About a decade ago, I had a daydream vision of me in my thirties. I think I was maybe around 23 at the time and was definitely unfulfilled in my work for an unfortunately pretty harmful climbing film company making $9-11/hr classified as a contractor doing full-time work and, while I don’t remember how old I was exactly when I thought it, I do remember specifically deciding the dreamy me was 34 years old, which is how old I am now.

In the vision, I was self-employed, a co-owner of a boutique design agency.

Never mind that I was missing a central component of not having ever done any visual design and probably not intending to learn. Never mind that the me of my early twenties didn’t know anyone who was self-employed, not in the sense of peers who were doing cool jobs that seemed straight out of a rom-com level of cliché (designer! florist! baker!). I never thought at the time I would ever own any business, let alone a cool one.

Vision-me had a cool haircut and a botanical tattoo sleeve inked on their left arm! How could I not be attracted to the idea?

It all felt like a pipe dream I wanted but didn’t think it would actually be possible to ever get to, though I think I intentionally pinned it on a far-off mental vision board with the hope that maybe in 10+ years I could. It just felt cool, but also contained this sense of looking forward that I had “arrived” somewhere, if only I could ever get to that impossible-feeling place to make it happen.

But I guess the arrival is here?

I am indeed a 34-year-old co-owner of a brand microagency. I never learned visual design (though some years ago I did make some amateur websites for clients that are truly precious to think back on how rudimentary they were). That’s probably because I didn’t know copywriter was an actual job title when I was envisioning it, and I didn’t know by the time it would happen I would have been self-employed already for eight years.

(I don’t have the botanical tattoo sleeve yet though, so I’d better get on it if I want to complete the spell before my next birthday.)

Because that’s what this is, right? A spell.

The vision, the will, and the may it be so.

Not in a wand-waving way, but not not in a wand-waving way. The kind that reminds us that magic is real, if we define magic as creating tangible futures out of the visions and possibilities we hope for.

Which is to say that Rest Day Creative, our anticapitalist worker-cooperative-turned-brand-agency is now open for business!

But it’s also to say, moreover, that this is how any future becomes possible, and I want to keep remembering.

Sometimes — a lot of the time actually — I look around and I feel a sense of hopelessness so vast because the chasm between all humans being adequately treated as human, meaning humanely, and the present state of the world feels incomprehensibly big. And I feel so small. I am small.

A year and a half ago that hopelessness was so all-encompassing that I cried on my couch for hours about reproductive rights and trans rights every single day for weeks. Hours. Every day. For weeks. I was crying because I was terrified for the safety and well-being of people I love and the people I will never meet, and I was crying the amount I was because of layered dead-dog-dead-dad-dead-career grief and trauma, plus mental health needs that I was drowning trying to get support for at the time, but I was also crying because, to some extent, that kind of release valve is a natural response to a certain level of continued overwhelm.

I couldn’t see any possibility for change, because all I could see was the whole of the problem, lined up beside the whole of every other problem. Any one issue that we’re collectively facing feels indecipherably unaddressable by how big it is in its entirety, and that’s not even factoring in all of the other issues that are just as big.

It was too much. I felt so deeply disempowered because I didn’t feel like I could change even one iota of my own life in that moment, let alone protect the dignity of someone else’s — especially when it felt like the scale of any change I made was meaningless.

But you know what? It’s not meaningless, actually.

Changing one corner of the world is changing the world.

If you touch your face, that counts as touching your body when you do. More precisely, the gesture is you putting your index finger on your cheek, but that cheek is a part of the body as a whole.

Your one neighborhood is not the whole world, but it is a part of the world.

It took my acupuncturist extending the kindness of her own discernment, this clear-eyed seeing that made me know that she knew that I didn’t want to live on this earth anymore if I didn’t feel like I had any power to make it better, and her being unflinchingly present with that truth. That presence let me know that whatever felt darkest in me was not going to scare her off, and that she would be in space with it unconditionally. Despite only knowing her in a professional context of semi-regular hourly increments, she’s one of my favorite people on this planet, and I’m not sure whether that’s because of that moment or already was the case and what made it possible.

That one act on her part, human to human, didn’t change the whole world, but it changed mine.

That’s not nothing. Each time we choose to be unflinchingly present with the truth and respond with the kindness and fierce care that is required, it changes that one small part of the world for the better too.

You know how more humans get treated more humanely? By us, as humans, treating each other that way.

Yes, we need greater systemic change. My fucking god, we do. But we are not separate from the change we want.

The revolution is not going to happen for us. We’re not going to vote the revolution into office public, not this term anyway, even if we can vote in essential stop-gaps.

I’m so sorry. Truly, babe. We want that, right? I want it so bad. I want to be able to cast a ballot and know that the people of Palestine and the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the whole world over are unequivocally taken care of. I want to know that health care is a universal right that is actually followed through on and that every person who needs shelter and food can get it without judgment or legal ramifications or unnecessary bureaucracy. I want to know that me and my queer and trans friends will have their personhood recognized and lives not up for debate, and I want someone smarter and wiser and much more experienced to make it so.

I want it so deeply, but wanting alone is not enough to will it into being.

We’re waiting for the saving, but waiting is not going to make it come.

Spells are cast with our imagining, and then they become truth through the will that makes it so. We are the will, we have the will, and our recognition of that is the only thing that’s going to make any kind of reality we want to see.

Please don’t get me wrong — I’m under no illusion that creating a new business with some kicky little doodles and well-chosen wording is the revolution (the doodles are adorable though). But every business can be a platform for individual change, and that’s something.

It’s not the revolution, but it’s not not the revolution. It’s one small part that leads to the real action, foundations made up of many tiny parts we can stand on.

That’s why I poured 57 hours of my life into creating and placing what is essentially a novella’s worth of website copy on Rest Day, even though it’s largely been unpopular lately to lean into long-form site pages.

I don’t care! There are things that need to be said, and I want more people saying them. And if I want more people saying them, then I’d better be ready to be the one to say some of it.

Things like:

• Openly stating our anticapitalist policies toward creating financial accessibility in our work and dismantling harmful business-as-usual defaults like markups on payment plans and urgency marketing tactics

• Sharing the step-by-step process for how we come up with our rates based on our actual needs, including publicly (vulnerably!) listing desired salary numbers and percentages of how we allocate each dollar that comes in

• Stating out loud, at work, that our labor is not for profit, it’s for human wellbeing, and if our work (that we ostensibly have control over) isn’t doing that, then what is it for?

• Having a whole-ass page where we share links to our “competition,” who are really just our rad friends, peers, and mentors, because if we want community to come to us, we’d better be ready to come to the community.

• Saying that a land acknowledgment can be one of many reparative steps extended to Indigenous people to start to acknowledge what is so often the erasure of violence — but it’s empty without actionable commitment. (Look, we’re all thinking it. I’m looking at you too, 2020-era anti-racism statements.)

In the style of Annie Dillard’s “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives,” how we spend our time is how we spend our time, and those small moments add up to the reality we live in. So if those minutes spent, however small, start with imagining a new world into being and then acting accordingly, that becomes real, encompassing change. In fact, it’s the only way we get change.

Casting a spell starts with the wishing, but it comes into being through the action beyond intention.

Acting in these small ways is not enough to change a whole landscape, but it is enough to change your life and impact at least someone else’s, if not many someone’s.

Somebody is going to look at our website or read the lessons of our anticapitalist rate setting course or deep dive into our resource library, and they’re going to do something different in their life because of it. That somebody could even be you.

Acting in integrity is the revolution. Saying what you mean is the revolution. Speaking out what you care about and what you will not stand for is the revolution. It’s not the whole revolution, but it’s a necessary part that we’re not going to get to any other part without.

Let’s meet each other there. Let’s believe in the possibility of our small power, and cast spells to make it so.

Love,
Iris

Major Thanks

I’m using the usual Recs and Thoughts spot to extend heaps of gratitude in all directions. (If you’re still missing the resources, I just created a whole page for that, and it should keep you busy for a while.)

• Shout out to the magic-making of our truly incomparable team, which is also made up of our organizational queen Maggie and doodle design dream Rylee, with super huge thanks to our honorary Canadian team member contractor, Jillian, who created some incredible systems like our entire client workflow. It took eight years of self-employment to bring this team into being, but it’s been well worth the wait.

• Shout out to all of you here who heard me say, “I’m working on this for our anticapitalist micro-agency,” for the past months and been like, “Okay, cool, but is this happening or what?” while I went offline to do behind the scenes things and didn’t really say that’s what I was doing.

• Special thanks to the one paid subscriber of this Soft Animal Bodies newsletter who is a person I don’t already know, who pledged their subscription after my last post and then had to wait until now for me to write another because I was busy writing elsewhere (If you think this is you, it is! Thank you! I think about you frequently and feel so grateful that you put your dollars here.)

• Super grateful for ’s twice weekly Landscapes co-writing container, which has anchored my brain and my Tues-Thu schedule for the past several weeks.

• Always always always thank you to the friends who have shared virtual and in-person celebration arms for each part of this creation, who brought me iced matchas while I was up to my eyeballs in finessing grammar, and most of all who received my long-form procrastination texts about whether my situationship was going to text me back and if my new haircut was cute. Community is the backbone and the reason for everything, and I’m grateful for the one I have and am building. If you’re here, you’re a part of it.

• Heartfelt thanks especially to my ride-or-die anticapitalist biz bestie , who consistently challenges me to be positively accountable to my work and life — while still being real and kind to myself — and who I know I would not have the bravery to be in this space of creation without hers and other shining examples.

About Rest Day Creative

Rest Day Creative is a cooperatively owned micro-agency with a community-oriented, anticapitalist lens. We build brand foundations and systems for divergent thinkers, values-centered organizations, and helping professionals.

We create websites, copywriting, visual branding, and operational structures to ground your business in an ecosystem that is truly rooted in tangible care. We also curate and create digital resources on anticapitalist business and human-first ways of being and relating. Learn more and sign up for our newsletter (yes, it’s a different one).

If this writing not for you, you can change your account settings here to only receive personal essays, or to unsubscribe.

In the early months of living in Portland, nearly every time I drove through city streets I felt a particular sense of awe and excitement at what I saw out the window. It was late spring, that time when the streets get dusted pink with fallen cherry blossoms and people emerge blinking into the coming months of sunshine. Walking on so many sidewalks and sitting in so many cars adjacent to mine was someone, or many someones, who just looked so hot.

The hotness was and is very specific. I don’t mean hot as in tall/dark/handsome. I don’t mean hot as in low body fat or symmetrical features or certain kinds of curves.

I mean hot as in visibly queer.

This city is full of “visibly queer” people, and the only thing that whips my head around faster to get a second look is if I see a cute dog on the street.

As said in their great piece on dyke pride, “I know you can’t tell who’s gay just by looking, but also you totally can and I won’t be taking any more questions on that topic at this time.” You can’t tell, but also you can…and without refuting that because it is absolute fact, I am here to say that sometimes I worry you can’t. (I cannot tell you how many times I’ve done a double take for what I thought was a queer cutie, only to have it turn out to just be some dude with a beanie who probably frequents a lot of breweries or something).

For my own queerness, not everyone may be able to tell that I am gay. I want to be read as gay, and I just have to hope that some can.

Hotness in queer culture can overlap with conventional straight beauty standards for better and for worse for sure, but what else can pass as hot in a city like Portland is its own animal.

Visible queerness translates to its own kind of attractiveness.

The trans femme taking your ramen order with the bandana in their hair, all the better to see their bright blue eye shadow. The goth couple passing on the Hawthorne sidewalk holding hands, looking somehow both intimidating and beautifully soft. The obvious marks are everywhere: hair dye, piercings, mullets, trans short kings, gender-bendy crop tops and skirts and oversized shirts, cargo pants, glitter, chains, painted nails, mascs in long shorts, fern and animal bone tattoo sleeves, the works. All the Doc Martens and the Blundstones and the high platforms and weirdly, but also somehow attractively, neon Crocs?

No one is flirting with me, but when so many people look like that, I get a feeling of transference like everyone is.

The list is far from exhaustive and none of these elements are inherently queer, but on so many people, select pieces come together in that delicious, slightly ineffable way that says queer before anyone ever opens their mouth, and therefore to me says, hot.

This hotness is inclusive of fat bodies, of trans bodies, of disabled bodies, of bodies of color both because why can’t those be inherently hot, they just are, and also specifically because by being gay, or appearing gay, they become hot. Portland is not the paragon of utopian gender-fuckery, anti-fat bias, anti-ableism, and anti-racism so many of us want it to be, but I have come across so many hot people here whose looks alone give me hope that pockets of it are or could be.

I guess I should be clear that I don’t see this hotness as synonymous with sexual or romantic attraction. Either or both can be there, but I see the attraction of visible queerness as more of a resonance. It’s like an appreciation or kinship separate from something familial – something you want to merge with, imbibe, consume, inhale. Maybe you want to touch bodies with it, maybe you want to build a homestead and raise a flock of chickens with it, maybe you want a separate third thing entirely.

Whatever it is, the attraction is a magnetized feeling, something you can’t help but want to be closer to in some way. This is what I love about queerness, it is intoxicating to me.

Appearances can be hot because they hint at what might be underneath, and what’s underneath is what creates the attraction and draw itself. This is what I mean when I say all of my friends are hot. It’s not because I select connections based on attractiveness, but because knowing them better highlights all that the physical presentation stands for.

One of my favorite places to be visually reminded of our queerness in space together is summertime at Rooster Rock, the clothing-optional beach on the Columbia River. On this stretch of sand, queer bodies in all levels of undress are on display in beautifully unselfconscious ways — top surgery scars, stomach rolls, paleness, body hair, all of it.

Queer-coded clothes may be one of the most obvious ways to flag queerness, but it’s not the only way. I know this because even undressed something palpable emanates from these bodies toasting under the sun like so many gay seals, eating snacks, lounging, wading nip-deep in cold water.

I take immense joy in all the visible queerness of this city, because for all that is not in right relationship here, our sheer visibility is still some indication of either our safety or our defiance, both of which are connected to this lineage of pride and love of self-identity.

So with all of that said, weighted by the comfort I feel by looking around me seeing and knowing queerness — maybe it comes as a surprise that I am not all that visibly queer, and I’m no longer trying to make myself be.

I have to bank on whatever that ineffable thing is that emanates off of me too and hopefully get across: I’m one of you. This is who I love. These are my pronouns. This is how I move through the world. This is what I believe. I love you. I want to know your heart. I want to be seen by you. Do you see me?

When you don’t present as obviously queer, that’s a lot of subtext and not much to embed it in.

I can’t really fault people for not being able to read between the lines of an essay I’m more or less trying to morse-code to them with my eyes. I know what I look like, and no stranger will probably ever look at me at first glance and immediately think: queer, non-binary, them/them. That’s what the insides say, but the outsides…not so much.

Factually, I look like a cisgender woman in her thirties, and most strangers probably think I’m in a heterosexual, monogamous relationship with a cis boyfriend named Ryan. I look like a she/her with some girl-next-door vibes who always turns in her library books before the due date (to be fair, I do always turn in my library books before the due date).

