Nimue Brown's Blog, page 117

The fall of Colston

All four defendants on trial for taking down the statue of Colston in Bristol have been acquitted. Not because they didn’t do it, but because taking down that statue was the right thing to do. Of course there’s a howling backlash from people who think this means anarchy, or the end of history. I have thoughts.

The Colston statue wasn’t an historic artifact from the time Colston was alive. It was put up far later. It didn’t record history, it hid the colonial, slaving violence that was part of Colston’s actual story. He was not a nice man, putting up a statue to commemorate him distorts the real story. History itself is not harmed by taking him down. Further, at this point he’s on his side in a museum with information about both him and his statue, so overall this has led to more history, not less of it.

I’m not a Bristol person, but I live close enough to have been to The Colston Hall as a child. I had no idea what the name meant. Thanks to the toppling of the statue, I now know a lot more about Bristol and Colston history than I did.

History is written by the victors. It’s a story about the past, the selected highlights that someone wants to focus on. It may be a story that tells us who we are or that encourages us to believe certain things about ourselves. Celebrating Colston is the story that goes with colonialism and making heroes out of people who are rich because they do such a fine and sustained job of exploiting others. Toppling Colston gives us a new story, and right now it’s a story about exposing the grim truth, community solidarity and being better people moving forward.

Right now, the victors who get to write the story are people who don’t want to whitewash the history of slavery, or excuse the ‘great white men’ that we’ve previously celebrated. This works for me. I don’t want to be part of a culture whose touchstone for celebrating people is that they be white rich men. I think we need to talk a lot more about how certain people, and certain families manage to accumulate so much wealth. It isn’t their own hard work, that’s for sure. Contemporary wealth is often built on the backs of historical slaves, on the backs of colonised people past and present, on the backs of exploited workers, and with the materials taken from the earth with no care for the lives, landscape and ecosystems destroyed in the pursuit of profit.

Work as a coping mechanism

I’ve always turned to work as a way of coping. That can mean paid work, volunteering, housework or making things. It’s something I can put between me and the teeth, and the teeth are very sharp and have been with me my whole life.

The theory is that if I can make enough, do enough, be good enough then I can stay out of the teeth. It doesn’t work, and I know it doesn’t work, but I’ve never found anything that does. The problem with working as a coping mechanism is that it can add to the exhaustion and make things worse. I’d be better off with some sense of worth that doesn’t depend on doing stuff, or being validated for doing stuff but I’ve never figured out how to have that. Self help articles and books are all about increasing your self esteem, not how to start from scratch.

I suspect the trick is to have a sense of self and self worth rooted in who you are, not what you do. It’s just that I’ve never felt intrinsically good enough. It’s hard to imagine feeling good enough without having to be useful, helpful or productive. I’m also no sort of ornament.

It also doesn’t help that every single thing I might do to try and keep myself out of the teeth depends on confidence. The worse things are, the harder it is to believe that I can do anything to offset it. The more in pain I am the less able I am to feel or appreciate any wins I might achieve.

It’s not a good way to be. But here we are, and I can still write blog posts,so there’s something.

Health crisis, mental health crisis

I’ve been seeing a lot of comments from medical professionals all around the world – that they can’t cope emotionally or psychologically with what’s being demanded of them.

We forget at our peril that humans are finite creatures. No one can work all the hours there are, indefinitely, without consequences. We’ve asked our doctors and nurses to hold the front line against a disease that kills, and that is more likely to kill you if you get a high exposure to it. Many of them have died. We’ve asked them to work without the proper protective equipment – especially in the UK. Also in the UK we’ve declined to pay them properly so that nurses can end up at food banks.

People become mentally ill when too much is asked of them for too long. Even people who expect their jobs to involve death and distress can only handle a finite amount of that. 

Exhaustion, burn out, overwhelming fear, and unbearable pressure can have an array of impacts on a person. It becomes harder to make yourself move or to act. Decision making becomes harder, even impossible. Every situation becomes overwhelming and impossible. Clearly it’s not possible to keep doing a job where you need to think quickly and act decisively to save lives if you can barely function. And yet that’s exactly what we’re expecting people to do.

At the beginning of the pandemic we were talking about slowing the curve, because there are only so many beds and ventilators out there, and if we have too fast a spread we’ll overload the system and people will die. If we overload people, that also matters.

All too often,mental health is treated either as a luxury, or as a problem for people who are just weak to begin with. Everyone has a breaking point. There is only so much stress, pressure, misery and exhaustion that any one human can take. We’re approaching the two year mark with covid and it’s amazing really that so many people in the medical profession have held up for so long in face of all this.

