Insist upon your humanity
I hate when people like me seem like they feel obligated to issue lofty or highly emotionally charged statements in moments like this, as if everyone was waiting to hear from them specifically. I do not think that I am The Person to listen to, or the person with all of the answers. How I feel is like: In the movie Clue, the cast spends most of the movie screaming their heads off at every new dead body they find. But by the time there are the fourth, fifth, and sixth bodies, they trudge silently into the room, take in the scene, and trudge silently out again. That is how I feel, with a side of flames, flames, on the side of my face.
But to the extent that this is newsletter is (I like to think) about claiming or maintaining some semblance of sanity and groundedness in our existence, I wanted to say:
This is a time to insist upon our humanity, especially because there is a will to separate us from it. That means feeling sad or angry, if that’s what you feel (if you even needed one more person’s such permission). It means taking time to do nothing except stare into space, allowing yourself not to have the capacity. It means moving slowly. It means not taking instruction even from well-intended people like myself, but paying rapt attention to your own state. And not because you need to process everything so that you can get up all the sooner and get back to work, but because our humanity is what this moment wants to take from us, and there is nothing to do but insist upon it in the face of opposition.
Insisting upon our humanity means taking care of other people around you, slowly and deliberately and intentionally, not out of obligation, but because the precise intended feeling of moments like this is to make us feel isolated, disconnected, fundamentally misunderstood and unheard. Insisting upon our humanity means doing the things that are not recognizably efficient, that aren’t focused on walling ourselves off.
The interesting thing about this moment is we’ve now been through it before (or, as close to something like it that is not exactly “it”). The first time, it was disorienting, and many of us spent a lot of time in a tailspin about what to even do or how to even begin thinking about this (feelings that were met by some people with exasperation at our naiveté. Fair!). The best thing that could be said for this moment is that there is a recognizable set of actions and thought patterns that don’t work, don’t help, and do nothing but waste our energy.
I know a lot of people have had to insist upon their humanity fruitlessly for too long, but feeling that despair and frustration is part of it, too. Part of the insisting can be letting other people help carry you. (If you’re one of the people looking for something to do, that’s an easy one.) If there's anything we know about round these parts, it's the impact of even seemingly minuscule but consistent investment, AND, that there are times to rest and times to step up.
Of course it’s unfair to have to continue to be reactive or carry ourselves in a certain way, just when we thought we might be on a path out of the hole, however crooked. (Insisting upon our humanity does not mean insisting it at other people who have a will to antagonize, posturing or getting involved in every argument we come across; there’s just way too much opportunity for that now and it’s a bottomless pit. Insisting upon our humanity means, if anything, the opposite.) But if I can relate anything from being in abusive situations, it’s that so much of the damage comes from the focus demanded by the predator in the room. The impulse to fix the situation by giving it even more focus compounds quickly, as do the effects of having to negate yourself and constructive forces in your life while you deal and deal and deal with this perpetual emergency.
But this is why it becomes multiple times more important to insist on your own reality, your dignity, your humanity—it’s not going to fall logically out of the equation. There is no amount of reasoning with anyone else or yourself that will make the predator, or people in general, agree that you are correct to do so. Validity and humanity can’t be captured by reasoning. At times this can feel like impractical, irrational blind faith. These are very overwhelming forces that have been building up over a long time, that we are working against. But the whole goal of these situations is to sow distrust in each person of themselves, and among each other. Fuck that and fuck them. Our humanity is what they attack, precisely because it’s threatening and powerful. Stay dangerous. Keep insisting upon your humanity.
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