CHAPTER THREE
Part Four
Not doing is undoing is doing
Without meaning to... without intention... within me a lens of complex attuning has been emerging.
For the past few years I was just surviving.
I was not making meaning or looking or caring about meaning.
But... not doing is undoing.
Not doing is undoing is doing.
Noticing with illness shifts how I notice the world and how I notice me in it. Cripping my attunement has given me attunement assemblages. Adding to my ways of noticing. Because... I couldn't find anything that helped me with embodiminded affective complexities that embraced my always messy and muddled and moving spatio-temporal pluralities from bodymind out and back in again. From my bed... I accidentally created my own.
It isn't until a year and a half into noticing with assemblages that I read a term that is a clear naming of what has been happening: "Disability as method", a form of Research Creation. "Disability as method names a creative approach through which research methods are informed by, modeled after, and tailored to the situated knowledges of disabled people. It involves attuning and sculpting research methods and modes of analysis to the particular ways of relating to the world that disabled living entails" (Dokumaci, 2023, p.11).
Invisible Bodymind and centering invisible bodymind, centering the practitioner are "informed by, modeled after, and tailored to situated knowledges".
Everyday unseens, multiple apertures, staying with, long exposures, bed mappings are "attuning and sculpting research methods and modes of analysis".
Embodiminded sustainability, "modes of analysis".
Assemblages of attunement, "the particular ways of relating to the world that disabled living entails."
I have been nurturing a space of whole self connection and comfort.
I have been creating from a space of whole self connection and comfort.
I didn't know I could.
"The personal is political" (Hanisch, 1970), and so the "private is political" (Hedva, 2016, p.2). The political can be soft and small and quiet sometimes too. For those of us who are soft and small and quiet sometimes our stories are stories of agency, protection and advocacy no matter how quietly they are told. My bed is political. My bed is method. What I feel here is political. What I share years after being in here is political.
I adore how this explodes the millennial cry of how you can only grow outside of your comfort zone. I love how this disrupts my own very deep training of our continual control and awareness of creativity is what dictates its end. Turning inward... nurturing... favoring and eventually celebrating my zones of comfort, my situated and embodiminded experiences of calm and less has spontaneously propagated new ideas, new ways, new receptions, new perceptions and new depth.
I am in no way saying that when you are in bed that it or you should be a site of possible productivity. Fuck. That. Noise. I am sharing how gentleness and softness and slowness and safety in and around the full everyday unseen experiences of my invisible bodymind has opened me up to ways of noticing and creating that are gentle and soft and slow and safe. I am the cartographer. It is safe to search here. I am the namer of places, experiences. I want to stay here. A comfortable space to value my full embodiminded creative world and to connect with other worlds.
I thought I had invited creativity into the middle with me... but it was already here.