A Radical Mutuality

Last month, I resurrected my on-off relationship with horror genre to get acquainted with The Conjuring movies. These movies aren’t exactly hot off the press, but somehow they’ve only really been on the periphery of my awareness for about a year. And for whatever reason, watching them never rose to a level of urgency even though a lot of writers and podcasters whose taste I trust had only glowing things to say about them. Anyway, watching them was overdue and I rectified all of this at the beginning of April. I guess enough content I was interacting with around that time cited the franchise, so it finally felt like the right time to give the movies a discerning watch, and I wasn’t disappointed.

It’s hard to know how deep into my historic relationship with horror to go to explain why the genre has been pretty formative for me. I don’t exactly follow or consume it super faithfully these days, but every time I return to it, I do find myself experiencing a release that no other content really affords me. I think something that explains it that I’ve known about for a few years now is that I probably have a sensation-seeking personality profile.

In my adult life, it’s basically taken a lot of stimulation for me to feel anything at all, so it’s memorable when something actually makes me feel upset or frightened, and it feels like an outlet to express a strain of anxiety that I’ve perhaps blocked access to in my day-to-day life. But there’s additional context around that which I’ve only really turned up in the past year. Namely, my impoverished capacity for sense perception and lack of sense memories—two things I always accepted as normal—are probably a relic of a coping mechanism that I developed when I was a kid to deal with chaos, precarity, and frequent sensory overloads.

I think that growing self-awareness has certainly changed my relationship to activities and content that I used to gravitate toward for want of some kind of sensation. But the two consecutive nights that I reserved to watch the first and second Conjuring movies might’ve accounted for the first experience where I was able to discern the difference for myself in real time.

There is this dynamic that both movies share where, within the families at the center of each story, two kids share a bedroom. Both films also share this progression where at first, only one child is conscious of the oppression and terror that’s unfolding in their own home. But then, in what I suppose effectively signals the transition into the second act of the story, there’s an event where the two siblings who share a room both witness terror together and are finally on the same page. That was the point in both movies where I felt physically less stressed out, even as the families continued to be tormented and harmed by the malicious shit going on around them.

Here’s what I’m pretty sure is going on with me there: I’m relieved by seeing people on the same page when fuckery is afoot because it means the one who was already aware of it is no longer suffering in isolation. I’m stressed up to that point. But once a story or an experience gets there, for some twisted reason, I’m almost unfazed by everything else that unfolds, however unsettling.

I say “for some twisted reason” as if I have no idea what’s going on in my brain when I’m pretty sure I do. It’s also something I couldn’t have articulated maybe a year or even six months ago, but I have a pretty fully-formed theory now. Like everything else I’ve been using this space to ramble about for the past several months, it’s trauma-informed, and I know it’s not unique to me.

I think a lot of us who’ve put some thought and labor into our own healing and recovery—as individuals and also as communities—have gotten used to accepting the violence or abuse that has affected us, or whatever other hands the cosmic lottery has dealt us, as this immutable reality. We’re not so good at imagining different possibilities and outcomes for ourselves beyond a deep cerebral self-awareness about the indelible mark our wounds have left on us.

I’ve kind of come to see the tension as one of dependence versus determinism. That is, I think it’s healthy to have a lucid sense of our circumstances as dependent on a larger context that’s social, political, historical, and—at least to some extent—biological. Basically, I think it will always be important and liberating to be able to locate ourselves in a larger narrative, and understand what we can and can’t control about that. But I think it’s dangerous and super common to internalize that very real context as exclusively deterministic. And I think what ends up happening is we have a lot of wounded people seeing their wounds as their principal source of identity.

I’ll be the first to own up to this. Until about this time last year, I really hung my hat on this notion that my neurodivergence was best defined by mood and personality disorders. And while I was in that leg of this little soul journey of mine, I was really damn good at explaining all the things that weren’t possible, all the things that would never happen, all the experiences I’d never have access to because of my disorganized nervous system.

