"Stability is death"

chatting about inconsistency and the shape of time with Marta Rose and KR Moorhead

Hello slugs, today I bring you another podcast interview!

I am in a little bit of a writing rut, which means it’s time to record other people saying interesting things instead. I wanted to talk to my good friend Marta Rose and my new friend teacher/author/creative writing mentor KR Moorhead about this class they’re running in the fall called Neuroqueering Your Creative Practice, thinking that maybe they would have some wisdom for me. I came away from the conversation quite comforted about my rut, actually. It’s fine! Necessary, even!

Here’s the full convo, and as per usual, I have lightly edited a snippet for your reading pleasure below:

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Marta: I have a very clear synaesthetic concept of time¹ that has been with me for my entire life. I don't need to talk about what it actually looks like, but it is largely a spiral or at least, it's really sort of an ellipse, right?

I think that originally, the shape of this metaphor sprang from the way I already saw time, but it also occurs to me that, I guess as space, like literal space and temporal spaciousness, was opening up for me in my life, once I accepted that I was probably never going to be able to work at a regular full time job and support myself, I started looking at the patterns of my own creativity, and I realized that they just weren't linear and they weren't focused in the way that we're meant to be like right now. You know, “if you just write a page day, you'll have a novel at the end of a year,” right? And it just doesn't work like that for me at all.

The metaphor that has really resonated most with people is this idea of an elliptical orbit around a creative project. So if you imagine your creative project is like a body in space. It's like a planet or a star. And imagine, then, that there's a comet that is orbiting around that body, but in a big ellipse, not a perfect circle, but a big ellipse. So at certain points in that orbit, that comet — which is time, right — is coming really close to the body, which is your project.

And because of the gravitational pull of your project, you whip around the project really fast in time. It's a period of intense flow and intense productivity, intense sort of, getting shit done. But by definition, that intensity is going to whip you out into space in that elliptical orbit far away, and that period of time is going to be really slow and dreamy and restful, in an ideal world, when we're allowed to do this, right?

But it feels like — because of the demands of capitalism and the demands of executive functioning and the demands of productivity and making money — it feels like being lazy or being unproductive or being daydreamy, or all these bad things that supposedly we’re not supposed to be. But I really believe that part, that drifting out in space part of that orbit, is essential to the whipping around the project and getting shit done part of the orbit.

Just in general, the idea of a spiral is a little bit forward and then a little bit back and a little bit up and a little bit forward and a little bit back and up, and sort of, what goes around comes around, you know, it's not just a straight line.

Since I've started studying this stuff, what I've come to understand, unsurprisingly, is that in many indigenous cultures, this concept of time as a spiral is just ubiquitous, and that the idea of time as a really straight line that marches forward is a very white, Western, colonialist construct that has been foisted on the rest of the world, but is not in any way like, an obvious or natural way of thinking about time.

L to R: KR, Jesse, Marta

Jesse: Yeah, I've been thinking about Spiral Time because you wrote in the description of your course that we need new metaphors. And I was like, it's kind of an old metaphor that's come back around for those of us who have been disconnected from the cycles of the earth.

Marta: Yeah, and there are all kinds of permutations of it too, right? Like the cyclicality of the seasons, you know, like fallow time in agriculture, like all of those are aspects of it that I think really resonate with the ways that our bodyminds would work naturally in the world if we were allowed to.

But when we're not allowed to, when we're forced into a linear, hyperproductive, hyperfocused [state] all the time, or you're not going to like, eat or be able to have a place to live, I think because that's so alien…nobody is really meant to work in the world that way, and then the dysfunction just compounds. 

KR: I teach Marta's neuro time document as part of my shorter course called Writing While Neurodivergent, and it is one of the concepts that sticks with people the most. The way I always talk about it is — and this is, you know, true to me, always coming back to capitalism — is this idea of something that moves in one direction forever, or anything that grows forever and never dies, right? That's just unnatural. Like that does not exist in space. It doesn't exist at the micro level. That’s cancer, right? Things that grow and never die. And yet, that's what capitalism is supposed to do, right? It's supposed to create growth forever.

And as we know, that's not possible, and eventually things crash and burn. But, you know, spirals are in our DNA, they're in galaxies, cycles, it's like everything we live on and work in is circles and cycles, so it just makes sense, it's just natural, and so I think it does [appeal] to a lot of people because it's their first way into deconstructing the rest of capitalism. 

