All Hands on the Bad One; dispatches from quarantine, #2
Learning how to be a good sleeper during rising fash
I only started sleeping ‘well’ about five years ago, after finally getting on a med to combat my C-PTSD, and that five years of sleeping well as been the best five years of my life. I’m not a fitful sleeper so much as I am a haunted sleeper — years spent siphoning less than a handful of sleeping hours after waking up in multiple waves of panic, certain of an impending home invasion or maybe the residue of having been repeatedly invaded in the comfort and safety of my home as a child pricked into my pores.
Each night of sleep, of multiple, glorious hours of sleep, since I started Zoloft have been deliciously looked forward to. If I'm awake past midnight, I'm probably in New York for work. To wake over the course of the last nine or more nights, feeling more anxious with every passing hour not asleep, I recognize whatever zen I was on two and a half weeks ago has run its course. That is to say, the absurdity of this moment is starting to prod at my pre-COVID reality. I am reminded, the home was never a safe place to me, not until very recently.
The home I’ve intentionally built with my partner taught me that home could be safe, that home could be a place I long to return to when I’ve been gone from it too long, a sliver of familiarity like a pendant on a chain around my neck. I’ve been living in that liminal space where the deep REM hasn’t hit yet but the rest of my body is in sleep mode and the only thing going is my brain.
I’m recognizing the limits of my physical body when I practice yoga, now, which I do often upon waking for the day. My knees are unfamiliar with the new weight of my body thanks to hormonal hacking via birth control, my spine is still curving itself away from the mass of my flesh as it’s done since I was a child. My wrists are especially weak, always shaking and burning with nerve pain so when I successfully plank a few times while practicing, I’m filled with gratitude my hands still work, even if the result of that work is pain.
I developed ganglion cysts midway through my mid-twenties.
I didn’t know why I woke up most morning unable to open or close my right hand fully. When the little hills of joint fluid began to protrude to the surface of my dermis, I looked at it worryingly and then shrugged it off. I ignored the pain, which was easy to do because I was busy doing the work of surviving which doesn’t allow for much time to process feelings or to feel emotions outside of anxiety and dread because those are ever-present feelings that don’t allow you to get your work done and if the work isn’t done, the bills and rent aren’t paid.
I’d just narrowly escaped homelessness a year and a half before the debut of the manifestations of how hard I’d been working. I missed birthdays, including my own and my partner’s, and I had no holidays off, including the popular winter ones. My time effectively belonged to my clients, all of whom at the time we’re getting married and were, as such, consumed to the point of madness with the spectacle of marriage. I had a full season of weddings to shoot — fifteen — after scrappily building up a business in the evenings after nannying.
The unknown entities reminding me of my life of lack up to that point taunted me especially in the evening, sending burning pain through my forearms and sometimes into my back. The combo of yet to be diagnosed C-PTSD and the wear and tear I was putting my body through to keep a roof over my head — homelessness was always just around the corner, in my trauma brain — caused me to have some of the most terrifying visits to the liminal space of sleeplessness.
Every time I pick up my cameras, I am negotiating with pain.
I’ve picked up my medium format camera twice since the beginning of the novel coronavirus outbreak here in the States. I often can not think about the pain I am willingly putting myself through to hold that box of light. The indecencies I am met with, the slights and phobias, the astounding dismissal of my humanity heightened by the recognition of what commodities can be grifted from me in exchange for a rate or, more often, simply an opportunity, because the rates don’t make the psychic scarring worth a gig. I’ve been getting real with myself about why I can’t make a photograph right now yet, I have a multitude of sentences I can string together just fine — this is the beginning of a painful practice in de-programming away from capitalism.
If pain is what reminds me I am a living, breathing being with a short life span and, for a majority of this life span thus far, I have spent significant time harming myself to make a wage because the residue of poverty and homelessness is still thick on my brain membranes, I am not sure I can do any significant work with my camera—or my pen—if I cannot admit to myself I was willing to kill myself slowly to keep up the charade of the Bootstrap myth as my guiding ideology.
We’re all here, sipping on our ‘chosen’ flavors of Kool-aid, awaiting Paradise.