But they can’t do it forever. 

We need to recognise the humanity of our medical professionals, and that we have asked too much, and we need to do what we can not to end up in hospital. We’re all in this together, we are all impacted by each other’s individual choices, but we’re asking one group of people to bear the brunt of the consequences. And then, ill and unvaccinated, the most selfish amongst us show at the hospital expecting to be helped by the very people they’ve accused of genocide, sometimes while shouting abuse and demanding miracles. 

I don’t have any large scale answers to this, but as individuals we can at least try not to be part of the problem, and to be kind to the people we hope will save our lives.

Winter Fungi

I am usually most alert to fungi in the autumn, but they appear all year round and this winter has brought me some gorgeous tree fungi.

These are wonderfully velvety. I also love the brightness of the moss. Apparently having a lot of things growing on trees is a sign of rainforest, and you can get cold, deciduous rainforest in the UK.

Light passing through the body of a fungi

Growing in the crook of a tree! Again I loved how these were catching the light, and the contrast with the bark and ivy.

Healthy Planet – a review

This is a really striking book and well worth your time.

The first section deals with how reality works – the science is quite intense but if you are an intelligent and determined reader, you’ll keep up even if it isn’t your area of expertise. What really struck me about this section is the deliberate choice of emotionally engaged language when talking about the building blocks and systems of the natural world. It made me realise that our ‘objective’ language is a choice and one that often serves to alienate us from whatever we’re talking about. This first section would make a powerful spiritual text for animists.

The second section really digs into the issues facing the world. It isn’t easy or comfortable reading. Part of the problem of course is that no one really wants to face up to massive, terrifying almost unimaginable threat levels, which is part of how we got into this mess in the first place and a real barrier to fixing things. Taking the time to educate yourself is a meaningful thing that you can do to contribute. Be prepared to be afraid. Embrace your grief, know what you have lost, and carry that knowledge. Use it to push back against business-as-usual.

Throughout the second section, there are prompts for things you can do or explore, so it’s not a disempowering read. The author is clear that it is worth acting and that we must not ignore the problems facing us. Political change will depend on creating a context that pushes politicians to act, and that’s on us.

This is a book primarily about climate chaos, but it’s not simply about CO2. There’s a serious look at the issues around methane, and an exploration of different kinds of pollution and the impact that has. We damage ecosystems in multiple ways and all of them need scaling back as a matter of some urgency. Light pollution only gets a brief mention – but at least it’s in there!

This is not an easy read, but it is well worth your time and attention.

More about the book here – https://www.johnhuntpublishing.com/moon-books/our-books/earth-spirit-healthy-planet

Doing it for money

Living by creative work is a bit of a gamble, to say the least. Most of my working life I’ve had other jobs on the go as well – often also in publishing, because marketing and editing pay more reliably than writing does.

I spent this last year mostly working on my own stuff, when I wasn’t being horribly ill. Given the many rounds of being horribly ill, it’s as well I wasn’t trying to do much else! But, I gambled on a couple of things and it hasn’t worked out. This happens. Opportunities melt away, or turn out not to be as good as they looked. Currently the entire book industry is being sorely challenged by distribution issues, paper shortages and whatnot, especially in America. Royalty payments are down, because American book sales are really low right now.

What you earn as an author tends to depend on work you’ve done in previous years, and there’s often no knowing how long it will take for the work to lead to money. One of the advantages of self publishing is that you get the work out and sell it. Big publishers move slowly and can take years to make decisions. Graphic novels are slow to make, so the books we’re working on were first drafted ten years ago. With the series complete, that set of books will be more interesting to other publishers, and Sloth may be able to pitch it on – but who knows?

Once upon a time, I wrote a novel in six weeks because someone offered me something like a thousand pounds to do it, and that’s more money than I’d ever made from writing before that point. By the end of it, I had days where I was mostly just shaking and crying – multiple drafts of an 80k novel is a lot to do in six weeks and I didn’t sleep much. I didn’t do another one. I couldn’t have sustained it, although it turned out that my first husband thought I should have done.

I gambled and lost, this year. I lost money on an event where I really needed to come out ahead. Everything has been slower than I needed it to be. Releases are delayed. Various projects have been hit with problems and some things I’ve just had to rethink. Meanwhile energy costs, and food costs are set to rise. I have a safety net, but it’s finite, and shrinking. 

