The more I wonder, the more I love.
—Alice Walker, The Color Purple
Gabby and I cranked battery-operated fans and drank bottles of cold water; we complained about the heat and chatted with participants while filling their orders—sterile needles, naloxone, crack pipes, meth bowls. In between bursts of people seeking safer drug use supplies, Gabby explained how Prevention Point Pittsburgh’s (PPP) community advocate program works: members of our using community receive a monthly stipend for disseminating naloxone (the FDA-approved drug that reverses opioid overdose) throughout their neighborhoods—to friends and family who cannot make it to one of our sites. Our advocates reach places the mobile PPP van cannot. For some, the work perfectly hems into the ebb and flow of their daily lives. “We’re all operating on different time and space continuums,” Gabby loves to say. Other members are eager to do more; passing out ten boxes of naloxone isn’t enough. And there’s more work to do. But Gabby lamented how busy they are, how much growth PPP has witnessed in the last few years. We gave out 100 percent more supplies in 2021 than 2020, and 2020 saw its own growth spurt, building 40 percent on the year before. “There’s so little time to dream about more,” they said. The needs are innumerable and time is scarce. The more our programming expands, the more we need to expand. The more we learn, the more we need to learn. This structural problem—that there is not even time to dream about more, much less design, organize, finance, implement, and manage those dreams—feels insurmountable.
Even as I actively write and think against the dominant narratives on drug use, I find in these moments—me sweating in the back of a van, stocking needles, and listening to Gabby—the compulsion toward cohesion and conclusion. I want my writing to capture what it feels like to be in the van (cohesion). I also want to help; and having the answers feels like the best way to help (conclusion). I am desperate for telos, as I suspect many of us are. I am interested in the affective experience of resisting that telos, even in the face of crisis, even in the face of a crisis without clear end. This is about my methods—for writing, thinking, and being in community.
Eager to study the affective possibilities of wonder in community public health programming on drug use and harm reduction, my second day in the PPP van, our mobile site that we drive from neighborhood to neighborhood, was the day Roe was overturned. Gabby and I were at our Friday site in an eastern neighborhood of the city; it was one of the hottest days yet, with participants waiting in long lines and under direct sun for water and supplies. As I rolled chore, a small bit of copper wool used for filtering crack, in my hands, as I put pipes and bowls into brown sandwich bags, I reflected on my writing, flipped it around in my head, pressed on its theoretical semantics, and reckoned with how estranged it was from the reality of the moment I actually occupied. Gathering supplies into green plastic bags, I thought about Roe as a reckoning and how “reckoning,” as a verb, is kin to recognition. To realize. To see. But reckoning is also a literacy event, a crossed threshold of understanding (the cognition in “recognition”). We can’t go back. We can’t unknow. To reckon with an event is to recognize and re-recognize how little we understand. But the ongoing renewal of recognition disturbs what is engrained; and this is an opportunity.
Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang endorse this tension; they encourage us to resist metaphor as a methodological and ethical commitment to keep working. In their piece, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” they write, “He can only make his identity as a settler by making the land produce, and produce excessively, because ‘civilization’ is defined as production in excess of the ‘natural’ world (i.e., in excess of the sustainable production already present in the indigenous world).” Part of capital’s harassment toward production is to not only stimulate wealth and expansion (though clearly that), but to fantasize toward “easier paths to reconciliation” between settler and indigenous communities. Solidarity should be unsettling (wordplay intended).
Our fixation on fix distracts us from the work at hand. The slip into metaphor “turns decolonization into an empty signifier to be filled by any track towards liberation. In reality, the tracks walk all over land/people.” Trans theorists argue along similar lines, that theory reshapes the trans person into allegory, relegating one’s lived experience to exoticized metaphors of transgression and marginalization. Overexposed yet not seen—this is a method I criticize throughout Achy Affects, human beings made into spectacle for the sake of telos and what that telos conjures: knowledge extraction. How do we write while refusing this extraction? How do we work toward liberation while refusing finality? Tuck and Yang argue that freedom is possible, and that while this possibility can be elaborated on through thought and theory, it cannot only be this. It is also particular and felt.
A couple years ago, I walked my dog to the Presbyterian churchyard a few blocks from home, one of her favorite neighborhood spots—bustling with bunnies and squirrels, a quiet place to romp with other dogs. On this day, it was just us. The sun was out and beaming its warmth, but the temperature was only just above freezing. Headphones in, I took slow breaths. I was weathering another depressive season. Depression has seized months and years of my life, a genetic inheritance and daily familiarity.
As I took slow breaths, listening to Elliott Smith sing about rose parades, I sensed within the sadness also a gentle strum. Despite the depression, I was not numb, but neither was the strum full or forward-leaning, just thin vibration, the dim hint of vibrance. For years I have tried to train myself away from fixing the depression. While I work toward management—sobriety, running, therapy, family, meds, writing—I resist the pull into telos, that one day I will “feel better,” and on that day, I will move into the rest of my life. It requires constant vigilance to keep this idea at bay, to refocus on temporal care. So I tuned into this moment in the churchyard with my dog. I thought, I am here in all my threadbare energy. To survive despite our pain (pain from being alive but also from systemic erasure and harm), we must be able to say I am here. It is a short phrase that insists on existence, that says: I take up space, I participate in world-making. “I am here” exists on its own, establishes its own agency. We are its makers.
