Category: thinking out loud

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movie rants thinking out loud

I am shocked that you think I wanted the thing I actively encouraged to happen.

This morning I found myself, perhaps weirdly, thinking of a particular scene from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. It’s the Nazi book burning scene, so obviously imagery warnings here.

You get Elsa, the hot Nazi archaeologist, looking slightly teary-eyed and upset while all the book burning is going on. As she walks away, Indiana (undercover in a stolen Nazi uniform) grabs her and takes his father’s grail diary out of her pocket, growling that they didn’t want the book to be incinerated. Elsa acts so shocked–shocked!–that Indiana would think she’d do such a thing. She believes in the Grail, not the Swastika! Indiana gets this close to literally strangling her, and only lets go when she threatens to scream.

(Now, one can argue this scene gets a bit undercut later when the temple is falling apart and Indiana tries to save her, but let’s skip that for now.)

There’s a thread going around Twitter right now in which a correspondent from USA Today has realized he shared transit with the one fascist who got shot and killed (who is a conventionally attractive white lady, funnily enough, rather like Hot Nazi Archaeologist Elsa) and wants to take it as a moment to recognize that hey, those violent fascists are also people! This is a jaw-dropping extrapolation of “he can’t be abusive, he was always so nice to me” out into a group of white nationalists. But since I’m drawing parallels from reality to this film, I’ll just note: Indie fucked the Hot Nazi Archaeologist before he knew she was a Nazi. And his take away was ultimately shock, disgust, and “well, guess I’m not gonna cry about it when the temple eats her.” Not, remarkably, “Well, shoot, I guess all Nazis are also hot people I could fuck, really makes you think.”

The Indiana Jones movies are problematic as hell on a bunch of axes (and I love them anyway), but one thing they are relentless about is how much they fucking hate Nazis and have basically zero sympathy for those who claim they’re definitely not Nazis while happily riding the Nazi coattails to glory. In Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, Belloq gets exploded by the power of the ark. In this movie, Elsa gets swallowed by the temple as it destroys itself. They signed up with the Nazis. They don’t get to run away from that association. Elsa might not personally be advocating for the burning of books–in fact she might find it a bit upsetting–but she’s still standing there and doing nothing while it happens. She might claim she doesn’t believe in the Swastika, but she’s happy to wear it because it helps her get what she wants. Thus, she gets to share the fate of the other Nazis, and no one is sad.

So you can bet this sprang instantly to mind as I watched a bunch of Republicans, including Mitch McConnell, trying to backpedal from the white supremacist mob they unleashed on the capitol yesterday. They’re shocked–shocked!–that we could think they wanted that to happen, after all they’ve been doing is hanging around with these violent fascists and tacitly encouraging them either with mealy-mouthed words or strategic silence. I am not, of course, advocating for basing morality off a pop cultural artifact. But I’m saying in this case, Indiana Jones is very, very right.

You don’t get to run away from this. It doesn’t matter if you don’t, in your heart, believe what you’ve been cynically encouraging others to do. You signed up with the Nazis. When they go down, so should you.

 

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movie thinking out loud

In the Belly of the Beast

Dark Waters is one hell of a movie. In the film sub-sub-genre of “corporate malfeasance thrillers,” it stands apart as singularly gritty, grinding, and unflinching in its refusal to manufacture drama beyond what’s already waiting in the life and death reality of an entire town being poisoned by a corporate giant. It even makes a point of how banal and drawn out the crime and the cover up is; the timeline of the film covers sixteen years on the same case. There are endless scenes of Mark Ruffalo shuffling through paper as Du Pont tries to bury him in discovery, long shots of the countryside, long moments where the characters are silent and contemplative. It’s a massive compliment to the director and the cast that the film is still gripping and upsetting even as it documents the deliberate, foot-dragging slow walk of Du Pont to the court room.

The movie is based on this massively long and horrifying New York Times article: The Lawyer Who Became Du Pont’s Worst Nightmare

And what it’s about is something that is happening, right now and will continue happening throughout our lives because it involves a chemical that the body doesn’t get rid of recently. My housemate is actually a technician in a lab that does water testing; just a few weeks ago she was telling me that they’re working on procedures for testing for PFOS, which is the killing vector at the heart of Dark Waters.

