Joy and Guilt Amidst Chaos

Before I go further, though, I should be clear:

• This entry is not intended as a comparison of our privileged woes against very real and atrocious censorship and suffering elsewhere. We understand that whatever we may feel pales.
• If you haven't gathered by now, this entry is vaguely political. While I don't think I'm alone in my opinions, I don't claim to represent anyone else's thoughts on the matter.
• I welcome good-faith discussion, but please be respectful in any comments and focus on the general message: how to balance living one's life, being happy, when it feels selfish to do so. Though reading is inherently political, this is not the space to talk politics.

External and Internal Climates

It's hard not to feel like the world is burning right now, or about to, and I'm speaking as someone who is experiencing no real day-to-day disruption (even as I stare at the horizon and expect that to change). Every day is not only a fight to sift truth and objectivity from falsehoods and bias, but a fight to balance despair and needing to do the dishes. Frankly, it's gut-wrenching to hear even the smallest piece of news about what's happening out there, either nationally or internationally. I applaud the folks who are choosing to act and speak up – frequently at great risk to themselves – for their fellow man. Among those folks are authors.

All public figures and creatives come under scrutiny and pressure to reveal their stance on all sorts of issues, and their response can spell career disaster (or, in some cases, success, even if only to certain audiences). Once you're of a certain popularity or wealth, you can often weather any backlash. Below that, however, the wise take pause. Unfortunately silence can often be interpreted as ignorance, apathy, or agreement with a shitty status quo. As consumers – readers, viewers, customers – increasingly look into the ethics of what they consume (as everyone should), it in turn becomes increasingly important for creatives, public figures, and businesspeople to be careful about where they source their goods, how they produce them, and how they engage with the world around them.

One way we may try to circumvent this is by being different people in different places. Everyone does this, whether politics is involved or not, to varying degrees. However, as I've begun to settle into my various social media homes and try them on for size, figure out who I want to connect with where, I've been seeing this choosing and masking in microcosm, intensified under the lens of how truly shitty the status quo has become across the globe. We – I – have to consider whether merely talking about what we're seeing or experiencing, much less stating an opinion about it, runs the risk of alienating our audiences or jeopardizing future opportunities. Nowhere is this riskier (in the industry) than with folks who are just starting out, particularly indie authors.

Guilt Over Joy

More than simply wondering how to cultivate our public image and our audience, though, is what happens when there's good news. The instinct is to share, of course! Victories can be small or in short supply at the best of times, and in the worst of times they can feel like lifelines that we want to share with others. But then a new dilemma arises:

Is it insensitive of me to laud my first sale in weeks, or my winning of an award, when families are being ripped apart by immigration enforcement? Doesn't it feel silly to talk about my new cover art when civil war still rages in Sudan? Shouldn't I use every character in this post to draw attention to the issues I care about, rather than talking about what book I finished last night? Alternatively, if I talk about bigger issues all the time, will my audience get compassion exhaustion – will I get burnout – because it's all just too much? If I'm silent about those issues, how will that be taken? And if I take one approach today, I still have to do it again tomorrow.

Again, some of us try to compartmentalize. It's why I have this blog. But compartmentalizing one's public-facing spaces doesn't do much to assuage the inner turmoil.

Joy Over Guilt

There are no easy answers, and no one-size-fits-all. Common wisdom of course is that you need to learn to take breaks, cultivate your online experience, and that we need fiction now more than ever. I want to dig into this a little more. Let's tackle the hardest first.

Yes, even in the face of the chaos and any guilt you may be feeling, you need to choose joy. You don't need to choose it every day – don't bury your head in the sand, don't put on false bravado – but you do need to choose it. You're keeping your strength up. Think of it as a mental and emotional gym routine, or a balanced diet: by seeking out the good, you are reminding your head and your heart of other modes of living and thinking – that alternatives to the shitty status quo exist. That it won't always be like this. That there are other possibilities, other futures. I say this as someone who fell out of practice with recognizing happiness and excitement when I was feeling it because I was either too skeptical of it, couldn't imagine why it existed to begin with, or felt guilty for feeling it. This is the type of neurological rut that can sway the course of your whole life if you let it – you musn't let it.

Secondly, joy is an act of resistance. By feeling it and expressing it to others, you're not only showing them that there's hope for better circumstances, you're helping them recharge. You're taking a long drink of cool water after working out in the sun all day, and offering that drink to others. It gives both of you the strength to keep going when those very circumstances – political or not – want you to fail. The circumstances are counting on you to be running on fumes. They're counting on you to not forge bonds by sharing with others. They're counting on you to stay in your head building false truths about the world, others, and yourself.

You won't become perfect at balancing things overnight, and I cannot tell you how you personally should approach when you speak up and when you stay quiet, but I can say that it's worth the practice, and we need to engage with the world believing that we won't always need these kinds of psychological survival skills. Because we won't. Fiction has already proved itself to be a template for progress, for goodness, but a template is useless if no one reads it. By reading – by sharing, by engaging in the best way you're able – you are perpetuating progress, goodness, and hope.

Choose joy, and share it when it comes. Resist.