It’s relieving to think I don’t have to care about everything. That I, Erin, don’t have to have an opinion and honestly it won’t really matter. I don’t care enough to be informed about everything, meaning I’m not informed enough to have an opinion, meaning I’m not opinionated enough to express my views to anyone.
If all I’m doing is fighting my brain, then I have zero room for anything else.
I stitch all the wonderful photos and stories and captions together to create a mutant Frankenstein’s monster of a person who does all the things and against whom I compare myself.
I don’t want to lose my ability to find patterns. I do want to stop my brain from concluding that if I can’t find a pattern, I must be a failure or wrong.
The way I like to think about it, isn’t about my suffering or lack thereof. It’s that collectively, there is a sharing of the suffering that allows humanity to survive.
The paradox of this time is that we’re so well-trained that “doing nothing = bad,” that now doing nothing seems like a punishment. But the only way for us to come out of this hard time is to let it be hard, and then to take steps so that next time, it’s not as hard.
My commitment is to keep with the monthly theme of vulnerability and trust. As I think about those concepts in the context of the worldwide pandemic, I wonder what they may have to do with the intense anger, the nearly obsessive indignation and self-righteousness, that I feel.
Striving for better has been a characteristic that’s brought me a lot of success and reward. But I tend to see those rewards as obligatory, not as something to celebrate. Because they’re rewards for things I “should” be doing anyway.
What if she’s the one who can see the authentic me, and I cannot? What if I can be vulnerable and open and real and all those things and still be seen as having my shit together? Like those aren’t diametrically opposed views? That being vulnerable doesn’t have to equal “hot mess.” That perhaps it’s _my_ definition of “put together” that needs to change, not hers.
Despite what the people are currently doing around this town, it remains inspiring to think about the ideals we can strive to as a nation, by taking the words of our forefathers and updating them to be more inclusive and relevant.
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