Incidentally, the EPA just set the safe level of PFOS (or PFOA or C-8 as its called in the movie) at 70 parts per trillion or 0.07 parts per billion, which makes the scene in Dark Waters where a West Virginia government scientist says they’re going to “unveil” a safe level of 150 parts per billion after consulting with Du Pont even more horrifying.

What really struck me about Dark Waters is its inclusion of the absolute cognitive dissonance most working people in America–and probably the rest of the world–live with every day. Anyone who has paid even minor attention to the news, to events around them, knows that large corporations are not to be trusted. That pharmaceutical companies actively push addictive medications that have caused an epidemic of deaths. That oil companies knew for decades that the carbon economy that made them rich was and still is causing global climate change. That chemical companies poison towns. That auto companies cover up their unsafe products. And on, and on. We all know these things. We all know that corporations are not looking out for us, never have, and never will.

Corporations do not care about us, but almost all of us are dependent on them in some way for our livelihood. Corporations do not care about us, but we are also aware that we are each a small part of those corporations. We are good people; corporations are run by people just like us, who make decisions every day just like us, and we don’t want to hurt anyone. Corporations do horrible, destructive, deadly things, and by being dependent on them, employed by them, how much of that sin might roll downhill to rest on our shoulders?

That’s what Dark Waters shows us, again and again. When Mark Ruffalo says, without any irony at all, that he’s sure Du Pont will want to know if they find out someone at the plant is doing things wrong. When a resident of the town says that she’s sure her blood test will show nothing is wrong, because “Du Pont is good people.” When the lawsuit against the company makes someone in town angry enough to try to burn the lead plaintiff’s house down, as if they’re the one that’s hurt people, not the chemical giant that’s letting its chemical waste leach into the wells and streams.

All of those moments rang horribly true to me, because I’ve witnessed similar ones every time I’ve worked in connection with the petroleum industry. Some in the industry are dedicated climate change deniers, and I think that’s in a large part because it’s easier than facing the truth that you’ve made a good living by selling the future of your great-great-grandchildren. Some are sure that the ingenuity of humanity will find an exist from this road to hell, and in the meantime, they have car payments. I’ve witnessed people say, unironically, that of course we could trust self-reported health and safety data from a company, because don’t they want to do things right? Don’t they want to look out for their employees?

(And if the company is looking out for their employees, they certainly don’t need a union. Don’t be silly. Just like the company knows its own business better than the wasteful, ineffective, silly government that just gets in the way of progress. Companies can regulate themselves; they don’t want to hurt people, right?)

The level of historical amnesia that can strike anyone when it comes to pursuing their livelihood is breathtaking. It’s frustrating. And perhaps it’s horrifyingly necessary for mental integrity in the modern world. Yes, we know that company cut corners and caused an explosion that killed people, but that was an isolated incident; that was bad people who made mistakes; we’re all good people here, aren’t we?

The greatest horror of all of it is that we don’t have a choice when it comes to participating. The corporation that poisons your water might be the only employer in town. What do you do then? Do you believe the news and still find the strength to go to work, because the kids need to be fed, even knowing that what you’re doing in some way might be killing yourself, killing them, killing your neighbor? And if you quit your job, what then? You still need to eat, and someone else will take your place because they need to eat, too, and the machine will grind on, belching poison into the sky and leaking it into the soil because the primacy of profit is far more reliable in the corporate world than taxes.

Dark Waters is framed as a thriller, but in its heart I read it as a story of existential horror. We all live in the belly of that beast. We all depend on what is killing us in the long term to survive in the short term. The one glimmer of light we’re offered is the fact that we have each other–and maybe that can be enough. That the system is rigged but the fight can succeed, as we stagger over the finish line half dead, the bodies of our friends left where they’ve fallen.

Maybe the greatest lie we’ve ever been told is that there is no escape from the monster that has swallowed us whole. But pretending that escape is easy or painless would be a lie almost as great; we’re not goats trapped in the stomach of the Big Bad Wolf, waiting for a hero to cut him open and release us. The path to freedom will be much more bloody and difficult, and all we have are our hands and each other.

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health the human body is made of bullshit thinking out loud

“Normal”

On advice of the workers comp doctor, I’ve been going to the pool, to try to do some walking without my full weight on my foot. My rec center has a little lazy river thing, and I walked with the current of it today.

It felt almost normal.

