All The Best, Jess

As people, we have this inherent inclination to make everything beautiful. It's one of my favorite things about us: despite the odds and circumstances, we can find something interesting in whatever we are faced with. As much as I love it, I also know how dangerous and ignorant the need to romanticize everything can be. We create tropes out of trauma and pedestal people who never asked to be.  One of my biggest pet peeves is the question  But doesn't it help you be so creative? that often follows any comment about struggling to live with mental illnesses. I hate the way people talk about Van Gogh, that he ate yellow paint to be happy, I hate the idea that an artist must be tortured. When people bring up Robin Williams, it is always to talk about how the saddest people work the hardest to make others happy, when I talk about my own trauma people feel the need to commend my kindness, and I hate that tragedy and beauty are so closely tied to each other that you cannot speak of one...

It's been a while. I guess, with the pandemic and near daily apocalyptic happenings, I didn't know how to adequately write about anything. Between people not taking the pandemic seriously, renewed conversations about systemic racism and human trafficking, the tragedy that is the election this year, and a million other tiny fires along the way, I didn't know what the right thing to say was. Because I come from a relatively privileged situation, I often wonder if it even is my place to say anything--shouldn't I be using the position I am to amplify the voices of the people who are actively hurting?  However, I've gotten well and tired of sitting and watching and worrying that my contribution in this apparently penultimate era of the world will be sitting and watching and worrying and sharing a few posts by people I feel are more eloquent than I. So, I make an attempt at putting my two cents into this global conversation. Over the past few months, I have seen countless...