I spent New Year’s eve looking at local employment possibilities. I’ve done all kinds of work along the way, I have no qualms about jumping back in – shelf stacker or dinner lady maybe. My skills aren’t much use for conventional employment outside of publishing, I don’t have a car, and that means I’m pretty much obliged to look at minimum wage jobs if I can’t get the writing based work to pay. At one point a few years ago I was doing half a dozen small jobs to make ends meet, and it was tough. So, I was bracing myself to get back into all of that.

Much to my surprise, I find that instead I’m going to be writing a novel to a tight deadline and for a flat fee. I’ve got three books to read as a matter of some urgency, and I’m going to be flat out for the next eight to ten weeks. So if the blog is a bit brief, or sporadic, this will be why. But it will pay better than being a traffic warden, and I was going to have to lie on that application about how well I handle aggression and conflict situations…

That resolution thing

One of the good things about making resolutions in a blog post is it being easy to check back and see how the previous year went. I can’t find last year’s, I may not have made any, it was a very tough winter for me and I was not in a good place.

This year I find myself in the awkward place of needing to re-make a resolution from some years ago. I need to get my body to the point where I can spend a couple of hours doing things. I managed to build up to that, previously. For the last 18 months or so I’ve been relentlessly ill in assorted ways, and currently I can walk for about half an hour on a good day. To get into town and back I need to take a rest in the middle. I can’t climb the hills. The impact on my life and on my mental health has been huge. I’m hoping to get enough time when I’m not ill so that I can rebuild.

I have a fundamental need to be able to pour myself, heart and soul, into things in a way that is meaningful. If I can’t give of myself wholeheartedly, it takes a toll. If all I do is pour from myself into other things/projects/people I can end up burned out and emotionally depleted – this is pretty much my default state these days. I’m not ok at the moment because I’m not giving enough of myself in a meaningful way. I’m not able to give because I’m feeling threadbare and desperately depleted. I need to find some space, or spaces, where more comes back to me, and where I can afford to have my heart on my sleeve. Right now I have no idea how that might be going to work, but I really need to find some answers to this.

As ever, I hope to learn new things this year. I hope to make things, to use less, to improve my relationship with the planet. I hope to do things I can feel good about. I want to invite joy and comfort into my life, I don’t have enough of either at the moment and I’ve felt that lack deeply. Walking was key to how I experienced and connected with the land, and the loss of that has deprived me of beauty and nourishment. Lockdown has deprived me of music. I’m missing too many of the things that enable me to feel like myself. Currently I’m not sure what I can build, or rebuild, or reclaim and I have no idea who I will be doing that with or in what way. I’m waiting to see who opts in.

I’m a relational creature, I don’t function well on my own. Most of the things I most want to do involve interacting with other people. Much depends on who wants to do what. 

Reading resolutions

I don’t track how many books I read in a year. Often my reading is pretty random, and informed by who wants a review from me. Sometimes I just go to the library and pick up random stuff I know nothing about. However, this last year I’ve been being a little more organised and as a result have come up with some reading goals.

I’m working my way through Jane Austin’s books. So far I’ve read Emma, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Persuasion. I’m aiming to get Northanger Abbey and Mansfield Park in the coming year. There’s an unfinished novel that I probably won’t explore.

I’m also working my way through the Brontes. I’ve already read Jane Eyre, Shirley, Villette, Wuthering Heights, Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. I have The Professor to go.

I’m planning to work my way through EM Forster’s novels. So far I’ve read A Room With A View and A Passage to India, leaving me Where Angels Fear to Tread, The Longest Journey, Howards End, and Maurice.

Last year I read the first part of the Japanese epic-classic – The Tale of Genji – I aim to read the rest of it, although I’m not expecting to manage that next year.

Otherwise my intention is to broaden my reading and pick up more classics in translation. Particularly with an eye to reading more classics that aren’t European in origin.

Being an ally – do they know it’s Christmastime at all?

I think we all want to feel like we’re good and valuable people. Unfortunately around allyship this can mean being moved to do entirely unhelpful things. Ostensibly we rock up as allies because we want to help, but often what we do instead is put ourselves centre stage instead. It can also result in treating the people who need to be ‘saved’ like they’re inferior, and genuinely need us to save them.

If this is an unfamiliar concept, I invite you to listen carefully to what’s going on in this song (or read the subtitles) – how inaccurate and patronising it is, and how it centres the idea of rescue and doesn’t talk about international debt, exploitation of resources or the legacy of colonialism, for example.

I could spend a whole blog post deconstructing this song line by line because there’s so much that’s wrong with it.

