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plant lover, cookie monster, shoe fiend
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The B.C. government says several construction contracts for long-term care homes that were delayed as part of February’s budget have now been cancelled, as has the contract for Phase 2 of the Burnaby Hospital redevelopment.
Mayors, hospital foundations and the provincial seniors advocate have all protested the decision, saying it means needed health-care resources won’t be built even as demand continues to grow.
Infrastructure Minister Bowinn Ma told reporters at the legislature on Thursday that budget constraints, given a projected record deficit of $13.3 billion, meant the government had to make some tough choices.
She said seven long-term care homes — in Delta, Abbotsford, Chilliwack, Kelowna, Fort St. John and Squamish — and the second phase of the redevelopment of Burnaby Hospital were projected to cost significantly more than budgeted.
“There is more work for our government to do with health authorities to get costs down and under budget so that we can deliver them sustainably for communities,” said Ma.
“In anticipation of moving to the next phase of project delivery, some health authorities did enter into contracts to help support that phase, because the projects are now operating on a different timeline, those contracts are affected, and in many cases, they’ve had to be cancelled.”
Ma said the projects still remain part of the capital plan, with the goal of getting them completed in the future.
In an email to Burnaby Hospital staff, Fraser Health executives said the contract with the multi-party Alliance construction group had been cancelled and that “we are working through what this means for the project and for each of you and will be in touch soon with more information.”
Burnaby Mayor Mike Hurley says that his community feels abandoned by the province and that he didn’t find out the hospital contract was being cancelled until Wednesday.
“Well, I’m absolutely devastated and frankly horrified by this decision. In 2018, the government said this was the most important health project in the province,” said Hurley. “Now they have seen to turn their back on Burnaby residents and east Vancouver residents and turn towards other things.”
The mayor said that Phase 1 of the redevelopment was a needed upgrade of a hospital that was built in the 1950s but that first phase of the project only added 12 new beds.
Phase 2 was going to include a 160-bed acute care tower, a B.C. Cancer treatment centre and a new medical imaging department.
Kristy James, CEO of the Burnaby Hospital Foundation, said donors had committed $55 million for both phases of the redevelopment, with $25 million of that set aside for Phase 2, which was budgeted to cost $1.8 billion.
She has previously disputed comments by Ma, who said the project has gone hundreds of millions of dollars over budget.
“We’re disappointed. Obviously, our board is extremely disappointed,” James said Thursday.
“We’ve been working since the budget announcement in February. We’ve been consistently reassured by the health minister, the infrastructure minister, our MLAs, we have been consistently, consistently reassured the project’s not cancelled, and it is just re-paced. But (a) terminated contract with no confirmed start date does sound more like a cancellation at this point.”
Delta Mayor George Harvie is equally upset about the decision to cancel the contract for the new Delta long-term care home, saying the community has raised $18 million for the project and that $10 million has been spent on infrastructure and getting the land ready for development.
He said that he had met Ma and sent letters to Premier David Eby urging the province to let Delta and the Delta Hospital Foundation figure out a way to lower the costs, but that offer was rejected. Ma has said the average of $1.8 million a bed was unacceptable.
The mayor said he is “disgusted” by the way the province has handled the project and that he will never forget how the government acted, including the lack of a heads-up that they would be cancelling the contract.
“They’ve already spent millions of dollars on establishing the infrastructure requirements, soil conditions for the build. It was ready for a building permit at the end of this year,” said Harvie. “But now, instead of just taking a pause, they’ve killed the project. They can use whatever words they want. They killed this project.”
The other long-term care projects whose contracts have been cancelled are in Abbotsford and Chilliwack, according to the B.C. Conservatives, with the status of additional projects in Campbell River, Kelowna, Fort St. John and Squamish unclear.
In budget estimates on Wednesday, Health Minister Josie Osborne said there were 7,829 seniors waiting for a long-term care bed, up from 7,029 last year.
Seniors advocate Dan Levitt said there is a critical need for long-term care services as the province’s population continues to get older.
“The recent decision to postpone or potentially cancel several planned long term care projects is deeply concerning, especially given how urgently these spaces are needed across our province,” he said.
“According to the Ministry of Health, we’re currently short 2,000 beds. We will be short 7,000 beds in five years, and then over 16,000 in the next decade. So now’s the time to be planning and building the infrastructure.”
In Chelsea Mazur’s dreams, she’s trying to use her inhaler but it’s not working.
The 30-something Winnipegger was diagnosed with asthma as a child. For years, she has kept it under control. But last summer’s wildfires and heat wave in Manitoba, which choked the skies with toxic, heavy smoke for weeks, presented a dilemma.
To cool off her scorching apartment, Mazur had to run her air conditioner. This pulled in smoky air, which triggered her asthma and forced her to use her inhaler.
She began refilling her prescription more often, worried she might run out, and checking the air quality index daily before leaving her home. The anxiety and stress of her hypervigilance invaded her sleep.
“I’d have a dream where I’m having trouble breathing,” she said in an interview with The Narwhal. In her dream, she reaches for her inhaler, but it doesn’t function. Then she wakes up. “There was more of that last summer,” she said.
