Emory Rosenow

Tag: Make Space

  • Make Space: The Space of Fear

    Make Space: The Space of Fear

    In the interest of Being Festive, let’s talk about the space of fear! Because is there a better way to celebrate holidays than by writing essays? I think not. I wrote about fear last Halloween from the self-care angle. This year I’ll examine it from my Make Space angle. If you haven’t already, you can catch up here with Part 1: Clutter and Part 2: Listening!

    I aim to approach this from two angles. First, by asking what the space of fear looks like; and second, by looking at what it pushes out. Disclaimer here (that I usually forget to add because apparently I just can’t be bothered to spend the time remembering) that I am not am expert, I just like to read all the things and then regurgitate unsolicited thoughts back out. Enjoy!

    The Space of Fear

    Fear can be roughly separated into two types: acute and chronic. Acute is short-lived, usually a response to a situation, lasting basically as long as your body can produce adrenaline. This can range from tripping on the sidewalk (brief burst of adrenaline, very short time being afraid) to being followed at night (more sustained adrenaline, longer period of fear). Chronic is fear that persists either longer than the danger, or danger that persists longer than your body can physically respond.

    Technically speaking, what I’m describing as chronic fear is actually anxiety. There are some nuances, but basically anxiety is fear without a concrete source. As far as I’m concerned, for the purposes of this blog, “fear without a concrete source” is still fear.

    When you’re in that space of fear, it doesn’t feel great. You feel like you’re being closed in. Every decision you face is more fraught. If it’s chronic, you feel more tired, because your body is working overtime to keep you alive. Fear takes up a lot of room and it doesn’t like to share. It invades and tinges everything else with its color: its murk of tension, exhaustion, apprehension, and apathy.

    Spoons

    When the space available to you is taken up with fear, there’s less space left for other things. You have less bandwidth to deal with additional problems, even the minor ones. And you have less space to devote to anything outside yourself: fear is forcing you to spend your energy on yourself, on keeping yourself alive.

    A popular metaphor in the disability community is that of spoons. When you’re living with a chronic illness, you often have less energy or are more quickly depleted than someone who isn’t. Spoons represent your units of energy, of which you have a set number that only recharges with rest and sleep. Living with chronic fear is, in effect, living with a chronic illness.

    What We Fear

    Before we go any further, let’s build some context. As I write this, we’re in the seventh month of dealing with a historic pandemic that has so far killed over a million people worldwide, almost a quarter of those in the United States alone. This has severely strained our already threadbare social safety net. While the official unemployment rate is relatively low, this fails to count people who have dropped out of the workplace to take care of children who now aren’t in school full time, people whose industries have disappeared, or all of the people who are underemployed.

    This is all in addition to all the “usual” causes of fear that were around before the pandemic, and will remain after it. These range from existential threats such as climate change to personal fears for our own success and well-being.

    What Impacts Our Fears

    Of course our fears don’t live in isolation. They are rooted in the condition of the world we inhabit. A world that leaves individuals to fend for themselves is inherently more fearful than one that establishes a community to delegate burdens of care. A world with lots of inequality is more fearful on both ends. On the bottom end of the spectrum, there is more fear for basic necessities. On the top end, there’s the fear that comes from the prospect of losing privilege should the inequality fail to persist. Naturally, this creates additional tension between those who would like to live more comfortably and those who benefit from others having less.

    The Space That’s Left

    So what is outside the space of fear? What gets pushed out? When we’re in a space of fear, our attention is focused inwards, on getting ourselves through the fear. That means there is less room for other people — less room for caring about them. A parent who is overwhelmed with trying to pay bills and put food on the table is going to have a harder time being present for their children. Someone working multiple jobs to stay afloat is going to have much less space to think about things like politics. A student who doesn’t know where her next meal will come from is going to have a harder time focusing in class. A black man who is afraid of being summarily executed by police or an immigrant afraid of deportation is going to have a harder time moving around freely in society.

    It’s also easier to fall back onto more base instincts when faced with fear. With your reduced space, it’s harder to devote any of your remaining bandwidth to complex or nuanced thoughts. Again, it’s a game of survival. The condition of your fellow people need only apply as they directly and visibly relate back to you. You can get so used being attacked that you see potential attacks in every action around you — and react accordingly.

