On *Gestures at the World Around Me*
Note: contains references to abusive relationships.
I’ve not slept well. That’s a life-long standard, sure, but it’s worse lately on account of I’m worried about my tonsils (do they need to be removed?), I can’t position myself well (just got my ears pierced, ow), and also I make a point each day of reading the news. Reading about anti-LGBT legistation in Florida, anti-trans legislation in Texas… doesn’t make me happy, but it’s important.
So before bed I usually spend some amount (let’s pretend it’s short) of time scrolling through Imgur. Sometimes I learn cool things, but mostly it’s a way to relax, get some laughter in, and drop some of the day’s tension while I get tired. I skip the occasional news-related posts, having already engaged earlier in the day. This is self-care time.
But last night, nine out of every ten posts were about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. A map of the front line. A video of a jet getting shot down over a city. An article about a man with his pet cat hiding in a bunker while his spouse was, hopefully, hiding in another bunker (in photos, everyone in the bunker had COVID-masks on as well). Reports of the Ukrainian pilot, “the Ghost of Kyiv,” who has so far shot down six Russian fighters. Video of Russian helicopters seizing an airstrip, then articles about how it was retaken by Ukraine. Video of a Russian tank driving over a presumably-civilian car. Posts about Chernobyl, Snake Island, Kyiv, NATO, Volodymyr Zelensky, etc, etc. Video of Russian civilians protesting their own government in huge numbers and getting arrested for it. Video of a crying Ukrainian dad kissing his five year old daughter as he put her on a west-bound train, sending her away while he was staying back to fight. A quote from someone in Kyiv asking the world not to leave them alone, to pay attention, even if we individually can’t do anything, to please just stay with them.
And then one out of every ten posts was a cute picture of a dog. Or a joke making fun of extroverts. Or a tutorial on cooking some pastry or meat. Or a really artsy photo of a fern. Or day whatever of a hamburger someone wants to eat.
Last night I skipped the light posts. I remembered the teaching I’ve done around Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis and the Iranian Revolution. The teaching I’ve done around Elie Weisel’s book Night and the holocaust. I remember feeling what they put into their words, and then I felt similar aspects in the first-hand accounts on Imgur.
My heart breaks for the citizens in Ukraine, for those Russians who want nothing to do with war, for queer friends and strangers and their allies in Florida, for trans friends around the country who have to hear about Texas. And for everyone I know, all of us subjected to varying degrees of compounding traumas. My heart breaks for the future and I search for hope.
According to Derrick Jensen, “Hope is a longing for a future condition over which you have no agency; it means you are essentially powerless.” So perhaps I do not search for hope. Instead I search for agency, but I know I am not at all the hero enough to change any of this.
Now, I’m keen on agency. I’ve got myself into a situation in which I personally have relatively few immediate stressors in my life. I set my own deadlines, choose my own projects, and engage with work on my own terms. I’ve found a therapist, I’ve sought treatment for ADHD, and my close relationships are solid and mutually supportive. I have enough money, and I have time and space and privilege enough to figure out who I am and what I want out of life. It’s been a journey to get here, but it’s lovely.
So I got up this morning, but even with my medication, it’s been difficult to feel like any of my projects are worth it. I can write a poem about gardening or mental health, but people are dying. I can work on my novel about someone who doesn’t feel like they fit in — and there are themes about war, societal discrimination, etc — but people are dying. I lost another pound this week — but so what, people are dying. People are always dying, but these people are dying publicly, abruptly, and often on live streams to the world. To borrow the words of an unnamed podcast that Twitter user Sigrid Ellis once heard, we feel the acute compassion, if not the chronic empathy. I feel a call to be the hero, then I feel depressed to see no way forward on that path.
I know I must compartmentalize. I must do other work anyway. Making progress on self-discovery, on a relatable poem, etc — this does not mean I am a bad person. But perhaps I can find some way to encourage more caring, more chronic empathy.
So I begin my routine. Post coffee and Wordle, I open a blank page, then — in my before-actually-being-productive ritual — I turn to my second monitor and check Reddit and Twitter and Facebook. A lot more about Ukraine. Perhaps my “you have memories to look back on today” from Facebook will be inspiring or rewarding? Ah. No. It is me getting support from friends after someone four years ago (who was once a friend-of-friends) named Graymael harassed me via PMs for criticizing the organization (Dagorhir — a medieval-themed foam-sword combat sport/LARP) that he was the national leader of (which was my primary social group for 10 years, and which I used to love).
Fuuuuuuuh. Okay, first I am upset, because I do not need to relive the exodus that happened from that sport, especially today when I’m already stressed. As the #MeToo movement was hitting news feeds around the world, white supremacists were marching in cities in the US, and the US president seemed an incompetent paranoaic nepotist, our sport was also dealing with internal accusations of poorly handled situations: abuse happening, being reported, and ignored; abusers being sheltered by those in power; those in power sharing it only with the “old boys club” of their friends; missing steps and racist people being tolerated because of their connections to people in power; an unwillingness to let the general populace participate in self-governance; and a generally grass-roots-level uprising of people who wanted change and were shouted down, told they were whatever-the-foam-fighting-equivalent of “unpatriotic” is. (Note: Many of these good people did then leave, some creating their own sports, some joining other sports, and some like me no longer having a sport to be part of. This means that Dagorhir still exists, but many of the good people have left. Some who remain are bad, but many are also still good people fighting the fight with fewer allies. I’m not sure about the ethics of leaving vs staying in terms of how it affected the group, but I knew what I had to do for my own health. Regardless, the parallel of leaving the US to start my own country is clearly not an option.)
