rachel Carson would suggest, something else. 'For each of us, as for the robin in Michigan or the salmon in the Miramichi ... this is a problem of ecology, of interrelationships, of interdependence.' " 

Ah yes, interdependence. The missing puzzle piece. The thing we don't like to admit. The thing the pandemic and climate change (and the robins and the salmon) keep calling to mind.

Over the past few years, I have found that working on systematic change is an ask that puts me face to face with my own powerlessness. There is no alternative though if I am concerned about my own health or my neighbor's. I am one person living amongst others in an interconnected ecosystem. I am deeply affected by what is beyond myself and so I must look outward, at my environment and my community, but also do so humbly, with, as Biss writes, a sense of empowered powerlessness.

It can be freeing, this realization. That I have power but that power will always be finite. That I can't do it all. That it wasn't designed that way.

All of this to say, I do still hope I achieve my dream one day. A little homestead somewhere with a garden out my door, that will hopefully nourish me even as our world changes. But I know that the house won't save me. I'm self-aware enough to know that if the ship goes down, it doesn't matter if I have solar on my roof or a garden in my backyard, I will go down too. I can't do everything. I'm not all that skilled. 

The interesting thing I've learned now is that I know that the house also won't save us. That can only be done in community, through very banal things like legislation and policy and incentives on a national level. 

So yes, I will garden, but I will show up for the larger struggle too. Here's to hoping (and doing and resting and playing too).

09/26/2020

Decided to make some time for celebration before November 3rd. 

Where to start.

I just turned 30.

I am happy to be 30. Pretty uneasy about the general state of the world but excited for a new decade.

I don’t have much to say about the milestone but I do want to talk a little about my last year. I spent most of the last year with my hands going numb, the pain increasing as the day wore on. Often by night, my whole hand and arm would be in pain and all I could do was go to sleep and hope that I would wake up, the pain slightly less.



I did not expect for my hands to rebel at me in my twenties. To go to the doctors and get my test results back with the diagnosis: severe carpal tunnel in both hands.

In a way, I was lucky to get the diagnosis. My pain was not in my head, after all. It wasn’t just anxiety manifesting in my arms. It was real and it had a remedy that was relatively quick and easy. I could get surgery in both wrists to release the pressure on my nerves and from what I was told, the pain would be gone. And so I had two surgeries, spent four weeks off of work, and hoped for the best.

I was lucky to get the diagnosis and yet, I want to talk about the pain. About not really being able to use your hands anymore. About the pain coming every day. First in my fingers then the wrist then the elbow then the forearm. It throbbed. It rendered my hands useless. I worked through it day after day for years and then at night, I was done. I couldn’t cook, write, scroll through Instagram like the rest of my peers seemed to be doing. All I could do was occasionally cry and hope it would be better tomorrow.

I am still healing from my surgeries. The pain still subsists and I’m still trying to figure out why. The whole thing was a good lesson in something we’ve all come to know as life goes on, and strikingly so, this year. It was a lesson in things going wrong and having to change your plans and adapt, despite wishing I didn’t have to. It was a lesson in growing older and realizing my body can give out if I don’t take care of it (sometimes even if I do). It was a lesson in deep empathy, realizing in a small way what those with disabilities and chronic pain experience.

As for the cherry on top that came for all of us, after four weeks of leave after my surgeries, COVID-19 came. I never ended up going back to the office. Instead I set up shop in my spare room and worked, while I watched as our collective health was threatened every day. 

After my first week in quarantine, I bought Eula Biss’ book, “On Immunity: An Inoculation,” where she put the lesson I was learning in such wonderful and plain terms. “Immunity is a myth,” she said. I underlined it, repeated the words to myself. Immunity is a myth. If you’re lucky, it’s not something you realize when you're young but I have finally taken it in. No matter my deep-seeded plans and my attempts to stay healthy, I am not immune. Not ever - and thanks to COVID-19 and our flailing government, especially not now.

In addition to my doctor’s visits, I started therapy for the first time this year. Like most people, I’ve tried it a few times before but it never stuck. Thankfully, this time it took, thanks to a partner who helped me to take the leap after years of seeing me live with deep anxiety. I asked him to help me find a therapist for my birthday last year and he did. He sent me a list of six or so therapists and after calling everyone on that list and trying to judge as much as I could about a person from a phone call, I found a really good fit.

