Kimaya Diggs Deeper 011: Help!! My life is ruined!!
What I've learned about resilience & being an optimistic nihilist
[You can listen to this post in audio form here]
Song of the day
The song of the day is Everything is Not Lost, by me, Kimaya Diggs. Partially because I wrote it and I love it, but also because it’s genuinely appropriate for this week.
Updates:
My depression song is coming out 11/22. Thank you for encouraging me to release it.
I have many shows coming up, including my 4th annual holiday show! If you live in Providence RI, New Haven CT, or Northampton MA, get tickets to one of my final shows of 2024!
Here’s why you should buy tickets in advance.
Things feel very bad. Things feel okay. Things feel very good.
It’s hard to see a way forward. I can’t see anything but a way forward.
There’s no hope. There’s nothing but hope.
I feel like the maker of my own destiny and like a pawn in a game I didn’t ask to be a part of.
As I’ve quoted before, the mural I saw in a bar in Atlanta sums it up the best:
I know there is a balance. I see it when I swing past.
Help!! My life is ruined!!
Let’s get this out of the way: I have no hot takes about the election. All the takes that can be taken have been took. I have many thoughts about it but I’m not getting into it.
To finish the intro on a fun and mysterious note, I’ll say: today’s post is not about the election, but it’s also not not about the election.
It’s about coping with hard things, grief, and community. It’s about how everything can be ruined and everything can be okay and everything can be wonderful and it can all be true and happening at the same time.
This feeling: my life is ruined!!!
If you’re like me (hopefully you’re not too much like me, it’s chaotic in here lol), you may often think about the purpose of your life on a large scale. I can remember as far back as being five years old and sitting on the swing in my backyard planning out what biographers would write about me one day.
I was like, I better remember all the details of today so I can tell whoever writes about me that I was on the swing. It was a green swing and the ropes were green and yellow.
The point is, I’ve always thought of myself as special – not necessarily special among humans, but I’ve always valued my life and the fact that I am alive. I’ve always been in love with nature and making potions and writing and reading and singing and climbing trees and cutting up fruit and looking at the moon. I love the experience of being here on earth – even as depression pulls me in the opposite direction. My depression is a part of me and has shaped much of who I appear to be, but it has never touched the essence of who I am as a human being, because I arrived here with the core of myself intact and whole.
Because I’m someone who’s all-in on the experience of being on earth, when truly terrible things happen, it feels like my life (my one precious life!!!) has been absolutely ruined. My mother getting cancer. My mother dying. Teacher abuse. Mental illness. My autoimmune illness. Becoming disabled. Losing friend after friend after friend to suicide. Crashing my car. Losing my voice for years to a devastating injury. Unbelievable medical bills. Bad elections, wars, genocides, climate disasters, death threats in my Instagram DM’s, friend betrayals.
When these things happen – when my life gets ruined – I imagine my old life – my life as I think it should be – and my new life diverging. It’s like I get copy-pasted and placed on a slightly different track. As time passes, I look longingly at my life as it should be and I feel cheated. This is a bit of a weird image for sure, but part of what makes difficult events in my life feel so painful is the idea that somewhere out there is the path that I was supposed to be on, and that adverse experiences continue to bump me off of that path onto a life path that I was never supposed to have.
It feels like the life I was supposed to have gets stolen from me over and over again.
But that can’t be true, right? Whether or not you believe in a multiverse (ie. that there are infinite variations of me, living infinite versions of my life), the fact of the matter is that the experience I’m having is the experience I’m having. The idea that there’s a Kimaya out there with a living mom does nothing for me. The same can be said for this idea of the perfect life path – that never existed. I’m not being bumped off the path onto another, worse path, I’m simply taking the twists and turns that have always been the hallmark of being alive. I’m not diverging from a straight line that promised amazingness at the end – I’m weaving through a chaotic, tangled thing that’s impossible to comprehend until it’s over, and running into disasters and joys along the way.
I’m a pretty resilient person,
largely by temperament from birth because I’ve always had an awareness that pain is involved in living. Not everyone is like that, and they’re probably having a funner time of it than I am in general, but they also likely find that moments such as elections, pandemics, genocides, etc. are nearly debilitating. But the opposite of change, progress, and action, is numbness and fear paralysis.
In these moments, I see a lot of “love will save us” and “rest is radical” and “be gentle with yourself” stuff that puts me on high alert. The fact that the framework around the idea of radical rest was intended for Black women and has been heavily co-opted by white spiritualists is its own issue I won’t get into today! Or probably ever.
More specifically, I want to get into Da’Shaun L. Harrison’s foreword to Joy James’ In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love. Harrison writes:
“...Love–Black, Revolutionary, or otherwise–is often used as a way to asphyxiate our desire to revolt and rebel. It allows for us to believe that there can be something subtle about revolution…Love works to ensure that our desire to see to the end of our suffering becomes quelled by postulations of a “better” world…It is presented as something more powerful than revolution, thus assisting in the destabilization of our movements and our commitment to our collective liberation.”
Joy James writes:
“...no amount of compassion and love has historically demystified the majority’s reactionary and predatory fetishes for racial, sexual, and class domination, and its suspicions and hostilities toward the ‘other.’”
But “love” is a comfortable fallback when things feel overwhelming, and when life, the world, the country, the climate appear to be – or truly are – ruined. It is simple and straightforward and all-encompassing. And in a vacuum, it is a dead thing that cannot truly sustain long-term action. But resilience can, and the root of resilience can be love.
