Contextual Mismatch

My 3rd grade class was raising money for the rain forest. I wanted to contribute my birthday money. My Mom insisted that I spend it on a gift for myself, since it wasn't enough to make a real impact. I remember standing at the store, trying to make a choice of toys and feeling unsatisfied and frustrated. I remember the Ninja G.I. Joe they got me at Christmas, exactly what I wanted despite the gendered expectations of others. The notebook I still have with their signatures on my childhood inventions, generators under rivers to replace dams. I did not dive deep enough to question our need for energy or how much was enough.

I had an action anomaly today, ironing a shirt on a Friday night because it's a men's shirt and the chest gaping caused weird creases that have bothered me for a long time. Now was the moment to fix it. I'm also there. My Mom ironing my Dad's shirt or somebody's outfit, rollers in her hair, frantic. We were late for church or something important. My sister crying about the feeling of socks. My Dad yelling. Wanting to be an easy child, to disappear into the walls, to be ready to go. Not wanting to be the child who couldn't help but dirty her white first communion dress. Not wanting to be the person who drops out of a friend's wedding because she wanted me to wear a purple dress like the other bridesmaids and not a suit like the groomsman who was going to be on her side of the aisle anyways. Not wanting to be the person who found her belated apology lacking.

The creases are subdued yet still present. I'm not certain I'm ironing correctly, but at least I'm not melting anything. Like I melted that folding table or my area rug. I remember a poem from Tiktok "Ode to Our Mothers" and I felt grateful that even though I am mildly incompetent at many household tasks, at least she didn't raise me to be a wife.

Children have less rights because humans are in our most malleable and present form when we are young. Our long and dependent development. All entropy and sensation, nascent norms not yet packed into "normal". In the global North or at least the United States, we are conditioned to become workers, to produce and consume. In the global south, you produce and are consumed. The global south pays the climate and resource cost for the north's profits and the endless growth we cling to. We live in the imaginations of the rich, who project their domination into a future existential AI threat that will dominate them. While current AI training and bias creates an algorithmic underclass, wringing out our ATP and the equivalent proportions of time and money like a nearly dry towel.

Dear ChatGPT, what amount of energy and water needs to be wasted for our amusement?

"Rich" and its messy amorphous definition becomes a placeholder and yardstick for what we will or won't have, what we should or should not have to give up. What we owe one another. What we are entitled and promised. What we deserve.

The promise of relief hides a bargain most of us continually accept on behalf of all of us. We want an end to the starvation that began with colonialism and enclosure. European elites cutting Indigenous people and peasants from the commons. The reformation of the church and the beginning of interest based loans. Factories, workhouses, poor farms, and genocide. The dualism that separated us from the land, our bodies, and each other. We are in the Becoming of Complicity, self aggregation and assortment without sacrifice. Tribes without tribunals, bribing each other with outrage and justifications for inaction.

What can we do?

We ask and study and collect data. Just one more basic income pilot, just one more Nature paper on the enduring harm of SARS-CoV-2 on our bodies, just one more nonprofit or campaign donation, just one more hour of this shift, just one more scroll. Will this be the post that gets picked up by the algorithm?

We edit a memory every time we recall it, because our cognition is generative and compositional. In order to piece together parts of any task or action, executed or imagined, into a new complex sequence, we must be heavily reliant on context. We pee in the bathroom, we cook in the kitchen, we sleep in a bed. If we are the lucky ones or at least think we are. Contextual mismatch simultaneously pushes us away from others and pulls us out of our bodies, disconnection and disembodiment. Contextual mismatch is manufactured against all of us, so that capitalism can fill in the gaps around us with comfort, convenience, conditioning, and cruelty. Nudges and sludge removing and adding friction to our context while our series of choices is modeled in a user flow or funnel. You can swim upstream, but will you make it past the dam? Will you drown in the moat of the castle containing your and everyone's data? Can you climb over the walls of software switching costs? Can you risk falling in love with a product that gets sunset or enshittified? Can you pay each digital rent forever?

Some of us have a higher contextual mismatch with our physical and digital environments, because they are inaccessible or we lack accommodations. This is my definition of disability, high contextual mismatch. Neither and both medical and social. A tiny linguistic attempt at healing an excess of dualism.

