How fragile we are...

Can we be gentle with each other?

In the midst of arguing with some dickhead online I got the news that a friend had passed away.

My husband is home for the school holidays. I climbed into his lap the way the kids do. Put my arms around his neck and cried hard into his shoulder. We checked the budget for koha. We messaged to provide kai. I cried some more.

He encouraged me to climb into bed and I spent today under the covers, reading and scrolling.

Catnip Tea by Meredith Stern.

I have been thinking about how hard it is to truly see each other in this world where everything is so divisive. Being online all the time it can feel like nobody gives you the benefit of the doubt. People say “you’ve disappointed me” when I disagree with them. They send me weird, long emails saying they don’t like me anymore, they have unfollowed me, they’ve unsubscribed. They consider this normal behaviour. It makes me feel crazy. Like my brain might just crack wide open.

I am always one step away from someone saying “I’ve been such a fan but actually I don’t like you now”. It’s the most bizarre thing, to be told your latest view wasn’t shared therefore you’re cut, your latest column wasn’t funny enough, you didn’t show enough grace when someone said you’re toxic, didn’t show enough patience when someone commented over and over again saying you’re just not a very nice person.

I wrote a silly thing last night about Judith Collins saying media studies and photography are “woke subjects”. But today I’m thinking about how more than ever my short lived career in journalism taught me so much about how little we know about each other’s struggles.

You are invited into someone’s home and they may share with you the worst thing that’s ever happened to them and that’s all you’ll ever know about them.

In your mind, they’ll always be “the mother of the girl hit by a car who you spoke to three days later”. They’ll always be “the rape survivor who smoked cigarette after cigarette”.

You won’t know anything else about them. You live in the most private moments of someone’s life.

It is similar but in reverse online. The private pain is hidden behind a screen but it feeds the public views that make us bristle and scratch at each other. We have a false intimacy yet we often see no positive intention in our interactions with each other.

Is it a false intimacy? Or is it real?

I am old enough, and many of you are too, to remember organising offline. Discussing the big and little stuff in groups in real life. Before Facebook. Before Instagram.

We challenged each other but we sought to know each other as much as we could as well. I wondered today why don’t often have that in this digital space. Then I thought about my friend…

I met her online, through comments on my posts and she became a friend. This is the way I have met many people I care very deeply about. I never met her offline, which I suppose makes people view our friendship differently. But that is how many friendships begin in this time.

Audre Lorde said in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches “The love expressed between women is particular and powerful because we have had to love in order to live; love has been our survival.” I feel this is in my bones.

We cared about each other and we sought to know each other. We stayed up late talking about silly things. We tapped away to each other in private, in the dark. Is that enough? I think it’s worthy.

The desire to know someone is a true form of love. It says that in a busy world you want to make space to see them. You want to understand them, hear them, walk with them.

Maybe we can know each other. Maybe we can’t. I want to try.

*

Before you know what kindness really is

you must lose things,

feel the future dissolve in a moment

like salt in a weakened broth.

What you held in your hand,

what you counted and carefully saved,

all this must go so you know

how desolate the landscape can be

between the regions of kindness.

Naomi Shihab Nye.