I don’t know who needs to hear this… is the start of more social media posts than I can count. What follows is almost always affirming, a reminder that we’re doing something right, doing life right, and a friend, relative, colleague, acquaintance, or total stranger is taking the time to share with others in their circle a truth they themselves needed to hear.
My I don’t know who needs to hear this… for today, this week, this month, this year, this era, is that putting words down on a page or screen is an act of survival. Among other things.
I’m going to presume that anyone reading is a writer or creative type who does, in fact, need to hear this. I need to hear it myself, which is a big part of why I’m writing it. And it’s not writing advice, or an exercise or prompt, or a vignette of my #WritingLife or the lives of any of the Center teachers. Not today.
Today, I need to be able to say, in an artistic space I foster precisely so that I and others can say what we most need to say, is that things are terrible and I am not ok.
I’m not sure how to exist in a world like this. I know there has always been violence, oppression, injustice, cruelty, and hatred. I’m not just waking up to these facts. It’s not worse now than it’s ever been. But people seem to care less, or show their care less, or believe more than ever that there’s nothing they or we can do. It feels like we’re backsliding into indifference and disconnection faster than we have time to process, and for me, indifference has always felt, in my body and heart, worse than the injustice itself (different bodies might feel differently, with good reason). We know there are villains, and we expect them to act in villainous ways. What we don’t expect is how, and how many, people will turn their heads and pretend the villains aren’t that villainous, that the pain they cause isn’t intolerable. I don’t know how to walk amongst the head-turners and feel safe, let alone seen. I’m not sure how to exist in a world like this.
But I am sure that making art matters.
So, I don’t know who needs to hear this besides me, but what we do matters. Holding space for creativity in a world that would outsource poetry and music and painting to software matters. Insisting upon creation in a time of destruction matters. Real bids for connection in the age of manufactured intimacy matters. Authentic storytelling amid false narratives and rampant misinformation matters.
When we feel helpless, let’s try to remember that it’s ok to turn off the news and read or write a story. Protecting our psyches and the most precious and vulnerable parts of ourselves—the parts that keep reaching out and reaching out again and again in an effort to connect—is itself an act of resistance. Of survival.
I don’t know who needs to hear this, but our stories and minds are the only things we truly own.
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