    A Society in the Space of Fear

    Fear is a potent emotion. It’s pretty good at keeping us alive by grabbing our attention when a threat presents itself. That same mechanism is ripe for exploitation, by its very nature. One of the easiest ways of getting people’s attention is through fear. Be it real or manufactured, fear has a natural leg up on other emotions when it comes to selling ideas.

    Fear is also a powerful controlling mechanism: if you do x, then scary y thing will happen. If you cheat on your test, then you’ll get detention. If you break the law, then you’ll go to jail. Or maybe if you just break some norm, you’ll face vigilante “justice”.

    Society doesn’t have to operate based on fear, though. Just because it is a sticky emotion, that doesn’t make it the most effective. Machiavelli might have preferred to be feared to maintain power, but a society operating in a space of fear has the same problems as an individual in a space of fear. There’s less space for growth, for creativity, for anything other than bare survival. We have other tools at our disposal. We can lessen the fears that people face.

    Mitigating the Space of Fear

    Fear is mitigated with action. Being able to do something about whatever is worrying you can dramatically cut down on how fearful you feel. We often face problems that are bigger than what we can deal with at once, on our own; or we have anxieties about things over which we have no control at all. In these cases, it’s good to try and do what we can, what we have the space and the spoons for, and then learn to set the rest aside — not forever, but until we have the space to pick it back up.

    I wrote in my last blog about making space for those who need it, if you have the space to spare. There are groups in our world who chronically face more fear than others, which chronically cuts down on the space available to them. For most of the history of the United States, various laws encoded a system in which black people were at the bottom of society, and held there by fear. While those overt laws have been replaced, the ingrained attitudes take much longer to erase. Other minorities face similar obstacles. Women have had to fear violence from men for as long as humanity has existed. Members of the LGBT communities have long been given reasons to fear living openly. The list goes on.

    Making space for others doesn’t mean speaking for them. It means giving them the space for their own expression. It means using what excess power you might have to allow someone else a break from their burden of fear. Overall, it means living in a less fearful world.

    Further Reading:

  • Make Space: Learning by Listening

    Make Space: Learning by Listening

    The most important part of making space is listening. No matter how you are trying to make space, you first have to learn to listen. You have to listen to yourself, and you have to listen to the other people in the space.

    If you haven’t already read Part 1 of my Make Space series, I highly suggest you go back and read it first. That’s where I have explained what it is I mean by “make space” and where I begin to flesh out how I conceptualize it.

    While most of us learn how to listen as young children, we often forget that it’s actually a skill we can and should practice. Usually we default to surface-level listening. We only passively hear the information that is pertinent to us in that moment, and disregard the rest. Only rarely do we venture into active listening or deep listening. With active listening, as the name suggests, you are actively paying attention to what you’re hearing: it becomes your focus. With deep listening, you bring additional attention to what it is you’re listening to, beyond how it immediately relates to and impacts you.

    Listening Inwards

    First, let’s examine the inner iterations of making space. This is when you yourself feel like you’re being crowded, be it by your physical surroundings, your own thoughts, or your emotions.

    Physical Space

    I know that listening to your physical space sounds a little strange, but bear with me. The important part of a space isn’t actually how it looks, but how it feels. No matter how aesthetically pleasing a room is, if it isn’t set up to be functional for how you need to use it, then it’s always going to feel difficult to be there.

    Sometimes this is a matter of rearranging the setup of your space. I am personally a complete dud when it comes to arranging furniture. My strategy has become multiple rounds of rearranging until the space feels welcoming and comfortable, which is how I prefer my spaces to feel. I have also found that (shockingly) using tips from design principles like feng shui is a helpful starting point. Mostly, though, I have to listen to my feelings after trial and error. Also make sure your furniture works for you: that your desk isn’t too high, that your chair isn’t too short, etc.

    Other times, it’s more of an issue of how you’re using the space. Humans associate places with the actions we typically perform there. This is why it can be hard to work from home if you haven’t before, or why sleep experts recommend only using your bed/bedroom for sleep activities. If you’re tight on space, you might have to figure out how to categorize and group activities and areas. Additionally, you could figure out a way to slightly alter the space for each activity by using different lighting, for example, or even just sitting in a slightly different spot.

