“Hope Is a Discipline”
“Hope Is a Discipline”
Considering the Mariame Kaba quote during a tough month
After the second inauguration of Donald Trump, I locked the fuck in. I made a blog post (which I turned into a zine and distro'd irl) about ways I was locking the fuck in, which I hoped would serve as inspiration for other people to do the same. I’ve talked with a couple people who tell me the post/zine actually helped push them into action. As a writer this makes me really happy. Two months later, I don’t really disagree with any of the points I was making in that zine, but all the same, I’ve come to burnout. This would suggest that something in my approach was not quite as effective as I hoped it would be.
This burnout is not of the “giving up" kind nor has it shaken my basic will to work towards liberation, but it's made it clear that my day-to-day approach needs work. Mostly, I feel stalled. Whatever I’ve been doing thus far, at the present moment I’m not doing nearly as much. The past three months have put me on my ass, and now I’m mostly just staying there and catching my breath. I’m at home more. Cancelling plans sometimes. Not answering texts or emails consistently. I’m crying a lot and don’t always have a reason for it. Is anyone else crying, like, a lot more than usual?
The personal shit I’m dealing with — medical problems, new job, a couple breakups simultaneously, etc. — is all deeply implicated in the fascist moment. I’m not willing to go into the personal details of what my life’s been up to recently, nor do I think it would make for good reading if I did. Suffice to say that shit really does find a way to hit you all at once. I don’t mean to say that these things happened directly because of the fascist moment, necessarily, and I’m not currently having any kind of regular direct contact with fascists at work or home. Thank God, it’s a rare day that I speak with somebody face-to-face who genuinely means harm to me or my neighbors. I’m talking in a more general sense. In addition to coincidental bad timing, I — along with every person I know — am personally suffering the stress of increased preparedness, hyper-vigilance, and massive changes to my life and my community. And this affects my day-to-day pretty severely!
Somebody got taken in an unmarked van off Myrtle Avenue in Brooklyn a few weeks back. It was right by my old stop. I was out at the time and talked to some neighbors on-site who watched it happen. I’m pretty sure the person is okay now, thanks to the legal and mutual aid efforts of a couple groups in my neighborhood. But just about every week, ICE and DHS are making their rounds. Prison camps are an increasingly real threat for political prisoners and apparently anybody who's brown. Palestinian students, and students in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle, are being disappeared by feds in New York City. A couple trans people I know, including my beloved long lost British boyfriend, have already faced serious issues with the US border, and all signs point to these issues getting worse over time. All of this sucks really bad. Unsurprisingly, it has affected my ability to sleep, eat, work, and make good decisions. It’s made it harder for me to have patience with my peers, and simultaneously, it’s put my patience in far greater demand. Without overstating the problem — as I’d bet we’re not even close to the worst of it, and we can put up with a lot more than this — it is difficult for us to function normally during the rise of fascism.
I am trying to respond to these difficulties with compassion for myself and others, but I’m also thinking a lot about how to adjust my daily practices so as to better accommodate for the day-to-day bullshit of fascism. The first casualty of a fight is usually the plan you have going into it. I’m trying to recuperate and readjust my sense of planning. While it's not a silver lining to the burnout, this question has turned out to be a productive one for me. So, with no sense of authority whatsoever, here's some questions I’m asking myself when I get home from work, feeling awful, not wanting to cook dinner, laying out on my bed and looking at the ceiling.
What is the role of discipline in my life?
Abolitionist (and NYC-based librarian, shout tf out) Mariame Kaba often writes about hope as a discipline, as opposed to a feeling. My earlier post was written with this idea very much in mind. Thinking of optimism as an orientation towards revolution and liberation, what are the daily practices I am employing to move in that hopeful direction? How am I structuring my life and time to make sure I prioritize moving in that direction? At the same time, how am I treating movement work, not like a job I clock in and out of, but rather as a constant discipline? How does that discipline manifest when nobody’s around, i.e. how must it inform how I take care of myself? More specifically, when I’m not taking care of myself — not eating right, not sleeping, not taking enough care in my relationships — how can that possibly align with a politics of hope and liberation?
As always, I’m trying not to over-individualize these questions. God knows there’s enough liberal perspectives that frame individual choice as the root of all change. I believe this is a dangerous trap. But individual practices do go a long way, especially in local organizing. Lately, it's been challenging to find the middle ground between my own individual needs and choices, and the needs and choices of the groups I’m a part of.
