It turns out I’m not someone who knows how to live through a genocide.
The last few months as a society, and on a more personal level the past 18, have pushed me further into some big existential questions than ever before. I KNOW I KNOW WHAT’S NEW but even for me this feels like deeper, darker territory.
Death and its shadow have been living in my house for quite some time. In various guises, it just kept showing up. And then it showed up outside the door, too.
And if death is going to make me ask anything, it’s this -
how can I really, truly, live in this world?
Maybe this is the question I was born with. Maybe I’m here to live out the answers.
These months are for processing. I turn over again and again the things I value and hold to be true, and try to work out what still stands.
I get very still and very quiet and listen. I look to the work of others I respect and know I can learn from. I have conversations with friends who are grappling with the same. I dig down into art more than ever.
And still, the questions.
And I get to ask these questions as someone with a ridiculous amount of privilege, an unearned luck. It feels so fucked up, self-indulgent, like so much of this modern human experience of late. But around and around we go.
In the park I watch the swans glide across the water. The sun is low and yellow in that way which can only happen on cold winter days. There is a frosted veil over everything. I feel actual awe in my body and stop talking to take out my phone and capture something of it. Some hope for later. I realise I haven’t done this in a while. I’ve been forgetting to look at everything. I’ve been struggling to hold it all.
In all the searching, there are some personal beliefs I keep coming back to in order to tether myself to something solid -
being human means that we are all connected and that there is no way for me to be unaffected by the immense suffering felt by other humans. And if there is? I don’t want it. CONNECTION.
the things that make us human, matter. As does expressing those things. ART.
we need each other. reciprocity of love and care is not just how to live, but how to thrive, with hope and joy intact. COMMUNITY & RELATIONSHIP.
the good must be taken with the bad. However hard or contradictory it can feel. BALANCE.
the only way through is to keep feeling it all. BEING A PERSON.
I sit in a cafe with my family and watch them laughing about something one of us said and I just can’t fathom it. Why am I allowed to be here, wrapped in love and safety when in this same moment, parents are holding their dead babies? What I’m saying is, I don’t know how to hold it all, all the time. It feels like my brain is breaking. Or maybe this is what holding it all looks like? What I’m also saying is, I’ve been having a flirtatious bout with nihilism. It’s unlike me. But these times are like nothing I’ve lived through. Later, my husband and I lay in the dark and talk about the meaning of it all and dig deep into the nitty-gritty of the macro and micro of our lives.
It turns out I just don’t have it in me to go full nihilist yet, but I’m letting it brush up against me more than before.
I dream I say to someone
‘It’s hard loving other people’
and I wake up and try to work out if I believe it.
I just don’t know how to do certain parts of the internet anymore. The rubbing up of visceral death alongside influencers selling shit makes me want to throw my phone at a wall. Is social media an example of holding it all in the extreme, or is it just mass distraction? I’m sure the answer is in that middle space, it usually is. Either way, it hurts a very human part of me. I know that feeling will get smoothed over, and get easier with time, but that ease feels like it might bring with it a small erosion of some essential part of self.
I’m struggling to be with the part of myself who deeply believes in joy as a rebellious act. I try to work out how the fuck she came to be and how I can hold on to and amplify her now. She feels mysterious and somewhat unknowable in this moment. Like, can this be a thing? How does this even work? Maybe this is how other people felt looking at that version of me in the past.
A friend leaves me a voice note about how I’d reminded her to find joy where she could, to celebrate the life she’s built, and she was doing it right that minute by sitting quietly in her kitchen drinking tea. Tears come as I listen and finally, I can feel those beliefs again for the first time in a while - not in some abstract way outside myself, but through something tangible and close by. She gives me the gift of reminding me of something true about myself when I most need it.
We’re deep in the season of choir recitals and Christmas shows and the plea of parental help. I go and hang out with my daughter’s class once a week to help them with a sewing project, I chaperone all the choir performances, and I’m in the front row of the Christmas show. It’s purely selfish - I need the proximity of innocent, imperfect, tender beings. They dance and make mistakes and sing loudly and get the words wrong. Little kids in light-up jumpers and tinsel tell the audience to remember this season is about love, friendship, and peace. I cry every single time my daughter sings Seasons of Love with everything she’s got.