    Thought Space

    Your thought space is influenced by your physical space, but not only by that. Our thoughts are also the patterns we give them. Similar to remapping physical spaces for what you want to use them for, you have to remap your thought space if you want to make any changes there. If you’re used to thinking about things from a certain angle, that is how your brain will default to thinking. If you try thinking from a different angle, things will look different.

    Let’s take a concrete metaphor of shifting perspective. If you’ve ever moved to a different neighborhood in the same city, you probably have experienced this phenomenon: nothing about the city itself has changed, but your center of reference has shifted. With this shift, locales can feel and even look different. Places that used to be convenient are no longer so, and new places have become more important. You may at some point realize that you haven’t even been down the street you used to live on in months or years — that street that used to center your lived experience. This is the equivalent change that has to happen if you want to recenter your thought space.

    Recentering and Diversifying Your Thought Space

    Unfortunately, you can’t up and move your self to a different part of your brain. But, stepping back, why might you want to go through the struggle of strengthening other neural pathways? Even if you’re happy with how you think right now, you would probably derive some benefit from experimenting with other ways of thinking. It’s part of over-specialization: anyone who exercises seriously knows the dangers of overworking one part of the body. Focus too much on your quads and not enough on your hamstrings, and you risk injury to your knees and lower back. Focus on only your abs and not on your back, and your whole body can be pulled out of balance. Think one way for too long, and you’ll forget the existence and validity of other perspectives.

    If, on the other hand, you know that there’s some thinking adjustments that you would like to make, your way forward is more clear. No easier, unfortunately, but more clear. Knowing where you want to end up helps to outline the path you’ll have to take. Just remember that goals don’t have to be set in stone: if, as you’re working on making your adjustments, you discover a new goal, you shouldn’t feel pressured to stay with your original destination. As you move and change, it’s perfectly reasonable for your goals to change too.

    What the Heck Are Other Ways of Thinking?

    Now you might be saying to yourself, hey Emory, cool metaphors, but I still have no idea what you’re talking about. That’s ok. (And thank you for calling my metaphors cool.) Thinking about thinking is kind of weird, and we don’t do that very much. Our thoughts happen how they happen, and that’s that.

    I think the most approachable method is to try thinking about things from someone else’s perspective. How do you think your friend, your coworker, your great-grandma, or your future self would think about things? How would you think about things if you lived somewhere else or were in a different personal situation? Try listening to your inner dialogue like it’s someone else speaking, and see how that changes how you feel about it.

    Emotional Space

    I struggled for a bit on how to separate out emotional space from thought space. They’re both inside your head, aren’t they? They’re both using that intangible space, so how should I separate them — or should I at all?

    Obviously, yes, I should. Your thoughts are not your emotions. Emotions are how you react to things, both internal thoughts and external events. You can think thoughts that you don’t agree with, or that you don’t believe. You can’t so much, say, feel emotions that you don’t agree with. In this way, there is an element of inherent personal truth to emotions. However, that doesn’t make them immutable. For instance, the things that made you incandescent with rage as a toddler probably now barely register on your emotional scale, because part of growing up is learning to manage your emotions, learning to manage how you react to things.

    Listening To What You Feel

    Listening to your emotions can be hard. It’s much easier to either just simply feel them, or to ignore them altogether. Listening to them means you both acknowledge what you’re feeling and why, while not being consumed by them. This takes patience. (Cool metaphor incoming!) It’s like learning bird calls. You can’t go outside and listen to the cacophony and miraculously know which sound belongs to which bird; you have to isolate the calls and learn how they attach to their owners. And just as a bird attracting a mate sounds different from one sounding the alarm, emotions will also feel different in different contexts. Feeling sad with friends is much different than feeling sad alone.

    Note here that I’m neither advocating for not feeling your emotions at all, nor giving into them wholesale. Of those two extremes, our society tends to lionize the former and ridicule the latter. This has obvious sexist underpinnings (hysterical women!), but it also has elements of Colonial-style racism (which to be fair is generally paternalistic and therefore an offshoot of sexism).

