January 23, 2025
On not catching fire when winds are high
Hello people! Some of you have subscribed in the last year, which is about how long it’s been since the last issue of Digestable. This is a writing project that has existed since 2020 and transmuted many times. Thanks for sharing your time and attention with me.
Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of launching a collective organizing project - a living directory of opportunities to collaborate and build power in the city where I live. A handful of old and new friends spent some afternoons crafting the concept, figuring out how to organize information, and doing research to populate the database. You can take a look at it here, if you like.
For the launch, I made a bunch of little calling cards with the url to find this database. As I was handing them out, a good friend and prolific organizer in our community looked at me and said, “you’re back!”
It’s been nearly a year since I put out an issue of Digestable, so this sentiment is perhaps one you share. I suppose in some ways it is true. My friend, who made this remark with enthusiasm, maybe thought that I’d stepped away from organizing work too.
When I was applying for colleges, I received the feedback from college advisors that it “didn’t seem like I cared about anything.” My smattering of jobs (teaching at circus school, babysitting) and extracurriculars (making and performing in art, interning at a park) did not paint a clear picture of the Professional, Smart, Committed Young Adult that colleges wanted to see.
As an adolescent, this made me feel angry and misunderstood. As an adult committed to generalism and deeply devoted to the stories and complexities of place-based knowledge and community, I see that my interest in people doing stuff somewhere together for a reason was already strong, albeit illegible to the adults in the room. The encouragement to slim myself down into a crisp volume of achievements and assets did not work on me (nor the colleges I applied to, for that matter) and undermined my sense of self. That slimming was a push to position myself as a brand, a much different sense of self, that so many of us encountered at this stage of life.
Naomi Klein calls out this pivotal moment of turning oneself into a brand in Doppelganger. She writes about how her first book, No Logo, which is all about corporate branding strategy and the way it breaks our brains, cemented her as the “No Logo girl,” a deep irony.
She goes on to describe recognizing and attempting to reject this irony by stepping away from what the world had established as her topic—and in turn, her brand. She wrote about climate change and disaster capitalism, pulling a thread she recognized (the way corporations reorganize public narrative to yield profits, for one) but that didn’t directly continue the story (and identity) she’d begun with No Logo. She explains that the pulling of this thread—breaking down silos between topics—felt like the natural way to build movement, and stay true to the craft of political analysis rather than the maintenance of a personal brand.
A few decades later, Klein finds herself with an extreme case of brand dilution. For the last decade, and escalatingly so since the onset of COVID-19, Klein has been confused with feminist-turned-conspiracy theorist Naomi Wolf. This is broadly the topic of Doppelganger, which discusses this and many more instances of what Klein dubs “doppelganger politics.” This is a politics of the real self and the shadow self; the IRL self and the online self; the people we are and the brands we are encouraged to create so that we might monetize our identities and get by in this world.
Klein asks: why now? As our species faces the greatest existential threat in history, our governments descend into fascism, and wealth is concentrated so highly among the fewest people, why are we also experiencing a global obsession with our own personal brands, these fabricated identities that represent us on the internet? She suggests that in the face of an absolutely terrifying reality that requires a nearly unfathomable scale of transformation, it is easier to turn inwards and try to control something more manageable—our own images.
And in cultivating these smoothed-out, palatable versions of ourselves, we continue to neglect the essential work that undergirds our ability to care for each other. As we live through the rolling crisis that is climate collapse, people demonstrate how we ache to care for each other. Mutual aid networks spring up after fires rip through neighborhoods and floods take out towns. Labor unions are on the rise. Community-led ballot initiatives are at an all time high.
But we aren’t sustaining this work. In order to care for each other, and actually practice the values we claim via our social media presences, we have to uproot the systems of our world (extraction, disposability, individualism, among others) that live inside of us. Mass uprisings in 2020 sparked by the viral video of the brutal murder of George Floyd and mutual aid efforts in response to COVID-19 both yielded movement energy that burned hot and fizzled out. People were exhausted, and rightfully so. This world is exhausting.
