They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us: Essays

I know that I stopped thinking about extreme grief as the sole vehicle for great art when the grief started to take people with it. And I get it. The tortured artist is the artist that gets remembered for all time, particularly if they if they either perish or overcome. But the truth is that so many of us are stuck in the middle. So many of us begin tortured and end tortured, with only brief bursts of light in between, and I'd rather have average art and survival than miracles that come at the cost of someone's life.

No matter how obsessed you've been with your own vanishing, there will always be someone who wants you whole.

It’s easy to convince people that you are really okay if they don’t have to actually hear what rattles you in the private silence of your own making.

Home is where the heart begins, but not where the heart stays.

A person is a whole person when they are good sometimes but not always, and loved by someone regardless.

The thing about grief is that it never truly leaves. From the moment it enters you, it becomes something you are always getting over.

Hasn’t that always been the way of it? We all choose our sins, and their measure. The ones we believe will render us unforgivable, and the ones that we will wash off with a morning prayer.

I have been thinking, then, about the value of optimism while cities burn, while people are fearing for their lives and the lives of their loved ones, while discourse is reduced to laughing through a chorus of anxiety. A woman in a Cape Cod diner the day after Christmas saw me eyeing the news and shaking my head. She told me that “things will get better,” and I wasn’t sure they would, but I nodded and said, “They surely can’t get any worse,” which is the lie that we all tell, the one that we want to believe, even as there are jaws opening before us.

It is one thing to be good at what you do, and it is another thing to be good and bold enough to have fun while doing it.

The truth is, if we don’t write our own stories, there is someone else waiting to do it for us. And those people, waiting with their pens, often don’t look like we do and don’t have our best interests in mind.

It's in the spirit of male loneliness to imagine that someone has to suffer for it.

There are few sins greater than the ones we commit against ourselves in the name of others. The things that push us further away from who we are, and closer to the image people demand.

It is jarring, what we let fear do to each other; how we invent enemies and then make them so small that we are fine with wishing them dead. How we decide what “safety” is, how ours is only ours and must be gained at all costs. How we take that long coat of fear and throw it around the shoulders of anyone who doesn’t look like us, or prays to another God.

It is a luxury to see some violence as terror and other violence as necessary.

The truth is, once you understand that there are people who do not want you to exist, that is a difficult card to remove from the table. There is no liberation, no undoing that knowledge. It is the unyielding door, the one that simply cannot be pushed back against any longer. For many, there are reminders of this every day, every hour. It makes "Alright," the emotional bar and the song itself, the best there is. It makes existence itself a celebration.

Sometimes it isn't what we're battling that takes us, but simply the battle itself.

I have remained here because of my comfort with the darkness I know and my fear of the darkness I do not.

I stopped thinking about extreme grief as the sole vehicle for great art when the grief started to take people with it.

Sometimes, that which does not kill you sits heavy over you until all of the things that did not kill you turn into a single counterforce that might. No matter what comes out of a person in these times, the work that we make when we feel like we no longer want to be alive is not the best work if it is also not work that, little by little, is pushing us back toward perhaps staying, even if just for a moment.

Staying is not always a choice, and I have lived and lost enough to know that. But the way I think about grief is that it is the great tug-of-war, and sometimes the flag is on the side you don’t want it to be on. And sometimes, the game has exhausted all of its joy, and all that’s left is you on your knees. But, today, even though I am sad, my hands are still on the rope.

It is true, yes, that joy in a violent world can be rebellion. Sex can be rebellion. Turning off the news and watching two hours of a mindless action film can be rebellion. But without being coupled with any actual HARD rebellion, without reaching our hands into revolutionary action, all you’ve done is had a pretty fun day of joy, sex, and a movie.

There is something about setting eyes on the people who hold you up instead of imagining them.

America, so frequently, is excited about the stories of black people, but not the black people themselves.

I struggle with this, the public grief by white people over Black Death. I have been, and am still, a victim of what my guilt can drive me to. Depending on the day, on the cause, on who I love that might be affected. There is, however, a manner in which this guilt is performed that sets me to wondering what the value of living blackness is when it rests against white outrage centered on the ending of black life. It is both essential for us to turn toward our people and ask them to do better, while also realizing that there is a very real currency that comes with being the loudest person to do it in public.

I don't fear what the future holds as much as I fear not being being alive to see it.

We make our own music to celebrate our dead where we must.

We are nothing without our quick and simple blessings, without those willing to drag optimism by its neck to the gates of grief and ask to be let in, an entire choir of voices singing at their back.

There is no moment in America when I do not feel like I am fighting. When I do not feel like I'm pushing back against a machine that asks me to prove that I belong here.