No one has ever tried to use he/him pronouns to refer to me, except when I was four years old and had a cute blonde bowl cut with a rat tail. My voice is not deep. Some might think I’m cute but no one would think I’m handsome. I don’t have the bone structure for it in a conventional sense, and I don’t carry myself or my body in a way that imparts masculinity. I love a butch, I love a masc, but I am not one.

I am a boring non-binary person. I don’t necessarily look all that queer, and if I do it’s more subtle. In this moment, I have a chin-length bob, and it’s a mousy brown color, which people seem to think is a self-insult but is the actuality of my natural hair color and I feel morally neutral about it. My nails are cut short and I haven’t painted them since 2013, but I like to cosplay a Hint of Femme™. I don’t wear mascara but if I feel like it, I brush my brows upward with a tiny spoolie, curl my lashes, and rub blush on my cheeks. I shave my legs even in winter but never my armpits, which I like growing wild except for those moments when a breeze tickles the hair there and sets it on end.

Any concerted effort toward masc presentation is less frequent. I have a binder, but I only wear it once or twice a month, if that, because it has a tendency to chafe and I’d rather be tits-to-the-wind than having to deal with that shit.

So much of what I find hot in the visible queerness I see around me is not what actually works for me, in my own body. I love a gender-bendy look, I love bright colors, oversized boxy cut clothes, patterns, piercings, hair dye, shirts with political statements that tell me I can trust you (you’re right, hot stranger, trans lives do matter, we do need to free Palestine). I love all of that — on somebody else.

I’m not trying to look more queer, more genderqueer, more androgynous. To be honest, I tried.

Right before I moved to Portland a few years ago, I semi-seriously told a friend that the first order of business in my new city was to get a queer haircut so all the hot queers would know to find me and become my friend. (In practice, the strategy turned out to be iffy, but I think that was more because I was in a multi-year mental health collapse.)

The haircut didn’t afford me much friendship, but it did give me a certain level of queer cachet. When it was freshly cut, the soft mullet looked pretty cute. I would introduce myself with they/them pronouns and could see recognition in the person’s eyes that said, “Okay, I can see it.” I could tell that appearing more androgynous made me make more sense to cisgender, heterosexual people especially, who could understand a person with a look that “matched the pronouns” but not someone who “looked like a woman” but said they weren’t one.

Even more than the understanding though was the recognition, gay-to-gay. Standing in line to get carnitas at Güero, a cutie made flirty eyes at me, and that never happens (though I wish it would!) While hiking on the Colorado Trail, a hot trail worker told me they liked my haircut with an intensity in their gaze when they said it. I’d been dragging ass all day but that compliment certainly sped up my hiking pace. (Let me tell you how many times instances like these have happened in the wild since I’ve grown out the mullet: precisely zero.)

I felt seen by the attention, and being seen made me feel like one of those hot visibly queer people that I see all over this city. I felt like my people, for once, could tell that I was probably queer just by looking, and in that way I felt like I was closer to belonging.

But I also didn’t feel as much like me, and belonging doesn’t matter much when it’s not really all of you.

I can’t really talk about being queer, genderqueer especially, without talking about being autistic, because that informs so much of my presentation and my ways of being in queerness.

I’m a clothes minimalist, just as much or more out of autistic necessity than a sustainable ethos. Style is a special interest of mine, and I have spent an inordinate amount of time curating specific pieces and aesthetics, so in that sense, I am “dopamine dressing” but none of it comes with patterns or bright colors. Regularly having to pick through more than a modest amount of clothes adds a level of decision fatigue I can’t afford most of the time. Having pieces in neutral solids where I know every article can mix and match with one another further reduces that fatigue. It means the closet I look at every day is not loud on my eyes or distracting on my body, but it also means less variety and fewer statement pieces. I wear a gold ring and the same gold chain every single day. The sameness is comforting, but not exactly bold enough to say much about my identities.

I have a kind of gender stasis, and it’s only when there are deviations that I feel gender dysphoric. What happens within those deviations feels deeply autistic to me, a kind of crackling undercurrent of rejection when I see something on me that doesn’t match what I feel to be true. Presenting as too femme feels dysphoric to me, but so does presenting as too masc. Gender euphoria for me is not smack dab “in the middle" between male and female because I don’t internalize myself as half/half and I don’t even know what middle of the gender spectrum would even feel like.

Inside I feel like a floaty genderless entity that likes to feel pretty but is not a girl, and doesn’t want to be called a “good girl” but maybe in some sexy contexts wants to be treated like one. I look femme-of-center, and probably most of the time I even act femme-of-center, but in my body there is no center. Wherever that is, my gender finds equilibrium there, but it’s certainly not in womanhood and it’s definitely not straight.

How other people respond to me is what reminds me that I feel genderless and queer inside but no one else will ever fully see me as gender-free or gay as I feel. When I had the more androgynous haircut, the external reception of me matched more of what I felt internally, and I received more correct assumptions about my actual queerness and gender — but when I looked in the mirror, the face didn’t feel like mine.

It was disorienting, to be treated more in keeping with what I wanted, but to feel less like I could see myself.

Is that feeling gender dysphoria? Is that feeling a kind of autistic dissonance? I’m not sure if I’ll ever know the difference, or if there is a difference in my body. When I am misgendered with incorrect pronouns, I feel the sting of it, so it must be dysphoria. But those instances also have the flavor of low-level autistic distress. The something-is-not-right-ness of expecting to perceive and understand the world in one way and to have its reflection appear distressingly different than expected.

I’d get glimpses of the opposite. Some days with the mullet, the bangs would look spiky just so and the tendrils would lay just right at the nape of my neck. I would feel incredible. I’d feel that illusive combination of insides matching outsides and outsiders being able to see the inside. That was the height of euphoria. Gender euphoria, autistic euphoria, whatever both/and that is.

But I also felt deeply uncomfortable the other 95% of the time that I couldn’t specifically tame my hair to look and feel the way I wanted and needed it to, which is why I think autism must be just as present as feelings about gender and self. I needed something so specific to feel okay, but to get there wasn’t fully in my control.

It is laughable when someone says, “It’s just hair, it will grow back,” when you have to look at that hair over and over for weeks and months and feel like the wrong face is looking back at you.

The hair grows back, but it can still cost you something until it does, and that something may be a resonant sense of self. Too high of a cost for me.

Few times have I ever felt more me than when I looked in the mirror pre-mullet and saw my own eyes look back beneath long straight hair and blunt bangs. I did not look queer. But I felt queer, for myself, with myself, in a wholly euphoric way.

It’s just that I also felt deeply, alienatingly invisible to the outside and the communities I wanted to be a part of.

The funny thing is even if disability may be a barrier that prevents me from looking all that queer, disability as a whole can be as queer as it gets, and feels like a very queer part of me.

The act of queering – relationships, politics, sex, survival — is creating new possibilities in order to accommodate what is real and true. And what is disability if not circumstances that necessitate and call for creativity to accommodate true needs?

Many ways queerness can show up (if not all ways) are about finding alternatives that support what’s true. Queering can look like finding ways to accommodate physical and sexual attraction beyond gender norms through queer unions or asexual friendships or polycentric relationships. Queering can look like supporting people and bodies seeking new shapes to match internal structures, and those accommodations might look like forms of social transition, name changes, HRT, or gender-affirming health care as a whole.

As alternatives to hetero-patriarchal norms, queer accommodations can look like creating non-hierarchal relationship structures, like a “heterosexual” couple queering sex by centering non-penetrative acts, or like fostering deep love in some middle space that is not fully romantic nor wholly platonic or particularly erotic. Queering can look like subverting the nuclear family to create networks of care beyond kin. It can be co-parenting families, coliving setups, and community gardens.

Disability can be an ultimate queering because it is existence as subversion, survival both as fact and as defiance. It is finding new ways of intimacy and ways to be in the world because we have to and, if we’re mindful, because we want to. It is the making of our own validity in the face of what tries to invalidate us.

I don’t know about you, but I feel like all humans, queer or not, need more of that in the face of the present we’re in and the futures we’re moving toward.

My own disabilities are themselves invisible. They are hidden disabilities that offer a similar privilege of protection and also a source of loss in being unseen like my invisible queerness can. But they exist all the same. Like my queerness, they are core pieces that allow me to reach into the recesses of my being to see what is true and make new pieces of myself and my environment to accommodate those truths. My disabilities both necessitate and allow me to have conversations in relationships not only about what isn’t working but also to make space for what might need to change.

Changing environments or restructuring relationships to meet needs can be accommodations for disabilities. More generally, they can also make way for human interactions that account for our humanity. The creativity that takes can be queer as hell.

Any marginalization of identity is a wellspring for creation, because those are the parts of us that this world isn’t made for and is actively built to ward against. They are the places within us where we feel the friction of what does not work, which means they show us what needs to change, what we need to accommodate, and what we need to queer, imaginatively speaking.

Sometimes we can clearly see identities in the ways that people wear them, but the creative roots of what they stand in for live so much deeper.

Seeing someone or something we think looks queer can strike a sense of resonance with what we already feel. That representation is important. It’s also just a scratching of the surface.

The source of that magnetism comes in the depths of our creative impulses, seen and unseen, that we draw on to create new possibility. The ways we love that don’t look like they’re supposed to, the ways we move through the world that we’re told we can’t or shouldn’t, and we do anyway. Even more so: what we do with that information to create new ways of being.

To me, that’s queerness. I may swoon at the feet of queer visibility, but that’s only because it’s in service to what can and can’t be seen: queer possibility.

It may just be true for me that when I feel most myself, I am not my most visible, and when I am more performatively visible, trying to get objects to speak for me instead of my own words, I feel less like myself. Given my specific sensory support needs and general aesthetic preferences, I might always have a certain level of invisibility within the greater queer community, at least where obvious looks go. I can make peace with that.

Within me, it is all a gender-neutral playground, a little gay, autistic paradise. It’s just that the advertisement for that paradise looks less like a photocopied zine and more like a Scandinavian furniture catalog: boring to some, suited for specific tastes, stands the test of time, and probably looks nice minimally accessorized in your living room.

I don’t look that queer, but I feel queer. And by that, I mean full of possibility.

I don’t have to choose between feeling like myself and being seen, and for anyone who feels similarly, you don’t either.

We can be seen as ourselves, it just means that we may not be seen as the drive-by sidewalk hotties. We’re the queers that radiate in close quarters. So come closer.

You can put on an article of clothing or snip a haircut that says queer but queerness lives in all of these deeper places too as the things we can never take off. The continued practices of queering our structures and our relationships and our survival is how we will see those deep parts of each other, building on them and learning to love each other better whenever we see more.

Given the state of our political systems, who knows how much of our visibility will be afforded to any of us in the future. But no matter what happens, we will find ways to see one another. And if we can’t, we will create them.

This is a love letter to all the gays who show up and slay with the glitter and the go-go boots, the Carhartt’s and the carabiners, the combat boots and the neon hair. You probably don’t even know how much it means to strangers you never even speak with, how much you buoy them just by showing up like you do.

You create possibility through recognition, through resonance, through visions of expansion and joy.

Your visibility is important and life-giving and liberatory and so, so hot.

This is just as much a love letter to all the subtle gays, the quiet gays, the closet gays. This is for the gays who wear masks in public, who say nothing at all but say everything with their silent, “I will not forget about you.” This is for the queers in transition who don’t feel like their appearance fits with their inner selves but are on their way. This is for the queers who are perceived as one gender but feel like another one or none entirely, the disabled queers who are too damn tired to be perceived as anything, and the queers who may never change a single thing about how they look or sound but feel that tremor of electricity inside all the same.

You create possibility in all that you hold, seen and unseen, and I know you’ll blow us away with your brilliance if and when we do get to see it.

Your queerness may not always be seen, but it is just as valued, and you’re the hotties too.

(This is even for the allied straights, the heterosexual babes who may not ever get their brush with gayness but still seek to creatively queer this world beyond the parts that exist to cater to them. If you’ve read this far, we need you too.)

Queerness doesn’t have a uniform but it does have a revolutionary magnetism, it does have ways of being and loving and showing up, and if you’re here, no matter what you look like, you’ve got it.

Tell a queer person you love them today. Even if it’s just yourself.

Love,
Iris

Recs and Thoughts

• Pride month was June, and this month is Disability Pride. Maybe it’s that they’re back-to-back and because they’re both called “Pride,” maybe because Portland does Pride in July for reasons unknown and because I just passed my diagnosis-versary, maybe it’s that I’ve never known myself as autistic without also knowing I am queer, but I always find something sticky in reconciling queer pride and disability pride as separate entities. What underscores both (and all attempts to recognize history and pride in marginalized identities) is that our existence matters, our joy matters, and most of all our strength in community matters because it is in service of our collective liberation. There is so much to say here but the main thing is if you care about queer liberation, that liberation is wholly incomplete (and inadvertently causing further oppression) if it’s not hand-in-hand with an intersectional lens that includes disability justice. I want your queer joy, I really do. But you know how your “Protect trans kids” shirt lets me know I can trust you? So does wearing your mask. Bare. Minimum. Please don’t think for a second they’re not the same thing. Lives are on the line either way (and some of them may be in the direct line of fire of your mouth particles). I know it can feel like it, but the pandemic isn’t over. The queerest acts are the ones that recognize our individual freedoms and joys are only made possible by the care we take for each other.

• Speaking of! I was reading The Future is Disabled, and now that I’m done I’m re-mentioning it because I still want to (lovingly) shove it under everyone’s noses and I will make no apologies if this recs section somehow becomes a fan page in future.

• I’ve since moved on to reading Inciting Joy by Ross Gay. I already knew within the first pages that it was going to be a banger, and every essay in it continues to be. I don’t know when this book wouldn’t be timely, but it’s certainly timely right now.

• I’m largely assuming there’s enough greater discourse right now around political fallout and ways to act that we don’t also need me in it, but if you want to reorient around action, these two pieces from earlier in the month are great compasses: How We Get Through This by and The revolution starts by building with poor folks in your own backyard by

• These musings and questions by are very much in line with what I was thinking and feeling last week when I was dog-sitting and the power went out for the third time in a week (and remembered again when the power fizzled out for a fourth time on Monday). At what level of inconvenience, personally, collectively, will it be enough to remember the realities we are in and not keep ourselves separate from them? The truth is, we’re all already affected by all of it, just more or less insulated from the extent.

• Recent honorable mention read goes to Everyday Utopia, which I felt gave some useful background history and alternatives for relationship and living structures.

• Intermittent dissociation also brought to you by: finding out that a British lesbian Love Island knockoff exists that is based on a gay Love Island knockoff?? I couldn’t watch I Kissed a Girl via the BBC so hopefully the sketchy alternate link I found does not result in a computer virus. (So far so good?)

• I’m finding it impossible to not be in in awe of videos like the ones on this page. To get cheesy about it: if magic art like this is possible, think of all the other creativity in this world that must be possible too!

• Go doomtouch grass (with love).

I believe that every being on this planet deserves an abundant, joyful, and resourced life and livelihood. Full stop.

Do I think that will ever be actualized? No.