As a Black person who is often avoiding being described as lazy or worse, ‘hard to work with’, my de-programming lies directly in challenging what it means to be ‘hard-working’ in a country where the ruling racial class amasses wealth primarily through the labor of others, mine included. While I am scraping to get by, having been under-insured the entirety of my adult working life, I can’t help but think about the creative director who lives in a million-plus dollar home, off of the labor of contracted, creative workers or the editor in chief whose connections, not expertise or knowledge, allows them to redistribute wealth to chosen parties by way of secretive pay practices or the producer who thinks requests for one-time quick payment is akin to loaning money despite a skilled laborer having successfully executed a project. I can't help but think of the database recruiter suggesting to the marginalized freelance artist the best way to combat discrimination is to spend hundreds of dollars quarterly to let clients know ‘you’re out there’ as if the hurdle is a lack of exposure and not a lack of basic human decency or the established colleague asking for resources from those with very little resources when they never think to recommend emerging or early-career artists to their big-buck clients in a measure to preserve their ‘livelihood’.
Part of the de-programming, for me, has been renegotiating how I spend my time interacting with a photographic practice, and since that practice is how I make 90% of my income, necessary negotiations can be really difficult to process and implement. There are parts of that practice I have long despised and hoped to rid myself of, in particular my use of Instagram. I was an early adopter of the app, primarily because I’ve spent my entire life on the Internet (my family had a desktop computer at home by the time I was mid-way through first grade and we got a broadband DSL connection by third grade, thanks to my father being an ex-Marine who specialized in communications) and most early adopters of apps are people who have spent a large majority of their free time on the Internet, learning how to Internet. This was the Insta before we all became brands (commodities) constantly selling our audiences on one thing or the other.
People just posted images of whatever they thought illustrated their lives so it was hella basic pictures of the sky and flowers for a minute.
Like most things, some users were ‘better at' Inst than others, and then folks figured out how to be good at IG (being good at commodifying oneself) and we did what we do in capitalist society: we assigned value to being good at using an app. This assigned value was and, still is, measured by 'engagement' which is to say, followers. The more ‘social capital’ you were able to amass through carefully curated galleries and even more carefully constructed captions, the more opportunity opened up for you In Real Life. The people who figured this out and capitalized on it were no longer simply users, they became influencers.
And then, by virtue of opting into the technology, we all became influencers— some of less aware of that latent influence than others, many hyper-aware of that specific form of power. Like journalists, every 'grammer has their ‘beat’— music, makeup, skincare, snake oil cures for whatever ails you. Behind every photographed posted on the platform, there is usually a human on the other side, who is crafting a specific idea of who they are in the world for you to consume.
As a Black person who is constantly being forced to shift into the various ideas of the world’s perception of what I am and should be, this is incredibly taxing work. Even more so when this conception of your being is also what helps you to get the work that makes it so you can keep a roof over your head and your bills paid. What I’m trying to say is that, for me, Insta was labor and it was labor I was not being paid to perform but I was performing on the app because I was told I needed to, that my career would suffer if I did not get in line and start jiving my way around potential clients.
I have never been a jiver and pretending to be one always failed. I also figured out pretty quickly that I could use my fiercest source of power — my writing— to commodify a part of myself I’d never exploited for money, or so I thought. Between being interviewed frequently around something or other having to do with labor, race, and gender, I started using my captions more...politically. I wanted and needed a place I could be transparent about what this sort of labor entailed because the consequences of laboring in this manner are very easily hidden when all you are bombarded with is the inevitable successes of the ruling racial class.
That’s a very specific conception of what being a photographer looks like and it is a conception that has been created to entice a generation of people into exploitative labor that is not for the faint of heart: it is par for the course that l go months without payment for work that is already being published in books, in magazines, on websites. This means renegotiating poverty at the false promise of stability, always an arms-length or more out of reach, just past my fingertips. It means I make decisions about work that are directly reliant on my ability to pay my rent and bills on time, my ability to keep myself and my (thankfully) small family fed and healthy when I want to be making decisions that consider my ethics and my lived experience, first.
Example: I visit a foreign country for a publication that hasn’t paid me despite delivering work promptly so I dip into our shared rent funds to get me through since I am often not offered advances even when I request them to get the work done. I ‘replenish’ rent when the direct deposit finally hits but I’m short for the month. As luck typically has it, an assignment I don’t give two flying shits about hits my inbox and I say yes since I am short on funds for the month. I tell myself more meaningful assignments are on the horizon, knowing at this point in my career I get work so someone can get their diversity hire brownie points for the quarter.
