Image description: A photo taken on horseback on a dirt path through a field of blooming bluebells. The horse is white with blonde hair and is wearing brown leather braided reins. There is a clear path ahead, but the beauty—speaking from the biased eye of the beholder, of course—is in all the blooming blue pedals beyond the trail’s edge.
“One might wonder what use ‘opening up possibilities’ finally is, but no one who has understood what it is to live in the social world as what is ‘impossible, illegible, unrealizable, unreal, and illegitimate is likely to pose that question.”
— Judith Butler, Gender Trouble
This week I’m juggling worsening arm and hand pain, a major plumbing issue, mental preparation for a weekend-long training, and a trip to California on Tuesday where I’ll do two events I’ve never done and am not fully prepared for. Though I’m in pain and bone tired, I love this weekly ritual so decided to write something quick instead of nothing.
My personal quest continues to find good language for what I aim to do in my work with people and with writing. I’ve gotten very interested in the possibility that I could support people in living non-standard lives, which are words inspired by a chapter I read this week by narrative therapists Jill Freedman and Gene Combs about the therapist as “second author.”
I recently turned thirty-seven. With age has come increasing awareness of the ways in which we are hounded to live our lives in particular ways that others assume to be normal, healthy or standard.
One of the more troubling ways I’ve been seeing this lately is through social media. To use Instagram or Twitter or TikTok is to place oneself under a constant shaping gaze, reinforcing some things and not others via likes and shares.
It’s an amplified version of what happens elsewhere, in analog life.
“You’re next!” A bride-to-be declares to me in a text exchange about her heterosexual wedding.
“Let me know if you ever want to talk about freezing your eggs!” A mom friend says, just before we hang up from a catch-up call. I’ve just finished saying I’m excited about work again (finally!) and that while I totally understand why others choose to have them, I don’t think that I personally want kids.
Ten thousand invisible hands are hard and relentlessly at work shaping us at all times. We are under a gaze that does much more than look. It pinches. It manipulates. Move this way, not that. Bulge there, not here. Hands prod, nudge, corral, lay pressure. Often for the sake of a standard. The standard’s sometimes called health, or functionality, or happiness.
With my own olive hands I want to do something different.