hungry ghosts
hungry ghosts
perfectionism creep, rest, radical means root, some autumnal tunes for dancing with your ghosts, and a newsletter announcement
Friends, hi. It’s been some time since I last wrote you, longer than I intended, for reasons large and small. Quite a few of you are new here & found your way to this space in the meantime — a heartfelt welcome — to this newsletter-in-flux, an extension of a me-in-flux. Maybe you, too, are in-flux (aren’t we all, always, in varying degrees?) and perhaps the thing is to plop down right in the flux and just sit together in it—your flux, and mine.
Since it’s somehow late October now, the season of hauntings and decay, it feels like the right time for a ghost story. I want to talk about hungry ghosts. The figure of the “hungry ghost” dances at the periphery of sacred texts and mythology in many religions—including Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism, Sikhism, and Jainism. Hungry ghosts are characterised by their endless search for gratification, their desires ultimately insatiable. The physician Dr. Gabor Maté has famously used the term to describe the experience of addiction. Hungry ghosts live within each of us, Maté says. We visit their realm more or less often, sometimes entirely dwelling there for certain periods, their lair a space of interminable suffering. Maybe you can readily conjure a few of your own hungry ghosts. I’ll return to these hungry ghosts in a moment.
An autumnal playlist for dancing with your hungry ghosts:
I’m writing you a week into Covid (itself a ghost for my body, from March 2020) on the heels of another cold. Like any convalescence, this one has temporarily inverted my usual relationship to time, body, doing—forcing a pause I wasn’t allowing (but desperately needed), admitting to an exhaustion that settled in long before this virus. Of course, the timing is no coincidence.
Prior to this pause, (work)life the past months has felt like a burst water main: the water(work) gushing out at a pace that at times has been difficult to keep up with. Abundant things, to be sure (among them: submitting the first draft of my book manuscript to an editor (!)). The abundance is exciting and overwhelming, unmooring in the way that water always flows, shapeshifts to its container. My reflex has always been to mirror the intensity around me, within. I wonder if I am the container or the water.
In this flood, my hungry ghosts came knocking. They go by other names—self-doubt, obsession, overwork, self-criticism, fear (less of failure, ironically, but of success), and *ugh* perfectionism—but, like hungry ghosts, they’re united by one thing: their insatiability. Their hunger is bottomless. “Perfectionism creep,” I’m calling it (not this kind of creep, but a stealth invader) has encroached into other parts of life beyond work-work—my facilitating, my writing, my relationships, even this newsletter. These hungry ghosts are the drain to my burst water-main, leaving me at times hollow.
In recognising their re-entry (thanks to this pause), a few questions swirl:
How do you/we/I resist the hungry ghosts of perfectionism and people-pleasing while existing within or interacting with systems built upon external validation?
If you do (resist), what does coexisting within and outside them look like, feel like?
How do I/you/we grow into new ways of reorienting toward ambition that don’t compromise care and connection?
Is “keeping up with” this even desirable, let alone sustainable—not only in an abstract sense, but for me as a human animal?
Especially in the presence of other pulls and desires that feel softer, slower, more solid—new, yet somehow also familiar/ancient?
There is always a tinge of remorse when you find yourself face-to-face with spectres of past selves, shadows, and patterns you’ve worked hard to build distance from. In meeting them (yet) again, though, there’s a chance to relate to them differently.
The key, I’m learning, is not to mistake these hungry ghosts’ needs with my own, but rather as a nudge to wake up to the mere presence of other unmet needs within. I’m trying to reframe hungry ghosts as sentinels, here to signal: time to revisit, reimagine, restructure, recalibrate (and that other r word—rest). While these hungry ghosts’ needs may be insatiable, my own need not be; that’s the difference.
I’m re-learning: no one is going to carve space for you to recollect, rest, nurture, regather, if you don’t. It’s a space you/we/I must assert for ourselves, take responsibility for — and defend fiercely (if we ever hope to one day create systems that defend it). Even (especially) when it disappoints others. This is something I, for some reason, must forget and remember, again and again.
It is humbling to admit that in practice, my relationship with rest is a strained and conditional one, even more troubling to realize how this pervasive “grind culture”—itself an insatiable hungry ghost—is complicit in reproducing other systems of oppression (relatedly, we should all be reading Tricia Hersey’s recently published Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto — a glimpse here).
In almost a decade of working in the field of medical anthropology, I’ve come across a lot of definitions of illness/disease/sickness/non-wellbeing. But two weeks ago, at this Narrative Medicine conference, I encountered a new framing:
Illness : an unhomelike way of being in and through the body in the world.
Health : a homelike way of being in and through the body in the world.
