Tag: Introspection

Why Centering Growth?

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Ever since I wrote the text for Centering Growth (which used to be on my home page), I’ve been having second (and third, and fourth) thoughts. I see around me every day people causing harm by ‘centering’ certain types of growth. Streaming services expecting unlimited growth in views and viewers, venture capitalists pursuing unlimited growth in profits, empires seeking unlimited growth of power and influence. I also see how the drive for unlimited growth (of converts, of power, of borders) fueled the conflict-centered worldview that I turned to growth to /avoid/.

I considered removing the page. Maybe talk about the cycles that growth is part of, homeodynamics, that sort of thing. It didn’t work, didn’t fit. Growth, for me, is central. Central to my life and central to my writing.

It is, I think, a different kind of growth. Not a growth that can be measured with metrics, plotted on graphs, or translated to profits. And it is a growth that is necessary.

I spent more than half my life like a bonsai tree: trapped in a too-small space, twisted to grow in the direction and shape others chose. Worse, because an experienced bonsai grower works with the tree, they don’t force growth with no consideration or respect for the tree’s nature and needs.

I spent more than half my life being told that my stories needed more conflict. Conflict for the sake of conflict. Because it’s not a story without conflict.

Why center growth?

Because I am reclaiming it.

I am sinking my roots deep into the earth, spreading my branches wide. I am saying to hell with conflict and their fucked up definition of ‘story’. I am creating my own stories, where conflict isn’t part of the definition and characters grow, like I grow, simply because growth is beautiful. Simply because we deserve the chance to be better. To be us.

That is why I am centering growth.

The Value of Walking Away

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The last few years I’ve tried to always have a nonfiction book going. Since I learned that I can handle nonfic in audio way better than one print, I’ve done more nonfic reading in two years than in the prior decade. And I’ve learned a lot along the way.

Today is only the second time I’ve DNF’d one of my nonfic audio reads.

The first book I DNF’d, The Story of Work, was a disappointment, but didn’t bother me. I picked up a couple of really bad errors in the authors discussion of ‘work’ among hunter-gatherers, and it read like he was using those same errors to set up a men’s work vs women’s work dichotomy. I noped out of there, sad for what the book could have been but happy I’d caught potential problems early.

I’m having more feels about my choice to DNF today.

I was/am due for what I think of as my ‘challenge’ reads. Books that I don’t just learn from, but which challenge me to undo ways of thought and grow in often uncomfortable ways. My choice for this read was Black Marxism by Cedric J Robinson.

It is, from the little I read, an absolutely fascinating book.

Unfortunately, it is not a beginners text on the subject.

I have a basic knowledge of communism and Marxism. Partly from a very long ago read of the Communist Manifesto, partly from hanging out around communists, anarchists, and other leftist ideologues the last (mumble) years on the Fediverse. I thought the basic grounding I had would be enough to see me through Black Marxism.

Nope. Very much not so.

Deciding to walk away wasn’t easy. I understood just enough of the text that I could have kept going. It would have been a hell of a slog, especially since audiobooks make it a lot harder to go back and check an early part of the text and refresh your memory. But I could have done it.

I would burned through a hellish amount of spoons, probably burnt myself out on nonfic reading for a while, and gotten out of the text a fraction of what Robinson meant it to be.

I know because I’ve done this before. Authoring Autism by Melanie Yergeau is a fascinating book. I’m glad I read it. But every time I read a chapter, it felt like I was bruising my brain struggling through the high level concepts on rhetoric and language. Wonderful book, I wish I could recommend it to you.

As much as I know I could learn similar important, world-view changing things from Black Marxism, I know I can’t do that to myself again. I can’t afford to burn myself out on a single book. Not with my health and life circumstances, and not when I could read three or four other ‘challenge’ books which I could fully understand and grow from in the same time and energy Black Marxism would take me.

That doesn’t mean I’m giving up on Black Marxism entirely. There are lots of great 101 books on communism and economics that I can read that will give me a better foundation for coming back to Black Marxism in a year or two. It will be there, in my library, waiting for me.

Until then, there is value in walking away. In choosing the right lesson for the right time.

In taking the time to walk before I try to fly.

Pushing Back on Chrononormativity — personal reflections

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I learned the word ‘Chrononormativity’ from the third chapter of Sherronda J Brown’s Refusing Compulsory Sexuality. (it’s a really good read, you should check it out.) In RCS, Brown discusses how asexuality, by merely existing, stands outside of chrononormativitiy. I’d never heard the word chrononormativity before, but I instantly understood it. I’ve been fighting against it for most of my life.

“First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in the baby carriage.”

My first conscious run-in with chronormativity was when I embraced polyamory. We called it ‘the relationship escalator’. The idea that relationships are expected to follow a specific pattern — a specific chronology. The pattern typically goes something like:

  1. date
  2. become exclusive
  3. get engaged
  4. get married
  5. have babies
  6. live together until one of you dies

Any relationship that doesn’t complete this chronology is considered failed. Any relationship which doesn’t follow the correct order or rejects a step entirely is ‘doing it wrong’ at best, and often considered unethical and immoral. In some places and situations it can be illegal.

