hey angel,
If the topic of scarcity is interesting to you, you might want to read those essays:
The Somatics of Scarcity: how avoidance shapes our emotional & material life
1/6: The Body as the First Economy
2/6: Emotional Scarcity: how neglect wires us for scarcity, self denial and obsession
2/6 bis: When we avoid looking at money, we avoid agency.
4/6: How MATERIAL scarcity shapes our capacity to receive, give and love (ourselves)
Earlier this week, I attended two separate gatherings: a series of events on Transformative Justice, and a feminist choir rehearsal (!). I was so excited to know that those spaces exist where I live and so I moved toward them with a new kind of openness, even tenderness.
And yet, in both instances, I found myselves unsettled in a way that was difficult to immediately articulate.
It was not something I first registered as a thought. It arrived through the body—through subtle discomfort, a sense of contraction in my upper chest, my breath stopping, an almost imperceptible withdrawal. The rooms were in poor condition. Not just modest or improvised, but neglected in a way that felt consequential. There was a lack of attention, a lack of care, that seemed to permeate the environment itself.
What followed, almost immediately, was not critique, but shame.
Care, how dare you feel a way about this! What are you? Some kind of king???. These were my thoughts. These are radical spaces, I thought. Spaces that exist in resistance to dominant systems. Spaces that, by necessity, do not have access to the same resources. To feel discomfort here seemed, in that moment, like a kind of betrayal to people around me, to my politics. It felt like I was a traitor.
Bu then this question emerged:
When did we begin to associate material scarcity with political integrity? Since when do disgusting conditions—and y’all, you should have seen the toilets—have anything to do with our politics of safety, dignity, and belonging for all?
There is a particular logic that circulates in many leftist and activist spaces—often unspoken, but widely understood—that proximity to scarcity signals not only a kind of moral seriousness but also moral superiority;
