November 11, 2024

Where to Start

“One implication of all this for politics, I think, is that while it’s important to argue for the world you’d like to see, through activism and advocacy, it’s perhaps even more important to live it. To “start from sanity”, as I’ve termed it, by taking the way you want life to feel – sane, generous, meaningfully productive, embracing of difference, and everything else – and treating it less as something to strive towards, and more as a place to start from.” —Oliver Burkeman

I have some idea of where to start, mainly with a different road that I went down the last time, and I really do wonder what it would have been like for 2016 and onward to unfold in the shape of something other than a Twitter thread. (I used to keep refreshing and refreshing, so sure that if I just kept sifting through the data, I’d finally find the key, the piece of the puzzle that made the world make sense.)

At that point in my life, I resolved to be loud and take up space—as a progressive, as a woman, a a feminist—and I don’t think that resolution was wrong per se, but the way I went about it was. My stance was defiance, the terms of engagement defined by the force I was opposing, and I see now how limiting that was, how unsustainable, and performative, and the inevitability that one day it would break me (and oh, did it ever…).

In my life, I’ve found that fighting monsters turns me into a monster.

I need to define my own terms, otherwise I am already not free.

I keep returning to Courtney Martin’s words (as I so often do), who shared words she spoke with her family on election night: “We are going to move through our lives being as different from him as we can—looking for those who feel scared or left out, welcoming them in, respecting people’s bodies and inherent worthiness, noticing the tenderness in ourselves and embracing it. We have to be as different from him as possible.”

I’ve been quiet on social media for the past week. In some ways, I really do have nothing insightful to add. I have learned through 2+ years in therapy that other people’s feelings are a real trigger for my own anxiety, and that I feel the need to manage these, to process these, and I feel like a lot of my writing online has often been just that, me trying to manage and control other people’s strong emotions, which is the most futile of endeavours.

I am not in charge of other people’s feelings. Other people’s feelings are not in charge of me.

In a few weeks, I am aiming to take a 2 month break from social media, to remove these platforms from my daily habits, mainly because I don’t need all the noise. I still can’t believe the attention I gave to so many ridiculous things back in 2017—since when do I need to know anything about the undersecretary in the cabinet of a head of state in a country in which I do not live? I was being fed perpetual fear and outrage, extremism and polarization.

I will never get back the time I spent reading that, “Time for some game theory…” thread in 2016, and I resent that.

And so instead, I’m going to live my values, instead of screaming them (which, it seems, only makes other people scream back louder).

It’s a place to start, a place from which to move forward one day at a time.