are you satisfiable?
Honey, I’m home.
This might not sound like much, but days like these were few and far between for the last 8 weeks.
If you know me in any capacity outside of this newsletter, you’ve probably heard me utter in some obnoxious form that I’M A BE-ER NOT A DO-ER - in fact, I’ve probably obnoxiously shared that within this newsletter too.
Suffice to say, I really do believe that part of my reason for being on the earth is to just… be. Just like, be here on the earth, pootling around with little to no agenda. Loving some people, creating some shit, taking and giving pleasure as much as I can. Because of this belief, I haven’t written a to-do list in literally years, I have no interest in anything that falls into a ‘productivity’ category, and timetables and schedules and filling up life with busyness makes me want to do a little sick. Even watching busy people turns me off.
And so the fact that my summer was going to be made up of so much doing filled me with a mild sort of fear. How was I going to cope with all the doing?! I adopted a mindset of getting through as gently as possible, which whilst it’s always good to move with intention, also left me forgetting something vital.
Doing can be hella fun, and doesn’t have to be at the expense of being.
And so after being home a few for a days in a more settled way than I had all summer, my mind started to turn over just how much fun I’d been having, despite the doing? NO, because of the doing.
….
I realised I’d been looking at doing from the wrong perspective. I was rallying against the capitalist view of doing - hustling, busyness for the sake of busyness, maybe even something linked to being unsatisfiable… More, more, more. There’s a connection there for me with doing that doesn’t exist in the being.
And whilst I was definitely achieving measurable things during that time, making my money in order to survive, there was also so much more doing that capitalism doesn’t give a shit about and that I love deeply. There were honest conversations and margs on the beach and late night tarot pulls and jumping in the ocean and holding hands on the sofa and deep platonic intimacy and laughing until I cried and uncomfortable questions and sex under the stars and seeing the world through others eyes and washing hung on the line and other lives witnessed and meltdowns in the kitchen and so much fucking love.
I’d been falsely equating so much of doing with something icky, not remembering that I can do in whatever way I want. I can do with intention, even if it’s moving quickly and a lot, and it can be really, really enjoyable.
And look, I’m making it sound like I’d been a hermit for the past 3 years and not out here living, which obviously isn’t true. But sometimes when we immerse ourselves in exploring one specific thing, we lose sight of something else.
…..
Those covid years pushed me to a place of almost complete stillness at times. Getting really still was the only way I could ground myself when the world felt out of control. That stillness helped me lean into my dissection of what it means to be a human living under capitalism. I had to do some real hard work to disconnect my self-worth from my job because there was literally no job to do. My value could no longer be determined by how much money I earned, or who wanted to employ me, or how full my portfolio was looking.It’s still s interesting to me that creatively, those Covid years were my most prolific. I created with abandon, as a way to live. It made me no money and it also saved me. Motherhood had previously helped me to unravel a lot of what my value was, but that time with little distraction and hours and hours of just being took it to a whole new level.
It was incredibly painful and unbelievably freeing.
That time has made the return to some spaces complicated. Because we don’t get to detach completely. The reality is that we still need to be a part of the system in so many ways, just to survive. And the truth is that here, for us, there’s even more dependency on the system than before because to tread the same amount of water we need more jobs and more money coming in. 2023 is a headfuck all its own.
But what the past few months have taught me that just as I feel my way into being, I can feel my way into doing, too. There is a form of doing which is highly pleasurable and considered and partners with being really well. The relationship of being and doing. It sounds so simple that it’s almost laughable that I forgot it, as the most truthiest of truths usually feel. Moving around in the world, sometimes fast, sometimes slow, in a way that invites questions and rest and fullness of things I find deeply pleasurable.
LISTEN:
Ok look, I need you to listen to this podcast ASAP PLEASE. I am slightly in love (Ok a lot in love) with Adrienne Marie Brown. Her book, Pleasure Activism, is all kinds of mind blowing. This conversation has stayed with me for weeks now and this part in particular is very connected to everything written above, everything I’ve been moving towards for the past few years - are we satisfiable?
Everything is wrong with you. You need a better car, you need a better house. You’re just not there yet. And we export, this is our primary export from the US to the rest of the world. It’s like we’ve got the best cars or whatever. We’ve got the best everything and so constantly from a very young age, what we’ve all been seeped in, but for me, I can speak to my life I’ve been steeped in, I am not enough, I’m not doing enough and I don’t have enough. And so then to inside of that decide, wait a second, maybe the satisfiability thing is actually something I could access. I could be enough. Maybe I already am enough. There’s no way that that’s possible. So a lot of satisfiability is just even sitting and considering that question, could you be enough? Could you consider that you’re already enough and that there’s nothing to fix about you, that there might be places that want to grow, but that’s different from there’s something fundamentally wrong with you that you need to go purchase a way out of.
And I feel like that for me, then I started living in my life and being like, well, when do I feel satisfied? When do I feel satisfied? And if I’m not feeling satisfied, why not? What is the texture of my dissatisfaction? Is it from inside me or is it from someone else’s narrative of my life? And that it turns out when I start moving other people’s voices out of my mind and I start to notice in my own body what that does feel good enough for me, that does feel good enough. I think about this with orgasms. When I was writing Pleasure Activism, I was like, it’s so important to me to write a book about this that kind of allows people to feel good with what feels good to them rather than what someone else is saying. I’d be like, as a woman, I can have multiple orgasms, so I’m just going to have as many as I can have because I can freaking have so many.
Instead of being like, what is the quality of this connection and what is the quality of this touch and what is the quality of how I feel in my body? And then what is the orgasm that comes out of that attention? And it might be one which is shocking to me, but it might actually be sometimes I have one that I’m like, that is totally satisfying for a moment. Audre Lorde is the patron saint of pleasure activism, and she wrote about this in this essay, the Uses of the Erotic as Power. And she talked about painting a fence or laying in bed with her lover or writing a poem as all these experiences that give her this erotic aliveness. But now I’ll be like, oh, I’m sitting on my porch watching the geese fly across the water. I’m like, God, that satisfies me every time.
PSA - did you know that you can listen to audiobooks on Spotify now? GAMECHANGING. I listened to this in such a short amount of time and loved it so much I should probably be embarrassed, but who has the time.
READ:
and very much related to the above article - this podcast on The Infrastructure of Community, and how the design of physical spaces can either encourage or discourage relationships. But people also have to be willing to slow down and take the opportunity to connect.
We were never supposed to see our own faces this much. I have so many thoughts on how much we surveil our own bodies and idolize others and how that ultimately disconnects us from oursleves. It feels to be so hung up or attracted to the beauty standard is at best a lack of imagination and at worst a direct result of living in a patriarchal society, whether it’s realised or not, and that’s just not an interesting way to live to me. Another thing I did this summer was photograph and just hang out in spaces with many bodies like mine, and it connected me to a part of myself I’d turned away from. Elenor talks below about how we also cleve ourselves into observer and observed… SO GOOD.
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WATCH:
It was only a matter of time before I got in to video essays, and Mina Le is one of the best. Why is everyone dressing like a little girl?
Not a groundbreaking recommendation but The Beckham doc on Netflix is just the best dose of 90’s nostalgia. The Spice Girls! The haircuts! The England controversy! The matching outfits! And look, I’m actually a bit of a sucker for their love story. SOZ.
And on that note, I bless your day with this iconic image.