Achy Affects: Crisis and Compositions of Selfhood

CE Mackenzie’s Achy Affects is a trans-genre memoir that boldly reimagines how we care for ourselves and our communities amidst relentless cultural, political, and ecological upheavals. It feels like we’re teetering on the edge of unprecedented crises. In the midst of this, as we wrestle with burnout and exhaustion, capitalism demands we push harder, achieve more, and become better. Mackenzie offers a radical alternative: give up the goal and just feel.
Organized into four key emotions—wonder, shame, shyness, and nostalgia, with a final meditation on ache itself—Achy Affects confronts the simplistic idea that feelings are either “positive” or “negative.” This tired binary demands we rehabilitate the bad into the good, whether or not this rehab is ethical, or even desirable. Instead, by tuning into the feeling of ache, we can resist these pressures and reclaim our agency through compositions of our own making.
In the spirit of public intellectuals like Maggie Nelson and Julietta Singh, Mackenzie weaves their personal experiences of crisis—divorce and coming out, working in drug outreach, top surgery, new parenthood, and traversing the Alaskan tundra—into a nuanced exploration of ache. Through this lens, Mackenzie invites us to live alongside pain, not as something to be fixed, but as something to be understood without judgment or expectation.