I will document this experience of abortion through a zine. In the zine, I seek to divorce the medically necessary procedure of abortion from the emotional charged language of “complicated.” I want to erode shame and stigma from a person’s decision to end a pregnancy. I seek to normalize abortion and assert that abortion is a social good, without which a democratic society is not possible. A persons assertion of bodily autonomy can be fun, lovely, even playful. Most of all, getting an abortion is a relief; an exercise in autonomy that leads to a full, free life.

I am looking for personal essays, written by people who have had abortions, about how abortion improved their life. I want stories from people who feel their abortion was uncomplicated, necessary, and good. I want to celebrate abortion. If you are interested in participating in this project, please pitch your story! Selected writers will be paid $100 dollars for contributing to the zine.

Pitch

Examples of stories I’m looking for:

• Abortion road trips.

• Abortion as gender affirming care.

• Abortions that helped you make a new friend.

• Abortions that helped you do something decadent (travel, fit into a particular outfit, indulge in a soft-cheese summer).

For other examples, please check out this episode of You’re Wrong About and the stories from Shout Your Abortion.

Deadline to pitch is August 31, 2026. Those accepted to the zine will be notified by October 31, 2026. Upon acceptance, writers will be asked to submit a first draft by January 7, 2027. Writers will be asked for no more than two rounds of edits, before May 1, 2027. Writers will be paid upon completion of the first draft.

To Pitch: You do not need to have a completed story to pitch. Please write a summary of your personal essay, a proposed title, and an estimated length. If you have a complete piece, please include the first few sentences in your pitch. AI writing is not accepted for this zine.

Pitch

The contributors for this zine will be selected by and the zine will be edited by TLN. TLN is an aggressively pro-choice cis-woman located in the United States. Submissions are open to people of any background or gender identity who wishes to share a personal essay about their abortion story. The zine will be marketed online and on social media, and will only be published in print.

And of course, please share this with anyone you think would be interested!

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Thank you for reading, as always. With much love- TLN.

Cover photo by Angeli Mittal from Daily Northwestern

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Plus I need to figure out how to get the “i” on my keyboard to stop sticking.

Au revoir for now, you’ll hear from me again when I’m either too inspiired or too pissed off not to write.

-TLN

There are a ton of talented a lovely people who are making art that is beautiful, interesting, and important. There are a ton of weird freaks making art that is transgressive, experimental, and important. There are a ton of pretentious assholes who are making art that is annoying, derivative, and still important. Most crucially, maybe, there are a ton of regular people out there who are making art that is underdeveloped, pedestrian, and still very important. There is zero obligation for anyone to pay for any of that. The talented, the freaks, the pretentious all go to the same people asking to have their work funded. Regular people often don’t think to ask. I wish everyone had the time and resources to explore their creative outlets, but under the current system, only the best grant writers can. We will never know what the Venn Diagram of good grant writers/good artists is because the bad grant writers/good artists never got to explore their art. I would hazard to guess that it’s not a perfect circle. Grant funding is a system where arts funding goes to people who are good at grant writing— like how the employment landscape is a system where people who are good at applying to jobs get wages.

When it comes to applying for jobs, I hear the system is broken. Someone finds a job that is perfect for them, and that they are perfect for, and they’re ghosted. The system isn’t working for them. The thing is, it’s not meant to. The system was built by employers, to cultivate and pluck from a pool of talent that will take the lowest bid. The system is working exactly how people who hire need it to. Just cause it’s not working for you, doesn’t mean it’s not working. It just means it’s an evil system! The system that matches labor with paid work was made by employers to take advantage of workers. It’s inefficient to the applicant by design.

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So why do artists want art to be labor? So you can beg someone who doesn’t care if you live or die to make art? What an artist asks of themselves when they label their artwork as labor is to prioritize economics over other common functions of art: community, spirituality, activism, decoration. When an artist asserts themselves as economically relevant the viewer is given the lens of capital through which to engage with the work. Is that the most interesting option? Is it the one an artist wants to choose? I’ve begged people to let me make art for money often, they usually say no. The difference to me, between art and labor, is that I still make art even if you aren’t paying me for it. You won’t ever catch me working for free.

We need to stop advocating for better application processes and start advocating for universal basic income. The system of begging can’t be improved, hierarchies are reinforced regardless of how fair a process is. While we should advocate for more public funding for the arts, universal basic income would be more beneficial to actual artists. Similarly, people can have a more dignified job hunt if their basic needs are guaranteed to be met while they pursue it. I want to live in a world where creatives don’t have to prove themselves before creating. I want to live in a world where a capable job applicant is not overlooked for their desperation. Dare I imagine a society where being a parent doesn’t need to meet the definition of waged labor to valued?

I don’t really care if art is labor or not. I think the moment we start trying to define that we have already lost the plot. Just give me money.

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Comrade is a translation; from a different language and also from a different time— a time when the threat of socialism loomed over western powers. To my comrade and I, we were agents of fallen socialist powers— but only in jest! That insinuated militancy doesn’t come from the root of the word comrade. The etymology of the word comrade is from the Spanish word camarada which translates to chamber-mate or close companion. As socialism became popular in the west over the 19th century, comrade became a gender-neutral term for people with shared interests. It was a way for people to signal to each other that they had solidarity, this is much like why I used the term for my co-workers.

Tovarishch is a Russian word that is usually translated to comrade. The root of the word tovarishch is business or travel companion. According to the Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, the word became popular during the Russian revolution specifically because it was egalitarian— it did not insinuate a person’s position in a hierarchy and it is gender neutral. By the 1920s people in the Soviet Union called each other tovarishch casually. The way you might say, “hi neighbor.”

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The translation of the word tovarishch to comrade is curious to me. I don’t consider myself a Russian language expert by any stretch of the imagination. I did, however, grow up with Russian speakers and watched soviet films growing up. The way people in those films use the word tovarishch does not communicate the militancy of the word comrade. It’s casual, used between friends, even used flirtatiously. Sure soldiers used the word, but so did poets and schoolchildren.

Here I am confronted with the politics of translation. Translators during the cold war made a choice when interpreting the word tovarishch to English. They chose to use a word that was politically charged to represent people in a socialist country. Tovarishch is a political word, it was widely adopted after the Russian Revolution because it is egalitarian. However, all words are political. Titles like Mr. and Mrs. reinforce patriarchy. Referring to someone as “woman” can feel derogatory. Titles like “sir” imply respect or authority. Tovarishch could be correctly translated to comrade. Tovarishch could also be correctly translated to neighbor.

Under America’s newest fascist regime, neighbor has taken on a similar revolutionary power. I’ve seen people apply this word to their comrades with affection, a sense of protection, and a sense of duty. It’s a lovely, familiar word. It’s accessible. The way a Russian may say, “Privyet tovarishch!” an American may say, “Howdy neighbor!” It’s non-threatening, even friendly. Crucially, it’s equal. Neighbor does not denote gender, class, or race. It does not denote legal status. Neighbor indicates a relationship, much like comrade does, to someone whose interests you share. You care about this person because you are next to them and their safety is your safety. I love how people say neighbor now. Protect our neighbors is lovely and anonymous and inclusive. It’s political in that its use is born of a camaraderie that is distinctly American.

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Someone I was reminiscing to about the old internet (when people used more than 5 websites and UX was uglier but easier to use) recommended I read Glitch Feminism, A Manifesto by Legacy Russell. Russell describes the experience of growing up as a digital native while being black and queer and how the internet affected their sense of self. Russell describes exploring their identity online, through an avatar, through refusal, and through glitches. They describe the act of refusal—or glitching: “Embodying error—an all-consuming joyful failure within a system that never wanted us and that will not make space for us.” The manifesto resonated, I too am a digital native and that fact has shaped my relationship with gender and identity deeply. Russell also describes a version of the internet I feel nostalgia for. One that was messy, easy to manipulate, and easy to hide in.

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When I first learned about ChatGPT I didn’t get the hype— how is it different from Cleverbot? Both bots use math to generate likely sentences, something that is no longer compelling to me. I got over that novelty about ten years ago. I’m not writing this to dunk on AI though. This person did it more eloquently than I ever will. What I do find compelling about the difference between Cleverbot and ChatGPT (or Claude or Gemini or Grok or or or….) is the difference in marketing. When I was a teen Cleverbot was a website that captured a niche audience who were interested in its mechanics. Cleverbot didn’t have mass appeal the way contemporary chatbots do. Contemporary chatbots are sold as real (if artificial) intelligence, and as your friend.

“Sold” being the key word here. That’s the difference between the internet I was on at 16 and the internet I’m on now: there’s so much more marketing. It’s all ads. Legacy Russell writes about creating an avatar and inhabiting it. They also write about “the bureaucratic violence of a single box tick,” when a user online is required to identify their gender. Identifying features build a data set about you, that data dictates how to market to you, what algorithms to deploy at you, how to make you depressed.

