Today is 10/10, which is World Mental Health Day, a good time as any to check in with ourselves at least once every 12 months. This post is about that, in a way. In it, you’ll find outtakes from my trip to Lebanon over Christmas.
There’s a word I’m searching for to describe the kind of emptiness one feels after sharing something vulnerable with people with little capacity to help. In my case, the imperative to share has been relentlessly vampiric; one is asked how one is doing almost as a chore, and one’s answer is sucked out so painfully, as with a cocktail straw. One can almost hear the high-pitched slurping sound at the bottom of the glass.
But sometimes, one chooses to actively open up, and that’s even worse. The hollowness of having to witness other people’s self-satisfaction at performative sympathy far exceeds the relief of unburdening.
That happened to me last night. Not only was I not actively heard (people always ask me about my family when I am talking about justice), I was told “you need a hug” (I don’t) and forcibly given one that I politely tolerated until finally saying: “yeah, okay…”
So, yeah. Okay. On this mental health awareness day, let me advocate maybe not doing that. Maybe don’t participate in a pantomime of care if you have not already shown yourself the discipline of self-examination.
And before you leave a comment here, sit with that feeling for a minute. It sucks, doesn’t it? To have all the best intentions in the world, but none of the impact. It’s okay to sit with that in silence today, at least for one day.
It’s a techno-modern fallacy to believe that the problems of misunderstanding can be fixed with more and more communication alone.
It’s a fantasy of optimizing signal to noise that pretends that universal understanding is achievable if we simply craft the right message at the right frequency and amplitude; Umberto Eco wrote a lot about this century-spanning quest to find the perfect language, and the subtext of his work is that it doesn’t exist, and pursuing it is futile.
But understanding can be approximated if one is willing to press on through the imperfect communication, and this can only happen if we acknowledge that we are all mostly foreign to each other. Then we’ll stop and actually listen instead of hearing what we think someone is saying. Then we’ll “find the way to enter” as that Arcade Fire song puts it (“but it was just a reflector”).
Enter what? In dialogue. That’s what asking how one’s doing is supposed to be. Don’t engage if you’re not ready to do the work.