"Misery isn't solidarity" - Beth Pickens
the end-of-the-month post
Hi m’dears,
The other night I had a truly glorious experience at the opening of my art show at Park Life Gallery. Many people came — a number from different corners of my life, some of whom I hadn’t seen in a long time. There was animated chat about books and art. We sold a number of my book artworks to people with a glint in their eye that suggested they loved them. And that’s not to mention the satisfaction of seeing a creative vision that’s lived inside my head for years brought into being in the real world — a concrete experience you can walk inside of. It filled me with so much joy.
This, of course, all happened ten days after the horrifying election that devastated and terrified me and everyone I know — and, I presume, you too. It’s very strange, a kind of emotional whiplash, to go from such overarching feelings of anger, sadness, heartbreak, and fear, to experiencing an evening of such pure delight. And of course it also comes with a background fizz of potential guilt. Ought one to be happy? Is it ok? Is it allowed? When things are this bad?
But I’ve been thinking long and hard, the past few weeks, about how I handled myself between 2016 and 2020. And, frankly, the answer is not terribly well. I was in a near constant state — as I believe many of us were — of miserable amped-up anxiety spiral. I wanted to do something. To help. To be useful. To make a difference. But you know who is not terribly helpful or useful? People in a state of miserable amped-up anxiety spiral. I spent so much time and energy worrying about what to do about things I actually had no control over that I think I was not nearly as effective as I might have been in the areas I actually could touch. I say this not to chastise my past self, but simply to say: I want to learn from my mistakes.
I’ve been rereading Your Art Will Save Your Life a short book that the brilliant Beth Pickens wrote in direct response to the 2016 election, and specifically to artists’ reactions to that election. Pickens is a consultant who works with artists on their careers, but she also has a counseling background so often ends up talking with them about emotional matters (I was her editor on her other very fine book Make Your Art No Matter What). She writes this, which applies directly to artists:
“After the election, many artists said things like ‘Maybe I should quit making art,’ ‘It’s kind of selfish for me to be focus on my art now,’ and ‘I should help people in a more effective way.’ These are expected grief responses to the shock and horror of our times, but I beseech you: Do not stop making art. I need it profoundly. We all do.”
But many of the other things she has to say apply to us all, whether we artists or not:
“You still need joy. It’s up to you to move ever toward a joy-filled and satisfying life…this is your life and you cannot put it on hold because of assholes in power.”
“Anger isn’t action and misery isn’t solidarity.”
I am slowly, slowly, taking on board the idea that preserving our own inner peace and, yes, even happiness, will in fact fortify and strengthen us for the fight ahead. Misery isn’t solidarity. I’m pretty sure that’s profound as hell. And it runs counter to so much that can feel intuitive at these times. Things are terrible so I should feel terrible. That’s only right and fair.
But what if instead we tried to figure out what real solidarity, real action, real community, looks like? For us. Because I’m thinking, more and more, that it’s going to look different for each person. We each have different strengths. We can each help most meaningfully in different ways.
Likewise, we each have to figure out how to guard our sanity, our mental health, and yes our joy, in our own specific ways. For instance, how best to be mindful about our news consumption and online habits.
Here’s a little story. I got an email from the ACLU the day after the election (speaking of taking meaningful action, I joined the ACLU in September of 2001, in another desperate moment of wanting to do something, and I honestly feel it was one of the better and more effective activisms I’ve done, long-term). In this email they were assuring their membership that they were ready to push back against whatever horrors are to come, and they wrote, “we're done with hand-wringing or admiring the problem.”
Admiring the problem? I’d never heard that turn of phrase before, but it sounded resonant to me immediately. I looked it up and it comes from the business world, where it describes the kind of terrible meeting just about everyone has been in at some point in their lives — where you all sit around and describe to one another what’s wrong for an hour, without making any progress whatsoever towards doing anything about it.
And, just: Yes. Yes, random ACLU email! I, too, want to be done admiring the problem. I know it’s bad. Really really fucking bad. We all know this. But misery is not solidarity. Sitting around thinking (or even talking) about how bad it is isn’t going to make it better. It’s only going to make me feel worse. If experience is any indicator, much, much worse.
