how to eat a meal in the middle of a food fight

living with chaos, tragedy and destruction has been the human memoir since the beginning of time. so has our resilience.

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There is a photo that I think of often of Chevy Chase in the middle of a food fight. He is smirking in a sort of, yeah, and? way, as if to say, of course this is happening. Food is being thrown everywhere at all times but also, I am going to eat my meal anyway. I’m going to sit down in the middle of the chaos and choose to exist in spite of it all.

I’m going to be both aware of what’s happening around me and also… I’m going to finish my goddamn potato salad. Or my taxes. Or get up and out of bed. Get dressed and keep going.

Back when twitter was twitter and I used to send tweets, I had a rule for myself: you must wait at least twelve hours to publicly and passionately react to a thing that is happening. I did this after reacting too quickly too many times. Recognizing that my need to IMMEDIATELY respond often came from a place of … unprocessed feelings — most notably powerlessness — a feeling that when activated, controls almost every other feeling I have.

I am slowly learning to do this within my personal relationships as well. Taking a beat before responding to a text. Or a comment. Or the mood swing of a teenage daughter, a seemingly hourly occurrence and one that has permitted me much practice in the art of finishing my potato salad as hamburger buns go flying across the room.

It has also kept me from emotionally absorbing every. single. thing that’s happening to everyone everywhere — most notably my children — who are at ages that demand most of my emotional capacity. This has rendered me relatively stoic in order to maintain a level of calm required to … raise them into adulthood.

In other words, I do not get on the rollercoaster and ride the upside-downs with them. Instead I wave them on from the platform and wait for the ride to be over. Sometimes they want to talk about the ride. Sometimes, having already ridden it and felt all of the necessary things, they don’t need to. But they know that my door is always open and I will never not show up/be in the audience/support them from afar.

I want them to grow up knowing they are tall enough to ride without me. I also want ME to grow up knowing that I can ride without them.

I recently read a piece on resiliency drought which speaks to the importance of discomfort and our willingness to endure pain in order to exist in the world. To be able to withstand criticism, accept defeat and not to take everything so gd personally.

If we are more concerned with avoiding pain than we are from learning from it, we are as doomed in our relationships as we are a society. And one cannot fix what’s broken until she understands how the thing broke in the first place.

Jordan Stacey writes

When individual autonomy becomes a blanket aversion to doing hard things and experiencing the discomfort that comes with struggle and growth it is, in my opinion, a resilience deficiency. Life isn’t meant to be constantly laborious, but it isn’t meant to be easy. The assumption that it is meant to be easy will make it feel laborious. When boundary setting and self-advocacy goes so far that we develop an allergy to the chaos of human existence, we have lost our resilience. We have become unregulated in the opposite sense.

The world has always been cruel and unfair. Our struggles may be new to us but they are not new. People die and do terrible things to one another. Our ability to absorb the chaos and cruelty of the world comes from the same place we enable ourselves to absorb the magic and beauty of it. It is how we metabolize both the hard pill of existence and what we chase it with, that allows us to persist both in the sun and in the shadows of our very complicated lives.

There is a word for this, Logotherapy, which essentially says:

A life imbued with meaning can withstand suffering in a way that a life solely dedicated to avoiding discomfort cannot.

Accepting that the worst can happen and LIVING your life anyway, baby. WE’RE ALL GONNA FUCKIN DIE, YOU GUYS. HOW YOU LIVE, LOVE AND WHO YOU CHOOSE TO FIGHT FOR IS UP TO YOU. So is knowing who gives a shit about you and not deluding yourself into depending on rich old white men… like… in any way.

Depending on the people in power to give a shit about those who aren’t has always been dangerous as any marginalized group will tell you.

America has always been dangerous for the people it does not prioritize…

…Does that mean we throw up our hands and give up? Of course not. But insinuating we are victims of new crimes against humanity is untrue. Saying ‘this is not normal’ is not true. Recognizing the patterns and questioning why we hold allegiance to systems that enable so much suffering — not just now but always — acknowledges our role in enabling the most powerful without performing activism as proof of our innocence. Or worse, fighting the wrong battles because our lack of resilience means we feel triggered when ANYONE says something that makes us feel uncomfortable with the choices we made in our own lives.

Our collective fragility has become both out of control and rewarded. The most triggered among us build platforms out of said anger and invite the masses to copy paste. Retweets become a popularity contest everyone is competing to win. Who can be the most angry in the fewest characters. Who can throw the most hamburgers without getting one in the face.

The beauty of long form writing is that one can address nuance. When you only have a few lines, nuance is harder to accomplish. Brevity has become the soul of shit-talking. When everyone around you is angry, it’s hard not to join them. It’s hard to find one’s inner Chevy Chase in the cafeteria.

Perhaps that means I’m too old for the mosh pit. But also… I get nothing out of throwing elbows anymore. I have seen too many people become so addicted to reacting to the discourse that they become distracted from the very things they are fighting for…