Liberation: I will be the beneficiary of my surplus labor.
I have a deeply ingrained fear of exhaustion, which has co-existed quite easily with deep physical and emotional exhaustion. If you don’t see things and name them, you can live with all kinds of contradictions “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that in an essay called The Crack Up, which tells you what you need to know about the sustainability of that kind of intelligence. He couldn’t keep it up past age 39. I’m made of sterner stuff, and have kept it up for an extra decade.
I remember– and have probably written about — my mother’s fear of my exhaustion. She didn’t want me to take algebra in 8th grade, because she’d seen students “staying up with their homework till 1 or 2 o’clock in the morning.” I went to just one high school basketball game as a spectator because my mother worried, “You’ll stay up too late and be tired tomorrow.” Being tired, staying up late… those were violations of the well-regulated life I was supposed to have. To be clear: my mother is lovely, supportive, and kind to me. I have always known that she loves me. She was passing on the skills that helped her survive and navigate the world as a smart girl in a tiny town that couldn’t countenance smart girls, and as the eldest daughter absorbing the shrapnel of my grandparents’ volatile marriage. And just at this minute, I realize she was telling me these things when she was in her early and mid 40s, which is when female exhaustion becomes crushing and un-ignorable. Maybe she was talking to herself.
I used my intelligence and my ability to work fast and efficiently to avoid exhaustion from paid labor. I haven’t and don’t work at my job late into the night or on weekends. My fear of exhaustion is such that I shied away from bigger jobs, because I worried I would be too tired if I took them on, and I had such a deep and subterranean exhaustion from the circumstances of my marriage. This is another white woman record-scratch: I work basically 9-5, and I always have, and some of that is attributable to fear and self-suppression, and some of that is attributable to my emerging belief that most of the ideas and vocabulary that people of my age, race, education, and class have about work are complete bullshit.
Now, today, when I am trying to get out of the wheel recreation business and into the real task of building axles, drivetrains, and roads (my ear and my logical mind are at war there. “Roads, axles, and drivetrains” sounds so much better, but it’s not the logical sequence of building. But maybe “axles, roads and drivetrains” is, and that’s not bad.)… anyway I’m getting out of the wheel business. So why would I spend all of my workday on wheels? Why would I spend more time than I need to competently deliver the wheel that I’ve promised my funders? Actually, I do better stuff than make wheels. I’m making nets, clasps, tents, and ladders, but I’m really good at it and it doesn’t take me a lot of time. Or rather, it’s taken me 25 years I’m not seeking more grants to make more wheels. I’m trying to get hired on to a really good road crew, but it’s taking a while.
Irony: not building wheels and feeling bad about it, not building wheels and looking at Instagram or the New York Times or anything but the truth in front of me, which is that I am so done with wheels, even as truly lovely people around continue to work on theirs, all of that has made me… exhausted!
So liberation is saying, I claim my surplus labor and I translate it back into time to build. While I’m waiting to build roads, I will build worlds with words. Or I will build lamps and spotlights and giant flaming stars to illuminate worlds with words. While no one is watching (or reading — can’t forget that) I can do my real work. Wallace Stevens was an insurance executive — even after he won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry (thanks, Wikipedia). I can test my bold statement that the way we think about work is bullshit by working differently.
shedding, shedding, shedding.
Another Door 