When I was first conceptualizing this newsletter, I was a fresh graduate of my second master’s program and I had just quit on a startup venture. I was processing and grieving the collaboration breakup. I noticed much of the grief touched on my relationship with the concept of value, particularly feeling valued and valuable.
The experience of “entrepreneurial” projects succeeded in putting me in a mode of constantly trying to prove myself and feel seen and understood. It trained me to approach starting things from a “business perspective”. Does this have value? translates to Will this make money?
Even though I had already built a counselling collective and a private practice, allowing me a four-day work week and autonomy over my time, something was challenging in a meta way about starting this anti-capitalist project during the transition. While I wasn’t planning on it to make money, I also didn’t believe it would be valuable enough to make money. The attempt to discourse on capitalism and mental health has been tethered to the multifaceted concept of value from day 1.
Assessing value
When ideating this project, I found myself centering the process with existential questions like:
Do I have anything valuable to offer in creating a newsletter on anti-capitalism and mental health?
Is my writing “good enough” to be perceived as valuable to potential readers?
Will people find value in any part of this?
And most savage of all:
Maybe don’t do it if you don’t have anything valuable to say?
A brief Google search on advice for starting a new project, creative or not, yields pages of blog posts and articles with different iterations of similar questions and one consistent algorithm:
Does it bring value?
a) If not, leave it;
b) If yes, how can you grow, i.e. monetize?
Pretty quickly, What’s the point? emerges as the ultimate gatekeeper.
In the lesson of value, capitalism teaches us we are merely planets that revolve around what gives and brings the monetary version of it (all roads of growth, influence, and power promise they lead to it). Outside of this orbit you and your production are irrelevant.
I was imposing an evaluation process on myself to assess whether I’m worth this project to begin it. I was quietly gauging whether my thoughts and skills are important to others, regurgitating the message most prevalent during the startup months: don’t put things out there unless they have value. Arguably a doppelgänger of don’t say anything unless you’re sure it has value is also a derivative of don’t. stand. out. A protective and oppressive voice familiar to most women, femmes, and particularly those who belong to the Global Majority.
@kendallroylookingsad
Ethics of value
I came across Ericka Hart's prayer on Mother’s Day after emotionally and energetically wrestling with my mother. I thought about my friends who struggle with this day, in particular one person, like my own mother, who has had to mother herself. My mother’s mother left her when she was two, and my friend’s passed when she was in her teens.
How does Value with the capital V fit into something like parenting, birthing, caring, impacting, and sometimes harming?
In Jessie-Susannah Karnatz’s post where she honours “all those who labor as Mother”, she writes,
“For our work of cultural lineage passing, for our grappling with morality and ethics and what is valuable for a person […] For doing the work of a life not just for one person but for many people. For taming our own natures lest we hurt another. For seeking out potential and building it into a fire. For remembering to nurture ourselves and for fighting for the time to do it.”
Even in the role of Mother, there is a responsibility to take accountability for one’s values as their own and not their children’s; there are ethics around recognizing where our wounds and what our shadows are, thus what our hopes and dreams may also be, by not projecting them onto those who for a period of time have no choice but depend on us for care.
I have long suffered from my relationship with my mother. A new realization came as I rested at my friend’s guest cabin, on Mother’s Day no less, and noticed how easily calm and safeness could and should be achieved. I thought about the times when my mom pushed me out of my zone of resiliency because of her traumas. More importantly, I, for the first time, thought about how I might have sent her out of hers based on my agenda to feel closer to her, to show that I’m interested in her life despite how difficult it is for me to be around her. My performance of care, based on my hierarchy of values, got in the way of us connecting.
Perhaps this is why Karnatz’s words that touch upon the continuous battle against deciding what’s valuable to others still echo in me. When you value somebody, you respect their complexity and differences. You care for them how they want to be cared for, not just how you want to care for them. Respect, then, is honouring the relational field between you and the other person / animal / thing, where you are your own and in connection to another, sharing space and time while experiencing respective safeness.
If I can reject the evaluative value on my personhood imposed by capitalism, can I, for example, resist assuming how I wish for people to show up for me is how my mother should also be received? In other words, can I accept that my expressions of care may not be valuable to her because of her own reasons, which I don’t need to understand, and still care for her in the ways she has capacity for?
@aredotna
An invitation to evaluate with care
What would it look like to apply this form of respect to our relationship with our body? Instead of fixating on the body’s performance and aesthetic based on capitalism- and patriarchy-induced values and preferences, what does the body need to feel cared for? What and where does it feel good? And can we tell ourselves more often you are good as you are?
What about our relationship to nature? How are we interfering with its needs and cycles, its way of reciprocity, by extracting from it what we have come to value based on the ideas of maximization and “unbelievable growth”?
How often has the quest for value to others stopped you from creating?
How much does the motivation to produce value drive you to center capitalism in your creative pursuits?
How do we begin to understand why we value what we value and whether we’re aligning our time, efforts, and identity praxis with it?
Most challengingly, how can we value each other and the land on which we live when capitalist values depend on the separation of us, the disconnection from our selves and bodies? When it depends on us believing that we in any present state are not enough?
Thanks for reading.