Second, I start to feel the parallels. Now, Graymael and Putin (or Trump, or various tyrants, politicians, or abusive people in power) are not at all identical or equal. Graymael and Dagorhir’s situation were absolutely in no way as serious as these other world events. But confronted with my memories from four years ago while in the midst of anxiety over the terror and death in Ukraine and anxiety about bigotry and abusive leadership in the US, I see parallels in the shape of the issues, if not the scope: People rise to power. Utopic peace and happiness is not achieved. Those in power are insecure. They refuse to grow from criticism and instead double down on their positions, become defensive, seek to keep power where it is, and, claiming they are the victims, they make terrible decisions and hurl attacks (verbal or physical) at people around them who have less power.
My situation with Graymael was incredibly mild; I cannot stress that enough. But I have people close to me who have endured more serious abuse, whether by professors and advisors, by parents, or by romantic partners. And we all are faced with personal accounts and journalism regarding small and large scale abuse in the news. Through all this, there is a common thread that abusers all share: they are abusive to those who have less power, and they try to do their abuse when no one is watching. If anyone sees, they explain how it is not abuse, it is necessary, and if anything it is the other person’s fault. They are not abusive to those with more power than them or to their other friends or colleagues — at least not to their faces. I remember thinking, in regards to my friend’s partner, “Wow, but he’s been nothing but nice to me.” But I know abusers operate in secret, and I trusted her lived experience, and I listened to her stories. It would have been easy for me to say, “Oh, he’s clearly working on things” or “I’m sure he didn’t mean that” or “he’s going through a lot too” or “that doesn’t mesh with how he’s always treated me,” and those would all be entirely correct statements, but none of them would help. Remember, I don’t want naive hope for the future, I want agency, and agency in this case starts with stopping the abuse, not justifying my own inaction. For the future to be better than the present, we must look at the painful places. It can be uncomfortable to question and rethink our understandings, but it’s a critical step in improving ourselves and the world around us.
We must internalize that loyal supporters cannot be not blind supporters. It is more important to support the strength and health and improvement of a community than it is to follow the will of any one person at its helm. Stopping abuse may cause other disruptions, but they are disruptions that must be worked through if we want the community to survive.
We must learn that questioning and constructive criticism are not just one way of loving your community, they are a required aspect of it. If we attack the validity or morality of those who point out wrongs, if we assume anyone who says, “Hey this is an obstacle, let’s steer around it” is doing so solely to attack leadership quality or incur negative outcomes, then we have given up all actual agency over the future. Then we have locked the steering wheel in place, saying, “The road looked straight on the map, how could turning help us get there?” as the car slams through potholes and parked vehicles alike, slowly drifting over the painted lines until its inevitable end.
We must eagerly seek out mistakes. It’s not that we want to make them on purpose or be happy about the flaws — no, it’s that we must acknowledge that mistakes will always be made. Having acknowledged their presence, we can then find them, understand them, and thus — by examining and acknowledging our own flaws, we will be able to grow through them.
It’s easy for an insecure person with power to take it personally when someone doesn’t approve of their decisions.
It’s easy for a person in power to feel attacked; to feel their self-identity and security threatened when someone points out their mistakes and flaws. When feeling attacked, it’s common for them to respond with violence.
It’s hard for a person in power to listen openly to such criticism, to learn from it, and to grow from it, but that’s the best way for us to recursively improve our communities. Another option is to let leaders rust into their positions, try to violently overthrow them every few years or decades, replace them with new leaders, let these new leaders rust into their positions, and rinse and repeat. That causes change, but more violently, and with more casualties.
So this concept of eagerly seeking out our own mistakes isn’t new. It’s how you improve as a writer, or at anything, and many people have written many valuable words on the topic. Those in psychology or witchcraft (aka, “spicy psychology”) circles are often familiar with the term shadow-work. In short, shadow-work is the process of exploring the aspects of yourself you’ve rejected. Your embarrassments, your shortcomings, your mistakes, and the impulses and feelings you’ve convinced yourself aren’t there. The parts of yourself that hurt enough that your instinct is to turn away and not deal with it, that make you lash out at others instead.
To quote the pioneering analytical psychologist Carl Jung, “That which we do not bring to consciousness appears in our lives as fate.” In other words, if I didn’t examine and deal with my being asexual, there are a lot of shitty “well, that’s just life” moments that would have continued happening to me. Having come to terms with it, I now understand a lot of causes and effects more clearly. Understanding turned inevitable fate into a situation I had control over. Can the same be done with political discourse in the US? With tyrants in general?