Five Hundred Twenty-Five Thousand
Six Hundred Minutes
Five Hundred Twenty-Five Thousand
Moments so dear
Five Hundred Twenty-Five Thousand
Six Hundred Minutes
How Do You Measure - Measure A Year?
In Daylights - In Sunsets
In Midnights - In Cups Of Coffee
In Inches - In Miles
In Laughter - In Strife
In - Five Hundred Twenty-Five Thousand
Six Hundred Minutes
How Do You Measure
A Year In The Life?
How About Love?
How About Love?
How About Love?
Measure In Love
Seasons of Love.
HOW ABOUT LOVE.
The thing is - we’re/I’m here. Doing, actually? Ok. There is so much love. We go on.
Maybe that’s the most perplexing thing of all. Humans continue to live. There will be pain of the deepest kind in someone’s being today and the chances are that someone will make them laugh again. I’m almost 100 percent sure of it. There will be good.
And none of us can stop it.
But we can invite it in, make space for it, and sink into it any chance we get. We can hold each other and seek peace in the small ways available, we can try to imagine a better reality for everyone.
The alternative just feels like a waste.
READ:
I happened to read one of the most profound and life-affirming books I’ve ever encountered and think everyone on earth should read it - A Heart That Works, by Rob Delaney. Please read this book. Yes, you will sob and grieve for so much (literally, I heave sobbed throughout), but you will also deeply connect with what loving other people really means. I can’t recommend it enough.
I also read Young Jane Young by Gabrielle Zavin (Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow is on the tbr pile) and loved it. Funny, sharp, and a great commentary on the slut shaming society that we continue to exist in. I’d pulled this quote in my notes: “Isn’t a person just a structure built in relation to the landscape and the weather?” which felt as apt a description of a human as I’ve come across.
After writing this letter I found a brilliant article in The Atlantic - Nothing Drains You Like Mixed Emotions (paywall! Use Pocket!) which spoke about the way ambiguity drains us despite being the best way to be. Validation!
David Graeber: 'To save the world, we're going to have to stop working' - The Big Issue
It’s not our pleasures that are destroying the world. It’s our puritanism, our feeling that we have to suffer in order to deserve those pleasures. If we want to save the world, we’re going to have to stop working.
Maybe this explains why social media just doesn’t feel like the thing anymore…
Jessica Delfino has started writing an advice column, Ask Ugly! for The Guardian, and I couldn’t be happier about it. This is from the first, but also read the second.
And on that note: whenever the urge to be “proactive about anti-ageing” hits me, as it has you, I remind myself that ageing is another word for living. That isn’t some faux-positive “frown lines are lessons learned” spin; it’s a biological fact. We don’t get to live without looking like it, and – in my wise-beyond-my-wrinkles opinion – we don’t get to live fully if we’re obsessed with not looking like it, either.
LISTEN:
Very related to the article above, I really enjoyed this episode of Everything is Fine - which continues digging in to the theme of aging = living. I really loved the way the whole conversation was framed, and the language we use to talk about aging explored. The author also spoke about curiosity and intention and just living a damn good life at all ages.
WATCH:
Past Lives is as beautiful as everyone says it is. Anatomy of a Fall was a great moment of cinema that definitely lived in the ambiguity. See it with others and you’ll have a fascinating discussion after where no-one agrees. Slow Horses is back for season 3 and it’s as good as ever. My love for Jack Lowden grows at pace.
LOOK: My screenshots. Always a WILD assessment of where I a mentally.
Thank you for all of this Laura. I feel all of this. You always know how to put the deepest feelings into words💛
Beautiful as always. This has made me wonder whether the clamour and ugliness of social media repels and fascinates us so much because it is (sadly) such an accurate reflection of humanity. Bodies under rubble and selling cures for neck fat. It's not even modern, it's a bawdy market street in medieval times, it's humans humaning as they always have xx