cw: pandemic, climate change, death

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In the last piece I wrote, I described seven different apocalypses (which are, probably, facets of the greater ending-beginning that is happening now), and the last one in that piece was the apocalypse of the self.

I don’t think it’s hyperbolic to describe the profound changes we’ve gone through — and are going through — as an apocalypse. Our interactions with each other have taken on a completely different tone than they did in 2019, and even then we were facing the consequences of what the 45th president of the United States was doing to us.

In naming this period of death, change, and transition an apocalypse ¹Apocalypse definition at the Oxford Learner’s Dictionary, I am attempting to describe in general the fact that the world of what we used to do has ended, and is in the process of ending, and that we have to find new ways of being or we will not survive.

we were never safe, but now it’s obvious

We have become painfully aware that an interaction with anyone outside our own bubble during this pandemic (these overlapping pandemics) could mean at the least sickness, and at its worst death, for you or for someone else you interact with, regularly or in passing.

We have become painfully aware that a lot of people are willing to knowingly lie about whether they’re unsafe to be around; and that there are a lot of people who have not paid enough attention to themselves to even be able to honestly answer a question about whether or not they’re safe to be around. As a collective nation, we are becoming sicker and sicker, and many people — as many as one in three — now have “Long COVID,” and they will carry this illness (potentially a cluster of chronic illnesses) for the rest of their lives. ²Sources here and here

Mask-wearing is where science and love/justice meet. When I see pics of unmasked folks who could be masked, I know: either you don’t understand science and/or you choose privilege over love and justice.

tweet by @access_ecology on Sep 26, 2022 at 2:47pm

Many of us, mostly the chronically ill and those of us closest to understanding the raw data, are still in bubbles. We are still wearing masks everywhere except at home. We are still getting boosters where and when we can (fuck our healthcare system, by the way). We are still observing quarantine procedures. We are still isolated. Hopelessness increases, alongside our disconnection from others. There’s a fuzzy strangeness to knowing that you are becoming part of the wallpaper of your life, because you have to say no to almost everything.

There is a specific and terrible loneliness that comes from avoiding the intimate interactions with others that we crave, because we want to avoid harm more than we want to breathe the same air as someone else and hold them close.

we’re hurting each other, and we don’t want to think about it

Our shared isolation since March 2020 has put some things in a stark relief: increasing intimate partner violence, police brutality, structural racism, transphobia, and a social safety net with such large holes in it that almost everyone falls through. Add in an often-horrifying news cycle and the observable changes to our climate as it goes quickly toward its own apocalypse, and nobody wants to think about the things that are upsetting because who would want to think about those things for more than a moment? A person can only manage so much existential dread in one day, and there’s more than enough to go around.

There are so many necessary-for-survival asks for monetary help on my timeline that there is no way I could help them all, and no way for me to share them all. This isn’t to say that I don’t share them, but I can’t share all of them, and I feel profoundly awful about that. Not all of us will make it, which has always been true, but observing in real time the frantic last gasps of a person in need is harrowing.

and when we do think about it, it feels too big and too impossible

And you know what? It’s hard to want to keep existing in a world like this one. These times we live in have dragged us nose-to-nose with the idea and the reality of our own death. We’ve realized that we could be the reason someone else gets dangerously sick. We have come to a hard stop at the reality that our choices affect not only ourselves, but others as well, in a spiderweb of consequences that is too big to see in its entirety. Nobody wants anything to be their fault. It’s so hard to acknowledge that you’ve made a mistake; it is so difficult to untangle one’s feeling of self-worth from an experience of making a mistake and owning up to it without excusing it.

