What if your ‘wrong’ way of responding to this moment is actually right?
14 thoughts
This is a few emails in one—longer because I have a lot to talk about. Usually, I write either a very brief or a very long essay (what is regular-sized anyway) about what I’m thinking and share multiple links with commentary; this week, it’s close to a short paragraph for each link/topic.
There is so much happening, so much to respond to and metabolize and consider, and this is me sitting down and processing on the page all these different threads I’ve been pulling about what’s going on, and how I’ve been figuring this out. It might be too much for a lot of you, and that’s okay. Many of my last emails have been focused on The Situation, which I think has much to do with our mental health and wellbeing and recovery; that said, I don’t plan to be a fascism correspondent and this newsletter will retain its focus on recovery and its typical contents. If you want an easier thing to read, this is still one of my favorite pieces of writing, more relevant now, I think, than when I wrote it years ago.
With love,
Holly
1. “It is not a political act to live in despair.”
I read
’s latest newsletter right after I sent my last one and before I went to a protest. In it, they talk about how they got embarrassed for visibly demonstrating “exuberance” in front of someone else, about the very many good things that are happening, because they felt like they were “somehow erasing the very real horrors of this world by allowing myself a little joy about these collective refusals that are gathering steam.”In response to their embarrassment for being visibly joyful, their friend reminded them that “it is not a political act to live in despair.” I don’t know why reading this line was so pivotal for me, but it was, and ever since I’ve been leaning deeply into my hope, joy, and excitement for the good that is happening, which has made for such a different experience in my life and in the lives of anyone that has to deal with me. I mean this, Readers—night and day.
For the better part of five years and until recently I was objectively fucked up, even though my therapist keeps saying “I never thought for one second you were.” But then again, she hasn't seen the Holly-shaped crater in the chaise of my couch that was carved out over the duration of our relationship, because all I could motivate myself to do was lie there and devour every post-apocalyptic film and TV series for five years while I waited/prayed/wished for the world as I knew it to end and for the one I wanted to start.
The point is, I was in a much different place for a long fucking time—in an ego death, in a trauma response, in an existential tailspin, in an ongoing passively suicidal state—and I could not have accessed even a fraction of what I can right now, no matter how hard I tried, how much therapy I did, how many affirmations I repeated, how much meditation I did, how many journal entries I made, how many rituals and cord cutting sessions and psychedelic interventions I participated in, how many pills I swallowed, how many intuitives I consulted, or self-help books I read, no matter any of it. I was where I was and there was no overcoming it; there was only being in it and living through it and attending to it and learning from it, and it’s probably only because I gave in to it and allowed myself to eventually fully occupy1 that miserable space that I can show up how I am now, which is strong and motivated and ready.
I never forced myself out of what I was in; I paid deep respect to it and got acquainted with it intimately, and I fully lived into all the things they tell you to run from (apathy, despair, fury, anger, resentment, nihilism, pessimism, hopelessness, godlessness) until I didn’t need to live there anymore. Until I baked it out of me. Until I composted it down into a new kind of soil that I could actually start to thrive in, live in, continue in.
Like J said, despair is not a political act, and joy and love are always accused of being indulgences when they are stronger than a bullet, than a bomb, than a sword. But my point is also that some of us are not in that place or even close to accessing it; some of us are in danger or deeply tied to people who are; some of us are despairing and spiraling and staying in bed or rage protesting or in the part where we want to only complain while we still order from Amazon, and some of us don't even know who Pete Hegseth is.
I think we go in shifts. I also think that we alone get to define what our shift is—what work we do, when we do it, how we do it, if we do it. And I believe the only way to know what work is ours is to ask ourselves, to answer truthfully, to consult our bodies and our cells and our nervous systems, to trust what we hear without consulting, without making sure someone else approves.
Listening to myself is what led me to check out for five years, to lose my shit completely, to go through an annhilation, to sleep a lot, to get over my attachment to wealth and status and youth and legacy and what everyone else fucking thinks. Listening to myself is also what’s leading me now to jump out of bed in the morning, into action, and dedicate most of my time to this moment in history through volunteer work and my writing and communication as an artist and intellectual. May we all learn to accept where we are in any given moment, to trust where we are in any given moment, and to move from that reality.