I’ve been having this conversation a lot, so I should probably try to write it down. I have a feeling this might be a little unwieldy. Let’s see how it goes.
I’ve determined that the disabilities that I live with, and the ways that I must live with them through this pandemic serve a function for the wider community, and I am committing to that.
Even as the public messaging twists and distorts and minimizes the dangers we are living through. Even as the community dissociates, abandons, minimizes and gaslights and attempts to tempt and coerce me into embracing a virus despite having a cancer of the immune system – I am committed to serving an essential function for this community.
Perhaps some of what I discuss here will apply to other lived experiences of marginalization, to the delusions that sustain capitalism, or to contending with climate change. Maybe some of what follows can be useful whenever we feel that we are merely powerless in relation to a community that refuses to hear our cries, whenever we are selected as scapegoats, or treated as disposable. Maybe some of these words can strengthen us whenever we feel powerless.
Here is what I know: I have spent thirty years or more - trying and failing and trying again and sometimes eventually succeeding and sometimes who the hell knows - to move people out of dangerous and harmful illusions. It is slow, incremental, and often thankless work. But it for some reason it became my job on this earth. To call people to consider all we cannot face.
Very rarely are we able to march up to someone who has spun themselves into a comforting illusion and simply pop it with a pin. The lies we tell ourselves are thicker and more insulated than that. We build them to protect ourselves from realities we fear we cannot withstand. Our thickest psychological defenses need to be worn away, chipped away, bit by bit.
Drop by drop, water built the Grand Canyon.
Any single gesture, any isolated drop is unlikely to make any instantaneous or dramatic impact. But millions of drops, from every direction, on all sides, over time will transform the surface of the planet.
In psychoanalytic terms, Winnicott talks about the “well-timed interpretation” - the “magic words” that an attuned therapist might offer that unlocks the exit doors and may free us from a harmful illusion. And Winnicott suggests that the only way to recognize the well-timed interpretation is that it will have some effect.
And you may never see that effect. That effect may unfold days, months, even years later. The light bulb may switch on and light the way out of the maze even though you will not be there to see it or ever hear about it.
We do not know the effect our small gestures, our behavioral models may have cumulatively or eventually.
I choose to stand in the power of that.
I have a lifetime of practice at seeing things others want to ignore. I am well used to being dismissed, often for years, because someone didn’t like what I had to show them. And many, but probably not most, have let me know, many years after the fact, that they were grateful for my efforts.
Nowadays this happens not only in my personal and professional life, but as I simply participate in public life.
It looks like this: I walk into a public space where I am the only one wearing an N-95 respirator. People stare. Some roll their eyes. Occasionally, someone who is so lost in their illusion of dominance and control decides to speak to me about it.
“It is a three-day cold.” says one man with a beer gut in a gas station.
“So is HIV infection syndrome.” I reply as I exit.
Bring it. I am not fucking around.
Even if there is no cause for me to speak, my mask, my cancer, my existence is a communication. It says to others who encounter it: “You are vulnerable. You can become disabled. You can sicken. You can die. Life as you know it can change in a flash.”
Those living with cancer, with disability, and those in states of oppression that put them in closer proximity to death and suffering become the death anxiety of those in the dominant narrative, as everything they fear is projected on to us.
If my mask momentarily unsettles the unholy trinity of illusions – supremacy, dominion over the earth, immortality – good. I only need to get into their head for nanosecond before they wipe the message away. I am just one drop.
When a system is unsettled it will always exert pressure on those embracing change and transformation to stop, to preserve their homeostasis. But such stabilities are in themselves illusions, and always come at a cost.
Sometimes the cost is your life.
Those who irritate, who warn, who unsettle us are serving essential functions for the systems and communities that they annoy.
God bless the fly in the ointment.
Sometimes this is the inescapable call. To be the reminder of things others would like to forget.
No one wants this job. No one chooses it. It is almost always wholly thankless in the short term and those who undertake it pay a heavy tax of alienation and discouragement. It is an assignment.
Sometimes we lable those who call attention to culturally-erased harms revolutionaries, rebels, activists, instigators. Sometimes we call them mad. Sometimes we banish or incarcerate or assassinate them.
Sometimes we call them prophets, (who didn’t ask for their jobs either). Jeremiah was sent to warn his community of the inevitable dangers they were calling down on themselves.
They didn’t listen.
Over and over, God sends poor exhausted ill-treated Jeremiah down to the people to deliver His warnings, and Jeremiah is repeatedly scorned, run out of town, abused for his efforts. The crankiest of the prophets he complains bitterly to the Lord:
I have become a laughingstock. All the day everyone mocks me…. “Denounce him! Let us denounce him!” say all my close friends, watching for my fall.
And God replies (and I’m paraphrasing here):
So what? This isn’t between you and them. It is between you and me.
I know Jeremiah thought all his efforts were futile, hopeless, pointless. But here am I, thousands of years later, still dwelling on his predicament, his agitation, his alienation, his anger and his grief. And I feel less alone. A well-timed interpretation with a several thousand-year lag-time.
It is a sacred task to call a community to accountability, and in fact, it is a hard act of love. Thankless perhaps, but sacred, nonetheless.
I wear my mask to protect my own health and my family, to guard my precarious and unexpected and precious cancer remission. But I also wear it to remind my community that people like me exist. That the vulnerable deserve protection. That service-workers deserve to have their lives and incomes and health protected.
Others who carry various marginalizations or speak out about unsettling truths also stand as shadow-keepers, living reminders of all that the collective has disavowed.
I am one drop among many. My solitary gestures may not result in much. I may never see the outcomes that flow out of the actions I take in this world.
My mask, my words, my observations, my existence are often unsettling
I may remind others of realities they prefer to ignore. I might be mocked. The collective illusions we are lost in are deep and thick and dangerously comforting. Others won’t like it when I perform these tasks, the ones I never chose but was assigned.
It isn’t between me and them. I will live my little unsettling life anyway, alongside millions of others. And God-willing, may we eventually reshape the world.
Today’s Business:
Please check out the Fall 2022 sessions of my groups and workshops - all starting in September, and are still open for registration:
Dream Workshop - 10 weeks, Friday mornings/mid-day
Living Intentionally with Mortality Workshop - 16 weeks, Tuesday evenings
and a new discussion group: The Group Group for people working on developing community groups - 7 weeks, Saturday morning/mid-day.
If you would like to subsidize scholarships for those who cannot afford the suggested donation for these classes and workshops, you can donate here.