Writing a blog, feeling sorry for myself.
It is times like this that it would be helpful to have a good team of scriptwriters, so that I could say “I don’t know what to say really” and, like in the film Any Given Sunday, follow that with an inspiring motivational speech. Sadly, I am not a fictional character, so I am stuck at “I don’t know what to say really”
I can’t decide if my mind is mush, treacle or weighed down; best to go with all three at the same time. Creatively things are slow; on the one hand, I have things to be getting on with which I am not doing, and on the other, I am not having creative thoughts. Where once the challenge was to capture my creativity, now it is often finding any creative impulse at all. I can bury myself in introspection but the elephant in the room is that the world is getting a nastier and more hostile place seemingly by the day.
I was going to write about the CNN discovery of what they called a “rape academy” last week, but I couldn’t find any words. I want to be shocked and horrified that such a site could exist, but I am not. Seeing men splitting hairs over the number of reported visits to a site that should have been taken down with immediate arrests is beyond sickening. This is not the first, and I know it won’t be the last time that I have wanted to not be male. I am a man, men did this, and I don’t know what to say, really.
In the most non-rhetorical way possible, what can I say that hasn’t been said? There is nothing; I have nothing to add. Women have the floor, the stats, and I am silent because they are not wrong. It doesn’t matter to me that I am personally not like that; the fact is, I look like those who were involved. I cannot be distinguished from the apologists and enablers. My silence isn’t complicity; it is recognition that this is the time for men to listen. If you are not part of the problem, then the time is to listen to women on what is needed to address those who are.
Right now, women have the absolute right to be suspicious of any man claiming to be an ally. Personally, I don’t feel I have any place taking part in a space that is correctly populated with women. I am male, and this is a space where I am not needed, and I am guessing, not wanted. What is wanted is for me to say nothing and do something. Doing something, in my case, is listening and learning; everyone’s lifelong project.
Who am I to be thinking of how the world is descending ever further into barbarism and chaos affects me. Who am I in my comfortable corner of the world to be saying I am affected when bombs and drone strikes are hanging over people’s lives? Who am I to say, I don’t know what to say when there is a genocide that is apparently okay? Who am I to introspect in this world of horrors?
There isn’t much more to where I am right now. I feel guilty for feeling sorry for myself when there is so much awfulness everywhere around me. Guilt and comparison never helped anyone, yet we do it anyway. Which leaves me back where I started, sitting down at my desk wanting to write a blog post with two thoughts in my mind: how sick I feel, and how sick I feel. In my best Point Break Keanu Reeves impression, “I wrote a poem today”.
That is all for this week, better than nothing, I think, until next week, keep on keeping on. (Apparently, tag line can drive engagement!)
