Do we have work tomorrow?
Or, how to answer the question "how's your work going?"
At work the other day, someone said it out loud: “What are we doing here?” This coworker and I have beliefs that orbit one another’s without colliding. We’re certainly not aligned on everything politically, but he meant what I mean when I think the same thought: What are we doing here? I wrote at the beginning of the month about the tyranny of normalcy, but I’m still wondering where it ends.
I’m thinking back to the start of the pandemic this week and what a shame it is that so many of us haven’t had the time, the opportunity, or the inclination to draw out the threads pulled in those early days when we were asked, “What is an essential worker?” If we put the Orwellian twist we added to the phrase aside (if you’re essential, you’ll be sacrificed on the altar of capital), it’s a good question. What work can’t we do without? Who does that work? Who doesn’t, and why not? What would we imagine if we had the opportunity to dream new relationships to labor?
Lately, I feel like I’m not doing any of my work well enough. In theory, my main work is writing. I’m in school, working with mentors, but mostly self-guided. There’s mountains of research and bad first drafts and editing and reading to do. It’s exciting, but it always feels crowded out of the center of my attention. Then, there’s the additional writing work I created for myself (classic me, to arbitrarily assign myself homework) here, which has been an important exercise in imperfection and connection outside social media. But again, it feels crowded out, too often pushed to the last moment.
For money, I do this and that. I’ve always created a patchwork of support for myself because, frankly, I have trouble holding a full time job. I have the aforementioned part time job, some freelance audio work, and a new tiny gig at the local library. All lovely, yet all taking pieces of my time away from…the something else, the unstructured time I crave.
There’s also the house. My partner and I lucked and finagled our way into deeply unlikely home ownership two years ago and there’s always work to be done. Yard, garden, cleaning, repair, maintenance. Here in the domestic sphere live more things that crowd out writing. Here, too, are the things to write about. The reason for all the work.
When my co-worker asked “What are we doing here?” he followed up by daydreaming about going to do something really meaningful. Maybe being a firefighter [Please support my campaign “Replace All Cops With Firefighters 2024”] or going to fight on what feels like the right side of a war. He’s tired of waiting around for something big to happen. I don’t glamorize war and emergency, but I empathize with the feeling.
Gaza has leveled me. I have done what I can, most of the time as much as I can, by educating people, gathering people together to learn and take action, calling my fucking alleged representatives. I want to stop everything until we can overcome our abysmal leadership and get food and shelter restored to these people, their children.
But I don’t know how, so I go to work, and I work on my pages, and I do the dishes.
Last fall, I was invited to a themed reading on work (“Work, Work, Work, Work, Work,” to be precise). In preparation, I made an elaborate map of notes: all the jobs I ever had (seventeen of them, starting at age eleven), the interesting jobs of my friends, the jobs that fed and sheltered me as a child, feelings about work (from fulfillment to existential dread), work sayings and idioms. It was easy to gather way too much for a ten-minute reading. I finally cracked through when I started writing 100s (micro-essays of exactly one hundred words each) on whichever note felt appealing. A finessed version of that piece was just published by the kind people at Write or Die.
Sometimes I wonder how much my American-ness influences my relationship to work, and to my own fluctuating ability to work hard. It’s probably not a coincidence that Pa Ingalls made it into the final paragraph of that piece, after all. Researching my Montana ancestors and thinking about my families of origin, I see the Protestant work ethic everywhere. Putting aside the political implications of their “heading West,” it was certainly an undertaking of relentless hard labor. But then again, maybe homesteading didn’t feel like work to them, but some type of noble calling. I wonder how I’d fare in that time, and what I’d do, all the time now.
I wonder, too, what I’d be like if I was born rich and never had to work. Maybe I’d still have a sense of justice, or creativity, or a desire to make something, but I don’t know. How much of the pride we take in our work is inherent and how much is a knee-jerk justification to quiet the fear at the heart of our capitalist arrangement? Work or die. I wonder what will happen to our work-worshipping culture when the already alarming impact of long covid develops further, and legions more people learn what it’s like to be disabled and/or chronically ill in a system which would rather you die than slow the machinery with your inconvenient presence?
Spring is helping, I think. Living as far north as I do, one learns to notice the first day when the sun sets later than 4:30 PM and to grow hopeful with the lengthening evenings. The end is in sight. Then, a day like today, the first where you feel the unfamiliar sensation of being too warm in your clothes. Suddenly the grass is greening, the bugs are out, it’s time to garden! Before you know it, you’ve swept out and organized the whole greenhouse to write there for the day. To be among the plans for future food and the dirt smell and even the spiders. The cat comes out and there’s even time to just sit and watch him. There’s time again. Daylight.
How has almost-spring found you? How are you keeping on in your own work? How have you managed to hold two or three truths in your full hands at once? The genocide and the laundry, the burning earth and the bills on the desk. What are we doing here? How can we help one another to find that answer?
Thanks for reading a more disjointed dispatch than usual. I hope to be back next week with a more focused covid reflection. Until then, don’t let any of it be normal. <3