Except as soon as I thought that, I realized that normal was the wrong word to use. What I really meant was that it felt something in the neighborhood of how I used to be able to walk, before the surgery, before the injury. Normal back then was a moderate gait with a slight limp that I’d developed over 35 years of walking on my terrible arches and chronically spraining my left ankle. That normal wasn’t the best gait in the world, but it got me around at a decent clip and meant I could average 5 miles of walking a day between work and playing Ingress or Pokemon and feel pretty good about it.

Normal is normal for you. It’s the place you settle after the healing and the physical therapy and the retraining to about as good as it’s going to be. Normal is made of hopefully good habits, but some bad. And normal changes. That’s the thing that trips me up. Normal isn’t a static value. It shifts with the circumstances, gets modified by the sling and arrows of outrageous fortune.

After you get injured, or sick, or anything else, on the other side you find a new normal. Sometimes it’s the same or close to the old normal. Sometimes it’s going to be really different. The hardest thing to accept is that it is what it is. Your normal is going to be your normal. You can push it this way or that with physical therapy, with dedicated time and practice and good technique and mindfulness. But at some point, you hit the border where you can go no further. The normal doesn’t move that far from its center unless it’s traumatically shifted again.

We like to pretend that mind over matter is a thing. But eventually, the matter wins. It’s what we’re made of, whether we acknowledge it or not.

I’m mostly thinking about this now because the workers comp doctor told me something else: I’m not progressing as fast as they would expect for someone my age and relative level of health. That could mean nothing, or it could mean everything. You can’t dictate the way your body heals. But it’s making me wonder if I’ve already arrived at my new normal and now I’m just trying to push the center of it as far as I can. Is my new normal always walking with a cane? Is my new normal chronic pain in the arch of my foot? Is my new normal a much more pronounced limp than I used to have, one that everyone can see and not just trained professionals? Or is this not my normal, and instead a symptom that something else has gone wrong, a nick in a ligament or a bruise on a bone?

There’s no way of knowing right now. Time will tell.

Which as you can imagine, I’m just overjoyed about. I’ve always been such a patient soul, right? I want a set reward and a guarantee, and I get none of those things. All I can do is put in the work and keep hoping. And while I work on my matter to try to build its normal, I also need to work on my mind. I have to be able to accept wherever I end up.

That’s the part that’s harder than fighting my nemesis, the two-inch-high step, or attempting calf stretches, or the other things that only just hurt. I have to reshape my expectations of myself, my habits, my life. Because I have to keep going on the other side of it. I have to find a new normal for my life, just like I have to find a new normal for my gait, and that’s the scariest part of all.

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conspiracy theory science skepticism thinking out loud this shit is fucked up

Pop culture matters, and education, and history, and…

On the way to Dallas for ConDFW, I started reading (listening to, actually) The Shock Doctrine: the Rise of Disaster Capitalism. The book is a great read if you want a reminder of how we actually shouldn’t be in the slightest bit surprised about all the gross shit that went down surrounding our invasion of Iraq (we’ve been training for it since the 60s, really) or that the free market should never be considered a magical unicorn that farts healing rainbows.

But there’s one particular detail in the book that’s sticking with me. One of the first chapters includes quite a bit of information about the CIA’s MKUltra program, including a conversation that Klein had with one of the program’s victims. You’ll note that I’ve just linked to Wikipedia for this, because that’s a decent enough overview. And if you try to just google MKUltra and go past Wikipedia and Rationalwiki, you will find yourself in deep in the bad parts of crazytown with no idea how you got there.

There are a couple reasons this is still niggling at me and sticking with me. First off, MKUltra was a deeply fucked up, horrifying thing. The government of the United States, through the CIA, basically paid scientists to clinically research torture. And Klein does an excellent job connecting the dots of that basic research to a whole load of incredibly awful, inhumane practices that have happened ever since, up to and including the “enhanced interrogation” (translation: torture) of detainees in recent years. And then there’s this asshole, Donald Ewen Cameron, who was the person who perpetrated torture on the woman to whom Klein spoke, including extended sensory deprivation, medically-induced near constant sleep, and electroshock therapy, rendering her incapable of remembering pretty much the first 20 years of her life and putting her in constant pain until this day due to persistent microfracturing in her spine from all of the convulsing she did while being shocked and going through induced insulin seizures.

And then you consider that this man was involved in examining Rudolph Hess during the Nuremberg trials (including testifying that he wasn’t insane) and then somehow went on to torture his patients in an attempt to remove their personalities entirely so he could create better ones for them. I’m still trying to wrap my brain around this particular dichotomy.

