2024-12-16 23:45:00
“My brain couldn’t stop me, so that tiny but mighty intestinal diverticulum did.” Brilliant and important piece from Shannon Mattern about burnout, but more importantly, about how systems of exploitation and abuse are created and recreated. Mattern is writing about academia, but as is so often the case, I think the experiences she describes are likely familiar in many other contexts. The whole thing is worth reading but I’ll call attention to two points: one, that bodies have a way of making decisions for you in those moments when your mind is unable or unwilling to do so. (I’ve written of my own body’s intervention, and I know many others with similar stories.) And two, refusing to care is its own kind of harm. Mattern admits to being short on solutions but I think she hints at one framework for thinking about them: abolition, not as refusal or elimination, but as a practice of cultivating new worlds—one experimental step at a time.
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2024-12-03 05:36:00
“I said at the beginning that culture is the norms and values of a community. Thankfully we’re mostly past the collective delusion that work is family, but a workplace is still made up of people, and it is still a community of relationships. This community can also be a network of care if you let it.” Great talk (with transcript!) from Jenny Zhang about the values of work—not what values work brings to us but what values we bring to work. And also what it means to hold those values in place even as so many other forces and systems—racial, patriarchal capitalism chief among them—attempt to wring them from our hands.
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2024-11-27 21:14:00
Very excited to share that applications are now open for the speculative fiction work/shop! This five-week program is for anyone who feels stuck and unfulfilled in their work and who wants to open up some space to imagine different futures. If your work feels like it’s at a dead end, if you’re struggling to imagine what comes next, if you want space to think both differently and in community—this is for you. If you have any questions about the application process, or the work/shop itself, please don’t hesitate to reach out.
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2024-11-26 20:53:00
MANY READERS will recognize the sinking feeling when you realize that some of the work you’ve undertaken not only won’t earn you any credit but may even hurt your chances of advancement. This is true of people of all genders, but especially so among those on the minoritized end of the gender spectrum, as women, femme, and trans folks are more likely to take on the kind of care work that is both essential to a functioning team and yet routinely derogated and dismissed. Often when I talk to folks, they describe tackling this work with enthusiasm and even gratitude, and only later discover the ways it may come to hurt them; that discovery is itself experienced as a harm, and it feels like it, too, with all the pain, frustration, rage, and sadness that follows.
The work I’m referring to here is sometimes called “glue” work for the ways it holds a team together, but I’m going to go with calling it “care work” as I think at the end of the day that’s what it does: care work cares for the people on the team, and seeks to meet their needs so that they can do good work. Care work in the workplace includes things like organizing team lunches, mentoring less experienced colleagues, and coordinating informal consensus-based decisions. It also includes making and updating documentation, facilitating healthy conflict (and diffusing the unhealthy kind), and advising a colleague about the tricks for navigating a fraught HR process. Critically, it also includes things like initiating conversations about a union, modeling how to step back when you need a break, or organizing your peers to protest an unethical business contract.
Look over that list and you will immediately see why this work rarely appears on any career ladder, why it’s never part of a promotion packet, and why it often barely goes acknowledged. Care work supports the team, of course—we have decades of data to show that teams that care about each other are going to outperform teams that don’t, one hundred percent of the time. But that’s just the thing—care work supports the team, it serves the people. It acknowledges that the work is only possible with the consent and care of the people doing the work. Alas, very few organizations are brave enough to reflect that fact in their career ladders, as doing so would be to acknowledge workers’ own power.
Where does that leave the people who do this work? Many times I’ve listened as someone says they realize the work they’re doing to support the team not only isn’t going to be rewarded, but may actively work against them. “My manager says I’m great at keeping the team together, but I haven’t delivered as much as my peers this quarter,” is a common refrain. Of course, such a tale fails to take into account that her peers were able to ship so much because of the efforts she made to help them understand each other—efforts that may not have been reciprocated. But that’s not one of the ten criteria her manager is required to mark, so it doesn’t count towards a promotion. The conversation at this point often winds around to the possibility that she has to stop doing this work because it’s hurting her career.
To which, I have two questions: the first is, what’s the cost of stopping? Maybe she took up this work reflexively, without really thinking on it, and now she can see that she doesn’t really want to be doing it, or that it’s not really worth the effort. In which case, by all means, she should stop. Likewise, maybe this is energy better spent in other venues—in her community or neighborhood, where the work will be welcomed rather than challenged. But more often than not when I ask this question, I hear a sigh or see someone’s shoulders drop, as they feel the effect of letting it go. As the realization that not doing this work would cut themselves off from something that matters to them, would inflict another kind of harm, one even less legible to the system but just as painful to the heart.
There’s a kind of pathologizing of care at work here, an effort to define care—the regular acts of kindness, outreach, and support, alongside the effort to work across differences—as unhealthy, inefficient, not aligned with business goals. The reverse is true, of course; teams without care inevitably falter. But the systems most of us operate in are designed to isolate us, to make us fearful of our own power, to keep us narrowly focused on our own careers instead of imagining what’s possible when we’re all in on things together.
What if we didn’t allow our need to care for each other to be pathologized and diminished? What if we saw that care as a source of power and possibility? What if caring for each other is the most important work that we do, every day?