Please excuse my bluntness. As much as I might want it, it matters less to me that we’ll ever reach a total or even partial reality than it does to continue to choose to orient toward the idea that there are inherent rights of the people, animals, and ecosystems living on this earth.

I want to live more often as if those rights matter to me, because they do.

I know in a lot of ways what I’m saying seems like a lofty and kind of annoying proclamation, but let’s just suspend disbelief for a second and imagine if we as humans universally behaved according to this belief.

Now imagine if just a fraction of humans behaved according to the idea that people and creatures were inherently worthy of a well-cared-for, well-resourced life. That every person, regardless of status or ability, was simply meant to have enough.

What if only a few behaved that way? Even if it was only part of the time?

My guess is that, even if it only happened some of the time with some people, anyone who came in contact with those people would be lucky to do so, and better off.

I’d love for that to be extended to everyone, but I’d settle for just…more of us extending it to each other more of the time, myself included.

Of course, there are people already operating this way. I’m not introducing a new concept, and I imagine if you’re here it’s likely that some version of this is in your heart at least some of the time.

So let’s just consider this to be a reminder.

Maybe you engage with the news and you do not feel this way, but I genuinely feel like the majority of people on this planet want to feel a comfortable sense of enoughness and joy, and if we could wave a magic wand, most of us would grant that same comfort and joy for every other person here too.

On the whole, it’s not for lack of desire that inequitable conditions exist. It’s — you guessed it — the systemic forces that perpetuate and entrench us in cycles of lack and/or resource hoarding (you didn’t think I was just going to talk about magic wands, did you?)

There are so many reasons why you might or might not have access to a full abundance of resources, let alone a more basic foundation, and so much more of that has to do with your proximity to privilege than it does to your work or contributions.

That’s not to minimize the work that you have undoubtedly done to get to where you are. It’s more so to acknowledge the reality of the systems we live in and how they keep us swimming upsteam no matter what our efforts are.

I’ve been thinking about enoughness this month in particular after attending a How Much Money is Enough workshop facilitated by my friend at the beginning of June (which, wow, am I so grateful she’s bringing that back in an extended format in the fall, because we unpacked some of the good deep resource and money questions that I want to be able to revisit again and again).

Enoughness is something I think about a lot in general, and it’s probably evident by the fact that I’m able to spend so much time thinking about enoughness that I have some measure of it.

When you really don’t have enough, like in a material sense to meet your basic needs, then you’re probably so focused on keeping yourself afloat that you’re not exactly sitting around waxing poetic about the philosophical underpinnings related to privilege and consumption.

But beyond that point, when you’re somewhere past the lowest baseline for survival, being in continual cycles of having less than you need likely brings up one principle question over and over: “What is this bullshit?”

And: “It is clearly bullshit that I’m experiencing this and people I know are experiencing this and not enough people care.”

I think we often see so much community resource sharing and mutual aid happening within lower-income communities and communities with people of marginalized identities and needs because those cycles of not-enoughness generally hit those people harder and more frequently. At some point, there’s also an inherent understanding of the resources that can exist outside of just money, because when you have less (or no) money to give but still want to give, you find alternative ways that you can.

So when the blows come (job loss causing significant financial strain, health changes that affect the ability and/or safety to able to earn an income, not having adequate access to fundamental resources, housing instability, etc., or in more extreme but just as real circumstances, displacement, violence, or starvation due to genocide), the people who experience them deeply and more often know the full extent of that pain for themselves.

Because they know it and they’ve personally felt it, my guess is that most people who have been in significant hardship, financial or otherwise, know on a deep level how inhumane it felt for them, and how it would be fundamentally inhumane for others to ever have to face the same as they have.

That, or as it sometimes seems to happen, they manage to muscle their way out of deep financial straits and then cannot ever willingly look at anyone else in the situation they were in with equal compassion because it’s too painful.

Judgment happens because we’ve been there and we’re afraid of getting back there so we feel like we need to distance ourselves, or we haven’t been there and we’re afraid of the possibility so we feel like we have to distance ourselves.

Speaking in part from personal experience, the more privilege you have, the more divorced you are from the actual felt experience of being denied what should be free for human access.

It’s gross, I hate it, and I am not exempt from it.

For full transparency, I am a person who does have quite a bit of privilege, and because of that, it’s of course worth getting more nuanced takes from people with varied backgrounds and circumstances outside of this one. I’m white and college-educated, without student loan debt, with generational wealth and a significant (though limited) inheritance. I am a person who can, at least for the time being, work for an income. I work remotely, with no commute, with a flexible schedule. In my work, I experience a high level of safety to my physical person because I don’t have to go into a workplace where I might be exposed to airborne illness, and I don’t have to do physical labor that pushes me beyond the confines of my body (with the exception of, like, self-inflicted carpal tunnel and back injuries).

My income has been somewhat variable in recent years because I experienced significant trauma, grief, physical health issues, and personal upheaval that resulted in mental health collapse for the majority of 2021-2023, and the work I did during that time was either inconsistent or non-existent. But I was able to remain independently sufficient (more or less) due to the privilege of the inheritance from when my dad died in 2020. Without that, I would not have been able to remain living alone and probably would have had to move back in with my mom in Colorado. (I’ll surely talk about that time period in more detail eventually because it has informed my orientation around work and relationships of care and how I seek to build Rest Day with our team in very substantial ways.)

It’s not cute to talk about being in your thirties and the possibility of moving back into your childhood home due to all-around instability, but I bring it up so we have some idea of the relative “stakes” I was dealing with in one of my more recent times of feeling some not-enoughness and simultaneously how my privilege ensured I would get by with more than enough.

I have some marginalized identities, as well as developmental disability, trauma, and health needs, and I come from an upbringing that included penny-pinching, coupon-cutting, and thrift store shopping for a good part of it. So my identities and experiences allow me to get somewhat closer to a felt understanding of not-enoughness, and I have felt it in degrees throughout my life.

But unless the circumstances around my privilege change substantially in my lifetime, I will only ever be able to approximate the full extent of what it is to be truly without resources.

For people with all degrees of privilege, but especially the more we have, some of our relationship with not-enoughness is based on past experience, but a lot of it is around unactualized fears of losing what we have, narrativized warnings about what our futures could be if we don’t adhere to the standard modes of operating (ie. remaining in proximity to whiteness, patriarchal ideals, adherence traditional gender roles, job title, education, generational wealth and public status, ablebodied status, etc.)

I don’t know about you, but I don’t want those stories driving fear in my life, because I don’t want to be granted privilege based on those ideas. I am, but I don’t want to be.

For fears around resources and work, a pretty common coaching or therapy exercise is to follow a fear to its natural conclusion, which after some unpacking inevitably comes down to some variation of: “I am going to be alone on the streets with nothing and nowhere to go.” Usually the coach or therapist then verbally walks their client backward from that catastrophizing scenario to show how many steps actually exist between where they are now and what it would take to get there.

Only, there already are people who are living alone on the streets with very little to their names, and those people are not just faceless projections for grappling with our own privilege. People who are, as of this week’s Supreme Court ruling, at risk across our country of being criminalized for not having adequate access to shelter, even if there is no alternative option.

Maybe we do feel better in a therapy session when we realize our distance from the stories of ruin that capitalism threatens us with coming true — but I want to make sure we each know what that distance costs us.

You may not personally find yourself unhoused today or tomorrow, but according to a 2023 report from the U.S. Department of Urban Development, more than 18,000 people will enter into homelessness systems for the first time each week (via the National Alliance to End Homelessness). Maybe you feel relief that the number doesn’t include you, and I guess a part of me secretly does for myself too, but it feels worth thinking as if those statistics could include us.

Not “it could be us” so we should hold onto even more for ourselves in our savings accounts, but “it could be us,” as in: we are not so different.

People we don’t personally know who are experiencing difficulties (of all kinds) are still people, and they’re just as much living, breathing, feeling humans like we are. That should be enough of a commonality to realize if we felt what they might feel right now, then we’d want it to be recognized.

The cost of our distance is our empathy, for the sake of self-protection.

Distance allows us to normalize what is absolutely inhuman and inhumane.

All of us. I’m included in that.

The more resources we already have, the more likely we are to centralize fear and narratives around the potential for our own loss: “I am terrified of the possibility of having to viscerally feel what it would be like to not have enough, so I will do everything in my power for myself to keep that from happening to me.

It’s an understandable sentiment, based on human psychology and also the capitalist structures we’re all doing our best to navigate — but it erases externalities. It is a different thought than: “I have viscerally felt what it means to not have enough, so I’m going to do everything in my power to make sure this never happens to me again, or to anyone else.” Doubtless, some of you reading this have experienced real, acute, financial scarcity at one time or another, perhaps frequently, and maybe even currently, and you know this all to well.

There are degrees of what it means to not have enough, so pretty much everyone who didn’t come out of the womb with a silver spoon in their mouth can understand the concept on a personal level even if it’s not an extreme one.

But if you haven’t felt it lately, then consider getting in conversations that remind you. Consider entering interactions, with anyone, regardless of whether they look like they’re having a hard time or not, with the intention of being open-eyed, and open-hearted to try to feel what it must be like for the people who are in what they’re in right this second.

It’s too easy to forget, to look away, to be insulated. I forget all the time, sometimes willingly and willfully. I’m embarrassed to say that, but I know I’m not alone.

I don’t want us to forget and not try to remember.

If you’ve felt loss, if you’ve felt the realness of not having enough, you are the expert in your experience. And if you are someone with privilege, it is your job to listen and witness, follow the lead, and believe the people who are telling you what they need – without gatekeeping or qualifiers. It’s also your job to understand that people in need may not trust you to tell you what they need, and they have every socialized and state-enforced reason not to.

This isn’t an either/or dichotomy. Having access to material resources is on a spectrum, and as individual people, we may start somewhere more to the left or the right, but we still move back and forth across that spectrum throughout our lifetimes. A whole bunch of other spectrums exist too: access to less tangible resources like community belonging, personal actualization, creative expression, emotional healing, etc., and all of those can be connected to or completely separate from financial wealth.

It’s not an exact science, but I do think we can tell for ourselves when we’re in a time of need, and for what. You may have an abundance of financial resources, but currently seriously lack community connection and have that affect your wellbeing in substantial ways. That’s still a need.

It’s worth knowing that we can be in need and still contribute. If we didn’t, probably nothing would ever happen.

We all have needs, and they’re all worth being taken care of, but not all of those needs have the same primacy. For example, having the need for human contact during quarantine and having the desire to break quarantine to meet that need would be a valid thing to want, but that need wouldn’t come before the needs of older and/or immunocompromised people who could experience extreme health complications by being in proximity to a virus that could end their life or severely diminish its quality. Cuddling your boo is important, but not as important as, like, people breathing. You feel me?

In lieu of systems that will do it for us, resourcing ourselves as individuals and having resources at our disposal are ways we can leverage more power on behalf of not just ourselves so we can move toward the building of systems that will.

Resources mean money, but they also mean time, relational, intellectual, organizational, etc.

Leveraging empathy for change becomes a matter of consciously reorienting away from fears for ourselves that, at least to some extent, exist in the imagined toward the very true scenarios that are happening in reality, right now.

Fears about not enoughness are valid, wholly and truly. They’re worth being tended to. But fears are not the same as actualities.

One of the things we talked about at length in the money workshop is how there will never be enough money to cover every imagined disaster scenario for ourselves. We can pretty much always imagine a catastrophe in which we need more.

So instead of shoring up as much in our bank accounts as possible for the worst possible future, and putting ourselves through an unending exercise of futility and anxiety — what if we…didn’t? There will never be enough so we don’t have to try to get close to a number that doesn’t exist.

Our imagined scenarios aren’t nothing. We do need a level of security, especially as our systems of government do less and less to support us. But we don’t need to only keep stockpiling our money and our time and our energy for some solo exercise in survival based on potentials when actual realities exist. This is not batten-down-the-hatches and wait it out, and let other people figure it out.

We will not be able to do everything, or even a very small fraction of everything. But that doesn’t mean we should do nothing, especially if that’s driven by fear based in supremacy we don’t even want to be a part of.

So what do we actually do about it all though?

I mean, you tell me, babe. There are countless experts on wealth inequality, resource redistribution, mutual aid, and advocacy work, and I’m not trying to be one of them.

What I am trying to get at is that one of our most important resources to come back to again and again is our felt sense of understanding, to continually, gently become aware of where we’re putting distance between ourselves and other people and why.

None of us need to be experts for that; we just need to be willing, and we need to remember what we value.

Each of us needs to find our own right relationship with empathy, because it is humanly impossible to feel it all. I am all in favor of establishing boundaries. I am all in favor of finding and creating our own parameters for what “enough" looks like in the ways we give and offer support. I don’t think we can keep our wits or our hearts about us if we don’t. Compassion fatigue is real. Limited time and resources for support are real.

But we need to have a relationship with empathy to begin with, because I don’t think we’re ever going to make it to a different reality than this one if we don’t.

Close yourself if you have to, but don’t stay closed.

Harm will happen because we exist in systems that perpetuate harm and keep us complicit in harm no matter what we do. But what if each one of us did just a little, a bit more of the time, to perpetuate less? It’s not an either/or, and being inherently complicit doesn’t mean we have to willingly or actively cause more harm where alternatives might exist that are within our reach.

There are still ways that we can minimize that harm while still meeting our needs, and being mindful that our resources don’t come at the expense of our mental wellbeing or someone else’s at the same time. Undoubtedly I will talk about some of the concrete ways we can engage, but for our purposes in this moment, I just want us to remember empathy and remember it and remember it again.

I don’t want to talk about the concrete examples of what to do right now because I want to draw our attention and our awareness first. That is where all of the concrete actions start no matter what they are.

Anticapitalist ideas acknowledge that we currently live under capitalism and have needs that generally require money to meet them, and they allow us to consider the potential impacts of the ways we earn and exchange that money. They allow us to consider the resources that exist in our bank accounts, and get real with ourselves about whether and how much we spend has impacts close to home or halfway across the globe. They also let us look past our wallets to consider the resources that are sourced in other ways, and how we can give those resources to ourselves and each other.

It’s worth looking at money and our resources and our values from an economic justice perspective not just because that sounds nice, but because our actions have very real repercussions on our life, the lives of others, and the life cycle of the resources that are used in the process.

There’s no way to engage with resources perfectly because we’re in a deeply flawed system, but there are ways to do it while keeping a bigger (and more humane) picture in mind, even just a small percentage more of the time. When we let ourselves feel just a fraction more of our empathy, we become that much more able to look anyone in the eyes regardless of whatever distance they’re at.

I don’t care about 100% of the people on this planet acting one way 100% of the time at some point in a distant future that doesn’t exist.

I care about 1% of us acting 1% more like the futures of people we don’t know matter like our own.

All I’m asking is when we look away (because we will, we’re human, and there’s no way not to sometimes), we make choices that help us turn and look back.

Let’s keep looking.

Love,
Iris

Resources and Inspiration

• In light of the Supreme Court ruling on the Grants Pass v. Johnson case this week, here’s a primer on What Communities Need to Know About the Criminalization of Homelessness through the National Alliance to End Homeless. It’s worth getting familiar, and then a good step one is sending a templated letter to your representatives in opposition to criminalization and in support of alternatives.