When first logging on, I was chronically online in a way that could get toxic. I was an angry teenager going through my edgy atheist, borderline libertarian phase. I picked fights online that I probably should have just been having with my parents. If remnants of that period in my life still exist, they don’t have my face and name on them. I am not sure how possible that kind of anonymity would be anymore. It would have been next to impossible to accurately market to me (a teenage girl) based on my online presence (kind of neck-beardy). I didn’t have to check (m)any boxes to get on most websites. I didn’t need to define my gender. I had an avatar. Decades later, verification laws might require you to upload a government ID to get online. I don’t think the internet I was an angry teen on was particularly healthy but it was separate from my AFK1 self in a way that allowed me to explore my identity safely. Ultimately, that was a good thing. I would have been angry as a teenager no matter what, a lot of people are, being chronically online allowed me to figure out why. Doing it anonymously was a privilege that current angry teens don’t have.

I have nostalgia for the early internet: for the anonymity. For the freedom to, as Legacy Russell puts it, “expand and explore in the freedom of abstraction.” Abstraction is impossible to market to and therefore is being limited online by those who want to market to you.

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I had all the best intentions of writing to you today about something thoughtful that I’d been thinking about lately. I have so many drafts in various places where I do my best to say something clever and interesting. That was not meant to be today.

I woke up today desperately hungover. I went out for one beer last night and failed. I woke up late, put on the same outfit I was wearing yesterday, and left to work a full hour after I was supposed to. The train, which usually arrives every 5 minutes, didn’t arrive for 20 minutes after I got to the station. That time allowed me to realize I was feeling anxious about my inevitable termination as a result of me showing up to work an hour and half late and hungover. When I did finally get on a train, this anxiety was not alleviated. My train stopped at another station and the conductor announced, “we are stalled. There’s a train on the other side of the tracks going to the loop. I don’t know when we will be going.” I was too hungover to get off my train and on the other one so it left without me. The train I was on sat there for 10 minutes. Another train arrived opposite of my immobile train and I anxiously pushed my way off the stalled train onto the newly arrived train. As I sat down, I watched the doors to the first train shut and it proceeded down the track. The conductor for the new train announced that the new train was stalled. I stayed put on that train which took another ten minutes to leave the station. For those keeping track, I was an hour a 40 minutes late for work and not even halfway there. The train I was on did eventually leave the station and only stalled one more time on my way and I arrived to work a breezy 2 hours late. Voila!

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When I sat down at my desk I messaged a co-worker, “would it be too obnoxious to go get coffee after being this late?” To which she replied we should go get a coffee immediately. Drinking caffeine on an empty stomach while hungover did not set me up for success that day. I was scheduled to meet with my boss and when I went to find her she told me she wasn’t feeling well and we would need to reschedule. “Thank god!” I said audibly and with immediate regret. My boss didn’t seem to notice though, maybe she was also hungover? The lunch hour arrived quickly, which tends to happen when you cut two hours out of your morning. I naively packed a salad, which is a stupid meal to pack if you’re hungover. Throwing a few tomatoes on top of a coffee while hungover does not inspire the body to heal, so I sat miserably the rest of the day unsubtly eavesdropping on my co-workers.

Before leaving work I found a recipe for a protein and fat rich dinner, wrote down the ingredients, and vowed to stop by the store on my way home. It was possibly the first responsible decision I had made in 24 hours. The recipe involved a lot of beans (thank god) which I buy in cans (heavy). I also bought myself a bag of hot chips and smartly placed them on top of the cans— the second responsible decision in 24 hours! I dragged myself home with bags of cans and when I got to the courtyard of my building I stepped half off the sidewalk and fell down. Not a dainty stumble, I was flat on the ground. Having landed on my bag of hot chips, my joints were safe from injury, if covered in red dye 40. I decided to eat the chips right away, since they were open anyway. If you’re keeping track, the food I consumed so far was a coffee, a tomato salad, and a bag of hot chips. After eating the chips I continued sitting there anxious, now with heartburn, staring at the well-intentioned beans I didn’t have the energy to put away. That’s when I realized I was supposed to write a newsletter to send to you, my dear friends. I have no useful thoughts today, at this point I’m fully committed to being an idiot.

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Thank you for reading my newsletter! I’ll send you another in two weeks. With much love- TLN.

I looked at Frida’s painting and though I loved the composition I knew I didn’t want to paint something that ambitious. She paints her feet in a bathtub— a composition I was interested in tackling. On that, she paints scenes from her life— something I did not have the time or talent to tackle. For further inspiration, I decided to look into other artists who painted similar compositions.

I had a specific painting in mind, but could not immediately remember the name of the artist. I remembered the composition and the fact that it was painted by a man who I did not like. I didn’t remember anything else, but I wanted to see the painting again. I opened my browser and the hunt for the painting began. There are a lot of men I do not like. I googled:

Picasso Bathtub

Ew. No… maybe Gauguin Bathtub?

Definitely no- “Jeff Koons Bathtub”

Dear god no. Damien Hirst Bathtub?

Weird and no that’s not the painting. As I started getting further away from the very literal depictions of infrastructure that I was interested in, my memory finally caught up with me. I had the horrific and startling realization that the artist whose bathtub painting that was in my mind’s metaphorical filing cabinet labelled “bathtub paintings,” was an artist who was better known to the world as other things: politician, war criminal, Texan. I googled:

George Bush, Bathtub painting.

There it was. The painting I was looking for. Another perspective on the composition I was interested in tackling myself. Painted by former president George W. Bush. I was vaguely disappointed in myself. I knew this painting, which means it made an impression on me and I’m not sure how to explore that about myself. I also found myself staring at the bare legs that belonged to the architect of America’s “disastrous venture in the Middle East” after September 11. I never needed to see the world through that man’s eyes but if I did I wish it weren’t in this intimate scene. Going into my artist residency, I had made the bold decision to cut myself off from communication with the outside world —no phone and no social media— so I had no one to commiserate about my discovery with. All I could do was think about the two paintings.

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I was struck by the similarities between the paintings. The composition was very similar and I wondered if maybe George drew inspiration from Frida’s painting. They are both intimate paintings: both let their toes stick out of the water. I sat with the similarities and pondered the connection to infrastructure— the thing I was interested in. These two people, as dissimilar as two people can be, saw this same scene in their private lives and decided to depict it. Composition may be where the similarities end.

Frida explored her life and traumas through painting. In What the Water Gave Me, Frida depicts her injury on her right foot. Through her painting she invites the viewer to feel her pain with her. Not only the depiction of the wound on her foot, but also scenes from her life and her heritage. She depicts death throughout her body of work, including in this painting: one sees a dead woodpecker, a dress with bullet holes, an Ophelia-like woman who is attached to a faceless man with a rope.

George painted, cynically, to rehabilitate his image from incompetent war criminal to guy raising money for veterans. Personally, I don’t think history will forgive him and I’m not the only one. Still, I understand art (no matter how cynical) can be therapeutic, maybe he was working out guilt about the decisions he made in office. His painting comes across as naive. A rubber ducky making a detestable man more palatable. Perhaps George also invites you to look through his eyes, this time begging: “I’m innocent!” George shaped policy, politics, and infrastructure profoundly during his presidency but his painting insinuates a passivity.

My interest in infrastructure blossomed after reading the book How Infrastructure Works by Deb Chachra. I was compelled by her definition of politics: politics is how you interact with people you can’t walk away from. It’s how people make decisions about tax money. It’s how you decide which sidewalks to build or repair, what public transportation to fund, where to build a stop light. It’s the fact that you and your neighbor, no matter how much you like each other, get your water from the same pipes. Much could be said about two people as different as Frida Kahlo and George W. Bush sharing infrastructure and that is something I was tempted write about. However, I want to be cautious about romanticizing something that is a tool. As one of my favorite scholars, Stafford Beer (who Deb Chachra cites in her book) says: The purpose of a system is what is does. Reading How Infrastructure Works, I recognized that infrastructure is a system of connection and that connection is shaped through political decisions.

As I’ve come to understand it, infrastructure is relationships made literal. This can be really lovely. Like public transportation as a site of community, bridges being built, trees in parks, and accessible sidewalks. It can also be horrible. Like redlining neighborhoods, building noisy highways through poor communities, or depleting water resources for mass agriculture. Frida was disabled by a bus. George built a 700-mile fence on the US-Mexico border.

The differences between Frida and George are easily spotted and profound. When I first found the George-bathtub painting I was tempted to write about the positive connections facilitated by infrastructure. However, there’s nothing for me to say there as it relates to these paintings. It would be an empty sentiment. You and I are neighbors when we share the consequences of politics. This relationship is true for most people but there are those who have the wealth and power to make themselves the exception to the consequences of political and infrastructural decisions. It’s no secret that ultra-wealthy individuals are building bunkers to hide from climate change. When the power grid failed in Texas in 2021 Ted Cruz fled to Cancun to avoid the hassle of it all. The rich and famous opt out of infrastructural consequences like crowded roads and poorly funded trains by taking private jets; not just across the country, but sometimes just to the other side of L.A.

