Checking in

Photo by Dennis Klein on Unsplash

Today I'm thinking of the oft-quoted, purportedly Chinese curse, "may you live in interesting times."

We are definitely living through interesting times. As the child of an historian, I know that times have rarely not been interesting, somewhere in our world. We are also living in a world where everyone has a story about what is happening.

Today, I’m reminding myself that two things can be true at once, and that stories can be very powerful and right and that they are also always wrong.

The human brain needs to know what happened. It wants what we all talk about—that mythical beast, “closure.” It wants to stamp the form and close the folder and then file the folder and then slam shut the door on the filing cabinet and then dust off its metaphorical brain-hands and waltz out of the office and shut the office door and lock the door and walk away and…. so on and so on until whatever happened is so thoroughly processed that it’s basically an ant in amber that we can pull out and look at dispassionately.

When we do this, we tell ourselves stories. They are often about how either another person is bad and wrong, or they are about how we are bad and wrong. And then we take stock of all the “evidence,” or what our brain has helpfully labeled as evidence, and then we build our case.

The thing is, we’re always wrong. This is why I love Philip Roth’s books, even though he was, yes, a misogynist. Philip Roth was a great champion of the notion that we are always wrong, as humans, and we can so rarely see that. Just like he couldn’t help but think his penis was particularly magnetic to women, that it was a very special penis. And couldn’t see that he was almost certainly nearly always wrong.

But this is not about Philip Roth. This is about us being wrong and how that propensity to file people away even though we are wrong is so easily weaponized. That’s why social media can be so wonderful and so horrible. We get to find our people! The people who get us, the people who share our obscure sense of humor or our love for something other people don’t even know about. But we also get told who our people are, and how we’re the best people, and how nobody else gets us and everyone else is bad for not getting us, and that we have to fight those people who don’t get us.

Obviously, we also believe that this is true for Team Us, but it’s NOT true for the other side, who also believe the exact same thing because they are also being told…the exact same thing.

Meanwhile, parts of this messaging can be absolutely true. Systems do exist that ignore, actively discourage, or injure particular groups.

But oftentimes, and at the same time, we’re being pitted against something or someone else by forces that benefit from our being divided. Divide and conquer is not only a strategy and a cliché, it’s how our brains work. If we return to my filing metaphor, the only thing our brains love as much or more than putting something in a file, is to then compare that file to another file.

This is how we figured out the difference between cave lions and cave-something-good-to-eat, or between the mushroom that gave us umami jazz hands and the one that made us shit ourselves to death.

In other words, what saved our lives on the savannah is fucking dangerous now that we have social media. Our propensity to file people away and judge them is so easy to exploit. But you know all this.

We all know this. I know this. And yet, I’ve found myself desperately latching onto stories told to me by others. “Is this the story that explains everything? What about this one? And will that one tell me what will happen, finally, so I can prepare?”

But all of these stories are false. Sure, they may be true on some level and for some people, but not for everyone or not entirely. We’re not built like that. Each of us are snarls of trauma and ego and desire and fear and lust and greed and small moments of joy and maybe, somewhere deep, moments of transcendence.

Tolstoy nails this idea. In his short story “Master and Man,” Tolstoy creates a character who is a dickhead. He gets himself and his serf stuck in a blizzard, because he’s arrogant and greedy. But (spoiler alert!) at the end he does something heroic, and then he dies.

So he’s a hero, right? Absolutely not. He’s arrogant, greedy, and he’s a saint—but only for a few minutes. If he’d lived—would he have continued to be a saint? Probably not.

In full disclosure, even as I write this I wondering if I’m making apologies for people who don’t deserve apologies. I wonder if I’m being too nice, and telling myself a too nice story because I was raised to be too nice.

That is probably true. But it can also be true that we’re all the hot mess I just described. We’re all chaos demons, intent on our own survival and, better yet, pleasure. Some of us have the facilities to recognize these propensities, and try to be less chaotic and/or demonic, and some seem to embrace that element of themselves. But even those people are, inevitably, doing so for reasons that, if we were party to them, would make sense to us.

So what is my point? My point is that the only thing bringing me peace right now is not the stories. I may find a story a like, and be happy with that story for about five minutes. Then I’m back looking at op-eds or reels or the news, for the next hit. The better story that better explains this fucked up world. Rinse and repeat.

That’s what I did all day yesterday. I did make myself go to the gym, and then I went to an appointment, and then I went to my Spanish class, which was good. But in between those things, I happily spiraled about like a dreidel, looking for The Story.

I was both miserable and not any smarter.

This morning, I left my phone upstairs. I finished a very good book while I had breakfast. I texted friends to check in and make some plans. I journaled, brainstorming new ways I might volunteer or engage with my city in a meaningful way that creates connection and community, besides the work I do for hospice. Then I wrote this, because writing calms me and makes me feel in control. Now I will get ready and go to work, and talk to my students and colleagues. Then I will see friends, tonight.

Have I changed the world yet, today? No. But I didn’t yesterday, either. And today felt a fuck of a lot better, and I did things that weren’t entirely scratching my own ass (not that our asses don’t deserve a good scratch sometimes).

Most importantly, today I reminded myself that I don’t know what is coming. Yes, I have a million catastrophic stories, like the worst Choose Your Own Adventure ever. But I am never right! I’ve never been right, and I will never be right. Like every person out there, I am almost always entirely wrong.

But I can be a friend. I can listen. I can check in with my most vulnerable. I can read and think critically. I can engage with the world in a way that is real and that tangibly helps someone else (and myself, because nothing feels better than helping, a fact to embrace rather than shy away from). I can take my little pleasures (my walks! lifting! baths!). It is also okay to fall apart for a bit, or spiral while doomscrolling. I can do all of it, even as I try to choose the stuff that makes me feel better.

So that is my exhortation to you. I know the stories are like sirens, especially for those of us who have slightly dodgy relationships with control and perfectionism. They call. It’s hard to resist. And they can teach us things! They’re worth consuming. But they’re never the whole story.

And we gotta get out there. We gotta be in the real world, even when we kinda want to set that world on fire. When we leave the house, we realize that people are still just walking dogs and picking their noses at red lights and grinning goofily at babies.

Who knows everything that is going through their heads—because we rarely know (or want to acknowledge) what is going through our own.

How are you hanging in? How are you getting through? Whatever you’re doing may not feel like getting through, but if you’re around to read this, you’re getting through. What stories are you telling yourself that are helpful and which are not? What can you do reach out to the world, rather than hide away because you actually want to wring its neck (which I know is tempting). What are your little treats? Can you give yourself more of them, especially if they are genuinely helpful?

I promise to see you as I see myself: frail and afraid and so mad I don’t get to control shit, and sad, and maybe hopeful and maybe mad I’m hopeful because, jesus, will I go to the gulag saying “maybe it won’t be that bad,” but also I don’t think despair ever really helped. In other words, I promise that the mess in me sees and acknowledges the mess in you. Namaste.

So feel free to share. You are not alone. xo