• One of my favorite recent reads was Falling Back in Love with Being Human by . I still cannot get over the full humanity and feeling of these love letters to transness, survival, breakdowns, healing, forgiveness, justice, and hope. I listened to the author read the audiobook, and got choked up at one point during nearly every single piece.

• I’m also in the midst of reading The Future is Disabled by , and I cannot tell you how wholly I feel seen in my own relationship to disability, and the ways I relate with other disabled people in my life. I am both so hopeful and heartbroken and hopeful all over again reading each of these essays, and it makes me want to continue to orient toward futures where we continue to be the creators and the caretakers of each other.

• I’ve been craving some dedicated space for writing, so I’m very grateful for and excited about the timing of the co-writing container of Landscapes with. As a person who both has what is at times very unruly ADHD and who largely spends time alone, I live and die by digital coworking, and the setup seems like a very generous one to hold space for my brain in a structured way (plus I cannot waaait for the visiting writer workshops).

• As someone who basically salivates over financial transparency (respectfully), I loved reading this mini-financial review by . Jen was my business coach back in the earliest iterations of my self-employment in 2017 when I was a coach myself, and just as she did for me then, her approach still offers such a measured and gentle look at creating business in order to live well — with enough, with spaciousness, and purposefully without growth at all costs.

• In my continual pursuit of restructuring relationships toward belonging and satisfaction, I enjoyed this piece about platonic partnership and co-parenting with the folks from , as well as this piece about friendship by .

• Continual reminders that we are animals who need tending, despite (and because of), all we’re facing: How to resist authoritarianism without fully losing your mind by

• For a little laugh: Love Island + politics, which tbh would still be better than what we’re in right now and that says something.

• This week, next week, all weeks:

What’s on your mind this week? Resources you’ve been reading, digesting, watching, etc.?

About Rest Day Creative

Rest Day Creative is a cooperatively owned microagency with a community-oriented, anticapitalist lens that builds brand foundations and systems for divergent thinkers, artists, activists, values-centered organizations, and helping professionals.

We create websites, copywriting, and visual branding, as well behind-the-scenes setup for businesses. We also create digital resources, including for branding, design, and cooperative work.

We’re in the process of restructuring existing structures into this new business from the ground up, but if you’re interested in learning more about our services, you can sign up here to know when we’re open for new clients.

If this writing not for you, you can change your account settings here to only receive personal essays, or to unsubscribe.

The other night, rain drummed hard on the skylight, which at times reached a near cacophony, but ultimately turned out to be a comforting din as I curled up underneath and lulled to sleep. The leftover droplets blotting the window in the morning made everything through it look impressionist, wavy approximations of trees on the other side. That’s a little how my insides have felt this whole week: wavy impressions.

That same morning after the rain, I was still under the duvet and looking up while a confused crow tried to land on skylight above me, sliding across the wet glass and squawking indignantly about needing to find footing for a new roost elsewhere (and startling the ever-loving shit out of me in the process).

I get it, buddy. Sometimes we think we’re landing on something solid and we’re not actually.

The place I’ve been waking up is my summer respite, a tiny house sublet in Portland through a friend of a friend where I’ll be staying until mid-August. After that, who knows where I’ll be next? I’ve lived in four places in as many months lately, and while that’s by choice, it requires me to completely build new structures of stability each time.

I feel stable in my living situation for now, but something is gestating internally this week and I want to give myself space to form the words for it. My internal ground is shifting. Not seismically — just enough to unsettle my equilibrium for a minute. So I’m letting myself find stability while that happens, taking a pause. I have a lot to say, but not a lot to say right this minute. Spacious time to process is necessary for anyone, but especially so for an autistic person (we have some cool neurological reasons for that, which I can talk about another time).

Handily, I feel very steady from a mental health perspective. Late spring into summer is historically a time when I feel Big Sad, and I feel beyond fortunate that depression is not my predominant reality this year, for once in a long time. That makes me hopeful that I can truly have a summer this summer.

But chronic illness is illness-ing this week, and as a result, all of my mental processing happens through a blurry filter. How cool, and also how inconvenient, that the gut is so connected to the brain.

Things continue to come together behind the scenes for Rest Day, but I want and need space to digest it while my body feels so wobbly and my brain feels so squishy before I talk about it. (Before I take that space, however, I did create a little something for you below.)

Let this be the permission-granting for all of us who need it, a reminder: take the space. A day, a minute, however long. There are truly urgent things happening in the world, but the vast majority, by a long shot, are not.

To give myself the headspace I need, I’m taking next week off from writing to go eat lots of local strawberries and rhubarb, to try to inject my eyeballs with enough PNW sun to try to last me the whole year, and to spend time with my fam visiting from Colorado. Out of the 25+ places I’ve lived as an adult, only my mom has ever visited one out of state, and that was 12 years ago, so I want to make the most of it by dragging my family to my favorite places in Portland and reveling in lots of summer eating with abandon.

So I’ll see you here in two weeks, and leave you with a fun reading resource below, the usual links and thoughts (including insight into my absolute delusion about being a viable contestant on Love Island), and some solstice wishes in the meantime:

May we pause. May we feel spacious and know spaciousness.

May we do good this week, this year, this season, for our hearts, our loves, and our cares. May we create the realities we want to see. May we tend to ourselves, may we tend to the earth. May we love each other gently, and hold each other well, in order to hold all of us accountable. May we lean into sweetness, may we recognize softness, and may we let in joy.

May we lie in the grass. May we eat ripe produce. May we read our new favorite book. May we laugh deeply. May we do nothing at all.

Sending you all of the solstice sweetness, babes.

Love,
Iris

Rest Day Book Library

I’m excited about a community resource we’re planning to incorporate into the resource hub that Rest Day is going to host, our digital book library!

The library is made up of curated lists with books from varying topics, like anti-capitalist business, community care and organizing, building and sustaining alternative relationship structures, polycrisis and eco-solidarity, disability and body liberation, anti-racism and BIPOC futures, and queer joy.

So far the lists only contain recs I’ve added, but I’m excited to get my team members’ favorites on there too, and to add your recommendations over time (tell me about ‘em!). Some day I’ll also want to add a whole bunch of fun fiction on there, especially lots of queer rom coms, because I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t.

Here’s to putting things out in the world before they’re “done”!

The intention is that the library can grow so people can come back again and again, and I want it to be truly community-initiated so we can make use of all of our beautiful minds together, not just mine or our team’s.

I built the library on Bookshop to easily allow for growth, and while the platform automatically sets up a small percentage of sales through the library to go to Rest Day, the primary idea is that the library is a free resource based in radical generosity and not a transactional exchange for us. We give it because want to, and that’s it!

You can change the setting once you’re there so proceeds go to a local bookstore of your choice, which we think is a great idea if you’d like to. Or if you use the lists to inspire ideas and pick up your books elsewhere like your local library, we hope they act as a little nudge to pay it forward! That might look like writing a review for the author after you read their book, recommending it to a friend, or doing a small act of kindness, however unrelated, for yourself or someone else, just because.

Want to find your next read?

Go to the library

Thinking, Receiving, Listening, Delighting In

• This important read by Price: When You Live Your Values Every Day, There's No Need for Activist Guilt, deconstructing the decision fatigue and moral imperatives that can come with not feeling like we’re doing “enough” in activist efforts (and, importantly, putting a critical eye on what we consider activism in the first place). A snapshot:

  “When we get swept up in not being able to ‘do it all’ or freeze up with complete inability to choose any cause to work toward because we can't decide which one is the ‘most worthy,’ we are operating out of a highly individualistic framework that positions the self as the agent of change.”

• Speaking of, Devon’s book Unlearning Shame feels like required reading for anyone who has ever experienced shame (aka me, you, basically all humans). Devon unpacks the ways shame is largely connected to larger systemic forces, and instead of saying, “Well, that absolves me from personal responsibility,” offers ways we can engage with expansive recognition, remain accountable to ourselves and each other, and still access much-needed compassion.

• This essay by on what it means to make art, make money, and choose to live toward futures we want to see:

  “We bear witness, organize, and learn how to resist in our own ways - whether through boycotts or civil disobedience… I know that it is our shared responsibility to not only get through this moment together, liberated and free, but to also simultaneously reimagine futures of survival and beauty, one where we can all exist together.”

• In the comments section of Fariha’s piece, I also saw an open call for speculative fiction reimagining futures beyond genocide by Stories to Change the World. Fiction revolutionaries, send in your submission so you can show us all the collective beauty of what is possible!

• This piece, “Living Danishly" isn't the solution we think it is by

• I’d heard Greta van Fleet before but they would always get mixed in with 70’s rock on playlists so I just realized this week that they’re a young, current band. The sound is reminiscent of Led Zeppelin and Fleetwood Mac, echoing an era of music I am so deeply down for. Greta van Fleet is still its own thing, and while I often want to go to the source, listening to them is a bit like getting new songs from already beloved artists of times past. (Plus I love that the leader singer is a queer bb.)

• Correctly-gendering street angels, lol.

• I love this sweet idea of a professional walk-companion. People showing up for each other in small but potentially impactful ways.

• Misbehaving bird + forbidden cupboard = protect at all costs.

• Lately I’ve been building a client project that is fun for me to do but requires that I simultaneously occupy 25% of my brain at the same time with external input. Predictably, that has resulted in background watching of the new season of Love Island UK. Is it just me, or is this one even more unhinged than usual?? I’ve watched nearly every season (UK, US, and Australia), to the point that I now harbor a small but deep delusion that I — a queer, autistic, non-binary, non-monogamous, fairly-cute-but-definitely-not-anywhere-near-supermodel, 34-year-old who doesn’t wear makeup and would be mortified to even be perceived by a camera — could compete to win the hetero-monogamous drama fest/beauty pageant. Even without all of the other necessary attributes, I would automatically be disqualified because I am already geriatric by their standards, and because I have actually been to therapy. Still, some corner of my delu little brain is convinced that I could somehow get far enough to make my way through a handful of recoupling ceremonies, only to have to recuse myself due to the competition where they have to baby-bird food and drinks into each other’s mouths (iykyk). Anyone else?

And on THAT note — probably a good place to end.

Posts Lately

To wrap up, here’s a quick roundup of the recent posts on Soft Animal Bodies, in case you missed one. If there’s one that particularly resonates, I wholly appreciate you sharing it with someone you know!

Rest Day Creative

This part of the newsletter is where I explore all things inclusive of and adjacent to co-owning and building an anticapitalist, worker cooperative microagency with a team, with thoughts and experiments in community-oriented business and beyond.

• Human wellbeing as a priority — creating a microcosm of reality. An essay on accidentally creating the change you think someone else is going to do, and looking behind the scenes of our worker cooperative.

• Values only have value if there's agency. Questioning whose security we treat like it matters (and whose we don't), plus a snapshot of our values as an anticapitalist, community-oriented business.

Soft Body Personal

This section of the newsletter is the spicier, less filtered, more personal writing sibling. Opt in or out depending on how you feel about: gay rom com books and fiction writing, neurodivergence, autism, disability, chronic illness, trashy and deeply problematic reality television as delightful medicine, hiking long or short distances in nature because it makes snacks taste better, and queering gender, relationships, and systems.

• Co-creating unconventional partnerships. Finding security through nuance, friends as beloveds, former romantic partners turned FWB minus the friendship, and sex as a hobby. If you like to be nosy about the particulars of other people’s sex lives, this one is for you.

• How do you celebrate when grief is here? Reflections on birthdays, death days, and accessing joy amidst sorrow, especially when we’re in a world that can feel so broken. Basically: the very human ways that we find our way through.

I have a friend with benefits.

More accurately, I have “benefits” with no friendship: an ongoing sexual agreement with a former romantic partner where we meet regularly and almost exclusively to hook up.

The “friend” part of FWB is thin on the ground, and we’ve negotiated it that way on purpose. Where we used to share visions for the future, now X1 and I exchange memes, stand-up comedy clips, and TV show recs (there just is something about an ex-partner who knows what you like by what you once laughed at together on the couch over takeout). I help point out choices to vote for in local elections. Because I am 34 going on 75, sometimes we go in on an order of our medical supplements to get the free shipping.

That’s about as friendship-y as it gets between us, meaning the emotional side outside of sex is fairly surface level these days.

Besides the broad strokes of our lives (and that one time I got deeply invested in the gossip of a friend’s wedding drama that went down), what we know about each other comes from a little over two years of serious dating, a couple of months where we were working out what friends with benefits actually meant, and then six months of sex-only communication.

Because being nosy is fun, and also since most of us legitimately don’t have many spaces to hear about real people’s sex lives on the ground, for us that communication now looks like:

• Texting about the logistics of when and where (ex. “What’s your schedule like? I can be there by 2pm but have to leave at 4pm.”)

• Gauging mood/vibe/intensity in advance (“I have some pent-up energy today that I want to get out. What’s your vibe like?” “I want to get thrown around.”)

• Talking about specific setup (“I want you lying face down when I come in the room. I’ll give you a massage to start.”)

• Negotiating compromise (“I’m feeling tired today, but I’m still open to these acts and positions. I’m open to using toys, but only these specific ones.”)

• Sexting (ranging between detailed fantasies, reliving past exploits, and stunning one-liners like all-caps “HOT” or “fuckkkkk,” with lots of splash emoji/eggplant emoji/hot face emoji/drool emoji/fire emoji, because even though I can write a Jane Austen-worthy love letter, a good writer is nothing without range)

Beyond texting, the only other communication is dirty talk during sex. I was going to say dirty sex is self-explanatory, but I don’t think it actually is. As all of this illustrates, we’re highly verbal people, and dirty talk is an explicit turn-on for both of us. Because our sex often explores power dynamics, we use facial expressions, physical touch, and dirty talk as ways to implicitly communicate who is in charge in each moment. There’s an implied “yes and” thing like improv that helps us play into one another. Besides changes in hand pressure and different touch intensity, we tell or ask what we’re going to do to each other or want done to us, and the tone and method of telling/asking dictates whose pleasure is the primary focal point in that moment. It’s also how we shift positions or intensities that aren’t working for one of us, without losing the energy we’re building.

This dynamic is not where we started, but it’s worth saying: I like it.

There were times when I wouldn’t have chosen it, but it’s certainly what I’d choose now. I wouldn’t do it with just anyone, though this has taught me I could if we wanted to.

So why did I choose it? I believe I can meet my core needs for emotional partnership outside of a person I have sex with, and I still have a need for physical intimacy, which this connection fulfills so well for me. I didn’t want to throw out the kinky sex with the bathwater, so to speak.

As a polyamorous person, as a non-monogamous person, but most of all as a relationship anarchist, I have built-in flexibility of who meets what need. If I was in a monogamous relationship, and that monogamy included sexual and romantic needs as well as material and security needs being met by just one person, I would not only have sex with that person since I couldn’t get those needs met elsewhere. Since I’m not, I don’t have to. With some built-in flexibility, and a lot of conversations, future-building might happen with friends instead of romantic partners, and sexual connection may not result in an eventual roof over my head. This is also why I am so wholly into business-building with people I care about, despite the general advice that it’s a terrible idea. It’s less about the idea itself and more about the execution.