In embracing polyamory, I automatically rejected the ‘become exclusive’ step, and I also made the choice to reject the ‘get married’ step. I refused to privilege one relationship over another that way.

Of course, chrononormativity, like all normativity, has a great deal of societal pressure behind it. In this case, I was at one point ‘forced’ to get married in order to have access to health insurance and health care.

The Sabbath

It’s always struck me as somewhat ironic, how much of the world is structured around a five day work week, Monday to Friday, 9 to 5. But then for so much of my ‘working’ life, I’ve been put in a position of ‘work Saturdays or you don’t get/lose the job’. But it’s not just work. There’s a local hiking group on MeetUp I’ve thought about joining more than once, but they only go out on Saturdays.

I could spend a very long time listing out the ways keeping Sabbath has conflicted with the expectations of our world. (And don’t get me started on the frustrations of having our holiday season overlap with the very start of the school year!)

Good Night, Sleep Tight!

The kid refused to go to sleep. We tried everything. Reading together, taking away screens, no water or food right before bed. Nothing worked. Eventually, we broke down and tried medication. Because they ‘had’ to go to sleep at night and they ‘had’ to be awake before 8 in the morning, and it didn’t matter if they were getting enough sleep, because they weren’t getting the right sleep.

And I would have told the doctors to fuck off except the kid was getting ready to start school, when they would be forced to get up before 8 whether they’d gotten to sleep on time or not.

For better or worse, the medication didn’t work either.

We homeschool now. For better or worse. And the kid sleeps when they need to and gets up when they need to. And it feels like I constantly need to deal with well meaning busy-bodies who want to know why I ‘let’ my kid stay up so late and don’t enforce a ‘healthy’ bed time.

Because it isn’t healthy for them, that’s why. Now fuck off.

Not many years later, I had my own run-in with weird sleep patterns, when I kept waking up in the middle of the night and couldn’t fall back to sleep. I was exhausted all the time, constantly running on half the sleep I needed.

Finally, I had a brain storm — why not try splitting my sleep schedule? Sleep 4 hours, be awake for 8 hours, sleep another 4 hours, etc.

It worked really well for a year or two, but god did it complicate interacting with the rest of the world!

Then for some reason I’ll never know, my body decided I was done with that, and I needed to start sleep 8 hours at a stretch again. And I learned another new thing — not only does our body’s chronology not always line up with what the world expects, it can also change on us with no warning and we just need adapt as best we can.

Except for far to many people ‘adapt as best we can’ means set that alarm clock real loud and stagger through the day on not enough sleep because our bodies needs are second in importance to being ‘productive members of society.’

That ‘productive’ is important.

Chrononormative-Fuck You

The term ‘chrononormativity’ was coined by Elizabeth Freeman in 2010 in her book ‘Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories’. Defined as “the use of time to organize individual human bodies toward maximum productivity,” chrononormativity finally describes and defines the force society has exerted on me for so long, dragging me into a ‘right’ pace and process for living. A pace and process determined not by what is best for me or my loved ones, but what is most productive for society.

Capitalism for the win?

I decided a long time ago that I was living life on my time and have been lucky enough (privileged enough) that I have mostly gotten away with it. But each step of the way has been a fight.

As always, fuck capitalism.

How has chrononormativity impacted your life?

On Queer Fiction

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Queer is both a adjective and a verb. One can be a queer person, and one can queer shit up. To queer is hard to define — as hard to define as ‘kink’ and ‘love’ — but inherent in any working definition of ‘to queer’ must be ‘to fuck with the status quo.’

If you aren’t shaking shit up, you aren’t queering it. If you aren’t fucking with people’s expectations and overturning world views, you aren’t queering.

There is lots of lgbt+ fiction. There is far less queer fiction. To be queer fiction, it is not enough to have queer characters. To be queer fiction, the story must also queer. A story may queer expectations of romance and relationships, or ideas about society, or genre tropes. It may challenge the current societal status quo or propose an entirely new worldview. Perhaps all of these at the same time.

I write queer fiction. Mostly spec fic — fantasy and sci-fi. Mostly found family. Often kinky. But to the extent I can manage, always queer. What I love most is queering ideas about love and family but sometimes I’ll get a kick out of queering tropes, or ideas about how society can work, or even classical literature.

It isn’t always comfortable to read (or write). But it is always mine.

Queerly yours,
Jess

Centering Growth.

Jess MahlerLeave a comment

Life requires growth. I know this as I know that water is wet and air keeps me alive. When we stop growing, we start dying.

That doesn’t mean all growth is good. Or that there shouldn’t be limits on growth.

I love crown shyness in trees. It’s a beautiful phenomenon where trees that grow close together stop growing toward each other when they get too close. Essentially, they respect each other’s space.

Not all trees practice crown shyness, though we are learning that it is far more common than we once thought.

Trees never stop growing. Every season, they add new rings to their trunk, and, every spring, new leaves and branches. But they do this while still giving each other space. They grow /together/ and not against each other.

