1 I saw this tweet in my Twitter feed last week and was so touched by it.
“I tweet because I have no one to talk to.”
2 It touched me so deeply. On one level, it was because she said it publicly. An inhibited part of me feels that saying something like risky or dangerous, that vulnerability -- visibility itself -- is dangerous.
3 I love as well that the tweet highlights her relationship with solitude – it’s not just "being alone," more of a state of awareness (maybe w/ some longing) that one’s internal self or inner life lacks a deep connection with or representation in others.
4 It's not an intelligence thing, not a positional or agreement thing, it's an "understanding" thing.
5 I had a therapist tell me once having heard some of my thoughts about individuals in relationships and society that I "like big ideas" and there's a "college kid" inside of me that "hasn't been let down by the world."
6 This man knows my biography: I was abused and or bullied literally the entire conscious duration of my childhood. My nuclear family has lived every adverse Liberal-porn social manifestation of American blackness. "Hasn't been let down by the world." 1
7 This therapist wasn't uncaring or dumb and the heart of this interaction isn't uncommon; this is a snapshot and flavor of my experience w/ solitude in general society. Understanding, empathy, wisdom, these are interdependent, interpersonal gifts that cannot be given entirely of one's own self, of one's "special knowledge," w/o any work done on you by and reflective of the fact of the other person.
8 But discounting the facts of others is exactly what we do. 2 This therapist had, as any of us seeking meaning does, knowledge of an anchoring worldview. But in hearing others' stories -- their biographies -- do we choose to filter those stories against our worldview or do we consent to doing the work of accommodating our understanding of our worldviews to include them? 3
9 This is The Work where understanding lies, the willingness to think, to not flatten in one's conceptualization a person to only a race, only a gender, only a religion or class, subordinating the easy or self-accruing thing I want to give w/ an ennobling grasp of who you are and what you need.
10 Anything else is "categorization," which also may be helpful, but is not understanding. In this way we're encouraged to count advice as wisdom and pity as empathy. And so I do and will (mostly) keep my own counsel.
- Jones, 2023-04-10
1 Those "big ideas" are some of the guts of this website: a rejection of 1) the ideologue reframing of victims' experiences in service of fairy tales that society is exclusively your friend; and 2) that we are each a congenital citizen, minion, follower, or vessel that can only observe, exist, decide things under some "greater" permission.
2 If I'm being really real, "Blowing by the facts of others so we can get to the part where we earn our social credit" is exactly what we do.
3 This is the idea that knowledge prevents thought. But to be clear, knowledge doesn't "prevent" anything b/c knowledge isn't a force. More explicitly: "People with knowledge often use it to prevent or exclude thinking." Which is also fine, b/c one's subjective space is one's own, it is the refusal to acknowledge that selection while performing it which is... bothersome. :)
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