August 15, 2017

praying

Have I told you the story of how I used to know Kesha a little bit? We did a summer program at Columbia together when we were 17. She was already a character: she stalked around the city in cowboy boots and talked a lot about the older man she was sleeping with and how she was going to be a famous musician one day.

Turns out she wasn't wrong!

It's been pretty weird, from my one tiny corner of the world, to watch a girl who was mildly rude to me when we were teenagers go through some extraordinarily heavy shit in the most public possible way; to try to reconcile her life since I've left it, as it's been lived in public, with those scant private months now well over a decade passed. It's interesting, mostly, a window into the seams between normality and celebrity we don't usually have.

Anyway though this isn't about Kesha actually. It's about the first single off of her most recent album, Rainbow, which is called Praying, and the question of forgiveness. What do you do with someone who's hurt you? You try to get over them, obviously, to get them out of your system. You try to learn from the experience, if there's anything to learn, and then to let them go.

But then do you have to wish them well?

Isn't wanting them to suffer still a kind of attachment, and a source of negativity that stays in your life?

But who's fucking superhuman enough to wish good things to someone who's done them real, serious harm?

I think Praying provides the most elegant answer I know about: I hope you find your peace / falling on your knees / I hope you're praying. 

Because the people who are fucked up enough to really hurt us and not care may find success, but peace will elude them. To hope that they find a path to that is not to wish them ease but to know that they have difficult work to do before they'll get there-- that their confrontations with themselves, if they can bear to begin them, will be long, and extraordinarily painful. 

"I hope you can do the work that will get you where you need to go" is not the same thing as "I wish you well." It's more powerful, and crueler, and kinder, and ultimately, I think, more honest. I hope that you are praying / I hope your soul is changing. I hope you never hurt anyone the way you hurt me again. I hope you find the strength to become a better person. 

But it's not my job to make you one, and it's not my fucking fault if you don't.