Dangling By A Silver Thread

I'm restless and sad. I don't know what my bodymind needs and I know exactly what to try. And I don't want to try. I would rather pretend I don't know, because everyone else is doing it. I would rather deprive myself of the chance. I choose moping and wallowing. I juggle my perception of the amount of control I had in the conditions that led me here. Hiding in knitting and crochet stitches. Pacing my apartment. Ignoring my dog to read a tweet. Trying to scroll until I get to whatever tok I need to belong to. Indulging my nostalgia and haunting my own memories of a past filled with people and many places and adventure. Waking from dreams that tempt and rattle me with infectious disease risk. Scraping out my last little bits of energy and focus, until I give up and cut the peanut butter jar in half for my dog.

I don't know how to conceptualize 2 years in near total isolation, with a lot of isolation before that. If I struggle to do that for myself, I don't know how I would explain or help others understand it. And that's okay, because understanding is not the issue. I don't know how to fully judge whether another person's question or inquiry or comment is in good or bad faith. When to turn away and when to engage. And that's okay, because intentions are not the issue.

We just want to believe it is and it keeps us explaining and seeking to understand. Teetering on the edge of all non-maskers being selfish or ignorant. Arguing with each other over which one it is. How do you bottle up the tangibility of your life and force another to drink it? If you were intimate with my suffering, if I could carry part of yours, what changes would that bring?

I woke up today to my sister telling me to freeze my credit because of a hack that released social security numbers. Who's affected? We aren't sure. I woke up Monday to an email from the Department of Education that my loans aren't on the SAVE plan anymore and instead are in forebearance. I have paid more than I borrowed. My history trickles in, every oppression hopelessly tied together like the tangled tasks of my messy finances. First generation, FAFSA, transferring, homelessness, food insecurity, the lawsuit, donating plasma, my PhD advisor's ableism, the searing pain of my forearms while forcing myself to type my preliminary thesis. My partner at that time tried to type it for me, but I couldn't think without my hands on the keys like they are now. Even if someone could take on the burden of being me, there was no time. I needed to believe there was no time, so that I would take it until the relief that seemed promised to me. I believed while my debt grew: undergraduate student loans and my inability to hold on and hold out hope. I don't know if I can ever pay back former me for the trauma they traded for degrees.

When we are given time, many newly disabled people adjust, return to a baseline happiness. We adapt to our new circumstances and limitations. We are masters and victims of our context. Yet no one holds both for us, we have to drop into one or the other to navigate the world. Manufactured urgency reduces us to a moment in time, to the loss and not the gradual adaptation, so common in the creativity of evolution where local competition creates new niches. Many ways to do the same thing, instead of the best way. Nature has no concept of "fitness" or "fittest". Matriarchal alchemy roots us to place and the rhythm of life, instead of patriarchal alchemy dissecting us into parts it can extract and tally and distract and force together. Regardless of the friction we absorb. Instead of dualism and enclosure and colonialism ripping us from ourselves and the land. What could we be like without these embedded beliefs and practices?

We think in stories, a series of events. LLMs can parrot this narrative intelligence back to us, but it can never meet us there. It can only dress up luck as skill, convolute not converse. A false certainty we will follow into traps of bias, sucking some into an algorithmic underclass while others project their own misdeeds into an uncontrolled AGI in some unknown future. AI can't meet us in our perceptual and predictive slice of homeostasis. In our immediate unconscious predictive understanding of what another fleshy body may need or enjoy or fear. Or our own. It disintegrates the link between please and pleasure, another echo in the pursuit of endless growth.

Did you know loans with interest used to be considered a sin, by the Church and secular systems?

Did you know insurance was once a hopeful concept, meant to be collective protection against risk?

Did you know you can contest FAFSA and file extenuating circumstances? If you did know, could you travel back to my 18 year old self and place it on the scales of my fate?

Did you know Sumerian kings would sometimes forgive all debts? Start all of us on a clean slate?

I bought that myth that white people are sold, especially those of us who grew up working class. Get an education, have a career, buy a home. You'll be fine. As our lives are built upon exploitation and deaths across the globe. Depending on our emotional state and our perception of fate, we look to the poor in the global south and to the wealthy to feel better. We pretend to not be part of that causal relationship. Or we acknowledge it as an equal contribution we are blameless and helpless for. We start our history and responsibility at a point in time and place that leaves us comfortable. We let wealthy be a shifting definition we rest upon, just like whiteness. But we are wealthy. Vacations, restaurants, movies, the newest gadgets and fashion trends, AC, a diet high in meat. We deserve our little treats.

We wrap the cloak of deservingness tighter with every 1 click purchase. How complicit are we in convenient consumption? Where did our risk and responsibility go?

I want to be a rusty gear in the machinery of racialized capitalism and forced infection and everything that devalues life. I want to hold the line, like when the shoelace of my steel toes was caught in a rack of parts destined to be painted by robots. Giant robots that would malfunction and bang against the wall between their booth and ours. Banned and allowed hygiene products, as our skin became a stand in for all the types of defects they would find in the layers of paint.

I wake up and I want to scream, "What are you waiting for?" But who is that scream for? There is no tipping point coming for us, no acceleration we can cling to, no far off indicator that we must act. It won't be another research article, review, or report. It won't be another 100 million disabled by Long Covid. It won't be wet bulb temperatures chasing us. It won't be the next mass shooting or natural disaster. It's all around us now and now is when we must act. We can't wait for the understanding or intentions of others. Once we let go of good and bad, what will we put our faith in?

I have faith in an awakened way of life and engaged action. I have faith in moderation and iteration. I have faith in maintenance and repair and radical care. I have faith in the work of lifetimes and generations, in valuing effort over outcomes or objectives. I have faith in myself, that I can at least be a pain in the ass to the systems that consume or consumer-ize us.

And most of all, I have faith in the people surrounding me. That we will not abandon each other or reality.

That scream is for me. Communicate, collaborate, move your body, write, listen to music, tug and throw that toy for Pep, pour chaos a cup of tea, have a snack, nap, close that app. You are a being in motion. Act like one, because capital expects you to react like one.

Climate crisis and pandemics are here. Promised relief was a trick and we should not fall for it.