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Hi friends,
What a year this past week has been.
I write to you with slight blood-shot eyes after having stayed up until 3 am watching Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’ first speech as US president-elect and vice president-elect. I cried as Harris thanked her mother, who arrived in America from India at the age of 19. If only she could see her girl now; the first Black and South Asian woman to become the vice present — and what is clear after that speech, the future president of the United States.
Before I leave you to today's essay, I am so excited to share that Be Your Own Collage is once again opening its doors next Monday. For those of you who missed the event when I first ran it back in May, Be Your Own Collage is two-week digital pop-up where you can purchase your very own custom collage — featuring you, from me.
If would like a bespoke collage making for you or a friend (digital gifts are going to be big this Christmas given the restrictions for seeing people IRL) at 20% of my normal commission rate, then make sure you have your eye on my website at 9 am next Monday when tickets go on sale. They sold out pretty quickly last time.
I am so looking forward to making dreamy works with so many of you again!
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There is a song I have been avoiding for a year. I’d imagined the moment arriving — the first notes of guitar causing seismic vibrations of history to erupt in my chest and the emergence of a crash cymbal causing my insides to shake. Choosing the road less masochistic, the song remained switched off; I didn't want to break my own heart. But recently whilst I was driving, it came on shuffle. With my hands fixed to the steering wheel, I was unable to stop it in its tracks. I suppose I could’ve turned off the radio completely but it was too late, it was already happening. I thought okay.
Similarly, two Friday’s ago, when the US election was still just a thing in the near future and not something we would have to wade through like thick sludge, my dad said to me: maybe Tuesday will bring the beginning of a new era for change. I wanted to rewind and pretend I’d never heard these words, to extract them from my memory, to stick my fingers in my ears and shout la-la-la. These words too, were a song I had been avoiding. Because to bear the hope, at that point, felt too devastating. It felt too much like tempting fate when I no longer had the bandwidth to withstand the pain if my faith ended up being blind. It’s why on Election Day, I captioned an Instagram post: holding my breath for you, America.
For the past year I’ve been saying he’ll get re-elected. It wasn’t out of pessimism, it was out of simply observing the landscape before my eyes. One he did not alone create but one he sure as shit spread like the virus he should’ve been trying to stop. To look at that — a near 70 million people who reelected him specifically and dare to hold hope in your hands, I thought, was to break your own heart.
But the thing about hearts is that they are more resilient than we often give them credit. One of the initial thoughts that held me together after my last breakup was that at least I could say I was never not myself in that relationship. I had always assumed that the year following heartbreak would be a clawing back of the self, but as the months passed, I found I was able to not let it pull apart the ideologies I held close. To turn me away from what I believed to be true about love. I had been burned, but I didn’t simmer down cynical.
But as Coronavirus continues to kill thousands by the day, as polarisation across the globe continues to divide us in hatred, as the planet burns, as systemic racism continues to reign, as abuse allegations ever escalate, as our mental health deteriorates with every new day of lockdown, I think I did. I think I did simmer down cynical. Though the heart is resilient, too many beatings at once can leave bruises.
And gosh, haven’t we been bruised. In the same way that the best memes of this year bring at once light relief to the world’s daily blows of trauma and desensitise us to them, Twitter, on the night Pennsylvania tipped Biden over the threshold for presidency scrupulously described the collective moment as one of a kind of detachment, a slight inability to remember how to process anything good. It was disorientation we felt as hope reentered our bodies after having been void of positive news for so long.
America needed that win, the world needed that win. Because as small as it was in the grand scheme of all that still needs to be done: 70 million people voted for Trump, Republicans still hold the Senate, (you know what to do in January, Georgia), the divisiveness within the Democratic party itself, it was enough to make us believe again. For a day, an hour, a minute. It was enough to use as fuel to continue the good fight.
For hope to not just be something that we dare to hold, but something we can feel too.
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