On Going Viral and Blackbirds

Empathy is only toxic when we can't find it in ourselves at all

In my freshman year of college, I was 24 years old, fresh off the plane from having lived in Central America and gotten terribly sick. The world when I came back to the exact same place I’d left six months earlier felt at the same time brighter and also more terrible than I imagined.

While I was bent over the toilet in my Guatemalan cinderblock garage bedroom, the phone was on speaker beside me. My dad’s voice delivered the news of my parent’s divorce, the end to their trial separation—the beginning of what my brothers’ child advocacy lawyer would describe as ”the worst custody battle I’ve ever experienced.” I saw her years later in the aisle of our local food co-op and she reaffirmed it. In six months I lost 60 pounds. I came home without money, car, apartment, or resources. My friends were getting engaged or married, having babies or dating. New York state paid me $890 a semester to go to our local SUNY school and so I did. I juggled two part-time jobs and went to school there full-time for a fall and spring semester before moving to another state and university to finish.

In those early classes I read Emily Dickinson, Phyllis Wheatley, Flannery O’Connor, and W. E. B. Du Bois. I wrote papers and discovered a voice within me that I never knew was there. I thought I was only a reader but my professors would tell me, “No, Lore, you’re a writer.” And I believed them.

I will never forget reading Wallace Steven’s Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird for the first time. I constantly felt like my inner world and the outer world were seeing two different things and I could never resolve the two. I would reason inward and perform outward. I would hear people say one thing and think, but it’s so much more than that. And also, but it’s so much less than that. I felt curious about the ways we saw things so differently and felt ashamed that when some people would say a thing was blue, I would see it was green.

I thought I must be wrong.

I turned myself inside out in those years, trying to make my inner self see the world the way all these people around me saw it. I was in a conservative church environment, full-quiver, courtship, male headship, stalwartly republican, and anti-feminist. But that world, and those rules, only seemed to work for some people who came from families that embraced the ideals wholly—and even then, there were exceptions. Anyone from outside the frame was forced to fit themselves into it and many of us felt our out-of-place-ness acutely.

I remember being presented with my second subpoena from my father by a stranger at the bottom of my apartment stairs while upstairs the person I considered my best friend flirted with a besotted man before heading home to her family home where she had health insurance, car insurance, three meals a day, a car at her disposal, and two parents who adored her. After she left, I was still in shock, and her six foot one, soon-to-be boyfriend yelled at me and threw a cucumber at me. Not a baby cucumber, one of those foot long ones, fat and hard. I moved out of the way and I remember standing there in the doorway watching the green slime and white seeds slide down the wall and thinking, believing, I am the bad guy here.

He probably remembers the story differently. So does she. But I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that happened. Exactly as I described it. I remember what he was wearing, what she was wearing, what the man at the bottom of the stairs was wearing, and the weather that day. I remember it exactly. And I’m positive they remember it exactly and a different way.

A few years ago I shared a graphic here and a post about the different ways we envision an apple we can’t see in front of us. Some people see it technicolor, cinematic, like the kids say, and I’m one of those people. I see the whole apple, every bit of color and texture. I see the shadows and shades, the place where it sits, the space it takes up. I even taste it in my mouth, immediately, upon thinking apple, I taste Pink Lady apple, even though we mostly eat Golden Opal apples. Others, when asked to think of an apple, see nothing, just black. And then there is every kind of person in between. I cannot even fathom a person thinking apple and seeing nothing, but I imagine those people cannot even fathom a person thinking apple and seeing everything. I don’t think they’re bad people, though, maybe they were just made that way.

A few days ago, Nate and I were driving somewhere and I was sad about something I’d read that day. It doesn’t matter what it was, the point was, I was sad. And I realized I was sad because I’m hurting about things a lot of people have said about Christians who didn’t vote for Trump. And I had this moment where I realized: No one is ever going to say they’re sorry for saying or doing the things they said and did to me and others.

I don’t want anyone to apologize for their vote, ever. A vote is a very small thing in a very big world and I know people who’ve tipped the lever either way and regretted it immediately, who walked out of the booth with a pit in their stomach. Why would I ever hold a tiny action like that against someone?

No, what I realized I wanted, was someone to say, “I’m sorry for how I treated you after you tipped the lever the other way. I said you weren’t a Christian. I said you voted for demonic agendas. I said you were evil. I alienated you. I said you believed fake news. And now I am seeing some of the same things you saw all along, and I’m sorry for how I treated you.”

I realized no one was ever going to say that to me and maybe it would be helpful for me to simply imagine the apple. What if I could imagine the apology, their grief and sadness, their regret, even their still held values? What if I could imagine their tenderness, their wholeness, the reasons they voted the way they did, but so, so, so much more than that?

What if I could imagine them in front of me saying the worlds, “I gaslit you. I made you feel crazy. I made you feel unChristian. I made you feel insane, and I see how much toll that has taken on you”?

