29. When do things start to change?

I did all the things I was supposed to do

Just last night I ticked the final box on my "Things to do to fix everything" checklist, deleted the app, and patiently waited for the world to transform.

I woke up this morning to the exact same world. A quick glance at Twitter made it seem like some things had actually gotten worse. How was that possible? I checked my recurring donations, my Instagram stories, the newsletter I sent weeks ago outlining my deep and abiding anger... Check. Check. Check. It was all still there.

I'd done all the things I was supposed to do and nothing had changed. Well, not nothing. Something had changed, something in the way I was feeling.

I felt like shit.

"It's supposed to be uncomfortable."

I've been reading about systemic racism. It's hard to do without constantly feeling enraged, which means I'm reading very slowly. There's a limit to how much human suffering I can digest on a daily basis, and it's not "centuries of atrocities".

It's forcing me to confront my own racism, which is a real thing and not just a party trick I pull out to shock people at work.

Turns out I have quite a few microracisms, blips in the back of my mind for certain people and situations. I've never thought about them all that seriously because I've never been powerful enough for them to become systemic. No professional racism here. Just a hobbyist really. Your average stamp collector racist.

Confronting them now means I end every day with a full cup of FFS. FFS I say, when another microracism flits its shadow across my thoughts. Into the cup it goes. I take that cup to bed and wake up gasping after spilling it all over my face. This is only sort of a metaphor.

A few weeks ago I discovered that an author whose work I greatly enjoy and whose public persona I really admire had been, for decades, abusing the trust of young female creatives.

At first I avoided the details. Not because I doubted any of the people speaking up, but because I had the idea reading their accounts would be gratuitous. That I didn't need to know the specifics. But as the days went by I wondered if it wasn't cowardice that kept me from them instead. That I was unwilling to face what he had done.

So I looked. And I read. And it was terrible. The stories, literal decades of them, were full of pain and betrayal. In reading through them I discovered other artists accused of similar things. Artists whose work I greatly enjoyed and whose public personas I had if not admired, not mistrusted.

Each of these men had gone on record, at some point, about equal representation. They had, at some point, spoken up as an ally to women in creative industries. The one who had spoken up the most, and the most compellingly, was also the one with the most counts against him.

A phrase I think about a lot these days is we have an incredible tolerance for other people's pain. It’s a line I read ages ago in, I think, an article about athlete injuries. When I mess up and find myself watching some Fox News clip or the latest Tory numbfuck babbling on about how we couldn’t possibly afford masks but make sure you fix the bell in Big Ben so it can bong for Brexit (deep breath deep breath deep breath)

…

I mean, you don’t even have to go to those extremes. I hear it in the parks and the pubs and god at a friend’s birthday party. “Not that many people died, have they?” How many is not that many? How much racism satisfies your definition of systemic? How many offers of career support coupled with invitations to hotel rooms is the unacceptable amount? The gone too far? The ok maybe I won’t keep supporting him he seems like one of the really bad ones?

So yeah. I’ve not been feeling great lately. And that’s without really reading the news or looking at Facebook or even, you know, having that many conversations.

I was struggling to write this because it felt performative. And then I worried that all you lovely new readers had joined at a pretty bad time for more good vibes. But then, writing about how I’m feeling was at least partly why I started this newsletter, so here we are.

Take care of yourself -- because, I tell you, nobody else is going to do it.  And that's fine. You can do anything. Own oxygen mask on first, bottle of water, deep breath, big weird week coming up, nothing you can't handle, hold on tight.

That’s pretty good advice, and I didn’t write it. The author I mentioned before did. He ends all of his newsletters with words of encouragement like these ones. And it was these words that made me think about writing a newsletter, and helping other people, and reevaluating my place in the world. This isn’t hyperbole. His words made me want to make more of my time on this planet.

And they still do, you damned asshole. But it’s supposed to be uncomfortable.