Best Thing I've Read This Week: Let's Get Messy at Midnight*
*technically well past my bedtime, I'm more likely to get messy around noon-8pm, but it didn't work for the title
I’ve been reading several books that I really love, including a book about Zen Buddhism which is either entirely relevant to this post, or is the exact opposite. TBD, I’m only halfway through. I’m also reading Less (the 2017 Pulitzer Prize winner), Fairest (a memoir for book club) and Dinosaurs (Lydia Millet’s latest - A Children’s Bible was one of my faves from 2020!).
Reader(s - if I’m being optimistic),
A quick note this week on feeling things.
There is no human alive who does not try to exert some control over their lives, and the lives of others. At the least, we look to have our choices validated, whether through direct affirmation or through scrutinizing the actions of those around us. This isn’t a post to encourage you to allow yourself to fail (which, of course, you should), but to actively seek out the chance to be utterly messy, in the open. Accepting and exposing your whole self (safely, non-violently and in the right setting*) and trusting others to do so as well, is liberating, if difficult and uncomfortable.
I had a meeting this week that landed on a topic I feel pretty passionately about. Another participant said something that I felt was not only wrong, but deeply unhelpful. Despite the fact that I am reading a book on Zen Buddhism(!!!!), I did not pause in composing what I wanted to say to contradict their points. I did not “get curious”. I did not allow space for another experience (literally, something I had just read about in my morning’s chapter!). I jumped in. From the get-go, it felt wrong, and I was met with blank stares and/or boredom. When I left the conversation, I couldn’t stop thinking how poor my approach had been.
Reader, sometimes, we just fuck up. Sometimes, we even KNOW we are fucking up. And we still do it. I would like everyone to know I am out here fucking up on the regular.
This leads me to the best thing I read this week, which is not actually reading, but listening (which is basically audiobooks?), and I say it counts. Taylor Swift’s Midnights was released on Friday, and I don’t really care if you love/hate/are ambivalent on TS (though, with the records set for downloading on Spotify, I suspect that too many of you are closeting your curiosity, if not something more), this album can still speak to you on a metaphorical level. As is true of many Taylor’s records, she does not aim to be cool. Her songs are not necessarily self-affirming or “empowerment” anthems. Rarely, could you dance to them in a club (I guess?!? I say this as someone who was last in a club at the turn of the millennium).
Midnights, though, is full of emotions - rage and vengeance, self-doubt/blame, happiness, nostalgia, embarrassment, contentment and conceit. Taylor has her questionable traits, not least of which that she has seemingly saddled herself to the poor man’s Nick Hoult (if you can point me to a Joe Alwyn production where he does not inexplicably whisper every single one of his lines at a barely intelligible level and exhibit a RHR of single digits, please do), but there is something about what her music provokes that wreaks a kind of liberating havoc on my life. We work to control so many aspects of our lives, but our emotions may be what we stifle the most, especially as we seek to find healthy outlets* for them. We are afraid to be…human.
Taylor is certainly far from the first artist to let out the messy of being human. This is why we love poetry (please, please go buy Saeed Jones’s Alive at the End of the World), why eulogies or wedding vows strike us, why we grow closer to our friends when they come to us in moments of complete breakdown. Nobody has it on lockdown, and if we want to truly feel seen (and see others), we can’t be afraid of wreaking a little destruction by occasionally letting it show that we are feeling something. After all, destruction is sometimes the only way to rebuild (I will not make a political statement about capitalism here, but know that I want to, ok??).
I’m not here to impose my TS-proclivities on you, but I do think we can all take note of how we feel when we are party to some emotional MESS. Do we open our arms and embrace the humanity of it all? Does it draw us closer to one another to realize that we are all alive with feelings? Or does it make us pull back with discomfort? (If so, a therapist can be good for that!) Art that inspires us and makes us feel unstoppable is fantastic, but art that reminds us of our fragility is always welcome around here.
I fucked up this week. (Probably more times than I’ll even realize.) But, I also felt an immense amount of joy. And god, isn’t it great to be alive and feeling things and making some goddamn stupid- but human- mistakes?
I hope we can all find a little space to liberate ourselves this week.
Yours in honest and constant disarray,
MJ
{Importantly, as I was editing this post, I was reflecting on the white supremacy culture we live within and considering who can feel safe expressing vulnerability in the artistic spaces we create and what it costs though who do. We’re not free until we’re all free.}