We live in continual predictions based on external and internal perceptions: past, present, and future. The predictive parts inside of us reflecting the shared archetypes in our collective un/conscious. Our cognition and complementary strengths are meant to be a shared tradeoff of flexibility and stability. Abundance and scarcity are an infinite loop that flow instead of fight. A questioning mindset might be even more advantageous than a positive one.

Can I do this? Can we?

We trade and debate our recall with each other. Your predictions about my perceptions, my perceptions about your predictions. Our parts echo and flux, habitual patterns and conscious logic and narrative intelligence. We pretend that a complex whole like a brain can be studied by damage to one area, that a person can be understood by one identity, that personal responsibility can exist without the context of collective. That a self can exist without the differences we observe in others. We separate ourselves from other species, decrying our "lizard brain" while avoiding our shared cognitive mechanisms of myths and misinfo. Because the brain is far more interconnected and less region specific than we thought, yet the myth persists of an emotional irrational animal inside of us. Every marginalization supposedly makes you less able to dominate yourself and any animalistic parts and tendencies in the service of logic and commerce and Christ and whiteness and men. We are animals, one species among many, with a spectrum of shame and denial of that identity.

Evolution is about many ways to do the same thing (survive), not the best way.

At her wedding, a friend from high school told me I stood up for her against bullies in our Greek and Roman class. I couldn't remember it. I could remember how I memorized a book for the Olympiad game we played and then I answered almost every question. I dominated everyone and probably ruined the game. My teacher was so impressed with me he wrote a college recommendation letter that made my Mom cry. Too bad FAFSA calculations couldn't include his words, so that I could have afforded going to the college I was admitted to. Instead I accepted going to a technical college with a transfer contract to the best state university, not knowing the hidden costs I'd pay for the money saved.

I was home recently with my parents and sister. The only people I can rely on not to expose me to an infectious disease the majority of society lives in denial of. For a week, I stayed off social and watched cable. I experienced the life of white retired boomer Americans. My parents are rural, diehard union Democrats. I and my 3 older siblings worked summers at the same factory my dad retired from. A family lottery system for college students to earn union wages. Every privilege hopelessly entangled with harm.

The complexity is the point, so we can be sold simplicity. And then be sold complexity again.

We watched a Kamala campaign speech. Reasonable, maybe even generous proposed policies. Cloaked in a narrative. The most lethal fighting force in the world. Better than China. Strengthen the middle class. Careers that don't require college. Climate crisis, genocides, pandemics, incarceration, and police violence went unmentioned in her speech and were screaming inside of me.

I felt a question was asked, a contract slid in front of me. What will you do for the promise of a white middle class American life? Will you study all night? Sleep in your car or on the floor of your friend's room before 2 finals? Except that friend didn't know his heat registers were off in the depth of winter and you froze all night. But you know cold. Northern Wisconsin, trailing your father and tracking a shot deer in the woods. Looking for drops of red in a sea of white and walk-jumping your little legs into his deep snow prints.

You must keep up or you'll be left behind. You need to take turns dragging that deer. You get to eat, but you aren't forced to hunt or kill or gut. I don't know what it feels like to immerse my arms into an abdominal cavity, dragging out intestines without ripping and spoiling the meat. I only know dissection. The 5 curious hearts of a worm, the smell of dead shark, the weight of a human brain in my hands from a person who had Parkinson's. Degeneration of substantia nigra and the dopamine pathways you once drew. The echo of my teacher's compliments, the cleanest fetal pig dissection in the class.

I signed up. I signed the student loans, I cast the vote, I took the default tax deduction so the refund felt like a reward, I walked to class, to the startup office in the all glass building downtown. I watched the CEO of my startup bang on the glass wall of the bank until a man saw him. I followed him inside to watch the berating and demeaning. The pursuit of power over, instead of power with. My soft heart walk-jumping into his ruthless beats and the deference it demanded. The personality test that said you were most similar to this bank-glass-banging man, except more accommodating and insecure. Peter the Personality Consultant placing CEO on your aptitude plate and saying you just need to believe in yourself and eat all of it before you can leave the table. The COO being the other person you were most similar to. Welcome to a sick little club of aggressive, oblivious, cold, risk-taking men. Didn't you know how much you are like them?

