I AM SHIPPING TRASH

my brain at 12:00 am on june 1st:

Pronouns

An accent

Environmental advocacy and the LGBTQ+ rights movement share a common purpose: protecting vulnerable communities, caring for the spaces we all call home, and creating a world where we all can flourish. Our world is brightest when people can live authentically, love freely, and be embraced for who they are. From rainbow reefs to shimmering tides, diversity makes our blue planet stronger, healthier, and more inspiring.

And body autonomy does include things that you don’t personally like either. I was prompted to write this post after a series of bad takes from progressives, but one of them was re-hashing the Sabrina Carpenter album cover drama with “I don’t think it’s conservative of me to think that the album cover is a bad look when we’ve seen images of women being abused in this way” because I do actually think you’ve failed to understand feminism by projecting your morals onto a woman who was consensually expressing her own autonomy just because she expressed it in a way that you didn’t like or that made you uncomfortable.

Body autonomy also means unhealthy choices. Body autonomy also means regret rates. Body autonomy also means freedom of sexuality. Body autonomy also means mutilation. If you believe body autonomy has limitations and exceptions, then your feminism is most likely surface level.

It’s like a sort of … feeling that the world is bigger than you, and very complicated, and filled with things you’d never expect.  It’s not exactly “skepticism,” and not exactly “humility.”  It’s compatible with having a high view of oneself or one’s intellect, though not with certain versions of those things.  It’s compatible with strong and numerous opinions, too, though not with certain ways of having strong and numerous opinions.

It’s having your most instinctive response to the world be “this is billions of distinct things; this is jeweled chaos; this is a buzzing, blooming confusion.”  And then you make models and concepts to try to make some sense of it.  Sometimes you become quite attached to them.  Sometimes maybe too attached.  But if you become too attached it’s not because you think your concepts are reality.  It’s because you feel you’ll be so terribly lost without them.

When I try to think of the opposite of this temperament I think of those sorts of political or culture bloggers who are never surprised by anything, who always respond to every news story with “oh, look, more of the thing I know about, doing the things I know it does.”  It’s not that these people are too political, or too certain.  It’s that their politics and certainty doesn’t feel like a lifeboat they’re clinging to in a vast roiling ocean.  They give off the impression of not seeing the ocean.

And lots of things follow from this.  You have to find ways of living with this ever-present sense – sometimes dulled, but never gone – that reality is too large, grotesquely large, that you’ll never find your way in it.  So you learn to revel in it a bit, to become an eclectic, an amateur, collecting and admiring little bits of jeweled chaos.  You collect #quotes.  You learn to laugh when you see something you don’t understand, so that you don’t instead despair.

You feel wary about systems, you feel wary about things that are top-down and a priori.  You like data.  But not in the sense of “the data is in”; not in the sense that we have measured, so now we know, and now no one can ever question again.  But you are always worrying that you are missing the forest for the trees, because there are so many trees, too many, too many.  You distrust the single event, the dramatic example, because you know that reality has room for everything, because you have enough such specimens pinned and mounted in your collection to prove any claim or its negation.  You want the species, not the specimen – but you feel deep down that that has to be hubris, because all you see are specimens, and the great whirling confusion laughs at your taxonomies.

I am a social worker. I have worked in community mental health and in home-based healthcare. And it is much, much easier for me to help you when the situation you're in is not yet a full-blown crisis.

"I'm out of money and have been for a while and now I haven't eaten for three days." This is a crisis. A crisis where I'm likely going to have to put you in the car and take you to the nearest food bank--except food banks require appointments now, and the next opening is in four days, so you're staring down the barrel of a week with no food. That's obviously not going to work, so, let's call eight different food banks until we've found one that has an appointment the next day...except it's in the neighboring county and you can't drive. So now I'm calling your doctor to try and brow beat an emergency plan of care update out of him so I can come back the next day and drive you to the food bank. And we haven't even started on the "constantly broke" part of the problem.

"I don't think I have enough food to make it to my next paycheck. I have (xyz) in my house and that will only last until (date)." This is bad, but not a crisis. We have a few days. We make you an appointment at the food bank and contact your brother to make sure you have a ride there. Now we can spend our visit talking about what bills are causing you the most problems and make a jump on a long-term solution, like looping in a community action agency to cover your utilities and getting you an OTC card from Medicaid to cover some of your groceries every month.

"I'm ten months behind on rent, and my landlord said I have a week to get out, or the cops will throw me out. I don't have the money, and if I get evicted, I have nowhere to go." This is a crisis. Every single thing we do here is going to be some version of a Hail Mary. In Michigan, we have the state emergency relief fund for rent issues, but process time is well over one week. There are community action agencies that we can call to assist you with payment, but they are unlikely to have sufficient funds to cover nearly a year of back rent. We can contact legal aid clinics to try and prevent your landlord from evicting you, but they may look at your case and determine that too much "fault" lies with you. Most likely, I'm going to have to put you in touch with homeless shelters and the public housing office.

"I'm two months behind on rent and I don't think I'll be able to pay next month either." This is bad, but not a crisis. This is solvable. We have time to apply for SER, or put you in contact with community action agencies. We have time to review your finances and see if you qualify for a public housing wait list or other forms of ongoing rental assistance. We have time to talk about a million possible adjustments to try and ease the burden of your rent.

"I am the sole caregiver for my elderly parent who has dementia and is emotionally volatile and fully dependent on me. I have not slept through the night in weeks and I have not had an actual break for over a year. I am having screaming meltdowns multiple times a week and I am threatening self-harm unless someone comes to collect my parent and take over all caregiver duties." This is a crisis. This is a crisis where the ethical code of my profession demands that I call 911 and report the conversation to them. They will likely come to the house and interview you. If they determine your threats were serious, they will have you forcibly committed to a psych ward. Your parent will either be dumped into a random hospital or rehab center, or left in the house on their own. Upon release from your psych hold, you will be expected to resume caregiving duties as though nothing happened. Except, now, adult protective services is actively investigating you, because it was determined you may be an ongoing danger to your parent.

"I am the sole caregiver for my demented parent, and I have not had a break in a couple of weeks, and I feel angry and weepy most of the time." This is bad, but not a crisis. We can get you in touch with volunteer groups for respite, and apply for state funded programs to get more day-to-day help, and talk about long-term planning for when the dementia symptoms get worse. We can get you the phone numbers for crisis lines and enroll you in a support group.