The cliff! The canyon! The swirling horrors?!

Hey everyone,

Hope you’re hanging in there. We’re now two full months into me writing to you like “hey, so, there’s a genocide happening and it feels unhinged to send u a podcast newsletter in that context but here I am anyway.” And yet, here I am, once again!

I am so sad, so sad, so sad, so sad, so sad, so sad, so sad, so sad. I am reining myself in because the whole newsletter could just be me saying so sad 18,000 times, or 2.2 million times, or maybe billions of times, just to be safe. So sad.

And also! I am getting better, over the years, at holding multiple realities in my head at once. Unimaginable horrors are taking place all around us, AND, personally, I am having a nice day. Sort of, mostly. Except for, you know, the horrors. But other than that!!!! Things are good. Ha ha.

I’m about to spend ten days celebrating and traveling and seeing loved ones across three states. It will be very exhausting and, I expect, very very good. (I will, hopefully, eat so many burritos!) And also, this is what will happen many times over the next week and a half:

I will see a friend, and I will ask, “how are you doing?” and they will say “oh, you know, terrible,” and we will both do a big shrug, because it all IS terrible and yet! We are also about to have a nice time together. We will talk about our little lives, and our little schemes for the future, and at some point we’ll find that we have walked our conversation right up to the edge of the cliff, and we’ll look down over the edge and into the canyon at all of the horrors swirling around down there. There are so many Horrors! They take up so much space. We always find ourselves there eventually.

We’ll stare silently into the depths of the Horrors for an unknowable amount of time, and then someone will say “It’s almost like everything is incredibly bad!” and the spell will be broken, and we’ll try to figure out how to go on. And soon enough, we’ll be talking about our little lives again. Like, look, it's not all bad. We have these burritos. And, hey, my friend took a weaving class! She loved it. Good for her.

A version of this has unfolded in almost every conversation I’ve had with any friend in the last, oh, several years. Nobody is doing it on purpose. But all roads eventually lead back to the Cliff, and the Canyon, and all the swirling Horrors, and you gotta wave down at ‘em, and then you gotta keep going. You can’t stay at the cliff. You can’t stay away from the cliff. You have to, somehow, do both at once. The world is heartbreaking and devastating and unfair, AND, you’re going to have a nice day, maybe, mostly. Every day takes figuring out all over again how to fucking live.

That’s it for this week. Here’s your Weekly Rhubarb. It’s one of my all-time favorites, and I hope it brings you a moment of peace.

Photo: Ruby sleeping peacefully in a patch of sunlight on a colorful, warm blanket.

Xo,

Yr resident gender detective

PS: PS: Our Palestine + trans solidarity fundraiser is extended through at least Dec 17. The nonbinary model and activist Rain Dove is also providing on-the-ground cash relief to Gazan refugees; you can learn more and donate here.

PPS: It’s been hard to figure out what music feels tonally-appropriate but I’ve been listening to this playlist a lot, if you care to join. (Fuck Spotify, obviously, but that’s where it lives right now sorry!)