A meeting with Miranda
I remember we made an appointment to visit Miranda. It was a rainy spring afternoon when we made the trek to campus to see her.
Miranda had taught the class Writing as Experimental Practice the previous spring, where V, Lucien, Clare, and I first met. Over the following year we had started meeting weekly, and had given a name to our foursome: “Sundae Theory.”
We waited in the echoey concrete building with the large windows, sitting on boxy industrial furniture upholstered in chartreuse fabric. I don’t remember the details clearly. I don’t recall any particular question we were there to ask. I think I was nervous.
Writing as Experimental Practice had been a more challenging class than I’d been prepared for and I’d been embarrassed by my performance. I skipped much of the 100–300 pages of reading that was assigned weekly, and submitted unedited first drafts. Without committing to the readings I struggled to follow the layers of intertextual concepts Miranda built from week to week, and my contributions in class were limited.
My sense of unworthiness was amplified by Miranda’s directness. She was kind but not mollifying, and the steadiness with which she met my ingratiating enthusiasm and my excuses filled me with insecurity. I believed that I lacked some personality ingredient that was required to engage at her level, to become what she was, and I wondered whether I was really cut out to be a writer.
And what writing had I done since graduation? A handful of poems. Shame uncoiled, a snake in my gut.
She called us into her office. Despite my anxiety I remember her calm. I recall how the warmth of her space seemed to emanate from her person, seated behind the desk, surrounded by books and papers, like the temperature of the room was an atmosphere she created with the softness of her voice, the coziness of her limited but beautiful selection of sweaters.
She inquired about our meetings, what we were reading, how we spent the time. We answered honestly, described our mercurial approach to production, our emphasis on tending the body, on catching up, on making space for feelings. She told us, “You have to write every time,” and we took in her words, abashed. Distantly I noticed the snake in my stomach writhing.
A thought surfaced and began to loop in the background as we left Miranda’s office and chatted on our walk to the bus stop. I had repeated this thought to myself for so long that I didn’t notice it at all. I had thought it 10,000 times, 100,000 times. It was a mantra inscribed in my body, traced over and over into the grooves of my awareness, a penance, my own personal hail mary: “I have to do more. I have to do more.”
A suit that does not fit well
I wasn’t alone in my shame. We all spent a fair amount of time in the “trance of unworthiness” as Buddhist teacher and psychologist Tara Brach calls it. I knew that I was struggling emotionally, but I was unaware of the extent of my reactivity, even as I was tossed around by my fears like a leaf in a storm.
Clare, V, and I had all graduated in 2015. Lucien was still taking classes and was working as a caregiver. Clare got a full-time job as an academic advisor at Evergreen and V started working swing shifts and overnights at the homeless shelter downtown. I did odd jobs for a while and eventually secured a six-month stint as an AmeriCorps fellow at a nonprofit. Before graduating I felt very ready to be done with school, but in the months after graduation I think the three of us felt like our intellectual lives went into dormancy. In an email from a few weeks before we met with Miranda, V wrote:
ive also been thinking a lot about having a more intentional writing practice. ive been seriously lounging around for like 8 months now. expecting basically nothing of myself besides making it to work, the occasional sundae theory meeting and band practice. which is fine but im starting to get really bored and doing a lot of thinking along the lines of “what is the point of all this…”
We had started meeting regularly while we were in school, and after graduating we made an effort to keep it up. We hoped that the rhythm of regular time together would serve as scaffolding to build a more robust intellectual and creative life. The scheduling was a struggle—I think only two of us had smart phones, and many of our emails were scheduling negotiations. Clare was having a hard time adjusting to the forty-hour work week and was often too exhausted to meet after work; V was in a dark spiral from months of insufficient sleep working sporadic overnight shifts; Lucien was preoccupied with school, his work as a caregiver was emotionally draining, and he often needed to protect his precarious health. Sometimes there was a reading, but more often when we met we ended up talking about our feelings and our lives.
Miranda’s recommendation that we write more brought up the same questions we’d been debating over the last year. Was our lack of creative discipline just evidence of personal dysfunction, or was it (perhaps also) a form of conscientious resistance against the impossible productivity standards of late capitalism? Were we failing in our attempts to create something, or was our project of “being together” too far outside the Overton window to be legible to our contemporaries? If we were writers, why couldn’t we figure out how to do what Miranda suggested—just write consistently?