Yet. Should we choose to really accept the terrifying, astonishingly beautiful task of being alive in this world, it is the work inside us that makes all that possible.
Prentis Hemphill’s What It Takes to Heal: How transforming ourselves can change the world and Dean Spade’s Love in a Fucked Up World: How to Build Relationships, Hook Up, and Raise Hell Together both champion this truth.
Hemphill and Spade both come from decades in political and social movements, and report on the countless ways that the poisonous systems we’re living under invade and transform us and our relationships. This toxicity undermines our ability to do stuff well together, or do stuff at all.
Organizing—the work of challenging those systems and the power they hold, and imagining and building alternative systems—is some of the hardest work we can do. Hemphill and Spade articulate a book’s-worth each of reasons why the work we do on our own insides, on the stories we’re taught about ourselves and the world, helps us find the patience and bravery it takes to organize.
For a lot of 2024, I stepped out of the fray of local organizing, not going to too many meetings, working on a project here and there. But I needed to tend to myself, to excavate my relationship with the person I’d become, and the relationships I had with a bunch of other people and my work. I had been saying yes to a lot of things I wanted to say no to, and was doing work that burned me out instead of filling me up.
I first saw Deepa Iyer’s social movement ecosystem in 2020. At the time, I showed it to someone who really didn’t want to go to protests, but loved to cook, as a way of saying: you can show up for movement work in so many ways, and you cooking me dinner when I come home from yelling in the street is one of them.
At the time, I didn’t realize that I hadn’t yet found my own place in the ecosystem. Until recently, I wanted to see myself as a frontline responder and a caregiver. There are ways in which I’m able to fill those roles, but they aren’t the roles that really fill me. I’m much happier as a storyteller and a weaver.
Reading Doppelganger, Klein’s description of pulling a thread that made sense to her, rather than following a trajectory that made sense from the outside, struck a chord in me. A few days later, when I picked up Love in a Fucked Up World, I saw Dean Spade name the same phenomenon. He writes,
“My previous books [Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of Law and Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During this Crisis (and the Next)] might seem quite different from this one…To me, Love in a Fucked Up World is a clear extension of the questions at the heart of my previous work: How do we build lasting and effective resistance movements? What are the barriers impeding our movements, and how do we overcome them? This book adds another, very human, layer to that project—in the form of a self-help guide to sex, love, romance, and friendship.”
Spade is clear that the people we are—the complicated, hurt people we are—are the same people we need to orchestrate the astonishing transformation of our world that Klein reminds us is urgent. Spade and Hemphill articulate that tending to the ways we are with ourselves and our people is crucial to our ability to tend to each other and our movement. Hemphill writes:
“Skillful relationships are the bridge between our individual transformation and systematic transformation. More than we realize, history and power script our relationships with one another and prevent the kind of reciprocity and connection we need to heal ruptures between us. If navigated well, our relationships become a powerful foundation for the liberation we seek to create.”
As we face into the wind, inundated with encouragement to “get involved” or “resist” or “do something,” Spade and Hemphill remind us that the internal work that makes it possible to show up for community and political organizing is movement work.
I smiled at my friend, and told them that I hadn’t gone anywhere. I was pulling a thread that needed pulling, a thread that took me to my internal systems and structures before I could follow it back out where other people could see. The project was not to fix myself, or improve my brand for public consumption. Rather, it was to actually listen to myself, and figure out what it was I could offer without burning up from the effort. In too many instances, I have ended up as a crisp ember for my loved ones to care for while I turned back into a person. That wasn’t good for me, or them, or the movement we so desperately need.
The violence and pace of our crumbling world is excruciating. It feels—rightfully so—like we are so behind, the clock is ticking, and perhaps we are too late. But every tenth of a degree of global warming we avoid saves hundreds of thousands of lives, millions counting other species. Every opportunity we take to not comply in advance with fascist regimes undermines the myth that they control us. And every moment we make to listen, not just to the world but to ourselves, and find our way to the energy source inside, makes it more possible for us to come into movement and stay in for the long haul.