This essay originally appeared as a takeover for my dear friend Leonor Mamanna’s newsletter, Leave it to Leonor, a brilliant weekly dose of smart thinking, culture recommendations, arty things and more, which always starts out with the phrase, “This week I’m thinking about…”
This week I’m thinking about hopelessness.
I’m typically a pretty stiff-upper-lip kind of person. Over the last couple of years my baseline response to “how are you?” has been some chippy half-smiling variation on: “I’m fine, despite *gestures broadly.*” (In person, a chance to show off my top-notch hand-talker skills. Over text, still a flex: “The world is melting down and I’m old AF, but I’m still tapped in enough to know that the kids use double asterisks to indicate stage directions now.”)
Either way, it felt darkly cute. A bit of quippy gallows humor. A stoic cartoon dog drinking coffee in a burning kitchen. So fun! And it always got the desired effect: a little snorty chuckle. A knowing half-smile. A split second of soul connection in the gathering gloom. What a time to be alive.
But lately I’ve dropped it. The bit doesn’t work for me anymore. First because I literally don’t have the physical wingspan to gesture broadly enough to evoke the apocalyptic levels of fuckery we’re all being asked to normalize these days like MY ARMS ARE JUST NOT THAT LONG.
And second because I’m not fine. Even when I’m fine, I’m not fine. No one’s fine. Coffee Dog is not fine. He’s like seriously it’s really fucking hot and smoky in this kitchen please call 911.
I should back up and clarify that, maybe paradoxically, some folks are thriving right now and that I, on my best days, am one of them. Burning kitchen and all. Most of us know someone who will sheepishly admit that they “actually had a really great pandemic,” and while that was emphatically not me (I’m a mother and a teacher, enough said), I’ve had access to enough infrastructure and community warmth and family support and privilege and creative outlets to experience frequent glimpses of momentum and joy and purpose in the midst of *gestures not-broadly-enough*. By which I mean, Mom, if you’re reading this, I’m not about to load my pockets with rocks and walk into the lake.
But here’s the thing: we can be thriving and still not be fine.
My first realization that I’d started to not be fine happened a few months ago. I was at the kitchen table with my ten-year-old who was memorizing a section of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech for an oratorical festival at school. He had to recite the part about how “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice,” and I was secretly amped when he asked for my help breaking it down. That sentence is very much my shit. On the tip of my tongue at all times. At the crux of my life’s work. Tattooed on my brain.
So I launch into what feels like a solid explanation and the kid’s eyes are shining, and I get swept up in the crescendo of my spiel about how the road to the promised land may be lengthy and hard, and how we can’t be naive about the challenges we’re up against, but that if enough of us do the work and keep striving for the world we know is possible, the universe is going to slowly but steadily curve away from hatred and division and exploitation and white supremacy and towards the harmonious state it naturally wants to evolve into, an abundant landscape of equity, care and vitality for all human beings and lifeforms on our planet, and I’m really winding up now and getting ready to stick the landing and ask my kid what he, personally, can do to help the arc of the moral universe bend in the right direction when I feel my rib cage collapse in on itself a little.
I can’t seem to catch a full breath. My palms get sweaty. My brain shuttles through a glitchy montage—the capitol insurrection, wildfires, mass shootings, conspiracy theories, hate crimes, anti-trans legislation, species extinctions, COVID deaths, police brutality, voter suppression, flash floods, erosion of reproductive rights—none of it new, all of it woven into the regular background static of a typical Tuesday evening on earth, but escalating these days to a point where eventually, probably sooner than we think, we’re not going to be able to walk any of it back--and it occurs to me, in real time, leaning on my elbows on the kitchen table passionately hand-talking to my kid about MLK, that maybe I don’t actually believe a fucking word of what I’m saying.
Maybe the arc of the moral universe doesn’t bend toward justice. Or maybe there’s no arc to begin with. What if this core idea that I’ve built my life around–the mission of the school I co-founded, the purpose of the chorus I sing with, the lifeblood of the art I make, the lessons I teach my children–is actually not a thing? If I can’t feel hopeful that all of us doing our part together is going to inch us steadily towards the promised land, then who even am I? And more urgently, what the fuck am I supposed to do right now?
