Bed Hang is a biweekly conversational column between Harron Walker and Larissa Pham. Rather than taking an argumentative stance that only serves to reaffirm what they already think, Pham and Walker offer productive conversations intended to push us all toward more generous and powerful modes of looking at the world, served up with wit, intelligence, and love.
LARISSA: Wow, it really feels like the world has totally gone to pieces as the temperature has risen in NYC. Sometimes I log onto Twitter and I don’t even know what’s going on, just that it’s all bad. Which leads me to the topic I wanted to discuss today… ~*~*~~*sELf-cArE*~*~*~*~!
I feel like in the the social justice community — like when I worked at a trauma response nonprofit, for example — we do a lot of talking about self-care, but we don’t always follow up on it. We know it’s important so we pay lip service to the idea of it, but then we continue to run ourselves into the ground. It doesn’t just happen in social work fields either, though that’s where I’ve experienced it the most. This spring, I’ve been trying to think more about what works for me regarding self-care and how I can prioritize it.
HARRON: Where have those conversations you’ve been having with yourself led you?
LARISSA: To be honest, I’ve been thinking a lot about how important it is for me to make time for myself, and to really nurture myself with that time. I tend towards isolation when I’m not doing well — I don’t go out, I don’t really reach out, and I mope a lot — so I sometimes see being alone as a negative thing. Like, if I just go outside and hang out with friends I’ll feel better!
But actually, I do need my space, and what’s more, I have to make sure that I’m uhhh…watering my plants…and not just wallowing while I’m in that space, you know? I have to make sure I’m eating well, getting a good amount of sleep, and most crucially, that I’m spending time in the studio, where I’ve started painting again. I went yesterday for the first time in almost two weeks and it totally turned my mood around. It was like a cloud had lifted.
HARRON: Did you water your plants today?
LARISSA: I did! Also, doing this column and hanging out with you counts as watering plants too. :)
HARRON: That might be the gayest thing I’ve heard in weeks. Are we allowed to call things “gay” on them dot us? Well I love you either way, my binchinus succulenta.
I’ve been trying to do some similar things lately, making time and space for myself while also making sure that I’m taking care of myself in all that brand new time and space. I’m prone to dipping into compulsive behavior — eating, drinking, smoking, exercising, joylessly refreshing Twitter over and over and over and over — whenever I feel depressed or anxious or out of control, which lately is like…the past four or five months lol. So doing that whole bastardized, commodified version of self-care that’s like, “Gonna flake on all my friends and order Seamless and binge-watch some show I’ve already seen a million times on Netflix: self-care!!” is absolutely not what caring for myself looks like.
LARISSA: RIGHT!
HARRON: I’ve decided to try going dry this month. No drinking and also no smoking. I mean, I’m white, almost 30, and don’t have fillers money — yet— so I should probably be doing more than slathering myself in 50 SPF anyway. It’s going great so far. It’s also only been going for a few days so…maybe check back next Bed Hang. I’ve also been spending more time trying to figure out why I feel so anxious and out-of-control and what I can do in response to those feelings that isn’t any of those compulsive behaviors I mentioned. Like, if I’m bummed out about most of the paid work I’m doing, I’ll try to remember all those unpaid side projects I’ve been working on over the past few months or years and make time to focus on those. And I’ve been reading a lot of books about alienated girls and gays like Tommy Pico’s Junk and Sarah Schulman’s After Delores. Those have helped. Speaking of Sarah Schulman, did you read her acceptance speech at the New School last week?
LARISSA: I saw a lot of people tweeting about it, but I haven’t had a chance to read it! What was it about?
HARRON: She talked a lot about reconciling public recognition and her desire to be told her work is good, with her skepticism of the literary institutions that make such recognition possible and their often exploitative reasons for doing so when it comes to marginalized writers. This line in particular resonated with me:
It is important that we not be fooled by the allure of acceptance, as much as we all want it and should have it. For, too often the introduction of some queer person of great gifts into the reward system produces tokenism instead of cultural expansion, because that person’s individual success does not represent a paradigm shift, but actually enhances the gatekeepers’ power.
It’s been helpful for my general sense of self and well-being to think of validation and acceptance in those terms, as things I want but not things I need. It definitely helps me feel better about not having a staff job or a boyfriend or a book deal, at least, and it helps quell the catastrophizing I spiral into about how not having one forecloses the other which forecloses the other which forecloses the other.
LARISSA: Damn. I felt that. When we continue to buy into systems that reward some of us by keeping others of us down, that’s not really progress, is it? As exciting as it is to win a prize, or get a good job, or byline, or other kind of recognition, it’s true that almost all of it happens within the same systems with the same gatekeepers. We return a lot to the idea of By Us, For Us in this column, but it really does seem like the best way out of this. Or at least — by creating alternate structures alongside these existing ones, and really devoting our care and our attention to them, we can create new paths forward.
Similar to what you mentioned, I’ve been thinking about our friend Peter Moskowitz’s “Righting the Plane” guide since you posted it a few days ago. In it, they talk about how healing from PTSD won’t happen at the same scale that capitalism expects from you. Living in a capitalist society causes PTSD and definitely doesn’t help us recover from it. We expect ourselves to heal quickly, to be able to work on time; we expect ourselves to move up the ladder (what an awful metaphor!) of…success? Adulthood? Whatever? at the same rate as our peers, and we’re hard on ourselves when that doesn’t happen, or when we see our lives diverging from that norm.
This seems pretty obvious when it comes to work, but I also feel like it applies to other “milestones,” like being in a serious relationship, or figuring out your mental health, you know? I think that part of taking care of ourselves — as Peter says in their guide — is acknowledging that we’re going to be moving at our own pace, and that’s okay. It’s better than okay. It’s healthy for us to know that.
HARRON: Queers stop weaponizing our failure to keep up with straight people’s measures of achievement and success against ourselves challenge! Also…go talk to your friends. See how they’re doing.
LARISSA: Check in on your friends! Check in with yourself! And remember that your friends care about you, too. Community care — being accountable to each other, responsible for each other, and caring deeply about each other — that’s part of self-care, too.
Read more Bed Hang here.
Larissa Pham is a writer in New York. She is the author of Fantasian, a queer erotic novella from Badlands Unlimited, and her work has appeared in the Paris Review Daily, Guernica, The Nation, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. Previously, she worked at the New York City Anti-Violence Project, focusing on support for survivors of sexual and other forms of violence.
Harron Walker is a freelance journalist based out of New York. Her work has appeared on Vice, BuzzFeed, Teen Vogue, Vulture, Into, Mask, and elsewhere.