I’m inherently wired for partnership, but that partnership happens with my closest people regardless of romantic connection or physical attraction because I’m so wired for it. When I go all in with my core people, I go in as fully as our shared desire and circumstances will let me. The primary factors that shape what that actually looks like and what limits it are our true needs. I have friends who are beloveds who live across the country. I have friends with romantic partnerships whose core needs for security are met by each other. In those cases, those beloveds offer me so much by meeting my emotional needs, but our current realities mean I don’t also get my material security needs met there too. I figure out how to get those needs met elsewhere, or we discuss how to co-create and reengineer the circumstances if possible so they can be. I think of romantic and sexual partnership in the same way.

I am clear that my needs do involve other people. As a more-or-less single person living alone, and living in my fourth home in as many months this year (by choice), I have a sense of freedom but also uprootedness. Doing things alone all the time makes me tired, and as a chronically ill person I already have enough things that make me tired. I don’t want to always have to make choices about my own security without the support of other people. Security actually is a driving factor of relationship anarchy for me, because flexibility is my way to get it.

My future might look more like cooperative housing with a few people I care about, and less like buying a one-family home with one other person I happen to be romantically or sexually involved with. My work might look less like solopreneurship or clocking in, and more like building a tight-knit cooperative business like what I’m doing with Rest Day Creative. As long as the needs are met, and as long as I don’t need those needs to be met all in one place or in conventional ways, the structure can be whatever it is.

If you are monogamous and it’s working for you, I am 100% here for it. Same if any of your other choices about employment or housing or any number of life needs might look more conventional from the outside. I’m just speaking for me personally.

As for the sex part of things, because sex can be just as fascinating as it can be needlessly comparative: I do this for fun. This is a fun hobby. Sex can have a lot of cultural connotations and greater implications, but ultimately if you don’t use it for procreation, sex is an activity you take part in like pretty much anything else. You can imbue it with as much or as little meaning as you like. It’s all up to you.

Sex is a hobby I have, that I share with this person, and it may not be your hobby. You might like knitting or bowling, and your frequency of sex or preference to have it at all says just as much about your validity as my inability to purl a row or bowl a strike says about me. Which is to say: none at all. Even if sex is one of your hobbies, maybe it’s one you don’t need or want to spend as much time or effort cultivating communication or systems around, in which case, great! Save your energy for something else. I like sex as a hobby, and some days I still want to do other activities, like reading or just taking a damn nap.

Like most hobbies, this arrangement happened and continues to happen due to very deliberate cultivation.

I don’t know how you can end up in an emotionally functional sexual dynamic with an ex otherwise.

Here’s how it all started: a few years ago, I did something very gay. (I do gay things much more frequently than that, but this was the kind of decision that we as a community™ can immediately identify as Big Gay).

I swiped right on a dating profile for someone who lived 900 miles away from me. A plane ticket got booked within a week, we met in person the next week, and 12 weeks later we both permanently moved to a city neither of us had scarcely visited, living a few blocks away from each other.

Before that happened, it started with the swipe. “I’m looking for a man in finance, trust fund, 6’5”, blue eyes,” except think more: trans man, good chat, 5’2”, glasses. I don’t really have a “type,” or rather I have many types, but the thing pretty much all of them have in common is being able to have extensive meta-conversation about relationships, which he certainly can.

Within the first week of long-distance chatting after that Bumble swipe, my phone left me a judgmental notice that I had spent 20 hours on my Messages app in less than seven days. I quietly turned off screen time notifications and proceeded to act as if I had not seen them. My friend Tricia started calling X my part-time job, as in “How’s your part-time job going?” The texting continued, but on top of it, we proceeded to chat on the phone for 3-6 hours at a time, me lying on my couch like a teenage babysitter in the 80s twirling an invisible phone cord, or otherwise sleepily holding the phone propped next to my ear, lying in bed as the hours ticked past my bedtime (9pm) to when I hung up the phone (2am).

I was swept forward in that giddy high that only limerance can bring, except it was reflected and magnified back, pinging between us in a dizzying way. At that point, we were two people who had ostensibly never met each other in real life, but had already spent more hours together than many close relationships and friendships even do.

Besides cutting into all of my time outside of work, the volume of how much we talked wasn’t that remarkable to me. One of the ways autism can present for me is through being hyperverbal, so even though I can be introverted and at times deeply internal, when I get going I have a pretty extensive battery pack that sometimes lets me talk and receive far beyond the limits of most other people. (A gift! A curse!)

What did feel revelatory to me at the time was the ease with which we talked about sex, especially as two people who had never so much as shook hands.

Not even just about sex, but about relationship dynamics as a whole, and how we were each active shapers of those dynamics.

As a late-in-life queer, I had been out for a couple of years by then. I’d had a handful of dates and flings (including a different time of moving across the country, only to live down the street from a love interest who had heavily hinted at polyamory and then turned out to be in a very decidedly monogamous marriage, and another time waiting weeks for my renewed passport to arrive so I could spend a long weekend with a Tinder date in Canada paddleboarding, hiking, eating our way through the city’s vegan food, and getting eaten out).

So I’d been out, I’d been dating, and I’d been doing the funny and occasionally questionable things you do (especially in the pre-COVID era) when you’re newly out and finding out what flavor of gay you want to be. The kind where you might try on different people and dates until you eventually realize, like an after-school special, the gay was inside all along.

Before the multi-state, multi-country gallivanting though, I’d been in a couple of long-term heterosexual relationships, one for nine years. Even being in such deep conditions for trust to grow that years together can bring, there weren’t really mechanisms to talk about sex or the concrete details of our connection. With the partner I had in my twenties in particular, we often talked about our relationship in vague future terms. When we did talk specifics it was usually when a difficult pattern neared a breaking point and we had to solve an issue.

In those relationships, we operated based on a lot of unspoken assumptions. I simply didn’t know I was allowed to be explicit about what I wanted (and, autistically, a lot of my worldview depends on understanding what I have permission for, which is why I create a lot of my own self-permissioning now). As someone who was socialized as female, nearly all external messaging led me to believe that the wants of someone else would be all I needed to know.

Nowhere do I remember there being tips or scripts for initiating sex, declining sex, offering counter-suggestions, declaring activities, changing pace, changing intensity, options for ending sex in any way besides an orgasm, or post-sex aftercare.

When it came to my late-twenties queer sex education, it felt like trying to fumble through teenage firsts all over again, gleaning information from wherever I could get it. One of my first acts of coming out was to watch The L Word in its entirety (It did not age well! Was it even aging well while it was airing??) Hilariously, I scrutinized the screen to try to understand what exactly was happening with hands and body positioning during the many sex scenes. I knew trying to get gay sex ed circa 2004 HBO was wrongheaded, but you don’t know what you don’t know, you know?

So when X and I had our first phone call, it was nothing short of revelatory to talk about sex.

Until that point, sex was something I discussed with friends, but hardly in detail with a person I planned on having it with.

Talking so openly was part of his natural personality as a curator of experiences and someone who likes to have a level of control and context going into a situation (which, same, bestie). But X also initiated the meta-conversation out of necessity. As a trans man, he commonly experienced new sex partners who were unfamiliar with his body, his anatomy, and with transness in general. To try to ensure a worthwhile experience for himself, he would lead with education and question-asking to get on the same page as soon as possible.

It was a smart move, and based on our experience, one I think should be the norm regardless of gender identity. This kind of preparation is common for the kink community, but not a given otherwise. I’ve had enough partners where we did talk beforehand about sexual safety, but rarely about pleasure and specific acts from a detailed perspective.

I’d been deep in my own self-exploration of genderqueerness as a way to understand trans friends and potential love interests (a special interest that would take me a while longer to understand was also about me coming to terms with my own genderqueer identity). That meant that most of the general education was already out of the way, but there were still pieces related to identity and preference that were invaluable for each of us to know about each other.

We talked about our kinks, our preferences, our sexual histories, whether we liked dirty talk, choking, restraint, impact play, whether any body parts were off-limits or required special treatment, what we wanted to be called during sex (yes to “slut,” yes to “king”), what to call our genitals (“pussy,” “dick”), what to call a dildo (“cock”). We talked about STI testing beforehand and how we would navigate destigmatizing conversations if either or both of us contracted one.

This whole conversation took place during our first-ever phone call, 900 miles apart, having never even touched. After so much guessing and assumptions both on my own and with nearly all other partners, I cannot begin to describe the fullness and freedom I felt during and after that talk.

In those early days, I had nothing but reasons to be excited about X, but in all seriousness, that conversation topped them all.

Someone was willing to go there with me. I knew I could talk about sex and relationship dynamics all day every day. I’m the kind of person who leans toward polyamory and non-monogamy less because I have a strong desire for multiple partners and more because the structures require conversation about relationships and that’s fun for me.

To have someone do it with me felt rare. Relationships and sex are so ubiquitous, but engineering them for pleasure, comfort, and desire, is not.

Conversations like the one we had are why sex is still happening between us, and why it’s still so fulfilling a year out from our official breakup. They’re what has allowed us to pivot through so many iterations of connection over just a few years.

Despite our conversation in advance, our first few sexual encounters were nothing exceptional. We were two people who had experienced rapid emotional progression long distance but didn’t have physical connection progressing at the same rate. My favorite part of watching Love is Blind is always the early episodes before the cast sees each other and then there’s the reveal, because it brings me so nostalgically back to picking up X from the airport for the very first time. My body was so viscerally like, “Who even is this?”

It took time for bodies to catch up. After our initial sex, it also took us pausing and going, “Here’s what I’m noticing. Do you feel that too? Here’s the assumption I’m making. What’s actually going on for you?” Part of the disconnect was a hesitancy on my part, operating based on past gendered assumptions about my own role in sex and unspoken trauma I hadn’t been ready to reveal yet. Talking forthrightly and honestly allowed us to rework this pattern almost immediately.

If we had stopped there, no conversation, he probably would have flown home with both of us thinking we’d had a great emotional spark and just some mediocre sex a few times. Instead, it’s resulted in building the longest-lasting component of our connection.

We were able to shift just-okay sex into sex that continually gets more exceptional over time even now, because we’re always making room for what is actually happening for each of us in the present.

From that first phone call, we went on to spend our first ten days in person together at a hotel (an astronomical amount of time with someone you’ve never met, if you think about it). We flew back and forth between our states every few weeks after until we eventually settled in the same city a few months in, dated for a couple years, and transitioned into where we are now.

Conversations got us through a lot more hot and heavy sex, having an ethically non-monogamous relationship and external partners along the way, co-navigating some of the most difficult and traumatic years of my life, and lots of couples’ therapy (the hill I will die on is relationship therapy, it’s so good).

Conversations saw us through at least two wobbly points where we got to co-create possibilities to pivot instead of breaking up, then through the break up itself, and through the liminal space of being not together but still kind of wanting to be in each other’s pants.

When we reached that point, I asked myself, “Having sex with your ex is some dumb bitch behavior, you know that?” I thought this with amused exasperation, and despite the wording, with kindness and little judgment.

The answer simply was: this is what I want.

It didn’t matter whether anyone else understood, or whether it made me look silly. It didn’t matter whether my decision would change later.

What mattered is that it felt like the right decision at that time, and continues to.

When it doesn’t, I’ll do something else. We’ll have a conversation and pivot this connection yet again, or we’ll dissolve it. We’ll do the next best thing, and in all likelihood it probably won’t ever look like conventional romantic partnership.

I could build all of this with someone else, but the main thing is, I don’t have to.

I am in continual conversation with my core people specifically so I don’t have to if I don’t want to.

Deliberate choice-making in the face of strong forces for the status quo can sometimes feel like swimming upstream, but I’d rather swim upstream than have the current take me somewhere I don’t want to go.

Flexibility can bring freedom, and it can also come with a lot of necessary intention and work. I am here for that work.

I do what I can to create possibility for myself, and to make it easier to meet my needs wherever I go and whomever I’m with.

What structures could you introduce into relationships so they meet your needs?

What intentional choices feel right for you?

I hope whatever feels worth it to you, you’ll give yourself the space to make them too.

Love,
Iris

Recs and Thoughts

• I made you a sexy little summery playlist, because anyone who reads this many words of mine at once and makes it to this point deserves a little treat.

• I recently read Feel It All: A Therapist's Guide to Reimagining Your Relationship with Sex by Casey Tanner. Recommend! Casey’s approach is systemically aware and sensitive, and makes plenty of space for all kinds of permission around sex and identity, including space for asexuality, changing one’s relationship to sex due to menopause and aging, and navigating a variety of contexts around sexuality. It’s laid out as a primer, but I don’t know anyone who couldn’t use the reminders.

• LOVING this list of reflections from of . A snippet:

  “I will die. You will die. We will die. The best possible outcome before that happens is allowing ourselves to step into an irresistible vision beyond survival and iterate toward it daily.”

  I MEAN.

• Have you called your reps lately? What part of you, in heart, in words, in actions, in dollars, is in solidarity with Palestine today, this week?

• opened a new batch of orders for their brilliantly imagined Gay Marseille card deck today. If you’re a queer witch who practices tarot, Charlie’s writing and art is truly exceptional and necessary. I don’t even practice tarot anymore, but at least 75% of people who have visited me IRL have experienced me shoving cards from Fifth Spirit Tarot under their noses to point out all of the incredible queer art and reading out loud passages out of their books.

• I’m about 75% of the way through the book Only This Beautiful Moment by Abdi Nazemian, an interwoven fictional story about three generations of Iranian men coming to terms with queerness, family, and cultural allegiances. The book walks the line well between real personal/political difficulty and grief with a surprising lack of emotional heaviness. Would recommend.

• I found this piece about disability + COVID by to be a moving account of realness this week. Several years into pandemic life has normalized so much business as usual, but despite the social blasé, there are still lasting implications. Yes, there are systemic supports that need to be better. Masking can’t do everything, testing can’t do everything, but they are clear ways within our own power to support disproportionately affected people in our communities, particularly disabled people and POC. Statistically, white people are less likely to wear masks than people of color, and POC are still disproportionately affected by adverse health risks due to COVID. Able-bodied people are also less likely to mask up, even though repeated infection could change their own status to chronically ill or disabled. Every successive COVID infection exponentially increases health risks. There’s no moral failing if you do get it, but there are factual realities. As someone who now has MCAS from unrelated causes, but knows people with long COVID can get it: can confirm, it’s more fun not to have it! Even if you haven’t been masking, you can start at any time. There’s no such thing as doing it perfectly, and I won’t claim perfection. I eat inside at restaurants. I’ve been to indoor swimming pools and not worn a mask. But at the grocery store? In a theater? As much as I can in indoor spaces? Personally, protecting myself and my communities feels worth it.

• Queer joy matters. Allyship matters. And sassiness is just fun!

• May I also present to you: dog in a bucket.

For the most part, I feel quite solid and calm in building our anticapitalist worker cooperative, Rest Day Creative, in part because I started self employment seven years ago so this ain’t my first rodeo, but mostly because I really believe in what we’re doing. I feel a different kind of confidence than I ever have in work before because of how much I believe in it.