What I did in that moment was pure mom-code. I kept my shit together. I helped my kid memorize his lines. My upper lip stayed very, very stiff.
For what it’s worth, I’m all for modeling healthy emotional vulnerability for the young humans I live and work with. Kids can handle way more complexity than we assume they can. And feelings–whether kid feelings or grown-up feelings–shouldn’t have to be squashed or suppressed, period. But I also don’t think kids should be asked to absorb a full-blown grown-up crisis of faith that the grown-up herself hasn’t processed on her own first. And I wasn’t ready to process.
In the weeks and months after that night at the kitchen table, I kept getting up. Kept going to the studio, kept going to school, kept mothering. But day by day, I felt my hope unraveling. It wasn’t the first time I’d been hit with an avalanching realization of what we’re up against. But it was the first time I let myself entertain the full catastrophic possibility that things might never get better. And with each day’s headlines, my hope frayed a little more. The worse I felt, the more tightly I grasped onto the fibers of hope I had left and the more vehemently I announced to myself and everyone else that I was, in fact, absolutely fine. Cold turkey withdrawal symptoms kicked in. It started to feel like bone-on-bone.
And then Uvalde happened.
The morning after the shooting, I was walking to the subway headed to my first period class of beloved 8th graders with my hands white-knuckling my coffee and tears tightening in my throat, when I officially felt my last few threads of hope snap.
If I could have lain down on the sidewalk, I would have. With hope at zero now, I wanted to feel the actual ground. Surrender my whole aching, clumsy body into it. Give my trembly self over so fully to uncertainty and grief that there could be nowhere else to fall. Instead, I leaned against the side of a deli, and I cried.
Ten days earlier on the morning after the Buffalo supermarket shooting, I’d paused my lesson plans and we’d started each class by listening to Give Your Hands to Struggle by Sweet Honey in the Rock, which my friend Abena, who directs the Resistance Revival Chorus, had played for us at rehearsal the night before. My students and I had talked about how when your heart and mind are overwhelmed, you can turn to your hands and trust that they’ll know what to do. Leaning against the deli wall that morning, I looked down at my own hands and thought about how Mariame Kaba says that hope isn’t a feeling, but a discipline.
And I realized: Maybe it’s okay not to feel hopeful. Maybe feeling hopeless is sometimes necessary. Maybe the work of our lives was never about feelings anyway, or about grasping for a promised land in the future, but about making good on our promise to show up fully in the present, no matter how we feel. Which then maybe–and there’s the old longing, trying to tug it full circle–if we surrender our attachment to the outcome, just maybe that presence in the moment actually WILL make the future better? I don’t know. Who knows how any of this actually works.
What I do know is that in twenty years of teaching, I’ve never experienced a purer or more precarious thrum of aliveness in the classroom than the energy I felt that morning, gathering my students into a circle and tentatively testing out whether I could show up for them without a trace of hope to bolster me. I know that I’ve never been more fully awake to the contours of their faces. Or more attuned to their words as they talked about how they were taking care of each other in the wake of the news. Or more curious about the movements of our hands once we transitioned into our work together, squeezing paint tubes, ripping duct tape, sanding the sides of unfinished projects. There was a familiar sensation in my chest, I know that, too. I don’t think it was hope. But honestly I can’t be sure.
This week in reading…
Currently inhaling Volume 3 of Emergence Magazine. The text on the back cover reads,
“What does living in an unfolding apocalyptic reality look like? The stories in this volume explore this question through four themes–initiation, ashes, roots, and futures–moving from the raw unknowing of transformation to a place of rooted possibility.”
YES PLEASE
This week in a podcast…
How to Survive the End of the World. So wish we didn’t need this podcast! So glad we have it! I’m obsessed with the kaleidoscopic minds of polymath sisters Autumn Brown and adrienne maree brown, who have been gifting us lush strategies for thriving in apocalyptic times since 2017. I’ve been a fan of amb for a long time, but only just diving into these archives now. What a gift.
