"You just jump a little higher"
I think about this tweet every goddamn day. Every morning I wake up and a little part of my brain whispers, Choose, choose, choose… CHOOSE the main character of the day! in the same voice as the robots in John Mulaney’s “Kid Gorgeous” special. The spotlights of past you’ve successfully ducked, but this is a new day! You might still be fucked!
The closest I’ve come to being a character of any magnitude on Twitter was when I tweeted something frankly stupid about the sweater that Chris Evans wears in “Knives Out.” I would link it here but I truly cannot countenance the thought of being responsible if it starts getting retweeted again. A lot of people tried to explain the concept of an Aran sweater to me. Several decided that my opinions about the relative pattern difficulty of various sweaters were reflective of toxic masculinity. Many impugned my taste. One said that I was contributing to the stigmatization of mental illness in the knitting community. The reply I did not send to that tweet was that I picked up knitting a few years ago because it was the one hobby simple enough to manage but complicated enough to distract me when I was quite literally crazy — crying six hours a day, spending an extra hour of my commute every night sitting on my office floor or the sidewalk or the curb outside the subway station sobbing, unable to look at my own body, too anxious to watch any show that wasn’t The Crown or Scandal or other TV about rich people whose problems changed every week and never had lasting consequences, standing in the kitchen every weekend punching bread dough and screaming, aloud, wordlessly. It seemed a little much to dump on somebody who was just quote-tweeting me to score a few moral points off a stranger.
In any case, I was at best a bit player, a jester-for-a-day, Terry Pratchett’s Fool who jingled miserably across the floor. I learned what should have already been obvious, which is that being part of Twitter’s latest Z plot is like sitting in the park having a conversation with a handful of your friends, and then somebody comes by with a megaphone and shouts, “Look at this fucking clown! He thinks Aran sweaters are ugly because he’s a tasteless boor who only wears graphic T-shirts and has never heard of Princess Grace!” And then everyone else in the park whips out a megaphone from inside their picnic basket or under their bench and shouts “HAVE YE HEARD TELL OF THE SWEATER OAF?? THE FIBER ARTS BUFFOON??? GATHER ROUND.” Meanwhile you’re still just sitting there, and it isn’t clear whether they don’t know you can hear them or they do know and they just don’t care, but either way several hundred people are shouting at their friends about you.
Anyway, I wake up every morning and one or two of my brain cells start singing their horrible little choose choose choose song, which was true even before quarantine. But now an even larger percentage of the world’s population has nothing to do all day except stay in their homes and stare at the nightmare rectangles that provide a livestream of the anxieties and nightmares of everybody else in the world, and the subplots are accelerating.
Last week had at least eight main characters. As tempting as it is to write out a good old ONTD-style recap, I feel the true experience of discovering Twitter’s protagonist of the day lies in putting those pieces together for yourself. At the very least it’s a good way to pass an hour by searching Twitter and clicking on every tweet in a thread to see its replies just in case one of them holds a previously missed clue and, of course, the most thrilling part of the chase: kneeling down next to the place where This tweet has been deleted is just barely legible in the hard-packed dust of the roadside, placing your palm against the earth, and saying solemnly, “Something bad happened here.”
Fortunately there are many people who are smarter than me who have written thoughtful pieces and threads about what I found to be Twitter’s most interesting character arc of the week, and I would strongly recommend that you check out their thoughts on the subject. For myself, I spent most of the weekend thinking about the shortcomings of the ways I’ve learned to acknowledge and discuss privilege. The rules I first learned to discuss matters of identity and experience were the ones I think many people first learn, which were that anybody gets to say anything at any time that they want and nobody is ever allowed to be offended. My childhood was overseen by my openly bigoted father, who openly espoused anti-Semitic views, racism and anti-Blackness in particular, colonialist perspectives expressly informed by the valorization of a British empire upon which the sun never sets, and transphobia and homophobia best illustrated by a particularly vivid memory from my early teenage years when he ripped out the front page of a newspaper in front of me because the A1 story was about marriage equality and said, “I don’t want your sister thinking that kind of thing is alright.” Not such a strong start; we got in a lot of fights about it as I got older and grew more brain cells and realized in fairly short order that he was an asshole.
The next language I acquired to discuss issues of race and gender and inequality came from the Internet, like so many of the best and worst innovations of the last decade (best: Vine, RIP; worst: imagine me shaking out a scroll that just keeps on rolling and then taking a very deep breath before I start listing items). The basic tenets of this language as I learned it are pretty solid general rules.
Don’t talk over people about their own identities or experiences and the interplay between the two.
Assume you know less than them on that subject.
Take them at their word on that subject.
Acknowledge that it is impossible for you to fully understand what it is like to have that identity or those experiences.
Do your best to listen to what they say and learn to live more empathetically according to it.
This approach gets a little complicated in practice because of a perceived tension between those last two points, I think. Often people decide that because it is impossible for them to fully understand somebody else’s lived experience, it does not behoove them to try — which is the “I come from no culture. I have no culture. I’m like, vaguely European” defense. It is the same people who claim ignorance as both a defense and as proof that their intentions were not malicious, and who thus use it as a shield against criticism and a get-out-of-jail-free card. But ignorance is neither an excuse nor an inherent failing. Everyone has gaps, as Dylan puts it; everyone is ignorant about something. To claim otherwise, or to suggest that ignorance is itself proof of malignancy, gives cover to people who are proud of their ignorance and have no interest in listening or learning, because if everyone is ignorant and thus a lost cause, this reasoning runs, then there is no point in acting to counter that.
What everyone really wants is for there to be one set of rules to follow in order to never fuck up, ever, that apply in any situation. Nobody wants to fuck up and nobody ever wants to be reprimanded, especially not when it’s warranted. It’s always easier to get defensive and double down than it is to acknowledge that you might not know as much as you think you do, or that you might not be as good a person as you think you are. But there are no universal rules except that you are going to fuck up at some point, and if you’re lucky, somebody will reprimand you for it, and then you can get on with the unpleasant, humiliating, uncomfortable work of learning from your mistakes. As I’ve written before, saying sorry costs nothing and is good practice. Learn to apologize properly (use the word “sorry,” identify what you did wrong, and express what you’ll do to make it right) and spend some time thinking about why you did what you’re apologizing for and whether it reflects larger patterns of bad behavior in your own personal canon.
And even that doesn’t guarantee that nobody will ever be mad at you again, or that you’ll always be forgiven when you do something wrong. You cannot control what anybody else is thinking or feeling. Sometimes you make a mistake and you are not forgiven. You have to learn to live with that, to understand that it doesn’t make your apology or the work you do meaningless. We all move through the world living complicated internal lives that nobody else ever fully understands. That applies to you; that applies to the people who get angry at you, the people who don’t forgive you and the people who do. Your duty is not only to them but to yourself: You have to do your best and learn to be okay with that, too.
—R.