You can read more about the basis for our worker cooperative and how it started here:

I believe in my work being able to sustainably contribute to my own future. To a future. To our futures.

I believe in my contributions having tangible impacts on the lives of the people I care about. I believe if the structures of care don’t exist how we need them to, we’re the ones to make them.

I do not believe wellbeing is too much to ask for, and I want more people to feel like it’s worth creating, and not in isolation. I want people to realize it’s possible, that what’s seen as “radical” may actually be a real and sensible direction for our futures.

As put in this week’s essay (well worth reading), “Stop being dismissive of radical movements. Stop rolling your eyes at the ostensibly utopian dreams of your anti-capitalist and anti-state friends.”

Reframe what realistic means. Reframe what radical means. Our radical imaginings may seem just that to some, but in the face of the alternatives, they could still be the most realistic way to get to a just future.

I believe in all of this, but this the first time I’m building these structures in a work sense, with decentralized power and policies that reflect value so wholly on so many levels.

I believe we should all have agency in how we approach work. I was a yes-person for so many years in so many different roles, because even when I was in positions that explicitly told me I didn’t have to be, I could still read enough of the underlying dynamics to know if I didn’t consent, eventually I wouldn't have that job (or relationship, or fill-in-the-blank).

I knew that I could say no, but only if the no was not too inconveniencing or threatening to that person’s worldview about their own security.

That dynamic still existed in very thoughtful work environments too, with leaders that were very considered about their impacts and trying not to do harm.

This isn’t just a corporate thing, and this isn’t just a “jobs out there” thing. This is a jobs-in-general thing. This is a navigating hierarchy and consent across any part of our society thing. We see that it’s okay if we protest as citizens — until our no threatens to the worldview leaders have for their own security. We learn it’s okay to say no during sex — unless our no threatens that partner’s sense of security. Thankfully that’s not all we experience, and there are many counterexamples. But what we have experienced is enough, in so many different settings and so many different ways and work especially, to learn that our participation might mean weighing our wellbeing with our own safety or security. The frequency of that lesson is only compounded by each layer of marginalized identity or circumstance.

Conditional no’s are not real agency, and the only way we’re going to get around them is if we, individually and collectively, shift our understanding of what we value, who we value, and whose security really matters.

Never in my work life, before now, have I entered into a formal partnership agreement where I felt like, top down, from how my input was treated to how much pay I made, what I had was fully recognized as equal. Which says a lot, considering I have had countless metaconversations over many years with all of those people about how I saw our work as collaborative partnership and co-creation. Whether through my own naivete or just sheer personality, I really believed I was building partnership, every time. I was met with ready agreement on the other end, and they were even sometimes the ones initiating the conversations — only when it came to a paycheck or the security of our futures, theirs came first. And the degree to which theirs came first was sometimes really wide.

But, really, what were they supposed to do? That’s what they were told to do, that’s what almost every single model we’ve ever experienced shows we all should do, and because of it, that’s what they felt they had to do for their own wellbeing. If I had been in their situation before this year, I might have done the same thing.

I truly don’t fault any of them for that. I really don’t.

I just wanted a tacit understanding — backed by real metrics — that my contribution was just as valuable as theirs even though I wasn’t the face of a business.

I’ve built a lot, most of it behind-the-scenes, some of it ultimately wildly successful on behalf of other people, and that has a lot more to do with having skills that are excellent for that kind of support than it does about me not being capable of executive leadership. Based on contribution and lasting impact, there are some collaborative projects that in an equitable, monetary arrangement, I would have received financial equity on, though I didn’t.

And again, that’s not on them, and that’s not on me. I’m not saying that because I need any part of the past to be different, I’m saying it because it’s factual. In a different arrangement, things would have been different.

I felt some friction, as I’m sure just about anyone has who has worked “underneath” someone else, but I didn’t actually know what an alternative could be and I doubt they did either. We operated based on what we had access to, and it would have taken a full paradigm shift not just for me but for everyone involved to rework what we valued and how that looked on so many different structural levels.

I think it has much more to do with our collective understanding and valuation of care work as much as anything else. Obviously there are so many smart people who have talked about care work, and here I’m using the term much more broadly than the usual sense to extend to any kind of supportive role rather than a leadership one, but I think a lot still applies in parallel. Support work is seen as less than, even though it is essential for all business. In any business, solo business included, someone needs to do it.

The ideas are what is valued. And yes, HELL YES, we need the ideas. So many times I am in awe of the creativity and power of the people whose work rests on their ideas. (Truly, do you know how many geniuses just exist out there?? And how many of them are people we personally know and get to learn from?)

But who do you think makes your ideas into something real that makes you money? Unless it’s you, it’s the support people who are with you.

Everyone on our team at Rest Day comes from a background of support in our work, and we’ve often chosen projects or roles in our solo businesses that are less visible or behind-the-scenes. These choices honestly have nothing to do with capability. Every one of my teammates has a special kind of charisma that can and does command attention, though admittedly at times in a quiet sense. They are all, quite honestly, brilliant, and I feel very lucky to get to share in their wisdom and their skills.

But even if it did have to do with capability, even if none of us were fit for what is traditionally thought of as leadership, why should our work be any less valued?

On our team, we’ve all been second in command, or fourth, or twenty-sixth, many times over. We know what it means to be in support roles, and we’ve chosen them anyway. We’ve chosen the projects and tasks we have because they’re fulfilling, they’re interesting, and we can see measurable impacts. We like them, and we’re good at them. Like, really, really good.

Whatever role we are each in, we need each other. So why not value each other?

And if we value each other, how do we ensure that value is reflected in a real sense? What are the dollars going in pockets, what are the benefits on the ground? How does that value extend beyond contribution and acknowledge actual need?

Again, what do we value, who do we value, and whose security matters?

What do we need to do in order to ensure we engage with our team, our audience, our clients, our customers, as humans who have needs that are just as real and valuable as our own?

If you are a free flow artist with no inclination for spreadsheets, value your spreadsheet person. If you are the spreadsheet person, value your artists. With praise. With dollars. With referrals. The visionaries and the vision-makers need each other (even if you work alone and that just looks like different parts of you making peace with that need).

Which yes, if you’re here, that’s probably what you want in the first place. But we’re still navigating uncharted territory to some extent, aren’t we?

There are reasons more businesses aren’t cutting the salaries of the owners and leveling out the difference to what their employees make. Some of those reasons are legitimate, as in, “If we change some of the structures of our business to make them more equitable right now, our business has a high likelihood of not surviving, and then no one is cared for.” Fair!

Let’s be clear that I am never advocating unreasonable risk when it comes to change, or significantly compromising survivability. (Though I do want to give a side eye at what is and is not actually “unreasonable” and take a look any structures that are based on narratives of deservability.)

What I am advocating for is approaching our interactions with each other and our businesses, whatever role we play in them, with clear-eyed awareness and curiosity.

I am advocating that we question business as usual when the business says it’s all for equitability but the behind the scenes say otherwise. I am advocating for the ability to receive and sit with what might be less palatable answers to those questions for ourselves and be willing to experiment with even incremental shifts and experiments.

We’re each meeting the dynamics of our lives exactly where we find ourselves in them, and that’s going to be its own whole thing depending on so many factors. I just want us to be willing and open to what those dynamics tell us about ourselves and what we can do about them if we see they’re aligned differently with what we believe in.

In our case, our team doesn’t have significantly more or less on the line than we did before starting Rest Day Creative. It’s an entirely new business, but there are a lot of invisible mechanisms it’s already standing on, and we have so many proven skills that are going to transfer over. Many of our existing resources can be funneled over from the businesses we’ve already been operating, and we’re mostly restructuring how those resources are distributed. Shifts toward equitable work relationships and conditions are going to look substantially different if any business you’re part of is deeply entrenched in existing systems and ideologies that need to be carefully dismantled.

Because we don’t have a lot to dismantle, just a lot to create, our experimentation at Rest Day mostly requires:

1. Making policies that we’ve never used before, many we don’t have any peers using as a model, and being the test subjects for how airtight they are (and reporting back on them).

2. Being willing, all of us, as “support people” to step forward into our what leadership requires of us in our own way, and seeing support, when it is given, as its own kind of necessary and integral leadership.

True democracy still means we each have to take initiative, and as I’ve stated above, I’ve never had an ongoing work collaboration that was democratic across all levels of the work. None of us have to this extent. We’re learning, and we’ll keep learning.

Different than I ever have in work, I feel the responsibility of my actions and input having deep and lasting effects on three other people from now until we say differently. It’s not like they didn’t before, since three of us already worked together before we formed Rest Day, but the sense of ownership and shared stakes are different.

We’ve made commitments to each other in tangible, monetary, resource-oriented ways that state, “When I thrive, you thrive. When you need, I support. When I need, I receive.”

I’m looking forward to when I can come back here and tell you more about what we learn in a concrete sense, like how we’re setting up our decision-making process, how we make our way through conflict resolution, and the structures we have in place for all sorts of eventualities. Next week we meet with a lawyer, and I know I will have so many things to say about that some day too.

Until then:

May we value our wellbeing, may we value each other, and may we build our worlds to reflect that.

Love,
Iris

Our Values

You can’t very well get in alignment if you don’t know what you’re aligned with. That’s why one of our very first actions weeks ago was to get clear on our shared values and what we stand for.

I’ll talk about these in much greater detail at some point and break down how we apply them in specific ways (which I am very excited to do), but in the meantime, this is a quick snapshot of our fundamental values at Rest Day Creative. Everything we do and plan to is cross-referenced with these values, from how we set expectations with clients to how we interact as a team to which benefits we establish, when, and why.

Do you have a metric like this to help yourself gut-check how you operate? Would you like to? What do you value, and how are those values present in the realest ways?

Transparency: trust generates transformative change.
Trust forms when everyone involved can see what is happening. Where there’s trust, there’s safety, and where there’s safety, creative expression is possible. Only with creativity can we imagine and then create the realities where equitable, mutually beneficial futures are the norm.

Reciprocity: generosity is a renewable resource.
No one is more or less deserving to have more or less than we each do, and when we operate from a place of generosity, we have a sense of relief and trust knowing that we are accountable to each other — not from a place of responsibility or obligation, but from a space of collective care. Mutual care makes space for the reality that no person operates on the exact same level every day, and together we don’t need to.

Experimentation: the rough draft is our playground.
To get somewhere new, we have to give ourselves the opportunity to not know, to guess, to fuck up, to fail — and to play without fear of consequences while we do it. Because living under capitalist structures has realities and constraints we can’t always get around, anticapitalist efforts are inherently experimental. There’s no one right way, only the ways we try to live closer to our values, to our own minds and bodies, and to each other.

Sustainability: nervous systems come first.
When we base our work on systems and processes that prevent burnout and dismantle urgency, we acknowledge realities that already exist and make it possible to actually navigate those human inevitabilities. We create space to live within the work and recognize the humanity of the day-to-day for ourselves and each other. Anything less than that isn’t sustainable, and none of us are expendable. No profit is worth anyone’s pain.

Pleasure: enjoyment is our most-used metric.
Taking pleasure in what you have is the ultimate expression of enoughness, and enoughness is the antithesis of capitalist growth at all costs. We believe in growth with a purpose, and if that purpose isn’t bringing joy, then what is it for? Play is fundamental not because we’ve arrived somewhere that allows us to, but in spite of the fact that we haven’t.

Resources and Inspiration

• I’m uplifted by the idea of list stacks as a grassroots move to highlight voices across this platform at different levels of audience and identity, and as part of that, I’m excited to have Soft Animal Bodies listed in the newly launched Q Stack directory of queer writers. I also look forward to making my way through many of the publications listed! (To my queer babes, they do featured guest submissions if you want a new place to put eyes on your writing or art.)

• Speaking of, it’s Pride month! Let us never forget that Pride is forever and always a protest — every day and year until it no longer has to be. Our joy is important, the visibility of our joy is important — and so is our resistance. The first pride was a multi-day riot against police violence. Queer women of color, notably trans women in particular, fought for themselves, for each other, for us. We’re not doing their legacy or our identities justice (allied straights included) unless we’re also committed to just futures that include and extend beyond our own.

• Wherever you are, however much you have or have not done yet, you are needed. Yesterday is always the best day for advocacy, but today is the next best, and it’s the one we can actually do something about. Not sure which cause to contribute to next? Choose one. Pick one. There is no ultimate answer. The answer is pick. The answer is do something. Operation Olive Branch, the collected mutual aid resource for vetted funds supporting families in Gaza, is always a great option.

• I loved this reminder by about artists making the revolution irresistible, and how hope is a necessary and intrinsic part of that revolution. In that vein, Future Praire opened applications to artists for their Queer Futures Award: “We are offering $1,000 grants to Portland-based artists working in any medium who create a new art piece that creatively envisions the future of Portland, especially for the queer community.”

• I look forward to: seeing Hannah Gadsby’s new stand-up comedy tour tomorrow night, with a group of autistic queers going to see another autistic queer. Wandering around Portland rose gardens while they’re still in full bloom and feeling like I’m taking a turn in queer Bridgerton. Lazing in the sun next to the river amidst all of the other gays, like ya’ do. Taking a bath in the clawfoot tub in the garden of my summer sublet at the new moon, because that sounds like a pretty gay thing to do. May we all have cute gayness in our lives.

• Normally I would shout out things I’ve already finished reading, but I’m in an ongoing state of working my way through six books and 1 million podcast episodes simultaneously. I don’t want to not talk about these any longer even though I haven’t finished them. First: Altar to an Erupting Sun, such a timely book for how we orient ourselves as one person amidst collective attempts to change systems. Even though it’s fiction, I’m heartened by the human reminder of the changemakers who have come before us and who will be after. The pacing is slower and I’m taking my time to read, but I’m definitely invested.

• The other: To Shape a Dragon’s Breath, which I’m listening to for this month’s book club at a local Portland queer bookstore, Always Here. Fantasy can be an iffy genre for me, but I appreciate the less Eurocentric perspective of a queer Indigenous protagonist who is outspoken in her pushback against supremacist structures. It’s more quietly political than action-heavy, but it has a lot to say and the protagonist’s bullheadedness happens to be very likeable. Many things to love about this book, including: multiple love interests, dissecting unquestioned hierarchies especially with race and class, and well-balanced secondary characters with their own story arcs, including an autistically coded one.

• Watch-wise, I feel like the show Hacks is too often slept on. The comedic timing and writing on that show is *chef’s kiss*. It’s harsh, it’s tender, it’s relevant, and it’s so fucking funny, with a cast that has become incredibly endearing over time, exactly because they’re so deeply flawed and hilarious. I feel like every time I recommend this show…people just don’t watch it?? But they should??

What’s on your mind this week? Resources you’ve been reading, digesting, watching, etc.?

About Rest Day Creative

Rest Day Creative is a cooperatively owned microagency with a community-oriented, anticapitalist lens that builds brand foundations and systems for divergent thinkers, artists, activists, values-centered organizations, and helping professionals.

We create websites, copywriting, and visual branding, as well behind-the-scenes setup for businesses. We also create digital resources, including for branding, design, and cooperative work.

