This is How We Learn to be Humans

This is the point.

Hello Beautifuls,

I am humbled and thrilled by the community gathering here, at each new subscriber and each person who’s been with me along the way.

However you found your way here, know that I see your subscription come in and I say your name out loud, a little prayer of gratitude and seeing.

Thank you for being here. It means everything to me.

🌈Please ❤️ this post (and share or restack it) if you’re feeling it! I’d be grateful if you do.

Me and B listening to music out in Dripping Springs, TX. A small act of resistance, being with other people, sharing something that transcends the things that divide us.

I love Ann Lamott. If I met her in person, I would ask to hug her. Not because she is a famous author, but because in many ways, she saved my life. She taught me how to keep breathing during the first few years of devastation after my divorce.

As a writer, I would like to pay it forward, and do for others what she did for me: Here small human whose emotional pain is so deep it feels like your bones are breaking, here's a roadmap for dealing with grief and loss and trauma and self destruction with a little bit of grace.

In other words: I didn't feel quite so alone when I read Ann Lamott.

Here on Substack, I find I'm doing that for at least a handful of people: telling the truth about my own experience and finding that it resonates with someone, usually few people, every week.

What a sacred experience.

Like Lamott, I'd like to see my work in Salon, an online magazine that published many of Lamott's essays before they came out as collections, back in the early aughts. I'd also like to publish in The Sun, a literary magazine where I would be in revered company.

There, I said it. If you've been reading Hello Beautifuls a while, you may remember when I got my big, black, Iris Apfel glasses frames last year. I wrote an essay called, "They Were Audacious and Who Was I to Think I could Wear Them?"

I feel the same about saying out loud where I'd like to be published. It's audacious, and who am I to want that? But I know the power of speaking things aloud, how it brings the lightness in and pushes the darkness to the corners or out of the room entirely, and I'm at a point in my life where I'm ready (and able) to stop being afraid to do and say things. I’m at the point where telling the truth is no longer like walking a tightrope strung across a canyon and more like walking a wide forest path. There are bears, but the ground beneath me is solid.

I recognize this is a privilege not shared by all the humans. I'm not even sure, in this political climate, how long it will be available to me. I've been writing a lot about love and joy as resistance, speaking up about what I want and don't want, for myself, for this country, for trees and butterflies and whales and humans. This too is an act of resistance. It is on those of us who can speak up, to do so, and if we do not, we are partly responsible for what ensues. A friend told me that many white people told their black and brown friends to stay home from the Hands Off march last week so they wouldn't be in danger. Those of us who can act, without fear of violence and retribution, acting. Whether we're activists or not. Whether it makes us uncomfortable or not.

Now is the time to be uncomfortable.

Having said all of that, I felt last week like it was all pointless.

Letters to my representatives? Who reads them?

Peaceful protests? What difference do they make?

Writing anything at all? How is that making it better?

I was at the pool yesterday and a dad was playing catch with his pre-teen son. They were throwing a football back and forth, I was half napping on a chaise and I could hear the dad talking about golf and McIlroy (who I mistook for McEnroe, which made me confused because I knew he was a tennis player, but was he now playing golf? Wasn't he a bit old?) But I digress, apparently McIlroy hit a hole in one over a sand trap during the pre game warm up. I was half asleep, so sports fans, feel free to correct all of the errors I just made. The point isn't McIlroy anyway. The son replied something to the dad about masters wins and the dad agreed and said, "Now you'll have something to talk to Travis about when you see him next weekend."

This is the point. This is how we learn to be humans. By being taught by other humans.

What I'm trying to say, dear reader, is keep going because the point is to keep going. The point is to be broken and hurting and devastated and humbled and moved and elated, joyous, ecstatic, excited, tired, rested, all of it, every single day, and then to keep going with as much love and kindness as we can muster towards ourselves first and then towards others. To keep going is an act of resistance and it is how we teach ourselves, and each other, to be human in a world that is stripping away our shared humanity.

This is how we move through this strange, bleak, alarming time. By talking to our kids about sports, by swimming, by going for walks with friends on their birthdays, by making dinner and sitting down to eat it. By getting up the next morning and breathing, saying, I am still here and I refuse to give up my life to sadness, to defeat, to despair. Just watch how I go and bravely eat my breakfast.

Because, friends, right now, the simple act of getting up and feeding ourselves is an act of resistance. And this is how we will teach each other to keep breathing through our devastation.

Did you know that liking this post helps Hello Beautifuls get found my more people (the algorithm likes likes. So if you’re feeling it, ❤️ this post (or share or restack it). I’d be grateful if you do.

I am also always so excited to see a comment come in. To know that something I said resonated enough to elicit a response. It’s hard to explain what a huge gift that is. ✨So if you feel moved to say anything, please do. I will always respond.✨

❤️I’m also very curious to know: What is your act of resistance these days?

With so much love,

xo

j