February 8, 2020

‘self-care’ and the language of wellbeing

in response to this article about jonny sun and lin manuel-miranda’s book ‘gmorning gnight’

the article i linked above really aired out some of the more egregious offenders on this topic, so i won’t talk about gmorning gnight or the cretins responsible for creating it. that said, i’ll talk about rupi kaur even though the other writer, alex nichols, did, because her work is a good entry point into the problems i’m going to talk about.

rupi kaur is inane in the purest sense of the word. she writes (or steals) her poetry, which rarely consists of more than 20 words as best as i can tell, and pairs it with tangentially related line art. rupi kaur is bad because her poetry, when intelligible, seems to exist purely to evoke a hollow sense of warmth in the reader. the outcome of reading a page from ‘milk and honey’ might be some sense of identification, but it is and can only ever be shallow, because kaur’s poetry never touches on anything beyond the superficial. you read 10 words in a black typewriter font on a white or off-white page, and then look at the accompanying line art that looks like it was copied straight off the shoulder or wrist of the worst kind of girl in your english class. kaur makes picture books for the eternal adolescent; her verses reassure you that your feelings are big and deep without actually plumbing those depths. the subject matter pays lip service to the content of adult life, but the themes are invariably juvenile. readers who are somehow able to engage with it sincerely feel validated in their emotions, and nothing more is asked of them. it’s the least challenging thing you could possibly write. it is exclusively aesthetic.

perhaps i’m being overly harsh, and i just don’t understand her poetry, or what her mission is as a poet, particularly as a brown poet. in an interview with vice, kaur shared a bit about why she does what she does:

shah: there’s this idea that your poetry is a more democratic format, but that sometimes has its own baggage—the whole plagiarism thing, for example. a woman of colour, nayyirah waheed, accused you of plagiarism. how did you deal with all of that? it’s hard. especially because you know you both come from communities that deal with a lot. and the reason that both of you are writing is because you’re trying to overcome that pain. It’s really sad that someone got so hurt. all those things are so real, and that’s what makes it so complicated.

i also feel that plagiarism is such a heavy, loaded word—it can also silence people. people who would not be writing otherwise. me using a couple of words that the other person also uses, doesn’t equal plagiarism. if another brown girl with the same last name wants to write about feminism and what it is to be an immigrant, it’s like me saying “you’re copying me.” we’re living in a world where me and so many other artists are writing about similar topics is just a reflection of our times.

if i’m being harsh, let it be known that vice was softballing throughout this interview, which is as much about instagram as it is about poetry. “the whole plagiarism thing” is how they subtly hand-wave waheed’s serious accusation.

kaur writes for feminism, and for decolonization, huge topics with decades of history and nuance to pull from. when asked about the claims of plagiarism, she just says that it’s “really sad that someone got so hurt”, and then talks about how the accusation has made her feel bad. the next question:

shah: it must be weird, because you’ve got all the recognition for it, but there could be a hundred other people doing it. is it hard to keep it real? do i feel guilty—why did i get all this success, and the other person didn’t? for sure. i wish the world was fair.

asked point-blank why ‘milk and honey’ has the success that it does, kaur’s response is easily substituted for ‘idk lol but it sucks not everybody can be as valid as i am. it’s so unfair.’ i’ll admit it can be difficult to view one’s success objectively and try to diagnose the reason for it. i’ll also admit that my reading of this interview is, shall we say, uncharitable. but the larger point is that kaur offers nothing in the way of insight into her work when asked. she doesn’t know, she can’t explain. she doesn’t even take issue with the idea that any of a vast number of social media posts or notebook doodles could be perfect substitutions for her poetry. she just got lucky.

i happen to think it’s deeper than that. i’ve already spent more time on her than i meant to, so i’ll just say this: rupi kaur is, apparently accidentally, the distillation of what’s wrong with how we approach our emotional and psychological health. the key thing here is superficiality; a fixation on pretty words rather than meaning.

i think it used to be the case that when people talked about your wellbeing, they just meant the physical health of your body. i say i think, because a revolution in our understanding of wellness and health was in full swing by the time i got old enough to really think deeply about anything.

i attended a boarding school for most of high school, and a three-year one at that, so most of the student body was at their third school in as many years by the time they became sophomores. part of our orientation activities included learning about how to adjust to a new environment, and they taught us the basics of depression and how to keep an eye on each other to spot it. my gym class (hilariously entitled ‘moving and learning’) was, on paper, entirely about holistic wellness as opposed to just making sure we were capable of running a mile and shooting hoops. we had readings and discussions that dealt with maintaining ourselves in each of the different spheres of health, not just the physical. notably, they included your emotional and spiritual wellbeing.