    Having emotions is part of being alive. Listening to them can enrich your life.

    When Emotions Take Too Much Space

    Emotions can be extremely weighty, though. Part of listening to your emotions is knowing when to stop: when you need to take a break from feeling all the things, when you need to take an emotional load off, when you need to take a step back from whatever is causing the emotions. For the most part, this is in the context of negative emotions, because (unfortunately) very few of us struggle with an excess of positive emotions.

    If you’re in a constant struggle to survive, it’s really hard to set your stresses – your emotions – aside. They’re always there, all around, constantly rearing their heads when you least expect it. Learning how to listen when faced with this kind of situation is daunting: you aren’t listening to the lone sparrow chirping, you’re living in an aviary full of angry corvids. (Am I writing this while being yelled at by a bluejay? Why yes, yes I am. Both physically and cool metaphorically.) You have to learn how to make your own little space of calm, where you can just breathe, for your own health and sanity. Then, once you’re in a secure place, you can take those emotions out an deal with them.

    Listening Outwards

    Making space isn’t just about you, though. There are billions of people and only one planet — there has to be room for everyone here. And not just physical room, but also space of acceptance and comfort.

    Many, if not most, societies are constructed on an exclusionary basis. You have to be the right kind of person to gain entry to the upper echelons, and if you aren’t, you receive fewer advantages. Even as we have developed incredible technologies that have the potential to feed, shelter, and clothe the whole world, we are still caught in a collective state of fear that we will suffer deprivations. Unfortunately, that fear isn’t unfounded: huge swathes of the world still struggle to survive, let alone thrive.

    Emotions About Space

    Objectively speaking, if someone has something that you too have — a phone, a sandwich, a friend —, your possession of that is not affected. If your coworker has the exact same model of phone as you do, that in no way impacts your phone or your ownership thereof. If you feel threatened by someone having what you have, it is because you perceive some advantage has been lost. Having better possessions, better opportunities, means that you have a leg up in the struggle for survival. You’re on a higher rung of the ladder. If someone else is on your same rung, you now have to fight them off too, right?

    Except. What is that ladder? Why are we climbing it? What’s at the top? And why, even in a place where there is more than enough to go around, do we so often act like the only way we can survive is by taking food from the mouths of others? Why do we act like the only way to climb that ladder is by knocking someone else off?

    How Wide is Your Ladder?

    I don’t know what’s at the top of the ladder. (I don’t believe there is a top. As far as I can tell, it’s just an obstacle course invented by those who have more to occupy those who have less. /RANT) By calling it a ladder, people naturally assume that it is narrow, with only room for one person abreast, as actual ladders are. Therefore it would be reasonable to assume that, should you wish to progress, someone on a higher rung than you would be in your way.

    This is only true if what you want is scarce, available only to a few. If you want to be head of a company, there is only the one spot. You gaining that position necessarily means that whoever is there now would have to move. However, this is not true if what you want is abundant. In that case, there is enough room on the ladder for others to be there without affecting you. This is doubly not true if it’s something immaterial.

    Of course this idea brings up plenty of objections. Physical limitations do exist. What if there isn’t enough for everyone? What if what you want becomes more scarce? Valid objections. We have to then ask, why is it that people want whatever it is? Is it something fashionable, that they can point to to highlight how high they have climbed the ladder? Or is it something necessary to their survival?

    Thought Space and Listening

    As many other people have said before me, in more detail and with more elegance, the internet is both a blessing and a curse for communication. It’s true that we can now physically communicate with infinitely more ease, but we can also tailor with equal ease exactly with whom we communicate — or don’t. We can build bubbles for ourselves in which conversations are functionally the same as talking to ourselves, if we want.

    Listening to Others

    Communicating with other people is at once the most basic element of being a social being and also one of the most complicated. We can never truly know what is in another person’s mind. Every additional difference between you and your interlocutor creates another opportunity for miscommunication. Gender, race, age, social class, physical location, life experiences, and more introduce more chances that attempts at communicating will go awry. Moreover, each of these elements reduce the chance that you’ll be communicating at all.

