CHAPTER FOUR
Part Three
Following my creative waste
1985
I remember my shy four-year-old self. A teacher drawing a pencil snail.
"You're slow. Just like a little snail."
And slow was bad. And I was slow and I didn't understand but I learned to know not to show my slow. This seeped lifelong, socially imposed humiliation gave me a damaged relationship to my sense of time.
My time. My time is slow time. Slowness was my first "failure". My first creative deficit. My first creative waste.
2006 to 2019
In my twenties, up to a certain point, my invisible illnesses and disabilities could be smuggled in. Because when I have created before I have gone toward practice. I bend towards practice. And in that moving toward I let go of my bodymind reality and needs and I morph into what I have been taught are the "good" body and mind ways of practice.
If you had asked me the pace of my practice in the first fifteen years of my professional life, I would've said "fast". Fast paced, neurodivergent, abstract and conceptual thinking. Fast with searching and researching and synthesis. Fast in bringing multiple ideas and possible solutions. Fast with prototyping, iterations, new ideas and exploring proof of concepts. I never missed a deadline. Fast is also what is needed in the industry I wanted to be part of (wanted, not want?). It is how we are asked to move. It is how we are taught to move. Our fast movements are now what its evolving structures are built on and rely upon. Sprints. Rapid prototyping. Agile design. Lean design. But really... what I can't process fast enough, I hide. I take it all home and break it down at my slow pace at night. Hours of work at home to understand in my own ways. My slow ways of processing and creating. I pull the day's information apart completely and reassemble it in a way that I can connect to and understand. Then put it back together for tomorrow in a way that looks like I can understand the conventions of the company I work for. That I understand completely. That I am fast-design-world capable. And I do it all again. Performing wellness.
When in 2020, for the fifth or sixth time in my life I have to leave the workplace because of exacerbated illness, specialists tell me it will take me many months, maybe years, to discover and establish and finally learn to live with, "manage", my disabilities. That it will be a full-time process. Not to think of work at all for a very long time if ever again. I tell my partner, "I just need two weeks. Maybe a month." But no longer than that... because I am fast, right? I am not thinking of healing fast. I am thinking I can create a hidden way to cope with disability and work just like I always have. Quietly... secretly so proud of how my brain can control my body. At least in public. At least enough to perform professional creative wellness. When my "month at the most" of rest and rehabilitation spreads into many months, years and brings me to my day-bed desk of typing this right now... I know deep in my energyless bone marrow that fast is not returning.
I look through my bodymind relational lens at how fast was never real for me.
Never actual.
It was a myth.
A damaging dislocation with myself. A movement towards practice... away from myself. Away from sick body "failure".
I was centering the practice. Disciplining my body around the discipline.
This automatic and unconscious centering of Western productivist practice scripts means to me that if I cannot return to performing a fast, approved, visible way of practising... then I can no longer practice. Then I can no longer work. I don't know how to create in a way that is not pushing myself. That is not excessive. That is not unsustainable. That does not make me sicker. I don't know how to do that. I don't know how to think in that way. I don't know how to create in that way. I need slow... but I am scared of it. I am scared... I will never work as a designer again.
I have been trained to be scared to be seen as slow.
To ask for time.
To need time.
To make more time.
To take more time.
To be slow and to be soft and to be quiet with creating.
2022
I have quietly shared with L and S.S over the past months that I am practicing slowly so I can try to keep doing my PhD.
That I am moving slowly and processing slowly.
And need to be always moving slowly and processing slowly.
As the months move by they give me excited curiosity and support and permission when exploring slowness.
This allows for a more shared excited curious for me too.
Because when I first shared about slow... this sharing is part of my early way of using slowness as self-defense.
I let them know so they could understand my needs and why I was practicing the way I was.
By sharing this bodymind need for slow it keeps me honest and connected to what my bodymind needs.
A shaky declaration that protects me.
Nothing to do with creativity... but with surviving being creative.
When I come to them mid 2022, to tell them I am physically and cognitively unable to continue with my original research... that I am unable to work in that industry again... they plant the seed of refocusing my research to explore with slow as a practice experience. I am ready to have the conversation of deferring or leaving the Lab. So I take two slow weeks to process this idea. I had never thought of slow or sick as something to share. I agree with a sense of light and joyous relief.
I am embracing slow in my practice and my research and I turn toward the design practice community to concepts of slow design and books and spaces.
I feel excitement and privilege that I will be spending safe and grounded time here.
I hunt and I read and I look.
I take notes and I forget.
I am not absorbing. I do not feel fully connected to what I am gathering.
I feel confused and it gives me panic and pause.
I am not feeling slow here... my slow.
I am not finding all of myself in these spaces and experiences, suggested methods and practice philosophies.
I stay with and centre my doubt and non-understanding of this disconnection.
I collect words from the slow practice vernacular and look closely.
I notice that for the majority of people who are sharing these beautiful experiences of slow... slowness is a choice.
I notice slowness experienced and shared through the "well" body gaze.
I can see how it is often met with a sense of romanticised beauty and peace and calm.
Slow in these spaces feels only partly told.
It is still othered.
It is spoken of in a gentle voice with gentle colors to tell us it is okay to be slow if it is still connected to some part of eventual productivity.
Healing to be better.
Rest to get better.
Time away to come back even better.
Brain switched off to experience epiphanies and transformations once it is switched back on.
A slow that can always do something for you.
I can still see the culture of design in slow design.
I have and do feel relief and release and joy in my slow. This is mostly because it helps carry the weight of unchosen slowness against the body normative comparisons that can shame and hurt.
Slow is many beautiful things and it is the following too:
Silence. Restless. Waiting. Rationing. Heavy. Failing. Self-conscious. The deep worry of hesitation. Chronic not knowing and unending temporality. Oozy. Leaky. Saggy. Unclean from not being able to shower or bathe for a week or more. Smelly. Biologically disorientating and messy. "It requires a different orientation to one's body. A foregrounding of physical needs, eating and sleeping and shitting, and the ways in which they shape our days" (Kafer, 2013). Bed sores and unending convalescence. Sickness sediment. Distance. Darkened rooms in daytime. Perpetually dirty seeing glasses from oily skin and hands and hair. Not understanding and not being understood.
Some days I hate slow. I resent it. Illness slows me. Disability begs I be slow, lonely, quiet, invisible. Slow leaks out of my illness. I am here with slow because my body has a timer on it. My slow is a sick body resting. Slow is a gentle witness that holds all of this with me.
Some people experience one part... one chosen kind of slow.
I want to be in spaces that are telling and showing all kinds... all experiences of slow.
When the word slow is written or spoken I want it to be inclusive of all experiences of slow.
This only part seeing and telling of slow in design culture reconfirms two important disability justice discussions for me. One, the implicit dominant body normative assumptions and bias in creative practice spaces. The fixed conception of the "good" body, and by extension, "good" time; industrial time. And two, by extension the diverse, everyday unseen experiences of everyday illness, disability and practice are rendered invisible within dominant design culture telling, showing and sharing. This is how The Inaccessibility Cycle (Pixie, 2020) within the design cycle continues (Figure 1).
Figure 1
The everyday unseens of my creativity are everyday unseens next to, in relation to, sometimes because of these rocks. Industry creativity failings as embodiminded waste. And I used to feel so embarrassed and ashamed of this. My bodymind seen as a failure. My bodymind creativity as failures. As waste. Bodymind dysfunctions seen as dysfunctional practice.
Just like with my want to embrace bodymind... I embrace and centre my everyday unseen practices.
I stay with and follow these practices... these failures.... this creative waste as something to think with.
It changes my creative life.