this is the case online too. mental health as opposed to solely physical health has exploded in public conversation. the prevailing opinion you’ll see online today is that most if not every person should see a therapist. joker, a recent blockbuster, was essentially about the horrors of life without access specifically to good mental healthcare. i’ve grown up in a world where the health of your person - as opposed to your body - is placed at the forefront. we have all sorts of ways to talk about this, and most everyone i know has had a diagnosis of depression or anxiety or some kind of mental disease.

so what? what’s wrong with any of this? why did i feel compelled to think or write about it? the general thesis i’m going to try and convey here is that somewhere along the line, we have gone astray from actually helping people with how we talk about wellness, and its popularity is to blame.

between talking about mental health with teachers, advisors, classmates, other citizens of online, family, and friends, i’ve more or less internalized the entire vocabulary and theory of wellness that can be learned outside of psychological research. i’ve known how to see it when people around me are suffering from mental illnesses. i know what depression is. i know what anxiety is. i know the words to say and the habits of mind to practice to keep yourself and the people you meet from being miserable, or at least to help them shoulder the weight.

the first time i went to therapy, i was asked what symptoms brought me in, what i needed help with. i listed everything i was experiencing, and he told me that i had more or less recited the dsm entry on depression. we talked a bit more about other things, like drug use, i suspect to rule out other disorders, and then i was given my diagnosis right there. i could have diagnosed myself. frankly, the fact that i saw a professional at all indicates that i already had. there is comfort in having the authority of degrees and certifications to back up my suspicions, but the plain truth is that i billed my parents’ insurance so that i could have someone tell me what i already knew and put it on their stationery so that i could make things neat with my school administration. i already knew what was going on. the way i see it, this story is both a credit to and a condemnation of the culture of wellness. it’s incredible that, by function of being party to the social institutions that are requisite to life, i was able to learn and recognize how to know when something is wrong. that infrastructure has done a lot of good for my growth as well as for how i understand the growth of my friends.

the problem is that when it came to actually getting better, it didn’t help. as i said, i knew all the habits of mind and the things to tell yourself. how to frame your thoughts so that you can function more healthily. i feel very strongly that none of these things, therapy included, contributed much to eventually getting my shit back together. what did help was dropping out of school, getting two jobs, and spending more time around people. invariably, when i was open with my friends about what i was feeling, the conversations would follow the same lines you read online and hear from guidance counselors; you are valid, your feelings matter, don’t be so hard on yourself. while true, i already knew that.

rupi kaur and twitter invite you to practice the language and the e·mo·tion of mental unhealth because it is easy and is capable of infinite recursion. rupi kaur says so herself when she accedes that there are many people who write the exact same poetry that she does. even so, she acquires both social and fiscal capital from it, and helps open the space for corporations to do the same. the language of wellbeing has done more good for corporate social media engagement and rupi kaur’s personal brand than it has for my depression. that bothers me. it should bother you too.

gi joe tells us that knowing is half the battle. true to form, the culture that educates us is desperate to be a glass-half-full kind of culture, so i suppose we can be understanding if it forgets the other half. therein lies the rub, though, and it’s why the superficial way we discuss issues of wellbeing is at best woefully inadequate. everybody knows their trauma or their self-esteem issues or what have you aren’t their fault; they just don’t believe it isn’t their fault, not really, and that’s what we need to work on. some good can be done by reassurance, but this kind of insubstantial aphorism doesn’t do anything beyond that, and for anyone who actually needs help, reassurance just doesn’t cut it. if self care bot is an effective treatment for your ‘depression’, you aren’t really depressed. conversely, and more the point, if reading a tweet that says “just be in tune with yourself” is the only thing standing between you and the void, it’s not going to help. you need to do something.

the point of this is not to say that other people aren’t being depressed correctly. the point is that when the only language we have to talk about these things is mainstream (and profitable), it is devalued. everyone who has a bad day can say they feel depressed, and they have the vocabulary ported over from medical spaces to describe it as a condition. we need to remember that there is a difference between having depression and feeling depressed, or having anxiety and feeling anxious. if you truly do suffer from a medical condition of this nature, the bottom line is that nobody can fix it for you, and nobody can make you better. you have to be better yourself.

the appeal of this self-care approach to wellness is clear; you’re feeling shitty and hopeless, and then you read a tweet encouraging you to drink water, because it’s good for you. you get some, and you feel a little better. it helps because you haven’t eaten anything today, but it feels like it’s helping because you can tell yourself you did something. the authority of a viral account or c-list celebrity has held your hand and guided you through a process that should be clear to any toddler - drink when thirsty - and you get to feel like you’ve done something to help yourself. superficial wellness-speak can give you the sense that you’ve accomplished something without actually having to do so. you’re being patronized, and the wealthy members of the culture machine are reaping the profits.

