My Notes on the Commodification of Care
Content notes: community harm, intimate partner violence, abuse, and my own complicity in staying silent
I keep thinking about how we show up for each other, when we’re not tied by blood (and even, when we are).
How much are we obligated to show up?
At what point do we let our loved ones “figure it out”? And at what point do we guide them through their pain, at risk of pain to ourselves?
I’ve talked previously about how I’ve been trying to understand books like What We Owe to Each Other (by T. M. Scanlon) and other ethical/philosophical books.
But maybe what’s more important is my lived experience. I am still resentful that people are so quick to judge the actions of someone like me. Specifically, I’m resentful about how others judge my choices and actions when I’m trying so hard to account for all the variables I can perceive at that point in my life. But I’ve been guilty of black-and-white thinking too. It’s hard for me to draw the line between the harm I need to get away from vs. the harm that’s inherently present between members of a community.
In my lived experience, every community that promises you a form of safety teaches you the price you pay for that safety.
I am a serial masker. Sometimes it happens without me trying. Because when you’re trying to find love, give love, and be loved, then you learn fast what it means to be safe.
Safety is what you earn by being legible, by being useful, and by being the kind of person other people want to be seen standing next to. It can be spent. It can be revoked.
The words we use for care these days, like care, accountability, mutual aid, chosen family, and boundaries — stop being things we do to each other and start being things we hold, bank, and withhold.
This is what I mean by the commodification of community: the moment care becomes a currency, harm stops being a rupture we have to sit inside and instead becomes a transaction we can settle and “get over.”
I want to be so careful here. The thing I am pointing at is a logic, the grammar of how we decide who belongs. The logic says that some people are safe and some are not, that safety is a status you can audit, and that the work of the community is to sort the audited into the believed and the exiled.
But I’ve watched how it runs in practice (because it also ran in me). Someone causes harm. A report gets filed. A name goes on a list. And the question the room actually asks is whether this person is still safe to be seen with. What happened, to whom, and what they need are questions that come later, if they come at all. Who gets believed? Who can afford the standing it takes to be believed? What does it cost to be the one who names the harm, and who pays that cost twice?
Of course, these tools and practices were not built by villains. Community accountability and transformative justice came from abolitionist organizers, people like Mariame Kaba. Of course I know and believe that, but I’ve also seen myself tip into carceral thinking as a way of survival within a community.
I am not here to say that what I did to my ex-spouse was incorrect. I stand by my actions. It was a messy time. I was at such a low fraction of capacity, and if I hadn’t left, I wouldn’t have had the life and the health that I have now.
But I keep thinking about the apparatuses we build to escape carceral logic, and how carcerality is simply framed in a different light.
We did not abolish the prison. Carcerality is everywhere. Surveillance became the spreadsheet at work and the casual monitoring of your home, your public spaces, and your group chats. Exile became the abuser list. Judgment became the whisper network.
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha calls the alternative a care web. In their work, Care Work, the care that keeps sick and disabled queer and trans people of color alive is not the professionalized, charitable, billable kind. It is the ride to the appointment that nobody is reimbursing. It is the meal train that keeps going after the casserole/curry/bakes/etc. gets boring. It is the friend who learns how your body works, so you never have to explain it from scratch again.
It’s also the care that comes from understanding that struggling people may not be able to receive the care you’re trying to provide, because that might seem like violence.
Care is a verb. It is slow and unglamorous, and it does not photograph well. You cannot bank it. There is only whether you showed up today, and whether you will show up tomorrow when it is harder, and there is nothing in it for you.
But when is giving care taking from you rather than it being a neutral act?
The commodified version offers an escape from exactly that. It lets you discharge your obligation to a person by filing them under “handled.”
I am writing this as someone who filed people under “handled,” and worse, under “later.”
I wish the following were an example of one situation I’ve been in, but it’s not. It’s an outline template of many situations. (And I’ve already had more than three people tell me that the other people in these situations were also adults with their own choices, and that perhaps I’m taking on more of the weight of all of this than I should. I don’t know what is right here.)
I knew about harm happening to myself or people I love — and I stayed quiet.
I stayed quiet because the person being harmed asked me to, and I know, in my own body, how dangerous it is when the choice to leave gets taken out of a person’s hands.
I stayed quiet because I had once been the one who needed someone to wait for me, and I knew that in the moment, waiting felt like the only loyalty I understood.
I stayed quiet because saying it out loud would have made me responsible for whatever happened next. And I was deeply scared of being complicit. (Sometimes my fear of being complicit outweighed the worry I had for people’s safety; and I’ve judged myself for that enough.)