As I painted my own bathtub composition it was the differences between the painters that I became obsessed with. The two compositions, so similar in subject matter, represented deeply dissimilar circumstances. Even from a therapeutic standpoint, Frida was working through deeply human pain while George was reckoning with waging an unjust war (even then, he was only concerned with American soldiers, not the myriad of foreign suffering he inflicted or the seeds of surveillance culture he sowed.) One painting is deeply human. The other painting is a doppelganger of humanity. Infrastructure is a complicated thing, it’s tool I am deeply thankful to mostly benefit from. It’s also a series of decisions. Infrastructure doesn’t just happen, it’s something a community needs to advocate for. It’s something elected officials need to prioritize; it’s politics.

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None of those accomplishments is why I learned Lisa Novak’s name. I learned her name in the early aughts, as a bystander to tabloid culture, when Novak drove from Houston to Orlando with a handgun and various other kidnapping-flavored accoutrements to confront the new girlfriend of her ex-boyfriend. It was a big deal in popular culture— an astronaut glitching. America was enamored with the fact that one of the most achieved people in the country acted petty and weird. The event toppled the understanding that highly successful people are better, smarter, more balanced individuals. You’d expect this from someone on Jerry Springer, not from someone on the International Space Station.

The general consensus regarding the crash out was that NASA was not doing its due diligence on the psych evals for it’s aspiring astronauts. This betrays a common misconception about psychology; the misconception being that we have a meaningful enough understanding of our brains to predict this kind of crash out. NASA psychologists are testing to make sure potential astronauts don’t go crazy in space. They don’t really need to know what happens if an astronaut gets broken up with. By all accounts, Lisa Novak was perfectly sane in space.

There was a rumor that on her 1,000 mile drive from Houston to Orlando, the astronaut wore diapers to avoid taking long breaks. She denies this was true, but at the time I remember thinking: don’t astronauts wear diapers to go to space1? It honestly does not feel like a big jump from that to using diapers for a particularly long and emotional road trip. I know I’ve sat down at the beginning of a long journey and considered every possible way to make it shorter, even by a couple minutes. I understand the impulse to shove your ick away and just wear a diaper if it would get you where you’re going faster.

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The drive from Houston, TX to Orlando, FL is about a 14 hour drive. The drive from Boston, MA to Chicago, IL is also about 14 hours long— that’s the drive I took to get to graduate school. I also did the whole thing at once, though without the diaper or kidnapping accoutrements. During a 14 hour drive you have a lot of time to think, especially about the choices that led you to being in the driver’s seat of a car for that long. One might reconsider attending graduate school during that time, or they might reconsider accosting their ex-boyfriends new girlfriend. In the end neither Lisa nor I turned the car around and drove away from our mistakes. We both followed through and only one of us has student debt to show for it.

I don’t think the type of person who decides to become an astronaut at 6 years old and follows through is the type of person who can be deterred by a 14 hour drive. I admire her resolve. I relate to her hunger for answers. The man who broke up with Lisa Novak was also an astronaut. He started dating her while still married to his first wife, and broke up with Lisa after his divorce. He broke up with her for a romance writer2. I can imagine Lisa putting her things in the car, sitting behind the wheel, and thinking: she hasn’t even been to space.

Lisa Novak didn’t become a tabloid sensation because she was crazy. She became a tabloid sensation because she applied her crazy to something she wasn’t supposed to. The kind of work that goes into becoming an astronaut is not normal, you have to be obsessed. They can’t screen astronauts for being crazy because you can’t become one if you aren’t. I might have learned Lisa Novak’s name because of the stalking incident, but the obsession that led to her going on that drive is the same obsession that led to her getting on a space shuttle. Driving for 14 hours straight is nothing compared to deciding to go to space at six years old and then doing it. Really, the craziest part of this story is that anyone would break up with someone who’s been to outer-space.

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Rand tells the story of a group of business leaders— the capitalist class— who no longer want to share their wealth. So they exit the economy and go into hiding. With these leaders gone, the United States economy crumbles and no one can figure out how to run anything; even the government’s torture device isn’t working because the “men of the mind” are not around to show the government officials how to use it. At the end of the novel Rand suggests (with too many words) that the only way to prevent this society-wide crumble is to keep the economy unregulated; to keep capitalists happy.

What is curious to me about Atlas Shrugged is that Rand recognizes how to wield labor power; the premise of the book is a strike that cripples the United States economy. Confounding about the book, is that Rand incorrectly pinpoints whose labor has the power to bring the economy to a halt. It’s only possible to assert that the disappearance of business leaders would lead to social and economic collapse in fiction. Reality is different. Since business leaders are so well-connected, one would think a strike would be easy to organize. This begs the question: why doesn’t the capitalist class simply strike when they want their way?

Capitalists can’t strike; their work doesn’t add meaningful value to maintaining society’s function. I sometimes wonder why people with immense wealth— the industry leaders in Rand’s novel— don’t take their money and relax. If I came into a any amount of wealth the first thing I would do is stop working. The thing is, with that level of wealth, a lot of money is speculative. If you have several billion dollars in stock, you only have that as long as those stocks are agreed to hold that value in the popular imagination. The moment the free market decides that isn’t true, that wealth no longer exists. Wealth is a shared illusion that needs to be maintained, and that maintenance can be seen in the contemporary oligarchs interference in the United States government.

The value of a stock is a gamble on how much value labor (workers) will produce. A company like Lockheed Martin is a good investment, only as long as department of war spending is guaranteed. Peace on Earth will have the side effect of depleting capitalists’ wealth. Industry leaders— the ones who Rand imagines can ruin the country by withholding their labor— have to insert themselves in public policy, into economic policy, because if they don’t the illusion of their wealth disappears. When a capitalist works, their work is focused on reaping the fruits of labor. They can’t relax on their hoard because their hoard isn’t a result of their labor— it’s a result of yours.

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A case study in an unneeded industry going on strike is the bankers strike in Ireland in 1970 and other shorter Irish bank strikes. For the duration of the strikes, people easily adapted to life without banks, in fact pubs stepped in for most needs that were previously fulfilled by banks (a charmingly Irish solution). The average Irish person during these strikes started bartering with their neighbors, or writing IOUs. Since Ireland had a strong sense of community, people were willing to trust that their neighbor was good to pay back a debt or for a service. Strikes are meant to be inconvenient— so if one isn’t then can you really go on strike?

I imagine part of the reason Rand wrote a novel instead of pushing for an actual strike of capitalists is that someone in the capitalist class already knew the answer. I have mixed feelings about the bankers strike. The tellers withholding their labor had more in common with a bureaucrat like me than with the actual capitalists who own the banks. I read this study from the London School of Economics which seeks to complicate the popular understanding of the Irish banker strikes. The study outlines that economic growth (the classic line on graph meme) was affected and large businesses were affected. Individual citizens and small businesses remember the strike as a blip where they needed to write IOUs but capitalist entities, according to that study, remember a real economic affect. What this tells me is that the institutions of capitalists are not needed in local economics or communities and the labor of people who work in large businesses and institutions can be withheld with relatively little affect on our neighbors.

Rand was right about striking being the most powerful form of protest. She was wrong about who has that power. I’d bet real money that there is an almost perfect inverse correlation between how much an American gets paid and how effective withholding their labor would be. I’m also really hopeful that the American public is figuring that out.

If capitalists stop working you will discover something you might have an inkling of— that you don’t need them. If we stop working capitalists will discover something they know well— which is that they desperately need us.

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When asked about my visual art I tend to tell people I made it during a mental breakdown, which is usually true. The only time I don’t make art during mental health episodes is if I am making art that I think I can sell; that art only sells like half the time. I was once told by an arts administrator that artists shouldn’t be allowed to write about their own work. After reading hundreds of artist statements1 I wholeheartedly agree. Many artists want to sound as smart with words as their art practice is. That is how you get an art-world buzzword salad.

I seek to inhabit the space I am conceptualizing through the juxtaposition of the personal and political memories of the mundane yet therapeutic via neo-portraits that depict the subject of my paintings.

I recently sent an artist statement to one of my co-workers (also an artist) who read it and stopped two sentences in. “You say that art is therapy for you. That’s true for everyone.” Which… yeah. Because half the time when you are describing your own art you just start describing art. You don’t want to come across as pretentious or self-important so you just describe art.

My paintings are representational depictions of space, light, and color.

The medium which I choose to depict a thing is the one I understand that thing in most. Asking me to translate it into a sentence in English is inevitably going to water down whatever I’m trying to convey. Personally, some of the most interesting and profound things I have said about my art were just lifted from what other people gleaned while looking at my art. In a perfect world, my artist statement would be “look!! You tell me!!!” Much of my art is just me putting a little piece of myself into the world and asking, “what the fuck is this.” Nine times out of ten someone tells me.