    But while we can only truly know ourselves based on what we have experienced, we can learn about other lived experiences by listening to the people experiencing them. And in learning about their lives, we can better communicate with them. We might then also learn more of what we don’t know, turning the unknown unknowns into known unknowns.

    Think of language versus dialect. If someone is speaking a language that you don’t know, you can’t understand what they’re saying. Moreover, you know that you don’t understand them. However, if someone is speaking a different dialect of your same language, you might think you know what they’re saying, because you understand the words they are using. But dialects are built on different connotations, different syntaxes, different lived experiences. You don’t know that you’re talking past each other, because you don’t know you’re using different dialects.

    Who is talking?

    There is more to communicating than the simple words. There’s tone and body language, which we know are lost in written and virtual communications. Sarcasm, for instance, is infamously hard to convey not just in writing, but also across dialects.

    Yet another element to consider when communicating with others is to listen to who is doing the talking. Are all parties sharing equally in the speaking time, or is one party dominating? If the latter, why? What is the context?

    Make Space For Listening

    It is unfortunately true that not everyone has an equal seat at the table. Further, those who have the most power believe it to be in their interest to maintain — and if possible, grow — that power. The more voice you have, the more you can advance your own interests. The more you can advance your own interest, the easier it is for you to live. The easier it is for you to live, the more space you have to breathe. The more space you have to breathe, the more you can use your voice.

    The more you use your voice, the less you can listen.

    One of the popular terms right now for people who have, shall we say, less room at the table, is marginalized. Marginalized people. People who have been pushed to the margins, who live on the margins, who have been marginalized. What’s fun about that phrase is that we pretend that “marginalized” is just something that happens, just a normal state of being, and not something that we cause. No Mom, I don’t know how the lamp got broken, it just fell off the table! No I don’t know how these people got pushed to the edge of society, it just happened!

    We know why people are marginalized. It’s not a secret. They don’t fit the exact mold that those with the most power — the loudest voices — have decreed is The Right Mold. Remarkably, the Right Mold looks exactly like the people with the power.

    Widening The Margins

    One cool fact about marginalized people is that they’re human beings. They have thoughts and opinions just like non-marginalized people, just like all human beings. The difference is they don’t have the same platform as the non-marginalized, and certainly not the same institutionalized megaphone as those who hold the reins of power. They’re just cramped into the edges of society, where it’s easier for those in the center to ignore them. Therefore, if we widen the margins, we bring them closer to the center, make them harder to ignore.

    We widen the margins by empowering those living on them. We empower them by listening to them. And in order to listen to them, they need the voice to be able to be heard, and the space to be understood. Not for someone to speak for them; while this brings them attention, which is a potential for a platform, it doesn’t actually give them power.

    There is enough room for everyone if we make the space. There is enough room for everyone’s voices if we learn to listen. We are all equal in our shared humanity, and everything else is just window dressing.

    And remember, friends, in a democracy, the ultimate expression of your voice – your power – is your vote. Make those in power listen to you. GO VOTE.

    I’m going to call this post here. I know I have glossed over and skipped bits, but this isn’t a novel after all. Take care of yourself so that you can take care of others. Learn to listen to yourself so you know how to listen to others. Be a good person.

    Want more thoughts? Keep reading here:

  • Make Space: Clutter, Attention, and Your Place in Society

    Make Space: Clutter, Attention, and Your Place in Society

    Where can you make space in your life today?

    So… it’s been a rough go of it lately. And it doesn’t look like things are going to get much better any time soon. In addition to the stress, anxiety, and depression contributing to my writers block, it also seems like every time I put together my outline for this post, some other major event happens that I feel the need to address as well. [For reference, the first (now wholly discarded) draft was pre-George Floyd.] History seems to be roaring past us right now.

    On the other hand, what has actually changed? All of the problems we have today have their echoes and equivalents in the past. And really, the people walking the Earth today are essentially the same as those who were walking around 5,000 years ago. There’s just more of us now, with fancier toys.

    Dedicated Readers of this blog may recall that I read and reviewed a book last year titled Make Space, and that I was not particularly thrilled by it. That is, the content was fine, but the execution was… lacking. In spite of that, the basic theory it presented has kept simmering in the back of my mind, intruding in on other topics. What better time to consider physical space than when faced with social distancing orders? To consider emotional space than when faced with racial justice protests breaking out around the country and around the world, or to consider mental space than when we’re all faced with news overload from this year? The original book was only about minimalism in interior design and self-help, but the principle of making space has much broader implications. My attempt here is to write what I wish that book had actually been.