I stayed quiet because there was a process, and I told myself a process was the same thing as protection.
I stayed quiet because silence was cheaper than the rupture the truth would cost me.
Every one of those reasons was real. Some of them were even good. And while I was weighing them, people stayed in danger.
Dharma in Hinduism is the duty you owe (I’m not trying to impose Hinduism on people here, but it’s a useful lens for me to explain myself). Like, consider what dharma is inside of the old myths, where the reader already knows the cruelest part of the narrative: when our duties contradict each other and there is no way to arrange them that leaves your hands clean. Arjuna froze on the battlefield for a reason. I am not going to pretend I untangled what he could not. I weighed loyalty against loyalty, I lived inside the delay, and the delay had a cost that landed on bodies that were not mine.
What I keep circling back to is the story we were sold about why we cannot stay present to any of this.
The story is called resilience, and in its current form, it is a scam.
Resilience used to name what a community could absorb together. Now it names a private asset you are supposed to own, like grit, where you tell it like a credit history of suffering you bounced back from alone.
If you cannot tolerate the discomfort of community harm, the story goes, that is a flaw in your personal coping, and the cure is to remove yourself from the discomfort.
Dr. Dan Siegel’s window of tolerance describes the zone where your nervous system stays regulated enough to think, rather than flooding into panic or shutting down into numbness. It is a true and useful idea. Trauma narrows that window. Disabled and traumatized people do not owe their nervous systems to anyone’s accountability process, and I will fight whoever reads this as a demand that survivors stay in the room.
But a window of tolerance is not something you widen alone. You widen it by being held while you stay present to something hard. That is the entire insight of a care web. The capacity that got privatized and made transactional was always meant to be collective.
And so the most beautiful tools we have get conscripted into the logic of exit. Spoon theory, which Christine Miserandino gave us to explain the brutal arithmetic of disabled energy, becomes a reason you cannot be bothered. The boundary, which exists to protect a relationship, becomes the line you deliver while you end one. Self-care, which was once named survival, becomes a permission slip for disposal.
A boundary protects a relationship you mean to keep. Walking away and calling it a boundary is just disposal in better clothes. CARE IS NOT A FINITE RESOURCE YOU RATION OUT TO THE DESERVING. The whole point of a web is that it holds more than any single thread was ever rated to carry.
I am not writing this from above it. I do not have a method that would have let me protect everyone, and I distrust anyone selling one. The honest position is worse than that, and it is also the only one I trust: that I am complicit and grieving and still here, that the people who cause harm are not disposable and the people who are harmed are not infinitely absorbent, and that both of those stay true at the same time and mercilessly refuse to let me rest.
I remain in the unfinished work of staying in community with people who have done harm and people who have survived it — and counting myself, on different days, among both.
Selected References
Updated June 2026 (Modified APA with annotations style)
Scanlon, T. M. (1998). What We Owe to Each Other. Belknap Press / Harvard University Press. — The contractualist account of obligation I keep wrestling with; grounds what we owe each other in reasons no one could reasonably reject, and is useful precisely because lived community keeps exceeding what any tidy account can hold.
Kaba, Mariame. (2021). We Do This ‘Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice. Haymarket Books. — Grounds community accountability in abolitionist practice; a reminder that the alternatives to carceral logic were built by the people that logic was harming.
generationFIVE. (2007). Toward Transformative Justice: A Liberatory Approach to Child Sexual Abuse and Other Forms of Intimate and Community Violence. — Foundational transformative justice text; names how communities might respond to intimate harm without reproducing state violence, and how easily those responses get distorted.
Piepzna-Samarasinha, Leah Lakshmi. (2018). Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice. Arsenal Pulp Press. — The care-web concept at the center of this piece: care as sustained, interdependent, unglamorous labor that keeps sick and disabled queer and trans people of color alive, not a billable service.
Sins Invalid. (2019). Skin, Tooth, and Bone: The Basis of Movement Is Our People — A Disability Justice Primer (2nd ed.). — Where much disability justice language was forged; sources the principles of interdependence and anti-disposability that this essay measures community against.
Miserandino, Christine. (2003). “The Spoon Theory.” But You Don’t Look Sick. https://butyoudontlooksick.com/articles/written-by-christine/the-spoon-theory/ — The origin of spoon theory and the arithmetic of disabled energy; included because the tool gets misused as often as it gets honored.
Siegel, Daniel J. (1999). The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are. Guilford Press. — Origin of the “window of tolerance,” the zone where the nervous system stays regulated enough to think, and the reason widening it is relational rather than solo work.