These details are all fascinating in a horrifying way.

But then there’s the fact that I actually had heard of MKUltra before. Fairly frequently. It actually gets pop culture shout-outs regularly. The first mention I can recall is in the X-Files, but it regularly gets mentioned with two purposes:

  1. To denote that the person mentioning MKUltra is a serious paranoid conspiracy crackpot who might be on to something nonetheless
  2. To trot out the fact that the US government apparently paid researchers to get people high on LSD.

Point number one is kind of hard to avoid when a cursory search yields mostly results that involve pop stars and how their behavior is obviously a sign they’ve had the MKUltra treatment done to them. And that then makes you feel weird about even trying to have a serious conversation about this, because I started talking about creepy CIA shit and spontaneously generated my own aluminum foil hat, stop looking at me like that.

And point number two honestly has the effect of reducing the entire thing to a punchline. Up until I learned more about this particular subparagraph of horror in the 10 volume set of Shitty Things America Did in the Last Century, this treatment of MKUltra had me filing it in the same part of my brain as the Stargate Project and research that I parroted dismissive talk about back years ago when I was a Republican (eg: “They spent a hundred thousand dollars and researching how fruit flies have sex! What a waste!”) and didn’t get that basic research is not only a thing, it’s an important thing. The CIA got people high on LSD, what a waste of money, amirite? Except we’re not talking about giving a bunch of college kids a few tabs of acid just to see what happens; we’re talking about doses of LSD and PCP and weird cocktails of uppers and downers administered with the specific purpose of trying to completely destroy someone’s personality and sense of self.

Which isn’t funny in the slightest.

So this bothers me. It bothers me that I just sort of consumed this bit of pop culture presentation without thinking more critically about it. And it also bothers me that something brutal and fucking horrible that the United States government perpetrated on innocent people—in this case innocent people with psychiatric problems who then had those problems made exponentially worse and in many case ceased to be able to function independently afterwards—is basically a dismissive punchline. And I don’t think it’s even something that’s being done willfully; apparently when the ugly facts of MKUltra came to light, the thing the media latched on to most was the line about LSD. So I’d imagine that it’s something writers remembered hearing about without looking into it more deeply, and used it as a throw-away reference, and then the next generation of writers picked it up and it’s just become a meme.

Kind of like that fucking ‘humans only use 10% of their brain’ bullshit that I wish we could just kill with fire but it’s got a life of its own now too just because it’s been repeated so many times.

This circles back to a weird and uncomfortable place for me, because I’ve gone on record before saying that I don’t think it’s the responsibility of movies/tv/etc to get science right. I’d rather have a good story even if that means bending the rules—though I do also think that it’s goddamn lazy writing when people just can’t be arsed to even check. Particularly when hewing closer to the facts would actually make for a more interesting conceptual framework than the lazy bullshit you pulled out of your ass, which happens often. And I still do hold to my position that if we’re looking to the movies to be educational vehicles, we’re fucked anyway because we’ve failed our schools and therefore the kids in them so badly.

But on the other hand now, this is a place where I got skunked by something that wasn’t quite true and didn’t take it upon myself to look any deeper. Which is mostly on me, but also feels like a failure of writing. It does show the power of pop culture to shape perception in very subtle ways, and makes me wonder what else I’m missing the gross (perhaps literally) detail on because it just doesn’t even seem that important when it comes up.

And it also does feel like an educational failure. Not that I think all children should have to specifically learn about MKULtra and Donald Ewen Cameron (gosh, want to make sure kids will never want to trust a psychologist again ever?), but this is one more little, tinkling horror in the giant black bag full of pustule-laden zombie demon clowns that is modern American history. I don’t know how it is currently, but we spent plenty of time learning how shitty the US government was to the Native Americans (very important) and then sort of… glossed over the rest with a sense of well yes, the civil rights movement happened and now black people can vote and isn’t that awesome, and there was the Cold War and things got a bit grim and the Cuban Missile Crisis wasn’t really a thing to be proud of but it’s all better now, right? Go America!

When in fact, the more I learn about recent history the more I’m horribly, horribly unsurprised about everything that’s gone down since 2001.