Therapy broke me. It broke me so much that in the middle of it, I had to postpone my wedding. As I do, I piled things on this past year (working late nights, taking on large projects outside of work as a volunteer for the Sierra Club, trying to find a new job because I wasn’t happy where I was, trying to write a book in any free time I had, and also planning a wedding — all while my hands slowly deteriorated). Something had to give and despite the deposit we had put down, it was my wedding that got the boot.

All of this to say I’ve been thinking a lot about how to take care of myself this year and it seems to be a bit complicated.

I have never been great at self-care. I think I’ve been fine, but not great. So much of self-care seems capitalistic. Buy this sheet mask. Buy this $200 serum (!). But the notion of it shouldn’t be dismissed. Jenny Odell in her wonderful essay “How to Do Nothing” examined the idea of self-care in a way that made sense to me: “Our very idea of productivity is premised on the idea of producing something new, whereas we do not tend to see maintenance and care as productive in the same way,” she said. “[Take for example a rose garden], the most constant regulars of the garden are volunteers doing maintenance.”

Maintenance. I like that term. Or as someone said in a podcast I listened to, think of self-care as self-parenting. As adults, we don’t have parents checking in on us daily anymore, making us dentist and doctor's appointments, dealing with insurance once the bill comes. In this way, I can get behind the idea of self-care. It’s not a face mask. It’s getting yourself to the doctor (something I avoided for too long).

I have spent more this year on medical care than I ever have, though I know this is probably just the beginning of ailments. For the first time, I have a primary care physician. I have seen a few hand specialists, surgeons, physical therapists. I have a therapist I see regularly. And while it isn’t cheap, it does make me realize that what we need more than self-care is just care, in general. Sometimes, we need a team of medical personnel to help care for us. We need insurance that allows that to be possible.

For me, the hardest part about incorporating self-care into my life is figuring out where resistance fits into all of this. I gave up a lot of “self-care” time for my volunteer work last year and my volunteer work fed me but it also exhausted me. Part of me thinks that’s just what activists have always been doing, sacrificing their free time out of necessity to fight against injustice and unrelenting power, but I wish it was acknowledged a bit more (though the term "self-care" did originate from Audre Lorde, a feminist and black rights activist, who was using the term in relation to activism). 

I felt it deeply when climate activist Naomi Klien talked about self-care in an interview for the Cut:“I don’t hold myself up as any kind of model for work-life balance,” she said. “I feel a genuine terror about how little time we have. I feel that incredibly intensely and have ever since I have started to listen to the climate clock. So I go hard. My balance is really about my son, my family. That does come at a cost to what these days is called “self-care,” but that’s just life. There aren’t enough hours in the day for me to do the work, be there for my son, and also have a regular yoga and meditation practice and chill out at the spa.”

In a way, I also go hard and then I take breaks when my body tells me to. Usually, when it screams at me to. This isn’t a great process, but I don’t know any other. I’m trying. I am seeing doctors when my body hurts and I’m talking to a therapist to sort out the many issues I just thought were a part of life and inevitable when they weren’t.

I’m also — in the midst of a pandemic — quitting my job due to my continued chronic pain. It’s scary to say the least but as my therapist tells me, “It’s okay to take breaks.” My body needs it, though I don’t know exactly how to take breaks without feeling guilty or worried about finances. But this is part of it too. She reminds me often, so wisely: “Learn to sit with discomfort.”

So now, here I go, off to sit with some mental discomfort for the sake of my physical health. Hoping I can enjoy, just a little bit, some time in the rose garden doing maintenance.

Pictured above: some shots from my first roll of 35mm film. Everything came out overexposed or out of focus but I'm a big fan.