More than five million Canadians live with respiratory conditions, including Winnipeger Chelsea Mazur. As climate change makes wildfire seasons worse and smoky skies more common, many of these people pay the price with their lungs. Photo: Supplied by Chelsea Mazur
Mazur, who works as a digital content specialist at the University of Manitoba, said she knows wildfires are becoming more frequent and more intense due to climate change, which is being driven by carbon pollution from fossil fuel use. She considers herself lucky she can access medicine for her asthma, but fears what the future may hold as the planet continues to heat up.
“It makes me worry about when I’m older, in my 60s and 70s. What’s it going to be like then to have asthma?” she said. “What’s the air quality going to be like, and how is it going to affect me?”
More than five million Canadians, like Mazur, live with respiratory conditions. As climate change makes wildfire seasons worse, many of them pay the price with their lungs.
The province of Manitoba experienced a devastating wildfire season in 2025. Photo: Government of Manitoba
Smoke days were responsible for up to a 23.6 per cent increase in asthma-related hospital emergency visits in Ontario in 2023, according to research published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal. Almost all respondents to a 2025 Asthma Canada survey reported worsening asthma symptoms with poor air quality, and most also reported a decline in their mental health.
Smoke from wildfires is a form of air pollution, carrying toxic gases like sulphur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide and carbon monoxide, as well as fine particulate matter. Other sources of air pollution, from car and truck exhaust to power plants and oil and gas facilities, are also hazardous to our health.
Wildfire smoke has blanketed many Canadian cities in recent years, including Edmonton, seen here in 2024. Smoke days were responsible for a 23.6 per cent increase in asthma-related hospital emergency visits in 2023, according to one study. Photo: Jason Franson / The Canadian Press
Air pollution can cause heart disease, strokes, chronic lung diseases and cancer, the World Health Organization notes. Federal research has found it contributes to about 17,400 premature deaths each year in Canada. In B.C., a nine-year-old died in 2023 after an asthma attack was made worse by wildfire smoke.
And that’s just one health impact of pollution and extreme weather. People exposed to air pollution also have a higher risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease, according to a study in the journal PLOS Medicine. Doctors and counsellors across Canada note that conditions from poor mental health to Lyme disease to detached retinas can be linked to the effects of a warming world.
In 2025, Winnipeg experienced 18 days where air pollution exceeded federal limits, an increase from four in 2024 and nine in 2023. Source: Open Meteo. Data analysis: Julia-Simone Rutgers / The Narwhal. Visualization: Andrew Munroe / The Narwhal
When Canadians talk about affordability, the discussion often revolves around the cost of fuel. While we pay for gasoline and diesel with our credit cards, in study after study, scientists have shown we also pay with our bodies.
In broad terms, it’s possible to juxtapose the economic output of fossil fuels with health costs. The federal energy regulator, for example, has reported the total value of crude oil exports from Canada was $138 billion in 2024. A Health Canada report that same year found the total cost of health impacts attributable to air pollution in 2018 was $146 billion.
But in other ways, it’s tough to quantify how much fossil fuels and climate change are costing Canadians and our health-care systems.
There’s a perpetual ripple effect of consequences that often go unaccounted for, Ottawa physician Helen Hsu said. Hsu specializes in addiction and mental health and is a spokesperson for the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment.
The indirect costs of climate change show up in things like premature deaths, she said, or the number of days people are sick and can’t work — which also brings a financial cost for businesses, though she’d rather not focus on that.
“It feels a bit ghoulish to say, ‘Well, how much do you contribute to our economy?’ ” Hsu said.
“I think certainly we do pay with our bodies, and we need to start really thinking about that.”
This is part of Who Pays?, a series at The Narwhal looking at the intersection of the environment and the economy
Alex Goatcher paid for B.C.’s 2021 heat dome and wildfires in terms of both physical and mental health, he told The Narwhal in an interview. That year a high-pressure system trapped heat on the ground, like an oven. It led to 619 deaths. Scientists have connected the severity of the wildfires and heat during this time to climate change.
Goatcher is a visitor services worker for Parks Canada and was living in Field, B.C., and working at Yoho National Park when the heat and fires trapped him inside for weeks.
He said he loves hiking on his days off, but couldn’t venture outside due to his asthma. Air conditioners were uncommon in the area until recently, he said, so he didn’t have one at the time.
“Being stuck inside during the prime of summer, with it being scorching hot and the smoke, it really negatively affected my mental health, to the point that I noticed my interactions with my neighbours were more hostile,” Goatcher said.
The outdoors are important to Alex Goatcher; he works at Parks Canada and loves hiking on his days off. In 2021, heat and wildfires exacerbated his asthma, trapping him inside for weeks. “It really negatively affected my mental health,” he said. Photo: Supplied by Alex Goatcher
Adding to Goatcher’s frustration was the way his asthma disrupted not just his immediate work, but his long-term career prospects. His supervisor, concerned for his health, ended up grounding Goatcher during the heat dome when other staff were sent out. He was also forced to turn down an internal job opportunity because it would have involved working outdoors.
“It never crossed my mind about the smoke and the fires and all that,” he said. “I never thought that this would be any sort of thing I’d have to really deal with.”
