Dream Baby Dream
A meandering on Joy, Pleasure, and the "Dream Job"
The word mend has a certain ring to it. The phonetics evoke a comfort, a care, a poem, and a pleasure. Mending is a radical act~ it rejects how things are and imagines a different reality. Together we can dream for a more sustainable future through these slow stitches. Together we can mend for a second, a third, a fourth life, and so on and so on.
I seek sensuality and joy to spite the cruelness + pain in our world. I think this is a main point in adrienne marie brown’s book Pleasure Activism (actually I might be totally off base, as I haven’t read it yet. The title though!) I truly find a lot of pleasure in work- business has become my activism and my art. I enjoy creative problem solving and making up systems as I go along; sometimes to my own detriment, sometimes to my utter delight.
Folks often ask me if I make my own clothes. Nope. I barely even mend them. Just as the cobbler’s daughter has no shoes, my poor boyfriend walks around with holes in his socks. (And he’s a chef, so it’s a lot of cereal for dinner too.) I have many piles of my own holey garments sitting in my house, which were once accumulated into a stack that grew so high over the years it toppled over. The fall of an empire I kept growing without any plan for care or infrastructure.
I also have so many pieces of clothing + fabric set aside for embellishment. Things that I want to sew together to create a whole new gesture without having to make an entire new garment from scratch. Different combinations of fabric have become little sketches for me- ideas that may not ever be executed but allow me to dream and play. I’ve always felt mesmerized by the play of color and texture. Therein lies the heart of what led me to textiles.
Waiting for something to happen is not pleasurable. Working on my own stuff brings up a guilt when I think of all the other things hanging over my head, like a leaning tower that could topple at any moment if I don’t keep trying to chip away at it. And yet it keeps growing. Mending projects, workshops, a team to manage, a physical shop to maintain, relationships with partners + collaborators + my landlord, and so so so many e-mails. There is true joy found in taking care of everything else in service of everyone else, but at what point does the work become less joyful?
A book whose title I love- and I have actually read it- is Marlee Grace’s How to Not Always Be Working. It’s on my nightstand most of the time for me to peek at when I’m feeling imbalance. One main idea in the book is to differentiate what is work and what is not work- a distinction that is so difficult when you put so much of yourself into your work and also get a lot of pleasure and self-actualization from it.
Is this my “dream job?” Hmm. For everyone else, I like the comeback of, “I do not dream of labor,” which James Baldwin originally penned and is now having a cultural moment in our post-2020 class + labor consciousness. But I think I do dream of labor. Or at least, I dream of a more pleasurable, more sustainable future and an honest livelihood for myself. And this work leads to that, so it’s a little complicated. I find so much joy in it, and I like the connection it brings me to other people and to cloth.
To me, the idea of a dream job is blurred with a dream life- which is what I think people may actually mean when they think about a dream job. It is a joy to pursue work that feels me with pride and ignites curiosity.