Joss: Desire is a powerful thing. For me, it can be hard to tell the difference between attachment, and some of its constellating synonyms: yearning, dissatisfaction, imagination, devotion, care, or just plain wanting. We’re attached to ourselves, we’re attached to others, we’re attached to certain imaginings of how we want the world to be. We want things. And far as … Continued
Joss: We are interdependent creatures whether we want to be or not (and sometimes, we really do not). We may not have a choice over whether we are connected to people (and creatures, environs, political structures, god-knows-what-else) but we do have some choice about how we connect with them. Mutual aid is about “imagin[ing] and build[ing] ways of eating, communicating, sheltering, … Continued
Joss: Our brains My brain really doesn’t seem to like uncertainty. It can be threatening. And to do its (very important) job of keeping me (mostly) sane and alive, I have a tendency to become hyper-vigilant about invisible threats. Given this is so, it can be hard to turn towards the mysterious or the unknown. And yet, … Continued
Joss: Pleasure seems to be receding into the faraway horizon, and then all of a sudden, it’s close again for a moment. Pleasure seems to be something we can be open to, but not something we can force or control. And is there pleasure in opening ourselves to a wider range of feeling, including “bad” feelings. … Continued
Joss: I’ve been thinking about how difference becomes stigmatized, how uniqueness becomes an exclusion, and how the world we’re in weighs heavily on our experiences of our own psychology. I’m borrowing a page from disability studies’ distinction between an impairment (which are the variations and limits we have), and a disability (which is a consequential social- construction … Continued