February 2, 2020

literature, experience, and storytelling

this week in my critical theory class we read an essay by walter benjamin entitled “the storyteller”. it serves as a critical examination of how the way people tell stories has changed. prior to the invention of the printing press and the wide practice of literacy, the only stories that most people heard were told to them in person by bards or the like. this is where we get folk tales, most of mythology, and epics. nowadays we call these kinds of stories and this mode of storytelling ‘oral history’. benjamin’s assertion is that what was once fundamental to the act of storytelling is now lost, if not obsolete:

memory creates the chain of tradition which passes a happening on from generation to generation. it is the muse-derived element of the epic art in a broader sense and encompasses its varieties. in the first place among these is the one practiced by the storyteller. it starts the web which all stories together form in the end. one ties on to the next, as the great storytellers, particularly the oriental ones, have always readily shown.

oral history is taught as something quaint, something romantic. this is because in a plain sense, it is. you don’t need to remember anything in 2020, except when taking exams. the whole of human knowledge is available within minutes online if you know a little bit about how to look. when i’ve gone to the bar with my dad and his friends, they’ve often lamented the extinction of the bar argument. they talk about how if you and a fellow patron had a disagreement over who won a heisman in what year, it used to be the case that you would argue about it. the right answer was whichever was supported with more convincing evidence, or, far more likely, by popular vote; you might tap your friend or the bartender on the shoulder to weigh in on the issue at hand. nowadays if we’re talking and aren’t sure about the fact of the matter, i can pull up several relevant wikipedia articles and put it to rest inside of a minute.

when i asked my dad if he missed it, he laughed. he said that that kind of discussion, in the past, was probably worse because it didn’t have anything to do with truth, and was more about the activity. people like to drink and fight about stuff, but it’s deeper than that. the old way was a fundamentally democratic approach to discussion; the point was to talk to your neighbors about sports, not to determine the historical facts. similarly to how portable google has redefined the subtle and delicate art of the drunken bar argument, the tendency towards immediacy and truthfulness has redefined, according to benjamin, the art of telling a story.

the intelligence that came from afar—whether the spatial kind from foreign countries or the temporal kind of tradition—possessed an authority which gave it validity, even when it was not subject to verification. Information, however, lays claim to prompt verifiability. the prime requirement is that it appear “understandable in itself.” often it is no more exact than the intelligence of earlier centuries was. but while the latter was inclined to borrow from the miraculous, it is indispensable for information to sound plausible. because of this it proves incompatible with the spirit of storytelling. If the art of storytelling has become rare, the dissemination of information has had a decisive share in this state of affairs.

the essay also disparages novels as a medium as responsible for the death of the storyteller. benjamin understands stories as live and active things, especially in that romantic sense i talked about earlier, where you would only know narratives that had been personally related to you by someone else. novels represent the atomization of storytelling. an individual constructs a narrative and tells you exactly where it begins and ends and what happens in the middle, and puts their name on it. it’s a private endeavor. when someone goes to the store and buys a copy of that novel, they read it in solitude. again, it is a private endeavor. benjamin’s view is that the real outcome is not just that his chosen medium is perceptibly less valuable, but that it speaks to a larger ill:

more and more often there is embarrassment all around when the wish to hear a story is expressed. It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions, were taken from us: the ability to exchange experiences.

this brings me to another essay i’ve wanted to write about. a friend sent me a copy of mark greif’s book “against everything”, which includes an essay titled “the concept of experience (the meaning of life, part i)”. greif starts by noting that our whole lives are lead in the pursuit of happiness, which, i grant you, isn’t particularly insightful. what’s interesting is what he claims to be the problem:

the problem is experience; specifically, a concept of experience that gives us the feeling we are really living, but makes us unsatisfied with whatever life we obtain.

greif goes on to discuss how, for most people, experiences are individual moments that we view as almost external to ourselves. we travel to faraway places and attend nominally exciting events so that we can encapsulate them in our memories. when we inevitably find ourselves in the future and want to be assured that our lives were well lived, we can look back on a collection of experiences and tell ourselves “see all the things i did, this life must have been good”. greif likens this to curation or collection. because we conflate a wealth of meaningful experience with happiness, the next logical step is to focus on obtaining as much experience as we can. you can see this in action already; a study from expedia and something called the ‘center for generational kinetics’ found that 74% of americans prioritize experience over ownership.

