Carrying Capacity

Dispatch from One Year Later

This week was the time two years ago that I unloaded my life on the Olympic Peninsula after eight long, damaging, but also formative ones on the East Coast. I’ve since learned that the exact date I landed out in this neck of the woods — August 23, 2019 — coincides with a significant local anniversary. On the same date in 1871, prompted by complaints from the area’s Euro-American settlers, the S’Klallam village of qatáy was burned violently by order of the federal government. The date marking my two years out this way also marks the 150th year since this pivotal moment of human history in my adopted convalescent home on the northeast Olympic Peninsula, and specifically Port Townsend.

When I made the connection about the significance of this date beyond my own experience, I hesitated to cite it in this foreword revisiting this piece. Not because it isn’t relevant, but because it feels disingenuous and virtue-signal-y to constantly relate facts that contextualize the colonial legacy of places I’ve lived without necessarily reversing it. Nevertheless, when I reread this piece, the connection seemed pretty plain to me.

My ability to freely settle in Port Townsend back in 2019 and still live here is predicated on acts of theft and violent imperialism. My ability to grow up in Greater Yellowstone is similarly predicated on a military occupation, violent seizure of land, and slaying of people and the creatures they subsisted on to establish a national park — and this all around the same time as the federal order that destroyed qatáy. My access to places where, to enlist my old words, “there’s plain evidence of a complete living order, and not just the systems humans have imposed on it” — places where I feel less alone and more part of a symbiotic whole — hinges on this same meta-narrative. And that would be a real bummer if that were the end of the story, but I’ve realized that I have to choose to believe that it isn’t. And that’s where I want to begin teeing up “Carrying Capacity” with a few things that 28-year-old Jackie, one year after writing it, has the benefit of knowing now.

The first (and IMO most significant) thing I have the benefit of knowing now is a proposition in the air for the future of those public lands that have been so central to my own self-actualization: repatriating them to the tribes. David Treuer makes a brilliant case for it in this May 2021 cover story for The Atlantic and I’m completely sold on the idea. I’m sure some people will assume that repatriation means access to some of these special places as we know it would be curtailed, but that’s not necessarily true, and I don’t think it would necessarily be a bad thing if it were anyway. Aside from sacred sites (understandably), restricted access probably wouldn’t be on the table. But selfishly, I think the most compelling reason it might not be a bad idea is that it might give our remaining intact ecosystems a fighting chance at staying intact. They, after all, have a carrying capacity, and ecocide is a high price to pay for continually breaching it.

The second thing that I have the benefit of knowing since writing “Carrying Capacity” is that what I had still been attributing to a personality disorder at this time last year has much more to do with symptoms of chronic exposure to trauma in my childhood. That information doesn’t make addressing the fallout any less of a project, but it has clarified an important nuance for me in how we treat mental illness in this country. Namely, we love to hang our hats on diagnoses that feel rigid and deterministic in the U.S. because the industries who can profit off those rigid, deterministic diagnoses want us to think prescription drugs and clinical treatment that they can monetize are our only recourse. They’re not.

For many of us, those diagnoses are a critical — even enlightening and liberating — step in our recovery journeys. But they are often only imperfect facsimiles at best of our root issues. Nonetheless, I have to return back to this theme of what things are predicated on, because I can say with conviction that anything approaching that elusive horizon of “good” or “healthy” in my life nowadays owes to the foundation of recovery that I began in 2019. I have to believe that this journey is just that — a journey, not an event or a curable one-and-done science experiment. I’ve updated the piece itself to reflect the language around my experience with neurodivergence and mental health that I feel most solid about now. Maybe that’ll offend some time capsule purists out there, but the benefit of having my own domain is that I can make the call about what’s appropriate to update, and this is where I’ve landed.

The third thing I know now that I didn’t know when writing “Carrying Capacity” in 2020 is that this piece effectively marked my entry into my personal internet vulnerability arms race. I say that with a mix of self-deprecation and tenderness. On one hand, it is a little comical that most of the content I produce for public consumption these days feels like a result of me trying to outgun myself every month by airing a new piece of dirty laundry. On the other hand, I feel like I’m only getting more sincere over time and it does influence what I write about and how. That seems like a healthy target to be hitting since snarkiness is kind of my M.O. and clowny sarcasm and performative mischief have been my bullshit coping mechanisms for flouting vulnerability most of my life. So, until I feel like I’ve become a morose caricature of myself, I think this is an alright wave to be riding.