Métis sociologist Trisha McOrmond is on the national council of the volunteer climate action network For Our Kids. She uses her training in trauma-informed coaching when broaching the topic of climate change with people who are more vulnerable to extreme weather, including those who work outdoors in jobs like construction or farming.
Sociologist Trisha McOrmond said it’s a challenge to quantify the mental-health impacts of climate change. But that doesn’t mean they’re not real. “We don’t see the cost directly,” she said, “because we don’t have a system that measures those costs.” Photo: Supplied by Trisha McOrmond
“There is a level of frustration, and almost like a compartmentalization,” she said — a defence mechanism people use to avoid confronting the stress of knowing they will have to deal with more climate-change consequences at their job. “It’s hard for them to open up and have those conversations, because they have to put it away.”
She said it’s a challenge to put a specific dollar figure on the mental-health impacts of evacuations or other climate-related personal emergencies, because they can appear years after specific events and seem disconnected.
“They’re not showing up by people saying, ‘Oh, I’m worried about climate change.’ It’s showing up as disengagement at work, it’s showing up as [fatigue and burnout]. It’s showing up as increased domestic violence and interpersonal violence,” McOrmond said.
“We don’t see the cost directly, because we don’t have a system that measures those costs. And since we don’t measure them, we don’t see them.”
Most Canadians have come to understand how some unhealthy behaviours are connected to their health — like how smoking cigarettes increases their risk of lung cancer. But many still don’t see the associations between fossil fuel use, climate change and health impacts, Doris Grinspun, the chief executive officer of the Registered Nurses’ Association of Ontario, said in an interview.
This is especially true for work days lost to climate-linked health problems, Grinspun said.
“I don’t think people really are connecting the dots,” she said.
“When more pipelines get built, or we will not put an end to fossil fuels, we don’t say what the consequences will be, in human life, in disease, in death and in debt. We are already paying for it.”
Those costs manifest in ways we may not recognize — like our vision.
Particulate matter, certain gases and other pollutants hurt our eyes as well as our lungs, Montreal ophthalmologist Marie-Claude Robert said. Research has connected higher levels of particulate matter and nitrogen dioxide with more hospital emergency department visits for conjunctivitis, or pink eye.
Other research has suggested a link between heat waves and an increased risk of retinal detachment, which can cause flashes of light and dark spots in vision, as well as blindness if left untreated.
“In my personal practice, when we had heavy smog in Montreal from wildfires out west or up north, a lot of our patients would come in with acute worsening of their symptoms from that poor air quality,” Robert, who represents the Canadian Ophthalmological Society, said.
Montreal ophthalmologist Marie-Claude Robert said her patients experience worse symptoms when smog rolls over the city. Photo: Supplied by Marie-Claude Robert
There are a limited amount of treatments for these symptoms, and each one comes with costs. High-quality artificial tears, for example, can cost up to $30 a bottle and are usually not covered by insurance, she said.
Climate change is also increasing the risk of Lyme disease, as ticks spread into more locations and last longer each season. That disease can lead to chronic disabilities that can remove someone from the workforce, Hsu, the Ottawa physician, said. She’s personally seen a middle-aged man with no pre-existing medical conditions who contracted a tick-borne illness and became paralyzed for months.
Hidden costs also fall disproportionately on vulnerable populations like children, the elderly, those with pre-existing disabilities and pregnant women, Hsu said.
Heat can trigger premature labour, and keeping preterm babies alive is very expensive for the health-care system. It’s also emotionally and financially difficult for parents — premature birth is the leading cause of mortality in infants in Canada, and those that survive can have lifelong respiratory issues.
Climate change-related health costs also show up for those who live in remote regions, including First Nations who have to be evacuated from wildfires in their territories, and Inuit whose lands are warming faster than the rest of the world.
And the financially vulnerable are least able to afford measures to protect themselves, like air conditioners or air purifiers.
Hsu said one of her patients is paralyzed from the neck down and can’t afford air conditioning. During heat waves, he often passes out.
“He’s just living in a state of suffering every summer, and it’s incredibly unfair. It’s wrong that we’re asking those who are most vulnerable in our society to pay that cost,” she said.
When heat waves hit, the financially vulnerable — who might lack access to air conditioning or drinking water — are often the ones who suffer the most. Photo: Cole Burston / The Canadian Press
For Melanie Hoffman, a school board trustee and community organizer from Edmonton, the emotional toll and financial costs of climate change are front and centre.
As an infant, Hoffman’s now eight-year-old daughter contracted a virus that infects the respiratory tract and had to be hospitalized, eventually requiring airway reconstruction surgery, she said. As a result, she pays close attention to air quality.
A few summers ago, when the city was engulfed in wildfire smoke, Hoffman realized her daughter’s outdoor-focused camp didn’t have guidelines in place for how to accommodate smoke days by bringing the kids inside.
“I felt really concerned for my daughter’s health, but also for the youth that were running the camp. This was their summer job, and they were required to be outside. They weren’t given the tools to manage that,” she said.
She and her husband had to solve the logistical problem of who could take time off work to keep their daughter home. She understands that this is a privilege.
“If your kids need you home, if you’re self employed, you’re going to pay for that in lost revenue. And if you don’t have benefits from your employer, you’re going to pay in lost days of work,” she said.
