I haven’t written much in a while because life became hard work. Not in any significant way to ‘write home about’ but enough to make it hard to find the energy and time for writing. One positive thing that’s been consuming my energy is trying to build a housing co-op, the existence of which should make it easier for everyone that’s housed there to have the space and capacity to truly live. With our commitment to making the monthly rent as closely aligned to Local Housing Allowance as possible, and the substantial reduction in mental load that sharing responsibilities for cooking, cleaning and caring would create, I’m excited to see what living actually looks like for those involved and what choices we each make when we aren’t so alone in sustaining that life.
Already there have been mentions of running different community spaces - from a community laundrette to a community garden to a community printing press! As a relationship anarchist I’ve been getting excited about having more people involved in my childrens’ and partners’ lives, as well as space to invest more care in the relationships outside of the housing co-op too. It being a predominantly queer space gets me excited about working together to campaign around lgbt+ rights, especially in the face of growing hate towards the trans community. And having experienced the toll that autistic meltdowns or mental health issues can take, as well as the way that physical ailments can knock you sideways unexpectedly, working collectively to cushion those kinds of reverberations for multiple people feels like a very productive use of time.
Interestingly though, if any of us actually claimed benefits such as the housing allowance in order to pay for our rent we’d likely be classed as ‘economically inactive’ by the state. Which is kind of funny given the word ‘economy’ derives from the greek word meaning “household management”, and we’d be building a more sustainable and resilient household than most people will have the opportunity to experience in their lifetime.
As part of my work at Collaborative Future I spent quite some time thinking about how to make work more accessible and equitable. Armed with the belief that everyone had something to contribute to the workplace, and deserved an opportunity to do work they loved, I have worked tirelessly with organisations to make them more flexible, open and less biassed and oppressive. The programmes we ran focussed on people who were unemployed and underemployed, and while it was much better than employment support that comes from a deficit based view of unemployed people, I’m beginning to wonder why I fight so hard to get employers to change their practices and beliefs when the real problem is society’s relationship with labour, and who should be expected to those forms of labour.
The reality is that if you have a chronic condition that can flare up at any time there is no amount of flexibility from an employer or understanding from your team that is going to enable you to do your work in the ways that you want or need to (and don’t forget the grief processing time needed when you are reminded daily that your wants and needs aren’t the same thing). If you have to face microaggressions in most environments whether it’s going to the gym, visiting the GP or travelling on the bus, you’re going to be on edge in your work regardless of how much work your teammates do to dismantle their white supremacy or transmisogyny. If you are raising kids in an abusive relationship, no amount of money or education is going to get you out of that situation, it takes love and care from a community that you likely don’t have.
For some of us, living is hard work in itself and we still fail to recognise that as a society. Partly because it requires us to entirely dismantle our capitalistic systems of labour, which those in power profit from and all of us depend upon regardless of how active or inactive we are within it. While I’ve got endless advice and guidance for organisations wishing to be a better employer, I haven’t yet got a big bright vision for a society where no-one is considered ‘economically inactive’ and where our economic freedom isn’t tied to our capacity to ‘earn a living’. Sure I’ve spent a lot of time in discussions about Universal Basic Income, but I fear the generic nature of it and our hangups about treating everyone ‘equally’ (without treating them equitably) will hold back the possibilities of it. So here’s five things I’m trying to embed within my own life to help me decouple my economy and activity from our Economy.
1. Rest (and pleasure) is resistance
“Bodies are not machines… rest, sleep, daydreaming and slowing down can help us all wake up to the truth of ourselves” - Rest is Resistance, Tricia Hershey (Founder of Nap Ministry)
After a decade of presuming that success was tied to how fast and how much I worked, only to repeatedly find myself simultaneously scrambling out and slipping back in to debt, I finally burnt out and faced a somewhat suicidal and occasionally psychotic state of affairs. Luckily I met a partner at this point in time who wasn't phased by my mental health challenges, and who showed me that one of the ways to overcome my demons was to allow myself to be consumed by lust and pleasure and post-sex naps. I remember how healing it was the times we sacked off work for an afternoon in bed, proudly declaring that the answer to all of the world's ills was more orgasms.
What I experienced for the first time was many things: being deeply loved, being in control of my body, feeling present, and enjoying extended space to rest my body and mind. As an occasional insomniac this same partner is also sleep obsessed, and spent a lot of time discussing the effects of my interrupted sleep from having small children. I would never have accessed this kind of support and knowledge from the healthcare system if I'd approached them for support with my mental health.
And part of that is because if the answer to much of our problems is simply rest, how does capitalism continue to function?
2. Knowing what is earned and what is a gift
It is a gift that I can choose to rest. And I also earn that rest. It is a gift because you exchange one or two details of my life and I might be in wildly different circumstances right now. It is a gift because it relies upon the people around me doing work on themselves to not be resentful of me resting when they can’t. But it is also earned, not because I work hard to “earn a living”, but because I work hard on thinking about how I want to and should exist in the world when so much of the world is set up to stop me from having to work on that. I could’ve made the choice to remain on a high london salary back in 2019 when I got pregnant with my second child - and that would’ve been the easiest choice to make in our society right now because I’d have something to prove my worth, and because I’d have no fear about where my income was coming from. I could’ve made the choice to stay in a marriage that wasn’t right for me and I would be told that I’d ‘worked hard’ at that relationship, but in many ways it’s been harder work to leave and exist outside of that normative structure. But it’s also a gift that I could make that choice, because it is impossible for many people to have agency over their own lives for reasons beyond their control.
