Over 42 million people in the United States rely on federal food assistance — that’s ONE OUT OF EVERY EIGHT PEOPLE. And that assistance is poised to disappear on November 1st because of the ongoing government shutdown.
Food banks around the country are bracing themselves for unprecedented need — and we can help them *right now* to help meet that need. You can donate to your local food bank, of course, or you can donate to FEEDING AMERICA, a broad network of food banks, food pantries, and local meal programs.
I’ll be matching the first $500 in donations. You can either donate directly and forward me your receipt (annehelenpetersen @ gmail)….or you can Venmo me at annehelen or PayPal at annehelenpetersen@gmail.com and I’ll make a big donation at the end of the week (and post all cashout receipts, etc.)
**If you need help finding food — this link will help you find resources near you.**
***If you’re able to dedicate a few hours to volunteering, this link will help you find an organization near you that needs help — local CS meet-up groups, take note!***
One of the recurring themes of this newsletter and is figuring out how to take care of each other in a society that valorizes self-sufficiency above all else. It’s taken so much active unlearning for me to rely more on others — even people I’ve known and loved for decades! — and I know it’s an ongoing project for so many of you, too. How do we stop trying to be perfect parents on our own? How do we stop thinking that any problem we have we can fix by buying shit (for ourselves?)
Sophie Lucido Johnson has been working through these questions too — but through a slightly different lens. First, she’s a talented illustrator, and sometimes these concepts can feel complicated…until you draw them and see just how simple they really are. Her framework of how queerplatonic relationship-building is also tremendously generative — particularly when it comes to communication and care.
If you’re trying to figure out how to find and/or better sustain kin in your life, read on — there’s something here for everyone. (And you’re gonna love these illustrations)
You can find so much more of Sophie’s work here and pre-order Kin here (as a gift to your future self!).
I think we should start with the title of the book and its unifying concept of kin. How do you think of it, and why does it feel appropriate for the sort of bonds & community-making you’re encouraging?
For the purposes of this book, I’ve defined kin as the people in your life to whom you’re deeply bound through all things; and who are essential for your individual and collective survival. I think of it as a word that grounds a relationship that is somewhere in between “friend” and “family” — the type of queerplatonic relationship that is becoming increasingly important as we build chosen family and support structures outside of families of origin.
I think we do need a word for these kinds of relationships, because language helps make things visible; but even without this word, you know the type of relationship I’m talking about. The friend you’d call in the middle of the night if your car broke down and you had no idea where you were. Someone who has seen you be really ugly and mean, and loves you anyway. (Loves you more.) These are precious relationships, and they’re essential building blocks to lasting, resilient community.
Can we share the figures from Chapter 1 of Your Resources / Their Resources / Other People’s Resources? It’s such an effective illustration, and I’d love to have you elaborate more on why New Relationship Energy cannot sustain us.
Absolutely! I’d be honored. People can find all the images here. As for New Relationship Energy….
…it’s that incredible, druggy feeling you get when you start dating someone new, and everything feels so good you can’t believe it’s all happening to you. It’s fun and seductive, and it’s fueled by novelty and uncertainty. It’s chemically supported by dopamine and norepinephrine – which, science alert: our brains can’t sustain longterm. The chemicals naturally even out as we settle into routine and familiarity.
New Relationship Energy is a spark, but it’s not an engine. We’re sustained by tending and returning, building and staying. And, crucially, it’s important for people to get to know the messy, unfun, frayed-edges parts of you, so that you can believe that everything about you is worthy of love. This is the kind of love that we hold on to when crisis inevitably descends — and it will. And we need more than one person to meet all our needs; I think that’s universally true, though it doesn’t have to mean nonmonogamy! We need friends, mentors, companions — people who meet our needs where they are without having to change themselves.
I interviewed several people in polyamorous relationships for my book research and it was really wonderful to veer totally away from what you call the ‘sideshow’ sensationalism and focus on the fact that it’s a lot easier to raise kids with more than two parents. I love how you call out how coverage of your previous book, a memoir about your polyamorous relationship, failed to focus on what really distinguishes poly relationships: it’s not the sex; it’s the communication. What is “lateral communication” and why is it so effective for kin-building?
Thank you so much — and yes, that’s exactly it! The radically honest, open communication is really what has distinguished my poly relationships from earlier monogamous ones.
Lateral — or non-hierarchical — relationships are really important to kin-building. This is about thinking of all of your relationships as existing on an equal level, rather than giving fixed preference or ranking to one relationship over another. Thinking of relationships as lateral allows you to shift your priorities as necessary. Sometimes, you have to prioritize relationships with people at work; other times, your closest friends need to be your priority; still others, it’s important to focus on your family-of-origin. A lateral relationship structure does away with the idea that one person is the most important person in your life. That’s simply not true, anyway! So many of the people in our lives are integral, and they all provide some of what we need.
Communication is about noticing out loud — a practice that is both revealing and vulnerable. This isn’t something that should be reserved just for your significant other; nor is it a truth that everyone in your life has automatically earned. Instead, I’m suggesting you make intentional choices about the people in your life who deserve your truth, and then structure your time to prioritize your friends at the same level as you prioritize romantic partners and blood relatives. This is all very heady-sounding on the page, but I’m basically talking about loving more people in your life by choosing to show them the less-put-together parts of yourself. That builds intimacy, and ultimately, safety.
I really enjoyed the section on how we don’t have adequate vocabulary for the people who matter in our lives. You look to other languages and cultural contexts to offer up some more precise language, and also talk through some of your own very specific relations (and what you’d like to call them). I find that having a name for a bond makes it legible, so I’d love for you to share some of your favorite examples here (this also makes me think this would be a great prompt for a future Culture Study thread).
