I am exhausted...yet willing to fight

I went outside yesterday 🖼️

It was the first time in nearly two weeks (yes, I need to change the way I live my life). But I went to the Met with my friend Liz (see photos below!) and we got lost in the massive, sprawling museum, and it was lovely.

In today’s “from the heart,” you’ll find an exploration of the world + my exhaustion + maybe, hopefully, some words that will offer hope as we charge forth and continue to fight a million different battles every day.

I skipped “from the page” cause I’m tired. I hope that’s okay. Love y’all!

From the heart 💗

It feels like the world is ablaze. Maybe that’s because it is, figuratively speaking — and sometimes literally, too. When I stop for half a second and consider all the things that I know of that are horrible right now, from a genocide in Palestine to nearly 7 million people internally displaced in the Congo to lawmakers in the US penning bills that would remove us of our rights1 to the war in Ukraine to climate change on a global scale that threatens to destabilize the very Earth we inhabit…I become overwhelmed.

Tack onto all of that the internal turmoil I am living with: fear that my books will never be published and severe depression that limits my ability to enjoy my life and a growing disability and chronic pain that inhibits my physical life and loneliness and the headache/backache/neck pain that simply never stops and…I’m even more overwhelmed now.

And yet, somehow, I must persevere. I must wake up tomorrow and log on to my day job and put on a mask of productivity and cheerfulness to an extent. I must leave the house and smile at the cashiers and strangers I meet because they don’t deserve to have my sullenness and overwhelm ruin their days, potentially as miserable as mine. I must seek out molecules of joy even though I don’t believe in their ability to have a long-lasting impact on my life.

I am so tired. I do not know a better word for the feeling that cloaks me permanently than “exhausted,” but even that feels too simple, too clean, too…light. I am exhausted in the sense that when I’m sitting upright it feels like there are hands on my head and my shoulder exerting pressure to make me lie down. I am exhausted in the sense that when I am lying down I feel the need to curl up into the fetal position and scream into the abyss. I am exhausted in the sense that after 20 steps around the block I want to scramble home and sit down. I am exhausted in the sense that I went outside for all of five hours yesterday and slept 10 hours to make up for it, and my joints still ache and my eyes are still sandy with tiredness. I am exhausted in the sense that if I think too far ahead — more than a day, more than a week — at the future unspooling before me, with all the horrors it might contain, I think I will pass out.

I am exhausted in the sense that Sleeping Beauty’s 100-year rest sounds ideal to me.

Maybe you feel this way, too. Maybe you are exhausted by the relentless pounding waves of horrors. Maybe you are exhausted by the onslaught of news that never brings a light, always brings shadows. Maybe you are exhausted because life is fucking hard, man.

We’re about to enter the fifth year of an active global pandemic; it’s been nearly four years since a racial recknoing ripped through the United States and it seems as though nothing has changed, instiutionally, and the powers that be2 are reverting back to their pre-2020 ways as though all the protests, all the fighting, didn’t matter; it’s been almost two years since the war started in Ukraine; it’s been 120 days since the Palestinian genocide began; and god. Where is the humanity?

Where is the recognition that we are all equally deserving of rights and respect and life. Where is the recognition that queer people deserve to love, trans people deserve to transition, Black and brown people deserve to live their lives as freely as white people do, Indigenous nations deserve their sovereignty, kids deserve to read, Flint deserves water, the Earth deserves to not be wrecked beyond recognition by industry and greed, and there is more, so much more, more than I could capture in one newsletter.

The world is unequal. The world is unjust. The world is unfair. And I am fucking exhausted by it all.

Maybe you are, too. Maybe you’re just as tired as I am, or even more tired than I am. And so I say: we deserve to rest. We deserve to take a break. We deserve to replenish our wits and our reserves. And then, the world deserves us on the front lines, fighting tooth and nail for justice to be served, doing what we can with what we have to make a better future for our children.

At residency a few weeks ago, my good friend Christine delivered a brilliant lecture about Indigenous language in kidlit. Christine, who is a member of Cherokee Nation, mentioned during the course of her lecture a concept that rocked my world. Essentially, many Indigenous nations take a seven-generation view of history and the future. That is, they recognize that seven generations ago, their ancestors were considering how the actions they took then would affect them now. And moving forward, they consider how their actions today will affect their descendants seven generations into the future.

This, to me, is a much more unselfish view of the world than even a “my children and grandchildren” view. Because seven generations is at least 150 years into the future, give or take. If we were to take action today, with the hope that 150 years in the future our actions would still reverberate with our descendants, how would we change the way we act — to each other, to ourselves, to the Earth?

Would we offer more love and compassion to people who don’t look like us, whose stories aren’t our own? Would we devote more money to things like solving the homelessness crisis in America, and less toward conquering Mars? Would we think twice about innovation that plunders the Earth of its resources and consider more seriously sustainability?

Would we rest and be kinder to ourselves, knowing that intergenerational trauma is a thing, that unhealthy ways of living set up by one generation can reverberate down the line?

Would we make a better world for us, for our children, for their children, for the children seven generations from now, whom we will never know, but who will reap the benefits of our care and concern for those around us?

I am exhausted. You may be exhausted. The fight rages on. What if we fight not just for ourselves and our peers and our elders, but also for the sake of, 150 years from now, there still being an Earth and a humanity? What, then, would we do differently?

From the camera roll 📸

Alla prossima 👋

That’s all for today, friends. I feel…mentally scraped clean after writing “from the heart.” So I’m going to keep this short & sweet and just say: I’m sending you love. I hope you receive it in the spirit in which it was sent (in love) and I hope it helps you somehow.

— xoxo Karis