Casting spells for the futures we want, to create present realities

Conjuring something out of nothing is our birthright and our spellbook for equitable change.

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About a decade ago, I had a daydream vision of me in my thirties. I think I was maybe around 23 at the time and was definitely unfulfilled in my work for an unfortunately pretty harmful climbing film company making $9-11/hr classified as a contractor doing full-time work and, while I don’t remember how old I was exactly when I thought it, I do remember specifically deciding the dreamy me was 34 years old, which is how old I am now.

In the vision, I was self-employed, a co-owner of a boutique design agency.

Never mind that I was missing a central component of not having ever done any visual design and probably not intending to learn. Never mind that the me of my early twenties didn’t know anyone who was self-employed, not in the sense of peers who were doing cool jobs that seemed straight out of a rom-com level of cliché (designer! florist! baker!). I never thought at the time I would ever own any business, let alone a cool one.

Vision-me had a cool haircut and a botanical tattoo sleeve inked on their left arm! How could I not be attracted to the idea?

It all felt like a pipe dream I wanted but didn’t think it would actually be possible to ever get to, though I think I intentionally pinned it on a far-off mental vision board with the hope that maybe in 10+ years I could. It just felt cool, but also contained this sense of looking forward that I had “arrived” somewhere, if only I could ever get to that impossible-feeling place to make it happen.

But I guess the arrival is here?

I am indeed a 34-year-old co-owner of a brand microagency. I never learned visual design (though some years ago I did make some amateur websites for clients that are truly precious to think back on how rudimentary they were). That’s probably because I didn’t know copywriter was an actual job title when I was envisioning it, and I didn’t know by the time it would happen I would have been self-employed already for eight years.

(I don’t have the botanical tattoo sleeve yet though, so I’d better get on it if I want to complete the spell before my next birthday.)

Because that’s what this is, right? A spell.

The vision, the will, and the may it be so.

Not in a wand-waving way, but not not in a wand-waving way. The kind that reminds us that magic is real, if we define magic as creating tangible futures out of the visions and possibilities we hope for.

Which is to say that Rest Day Creative, our anticapitalist worker-cooperative-turned-brand-agency is now open for business!

But it’s also to say, moreover, that this is how any future becomes possible, and I want to keep remembering.

Sometimes — a lot of the time actually — I look around and I feel a sense of hopelessness so vast because the chasm between all humans being adequately treated as human, meaning humanely, and the present state of the world feels incomprehensibly big. And I feel so small. I am small.

A year and a half ago that hopelessness was so all-encompassing that I cried on my couch for hours about reproductive rights and trans rights every single day for weeks. Hours. Every day. For weeks. I was crying because I was terrified for the safety and well-being of people I love and the people I will never meet, and I was crying the amount I was because of layered dead-dog-dead-dad-dead-career grief and trauma, plus mental health needs that I was drowning trying to get support for at the time, but I was also crying because, to some extent, that kind of release valve is a natural response to a certain level of continued overwhelm.

I couldn’t see any possibility for change, because all I could see was the whole of the problem, lined up beside the whole of every other problem. Any one issue that we’re collectively facing feels indecipherably unaddressable by how big it is in its entirety, and that’s not even factoring in all of the other issues that are just as big.

It was too much. I felt so deeply disempowered because I didn’t feel like I could change even one iota of my own life in that moment, let alone protect the dignity of someone else’s — especially when it felt like the scale of any change I made was meaningless.

But you know what? It’s not meaningless, actually.

Changing one corner of the world is changing the world.

If you touch your face, that counts as touching your body when you do. More precisely, the gesture is you putting your index finger on your cheek, but that cheek is a part of the body as a whole.

Your one neighborhood is not the whole world, but it is a part of the world.

It took my acupuncturist extending the kindness of her own discernment, this clear-eyed seeing that made me know that she knew that I didn’t want to live on this earth anymore if I didn’t feel like I had any power to make it better, and her being unflinchingly present with that truth. That presence let me know that whatever felt darkest in me was not going to scare her off, and that she would be in space with it unconditionally. Despite only knowing her in a professional context of semi-regular hourly increments, she’s one of my favorite people on this planet, and I’m not sure whether that’s because of that moment or already was the case and what made it possible.

That one act on her part, human to human, didn’t change the whole world, but it changed mine.

That’s not nothing. Each time we choose to be unflinchingly present with the truth and respond with the kindness and fierce care that is required, it changes that one small part of the world for the better too.

You know how more humans get treated more humanely? By us, as humans, treating each other that way.

Yes, we need greater systemic change. My fucking god, we do. But we are not separate from the change we want.

The revolution is not going to happen for us. We’re not going to vote the revolution into office public, not this term anyway, even if we can vote in essential stop-gaps.

I’m so sorry. Truly, babe. We want that, right? I want it so bad. I want to be able to cast a ballot and know that the people of Palestine and the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the whole world over are unequivocally taken care of. I want to know that health care is a universal right that is actually followed through on and that every person who needs shelter and food can get it without judgment or legal ramifications or unnecessary bureaucracy. I want to know that me and my queer and trans friends will have their personhood recognized and lives not up for debate, and I want someone smarter and wiser and much more experienced to make it so.