Rather than feeling guilty for being happy, for the joy I derived from making a shit-ton of art and sharing it with my community, I’m going to try and be happy about being happy. I’m going to try and not let the assholes in power take that away from me. Rather, I’m going to try and draw strength from it. And then I’m going to use that strength to find ways to push back.
Many of those ways, I’m thinking, will probably be very local. To help vulnerable people in my local community. To forge closer bonds within that community. I’m still figuring out what makes the most sense for me. That’s another lesson I want to learn this time around (I mean, Jesus Christ, if we have to do this twice, at least we should get the benefit of hindsight!) — to take my time and figure things out at a considered pace, rather than running around like a headless chicken with its hair on fire.
I tell you all this not to be like, ooh look at me I’ve got it all figured out — indeed, more like to explain that I very much have not. But also to share that I am deeply interested in being in the process of figuring it out.
“We cannot retreat to the convenience of being overwhelmed” the politician and activist Ruth Messinger once said in a commencement address at Stanford. I always thought it was fascinating and sort of great that she called being overwhelmed (generally agreed upon to be an unpleasant state of being), a “convenience” — I imagine because once you’re overwhelmed, you can stop. It would be so phenomenally easy to be overwhelmed right now. To give in to disillusionment and despair. I don’t want to do that. But I know that sometimes in the days and months to come, it will happen to me, to all of us. Indeed, despair will befall some folks long-term and that will not be their fault. Once again: this is going to be different for everyone. Much will depend on our capacities, our circumstances, our mental and physical health, our brain chemistry, our temperaments, our marginalizations, our privilege, and myriad other factors. Which makes whatever we can do to support and uplift ourselves and one another all the more important.
“Happiness” per se may feel like too high a bar. Occasionally a life event, a creative accomplishment, a milestone, a gathering with friends or family, some great flash of beauty, some collective of community may offer us big joy. But much of the time we may have to fall back on the kind of small pleasures many of us relied on during the height of the pandemic — a cup of coffee, a hot bath, a good book, a long walk, a kid’s laughter, an old movie, a favorite song, a hug. Gummy bears, group texts, galoshes. Seeing the sky. Seeing one cool new work of art.
Understand that even as I typed up that list, I continued to struggle with the feeling that it might be wrong and frivolous to do so. But my conviction that Pickens is right, that we need joy, that misery isn’t solidarity, is stronger. As we all are, I am figuring out what to do, how to live now, and what I have to offer, in real time. I am weirdly, wildly grateful that you might be willing to go along on this journey with me. Community is going to be so important, and any way we can connect with one another feels precious to me right now. So, thank you. Thank you for letting me invade your inbox all the time. Thank you for reading all the way to the bottom of this lengthy dispatch. You bring me joy. Hang in there.
Books
Personally, I’ve wanted one of two things to read just now: very serious smartness, or total cozy escape. Here are the books that have offered me each of those:
Opinions: A Decade of Arguments, Criticism, and Minding Other People’s Business by Roxane Gay
A hundred pages of Gay’s incisive-as-hell, live-as-its-happening writing from the past ten years on politics, identity, police brutality, gun control, Black Lives Matter, elections, the first Trump era, #metoo, covid, and more is followed by somewhat lighter fare — cultural criticism, book and film reviews, even a few celerity profiles — that is also deeply insightful on matters of race, gender, and the world we live in.
The Spellshop by Sarah Beth Durst
This latest entry in the recently burgeoning “cozy fantasy” genre (kicked off by Travis Baldree’s Legends and Lattes) is everything you could want in a quaint cottage-core escapist read: found family, a healthy dash of romance, tons of detail about building a new life in a new/old house, and cute fantasy stuff galore (mermaids, winged cats, a sentient cactus who only says “meep!). Just what the doctor ordered.
Mix Tape
I put this one together with the express purpose of channeling all my November feelings into something that could uplift me, and I hope you.
xo
b
Thank you for this text! It gave me hope. I will bookmark it and come back to it on days of despair. ❤️