Transcript: The Politics of Feeling Good with adrienne maree brown
The transcript from Episode 70 of Strong Feelings — a podcast by Katel LeDu, and Sara Wachter-Boettcher.
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Transcript
Sara Wachter-Boettcher Hey you over there—feeling frazzled, juggling clients, and invoices, and projects. Do you want to simplify your life? Then you should check out Harvest, the easy, super-useful tool for tracking time, monitoring the health and progress of projects, and getting paid. Send invoices and reminders, create reports highlighting project progress, and so much more. Try it free today! Just visit GetHarvest.com/StrongFeelings to sign up. And when you do that, you’ll get a special deal—50% off your first month. That’s GetHarvest.com/StrongFeelings. [theme music plays for 11 seconds and then fades out] Hey, everyone, I’m Sara!
Katel LeDu And I’m Katel.
SWB And this is Strong Feelings! A podcast about work, friendship, and feminism—and what happens when you bring them all together.
KL So, last week we talked about removing guilt from guilty pleasures, and today we are gonna go even deeper on that topic because I got to sit down with adrienne maree brown, author of the new book, Pleasure Activism.
SWB Ahh, I am so jealous! You know I love adrienne’s work, and missing that interview was a huge bummer for me. Her first book, Emergent Strategy, was so impactful for me in how I think about my work trying to change big, messy systems, but Pleasure Activism… now that is a concept I want to explore!
KL Yeah, she’s so great! And something adrienne talks about is needing pleasure and needing to rest and slow down, and how critical these things are to doing movement work, and being an activist or an advocate for any cause. And in talking to her, it also really struck me that it’s not just important to have pleasure and take rest as much as possible, but it’s powerful that we talk about it. That we acknowledge that we need and want pleasure and even share what gives us pleasure. It helps us feel more connected to our work, our communities, our selves, and our activism!
SWB Mhmm, I feel this so hard. I wouldn’t describe myself as someone who does movement work per se, but I do think of this podcast as being a political act. And I think so are our events and so are the last two books that I wrote, but they’re also super tied into business and they’re not works of pure activism or I don’t go to a nonprofit every day. So, sometimes I’m like, “oh, does this apply to me?” But I even feel like at this level…or even just living in this world and trying to keep abreast of all the immediate daily horrors—whether it’s kids at the border or mass shootings or just a million other things—it all starts to feel like a lot.
KL Mhmm.
SWB And the exhaustion feels real! And then the guilt over not giving every moment of yourself to those horrors feels real too.
KL I know, I agree. I think we are definitely contributing to movements and I often feel really, really tired. Either I don’t deserve rest because I’m able and I’m capable of doing more…like technically I could? [laughs] Or that if I stop to rest, that I’m not helping. And mainly if I’m not “doing,” then I’m not helping. I think that’s the biggest thing.
[3:00]
SWB Right, right, right. I also think about—we spend a lot of time celebrating people’s work and ideas here. And at Collective Strength events, we do a lot to try to spread joy, and to celebrate each other, and to find moments of happiness. And sometimes I find myself wondering, “does that make any sense? Does it make sense to be doing that at all in the middle of all of these endless crises?” I find myself questioning my own pursuit of joy a lot.
KL I do too! And that’s what they want, man! [both laugh] I mean, it is obviously great for capitalism and the current systems in place if we feel like we’re never doing enough and if we don’t find or even seek joy and pleasure and rest because then it can just be sold to us and it’ll always feel elusive, and we’ll never break free from the cycle. So, I’m really glad we’re talking about this way more.
SWB Yeah! Like the idea of pleasure and rest as something that can be inside of ourselves and not just a thing that you try to buy because you’re not giving it to yourself!
KL [laughing] Yes!
SWB Oh my gosh, yeah. Yeah, okay. But at the same time, I want to talk about pleasure, I want to talk about joy, but I also am really aware of something that I see a lot of right now, which is toxic positivity.
KL Mhmm.
SWB You know what I mean. This “posi-vibes only,” “no negativity” kind of thing where people want to shut out anything bad that’s happening. And I’m like, “kids are dying in cages,” my vibes are not good!
KL No. Yeah! And look, desire for positivity is fine, but what good does it do to disregard everything else? I feel like all that does is kind of get you to numb. And if all we’re ever looking for is the positive, then we’re never dealing with real or uncomfortable or terrible shit, we’re just looking for the next thing to numb us. And, fuck, that’s good for capitalism too!