In an email thread from some time after that meeting, V wrote:
i’ve been thinking of this a lot, in particular in conversation with Evelyn about a subtle feeling of not exactly disappointment but disjunct in the expectations we sometimes feel from Miranda that don’t fully account for our collective experience which includes auto immune stuff, eating disorder, and mental health struggles […] I think our last meeting was pretty representative of that; we tried to find direction and a way to be “working” on stuff when it seemed pretty apparent just getting to and being at the meeting was a feat that day. Afterwards Evelyn and I talked about how amazing and essential the amount of patience we have for one another is.
Later in the thread Clare responded with quotes from a Tumblr post that they found resonant with this inquiry: “For many of us, sitting down to write feels like being asked to solve a problem that is both urgent and unsolvable—’I have to, but it’s impossible, but I have to, but it’s impossible.” Lucien’s writing has frequently touched on this stuckness too, writing in one essay that we desired “to put on the suit but also to be honest that the suit is itchy and does not fit well,” and starting another collection of poems with an epigraph from McKenzie Wark: “There is no other world, but it can’t be this one.”
In that same thread, Clare also included a quote from the Tumblr post about shame:
Shame lives in the body, it clenches our muscles when we sit at the keyboard, takes up valuable mental space with useless, repetitive conversations. Shame, and the resulting paralysis, are what happen when the whole world drills into you that you should be writing every day and you’re not.
They noted, “oh it comes down again to SHAME. maybe we should read some Silvan Tomkins, Shame and Its Sisters.” They used the word “again” but I think this was the first time I can recall the topic of shame coming up in our conversations. We never did read Silvin Tomkins, and it would be another ten years before I found Tara Brach’s writing and noticed myself acting from the trance of unworthiness.
At the time things just seemed very hard, seemingly normal things, in a way that was hard to justify. I was still figuring out basic time management and self-management skills. Though loving, my parents weren’t exactly a paragon of organization and consistency. My inheritance leaned the other way in fact, toward executive dysfunction, time blindness, and overcommitment. From the frames I now have at my disposal I might call this constellation of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors “ADHD and people-pleasing” or “learning how to adult,” but my inner atmosphere at the time was a background sense that I was continually failing to meet some universal standard of functionality, and that the fault was my own.
Brach’s account of shame beautifully captures the way this feeling shaped my self-perception. Shame, she explains, is at its core an experience of fear and feeling of deficiency, and it comes from a fundamental sense of separation; separation from our bodies, our hearts, other people, the earth, and life itself.
Brach notes that this feeling is especially prevalent in the West because we have been so thoroughly taught to see ourselves as individuals. Even the Dalai Lama has expressed “astonishment at the degree of self-aversion and feelings of unworthiness reported by Western students.” Our sense of ourselves as separate from the rest of life fosters our belief that, “Since everything that happens reflects on me, when something seems wrong, the source of wrong is me.” This “prevents us from being intimate or at ease anywhere,” and sets us up to perceive any rejection, mistake or misfortune as evidence that there is something fundamentally wrong with us.
Like so many other times when things didn’t go as we’d expected, that meeting with Miranda struck a resonant frequency in the space of our collective shame. Her encouragement (or incitement) to be more disciplined about our writing became one of the many stories of “failure” that constituted our history, the blue notes we returned to again and again in our song of ourselves.
The conditions of an era are how it feels
I met V in my first class at Evergreen. I remember the first time they came over to my apartment, a dark two-bedroom in an out-of-the-way corner of West Olympia that I lived in with a roommate I found on roommates.com. V had so much anxious energy in their body when they arrived that they said they needed to run around. They did a frantic couple of laps around the small apartment and collapsed in the middle of the living room. Rolling around on the floor, they asked “Don’t you ever have this feeling?” “What feeling?” I said, joining them on the floor. “You know, like a dog with the zoomies? Panic doggie!” they blurted out, and we fell over each other, laughing in recognition.
Maybe part of what helped Sundae Theory connect initially was this shared feeling of anxiety. We talked openly about feeling anxious and depressed a lot, but I don’t think I really saw how much fear and insecurity dominated my experience. There was no outside to my awareness—I didn’t have a sense of what it would be like to accept myself, to accept things as they were. And my ignorance was more profound than that: I didn’t realize the extent to which I couldn’t imagine these states. Self-love, acceptance, these were unknown unknowns.
