letter ten: slice of a humdrum life

there is so much anger inside this love

Dearest friend, 

Have you ever found yourself caught in the middle of consuming a piece of media — a song, a movie you thought you were watching passively, or maybe not a piece of media at all but a walk, a conversation, a new drink you tried on a whim you were sure you’d regret — and thought, Oh. Well. I guess I like this?

I ask because I was laying in bed last night listening to Hoppipolla’s album And Then There Was Us, and I knew I was compatible with this band’s sound because a song from another album has been a no-skip for months now, but about halfway through this album, listening to these strings come in (and I’m always a sucker for string instrumentations), I was kind of slapped in the face by this thought that, Oh. This kind of music might be my style. The thought seemed immediately useless, because yeah, and? Would I be listening to this if it wasn’t? It’s hardly the first song I’ve liked, and it won’t be the last at all. But blame my sensitivity to all human emotions right now as I adjust to abruptly stopping one of my antidepressants or blame something else, I just figured — like is such a nebulous sensation. It’s certainly not love, yet it’s nowhere near apathy or dislike, either, the same way that ambivalence is not apathy, and distaste is not dislike. These are all different words, and they all contain different emotions inside them. But seldom do I make note of the things I like or even the things I dislike, or at least definitely not as often as I do the things I hate or the things I love. 

I think love and hate are easier. We know that human beings don’t do well with more liminal, non-black-and-white ways of thinking; it’s always one or the other, because things consumed in simple terms are also things more easily digested, and human beings rarely like things that are difficult to swallow, let alone to allow to pass inside them instead of just through. And it’s not necessarily a revolutionary epiphany, but it’s still a moment of realization for me to see that just as plenty of people get too exhausted by nuanced thinking before they even try it, many of us also get too exhausted by nuanced feeling before we can even process those nuanced emotions. Emotions usually get the reputation that they’re more encompassing than logic, than rationality, than leading with your mind instead of your heart — but are they, by nature? Are they not made of the same tiny building blocks that logic is? Building blocks that can only contain so much, and so we must work to allow ourselves to be given more of them? Why do we deny ourselves less simple feelings if we love feeling so much?

Here’s what I know about myself: The kind of people I love most are those that are made of so much. People who have lived lives and thought thoughts that will be inaccessible to me unless they voice it, unless I ask, unless I take the time to properly observe and be patient with who they are and who they were. It’s mostly a recurring meme now, Walt Whitman’s I contain multitudes, but multitudes are harder to come by than a joke might suggest. In fictional people, obviously, but especially in real people. Not because human beings are inherently lacking in multitudes, but because I don’t know if human beings allow themselves multitudes. I get it. It’s easier not to. It’s easier to tell yourself this or that complete thing than to do the work of carving out a different path. It’s easier to receive than to give, yes, but mostly it’s easier to receive than to take. People are afraid to take from the world when the world is so ready to give. And so the people who do — the people who contain so much because they have had to take, the people who have had to take so much from the universe that the very act of taking has taken from them as well, the people who haven’t given but have had things taken from them just for a semblance of a life, of knowledge, of a self, whatever it is — are people I respect and admire and love. And not people who use the short end they were given by the world to justify the harm they’ve always wanted to cause whether or not the universe afforded them luxury and success, but people who understood early on the things they wouldn’t just be handed, and yet somehow, despite it all, welcomed all that the universe has given them anyway. People who have all those building blocks inside them co-existing, co-facilitating this person’s capacity to love, fight, help, whatever it might be. People who have done the work of being a person.

On the other hand, the kind of person I hate the most are those that don’t take a second to breathe and think before they speak — of which many run rampant on social media, and nothing ticks me off quite like people who would rather circulate information as quickly as possible, to throw their two cents in alongside the movement of the ride by simply repackaging what the previous person said. It’s like if an echo chamber and a game of telephone had a child, and the child knew only to babble in the language of online communities: affirmation and reaffirmation, as if the only symbol of communication well-handled is a thumbs up or a gold star for participation. It angers me more than anything else, I’m afraid to say. It angers me that people would rather bastardize language so that they can move with wherever this particular bandwagon is heading, say their ultimately useless, unthinking piece — ha, thank god I never picked up this series in the first place or I agree with this person despite never even watching this film/show/music video — because what is the point then of being born with critical, sentient brains and using it for — what? For a breath’s worth of momentary superiority? Momentary belonging? By claiming to be a critical voice yet only exercising your right to criticism when you’ll be well-protected from what it opens up for you? Joining the wave because then you won’t have to be a person, only one building block in that wave? Parroting what you heard from a friend of a friend because god forbid you spend two seconds to interrogate your initial response or, I don’t know, do a quick Google search?