One would think people would trauma dump in their artist statements but I don’t see that often. Artist statements might hold one’s attention more if they did. The trauma dump happens in the art making and the statement following up is usually a vague, detached: “this painting is about memory.” Yeah I make my art during mental breakdowns but I don’t apply for residencies or submit my art to shows during mental breakdowns. If you ask me what this painting is about my impulse would be to ask: are the shapes and colors not enough? Personally, I save the trauma dumping for stand up comedy.

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rent free.

in defense of pretension.

corpses walk among us. they might look like you and i but in truth, they are contaminated by a disease that has turned them into empty shells, mannequins masquerading as people. richard hofstadter ha…

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a year ago · 24391 likes · 597 comments · ayan artan

I loved defense of pretension because it made me feel great about enjoying good art. Maybe it’s a good thing to have good taste? Let ayan artan convince you!

If you want to over think about social media read this:

It's Not Us

The People Who Don't Want You to Sleep

When former Google design ethicist Tristan Harris testified before the U.S. Senate in 2019, he explained why so many of us are perpetually distracted by our phones: “You can try having self-control, but there are a thousand engineers on the other side of the screen working against you…

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3 years ago · 1942 likes · 118 comments · Sara Eckel

The People Who Don’t Want You to Sleep gave me the structure to understand my relationship with social media— if you have heard me say “economic event” over the last year this is why.

The next one is through the guardian but if you click this button you avoid a paywall:

The death of writing

The death of writing is an op-ed about how creatives sustain themselves in the contemporary economy.

If you don’t want to think about jobs or economics I recommend this personal essay. Starfucker Logic about a fucked up approach to sex and I loved it. Trigger warning for everything but this is a really fun dark essay.

Girl Insides

Starfucker Logic

Usually when there is a dick in my mouth and the dick belongs to a guy with a porn problem or a coke problem or some other problem that makes it take a really long time for the dick to shoot a load, I can’t help but think about committing suicide. Has anyone ever killed themselves with a dick in their mouth before? I just think it would be a really inte…

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a year ago · 1138 likes · 1 comment · Girl Insides

Nothing to do with jobs, which is refreshing for me.

Hey, if you’re in Chicago I’ll be showing my art at a (really) little gallery in Rogers Park. There’s a reception on Saturday at 2PM. Come by!

I’ll write an essay for you in a couple weeks. Love you, stay warm. Bye.

-TLN

To stave off the inevitable decent into madness, a workplace may offer a free snack to its feral employees. Often donuts.

I spent all my money on beer last weekend and forgot to pack a lunch, so news of the donut-treats was welcome. I wandered into the break room to find a box that contained the mangled corpses of 12 donuts. Several were neatly cut in half, some look like a bite has been taken out of them. There’s only a bite left of other donuts. There was one intact doughnut but it had coconut on it. I sighed and left.

We live in a culture of excess and hyper-individualism but for some reason the one place people find restraint and charity is with donuts at work. I can’t understand it. Villains have attempted to explain their actions to me:

“I can’t eat a whole doughnut!” Liar.

“What if someone else wants part of this donut?” Ask them about it.

“I wanted to try multiple donuts in the box.” Fiend.

I don’t believe any of you. You should take the whole donut and eat it; this is one of many, many rolling beautiful hills I am willing to die on.

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My primary concern looking in a box of leftover donuts is hygiene. I worked in food service for five years. I know how you’re supposed to wash your hands before you handle food for other people and I KNOW very few of you do that when you reach into the donut box to chop them up. Did you wash the knife you used to cut it? Did you wash your hands after touching the doorknob to the break room? Did you hover over the box, breathing on all the pastries while you mutilated them? I have no way of knowing! I also have a sensitive stomach and a hard time getting over illness. Where once there were donuts, all I see is pestilence.

Is this some kind of skinny girl, almond mom performance of restraint? You don’t want people to see you eat a whole donut? You want people to believe you have self-control? Maybe you’re above indulging in a complete pastry, or at least you want your coworkers to think that. The obvious solution here is to just not partake, however the sirens call of sugar and dough is too much to actually resist.

It doesn’t feel like honest, friendly sharing either. If I trust you enough to split food with you then we should be able to talk to each other and split the food together. Instead I wander in and am expected to eat donut leftovers like the rat my place of employment is trying to prevent me from becoming.

Seeing an eighth of a donut I would have enjoyed eating is in a way, a kind of profound grief. You didn’t have to leave evidence that you ate the best one. Just eat the whole thing— I mourn, knowing I would have enjoyed all of it. I would have enjoyed it more than you. I would have enjoyed it enough to actually finish it. Instead I see the the germ ridden carcass of something I would have loved completely, fully. Something you choose not to appreciate. I suffer more than anyone.

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Thank you for reading my newsletter! I’ll send you another NEXT YEAR. With much love- TLN.

P.S. I’ve recently published some writing in print! I wrote about freaking out over emails in this magazine. I also wrote about student’s protesting and how that’s connected to their job search for this anthology.

I empathize with the people who want to throw their hands up in the air and become a stay-at-home whatever. It feels like a massive risk to me, but at this point so does employment. There’s no loyalty to workers, and while this has been true for a while, the fact has become more brazen in recent months. Decades ago, a company laying off its workers was considered an embarrassment. Now it’s considered business as usual. You don’t have to be a poor performer to get laid off either, in fact the point of layoffs are that they aren’t due to an individual’s performance. The logic of depending on employment instead of depending on your partner becomes porous. Maybe you trust your boyfriend to stick around more than your company. Maybe your wife treats you better than your boss. Maybe you feel more secure there. I don’t, but maybe I just came of age during the lean-in feminism days.

One of the trendier ways to connect with your significant other is to ask them if they would still love you if you were a worm. The conversations that arise from this question certainly betray people’s way of thinking. If your partner is more whimsical they might describe the terrarium they would build for you or what worm date they would take you on. A more practical partner might describe how they would attempt to turn you back into a person. A very considerate partner would ask you what you would want if you turned into a worm. If they say they wouldn’t love you as a worm, then they do not love you as a human.

@ahizzle0My girlfriend turned into a worm 🪱🥐 #shortstory #worm #girlfriend #relationship #relationships #romance #romantic #emotions #filmmakersoftiktok #shortfilm #asthetic #asmr #calm #calming #meditative #whisper #meditate #slow #quiet #sadstory #sad #bugs #production #filmmaker #director #cinema #cinematography #movies #movie #editing #baking #cooking #bakingtiktok #chef

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The worm question isn’t just a thought experiment, at least not to me and not to many of the worm-curious people in my social circles. The worm question is a symbolic way to ask “If I changed in some fundamental way: if I got sick, if you couldn’t have sex with me, if I were depressed, what would you do?” It’s a question that asks: what is the first thing you will do when I need serious help? The stereotype for this question is a girlfriend asking a boyfriend. This correlates with the fact that women are more likely to be left by their husband during times of illness than the other way around. It’s a lighthearted way to sneak in a pretty heavy topic. I would not date someone who wouldn’t love me as a worm.

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I spend most of my time with my partner, the next most time is spent at work. A break-up has never ruined my life. Losing my job would. I don’t hold work to the same standard I hold my partner, in fact I put up with things in my job that I would never tolerate in personal relationships. I have not put all my eggs in the relationship basket… but I may have put them somewhere far more precarious. I fear my institution would not employ me if I were a worm.

Just over the last year I have watched institutions, including my own, fire or lay-off people who have worked with them for literal decades. It’s the exact kind of betrayal I aim to avoid by not depending on other people financially. The thing is, I do depend on other people financially. I’m employed. I’m not sure how confident I am in my employers commitment to me, even as I am now. The moment I am not useful to them I might get cut! If I got sick, if I couldn’t sit in an office chair for 8 hours a day, if I were depressed, would I have a job? The protections I have are through the law: The Civil Rights Act, The Americans with Disabilities Act, my union’s contract. Is that the alimony of employment?

It was a bit odd, as I sat and considered my life as a worm, to realize that between my relationship and my employer, the party I hold to a lower standard is the one that would not love me as a worm and is the one I functionally need more. Not that my job “loves” me now. In fact there are times my career is actively hostile toward me. Nonetheless, they have more power over me than I’ve allowed anyone to have since I was a child. God forbid I turn into a worm.

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Thank you for reading my newsletter! I’ll send you another in two weeks. With much love- TLN.

My barista years involved a lot of light flirtations that never turned into anything of substance. People just loved to flirt with a barista. This ended with a lot of Instagram mutuals who could have probably been the love of my life if I cared to spend more than the time it takes to make a latte with them. One of these individuals was a man, well a lot of them were men, but this man in particular reached out to me after I quit and moved. He offered to buy pictures of my boobs. I politely declined and he was very understanding. He would then message me periodically, no more than twice a year, to inquire if I would kindly send him pictures of my boobs for money. I never took him up on the offer, I never blocked him either. I enjoyed the attention and he was polite about it. He stopped messaging me eventually and I got worried about him, when I looked at his profile I found he was newly engaged. I was relieved, having imagined something terrible happened to him. I always assumed people begging for random women’s boobs on Instagram were unwell but he was literally just some guy. I was also jealous, having imagined him pining away for me instead of moving on to someone else.