SWB Ughh, damn! And then also on a personal level… you know, last week I had a work thing happen that was not great. A project went sideways in a way I’d never experienced before. And honestly, it made me feel like shit.
KL Mhmm.
SWB I felt like shit and I wanted to talk about feeling shit. I didn’t want to tune that out. I don’t necessarily think it’s healthy to tune out those kinds of negative emotions. And I don’t think it was important for me to keep it posi all week, part of it was dealing with the thing that just objectively sucked! And so I often feel like when we talk about finding pleasure and joy, a lot of people end up in that “keep it posi” space and it really distances you from your own feelings. And I think that that builds up over time. When you avoid facing the realities of the world or you avoid facing the realities of yourself, [laughs] you end up with this very selfish behavior because you focus all this energy on you feeling good, but you’re not really processing at whose expense your joy is coming from.
[5:47]
KL Yeah.
SWB And who is being left behind or who is being actively harmed by that kind of tunnel vision. So, this is something I really love about adrienne’s concept of pleasure activism because it’s celebratory, for sure—it’s got positivity to it—but it’s not shutting out any of the hard stuff. And I think that’s what we’ve been trying to do too—creating spaces where people have permission to talk about the things they struggle with, to talk about their trauma, and then to actually connect with others by sharing those things. Because I feel like it’s when we can open up, and when we can connect over the hard shit, and when we feel permission to be real, that’s when we ultimately create a space where a deeper sense of joy and celebration can emerge and it’s not just the surface level posi vibes.
KL Yeah! Something else this made me think of is our conversation with Nanci Luna Jiménez in the spring. She brought up the concept of adultism and how that so often manifests, as you know, telling kids not to cry, not respecting them or their emotions, and basically treating them like they’re not real, whole, human people. And I think we all grow up enduring some measure of that and I think about it all the time. If we’re taught that our emotional needs aren’t relevant or that we’re weak for showing and connecting with emotions, how are we supposed to get to a place where we’re aligned with ourselves enough to say, “yes, I need pleasure, I need joy, I need rest.” We need those things in order to heal!
SWB Mhmm. You know, it’s like every episode we do I feel all of these connection points to other episodes—
KL Yeah.
SWB —which is kind of rad. So, for example, it made me also think about Liz Fosslein, who we talked to in the winter about her book “No Hard Feelings,” which is about talking about your feelings at work.
KL Mhmm.
SWB And I love that, I love talking about my feelings around work because I think that talking about our feelings at work connects us to this broader conversation about being able to align our values with our work, which is actually really hard. I think the reality is it’s very difficult to align your values with your work, given that if you work in a business, you work within an existing capitalist system. And that system is super good at exploiting people’s, and it’s super good at extracting profit beyond everything else, which means it’s really, really hard to bring anything value driven into it in a real and true way. So, bringing feelings into work culture doesn’t fix that problem, but what I think it is is still actually radical because it takes the system as it is and it inserts more humanity into it and more awareness of people into it. And that happens at a small scale, but I think it’s really important because you have to bring the people back into the equation if you ever want to get away from this system that is built to exploit them.
[8:28]
KL Yeah! And it’s also really radical to rest and slow down. [laughs] I’ve been following this woman, Tricia Hersey, who founded something called the Nap Ministry.
SWB Ooh, Nap Ministry? I think I finally found a religion for me! [both laugh]
KL I know! She started this movement to help folks slow down and rest as an act of protest and resistance, and I love this so much. She started it as an art installation where she invited community members to nap in a group setting and now it’s gaining all this momentum. She’s doing it all over the country and I’m so happy it’s spreading. And one of the things I really love about what she’s doing is that she’s talking about how important rest is to the collective human experience, but specifically how important it is to black bodies. She’s creating dialogue and a space for black bodies to recapture rest and peace that was stolen from them for centuries. So, she says that rest is resistance but it’s also black liberation!
SWB This is so interesting and I’m really glad to hear about her work because, yes, everybody deserves a rest, but there’s so much white supremacy built into our ideas of who deserves rest or who gets rest—
KL Mhmm.
SWB —and who is allowed to be at leisure. Like you said, we spent literally hundreds of years denying black people rest. And now, today even, it’s still deeply embedded in our culture that black people, especially black women, don’t need rest.
KL Mhmm.
SWB We think of black women as strong or tireless. We expect them to come out and save our ass on Election Day, right?
KL Yeah.
SWB All of that I think is really tied up in super racialized ideas of who needs what, and who deserves what, and who gets to be a full person versus who is a tool that we employ when we need them.
