Complicated Feelings: Apathy

I just reached a full year of completing the NYT crossword every single day. I might have reached this milestone sooner were it not for the pesky little ordeal of an extended hospital stay. Most days of the week, the crossword for ‘tomorrow’ is made available at 10pm EST (6pm for the Sunday and Monday puzzles), and ever since being discharged it has been the activity that marks the end of each day for me; the start-and-end point of a 24-hour cycle. My entire life, even before that injury and recovery, I have tried to arrange and rearrange letters, puzzles, and phrases to see the distance they might travel; if they could indeed take on complex lives of their own.

My parents dressed the dining room of my childhood home in star-spangled wallpaper, an ivory backdrop dotted with golden, equidistant five-point stars. They were shaded in a way that gave the illusion of three-dimensional life, like I could trace my finger over them and feel the ridges jutting out around us as we ate. I used to refuse to take my first bite until I had finished mentally tracing a pattern from a random star I chose, travelling diagonally around the room and bounding off the walls and window panes until returning to its starting point.

In middle school during the cold suburban Massachusetts winter months, we would occasionally forego the New England rite of passage — recess below freezing in regular gym clothes — and play Bananagrams or Scrabble in the library instead. At that time of my life I was a student who had not yet come to understand the pristine gift of knowledge, the magnitude of preciousness and deep responsibility of learning; all I knew was that I was very competitive and particularly agile with words and letters.

I got laid off last week. One of the many consequences of the backlash on “wokeness” is that philanthropy in the United States shat its pants. Where bureaucracy once delayed action by imposing (occasionally) unnecessary layers of checks and waiting periods, it now stumbles over language and identity for fear of retribution from the most powerful people in the world. And now my job is gone. It’s interesting that this happened immediately after I wrote my piece on improvisation, in which I said that “I often find myself in situations where I am not sure of my next step. It makes me want to wrap my fingers in a clump of hair pull as if weeding my front garden, a chore which, even if I might think of sometimes, I never actually do. I am grateful to know how to improvise. To let my twelve-years-trained-in-classical-piano fingers outpace my once-hit-concrete-at-high-velocity brain and type the playbook faster than I can logic my way out of anything, much as I am doing now.” I knew the layoff was coming. It was pretty clear. I have the shadow of a plan for my next steps, but the first thing I know I need is a couple of weeks to just observe — to look for patterns that I might have missed. I’m tired of thinking about how desperate/precarious my situation is, I’ve been doing that in different ways for years. I need to just exist, to celebrate my sobriety through everything and my upcoming birthday… and I recognize the privilege in being able to say that. My severance package includes the dollar value of my life from ages 22-27, which, it turns out, will be able to sustain 28 for at least a couple of months.

From a storytelling perspective, it’s a bit odd that I didn’t open or close this piece with the ‘big reveal’ of my impending unemployment; the revelation that my job, which has commanded the majority of my time and mental energy over a period of nearly six years, is simply gone. This is, perhaps, because it doesn’t feel particularly revelatory. I’m disappointed, yes, a bit angry of course, and possibly even frightened deep down… but the fact of the matter is that I am remarkably, unshakably, calm.

Over the long weekend I read, in one sitting, “Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative” by Isabella Hammad. There is an astounding sensation I have delighted upon several times recently in the realization that I am, in real time, experiencing the kind of insight that will refine my worldview. Hammad repeatedly weaves revelation into her prose, saying “[...] denial is arguably the opposite of recognition. But even denial is based on a kind of knowing. A willful turning from devastating knowledge, perhaps, out of fear. [...] Think of climate change denial. Think of the slave traders and economists of the nineteenth century who claimed that ending the enslavement of human beings was economically and politically unviable. The strength of their stated convictions resembles the arguments of the gun lobby in the US today, and of governments regarding the use of fossil fuels, and arguments that sanctioning occupying powers on the basis of crimes they commit against humanity is impossible. We’ve seen evidence very recently that this is not impossible.”

In addition to my quiet thrill at still being able to access the requisite attention span to read a book in one go, I recognized in Hammad’s rhetoric a further-down-the-path-of-inquiry theme I had accessed when writing about imagination and peace; I recognized a pattern.

There are a few simple, true statements:

1. The richest man in the world and the most powerful man in the world threw a tantrum about equity practices which desecrated the entire nonprofit funding landscape and led to the elimination of my job and hundreds of thousands of other jobs.