I have real gratitude for what “Carrying Capacity” broke open for me. I’ve updated it lightly for clarity, but the spirit of it still holds up when I read it now and I hope it still does for years to come, even as I continue to learn and evolve.

I still tend to fare better when there’s plain evidence of a complete living order, and not just the systems humans have imposed on it. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

—JTB, August 23, 2021

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Carrying Capacity Revisited

For the first time since I was 18, I’ve lived a consecutive 12 months outside of the Eastern Time Zone. My mood has also become more stable in that time than it’s been in my life. Not just my adult life, but my whole life. That owes to a few different things.

The setting I moved to around this time last year doesn’t hurt. In terms of environmental factors, the northeast Olympic Peninsula is the mildest climate I’ve ever lived in. It’s rarely uncomfortably hot in the summer unless you’re in direct sunlight. Even then, trees are everywhere, so you’re reliably within close range of shade at all times. The temperature also rarely drops below freezing in the winter. And I would appreciate it if you kept this part quiet since I assume the dominant perceptions about the precip situation keeps many people away, but this part of the Peninsula gets less annual rainfall than the U.S. average and even less than Mid-Atlantic states. Really. In the summer, it’s a desert by comparison.

And of course, I know better than to discount the power of peaks and ocean to rehabilitate a damaged spirit. I can see both from my cross streets. On clear days, facing northeast, I can spot the top of Mount Baker in the gap between a neighbor house’s gable and chimney. Facing southeast, I have a suspiciously direct view of Rainier, its snowy hood usually hazy, like a conic apparition above the last bit of continent where Port Townsend Bay meets the northern edge of three islands. That Rainier is that visible feels like it should be a delusion, but only because I know there are miles of more islands and sound between my vantage point on the Peninsula and the peak’s base in mainland Washington.

Just outlining that bucolic bit now makes it sound like a successful convalescence has been guaranteed on the strength of the scenery alone. But the reality is that it owes to a confluence of factors. The commanding physical environment has been an important piece. But if it were the only piece, or even the seminal one, I would’ve had a stable mood throughout my youth in southwestern Montana. I think what’s different about this time and place is that I returned to this side of the Mississippi with information about myself that I’d waited a long time for.

In the nine months that ended up being my last on the East Coast, I did myself a solid and started therapy for the first time. And here, I feel a responsibility to say it only helped because I was ready to do the work. While I think there’s immense value in trying to understand how other people in your life see you, I’m convinced you really can’t learn the most important stuff about yourself or anything else through another human being. Only you can do that, at your pace, on your terms, and through your filter. What somebody with compassion, a license to practice medicine (a colonized profession, to be sure), and fluency in the DSM-5 can do is help you get out of your own way. I don’t think I’ll ever master the art of getting out of my own way. But the will to at least try in 2019 was sufficient to turn up some language for something that has more or less defined my life to date—a catastrophically disorganized nervous system in the wake of what I now understand as complex PTSD, the calling card of which in my case is a factory setting of self-loathing that can easily overwhelm my every decision and behavior.

It’s kind of a bummer that you can’t always diagnose certain things until you’re an adult, but it also makes sense because, well, linear time. There’s no way to know with utter certainty if a symptom—even a chronic one—is a one-off (or two- or three-off) or part of a sustained pattern worth investigating. You can be living with all the hallmarks of something up to your adult life, feel very isolated because of it, and still not have the cursory evidence you can only get when you start to truly decompensate.

I got by on the East Coast for the better part of eight years, but I knew at every turn that I was never built to stay there for as long as I did. I was lucky—like, really damn lucky—in that I happened to get help before I had to experience a psychotic break. And I think I was close—like, really damn close—to having one. But some way, somehow, I’ve managed to avoid one. I dismissed a lot of earlier signs that I wasn’t in a good place, but I eventually heeded the big ones and got my ass out.