The way I wilted in that atmosphere, thinking my only other choice was to be an invasive species. Taping white birch trees with duct tape slathered with vaseline to prevent tent caterpillars from crawling up. Drowning buckets of them in the lake. A lake we cleaned garbage out of, but I still cut my foot open on a can we missed. Snipping common buckthorn and hoping I was correctly identifying the leaves. And not massacring infant aspen trees.

As a white settler, I am the buckthorn and the tent caterpillar.

I asked my Dad on Father's day if he ever felt guilty for what our family has. He said being a Marquardt means going to your first job and coming home to your second. The way generations of us worked in factories, ran the family sawmill, built our own homes, "own" land by each other, the men's deers draining blood in the trees outside your Grandma's house. The way he designed our house we built, down to the blueprints. The inventions he patented. He plays me a song that he wrote while on a shift operating the robots on a paint line, holding it in his mind until he could arrive at the home he built and the piano he has had since the apartment with the sagging mattress propped up by magazines. An era in your young parent's life that you just heard about for the first time on your last visit home. For a while he drives a Ford Escort with a rusted out bottom, but it gets great gas mileage. And he owns it, because if you have the choice being poor is better than looking rich with debt.

And you don't know if you had a choice in your debt. All you know is your mom hugging you as you cried in the kitchen saying it was all your fault.

We cook and cry in the kitchen.

I have known community, showing up at the local bar where I will know every face. For better and worse. Getting drunk on your cousin's mead or wine on the 4th of July. I've lost my family of origin, built a chosen one, lost them all to covid differences, and reconciled with my family of inheritance. Maybe that's my Aries Moon in my 8th house of inheritance and transformation. My mom finding out she was pregnant with me at an appointment to tie her tubes. I was still born with an umbilical cord around my neck. Or so I've been told.

Every chain of words I wrap around me for a shred of comfort feels hollow. I must knit and crochet and sew. I must stitch and weave. If you pull the wrong thread in the web of your brain, it will tighten the knot. Maybe you want that.

I wake up some days and think I need to be wound up like a toy soldier. I need to be shaken like a snow globe. I need an intervention or an exorcism.

I am stuck with my wheels spinning. It could be the conditions of the road. It could be where and when I decided to go. Maybe my car needs maintenance or I'm doing it all wrong. There's no one to help me push and I don't know where I'd be off to at this time of night. Maybe I just don't want to get covid at the car dealership.

I wanted this writing to be cohesive and clear. Diagrams so defined and illuminating they put a little chink into armor, chips into gears, silence into the rushing realm of notifications. I want those diagrams to be paired with a product so useful and accessible, that it's a delight instead of a demand. I want to be a side character. Come to Cake's Cavern, an accessible junkyard library, for any magical item that your heart desires or your quest requires!

I'm not sure I am or will be part of bringing any of these things into interbeing. I'm sick. I'm worn out. My bodymind is battling itself. I used to be so driven by challenges, but covid makes everything into an obstacle now. And I can't seem to contain let alone process all the avoidance and denial directed at me. It just seeps out somehow. I keep dropping stitches somewhere between excuses and responsibility. How far back do I need to frog this project?

What will this fix require of me?

I can't pretend I know what will happen or what any of us will do or live through.

And yet I can still practice.

We can give our tiny bits of money and energy to conservation and dream of a free and protected rainforest. We can insist on clothes we feel comfortable in and not buying new things for every event. We can cry about our debt in the kitchen to our formerly estranged mother after you gave each other another chance. We can build community and family and lose it and build it all again.

A practice is just a collection of moments. Moments where we choose or feel or act a different way. Moments unique to each fleeting squishy context and all the mismatches we are forced to bridge every day. Moments built off from perception that sway back and forth into dynamic predictive parts.

Moments where we open our hearts.

Header image description:

Color inverted whiteboard over a tree with artistic filter applied. Body, task, and context at top of whiteboard. Abled has a shorter distance between body and context, disabled has farther.

Time: Before: cue, trigger, glimmer During: distractions, emotions After: reward vs crash

Energy chart: disabled has higher peaks and lower crashes