In the last quarter before graduation, a year before our meeting with Miranda, V did a class presentation about the writing project they were working on that quarter. I don’t recall the topic but I remember that the presentation had all the signatures of V’s thinking—a complex web of references, a large piece of butcher paper and colorful markers meant to capture and diagram the branching theses they were swinging between, and their omnidirectional enthusiasm, shifting between playful and serious, forgetting themselves as they sketched out the map of their ideas for us with waving arms.
One of the articles they referenced in that presentation put language to our emotional context so matter-of-factly that the title has never left my memory, despite the fact that I had never actually read the article (until now). It was called “We Are All Very Anxious.”
Written by The Institute for Precarious Consciousness and published on CrimethInc., “We Are All Very Anxious” posited that anxiety was the newest of many phases of reactive affects that characterize different eras of life under capitalism. Along with anxiety the authors offered “precarity” as a sign under which to corral the variety of hardships that, in their view, characterized life under contemporary (circa 2014) capitalist conditions. They referenced changes in surveillance technology, work culture, policing strategy around protests, media, consumer technology, self-help discourse, mental health rhetoric, “dominant public narratives,” and more as illustrations of the way anxiety was being used as a tool to control the public and suppress radical consciousness.
According to their theory, anxiety was the most recent in a series of dominant affects which maintain their hold over the population partly by being experienced as an “open secret,” an emotional and bodily experience that is ubiquitous, yet personalized. In each era the dominant affect is a feeling that everyone feels but nobody talks about, and so rather than being a site of mutual recognition and occasion for collective support and action, the feeling is owned and negotiated privately and becomes a personal problem.
In one way or another many of our discussions were about making sense of ourselves in the context of our historical moment, and we turned to critical approaches like the CrimethInc. article to do so. We wanted to understand whether things were specifically hard for us, and if they were specifically hard for us, why. In that same class V and I learned a phrase from the field of cybernetics: “The purpose of a system is what it does.” We might think of the thesis of the CrimethInc. article as the emotional equivalent of this idea, something along the lines of: “the conditions of an era are how it feels.”
We took deeply to heart the feminist praxis of analyzing personal experience through a political lens. To the extent that we were even aware of the analytic tradition of philosophy, we bounced off it, with its emphasis on discovering aspects of Truth that are context-independent, universal, and fundamental. We took more readily to the continental approach, which uses one’s identity and one’s location in history—the who and the when—as central to the process of getting clear on the what and the why.
Thus our collective struggle to produce writing against the various resistances we encountered became a project of mapping the relationships between productivity culture, artistic production, and capitalism. As V explained in a brainstorm for a presentation called GETTING OUR SHIT TOGETHER that I believe they worked on a lot but never finished, the purpose of this mapping was to help us figure out how to fix what seemed broken about everything:
My suspicion is that by having specific words that refer to the various phenomena we experience under [insert the word adjacent to ‘late capitalism’ im trying to define here] we are able to give ourselves agency. Understanding whats going on is usually the first step in if not changing the thing itself, at least its grasp on you. And this is especially important in this context because what we are talking about: rising rent, our cities and neighborhoods changing, what feels like an unchallenged acceptance of all technological advancement whether or not it actually feels like it is enhancing the quality of our lives (rather than the pace at which we live), all can lead to a feeling of being utterly out of control of our lives and the places we call home. So my hope is by using specific language we can begin to regain some agency and we can, if nothing else, affirm for ourselves that the alienation we feel is real, is produced and in many cases is intentional, has been planned.
The meeting with Miranda came to feel like a microcosmic example of the tension we felt between our disdain for the “impossible standards of productivity” that capitalism compelled us to impose upon ourselves, and our desire to meet those standards. The list of questions that V fires off at the beginning of the brainstorm express this tension, and the difficult feelings that animated it:
-how can we leverage GETTING OUR SHIT TOGETHER against that which keeps us feeling stagnant, disconnected, jobless//stuck in dead end jobs, unable to get 4 people in the same room at the same time, lonely, anxious, apathetic, disaffected, over affected, and out of sync?
-how can we appropriate organizational strategies that have facilitated the disastrous profitability of the information sector for our own revolutionary purposes?
Paranoid and reparative readings
POSIWID has extended beyond its origins in systems science in the last decade and into internet political discourse. In this unfamiliar context it has acquired a new, subtly different meaning, like a plant or animal that moves from one island to another and begins to diverge evolutionarily from its original form.
