Rhythms of Labor, Labors of Love, Labors of Grief

Another day goes by and I haven’t sent out a newsletter. I watch the angular curve of new subscribers slow, flatten, and now begin to drop. Still I can’t get myself to write.

I guess the people who do not know me know me as a prolific writer. The ones who have guessed my pen names know I’ve come close to a book a year since my first one when I was twenty-three.

I guess the people who do know me know me as an exuberant organizer, throwing myself into campaigns, protests, social centers, assemblies, infrastructure projects, gatherings, riots, and rebellions.

Both of those versions, though, provoke a deep sense of alienation in me. And the point is coming in my life where I can’t stay true to these half-truths about myself.

I have always had my days when I could write twenty pages, weeks when I could stay out in the streets as long as things were going on and a little longer, months spent organizing multitudinous gatherings with more preparatory meetings than I could count.

But I have also had my days and weeks and months when I couldn’t show up for anyone, couldn’t commit to anything, when I’d hide away and hope everyone assumed I was busy with something else, because there are very few people I trust with what those times look and feel like.

And I would not be confessing this now if it weren’t for those people who have pushed me—empathetically, because fuck the guilt-trippers—to be a better friend, lover, and family member; and if it weren’t for my deep-seated need to show up for younger folks who go through these same things, who give everything they have to a movement that pays lip service to offering accessibility and challenging normative rhythms and expectations, who do their best under a capitalism that demands people conform to cookie cutter schedules.

So yes, I do a lot of writing. And yes, I suppose I do a bunch of organizing too. But also, plenty of the time I am an absolute mess and given how I experience the world, one of those aspects could not exist without the other. And yet, both in the movement and under capitalism, we are expected to be productive in a regimented or predictable way.

Shaping my life around employment, and thus consumption, is something I have been unable to do, and also something I have refused to do.

I have an ambivalent reaction when people—from my grandma to some reviewer or friendly professor introducing me before a book talk—describe me as some kind of principled ascetic. On the one hand I could not endure a life I did not find deeper meaning in. But on the other hand, I would not survive a life centered around a nine to five job.

I grew up middle class enough to get a lot of opportunities, but not enough to get a free ride through college. So when I dropped out after a year and a half, it was in part because college didn’t inspire me (or at least, all the required courses I’d been skipping sure as hell didn’t), and in part because I knew living with debt would diminish my chances of survival.

Eventually, I settled into a job as a taxi driver, getting all the hours I needed in two or three 12 hour shifts a week. I survived on $400 a month, of which $240 was rent (this was small town Virginia in the 00s). Having most of the week free meant I would have enough time for writing or organizing or being a pathetic little mess. I wouldn’t have to suppress my innate rhythms. And it mostly worked. Though I never learned to share how I was doing, or challenge the normative rhythms and expectations that also existed in our supposedly anti-ableist, anticapitalist movement. And there was that one day I tried to work while I was dissociating and backed my cab straight into the neighbor’s parked car.

When I moved to Barcelona by virtue of getting arrested on mostly ridiculous explosives charges (actually not my fault), forced to stay there awaiting trial but also not allowed to work (for good measure, they brought immigration charges against me as well as criminal charges), I learned how to get by on 50 euros a month. Necessary skill sets: squatting, dumpster diving, and a few other profiles there’s no need to talk about in print.

This greater amount of freedom, in the sense of structurelessness, freed me from the pressures, stresses, and obligations of employment, and allowed me to organize my life as I wanted, which meant I could collapse for a couple weeks straight with no punishment except for the informal stigma of missing meetings or not hanging out for the evening beer… or I could go on a writing bender, go to Greece after an insurrection to explore the nearer boundaries of revolution, organize a solidarity trip to Chile in the midst of a wave of antiterrorist repression.

But I wasn’t really free. A real system of oppression is always present in its zones of presence and in its zones of absence, and the precarity and very real scarcity I experienced for fifteen years to free myself from capitalism (scare italics cause none of us are free until all of us free, for realsies) deprived me of needed resources, something I’m realizing more acutely now as I slowly get into the deep work and see again and again how much better a friend, lover, and comrade I would have been with a lot more access to therapy.

