When You're Not A 'Feelings Person'

Dear Friends:

Greetings from Los Angeles! Each year, the weekend before Thanksgiving, my pals Steve and Beth and I meet in this city to reunite and explore. These are friends from my college days. They are the friends who got me through the pandemic via semimonthly Zoom chats that we continue to this day. We’re close, and that I’m able to take this little time out from the fall semester to stay close to them means more than I know how to put here.

The worst part of the trip was that I lost the best rain jacket I ever had. The best part of the trip is that we barely talked about the election, opting each day to think about—and live—the kind of lives we want to see now, and in the future, for us and for our loved ones.

I feel like Shenny’s going to get a lot more like that. That is: in these lingering feelings that we have no future, I’m wanting to start imagining one.

Yours:
Dave

Endorsements: Los Angeles Edition

1. Cocktails at The Prince at 4pm
The Prince, a Koreatown bar and restaurant, is like the opposite of a hidden treasure. They hung out there on The New Girl for god’s sake. There’s a Mad Men scene set in one of the booths. The reason is how classic the place looks, with these gorgeous red vinyl booths and rich colors everywhere. Perfect lighting. One of Los Angeles’s talents is how well it holds onto its classic bars, so we, loving classic bars, make it a point to stop in:

And when we do, we go right at 4pm, once it opens, because the place is totally empty. Some bars you want packed with strangers, to maximize the chances of meeting someone who can’t help but tell you their wild story. But a bar like the Prince is exquisite when it’s empty, likely to help build the illusion that you and your friends are starring in a scene from a movie. It’s Los Angeles after all, how else would we want to feel for an afternoon?¹

2. Ordinary People at MOCA
The best art we saw last weekend was this photorealist show at the Museum of Contemporary Art. I wasn’t sure about photorealism, because it seemed gimmicky, like trompe l’oeil or op art. Virtuosic, but too documentarian? Ordinary People is the show I needed to set me straight. Yes, they’ve got a number of those classic 1970s paintings of photographs of people and storefronts—which are admittedly gorgeous objects. Photorealist painting does astounding things with color it’s best to see in person. And the best example of that is Ben Sakoguchi’s Bombs (1983), this altar-like arrangement of paintings of news images from America’s A-bomb tests.

In the center, if you zoom in, you can see paintings of burns on the bared backs of Japanese people we bombed, with a little uniformed white hand holding an identifying sign in place. It is a sickening, affective piece with a complex sense of humor. I could look at it for hours. Open now through May.

When You’re Not A ‘Feelings Person’

These last few weeks since my country indulged all the worst in itself, I’ve been ignoring the daily news about who this administration is hiring, and I’ve been cantankerous among friends in their conversations about how everything is over, there is no future we can look forward to, etc.

Doom isn’t a mode I like. Doom paralyzes me. And fear, living daily in fear, is, I know, a gift to any authoritarian. D. Trump et al. want me fearful, and I’m not willing to give them anything, much less that.

Hope is the seed of change. I imagine that’s on a poster somewhere, and so I’ve been reading what I can to stir up all the hope I have in my heart that this election didn’t already kill. A great resource has been activist news/analysis site Waging Nonviolence.

There, I’ve been reminded that many strong and smart people have been here before, on the cusp of fascist, authoritarian regimes, and those people know how to fight.

I’ve gone back numerous times to this list: 10 ways to be prepared and grounded now that [D. ] Trump has won. I love a plan. I love feeling prepared. Plan : me :: kennel : anxious dog left home alone.

I was doing just great with the list of 10 tactics until I got to #3: Grieve. Grief is … an emotion? A process? Yes, a process. A process that involves emotions? It’s a thing I’ve heard about people doing, needing to do, a thing that befell them almost, and I’ve read at least 11 different student essays that engage in Kübler-Ross. But grief didn’t seem like something I needed personally to engage in. I’m not much of a feelings person.

‘If you aren’t a feelings person, let me say it this way: The inability to grieve is a strategic error. After [D.] Trump won in 2016, we all saw colleagues who never grieved. They didn’t look into their feelings and the future—and as a result they remained in shock. For years they kept saying, “I can’t believe he’s doing that…”.’

That’s Daniel Hunter, from the piece. I read it and saw myself years ago continually saying ‘I can’t believe he’s doing that’ and ‘I can’t believe this is where we are as a country.’ So I took the advice and added it to a list of resistance tactics I’ve got in my notes app: Grieve.

But like: how?

I took it to my therapist. Those two days I felt numb after the election, before I found a way to return to myself and look forward: was that my grieving stage? How did I know whether I’d effectively completed The Grief Stage or whether I’d just pushed negative feelings aside to hold onto more positive ones?