As air pollution becomes a greater concern, Canadians are forced to weigh the risks of outdoor exertion under smoky skies. Photo: Bryan Dickie / The Narwhal
Just as difficult was navigating the tension between wanting her to be able to go to the camp and the uncertainty about exactly how harmful the long-term consequences of exposure can be.
“I had not processed for myself the fact that these are the rest of the summers of my daughter’s life. Growing up, certainly in her youth, she is not going to know a summer that isn’t in a changing climate,” she said.
Hoffman holds a PhD in chemistry, is the former program manager for Capital Region EcoSchools with the Alberta Council for Environmental Education and volunteers with the Climate Reality Project Canada. She knows science-based climate solutions, like transitioning to renewable energy sources, using heat pumps and improving public transit, work. But, she said, there’s “an issue of political will and cultural inertia.”
McOrmond, the sociologist, sees a glimmer of hope in the course she teaches on systems thinking, a way of examining the different components of why the world is set up the way it is and how decisions are made as a result. She says students bring excitement and enthusiasm to conversations “as they start to realize that there is another way of looking at this world that isn’t just about extraction.”
Some of the climate solutions related to health she points to are movements to source local ingredients and share food, community-supported agriculture in rural areas to help farmers get food to local markets, local community festivals, volunteer-run shops and food banks.
“We have to stop looking at the big things that are scaring us, and start looking at the small things that are saving us,” she said.
“The more local we are, the safer we are. I know that sounds contradictory, but once we’re safe locally, we can begin to make changes and we can move the needle on a bigger scale. We just have to know each other, and have to trust each other.”
— With files from Julia-Simone Rutgers
Updated on April 23, 2026, at 12:20 p.m. ET: This story has been corrected to note that Melanie Hoffman is the former, not current, program manager for Capital Region EcoSchools with the Alberta Council for Environmental Education.
When federal agents came to the home of David Morens on Monday with an arrest warrant for allegedly concealing federal records related to the debate about the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, they behaved as if the 78-year-old retired scientist was a violent criminal.
Science has learned that Morens, an influenza researcher who worked at the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) until 2022 and was an aide to its former director, Anthony Fauci, was having his morning coffee at his Chester, Maryland, home when he heard loud pounding on the door. He opened it to find a half-dozen federal agents carrying guns and wearing tactical gear, including bulletproof vests, according to two sources who spoke with him but asked not to be identified. Another team of officers stood in the distance and observed, as did neighbors.
The agents did not harm Morens, but took off his pants and shirt, handcuffed him, and drove him 65 kilometers to the U.S. District Court in Greenbelt, Maryland, where he was fingerprinted, photographed, and jailed. He was released on his own recognizance later in the day, but was asked to return to Greenbelt and surrender his passport, which he did.
The Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees NIAID, and FBI both have field agents who make arrests in federal cases like this. Only FBI replied to Science’s questions. “The claims about aggressive tactics are inaccurate,” it stated in an email. “The FBI respectfully follows policy and procedures for the safety of everyone involved in the operation.”
Morens, a medical doctor, has no criminal record and served in both the Commissioned Corps of the U.S. Public Health Service and the U.S. Army Reserve. In cases involving alleged crimes that do not involve people known to be dangerous—such as drug dealers or violent gang members—prosecutors often allow defendants to self-surrender. Former FBI Director James Comey, who was indicted yesterday, had just such an arrangement. “It’s a shameful, politically motivated attack on science,” says Edward Holmes, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Sydney who once collaborated with Morens. “I’m at a loss for words.”
Some in Congress have called for filing charges against Fauci, too, for how he handled COVID-19 origin matters. But Fauci was pardoned by former President Joe Biden on his last day in office because of concerns about the potential for “unjustified and politically motivated prosecutions.”
Morens is accused of violations including trying to circumvent the Freedom of Information Act by using personal email rather than his government account in efforts to help Peter Daszak, former head of the EcoHealth Alliance, a now-defunct nonprofit research organization. Daszak’s NIAID grant had been cut in 2020 as a partisan debate over the origins of SARS-CoV-2 gathered steam. The grant funded research on bat coronaviruses, and Daszak had subcontracted work to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China.
The proximity of WIV to the city that first suffered from a widespread outbreak of COVID-19 has led to intense suspicions that the virus leaked from the lab. Republican lawmakers and the Trump administration have promoted that theory despite growing but still not definitive evidence—including studies Holmes co-authored—that an infected mammal at a Wuhan market spread it to humans there.
“This smells to me like political theater, and is absolutely overkill,” says Daszak, a recipient of some of Morens’s personal emails who was barred from future National Institutes of Health funding in 2024 after the government found he had violated federal grant rules. “David Morens has already suffered severe consequences because of the investigations from Congress, and I don’t see the value to the public of pursuing this in such an aggressive and unnecessary way.”
An arraignment is set for 8 May in the Maryland court. Morens faces decades in prison if convicted of all five counts against him, which include altering and destroying records in a federal investigation and conspiracy against the United States.
A higher number of military recruits are failing to pass basic training since changes were implemented to boost enrolment, says a leaked report circulating within Canada's defence community.