We’re in the process of restructuring existing structures into this new business from the ground up, but if you’re interested in learning more about our services, you can sign up here to know when we’re open for new clients.

If this writing not for you, you can change your account settings here to only receive personal essays, or to unsubscribe.

How do you celebrate when grief is present?

I wish for all of our sakes that question didn’t have so many applications: both for the witnessing of our collective griefs and trying not look away, and for our own smaller, but just as present, griefs.

For the most part, the grief I’m about to talk about is extremely small on the world scale and large on my own. But I don’t know that we can get any closer to understanding how to metabolize our world griefs at all without trying to do it with our small life ones too.

Today is my 34th birthday, and tomorrow is the fourth anniversary of the death of my dad.

I would love to tell you that this morning I sprang out of bed in anticipatory birthday delight (because I am in fact the friend that will tell every single barista and anyone who will listen when it is their friend’s birthday).

This morning, I woke up with a heaviness I couldn’t name, until sleep cleared and I realized it was the tents getting bombed outside of Rafah. It was family after family losing what I lost, but to an absolutely indeterminate degree, as in, our brains cannot even determine what that must be like.

My birthday wish, my always wish, is a permanent ceasefire and a free Palestine, and while none of us can make that executive order, there is still a bridge between our felt helplessness and what can be done. Here’s a quick snapshot of actions you can take, here is the the official Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions list of organizations to boycott to target collective efforts, and if you have the financial means, consider donating to a cause like Ele Elna Elak, which provides fresh water and food, or to the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund. Anything is better than nothing, but truly see if you can do more. You are not too late to start. You are not too late to start again.

I can only talk for myself about what grief is in a context outside of violence, but maybe as I talk about this, we also can think about what the reality of a “small grief” like mine must be when it is magnifed to such an unholy, incomprehensibly inhuman degree.

Six days before my 30th birthday, and seven before my dad’s death, my friend Andrew penned my first tattoo on my skin. Lying down on the coffee table while he hunched over me, my arm outstretched, I thought of the tattoo as a preemptive celebration, a send-off from my twenties, and a years-late teenage rebellion. “This is what my thirties will be like,” I thought confidently: a little messy, done in friendship, boldly, unapologetically, and imperfectly.

I was not quite prepared to find out just how messy or imperfectly my thirties would so far prove to be, but I was about to.

A few days later, when my mom called to tell me about my dad’s critical condition in the hospital, I remember thinking about that tattoo still healing on my inner bicep. The tattoo is a stippled outline of Mount Sopris, a snow-capped beacon in the Roaring Fork valley where I grew up in Colorado, and where my family still lives. I remember thinking, “Well, good thing I have this tattoo now. Maybe I was supposed to have this to feel closer to my dad in a way I haven’t for such a long time.” He was already gone to me in all respects that mattered, but I thought maybe I could finally feel close again with him gone gone. He was unconscious, and his prognosis was days, if not hours.

I did not get the tattoo of Mount Sopris for my dad, but I’ve never looked at it since and not thought of him. At the time, it simply wouldn’t have occurred to me, because we didn’t have that kind of closeness in his final years.

When I’d been a teenager, literally half my lifetime earlier, my dad and I made plans to summit that same mountain, along with one of his visiting friends.

Despite his Oklahoma/Texas country upbringing, my dad was not exactly an outdoorsman in the recreational sense, so the memory is singular. We woke before dawn and for hours we wound through grassy fields and across talus rock, almost getting as far as the false summit before aging bodies were ready to turn around. I turned around with them. Part of me wanted to keep going, but I only wanted to keep hiking if they were coming with me.

Having a birthday right before a death day feels kind of like deciding whether to turn around on a mountain. If you keep going to the top, you can celebrate once you get there, but that celebration comes with the reminder of what you left behind to do it, and you may not have the people you wanted to celebrate with in the first place. If you turn around before the summit, you can celebrate the extent you did go, but the price is the knowledge that you could have done more. Either way is a choice, and each choice comes with a sacrifice.

In birthday terms, if you choose to celebrate your birthday fully, you edge out grief to make it happen. To do that, you have to willfully ignore the memory of someone you love, at least to some extent, and that comes with the guilt of prioritizing your own joy. But if you don’t celebrate your birthday fully and instead honor the grief full stop, it can feel like you’re appropriately giving a person you love what they deserve, at the cost of feeling like you’ve short-changed yourself and your joy.

Most of the time, I think I have a choice in the matter at all, and then grief arrives and sweeps away any agency I have along with it anyway.

I always think I will be fine, if not good, and then a torrent of grief rips through me. It’s a special kind of credulity that leads me to believe each year will be different. The year after my dad’s death, I had to cancel a birthday party hours before it was planned when friends were driving in from out of state, because I was sobbing too hard to hold myself together. I had to bail on gifted tickets minutes before a much-anticipated show to see Alok Vaid-Menon because I started hyperventilating and couldn't stop. I’ve gotten pre-birthday haircuts and cried in the chair — twice.

More recently, I’ve opted for small-scale get-togethers with a friend or two, but those plans also leave a lot of room to remember and feel. I’m fortunate to have a bevy of amazing connections, but many of my closest are long-distance, and executive dysfunction can make certain coordination for event planning difficult on top of the spontaneous cry thing.

The more I age, the more it seems that we live in dichotomies all the time. I want few things more than to be celebrated wholly and uncomplicatedly at this time of year, but the reality generally ends up being more tender, self-protective, and tinged with grief. I am exasperated by this reality, resentful of it, and quite frankly exasperated by myself that I think it will be any different every year.

My family is fortunate (if you can call it that, and I do think you actually can) because, in theory, we had time to come to terms with an end.

My dad had at least a decade of cognitive decline, and maybe three of those years came with a namable diagnosis we could map onto past memories and associations.

As long as I can remember, my dad kept post-its on nearly every surface in the room that was his office, jotting down thoughts and passwords and who knows what else in a scratching mechanical pencil scrawl. When talking, he’d always been somewhat of a rambler, almost universally known for telling jokes so long you sometimes forgot there was going to be a punchline to laugh at by the time it came. There were many things like that about him: slow, like a cowboy drawl, unhurried. My dad was in fact a cowboy in the early years of my life and before, just as likely tending cattle in Texas as he was listening to NPR in the kitchen, which he analyzed through the lens of his political science PhD. He was in some ways so casual and country, and in others so measured, so buttoned up. When the two mixed, there was a delightful kind of irreverence, with surprising humor that was just as smart as it often was foul-mouthed.

My dad, who I called Papa, was generally a quiet man: considered, thoughtful, and without a doubt an overthinker. He had an undercurrent of wit, with a quiet kind of intensity. So much about this man was understated, but sometimes a glint of mischief surfaced. I could never quite fathom that the superlative in his senior high school yearbook (circa 1960, or thereabouts) stated “Most School Spirited,” but I think there must have been a rabble-rouser in there I just never fully glimpsed.

Beyond that, he was kind. He was, as they say, one of the good ones. He had such patience and was largely good-humored when it came to most things, politics and accidentally slamming his finger in a drawer excepted.

My dad generally operated on the slow side, but I’d also found him to be reliably present in anyone’s company, and certainly with me. I didn’t know what to make of those two things being at odds when they suddenly were. Dozens of memories point to that disconnect, reaching back at least a decade before the pandemic and before that day my mom phoned me with his news in the hospital. It’s just that for a long time, we all interpreted signs of his deterioration as simple facts of his personality.

I’ll spare you the details of what that deterioration looked like, partly because I did write it all out and decided none of us actually needs the reality of a dementia-like condition spelled out today, and also simply because the fact of his decline is central to what happened to him, but none of it is central to who he was. Suffice it to say, watching a person you love slip away from their personality and personhood is heart-wrenching, whatever the details. My mom, my sister, and I spent years trying to reconcile this disconnect with our understanding of the man we’d loved, and meanwhile, he was still walking on the planet for all of that time.

By the time my mom called to tell me my dad had a stroke, I thought those years of reckoning meant I’d gotten so much of the grief out of the way already. Maybe I had, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t still more.

Two days later, my birthday arrived and my dad’s heart was still beating, though he was still several states away from me, unconscious, and not in any better condition. I didn’t know how to feel. It was May 2020, and I wanted to have a birthday as if a global pandemic wasn’t the predominant reality. I wanted to have a birthday as if dying was not already happening. And I wanted to feel like if my dad was dying, at least I was living. But I also didn’t want to feel guilty about living for myself when he couldn’t and others couldn’t. In short, I wanted the reality to be different.

I had told my mom that if my dad had to die that week, then maybe I wanted him to die on my birthday. I thought it could be something shared between us for me to treasure. Once it happened, I didn’t have that wish anymore. He didn’t die on my birthday, but as it turns out, having your dad die the day after your birthday is still close enough to irrevocably alter your relationship with the day you were born from then on.

At the time, I happened to be living in a trailer on some acres of land in Washington owned by friends, and because the trailer was only equipped for sleeping, my dog and I effectively lived in our friends’ house.

Those five weeks were a rag-tag time, and despite the difficulty then, there was something beautiful about it — not being roommates, but more so getting to be briefly subsumed into a family unit that was different than my own. It’s not often as adults that we get to glimpse the lives of our friends to that extent, outside of dating or sharing a lease, and it can feel like a special kind of intimacy and shared knowledge when we do (this is, in part, why I love long-distance hiking with friends).

That birthday, while my dad lay dying 1300 miles away, we piled adults, kids, and dogs into the Suburban and drove fifteen minutes up the road to a pebbled beach. We didn’t bring swimsuits, but the sun was searing, and I let it burn the edges of my shoulders around my bra straps and chest. I don’t know if I was asking for the sun as a blessing or the sunburn as a punishment, but I think I got both. Paired with my bra was a denim hat that did nothing to shield the rays coming in from every angle. Gay Power was embroidered on the front, which I had bought to feel cool, but I’m not a hat person and I’m certainly not a hat with sayings person, so the hat was doing nothing to add to practicality or style. While I rotisseried in the sun, I watched my dog Fenton gingerly make his way through the shallows, blinking at the brightness glinting on the surface. I think for a bit I forgot about my dad, the sun baked it out of me. Or maybe I didn’t fully, but I let myself pretend. Back at the house, I opened mailed presents and we shared rhubarb crumble and homemade coconut ice cream.

That was four years ago, and it’s weird to think that’s the last birthday where I felt fully celebrated, given the circumstances. I don’t really know how to have a birthday anymore. I just know that I want one, and I want the feeling of family to be part of it, chosen family or otherwise.

I don’t think that’s an experience singular to me or my grief. I think even for adults who don’t have a significantly hard time near a day that’s “supposed” to be celebrated, a lot of people feel something like this too.

Regardless of grief status, I am fairly certain many of us want a day (or more) where we’re each tended to, and where it feels like a weight of responsibility is lifted. We want to feel like we’re not alone, but also that we are completely individually seen. It’s not really about birthdays at all, especially because I know many people have complicated associations with that day. More so, I think we want dedicated time and acknowledgment, completely unadulterated for ourselves, and that’s hard to claim when we’re faced with the crushing realities around us.

How dare we find joy, how dare we rest, how dare we want and desire, when all of those are impossibilities for other people, and when some of those people are ones we know and love?

We have to remind ourselves that denying our joy and our wants isn’t going to improve the lives of anyone who doesn’t have access to their own. But neither is complete erasure of the circumstances in our minds. We can retrace our steps down the mountain or keep heading toward the summit, decide to do it big for a birthday or do it small for the grief, but there really is no right answer, and it’s just a matter of what we feel like we can live with.

As far as I can tell, you make the plans for the birthday, and if you have to cancel last minute because you’re catching your breath from crying, you cancel. Maybe having to cancel makes you cry angry tears because you don’t want to have to do it at all. Dude, been there. You just have to try to act based on your emotional baseline, and then live with the disappointment if it goes differently than expected. Sometimes you set aside the day to cry and end up feeling fine, good even, so you take yourself out for a treat.

You lean toward the wants, and then you live with the realities, even though you really wish the realities were absolutely anything else.

Living your life and honoring your desires is how you honor the ones you love. We can’t do that uncomplicatedly, no matter how much we want to, because love and grief are one and the same. We can’t stop living our lives entirely, but we do have to alter our lives to accommodate what is here.

This year, I’m in a cabin alone in the woods for the entire month, which in some ways is entirely right for grieving and is in other ways entirely antithetical to the birthday I want — the stereotypical kid kind where some adult (not me) invites my friends and coordinates the activities and food, where I am surrounded by my people, they get me, they love me, and I feel it. As much as I want to lean into that want, that’s also not a reality I could coordinate this time.

Grief is a lot like that, or entirely like that: deep wants that are at odds with actual truth.

I have to reconcile my desires with what’s actually true, so my own reclamation was the quieter kind for this birthday. This weekend, I drove 1.5 hours from the cabin along the Columbia River Gorge back to Portland. I took the bus across the river and slowly wandered streets past the Victorian and ornate Italianate residences in Nob Hill, no headphones. I listened to the gentle shush of leaves on tree-lined streets, only stopping to pay for a ticket to a solo matinee at the local movie theater. Afterward, I sat at a sidewalk cafe and sipped on rose hibiscus iced tea. I tangled my limbs with another’s, sweaty and breathless and panting. I brought Mikiko mochi donuts to eat in the car with a friend as we headed out for a morning hike, hands sticky with yuzu curd and lavender. I napped and woke up bleary-eyed and head heavy. I felt quiet satisfaction. I felt resentment. I felt deep world-weariness. I felt joy.

Nothing about this birthday is revelatory. It’s not a big bash or surprise party. It’s a do-the-best-that-you-can party.

I’d love for our collective realities to be fuller than do-the-best-that-you-can, but I don’t know what other option we have, and I think doing the best we can is how we’re going to get anywhere different if we want to.

Maybe we should make a birthday network where we all plan each other’s birthdays. Where we say, Here, let me do that for you. That seems heavy, let me take a turn holding it for a while. Only, whoever plans mine will have to account for this tiny detail of existential grief. My friend Maggie says when she visits in September we’ll have a birthday do-over for both of us, and while it’s no blowout birthday, it is an opportunity for that grief to have a place to rest for a while, and to have a place for wants to go to be seen, experienced, and honored.

May we all have the community to witness our grief, and may that community help us celebrate anyway.

May we hold our griefs together, and may we all do the best that we can.

Love,
Iris

Recs and Thoughts

Recommendations are my love language! I love to give them very much!

• I cannot wait for the How Much Money is Enough? workshop my dear friend

  is hosting this coming weekend, so much so that I literally changed the date of my move into my summer tiny house sublet to be able to attend live. One might say I’m biased by friendship, but in this case, it is purely that I have never not once engaged with her work and left feeling anything but more wholly connected to myself and community.

• In the spirit of being adults who might wish we could access more play more often, and with other adults, Evan Chelsee is also hosting Rec Room during the month of June as their answer: coworking, but for fun times. Very literal parallel play for whatever crafts/hobbies/leisure activities that don’t get enough of their own space and time, in company with other sweet, chill humans? Yes, please.

• This episode What If We Shifted to a Not-for-Profit Economy? from the From What If to What Next podcast has me absolutely buzzing, and I’ve saved at least 30 more episodes to make my way through. I will definitely be talking about this in future.

