Sunday Bookmarks 23 // 1
The first letter for the year: talk of work, culty books and an essay about disabled communication
Hey friends, welcome to the January edition of Sunday Bookmarks. I am declaring February the start of my year proper, because January was lost to hospitals, beds and bathroom floors. I am consistently impressed with just how many things can go wrong in my body at once, a real feat if you ask me. I did however manage to escape into the pages of some great reads this past month, and as always, am lucky to be supported by some beautiful people who hold me up and push me forward when I cannot do that for myself.
LIVING THROUGH //
There is something so deep I feel for my sick friends , two in particular. They will likely read this essay below and then send me underlined screenshots of the bits that made them cry a little because they are both those kinds of people. One of them proposed a new way of communicating last month, an exchange of thoughts and ideas without written words, and in the short weeks we have been trialling the practice, it has undoubtedly changed our shared world.
I was a tumblr teenager, I am sure that is a pipeline from mentally ill internet user of the 2010’s to a (still mentally ill) journalist of today. What I loved so much about that corner of the internet was the multitude of ways you could say what you meant without having to say what you really meant. It was pretentious, yes, and likely infuriating to those who weren’t able to decode the streams of film stills and collaged images, but as a social media platform it was anonymous enough to allow for some kind of expression without performance.
I don’t care to expel the issues of the current social media platforms most of us participate in, but it is pretty certain that with the assumption of surveillance, even by the people you know, ultimately changes the way we show up online. The pendulum between oversharing, trauma dumping and performativity seems to oscillate at an unfathomable pace. Trends continually shift or individuals struggle to find a middle ground, social media becomes more chaotic to witness. There are closed circles of communication, like private friends stories or finsta accounts, most use them to be more forthcoming with actual feelings and experiences in real time - after all, it seems we are allergic to “being earnest on main ''. But there is still a demand for conversation, for responding with thoughts and sentences, even if totally private exchanges via Whatsapp or DM.
My friend and I sought more connection, reliant on each other to get through endless pain episodes but lacking in energy and separated by a sea, that stops us being able to lay next to each other and rest in unison. We created a private pinterest board that operates like an exchange of post-it notes, we pin images, illustrations and sentences back and forth, forming a chain of visual dialogue we can look back on each day. This process has the same energy as “I read this and I thought of you” - eight words that have always made me smile when they appear in a message.
‘I read this’ exchanges require a reply, a reading experience, they open a dialogue to consider the ways you and the other person’s lives have entwined up until this point. That is a beautiful thing, but when energy is a scarce resource, it can be consuming too. This private pinning exchange is creating a codified visual language between two people who exist in similar spaces. For us it is sickness, it is the pinning of a photo of two women in wheelchairs letting the sea wash over their feet and knowing what it means to the both of you: future hope, acknowledgment of struggle, desire to touch and hold and love one another.
Our platonic relationships are most often built on shared experience or history. At a time in my life where I feel like I'm haemorrhaging more relationships than I am gaining, the desire to connect to those who understand is stronger than ever. The joy of those relationships is often the foundation of a language spoken between only the two of you. We are embarrassed to reveal the pet names we develop, or are protective of the jokes we have nurtured across life stages and places. The unity of prior knowledge is what builds intimacy. That is not to say time is the only measure of friendship, more than ever do I notice it is the depth of the knowledge instead of the history of a relationship that stands it in great stead to have future longevity.
Writing about these boards I have built with people I love, in a way feels sacrilegious. By announcing their existence do they lose their preciousness? It is their privacy that opens up opportunities to be honest with how you are doing. I can’t speak for every sick or disabled person, but my own ability to tell people just bad things are, can be daunting. Thoughts whirl on burdening others, being dramatic or ruining someone’s day. That is assuaged in some ways when you are communicating with another sick person but then the problem arises, how can we keep each other afloat when we are both drowning?
This new language of sharing via images feels sacred. It lets the other person know what kind of day you are having, what you are holding onto hope for and what the annoying voice in the back of your mind is trying to tell you too. It is another way of talking without moving your mouth, and if you too sometimes find that hard, I invite you to give this a go.
BLOWING MY OWN TRUMPET //
For aforementioned health hell this month combined with a new freelance commercial contract that is taking up my time, my public facing editorial writing has slowed down. I am not mad about it, my 2023 is about protecting my energy better, and only making work when I have something to say:
I worked with the Wellcome collection last year to produce this essay and accompanying photos, and it was published a couple of weeks ago. This piece is an attempt to dispel the myths of invisibility in relation to chronic illness, it was joyful and complicated to write. I had a hard time balancing personal experience with more explicit critique of non disabled people’s assumptions about illness. I hope it was somewhat successful in the end.
I am on a crusade this year to write more about wellness, or more accurately, against wellness - I just need to be well enough, to pitch, research and write them. The first of the year is for Dazed (a commission 14 year old tumblr me would be proud of) investigating whether the root of wellness products is in fact, fear of disability.
Something much lighter (which is another career goal of the year) Roadbook, a new digital travel platform, asked me if I would like to write about Amsterdam - The place I have called home for nearly two years now! Consider this Amsterdam guide a list of recommendations if you are visiting. I ran out of words to add my favourite bookshops, so in case you’re wondering they are Scheltema and Used English Books.