The 15-page internal evaluation report, dated Jan. 27, says the success rate dropped to 77 per cent in 2025, compared to 85 per cent the previous year.
On Thursday, defence officials verified the authenticity of the report by Lt.-Col. Marc Kieley, commandant of the Canadian Forces Leadership and Recruit School (CFLRS) in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Que.
Defence officials announced last week that the military had achieved the highest level of recruiting in three decades, and that the overall size of the Armed Forces had begun to grow modestly for the first time in several years.
They highlighted how the military beat its recruitment target, helped mostly by the enrolment of 1,400 permanent residents.
Kieley’s report, however, noted a series of problems including the number of new troops suffering from mental health conditions, notably anxiety, as well as cultural issues.
The proportion of candidates requiring multiple attempts to graduate from basic training jumped to 14.89 per cent, the report said. That's far higher than the 8.44 per cent who required multiple attempts in 2024, and well above long-established annual rates.
Over the last few years, the federal government has sought to boost military recruiting by relaxing several policies related to pre-existing medical conditions, and has stopped doing aptitude tests.
The Defence Department also opened the door to recruiting more foreign nationals and newly arrived Canadians with permanent residency.
"The current CAF basic training model assumes that roughly 85 per cent of all candidates can be effectively trained to become CAF soldiers, sailors and aviators and officers, with the majority requiring only a single training course and a minority taking two or three attempts," Kieley wrote.
The recruiting school delivers basic military qualification courses and basic military officer qualification training. The increase in the failure rate has "created significant friction" within the training school.
Juno News was the first to publish the evaluation report.
Kieley expressed concern about the "dramatic increase" in the number of applicants "presenting significant mental-health concerns," including anxiety.
According to the report, 92 recruit candidates had to be sent to an outside hospital or clinic on multiple occasions.
"The local suicide crisis centre is typically filled to full capacity with CFLRS candidates," Kieley wrote, adding that a number of the recruits aren’t disclosing their mental health challenges during the initial recruitment process.
He recommended the military keep a close eye on the enrolment of candidates with pre-existing medical conditions.
Changes that allowed for the admission of permanent residents into the Forces also meant a higher number of training units with newly arrived immigrants.
"These initial platoons were also made up of candidates with as little as three months residency in Canada, leading to a significant culture shock as candidates had not yet acclimatized to Canadian society, let alone Canadian military culture," Kiely wrote.
Those units had a higher failure rate, with one French-speaking unit graduating only 48 per cent of the class.
Permanent residents have "been a challenging demographic to train," said the report.
The unit cited with the high failure rate was also beset with allegations of racism and infighting, such as recruits from Cameroon "against those from Côte d’Ivoire."
Kieley also noted that in the officer training unit, some permanent residents struggled with the culture shock of being "expected to treat women as their peers."
Since I stopped consuming caffeine sometime about two months ago I have lost nearly all desire to be creative. At first I interpreted this to be a good thing—once I removed the drug I no longer felt a compulsion to produce. Writing words and music are the primary ways I have been creative recently, and even though I have no one demanding any of these things from me (no deadlines to meet, no one to impress or appease; my livelihood is not tied to this work in any way) still I felt compelled, to make something of my thoughts and feelings, to mold and shape them into artifacts of my life. Now though, I began to realize it was as if my habit of drinking caffeine brought with it not only increased energy but an increase in feeling like I must put that energy to some good use.
Even Thoreau commented on this in Walden:
I would fain keep sober always; and there are infinite degrees of drunkenness. I believe that water is the only drink for a wise man; wine is not so noble a liquor; and think of dashing the hopes of a morning with a cup of warm coffee, or of an evening with a dish of tea! Ah, how low I fall when I am tempted by them! Even music may be intoxicating. Such apparently slight causes destroyed Greece and Rome, and will destroy England and America. Of all ebriosity, who does not prefer to be intoxicated by the air he breathes? I have found it to be the most serious objection to coarse labors long continued, that they compelled me to eat and drink coarsely also.
It is no secret that caffeine (but not only caffeine) consumption and overconsumption is intimately connected with market demands to produce more and more, thereby increasing the demand for more stimulants—the relationship between coarse labors and eating and drinking coarsely is ouroboros-like. So I spit out my tail. But if my cup had become more transparent immediately after abstaining it has since grown cloudy and murky—not because I have started drinking caffeine again but because whatever clarity I was afforded by my initial abstinence has now worn off.
As an entrepreneur of the self, the achievement-subject is free insofar as he or she is not subjugated to a commanding and exploiting Other. However, the suject is still not really free because he or she now engages in self-exploitation—and does so of his or own free will… The neoliberal dictum of freedom finds expression in the paradoxical imperitve, Be free. But this plunges the achievement-subject into depression and exhaustion. Even though Foucault’s “ethics of the self” stands opposed to political repression and allo-exploitation in general, it is blind to the violence of the freedom that underlies auto-exploitation. …You can exercises even greater constraint than You should. Auto-compulsion proves more fatal than allo-compulsion, because there is no way to resist oneself.
