Me: what social media I still have doesn’t really seem to be working out for me anymore
Me: at least the newsletter is going well, I guess I’ll focus my connection efforts there
MailChimp (owners of tinyletter): we’re closing down tinyletter in February! :)
Me: well, beans

So I guess I’ll have to find a new platform - I should be able to migrate my subscriber list, wherever I end up - and find a way to transfer the archive to my website. Hm.

This newsletter is about heartache and care. (Thank you Teddy for your feedback on the first draft!)

Song: we'll get the poetic lullaby in the subject line later, at the end, but here's a musical one for the beginning. 
 

It hurts to exist. This is a useful sentence, as it sums up so much. My body hurts and the pain evolves; I’ve been a month in a nasty flare affecting sleep, breathing, eating, bathrooming. My heart hurts with the harms of the world. My head - reason? consciousness? - hurts, trying to understand it all, or what to do about it, or why (some) other people seem fine with the way things are.

It is tempting to lean on the by-now-a-meme sentence of “I don’t know how to explain to you that you should care about other people,” which I have often used to sum up my feelings on the injustices of the world in the past, but something I realized while reflecting on my recent residency experience is that I do: I do know. I know how to explain it and how to teach it - two different but similar things - and ways to build and practice the skills of regard, respect, and exchange. What I don’t know is how to get the people who most need the teaching in the door in the first place. 

I had a lot of thinking to do to prepare for residency, to condense my own practices and values into classroom-size nuggets, and fit them to the frame of conflict transformation, and offer them to college-age strangers whom I would (mostly) only see once, in the global context of unfolding, intensifying genocide. The heart of it all, where I ended up, was that harm - big and small, personal and global - comes from some people deciding that other people aren’t as much people as they are. 

So we practiced being people together: paying attention to our own bodies/selves and those of the people we danced with. I asked them, in various ways, to see one another, and be seen, and to not just be bodies following instructions; to set boundaries, give attention, provide context. I don’t know what effect it will have in this instance - I don’t get any follow-up time here, alas - but I have seen it start to build ripple effects, elsewhere, of being more thoughtful in relationship with other humans, which is what society is: relationships with other humans. Governments are humans. Algorithms are made, deployed, monitored, and refined by humans. The choices being made in the world, that affect people, are made and shaped by other people. Maybe any person I can teach to think carefully about their fellow humans will make a difference.

But quite a lot of the people in power, making the choices that make my heart and head hurt, make their choices work for them by deciding the people they affect aren’t real people, not really, not as much a person as they are, and if anyone in their orbit questions their ethics or validity, they have the power to simply redesignate that person as also not real people anymore. So: I don’t know how we change the ones with that much power. I don’t know how we tell them they have to care about other people - and that actually, everyone is people. I don’t know how we get through their walls of dehumanization to start that lesson.

Outside of the extremes of power differential, though... I keep teaching and I keep hoping it ripples.

Sometimes I hope. Sometimes I don’t. I’ve been struggling - again, still - especially on the heels of this flare - with depression, grief, and despair. I’ve written about the experience of despair vs. common misconceptions about it before - that it is not a choice; how one goes on; that everything does, in fact, go on. This time I want to talk about despair as part of the human experience, its existence in relationship, and how to talk about it with others.

A lot of activist folks are calling for people to hold on to hope, to rally, to gather (wear masks please: safety and solidarity), to push and fight and hold fast to the dream of a better world, to grow it, share it. Good! Yes!

This is often followed up by a stern warning about despair. I bet you’ve seen some. “We cannot afford despair” is a classic, like we only have $20 left for emotions this month and purchasing either hope or despair will run us $15. But they run the gamut from a simple “don’t” to more vehement allegations: if you despair, you, personally, have failed the cause and let the bastards win. You have opened the door to the enemy; you have poisoned the well; you contaminate your friends. Traitor.

I would rather live in a world where those who have hurt so badly for so long - or who have drawn such a short goddamn stick in the brain chemistry lottery - that they’ve lost their hope are supported by those who can still find the way forward, until maybe-someday they can believe again too. Maybe it takes only a little while, seeing a friend holding hope close and ready for them. Maybe it’s a long time. Those who have been crushed by the weight of this world deserve a better one, too, even if they still hurt once they’re there. No one person makes the new world we dream of on their own and no one person, aching when they cannot strive, fails it.