What does accountability actually look like?
I’m thinking of this question not in the philosophical abstract but in a very specific, applied sense, and lately in two parts: my own accountability towards myself and others, and other people’s accountability to themselves and to me. As to the first, how practiced am I in admitting when I fuck up? How committed am I to actually changing the patterns of my life when, say, I hit a wall like at the present moment? Or act like a bitch to someone who's on my side? As to the second, what does forgiveness look like to me, and who deserves it? When is “accountability” something to even bother seeking? Are there certain harms — real instances of harm, I mean, not the little stuff— that, for my own peace and the cohesion of larger group dynamics, I should just move on about? Exactly what degree of harm makes accountability impossible? That is, at what extreme (if any) does a person in my political in-groups — a trans person for example, a working person, a person I might even struggle alongside — functionally stop counting as part of that in-group?
I fuck with the Margaret Killjoy quote "Deescalate all conflict that isn’t with the enemy," and I also wonder about the definition of that word "enemy." I insist on the in-group/out-group question as an extreme last resort, but a resort that should sometimes be turned to all the same. The instances where this question is even relevant are dramatically few but they tend to stick around when they do come up. Unlike certain abolitionists I respect, I don't believe that this question is easily negatable on principle alone. I wonder about the trans landlords, the homosexual cops, and the in-group no-accountability serial rapists of the world. Once again, I ask this in a strictly applied way — not philosophizing. All the grace in the world I've got for my own kind, it seems important for us to ask what it means, in a time of serious conflict, to consolidate power for the purpose of self-defense.
What defines a limit?
I’ve operated beyond certain personal “limits,” sometimes for years and years at a single go, and I am completely confident that I will have to do so again. I believe things are gonna get worse before they get better. I think about what survival means, especially in a revolutionary context. I think about the practical value of “limit” as defined by anything besides the literal physiological no-go’s of thirst, hunger, and exhaustion. What’s a limit to me and what’s a limit to, say, a disabled mother in Gaza, or an orphaned kid in Sudan? For that matter, what’s a limit to me as opposed to the limit of other trans women in New York City, those from the AIDS generation and the regime of Masquerade Laws, those Stonewall and pre-Stonewall queens who made my relative comfort and success here even possible?
This framing might strike people who love me as a kind of mean-spirited or dismissive way to talk to myself, but I actually mean it as the opposite. I want to imagine my relationship to personal limits as fluid and, at the end of the day, empowering, rather than discouraging. Even if fundamentally it's about my disabilities, or general lack of power. Like, my burnout right now is in many ways my body asserting its needs and forcing a stop to ongoing stress. But the nature of this burnout is, like, my body making sure we can keep persisting despite that stress. Cancelling plans for a week and crying a lot shows that I’ve gone beyond a threshold that I should avoid surpassing if at all possible. It means I need to rethink how I rest and take care of myself. A limit, on the other hand, is a very distant thing. I’ve yet to reach it, and I know in a pinch I could move through even this bullshit and come out the other end alright. The emotional feeling of rock bottom is rarely a material reality of rock bottom. I’ve got more in the tank, and I am under a serious obligation to continue using it. Just gotta get smarter about how I’m using it, I guess. It's a matter of relative pacing more than absolute capacity.
Anyway. This week I rode on the back of a motorcycle at sunset and I smelled fried food outside Saratoga Park and watched all the people walking outside their houses, like ten times the number who were out a month ago, and all that is at least something. Sometimes the change of season feels like a shallow thing to celebrate, with shit as bad as it is. Hope isn't this feeling of elation. It's the work we do and the practices of liberation we maintain. It has to be that way or we're fucked. But sometimes, hope as a feeling visits you out of nowhere, all at once, and you get to smile and lean into the girl in front of you and believe in all sorts of things for a second.
thanks for reading.
book update: release date will be available very very soon and it's looking like late spring. audiobook production is stalled indefinitely and i am sad about that. (but it's still happening.) turns out this book stuff is extremely hard when everyone involved A) is being targeted by the state somehow and B) has a full time job outside of publishing. please hmu if u pre-ordered already and have questions or concerns.
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your uber driver (i'm outside),
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