The original phrase took a diagnostic approach to understanding a system, an instruction: start from outcomes and work backwards, looking at feedback loops, incentive structures and selection pressures, to get a better understanding of how a system is working and how to align the outcomes with the intended goals of the system.
However, when it was introduced to me in an Evergreen class, our professor presented the newer interpretation. I learned that, “the purpose of a system is what it does” should be taken to mean “the outcome of a system is the intended outcome of a system.” This way of looking sees the intended goals of the system as indistinguishable from the outcomes of a system. The subtext of this frame is “everything is working as it is supposed to.”
These cleaving interpretations hinge on the meaning of “purpose—is a system’s purpose a synonym for “product,” a description of what emerges from a system’s interacting parts? Or does it imply intention and agency, the hidden or subconscious goals of those who designed or benefit from the system?
The evolution of this second meaning, and the fact that it was the primary interpretation I encountered, is an example of the “paranoid stance” that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick critiques in her 1997 essay “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading.” Sedgwick presents paranoia as an ontology, “a way, among other ways, of seeking, finding, and organizing knowledge.” Like all ontologies, the paranoid stance allows one to know and act on certain kinds of information, and is limited in its ability to know and act on other kinds of information.
Sedgwick’s critique of the paranoid stance, then, is not a critique of delusional thinking. Rather than argue about whether or where paranoid approaches incorrectly interpret the facts under consideration, she argues that the proliferation of the paranoid stance, especially in critical theory, narrows the epistemological field by claiming to offer “unique access to true knowledge,” to the exclusion of other interpretive methodologies.
The paranoid stance is fundamentally defensive, borne out of the desire to protect oneself from “negative surprise”. The main way it does this is through the mechanism of exposure: the paranoid approach “unveils” or “reveals” hidden structures, motives, relations and meanings. It is “at once anticipatory and retroactive,” laying its interpretive claim over the events of the past and the possibilities of the future, eliminating any room for uncertainty.
Paranoid interpretations transform the unavoidable messiness of reality, what Sedgwick calls the “simultaneous chaoses of institutions” into “a consecutive, drop-dead-elegant diagram.” Sedgwick compares this aspect of the paranoid stance to a form of love. The paranoid approach lavishes attention onto the objects of its interest, working tirelessly to understand them. But as a form of love it is “the most ascetic, the love that demands least from its object.” The paranoid reader already knows what they’re going to find, so they can’t (and hope not to) be surprised or changed by what they encounter.
The theory presented in We Are All Very Anxious illustrates the advantages and the limits of the paranoid stance. There was a sense of validation, of comfort, of understanding, as the theory (even just the title of it!) clicked into place with my emotional experience. In Sedgwick’s framework, this relief is the result of the sense that the theory’s ability to make sense of my experience protects me from future harm. In V’s language, it helped me “understand what’s going on” with the hope that this understanding would change “the thing itself” or at the very least “its grasp” on me.
But as Sedgwick notes about paranoid reading, the framework “can’t help or can’t stop or can’t do anything other than proving the very same assumptions with which it began.” Once I adopt the theory that anxiety is a force being used to control me, every instance of anxiety confirms the theory. The interpretation becomes totalizing, and circula—rno other interpretation can break through. Similarly, the identification of my anxiety as coming from a force “out there” saps me of my agency. I end up perpetually defending myself from forces outside of my control, paradoxically trapped in my anxiety, stuck in a self-reinforcing loop. An email from Lucien from 2016 perfectly captures this loop:
[v] and i were just talking about self criticism. what is it good for? this whole “pitted against” feeling is another way i’m describing it. i’m just feeling really mad at all these systems i have internalized that declare war against myself and the people that i love in order to make me and us weaker. boredom is just one of these holes, so i feel bored because i am stuck in a position (social position) that I didn’t choose for myself and that doesn’t feel like it has space to accommodate me, and i need to look elsewhere for entertainment (commodity?), and that loops me into a cycle wherein i get mad at myself for being bored, (am i boring?).
In contrast to the paranoid reading’s defensiveness and certainty, Sedgwick proposes “reparative reading”—an approach that stays open to surprise, multiplicity, and the unknown. Rather than fear of surprise, one of the energies at the center of a reparative reading is hope—hope that things could be different than they are.