In that liminal waiting space, the space of do I continue or do I dip and do something different, the anger is visceral and tangible, waiting to be met with some form of action.
I took three whole weeks off of IG for the first time since downloading the app back in 2011 (reader, that's NINE YEARS AGO). I deleted the app from my phone. Changed my password to a 25 character behemoth I wouldn’t remember and made the decision not to even peer at the app for any reason, which was a surprisingly easy thing to do after the collapse of the US economy. There was no reason anymore for me to keep ‘selling’ myself on the platform — the adjacent industries I work in, hospitality, food, and travel, have all crumbled to non-existence in the wake of shitty management of a plague. None of these industries will ‘return’ in the way we’ve become custom to because our lives have changed irreparably due to the novel coronavirus.
Any thought that doesn’t recognize the shift that has already occurred in our lives is a sheer and total delusion — delusion as a coping mechanism.
Over the phone, a dear friend recounts to me the ways she’s come undone at this moment and how she’s putting herself back together through service. She bikes, for miles and miles, across New York City delivering masks to first responders and groceries to folks who need it most. We spent many mornings, iced coffee in hand for breakfast, communing with one another before she moved out of Los Angeles.
We found each other to be soft places to land when tough, important conversations about life needed to be had. Over the phone, states away from one another, iced coffees in hand for breakfast, she tells me the mutual aid organizer she’s working with on these deliveries is reminding everyone they are volunteering their time to help others, and as such, are entitled to rest when its needed—no explanation necessary. She quantifies this by suggesting everyone "use this time to de-program from capitalism."
The phrase makes me think of my best friend, also a photographer, who has re-oriented themselves toward mutual aid deliveries.
Around me, everyone is pivoting away from being a commodity to returning to human beings with desires to see a more connected, communal world. I spend two days a week on an hour-long call with other artists, all of us working together to lay down the groundwork for our collective desire to see an industry that doesn’t rely on commodifying humans into small 6x6 squares, hashtags, and contrite captioning thanking their captors for that momentary whiff of the pie.
A month without assignments has meant a month of rest, allowing me to reposition myself towards the truth: despite the ways in which my work has attempted to break my body down and render me useless, along the way I’ve collected strength, enough to know what is important at this moment is my actual embodied being, that same being that observes and dissects what the product of my labor means.
Every time I pick up my camera, I am also negotiating with power.
I refuse to negotiate away any more of my power to uphold a crumbled structure.
~~~
While writing bits of this letter over the course of the month (It's April, right?), I listened to Travis Scott's masterwork, Birds in the Trap Sing McKnight (my favorite tracks the ends, goosebumps, guidance, and wonderful) alongside Fiona Apple's perfectly prescient and feral, Fetch the Bolt Cutters. I have been chanting to myself 'I spread like strawberries! I climb like peas and beans!' often these days. I am currently reading Pedagogy of Freedom by Paulo Freire as I contemplate non-traditional and community teaching in a post-COVID-19 world, alongside Hanif Abdurraqib's heart-wrenching poetry collection, A Fortune for Your Disaster. This month I've watched and enjoyed Jim Jarmusch's Only Lovers Left Alive featuring the otherworldly Tilda Swinton as a vampire and one too many bars alluding to our current plague situation, and basically every Questlove live deejay set but specifically, the week of Prince-themed sets he did. Chef's kiss!
And, before we go, a poem by Hanif Abdurraqib
called If Life Is As Short As Our Ancestors Insist It Is, Why Isn't Everything I Want Already At My Feet?
if I make it to heaven, I will ask for all of the small pleasures I could have had on earth.
And I'm sure this will upset the divine order. I am a simple man.
I want, mostly, a year that will not kill me when it is over.
A hot stove and a wooden porch bent under the weight of my people.
I was born, and it only got worse from there.
In the dead chill of a doctor's office, I am told what to cut
back on and what to add more of. None of this sounds like living.
I sit in a running car under a bath of orange light and eat
the fried chicken that I swore an oath to stray from
for the sake of my heart and its blood labor
Still, there is something about the way a grease stain begins small and then tiptoes
its way along the fabric of my pants. Here, finally, a country worth living in.
One that falls thick from whatever it is we love so much
that we can't stop letting it kill us. If we must die, let it be inside here. If we must.