Equilibrium 🌸 🍂
Spring equinox and slowness as resistance
As I write this, I am tucked up in my bed at midday on the day of the spring equinox, and behind my curtains, the sun is illuminating everything that is outside my window, just out of my reach. I wanted to write a newsletter on this day, particularly knowing that the last time I wrote was on the winter solstice three months ago. But sickness and wellness follow no calendars, so I will try to keep this short.
It was a busy start to the year, including photographing Olly Alexander for the cover of Attitude Magazine, Self Esteem for the cover of DIY magazine, new press photos for caroline and a gig at One Of A Million Festival in Baden, Switzerland. So many projects I am hugely grateful to have worked on!
I have just returned from a special two weeks away in Europe, accompanying my friend Laura Misch on her ‘slow tour’. Over fifteen days, I captured on camera how she is reimagining the pace of touring live music - following her own period of burnout after previous tours. I have not done photography for an entire tour before. Partially that is because both the music industry’s expectations, and its crumbling financial structures, would not make it easy for me to do so either. There were five shows across four countries, which we travelled to via train - in a timeframe that most touring artists might play twelve gigs in. Punctuated between these were intimate, gentle, two-hour workshops which explored slowness with local participants in each city. I am aware that it is only through the funding that Laura received that she, I, and the rest of her wonderful team (shout out especially to Phillipa & Tomáš!), could dream a different way of doing this, this time around. But I feel hopeful that this approach can become a blueprint of sustainable gigging in the future.
Amidst all the calm and ease of this is experience, I still returned home to isolate in my bedroom next to a pile of tissues, painkillers and orange juice. Sickness waits for no one.
It is within this context of slow exploration and recovery in bed, that today I am thinking a lot about Labour’s proposed cuts to PIP (personal independence payment) for disabled people. PIP is already notoriously hard to be considered eligible for, even for the most severely disabled. Yet whilst there is zero evidence of anyone committing benefit fraud to acquire PIP, that is our government’s argument for pushing folks who cannot work into poverty, into work when they cannot, or for many of those who do work whilst on PIP - make them pay for the huge expense of vital medical costs, deepening the divide. There are no words except shameful for the supposed leftist party who wants to punish those who are the most sick and vulnerable in our society, rather than tax the super-rich a tiny amount. As if productivity is a more vital foundation for life than healthcare. I am tired of the right’s use of laziness as a synonym for basic survival.
Although I rarely experience flare ups these days since my own period of chronic illness, I know that I can never return to (and never want to) the way I was living before: working when sick, unhealthy circadian rhythms, going from everything I did to the next with no breaks. It is a sad reality that often it is only those who have experienced sickness firsthand, or secondhand when supporting loved ones, who can truly understand. Productivity is an equilibrium that must be walked as gracefully as a tightrope. It is not a storm to repeatedly run back to, only to repair the destruction over and over again. This is why I now seek consistency, contentedness, stability and temperance in my life, over ebbing highs and lows, crashes and burns.
For those who are able, Crips Against Cuts are planning a day of action across the UK this Saturday 22nd March. They need as many allies there as possible. The toll protesting takes on disabled people’s health — not to mention that nearly all of us will inevitably be affected by disability at some point in our lives — means that if you are well enough to make it, you should care about showing up.
(I guess I didn’t keep this newsletter so short after all?)
Love and solidarity,
El x