Stole this from Kate Zambreno’’s blog (see blogroll, Frances Farmer….) because it sums up the failure feeling for the day, the confusion about where to put very finite amounts of energy.
She is quoting Eileen Myles, who says:
The thing is if you learn how you fit in a culture fairly late (and I'm thinking your mid-twenties is actually quite late in terms of development) you will probably spend the next bunch of time sort of exploding with the news while variously attempting to wedge your way into the imagined cultural body you think you need to belong to whether it's a loosely organized one like the art world, the poetry world, or the gay community.
Belonging is definitely the problem for a very good reason. The working class prepares you to be a player in a very unspecialized arena. Because you have been educated to support the way the world turns.
I might add or replace some of the communities she mentions with the disability community, the service provider community, etc.
How to maintain that support role station, which you respect for its core functionality and thus poetic economy and which affords you with the time to do many other things in additon to and thus enlivening the support you provide, while also retraining yourself to specialize and thus live at your “full capacity” and have the most “impact”. What are those measures? But also, isn’t it a stupid myth that any kind of work is unspecialized, so long as the self and the action are in dialogue?
