alanna dongowski
alanna dongowski (*2000) studied fine arts. They paint, make experimental videos, and write. In addition to that, they like to read about and discuss the conditions under which art can happen. Their work has been shown in artist-run art spaces and screenings. They currently live and work on the outskirts of Berlin.
More info available at www.alannadongowski.de
Instagram: @anna.dongowski
I’m so tired, I can’t sleep
When I say I am tired, I mean I feel like I just hopped on the last night-bus home, barely reaching it on time, all heavy eylids and sore legs from running, and then realizing, just as I’m catching my breath, that it’s the wrong line and I’m going straight to the middle of nowhere that is Berlin C-Bereich, not the part of it where my home is, but another part, with no chance to get off for the next 15 minutes, a sketchy passenger in the seat next to me and still an hour to go according to google maps.
I’m tired, but I can’t lie down. I want to go to a place that’s warm, quiet and comfortable, but I have no idea how to get there, where or what this place could even be and I don’t think I have it in me to walk all this way and look for it.
One of the first texts I ever read on crip was Johanna Hedva’s Sick Woman Theory. And while it tremendously helped me understand and speak about my place in the world, I still remember the first few sentences alarming me, ringing in my head like sirens. Those parts about being sick and having to stay indoors while other people are taking part in the protests one wanted to join. And then taking part virtually, through the phone, and finding solidarity and inclusion through that.
I refuse to frame my suspicion regarding most online activism as paranoia. Because how can you trust a platform like META with your politics?
I also refuse to see my unwillingness to broadcast myself to an anonymous mass audience as anxiety. My political socialisation taught me to protect my identity. And I know how people receive or reject a message, depending on the look of the face that communicates it.
I don’t want to be diagnosed with apathy and psychomotor retardation either. Sometimes it’s better to do nothing, than to do something just for the sake of doing something. Adorno called it „Pseudoaktivität“, these things you do to tell yourself you were on the right side of history, all the while not even knowing what, if any at all, impact they had. Always having to stay busy, even as an activist, even as an anarchist, that is capitalist logic applied to what is supposed to overcome capitalism.
In Penny Royal Tea, a song named after a DIY abortion technique, Kurt Cobain sang I’m so tired, I can’t sleep.
And that’s how I feel about sickness. The cure that you’d assume would help is unavailable and impossible.
One of the things I experience as part of my sickness is unforeseeable nausea and seizures. They don’t happen very often, but most of the time I’m in public when they happen. There is no point in calling my friends, who all live at least an hour away from me. Usually I just try to warn the other passengers, like: „Hey, I’m having a seizure. Please don’t be scared and, if possible, keep your voice low. I might need help getting out of this train.“. Usually noone helps me. I think people don’t really understand things that are uncommon. If I call an ambulance, I’ll just be driven to the next hospital, and discharged once it’s my turn to be examined, cause the seizures don’t even last that long and I’m mostly fine afterwards. I wish there was an ambulance that just drove you home.
I think I’m most tired of neat boxes and a narrative of sickness that consists of:
sickness → rest → betterment (repeat)
or
sickness → treatment → betterment (repeat)
I’m 25 now and only since february, for the first time in my adult life, I own a mattress that wasn’t broken or used by someone else. My bed is comfy and smells good, but it’s not the first place I think of when I think of my sickness. Not this Tracy Emin Archetype, this individual Monument. I think of something like a network, an invisible layer of connection, information, a subway plan.
I’ve had activist friends being interviewed by conservative journalists when they had to take a step back from their involvement in political movements due to mental health issues. And I don’t want my sickness broadcasted like that. I want information on how to do mental first aid broadcasted in public. Not personal stories. No testaments to individual failure. And no lists and data-packages shared between mental health providers and the police of Hessen or NRW.
When I think about politics, I often think about very intimate settings. Like homes behind closed doors. Parents watching TV. Someone experiencing domestic violence with the shutters closed. A woman not being allowed to use the computer alone, because her husband doesn’t want her to access information. Someone ingesting a herb or chemical to alter the state of their bodymind. These acts are charged and happen accross distances regardless of whether the people reenacting them know eachother, relate to eachother or see eachother as part of a demographic/movement/community, or not. And sickness can be similar. There is no rest for the wicked and what do we do as long as there’s nothing on the outside to relate or connect to yet, is also something.
I often think that the most effective activism would be whatever activates your direct surroundings. And most of the time that doesn’t look like a protest march. It probably also doesn’t look like what you already see happening everywhere else.
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