On Invisible Labor

& the importance of sacred reciprocity

(A woman in Dhaka clad in fine Bengali muslin, 18th century)

I have been feeling depleted recently. This last time it sort of came as a surprise, masked in depression. I realized what I thought was a sense of overwhelm was actually this immense sadness around the constant invisible labor that I do. What’s difficult is that spiritual work or even just being committed to being a good person goes unseen, nobody gives you a shiny gold star to keep going. Even more so, the pursuit of integrity is a thankless mission.

If you’ve been following my work you’d know that “being seen” is a common motif in my work, simply because for much of my life I was giving my entire lifeforce to my mother, and thus have a pattern of feeling historically unseen. This meant that I wasn’t being validated for the good kid I was, or the ways in which I was trying to make her or my family happy, because it was just accepted of me. My dedication was a given, and that’s why devotion to others is easy for me. I have always felt like I had to give more and felt it was my responsibility to do so.

In going deeper into understanding why I am the way I am, overturning every tiny little detail of my internal mechanisms, I have noticed this theme of giving more has unintentionally seeped into every facet of my life, including my actual profession. Late last year, a white woman harassed me online (including a handful of her friends) because I didn’t tag her photo. At the time (and still, tbh) it was so shocking to me because my lack of sourcing is not out of bad intention, or even laziness, it’s because I grew up on Tumblr and much of my personal archive are random loose images that I find on the internet without reference. I’m not condoning this (and I’d like to get better), I’m simply pointing it out. She came at me with her cavalry like I was some institution trying to steal her labor. She accused me of trying to profit off her photo (which was one of ten in the IG carousels I’ve been doing for a few years now) and I was left with a sick sad feeling in my stomach.

But, it got me thinking about my own work, and how little I defend it. Over the years, I have seen how much my writing affects the writing of others. I’ve seen people mimic my style, and sometimes downright copy my ideas and write exactly like me. Sometimes by people I know. I never say anything. It’s easier for me to be protective of other people’s work, and I also just have accepted that this is the nature of art. But, it has made me start wondering if really what’s at play is that this childhood incapacity to say no, to stand up for myself, is also playing into the way I engage with my work. Maybe I don’t say anything because I’ve never known what a boundary was, and have always assumed that I had to give and give and give—and that that was my own value.

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As a South Asian woman, a Bangladeshi woman, this has a more nefarious distinction. My friend Tanaïs is writing about the intricacies of a lot of this in their new book “In Sensorium,” and it’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot myself recently, about extraction. Bengal was once known and referred to as an “inferno full of gifts,” and the “paradise of the nations,” because it was the wealthiest province in India and became a major global exporter of cotton textiles, silk, and shipbuilding. 

When my father talks about Bangladesh he speaks of its land fertility—the density and richness—because it’s one of the lushest regions on the planet. Cox’s Bazaar has the longest strip of beach in the world and because of the Ganges-Brahmaputra delta system the region’s ecology is particularly unique. I think of the green, green acres of tea farms, steep mountains, and gulleys of oceans, rivers and the blue cascade of waterfalls. I think of the sheets of rain come monsoon season. I think of the jeweled reliquary of our culture, of how Bangla was the language commonly used in religious texts named Charyapada (part of Vajrayana Buddhism) for its inherent profound poeticism. This is perhaps why the work of Rabindranath Tagore, Satyajit Roy, or Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain is so iconic, so quintessential.

We were always ahead of the game. The women of this region were mystics, healers, sexual provocateurs—the intelligentsia, a bricolage of everything mysterious and powerful, pulsing with tantric canyons, high priestesses that weren’t governed merely by the greed of men. But all this has been lost, stolen, depleted.

When the British East India Company came to conquer India, they did so through Bengal. Now this region, my land, is one of the poorest nations in the world, its resources taken through the travesty, destruction of colonialism. It’s important to note that not only did they deplete our lands, but they also made it illegal for us to make and trade our own ancestral goods like muslin, kantha and cotton; everything had to be British. They made it illegal to be who we are, they made us forget while taking everything from underneath us.

Extraction is an important theme in my lineage.

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Last week I had a series of conversations over voice notes with my close friend Mimi about something we’ve both been talking about for a few years—the discrepancies in how people interact with Asians, and how in America so much of our being is distilled into the model minority myth without an engagement (or interest) in our historical pasts. Ones that are laced with such layered brutality outside of the American imagination and hegemony.

This is dangerous for many reasons because it’s not just in the past. I’m thinking about Bangladeshi and Sri Lankan garment workers who make the foundation of sweatshop labor for the world—which most of us have or do participate in; I think of the Filipina women and Bangladeshi and Pakistani men who are currently being enslaved by the Middle East who leave their families for a “better life.” I think of the Rohingyas in Bangladesh and the Uyghurs in China who are being vilified by the lands their from because they are Muslim. I think of the farmers that are striking in India RIGHT NOW for their right to life.

The saddest impact of colonialism is that to contend with the greed and depletion of the West, countries like India, China, Burma are turning on their people, believing that to be aggressive is the only way. So, for this reason, and many others, there is so much violence in distillation. In erasure. In being unseen.

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Invisible labor goes hand in hand with extraction.

Recently, I’ve been meditating on my impact and the invisibilizing that happens when you’re a woman or femme person in this world and obviously how this plays into the larger systemic underlying issue of how we interact with Mother Earth. We take and take and take because we all want more.

I think, in general, under capitalism, many of us feel like we don’t have enough. Some of us have more reason to feel that way than others, but one way I want my writing to start a conversation is by asking: how do we start to look after each other?

