On Potential and Fatigue

A few weeks ago, I went to a JStreet event with John Ging, the head of the United Nation’s Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in the Gaza Strip since 2006 . He told us about some young Palestinian girls who came into his office concerned about the security situation and the threat to the UN and the work it was trying to do. “You must be brave,” they said. My cynical heart beat quickly in my ears.

Optimism for me is like math: I need to be tutored in it. I have trouble believing that things can get better, in spite of the fact that I also have to believe that it can in order to get up in the morning, often literally. I just keep wondering, how do we make it better? What are the answers? Is it to punch through the wall from the inside, or build a new structure entirely? (Both, perhaps?) How much longer and harder will it take?

Tonight I had a conversation with someone who is amazing and exhausted, like too many smart, dynamic activists I know. Some of us know the potential we hold to make change, and I think that those are the people who are in the most trouble. Potential is perhaps the most excruciating burden to have, it can make us fearful and exhilarated and so tired. It depends on energy and patience and the willingness of others to move and be moved, things we cannot control. It’s also terrifying because it requires confrontation with our priorities and limitations, and ultimately, with our mortality. We are one of a kind, whether we know it or not, and no one can do things quite like we can.

This last part is something I’ve struggled with for a long time, and continue to. Leadership saturation is really powerful, and dangerous. It happened in 2008 with Barack Obama, when people pinned all their hopes for change on him. His campaign slogan invited that hope, but when change proved slower and harder than people would like, there came a backlash. It happens to any activist when they have to admit they’ve had enough, they’re burnt out, they’re not taking care of themselves. Who will do it? Who will take on their role? The answer, I’ve been forced to admit, is no one, at least not the way I would. This doesn’t mean I have to be the one who always does it, but it does mean I have to have some faith, in spite of the petulant child/control freak inside me.

on what is hard to say

A few weeks ago, I was visiting some college friends, and held A, their 3 month old, for five minutes. (It was kind of like holding a cat, except I got drooled on.) In those moments, I felt a combination of terror and confusion. I thought, what if holding her makes me want one? I don’t want a kid, not even theoretically, but what if it’s so contagious that just seeing her small baby ears makes my ovaries swell and I Suddenly Understand? (In the end, I returned A to her mother, and my ovaries seemed to have remained their normal size.)

I conceived of this blog, originally, as a place to write what I wanted to, instead of waiting for other people to allow me to do it. What I considered only marginally is what I would allow myself to say. There are things, though, that are at the front of my brain that I have been reticent to write about, mainly because I’m nervous about alienating my friends (total strangers, not so much). Just as the personal is political, the political, of course, is deeply personal. I wrote a piece last week for the Sisterhood in which I talk about the reclamation of feminism and the boundaries around it. Read the piece, of course, but basically, I assert that you cannot be a feminist if you are anti-choice and not at least an active ally to the queer community.

I’m wary (and somewhat nauseated by) the blanket statement that feminism is about choice, and therefore every decision that gets made by women is in the name of feminism. Socialization of gender is at work in everyone’s life, and no one can rightfully claim they’re exempt from it. It impacts all of our choices. The ones I’m most interested in, and the ones that get me in trouble in my non theoretical life, are those that concern marriage (of the heterosexual nature), the surname “challenge”, and childbearing (to do it or not). These choices are all rife with issues around race, class, sexuality, etc, and yet I can’t help but notice that all around me, (outside and in my Jewish/lefty worlds) women all seem to make the same choices.

I’m not insinuating that one should do or not things just to make a point, but at the same, at the heart of my desire for equality (another blanket word that makes me nauseous) is my belief that everyone should be able to access their full potential, and that means being able to see clearly, in spite of the obstacles of bullshit that are in the way. The way we’re programmed to see our gender is directly related to the way we see our choices in the world.

It’s very often difficult to understand where expectations and social morays end and our genuine desires begin and even more difficult to ask ourselves why we might want (and not want) certain things. J recently told me that a friend of hers revealed to her that she was the first person to ask her, “What if you didn’t get married?” This friend had literally never thought about a life without marriage, as I suspect many of us have not. Maybe she’ll get married, maybe she won’t, but what matters most to me is that we not treat such things as though they are an inevitability. For me, at least, it’s thrilling to imagine this young woman considering her life now, and all the possibilities, terrifying and beautiful, that have opened to her.

