life is other people
and i don't think you can decenter them
The internet wants you safe in your room, clicking ragebait articles or succumbing to curation. The system runs on you having to spend more money to stave off emptiness. Decenter, disengage, detach, deny. They may attempt to orchestrate a faux humiliation ritual, breaking the fourth wall to inquire if needing the presence of another is embarrassing, if putting another first is a circus interlude, if opening your heart is surgically invasive. But antisocial pedagogy won’t do. You’ve got two hands to touch things that aren’t your clothes on a hanger. You’ve got two eyes to look at things beyond the mirror.
Life as service, life as arms extended wide left and right, stranger or lover. I love you, therefore I see you, therefore I center you. You have both my undivided attention and my capacity to examine your faults and beauty with compassion. Taking care of you is not a means to an end, not an offering to Ceres, not a plug and play dopamine chase – it’s a choice I’m making every day, crossing over the bridge, it’s how I come alive and why I’m still here, orbiting way past the age I thought I’d make it to. Your best day is my litany, making you smile my mission, the fight for your success my heart’s allegiance. Love is modest, quiet, overflowing, I’m not proving anything to anyone – just engulfed and flying through the extraordinary. In my greatest moments, if I were to rewind, all I cared about was the other. Biologically, spiritually, sensationally. My ability to care is inseparable from my ability to exist.
To love is to take someone as part of yourself. To go beyond convenience, willingly, not because you’ve been instructed or promised something back at the end. We seem to talk about community building so as to announce righteousness – glossing over the courage of putting your time and will on a platter to be devoured with no benefit. Asking whether doing anything is embarrassing is histrionic: the question itself places you at the center of the conundrum, doing nothing useful but injecting more thinking-about-self theatrics into your veins. It assumes the main worry is how you look - as if the front camera surveillance around the clock and shoppable content weren’t enough to make you feel like shit. The goal is to remove yourself completely from the equation, to be so immersed in everyone around you that all consumptive pondering of how you appear to the public ceases to exist. Think lightly of yourself and deeply of the world, said Miyamoto Musashi.
It’s hard to operate on hope when everything around you is primed and buttered for failure evasion. Anything to spare the pain, mask the mourning. Don’t do this, don’t go there, don’t you dare ask for reciprocity. Broad categories like to date and to avoid, red and green flags, to center and decenter have us in a stranglehold, diluting complexity into prepackaged over the counter cough drops. But the pain of an unlived life haunts you better than being a trusting fool ever could; safety neurosis bubbling up the aorta when you’ve been denying yourself very human, candlelit living room experiences in the name of pride doesn’t give you bonus points or greet you at the gate with a welcome basket. I believed in love my whole entire little life, even when all the odds were stacked against me, when it was bitter and sweaty and thankless, and when I got what I wanted, I knew it was by enduring with softness and confrontation. Would I have succeeded had I believed transaction lies at the center of all human feeling? Height or income markers wouldn’t have been wisdom. Not the kind of wisdom I wanted to be part of, anyway. I needed something lighter to believe in. I gave that to myself. Then it turned my way.
You are a bored student, a historian, a dreamer, a forgotten friend, a civil daughter, a designated driver, a struggling graduate, freshly sober; we’re fractured but made of the same flesh – you’re complicated like me and growing frustrated, each day an inch closer to your parents’ constitution and further away from doing things for the sake of doing them. We’re in cohesion here, submerged in echo chambers, I understand. There’s only one thing to prepare for: when caring comes sweeping you off your feet like northern winds, whispering that you were made to love and center other people, will you be ready to break even?
I’m not encouraging stupidity nor disqualifying important conversations. A good guard is warranted upon systemic unfairness, thinly veiled conservative ideologies - it feels great to get our power back. But something tells me it’s a slippery slope, a mindless one at that, enabling the very structure that upholds our suffering. Cynicism spreads like a cancer cell: today sincerity is lightly mocked, tomorrow helping a friend in need will be embarrassing. We’re in the greatest danger of pathologized vulnerability - the real regressive force here. If we’re at the height of previously unknown freedom, shouldn’t we be doing more soulful things than yelling just how much we deserve our blood-earned prizes? Must we point guns at each other’s stab wounds? Polarity was imposed on you without permission: know your worth or die in servitude. Stand in your power or submit. We’re either objects or commanders; picket fence property or freedom fighters. Of course it doesn’t resonate and feels aggressively charged. It’s shallow thinking. We’re so much more than that - so divinely disgusting, not to be classified. And thank god we are.
Hope is found in caring for one another. No progress ever happened through ego maintenance. You don’t need to protect your peace and guard your humanness. You need to go to the party, share a meal. You will double text and beg for reciprocity. You will get hurt. Life is not getting to the finish line and being awarded three gold medals as one who cared the least, made no mistake, and was never embarrassed. Life is other people. Life is service.
I suffer when I read your posts. They pierce me every time. It’s all I can do not to throw myself on the floor and cry to heavens, “how can I write like this?” Whatever higher forces granted you with a passion for writing, they did the world a favour.
in awe of the way you weave in the “I,” “we,” & “you” so seamlessly. bookmarking this for the next time I’m caught up in my own head<3