Despair is not inherently a contagion: being lost yourself and telling others to give up are separate things. 

Despair is not inherently destructive to others. Sometimes it is an inside-only feeling. Sometimes it leaks out. It is possible to recognize someone else’s sorrow, grief, rage, and confusion - all components of despair - without trying to judge, erase, or consume it as your own. It is theirs.

Despair is not a moral failing nor does it make someone the enemy. It is different from a choice to do harm, including the choice of harm by inaction. 

Despair is, still, as with the first time I wrote about it, not a choice or - god help me - a privilege.

Despair is also not, for all that it can feel like it in the moment, all-encompassing or eternal. It waxes and wanes; your heart can be broken into pieces and ground into dust and you can savor a cup of tea or the hand of a beloved friend. There isn’t a fixed budget for emotions, let alone fixed prices. We contain multitudes.

Despair does not mean you cannot make good in the world, cannot contribute. After all: nothing stops. And hope is not the only motivator. Others include rage, trust, spite, stubbornness, promises… even nihilism can have its uses: if everything is meaningless, all equally pointless, I might as well make what choices I can. Within the choices I can make, when possible, I can choose to keep trying.

Despair does not make you worthless, or less of a person.
 

And if the cruelty of the despair-as-failure sentiment wasn’t enough to convince you, or its incongruence with an envisioned world where everyone matters: “just stop, do better, fix your head, simply do not” doesn’t work.

We exist in a web of relationships. Individualism is a lie; humans don’t function in isolation, most “independence” is fictitious, and interdependence is how we get free. No meritocracy, no bootstraps.

Nobody gets out of the pit in isolation. Especially, perhaps, when the despair comes from the dissonance between the world we live in and the world we long for. I think it is always true anyway, but, when the issue is “the world hurts so much that I can no longer hold on to the dream of a world where I and we matter,” the way through is to say “you matter and I will not leave you behind.” Not “get it right or get ejected/shamed”. (Does this have parallels to restorative justice? Glad you asked, yes it does!)

What does it look like to carry someone else’s hope for - or alongside - them, when they cannot? 
How do you help them survive and, in time, even thrive? 
How do we move forward together?

This attitude toward despair doesn’t make for pithy, algorithm-happy social media posts, certainly. No quick catchphrase, no simple social script, because those things aren’t what’s needed: what’s needed is going to differ for the individual relationships, and the individual humans. It’s like the difference between “let me know if there’s anything I can do to help,” which makes more work for the already-in-crisis person, to figure out what you can do and whether it’s useful and then arrange for it to happen; and “here is the help I can offer at this time, would you like me to do any of this?” It matters not just because it makes things easier for the struggling person, but because doing so  shows attention, individual care, and consideration, in relationship. It shows them they matter - and wow, does that help make it easier to believe in, work toward, push for, a world where we all matter. It is a proof that keeps belief going. Relational care, in the context of social change, is the closest thing I know to an antidote to despair.

Sometimes that’s just some version of “I see how hard things are right now. Let me stay beside you a while.”

One of my favorite pieces in What Cannot Be Held is just that, or tries to be that, insofar as one can do so through published text, in that distanced relationship between author and anonymous reader. I want to make a video of it at some point, in my rocking chair, but I have been too sore. 

I wanted a way to say: I see these feelings, and they hurt, but they will not destroy me, as they will not destroy you, and you will not be alone. You are hurting but you are enough, already, and deserve to be loved. 

(Really, that is the whole point of WCBH, and maybe all my written work overall, but it is most acute here.)

"Lullaby"

Rock, beloved
     hum, beloved,
soft, warm loops.
Peace, beloved
     breathe, beloved: 
I will stay with you.

Let go, my love,
     let go, at last
take respite, find relief.
Be seen, my kin
     be held, my sib,
and know that you are safe.

Dear heart, 
     soft heart,
broken, bleeding, spent –
weep, love;
     sleep, love,
we'll heal what can't be held.