• I am absolutely obsessed with the Common Queertesy column by Burton. It’s like Emily Post etiquette plus queer gossip and a healthy dose of side-eye.

• The book To the Gorge: Running, Grief, and Resilience & 460 Miles on the Pacific Crest Trail by Emily Halnon eviscerated me, in the best way way possible. The combination of raw grief and determination, with the visceral sense of endurance in nature, is one I’ll be thinking about for a long time. I cried so much, more than I can remember in recent times while reading (which says a lot because I am a crier), and it was a cathartic cry I didn’t know I needed.

• In the queer rom-com vein, Alison Cochrun is always a favorite for me, and her new book Here We Go Again hits many of the right notes of cross-country road trip sing-alongs and irreverent end-of-life camaraderie and love. It doesn’t top Kiss Her Once for Me, but it makes a sweet read and reminder that second chances can be worth the risk.

I want to live in a world where human wellbeing is a priority. Full stop.

I’d guess if you’re here, at least some part of you agrees with that statement, but it can be a weirdly audacious thing to say, given the culture of individualism and profit that we live in. Trying to implement it from a top-down policy level seems even more radical, though it really shouldn’t be.

Shouldn’t it be weirder that human wellbeing isn’t already a collective priority?

To me, it’s just a common sense baseline, the standard of living on the ground floor.

The idea that people should have access to a fundamental level of care has been in me for as long as I think I’ve had a sense of justice. (And while that might be an idea I got in childhood, I definitely don’t think it’s childish. It’s not naive thinking, just humane.)

Still, I don’t always move through the world like I personally have the agency to make human wellbeing around me more of a reality. I want it, but I don’t usually act like I’m the one to do it. I try to approach as many situations as possible with the benefit of the doubt. I try to be kind as much as possible. I try to give money and time and self-education to the causes I believe in. I try to have conversations about equitability and systemic change and being soft with ourselves and each other. But to create my own thing? I’ve almost always supported someone else’s initiatives from the inside out, someone else’s ideas.

Even though I know that change only happens due to regular people like me who just decided to be brave and try, I often look outside of myself for someone else — anyone but me — to build the realities the world needs. Despite educating myself to recognize and dismantle harmful and oppressive ideologies within me, despite “knowing better,” I often find myself in a cycle of thinking I’m always just short of the understanding and proficiency I need to meaningfully act.

I did not plan to start an anticapitalist worker cooperative, because I did not fully realize I could.

It had literally not even crossed my mind a moment before it actually happened. If I’d given any notice to worker cooperatives before, it had been an intriguing but a passing interest at most, so at first I didn’t even realize that’s what we were making.

Ever since the astrology company CHANI unveiled their exceptional list of benefits some years ago, I kept applying for job openings hoping to be hired. But as it turns out, there are a lot more humans who want humanizing work environments than workplaces prioritizing and publicizing them. It seems like a wild blindspot to me now that I never actually thought about creating these same benefits or similar somewhere else. Even though I’ve been self-employed for many years, I thought it was all going to happen at some time and some place beyond me, not by me.

I’d love to say it was intentional, but it just sort of…happened. The idea of creating a microagency came from my friend Maggie through the copywriting work I already do in her mindful marketing business alongside her and our systems and operations genius, Jillian. I had asked Maggie to keep an eye out for projects we might be able to pull my designer friend Rylee onto, and she came back with the idea that we fully reshape our existing business to bring Rylee into the fold.

Maggie then said she had previously registered a URL with “anticapitalists” in the name, and it got me thinking: if we start from scratch, how much could be possible to create this next evolution of business in as equitable and enjoyable a way as possible?

So that’s how our anticapitalist cooperatively owned microagency, Rest Day Creative, happened.

The origin story isn’t exactly revolutionary, and in that way, it’s pretty much like any other business. The structures and values are the secret sauce.

Our business is a worker cooperative because it’s employee-owned, and we each own an equal 25% in the company.

The basis of our operation starts with universal wages. Everyone makes the same amount of money, and that money is not based on hours or output. There are so many reasons for this, reasons I’m full-on nerd excited to talk about in future, but at its most basic, we believe that each person is inherently worthy of receiving care, regardless of their ability or productive output. It’s when people are at their least able to provide labor that they usually need the most care (and we need money for most care in the world we live in) — so why make that care more difficult to access by linking it to labor and output?

In our business, we are all interdependent and need each other, so why value someone’s work over another’s if that work couldn’t happen without the others’ in the first place?

Universal wages are a fairly novel idea, but they don’t require any special conditions to implement, only that the person or people at the top don’t take more than anyone else. Pretty simple, but not usual. In 2022, CEOs in the US had average salaries that were 344 as much as much as a typical worker’s (source), and 603 times as much in the S&P 500 companies with the lowest median worker pay levels (source). I’m going to hazard a guess that CEOs are not making 300-600 times the impact or contribution as their workers. Even if that ratio was smaller, the CEOs would have nothing without the labor of their workers, so it does take some mental gymnastics (and a certain level of belief in human expendability) to justify significantly higher salaries in comparison.

In our model, when excess profit comes in, first that money will go toward raising our salaries to fully meet our needs and be a floor for living wages, and then over time, extra profits will go toward building in a number of equitable and quality-of-life practices for us as employees and raising the contributions we can make to the communities and organizations we care about.

Another time I’ll dig into these in more detail, what all of them mean, and why, but here are some of the benefits we already have in place to start with, plus ones we’re prioritizing gradually as we eventually grow.

Benefits we’re starting off with: flexible remote work and a four-day work week, unlimited vacation, unlimited menstrual and sick leave, birthdays and grief anniversaries automatically off, and quarterly redistribution and reparations to organizations and causes that are important to us (this one is more of a policy than a benefit, but we do think of benefits in terms of both personal and collective, and we each have a say in the organizations, so that’s why it’s listed here).

We can offer these benefits at the beginning, because these structures don’t require extra resources for us to create, just policies. Because our work is based on project outcomes instead of hourly or time spent, as long as the work gets done, there’s space for time off. We also have some other mechanisms in place to support the time off policies as well.

Benefits to prioritize as we’re able: fully funded health benefits, including vision and dental (with some equivalent benefits to be determined for our Canadian co-owner, Jillian), a health stipend for non-insurance-covered services, generous paid parental leave and medical leave, multi-week office closures in summer and winter, retirement benefits with a company match, a personal and professional growth and learning stipend, a tech stipend, and a community wealth stipend.

Clearly, these benefits will require significant resources on behalf of the company, which is why we’re not implementing them first thing. Eventually, they’ll be possible because this is our form of profit sharing, where a surplus of income goes toward building these structures.

If you’re familiar with the CHANI benefits I mentioned above, then you’ll see we have many of the same ones listed. Their list was the initial inspiration, along with a few other companies like Tunnel Vision clothing and the budgeting software YNAB.

One thing CHANI doesn’t have listed is the “community growth stipend,” an idea I came up with based on their wealth-building stipend. I haven’t heard Chani and team talk about what their stipend entails so I can’t speak to it, but my hope is that once we implement all of our other benefits, that will be enough of a foundation for individual wealth on its own. On our team, each of us wants to live lives that are comfortable and where we have enough to survive, rest, create, access joy, and take care of the people and things we care about. That’s a high bar for quality, but not necessarily a high dollar number.

To speak to the wealth part of wealth-building, wealth is an inherently capitalist idea, which is something I first learned about specifically through the radical business consultant and social justice educator Bear Hebert. It’s clear why wealth hoarding happens, because we feel like we have to create safety nets for ourselves in lieu of greater structures to ensure our survival and we’re not exactly living in systems that make it a given.

But when we operate from a space of enoughness, we make sure both that we have enough to be tended to and we see where we have extra. Instead of holding onto the extra, the idea of the community wealth-building stipend is that each member of our team can eventually become a financial foundation for the people we care about who don’t have the privilege or means for wealth on their own.

We’ll iron out the details of this down the road, but the initial thought is this stipend can go toward things like: supporting a loved one to get out debt, contributing to retirement or medical expenses for aging parents, funding education for children in our lives, funding community resource initiatives, buying land to build cooperative housing with friends and age together in place (personally, this one is the glimmer at the back of my mind). I’m not sure exactly how this piece will look, but I do know I’m really excited by the idea of it. This idea has to exist in some other context, but I personally haven’t heard about it as an organized thing before (please tell me about it if you have!). I’d love for it to be more of a thing.

So that’s some of the behind-the-scenes structures we’re building from. We haven’t even talked about the client-facing structures, or gone into the values on which all of this is standing, but I’ll leave those for another day.

The main thing is, I’m struck by how immediately and clearly this business became a mechanism for putting my values into action, when I tend to hand over the idea of that action an honestly embarrassing amount of the time.

I know what we’re building is small, and no part of me thinks that our four-person company is the means for a wide-scale revolution. But it’s something.

Not only is it something, but it’s one thing I can point to and say to myself, “Look, you are creating something out of nothing, and that something out of nothing is in support of the future reality you want to be a part of. You’re doing this, you’re creating this possibility — what else is possible?”

I don’t know if we’ll ever get to see a reality where human wellbeing is a top priority. I hope so, and I am a person who leans on hope, but I also highly doubt it will be in our lifetimes, if ever.

It’s not up to me to know, and I honestly don’t care. Maybe it never happens, but I will live a better life knowing I tried.

I do feel like it still means something anyway, to try in our small ways, and I do think those small ways matter. Not just in business, not just in activism, but also in art making, in relationship building, in community growing, in meal cooking, and joy making, in really living and living for a life worth living.

It’s not all about, “How do we build equitable work structures?” Lying down in the grass and looking at clouds when you could be producing something, savoring your time, savoring your senses, can in fact be a valuable form of resistance to capitalism and its oppressive edicts.

I’m not going to pretend that just because I’m here it now means I’m going to completely stop being complicit in all forms of harm. I certainly want to, but there are still greater systemic realities and my own human fallibility to account for. If we’re living, we’re harming to some extent, but I’d like to do it less of the time.

One degree more toward equitable, sustainable, restful, joyful living matters, because it’s one degree less that points toward suffering, and that’s not nothing.

We still live under capitalism, so we still have to engage in commerce to materially survive, but on a microcosm, there are still some things that can be done to lessen exploitation (of others and of ourselves), and they can be done by us.

We can decide to be the ones to do them.

If we only look at anticapitalism as a response in opposition to or against, we just see a fraction of the whole. But in being against systems of harm, we can also be for human livability, we can be for human joy. To make that happen, anticapitalist efforts aren’t just about dismantling harms and preventing them, they’re also about the new realities we build in their stead.

We build those new realities one small way at a time.

However that looks for you, I hope you’ll join me.

Love,
Iris

Resources and Inspiration

• I finished reading A Psalm for the Wild Built and its sequel A Prayer for the Crown Shy by Becky Chambers the day before the idea sparked for the microagency, and there’s a very specific feeling of softness I’ve carried from it in ever since. The underlying humanity and tenderness throughout both books struck such a chord for me, and I want as much as possible for our venture to approximate that feeling in whatever we do.

• In case you’re wondering how it makes sense to have an anticapitalist branding agency and whether those terms are contradictory, I plan to talk about that in the future. Bear Hebert (mentioned above) also has a really great breakdown of the differences between capitalism and commerce in their Marketing for Weirdos course. Enrollment is currently closed but it’s a useful resource to save for any self-employed folks who are grappling with ideas of selling coming up against their values.

• This 2015 article from The Jacobian, How to Be an Anticapitalist Today by Erik Olin Wright, gives a straightforward breakdown of primary anticapitalist logic and strategies as one useful framework to think about approaching resistance efforts. As a small-scale and mostly individual initiative, our microagency is under the strategy of “eroding capitalism,” and we’re drawing on the idea of the “real utopia” referenced in the article as something of a model for what we build.

• The book I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt by the owner of Tunnel Vision clothing, Madeline Pendleton, is part-memoir and part-money survival 101. I recommend it as a straightforward way to look at how our systems can be disenfranchising, along with some tips for individually navigating alternatives. Toward the end, Madeline also details some of the ways she implements equitable work structures in her business, which helped demystify some ideas for me around concepts like universal wages.

• This episode of the Let’s Make Work Human podcast with the CEO and Co-founder of CHANI, Sonya Passi, speaks to some of the company’s benefits in greater detail and the thinking behind them. I started listening hoping for some deep and complicated insights, but the underlying reasoning really just is: treating your employees like humans who matter is just good business and makes good sense.

• I’ve been getting a lot of useful structural and legal perspectives from listening to the Whiskey Fridays podcast with the business owners of Wanderwell Consulting and Unlawyer, and I’m sure I’ll have much more to say on all of that soon.

• I’ll do a deeper dive on worker cooperatives down the road, but if you want a quick primer in the meantime, here is one from the Democracy at Work Institute.

• Regardless of what we do in our own lives, no one is free until everyone is free. This week’s post by breaks down to the cognitive dissonance at the core of Zionist rhetoric (which is in no way actually synonymous with Judaism), and I can’t state enough how important of a read it is in regards to Palestinian liberation and truly understanding the magnitude behind what we’re witnessing in Rafah, in retaliation to student protest encampments in the US, and beyond. If you only do one thing for a more just and equitable world this week, do it for Palestine.

Thank you to the friends who pointed me in the directions of these resources. We’re all each going to get where we’re going a lot sooner with the support of each other, so if you have any resources to share too, I’d love to know about them.

About Rest Day Creative

Rest Day Creative is a cooperatively owned microagency with a community-oriented, anticapitalist lens that builds brand foundations and systems for divergent thinkers, artists, activists, values-centered organizations, and helping professionals.

We create websites, copywriting, and visual branding, as well behind-the-scenes setup for businesses. We also create digital resources, including for branding, design, and cooperative work.

We’re in the process of restructuring existing structures into this new business from the ground up, but if you’re interested in learning more about our services, you can sign up here to know when we’re open for new clients.

Writing in Real Time

The Rest Day Creative section of this newsletter chronicles our business in real-time as we build it. As of now, Rest Day Creative is six weeks out from when it was first an idea, and I knew from very early on that I wanted to document our inception even in the initial messy stages of creation. (Like, we’re literally in the process of creating our own branding as I write this.)

Anyway, I imagine I’m not the only one who finds the idea of worker cooperatives intriguing...but potentially also kind of opaque. I always think it’s cool when businesses are doing new things to bring generosity and care into their work, but I’m often left thinking, “Okay, but how??” So this is my answer to that question.

We are not people of significant influence. We are not anticapitalist, anti-oppression educators in any sense, nor are we trying to be (there are many incredible resources for that, and I highly encourage you seek them out and financially support their work). We are just a few self-employed people with an idea, which is exactly why it feels important to document our team’s process to create equitable work structures from the ground up. Because if we can do it, there’s probably something others like us can do too (even if whatever it is ends up being something entirely different!)

I wholeheartedly appreciate you being here and reading, and I hope you get something out of it, whatever that is! I promise not every post is going to be nearly so dang long. (If this writing not for you, you can change your account settings here to only receive personal essays, or to unsubscribe.)