It doesn’t really work if you’re showing up because you want a pat on the back. Being the guy that women reassure is a good guy. Being the white person who is affirmed by black people as not being the problem. Being the straight person the gays think is ok… there’s nothing weird about wanting praise and affirmation, it’s just this is a really unhelpful way to go about it. The result is putting pressure on people to stroke your ego, rather than doing anything to solve the problems they face.

Good allyship looks like talking about how we change things and flagging up issues in systems that cause oppression. It looks like educating people who are like you so as to spare the people you are supporting from having to keep doing that. Which may look like explaining about pronouns, or why it isn’t cool to touch other people’s hair without permission, or that catcalling isn’t a compliment, and so forth. Sharing content from people who are affected by an issue, and undertaking to learn from them about the issue is all good work to be doing.

It’s important to avoid speaking for people or over people – the balance can be delicate around avoiding this, while educating people like you. Care and attention are required. It is vital not to patronise the people you are supposed to be helping. Discretion is also important – if being an ally involves sharing the private details of people you’re supposedly helping, you aren’t much of an ally. I’ve seen this one done, and it’s very much about centering the ‘activist’. Again, there are balances to strike here, because stories can be educational, and talking about what you’re doing can be a good way of getting others engaged with an issue. But, keep a close eye on who and what is centre stage, and what the story is for. If you’re telling stories about how you go round heroically saving disabled people… you are the problem not the solution.

One of the most useful things a person can do is look at their own involvement in things that exclude, or are unfair and unjust. That tends to be uncomfortable. It means looking at your own complicity, and at how you might benefit indirectly from privilege. But, this is key to levelling the playing field. Wanting to ride in, the glorious knight on horseback here to save the day is part of the normal desires many of us have to feel special, powerful and important. But when we do that, we only empower ourselves.

It’s not your job to feed the world. Better to stop doing the things that contribute to hunger in the first place.

How to change things

Knocking people down is easy. Knocking people down to make yourself look good is really easy, and a low effort ego-boost if you aren’t careful. So, please hear me as tongue in cheek as I mention how those other people are doing it wrong, blogging their complaints about the greed and selfishness of others while I have the moral high ground over here talking about the importance of bigging people up.

Anger and frustration are entirely natural emotional responses. There’s certainly plenty out there to get angry with, and nothing wrong with feeling it. No emotion is wrong. But, we then get a lot of choices around what we do in response to any given emotion. Knocking someone else down can feel like power. It can feel like taking a significant, meaningful action. However, politics in recent years has demonstrated that often when you try to knock people down, they’re more likely to dig in with their position. Feeling humiliated and got-at doesn’t tend to bring out the best in people.

There are a lot of stories out there in which evil characters do evil things because they are evil. It’s one of the most unhelpful stories we habitually tell each other. People do things for reasons, and at the time they tend to think their reasons are good ones, or justified, or necessary. When people seem to be acting badly, it’s worth stepping back and asking what might be underpinning that. Often the roots can be found in fear – we live in insecure societies with most people in debt and a paycheck or two from utter disaster. Individual coping mechanisms for this can often add to the problems as well as distracting from them. Scared people seldom make good choices.

As social creatures, humans are motivated by the approval of others. When this goes wrong, it can drive a person deeper into the embrace of a toxic relationship, or for that matter, a toxic community. If everyone else is calling you stupid, you’re going to cling that bit harder to the people who tell you that you’re very clever. Cults and conspiracy theories alike thrive on this.

Knocking people down doesn’t reliably persuade them that you are right. But it does fuel the kind of anxiety that pushes people towards the things that offer them apparent uplift. A lot of populist politics depend on this. It doesn’t help that money, and the display of money through rampant consumerism is one of the few routes most people are offered towards being socially respected. It’s a precarious path, and it doesn’t get the majority where they want to be so it feeds resentment and dissatisfaction as well.

If we want to make real change – socially or environmentally – we have to persuade people to engage. People who feel belittled by a minority aren’t going to step away from a culture that promises to reward them for being selfish. It is essential to lift and inspire people rather than just criticising them. We’re all flawed, we all have things we do badly and competitive virtue signalling isn’t reliably virtuous. When it comes to making change in the world, I feel strongly that kindness and compassion are the key virtues to cultivate. Even if you do that primarily to try and impress people with your performance, it still works. If everyone is trying to perform kindness, we can get some good things done.

Kindness and compassion do not require us to be uncritical, but presentation can make a lot of odds. It’s possible to dismantle ideas without attacking people, and I think it gets more done to offer people ways of feeling better about themselves.