‘Have you written about those negative feelings?’ she asked. ‘Or talked about them with friends?’

I hadn’t, and she, characteristically, found that interesting. ‘What if you let yourself play with those feelings?’ she suggested.

‘But like: how?’

‘Just talk about them,’ she said. ‘See what comes up.’

So I talked about them.

I was angry. I was so angry that so many people had made a choice to elect, again, a person whose only promise was lies and hurting people. I was so angry that my whole life as an American has been watching this steady siphoning of money and resources away from Us The People and toward the richest shitheads who now own everything, so mad about our 50-year, enormously popular draining of public education’s funds. The majority of us have again and again wanted ourselves and others to be made dumber and poorer, and this presidency is everyone’s reward.

I let myself imagine a deeply misinformed D. Trump voter and bashing their face into a curb.

Then I felt quick shame at how violent my anger was making me, and then I remembered something I learned from a previous therapist, who was big on Itchy and Scratchy.

When someone makes you angry, he said, let yourself feel that anger however you can. Imagine bashing their skull in with an oversized mallet, or driving a flagpole into their cold heart, or shoving them into a woodchipper and dancing in the rain of their shredded blood and guts. The function of cartoons, he said, was to give the feelings that worry us an outlet that’s both cathartic and comic, or cathartic because comic.

I kept talking. I said that I was sad, because I’d heard that sadness was part of grief, and I wanted to try that out, see if it stuck. I haven’t cried once since the election, and ever since I started seeing therapists I’ve been worried that I’ve got something wrong with me, some absence or lack that many people in my life seem not to have, and thus, when sad, they cry. I don’t. I’ve had to accept that sadness evinces differently in me. Or that I just shove it down and avoid the feeling.²

What made me sad was the loss I felt. I had lost a lot of trust in my fellow Americans. And I lost my faith in institutions I’d put a lot of faith in. The loss of an honorable and legitimate U.S. Supreme Court I’d felt years ago, but now I realized I was all out of faith in the Executive Branch.

This made me very sad. If you hate the federal government, as this administration and its party have said for decades that they do, what better way to destroy it than to destroy even the faith we pro-government people have in it? My distrust was, then, a gift I couldn’t help giving to people I wanted to give nothing to.

And that hurt. And it made me angry again. But then it felt okay.

I was lying in bed, our session remote that day, and as I was saying these words to my therapist, I found no corresponding feeling in my body. That is, I didn’t feel numb when I said this, I felt fine. Comfortable, even.

Then I was faced with the realization that, to feel happy and grounded and engaged, to feel I had a future in this world, I didn’t need to hold onto any faith in the Executive Branch. Or the Supreme Court. It felt the way a child must when they realize that, despite all the love they’ve had for a deadbeat or abusive parent, they need for their own happiness to end the relationship.

Pain. Sadness. Loss. Grief. I felt all those, and then I laughed, because the branch of the federal government I trusted most was suddenly Congress.³ Which was, to me that afternoon, a very funny thing indeed.

Had I done it? Was that The Grief Stage completed? Check plus? Gold star?

My therapist knows me well enough that telling me ‘good job’ would only make me try to curry her favor for another one. So I was left only with what I’d said, and felt, and learned. I put feelings into words. The words left me, and they made me feel new things, and I put words to those too.

Thursday after the election, faced with a room of defeated and hurt students in no mood to talk about what’s funny in the work of Samantha Irby and David Sedaris, I had us instead write about what words are for, and why we’ve chosen writing. Here’s some of what I wrote:

What we see in our present moment is words failing again and again to denote the same meaning across the culture. Genocide, e.g., is a word. Gender, too. So when I think about what words are for, I have to think collectively—words are for steering us toward more words. At their best, they introduce and assert the idea that silence is something to fight against, and if words have a faith it’s that more of them will ultimately accrue. One flake of snow is an anomaly, but a blizzard is a force. Where I am right now is wanting my words to be a force.

1. Feel like I should caption that pic of me and Beth, ‘Let me stop you right there, Sweetheart.’

2. I did, though, cry later in the session where I tried to play with my feelings. But not over the election. I cried while recounting the climactic scene in Ratatouille, which is the one movie that’s sure every time to get me sobbing. (Duh, I identify with the rat.)

3. Say what you want about who’s in charge, but we elect those folks directly, not through some anti-democratic ‘College’, and they’ve got local ties, and you can talk directly to people in their offices. In an authoritarian regime, I feel that that’s all going to be very important for any resistance we the people wage against it.