by 
Hi folks, I’m taking the week off! No new essay this week. Instead, here are a few things I read recently that I enjoyed a lot.
The Unspoken Complexity of “Self-Care” by
My friend Elizabeth emailed me about my recent article beyond self-care. She had shared my article with some colleagues of hers, and one of them shared this article in return. I appreciate that this cartoon (with alt text at the bottom) drew distinctions between self-care, self-soothing, community care, and structural care. Read the excerpt below and you’ll understand why this one sang to me.
“Taking one step further back, it’s also important to recognize that workarounds and harm-reduction are also only one part of the solution.
We also need to fundamentally overhaul (or tear down and rebuild entirely) the systems in which we live, so that we can be further enabled to work on the other kinds of care that we need.”
Keeping Food Pantries Safe Spaces for Everyone by Anina Estrem
I subscribed to Anina’s newsletter a few months ago and really enjoy her perspectives on food justice topics. Here, she addresses the rise in food pantries hiring security to monitor or control the people who visit them. These recommendations really apply to any public-facing service work. We can do better than to treat strangers like adversaries.
“The biggest mistake that food pantries make is treating poor behavior like a deliberate effort to be difficult rather than a symptom of trauma, fear, or mental illness. Responding to these issues as transgressions that need to be punished fuels confrontation rather than alleviates it. People respond with the same level of energy we direct at them, which means aggressive responses evoke aggressive answers.”
“I Want to Do Well Here” by Alicia Kennedy and Israel Melendez Ayala
This week I paid for a subscription to Alicia Kennedy’s newsletter (everybody’s doing a newsletter now!). One of the articles that prompted me to sign up was this interview with small food-business owners in Puerto Rico. Think about a high-risk profession like being a baker or a chef. Now add the unpredictability of not knowing if you’ll have clean water to cook with or power to keep the bread from overproofing. Even in times of great crisis, there are still people trying to make food for others to enjoy.
“So I think the main challenge for us is kind of, like getting a power outage in the middle a bake or the middle of a prep. We’re prepping dough, and then we have nowhere to safely put it. We do have a small generator for the fridge. Once you have it in the sheet trays, you can’t really fit everything in the in the shelves of the fridge, so it’s a little bit overwhelming sometimes and you end up losing a lot of ingredients and time—and personal time, too, because you end up having to use personal time getting more ingredients; you end up using a lot of your personal funds, too, because it’s a lot of money just to buy ingredients here. Everything is so expensive nowadays, and then the power is still super expensive. We barely have power sometimes. Like, it’s just like a game: Are we gonna have power this week to cover what we’ve lost?”
bonus thing to watch/hear: Shit’s Totally FUCKED! What Can We Do? by Dean Spade and Ciro Carrillo
I’m such a huge fan of Dean Spade’s work around mutual aid. Recently he shared a clip of this video that he and Ciro Carrillo created a few years back. The less-spicy version of the same video, “What is Mutual Aid?” is also great for any audience that want to avoid swearing.
“The messages of this work are: government is fucked, we can’t rely on it; you are not alone; the system is the problem not the person being targeted by it; and we’re gonna take matters into our own hands and help each other survive right now rather than expecting help from the same systems that have a clear history of causing harm.”
josh
my name is josh martinez. i have always loved trying to understand systems, and the systems that built those systems. i spend a lot of time thinking about how to get there from here.
i'm the founder and principal consultant at Future Emergent.
say hello: josh[at]bethefuture.space
