If you’ve ever received bodywork (perhaps a massage, cupping, or acupuncture) you may have experienced a heightened awareness post-session of muscle tension creeping back in. Maybe you realized some of your daily movements and interactions were in fact sources of tension. Bodywork, like any healing modality or shift in pace, allows us to better measure our somatic states across familiar surroundings.

Over the last few years, as lockdown induced global deceleration and covid-capitalism charged on, I witnessed myself and my friends developing a similar sense of friction as we moved between stillness, grief, and survival. Specifically, I noticed a more acute awareness of isolation and burnout within ourselves, and structural barriers within our industries and communities. Every time we slowed down, the speed of life around us felt more dissonant.

People within and outside of creative industries increasingly speak of being stuck in “survival mode”, of being unable to prioritize rest and deprioritize production, unless our bodies bring us to a grinding halt. Burnout erodes our sense of self, and we become prone to comparison and jealousy. Burnout is also deeply isolating and has compounded the physical isolation we’ve experienced throughout the pandemic. Prolonged isolation, in turn, has restructured all the ways we relate and commune. 

Even now, living in a dense city with a near-infinite possibility for connection, I am obviously not immune to isolation. I notice that all intimacies and kinships must be tended very actively and intentionally in order to last, across digital and offline spaces. It doesn’t come easy – early on I’d go to clubs chasing my fantasies to feel calm, to feel euphoric, to feel desire. Some nights would be so beautiful and surreal they’d entirely shift how I approach organizing, pleasure, and safety. Other nights I’d instead find the ground turning into quicksand underfoot, feeling the ache of alienation. For me, the club is less a space of deep presence and more often one of disassociation – which can be a balm in its own way.

For the past two years as our surroundings warped around us, we all quietly watched many of our fantasies wither, coping with heartbreak in private. I imagine us all as sea sponges absorbing everything our environments offer us, from data to nutrients to emotions to resources. When we are severed from our environments we become saturated with capitalist messaging, with each isolating influence causing us to contract further. 

Examining these crises of pace, selfhood, and relation reveals Darwin’s “survival of the fittest'' theory as one of several precursors to modern capitalism. In the 1850s Darwin’s theory positioning competition as the crux of life was translated to sociology, politics, and economics as Social Darwinism, from which modern capitalism emerged in the 19th century. Social Darwinism was also employed to justify eugenics, facism, and authoritarian regimes around the world. Survival of the fittest ideology rears its head in so many of our social relations, from CDC messaging surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, to education access, to food distribution, to (yes) music and creative fields.

Searching for antidotes to isolation, competition, and burnout guided me to the natural world – specifically mycology – for answers. In Merlin Sheldrake’s mycology book “Engangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures”, he summarizes a study offering the term “‘involution… [i.e.] rolling, curling, turning inward’”, as an alternative to “evolution”. Involution dislodges Darwin's theory as the dominant understanding of life over time, instead suggesting that life on earth has solely persisted through all lifeforms becoming more enmeshed and symbiotic. 

If gatekeeping is survival of the fittest ideology internalized and imbued into our social relations, then socialism, mutual aid, and abolition might emerge on the flip side as political equivalents of involution. Gatebreaking then, could be a more accessible umbrella term for interpersonal involution and enmeshing, or simply the opposite of gatekeeping. So teaching people all your skills and cheat codes, sharing as many material and informational resources as possible, and unraveling barriers and hierarchies within a space you inhabit. 

Sharing this idea of gatebreaking online, I half-jokingly made a style mood board for gatebreakers that featured comfortable, durable garments, including hiking clogs, a puffer skirt, and a fuzzy multicolored scarf-hat. Ultimately, what anyone chooses to wear when they’re gatebreaking is unimportant, but I do believe that individual and communal comfort lies at the heart of gatebreaking. I want nightlife and gathering spaces to have more seating and snacks, bodywork stations, safe ride funds, and harm reduction measures (including earplugs, condoms, and safer substance supplies like narcan, fentanyl testing strips, and cup condoms to prevent drink spiking). All of this has been done before for free or with minimal fundraising, and can be prioritized at any moment. Comfort is about expanding into the edges of yourself and your surroundings, slowing down, and honoring the abundance of knowledge within and around you. What comes to mind when you envision maximum comfort? 

On a personal level, one specific event foreshadowed and shaped my thoughts surrounding gatebreaking. Last year I was on my way to a DJ set while managing seasonal chronic pain and needed urgent relief. I ducked into a CVS and iced my hands with a few foil-wrapped ice cream sandwiches for 40 minutes, stressed enough that I entirely disregarded what other shoppers were thinking, and lost sight of the fact that I was late to my set. I realized then how chronic pain encourages improvisation and innovation beyond the prescriptions of traditional Western medicine, creates fissures within capitalism, and can encourage slowness. When I look back on that brief moment of prioritizing my own comfort, I think of all I have yet to learn from disability justice and chronic pain communities on gatebreaking and access. I dream of ways we – particularly visual artists, graphic designers, and coders – can better circulate non traditional knowledge and healing tools hidden in plain sight. 

As the new year provides space to parse collective isolation, grief, burnout, and internalized capitalism, and clears the ground for new collective fantasies, I hope we can resource each other towards maximum comfort. Whether we label it gatebreaking or not, you’ll always fall closer in orbit to those reaching towards you, guiding you to a more easeful, interconnected, comfortable world where knowledge and resources flow just as emotions do. Online and offline, interpersonally and intergenerationally, not staying confined within one body. 

Over the past few years I have witnessed and been rescued by gatebreaking time and time again, and am lucky to be surrounded by people who embody gatebreaking through their work. I got the chance to speak with four organizer and artist friends, Cy X, Pauli Cakes, Josephine Shetty, and Meenakshi Parashar about their gatebreaking hurdles, blueprints, and fantasies: