Making Space for Our Own Humanity
Creativity as a tool for empathy.
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I was driving the other day during the end of the afternoon NPR broadcast, and there was an interview with the executive director of the World Food Program. Maybe it was because I was driving and didn’t have a way to distract myself, but there was something about her words and descriptions of humanitarian crisis that lodged themselves in me in a very heavy way.
I’ve found myself in the past few weeks starting to feel desensitized to horrific images, most likely some kind of coping mechanism that I find disconcerting. The scrolling through just becomes a mindless habit, no place for the emotions to sit or develop before we move to the next thing, no nuance necessary. For me, hearing words and stories lands very differently. It’s harder to turn away when you’re hearing the gravity in someone’s personal story. Reading is the same, whether it’s a reported article or a poem. Art too carries that power, finding its way in along a different path.
There’s a large sense of overwhelm to feel right now. Pick your crisis, it’s out there. What do we do in response to that? How do we communicate? How do we talk about the things that we care and feel deeply about? How do we see our own role in this complicated, messy, interconnected world?
“We can't move through the crises one by one and have the correct empathetic response to everything. It's simply not possible.” - Ann Friedman
Ann Friedman had a great newsletter this week, tackling the easy and convenient phrase that I am sure a lot of us have written at some point: with everything that's happening in the world right now.
“‘It's one thing to be exhausted and upset about overlapping crises,’ wrote Dahlia Lithwick in 2021, ‘It is quite another thing to be expected to embody pitch-perfect emotional responses to each one of those things instantaneously online.’ Silence is violence, we have been taught by this point. And also we are acutely aware of the limits of our own knowledge and firsthand experience, We can't move through the crises one by one and have the correct empathetic response to everything. It's simply not possible. And yet we are trying not to lose touch with our humanity. And so we just write ‘with everything happening in the world...’ and hope it's enough for now.”
We’re trying to show that we’re paying attention, trying to show that we feel. Which is a way of expressing our humanity, but it can also be a kind of posturing. As
wrote recently, “I often think about the world 15 or 20 years ago, when we were not able to broadcast our state of mind at any given moment, and so we felt no pressure to simplify complex and fragile feelings.”I’ve been thinking about this a lot in the past weeks. This aspect of what to say, what not to say. That balance of acknowledging the weight of what happens around us, while at the same time focusing on and showcasing the pockets of beauty that exist in the everyday. Understanding that we’re all part of a larger, very unjust system, and also: needing to run an art business, wanting to create things that bring joy to people.
When I read
’ excellent piece titled “How to be online right now,” I found it helpful and clarifying, both because of her own words and the words and wisdom of various other writers cited.“I think a lot of us are grappling with this relatively new expectation: That to know about what’s going on in the world means to publicly state nuanced opinions about events as they unfold.”
She continues a little later:
“I’ve written before, at the start of the Ukraine war, about how I personally think it’s okay not to post at times like this — which, I’ll note, is not the same thing as ignoring what’s going on in the world. I personally can’t help but grapple with the inherent issues of the platforms themselves: What their for-profit structures and the men who run them try and steer me to view, interact with, and post — and more importantly — what to think and feel.”
This is a newsletter devoted to creativity. Yes there are creative prompts and there’s art and I’d be more than happy to have a chat with you about how creative process works, but for me there’s also something deeper at play. Creativity is a core component of being human, and as such, this is really more of a newsletter about the human condition.
And if we’re talking about the human condition, then we can’t separate ourselves from events both near and far that make us feel something, that makes us want to scream, that make us lose a sense of hope, that make us want to turn our emotional receptors off.
We don’t create in a vacuum—creativity is a constant collaboration with the world around us. Creativity is an act of perception, of opening up, of listening, of processing and that’s exactly why we’re impacted by what else is happening in the world at large. When you work at that perception, it gets harder and harder to tune things out. Harder and harder to build up the walls around you to not feel a sense of empathy.
That’s the beauty of art: it becomes a vehicle for accessing and strengthening that empathy.
A friend sent me a post this week about how an act of creativity was an act of self-care, noting self-discovery, improved problem-solving, and mindfulness as some of the benefits. I couldn’t agree more, and these are all things that we need to function as humans.
But you know what else I think creativity can be? An act of community care.
Creativity binds us together. This is not just about making something and sharing it, or finding a way to express pain and rage in a different form, or using art to question and challenge, or to get someone to take action on something.
Creativity is a way of being, and that way of being requires listening, it requires learning, it requires sitting with questions, it requires thinking, it requires rumination, it requires making connections.
If we can make space for that, maybe we can start to make space for our own humanity.
-Anna
CREATIVE PROMPT
Feeling…?
This could be how you’re feeling or what you’re feeling. It could be the description of a feeling. It could be emotional, or it could be physical.
As always, just see where it takes you.
A nice prompt to pair with this might be the sensorial writing exercise I wrote about a few weeks ago.
“War divides. Music connects.”
YES YES YES! 🙌 I really resonate with Rosie Spink’s perspective - “I personally think it’s okay not to post at times like this — which, I’ll note, is not the same thing as ignoring what’s going on in the world.” -- that’s the route I’ve chosen to take with recent events.
I really love this post, Anna. I continue to struggle with what to say or not say online since the most recent developments in the Middle East and how what I say or don’t say is interpreted by others. I especially liked the Dahlia Lithwick quote from 2021 (which I may also borrow). I have so many friends with strong feelings and pointed opinions about the “proper” response to a terrible and complex situation. I respect those feelings, but our views are not always completely aligned. I certainly do not pretend to have all the answers.
I think the concept of creativity as not only self care but community care is an important one, and I'm glad you chose to make this post available to all subscribers.