This isn’t about me. Or maybe it is. Maybe it’s not about anyone in particular, and instead it’s just about the state of the world.
Hang around with enough decent people, and you find yourself around awareness-raisers. People who fight the good fight, and point out injustice whenever they see it, and take it upon themselves to ostracize genuinely bad people in the name of the public good. And that’s good. It’s all wonderfully, inspiringly good.
And yet.
People who do this sort of thing in a public sphere, by virtue of what they do, have a habit of drawing your attention to a lot of bad stuff. It’s all stuff that doesn’t disappear by virtue of not directly engaging with it, of course, but it’s still stuff that slides into your field of vision and impacts how you feel.
Understand, too, that this all comes from a place of immense privilege - there are plenty of people for whom injustice and unpleasantness is an everyday fact of life, one that they can’t avoid even if they disconnect from every awareness-raiser and activist. There are a lot of godawful people out there, and as a white man whose queer sexual identity usually has low visibility thanks to my choice of partner, I have a tendency to be able to avoid direct encounters with most shittiness.
So there’s a certain, slightly-backwards degree of guilt when I say that on Twitter, I’ve created about a dozen muted keywords and unfollowed about thirty people in the last week. When my self-esteem is at my lowest, it feels like I’m somehow avoiding the issue. As if leading by example isn’t enough. Maybe it isn’t. I’m not sure where the line is.
I don’t write call-out posts and angry tweets because it would jar with my online persona, as someone who largely talks about culture and writes fiction. I also don’t feel like it’s my personal responsibility to do so. I’m not sure if there’s a morality clause in all of that.
In terms of my own exposure, though: every bad thing that I see, usually upon waking up, creates its own little micro-anxiety. There are victims out there going through so much worse than me, I know that. Talking about my own mental health after trawling through a hundred tweets about the CEO of Mozilla, or one of countless awful men in the video game industry, or the terrible human being that Woody Allen most likely is, does reek a little.
With all that said, though, the idea of measuring affect is a horribly labyrinthine concept in the first place. It’s “starving children in Africa” as a way to wriggle out of things. Someone groped you in an elevator, but there are starving children in Africa, so keep quiet. A video game borrows Nazi-related imagery in a display of a lack of cultural sensitivity, but the USA has had a policy of sending drones to indiscriminately target civilians for years now, so shut up. Every time you check Twitter, you get a horrible build up of anxiety, but it’s all about far worse things that are happening to other people, so maybe get some perspective. Jeez.
I mean: it’s all unpleasantness, right? Not the tweets themselves - pointing out the awful things humans do is usually good, especially if there’s a chance that by raising awareness it’ll stop those humans from doing awful things - but my anxiety about it all is a bad thing, and I should just be able to take that at face value, rather than to let it mingle with the guilt of the issues that my anxiety chiefly concerns.
I wake up now, and check Twitter, and I see people talking about anime, and their writing schedules, and the mundanity of day-to-day life, and telling heaps of stupid 140-character jokes. I get out of my bed with a smile on my face, while the world rages on a few clicks away. That might be cowardice, or simple self-preservation without regard for context. But I’m still smiling. I feel better equipped like this to leave a positive stamp on the world. That has to count for something.