I don’t really have a good answer for any of this. I’m still thinking it through. I mostly just want to register how very disturbed I feel about… everything, right now. If nothing else, this is a harsh reminder about the importance of not only what you say, but how you say it. And at the least I’m going to try to take this as a lesson to be more mindful about knowledge I’ve picked up as a meme rather than via research, and just take the time to at least use the damn Google. For all that we have so much knowledge at our fingertips, it’s still frighteningly easy for something to get distorted so out of shape that it doesn’t even seem like it’s worth a second look.

Categories
science fiction things that are hard to write thinking out loud worldcon

Drawing the line

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, these last couple of days. Well, as much thinking as possible considering I’ve been getting about five hours of sleep a night and work is slowly consuming my brain, my soul, and probably my major viscera. (But hey, workshop day is tomorrow! Then I get to relax have severe panic about all the end of month work that I didn’t get done because of the workshop wheeeeeeee.)

Anyway. I’ve been thinking drawing the line. You know. The Line. The Line That Must Not Be Crossed.

It’s an expression that can have some real macho bullshit baggage with it, I guess because it makes for nicely threatening language. See anything involving foreign policy. But that’s not what I mean, here. It’s not about denoting territory in a power struggle, be it between international powers or people. It’s not about maintaining physical safety. Those are the lines you draw outside of yourself, whether you’re a country or a parent with a cranky toddler or someone trying to hold the distance between you and an evil shitbag that doesn’t comprehend the meaning of No–and that’s a whole different matter.

The lines I’m thinking about here are the ones you draw inside yourself. They’re part of the way you define and shape yourself into the person you want to be. They are yours–only yours. You don’t get to force your configuration of internal borders on anyone else, and no one has the right to reach into you and redraw those boundaries.

These internal lines read: if I do this, if I am a part of this, I will no longer be the person I am or the person I want to be. I will no longer be right with myself. Crossing these internal lines will probably never hurt you physically, but will wound you in ways that never heal.

And make no mistake, other people aren’t going to have the same internal lines as you; it’s never easy to hit a point where you think something is unacceptable, but your friend is okay with it. Being human ain’t easy because no two of us are exactly the same, and that’s another thing you have to decide for yourself.

But these lines are important. These are the lines you draw between yourself and the dark.

#

So why all the navel-gazing? It’s not really my style when I’ve got movies I could be bitching about. As you might suspect already, this is another dispatch from the gift that keeps on giving: this year’s Hugo short-list. In my previous post, I said I’d be doing my best to read all the entries with an open heart. It was the best I could come up with at the time, because my first urge is always to ask what’s fair.

But then I made the mistake of getting lost down the comment rabbit hole of Natalie’s post, and one of the people there invoked Orson Scott Card, Roman Polanski, and Woody Allen as similar situations to the Vox Day being a Hugo nominee. (Insert your own feelings here on if you think that’s even a fair comparison to make on the scale of artistic merit versus complete shitbaggery.) And god I wish he hadn’t done that, because I’d almost managed to stop picking at this particular scab and let it retreat to no more than a nagging itch.

I’ve already searched through this little sector of my soul in relation to Orson Scott Card. (For me, he’s the only really pertinent example, because in all honesty I’ve never really liked Woody Allen’s work.) I fought with myself, blood was drawn, wounds were taken, and I came to the conclusion that I have a line. There is a point at which I can no longer separate the art from the living artist. I cannot escape the fact that my support of their art, however miniscule in relative scale it may be, implicates me in what they then use their platform to do and say. It makes me complicit, if only peripherally, in the harm they choose to do. I said of Orson Scott Card:

If you can separate the art from the artist, maybe that makes you a better person than me. Feel that way if you like. But I cannot support someone who believes that me and many of the people I love and esteem are not full human beings.

If that’s true for OSC, whom I have met and actually liked as a person, it’s just as true for Vox Day. And I’m ashamed of myself for not having considered this sooner. Though I guess that explains why I’ve been so damn uncomfortable about this entire mess.

I may still read Vox Day’s story if it’s in the Hugo packet, because what little of his prose I’ve seen has been downright florid, and I have this “hobby” (some might call it a “problem”) where I watch or read terrible things and then go on seething rants about the awfulness I witnessed. So I might give this embarrassing shitstain in the shorts of humanity that much of my time. Or I might just watch a couple episodes of Master Chef reruns instead. The series where it’s all kids is super cute, after all.

