You know when people are so close to getting it but just can’t seem to get there? How they’ll assert a thing like it’s a side of fries that can sit pretty by their narrow notion burger? I used to have a teacher who would berate us for not absorbing our lessons fully by pompously declaring “you must eat the stones,” which would irritate us to no end, and yet, somehow makes more sense to me now. By what social metabolism can you digest a lesson for others? You cannot. Your advocacy will break them out in hives. Their anti-bodies will reject you as a threat. All you can do is adapt; sometimes hope means becoming recessive.
I watched a video yesterday that introduced me to the idea of “distress tolerance,” and how some of us carry a lot of it, while others do not, and how that uneven distribution has a little something to do with power, privilege, and place of origin.
I know it’s uncool to talk about “identity” now, even on the left, but you’d be a fool to pretend that you don’t know exactly what that means. You’ve faced fragility; you’ve seen it weaponized.
I learned another term yesterday too: “virtue hoarding.” It comes from a book that’s described as “a denunciation of the credentialed elite class that serves capitalism while insisting on its own progressive heroism.” You have to admit that you already know exactly what that means as well, without even reading the book.
I get spiritually fed in an institution that used to be called ‘the Republican Party in prayer,’ but over the years, it’s liberalized, and is now quite honestly the Dems in prayer. And that’s not much better. Maybe I’m being dramatic, but anemia is not the best replacement for toxicity.
But that’s the thing about resilience. It means we’re stress tested. We’re immune. You’ll think you stamped us out with your acid wash regimes, but we are endemic. And we will inherit the earth.