Our society is shored up by (among other things) the idea that making mistakes is what a morally bankrupt person does. This is not a hill that anyone wants to die on. We would rather pretend to ourselves that there’s some other reason that a bad thing happened as a result of choices we personally made, than face our own flaws and learn to live in reciprocity with those around us.

what causes an end can also bring a beginning

And that, I believe, is the end point of this apocalypse of the self and the reality toward which we should strive. We need to learn to live in community with one another, valuing each person as well as ourselves, willing to be truthful and to be told the truth, willing to speak up and willing to listen, willing to stay up all night talking through a complicated subject because it’s important and has affected someone in our circle of family. Willing to seek non-carceral justice. Willing to be an abolitionist of the old ways because they do not work and we have proof written in blood and tears and pain.

Apocalypse seems, if you take the Christian view, to happen inevitably. It comes as a consequence of none of us being able to do the right thing in the right way enough of the time. It’s a punishment that happens from on high, by a deity that has decided we fucked up too much. It happens to us; we are powerless. But I think that idea is only part of what is true. I think that apocalypses are both causation and correlation. I think that tipping points, created by our collective choices, are catalysts for apocalypse, and that once we have tipped toward it, we probably cannot avoid it.

The way things used to be is gone forever. We have new ways of hurting one another, and new faces of new variations of hatred that were formed from the ashes of older hatred. We are faced with consequences of actions that were taken long ago, either by a much younger version of us, or by people now dead. This is a reckoning that has needed to happen ever since the first harm was done. This is a chance to do it better this time.

As my tradition teaches, each must be free to choose. We each have a varying number of choices available to us, and this is a gift; what we choose is ours to decide. I can’t tell you what your apocalypse will end and what it could begin in you. But you can.

featured image is a photo by Florian Olivo on Unsplash

Footnotes

• 1
  Apocalypse definition at the Oxford Learner’s Dictionary
• 2
  Sources here and here

cw: existential dread, discussion of death

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Okay, so ¹HOKAY SO, HERE’S THE EARTH — — hear me out — several things have collided in my mind and it’s taken me some time to follow the string to the middle of the tangled mess of yarn, with the yarn being a metaphor for this wide expanse of a topic.

apocalypse: can we outrun the consequences of what we’ve done?

I’ve recently been playing a lot of Death Stranding, which has both the quality of nostalgia and the hopeless hope that remains at the end of the world, stubbornly trying to put the pieces back together anyway — and what that costs; I’m reading the book The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth’s Past Mass Extinctions ²by Peter Brannen; Bookshop link, which includes, so far, a hell of a lot of evolutionary history I never learned in school, the tone of which is fascinatingly hopeful; I’m on Twitter pretty much daily, so *gestures vaguely at everything*; and my Spotify algorithm has been really good today, which means a lovely selection of music on death, queer experience, and things that end but don’t disappear.

apocalypse: ‘so much death. what can men do against such reckless hate?’

In trying to wrap my head around these apocalypses, I have to acknowledge that my worldview is essentially the way I understand what I’ve learned, and am still learning, in my tradition. It seems our purpose is to paradoxically bring light to the world (one person at a time, let’s not be ridiculous) but not die trying. How can we be the light when the dark has such sharp teeth? With apocalypse on my mind almost continuously, there’s been a lot of personal soul-searching about whether it’s worth trying to keep our shit together and to help whomever we can, if everything is ending anyway. And I wrote a whole thing wondering about whether or not the world will actually end.

(the quote in the paragraph heading above is by Theoden, King of the Rohirrim, before riding out from the ruins of Helm’s Deep to certain doom) ³a video clip containing this quote and its context; gives me chills every time. ‘the horn of Helm Hammerhand shall sound in the Deep, one last time! … let this be the hour where we draw swords together … fell deeds awake! now for wrath! now for ruin! and a red dawn!’

apocalypse: even the gods change

Whether it ends or not, everything has already changed and is still changing. The world will never be what it was before, and I don’t just mean the physical world and our social and cultural structures; for me and others like me, it also means that our gods and ancestors are deciding what change means for them as well, and we are all experiencing our way through it together. I am grateful for the work I’ve done in building relationships with my deities, because it’s slightly less terrifying to feel that pull toward the unknown that is in the process of becoming, knowing that we’re going there together.