But I will not be putting Vox Day above the No Award line. I gave up Ender’s Game because being right with myself was more important than a novel I treasured as a teenager. This isn’t even a contest.

#

You don’t have to agree with me. I don’t expect you to. These are my lines, not yours.

Feel free to discuss this with me. Feel free to offer me arguments (I’ll do my best to consider) or ask questions if you’re going to actually listen to the answers. If you think less of me as a person for my melodramatic little choice, well, it is what it is. This is personal. I didn’t make this decision for you, and I sure as hell didn’t make it just to spite some guy I wouldn’t recognize if I bumped into him on the street.

It’s the end of the day, and I feel right with myself.

Categories
thinking out loud

Do the Thing

So, I loved this movie titled Addams Family Values when it came out oh sweet baby Jesus over twenty fucking years ago YOU’RE KILLING ME a while ago, but weirdly the scene that’s stuck with me the most is just this short bit of dialog where Uncle Fester (played by Christopher Lloyd and his terrifying I have looked into the abyss and the abyss looked back into me stare) is getting a pep talk from Gomez about asking a woman out, and Fester says: “What if she says no? What if she says yes?” with his tone indicating that yes might actually be the way scarier answer.

Wish I could find a youtube clip for you, but we didn’t have youtube back in the stone age, and maybe no one’s gotten around to digitizing the petroglyph-filled stone tablets that we stuffed in our VCRs (Visually Creative Rocks), so you’ll just have to trust me on this one.

Anyway, there was a point to this other than how fucking old I suddenly feel.

And that point is: getting rejected sucks, and change is really fucking scary. But you should try stuff anyway.

We’ve all been rejected before, gotten our hopes up and had them dashed and it feels bad, man. Really bad. Rejection is the reason disappointment fajitas were invented. And change? Even when it’s a potentially positive change, it still means things are going to be different on the other side of that door labeled tomorrow, and you can never be quite certain how different. That can be really intimidating. Uncertainty can be terrifying stuff. But in many ways, life is an uncertain prospect. Maybe change is scary, but change also means you’re growing and living.

So you should try stuff anyway.

Because if you never try stuff, and you never do anything scary, and you never risk getting a little hurt, the likelihood that in sixty years you’ll be scrolling through ancient jpegs stored in your neural hard drive and wishing that you’d just done something when you were young and had fabulous hair and no mortgage, goes up exponentially. (Though don’t get me wrong here. I firmly believe it’s never too late to do the thing. Expect to see me out on dance floors up until the point I’m a disembodied brain in a jar.)

I’m not telling you to quit your job and run off to the beach and forget your car payments and paint seashells. But I think whenever there’s a chance on the horizon and you’re eyeballing and trying to decide which direction to run because you can’t quite tell if it’s a cotton-candy fountain or a pissed-off rattlesnake, the thing to really ask yourself is: What’s the worst that could happen?

If you come up with answers like jail time or complete financial ruin or grievous bodily injury and potentially death, then yeah, you might want to avoid that. But if the worst you can realistically come up with is I could get rejected or I might feel embarrassed? Rejection and embarrassment are part and parcel of the fabulous thing called being human. They suck, but you also eventually build up callouses, I promise. You learn that you are category 5 kaiju of pure awesome and it takes way more to stop you than rejection, than embarrassment.

And it’s a biological fact: regret stays in your system a hell of a lot longer than a plate of disappointment fajitas.

Take a deep breath.

Apply for the job.

Send the query.

Submit the story.

Do the thing.

Categories
personal thinking out loud you need to do better

Disappointment

Recently, I was majorly disappointed. This is because I am a human being who lives in the real world.

When I experienced this latest disappointment, I indulged myself in about thirty seconds of high-pitched, anger and self-pity-filled, internal screaming. Then I took a deep breath and said out loud, so I had to hear it: “Well, this isn’t about you.” And then I made myself let it go so I could focus on what came next.

My housemate watched this minor drama as it unfolded and said she’s never seen anyone else deal like that. Is it that unusual? I don’t know that many people, and haven’t been around most of them when they’re having a crap day.

But hey, maybe it’s worth talking about.

Disappointment sucks. No shit, it sucks. It feels terrible. It’s a massive let down, excitement and happiness and expectation going from mach 1 to hitting a brick wall. Instant stop and total annihilation. It’s a low, awful, destructive feeling. But you know what? It’s part of life. To be blunt, it’s a major part of life.