Byung-Chul Han, The Agony of Eros
Whatever coarse labors I have felt less compelled to do since abstaining from caffeine have nonetheless plunged me into exhaustion. Generally speaking I think my mood has improved these past months, my patience increased as well. At first I felt more energetic and I even slept better—easier time falling asleep and easier time waking up. But the exhaustion has returned, tempting me to bite my own tail again.
Initially, back when I started professionally caring for my brother over 15 years ago, I struggled with the switch from pursuing a creative life to pursuing a life of caregiving. I felt it was the better path morally—spiritually even—to care for my brother than to perform and teach and music—labors that didn’t seem to matter that much, at least not in the same way that caring for someone who cannot care for themselves did. And so I found my footing and began to walk that path, though I frequently found my shoes were caked with shit and piss. Naturally I had to stop making music, stop creating, stop performing. There was no time and besides I had more important things to do.
In the past three or four years I started writing mainly as therapy, but it quickly became something I enjoyed and looked forward to. It seemed to be a creative pursuit that could—I hoped—coexist with the life of a caregiver. I began writing music again too, rehearsing and recording with some old friends, and even playing a few scattered shows. However, trying to spend what little free time and energy I had making music or writing only made it harder for me to take care of my brother. Maybe I could do both and not plunge into depression and exhaustion if I overconsumed caffeine…
Yet even these past two caffeine-free months I still feel just as exhausted and exploited as I did before. Somewhere along the way I began to equate my creative pursuits with the You can and caregiving with the You should imperative. Over the course of the 15 or so years taking care of my brother being creative slowly transformed into a coarse labor, a distraction from my primary, more elevated and noble labor of caregiving. Time spent rehearsing, writing and reading, making music—they were taking away precious resources from what was really important. And yet now, I feel more and more like caregiving has become the coarse labor, or more accurately, that I am performing those labors coarsely.
Against the popular or common sentiment that creative pursuits or hobbies can help insulate me from the devastation of difficult work like caregiving, my own experiences are a bit harder to parse. The You can proves to be impossible to overcome, with or without caffeine. I find myself stuck somewhere between the You can and the You should, each of them coarsely feeding on the other. I at once desire to be creative, to touch the source of things, and to share what results, and also to devote my life to caring for my brother. I cannot, it seems, do either for very long, without feeling compelling or pulled towards the other, and there is no balancing them, because each of them demands everything that I am.
My son was riding his bike up and down the alley by our house and I found myself bracing for some terrible accident, broken limbs and bloodied knees—that sort of thing. Not that I had any reason to worry but because, even now, going on seven years of being a parent, I still find myself getting lost in the abyss that is imagining the worst-case scenario. In the summers we go to a family cottage on Lake Michigan and always take a ferry trip to Mackinac Island. Without fail, we sit on the open top deck and right at the edge (so my son can crane over the side and watch the waves). Visions of him tumbling overboard fill my head the entire drive up to the cottage, yet while we are actually physically sitting on the boat, with the wind in our faces and my arms securely around him, I have never once felt like he was unsafe.
In How Forests Think, Eduardo Kohn describes a moment of panic while traveling to the Amazon in Ecuador. Landslides are a common occurrence on those mountain passes and on one particular occasion the bus he was on got caught between several:
Traffic was backed up in both directions, and we were trapped by a series of landslides scattered over a distance of several kilometers. The mountain above was starting to fall on us. At one point a rock crashed down onto our roof. I was scared.
He notes, however, that no one else on the bus was fazed. Sensing that his experience of that moment was out of sync with the people around him he began to feel a sense of alienation, first from his fellow passengers, then from his own body:
This discrepancy between my perception of the world and that of those around me sundered me from the world and those living in it. All I was left with were my own thoughts of future dangers spinning themselves out of control. And then something more disturbing happened. Because I sensed that my thoughts were out of joint with those around me, I soon began to doubt their connection to what I had always trusted to be there for me: my own living body, the body that would otherwise give a home to my thoughts and locate this home in a world whose palpable reality I shared with others. I came, in other words, to feel a tenuous sense of existence without location—a sense of deracination that put into question my very being. For if the risks I was so sure of didn’t exist—after all, no one else on that bus seemed frightened that the mountain would fall on us—then why should I trust my bodily connection to that world? Why should I trust '“my” connection to “my” body? And if i didn’t have a body what was “I”? Was I even alive? Thinking like this, my thought ran wild.
These feelings—thoughts of future dangers spinning out of control, of being so mistrusting of your own sense of the world that you begin to doubt your very being—are familiar to me, and I imagine to most parents. In addition to reminding me of how I felt for the better part of two years after my son was born, Kohn’s words also reminded me of Thoreau’s infamous contact passage from his first trip to the Maine woods:
I stand in awe of my body, this matter to which I am bound has become so strange to me. I fear not spirits, ghosts, of which I am one,—that my body might,—but I fear bodies, I tremble to meet them. What is this Titan that has possession of me? Talk of mysteries! Think of our life in nature,—daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it,—rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?
There is a shared experience here, between Kohn and Thoreau, even including the aftermath of these rupturing events. For the next day or two both continued to feel the anxiety of this disconnection. In The Maine Woods, Thoreau’s description of the return journey is filled with anxiety and unease, describing waterfalls and portages with uncharacteristic nervousness. Kohn describes the racing thoughts of what might have happened, “different dangerous scenarios,” that would not relent even a day after the landslides had been cleared and they were able to pass safely through. Yet in both cases they were able to find a path out of the abyss and back into the world.