 

Lo, were it that I was unproductive this entire weekend….

Age turned: 32
Dogs Walked: 1
Bottles of Ginger Ale Consumed: 2
Itunes Mixes Made (“glitterhipsterbanjoparty”): 1
Hours of Television Watched: 65,000 (approximately)
Museums Visited: 1 (The Museum of Sex-excellent)
Walks taken: 3
Miles Traversed on Said Walks: 6
Holes in Beloved Sneakers: 1 (rather large, forced to confront  by M)
Hours Spent Worrying That In Trying to Forge a New Path in My Story I May Have in Fact Broken It: Several.

lovely

reading an entire book in one day. the moth. banjos. housingworks. buddy miller.  coffee cart coffee. my chucks. sandwiches containing figs. recovered memories of games of Risk with D and S. lemon. real fall. my red barrette. refillable fountain drinks. trader joe’s. kum kums. tiny drawings. vanilla soy milk with honey. wearing something  until it’s unacceptable to wear it in public anymore. names. dimples. the lower east side. the tall woman with long hair and beautiful tattoos sitting on the counter in here right now.

 

“two or three things I know for sure, and one is that I would rather go naked than wear the clothes the world has made for me.” (dorothy allison)

Within the past few days, I’ve developed the dangerous and unsavory habit of psyching myself out before I write anything. This is a reversal of things; usually I write something, send it out into the world, and then worry about it. That I’ve decided to impair myself mentally before the fact is of some concern, and possibly part of some new, terrifying writing process.

On some level, I’ve tried to resist letting this become a blog about depression, but I  decided before that that I was going to let it become whatever it wants to be, the way some people probably feel about their children. So for a while, it seems, that’s what this is going to be-depression and life crises and feminism. One stop shopping.

On Saturday I spent  time with J, and we discussed psychopathy, brain functions and teen pregnancy (separately).  She is wealth of information about two out of three of these topics (not the pregnancy one), and also an excellent person with whom to indulge  mutually embarrassing obsessions. During our discussion about brains, she told me that once a person with depression has experienced a stressor, their threshold drops, making them more vulnerable to smaller  stressors, which explains my continuous feeling of never being able to surmount things, because it’s so easy to get knocked down.

Also, we ate Indian food.

Yesterday, I read all of Joanna Lipper’s book Growing Up Fast, which is about six teenage mothers in Pittsfield, Massachusetts,which, incidentally, is about an hour from where I grew up. It’s a great book, not just because I’m fascinated by the way  teen pregnancy and parenting  has become such a media phenomenon lately, but because it does such an excellent job of explaining the impact of  sexuality, gender roles, poverty and abuse on young women. Lipper also made a documentary about the teen mothers, who all graduated from the Teen Parenting Program in Pittsfield.

The book was published in 2003, so the statistics are a bit old, but it’s an interesting and very readable portrayal of teen motherhood in a way that’s not sensationalized.

new piece

The new issue of the Hadassah Brandeis Institute’s eZINE is up: http://www.brandeis.edu/hbi/614/. My essay about lipstick and religion is in there. Read it.

snippets

Pieces from the past few weeks…

1. Two unfrosted strawberry PopTarts, three reruns of Old 90210, one hairy, obnoxious cat determined to sit on my keyboard, the first 4.30 sunset of the year.

2. Teriyaki chicken tea rolls at Fresh Side, where I used to go to grade papers when I was a TA in Jewish History. Those students could not spell “Israel” correctly, even though it was in the notes, the textbook and on the board every single day of the semester.

3. I found out recently that women weren’t allowed to run in the Boston Marathon until 1972. If that makes you mad, you might be a feminist. Sorry to break it to you.

4. As of today, there are fifteen days left of me being 31. I always feel weird about my birthday, but I will not be sad to see this age go. 32 seems like a nice number, and I am really grateful to not feel trapped by  deadlines like kids and marriage. In light of how trapped and crazy I’ve been feeling lately, I suppose my birthday leaves me no choice but to try and look at things differently. Although I am still spending the day on the couch watching crime drama. And also, dog walking.

light

new(ish) sisterhood post

Here’s me at the Sisterhood, last week,  talking about the  overlap between sexism and homophobia, and how the Jewish community perpetuates both.

the interview

 

Sometimes, just for fun, I have my fictional loved ones interview each other. It’s a nice character building exercise, and it helps me see them as if they were real people. I also really like those long questionnaires people send me on Facebook, designed to elicit pointless information.

