We Contain Multitudes
Yes to everything in this post. Yes to believing that 2020 would be defined by the Australian wildfires. The virus was still a quiet news story back in January, whereas the fires were immediate. They were horrific. They were all we could talk about. Even if you told me at that time that the virus would eclipse the wildfires, that it would become the defining news of the year, I couldn’t have fathomed what that meant.
But what I loved from this post was the capturing of how we can feel two very different things at the same time: Anger and tenderness. Grief and joy. Fear and calm. The wildfires and COVID shock. She writes:
The coexistence of two seemingly disparate emotions may shock us, yet we’ve proven how it’s done over and over: Our enraged bodies are still tender enough to scratch a dog’s ears and our devastated hearts still beat wildly at the sight of mountaintops from a plane window.
Which leads to her point: our feelings are just feelings. They aren’t immutable facts. And we can feel two different things at the same time, and neither feeling cancels the other one out. And then she travels into the damage done by purity culture and the either/or thinking, and its emergence online. How it plays out online. How we process it online.
It’s really a breathtaking piece, and I’d love to hear your thoughts.
2 comments
I echo your “Yes” to everything in this post. I’d seen the face-washing quote as a meme on social media, but didn’t realize there was a whole essay attached to it. Thanks for the link!!
It’s a beautiful post. I wasn’t really aware of purity culture, which seems to me to be the opposite of my definition of purity. Thanks for flagging it.