It can feel like we are steeped to our eyeballs within the ruinous effects of end-stage capitalism, but one of those effects that I’ve only recently become aware of is how capitalism is internalized within our emotional bodies.
One of the moments that this plays out most intensely for me is about a week or two into my summer break from teaching. After I’ve turned in grades, cleaned my office, slept in soundly and generally recuperated from the intensity of the last month of the academic year. Now the bright expanse of the summer stretches out before my imagination, and my first inclination is to make impossible lists of what I’ll do with that time. It’s like New Years’ resolutions on steroids.
Here’s a short list of what I did not do on this summer break:
—I did not work out at the gym 3x a week and lose that 10lbs I’ve been trying to lose
—I did not meditate every day
—I did not read a book a week
—I did not watch difficult foreign films that I always intend to watch
—I did not travel
This is not a list of grievances. It’s a testament against my inclinations towards justifying the goals of emotional capitalism.
Instead, this is what I did:
I took every opportunity to say yes to my friends. Way back in the early aughts I was an avid user of Livejournal, and I made several close friendships with people from that platform, and have met most of them in real life. One of those folks moved to Colorado for a spell, and has been within driving distance from me. She’s been in the midst of a disruptive, uncertain and life-changing juncture, and I’ve been adjacent to that by proxy to her. We have gone to see movies, exhibits, concerts, had meals together, made some art. She may be leaving soon and maybe not returning here, and the finitude of her being here has been a character note in our time together.
Me & Kate at the exhibition Beyond Resilience, at the Museum of Art Ft. Collins this summer. (left): Mona Bozorgi, Wreath, 2024; Shawn Bush Angle of Draw.
Another friend of mine, in a different life stage with a three-year-old child, has been allowing herself get away time with me to see guilty pleasure films in dark-lit theaters with lazy-boy recliner seats. Her personal life and job are very demanding, and I feel lucky to be her decompression friend. She is living within one of those periods of everything-coming-at-you-from-all-sides-all-at-once, and I remember from first hand experience having been in one of those periods the need for some kind of outlet that does not have to answer to anyone else (at the time, mine was 6am extreme workouts). We have seen all the Pedro Pascal films except the Marvel one, that new Wes Anderson, the new Darren Aronofsky, and I think we’re seeing the doomed marriage drama films that are currently in theaters next. We don’t even get popcorn; I think the pleasure is being in largely empty theaters on a Sunday afternoon while someone else watches our children.
The pacing of summer has its own internal logic. For the first month, I still have a lot of the energy of the teaching year, and the urge to do things with that energy that are productive (see: emotional capitalism). I cleaned and organized our shed. I cleaned and organized the garage. In a rite-of-passage from childhood to tweenager, I remade my daughter’s bedroom according—to some degree—her pinterist wish list. She lamented that she hadn’t been able to choose any of what her room contained, and that it didn’t feel like her or who she's becoming, and that this made her sad. She went out of town with a friend and her mother for a week, and in a burst of early-summer energy I repainted walls and cork tiles (after which my husband said her room looked like a bar), sold a bunk bed, bought new bedding, “cottage core” lighting, a white shag rug, and other wished-for-trappings of a young punk goth in the making. She returned home vibrating with happy approval.
We went with Tomcat "black" (I want to be the person that names paint colors!); cork painted to now resemble a dive bar; almost-twelve-year-old in her transformed space with cat and 1000 less squashmallows.
By month two, I into wandering/wondering mode. I let myself go down rabbit holes that led to interesting places and realizations. I researched Filipino pre-colonial design, tattoos, and textiles—something that is working its way into work that I will continue to make this fall. I got a septum piercing, and plan to get another nose piercing soon. I’ve made plans for a tattoo design that I want, based on my Filipino design research, and it surprises me what it will be, where it will be, how big it will be and that all of that feels right.
I’ll be teaching a camera-less photography class this fall, and I’ve been making emulsions of fruits, vegetables and flowers in my kitchen, spreading them onto watercolor paper, and waiting days and weeks to see what transpires. It’s fun to pre-teach yourself the things you’ll soon be teaching, and finding out through trial-and-error things you can pass on as your hard-fought wisdom when you hand them mortar and pestles.
I watered and tended my garden every day. I pulled lots of weeds. I rested.
Last year, I felt robbed of my summer. My father died suddenly at the beginning of it, and it was difficult and complicated grief that I spent all summer trying to not feel, and failed at not feeling it. I grief-slept for weeks. I developed tendonitis in places that the acupuncturist told me was related to my liver, which is related to unresolved anger, and I let myself be poked with needles twice weekly while I slept in a lazy boy in a room full of other people sleeping in lazy boys with needles in them. I had health scares all of July and August, going in for every heart test imaginable, changing my medications to higher and higher doses and combinations of things that had me feeling crazy right up until the week classes began and my blood pressure finally regulated to normal levels. I felt depressed about taking medicines that I will have to take the rest of my life, and for the knowledge that a hundred years ago, I would have just died earlier.
Once the calendar flips to August first, there’s an urgency for meaning and making and cramming both of those things into the fleeting last days before faculty meetings, office hours, grading and teaching. In my last free week, I created a critique group of myself and a handful of hardworking, curious alumni of mine, and we begin our monthly meetings in September. I’ve been jealous for years of artist friends that have that kind of relationship with their graduate school cohort, or with other artists because they live in metropolises where other like-minded artists reside. I’m tired of feeling like I lack anything, so I am creating what I want to experience with what and who is around me, and I know that I will learn as much from them as they will from me. One of the greatest benefits of teaching creative young people is that they give me energy in return for whatever it is I can offer to them.
If last summer was about denial and then submission to the realities of that denial, then this summer has been about giving myself back to myself, slowly.
I am rested and ready for my new year to begin (my year is the academic calendar year, not when the ball drops in Times Square), and my intention for the year is to lead with generosity, and hope for generosity back.