I regret not dipping my feet into sex work. I should have taken some artful, faceless pictures of my boobs. I should have made the cash. Not because it would have made a big difference in my life financially but because I missed out on a valuable career experience. I missed out on an opportunity to learn something useful, something that could further my career. Because I didn’t pursue this opportunity, I don’t know how to fake it.

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My favorite feedback I have gotten in my annual performance review is that I make people uncomfortable. I look “unhappy” and “disengaged” in meetings. It’s almost as if I don’t want to be here! It’s almost as if I’m letting people know. One would think a customer service job would prepare you for this exact problem but it didn’t. I could say “have a good day” to someone I was only seeing for three minutes that day. I see my co-workers for way longer than that; I’m not sure how to fake nice after the three minute interaction. I wish I could cast away my boss for 24 hours by throwing a cup of milk at her. What works on a customer at Starbucks does not necessarily work with your office-mates. My displeased expression is my biggest liability at work.

I often think back on the day at Starbucks with no coffee— I like to fondly remember being a part of something so ridiculous. Staring dumbly at a customer who walked into a coffee shop naively expecting to get a cup of coffee. I didn’t care enough and didn’t have the energy to commiserate with them, I also didn’t get any coffee that day.

“Why don’t you have coffee?”

“We didn’t order any.”

Exquisite. But it did not prepare me for the life of an office worker. There’s actually very little to do at a desk job besides perform. The performance is an open secret. I looked happy as a barista but that’s because I was happy. It’s hard not to be when you spend the day getting over caffeinated, flirting, and making coffee (when we had it.) If I did ever find myself in a bad mood in my barista work, I would simply hang back— doing dishes or running trash. I didn’t tap out of working but I could tap out of interacting. Not so much in a cubicle. Everyone goes to the team meeting and everyone is expected to smile at the bad ideas. The people in the office whose careers have futures can (usually) pull it off. I default to the slavic stare.

@juprokopovichSorry… 😂 #trend #fyp #slavicgirl #slavic #girl

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I look at them the same way I looked at the people who came to Starbucks for coffee that fateful, coffee-less day. I pride myself in my uncanny ability to fucking kill the vibe. Honestly, my co-workers should be thankful. It’s that or I start crying and screaming.

My barista training prepared me for a lot but it absolutely did not prepare me to endure the social politics of an office job. You know what would have? Sex work. If I learned how to be interested in a man, or how to flirt with someone I don’t actually care for, or how to smile when told, maybe I could could nod enthusiastically in a meeting. Tragically, doing your job completely and well does not get you anywhere in a nine to five. You need to brag about your work; maybe learning how to do a strip tease sober and scheduled would have made me a more intriguing presenter. When you work an office job, you become important by making other people feel important— a sex work classic.

I don’t want to sleep my way to the top, I just regret not sleeping my way into a becoming more socially adept individual. If I sold that one guy pictures of my boobs, maybe word would have gotten around and I would have established a client base— that’s invaluable networking and marketing experience! As of now I’m really winging it when it comes to networking and marketing. I had the golden opportunity to get started on that while I was still in my twenties. It would have been great exposure too. I passed it up. And for what? I didn’t reject that man out of a sense of self-respect or morality. I guess I was mostly worried about the career repercussions (as if my career now was worth not having extra cash back then.) If I ever want to be paid more than I am now, or find a job that isn’t this one I should probably have learned how to smile more. I should have learned how to fake it.

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Thank you for reading my newsletter! I’ll send you another in two weeks. With much love- TLN.

The meeting place was a nearby stop on the red line train. Community members gathered at the entrance to hear local activists speak. Several people brought the words “RESIST ICE” in lights up to the platform. Neighbors were reminded of hope, given resources for continued resistance, and we listened to each other and we sang together. It was certainly a difficult day for the neighborhood, in what has been a difficult year for our city. I left feeling thankful to be in community in the struggle.

The choice of a commuter stop for the gathering was especially poignant. In the book How Infrastructure Works author Deb Chachra outlines the ways infrastructure affects communities. The same pipes that get water to me also get water to you. Everyone uses sidewalks. The infrastructure that makes day to day life happen also connects us, quite literally, to our neighbors. Much of this infrastructure is hidden. I don’t have a clue how the light switch in my living room makes lights turn on. What I do know is the process for turning on my living room light is the same as the process for everyone else who lives in my building. I know the electric grid also serves everyone else on my block, in my neighborhood, in my city. I am connected to everyone in my community via infrastructure. You and I exist in a society. It’s why simple libertarian beliefs fall apart with any critical examination. No matter how independent you are, your infrastructure needs are not met if you don’t participate in society. If you have running water you are part of a community.

Public transportation is a form of infrastructure that doesn’t hide. I get on the train and see the people I am in a society with. I see people I am in community with. Contrast this with driving a car. In a car, a driver is literally boxed off from the people around them, an individualizing experience. Despite the massive public investment in roads people drive on, drivers also have to make a massive investment in a car to even use the roads. This makes the driver forget they are part of a society, they are instead their car. Maybe that’s why my partner and I were so grumpy at the end of our drive. On a train, we sit next to each other. Both a driver and a transit commuter are taking advantage of public infrastructure but the shared nature of infrastructure is more pronounced to the transit commuter. On the train we see our neighbors, we are sharing a journey. Our commute is a third space, where people sit together to scroll on their phones, read books, listen to music all on our way to our destination. As Jenny Odell puts it in her book How to do Nothing, “For many people, myself included, public transportation is the last non-transactional space in which we are regularly thrown together with a diverse set of strangers, all of whom have different destination for different reasons. Strangers have a reality to me on the bus that they cannot have on the freeway, simply because we’ve agreed to be in an enclosed space in which we are subject to each other’s actions. Because we share an understanding that we all need to get where we’re going, for the most part people act respectfully, literally making space for each other when necessary.”

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When going to my first pride parade in Chicago I boarded the train to get to Boystown. On the train was a sea of rainbow-clad people, of all ages, genders, and sizes. We shared an understanding that this was a celebratory day. I didn’t need to talk to anyone on the train to feel safe and included. A couple years later I boarded the train during Pride again, this time I was on my way to a Dungeons & Dragons1 game, when a group of nerdy kids stopped my partner to ask about his Dungeons & Dragons stickers and tell him about the characters they had made for their games.

When I lived in Boston I hopped on the train on January 1, shortly after the new years fireworks. I was on the first train out of Copely Station that year and everyone else was also out for the celebration. The train car broke out into song, with people chatting the whole ride home.

When I travel to protests and demonstrations, I always find myself sharing a train car with other passengers holding signs and wearing buttons. During the Black Lives Matter protests, when Roe v. Wade was overturned, during the recent No Kings protests I always found myself in a train car with passengers also ready to engage with their civic duty to protest. We shared purpose on our way to our destination, I didn’t need to talk to the other people on the train (though I sometimes did) to share understanding. Solidarity was being built by commuting.

Public transit is a site of community. It’s on public transit that I most often see familiar strangers. These are people whose face you know but names you don’t. You may have never talked to them but you recognize them, you see them at the grocery store, walking their dog, and very often on the train. I may not know who you are by name but if you stop riding the train I will miss you. Of course the community gathering to regroup after the most recent ICE raid was at an L stop— that’s where I always go to find my neighbors.

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Thank you for reading my newsletter! I’ll send you another in two weeks. With much love- TLN.

I carried this with me as I became the authority figure to others. I didn’t want to be a figure of disappointment to students I taught, people I managed, or younger friends. I do my best to live the values I hold, to avoid being a hypocrite. I’d like to think people younger than me will be better than those who came before me.

Before working in a college, I spent five years working as a shift manager in a Starbucks. It’s hard to live your values and work at a corporation like Starbucks but I think I struck a balance. I’m proud of the time I spent there.

Part of that time was spent at a store near a college, so most of the baristas I was managing were in their late teens and early 20s, pursuing a degree. I still talk to a lot of them: they list me as a reference when they apply for other jobs, and connect with me on various social media. I am not terribly dissimilar in age to these kids, I was in my late twenties when I was working with them. That was five years ago. I’m in my 30s now and they are out in the world, with their degrees, and some of them are still my mutuals on Instagram.

When Trump was being sworn into office a second time, I posted something about how anxious that made me. Someone who I used to manage replied with a wall of text to say he didn’t know why everyone was so anxious. Dismissing the threat of a tyrant and walls of text is typically a red flag and immediate block for me on social media. However, I knew this kid. He was a good worker, always went the extra mile, and was generally in good spirits when on the job. I liked my shifts with him. I responded to the message, gently explaining what made me anxious. I also told him it was fine if he wasn’t anxious. I assumed he thought Trump wouldn’t do what he was threatening, not that he was in support of it.