Sedgwick’s observation of the paranoid stance is itself an example of reparative reading. In her case examples she notices the ways that even the most paranoid critical theorists engaged with other ways of knowing in their work, but that these less paranoid methods had to be subverted through “disarticulation, disavowal and misrecognition,” as the hermeneutics of suspicion came to be synonymous with serious academic work.
Like those theorists that Sedgwick saw practicing in multiple ways, we too were dancing between these stances. Within and alongside our desire to defend ourselves from the blows that the powers that be would inevitably deal us, we wanted to care for each other, and to understand that impulse to care.
Making nothing happen
So we had a bit of a story that the world was against us—which was partly true—but we were very much for each other. The support and patience we offered to each other was a nutrient we needed and were missing. Even though we weren’t getting much writing work done together, it felt meaningful in a hard-to-measure and hard-to-represent way that we were supporting each other emotionally.
We felt that the fact that the value of our mutual support was hard to express and hard to represent was symptomatic of the greater context—that what we were doing for each other wasn’t valued in the world around us. We felt that there was no way to talk about this kind of value we were creating for each other, and that the lack of language here was telling. In an email from 2016, Clare wrote:
it would be nice in our statement of poetics/politics to re-define what “productivity” means for us—or is there a different word? one of the primary things we make is relationships (meaning-making thru relationality)
Clare’s reparative reading on the fruits of our “productivity” highlights how our previous definition of productivity constrained our vision and kept us from recognizing the value of all those hours spent, scheduling meetings, checking in, responding to each other’s texts, planning birthday celebrations, sending postcards, reading each other’s writing, calling, returning calls, cooking, organizing events and trips, coordinating rides, and talking. Tara Brach’s writing on shame explicitly positions connectedness as the antidote to the trance of unworthiness. The context of belonging we created with each other through these mundane activities was an off-ramp from the trance of unworthiness, a “pathway toward remembering our belonging to this world.”
For years we have used W.H. Auden’s phrase “making nothing happen” almost like a slogan for our group, relying on its spring-like internal tension to represent the paradoxical ways we have actively and intuitively resisted prioritizing product-oriented productivity. While writing this essay I discovered that this phrase is not in fact a slogan, but a line from a poem, an elegy that W.H. Auden wrote for W.B. Yeats:
for poetry makes nothing happen; it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.
As with our value of belonging, we have struggled to find the right words to express the value of poetry, though we go on writing and reading it. Like belonging, we have felt its value in an embodied way, moving towards it even as we failed to comprehend it.
Many of the beloved pieces of writing in our shared cannon touch on this question, and we’ve entertained many possible answers to this question: Perhaps the function of poetry is to dispel (or waste) excess energy, unveil hidden structures (in society or in language itself), make consumption difficult, document the everyday, serve as a tool for mental processing, create pleasurable experiences for their own sake, manufacture errors that reveal the unexpected, make money for the writer (or bookseller), serve as a tool to explore and test the limits of language or of the self, serve as a weapon to wage memetic warfare against the status quo, and/or record those moments when God’s breathing makes us buoyant with language.
Poetry and collectivity—these are the habits we return to again and again. Despite their regular failure to get the job done, or clarify what is supposed to be done in the first place, they continue to flow out of the world, irrepressible, beautiful, misunderstood, prone to failure. They are not tools, but evolutionary forms, ways of being, bodies that determine the shape of our experience, and at the same time, offer us hands and a mouth with which to share it, pass it along, tend to its survival.
The possibility of surprise
Plenty of daylight shines through when I hold this old story of our meeting with Miranda up for a closer look. My memories of that time were threadbare to start, and in telling this story I have cut up the memories I did have and collaged with them. In the process I had to compress the real Miranda, in order to make her fit within the edges of a character I have sketched out.
I am realizing that this flattening is an inevitable phase in the relationship between students and teachers, or children and parents. Parents and teachers provide a kind of tensile strength, a solidity against which their less-formed counterparts can push off. This push squishes them down a bit, at least from the vantage point of the pusher.
As I go, the Miranda I find in the archive of my inbox begins to take on more dimensionality. Sifting through the class emails and our personal communication throughout that quarter uncovers moments and phrases that don’t fit the script, adding color. What might be a truer version of her emerges from the gradations in the tone of her writing, somewhere between the sweetness of an email addressing the class as “Dearest Ones” and the firmness of the the email that went out a day before about the class workload:
As it says in the syllabus: […]
“Come prepared to read anywhere from 100–300 pages a week; write intensively and rigorously…”
[…] If you find you are struggling to keep up, it’s because you are being challenged. That’s what we’re here for.
