#052722: A tiny thought that no one asked for
On tragedy, grief, rage and the public
I got this uncomfortable feeling in the pit of my stomach yesterday morning after my newsletter went out and thought the discomfort was a kind of regret that I had published anything during a tragic week in America that landed on the backdrop of a uniquely tumultuous, divisive period of political unrest. The school shooting in Texas was the third deadly massacre of just this month, and this doesn’t include the string of New York subway murders that don’t seem to be calming either.
For the past year and change, I’ve been pretty vigilant about keeping to writing mostly about how to get dressed. Lately, it’s been nice to reconnect with more personal writing as it relates to learning about what it’s like to be a mom and a partner and a daughter and a woman but I do have to say that limiting the scope of what I share has really reframed my relationship to what I feel the need to share, and how I think about sharing it.
It’s necessarily removed me (as in the person) from current events (running a media company during a decade that was defined by topics and issues across every category for which one could possibly capture attention melting into each other set off an internal panic alarm that often dropped the boundaries on the difference between myself and everything else) and let me think both more critically and compassionately about whatever’s going on right then.
It’s helped me to think more objectively about what I “can do to help,” if anyone really knows. It’s helped me to realize we can’t take away each other’s pain, that we all have it— that it’s okay to feel it, that it comes out differently depending on the person and that the expectation we can make is really an expectation of ourselves: to let those around us feel their pain in dignity and when appropriate or possible, to genuinely offer support.
For the most part, I maintain that limiting the scope of what I write about was the right decision for me, in particular because the reality of the current culture is that there is now this expectation that we’ll signal our stands. That if and when we don’t, we’re complicit. But often these stands show up most effectively as outrage/activism (this is one way pain manifests), which is rewarded in the social media landscape and more and more, has become the model for how to acknowledge adversity.
Obviously outrage/activism isn’t the most honest expression of how many — myself included — respond to unrest. Which is sometimes as basic as breathing or docile as calling someone I’m thinking about to say hi or packing an extra protein bar to give away to another who needs it. An unrelated opportunity to extend the ring of intimacy/kindness from myself to someone I know to someone I don’t, then on from there.
Sometimes I writhe though when conflict erupts and I’m scrolling and scrunching my forehead and it’s not that I want to speak up or Take a Stand but at a minimum, to relay compassion for something that’s going on, a sort of nod from the perch of my one separate self that conveys I’m aware we’re also connected.
This — the unspoken understanding that although we are separate, we’re also connected; although we are different, we’re also the same — is, I think, the key thing. It’s also what it means to be emotionally sensitive. Often mistaken for weakness or flightyness or being unstable, it’s really just having the courage to go inwards and see this. It’s funny to say it because I used to think that I wasn’t sensitive. Lately it seems I was just trying to suppress this core belief I have, a sort of faith in connection.
Yesterday, there was no backlash or spoken disappointment in response to the dispatch I shipped out about button down shirts. It got shared around and some questions on particularities came in throughout the day. These could have easily signaled business as usual. In some ways, they did. Business went on as usual. But I still felt a sort of heaviness, this discomfort even through moments that were normal or better than normal: soft, warm, jittery, fun. At times I felt like I was in misalignment — having published something that didn’t match up with how I was feeling or what I was thinking right then. In other moments, I didn’t give it much thought.
This is, I think, is the most frustrating discrepancy between being human and being online — the experience of the former is a dynamic, fluid process of various experiences, judged as positive or negative throughout the day and that can’t quite be captured online lest you commit to conveying the full range in real time, which I do not recommend. Our respective senses of alignment won’t always match up with the public feeling of the moment — to someone else somewhere, no matter the message, we’re all tone deaf in some way. How could we not be? Billions of different experiences and circumstances and intentions and impulses.
But during public moments of heightened emotional intensity, it becomes harder and harder to tell the difference between your own feelings and the ones you are scrolling or tapping through. I think this necessarily disconnects you from yourself, confusing the hell out of you, disavowing a sentient inclination or desire to step back and ask: what’s honest for me, what feels right to me?
I don’t really know what my point is, but after having slept on those questions, I think I just want to convey that trite as it may sound, my thoughts are with the mothers and fathers and grandmas and grandpas and aunts and uncles and sisters and brothers and friends and caretakers and all of the hearts cracking open in real time, in pursuit of more peace in America.
I wish you safety, peace and connection this weekend. Love,
Leandra