The feeling of wonder is not just the feeling of awe, the captivation of wild landscapes or the sun falling under the ocean’s rim at twilight. Wonder is a quiet strum in a churchyard with a tender hound bounding after rabbits. Meaning, wonder intimates an opening. We might be energized by a song stumbled upon on the radio or by changing the tire on our car. We might be galvanized by caffeine as we muster toward the start of the day, or beer as we linger in the kitchen with friends. But no matter, all of this is taking up space in the world, saying I am here.
José Esteban Muñoz promises we protect our futural longings by, counterintuitively, un-engineering the future. While one of our goals at PPP is to help participants envision realistic recovery, it is not the primary goal, which is to reduce harm and overdose and to abate stigma and disease in our community. In so doing, we may not be working toward a future absent addiction, but a future absent the violence surrounding addiction. This kind of temporality, writes Muñoz, is ecstatic and horizonal, “a path and movement to a greater openness to the world.”
For Muñoz, who is writing specifically about queerness, our utopic futures are, obviously, not quite here and yet an always existing potentiality. He destabilizes our attachments to liberation while also working toward liberation. This is why I call on him now. His understanding of freedom entails willful immersion in an “ontologically humble state, under a conceptual grid in which we do not claim to always already know.” This, he argues, might “potentially stave off the ossifying effects of neoliberal ideology,” that which brings us only allegories of and metaphors for liberation. Though criticized for daring to optimistically situate the future as utopic possibility, some of us also choose these optimisms; some of us cultivate these optimisms because we refuse to forfeit our lives into the constraints of one-dimensional narratives of precarity, pain, and otherness. We are more; we deserve more.
If we cannot escape the systems in which we are so deeply and forcefully embedded, what do we do? What is liberation, a word with its reach boiled off, when we’re burned out? How might wonder become a method for thinking, writing, and dreaming about liberation without simplifying the work of liberation? As I roll chore, I think, liberation is the size of a ball of chore. It is the ball of chore. It is the smallest bit of stinging copper wool that brings an inch of less harm into this world. I seem as if I’m romanticizing (or metaphorizing), but I mean to intimate the opposite—that liberatory work is tiny, incremental, repeating. This patient laboring might not satisfy us in the way the collapse of an industrial complex would, but it is what we do while we wait for collapse.
While emotional valves open their mouths when I stand in Pacific Northwest rainforests—the scent of moss, the ferns unfolding their tiny fists, the centricity of time in Douglas firs—I do not wish to relegate wonder to exceptional scenes of the sublime. “I am moved by wonder, certainly, but from a place of innocence to a place of ambivalence and critique—my innocence is contaminated through this process.” My pumping pathos valves in the old-growth forest mimic my everyday life as a writer, activist, advocate, and academic: when wonder expands, so also does our understanding of complexity; as wonder expands, the more we come to understand how little we know—we are contaminated by our illiteracy. Wonder is a fractal of feeling that enflames our limitations, and then takes pleasure in them. But this is also why it hurts. The sense of excitement incited by growth and change (those painful things) keeps us returning to our work. We have to rewrite the thesis or apologize for our errors; we try and try again.
A broken record: Gabby looked over the forms from a Friday in August, elbows propped on the van’s built-in counter, and calculated. They told me we already saw 100 participants, nearly 70 in the first half of the shift. This sounded right; the moment I jumped into the van, we moved fast. I pulled needles out of boxes, lined up the equipment, filled orders, and sent bags out the back door. For the first hour, Gabby and I didn’t say a word to one another—we were that busy. Too busy, I got behind on order forms and a participant walked away with a bag of tampons she didn’t ask for. Later, when the activity calmed, Gabby and I laughed at the idea of surprise tampons, but I also dreaded that it meant more mistakes were made. Each Friday was busier than the last, a trend that raised the question of how to meet need when we’re ostensibly at capacity. Not surprisingly, I continued to make mistakes each shift.
The next week, a participant complained to Gabby. “Man, y’all forgot my fent strips last week.” Meaning, I forgot his fentanyl testing strips. He was rightly frustrated. “People are dying out here.” I put extra strips in his bag, rechecked his order form twice to ensure I got it right, and jumped out the back door to find him. We’re far too busy for me to do much more than pass out bags, but I couldn’t let it go, especially his words. “People are dying out here.” I hopped out of the van, walked up to him chatting with a friend, and interrupted to apologize. “Holler at me if I ever get something wrong, OK?” When he put his arm around my shoulder in a gentle side hug, relief deflated the tension. But I spent weeks wondering what consequences rippled from my serious mistake. I’ll never know. Every week I hear about someone who died. Every week I hear about someone saved from naloxone.
“Wonder Drug” from Achy Affects: Crisis and Composition of Selfhood, by CE Mackenzie, 2025. Reprinted by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.