For Thoreau this path was an encounter with a Penobscot man, Louis Neptune, whom at first he didn’t recognize: “…we discovered two canoes, with two men in each, turning up this stream from Shad Pond, one keeping the opposite side of a small island before us, while the other approached the side where we were standing, examining the banks carefully for muskrats as they came along. The last proved to be Louis Neptune and his companion, now, at last, on their way up to Chesuncook after moose, but they were so disguised that we hardly knew them.” This was enough to bring Thoreau back to the present moment, to the actual world and its inhabitants, and to his own body.
Kohn had a similar encounter, but with an indigenous bird. After deciding to go for a walk with his companion he spotted a tanager and grabbed his binoculars to get a better look: “I rolled the focusing knob and the moment that bird’s thick black beak became sharp I experienced a sudden shift. My sense of separation simply dissolved. And, like the tanager coming into focus, I snapped back into the world of life.”
In all three cases it is symbolic thought that has proliferated, cancer-like, unchecked and untethered to the larger world beyond the human.
One of Kohn’s points is that symbolic thought isn’t separate from but emerges out of other registers of thought but that this separation is exactly what symbolic thought has a propensity to do:
We tend to assume that because something like the symbolic is exceptionally human and thus novel it must also be radically separate from that which it comes… If, as I claim, our distinctively human thoughts stand in continuity with the forest’s thoughts insofar as both are in some way or other the products of the semiosis that is intrinsic to life, then an anthropology beyond the human must find a way to account for the distinctive qualities of human thought without losing sight of its relation to these more pervasive semiotic logics.
[Panic and its dissipation] point both to the real dangers of unfettered symbolic thought and to how such thought can be regrounded. Watching birds regrounded my thoughts, and by extension my emerging self, by re-creating the semiotic environment in which symbolic reference is itself nested. Through the artifice of my binoculars I became indexically aligned with a bird, thanks to the fact that I was able to appreciate its image now coming into sharp focus right there in front of me. This event reimmersed me in something… a knowable (and shareable) environment, and the assurance, for the moment, of some sort of existence, tangibly located in a here and now that extended beyond me but of which I too could come to be a part.
I am new to semiotics and admittedly know very little, only as much as I have read (and understood) so far in Kohn’s book. But contemplating these three scenarios side-by-side-by-side reminds me of the importance of those modes and registers of thought outside of the human and symbolic. Kohn doesn’t mention this (perhaps he will later in the book) but I have a feeling that much of our technology also functions as some sort of hyper-symbolic realm, generating entire worlds disconnected from the elemental conditions that gave rise to them.
We need pray for no higher heaven than the pure senses can furnish, a purely sensuous life. Our present senses are but the rudiments of what they are destined to become. We are comparatively deaf and dumb and blind, and without smell or taste or feeling. Every generation makes the discovery, that its divine vigor has been dissipated, and each sense and faculty misapplied and debauched. The ears were made, not for such trivial uses as men are wont to suppose, but to hear celestial sounds. The eyes were not made for such grovelling uses as they are now put to and worn out by, but to behold beauty now invisible. May we not see God? Are we to be put off and amused in this life, as it were with a mere allegory? Is not Nature, rightly read, that of which she is commonly taken to be the symbol merely?
Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
The older I get the harder it is to push myself into uncomfortable situations. Not difficult ones, and not even dangerous ones—just uncomfortable. Yet it is still something I believe is important, not just for me, but for my son as well. In those uncomfortable situations I am forced to confront the world and my body—I cannot hide behind the comfort of the symbolic. These are situations where I cannot avoid the discomfort that accompanies embodiment, both within and without. The elements insist and I cannot stop them; I hike miles into the woods and have no choice but to hike back, despite my body wanting to stop. Allowing myself to feel this kind of discomfort has long been a way for me to reground, to reconnect to the wider world around me, to include myself in the world rather than isolating myself from it.
I didn’t intend to talk about both of these things, instead attempting to just present some of my scattered thoughts in a scattered way. But I do think there might be some connection between these two.
Attempting to balance creative pursuits and caregiving is impossible, perhaps, because balancing is an act of the achievement-subject, and the creative, non-symbolic forces of the world, Nature rightly read, can only cause imbalance.
Eros is a relationship to the Other situated beyond achievement, performance, and ability. Being able not to be able represents its negative counterpart… A successful relationship with the Other finds expression as a kind of failure. Only by way of being able not to be able does the Other appear.
…Achievement society—which is dominated by ability, and where everything is possible and everything occurs as an initiative and a project—has no access to love as something that wounds or incites passion.
Byung-Chul Han, The Agony of Eros
Eros is not just about passion and the erotic, but concerns, necessarily, the Other, and that gulf between self and Other is where creativity resides. “Therefore,” as Byung-Chul Han says, “in the inferno of the same, which contemporary society is increasingly becoming, erotic experience does not exist.”
For Thoreau and Kohn both, an experience of the Other was what led them out of the symbolic abyss and back into their bodies and the world. The distance between themselves and the Other was what allowed them to leave the symbolic and come into contact with their bodies, with creativity, with Nature. But that distance is crucial and collapsing it—whether through the symbolic or through an aversion to the discomfort of that distance—annihilates not just the Other but Eros, Life.
I very much feel that I am able not to be able. Perhaps my failures at both caregiving and at writing words and music, is, actually, a good sign.
Mood: Melted. There is no other word for it.
There is a practiced but familiar rhythm to my life that usually only I can hear. It is the rapid-fire thwip-thwip-click of a screen reader, the frantic, synthetic heartbeat of my phone as I navigate the world at five hundred words per minute. To anyone else, it sounds like a droid having a panic attack. To me, it is just the sound of access.
I know this rhythm so intimately that when someone is using a screen reader for the first time, desktop or mobile, it’s a kind of signal before I even say hello.
Usually, when a sighted person wants to help me with my phone, when an app updates and breaks its own accessibility labels, turning a useful tool into a minefield of "Button, Button, Unlabeled Button"—they take away the thing they don't know how to use.
It usually happens like this. They sigh, they take the device from my hand, and they then silence the voice, reverting to the world of the sighted. Of course, they fix the problem with their eyes before handing it back.
I am grateful for their help, certainly. But it is also a reminder that I live in a world that requires a translation layer they can simply peel away when it becomes inconvenient for them. Them turning off the screen reader reminds me that my world is something they'd rather get rid of, rather than ask me how to use the device with the screen reader enabled.
But there are those people that stun and amaze me. Not for what they say, but what they choose to do.
Tonight, I witnessed something that gave the word, love, a new dimension.
I was sitting on his couch, half-listening to a podcast, when I heard the distinct, robotic cadence of VoiceOver coming from the other end of the cushion. But it wasn't my phone chattering, and the rhythm was wrong. It wasn't the lightning-fast blur I use. It was slow. Deliberate. And extremely clumsy.
Swipe. Pause. Swipe. Pause. Double-tap... silence.
Then, the frustrated, rumbling baritone of his voice, muttering a soft curse.
"“The hell is that gesture again? You finna be thrown ‘cross the room if you don't behave.”
I froze. Anthony, a gay Black man I recently met, only had a passing interest in my world. He’d ask questions. I’d answer them. he seemed to be content never going beyond what I provided. this was unexpected and earth shattering.
I shifted, sliding my hand across the plushness of the couch until my fingers brushed his knee. He was tense, his leg muscle rigid.
"What are you doing?" I asked.
"Trying to order that Pizza," he grumbled. "The app updated. You said you couldn't find the checkout button yesterday."
"I know," I said. "But usually you just... look at it."
"Yeah, I'm not looking at it," he said, and I could hear the stubborn set of his jaw in his tone. "I turned the screen curtain on."
My chest did a strange, tight flip. Screen curtain is a feature that turns the display off entirely for privacy, forcing you to rely 100% on the audio. He was simulating blindness and not for a few minutes, only to be grateful he never has to be trapped in my world again. Anthony, who's moderately tech savvy, willingly plunged himself into my world. Given his tense muscles and tight voice, he’d been at this for a while. Nobody ever does this for their own understanding, at least, not in my universe. Still, I had to ask.
"Why?"
He paused. I heard his thumb drag across the glass again. “Unlabeled button,” the synth voice deadpanned.
"Because you were frustrated," he said, his voice sincere and vibrating with that chest-deep resonance that always grounds me. "You were frustrated yesterday, and I told you it was 'easy,' and you got quiet. I realized... I didn't know what I was talking about. I didn't know what you was goin' through every day. I wanted to feel what you feel when something ain't accessible."
He tapped the glass again. Thump-thump. A hollow sound. The gesture didn't take.
"How do you do the... the thing to go back?" he asked, sounding defeated. "I'm doing the Z-scrub gesture but my fingers are too big."
I had to bite my lip to keep from crying. Nobody ever did this long enough to understand. Here Anthony was, asking me how to navigate in my world instead of going back into his familiar sighted world.
I reached out, covering his large, warm hand with mine. I could feel the heat of his frustration, the tension in his fingers as they hovered over the glass. He was struggling. He was failing. He was experiencing the exact, maddening friction that defines so much of my digital life.
And it was the most romantic thing I have ever witnessed.
He wasn't trying to save me. He wasn't trying to be the hero who fixes the broken thing. He was trying to be with me in the brokenness. He wanted the empathy of shared frustration. He wanted to understand why I was tired, not just that I was tired.
"It's a two-finger scrub," I whispered, my voice emotional. "Like you're scratching a lottery ticket."
He tried it. Scrub-scrub.
“Back,” the phone announced.
"Got it," he breathed, and the relief in his voice was pure triumph.
I leaned my head against his shoulder, listening to the slow, stumbling rhythm of his fingers learning my language. It sounded like a child learning piano. It was the best sound in the world.
He never did find the checkout button. We ended up calling the restaurant. But as he sat there, struggling with a piece of glass in the dark, refusing to open his eyes to the easy way out, I realized that he hadn't just learned a gesture. He had learned me.
And that's what real love is all about.
If you enjoyed this show of care, you might like Daydream by Hannah Grace
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