I want it so deeply, but wanting alone is not enough to will it into being.

We’re waiting for the saving, but waiting is not going to make it come.

Spells are cast with our imagining, and then they become truth through the will that makes it so. We are the will, we have the will, and our recognition of that is the only thing that’s going to make any kind of reality we want to see.

Please don’t get me wrong — I’m under no illusion that creating a new business with some kicky little doodles and well-chosen wording is the revolution (the doodles are adorable though). But every business can be a platform for individual change, and that’s something.

It’s not the revolution, but it’s not not the revolution. It’s one small part that leads to the real action, foundations made up of many tiny parts we can stand on.

That’s why I poured 57 hours of my life into creating and placing what is essentially a novella’s worth of website copy on Rest Day, even though it’s largely been unpopular lately to lean into long-form site pages.

I don’t care! There are things that need to be said, and I want more people saying them. And if I want more people saying them, then I’d better be ready to be the one to say some of it.

Things like:

• Openly stating our anticapitalist policies toward creating financial accessibility in our work and dismantling harmful business-as-usual defaults like markups on payment plans and urgency marketing tactics

• Sharing the step-by-step process for how we come up with our rates based on our actual needs, including publicly (vulnerably!) listing desired salary numbers and percentages of how we allocate each dollar that comes in

• Stating out loud, at work, that our labor is not for profit, it’s for human wellbeing, and if our work (that we ostensibly have control over) isn’t doing that, then what is it for?

• Having a whole-ass page where we share links to our “competition,” who are really just our rad friends, peers, and mentors, because if we want community to come to us, we’d better be ready to come to the community.

• Saying that a land acknowledgment can be one of many reparative steps extended to Indigenous people to start to acknowledge what is so often the erasure of violence — but it’s empty without actionable commitment. (Look, we’re all thinking it. I’m looking at you too, 2020-era anti-racism statements.)

In the style of Annie Dillard’s “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives,” how we spend our time is how we spend our time, and those small moments add up to the reality we live in. So if those minutes spent, however small, start with imagining a new world into being and then acting accordingly, that becomes real, encompassing change. In fact, it’s the only way we get change.

Casting a spell starts with the wishing, but it comes into being through the action beyond intention.

Acting in these small ways is not enough to change a whole landscape, but it is enough to change your life and impact at least someone else’s, if not many someone’s.

Somebody is going to look at our website or read the lessons of our anticapitalist rate setting course or deep dive into our resource library, and they’re going to do something different in their life because of it. That somebody could even be you.

Acting in integrity is the revolution. Saying what you mean is the revolution. Speaking out what you care about and what you will not stand for is the revolution. It’s not the whole revolution, but it’s a necessary part that we’re not going to get to any other part without.

Let’s meet each other there. Let’s believe in the possibility of our small power, and cast spells to make it so.

Love,
Iris

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Major Thanks

I’m using the usual Recs and Thoughts spot to extend heaps of gratitude in all directions. (If you’re still missing the resources, I just created a whole page for that, and it should keep you busy for a while.)

• Shout out to the magic-making of our truly incomparable team, which is also made up of our organizational queen Maggie and doodle design dream Rylee, with super huge thanks to our honorary Canadian team member contractor, Jillian, who created some incredible systems like our entire client workflow. It took eight years of self-employment to bring this team into being, but it’s been well worth the wait.

• Shout out to all of you here who heard me say, “I’m working on this for our anticapitalist micro-agency,” for the past months and been like, “Okay, cool, but is this happening or what?” while I went offline to do behind the scenes things and didn’t really say that’s what I was doing.

• Special thanks to the one paid subscriber of this Soft Animal Bodies newsletter who is a person I don’t already know, who pledged their subscription after my last post and then had to wait until now for me to write another because I was busy writing elsewhere (If you think this is you, it is! Thank you! I think about you frequently and feel so grateful that you put your dollars here.)

• Super grateful for

  Cody Cook-Parrott
  ’s twice weekly Landscapes co-writing container, which has anchored my brain and my Tues-Thu schedule for the past several weeks.

• Always always always thank you to the friends who have shared virtual and in-person celebration arms for each part of this creation, who brought me iced matchas while I was up to my eyeballs in finessing grammar, and most of all who received my long-form procrastination texts about whether my situationship was going to text me back and if my new haircut was cute. Community is the backbone and the reason for everything, and I’m grateful for the one I have and am building. If you’re here, you’re a part of it.

• Heartfelt thanks especially to my ride-or-die anticapitalist biz bestie

  Nic Antoinette
  , who consistently challenges me to be positively accountable to my work and life — while still being real and kind to myself — and who I know I would not have the bravery to be in this space of creation without hers and other shining examples.

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About Rest Day Creative

Rest Day Creative is a cooperatively owned micro-agency with a community-oriented, anticapitalist lens. We build brand foundations and systems for divergent thinkers, values-centered organizations, and helping professionals.

We create websites, copywriting, visual branding, and operational structures to ground your business in an ecosystem that is truly rooted in tangible care. We also curate and create digital resources on anticapitalist business and human-first ways of being and relating. Learn more and sign up for our newsletter (yes, it’s a different one).

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