Being able to unpack for myself what has been gifted to me and what I have earned has enabled me to be more humble about where I am at and what I expect of others. And reminds me to make use of the power I have in the moments I have it, because that power can disappear just as rapidly as it appeared.
3. Community is strength
Since having kids I’ve heard far too many people talking about how they have no-one to help them with childcare, and as a result it feels like the next generation is being raised on fumes! Some of this is a Political issue - we don’t invest in affordable childcare within this country. Some of it is cost of living issue - many people have had to move away from family in order to afford rent or mortgage. But some of it is an issue of what we value and invest in as individuals. The support network for my kids grew exponentially when I chose expansive forms of love. Living an openly polyamorous life has meant I now have two partners and an ex who I co-parent with. As a result there’s more than two adults involved in daily life with the kids, and I get the love and care that keeps me steady as a main carer. But as a relationship anarchist, my ability to build intimate connections with many people regardless of levels of commitments also means that I have more friends and chosen family than I used to that want to show care for me and my family regardless of their ‘status’ within my life.
But it hasn’t just been polyamory that enables me to create a stable support system. Running community events, hosting regular gatherings for friends, buying locally, supporting people with their ideas, being authentically me with those I work with and talking about my life openly has all led to an increase in the deep profound connections that shape my world. And as a result I no longer fear being ‘alone’ with most of the common questions we all face - “how do I do everything I need to do” and “how do I respond when shit hits the fan.
4. Rallying around those most affected / those best positioned to respond in crisis
With the genocide in Gaza it’s been hard to know as someone so removed how best to show solidarity. When we ate a palestinian restaurant we decided to leave a big tip because many of the staff would be sending money back home right now. This aprroach to solidarity feels more meaningful than a random donation on a charity website or angry letters to MPs who might then raise concerns in parliament just to be overridden by others. And it got me thinking about how as a society we rarely think about supporting those who are closest to those affected by a crisis.
Some of us (me) have a saviour complex, which isn’t always helpful. When our local community farm flooded I felt great that I had the existing relationship with them to be able to jump right in and start clearing the debris, but if I’d rocked up to volunteer without being part of the farm before that point I would likely have just caused extra work for the team. So if I wasn’t affected by flooding, and I didn’t have any direct relationship with those who were, perhaps the most important thing I can do is pay attention to those who are able to offer direct support and fund them to take time off work to be able to respond / look after their kids / fill their cup when they are exhausted and worn down.
On the flipside some people believe that other people’s problems have nothing to do with them (unless of course it’s a pandemic and everyone is scared shitless that they could be next). If we were to build our society based on the knowledge that everyone is ’not yet disabled’, ‘not yet homeless’, and only one fascist leader away from violent forms of oppression - would we do more to care for those who are already subject to these things?
5. Working in a life-affirming way
When life is hard work, many people have to settle with soul-destroying forms of labour. Things that sap us further of any point of existence. But it feels like the opposite should be true. When life is hard, any labour we engage in needs to feel life-affirming.
When I set up Collaborative Future I was tired of unnecessary bullshit. While it was partly created out of necessity, as the only form of employment I could access, it was also created out of a fierce desire for young people to be able to access their fullness as human beings, not solely as cogs in a machine, and in turn it allowed me to access my truth too. The mutual care we had throughout all of our work, and the decisions to always breathe more life into each other was profoundly important. Honestly one of my favourite moments during Collaborative Future was encouraging my co-founder to sack off work to go on a date - they fell madly in love and are living a beautiful life with that partner now. I'm not sure how to share things like this as career achievements but they mean more than anything you’ll see on my Linkedin profile.
For the past few years I’ve been doing what felt like a bit of a random mush of stuff, and it’s sometimes hard to know how to explain myself. I work with a bunch of health economists and health funders to be more thoughtful about how they address health inequalities. I organise workshops and gatherings about food, relationships, creativity etc. I facilitate team away days. I write about energy genitals. I facilitate community researchers to share practices with one another. I go to sex parties and dream of running my own. I interview people for reports about power dynamics. I write about autism. I raise two kids, and want to help more people raise theirs. I design more human HR policies. I train people to be better at holding space. I DJ when I can. I dream about being a boxing coach one day. Sometimes I pick and pack vegetables for veg boxes. I study to become a death doula. I run playfighting events. And there’s so many more spaces I want to venture into and feel the mutual expansion of myself and others as we explore possibilities.
When I listened to “Embodied Entanglements” episode on For the Wild where they talked about funghi, and “behaving in a way that likes life” I realised that’s the common thread through everything I do. Because when life is hard enough work as it is, we don’t need to work in ways that make it harder.