I can remember declaring I was not built to live out East long-term as early as 2012, but my points of critique then used to be purely cultural. This is not the exact language I would’ve used at the time, but I now recognize that what grated me about it is that it’s very anthropocentric, and your value there is very much equated with your potential as a consumer. I do stand by that criticism, but if it were just for that prevailing sensibility, I think I could’ve carried on out there much as I had been—basically intact but crotchety, never subscribing to the dominant culture’s agenda. Under certain circumstances, I think I could even endure a place as neurotypical and output-obsessed as my old work environment despite my self-sabotaging tendencies. But I think the real deathtrap-caliber trait of the region that I’m not wired to endure for a sustained period is that it’s all very synthetic. It’s extremely difficult to get away from evidence of human development. And overwhelmingly, the only other beings you encounter are humans.

Call me basic, but my idea of a symbiotic ecosystem with a noticeable variety of beings is just not the cement-plugged rainforest of Northwest Washington, DC with its noted abundance of humans, cockroaches, rats, and mosquitoes. It was that, paired with the cultural blackmarks I had already noted about the East Coast writ large that made living in the District specifically lethal for me. And in hindsight, no wonder it took me so long to recognize the indomitable magnitude of my self-loathing, and the extent to which it fueled my paranoia, anxiety, and suicidality. I was distracted by an immediate physical environment that only reinforced my long-held suspicion that I was critically “unfit” for society.

I will return to the concept of being unfit for society because it’s a significant one. And I know mine is not the only neurodivergent conscience it’s leached into. But I first want to talk about something that loomed large for me long before I ever had language around my biochemistry to understand why. Namely, the concept of isolation.

It really shouldn’t surprise me that the defining preoccupation of my life can be boiled down to loneliness. Even so, it’s a concept I came to understand much differently by age 27 than I did at 17 or 7 years old. And it absolutely connects to what I had to figure out gradually for myself on the East Coast. That is, I tend to feel alone around groups of people large enough to organize themselves, and fall into patterns predetermined by the anthropocentric, manipulative, performative habits of capitalism. And the fact is the threshold of “large enough” I’m talking about here doesn’t take that many people to hit.

I’m not sure what the critical number is according to social science, but for me, it only takes casually being around four or five other people at length to start feeling like I’m the leper. This has been the case in every stage of my life with a notable exception. Between 2011 and 2014, I returned to Yellowstone, my home area, for seasonal gigs with the Park Service between my spring and fall semesters of undergrad in Virginia. My threshold was higher during those summers, and I think it has everything to do with a dual-phenomenon that’s true of many public lands.

For starters, biodiversity makes a big difference. Greater Yellowstone is one of the largest nearly intact temperate-zone ecosystems on the planet. Not only is there plenty of backcountry to disappear into, but in situations where you can’t avoid other human beings, they’re always visually outnumbered by other beings—plant, animal, or microbe. I tend to fare better when there’s plain evidence of a complete living order, and not just the systems humans have imposed on it. That’s one level of this dual-phenomenon. The other is the “public” aspect of public land, which carries a lot of weight in my life.

I don’t come from a propertied people. My proletarian breeding has certainly intersected with my neurodivergence in formative ways that I’ve only recently had the perspective to process. And I do wish the discourse around class consciousness in the U.S. had been more explicit when I was younger. Something that comes with indomitable self-loathing is a predilection for self-blame. In particular, I tended to blame myself for things I couldn’t explain or contextualize. My instinct was to feel shame over the particulars of my brain and birth that I had no control over. I think I also felt shame in not having a home or land to share with people. But strangely, I never felt unmoored.

I only felt like a refugee once I left Montana for Virginia. Interestingly, that was nine years ago to the day I began writing this. I remember it only because my freshman move-in day coincided with the magnitude 5.8 earthquake that struck in north central Virginia on August 23, 2011. In my Virginia years, there wasn’t really any place to go where I felt like my existence made sense. I think it’s because, even in what were considered “rural” areas there, everything was already owned or developed. Even in the national forests closest to my college town, and Shenandoah as the nearest national park, it was difficult to avoid signs of human development. Sure, you could hike to an overlook, and the view would be idyllic in its way, but you’d basically always see several homes and pastures.

