I’ve been on a bit of a journey these last few months. Like so many people, I’ve been trying to find my own reasons for getting up every morning, and my own strategies for getting through the day. There have been a few stops along the way, but I’ve gotten somewhere useful, so I wanted to share.
Stage One: The Eighteen Dystopias (Imagination)
One morning in late January, when I was having a particularly hard time beating off the existential panic, I told my husband that I had eighteen different versions of dystopia all fighting for space in my imagination, and I couldn’t figure out what to DO that day because I didn’t know which dystopia to prepare for.
Those eighteen dystopias existed in my mind as an unfortunate combination of current events and my creative life. As I’ve developed my writing craft, I’ve also been building up my practice of imagining, training myself to respond to any “What if?” by filling in setting, plot and characters with increasing detail the longer I think about it. When faced with the onslaught of executive orders and DOGE actions, I reflexively did the same thing, but this was real life and there were too many terrible possibilities. My imagination left me paralyzed.
Since then, I’ve kept the name “the eighteen dystopias” for anytime the panic feels overwhelming. Giving my fear an absurd name gives me some distance from it, which has been essential for forward movement. I’ve also started giving my imagination specific assignments to keep it occupied. Some of those are related to my writing projects, but some are specifically imagining responses to one specific terrible thing.
That could almost be a complete solution, if I wasn’t so easily influenced by other people’s emotions.
Stage Two: Damn This Bleeding Heart (Sensitivity)
Do you remember when “bleeding heart” was the worst insult attached to liberalism? I have some thoughts about why it’s falling out of favor (especially with folks who will literally call “empathy” a sin), but it hardly matters. The association of sensitivity with weakness is still rampant in our society. I’ve heard “sensitive” used as an insult so many times that I had unconsciously stopped using the word entirely.
But I recently had a conversation with my therapist about how certain situations in my life would be easier if I weren’t so sensitive to the emotions and needs of other people, and her immediate response was that I could never become the kind of writer I want to be if I shut down my sensitive side.
Oh.
She’s right, of course. It’s not that “artists are more sensitive,” it’s that sensitivity is necessary to be the kind of artist who successfully understands and depicts what it’s like to be human. Sensitivity is as important as imagination to the kind of art that I want to create. I cannot afford to develop “thick skin” when it comes to perceiving and feeling the full range of human emotions.
The problem is that Sensitivity can make me pretty miserable, right now. It takes less than ten minutes on any social media platform out there to pick up on so much human misery that I can lose the rest of the day to feeling instead of doing.
It’s my sensitivity that makes me want to shut it all out. Tune out current events altogether and let “someone else” solve all the world’s problems. I fight that desire every day, which is why I never look at the news until the afternoon, which gives me uninterrupted time in the morning to focus on work. But I still wonder if I’m being selfish.
Stage Three: What’s So Urgent About Art? (Importance)
Lots of smart people have written about the importance of continuing to make art, even when it feels like the world is on fire. I agree with them, intellectually, but I have a hard time believing it deep in my heart. It feels selfish, and I find myself asking…
Am I as guilty as Nero, of fiddling while Rome burns?
I’ve always loved the imagery inherent in that saying, picturing an entire city on fire while its neglectful ruler occupies himself with shallow entertainments. But there are a couple of flaws in applying it to your current life. (And I’m not even including the fact that the fiddle hadn’t been invented in 64 CE)
The first flaw with the question is that I am not an emperor. Whether or not you believe the version of events where Nero gave the order to burn Rome, I don’t have that kind of power. None of us do. We can’t simply give orders that will burn OR save the city. And we’re never going to solve any of our current problems if we subscribe to the myth that one person must take heroic action to do so. (If you need more reinforcement for that idea, may I recommend this great essay.)
The second flaw with the question above is that it assumes simplicity in our choices. When there’s an actual fire, the steps you need to take are pretty obvious. Get to safety. Get your loved ones to safety. Fight the fire. Only when it’s no longer burning do things get complex again, and you have to worry about rebuilding.
But for us, things are already complex. We do have urgent problems that need to be dealt with right now. But we ALSO have problems that are going to need our attention for decades to come. We can’t afford to sacrifice the important for the urgent, which means continuing to do the “long haul” work alongside the immediate.
Imagine for a moment that we fight fascism well enough that the current autocrats are no longer in control in 3.5 years. We’re going to have a big ol’ mess to clean up. We’re going to need to rebuild a lot of things from the ground up, including relationships with a lot of individuals and other countries.
To do that – we’ll need… Imagination. Sensitivity. We’ll need creative solutions, empathy, and compassion. And we’ll need everyone to have those things, which means we’ll need a way to teach them.
We’ll need art.
I wish that I could tell you that reaching this conclusion was enough to make things easier, but it doesn’t. This isn’t ever an easy path, and it’s especially hard now. But it did remind me of why it’s worthwhile.
I’m thinking about collecting strategies for guarding your sensitivity and imagination in difficult times, and publishing those in an upcoming blog entry. Do you have ideas? Share them below!!