What are you doing? Drinking ginger ale, typing, petting the cat, worrying, wearing a sweater and some pants.

What do you want to write? I want to finish writing the stories I’ve been telling myself for five or six years now. Every time I think I know what’s going on there, something changes, something will strike me as so beautiful and urgent and essential, that it has to be written in, even if it alters the fabric. Agnes DeMille said, “The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.” The fiction I write is never about me, but I do lift aspects of the world around me for it, that’s how writing works. You have to know what to steal. I like creating these lush, complicated, comfortable worlds and people, but I hate plot. I just want to make characters forever.

I’d like to keep writing creative non fiction, essays. I’m glad that I’ve had the time to concentrate on it. The other day I had a thought that I should just tell as many stories as possible. There’s a lot in my life that I don’t talk about, but that I’m always thinking of. I might be getting closer to writing it down.

Who are your influences?  I am loathe to say my mother, but I’ve been writing about her so much lately. I hate when people say that, though, even if it’s true. I love Jami Attenberg and Jonathan Ames, I’ve read everything by them. Walking in certain places- New York, Ann Arbor. Anything or anyone that’s shiny, quirky or original.

What do you love? Coffee shops and their beverages, cardigans, paper, crime drama, New York City, vegetables, NPR, social media, fiction, traveling, imagination, riding the bus, kettlecorn, ethnographies, walking long distances, museums, making lists, feminism, song lyrics, my black and white sneakers, corduroy pants, cold weather, photography, libraries, documentaries, rice pudding, scary movies, curly hair, bookstores, the evolution of nicknames, happenstance, drawing pictures of trees, collarbones, dresses with sashes, ziploc bags, drinking out of mason jars, my journals.

What’s in your bag right now? My cell phone (off), a coffee mug, my computer cord, the book I’m reading (Special Topics in Calamity Physics), my journal, my calendar, an empty journal where I was going to write down places I want to come back to, my green pencil case that has some pens and 3 memory sticks, my wallet, my camera, some stray pens, an ipod/computer connector thing, my Voices on the Verge cd, Oh, and the bag smells like coffee.

What do you wish you could do? Play acoustic guitar. I don’t want to learn, I just want to be able to do it. I want to drive cross country. I also wish I could not panic, that I could dance and would do it in front of people, and that I were a morning person. Oh, and I wish I had a bike and were not terrified of riding it in the city.

What are you proud of? Getting over my fear of flying, my college gpa, my imagination, living my politics, my leadership experiences, my writing, my blog, my independence, even when it gets me in trouble. Being who I am, in spite of what people think. Climbing various mountains. Also, my reading speed and my ability to remember strange things, although I can’t take credit for those.

Where are you going? Someday: Oregon, Seattle, California, Argentina, Europe. Brooklyn. The coffee shop, for many hours, tomorrow. Graduate school, hopefully. To sleep, eventually, to the kitchen for more ginger ale, to the safe corners of my brain.

What do you miss? Oberlin, Amherst and Northampton, Ann Arbor, college, Israel, driving. Running in the middle of the night. Playing Risk with D and S. Boston, sometimes. New York when I’m not there, and even sometimes when I am. Certain roads. Laughing with particular people. Half Price Books.

What do we not know about you? I hate ice, especially in drinks. I think baths are gross. I like being obsessed with things. I’m good with names. I like always being a little bit cold. I love singing, but I don’t do it anymore, and I never did it in public. I almost never travel with less than five books, even if I’m just going somewhere for the weekend. I hate talking on the phone. I sleep with the tv on. If you hurt me, I will probably never tell you. When I was eleven, I wrote a crappy, melodramatic novel. When I was a teenager, I wrote a tv show. I might be kind of psychic. I am never not worrying about something. I think coffee is food (it’s made from bean!). I’m terrified that someday someone will find and read my journal, so I’ve inadvertently cultivated a weird, totally illegible handwriting.

What things today were lovely?  My hair is clean. It’s autumn. This cat is fluffy and awesome. I saw two people I really like. I had some coffee. My brain got quiet and I had some good ideas. J and I had a talk. I wore a scarf and a necklace, I ate dinner, I read some interesting things, I used an excellent pen, I went on a walk.