The second question I like to ask is: who else can do this with you? Care work needs good workers, not martyrs. And good workers work together. If you’re doing this work alone, who can you invite in to work alongside you? And if you’re not doing this work—if you’re merely benefiting from it—where can you join in? It’s certainly the case that some people will not take up this work, even if you ask them to. They’ve been taught that doing this work is beneath them and they haven’t interrogated that teaching; or they are too overburdened as it is, and just don’t have the spoons. But in my experience, most people want to be in a position to care for others, want to be useful, and not only in career-ladder legible ways.
I’ve seen it argued that we ought not to care for our colleagues, ought not to make friends at work, because it exposes us to harm. We’ve all learned, some of us the hard way, that organizations will exploit the friendship and camaraderie that develops on a team, given the chance. But again, what’s the cost of not caring? And what if the story of exploitation is only the half of it? Caring for your colleagues—caring for anyone—makes you vulnerable. But it also makes you human, and alive, and aware of your own collective power, capable of not only standing up to that harm but of building new worlds. And at the end of the day, the only path to a better world is the one we make together.
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2024-11-13 02:21:00
ONE OF MY FAVORITE WAYS of being with my clients is when the dialogue suddenly time travels into the future. You can almost feel it when it’s about to happen. A tale of a frustrated interaction with a colleague or a terrible edict from the C-suite starts to slow down, and there’s an almost furtive moment when something else pops up—like a little furred creature cautiously peeking their head up above the grass to see what’s out there. If we can hold the space, if we can keep from frightening the messenger back into their den, we may notice something new and interesting out past the treetops, off towards the horizon, where the sun is just now lighting up the space ahead.
I know that moment has worked when the storytelling shifts from what has happened to what might happen in the future. I know we’re getting to the good stuff if what might happen is something wild and seemingly impossible but also specific, something that we don’t usually give ourselves permission to dream about: their organization converting to worker ownership, joining up with their favorite coworkers to start a small business together, taking over that vacant lot down the street and building a community studio, opening a hardware store or a garden shop or an oyster farm.
Those stories aren’t necessarily useful for their plausibility—in the moments when they show up, they are often anything but. Rather, they are useful because they expose some want or desire, one that has probably been kept under lock and key, too dangerous to be let out into the world. We’re wont to tuck our greatest longings away because then we can’t be hurt when they don’t come true. But left untended, those longings can sicken us, they can fester and rot and poison the ground around us. Warded up, the little creature becomes huge and monstrous, armed with tooth and claw, and the labor needed to guard the doors and keep the walls high drains our energy, leaves us exhausted and weary and sad. Our dreams need light and air to breathe and heal, just as we do.
It seems especially difficult to let our dreams out into the world these days. It seems radical to dream at all. But curtailing our dreams in the face of authoritarianism is to obey in advance; it is to relinquish our right to good lives and good work—work that makes change in the world, that serves the needs of the living—before anyone so much as raises a fist to stop us. We may not be able to bring our dreams into the world unharmed. We may have to accept that some of our dreams will be carried not only by us, but by the next generation, and the next after that. But we cannot build towards a future that we cannot imagine. We need to lift our heads up, to see the light on the horizon, to remember that the future is always and forever undiscovered and uncertain—and where there is uncertainty there is also the potential for change.
The thing is that once we let those dreams out, they become a source of energy instead of a drain. Even if they aren’t reachable in their original form—or if we can recognize the escapist fantasy that lurks within—releasing them gives us room to play with them, to converse, to let them shapeshift into something like a direction or intention, the next experimental step. Rather than a caged and dangerous beast, they become a willing and capable sidekick, with all manner of magical powers and enchanted amulets to help us on our way.
All of which is to say, starting early next year, I’m going to gather a small group of people to time travel together. Using the mode of speculative fiction, we’ll write about our work, and then reflect with fellow workers and time travelers about what that writing tells us about our environment, needs, fears, commitments, and dreams of the future. We’ll use storytelling to unlock those long-hidden hopes and release their power to get unstuck in the present—to better understand what work means to us and how we might learn to shape it and shift it in new directions, both in the stories we tell and in the ways those stories manifest in the world. Together, we’ll make space to let our dreams out into the clear, bright sun and learn what incantations and spells and secret passageways they’ve been holding for us all this time.
The first group will begin in late January 2025. Space will be very limited, so get on the waitlist if you want to be the first to know when applications open up.
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2024-11-06 21:36:00
I sent the following note to my current clients this morning, and a few of them asked me to share it more widely, so here it is:
Hi friends,
The news is grim. I want to share two things that have been helpful for me and others on similarly dark days.
First, as you have oft heard from me, grief needs space and attention. Refusing to grieve is like wrapping a wound too tight—it can’t heal without light and air. We need to acknowledge it, to listen to what it’s telling us, to be patient with it. To accept it.
The same is true for fear.
Second, the work is still the work. Even if we had better news this morning, there would still be work to do. There’s the work that brings in wages so we can care for ourselves and our kin, there’s the work in our neighborhoods and communities, the work of our art. All of it is still with us; much of it will be even more critical in the days ahead. And much of that work is truly life-giving, not only in that it creates the conditions for life but that it allows us to use our gifts, to see the change we can make in the world around us. However frightened and sad we are today (and I assure you, I am both of those things!), there’s work that needs doing in the world and we are the ones to do it.
Rest up and take care today, in whatever way feels right to you.
With love and solidarity,
mandy
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