KL Yes.
SWB And then you end up having the situation where as soon as a black woman needs rest and needs a break or as soon as she is struggling under the pressure that we are putting her under, immediately she can get labeled as “lazy” or some other similar stereotype.
KL Yeah.
SWB So, I do think we all deserve to reclaim rest, but especially and particularly, I want to support black people reclaiming their rest because absolutely that has been denied.
KL Yeah.
SWB And I also think about the general class issue of all of this. If you have two part time jobs and a gig driving Uber in order to make rent, and somebody is like, “just nap more”—
KL Mhmm!
SWB —I’m not sure that’s totally helpful!
KL Right.
SWB But I do think there’s a piece of this that says, look, if you can take breaks and rest, if you have the privilege to not quote unquote “bust your ass” every second, I think it’s really important to do so, and to talk about it and to normalize it, and to make it a thing that simply is part of people’s lives.
[11:04]
KL Yeah, absolutely. And if you’re in a position of privilege or power to make space for black and brown bodies to rest, also do that.
SWB Oh my gosh, yeah. This also just reminds me of how much productivity culture is just a fucking scourge though.
KL Ughh.
SWB But I also think a lot of the popular lit on medium.com or whatever about rest or sleep is actually just treating it like another productivity hack.
KL Yeah!
SWB We’ve talked about this a little bit, but a nap is not just good because you get a boost of productivity afterwards. That might be true or might be true sometimes, but what if naps are also good just because they’re… good?
KL They’re good!
SWB Because people need rest and naps are good? And what if you were well rested and in touch with your body and that just felt good?
KL Mhmm.
SWB And it reminds me how rigged the game is. You can’t out-optimize capitalism. There is no productivity hack in the world [KL laughs] that is going to get you out ahead of that. All it does is make you more efficient for capitalism.
KL Mhmm.
SWB And guess what? Capitalism will always up its demands on you, right? So, it’s a never ending cycle.
KL Yeah! We will never win their game by playing that way. We’ll just get sick and be disconnected, so we’ve got to fuck up all the rules. Sorry, we’ve got to do it. It reminds me of something adrienne wrote on her blog, that I love. She talks about waking up to a new reality, about feeling it on the horizon—a reality where, “we collectively realize capitalism cannot yield the societal norms we need in order to survive and thrive as a species. A reality where we begin to practice what’s next.”
SWB Ughh. On that note… let’s get to what’s next. [short transition music plays]
[12:40]
Harvest: Creative Mornings
SWB So, Katel, you know that I’ve been talking a lot about community lately since we started running our Collective Strength events? And something that’s becoming increasingly clear every day is how much work it is to run a community!
KL Oh my gosh, it is a lot of work!
SWB Yeah. And I knew that, but I feel like I know that in a whole new level now. [laughs] So, thanks to the support of our friends at Harvest, we have a little treat today. We are going to get some extra insight from one of the best community builders around, Tina Roth Eisenberg. She’s the founder of Creative Mornings and we are so excited to welcome her to the show. Hey, Tina!
Tina Roth Eisenberg Thank you for having me!
SWB Yeah, thanks for being here! So, can you tell us—first up, what is Creative Mornings and how did it start?
TRE So, Creative Mornings is the world’s largest face to face community that I started here in New York after I moved to New York and I didn’t know anyone. And it was really hard for me as a designer to break into New York and find my creative tribe. A few years after I arrived here, I started a coworking space. And I remember sitting there, looking into my space, and realizing, “wow, you have space! You can invite people in!” So, I started a prototype kind of thing; I started inviting people in one Friday morning a month for free breakfast and a lecture. And it has over the years—over the last eleven years—organically grown into a beautiful, global community. We are happening in 207 chapters around the world—that’s 207 cities that gather their creative community—and it’s all volunteer run. It’s a really beautiful labor of love, as I call it.
KL Ah, we’re big fans of Creative Mornings. So, I do want to ask: so many communities can be kind of toxic or feel exclusive and elitist—what’s the most important thing you think people can do to create a community where folks are kind?
TRE Well, I’m a big believer that you attract what you are. So, if you show up kind, and warm, and open hearted, it kind of is contagious [laughs] to the community. So, we make a point when you arrive at a Creative Mornings that people welcome you warmly, they hand you a coffee, and might even give you a hug or a high five and people feel safe instantly. Because most people come alone to Creative Mornings. When you sign up for an event, you only get one ticket, so you have to be a little brave and show up on your own. But then when you arrive and everyone welcomes you so warmly, you kind of feel instantly comfortable and relaxed and you start chatting with other people.