This is the kind of person I hate the most because it’s the kind of person that leaves me the most dejected about this world. Not the people in power, not the manipulative figures acting as some kind of activist, because an inherently awful system will always have inherently awful people occupying that system — but the people who actively allow themselves to be content with misinformation mainly because misinformation guarantees them emotional and social protection. Saying the first thing out of your mouth doesn’t matter; what matters is that you say something while everyone else is. It breaks my heart more than I have the adjectives for, leaves me feeling ridiculously hopeless, when I see people use their words so carelessly. 

Most of us who maintain some kind of online presence live in a reality where we have the luxury of saying whatever we want, where we can freely hate or love or like or dislike things, whether or not we do so in real life. And so it drags me down lower every time, when I see someone exercising that freedom with abandon that they don’t realize is transparently performative, or transparently self-servicing, or transparently malinformed. 

I’m not expecting people to suddenly start writing threads about every single thought. I’m not asking people to draft that tweet about your cereal for breakfast. Sometimes all you have to say is “good night everyone :)” and that’s more than fine. I don’t mean to enforce the i hate small talk pretentiousness of Tinder guys on how low-commitment social media is meant to be. Something that has come up in the media I’ve consumed lately is the idea that sometimes you need proof that you exist — but all the more reason, I think, that this proof doesn’t need to be in attachment to someone else’s, let alone some overarching culture or wave of the same ideas being ping-pong’d across the same space it always is. What depresses me is that someone can take that previous sentence and say, “oh, so you’re against cancel culture? 🙄” to which my point would be that cancel culture is meant to take away power from those that have dealt harm in their positions and will continue to if left un-called out. It’s evolved to be more, but what cancel culture shouldn’t be, at least to me, is a tool to serve your need to feel superior whenever it’s convenient. Do right by the people harmed and do right on your own terms, not because it’s what looks good, not because it adheres to an aesthetic or a lifestyle — Isn’t that the whole point? To self-actualize and help others do the same? 

Really, I don’t care what you have to say as long as what you have to say is yours. 

It just upsets me, to see people not realize how easily they can be fooled, how easily they can be brought along with the wave, how easily their own freedom to think and choose and speak can be weaponized against them without ever taking the knife out of their hands. It just — depresses me a lot, these days. It depresses me how easily content people are with so little. How people can accept these flattened, soulless things and circulate that over and over and call that their homage to language, to call that creative content when all you need to do to create in an online world is find the people who have already created ahead of you and follow their footsteps. Recycle the same web weaving quotes, use the same style and voice of Twitter or Instagram poems, interpret the same songs and the same albums always with the same goddamn thesis you have attached to all the ones that came before it. 

It’s exhausting, is all. It’s hard to either love or hate in a world like this. The only thing keeping me going are the shades in between those two extreme ends. There are people I hate and people I love, and I’m reaching a point where neither makes life more worth living because the circle made up of those I love is getting smaller and smaller while the list of the ones I hate is starting to take the shape of an entire faceless world. 

But I also know that in between all of that, I don’t often appreciate the things and people I simply… like. Nothing more than that, but sometimes the only thing that makes a day even a day is the stranger who held the door open for me. Not a good day, or a bad day, but a day in which I existed. Sometimes I go months without loving anything, but I like this hot sauce that came with our takeout. None of it makes anything better, but again — Sometimes, you need proof that you’re still here, and those small, inconsequential things that you might barely like is often more proof than anything else. 

I told someone the other day that you find out the things you love by knowing the things you hate, and I think now that I’m also just so tired of people being satisfied with just one. I want people to live more because I want this world to be more. I know I keep reiterating that, but maybe this is its own kind of love for the world, too. This need, this anger, this frustration that all the parts to be good are there and yet people never do anything with it. There’s that adage, about imagining Sisyphus happy to be pushing that boulder up a hill again and again. I don’t want to imagine Sisyphus happy. I am looking from the bottom of the hill and I see that it will take just one nudge at the peak to push the boulder down the other side. And yet every day, I have to watch Sisyphus kick the boulder back down the way he came, because yes, maybe he is happy stuck with the simplicity of punishment, and isn’t that more sinister than allowing yourself what comes next?

Maybe, too, that’s why it surprised me a little, the other day, to acknowledge that I just… like this one album. I can’t wax poetic about its greatness because I don’t even know if it’s great. It probably isn’t. I don’t think I love it. You ask me to sing a song from it, and I won’t be able to. It doesn’t take me back to some great nostalgic memory or anything like that. I just liked it enough to acknowledge it in the moment, and that’s maybe something I should do more of. Instead of asking the world for more things to love, or screaming at the world for the things I hate, sometimes it’s a matter of knowing there are small things I like or dislike. That it’s the little quirks and idiosyncrasies that define you more so than any grand ideology you’re part of. 