(from Swedish philosopher and phenomenologist of medicine Fredrik Svenaeus. read more here)
I’ve been thinking of this concept—illness as unhomelike, health as homelike—not only with regard to our bodies but also to our collectives, the systems we inherit, inhabit and reproduce. How they are made to be homelike for some people and ways of being, and unhomelike for others (often the latter is the expense of the former).
These homes/houses/structures are themselves haunted by hungry ghosts: the insatiability and insidiousness of late stage capitalism, neoliberalism, patriarchy, white supremacy, ableism…to name a few. (On hauntings & social life—highly recommend Avery Gordon’s Ghostly Matters. Gordon writes about haunting as a sociological method: “to study social life one must confront the ghostly aspects of it”). Their insidiousness renders impossible the most essential human, bodily, animal needs — rest, care, belonging.
Plenty of brilliant people have been reimagining and modelling and building alternative spaces and radically-homelike ways of being for a long time (long before the #selfcare industry co-opted and stripped it of its politics and history). The heft of this comes from a rich history of Black feminist scholarship and liberation theory, including the transformative and revolutionary works of bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Gwendolyn Brooks, James Baldwin, Octavia Butler, and more recently adrienne maree brown. Tricia Hersey’s The Nap Ministry builds upon this lineage.
I’m only about a halfway through Rest is Resistance, but one of the fundaments of Hersey’s argument (reminiscent of Audre Lorde’s) is this:
“This protest against grind culture is for you to create in your own body. Your body is yours. Its uniqueness and stories it has to tell is yours. A community call toward rest as a form of activism is a call to slow down and listen and care. It is an empowered place filled by the shared goal of becoming more human. We are not machines. We are not on Earth to fulfil the desires of an abusive system via our exhaustion.” — Tricia Hersey, Rest is Resistance
Hersey said something (among many things) in this podcast interview that really struck me—Exhaustion only results in more of the same.
The same patterns. The same systems. The same hungry ghosts.
Rest, says Hersey, opens our ability to imagine an otherwise. It is not only necessary, but vital—not so we can return (temporarily restored) to the same, but so we can create something different.
I was recently reminded (by this podcast) that the etymology of “radical” is “root.”
In the abiding presence of insatiable hungry ghosts floating, rootless, wanting us to forget the presence of our own (roots)—may we tend to them.
hungry ghost poetics
—an excerpt from What Use is Knowing Anything if No One is Around, by Kaveh Akbar
The spirit lives in between
the parts of a name. It is vulnerable only to silence
and forgetting. I am vulnerable to hammers, fire,
and any number of poisons. The dream, then: to erupt
into a sturdier form, like a wild lotus bursting intoits tantrum of blades. There has always been a swarm
of hungry ghosts orbiting my body—even now,
I can feel them plotting in their luminous diamondsof fog, each eying a rib or a thighbone. They are
arranging their plans like worms preparing
to rise through the soil. They are ready to die
with their kind, dry and stiff above the wet earth.
Read the full poem, by Kaveh Akbar, here.
writing prompts for you:
What hungry ghosts are you meeting in this season? If they were to hold up a lantern, what needs would they illuminate—within you, within the home(s) and structures you inherit, inhabit, or are (re)imagining?
and/or, take the line from Kaveh Akbar above as an inroad, and write with it:
There has always been a swarm of hungry ghosts orbiting my body…
If you feel so called, you are more than welcome to share your words in the comments below!
a note on the newsletter in the coming months:
What the above has meant for the newsletter in the past months: a pause, as I seek new rhythms that feel nourishing and sustainable. What this means for the future of the newsletter, where it fits into these new rhythms, I’m still sorting out.
As my writing outside this space (academic & creative nonfiction) picks up, writing these monthly mini-essays here currently feels less sustainable for me. (I’ve tried to change this in the past, to no avail— this is me trying again!). This means upcoming changes in form & frequency. There will be months/seasons where I show up more frequently here and others where I am quiet.
This is all so to let you know that if you hear less often and in different ways from me here: I am not ghosting (ha! had to) The Liminal, which I care for deeply, and which I have (YOU) to thank for helping me write and show up in new ways. I’m just re-imagining what ways I can show up here that support, rather than drain, me amidst current, fluctuating realities.
This too is a form of care, I am learning. The dance between fluidity and structure, is one I am learning. We can be both the container and the water, I am learning.
Like me, like you: so may the structures we create.
Thank you, always, for being here. With heart,
Allie
within : embodied writing
WITHIN Season 4 is now underway, and it’s my favorite place to be this autumn. I learn so much from the incredible humans from all over the world who make up this collective and bring their bodies and histories and imaginations to the practice of embodied writing. When I talk about alternative spaces of orienting toward care, body, and creativity—this community gives me hope.
If you are interested in future Seasons of WITHIN — the waitlist for 2023 is open. Or, if you want to dive in already — there’s an on-demand version of the series to practice with on your own time: WITHIN: Your Time. Welcome!