My biggest memory about this kid was coming in to work one day and not being able to find him. It wasn’t a big deal, college students are sometimes late for their jobs and it wasn’t a busy day. I asked another barista if they had seen him and they told me he had gone in the back “to do inventory.” It wasn’t his job to do inventory. I went to the room that was piled high with syrups and giant bags of coffee to find the kid crouched in a corner softly crying. His childhood dog had escaped his parents yard and gotten hit by a car. When people are this young, you can really see the child they used to be when they’re upset. He looked small in the Starbucks apron, like a kid wearing their parent’s work uniform. After he explained why he was crying he assured me he was done and could return to the floor. I sent him home, with pay. A lot has happened since then— a pandemic, I moved to Chicago, several relationships and grad school. Now it’s the year of our lord 2025. I hadn’t heard from that kid except for period Instagram updates until recently.

Periodically through this year he would reply every time I posted about something happening politically. As project 2025 has been hastily rolled out, I expressed my anger about it online. He would send me paragraphs of increasingly nonsensical text, which I went from patiently replying to, to ignoring.

When ICE first came to my neighborhood I was out of town. I got texts from several friends, updating me where ICE was, alerting me when my neighbors got kidnapped, and giving me information on how to help out when I returned. I was incredibly anxious being away, I was worried about my community. I felt guilty that I couldn’t spring into action immediately. I felt angry that people who weren’t even from my city were terrorizing people I cared about. A tweet about this feeling popped up on my feed on Instagram. It resonated and I shared it.

Shortly after sharing, I got a notification that my former barista sent me a message. I immediately set my phone down and turned to the two friends I was with. I explained the situation, the increasingly concerning messages, and what the post was. I said I was nervous to open the message. One friend offered to open it and reply on my behalf. Another told me to just block him.

Just blocking someone and moving on is something that’s usually pretty easy for me to do. The thing is this wasn’t just someone, they aren’t a creepy band teacher, politically incorrect uncle, or random troll. This is someone I was in a leadership position with. He was someone I’d like to think I influenced positively. Even after picking my phone back up, I didn’t open the message right away. I had plenty of other things to worry about, I was out of town for an art sale and wanted to be present for that. I only got distracted by the dogs and babies around me and by checking in on my friends who were still in the city, participating in ICE watches.

When I finally opened the message I didn’t get past the first sentence.

“I’m genuinely curious what you think we should do with all the illegals.”

I couldn’t imagine that kind of hatefulness coming out of the kid who I found crying next to syrup bottles about a childhood pet. There was an entire paragraph following it and I wasn’t about to read all that.

I no longer engage with that kind of rhetoric. I disagree with the premise of the statement. You also can’t logic someone out of hatred; I know. I’ve tried. There are better things for me to do. There are people to protect and comfort. There is joy to engage with. There is art to make. My civic engagement should not include fighting people on the internet, I learned that the hard way a long time ago.

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On the way home I talked to my friends about the situation more. I explained that I feel like I failed as a mentor, that it was hard to see someone who I really enjoyed the company of saying stuff like this. I said I was disappointed.

“You should tell him that,” my friend said. Maybe I should have. Instead, I finally blocked him. I was his shift manager and I don’t think that obligates me to lead him out of a fascist spiral. I feel guilty nonetheless. Being a shift manager at Starbucks should probably be really low stakes but I felt like I was making a difference in the role. I’d like to think the kids I was working with learned from me. I’d like to think I left them with a healthy idea of how to balance a good work ethic with personal boundaries. I’d like to think some of my values rubbed off on them. I remember them coming to me for genuine advice. I remember them listening to me. Maybe some things are better left in memory.

The thing about people who disappoint you is that they reflect a loss of something you thought you had, a failure within yourself. You get disappointed when you have hope, and hope comes from potential. I watched a young person fail to realize their potential. Being disenchanted by the failures of my authority figures is manageable. I can move on to the future. If someone I mentor comes up short, then my hope isn’t realized. The failure is in the future. The disappointment is optimism defeated.

I don’t consider myself a mentor to this person. I was a former manager and then an Instagram mutual. Nevertheless, this experience made me confront the possibility that I can fail as a mentor. This raises the stakes regarding how I work with students now. I realized that I can’t assume they will be the change the world needs, that is something that needs to be nurtured and encouraged. Young people saving the world isn’t something I can take for granted. The next generation isn’t inherently more progressive and hateful people used to be children.

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Thank you for reading my newsletter! I’ll send you another in two weeks. With much love- TLN.

Horror films also reflect how prevalent an anxiety is socially. Some examples include fear of nuclear radiation in Godzilla (1954) and how the Bush administration’s reaction2 to 9/11 made the Saw franchise successful. Recently we’ve seen a renaissance of psychological horror like Get Out (2017)(which also signaled a mainstream acknowledgement of racism in America), The Babadook (2014) and Hereditary (2018); all movies that make literal an abstract anxiety about trauma and mental health.

I’m about to potentially spoil —but mostly just mention— a bunch of movies/TV shows: American Psycho (1987), The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016), The Other Black Girl (2023), Mayhem (2017), The Purge (2013), The Cabin in the Woods (2011), Us (2019), Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), Halloween (1978), The Belko Experiment (2016), Office Space (1999), Severance (2022), Parks and Rec (2009-2015)

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There are surprisingly few popular horror movies that are strictly about work. The first that comes to mind is American Psycho (1987). The movie features scenes of Patrick Bateman at work, but he doesn’t really engage in any psycho behavior on the clock.

His murders and psycho-ness are pretty much confined to personal time, though the fact that he is in a high-powered career is an important aspect of the film’s story. I can think of a lot of movies that use work as a backdrop for horror like The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016), in which the morticians are tortured by the possessed corpse they are performing an autopsy on. In The Other Black Girl (2023) the protagonist is haunted while at her job as an editorial assistant. While these stories take place at work, the horror is not their job. The slasher-style revenge fantasy Mayhem (2017) features work as the bad guy more prominently but the horror (and comedy) comes from a breakdown of business as usual. In these stories, horror is at work— not because of it.

I’m interested in horror that comes from systems operating as intended. For example, in The Purge (2013) the horror is violence being incorporated into routine in the pursuit of broader social order. In The Cabin in the Woods (2011) the ritual torture of a group of college students is necessary to stave of the apocalypse. In both of these films the system is the monster. In Us (2019) the government keeps a permanent underclass of citizens hidden, the result of a failed experiment to control the general population. The horror ensues when the system fails, and the permanent underclass escape into the regular world. The violence is preceded by bureaucracy, much like it is in real life, as observed by Hannah Arendt.

The system I am most interested in, the one I write about, is work. While work sometimes features in the films I discussed, work isn’t featured in the films as the horror to be feared. The anxiety often comes from a breakdown in or rebellion against a system (like in Mayhem or in Us) or the failure to conform to what a system requires of the characters ( the couple’s car breaking down in The Purge or the bureaucrats underestimating the protagonists in The Cabin in the Woods). In the anthology Labors of Fear, Aviva Briefel and Jason Middleton point out that classic horror usually depicts work rather than labor. Work and labor are defined against each other by John Rhodes in Belabored: Style as Work:

“Labor is also repetition. It is labor’s repetition, as well as its repetitive privacy that encourages Hannah Arendt to oppose the category of labor to the category of work. In Arendt’s terms, labor is related to the fecundity of the world and the reign of necessity. Labor is inseparable from the life process itself, from the things that are necessary for life to sustain itself. Work, or a work, meanwhile-and here I am interested in thinking about the work of art-requires a kind of specialized labor to come into existence; it is the product and the practice (in Arendt’s terms) of “reification,” of bringing something with some permanence into the world.”

Work done by protagonists in horror movies tends to be educated and specialized. The morticians in The Autopsy of Jane Doe and the bureaucrats in The Cabin in the Woods aren’t necessarily alienated from the fruits of their labor in a way Marx would be concerned with. When workers, the kind Marx is concerned with, are depicted in horror films it tends to be as the monsters. They are laborers. In Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) a group of teens is tortured by an out of work slaughterhouse worker. In Halloween (1978) Michael Myers wears a mechanic’s outfit, signalling the working class. In Labors of Fear, contributor Marc Olivier breaks down 1,130 altercations from 119 horror films and finds that the aggressors are working class 45% of the time and poor 11.5% of the time. This means the source of horror is the guy alienated from his labor more than half of the time. The victims of horror movies tend to do meaningful work, while the aggressors tend to labor. Understanding horror as a lens into personal and societal anxieties, work hasn’t been depicted as a horror until recently.

This says a lot about how laborers have been positioned in society since the advent of film but it also says a lot about the mainstream relationship to work. Historically it’s not the source of horror. Even in the horror genre, work is an avenue to success, a fulfilling life; it is labor that presents the foil to horror protagonists. I have had trouble finding horror movies that depicts work (being employed) rather than the laborer as the horror.

