Cover photo: Jacob Wrestling with the Angel by Gustav Doré
Ever since November, I’ve been trying to kill parts of myself. The softer, bleeding-heart aspects that compound my depression in these winter months as I watch America proverbially go to hell in a handbasket. I don’t want to be hard. I don’t want my softness to be small or limited, but I also can’t survive with the wideness I want. Not now.
I don’t want to
grow a thick skin
I want my skin to stay
as thin as I was made
and everything outside of that
to be softer.
— Brianna Pastor, Good Grief
One of the most striking things I remember a professor saying was how she wanted a Christianity that drew in the most people; that embraced as many as possible. I have always had an unease, a fear: will God tell me I was too open, that my idea of him was too big? Not that I’m a universalist, but it’s a thing to wrestle with like Jacob and his angel. Which now makes me think of another professor talking about salvation: “if my two sons were drowning, how could I make the choice to save only one? How could I reach out my hand to one and not the other?”
We knew it would be bad, but the daily assault of impossibly heavy things gets to the body—and it’s only been a week. I keep hoping against hope that me and mine will be alright; we can ride out the rip tide and mostly keep our eyes fixed on where we came from. Better jobs, families, and support systems; straight-passing relationships and citizen passports and permanent birth control already taken care of. But there are so many who can’t and don’t have these advantages. I have my privileges, but I still want freedom for everyone. My mom, among a slew of crappy talking points that didn’t really listen to or understand my anger after students died from gunfire at school, told me not to take the burden of the whole world on my shoulders, but…how can I not?
I’m so angry and tired these days, oscillating between the high whine of despair and the twang of hope. Lover told me I need to try to just focus on my little sphere of influence in the world, and while I wholeheartedly believe in this, I also want to believe that we’re all responsible for the entire sphere of humanity. How much inaction is too much? I want to be happy and productive and find joy in mundane things, but every time I pick up my phone I feel like I’m being drowned in all the anger and grief of the world as things fall apart (I never liked Yeats anyway, but that’s beside the point).
In the winter I am writing about, there was much darkness. Darkness
of name, darkness of event, darkness of the light of reason. I would
speak here of the darkness of the world and the light of ________.
But I don’t know what to call it. Maybe hope. Maybe faith, but not
a shaped faith—only, say, a gesture, or a continuum of gestures. But
probably it is closer to hope, that is, more active and far messier than
faith must be. Faith, as I imagine it, is tensile, and cool, and has no
need of words. Hope, I know, is a fighter and a screamer.
— Mary Oliver, Winter Hours
I’m learning what I can afford to keep alive and what I need to kill, and I hate every moment of it.