    The Background of Making Space

    In order to make space, we first need to take stock of what is currently taking up that space. This means taking a good hard look at your surroundings — and you know I don’t just mean physical. What does your mental framework look like? How are your emotional underpinnings structured? Where is your attention centered?

    The design goal of Make Space is minimalism. Minimalism in design pares elements down to the understated essentials, which brings increased attention to the few things present. Minimalism in music is made by repetition and very gradual change, which focuses attention on the musical minutiae used. Similarly, minimalism in visual art often uses repetition in its geometric, structural shapes. The underlying idea is to set a homogeneous base from which subtle changes are magnified, and large deviations from the pattern have exponentially more impact.

    The book suggests getting rid of clutter and excess, whereby you can discover what is truly essential to you. It’s a version of Marie Kondo’s sparking joy. How much space can you clear? Once you have cleared the space, you have the room to truly enjoy life… or so the theory goes.

    Why Make Space?

    The physical space we occupy informs a lot of our mental space. The most obvious example of this is clutter. Some people work very well in a cluttered office, but I would hazard a guess that the majority of people are negatively impacted by that kind of environment, whether they realize it or not. If you live or work in a cluttered space and often feel overwhelmed or anxious, the clutter might be a contributing factor.

    However, there are other affective physical elements to consider, such as those that tend to impact only certain groups. For example, let’s take stairs. They might not be a notable feature for someone like me, but for someone who can’t walk very well or at all, they represent a big physical challenge. This physical challenge in turn becomes a mental strain. For every place they go, they have to consider the navigability of that place. While each individual instance of encountering stairs may not be a huge deal, in the aggregate it becomes a much larger mental load.

    The Power of the Individual

    Many of these discriminatory environments exist at a societal level. This means it is far outside the ability of any one person to control them, to make them less discriminatory. It’s human nature to just accept the things that are too big to control — especially if they aren’t impacting you personally. As a white woman, I have generally no reason to be afraid during encounters with police. But I also know this isn’t the case for everyone. There isn’t much that I personally can do about that societal fact.

    The power that I do have personally is to use the space that I have to open more space for others. It’s like if you’re walking down a narrow sidewalk, and someone pushing a stroller approaches from the other direction. It’s easier and safer for you to do what you can to give them room to pass, than to expect them to do so for you. Sure, it might be an inconvenience for you to briefly press against a building or step out onto the curb. But maneuvering a stroller like that is plainly more difficult. Additionally, that person pushing the stroller is already working harder to 1) maneuver around other obstacles, like curbs without cuts, and 2) just push the stroller in the first place. You have the power to give them space and lighten their load because you aren’t pushing a stroller yourself.

    Attention

    In How to Do Nothing, Jenny Odell touches on this concept through her lens of attention. She calls them the margins. It’s hard to miss the stroller approaching you on a narrow sidewalk: that’s an obvious obstruction. You can clearly see your opportunity there to make space. But there are also plenty of less obvious margins.

    There is a significant portion of people for whom the project of day-to-day survival leaves no attention for anything else; that’s part of the vicious cycle too. This is why it’s even more important for anyone who does have a margin — even the tiniest one — to put it to use in opening up margins further down the line. Tiny spaces can open up small spaces, small spaces can open bigger spaces. If you can afford to pay a different kind of attention, you should.

    Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing

    If the first step of making space is noticing where you need it in your life, the second step is paying attention to where you can make space for others. In this plane crash, you have to put on your own oxygen mask first, and only then can you help others with their masks.

    Just paying attention can itself make space. Having more people carry the burden doesn’t make the burden itself any lighter, but the weight is spread out so each person is carrying less. Being able to not pay attention to a problem is a privilege — and therefore an opportunity to make space for others.

    To Be Continued…

    Rather than trying to wrestle everything into one exceedingly long post, I’m going to split this up. Part 2 is all about making space by listening, in all its different forms.

    Further Reading / References