Wealth is not the fruit of labor but the result of organised protected robbery
- Franz Fanon
On my birthday a big swell came in from the north, and the waves arrived in confident, clean peels. The swell would occasionally intersect with a local wave and produce a terrific amplitude, big enough to in turn produce in me a gleeful shudder - the sort of involuntary, swift squeeze of the arms against the torso that can only be born of a painful shard of awe. I was up on the promontory between the big and little beaches with my cup of coffee, in time for the distant sky to move from a clear, theoretical gold directly into the heart of a blue cloud. I walked home with pearls of cloud interior in my hair and stopped beneath the neighbourhood camellia bushes to inspect the glorious progression of rot across the carpet of fallen flowers.
Earlier in June I finished up my run of counselling at the marae. There was no limit on sessions, but I wanted to free up the spot beneath the tree for the next person. I kept the notes that the counsellor asked me to write, on what I wanted to take away from the course of our months together. One note says, “refusing to receive minimising & gaslighting” and another says, “keeping my gut instinct to ask Am I The Asshole?” Somehow I have to do both: offer a tender belly and a strong spine; occupy a kaleidoscopic, cartwheeling relativism one moment then occupy a firm, earned wisdom the next. There’s another thing I only realise now, that I’ll have to add to my stash of notes. Here goes: I now trust the mute wisdom of my depression. I do not resist or hate it, I read it as a language. In March [Please] I wrote about calling the depression helpline. I stand by every word from that experience. And I now have more words.
I can’t speak for you, but I now know that my own depression does not belong to me. Depression belongs to the world - either in the form of a social or economic or environmental harm, or as an interpersonal harm. The depression is born in the world, but it can get stuck living in me as a privatised pain. Depression happens for me when there is rupture, exploitation, abuse or neglect. And when there is no clear recourse; when all avenues of agency feel exhausted; when the hectoring command to have an ‘internal locus of control’ becomes a contortionist and lonely act of tiny-fisted knocks against an immense and impenetrable door. Suffering happens, loss happens; that’s life, and that’s grief. Depression is harm plus no-way-out. Some temporary ways-out really do help: calling a friend, writing a note, listening to a song - remembering all of the whole and innocent things in the world and in our lives. But there are real systems and real people that have real power to listen to the knocks and open the door (intervene, provide, divest, share). When the harm is real and no one answers and nothing changes? Bingo! Depression! No where for the knocking to go but inward.
The best salves for the type of depression that I am talking about are always found in solidarity - pooling disparate, tiny-fisted knocks into some kind of collective impact: knocks that operate as little wavelengths meeting and combining into terrific amplitudes of glee and awe. I am so proud of every person that has ever gone on strike. I am so proud of the current RMT strikers in the UK. When I was 21 and I first became a teacher I joined the PPTA union (the Post-Primary Teachers Association) in New Zealand. The sign-up pitch included something about legal protection in the event that we were accused of misconduct. The pitch also included advice to always leave classroom doors open so that students couldn’t falsely accuse us of assault. This all angered me, because I had no intention of doing anything in my treasured new public vocation that would require legal defence, and I had no belief in the nefariousness of student complaints. I felt sick that the union messages were more about protecting adults than listening to literally disenfranchised and institutionalised children.
But I had an inchoate appreciation of people power, and agreed to tithe part of my humble salary to the union. When I was subject to bullying and sexual harassment in the workplace I went to my union rep for advice, and they coached me to grin and bear it until I could move to a different school. When it came time for the first group union meeting it was a curiously detached and polite environment. It was about asking nicely. It was about posing as middle-class professionals rather than embracing our economic location as out-and-out workers, and I left that lunchtime meeting feeling bored and uninspired. It probably didn’t help that the rep was an accounting teacher, and was promulgating a curriculum that uncritically took capitalism to be as given as the air that we breathe.
The most inspiring thing that ever happened, union-wise, when I was a full-time public school teacher was the day that my payslip came through with one day’s wages docked. That was the day that we, as members of the union, had gone on strike and refused to work. Together we were the combined knocks on the impenetrable door of unfair pay. Tears are coming right now, remembering the moment that the small but very real sacrifice of that day’s dollars really clicked. It wasn’t about dispositions and emotions and using the right words, it was about withdrawing our labour power, all together, all as one and all at once; accepting a personal short-term shortfall in search of collective, social justice.
A superpower in this current world is to be unmoved by money - to refuse its disciplining logic and charlatan charms. We all need adequate means to live safe and full lives - no question there. But the combined amplitude of the strike isn’t about finding wealth, it is about finding fairness. Many people don’t have the time or space to afford to take a hit. And yet it is precisely the people that can least afford it that so often do take the personal hits for the good of the collective. The good news is that it is not charity or martyrdom! In serving the collective we do serve ourselves. We all get the pay rise. We all get a bigger share of the fruits of our labour. And then what? It can’t just be to get comfortable enough to cosplay at being polite and genteel.
What did our forebears imagine for us? What do we imagine for our descendants? Even at the level of the biological family - not my favourite cultural unit, but one that I recognise as deeply important to so many - the time between the beginning of a grandparent’s life to the end of their grandchild’s life can span centuries. We don’t have to think in annual quarters. Our ways of making sense of the world are not all broken. I believe that change is inevitable. We have everything we need. We do not need to be good and kind - though those are nice, and often make life nice - we need to surrender to the additive amplitude of our little waves. De-privatise the pain of humiliation, harm, and exploitation. Give it back to the world and let it knock down the previously impenetrable. I feel it, you feel it: the shuddering shard of possibility, the glee and the awe.
Until next month,
H x
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Aroha, alofa, ofa to you, dear Hannah. Thankyou, as ever, for your powerful and personal shares, and your magnificent articulation of things we may have vaguely sensed as a burgeoning thought but not got any further with. Or not even!
Speaking for myself - twice in the last week I have checked with friends "Am I the Asshole?" and though was reassured (this time, anyway) that I am not, I'll keep reflecting and checking. A recent realisation, borne from the age-old theory that we reject/resent/criticise/lambast in others the very thing we loathe in ourselves, that I may be a blackened pot and not realise.
Brava, you most fine specimen of the smart and humble human 🧡
You write so beautiful Hannah, I always look forward to your end of month email in my inbox. I understand what you mean about privatised suffering. If you have the time and capacity I would recommend an excellent book I recently read called ‘Sedated: how modern capitalism created our mental health crisis’ by James Davies. Sending love. Take care of yourself