adrienne maree brown, 2019
In 2018, the IRS caught up with me.
Again.
I was traveling, with a group of Black people down south that I was facilitating. I went to check my bank account to see if I had enough money to rent a car, and it was empty.
It shouldn’t have been empty.
It should’ve been quite full.
But it was empty. And I immediately knew what had happened. It happened before, three years before, while grocery shopping. That time, I called my bank and they told me that the IRS had put a hold on my finances. They told me that there was nothing they could do, even though I’ve been banking with them since I was 13. They told me that the government would have to lift that hold for me to access any of my funds again.
That time, I was able to call someone and get the hold lifted that day with the promise of future payments. I got myself into right standing with the IRS, and entered into a payment plan.
But then Trump was elected. And when it was time to file my 2016 taxes, I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. Now here I was, on the road, without any funds, and with no one answering my calls.
When I finally got through to someone at the IRS, they said that my situation was dire, and that I wasn’t going to be able to fix it on the phone call. I panicked: how was I going to survive?
I had a few smart moments. One was my past self helping me: after the first time the IRS froze me, I had set aside a few months rent with my parents. I figured a few months would be enough time to resolve whatever issue came up. Two, I asked some of my very smart friends to help me. One of them found a tax relief service, basically an operation that says, “we recognize that you are overwhelmed by adulting, so we will talk to the IRS for you for a massive fee.” I called them at 7 AM the next morning from an airport. The guy who I spoke to on the phone was smooth as silk, and he made it sound like they would rescue me, valiantly, slaying any IRS officers who tried to fux with my life. He sold me, and I signed up to hand over the responsibility of interacting with the IRS to strangers.
Of course it didn’t go that smoothly, they weren’t able to negotiate the amount down in any way, and it took many more months than I had set aside rent for.
The IRS was coming for me, not just because I hadn’t paid my taxes for one year in protest of this ignorant president. I’d actually not paid my taxes for 13 years prior to that. I was a war tax resister, which meant that as long as our country was involved in what I deemed to be unjust wars, and as long as the tax system was structured so that the majority of payment we make goes to fund military operations (as opposed to some form of participatory budgeting), that I would not pay into that system. I still feel like it’s one of the most radical and beautiful choices I’ve ever made. The years in which I could claim that I was not financially supporting the violence that my country was enacting on the world, those were the best years of sleep I’ve had in my life.
But it made the IRS furious. And when the IRS is furious, it’s dangerous. Now I was in a particularly dangerous situation. The IRS was angry and vengeful with me, and they wanted to punish me. This meant that every step forward I took, I was facing their bureaucratic and irrational frustration. There was never an easy way to make a payment, to be able to say to them “look, you’ve taken all my money, doesn’t that equal payment?”
They wanted me to somehow make exorbitant payments, even though they had emptied all of my bank accounts, garnished my wages, and put a levy on future earnings. It was a conundrum, and I couldn’t find a way out. It took months, months where I didn’t have any money and I had to teach myself, remind myself, how to survive without an income. I had to remember how to hustle, I had to ask my clients to cover all of my expenses upfront, rather than waiting for me to spend all the money and then get reimbursed.
And, most of all, I had to turn to my community. I had to ask people if they could put actual money into my bank account, and I had to ask people to cover some of my expenses. I was mortified, and then I was vulnerable, and then I was transparent, and then I was in deeper community than I’ve ever been in.
What I found at the intersection of all this transparency and generosity was enough. I wasn’t shopping, I wasn’t spending in the ways that I was used to. I didn’t have access to all the bougie things that I was accustomed to.
Instead what I had was nourishment, shelter, care, and love. All around me, in abundance. What I had was offers from so many people that I could come to them, stay with them, live with them, eat their food. I got to see in a visceral way just who had my back, who held my life with me. It was so humbling.
And I also learned that I’ve been generous in my life. People had noticed the things that I had given them, both the material resources, and the other kinds of offers of support, generosity, love, having people’s back. Things that I had done organically, not as part of any transaction. I had planted seeds with my love and care that were now bearing fruit right when I was hungry.
And I’m so grateful, grateful to each of the people who stepped up, who showed me that they were down to support me through my mistakes, ego and learning. I’m still convinced that more tax resistance is a powerful strategy, but what I’ve learned is that there is no strategy that works as a solo strategy. I was just thinking of myself, just thinking of my own radical politics, and making political choices from that place. But that’s not what I believe in.
What I believe is that collective strategies are the ones that actually advance us as a species. What I believe is that interdependence is the way we stand in our dignity in the face of a government system that wishes to make us all conform to the most violent and base level of our humanity.
What I believe is that we will find a way to re-distribute the funds, our collective funds, through strategies that actually serve the majority of humanity, instead of a small few who wish to use all resources for territorial imperialistic aims.
So, now I make my monthly payment to the IRS. Now I set aside funds for future mess, just in case I ever forget my place in this current hell economy again.
Now, I’m very transparent with a large number of people about my financial situation, the risks I can take, and how important it is for me to maintain my living wage, my financial solvency. Now, I am in conversations with people I love about how we build the next economy together, an economy that aligns with our values, through strategies that align with interdependence, generating pathways to enough.
adrienne maree brown grows healing ideas in public through her multi-genre writing, her music and her podcasts. Informed by 25 years of movement facilitation, somatics, Octavia E Butler scholarship and her work as a doula, adrienne has nurtured Emergent Strategy, Pleasure Activism, Radical Imagination and Transformative Justice as ideas and practices for transformation. She is the author/editor of several published texts, cogenerator of a tarot deck and a developing musical ritual.