Once that starts to fall away, it allows you to sort of see behind the veil a bit. And my students all kind of like, their minds are blown when we first do that little session on Marta's stuff. It's a very impactful little document and metaphor, essentially, that I've found very useful for myself and for passing this kind of information on to other people.

Jesse: Yeah, it's hard because we talk about it all the time, and I use it, this metaphor, in my life all the time, and I know it, but then I still feel that shame of like, I'm not doing enough, I'm not doing anything, or like, I don't know what I'm doing right now, or I've abandoned this thing and I feel really bad about it. It's hard to not feel that shame, even though you know. 

KR: You can know intellectually, but it doesn't mean that emotionally you're on board. And another metaphor I use is like, that negative voice in your head, the one that's telling you, you should be doing more, you're shit, you're lazy, isn't actually your internal voice.

Because we aren't born with that. I don't know if you've ever been around small children, but they are confident. “Look at me, I'm the fastest in the world!” At least to a certain point, you know, until the world beats them down. But that voice is instilled in us.

And I always say, imagine it's your favorite — or “favorite” in quotes — colonialist. Like for me, that's my Christopher Columbus voice. Like, that guy's such a horrible monster. So if I imagine that the voice is Christopher Columbus² and not me, it's a lot easier to be like, shut up. I don't want your approval anyway, I'll do what I want. Really separating ourselves and understanding what is actually us and what has been implanted and brainwashed onto us by these overarching capitalist, white supremacist structures that when you're in them, can be really hard to see. 

You can't really get outside of it, so it's hard to actually see it. But once you do, you can't really put the cat back in the bag. It changes a lot of things.

Marta: I think that something that has helped me is understanding that neuroqueering itself is a practice, and it's not a linear practice, just like time isn't linear. Healing from that Christopher Columbus in our brains, that’s not a linear journey either, right? And this has sort of been startling to me recently, because I've always imagined in Spiral Time that like, the good stuff will come back around. Like all the stuff that I learned from [writing] my first novel, I can now sort of glean from and bring it forward into now. But the truth is that the bad shit comes back around too, right?

The insecurity, the anxiety, the stress, the voice inside your head. And for me, it's just about like, can it come back, but in a slightly different place? Can it come back around, but with a little bit more self-awareness, with a few more tools for disrupting it, with a couple more friends who can help me through it?

There was a period of my life very recently where I really felt like, Oh, I'm fixed. I'm cured. I don't have depression and anxiety anymore, you know? And it's just not true. I still live in this world and people still do shitty things and people still have expectations of me that I'm not able to just shake off. And the bad stuff comes around, too, but now I have more resources and also just more resilience to sort of sit with it and be like, Oh, yeah, this sucks. But I know that just like the good stuff wasn't forever, this isn't going to be forever either.

KR: Stability is seen as something we are supposed to want to achieve, whether that's in our relationships, in where we live, in our job, in our creative practice, like, of course, why wouldn't you want to be stable?

But actually, stability is not natural. We are supposed to be in flux, we are in flux, whether we like it or not. And therefore, if we think we're supposed to be stable, then we're not, it feels like a failure. If we accept that we're supposed to fluctuate constantly, and that it's okay for our relationships to fluctuate, it's okay for our jobs to fluctuate, it's okay for our identities to fluctuate, right? We're meant to move in cycles and circles and change and shift. Nothing's ever meant to be stable.

So I think this idea of stability is actually quite a negative one that has been put on us by capitalism [and] white supremacy, but has been developed to be this ideal thing that we're supposed to reach for in all elements of our life. But actually, stability is death. Stability can often be, you know, stopping and not doing anything, right?

You end up in a relationship you don't want to be in because you're supposed to stay in that relationship. You end up in a job that you hate because you're, I mean, I was in my job for 15 years, trying to make it even more stable and being like, this is a good job. It's a secure job. And then you get to the point where you realize, I can't neuroqueer this space. I can't be neuroqueer in this space. I will forever be burning out, so I have to find a way to leave this space, even if that means being poor, relying on family, you know, and not everyone is privileged enough to be able to do that.

Not everyone has the option to just like, leave their job and start over again or focus on other things, so I recognize that as a huge privilege. We have to seek stability sometimes in order to survive in capitalism, but I think if we can embrace our own flux and [the] fluctuation of it all, that's when we can start to lose some of that shame and that failure and feel it as it is meant to be, as a successful movement through space.

1. This is called ‘time-space synaesthesia’

2. I do a similar thing but I call that voice my ‘inner businessman’ lol