Life requires growth, but we can choose how we grow. Let’s grow together.

bell hooks and Being a Respectful Eavesdropper

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My biggest personal takeaway from bell hooks’ Outlaw Culture (and I emphasize /personal/ takeaway — I’ve got a LOT of political takeaways I’m still processing) is the idea of being an invited ‘eavesdropper’. I’ve long felt, reading work by hooks and Davis and other womanist thinkers, a bit uncomfortable. It was clear they weren’t speaking to me. That I, as a white person, am not part of the audience they address. It felt like I was intruding, actually. Like I didn’t belong here.

So it was almost as if hooks /was/ speaking to me — or at least, my concerns — when she said in Outlaw Culture that she is writing for a Black audience, and views white people who read who her work as eavesdroppers. Welcome ones, but eavesdroppers. (I believe this was in chapter three, during the interview with Marie-France Alderman. Unfortunately, audiobooks are difficult to cite and nearly impossible to look up a reference in.)

For the first time, I have permission to enter and engage with hooks’ work, and perhaps the work of other Black writers addressing Black audiences.

But what does it mean to be an invited eavesdropper?

What Is an Eavesdropper?

An invited eavesdropper is a very odd thing. Because eavesdropping, in its basic conception, is a violation. When hooks first referred to white readers as ‘eavesdroppers’ I had one moment of ‘Yes! That is what I’ve been feeling like’ and a second moment of ‘Oh… that’s not good, is it?’

hooks put that second thought to rest quickly enough. Probably intentionally, given her awareness of the many white people who did and do read her work. But that idea of violation still needs to be addressed. Or — not violation, but what is being violated:

Privacy.

An eavesdropper is someone who violates /privacy/, and who takes away the safety privacy creates, from the people eavesdropped on.

In saying that white readers are eavesdroppers, hooks is laying a firm boundary — we (white people) do not belong here. She chooses to allow us, but we do not belong. And our presence is a hindrance to the safety and security of the conversation she and other Black people are trying to have.

This may sound strange to white people who only know hooks as someone who has written on racism and sexism. We are used to being the audience when it comes to racism. After all, we’re the ones who /are/ racist, right?

But that’s not what hooks is about. hooks isn’t talking about white people being racist. She takes living in a white supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist society as a given (and always the three are linked for her). hooks is talking about how racism affects Black families, how Black people can respond to racism, the intersection of internalized (Black) racism and sexism, the way Black men are harmed by sexism.

Conversations that — I’ll agree with hooks — we (white people) don’t belong in. Those are intra-community conversations, /not/ inter-community. The difference is important and far too often neglected.

Still, hooks welcomes us — as eavesdroppers.

Can I Be a Respectful Eavesdropper?

I have a lot of thoughts here, but I’m having trouble finding words for them. The heading captures the main idea pretty well — if I am going to be eavesdropping on conversations not meant for me, even with invitation, how can I do it respectfully?

I don’t have a complete answer, but I’ve figured a few things out.

1) Recognize lack of context —

Because I am not hooks’ intended audience, I am missing context. Her audience is a community she is part of and she addresses her audience — other Black Americans — assuming certain knowledge, cultural context, and history that I don’t have and probably never will have.

I need to recognize this lack of context and the way it will make it harder for me to understand some of what hooks says. It will be easier for me to misunderstand or accidentally ascribe incorrect interpretations. I need to do more work to understand than the folks hooks is speaking to, and if I don’t or can’t do that work, then I need to accept that I may never understand.

2) Don’t insert myself between hooks and her audience

I have no business telling Black folks what hooks says, means, intends, etc. If they care, they can listen themselves, if they don’t care it’s not my business. If someone /asks/, that’s one thing, I can answer to the best of my ability, acknowledge where I recognize a lack of understanding, and direct them to where in hooks’ work I learned something. But it is sure as hell not my place to be going around ‘educating’ Black folks about hooks (or any other Black thinkers).

2a) What about educating other white folks?

Good question. I’m of two minds. On the one hand, educating other white folks about racism (and sexism and all the other stuff hooks talks about) is a major way we can help fight back against white supremacy. On the other hand, there’s that whole ‘lack of context’ thing and the risk of sharing wrong or misleading answers

Obviously, I’ve decided I’m okay discussing some of hooks’ work and my reaction to it, but you’ll notice I’m talking about how I engage with/respond to hooks work in one area that affects/addresses me.

I’m figuring this shit out.

3) Intra- vs inter-community

Any engagement I have with hooks work is by definition inter-community, when hooks was writing intra (within) her own community. I’ve mentioned this before. There are times and places that intra-community discussions must and should move into inter-community forums. And there are times they shouldn’t. I can assume, given hooks’ acceptance of ‘eavesdroppers’ that she anticipates and accepts her own work will end up as part of inter-community conversations.

But I think understanding the way intra- and inter-community conversations differ and the harm that can be done by carelessly dragging intra-community discussions inter-community — /especially/ the harm that can be done by an outsider doing that dragging — needs to happen before an eavesdropper has any business /responding/ to hooks writing.

Engage with it personally? Sure. Share reactions to it? Usually. Respond to it? ie, critique it? Nope. I’m nowhere near a place I can do that respectfully. And neither are the vast majority of white folks.