October 17, 2023

Synthesis

If you’ve been around here for a while, you know that my blog is most useful to me as a place to work through my thoughts, ideas, and confusements, a place to try to synthesize ideas that seem disparate, contrary, and that this process is a way to calm my busy brain.

Synthesizing is what I do, as a human being and as a storyteller, and not long into my experience in therapy (for anxiety) it became very clear to me that every book I’ve ever published exists as an attempt to complicate binaries, to inhabit grey areas, and to bridge divides. And by extension, that I feel a responsibility to bridge divides, to manage conflict, that I feel a tremendous amount of anxiety about any conflict or disagreement that I’m not charged with mediating, and that I take on the role anyway in my own mind and fry my brain cells in an attempt to get it all sorted out.

Social media is really hard for me because of all of this. First, because I have a hard time understanding that not every message is directed at me personally—synthesizing is what I do, and so I’m using all the data, plotting it, trying to understand it, making it all make sense. And second, because it doesn’t all make sense, it can’t, and no amount of understanding or management can form all that noise (most of it charged by other people’s emotions) into a cohesive narrative—which, of course, doesn’t stop my brain from being wide awake at 4am trying to make it so.

That I can’t control how other people think or feel or emote—I don’t think I’m unique in finding this impossibly difficult. For me, that lack of control feels like a real threat to my security, even if it isn’t in practicality. Learning to let other people think what they think and feel what they feel has been an important part of my progress in terms of mental health, to learn to understand another even if I disagree. Also to sit with pain and suffering and their realities, instead of trying to fix it, or deny it. because it makes me feel better. To accept that there is not just one narrative (and also maybe that someone has more chance at arriving at what I believe to be the truth if I give them the space to get there themselves, rather than insisting on their arrival). That just because someone has a different story than mine, it doesn’t mean they’re wrong, or even that I am. I have become disillusioned with a politics of self-righteousness (along with hierarchies of suffering), because I don’t think righteousness is politically self-defeating (and also/and-by-extension, righteousness itself becomes a a silo in which one loses touch about what one is right about in the first place).

I don’t know where I’m going with this. And maybe that is the point.

And course, I sort of do know where I’m going (if not where I’ll ultimately arrive), which is that in the last week and a half on social media, I’ve been witness to conflict like I’ve never seen before. (Which, OBVIOUSLY, is the least important fact of all of them regarding conflict in the last week and a half, but, see, they’re not covering my mental state at the New York Times, so I’m sorting it all out here, and I know my three loyal readers will understand.)

So much CERTAINTY has been really impossible for me to grapple with. Of course, the proverbial “It’s complicated” is an obfuscation, for sure (as well as, in almost every instance in which it’s employed—mostly an excuse to do nothing, an acceptance of the status-quo) but I think “It’s simple” can be just as much. Especially when presented by both sides who are using identical language—of pogroms, of genocide, of being on the right side of history—and insisting that their opponents are simply presenting lies and propaganda.

How does one begin to synthesize that?

Partly, I suppose, by understanding that both sides are using this language inspired by genuine fear, by terror. Terror that’s justified by historical precedent, borne through inter-generational trauma, and justified by anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim acts of hate and violence. As a person who lives with anxiety, I actually understand a tiny fraction of what this must feel like. I felt it this week as my community centre heightened security, as I received updates from my child’s school in response to threats real and imagined.

But it’s the dehumanization I’ve struggled with, the reaction of so many to take sides, to post flags, the impulse to debate about just how babies were murdered, or justify the deaths of thousands more children. As though there was no other choice, that this is just the way. As though any of this will make anybody safer in the end. When you’re fighting a monster, and your enemy puts you in a place where you’re justifying the death of somebody else’s children (as though there were any such thing as “somebody else’s children), you’ve become the monster you’re fighting and your enemy has won.