It’s not as though I was neck-deep in the vagaries of organized society at full bore in the Shenandoah Valley. But it was more of the synthetic version of society and systems that I’d already started to believe I’d never fit into. And back then, I didn’t realize that my standby coping mechanisms weren’t available there. I didn’t realize how much growing up in a pretty isolated and pristine pocket of the world had kept some of my most predatory beasties at bay. Basically, when there’s no variety in the the forms of life around me, I start comparing myself to the only beings I encounter. And if they happen to be humans, that’s very bad for me.

Becoming more convinced that I was essentially not built for society became the theme in my time in the eastern U.S., and with mounting urgency each year. I think it honestly came to a head just because I got tired. Like, I was physically tired of going through the motions without actually having the will to live. One of my most-used statements in 2019—my last year living in the District—was “I just want to die of natural causes already.” The self-loathing was driving, and I just wanted to get out of people’s way in the least traumatizing way possible because I didn’t want a future.

This is where I want to revisit the idea of being unfit for society in earnest. I have a distinct memory of boarding a plane in 2018 and, while pulling a roller bag behind me, inadvertently bumping it against a dude whose knee was protruding into the aisle. That got an indignant rise out of him and of course I felt like shit about it.

It was a familiar feeling—that anywhere I go, I might inconvenience or injure somebody while they’re innocently going about their lives. I remember clearly thinking to myself, “I’m so unfit for society.” I think the sentiment had already taken up residence in my brain, but it registered with special force in that moment. I recounted it for friends a few weeks later, one of whom was quiet at the time, but later sent me a long message in response. I knew that friend had been going to therapy and getting more language around their own trauma and dissociative coping mechanisms, and they effectively became the first neurodivergent voice to say I wasn’t the only person alive who had internalized the notion that I was unfit for society. I understand this summary probably underplays it all, but that message had a profound effect on me, as has that friend. And that put me on the path where, in the two years since, I’ve arrived at some convictions about how ideas like that incubate in our culture, to the point that somebody who’s been made to feel “other” internalizes society’s phobias about their existence.

The origins of it, I’ve learned, are in the eugenics movement in the U.S. It’s weirdly underrepresented in the dominant telling of our history, and kind of played off as a fringe movement whenever it is. But the fact is that early in the 20th century, 32 states passed laws mandating the involuntary sterilization of “unfits” or the “feebleminded”—catchall terms reserved for folks who were usually just poor, uneducated, disabled, epileptic, living with untreated mental illness, or—disproportionately in many states—BIPOC women. Of those 32 states with sterilization laws, all but two recorded operations. Most states repealed their sterilization laws during the 20th century, but not before recording something north of 60,000 state-sanctioned sterilizations. We can assume there were many more than that though. Mississippi and North Carolina were the two states who held out on repealing their sterilization laws until the first decades of the aughts. Exactly one state, Washington, presumably still has its 1909 sterilization law on the books, and a Thurston County Court Commissioner proposed invoking it as recently as 2017 (more commentary on that here from the ACLU).

It might not sound like a big deal that exactly one state still has some official latitude to carry out an involuntary sterilization in this century, under a guardianship, no less. And while I’m dubious of that particular idea, I’ve never been involved in any legal arrangement like that, so I can’t pretend I understand what’s at stake there. I say that because I’m less troubled by the way one state’s law (incidentally, the state I currently live in) bears the legacy of a shameful chapter in U.S. history. I’m more troubled by the half-life that ideas inevitably have in public consciousness when they’ve been socially or legally sanctioned at some point in history.

In theory, it’s been decades since folks with atypical biochemistry and bodies, or folks who were left for dead by our systems for other reasons, were legally classified as “unfit” by the government so they could be sterilized. In reality, however, the practice of involuntary sterilization is still alive and well, albeit in more covert ways nowadays (28-year-old me revisiting this piece in 2021 has the benefit of knowing that as recently as 2010, women in California’s state-run prisons were still being forcibly sterilized, and some are finally receiving reparations). The staying power of involuntary sterilization as a practice coupled with the fact that the concept of being “unfit for society” is still idling in our discourse feels emblematic of the long tail that atrocious social concepts have once they’re couched in the realm of law and science.