An exception to this is the slasher/psychological horror The Belko Experiment (2016) that depicts a group of white collar workers subjected to psychological torture by a disembodied voice instructing the workers to kill each other through the company intercom. They realize that the trackers the company embedded in their heads (ostensibly for their own safety) were actually bombs which would be detonated if they refuse to comply with the experiment. The workers in The Belko Experiment retain their white-collar attire as they turn on each other: women keep their heels on and men keep their ties on. Through the film the characters realize that the work they were performing (high paid, great benefits) was a ruse to trap them in the office building and torture them. In the film, the company was billed as “a non-profit organization that facilitates American companies in South America.” It’s the kind of lobotomized corporate drivel that I recognize as commonplace on LinkedIn.

Office Space (1999) is a comedy cult classic. Despite being a comedy, I couldn’t stop thinking about it when thinking about workplace horror because of the character Milton Waddams. Milton is a meek and neurotic man who was fired from his job, but no one ever bothered to tell him. Due to a glitch in payroll, he continued getting paid and kept showing up to work unaware that his work was meaningless.

Milton hates his nonexistent job, and is pushed further and further into madness as his story progresses. He finally breaks down when the payroll glitch is fixed, his boss relocates him to the basement, and cruelly steals his stapler. Had the movie been edited and scored differently, Milton’s story of being forgotten in a work basement could easily be read as psychological horror. Jordan Peele explains the fine line between horror and comedy, “the difference between horror and comedy is the music.” Office Space is work horror to me.

Lately I’ve been obsessed with Severance (2022) a show about employees who literally sever their work brain from their home brain. It stars Adam Scott who got his start in Parks and Rec (2009-2015), a workplace comedy. It’s interesting that he is now staring in a workplace psychological thriller (where the characters are confined to a basement while at work, similar to Office Space and the workers surrender their heads to workplace technology, similar to The Belko Experiment). Severance, and Adam Scott’s career, represents a shift in attitude toward work. In Parks and Rec, Scott’s character begins as a cynical downer who develops into someone optimistic. He finds meaningful work, community, and purpose. In Severance, Scott’s character is resigned to meaningless work to the point that he doesn’t know what he does at his job. Over the course of the first season, he realizes how sinister the situation is. In Parks and Rec apathy turns to care, in Severance apathy turns to horror.

Outside of media, we are also experiencing a shift away from seeing work as purposeful. In The Death of the Corporate Job Alex McCann talks about the end of The Great Pretending, “But talk to those same people individually, and a different story emerges. They’re in back-to-back meetings where nothing gets decided. They’re managing projects that exist primarily to justify the existence of project managers. They’re creating strategies for strategies, optimising things that didn’t need optimising, disrupting things that were working fine.” A worker is quoted early in the essay saying: “I facilitate stakeholder alignment across cross-functional workstreams. I genuinely don’t know what that means anymore.” It’s the same lobotomized corporate drivel that you see in The Belko Experiment and on LinkedIn. In his essay, McCann refers to David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs. Graeber says:

“It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working. And here, precisely, lies the mystery. In capitalism, this is precisely what is not supposed to happen. Sure, in the old inefficient socialist states like the Soviet Union, where employment was considered both a right and a sacred duty, the system made up as many jobs as they had to (this is why in Soviet department stores it took three clerks to sell a piece of meat). But, of course, this is the sort of very problem market competition is supposed to fix. According to economic theory, at least, the last thing a profit-seeking firm is going to do is shell out money to workers they don’t really need to employ. Still, somehow, it happens.”

Those office jobs, the ones we thought would be meaningful work and not meaningless labor, are losing their meaning. We, as a society, are beginning to understand white-collar employment as a Kafkaesque nightmare. Our labor is not meaningful or necessary except for the fact that we need a paycheck. Graeber uses socialism as a bogey-man in that quote. He penned his essay in 2013, when the word “socialism” was still taboo in US-America. Lately Americans have felt more positively about socialism. The new bogey-man is capitalism, and the work/labor required by that system. Employment once represented the American dream, now we understand it as a nightmare. I’m seeing that anxiety expressed in media.

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Institutions operate similarly. A process that doesn’t make sense for a large institution may have been established when it was smaller, or when fewer people worked there, or when better technology didn’t exist. People keep following the process because it’s easier to do that than it is to radically transform the institution. Entering an institution can be a bit like moving to Boston. You may ask “why does that street curve so randomly? I’m lost!” You might find yourself admitted to art school and ask “why do I need to talk to nine different people to straighten out my financial aid? I’m lost!” The answer in either case is that the people who have been there forever have been doing it that way the whole time and changing the process would take the kind of coordination that was punished by god for building the Tower of Babel. The easiest path to take is not the one that makes the most sense, it’s the one that other people have already taken.

Institutional systems, unlike the streets of Boston, do not manifest physically. Despite this, the way systems are arranged in institutions seem as impossible to move as the infrastructure of a paved road. Stafford Beer describes systems in institutions in his book Designing Freedom, describing the systems in terms of a machine. The machine, and the people who are part of it, work to produce consistent outputs. No matter where you are positioned within an organizational chart, you understand what the expected result of the institution is. For a college, that may be a graduating class. It may also be paid tuition. Whatever the output is, the system is challenged by inconsistency and rules are established to limit that inconsistency.

“Our institutions were set up a long time ago. They handled a certain amount of variety, and controlled it by sets of organizational variety reducers. They coped with a certain range of perturbations, coming along at a certain average frequency. The system had a characteristic relaxation time which was acceptable to society. As time went by, variety rose—because the relevant population grew, and more states became accessible both to that population and to the institutional system. This meant that more variety reducers were systematically built into the system, until today our institutions are nearly solid with organizational restrictions.” -Beer

If you ever find yourself wondering why you need to jump through a hundred loops to make an accommodation or why seemingly arbitrary deadlines are so strict or why any other bureaucratic pickiness is enforced with an iron fist, it’s because you are presenting an input that has the potential for an inconsistent output and the institution you are trying to work with wasn’t built to handle it. This boring, administrative complexity has real affects on real people. It’s how you can have a racist, sexist, or classist system even if none of the people working in the system hold those prejudices. There are people working in institutions such as colleges or companies right now that were founded by people who intended to uphold oppression. The initial paths of those institutions were paved on violent ideology, and that ideology has become the infrastructure that we currently live in, work in, and facilitate in the day to day.

For example, the SATs— a test high school students take to be admitted to college, were created as a means to keep Black Americans out of college. Students still take the SATs, and I would be willing to bet that people who administer the tests are not doing so because they want to keep Black people out of college. Nonetheless, the test is still built on racist ideology and is only one of countless pieces of racist infrastructure a student may encounter trying to access higher education.

People facilitating systems might also be misinformed about how a system works, putting the responsibility for understanding the system on the person who is navigating it. David Graeber tells a “brief story of bureaucracy” in Beyond Power/Knowledge about being bounced back and fourth between a notary and a banker while trying to get power of attorney for his mother as she approached death:

“The next day I took [a form] to the bank, where the woman at the desk took one look, asked why my mother hadn’t signed it, and showed it to her manager, who told me to take it back and do it right. Apparently the notary had no idea what she was doing. So I got new forms, filled out my side of each, and made a new appointment. On the appointed day the notary duly appeared, and after some awkward remarks about the difficulties caused by each bank having its own, completely different power of attorney form, we proceeded upstairs. I signed, my mother signed—with some difficulty—and the next day I returned to the bank. Another woman at a different desk examined the forms and asked why I had signed the line where it said to write my name and printed my name on the line where it said to sign.”

That’s the thing about navigating bureaucracy, the people doing it are often having one of the worst days of their life. In my work, I sometimes find myself talking to students who are having trouble paying tuition, paying for school supplies, even paying rent. These students are bounced from staff member to staff member, dissecting themselves and their struggles over again until they find the administrator who can facilitate a consistent output for them. College is a classist place, run by well-meaning administrators who’s job it is to make sure tuition is paid. What is an incredibly stressful day for a student is just another email, another number in another box to an administrator. It’s the way the institution has always operated and it continues barreling forward.

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Worse, those who work in institutions can utilize this institutional inertia for their own benefit, hurting people in the process. This is something Beer acknowledges in his study of institutions, he says the following referring to an hierarchical organizational chart:

“What this orthodox organization chart leaves out of account, when it comes to understanding institutions, is that we are not dealing with pistons, pumps, and distributor arms, but with people; and the connexions between the parts are not crankshafts, pipes, and electrical wires, but human relationships. What matters about the institution is not its set of dependencies but its performance—if you like, its speed. The organizational forces by which the whole institutional machinery is held together include psychological conflict, loyalty and perfidy, integrity of purpose, hard and lazy work. They also include all manner of special arrangements making cross-linkages between the cousins of the family tree, which are the formal boards and committees, the less formal liaison officers and advisory groups, the informal old-pals network—and even maybe secret connexions whose existence will be denied. How can we picture this dynamic system in our minds, and how contemplate its output and stability?”

