On the Lookout for Humans

Folks using screen readers and anyone who prefers to listen — there’s an audio player bar just below this paragraph, with a play button on the far right. Please let me know if you have any trouble with it.

A thing I’ve noticed about my eyes when gazing into a glowing screen: left to their own instincts, they will quickly dart to the scariest, cruelest, and ugliest expressions of humanity. Is there a reel with baby pandas playing? I’ll hardly register it in my quest for the most incendiary telling of the worst news of the day. Are the trolls spewing hate back and forth in a comment section? My eyes will lock in on the carnage and see the battle through to the last fizzle. Are they humans? Bots? Can’t be sure!

To be clear, I’m not proud or ashamed of this instinct. But, I’ve taken note – it’s here. Anyone else?? Does your brain bend this way, too?

As you might imagine, my digital habits do take a toll on my general impression of humans. It’s not hard to find evidence that a lot of people would fit nicely onto an orcs-and-ringwraiths team. It makes me want to pull my little family into a bubble fortress (more literally under the blankets on my bed) – to keep us safe from all the orcs out there. It makes me feel wary of strangers (are they secretly an orc?) I feel less motivated to create (what’s the point when the orcs are destroying everything?) and much less motivated to share (for an orc to see?! No thank you!). (Micah just bought the LOTR trilogy on DVD. Is it showing?)

It’s not that there aren’t real life humans that fit the supervillain brand remarkably well. Of course there are. And it doesn’t stop at optics. The harm humans are capable of wreaking is staggering and excruciatingly real. But it’s not the only thing that’s real. And it turns out when all I do is stare at humans through this one, detached lens, exclusively fixated on our anger and destruction from across my flat screen, it starts impacting the way I show up here.

In a recent interview John Green said “I wouldn’t have an issue with despair if it caused me to be a better human or a better dad. But despair just sinks me deeper and deeper into the couch…”

Same, dude. Same.

So lately, I’ve been trying to open up the streams of data collection and pay attention to the actual people around me like a brand new baby alien – to scan the rooms and audiences and lines around me like I’m doing research. This study isn’t so much about the ones already tucked close into my orbit (turns out I don’t need to be convinced of their humanity), but all the other humans out there – the ones that can be clumped into a faceless blur, easy to fear or dismiss or resent. Antennae up and searching – what are these humans about?

Here are five sightings from the wild:

1 – We are under the night sky in the middle of 30,000 people, barely able to make out the human form of Chappell Roan on the stage. The teenage girl sitting across from me on the other side of the ADA aisle has glitter all over her cheeks, a giant leg brace on her left leg, surgical scars on her right, and she is BELTING OUT every lyric to every song. Like her body might just levitate off the ground and shoot straight into Chappell’s arms. Especially memorable is the way she screams along to – “WELL, FUCK THIS CITY, I’M MOVING TO SASKATCHEWAN.” The person with her says, “Oh my god, shut UP.” She does not. In fact, she doesn’t even acknowledge the naysayer spoke. I sit in my chair, delighted by her choices. I will never again listen to The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess without this girl’s voice screaming alongside Chappell’s.

2 – I’m at the hospital for another doctor’s appointment – my home away from home. Whenever I enter a place none of us want to be – the airport, the DMV, the gynecologist’s waiting room – I’m used to all of us looking down at our phones, collectively trying to pretend that we’re someplace else (zero judgment, baby) and not squished up next to these weird humans to our left and our right. With this norm firmly established, I’m in an elevator with maybe five other people, waiting silently for the moment we part ways and presumably never see each other again. And then – one small woman, her head peeking out of her puffy coat, takes a long, loud breath. Like relief she finally got to the hospital? This appointment? This moment? Then she says, “Good morning!” to us, as she looks around at our faces, her smile giggly and shy. We all smile and murmur and kind of giggle our own salutations. A tiny human acknowledgement that somehow, from our entirely separate, complicated, rushed and full lives, the five of us all landed here – together – squished into a box for 20 whole seconds. Hello! Good morning! We made it! We’re here!

3 – I find the “Cathedral of Junk” on the internet. The guy who made it has been working on this project in his backyard since 1988. His name is Vince. We arrive at his house in the middle of a suburban street. A sign – “Yes! We’re open!” – greets us from the driveway. Vince sits by the gate to his backyard with a few brief instructions – there’s the bug spray, that shed tells my whole story, donation box there, the ramps are there and there. (These ramps are way nicer and there are more of them than I expected).

I roll down one ramp and the intricacy of detail inside the enormous scope washes over me like a heavy wave. BLAST! Take it in! An entire kingdom of discarded objects.

The towering cathedral is built on crutches, bike wheels, chain link fence, gates, and walkers, bedazzled with strings of beads, dangling CDs like scattered disco ball sequins glinting in the sun. The whole column wrapped with tiny toy horses – My Little Pony, galloping steeds, twined together with vines. The foosball bros tangled in a grate beneath the words “serenity.”

Old switch boards and dials. Little plastic skeletons gathered beneath a cluster of wrist watches. A blue spoon. The bust of a face with short curly hair, gold over its eyes like a superhero mask. Stones in the ground making a path – two together read “never ever” and then “forget about it.” A throne filled with mosaic tiles at the bottom of a towering wall of typewriters, horns, and pans, a Mother Mary figurine, license plates.