We live in a complex world full of forces and people who are completely outside of our control. Neither the world, nor the people who populate it, exist to make us happy or make us feel good about ourselves, let alone give us what we want. So when something good we’re hoping for happens, that’s awesome. But the chance of that is just as random as something shitty and disappointing happening.

One of the things I find most comforting about the universe is that it is quite literally incapable of caring about us. If something shitty and disappointing happens, there is no malice behind it, no messed up biblical judgment. Sometimes things just happen the way they happen. And even when it involves people, I’d argue the disappointments caused by actual malicious intent are pretty rare1. People aren’t [normally] out to get you. It’s just the way they’re working things out doesn’t quite jive with what you wanted. So with that in mind, who is there to get mad or upset at, when something disappointing happens? Unless you know that someone screwed you over just to be an asshole, there is no place to direct your anger.

And maybe it’s different for other people, but for me anger without direction has always been self-destructive. It turns inward and gnaws on my heart like a wolf. It turns me into someone I don’t like.

I don’t know if I’ve had a better education in disappointment than most. I don’t think I had a particularly disappointing childhood. Maybe I’ve had a bit more experience with the sensation in recent years, since I started selling my writing. Because as a friend recently pointed out, art and disappointment are like peanut butter and jelly. You spend so much time hearing “no” that you come to expect it. Maybe that’s the shift. Maybe I’ve switched over to expecting to be disappointed, so I’m pleasantly surprised when I’m not.

But I don’t think that’s quite it. I’m not natively a pessimist. The more important lesson of disappointment is there is always life afterwards. And there is life immediately afterwards. The world does not pause on its axis, because the world does not care how badly your heart has just been broken. You still have to get up and go to work and feed the cats and interact with other human beings. Who may be sympathetic, if you’re lucky, but there’s a very set limit to how much wallowing in upset anyone is willing to hear out.

This is why, by the way, I think parents who try to shield their children from disappointment probably aren’t doing them any favors. When you’re five years old and don’t get what you want, you can get away with having a screaming meltdown, and you get the chance to then learn that when it’s all over, nothing has changed and now you feel physically awful too. A screaming meltdown is a much less acceptable response when you’re 30 years old, no matter how good you think it would feel at the time. The world will still be the same once you’re done crying, but you’ll have embarrassed yourself and probably gotten snot all over your nice shirt.

The real lesson I’ve taken from disappointment is this: You will never be able to control who and what will disappoint you, when it will happen, and how much it will hurt. The only things in the world you have any control over at all is how you deal with it and what you do next.

Which is hard. I’m not claiming it’s easy. Letting go of pain and anger and upset is never easy. If you’re incredibly lucky, maybe you can take that disappointment and make it into something greater. Maybe you can say fuck you, I know my art is worth something and turn it into determination. Maybe you can say fuck you, this isn’t how the world should be and go out there and start working for change. Maybe you can say fuck you, this is only tearing me down, and cut loose a toxic relationship.  Maybe you can say fuck you, you tried to destroy me, and now I’m going to build something bigger and better and I hope you choke on it.

But those kind of disappointments? I think they’re pretty rare, to be honest.

I’m not here to preach lemons into lemonade crap, because frankly a lot of the lemons life hands you aren’t so much lemons as leaky bags of radioactive dog shit and there is nothing good to be made from them. But there is still life after, and it’s up to you to decide what to do about it. Are you going to give up on your art? Are you going to lay in bed for two days and not move? Are you going to hold onto that anger and lash out at anyone you think might be to blame? Are you going to poison your next project? Are you going to break things for the sheer pleasure of hearing them smash?

What you choose to do must be more important than the pain you currently feel. Disappointment sucks. But disappointment is also a teacher. And sometimes it teaches us more about ourselves than we ever wanted to know.

Ultimately, this is the best solution I’ve ever found: You take a deep breath. You let it out slowly. You say, “Well, that sucks. But it’s not personal.”  Maybe if it’s been a particularly big disappointment, you have yourself a good cry, then go out to your favorite Tex Mex place and have disappointment fajitas and a margarita.

Then you get on with your goddamn life, because what the hell else are you going to do?

 

1 – Though obviously here, depending on the situation at hand we need to acknowledge the existence of institutional bias and prejudice, etc. That’s not really what I’m talking about here, but I feel it’s important to note that these are things that exist, and while not necessarily consciously malicious, will act in much the same way.