Hello friends & witnesses,
Welcome to my resumed newsletter; unlike prior newsletter projects, it has a limited duration and scope. In each post, I will explore a single word within the social body knowledge project. Today’s word is “change” and next month’s word is “mirror” - word requests are welcome, and there will be no more than 100 posts.
A few weeks ago I wrapped up the last session of the last course on Radical Imperfection in Self-Tracking, the fourth in a series that started in 2020 at the School of Machines. This lecture, about CHANGE, tugged on three vital threads.
The first thread I tugged on was a passage from Amy Leach’s “Things that Are,” which I read nearly a decade ago, and which I have held dear in my imagination since:
The floor of the sea is also the setting for the potentially dramatic life of the sea cucumber … Every year, for three weeks, it melts down its respiratory and circulatory systems and then rebuilds itself. The danger is that if it gets warm or stressed during this restoration period the poor frail cucumber will burst, expelling all its softened heart-soup. Please do not yell at the sea cucumbers.
The sea cucumbers - as representatives of overwhelming transformation, commonplace in many beings - teach me that personal change takes time and patience. Change can be destructive! It does not benefit from being yelled at.
The second thread was a book recently published by a friend on How to Change Your Body. In it, Saga Briggs weaves personal experience, science journalism, and body practices to explore how body connection & social connection support one another.
The third thread was my own experience of transsexuality as deliberate bodily change. For me, self-acceptance coexists with change and transformation. Even deliberate, self-initiated changes are not really controllable: I can start the process of melting myself down, but there is a degree of trust that is needed, which is nourished by body connection and social connection. As Daniel M. Lavery writes in “Something that may Shock and Discredit you”:
As my friend Julian puts it, only half winkingly: ‘God blessed me by making me transsexual for the same reason God made wheat but not bread and fruit but not wine, so that humanity might share in the act of creation.’
By now that aspect of my change is a past event. (I am again robust to being yelled at.) During the process, I undertook artistic research - through drawing, movement, and participatory performance - about hormones. In humans, hormones are essential internal mechanisms that govern so many interconnected processes! The book I subsequently wrote in 2023 ended up being not so much a book about hormones, but rather a book about how we humans think about our hormones, and how we know whatever we know about our hormones. This book is also a collection of invitations to draw, discuss, move, and imagine the internal bio-chemical dialogues that our bodies hold within themselves.
That series of classes on self-tracking and body data seemed for the first few years quite distinct from this embodied, artistic research on hormonal experience and collective hormonal epistemology. However, the data-reflection practices and the drawing practices co-evolved, and became integrated within what I now think of as practices of systematic self-reflection. These include journaling with a pen and paper, as much as with the aid of technology.
So, how can systematic self-reflection - including self-tracking - nourish CHANGE? Firstly, I exclude any mechanisms of punishment or guilt (“please, do not yell at the sea cucumber!”), and go from there:
practices that improve body trust can be helpful; practices that promote reliance on external assessment may lead to unsustainable behavior change, and other frustration
systematic self-reflection tools encode specific values hat may be counter-productive to a specific individual’s connection to their body, and this is something that should be considered when establishing a practice that uses particular tools. For example: habit change apps focus on daily habits and short-term results, which skews the expectation of how long it takes to enact a meaningful change. Most real change requires a longer commitment, and also many things don’t need to be daily, and don’t benefit from extremely detailed tracking.
speculation and imagination is a way to co-produce the “assessment” of change and potentially to reframe how and what is tracked. Practices and tools that center the collection of body and activity data implicitly interpret data as an accurate representation of the past. Often, it’s not that accurate. Also often, it’s not the past that is most important thing, anyway! Speculating a dataset from an imagined future, and using that for reflection (not proscriptively), can help question what is tracked and how generative it is of the transformation process
In short, the suggestion is to only use tracking/data as much as it’s actually helpful. When it comes to CHANGE, it may be helpful to shift the focus away from data collection, data accuracy, and short-term past/future - toward interpretation, reflection, and longer timeframes.
These observations are based on my personal practice, and collaboration with others around self-tracking topics. They are not set; they are evolving; they are subject - as all things are - to CHANGE.
Next time, I will write on the subject of complexity, as part of reflecting on the “Body Imaginations” track at next weeks’s POM conference. This track imagines mechanisms of care within the human body as a complex system, and asks: What artistic, practical, and speculative tools make care possible within complex biological systems?
Until next time,
Best,
Kit