It’s Wednesday. I spent all morning thinking it was Tuesday, even though I knew it was Wednesday, but I was still pretty sure it was Tuesday. That’s why Tendie Tuesday is a day late. School got canceled for my kids last Friday due to high winds (I do not like weather snobbery, but you guys…) and they have not been back. I don’t know why I feel compelled to issue a statement about how I know everyone else has it worse, but I do. I watched a beautiful live with Cole Arthur Riley, whose book came out this week, talking about the cognitive dissonance of being a person in these strange times. I’m either heavily disassociating from the horrors or trying to bear witness and on the verge of emotional collapse on the daily. I know some of you are in taller grass than that, so let’s just all be gentle with ourselves. This is complicated, we are just people trying to people, you know? There is something in me that feels selfish sending out a silly little email when the world is burning. I’m talking to my therapist about it.
I initially had a Tendie Tuesday ready to go about a book I got off of Net Galley I knew I probably wasn’t the intended audience for, but I requested it anyway, assuming I’d get denied. And then I did not and I’ve spent the past week with an elevated BPM.
If I have a formal code of ethics here on the World Wide Web, it can be boiled down to something like this: any internet platform I have, big or small, will never be built on rage-baiting or fear tactics. Not that I’m better than anyone else, but if you’re peeking behind the curtain, this is something I’ve worked hard to maintain, for three reasons:
One: I think building a community around something(s) you collectively hate is antithetical to building a community at all. Communities constructed around toxic rage are toxic, violent, and rotten. I’ve yet to find an exception. Two: you can’t support cooperative rage when it emanates from a place of fear. Rage from a place of love? All day. But anger tethered only in hand-wringing and self-righteous alarm? Unsustainable. And three: fear-based communities suffer from a lack of hope, which is untenable for me. It’s not my vibe. I do not want to be known for what I hate. Anger totally has its place, no question. But my mission statement for myself is telling the truth, baptized in hope. You can’t do that if you only build with rage-bait.
I also think it’s a trash way to take people’s money, but that’s for another day. I could not take anything more seriously than the idea that you’ve given me $6 every month. If I’m taking that $6 and all I’m doing is churning out thoughts that are poisonous or fear-mongering or toxic or keep you agitated in your distrust of anyone else who doesn’t think or act like you, I’m denying my own core values of uncomfortable curiosity, radical empathy, and subversive grace. So I do whatever I can to save those thoughts for Ben (who like, refuses to use pejoratives for anyone, which is great but also can be annoying) or my therapist (who I pay to let me say mean things cathartically and then pay to forget them) and only bring constructive anger to these public spaces. It means a lot to me that you’re here and I take it seriously.
So I guess all that wasn’t really for another day.
This is a long way to tell you I can’t decide if sharing my thoughts about this dang book I read is a constructive anger moment or a petty anger moment1, which is why I solicited questions from IG for this week’s Tendie Tuesday. And it’s good because I like these essays: they feel more like conversations, which is exactly what I’m here for: conversations that push past that require intentionality and proximity with tenderness. And like, stuff about Zac Efron and Jeremy Allen White’s Calvin Klein ad okay? Here are the ones I decided to answer today:
👐 What low-maintenance things do you do for your spirituality?
👩🎨 Imagine you did not have creative confidence. How would you go about obtaining it?
🏡 How to respond when people misunderstand de/reconstruction? (This is kind of a combination of a lot of specific questions asking basically the same thing.)
🖐 Have you seen The Iron Claw yet? If so, are you okay?
Let’s jump in.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Swipe Up: A Newsletter from Your Internet Friend to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.