This week in listening…
When I’m in a hopeless stretch, music listening can feel tricky. Too much sadness drowns me. Too much inspiration feels like bullshit. Here are some standbys that reliably meet me where I am, coax me out of my stuckness and ease me back into flow:
Little Wing by Stevie Ray Vaughan. This wordless cover of Jimi Hendrix’s ode to a mysterious wild-woman is my favorite SRV track of all time. It was recorded live in 1984, but it didn’t surface until his posthumous album The Sky is Crying in 1991. I grew up listening to Stevie Ray Vaughan, and his death by helicopter crash when I was a teenager wrecked me. There’s a raw living presence to this recording; in the sparser moments, you can hear his amp buzzing. I have vivid memories of listening to this track over and over again on my yellow SONY walkman in my childhood bedroom, imagining I could feel him still with us. Years later, this song keeps welcoming me in, soothing my mood no matter how melancholy I feel, and shaking me into a space where I can breathe a little deeper.
Once In a Lifetime by Angelique Kidjo. This whole album–Kidjo’s reimagining/ reclamation of The Talking Heads’ 1980 Remain in Light, which drew its influences heavily from Afrobeat–is outrageously good. I’m in love with how this song balances the energy of utter dislocation in its iconic litany of questions starting with “And you may ask yourself, "Well, how did I get here?” with gentler reassurances like, “There is water at the bottom of the ocean.” (Yeah, I guess there is, good to remember.) Kidjo’s energy on this whole album makes me feel like the Talking Heads were actually covering her, which, in an abstract sense, they kind of were.
The Waters of March by Susannah McCorkle. There’s something iridescent and almost fractal about McCorkle’s cover of Antônio Carlos Jobim’s word-collage classic that gets me every time. Not to be morbid (or self-aggrandizing for that matter), but this is one of those songs I want my loved ones to play when I’m dead and be like uggggghhhh this is such a fucking Kate song.
Tenderly by Oscar Peterson. They don’t make ‘em like this anymore. Another live recording, I love the shimmery swells of audience response each time Peterson gets his band into the pocket and ratchets up the vibe. The way the track builds from a featherweight touch to such a hard swinging groove by the end with Peterson doing his involuntary growl-chant-singing along to himself just off the mic… it’s sublime.
We Are Fine by Sharon Van Etten. No matter how I feel at the beginning of this song, by the end I always believe her.
This week in my kids are at sleepaway camp so I finally had time to binge…
Fleabag. Holy shit, hot priest mania finally makes sense to me. But seriously, what a show. It didn’t hit me until this exact second how well it fits with this week’s theme of navigating being fine/ not fine.
This week in Jonny Sun’s IG…
He really owed us this sweetness, because last week’s short story repost from his book Goodbye Again was a fucking gut-punch.
This week in holy shit…
After many years of not knowing this very important piece of information, I recently found out that The Principles of Uncertainty by Maira Kalman, a book which concretely changed (err, saved?) my life back in 2007, was designed by one Josef Reyes, my longtime friend through Leonor (and the designer of the LITL logo)--a wild enough coincidence in and of itself which I have been steadily processing for a few months now but which was topped a few days ago when Josef and I stumbled on a fresh piece of the story that’s so uncanny and poignant I’ll have to save it for another newsletter, which brings me to:
This week in an announcement…
I’m starting a newsletter. (OMG I’m starting a newsletter! First time I’ve typed that! Freaking out!) It’s called Field Notes on Longing and was inspired by the essay I wrote for last year’s LITL takeover. It won’t be as pop-culture-treasure-trove-y as LITL, it won’t (always) be as emotionally intense as today’s takeover, and it definitely won’t go out once a week because no. What it will be is a sparkly trail of breadcrumbs tracing the constellation of ways longing shows up in my world. I’m thinking about longing less as a desire for specific people, places or things and more as a yearning for what Mary Oliver calls the “summoning world,” an electrified field of experience that calls out to us from just beyond our peripheral vision.
Longing for me is a conduit to liminal spaces. It’s the spirit of seeking, of tugging at threads and being open to where they lead, of wandering with uncertainty and hyper-charged senses, of dancing on the knife’s edge, of missing what you already have. I’m excited to share musings and stories with kernels of longing at their center and hope to hear about what’s animating your longing these days, too. I’ll also share little glimpses into what I’m reading, watching and listening to, and the occasional snippet of arty news from my studio.
I have absolutely no idea how this will go. But I do know I’d love to share the unfolding with you. If you’re moved to, please sign up here.