December 6, 2023
No Strong Feelings
I got out of the pool on Monday in the company of this woman I’d always considered part-mermaid. She doesn’t swim as much as bob around in the pool with the most contented look on her face, a contented look I understand, because this is swimming, but on Monday she wasn’t content at all, instead she was furious. There was all this hair floating around the pool, she said, and she was right, it was gross, a clump had wrapped around my wrist while I was doing the back-crawl, and the woman was imploring me to send a letter of complaint, demanding that rules regarding long hair being tied back be better enforced, and I promised her I would, but I never will, because I just don’t care, and I felt that freedom as I left her, of not being burdened by unnecessary rage. Of all the problems in the world, I considered, if this one’s the worst, we’re pretty lucky, and later I was talking to my husband—who’s a member of the gym as well—about how we always hear people complaining about the facilities and we just can’t believe it, because this is the first time we’ve ever belonged to a gym where people don’t break into lockers and where no one is going to steal your boots.
No strong feelings. I think about this a lot. I’ve written before about how a decade on Twitter trained my brain to only have strong feelings, very unnecessary rage, and how my brain broke in the end, and it’s been a long, slow journey back to something more like mental equilibrium. And then I think about what would happen if nobody ever had strong feelings at all, and I can’t help but decide that would be a bad thing, because it’s strong feelings that make way for new possibilities, and the alternative is apathy.
But what if it isn’t always? What if no strong feelings also means really understanding?
On Monday evening, after dinner, I stumbled into the most nightmarish internet rabbit hole, the comments of a substack where people are still going on about the open letter and #UBCAccountable, and defending the right to due process, and it was absolutely loony, absolutely no reflection or understanding of a broader context, everybody so self-righteous. And it made me think back to 2017 Feminist Twitter (which was part of the Twitter that broke my brain) and how everything was over the top there, and how its critics were not always wrong, but about how their critique turned them into the mirror image of what they were opposing. Pick a side, get louder, there are more of us than you.
I would like to send a metaphoric bouquet of flowers to everyone who manages to find young and earnest progressive online lefties sometimes annoying without turning into a fundamentalist reactionary. What a remarkable achievement, with so many others cut down in their prime. And yes, obviously I’d ended up in this rabbit hole because my brain was being fried by somebody else’s narrow, fundamentalist views about Israel and Palestine expressed on Facebook, and one link leading to another. Let’s just say that there were a lot of strong feelings, but absolutely zero understanding or curiosity about another point of view.
I’ve never signed an open letter. I remember when the UBC Open Letter went around way back when, there was a Tweet by some dipshit about how they were absolutely humbled to be signed on to a letter amidst so many CanLit greats, and that encapsulated it exactly, the desire of so many people (particularly writers, never a most secure lot) to belong, be a member of a team, to be on “the right side of history,” even. I am always suspicious of anyone anyway who’s claiming to be humbled, because let me tell you, every time I have truly been humbled, I’ve certainly never tweeted about it, having been much too busy lying on the floor. (You would think that part of the job description of being a writer is knowing what words mean?) I am have also grown suspicious of anyone who is claiming to be on the right side of history, mostly because everybody things they’re on the right side of history, and I’m just not sure that history actually works like that. (I think it’s safe to say that all sides of history have their own nefarious characters.)
I’ve never signed an open letter, because I’m just not sure that the open letter discourse is productive in the end. (And because Open Letters have a habit of breeding out of control, like guppies. They get unruly. It’s just not great.) I’ve never signed an open letter for the same reason I’ve realized I am not comfortable with street protests, which is the fear of losing myself in a body of people. Some of this, I think, is due to me coming to terms with my anxiety, something still fairly recent that I’m working through, and perhaps at some point I’ll change my mind about that, but not right now.
(This is not necessarily a critique of protests and open letters. And there are other ways to stand up for what I believe in, and I have not ceased those actions. But I need to find a way to use my voice and make a difference that is true to my experience and also sustainable, instead of doing whatever whoever is yelling on social media the loudest is telling me to do, in a lifelong quest to be seen as good.)
There is something about “the mob,” but not in the way that the critics of 2017 Feminist Twitter imagined it. I think you fight the mob not by fighting the mob, but by fighting that impulse inside yourself*, the impulse toward rage, toward othering, instead of listening and understanding. And understanding not for the sake of agreement—it would be a very sorry world if everybody felt the same—but for the sake of understanding in itself, the exercise of making sense of somebody else’s point of view.
Which is a long way to come in a post that begins with floating clumps of hair, but such is a the way of a blog.
