so_what_do_you_do ovenbird I hate this question. It comes with a whole host of insidious assumptions. It is not asking what you aim your heart towards, or what things bring you joy, or what you engage in to make yourself whole. This is a question concerned with how you meet arbitrary standards of socially manufactured success. You are meant to answer in a very specific way and that way has to include what public facing job you do in a formalized setting that allows you to collect a regular paycheque. You can not, for example, say that in the aftermath of severe postpartum depression you decided not to return to your soul crushing job and, instead, became a full time parent. The answer to “what do you do?” can not be “mothering” unless you want the person you’re talking to to immediately decide they need another drink and then disappear permanently. Or unless you would like the other person to ask you questions such as “when do you plan to return to work?” as if mothering is not, in fact, work, but some fancy vacation. It’s not a question that asks who you are and what matters to you, it’s a question that asks what your dollar value is and how much social currency you have. I wish people would start answering this question in completely unexpected ways. For example, “What do you do?” "Well, sometimes I bite my nails until my fingers bleed due to a life long struggle with anxiety and a very specific type of body dysmorphia. How about you?" Or, "Thanks for asking. I like to talk to the quaking aspen tree by the river and watch its leaves flicker in the wind and imagine how it experiences the slow tumble into torpor in the autumn and how it feels when its sap begins to warm in spring." Or, "That’s a good question. I like to live alongside the brief warm bodies of the animals that inhabit this world. I cast my mind into their furred and feathered forms to see how the beauty of their wild lives maps onto my heart so I can know what it means to be alive." When people ask this question I wish they were asking “what do you do that makes you love the world?” rather than “what do you do to satisfy the demands of our collapsing capitalist systems?” Maybe we should be asking different questions altogether. So I won’t ask you what you do, instead I will ask you what you see and then I will get to trace the topography of your mind and immerse myself in the beauty of your unexpected and unique vision. So when you open your eyes to this tender, broken world, what do you see? 250905 what's it to you? who go blather from