I made many realizations over the course of my masters education in public health, but one of the strangest was that I was both unreasonably optimistic–refusing to agree to quarantines in simulated pandemics because they are coercive–and several shades of jaded. I found my opinions increasingly pulling at the margins, disillusioned by every “next big idea” that cycled through the discipline, to the point that my plenty older professor who had recently been fired after 25 years of teaching at the school, and then rehired, told me I was “too cynical for my age.” It hit me both ways: first, in some ways I feel entitled to be, given trends like climate change, neoliberalism, militarism, and the disparate ways they affect people because of the white cis-hetero-patriarchy–but also, if this man who has clearly been discarded in his prime can find hope in the pieces, then so can I.
I still hinge on this tricky see-saw take. For example, Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark rang a little flat for me, as much as I wanted to take solace in it. She writes that the democratic revolutions in X and Y are examples of counter-neoliberal efforts taking hold across the globe. Today, both heads of state have been removed in coup d’etats reinstating neoliberals and neofascists. She writes that the Bush years will lead us to something better, when we readers know that 2016 happened and there is no means of erasing those years from everyone’s memories to start fresh that we know of yet. But most troubling to me, the entire book is based on a careless snippet from Virginia Woolf (a “many-gendered mother of my heart,” to borrow Maggie Nelson’s terminology). Solnit says that Woolf entered the Second World War after all the trauma of the First writing that “the future is dark, and that is all that we can know about it.” Just pages before, she dismisses suicide as a wasted effort, but who can forget that Virginia Woolf walked into the river with stones in her skirt, just months after writing that phrase?
I don’t mind the suspense of disbelief you need to hope. I relish it, I think–I want to believe there is some kind of justice, I want to imagine better futures, I want to root for the home team. I think what I’m resisting here is a narrative that decides against cynicism without reckoning with despair.
This might be a fundamental issue for me, a crux of who I am. When my mother died in 2002, I, like many others who suffer within the medical industrial complex, was “bright-sided” by cards and flowers and dinners, but nothing material could reckon with the severity of my loss. Even the tidbits of who she was, stories from the woman who delivered our mail, my horseback riding trainer’s tearful reaction to the news, gave me only a shadow of what I could no hold in my arms. I was a motherless child. I despaired.
I still am, and I still do. I know others who have felt this pain and pain like it, in small inoculations or doses that seem morally unfair: but good things don’t only happen to good people, and bad things don’t only happen to bad people. We are not being punished; we are surviving. Every day, every minute, a minor victory: this is life. I think there is a hopefulness in that, in examining suffering with an open and wounded heart for the sake of finding the drive, the legacy, the life-essence of people as they experience the prisons and pleasures of their own bodies.
[retouched portrait of Virginia Woolf found at http://www.redbubble.com/explore/klassixx%5D
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