SWB Tina, I love that so much and I love how you’ve grown that community. Thank you so much and thank you to Harvest for shining the spotlight on your work. How can folks find out more about Creative Mornings and find a community near them?
TRE You can go to our website at CreativeMornings.com/Cities to find a chapter new year. Or you can subscribe to our newsletter on CreativeMornings.com.
SWB Thanks, Tina! [short transition music plays]
[15:29]
Interview: adrienne maree brown
KL adrienne maree brown is a social justice activist, black feminist, and the author of a book I can not put down—_Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good_. It feels like critical timing for a book like this to exist and I am so excited to talk with her today. Adrienne, welcome to Strong Feelings!
adrienne maree brown Thank you. Thanks for having me.
KL So, first up let’s start with mercury in retrograde. [laughs & amb laughs] Do you feel like it’s real and is it messing your stuff up like it’s messing mine up? [laughs]
amb Yeah! I have experienced it. And I’ve been trying for a couple of years to give a positive reframe on it—
KL Yeah.
amb —because it’s supposed to be a time to renew, and redo, and refeel, and all of those things. But mostly what I feel is it just messes everything up. [laughs & KL laughs] So, you have to plan your life according to it, impossibly.
KL Yeah.
amb The other night I was flying back from LA and I ended up having to facilitate a whole moment on a plane because we had to do an emergency landing [KL gasps] and then come back up in the air. And then the air conditioning broke, and then something else happened, and we all had to get off and blah, blah, blah. But it was just like watching how humans quickly default to their most base version of themselves. [KL laughs] Like, “what’s going on?!” Like you all really want to come for these workers, [laughs] you know?
KbL Yeah.
amb Just having a moment of “the workers actually don’t have a working sound system, that’s all that’s happening right now. We’re all going to be fine.” But it’s just those moments where it feels like, “oh, we’re really in the wild right now.”
KL Mhmm. Well, I am glad that I am not the only one who is feeling it. But I agree—I’m sort of trying to use it as a moment to reflect a little and look at what feels out of whack.
amb Yeah.
KL Okay, I do want to dig into Pleasure Activism. Can you tell us what the book is about?
amb So, the idea behind it, the core idea of it is rooted in this question that I’ve been sitting with, and working with, and playing around with, which is how do we make justice and liberation the most pleasurable experiences that we can have? And my hypothesis and my place to work is how can I feel into the things that actually give me pleasure and let that be a guide? Like hear that yes in the body, yes in the self, and use that as a guide to help me experience more pleasure, and then experience more connection, more relationship, more depth, more connection with the rest of the world. So, part of it is that—how do we make it so that the things we’re trying to do to make the world a better place are actually pleasurable to involve yourself in? A great example that I just can not stop pointing to right now is what’s going down in Puerto Rico where all the footage of the resistance movement that’s trying to oust the governor there is dancing, and singing, and drums, and mothers dancing and leading, and children playing—the stuff that you’re just like, “who wouldn’t want to go to that party?—
[18:31]
KL Mhmm.
amb —Who wouldn’t want to go and be a part of that?” I’m like, “oh, that’s how movement can and should look and feel.” And it’s such a compelling space. People who are like, “I might not see myself as part of a resistant political process, but I definitely want to see myself as part of a vibrant community that is dancing in the street, and feeling free, and feeling uplifted, and uplifting each other.” Another part is reclaiming access to pleasure for all of those of us who are in marginalized identities and who have been purposefully excluded from believing that we deserve access to pleasure. And really healing some of the wounds of capitalism, which make us believe that we never have enough and the only way that we can survive, and get ahead, and feel good about ourselves and our bodies and our lives is if we spend some money.
KL This also makes me think of, why do you think the concept of pleasure feels so polarizing for so many folks?
amb Yeah. I mean, I think a couple of things happen. One is that people feel really guilty for the pleasures that they indulge in. My focus is those of us who are in social justice work or in movement work—that because the crises are so big, there’s a real desire to constantly be responding to these crises and constantly be—there’s never a moment when we can’t justifiably be working because there’s so much to work on and there’s still so few people who spend the majority of their lives doing that work. So, it’s totally understandable that we’re like, “no, I’ve just got to be tireless.” But what ends up happening is we suffer because we don’t have joy, and connection to each other, and connection to our bodies, and connection to family, and pleasure in our lives. And that suffering builds up into exhaustion. That exhaustion leads to a depletion of hope, a depletion of vision, a depletion of innovation under pressure. Even being able to hold a standard for what it is we’re fighting for because we get constantly stuck in, “I’m fighting against everything we can fight against.” So, I understand it when I come across it and people are just like, “no, I can’t imagine that this is important.” And rather than try and make the case myself, I try to fill the book with examples of people who are actually doing that work—doing the healing, doing the community knitting, and uplifting through all kinds of methods. There’s work happening around fashion. There’s people who are treating and facing the war on drugs through the process of building a community dispensary. There’s a lot of options in there for ways that people are addressing the issues of this moment with as creative as possible solutions.