READING // LONG FORM
I had a bumper reading month in January, mostly because I was tied to my bed for the majority of days. I pivoted between being unable to read at all, to reading being the only activity I could manage, so although it was quite stop and start, I did finish plenty of reads.
I have read a number of books on Cults, as far as niche interests go I think a lot of people consider themselves fascinated by Cults, their history and often, their connection to crime and abuse. I am an ardent avoider of true crime content, serial killers and the like, so my parameters for what I do and don’t choose to pick up are quite stringent.
I am most interested in the socio-political complications of a given place / time period that draw a person to start a group, and those that entice others to join. I am also always seeking to understand further the specific psycho-social tactics the group uses to keep someone in. I am much less inclined to pour over the gruesome details that usually end these stories.
Jeff Guinn is a biographer who has written two of my favourite cult books, the stories of Jim Jones and Charles Manson. With meticulous detail Guinn tells the cradle to grave story of each of these men, painting the picture of their childhoods; the destitution of Manson’s upbringing and the religious fanaticism that followed Jones.
He includes lengthy explanations of family roots and early traumas not as a way to let these heinous men off the hook, but to illustrate the number of chance encounters, experiences and resultant behaviour patterns that create an adult who is able to mastermind such misery. Each well over 450 pages, there is rarely a fact Guinn fails to mention.
That is all to say, I have a lot of information stored in my mind already about how, why and when the most well known cults have been formed, so I tend to steer away from books that feature the most prominent ones. However, when I saw Cults: Inside the World's Most Notorious Groups and Understanding the People Who Joined Them, by Max Cutler, in my local store, I was intrigued by its size alone.
I found it on Scribd, the audio platform, when I was desperate for distraction in the early hours of the morning, Although it does rehash many of stories I have heard before, and I skipped the Jim Jones Chapter entirely, it does make a point to include the epilogue of the cults that end in diastar (as all do eventually). Cutler gives up to date 2022 parole records of the Manson Girls, referring to those with attempts to be released, and others who still profess love for their ex leader. That chapter also reminded me to watch the docu-series that was released a couple of years ago on the gang of female followers Charles Manson amassed.
I love when my fiction and nonfiction reads collide, and surprisingly this was the case with Cults, and Hurricane Season by Fernandie Melchor. A much loved Mexican writer, Melchor’s debut centres on a Mexican hamlet where gendered violence, drug abuse and poverty are all rife. Each of the eight chapters bombards the reader with an account of the murder of the hamlet's most notorious dweller, the witch. From differing perspectives we come to understand both the physical and metaphorical role this purveyor of goods and power held over the community. Melchor references in interviews that much of the novel’s content came from consuming local newspaper stories, through the many layers of unreliable narrators it is clear Melchor is illustrating the destruction machismo tradition has on a community, and the crisis of femicide Mexico (and the rest of the world too) experiences.
Hurricane season is not about a cult per say, except that it is easy to conceive organised crime, drug abuse and hierarchical structures existing within patriarchal tradition, as all cult-like in their own ways. However, the religious / occult practices of The Witch are conceived with great care by Melchor to mirror some of the long held (and deeply respected) practices of healers and other similar figures, in Mexican history.
In Cutler’s Cults, he discusses Adolfo Constanzo, leader of the Narcosatanist group, established in the 1980's in Tamaulipas, Mexico. He was raised Catholic as a Cuban American in Miami, spent time with his mother absorbing Haitian Vo-dou on her trips to Puerto Rico and settled in Mexico as a young adult. Much like Melchor’s Witch, Constanzo took up the practice of casting spells on behalf of community members who are seeking revenge, retribution or survival. Whereas Mechlor’s Witch works against the patriarchy (at least part of the time), to serve the needs of sex workers and abuse victims, Constanzo works for the Gulf Cartel, ensuring powerful men continue to reap the benefits of the drug trade.
When reading of Constanzo’s obsession with animal sacrifice, that later turned into human sacrifice, Culter references the deep rooted religious and occult beliefs that shaped Constanzo’s early ideas about himself as a chosen deity who has the ability to change reality, but is sure to acknowledge that the original lineage of these occult religions were not inherently violent. It was Constanzo himself who twisted the Vo-dou and witchcraft practices into a profitable, and corrupted business model, but it is intriguing to consider The Witch and Constanzo as distant colleagues I suppose, or at least in the same ‘industry’.
READING // SHORT FORM
Some you may know Hunter by his Instagram handle, @shelfbyshelf, he has great book recommendations. But he also has the ability to devastate your inboxes with the life writing he shares on his Substack. The most recent piece, I Live at The End, was beautiful and heartbreaking and so evocative of time and space. If you have the time, and the bandwidth to read about teenage trauma, abuse and suicidality, then I must push this piece into your virtual hands.
Without sharing information that isn’t mine, this Catapult essay on why Academia is so toxic, brought home a lot of truths that have been whirring back and forth in my world recently.
Finally, someone said it. Or more accurately, someone said it loud enough for people to take notice. Katie Way for Vice outlines why Dr. Nicole LePera, better known as @The.Holistic.Psychologist, is falling from grace. Individuals, particularly people who have been harmed by the industrial psychology complex, forced in-patient units or the psychology industry at large, have named many of Dr LePera’s ideas as troublesome, but her social media presence continued to garner success. Now perhaps, the tide is changing.
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That’s all I have this month friends,
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