To quote the philosopher Krishnamurti, “The evil of our time is the loss of consciousness of evil.” I don’t know when he wrote this, but he lived through the major world wars. I can see clear applicability to the Holocaust. It was easy to justify inaction, to justify standing by. To take small steps to increase one’s own ignorance, so that one didn’t need to engage. It’s easier for me to not watch the videos of people dying in Kyiv, even as they beg us not to look away. Easier to just say, “Yeah, Russia and Ukraine are always fighting. It’s a thing. It doesn’t affect me.”
To quote psychiatrist R. D. Laing, who wrote this in poem form, but I’m presenting it as prose: “The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice, there is little we can do to change until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.” If we do not allow questions or criticism and we only look at what’s going well, then we do not have the tools to improve where we actually still need improving.
Or to quote Jungian psychoanalyst Edward C. Whitmont, who stays with the unfortunately rather dated dark and light imagery a bit much, but whose words speak for themselves well enough here:
“The shadow cannot be eliminated. It is the ever-present dark brother or sister. Whenever we fail to see where it stands, there is likely to be trouble afoot. For then it is certain to be standing behind us. The adequate question therefore never is: Have I a shadow problem? Have I a negative side? But rather: Where does it happen to be right now? When we cannot see it, it is time to beware! And it is helpful to remember Jung’s formulation that a complex is not pathological per se. It becomes pathological only when we assume that we do not have it; because then it has us.”
Let’s bring in a new but similar concept from a different field. Essayist and former finance and risk statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book Antifragile is terribly written and reflects poorly on him as a person, but the core concept behind its title is important and fits well here. To quote the back cover,
“What Taleb has identified and calls ‘antifragile’ is that category of things that not only gain from chaos but need it in order to survive and flourish. The resilient resists shock and stays the same; the antifragile gets better and better. What is crucial is that the antifragile loves errors, as it incurs small harm and large benefits from them.”
Does this not sound somewhat like shadow-work? Among many other examples, this is seen in seedlings, which need the gentle attacks of wind to grow strong stems; seeds grown indoors with no wind break in two as soon as they’re transplanted outdoors and the wind blows. To pull Taleb’s concept and my seedling analogy out of one of my favorite songs, “Bilgewater” by the band Brown Bird, “If the sun was always shining and our load always light / We’d be shaking like a leaf with every God given night / And we’d break under the weight of any pressure / That was ever applied.”
It’s not that dealing with rough shit makes us strong. Sure, we get calluses and muscles — strong in a certain sense — but the real strength is in learning from that rough shit. If after experiencing stressors we are able to analyze them and learn from our mistakes, then we can internalize our new understandings and apply them in the future. In a subtle and expected twist later in the Brown Bird song, this line hits me hard: “Just have the strength to know you’re wrong / And when you’re right the strength to stand your ground.” That’s right: the strength to know that you’re wrong. Bluster, puffed chests, and flexing are ways of masking and weaponizing weakness. Shadow-work, owning our flaws, and learning from our mistakes are where strength is required.
So how do I pull this essay together? It’s not morning anymore. I guess I found a project that feels meaningful, but I don’t have a solution to the situation with Russia and Ukraine. Or Florida. Or Texas. These are all shit-shows at various points of climactic tension.
We haven’t enacted enough small, recursive, ground-up changes in response to small mistakes in order to fix all this, so instead, old and untenable ways of thinking have become entrenched in power, building up problems until the point we’re at today when a hero is needed, but no one is able to step in and fill those mythical shoes.
So I don’t know how to resolve these conflicts, but here are the small things I think we need to remember in order to mitigate future conflicts:
- Communities improve by learning from their mistakes. Communities that don’t grow in this way become stuck, become toxic, and inevitably face breakdowns.
- One of the best ways to support your community is to question and criticize it when it’s wrong. Question everything. Have the strength to know when you’re wrong. Call out your own mistakes.
- That said, questioning and criticizing isn’t enough. After questioning, you must stand up for what you believe in. Be the change you want to see in the world, or if you’re not situated to do that yet, find people who are and support and amplify them.
To go back to the language of whatever podcast Sigrid Ellis heard that day, we don’t need acute heroes, we need chronic caring.
And we wouldn’t be in the position of hoping for an impossible hero to arrive and overthrow things if we cared to do small, recursive, endless maintenance in the form of shadow-work, of small and constant changes. To once again quote the University of Wisconsin President in 1984, we “should ever encourage that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found.”
So I understand why the Ghost of Kyiv must shoot down Russian planes, and why the internet is rallying around this person, and I do not judge, but I also grieve for the Russian pilots killed, for the cities and countryside onto which the wreckage of these planes will fall. I do not see any of these fighters as heroes or villains: I see them all as individual people who are all in terrible situations. Some making better choices than others, but none of them there solely as a result of their own life goals. These are results of our world community’s problems.
I grieve that we have tyrants who maintain power by violence.
I hope for a more self-aware future. A future that calls itself out. A future that learns how to practice chronic empathy while also ending all tyranny or abuse it finds.
May we live in a world that learns to deal with its issues before they require heroes.
[After every article, I’ll supply a not-necessarily related musical pairing. Your music video for today is “Монах” / “Monahk” by the Ukrainian group ДахаБраха / DakhaBrakha. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFJ717atqaw]