It’s fucked up for probably more reasons than I can understand, but I want to touch on one more piece of this history that kind of gets back to the prevailing anthropocentrism in our society that I’ve had a hard time with. In the way it charts relationships, the English language largely assigns subjecthood and agency to animals, and humans in particular. There feels like an awful lot of dangerous hubris in that alone. And it’s probably what has enabled some of the most objectionable attitudes and policies, including the notion of applying breeding principles to our own species. And that feels awfully short-sighted knowing what we know now. Namely, genetic diversity within a species is one of the biggest predictors of its survival. But I also think this concept gets into the weight we assign to certain ways of knowing at the expense of others. And different beings excel at different ways of knowing.

I’ve lifted this idea of different ways of knowing from Robin Wall Kimmerer. She’s by no means the sole purveyor of it, but she became an important one to me in 2020, first with her 2013 book Braiding Sweetgrass, and most recently with her contribution to a 2016 anthology. The anthology, Forest Under Story: Creative Inquiry in an Old-growth Forest, features work that scientists and writers have created throughout the first 16 years of residencies at the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest in the Oregon Cascades.

The first of two Kimmerer contributions in Forest Under Story is an essay called “Interview with a Watershed.” In it, she nails the exact phenomenon I was alluding to when I said earlier that I understand the concept of loneliness much differently now than I did as a kid or a teen. Whatever sense of isolation I felt when I was younger was, I think, very much dictated by the kind of company society taught me to value. That is, I thought then that I needed more human beings to be around me. Like, somehow, the feeling of being a leper and my self-loathing would go away if I just surrounded myself with the right combo of human beings. I was so wrong.

Like an ecosystem, we all have our carrying capacities, and if there’s any semblance of an outbreak—an overrepresentation of one type of organism, way of feeling, or way of knowing within it—it throws everything off-balance. Viewed from this angle, perhaps those of us who’ve internalized the idea that we’re unfit for society just need to be around less humans that feed our tendency to compare and self-sabotage.

Kimmerer speaks to this whole idea in a way I’ve never heard before: “the sighs of loneliness we feel when the only living beings we encounter are ourselves.” The concept appears in a sequence in which Kimmerer is imagining what it’d be like to have instruments to measure some of those different ways of knowing, and not just data points. She writes:

The experiments we need to do are about how we can live and not hurt the land. How we can heal the wounds that we inflict. For those experiments, I would sit with eyes glued to the terminal, watching for cultural change, in order to chart a rising tide of ecological compassion.

From my standpoint, I think there are a few things worth connecting to what Kimmerer’s laying down here:

1. As somebody whose cognition and behavior has been guided by self-loathing since the first time I can remember thinking of suicide when I was seven years old, I have to say it’s amazing how much easier it is to be compassionate toward yourself once you can dispassionately see yourself as part of the living order.
2. Recognizing myself as part of the whole living order is honestly what keeps me from becoming a totally unhinged, out-and-out misanthrope. And what Kimmerer has said in Forest Under Story and elsewhere should actually remind us of the singular power that human beings have—particularly through science and art—to move each other, and to inspire each other to make decisions on behalf of the living world, not just other human beings.
3. I think it behooves us to run experiments and research ourselves once we can get out of our own way.

One radical proposition that Kimmerer lays out in Braiding Sweetgrass that I’ve really tried to commit to is the thinking that we have gifts in lieu of property and transactions, and responsibilities in lieu of rights. But real symbiosis hinges on giving only what we are able, and taking only what we need. It’s a wild contradiction to the capitalist doctrines most of us have been socialized with. It would rule on those grounds alone. But I’ve also found it to be an effective antidote to what 20 years of self-loathing neuro-patterns have done for my relationship to my ego.

An ethic that revolves around reciprocity demands that we develop a healthy relationship to our ego, and even research ourselves to figure out what we have to offer, what we need to thrive, and how to get out of our own way so we can give without reservation.