anti:freeze

In response to several email requests, I am posting a brief excerpt from Little Motors, an essay I wrote many years back (and the namesake of the littlemotors.org site). So now you will know what the name means, and why I wanted this particular band of badass women to share a little corner of cyberspace with me. Here goes:

My teacher draws a triangle on the chalkboard and divides it into sections like the USDA Food Pyramid. “Maslow’s Hierarchy has five parts,” he says, tapping his chalk once inside each section.

Physiological needs - food, water, shelter and warmth - fill up the base. "These are the most important," he says. "Like bread and water."

He writes our emotional needs next: safety goes right above the base, then love on top of that, and above them both, esteem.

“The first four – bodily needs, safety, love, and esteem – we call deficiency needs,” he says. "They're like food. When you don't have enough, you hunger for them."

At the very tip, he leaves the fifth section blank. The section seems chincy and small, like a bottle of expensive perfume, and I wonder what makes it so special. Why so little of it to go around? Is it bad for us? Does it rot out our teeth and make us fat, like sugar? I lean forward, rapt.

Inside the tip, my teacher writes self-actualization. “When a person becomes self-actualized, she discovers her authentic self and sets out to achieve her true calling in life,” he says. “She becomes whole.”

He explains that self-actualization is not a deficiency need like the others, but rather a growth need, only activated when all the lower needs are met. According to him, we cannot long for actualization if we are starving or tortured or unloved.

I copy down the triangle in my notebook and slide my finger up from the base to the tip, like I’m pushing a game piece across a board. I am suspicious of the hierarchy, how according to Maslow each need is separate and distinct – as if food is not mixed up with safety, and love is not a bodily need, an ache deep inside your muscles, a cold longing close to your bones.

Self-actualizated people hunger for truth and beauty, personal growth, new knowledge, harmonious aesthetics, and symmetry. Symmetry. I think about my right hip, higher than the left because I was born with broken hips that healed funny.

"Another way to think of self-actualization,” my teacher says, “is when you understand and embrace your identity. When you know who you are.”

Esteem makes sense to me. So does aesthetics, like how my bedroom walls are ever expanding collages of defaced BOP! Magazine posters, broken Madonna records, picket pamphlets, and “The Course is a Curse, Vote Democrat!” signs stolen from my father’s stockpile in the garage. I tacked up the posters back when I still liked radio pop, but see no reason to tear them down now. I am charting the movement of my stars, and the BOP! Posters have long since been scribbled on, pasted over, or juxtaposed with gross medical illustrations ripped from an old encyclopedia set. I smashed the Madonna 45’s with a hammer in my front yard, replaced them with The Cure and REM, Sonic Youth and the Dead Kennedys, and best of all, Mom’s forgotten collection of Beatles records – rediscovered while digging through her closet for old hippie clothes. According to Maslow’s Hierarchy, Frankenchrist represents a long developmental step back from Like a Virgin. No harmony in punk rock. No symmetry. Fuck Maslow.

But the top of the triangle still terrifies me. Self-Actualization. When you embrace your identity and become whole. When you have a sense of mission for your life. When you are not deficient. What if, at any given moment, hundreds of hierarchies live inside you, flickering from tip to base. What if you are more than one person at once?