This is addressed by academic Sarah Ahmed in her book Complaint! which looks at how complaints about an institution, or those within an institution, are handled or (more often) not handled within the institution. She focuses primarily on academia. She describes how someone who experiences an injustice within the context of academia (sexual harassment, plagiarism, bullying) has do to the work of navigating bureaucracy in order to have the situation resolved. She illustrates how this process can take years, ruin the victims reputation and career, and burn them out without any promise of a resolution. The cow-paths of the institution are muddled by contradictory and confusing policy and one constantly runs up against dead ends. If one doesn’t run up against a dead end, they may encounter an unsatisfying resolution. A bully may get a Talking To, with no concrete action to change their habits. An institution may establish a toothless committee, or an unenforceable policy. Ahmed writes:

“Complaint by showing the failure of policies, which can include the failure even to have policies, often point to the need for new policies or for amendments of old policies. That this is the case has much to teach us about why complaints end up being so much work: the work of complaints becomes the work to change the institution in which you make the complaint. Many people have expressed the concern to me that if we help organizations develop new policies or procedure to address an institutional problem, we are giving them tools they can use as evidence they have dealt with the problem. Creating evidence of doing something is not the same thing as doing something.”

Confronting an institution is a gargantuan task. I know because I’ve been the complainer and I’ve been the bureaucrat. Policy can be an oddly plastic thing when the institution enforcing it needs it to be: for example a zero-tolerance policy for bullying can be quite toothless if the bully brings in a lot of funding. Stafford Beer describes institutions, and the people operating within them as a wave. It’s in motion and when you are in it, the path of least resistance is going with the flow. When I was writing my master’s thesis I was explaining Beer’s description to my thesis advisor when he gently reminded me that “people can make choices.”

Periodically when I am working I think about the scene from The Incredibles where Mr. Incredible is working at an insurance agency. He meets with an old woman whose claim was denied and covertly instructs her on how to navigate the bureaucracy of the insurance company he works at before getting yelled at by his boss.

It’s the kind of wink and nudge I am familiar with. There are ways to navigate bureaucracy, and it can feel covert and secretive to share them. I often have conversations coaching students through how to have conversations with polite and powerful strangers who have the power to make their life easier, or ruin it. It reminds me of how I coach them through job interviews.

I’d like to think that I make the institution a little better, a little easier for the people I work with. That doesn’t change the fact that the system I am working in is built on the infrastructure of oppression. The kind of infrastructure that can forgive a white man for saying the n-word but cannot forgive a faculty of color for misusing a printer. The institution doesn’t just happen to bureaucrats, we reproduce the system every time we come to work.

If we return to the cow-paths of Boston we can learn an optimistic lesson. Beginning in the 80s, Boston was the site of The Big Dig, an infrastructure project that radically changed downtown Boston. The city had a major highway cutting through downtown, workers dug it up, put the highway underground, and created green space where cars used to speed by. Funding for the project was approved in 1987 and the project wasn’t finished until 2007. It was a massive undertaking that changed one street and the city was transformed— for the better.

If Boston can do it, so can the bureaucrats. It takes time, intentionality, and imagination. To do something like this, people operating within the system need to recognize that they are reproducing the system. If you start the work now, you might find yourself 20 years later, in a more beautiful world.

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P.S. I have a website now!

Decades later I am working an office job. Between interpersonal politics, world events, and the noise that always exists in my head I feel a bit like an animal trapped in a zoo. Luckily I work with artists, and one shares her screaming practice with me. She, a couple co-workers, and I walk down to the highway that separates us from the lake and wait for cars to go by; on her cue, we scream. I become obsessed, we establish a weekly scream. We save time on our calendars to do it. After one scream by the highway, a couple walks by us. The man appears confused but the woman is delighted. As they pass she says, “I should do that sometime too!”

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My union stages an action fighting for our contract. My co-workers and I march in circles chanting about our wages (or lack thereof), about respect, about having a voice. A co-worker later texts the group, “I didn’t realize how much I needed to go out and scream for an hour.”

I take a stand-up comedy class. I tell the rest of the class about the weekly scream at work and they are delighted. They encourage me to make it a part of the routine I will preform at the end of the course. My coworkers are in the audience as I lead the room in a scream in between laughs.

The United States elects Donald Trump to office a second time by popular vote. I’m at an election watch party and I drink too much. It’s past midnight when I leave and I’m desperate. The noise in my head matches the noise of the world. I go to the lake and find a couple there who share a joint with me. I come home and get just a couple hours of sleep before going in to work, looking as ragged as I’ve ever looked. The entire office is decked out in black: mourning. We all go into the alley behind the office, stand in a circle and scream.

The the artist who introduced me to screaming as a creative practice invites me to facilitate a community scream at her art show and I gleefully accept. Someone lights a campfire behind the gallery that is positioned near the L. I offer copies of my resume as kindling to start the fire. We wait for the train to go by and scream as it does.

I get texts from at least four different people: “Is this you?” and a link to Scream Club Chicago. It’s a club where people meet on the lake to take part in a coordinated scream. They have an official website and community rules. I’m flattered but I’m not the one organizing it. Other people just feel like this too.

It’s not just Chicago. The New York Times did a write up about screaming as a trend. They focus on screaming in TV like the scream in John Proctor is a Villain and music like Florence Welch —icon for feral women everywhere— who has titled her newest album Everybody Scream. This write up in Artsy dives into screaming in visual art.

I’m calling it. The age of professionalism is over, the age of pretending to have your shit together is over, it is no longer appropriate to pretend to be okay.

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A friend I do comedy with tells me that maybe I can’t get a job with a “Director” title because I’m just too young. I ask him how old he thinks I am. 23? I was 30.

A friend 8 years younger than me tells me she’s been followed and harassed on the train. “It gets better as you get older,” a friend a few years older than me assures her and I agree. “Men stopped bothering me a lot after I turned 25, though sometimes it still happens.” I try to think of the last time I was harassed on the train and realize it happens much less frequently than it did in my early twenties. I’m not sure if it’s that I look older or that I look meaner. Probably both.

The head of my department tells me I remind her of her daughter. The head of my department is 10 years older than me and her daughter is in middle school.

A well meaning woman at a party tells me I am the perfect age to start “preventative Botox” and it’s only $300 a session!

Am I too young or too old?

The first time I found an anti-aging serum in a woman’s bathroom I was surprised. She seemed like such a confident person. She is someone I look up to and someone I wanted to be someday. I had trouble conceptualizing that she didn’t want wrinkles on her face— a face I had never known without wrinkles. I had a hard time accepting that she had an insecurity and that the insecurity was something as stupid as wrinkles. Of course, I was a hypocrite. I was a teen at the time and had horrible acne, of which I was deeply ashamed. I washed my face relentlessly— torturing my poor young skin and probably making it more susceptible to acne. Someone else, who I wasn’t surprised to learn had insecurities, told me if I kept rubbing my skin raw I’d get wrinkles early. I was fine with that. As long as the acne went away. It didn’t. Maybe I would have cared about the concept of getting wrinkles if I were exposed to the same propaganda young people now are exposed to; the relentless bombardment of anti-aging ads, botox ads, skincare, skincare, skincare.

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I turned 30 last year and asked everyone older than me what turning 30 meant to them. People in their early 30s told me nothing changed. Those closer to 40 told me their 30s were the best years of their life so far. I took this to heart. I was going to turn 30, get a new job, watch my art career flourish, and finally relax. Now I’m 31 and nothing has changed. Maybe it’s that I still look 23. Maybe it’s that I didn’t get preventative Botox. Maybe I American-dreamed too close to the sun when I got an art degree. Maybe I set my expectations too high after watching 13 going on 30. Maybe I didn’t scrub my face enough to develop wrinkles and fix my life by 30. The confusion around age isn’t unique to me. People my age have all been missing or delaying common life milestones like buying a house, finding stable employment, or even living alone. Millennials have less purchasing power than generations before us which has left us in a state of arrested development. I see people my age resisting aging and while I do suspect that part of the resistance is not wanting to age before you meet the milestones of age, I think the focus on beauty and staying young is conservative backlash more than anything. It’s no secret that keeping women focused on youth and beauty is a conservative tactic to keep women unempowered and out of the workforce. The rhetoric of divine femininity is now being wielded on social media, with much appeal to young women who are (as we all are) barely treading water trying to find a job and sustain themselves.

The thing is you can’t really save yourself by being beautiful. In my experience, youthful beauty is only pleasant for everyone around that person. It matters less to them. I want to be old, fat and happy. I want to convince every other woman that age is a gift too. Put down the collagen mask and take my aspirationally wrinkled, liver-spotted hand. I don’t want to be Gossip Girl- I want to be Golden Girls. Chances are you are already exhausted by your beauty routine. I’m here, at the ripe age of 31, to propose a pro- aging routine. Please, as a birthday gift to me, follow the steps below immediately and carefully:

1. Sit in the sun

2. Smile a lot

3. Have a glass of wine

Now you can develop wrinkles perfectly.

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