Maybe it’s somewhat the case that I woke up like this, as it were. That is, maybe the whims of one’s nervous system are, to some degree, predestined and intact from birth. But I think what was problematic about my attachment to the idea of disorders was that I hadn’t done all the deconstructing I could for myself. By identifying so strongly with a collection of disorders, what I had failed to do was understand how the organization of my nervous system might be the predictable outcome of an adaptation, or series of adaptations—albeit tragic, not altogether healthy ones—that I enlisted at some point to survive. They were never intended to serve me long-term, and I think it was easiest to believe that something innate about myself was to blame for what was manifesting as chronic self-sabotage.

I think that moment I noticed in the first and second Conjuring movies where the suffering is taken out of isolation does illustrate some real wisdom about the nature of healing. I think there is always going to be importance to witnessing and validating each other’s trauma and fear as a step in a process. But I think it’s telling that I’m still pretty relaxed and comfortable with suffering that occurs beyond that point. I think years of immobilization, often self-imposed but not always, in the midst of my own distress—that internalized belief that harm is inevitable and that I have no command over it—that goes far to explain how content I was with the idea of disorders to make sense of my own beliefs and behaviors.

Having a definition or clinical diagnosis does some of the important legwork of taking an experience out of isolation. I do believe that. But I’ve realized there can be some problems with idling there. The big, overarching one is that the American Psychology Association and pharmaceutical companies make a lot of money off of diagnosing people with disorders—like hundreds of millions of dollars every year. I say that not to invalidate the experience of folks who’ve found a genuine path to wellness and wholeness in spite of the commercial systems that drive how we diagnose and treat illness in this country. But I think it’s important not to lose sight of that context.

The bigger issue for me personally, however, was that idling with diagnoses didn’t require me to adjust any of my existing ideas and accepted truths about reality or myself. Staying there was never going to help me imagine different possibilities. There was no imperative to have aspirations or imagine much of a future, much less one where I might thrive. And from where my mind’s at now, that feels like a royal disservice, and maybe even a prolific failure to deliver on my responsibility to the living order that I’m a part of.

Chances are if you’ve popped your head into even one or two of these monthly scribbles over the past year, you’ve probably learned that I’m a huge fan of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass. I reference it constantly because it’s become pretty foundational to how I understand my own place in the living order, and my sense of comradeship with it—of having a stake in and responsibility to the flourishing of every last assemblage of dead star matter and spirit I share this terrestrial lifetime and future lifetimes with. I’m sure in some circles, that idea lands as naive and idealistic or just straight-up witchy, but I think it’s one of the most hardcore and radical outlooks to have and thereby one of the most worthwhile.

To approach one’s life from a place of total non-violent mutuality is a radical proposition. And what’s actively radical about it to me is it requires a willingness to reject all the synthetic, imposed systems that most people go their entire lives without questioning. In the same way that hanging my hat on disorders never challenged me to reconsider my concept of reality, I think most people go their whole lives thinking the systems they live under are somehow predetermined and immutable. They never consider what a collective, self-determined mutuality would look like.

For my part, I never considered what that would look like until reading Braiding Sweetgrass. And I certainly didn’t understand why I had a responsibility to figure out what flourishing on my own terms would look like, much less what any of that had to do with the rest of the living world.

I still have a lot of discovery to do around what I have to offer in this radical order of mutuality that I want to see in the world. But even in recent months that have been defined by physical isolation for just about everyone, I have to say I feel anything but alone in wanting to write and will this idea into existence. That’s because it’s become very clear to me that I’m not the only person out there craving and considering different paradigms for what we draw identity from, and how we give care and aid to all forms of life.

I have this standby line for explaining the broad strokes of what I’m focused on and motivated by these days. I tend to say I’m just trying to live a life I’m not ashamed of and make tiny changes to this place while I’m here. I find it comes in handy when people ask what I don’t think they realize is kind of a violent question to front-load a conversation with: What do you do?