“Continued fealty to economies based on competition for manufactured scarcity, rather than cooperation around natural abundance, is now causing us to face the danger of producing real scarcity, evident in growing shortages of food and clean water, breathable air, and fertile soil. Climate change is a product of this extractive economy and is forcing us to confront the inevitable outcome of our consumptive lifestyle, genuine scarcity for which the market has no remedy. Indigenous story traditions are full of these cautionary teachings. When the gift is dishonored, the outcome is always material as well as spiritual. Disrespect the water and the springs dry up. Waste the corn and the garden grows barren. Regenerative economies which cherish and reciprocate the gift are the only path forward. To replenish the possibility of mutual flourishing, for birds and berries and people, we need an economy that shares the gifts of the Earth, following the lead of our oldest teachers, the plants.” Robin Wall Kimmerer in Emergence Magazine.

Humans are the only species that take more than we need, just because we can. But, isn’t a sign of a healthy society where we all feel held and uplifted by each other? Where no one is left behind? A place where everybody’s power is uplifted… A shared economy, a shared responsibility, a shared reciprocity; a care network. I am grateful for the arduous work and labor of Kimmerer, Mia Mingus, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, adrienne marie brown and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarinha who have been writing about this for a long time. Mariame Kaba has been reminding us that abolition is essentially about care—it’s about transforming. It’s not that my own care is more important than yours, it’s that how I care for you is equal to the care you give me.

So what is a shared and responsible society? It can’t be just taking from those you deem more powerful than you, or taking from those you believe have more to give — it’s learning how to give to each other equally. In a way, I think the only binary is those of us who believe it’s our responsibility to give and those who believe it’s theirs to take.

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I often wonder if the reason my mother went crazy is that she gave too much and then ended up giving it all—to men, to people, to anybody—for love— and then got so angry and bitter when nobody gave back that she took it out on her husband and two daughters for decades. There has to be a universe where my mother’s invisible labor lives alongside mine.

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So, if you’re reading this newsletter, and if you read every single one, I have a question for you: What is my pain worth to you? Then, what is my healing worth to you? If you’re well-acquainted with me, you’d know it’s been a battle to stand up for my work. I’ve said this publically, but when How To Cure A Ghost came out I didn’t feel pride, I felt shame. I felt embarrassed. This, to many around me, was confusing. Nobody seemed to understand why I would feel such a way, why I wouldn’t see this huge achievement and feel courage. It took my therapist to remind me that I’m a child survivor whose whole abuse was reliant on how well I dimmed myself around my mother. When I said lifeforce earlier, I literally have felt like my childhood was like that scene in Donnie Darko where I would just give my energy to her, pouring it out of me. My entire life was about making her happy, without securing my own contentment or care. This is where dedication and devotion comes in. I have gotten into plenty of adult relationships since where I replicate the same behavior. I give and give only in hopes that someone looks at me and says: you’re enough.

Now I’m learning how to do that for myself, but it feels brutal to change. And yet, I also know, if I don’t, I will die. It’s not sustainable to give this much and feel depleted all the time. I’m single, I live alone. My father lives in Abu Dhabi, my sister in Sydney, and I no longer talk to my mother. It’s a pandemic and the last week in New York has felt like an endless blizzard storm. Sometimes I don’t know who to turn to. This feels very lonely, that I can’t just have one person who I know, no matter what, they’ll be there. With my life, it feels like an endlessly cruel cycle. It’s why for most of my life I’ve preferred isolation, nobody can disappoint you that way. But the thing is, this isn’t working for me anymore. I want help. I want love. I need care.

Kimmerer writes a lot about sacred reciprocity, and I’ve been thinking about that in regards to my art. I’m going to be frank—I’ve been writing professionally for over ten years, I have published three books and a fourth one is on the way, yet I don’t have a savings account. This is made difficult when you also don’t have people you can count on momentarily to get you through the hard parts. Last year, at the top of the pandemic, and why I started this newsletter, I lost all my work. I began to go crazy, what would I do, where would I go, if I couldn’t pay rent? Over the years, because, I don’t make enough money from writing, I’ve worked with brands (which I hate, and I want to stop doing) to make ends meet. Most of my money goes to my daily survival and now financing Studio Ānanda (and paying everyone else, except myself) a wellness archive that I dreamt of to make wellness conversations outside of the mainstream accessible to all.

This newsletter is something I’d like to be more financially viable because it feels like the most honest work for me. And, though, almost 10,000 people read my last newsletter I only have 273 paid subscribers. It’s not enough money to keep me going and I am fucking tired. Every week a handful of people write to me to tell me that my work is helping heal them, which is an honor, but something isn’t translating. There is a cost to this extraction and I am asking for your concern.

As an artist who is hungry to make work outside the parameters of capitalism, I don’t’ want to sit here and say “fuck capitalism” only to end up taking a check from some corporation or brand. It’s not in integrity for me, and I’m hoping to shift this because I no longer want to participate in an economy of extraction. So I am asking these questions to help diagnose something about our culture — why do we want to consume things for the cheapest price?

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I am burnt out because of the spiritual, emotional and financial labor and pressure I’ve been under, and how that is undervalued and invisiblized. I’m not going to change, I’m always going to give this much, but I feel an urgency to write this: if we want a real revolution then it’s important for us to all to give more than we ever have before. Are you making excuses for your lack of generosity? Isn’t real abundance believing that there is plenty for all of us?

Through the teachings of grandmother ayahuasca, I’m learning about service but also the value of receiving for that service. If you’ve been reading me for a while and value my work I’d like to ask you to support me, especially if you haven’t financially before. I understand not everyone can truly afford a subscription but Studio Ānanda now has a Patreon and you can always make a one-time donation with Venmo or PayPal. Even small amounts make a difference. I’m trying to manifest 2021 into my receiving year. Only took thirty-one years to ask. Please consider helping.

In love and solidarity.