Maybe my favorite spot was a giant dome, light shining through the top. Each corner features objects of different colors – pink, cut-out letters spelling “creative” in cursive and a pale pink column, a red kayak and a red bear painted on wood, a gold Pillsbury Dough Boy and a car’s side mirror, blue glass bottles and a dark blue grocery cart, and above it all, a giant yellow sign that says “church.”

Eventually, we tuck some cash in the donation box and get back in our car. I can’t stop saying wow. Wow! WOW. The boys with me are a bit puzzled by the intensity of my transcendence, and I reach for words to explain. Something about a person gathering objects everyone else would’ve dumped in a landfill – consumed into trash. He saw something different and made a little kingdom. A whole universe. A holy cathedral. One tiny piece at a time – a conversation between two pieces, the gathering of colors, the building and tending to and believing in for no obvious function or practical utility. But created anyway. Making experiences for randos like me. A human has decided to do that for 37 years.

4 – Ricky Lee Jones sings like a slinky, velvety black cat – she’s a spoken word poem – all the characters in the story. The venue is full of people at least two decades older than us, which, as it turns out, is precisely our vibe. When Ricky sings, the whole room wiggles alive. The man in the row in front of us never ever stops rocking his body to the beat. When he cheers, he throws his head back and sends his voice toward the ceiling. The person behind us keeps trying to get a clap going in the audience. They have a gratifying lack of rhythm. Rickie says, “It’s hard times out there,” and the room erupts in rumbles of uh-huhs and yeses. “And it’s scary times, too,” she says. The crowd answers resoundingly – YES. And thank you.

5 – Driving away from Dripping Springs, Texas, a small group of people line a sidewalk holding protest signs. “Honk!” I order Micah while I frantically hold out my thumb’s up sign for them to see through the windshield. One homemade sign – “Courage, Dripping Springs” catches my eye. An older lady holding her sign high in the heart of Texas. My eyes well up as I wave from the passenger seat of our rental. My kid sees me crying. “I think it makes me want to cry,” I say, “because it’s so EASY to feel powerless – like what can I even do? Tiny me? But she’s doing it anyway.”

It’s not that I’m interested in bright-siding humanity. See, humans aren’t so bad! They go to concerts! Oh, why didn’t someone tell me sooner! What a relief! But I’m finding, at least in me, that how and where I tune my attention leads to different energies/possibilities. Almost as if there is a kind of contagion or mirror-reaction that happens where I stare. In that same John Green interview, when he describes despair as a force that leads to more despair, the interviewer asks him if he sees hope the same way. Does hope multiply itself, too? He says he doesn’t know. Maybe it does. Sometimes. Like John Green, I find hope to be a wobbly word. Too big and bright to make much sense of. But in a very practical, tangible sense, I am noticing – when I see humans seeking connection, singing at the top of their lungs, reaching up and out, trying when there are 1,000 reasons not to, making meaning and beauty when no one asked for it – it makes me curious enough to pull the covers off of my head. I feel my own creativity tingle in the back of my brain. It makes me want to connect and care and participate, too. So I’m trying to scan the room, the crowd, the aisle, the street, just a little bit more than my phone.

In the spirit of humans making beauty and meaning anyway, do you already know about my friend Haley Brown? She is a wonder – a queer disabled artist embodying a magical combination of soft and fierce. And not in an Instagram bio kind of way. She really lives out a kind of gentleness that, according to every calculation, should get her trampled, except she’s still out here with fairy wings and paintbrushes, putting whimsy into the world. For the last ten years, she’s been making these coping calendars, and for almost all of those years, I’ve had one up in my kitchen. She describes them as “a container for grief and love, always a space to cultivate relationships to resilience, healing, and care.” And this year in particular, the 2026 calendar pulls together “messages to invoke radical introspection and gentle company.”

Haley has offered a discount code to the readers of this newsletter! Check it out here💌 And if you decide you’d like to make a purchase, use the code THISTOO at check out. We’re quickly approaching some shipping deadlines – USPS Domestic holiday shipping is tomorrow, December 16. And White Squirrel, the fulfillment company Haley uses, is closing on December 22nd and will return on January 4th. But even if you get it a little bit later, I always recommend more Haley Brown in all our lives.

CHEWY QUESTIONS – If you want to continue to think through the ideas here, these questions are for you – please feel free to explore this in your personal writing, to talk about it with your people, or to join the conversation on Substack.

1. Do you think your media consumption influences how you interact with strangers? Maybe making you less trustful, less curious, or more fearful? Anybody experience the reverse?

2. Have you had any “brand new baby alien” moments out in the wild lately? When you got a good glimpse at three-dimensional humanity? What did you notice?

3. I’ve noticed this year that being around art making and going to live performances has felt almost urgent to me. It’s almost like it reminds me of the point? And it’s a fast way to slip into brand new baby alien mode for me. Do you have anything like that? A space or practice that uniquely grounds you or gives you perspective?

Thank you, as always, for being here.

xo

Rebekah