Punk Damage

A thing I love is when I learn about a word or phrase that gives language to a thing I have known, but did not have words for.

Like the first time I learned about harm reduction, which is a specific theory of social work that says that in order for people to make good decisions, they must first be alive so let’s focus on keeping them alive to buy them time to make good decisions.

So, under harm reduction, you focus more on making sure people who inject IV drugs can shoot up safely, instead of them having to reuse dirty needles. Teenage kids are going to have sex, so let’s make sure they have access to birth control and STD preventatives, like condoms. Mentally ill people who live on the street should have warm beds and hot meals so they can live long enough to access medical care.

Like that.

I “knew” that, but I loved learning there was a term for it. That people took it seriously. That people were actively working on it, and how to discuss it, and how to perpetuate it. I’m self-educated, so I sometimes feel embarrassed to learn the things I didn’t learn in school, that my impostor syndrome told me “everyone else” knows, because they went to better schools than I did, or went longer, or have more letters after their name than I do.

But a lot of that is context. Most folks who are not involved in some form of social work are unaware of harm reduction, no matter how many degrees they may have. It just doesn’t come up.

Likewise, as someone who grew up listening to Americana and 80s hair metal, I wasn’t much into punk, and never really identified that way. Although, in retrospect, there was a lot of overlap that just didn’t make its way into the social discourse of Independence High School in Independence, MS (population 106) in 1987. 

So, when I recently learned about “punk damage” in Beth Picken’s book, Make Your Art No Matter What, I felt known, despite my lack of punk credentials. 

There are many ways of money damage that are culturally linked and rooted in our families, religions, or communities of origin. One kind of money damage that frequently appears in my consulting practice is referred to as “punk damage,” which is a type of demonization of money and the people who seek it. According to the Lesbian Lexicon, Punk Damage (noun) is the sordid underbelly of self-limitation that comes directly from having come of age in a punk scene. Often marked by an extreme distaste for the making and/or spending of even small amounts of money. (p.73)

I didn’t get it from punk, though—I got it from poverty, and growing up in a strong DIY household, and then working in the finance world to get away from all that, and then finding that I hated that world, and then working for two decades in anti-capitalist spaces.

I have a lot of it, whatever you want to call it.

I heard a friend, who is a bestselling and award-winning author talk about how for decades her writing made a living for her publisher, her editor, her publicist, and her printer, but not for her, and that she just bought into that.

“I once believed that making money from my art was wrong, and so I lived in poverty. I no longer believe that.”

I love her putting it that way: I once believed x. I no longer believe x. So simple, so clean.

I was talking to my therapist this week about “acceptance” and my problem with it, because acceptance often seems like acquiescence. And there are many things in life that should not be acquiesced to. And as Dorothy Day said, “Our problems stem from our acceptance of this filthy, rotten system.”

I like Angela Davis’ remark that she is no longer accepting the things she cannot change—rather she is changing the things she cannot accept.

I’m coming to terms, in my sixth decade, with the fact that I need not accept the “punk damage” I have learned, and that my art can make money, and that while I once believed x, I need no longer believe it.

Slowly. But it’s coming.