27. how it feels

Content Warning: Today's piece reflects on the California fires, gun violence, white supremacist culture, and other potentially activating topics. Please read at your own risk, take care of your mental health and your people, and skip this one if you're feeling taxed by the weight of the world.

***

Today I left another semi-social digital space, a WhatsApp group, because one of the members wanted to check in and see how others were feeling about the California fires. 

For context, I'm California born and raised. My family is there, many of my best friends are there, and until age 37, I lived all my life (except 3 years) in the Golden State. We know fires. They are familiar to us, the special flavor of natural disaster (along with earthquakes) that feels like home. 

The person inquiring about people's feelings on the fires doesn't live in California - nor the USA, not even the continent of North America. I can't speculate on their motivation, but it was interesting to witness the responses of many other people - who also all live outside the US - to this check in. 

By and large, the response was: "It's horrible, awful, terrible. So much suffering. I can't really look at it." 

I get it. Whether it's bypassing, privilege, lack of awareness, overstimulation, simple disconnection, nonchalance, the issue being personally irrelevant, or an aching, bleeding heart overwhelmed by the grief of the world... 

I get it. 

I'm not sure what rubbed me the wrong way, exactly, so much so that I toggled my way to the settings and hit 'leave group,' but I think it was something like this: 

The hyperconnected digital realm exposes participants (especially through social media) to unpredictable, uncontrollable, frequent or continuous threats to the nervous system, through images of violence, pain, disaster, and fear-oriented messaging that is highly contagious and successful in an attention economy. 

This person was relating to a collective trauma experience from the outside. I'm not even sure if 'relating' is the right word. What it felt like, if I'm honest, is voyeurism of pain.

Last night my husband shared with me that he watched some news about the fires, a clip where people were (out of necessity, due to a raging inferno within meters of the motorway) abandoning their cars, carrying what they could of their belongings, and running towards the ocean. 

I should back up here, and share something about growing up in California. Beach-dwellers (as we've been for many years), when it's fire season, often comfort themselves with the expression, "well, at least we know it won't jump the PCH." PCH is the Pacific Coast Highway - Hwy 1 in some places, 101 in others. The idea is that if you're close enough to the ocean, you're safe, and the fires won't burn on the ocean side of the freeway.

Back to the news clip - which was filmed on PCH, with fire blazing on both sides, and people, panicked, in shock, moving as animals in fear do, by instinct, towards a hope of safety. 

What Brent noted was that people were stunned, disoriented, and aghast that even as they were in an active emergency situation, the news anchors were pursuing them with cameras and microphones, trying to get a sound byte by asking, "how do you feel right now?" 

This is what voyeurism of pain has done to us, what we've allowed it to do. Collectively, by and large, people are desensitized to the pain of the burning world, because we believe ourselves to be separate from it. By and large, the western world is numb to the screams of the Earth and the body of the Great Mother. By and large, because we've forgotten we belong to Her, and to each other, countless people are even unable to feel their own anguish, grief, fear, and rage. 

Let me be clear: I am no exception. I am not standing on a soapbox of separation in this matter. But what I've noticed lately, having disconnected from social media, is that I am much more here. I am here in my body, with the immediate joys and pains of my own lived experience. When it's personal, and I need to be aware of a threat to someone I love, I get a text or a phone call. 

I don't have an answer, a solution, or a finger to point at people processing the endless onslaught of atrocities that loop on all forms of media. I'm not shaming the woman who wanted to check in on how others felt. I'm just noticing that the low level pressure, rush, anxiety, and panic I felt frequently on social media to consume information about the latest disaster, war, genocide, rape trial, famine, scandal, flood, fire, or whatever else... 

is gone.

So I'm sitting with that, not trying to make meaning of it, just observing, and it reminded me of a poem I wrote a few years ago (which I edited a bit today in light of current events), which at the time felt waaaay too scary to share. But it was written when I was deep in the scroll-mind, living in California, consuming the pain of the day in little square boxes and 9:16 videos... 

and it feels appropriate to share today.