2. That tantrum was a critical domino (though not the first) of several other chain reactions that are currently altering international relations, climate protections, healthcare access, higher education, separations of power, race relations, wealth inequality, and just about every facet of life in the United States.

3. When I did have a job, my pay was not enough to live comfortably in the city that job required me to live in, and that is an unsurprising statement to anyone who has ever worked in the nonprofit sector.

I could make a million witty swipes at the systems of power that incubated, even encouraged, the widespread terminal apathy that eroded our institutions and led to my situation, the state of employment in D.C., and the broader state of the world, and I absolutely will because it is fun, but witty swipes are ultimately a pretty useless tool for combatting power (though there are exceptions). Concurrent global travesties make my personal tragedies feel very small: The ongoing starvation campaign in Gaza and more institutional backlash to anger at those crimes against humanity than at the crimes themselves, the accelerating wars on immigrants, trans people, scientists, and anybody who dares to fight on their behalf. Waiting for an epiphany that never seems to come — that moment of grand realization; the joltifying recognition of some shared humanity — it’s a wearisome process.

I understand, deeply, the inclination to veer towards apathy. It protects a person from falling victim to their rage. The thing is, all of those statements are true, and choosing apathy or optimism won’t change anything but my mood. People often ask me how I’ve stayed so positive, so certain of a silver lining somewhere, and the answer is that I haven’t. I’ve fallen apart more times than I can quantify, in different configurations and with different speeds. I have more questions than I have answers, and every answer I unearth is tainted by new quandaries to trouble me: what if the pendulum doesn’t swing back? What if I can never find work? Am I too preoccupied with asking questions to find peace or love or something resembling success? How do I fix this?

I don’t know if I want this fixed just yet. Maybe under everything I’m a bit obsessed with brokenness, of living inside that hard-to-define, jumbled up gray space… the puzzle of hardship. I admit that when it became clear I was about to lose my job I felt a rush of something; energy, relief, determination… the exhilarating realization that this endeavor might stump me, that I’m being sent back to the gray space. I’ve found comfort in the gray space… I’ve learned to recognize the specks of certainty and savor them, knowing they’ll sustain me for another count of ten.

I don’t know if this is just who I am, or if other young people face a similar challenge, but I struggle to articulate my talents as they relate to my career. It’s always the first question a person asks: “What do you do day-to-day? What parts of it do you enjoy most? Where are you strongest?” I always seem to draw a blank as soon as these questions are posed, I always feel as though I’m looking at a jumbled mess of letters and I cannot find a vowel anywhere. I think this is a painful and necessary part of being young, but the longer I sit in the feeling the more I worry that it could only get worse… Because somewhere in me I’m certain that I don’t fit cleanly in the modern workforce; in a culture of planned obsolescence and of profit over everything… the age of hustle culture. The age of barely disguised apathy.

I want to understand myself and the people I care about and the world at large, and apathy is not conducive to those ends. Therefore, apathy is not compatible with the life I want. I am no optimist, but I do know how to keep from chasing that numbness: the antidote for apathy is gentle curiosity. To have borne witness to death from all directions for so long; mass shootings, Covid, genocides, while grappling with the smaller but still real deaths of careers, of ambitions, of affordable housing, of possibilities… It is no surprise that apathy has infiltrated culture and become a self-fulfilling prophecy: an apathetic populace yields nothing more than status quo.

I like to sit on my back porch and listen to music at the days’ end, just before the NYT Games app notifies me that tomorrow’s crossword is available. I imagine myself tracing the outlines of the most flamboyant clouds and, when my universe is gracious, feel a gentle breeze wrap a flirtatious finger through my hair. I hear it every now and then and never recognized it until a couple of nights ago when my headphones died and cut the music but I didn’t realize: D.C. has a voice. Beneath the mythologization, the drag-performance of politics; an omnipresent humming of a spirit that cannot be dissuaded, the spirit that exemplifies this nation which, despite its many systemic faults, is full of people who want to live in a kind world. I cannot be audience to that voice and succumb to apathy.

Thank you for reading. If you found it worthwhile, please feel free to subscribe or share. As always, you can find me on Instagram and nowhere else on the Internet for now.

With Sincerity,

J.K.