My favorite is the French sortable: the kind of friend you take to events because they don’t embarrass you. While there aren’t adequate words in English for all the unique roles that our close friends play in our lives, I think it’s still important to recognize what specific people offer. I have a few friends with whom I love to talk about books. I don’t know what I’d do without these people; I think about books nonstop and I feel a deep need to text someone when a novel uses the word “scrum” four separate times. (This is a real example. This really happened.) When I recognized how important that was to me, I sent a voice memo: “Hey! I just realized that you are the person I talk to about books. I am so grateful that you are that for me, and I don’t know what I’d do without you. That’s all! Love you!”
There are also people in my life who’ve taken a vested interest in my daughter and her well-being. That is more meaningful to me than I think they know. She calls them “aunt” and “uncle,” which is a good place to start, but I’ve also sent a card that says, “Thank you for caring for T. I see it and it means a lot to me.” Notice who feeds what in you, and tell them. Maybe language will evolve to acknowledge more roles, too.
The book is filled with advice, examples, and empathetic encouragement on how to start building (and sustaining) kin in your own life. What part of your advice is the hardest to implement in your own life?
I just had strep throat. Three people (three!) I’d describe as kin texted me and asked me if I needed anything. What I needed was for someone to come and hang out with my daughter; she was off-the-wall and I had zero energy. But childcare still feels like a bridge too far to ask for on a whim.
I want to live in a world where I can ask for something and hear the word “no,” and feel emotionally safe in that exchange, but it’s not how I grew up. I grew up to believe that you only ask for help when you really need it, and at that point, it’s not OK for someone to say no. I want to bend this reality; to text my friends, “Can anyone come and take T to the playground for an hour?” and to then trust that any “yes” would be resounding and honest.
But this will take practice. And cruelly, it’s worse when you have strep throat (or anything like it); when you’re not well, it’s hard to act in a balanced, regulated way. So I sucked it up and texted back, “You’re sweet, I’m fine!” when really, I wasn’t.
We went to the same small liberal arts college (which isn’t why we’re doing this interview — anyone who reads Culture Study knows this book is a natural fit for this newsletter). Like a lot of small liberal arts colleges, it’s a petri dish for very, very tight community, and the friendships I built during those four years have structured the trajectory of my adult life. I mean, I live on the same island as someone who lived down the hall from me freshman year! But as close as we were (and are), I’m always struck by a real gap between what we valued then (proximity, casualness, play, community) and the way our institution funneled us into bourgeois career trajectories that actively discouraged all of those things. I also think that feeling has accelerated over the last twenty-five years, as the school has come to understand itself more and more as a launchpad for “excellence.”
We used to say that we worked really hard and played really hard, and then after graduating, we mostly just….worked really hard. (And understood “success” as leaving our friends and seeking out grad programs, internships, and jobs that scattered us across the world; I’m thinking specifically about the push towards Teach for America in the 2000s which I know structured your post-college life).
And from what I know about campus life now, the balance of play and work has really shifted as well. (To be clear, I’m not just talking about “play” as drinking — I’m talking about skipping class to walk to Safeway to pick up the photos you had developed, or filling a kiddie pool on a Tuesday afternoon in front of your dorm instead of studying, or, well, running the Beer Mile, which does involve drinking but mostly involves running naked at midnight). It’s just really hard to build community when you’re professionalizing yourself so damn early (and are so terrified of what happens if you don’t).
I graduated in 2003. You graduated in 2008 — right into the Great Recession. How do you think about how our school prepared us (or failed to prepare us) for kin-building?
Oh my God, no one has said “beer mile” to me in over a decade, and I completely forgot about that. I never did it! But it really did seem fun.
This is a great question. I did go straight from Whitman to Teach for America, and I have barely stopped to process anything about my life since then. I returned to Whitman a few years ago to do a reading from my first book, and it was wild to go back to the manicured lawns and brick buildings and cheese platters and interest houses; I thought, “Wow, you don’t really get the chance to enjoy what a summer camp this is when you’re here, do you?” I spent all four years at Whitman as the editor of the campus newspaper, which at the time was a print weekly with very little faculty advisory. Every Tuesday night was an all-nighter. I remember thinking that was par for the course; actually, I remember thinking that I didn’t work (or play) hard enough.
I got really physically sick living in New Orleans and trying to pull all-nighters while teaching in the Recovery School District. I’m still learning how to rest. It was absolutely not a thing I learned how to do in college. As a college professor now (I teach at The Art Institute of Chicago), I can attest that today’s students are no better equipped for rest; they still stay up all night working and playing. There isn’t enough time for all that we ask young people to do.
Like you, I met some of my closest friends at Whitman, and because the campus was small, our lives were totally enmeshed. My best memories from college are of walking out to the wheat fields to watch the sunrise with friends, or to eat cheese on a blanket or try to fly a kite. But play is not synonymous with rest.
Kin-building is, at its heart, about finding ease and choosing to rest in others. When you have more people in your life, there is less on your individual shoulders to do and achieve. I do wish I had known sooner that it was about people just as much as it was about accomplishments. It’s something we can teach to the young people we meet, through words and actions: life does not have to be as hard as you were taught it has to be. Most of life is not actually an emergency. ●
You can find so much more of Sophie’s work here and pre-order Kin here (as a gift to your future self!). She’ll be doing book events in Chicago and Portland — go see her! And finally, sign up for her newsletter: You Are Doing a Good Enough Job.
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