***

how it feels

tap.

tap.

scroll.

the lids of my glazed eyes droop, somnolent and weary from the grief of a million deaths I never knew to mourn. somewhere beyond the little blue screen, someone dies, again, and the guilt of my milky skin weighs upon my heart, the shame of sharing the same range of melanin as yet another violent white body. 

perched atop and within pixelated soapboxes, the righteous point fingers and declare we must vote. because voting will stem the torrential tide of of tears that men were never taught how to shed? will heal the ancestral wounds of Indigenous people whose tongues no longer traverse the languages of their blood? voting will undo the years lost in prison for every drug offender who struck three times? 

will it time travel us backwards, return fertility to the women involuntarily sterilized by the cold white hands policing ovaries after all the midwives burned? tongue tie and sew shut the lips upon which rest racial slurs, dismantling systemic racism and its kudzu-like tendrils? 

will we vote guns out of hands too hateful to hold them, vote the crazy out of the unsupported, unrecognized, undignified, unnameable mentally ill, vote violence out of media, vote skinny off the altar, vote the voyeurism and vitriol from our own hearts? 

will we vote to elect consciousness, empathy, and healing, flooding the inundated ballot box with idealism instead of idolatry, activism over apathy, a crescendo of change crashing out across our country thanks to countless tiny bubbled boxes? maybe. maybe. but. 

but black women are arrested on the house floor for peaceful protest, shot dead in their homes. their male kins’ life stolen in the brazen light of day by blue bodies with brass badges and from white lips tumble “what did they do?” 

pamphlets warn: choose your mask wisely, not red, not blue, don’t ask for it. 

black freedom of expression is a short skirt begging for the long arm of white violence. 

but nations of folks who tend the land and call her Mother have no water, food deserts, the elders are dying, and it's the same shit, different day, for the ninety thousandth sunset.

land of the free. home of the brave.

humming buzzing tingling heat wafts from the keys of the message board, and my fingers burn. inside my mind, spinning round and round, frantic and anxious to help or to heal, but my body stays glued, fingers scrolling, lids drooping, mind draining itself of any semblance of hope. now leery of headlines, of hotlinks, of small sound bytes of anguish delivered in one hundred and forty characters. 

we’ve been slip sliding stumbling bumbling down a rabbit hole vortex to the land of No Regard, to the place of No Turning Back, to the time when the seas will rise and the big one comes and Nevada is oceanfront property and maybe today is the day. west of the PCH is burning and maybe today is the day. winds rage, rains pour, lands drown, and maybe today is the day. the seas are rising, ice caps melting, and maybe today is the day. 

one mass shooting for each day of the year, and maybe today is the day. death by cop number 365 and maybe today is the day. psychotic garbage spewed from the leader of the free world and maybe today is the day. global pandemic, ‘safe’ at home, new normal, and maybe today is the day. 

sometimes I hope today is the day because tomorrow it will be another woman, perhaps named Claudette, buying shampoo at the walgreens in Lafayette, Louisiana. she will be deciding between two options and the delay of indecision will lead her to the barrel of an assault rifle, to a small man in a large body with a broken mind and a quick finger who calls her words we don’t say when our skin is the color of porcelain, alabaster, light pink, beige, tan - words not ours to own, that start with N and end with incarceration, injustice, oppression, death. 

for each death there will be shock and outrage, but not too much, not too much, because the next day will come and more people will die. 

temper your heartbreak.

triage your grief.

desensitized, paralyzed, mull it over with an almond milk latte, caramel foam whipped just so, and a savory flatbread hinting at a wisp of umami from the nitrate free coconut bacon - it’s vegan. i’m doing my part. the coffee is hot, but not as hot as my cell phone, burning the skin of my hand as I scroll.

nine dead, church is not safe. seven dead, the bar is not safe. two dead, the hospitals are not safe. the park is not safe. jogging is not safe. selling cds is not safe. needing car repair is not safe. sleeping in your home is not safe.

hands up, don’t shoot. comply, don’t die.

and they do and still die and we sigh as they cry. thoughts and prayers packaged up in a tiny square box, and who grieves? 

not the ones who come in guns blazing, proud boys rabid for a ‘murica they own, “earned” through the violence of their forefathers. white men. taken alive. mentally ill. justified force. acquitted. again. and again. and again.

the lids of my eyes droop, heavy from the weight of the supremacy I carry in my skin, in my bones, in the crimes of my ancestors, in the torpor of inaction, sinking to the floor as I drift into stillness, palpably privileged in my option of immobility. 

people are silenced, children die at school, black folks murdered by police, holocaust survivors die in synagogue, tear gas at the border, doors closed, arms closed, eyes closed, don’t travel, don’t speak, don’t sing, don’t touch your face, don’t breathe, don’t move, don’t think, don’t look…

and I type a fucking poem as my stomach turns, fingers frozen as we wait for a tidy conclusion, a lilting upward endnote to tie it all together, a ray of hope, a silver lining, a glimmer of a chance that we might just make it after all… 

and we wait.

and we wait.

and we wait.