We keep wanting to be more than we are, and sometimes I think that very untruth we keep feeding ourselves stops the world from being the more it can be. We keep wanting our individual lives to be each worth more, for every like to be a love and every moment of indifference to mean hate, and that’s what makes so many people unhappy. Everyone wants every good thing, every small moment, to be capable of saving their life. It’s unsustainable for long-term happiness. Why isn’t it enough, for a thing to have happened, and for that to be it? 

Why do we want to be the guy sentenced to push the boulder up the hill every day instead of the guy who struggled to push it up then went back down the other side? Because continued, mindless simplicity is easier than finding out what the thing waiting on the other side will ask of you?

I get it. I do. I just — I have been so angry lately, my friend. Consumed not by hatred or exhaustion but by just… anger. Anger at people for not understanding how see-through they are, how much they spill over and stain the people and things around them. Anger at the world for having it in their capacity to be better and actively refusing to be by the mere act of ignoring that capacity. Is it not the same as being a bystander to mediocrity that will prove deadly in the end, to be passive in a world that has given you all the luxury to dare to want to be more?

And the thing is — Small moments will not save us. I am so, so tired of people pretending like it will. There is no power in being small. There is in living a small life, but not in being small. Some people can find happiness and comfort in small moments like looking at a tree or finding a book because their happiness is only contingent on whether this small moment is a moment they can share, or on where this small moment stacks up against the other things that feel big.

But that’s a privilege, too, that choice to interpret the smallness of something. And so it’s all the more upsetting to see people champion the importance of small moments so much without the same generosity towards the small things that distinguish them from others. Why is it that you only value being small and soft when it affirms your right to not see the world for what it is? Why do you weaponize the luxury to remain small and soft? Why do you take this valid way of surviving and keep cutting it in half until it no longer matters? Until it’s just empty sentiment? 

No, small moments will not save us. But the point is that small moments can keep you sane enough until you’re ready to save. The same with liking things. Liking things can tide you by until you’re ready to love. But knowing the importance of either shouldn’t make us complacent, either, I don’t think. Having access to small moments does not absolve us of all the rest that the world and each other require of us. And having tiny things we like is not the same as being open to the bigger act of loving. And it is a big act. Love is a responsibility. 

We should allow ourselves the small things, absolutely. People keep saying that, I know, but what they usually mean is we should allow ourselves to stay small even in the face of the things that demand more from us. I don’t know if I have it in me to see that as anything but a way of staying content with what has always protected us anyway. I don’t think that’s the point, nor the power, of small things. The point and the power in allowing ourselves the small moments is in how we shouldn’t grovel for perfection even in our emotions, that we should allow ourselves lesser because they matter, too. The point and the power in allowing ourselves the small moments is in how they add up to a whole that the world will be glad to have. I don’t know when we started thinking of small moments as a universal blanket of reassurance, or an end goal — one we have always had at that — instead of the things that, more crucially, are there to keep us going, to remind us that we’re here, we’re real, and we have a life to live.

So go live it. For yourself, for others.

I want a small life, too. You know I do. I have brought it up many times. I am guilty of being tempted by the allure of protected smallness. And I’ll be the first to choose the small moments over the big ones. All I want right now is a sunlit apartment. That will never change, even as it moves further and further out of my grasp. I’ll be most content being a nobody in a nowhere town. And if I could stop wanting more from people, from the world, I would. But this planet and each other is all we have left. The small steps that amount to big ones are the only option we small human beings have. Staying soft and small is only a perfect defense against a world who wants to make us hard, to see us give up on what the world can be — but that doesn’t excuse us from the work of being more for this world and the people around us. We’re all we’ve got. Trying is all we can do. And yet people consistently discount either in favor of simplicity and the kind of smallness that limits more than it expands.

Maybe I am tired. Maybe more than anything I’m angry because I’m tired of not being able to stop myself from trying for more and asking for more. I really do wish I don’t. I want my desire to live a small life to mean a desire to live a simple life — because in that context simplicity becomes passivity, becomes apathy, becomes untouchability. It means no hurt, no stress over things beyond my control, only beauty, only comfort I have done nothing to earn except through the luck of having a more privileged life than most. But I don’t want to be apathetic to the world. I want to be annoying about what I love. I want to be annoying about what I hate. I want to feel detached at my worst but never uncaring. Never just accepting of the motion of the tide. Never that.

Until then, I’m trying to anchor myself with the small proofs of living that won’t matter come tomorrow. Because there’s merit in that, too, maybe. In latching onto the things that don’t matter as a reminder of how much you do, and that’s only step one to realizing how much the things you do matter to the rest of the world.

My friend — If you’re in a country going through horrible heat, I hope you’re doing alright. I hope the sun and the long summer days are filling your heart up with warmth, and I hope you know how grateful I am whenever you make it to the end of my letters. 

Until next month.

Your huckleberry friend,

Sha