Many Things Can Be True

When something feels compulsory, it is ruined. I hate it so much. All of a sudden, because I said I would, maintaining this blog ONCE AGAIN feels like an upstream slog. This is an issue I will be unpacking in the coming weeks as I dive back into The Artists Way. I’ve tried to get through the program, but I really was not ready to abandon judgement in the way it demands. I feel hopeful this time around. I have made it through week two.

I will say, that I have been making art, just not writing much. I have been painting my heinie off. I can’t paint fast enough. I have mostly been painting clouds:

You can buy them here:

CLICK ME

There’s my signature rant about how I cannot keep a consistent blog schedule over. Now onto some meat:

I spoke about self-consciousness in my last post. I truly believe that most people feel a lot more “watched” and judged than they did ten or twenty years ago. Even if you don’t log your life online, the internet has changed everything.

A few weeks ago, Charlie Kirk was shot. I think the discourse around it has turned into a terrible echo chamber, in which most people are a little right and a little wrong (in my opinion). I’m part of a few of the populations that Charlie Kirk reviled, so I’ve had pretty complicated feelings about his murder. Conversely, I’ve never had complicated feelings about the murders of Black people in America, Palestinians, women, and queer people all over the world. I also think that people voicing their positive reactions to the death of a person who wanted them dead should not be punished. That’s all I’m going to say about it directly, because I think that essentially covers my position.

I mention this because Kirk’s murder has highlighted a feature of modern discourse that I think about a lot: the inability of people and ideologies to hold complicated and contradictory truths. For example: murder is upsetting, and yet I am not mourning this person who was murdered.

Contradictory feelings are—in my opinion—a cornerstone of the human experience.

We have all hated and loved someone. There’s a reason why the Kombucha Girl meme (Brittany Broski) became a smash hit. The loss of the ability to hold multiple truths is really scary to me. It means that empathy, rehabilitation, great art, comedy, history, and a bunch of other things are at risk of fading away.

I used to work on a suicide hotline. It taught me to look at every. single. person. differently. I often wedge myself into conversations and share some “sage wisdom” from working on the line, and everyone is sick of it—and sick of me.

Working on a suicide hotline was a lot more emotionally complex than I thought it would be, and not for the reasons you might guess. Talking to people who were at high risk for suicide was often surprisingly straightforward. The line being anonymous meant that we attracted a lot of people in the throes of extreme shame. Our job was to deescalate their emotional state through empathic validation. That doesn’t mean we endorsed bad acts, but we did affirm the emotions behind them.

This meant that sometimes, you found yourself in a place of understanding with someone who was doing things you abhorred. For example, I once spoke with someone who was thinking about shooting up a school, and we spent some time talking about why he felt that way. And what a terrible feeling to have! To be in so much pain that you want to inflict it on others. He seemed to really appreciate the effort I put in to understanding him, while I also made it clear that he should NOT follow through on his impluse. (He did not shoot up the school, btw). Actual therapeutic value comes from genuine, sometimes hard-won empathy.

I may get pushed in front of a car for saying this, but any reaction to Charlie Kirk’s death is valid. Any feeling is valid, because it is happening. You don’t choose how you feel; what you do with that feeling is what should be judged. Say you find yourself more upset about Kirk’s death than about what’s happening in Gaza. Then, yeah, you should probably reevaluate why that is. But having that emotion in the first place simply means it exists, whether you like it or not.

Imagine, for a second, that you signed up for a job that requires complete non-judgment—that you’re being tasked with trying your best to understand any form of pain that’s presented to you. Incarcerated people, victims, leaders, disenfranchised people, people on drugs, people who think the government has poisoned their food, people who don’t like gay people, etc.

Also, imagine you call someone—a stranger—and tell them your honest, true feelings that are causing you pain. What thoughts have popped into your head that have brought you shame? What have you drunkenly said to a stranger? Who have you hurt? What are your “knee-jerk” moments? What would it be like to hear someone say, “God, that sounds so painful. I am sorry you are going through that,” and mean it?

In a time when people are putting their internal worlds on full display, criticism of an individual’s emotional experience has grown—and has somehow gotten both more pointed and more rogue. Oftentimes, when I see a video, I’ll immediately open the comment section to make sure that I’m “feeling correctly” about it.

There is a lot of horrific hate and violence in the world. Many people will hold fucked up opinions that cannot be softened regardless of how much empathy you try and fling at them. Charlie Kirk was of definitely one of those people. But I think we are in a time in society where we feel very threatened by people that do not have the same emotional reality as us. This is a deeply complicated, heavy time in the history of humans.

I do not really have a solution or a rallying cry to wrap this up. I am paralyzed by the fact that every “solution” or “suggestion” I think of feels to simple or flimsy. I guess, try to keep empathy at the front of your mind. Charlie Kirk didn’t believe in empathy, so might as well dishonor his legacy by amping it up.

I wake up to what feels like a comb made of needles dragging across my scalp and getting caught in my hair. It’s one of the three cats—but I know which one, and let’s be honest, so do you.

“Hey,” I whisper. “What the fuck?”

“I need you to wake up.” Darwin’s eyes glow like two cursed Christmas baubles in the pitch dark.

“Yeah, I got that. What is it? I just fell asleep.”

He stares at me blankly.

“Hello? What?”

He sighs. “I don’t know. I think I want catnip?”

“K, bud, that’s a want, not a need.”

“Sorry, I meant I think I need catnip.”

“No, that’s not at all what I meant. I’ll give you some catnip, but then it’s bed, okay? Anything short of death can wait until morning.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

I get up and give him a little pile of catnip on the floor. I walk back to the bed and wipe the rogue litter off my feet.

Five minutes pass. He starts to yell, so I’m awake again. He runs around the apartment while I try to catch him with a blanket—like a loose pigeon—all while trying not to wake my sleep-deprived girlfriend.

Once I catch him, I swaddle him sloppily. I hold him like a human baby, and from the blanket, he reaches up and puts a paw on my neck. He starts purring and giving me soft kisses near the mouth.

“Hey, what the fuck? Why did I have to do the old catch and wrap? You’re chill now? Why didn’t you just come over and cuddle?”

“I don’t know… I just felt overwhelmed by all the things I wanted and all the feelings I had.”

“I get that… but I’m still really annoyed that you won’t let me sleep.”

“Aren’t you trying to hold space for contradictory feelings?”

“Goodnight.”