Also: I know. It's a bit of an eye-roll to talk about my own pain right now and the concept of care as a white woman when for so long, we have denied black communities access to this care, as well as trauma therapy, quality education, job opportunities, food equity, community safety, an unbiased justice system, reparations, and other basic human rights. Our black communities have been deeply devoid of care for so long and we need to be working towards major shifts in our communities and personal lives. I've said this in a post before but as writer Brittany Packett suggests, "Spend your privilege. And then when you think you've spent enough, spend some more." I.e: Donate monthly to black organizations as a form of reparations. Move money from white people who have benefited from a history of privilege to black spaces. Become personally / monetarily invested in the health and safety of black communities. Work toward the defunding of police and for the funding of social services (Every year at the non-profit I worked for in Chicago, our trauma therapy and after school programs were cut and social workers were asked to do more with less. I thought it really was a budget thing, that we didn't have the money, but now I know the funds were just being put into policing first. Our social workers and therapists and teachers and care workers deserve more, especially since they do the desperate work we need). Volunteer, get immersed in the cause, learn to occupy spaces with people of color and work to release the racialized trauma your own body holds. Put your kids in the neighborhood public school. Support the school and then listen to the community who was there before. Read "What Is Owed" by Nikole Hannah-Jones. Read Ta-Nehisi Coates, Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, and the many others who have taken the time to teach us. Support black art that celebrates black beauty. See the joy and full humanity. Support black businesses. Support black farmers. What else? I've learned so much in the past months and have a lot of work to do. Please, I hope you're doing the work too.

Final note: Eula Biss' "On Immunity" is not only the perfect book for this time in terms of COVID-19 (I never thought a book about viral disease would be so relevant and interesting, especially in terms of how it also speaks to climate change. Her interview with the Cut talked about the idea of community care so well.) but she has also been a formative writer for me in terms of white privilege and debt. I highly encourage reading her essay "White Debt" and "No-Man's Land" and listening to her interviews about whiteness here and here.

Just wanted to sign on to say hello, post photos of a magical hike I took through Millcreek Canyon last week, and make a list of favorites of the year, which I can't help but do.

Not surprisingly, most of the writing that stuck with me this year was activism-related. This Rebecca Traister piece kept replaying in my mind all year. "Seek the organizing that is already underway," she wrote, among other illuminating advice. 

Then there was Rebecca Solnit's piece "When the Hero is the Problem" that was incredibly refreshing in its messaging. We don't need heroes, she theorized. We need community work, community efforts, community action! I also loved Naomi Klien's "How I Get it Done" interview. Her bluntness about how hard and urgently she works on environmental issues was comforting, as I feel a similar urgency / lack of balance this year. 

In terms of beautiful things that crossed my paths, I stumbled on Nikala Marie Peters' photography this year and couldn't stop scrolling through her photographs that so beautifully portray domestic life and what looks to me like a midwest childhood.

FKA Twigs "Cellophane" was the most captivating thing I heard all year. Her music video and live performance of the song left me speechless.

Alex G's House of Sugar and Angel Olsen's All Mirrors were so dreamy that I couldn't help but play them on repeat.

Jenny Odell's interview on the Longform podcast was delightful.

This Modern Love piece "Taking Marriage One Year at a Time" absolutely destroyed me in how much it spoke to me as I made the difficult / incredibly healthy decision to postpone my wedding this year. 

Of course, I woke up most days this year and read my way through books, as I do most years. 

Braiding Sweetgrass was the shining gem of everything I read and I wish it were required reading. Imagine if our schools taught a book that raised the question: "What would it be like to be raised on gratitude, to speak to the natural world as a democracy of species, to raise a pledge of interdependence?" 

Like most people, A Little Life consumed me and left me desperately sad, but mostly in a way I appreciated. The Golden State also stuck out as one of the best books I read this year. The whole novel flowed so naturally and in some magical way, seemed to leap from the page.

In terms of favorite things I watched, I can't emphasize enough how much I loved America to Me and Minding the Gap. Such important pieces of art / documentation made so close to home. Parasite and Shoplifters were also mesmerizing.

And then of course, there was Fleabag: Season Two. To me, that show was such a quiet, profound feat. I laughed a lot but I mostly sat in awe of the imperfect love that it was trying to display and so incredibly did. 

Some other things of note that made my year: finding a healthier relationship with Instagram and Twitter (haven't deleted them entirely but logged off a lot more), going to regular therapy sessions, discovering Weleda's Skin Food, fitting in a lot of twenty-minute yoga sessions at home with Adriene, getting a little bit better at learning how to live without a plan.

All I can say is, it was a year. Now on to the next decade (!).