To me, that question is violent because what people are really asking is what you do for economic purposes so they can fall back on it as a way to reduce and flatten your identity. I guess we’re taught that somebody’s occupation under the auspices of extractive capitalism is the best existing approximation of their identity—as if they’re not a dynamic being with will and autonomy and aspirations outside of a framework that only serves the white and ultra-wealthy in the end. Suffice to say, I think that’s deeply fucked up.

Anyway, I probably get way too much pleasure out of seeing how frustrated and out of their depth, or sometimes just disarmed and refreshed people seem to be when you essentially reject the premise of their scripted questions. And I’m not the only person out there doing this these days. Just recently, I had a chance to watch the recording of a conversation for Red May with David Correia and Jennifer Nez Denetdale, moderated by Chris La Tray—a person I reference all the goddamn time, but have to extol yet again because I’m more convinced by the week that he’s the people’s at-large poet laureate. That’s to say that his involvement was the reason I heard of this particular event, and I’m grateful for that.

The conversation was focused on bordertown violence and Native liberation and based on a new book called Red Nation Rising that David and Jennifer both contributed to. But even for such a seemingly specific topic, I was struck by how much the vision for Native liberation rests in considering possibilities beyond the models of a settler society and social order we currently live under. At one point, Jennifer even said there are certain issues she’ll get questions about from reporters, and she’ll essentially tell them that their question is misplaced and tell them what question they should consider asking instead. I love when people are willing to do this.

To me, feeling free to say that we reject the premise of a question or an idea from the dominant culture feels akin to that necessary step beyond witnessing and validating each other’s suffering. It feels like a rejection of the conditions that perpetuate the suffering. It’s like saying, “Not only do I recognize and understand the suffering that has occurred here, but I see how fucked up the conditions are that have allowed it to happen, and I will work in solidarity with the oppressed to change the conditions because we all deserve better.”

It feels like a principle to live by and reminds me of another concept from Braiding Sweetgrass that changed my whole outlook. In the book, Robin Wall Kimmerer has this section describing how mycorrhizal fungi species function as connectors that redistribute nutrients throughout a forest system so that trees can be at peak health and performance in unison. This is the passage I’ve been thinking a lot about with respect to a radical order of mutuality:

These fungal networks appear to redistribute the wealth of carbohydrates from tree to tree. A kind of Robin Hood, they take from the rich and give to the poor so that all the trees arrive at the same carbon surplus at the same time. They weave a web of reciprocity, of giving and taking. In this way, the trees all act as one because the fungi have connected them. Through unity, survival. All flourishing is mutual.

What I love about that is that even though subterranean networks of mycorrhizae are doing this below ground, out of our sight, all the fucking time, rain or shine, the manifestation of fungi most recognizeable to us are the saprobic kinds, the decomposers that appear as mushrooms in the wake of digested organic matter.

I guess I just dig that the most visible indicator of this class of organisms that we can see emerges from a death or an annihilation followed by a transformation of one kind of terrestrial matter into another. Whether above ground or below, fungi is what maintains this subtle, constant mutual aid process that we all take for granted.

On so many levels, I feel like that’s a model of mutuality that we can learn from and aspire to, even as the existing, self-cannibalizing, synthetic conditions around us are working overtime to break our spirit and isolate us at every twist and turn in this life.

I feel like there are more and more of us out there who realize that the way things are isn’t the way things have to be. And I think I’m beginning to realize myself that the endgame of healing and recovery work is really about imagining other possibilities for ourselves and each other, and slowly manifesting them.

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A bit about the photo: That is some western black elfin saddle that I stumbled upon on April 6—coincidentally the same day I completed my overdue Conjuring movie franchise initiation. I learned from the internet while writing this that although saddle fungi have traditionally been thought to be saprobic, there are now suggestions that they might be mycorrhizal. Or they might be both—Robin Hoods also capable of decomposing organic matter, as it were. Whatever the hell these fungi are capable of, I absolutely dig their vibe.