every profile on tinder mentions the desire to go on an ‘adventure’ - i think they might hard code it into the app - but the reality is rarely adventurous in character. i can’t find the tweet but a while back i saw something like “mfs will talk about wanting to go on an adventure and then smoke weed in their car in a jcpenney parking lot”. there’s a small but dedicated genre of tweet about how people in small / midwest / rural towns have fun. it usually consists of smoking pot in a parking lot or loitering at walmart. there’s nothing that says those aren’t experiences, though. i’ve spent a lot of time smoking in cars and searching for the funniest thing in the home good section at walmart, so i can tell you: that was almost always just a backdrop to simply being around my friends. it’s the activity we ‘planned’ so that we could justify being around each other, while the actual (but unspoken) point of it was to interface with each other in person for once. i think everybody knows this, because everybody has fun doing ‘nothing’. everybody loves to spend a whole day doing ‘nothing’, but we tell each other and ourselves that we’d rather be doing something exciting. we’re convinced that we need to go to exotic places and do exciting things in order to be fulfilled, but at the end of the day doing these things for the sake of them doesn’t meet the desire that initially drove us to them. experience becomes less and less valuable when we view it this way. kafka once said “we photograph things to drive them out of our minds. my stories are a way of shutting my eyes.” walter benjamin would criticize our practice of compulsive photography as a way of converting not just what we are told, but what we live, into information. the mindset of endless accumulation is, therefore, increasingly a failure. according to greif, what we really want is to be able to share experience:

you can wish your experiences had been more plentiful, or longer lasting. you can wish they had made you someone else—or that you could retell them to anyone who’d understand. but you do not wish you hadn’t had them. the need to retell experiences becomes your last means to try to redeem experience from aimless, pure accumulation—and either you cannot find a listener or you realize that you are mute, unfit to communicate the colors of this distant realm of experience in any way adequate to the wonders you found there. thus everyone longs to tell his story today, but not as literature.

anyone who’s tried to write something personal has been through this. the process of using the written word requires a few layers of translation across entirely distinct languages. the way sensory information enters your brain and is processed there has precious little to do with the ways in which we communicate that information to other people. there are some workarounds; for example, impressionist art creates images that have little, directly speaking, to do with the actual experience of our visual sense, but by blending light and color together, evoke an emotional response in the viewer that might resemble the wonderful ‘distant realm of experience’ that greif’s talking about. the theoretical argument of impressionism is that its approach creates art that is closer to what we ‘actually’ see when we look at the world. of course this brings up the same issue my dad discussed when i settled a bar argument with google — when you look at a monet, you aren’t looking at real life in the empirical sense, and the modern world relies on empiricism. we want exact knowledge of things, and to have them explained to us. i couldn’t tell you why, because it seems that more and more, people are yearning to live in a world of wonderment and mystery. they experience the latter desire a priori; it exists without need of experience. i could point you to capitalism or to ad firms or decry the societal ills proliferated by social media, but i don’t think it really matters who we blame for this cognitive dissonance between what we want and what we tell each other we want.

February 1, 2020

top text

time to embark on whatever this is going to be. because i skipped this in the ‘about’ page, i’ll take the opportunity of this first post to talk about what exactly’s going on here.

anyone who knows me (and therefore everyone who will ever read this) has heard me talk about doing something to this effect. the goal is to get into practice writing things that someone other than me will see. as much as i love keeping a private journal, i think limiting my written audience to myself and my teachers is starting to have a negative impact on my own perception of my work. if the goal is to eventually be paid for my writing, then i really ought to do something about it not being worth very much.

alternatively, this can be a way for me to streamline the “what have you been up to” conversations that are a constant part of adult life. here, mom. here, old roommate. here, people i haven’t seen since high school but still try very hard to keep in touch with. look. i made this for you. to that end, most of the content is essentially going to be me doing my homework, only you get the privilege of seeing what that means for me. i’ll be taking readings and stuff from class and putting it up here along with whatever it makes me feel like writing. hopefully i can use this to find a comfortable blend between the way i talk (aggressively casual) and the way i write when i’m writing seriously (convolutedly ostentatious), and in the end y’all can look back on the days when you knew me before i was the king or something.

i’ll also be putting up some review / reflection type things. i’m thinking of calling them meditations as a nod to the aimless stream of consciousness i’ve tended toward when i’ve written this kind of thing for myself in the past, but that name also sounds kind of wack and reminds me too much of descartes. the point is, you can also expect to see me talking about media on here.

in the spirit of summation, here’s everything i plan to post:

• meditations on books / media
• stuff about my classwork
• anything i feel compelled to write about. anything at all

i can’t promise a schedule or anything like that. this is first and foremost a personal project; it’s taking this form so that 1. i can theoretically develop a body of original work to show off, and 2. whoever reads it can hold me accountable. please harass me if i fall off the wagon. i put good money into this site so it better be worth at least a few good sentences.

p.s. i’m really new at web stuff, so even though blot dot im does almost all the work for me, things might be a little wonky until i get my feet under me. if you think something looks ugly or wrong, you know better than me so let me know