This Is Why We Fight
Everything is terrible, isn't it? I didn't think I was going to manage a newsletter this week because I couldn't think of anything else to say besides that. My brain is just a constant wordless howl of misery right now and that doesn't make for good writing. The personal and the political have combined to form an awful and inescapable miasma and I want to scream and scream about it and never stop screaming.
What else is there to do when every day there's a new horror to confront? When I'm trapped in one of the top 10 worst states for quality of life with no way out on the horizon? When election season looms enormous and terrifying in front of me and the country is collectively losing its mind in so many varied and horrible ways? When people I've become invested in are disappointing in ways that are so predictable that it's almost boring, but it still manages to hurt my feelings like I knew them personally? When people I do know personally also hurt my feelings, but in ways that are harder to quantify and in ways I can't hold against them?
Everything happens so much, as that one iconic Horse_ebooks tweet says. It never stops happening. There's never time to rest and regroup, to take a breath and grapple with the grief and the fear and the bottomless exhaustion. We just have to keep pushing forward and hoping that somehow, eventually, we'll be okay.
And I guess that's what I can give you today. I don't feel okay right now and probably neither do you, but I can offer you hope for that eventual future where we might.
One of the things that keeps my personal hoping machine running is this quote from Leonard Woolf's memoir, called Downhill All the Way:
I will end ... with a little scene that took place in the last months of peace. They were the most terrible months of my life, for, helplessly and hopelessly, I watched the inevitable approach of war. One of the most horrible things at that time was to listen on the wireless to the speeches of Hitler - the savage and insane ravings of a vindictive underdog who suddenly saw himself to be all-powerful. We were in Rodmell during the late summer of 1939, and I used to listen to those ranting, raving speeches. One afternoon I was planting in the orchard under an apple-tree iris reticulata, those lovely violet flowers ... Suddenly I heard Virginia's voice calling to me from the sitting room window: "Hitler is making a speech." I shouted back, "I shan't come. I'm planting iris and they will be flowering long after he is dead." Last March, twenty-one years after Hitler committed suicide in the bunker, a few of those violet flowers still flowered under the apple-tree in the orchard.
Nothing is new. People have survived this and worse and gone on to lead triumphant, beautiful lives. It doesn't change the present, but it gives me something to keep moving toward, and even if it's difficult to impossible to care about planting iris right now, we must. Whatever your version of that is. Maybe it's not literal planting or maybe it is. Whatever it is, you must find a way to make the doing of it feel worthwhile. My way is often spite these days. I care for myself out of spite, and I care for others out of spite, and I keep waking up and going to sleep and breathing and doing the boring, repetitive, draining work of living out of spite. As John Darnielle says in This Year by The Mountain Goats, "I am gonna make it through this year if it kills me." It's not glamorous, but at least I'm still here.
There's a poem by Andrea Gibson called The Nutritionist which ends with the lines:
You, you stay here with me, okay?
You stay here with me.
Raising your bite against the bitter dark,
your bright longing,
your brilliant fists of loss.
Friend, if the only thing we have to gain in staying is each other,
my god that is plenty
my god that is enough
my god that is so so much for the light to give
each of us at each other’s backs
whispering over and over and over,
“Live. Live. Live.”
People are everything. Community is everything. Connection is everything, as I've said before. Sometimes an arm around you or a hand in yours or a head on your shoulder or a mouth on your mouth is the only thing that anchors you here, and sometimes a conversation at Starbucks or sitting in a theater watching Nicolas Cage being unhinged on screen or laughing at inside jokes you can barely explain later is enough to loosen your chest enough to allow one more deep breath. It's not going to change the world or even the country, but maybe that doesn't always need to be the goal. Maybe it's enough just to get through it, whatever it is. Maybe survival is as significant as politics. Maybe it's even more so. We're the point of all of it, all of us together, building and strengthening and holding and loving and trying and singing and writing and playing and drawing and painting and caring and hoping. When all the hope has been beaten out of us, that's when it's all over, and I'm not there yet and I hope you're not either. If you are, I hope this newsletter might replenish you, even if just a little. Just enough to keep you going for one more week. I need you and so does the world.
If you're anything like me, it's very easy to start self-isolating. The siren song of nobody cares about me anyway, everyone would be relieved if I disappeared from their lives, I can do it on my own is too strong, too convincing to resist. If you're alone, you only have yourself to worry about, and that's safer and easier and less painful. But it's not. You know it's not. I know it's not. It's a disservice to all of us to make ourselves and our lives smaller in a vain attempt to feel like we have control. We don't, and it's okay. We're all going to be okay. I love you so much, and no one says that enough. There's a weird belief from a lot of people that saying it too much devalues its meaning and that has always seemed like nonsense to me. I need to hear it and feel it and I know you do too, whether your love language is words of affirmation or not. There isn't a finite amount of love we have to hoard so it doesn't all get used up. Making more love makes more love, and so, I love you, and that's why I know we're going to be okay. That's something they can't take from us and it's something that can save us if we remember how to let it.
This all feels very small and trite, but not everything is large scale, you know? Not all of us are meant for the big picture fight. I'm not. I'm meant for the tiny, seemingly insignificant kindnesses and acts of radical vulnerability that make the big picture fight possible. This is my work and I'm so glad to do it. I hope it helps. I hope these words mean something to even just a single one of you. I'm going to leave you with this, the words of someone else that echo my own. Cling to the little things because they're the things you can hold and the things that will hold you. I'm holding you as I send this out, and after. I got you. We got this.
Reasons to Live Through the Apocalypse
By Nikita Gill
Sunrises. People you have still to meet and laugh with. Songs
about love, peace, anger, and revolution. Walks in the woods.
The smile you exchange with a stranger when you experience
beauty accidentally together. Butterflies. Seeing your grandparents again. the moon in all her forms, whether half or full. Dogs.
Birthdays and half-birthdays. That feeling of floating in love.
Watching birds eat from bird feeders. The waves of happiness
that follow the end of sadness. Brown eyes. Watching a boat cross
an empty sea. Sunsets. Dipping your feet in the river. Balconies.
Cake. The wind in your face when you roll the car window down
an open highway. Falling asleep to the sound of a steady
heartbeat. Warm cups of tea on cold days. Hugs. Night skies. Art
museums. Books filled with everything you do not yet know.
Long conversations. Long-lost friends. Poetry.