About a month into my freshman year of college, I realized I didn’t know where Connecticut was on a map. It was the first time I had cried since moving in, and it probably was for many reasons, but what stuck was the feeling of being so physically lost. I sat down in the grass and cried and called my mom while I tried to find myself by zooming out on Google Maps. This year I haven’t been in one city for more than two weeks. My knowledge of geography hasn’t improved (Idaho is so far from where Idaho should be you guys), but I do try to more thoroughly take stock of where I am. Right now I am in Colorado Springs, working at the living room table, staring out the window at the huge white cross that tops a hill just outside our neighborhood.
A cross outside the window is like a Bible on your bedside table: a reminder. Though I grew up in Kentucky and Christianity was the default, I have never had a Bible by my bed. As a religious studies major, the Bible I used all four years was an all terrain vehicle—crammed in bags, left under the common room couch, wedged between my bed and the wall as I tried to write a paper before falling asleep. Its margins are decorated in purple, orange, black, and blue ink; some areas are so underlined that it’s impossible to tell what I was reacting to. It is well-loved and reflects a scholarly history—coffee stains and “thesis??” and arrows and all. There is now a Bible by my bed. It is small and bound in red leather that has gone buttery from the constant touch of oily fingers. The paper is that classic thin, crinkly biblical paper. From what I have seen it is not annotated, but the gilding on the edges of certain pages is almost gone so that I can tell what has been read and reread the most. It is not an academic Bible. It’s a reminder, an invitation, it sits patiently on top of my tissue box, under a smooth stone, and is content to wait for me to get bored or curious or inspired or mournful enough to pick it up.
Yesterday morning on Twitter I saw a thread of photos of all the children who were killed in the most recent school shooting. Directly under the thread was this tweet:
It’s obviously nobody’s fault what their content ends up next to, but these two things, placed directly next to each other made me acutely aware of what we all know—we are not meant to process the world this way. Or rather, it is actually impossible to process the world this way. We have eliminated all the time and space needed to rage, to grieve, and to heal. In the face of national tragedy, which has ranged from monthly to daily in this country, the most I am able to experience are sharp spikes of anger, disgust, an almost incomprehensible moment of sadness, and then a milky, lukewarm numbness. Nothing heals, I would argue that nothing ever even scabs. Each new devastation prods at a wound we’ve covered with a bandage and convinced ourselves isn’t gaping. I am reminded that online can be a community in so many ways except, for me at least, in grief. Grief requires time. It wants to be held. The internet is, at its core, about motion—which is not an indictment of the internet, but it is counterintuitive to the long-haul project of healing. Hayley Nahman, writing about the death of trends and possibly the death of ideas, writes:
Online discourse has an impressive ability to die on the vine, reaching its apex of visibility—and value—before it’s put to any discernible use. This might have something to do with the fact that, per Max Read, “The main purpose of social media is to call attention to yourself.” As he points out in this essay I still love, the fact that anyone can join social media and publish an opinion lends the industry a democratic air while it profits off of our every spare thought. We’re lulled into a stupor and call it participation. “Each new byte of information adds confusion and entropy, and takes us further away from meaning and consequence,” Read explains.
Just as Hayley points out about herself, I am aware that I am adding to that swirling mass of impermanent thought, but I was struck by the idea of stupor and participation. Sometimes, it is brought to my attention that I am not actually participating in the events of my life. I am allowing myself to scroll past them, with a glib “take” or an ironic photo dump. Reading Brandon Taylor’s brilliant essay on contemporary critiques of gay literature, I caught that I (and Brandon argues all of us) am suffering from an aversion to sentiment.
Ten days ago, I graduated from college two years late. When we were told last summer that Yale would host the 2020 graduates this May, the question in all my groupchats and DMs was: “Are you gonna go?” It was important, especially in that first fact-finding wave, to be as casually vague as possible. no dude unless enough people go, but even then. but my parents want me to go so probably won’t decide until day of. what about u? No one said they were excited. In the days leading up to the event, we started to admit that we looked forward to seeing everyone, but the graduating itself was exclusively referred to with air quotes and eye rolls. The weekend began on Friday with the kind of drunken revelry I expected. On Saturday morning we all sat, hungover and dehydrated, on Old Campus for the University-wide commencement. The air still hummed with the fizzy irony of being celebrated in the past-tense. President Salovey stumbled through Latin, we wooed and giggled into the camera that projected us backwards to the crowd of family members that forced us here in the first place. It was fun, but not cathartic. Then we moved to our residential colleges. This is where we would hear our full names read next to that almighty degree, shake hands, and throw caps. By this point, I was tired, in desperate need of water and coffee and a beer, and ready for the photo-op and lunch. Midway through the names, a student was presented his degree by his dad. When his dad stood up I was gifted with the raw, unfiltered pride that shone on his face for his son. For the first time I thought, “Oh, we’re graduating.”
At the end of the last speech of the day, our head of college said, “You are extraordinary.” Incredibly easy to laugh that off. What a ridiculous, sentimental thing to say. The sticking point to sentiment is that it is not earned, deserved, or moral. It’s truth without objectivity or attachment to commerce. It just kind of is, and I don’t think we know how to deal with that. If you really hear someone saying you are extraordinary, and you let that work inside you, it’ll shake some stuff up whether you think you deserve it or not. In his essay, Taylor writes about sentiment as it applies to the brutalities of life:
I got into this in the essay on the trauma plot, but people really do seem very suspicious of responding to the brutal urgencies of life with ambivalence, exhaustion, sadness, terror. Like, sometimes it is okay not to laugh at hard things. As a move, that’s actually kind of played out at this point in history. There’s only so much laughing at catastrophe that a person can do before it’s no longer irony and instead it constitutes an emotional imbalance. Which, again, could be funny. But also, some things are just fucked up. And that’s okay. This allergy to sentiment, to meeting sentiment head-on and trying to bear witness to it, to articulate the exact parameters of the brutal shit life threw your way.
The Bible on my bedside table was a graduation gift. My godmother, the only person who has ever said, “I adore you,” left it for me ten days ago. In it was a note with the reason why she gave it to me. It brought me to tears. When I called to thank her, I consciously tried not to make a joke. It wasn’t a brutal urgency of life, but it was a beatific one, and to me those are just as difficult to meet head-on. Recently I told a group of people, “I like who I am and I like the people I have chosen to spend my life with.” I was unexpectedly moved to tears, it was sentimental, it was very true in a way I could not have known without first saying it. Some things should be faced, I will try to start with the good. I like who I am and I like the people I have chosen to spend my life with.
You are beautiful, strong, you have a wonderful purpose on this earth and I also adore you. I feel this is just the beginning of your beautiful journey.
Just so you know, I also adore you!!!!