Read on Twitter
Real talk: I think there’s going to be a lot of affective reactions we will all be negotiating in not just private places based on what has happened to us so acutely these last 4 years. It’s time we started holding space for uncomfortable affect. https://twitter.com/mattzollerseitz/status/1296683104275496963
And it’s time we started really looking at who carries and models those kinds of uncomfortable affects well so that we have examples to learn from.
I don’t think we are ready for what return of repressed emotions and behaviors we will be faced with should we win in November. And if that’s the case then we need to shift our definition of civility bc it as we currently understand it is located in a kind of respectability
we won’t be able to really “do” anymore. Nuzzi is uncomfortable with what healed trauma in a body looks like. She will not be ready for what unhealed, explosive, unrecognized bc we were in triage for 4 yrs trauma will look like among all of us en masse.
I say all this to say that part of the reason (at least for me) that Biden seems to be the dude for right now is that what’s ahead of us is not just going to be ab active policy changes and beginning to fix what’s been so badly broken. It’s also going to be about
someone wholly experienced in grief and suture helping many of us privileged inexperienced unaware ignorant (instead of innocent) bodies find our way through what will be bodily and mental angst and trauma. It’s not going to be pretty for a while my friends. We won’t be.
Between the shame (global loss of position, reality of our severe ungreatness), the need for humility to return to the table, and whatever existential and real angst and uncertainty? It’s going to be a trip. So I hope Nuzzi et al find a way to make peace with it bc it’s coming.
Last thing (I think at least): I’m trying to be careful ab how I present this bc I recognize that for some they’ve/we’ve been here all along and it can be “easy” to dismiss all these new feelings folks are having. I don’t expect anyone who isn’t paid to do so to teach or hold
space. However I do think that there is a remnant of folks who will feel called to be the heavy bags holding many of us and keeping us from floating. Those who have integrated their grief into something healing. Watch for them. I’m so grateful they will help.
And I also want to reemphasize the grief that will be felt by so so many once our acute immediate work is done. Even though the reality of who we are has always been, imitations can still feel real. Cubic zirconia
passed down from your great grandma to you may be literal fake stones but your personal investment in them makes them just as real as a diamond. So people will mourn that. We should have grace.
Clearly I’m thinking of the opening song of Sirk’s Imitation of Life (1959) and, well, the whole point of the movie really.
Mostly I’m thinking about my favorite concept of the “happy ending” that Sirk so comfortably rejects. That moment when you think the family has been repaired only for the film to stop before things get real. The end there is what he calls an emergency exit.
We need to see not just November 3 or January 20 as the ending (I know we aren’t in terms of work and policy) but as the moment where we go beyond what a film allows and when stuff starts to get real. #end
