Good morning!
Welcome to Digestable, your mouthful of things happening in the world. Happy fourth calendar year of this existing!
Today’s ferments:
Hey friends. It’s been a while! Thanks for having us back in front of your eyes.
Last week, I took a writing workshop I had high hopes for. I wanted to learn about what happens once you have a pretty thick archive of writing, but aren’t sure how to give it more life than it’s already had.
(There are over 450 issues of Digestable. Holy wow. There’s a decent number of folks who read this work, but I have dreams, you know.)
The workshop was pretty boring, and it was a bunch of people I didn’t really feel connected to. We weren’t paired up by genre, or project, and most people wanted to join a writers group to create some structure and accountability around a writing practice.
But I have that already—I have you, and I have Gabriel. What more could a person want?
Digestable started in March of 2020, initially as an alternative to reading all the horrific news, and also to conveniently replace my morning commute. I wrote obsessively; it was months before I missed a weekday. Every morning, eight to nine am, and out came an issue.
And, remember all the things that fell away in that time? All the acquaintances from your exercise class or grocery shopping or place of worship—the people you wouldn’t want to talk to on the phone but would still give you an endorphin rush in passing. All the spontaneity of social time, the long linger around a lunch table in the office, or a friend prevailing at the last minute to get you out dancing. And there were events, and Work Functions, and festivals, and.
I bring this up not out of nostalgia, but more to highlight the robustness of the pre-pandemic times. It is a robustness we’ve all had to fill for ourselves the last three years, even as many consider the pandemic “over” and in-person gatherings return.
When I started writing, it was towards that end—fill in a gap left by the pandemic, give myself something to focus on, someones to focus on (you!). Our publication schedule and columns have shifted considerably over the last almost-three years. Our focus has wavered and returned.
We’ve been busy the last few weeks, Gabriel and I. They’re working on a hefty PhD chapter, and I’ve finally let myself get in the weeds on some local organizing projects. There’s a lot to focus on; in the winter months, it’s especially nice to sink into work that other people are structuring.
Recently, a friend asked me if we’d stopped writing Digestable. I almost hadn’t missed it, and was comforted to know that someone noticed our absence. So much of what distracts from writing is outside of me, a swift current moving along, no matter what I do.
If I didn’t write, there wouldn’t be this writing, and the current would still rush. Understanding this made me see that writing actually really scares me—an absurd notion, given the state of the world. While perhaps I can impact some of that horrible complicated stuff, it’s so much bigger than me, and I’m not needed for it to exist.
But writing anything does—and the work of Digestable has always been to take something hard and fibrous and turn it into something tangy and good, influenced by the alchemy of adding other brains into the mix of collective analysis.
Often, writing feels like standing at the edge of a chasm, looking at a rickety bridge, and taking a step, hoping it will hold. Usually, the far-off planks of the bridge come into focus before the ones right in front of me do, and then I’ll figure my way backwards, finding structure and filling in gaps. It’s impossible, I think, to walk from one side of the chasm to the other in one go, without changing direction a few times, taking time to bounce on that sketchy spot to make sure it’ll hold. You are building something new.
Now that I’ve mixed metaphors and made the unhinged claim that writing is scary in the face of everything else we’re up against, I’ll tell you what this is all about.
I want to refine and publish some of the work that’s in this newsletter, and I need some readers who will be bold and critical. If I didn’t think this writing was already serviceably good, I wouldn’t bother to ask; the kind of feedback I’m looking for is heftier than affirmation. If you want to be a reader—or if you have any experience with the publishing world you’d like to share—reply, and we’ll take it from there.
Thank you, as always, for being a part of this project.
The Second Look
Half-baked cultural criticism from Gabriel Coleman.
I’m in my bed with my laptop in the place it was named for, a pillow between my back and the headboard. The monitor on the desk next to my bed is turned to face me so I can use it as a second screen without having to sit in the chair in front of the desk. This is where I post from. This is how I needed to set myself up to finish and submit, a day late, an essay that’ll be published in a physical book later in the year.
I don’t know how I got here. To this point where I need to be in the most comfortable position, without any laundry to do or video essays to tempt me, in order to write a 1500 word essay that I’ve already researched and worked out in my head. Don’t even get me started on the thesis chapter Lena mentioned above. It's coming along but if I have to write the whole thing from bed my legs are going to atrophy into jello.
Often I am scared that the pandemic broke me, between moving to a country where I didn’t know anyone, from an office job to a graduate program, and being isolated in my little student accommodation room the whole year. I think that’s where the whole “goblin mode” thing came from, we were all alone underachieving, giving into our base desires for a couple years and now we can’t help but long for the My Life of Rest and Relaxation lifestyle. People from the before-times know me as Mx. Interdisciplinary-Plate-Spinner and I like being that person, but I’ve only seen flashes of them since moving to this island and that scares me a bit.
Really what I think the pandemic did was break apart any idea of accountability I once had. Unlike the auld job where I had a supervisor and teammates and scheduled meetings with deliverables, there are very few people in my life I feel accountable toward these days. The risk of losing my PhD status is relatively low, but equally the opportunities for advancement are nonexistent. I can’t get a raise or a promotion, all I can do is take on more work grading for professors that make several times my stipend. The one person I feel regularly accountable toward is Lena (except last week when I completely ghosted their very simple and straightforward New Years newsletter idea whoops) and it really says something when the primary thing that two people are motivated to do on a consistent basis is a newsletter that neither of them have time for.
I’m usually really good at untangling things like this to get to “here’s why people feel this way,” but maybe I’m too wrapped up to really have a clear perspective. Part of me can see why there’s this whole reactionary “biology is real! binaries are important! Get in touch with the Divine Feminine in you that just wants to be a mother!” movement because maybe, in addition to being transphobes, people want to be told that despite the upheaval of these past few years, there are rules and expectations and you can follow them and not think so hard. But these larger systems of accountability don’t love you back. You don’t get anything out of following a strict gender binary but the satisfaction that you’re living by the rules. I’m nostalgic for my office job and its meetings, but I didn’t get anything tangible from it, just money to live off, which we all should be entitled to regardless of how we spend our time.
And ultimately these systems of rules and expectations we’re so eager to follow aren’t built to guide us toward the open, interesting, or helpful actions our planet and our fellow beings desperately need. Stafford Beer, who I was introduced to by Abigail Thorn, talks about how large systems default to reducing the variety of issues and requests they’re capable of addressing. This urge to streamline means healthcare systems, in Abigail’s example, are made to cure diseases, not provide resources, so trans folk need to be diagnosed with the disease of “gender dysphoria” to obtain service. The US government is a machine built to negotiate budgets and address the national debt, not guarantee the wellbeing of its citizens, so issues of climate change or gun violence aren’t able to move forward unless they are incorporated into a budgetary bill. So, is goblin mode the appropriate way to resist collapsing into these ordered, rule driven systems?
No. Goblin mode is reactionary, self-interested, and unhelpful to fostering system change in its own way. Maybe these micro-systems of accountability are the middle path, where we’re motivated by and accountable to people we know, rather than the systems built around us. The people in our lives aren’t interested in streamlining relationships. We see one another as full humans with an infinite capacity to give and to get in our own way. I don’t feel accountable to the university because the university is built to generate scholarship, not foster revolutionary movements, and that makes writing my PhD hard. But I do feel accountable to my advisor because they care about me and the work my research can do, and I do care about this newsletter because I know that my co-author and you all are open to and interested in what these conversations point toward.