Since we’re talking for realsies, though, let me name our wretched old travelling companion, patriarchal conditioning. The lack of resources is real. Being theoretically aware that a major problem exists—being aware that you, in fact, have that problem—and yet not doing the hard work to avail yourself of the resources to move from theoretical awareness to a transformation in embodied practice because whatever man… yeah, that’s also real.

A part of my lack of income has been a result of real limitations, from a restriction of employment opportunities for people without college degrees and, for many of those years, without a work permit, to an inability to cope with a work schedule designed for those able to adapt to a monstrous society.

(In fact, capitalism’s labor regime, together with Christianity and then Science’s war on nature and on embodied experience are the two major forces that have shaped our ideas of normative mental health, that have defined the concept of sanity. Not to insult the normies again, but it’s the foot soldiers who helped accomplish the alienation of thought from body, of human from nature, it’s those who have been able to look out over a sick world and say, this is okay, those are the ones who model our very unwell idea of mental health.)

But it has also been the effect of decisions I own up to, like not wanting to be here just to get by, but needing to dedicate my life to things I believe in. And though there’s not a lot of money in anarchist publishing, I’ve written enough books that the sales could have significantly raised my income. But from the beginning, I chose not to keep any of the money from writing.

Starting this newsletter, in fact, was a direct result of my decision to no longer disavow income from writing. And the newsletter’s actually free, but if you want… let’s see, where’s that subscription button?

It was easy enough to come to that decision since, if we’re telling truths, I’m kinda getting old. But honestly, a lot of it has to do with loving criticism from someone close to my heart, trashing my whole practice of individual freedom. What about when I have other people to take care of? How is my asceticism going to help them?

Nevermind my sensible rebuttals about how in the squatting movement, we did a decent job creating and sharing collective resources, certainly better than the careerist middle class, inside or outside the movement. It also turns out we could only name two other anticapitalist authors who don’t take any money (and no idea whether there was substance to the rumors of independent wealth), and several who make six figures, which they may or may not share.

The point is, I’m trying to show up in different ways now. I’m trying to move past half-truths and get lost in the weeds, and then tell everyone about the wildflowers and thorns I’m finding down here. I’m trying to tell the stories, not just the ones that will make us more correct, but the ones that will actually help us transform, and heal, and still be here, more whole and aware, several generations from now.

But one thing I cannot do is show up like clockwork. Not even with this newsletter. Because I am not a clock. I am a geyser, and a swamp, and a river running its frantic path back to the sea.

And these last days (has it been weeks already?) when I have not been able to write, when I have not been able to work, when I’ve been showing up in other ways, I’ve been worrying. Worrying I’ve let you down, worrying you’ll think I’m not thinking about you, worrying you’ll think I’ve forgotten about the implicit commitment this newsletter represents.

But I haven’t forgotten. I’m here. But I can only ever be here in my own way.

Thank you for sharing this space with me.

Postscript: Citations and Tangents

My head is a little foggy now, but I know there are great books out there about depression, the normative effects of capitalist labor discipline, and schooling, and so many other institutions. Send me your recommendations and I’ll share them!

For now I’ll just repeat my heartfelt endorsement, from the video a couple weeks ago, of the recent movie Aftersun, and the heart rending portrayal it offers of surviving depression, of what we carry with us, of what we pass down.

Texts of the Week

Ricard de Vargas Golarons (ed.) (and translated by me!), Salvador Puig Antich: Collected Writings on Repression and Resistance from Franco’s Spain. I sent this one out on the recent anniversary of Salvador’s execution in 1974. Some of my older friends in Catalunya are Salvador’s friends and comrades.

And for the anniversary of the Kronstadt Rebellion, Alexander Berkman, Kronstadt Diary.

Oh and happy equinox!

Header image by Carlo Carrà.