It wasn’t hard at all to imagine that. Not even a little bit. I inserted the beloved faces and hands and bodies of all the people I’ve loved over the years who tipped the lever that way and now regret it (and I understand there are many who don’t regret it, and I don’t need them to nor did I imagine them in front of me). I imagined them sitting in front of me and saying those words and something light happened in me. I felt, for a minute, just a little bit freer. Even more, I felt like I could truly love those people again in the way I used to love them and miss them.

When I got home, I wrote out what I imagined they’d say. I tried to be generous and true, using only examples from real life experiences I’ve had, not making them out to be monsters, but just humans with values and stories, just like me. I tried to empathize with who they are and why they made the decisions they made, and then I read through it, and I thought, If I needed to hear this, maybe someone else does too?

So I shared it. Maybe I should have thought through it more but I just felt so light in that moment, like, this exercise really helped me love my neighbor a little more than I did earlier today, maybe it would help someone else. And I shared it.

I shared it in two places: Instagram and Facebook.

I have never, not in over twenty years of writing online, gone viral. Going viral is extremely easy if you’re a half-decent writer, but I’ve never tried to go viral on purpose. I’m not interested in what makes someone go viral. I’m not interested in writing the kinds of things that go viral. I’m extremely not interested in being trolled by bots or humans. I don’t want to provide a place for anyone to show up and be their worst self in a comment thread. Not for me. I’ve stated that pretty publicly over the years and while all my writer friends had their viral moments, I kept my V card. (Sorry, had to.)

Within a few hours that post had over 100k views on Instagram. I did not mean to do that and would undo it if I could without deleting the post.

But here’s what happened instead:

On Instagram, despite my caption clearly saying that I did not vote for Trump ever, the progressives came out screaming at me.

No, they would not forgive me for voting for him. Can’t I see how I wrecked their lives and their faith? Was I aware of, you know, science? and facts? or was I stupid? Here was their screed of all the reasons I should be ashamed of myself. Here was their list of demands if I would ever deserve their forgiveness. I spent hours replying to their comments, asking them to read the caption, before finally turning off comments.

On Facebook, the exact opposite happened.

Here, the conservatives came out of the woodwork, calling me mentally ill, crazy, an ego-maniac, having given myself and my children over to mammon. They said doing something like this was insane, arrogant, prideful, and I don’t deserve their forgiveness. They pounded their keyboards with all the reasons I was a political zealot instead of a Christian and had lost my true way.

The exact same post, the exact opposite reaction.

I sat down this morning to do some comment management (i.e. deletions) and texted a few to Nate. He came downstairs a few minutes later and said,

“It’s like a real life Rorschach test, looking at the exact same thing and seeing something else entirely.”

And I thought of Wallace Stevens blackbirds and the thirteen ways we look at them. I thought about how we do things with goodness in our hearts and how once they leave our hearts and live in the world, they become turned by the weather and our fears and our “three minds” and our inflections and innuendos and indecipherable causes. How when everything is just in our imagination, it is safe, but when we chance to invite anyone else in, we chance the breaking of everything.

It’s why, I think, so many people—and on both sides, let’s please be honest—are so afraid of empathy for the true Other.

Because if we can allow ourselves to imagine the other as they are while also holding hope for who we wish they would become, we are putting ourselves at the risk of love, and love is so, so, so terrifying. It is the most terrifying thing in the universe which is why it is also the biggest thing in the universe which is why it is also the greatest thing in the universe which is why it is also God.

To fill ourselves with empathy, with imagination, with the possibility that there is more to the story than we have known or experienced or believed, is to chance an encounter with love and to chance an encounter with God.

I haven’t read the Law or the Prophets in a few years. Probably more than five years. And it’s on purpose. The prophets hurt my heart. They are so, so fiery and so, so full of love. They are the blackbirds cawing ahead of the storm. Away! Away! They are the blackbirds picking at the carrion carnage after the storm, I’ll stay! I’ll stay! They are the blackbirds showing us how human we are and how beloved we are and how hard it is and how whole we can become, and it all hurts my heart too much.

But it is their imagination that hurts the most, I think, their radical belief in something better, someone better, and the devastation they can predict with alarming specificity when we lose that belief in something better and settle for the worst of it all. Envision a black hole instead of even the outline of an apple, the hope of an apple.

The prophets encountered God, though, didn’t they? And in their stories, the blackbirds brought Elijah food outside the cave and told Noah of the dry land and became a symbol of care and provision and hope and sometimes death, but that is all a part of all this, isn’t it? That it’s all here, for us, for the taking, for the giving, for the imagining and the imagination, and how good it can be if we can just imagine it better until it eventually becomes better.

---

If you’re reading this in email (which 98% of you do!), consider pressing the heart (♡) at the bottom or top of this email. It helps my work get more eyeballs on it, which is nice for me and kind of you!