I find that I’m still uncomfortable with this tension, even now, reading these emails more than 10 years later. Perhaps what I’m finding uncomfortable is not that her rigorousness was somehow misattuned or oblivious to our struggle to find balance in the space between productivity and self-(or community-)care, but that she offered a kind of love, a fatherly love, that I didn’t know how to receive.
Miranda’s firm boundaries, rigorous standards, and encouragement towards excellence exemplify a love that seeks to encourage growth through challenge. This kind of love sees the edge of one’s capacity and pushes one towards it, expanding one’s sense of what is possible through determination and effort.
I mostly missed out on this kind of love growing up, and so at the slightest hint of disapproval I froze up and collapsed inward. I was so trapped by my fear of disappointing her or not living up to her expectations that I completely failed to take in her ample encouragement. Evidence of this pattern even shows up in our emails. In a follow-up from our mid-quarter check-in I find this post-script:
p.s. I was so surprised when you said at your week 5 conference that you felt disengaged: from my point of view you have been so thoroughly and highly engaged! I’ve been happy with your work, anyway. But it is hard to be in a full time program, do volunteer work, work and find the time to write.
She offers reassurance, but in the shadow of her encouragement she also offers a hard truth: you can’t do it all. If I had been willing to accept what was confrontational about this feedback, accepted that I was trying to do too much, and refocused on school, I think I would have gotten more out of the rest of my time at Evergreen. But just like in our meeting with her a year later, all I could hear was the disapproval.
A reparative reading finds that though we may have benefitted from more focused writing times at our meetings, we were, in fact, chipping away at our work all along. For years V carried morning pages, their small script meandering across the large, unlined pages of the sketchbook they preferred to write in. Lucien brought us a practice from a class with Miranda called 3×3, finding little alcoves to write in for three hours at a time, three days a week. I found it for a while with Shut Up and Write, first as a founder of the Olympia chapter, then as a newcomer to a Portland-based meetup. Clare ran with it in Mills Oakland Writing Workshop, the speaker series they organized in grad school. In Miranda’s class it was a daily practice of free writing, tuning our hands to the room. We tried establishing our habits over and over again, tucking away tips and passing them along to each other: “find a space,” “set a time,” “make it a habit.”
And Miranda’s love followed us out of the academic context, continued on as we transitioned into young adults in the world. This note, sent after a reading we organized and invited her to read at, resonates in a beautiful tension against my fear of her judgement:
Moved, proud, and grateful to hear the strong, serious, and diffractive readings this evening, and to sound the new body together, perhaps long before it happens. I would like, also, to sit down and read your pieces.
Looking back now I can see how limited I was by my lack of context. Without the accumulated data of past life experience through which to interpret and add nuance to my experiences and the news I was receiving about what was happening in the world, it was very hard to get a good handle on what anything meant. It was as if I was trying to understand what was going on in a very complicated movie, but I’d started watching it somewhere in the middle, and I could only see a small portion of the screen. Discovering critical theory was like reading someone’s review of the movie—I suddenly had a much better idea of what had been going on before I got there.
Philosopher and mystic George Gurdjieff has described the state of being bound by the immediacy of your mental and emotional experience as being in prison: “If you wish to get out of prison,” he wrote, “the first thing you must do is realize that you are in prison. If you think you are free, you can’t escape.”
Critical theory correctly identified some of the architecture that constrained me—the precarity, the productivity culture, the impossible standards. But from within the paranoid frame there was no possibility of escape, only the revelation of larger and more powerful cages. This way of looking also failed to illuminate the other prisons I was bound by: shame, reactivity, comparison, the fear of disappointing others, the inability to recognize the value of what I was already doing.
One possible center of a reparative reading is hope. Sedgwick admits that the experience of hope can be a “fracturing” experience, as the reader tries to organize the “fragments and part-objects she encounters” into a coherent response to the messiness of reality. Yet in this openness to the “profoundly painful, profoundly relieving, ethically crucial possibilities” that the past could have happened differently from the way it happened lies the true gift of to reparative reader: the possibility that the future may surprise her.
Evelyn C. McLean 