I don’t have any theological proof for this thought; it’s just mine, and maybe other people are feeling the same way. It makes sense to me and I think we need things that make sense to us, in order to hold onto them when shit gets scary.

apocalypse: we are waiting in line for our turn to die

I’m a queer person who came late to my queer identity, and I’m still finding the shape of it. I think that part of a cultural backlash against white American heteropatriarchy meant that a hell of a lot of us discovered that the reason we don’t fit is that we’re REALLY FUCKING GAY. Unfortunately, as much as we fight to be seen, to be loved, to at least be let alone to exist, we are harmed. As a deathworker, I spend maybe too much time thinking about all the ways our lives are extinguished and how many of us there are, how many are dying instead of living, alone instead of held in community, fumbling our way through a rotting capitalist culture that uses black, brown, indigenous, and queer bodies to climb high enough to keep the kyriarchy alive. There is great love in our chosen families, and there is risk of great harm, every day that we show up however it is that we show up. Not all of us are visibly queer, but we can’t stay hidden forever.

Love us as we are

See us and we’re holy

In this shall we shall ever be

Wholly ourselves

Your love will take us far

Praise us and we’ll show you

From heaven to the glory holes

Glorious and free

The Queer Gospel by Erin McKeown

apocalypse: rage against the machine

The current balance of the world feels very much, at least from this very western mindset, as if it is trying to tip into unchecked evil. We wail and beat our chests and do our best to remember all the names of those who died unjustly in an unjust society in an unjust world, while screaming as loud as we can that we deserve to live. We deserve fair reciprocity for our work. We deserve healthcare that honors our bodies. We deserve enough to eat. We deserve community that brings us together and becomes the way to address our differences without violence. We deserve to have promises kept and treaties honored. We deserve to live in a society where the disabled can thrive without having to fight so hard for the barest necessities. We deserve to see ourselves reflected in our mass media, in our social networks, at our jobs. We deserve to unionize, to abolish our carceral system, to free ourselves and free one another. ⁴the timeless anthem Killing in the Name by Rage Against the Machine

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.

Ursula K. Le Guin

apocalypse: the beginning is the end is the beginning

I have no memory of ever living through a world’s end. I don’t know how it works, what it’s meant to feel like, or how to find those answers. As a practicing witch, there are many things that I can see at least the shape or feeling of, but this is more nebulous than anything else I’ve tried to look at.

I think that apocalypse must be — like being born, like the last breath of life, like orgasm, like childbirth, like an initiation, like nearly-dying but not quite — one of the great mysteries. We can’t know what it is until we have experienced it. But there are tiny bits of light and hope here and there, written in song lyrics and in books by people who also didn’t exactly know what was going to happen next.

To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.

Ursula K. Le Guin, from The Left Hand of Darkness

apocalypse of the self

It’s an existential crisis inside an existential crisis out here. I think most of us have come to that conclusion. And we keep waking up every day, doing stuff, maybe doing more stuff, looking for the things that might comfort us, asking the world for meaning, and then we lie in bed and either fall asleep or stare up and wonder what the planet would be like if we were all gone.

I made a playlist while I was thinking about writing this, and here it is so you can listen to some of the puzzle pieces that made sense to me:

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I really want to hear what you’re thinking about after reading this. I don’t think we can figure any of this out individually; we need each other. We need each other’s questions and we need each other’s answers and thoughts and additional questions.

Thank you for being here with me.

featured image is a photo by benjamin lehman on Unsplash

Footnotes

• 1
  HOKAY SO, HERE’S THE EARTH —
• 2
  by Peter Brannen; Bookshop link
• 3
  a video clip containing this quote and its context; gives me chills every time. ‘the horn of Helm Hammerhand shall sound in the Deep, one last time! … let this be the hour where we draw swords together … fell deeds awake! now for wrath! now for ruin! and a red dawn!’
• 4
  the timeless anthem Killing in the Name by Rage Against the Machine