Resilience is a skill and a muscle
It must be developed and maintained. To me, having to develop resilience feels like another juncture at which my life is ruined – I want to be soft! I want to lay in the hammock and eat grapes and dance in my yard! Softness is interesting because it feels aspirational in a beautiful way, but does striving for softness disenfranchise us of our ability to enact change?
In becoming more resilient, I am able to love and engage with the joy of living more fully because it feels firmer and more real – it’s not a fragile present moment that could shatter. And if the joy of the world does shatter, as it often does, I have faith in my ability to do what I can to repair it. It’s not the secret to happiness, but it’s the secret to active movement and improvement of the world, which is the antidote to despair.
Strengthening resilience with intention
[If you’re looking to explore resilience, distress tolerance skills can be helpful (free resource here).]
I’ve had a number of major adverse events in my life, and to cope with them, my mind used to run through alternative scenarios. The first time my mom got cancer, I started planning for her death. By 17, I was ready to raise my sisters if the need arose. I kept track of their clothing sizes, violin teacher’s phone number, medical appointments, and sports schedules. I had a list of children’s books about death just in case my youngest sister wanted them.
My mother didn’t die for another 11 years.
But when she did, the part of my brain that had prepared is what kept me upright and able to do the things that needed to be done. The (larger, louder) part of my brain that absolutely fell apart was dragged along limply for months by the part of me that had been ready all along.
During the peak of the Civil Rights movement, activists underwent intensive training in order to successfully facilitate peaceful demonstrations. Prior to undergoing an act of civil disobedience, activists would role-play likely scenarios: having cigarette smoke blown in their faces. Having their hair pulled, their Sunday best clothes doused with drinks. Being spit on. Having slurs screamed at them. These trainings might be hard to watch, but they were a key element in the success of these nonviolent actions. These training sessions were resilience-building and allowed the activists involved to tolerate a higher level of distress during actions that moved the needle in the fight for Black civil rights.
There’s a video of a classroom training for Black children that I think about all the time. It’s from 1968, and you can watch it here. The video starts with a teacher asking a child how old he is.
“I am four years old.”
“Are you sure you’re four?”
“Yes.”
“You gonna let me turn you around and tell you you’re some other age? You’re six years old, Eric.”
The child is so young. He’s so small. He doesn’t look confident. But he knows himself, and because he’s had to practice it he is able to stand in his truth. The whole video is about a minute long and is very much worth watching.
Resilience has taught me how to make things out of grief,
to be fierce in my protections of others, quiet and efficient with the actions that I need to take, and invested in community. I use “invested” intentionally because it is not a giving without a getting. Done right, a community has the potential to offer infinite abundance.
On community
What does community mean to you? I have always felt disconnected from community at the highest level – such as broad statements about “the Black community” or “the queer community” – but deeply-connected to community at the most intimate levels: my family, my friends, my hometown.
I like to engage in community at a level where I can make meaningful contributions, where I can know and appreciate the contributions of others, and where I can track action and progress over time. I don’t feel like I can do that on a global/national or even state level, but here’s how I see my level of community engagement fitting in on this earth:
First, I try to remember that there are manyyyyy people out there who don’t feel the way I do. I have tons of friends who truly live for state- and national-level organizing and building. I add my signature where I can and I send gratitude to the people who love to engage on that level.
Second, I truly believe that lasting change can happen on the micro level: in families, friend groups, small towns. I wish I could solve racism, sexism, queerphobia, transphobia, the economy, the climate, armed conflict, land theft, domestic violence, healthcare, substance issues, homelessness, and everything else at once. Instead, I best feel the weight of my impact when I raise a tiny $2000 for a local cancer support nonprofit, or send $50 to someone rebuilding after a house fire. Not everyone feels as I do. Some people feel the weight of their impact when they send a national campaign a hundred bucks or put a sign in their yard. It’s like exercise: some people like taking long walks, and other people like lifting weights. The most important thing is to choose the one you’ll actually do. There are many ways to live.
The world wide web is breaking our brains
If you’ve read any of the other posts on this Substack, you know I have lots of hateful feelings about the internet :) (and yet here I am trapped in your phone!! Help!!! Get me out!!!!!!)
I kind of think that we’re not supposed to know all the things we know. We’re not supposed to absorb as much information in one day as we do in a single scrolling sesh. People used to ride into town on freakin’ horses to shout a month’s worth of news headlines in the village square or whatever (bring it back! bring it back!). Modalities designed to improve resilience and distress tolerance were not developed with war-footage-on-Instagram in mind. It’s easiest to say ‘get off the internet’ but at the same time, a lot of people feel compelled to bear witness to everything the algorithm serves them.
Done right, the practice of becoming more resilient is an investment – in that the returns are greater than the time and energy put into developing the skill in the first place.
Because I am resilient, I don’t feel hopeful. I feel ready. I feel confident in my ability to help where and how I can best contribute. I don’t always feel this way – I often fall back into the place where I see my life as irrevocably ruined, but what can I say? That’s perspective, baby! And since resilience is a muscle, sometimes you work out too hard and have to quit the resilience gym for a week or two. Recover with a resilience ice pack and some resilience protein shakes. You know what? No one is forcing me to continue this metaphor. Honestly, I went too far several sentences ago. And now I’m basically thinking out loud on the page. Help, make it stop. Ahh I can’t. I’m stuck!! No seriously Kimaya stop typing! Ok sorry I’m done!
Just kidding I’m not!
One last (annoying?) thing:
Black women been telling you!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Now get out there and go meet your neighbors, figure out who’s on your town council, and sign up for a Thanksgiving week shift at a food pantry.
Ok bye!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1