care against the machine
what we're grasping for to survive the despair and collapse - is care and connection
February is the month of love, of the Sun in Aquarius and Pisces, of Valentine’s day, and in 2024 contains Lunar New Year. February 2024 is the 5th month of Israel’s latest genocidal attempt on Gaza. Global racial capitalism has ruled the planet for too many generations. We are in a period of overwhelming grief and monumental social and political shifts, and yet somehow still there isn’t enough - action, power, or humanity - to save the people crushed under imperialism’s boot on nearly every continent. The contradictions have formed a rocky emotional and social landscape where most of us are oscillating between hyper-activity, despair, revolutionary optimism, and complete overwhelm. The greater political contradictions foreshadow even more grim outcomes that, personally, my nervous system can hardly handle.
And yet, it is still not about my comfort right now, and it is an uphill battle to combat this isolationist impulse. In the face of insurmountable odds, the only way through is together - yet this togetherness feels so fleeting most days.
I’m a yearner. A self-professed lover, a reminiscer, nostalgia’s bitch if you will. I’m incredibly sentimental and hold my relationships closest to my heart. But as a citizen of this capitalist hellscape, I still feel constantly starved for connection deeper than the transactions we’re reduced to. The collective grief of recent months/years/generations is an entry point for deep communal connection that I want to grasp onto. We’ve all made the realization that capitalism will not stop for us to mourn or heal, but we must create that space anyway. We must love and care and rage a war of love against the death-dealing machine. We are not invincible; our cup may runneth over with unprocessed as trauma just as much as it could with radical healing and growth if we aren’t intentionally caring for ourselves and our folks.
My unending desire for deep connection is tied to my ideal of radical, freeing love in all its forms. I crave and actively make space for love that holds me in my complexities, that is mutually hungry for connection on behalf of all parites. Love that is so clearly the vital life source keeping us intact. This is deeply tied to being capital Queer, as in a disruption of all that is normalized and an embrace of all the grandest demands we can make of each other. I’m in the ongoing process of shedding layers of falsehoods and personas I’ve been taught as barricades between myself and other people’s humanity. I want to walk through this world as soft as I was born and share life with those who will show me their softest parts, too.
These days I actively work into my schedule times to call my long distance chosen family, meet my local friends for coffee and invite them over for more dinner parties. Anything that brings a sense of true connection amidst the constant reactive “connection” of the internet is welcome as I wrangle myself back from the edge of despair.
We are so vast. So much more vast than alike, I’ll be damned what the genome says. There is an infinite number of possibilities in each person and an infinite more at all the possible touch points with one another. I’m addicted to the unique rush of discovering love over and over again in new souls. I crave in my lungs as many of these bone-deep connections I can form in this lifetime. I love learning about how others love each other - kinks, rituals, practices of care and mourning- us running in meta circles attempting to mimic the innate connectivity we feel all around us but that we see most clearly in the eyes of those we love.
It is impossible to care for ourselves without caring for each other, and the same applies in reverse. Many have cherry-picked Audre Lorde quotes to uplift consumerist self care, effectively watering down the communal focus that underpinned nearly all of Lorde’s work on care, sensuality, and healing. I recently read an essay that detailed a discomfort I’ve felt at watching folks return to individualist thinking when it comes to rest and healing. As if capitalism doesn’t have us all bound up trying to survive 24/7, as if our bodies and souls aren’t begging for solace with every nerve in our being.
What I need both immediately and in the long term is the end of empire; what I need most immediately is to be held by those who love me, and to be affirmed that this feeling of my bones cracking, my edges expanding to make room for more grief than we were ever meant to hold and that our vessels have the capacity to carry without rupture, that I’m not the only one consumed with this pain.
In truth, I’m not nearly alone in wading through this grief that is stacked miles high and felt oceans wide. It goes back generations; we are not the first to live through the world’s end. We may be the first to witness it live in 4k with such detail and such apathy on broad display, and this has required our minds and spirits to rapidly adapt in ways we never should have had to. This goes for those of us in solidarity within the metropoles of empire. Those in Palestine, in Sudan, in the DR Congo, and every other hotbed for militarized violence are facing unthinkable breaks in the psyche. No one should have to mourn their own annihilation so many times over; there are many things the soul and mind were never built to handle. Full stop.
For those of us left to scrape together our sense of humanity and connection amidst the slow collapse of capitalism, I believe what we’re looking for to fill in the gaps is care. The myth of “every man for himself” is at the basis of Western capitalist behavior and yet is foundationally untrue: humans, like most species, cannot and do not survive by solely providing for one’s own needs. We all live in complex ecosystems of care and maintenance - also understood as reproductive labor - that maintain “life” as we know it. The many hands from seed to table involved in every meal; street cleaners and waste workers; parents and health workers and countless areas of labor required for maintaining life and society. Care is what keeps us going from birth to death, and yet is invisibilized, minimized, and discouraged by systems that would rather we strive towards isolated capitalist perfection. Reject this impulse at all costs.
It may take every fiber of our being to turn towards each other rather than isolation when faced with the world’s end, especially if this is your first time opening your eyes to the sky’s sometimes slow, sometimes rapid fall. But the only way to hold this gut-wrenching despair of witnessing global empire collapse on the backs of our distant families is to invest as much care as possible into each other. We must care against the machine, rage and rage and rage and care against all the death making forces stacked against us.
Visit your neighbor, write your grandmother, put on that block party you’ve been dreaming of. Join an organization. I sound like a broken record to anyone who knows me because I’m trying to save us one at a time from the cliff of total isolation. Fight despair with active hope, that which is realist but is committed to building the world we’d like to see even against insurmountable odds (Kaba and Hayes 2023). When have our ancestors ever been guaranteed to survive? Never has power fallen with grace, but we wouldn’t be the first to choose each other in the face of the world’s end.
My writings this month may read as incoherent or lacking concreteness. If so it’s because my brain is actively swimming in a thick, muddy river’s worth of grief and despair myself. Practically everyone I know is at the end of their rope and questioning if a world this inhumane and apathetic is even worth fighting for. But each of my greatest teachers have identified as humanists - from Che Guerva to Paulo Friere, in my study I’m constantly reminded that love for people must be central to our work. Dehumanization is one of the key outcomes of capitalist exploitation - we can demand of each other that we resist such forces and choose each other.
Through this world’s end and until the next ~
Thank you so much for your words. With the active genocides that are occurring and the simultaneous pressures to continue acting with normalcy, your reflections on what it means to embody queerness through care are so important. As an educator, your words deeply resonate as I constantly question how much I allow and reinforce the oppressive structures that capitalism requires. Thank you and I look forward to reading your next post! Take care <3