I'm Not Sure How to Make People Care About Things Anymore

and maybe I am unwilling to try??

I’ve been afraid to email you because I frankly have lost interest in really dissecting the beauty industry for the moment - beauty burnout, baby - and I don’t want to operate from a place of insincerity to pay my rent, even if I’m slowly (and understandably) losing subscribers along the way. I’d rather always you know I mean to talk to you because I can’t help it, because I want to say hello, rather than out of a capitalistic obligation. Could I write a long-form thinkpiece on why the ALLURE cover story on Kim Kardashian is so troubling - especially only a few issues after I wrote, for ALLURE, on the end of the Kardashian era of plastic surgery? Yes. Yes I could. But I actually don’t want to - not only because, transparently, Allure is one of my long-time freelance clients and I don’t want to burn a bridge in an already deeply degraded freelance economy, but because the Kardashian’s have already taken up a lot of communal brainspace. I’d rather think about things that give me hope and show me grace and curiosity than operate constantly from a place of criticality. I’m used to being critical - I am, after all, a Capricorn - it’s how to use it gracefully that is my life’s work, I think. So I’m not going to go too into that cover feature, just know that if you had a lot of thoughts in response to it, I do too, so I went outside and took photos of flowers instead of tweeting about it. I believe this is personal progress!

I want to mostly think about stories of persistence in the face of loneliness, and how to build a reality in which people don’t have to deal with that anymore. We have plenty of examples of people lying and getting away with it. We have plenty of example of horrible things happening and nothing changing. I am desperate for the opposite of these things. I am desperate for evidence of meaning, and honoring the losses, and care that emerge in the face of bad odds. Real care, most specifically. Saidiya Hartman wrote that care is the antidote of violence. I think irresponsible frameworks and shitty public policy and exploitative beauty business and conservative political ideologies would rather be selfish and violent than consider care as an encompassing, generous thing everyone is deserving of. That care can and should be unconditional. The more that America swings Christian-fascist conservative the more deeply desperate I am for archives of longing and survival of everyone who has survived - or been lost in - its rageful journey.

I can’t stop thinking about, for example, this interview:

arabelle sicardi 英梅 @arabellesicardi

From an interview with Myrna Kurland in Baby, You Are My Religion: Women, Gay Bars, and Theology Before Stonewall, by Marie Cartier (2013). Myrna passed away in 2014, at age 86.

I’m also thinking about this page of Claire Schwartz’s poetry book, Civil Service:

And I’m thinking about this excerpt in June Jordan’s Report from the Bahamas:

And this page from M Archives:

Listen, I know this missive is probably not making much sense. I mostly wanted to share what I’m thinking about and directives that are guiding me through the fugue state of our existence. I don’t have any clever rejoinders or sharp critique to provide today. Mostly just wanted to say: as much as the world collapses and reforms into uglier, more brutal forms, as quickly as it gets crueler and hotter, there’s always going to be people who are just as persistently seeking care and love and recognition and safety and tenderness as you are, and you can find each other if you keep trying, and if you do not lose faith in their existence. And you and I are lucky in some ways because we do have each other at least in this way - here - for however long you and I would like to keep in touch. And I think that’s wonderful.

I’ve been writing online for more than ten years now and I get more people telling me that they grew up with me than I do new people discovering my work. That is so weird to me, that shift! From discovering things together to being a pillar of someone’s history. Sometimes it makes me feel stagnant. Because in reality I’ve been living and working online constantly even if people dip in and out of my realms, I’ve never left, people just change, and that’s fine. And eventually my beauty book will finally be ready for the public and I’ll get more readers new and old again and we’ll have lots to talk about together. I’m so excited for that, and also terrified. To have done so much, for years, to have put faith in myself and in my work, to hope people will care, and to know it’s not really up to me anyway. That no one can show up. That we have to choose each other. That I can offer a connection, and no one might pick up. And that I bet my whole life, for years, on someone picking up.

I have deep faith in myself and in my work most of the time. It’s just been a bit harder than usual the past few weeks. So I opened up a box of things I call my Heart Chest and pulled these excerpts out to share with you, so you know where I am, and maybe you can tell me where you are. How are you doing? How are you choosing yourself lately? What are you doing to build the world you want to live in?

Me, I’m going off grid a lot. I went camping recently. I’m meeting more of my neighbors. I’m making flower arrangements and Tiktoks and learning new things. I’m crying about stars and spacing out over impeccable stitchwork and irrigation systems. I’m trying to be more than my own doubt over work. I’m trying to be less personally offended at things disappointing me and more interested in being curious instead.

Hope you’re doing okay. Tell me anything.

Arabelle