Taking Care
Sometime in the beginning of the pandemic—maybe in April or May, when life inside my one-bedroom apartment had become ritualized but I still didn’t have any clear ideas about how anything might end—I decided to venture into one of my aspirational shopping lists titled, simply, “Art,” and buy something I had saved there. I have several of these lists, full of things I like but either shouldn’t, can’t, or won’t spend the money to get. But buying something to put on the walls felt right. I ended up buying three prints from an artist I had followed for a long time.
After completing my purchase, I opened Adobe Illustrator. There, I plotted out how I might arrange the pieces on my wall. Would I put a small print on either side of the large one? Should one hang in a different room? I focused on the particulars. If I had to stay inside for a long time (the naivety of buying a 90-pack of gummy vitamins “to last me through quarantine” had been fully realized by now), it felt right to spend some of that time changing things in the ways that I could.
Eventually, the prints reached me. The artist included the three prints I ordered, along with two smaller pieces. The extra artworks were a gift, not just because I got more than I planned on, but because these unexpected additions meant I could return to planning and configuring the artworks with a fresh perspective and new constraints. After unpacking everything and weighting the prints, I was ready to open my .AI file again.
But there was one more thing included in the package. Tucked between the prints lay a postcard. It was simple: black ink on white paper, handwritten. On the back was a line-art drawing of a man wrapping his arms around himself. The points of his elbows were aligned with one another, centered below the curves of his shoulders. His self-embrace formed a giant heart. On the front, the card said, “take care of you, Liam,” I think. Or maybe, “take care of your Liam.” At face value, I appreciated the sentiment. Inside, I relished the potential of the card’s ambiguity. That ambiguity would become a refuge where I could hide, just for a moment, every time I saw the card hanging on my fridge.
The notion of telling someone to “take care” is thought-provoking in itself. The idea of taking care of anything suggests a level of agency over the object of your caretaking, as well as an understanding of its needs. It presupposes a relationship to the thing being taken care of in which you can actively look after it and perhaps intervene on its behalf. A type of agency that felt increasingly absent as the months dragged on inside my apartment.
Telling someone, “take care of yourself” (could the “you” on my card be a shorthand?) then turns that agency into something reflective, making you the object of your own caretaking. It asks you, with full knowledge of your own subjectivity, to exercise agency over yourself. What that actually means or entails is a personal matter, as it relies on your own understanding of yourself. But the speaker is also suggesting a confidence that you’re up for the task, or at least that they give you permission and encouragement to make and act on your own determination.
If the card indeed said, “take care of you, Liam,” it expands that sense of personal direction from the speaker with an invocation of my identity as a separate being, reaffirming who I am at the same time that it affirms my agency over myself, wishing me well in the ongoing task of looking after my own wellbeing, whatever that means - either to the speaker or to myself.
But what if the little squiggle after “you” is meaningful, and the card says, “take care of your Liam?” Strange as it may read, it’s a fair interpretation of the cursive. What would it mean to overlay on the meaning of the preceding messages a sense that “my” Liam is a discrete object of its own? That my Liam is, for example, distinct from the artist’s Liam, or the Liam of anyone I meet on the street? How about the Liam that belongs to any of my friends or family members? Their Liam-objects, on which they enact their own caring or other effects? Taking care of my Liam is a separate activity from taking care of all those other Liams. A profound intimacy is inherent in the task. My Liam is different, needs different things, and has thoughts and feelings inside it, and I am the only one who can really access it. My Liam is amorphous and ever-changing, but simultaneously suggesting of the morphology that is perceived by everyone else and captured as their own Liam-object, a party favor taken home from every new social interaction.
Taking care of this Liam is a task much deeper and more nuanced than the demands of any of the other possibilities.
I indulge in considering the possibilities of the diction of this postcard because it came to me during the pandemic—a time of being alone, and a time of heightened awareness of myself and my wellbeing, and how rapidly both seemed to be shifting.
Interpreting this card’s message is like arranging and rearranging the art on my walls. The joy is not in arriving at any final or true image, but in the interpretation. It’s in the realization that the possibilities and in-between parts of the process are where fulfillment actually lies. That, regardless of what was written, or where the drawings hung on my walls, I could take for myself—from the process of deciding—the agency that was elsewhere missing. I could configure the words on this postcard over and over again, finding the version of the message that was most soothing when I needed soothing, most optimistic when I needed optimism, most kind when I needed kindness, and most thought-provoking when I needed something else to think about. And that, I think, is a way of taking care of my Liam.
