A bit of context: I write in my journal a lot, and have since I was 10. I often like to go back and re-read past journals to see if I said anything personally noteworthy. Sometimes I tap back into ways of thinking that were helpful, and that I want to revisit and continue. The excerpt I’m posting today was written the end of March, when the pandemic experience was still relatively new. It was also prior to the sudden death of a very dear relative, which changed my outlook dramatically at the beginning of June. I developed a second layer of “before and after”, so it’s interesting to go back into that first layer and see how I was thinking.
3/31/20: Already, for the last few years, I’d been trying to examine the system of valuation I was raised into, and this process continues in the midst of, and highlighted from various angles by, the pandemic. (Everything is now framed in terms of “before this”, and whether certain lifestyles pre-existed this situation or not. This is another reason writing has been difficult: everyone’s lens on oneself is now distorted in some way by the current, somewhat inconceivable, reality. And so to continue any prior current of self-examination, we have to make adjustments, calibrations to account for slippage of reality.) However, the pandemic seems to be mainly exaggerating things I was previously aware of and questioning. All the more reason to continue.
So, walking around outside my house spinning, I was thinking about the innumerable forms of valuation that come into our daily lives, and to what extent this grows out of a culture of measuring, comparing, competing, seeking productivity. Now, possibly more than before, there is a sense of needing to account for our time, to give evidence (on social media especially) of the things we are doing, which have accompanying valuations of healthy/not healthy, active/lazy, stressful/relaxing - along with the subtler nuance that distinguishes between indulgence and “self care.” It’s as if there is a spreadsheet (some actually have them, or bullet journals) that list and account the actions and inactions and where they fall within the overall plan for how to live. What I’m noticing is that while I can see this to some extent objectively, I have also internalized it, and part of my mind is weighing and valuing in spite of my resistance to it.
There must be a term for this in the context of feminism or other struggles - the attempt to resist the system from within it, which is ultimately ineffective because the system itself has to be exited. One has to step out of the self-perpetuating cycle, and to extract its residue from one’s own way of thinking….
In concrete terms, I was thinking that if someone can report, “I went for a walk,” it carries more value than to say I was wandering around my yard spinning and standing there looking at things. But what this means is we have, in focusing on currency and valuation, we have taken away the value of that which cannot be valued. I already knew this, I’ve thought about it for ages re: textiles - the inherent benefits in an activity are diminished as soon as one tries to commodify them. And it’s this very effort, this idea that it even needs to be measured, valued, etc, that eats away like acid at people’s capacity to engage with the immeasurable.
(weaving content also posted, on this page)