KL You talk about the concept of somatics in the book. Can you describe what that is briefly for folks who might not be familiar with that?
[21:20]
amb I’ve been studying somatics for a decade or so and it’s really the study of the body in its wholeness and understanding that there are things that break our connection to wholeness, break our sense of wholeness, and that gets stored in the body as trauma and holds on waiting for us to turn and face it and complete the process. A lot of how humans store trauma is by repressing—hardcore repression.
KL Mhmm.
amb We start doing this at a very young age with kids. “Stop crying. Stop feeling your feelings. If you don’t stop crying, I’ll give you something to cry about.” Really making it the worst thing you could be doing is actually feeling your emotions instead of the worst thing you could be doing is repressing those emotions, repressing the reality of your experience and the part of you that knows how to set boundaries and say no. So, we create the conditions for a lot of harm pretty early on in processing. So, then it’s like, “oh, how do I begin the work of reclaiming?” Somatics says that one of the ways we can do that is actually by relearning how to feel, relearning what it looks like when we’re actually grabbed and triggered and giving ourselves a center in the body, a home in the body that we can return to when those pressures come, and a way that we can reclaim our dignity, reclaim our right to be present, and open, and connected. That’s how we talk about it. And it’s incredible to me—when I first started the work, I was just curious. And then after a year of training I was hungry. I was like, “I see the transformations happening in this room and I see people walking with extra inches in their dignity. Not in their bodies, but in their presence.” And feeling like, “oh, what does it take to return that dignity to people where there’s been great harm?” And I got curious. And now I’ve been on that path learning technologies of the body in that way. One of the things that really does open up is once you clear out some of the spaces that had been blocked by trauma, so much more becomes possible in the realm of intimacy. And most people—most people in organizing, most people I’ve come across in any of the work I’ve done—are looking for belonging in some way. They want something that they can belong to that will never let them go, that will never leave them, that will never cancel them because they say the wrong thing on the internet. [laughs & KL laughs] They want something that’s going to stand for them and have their backs. And some spaces are like, “oh, parents do that or communities are supposed to do that,” but again, one of the outcomes of capitalism and that individuation of family and success is that we have fewer people that we can expect to call upon for that sense of belonging. Everyone’s got good fences now, right? So, somatics is a way that you can recreate, regenerate belonging through learning how to be authentic and to feel your feelings in real time, and communicate them in real time, ask for what you actually want and mean.
[24:22]
KL Mhmm.
amb There’s a lot there.
KL Yeah. It really seems like if we can get in touch with that, with ourselves, it seems like that’s a natural progression to experience pleasure better or more deeply.
amb Yeah, yeah.
KL And, hopefully, actually let us do better work or be better partners. And even neighbors and community members.
amb Yeah. Although, I think the caveat I try to make whenever I talk about it is it’s definitely not like a one-stop workshop type experience of transformation. [laughs]
KL [laughing] Yeah.
amb And I think about that a lot—how to create more access or pace. There’s a slow kind of pace of work. You really have to change your practices, which I’m a huge fan of. I love practicing, and I believe that we are what we practice. I’m just like, we become what we do over and over again. That makes sense to me.
KL Mhmm.
amb It’s easy to prove, right? If you keep rubbing at the same spot in your clothing, eventually you’re going to change that spot, you’re going to make it a worn-down area. I think we do the same thing ourselves. We wear down parts of ourselves that we actually need to keep sharp and strong. Like analysis, like the part of ourselves that can intervene on racism. We wear those things down by being polite over and over and over again. When the choice is like, “oh, I’d have to break the social norms in order to say this is wrong,” that kind of stuff.
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Strong Feelings is a weekly podcast about work, friendship, and feminism. Because life’s too short to bottle things up. Hosted by Katel LeDu, and Sara Wachter-Boettcher. Produced by EDITAUDIO. Made with ❤ in Philadelphia.
