Debbie Downer (pejorative) Discerning Debbie (complimentary)
ep. 02 - a reminder of the generous truth, my long-dead Jonas Brother fanfic, and learning how to want without consequence.
In a recent Subway Take**, someone pointed out that we weren’t supposed to look at ourselves this much. Everyone constantly has their phone camera ON, pointed at their face. This much self-gazing is unnatural, and it’s fucked up our ability to see beyond ourselves and to relate to others. Profound, yes?
I’d give it about a 6 out of 10 on the scale of social media wisdom. It’s just another practice in disguising self-reporting as knowledge. And that’s not really anyone’s fault, but just a measure of the zeitgeist. We are in the age of confessionals, therapy-speak, and loving away all the parts of life, ourselves, and society that lie embedded beneath the surface.
the truth is just an overlap
Here comes Debbie Downer, ready to dismantle everything, tell you that you’re living a LIE, and you need to be better at… what? Being better?
I come bearing well-meanings and, underneath it all, a hope for humanity. Yet I won’t pretend that there’s a surplus of spiritual, intellectual junk these days. “Think positively, Cara! Manifest the GOOD you want to see!” - Mainstream self-help to me.
Okay here’s the bright side: swimming in all of the bullshit/escapism/vanity makes wisdom almost impossible to miss. The single ring of a bell, a sip of the clearest water.
“The truth… is the intersection of all experiences,” Norma Wong, When No Thing Works.
How is that so bad? What the fuck is everyone so terrified of?
The mainstream self-love, self-discovery movement has become this incubator for realities, self-perceptions that are fed and oxygenated on a strict diet of good feelings, good self-perceptions. Everyone wants to love themselves into being ten pounds lighter, or into having friendships that don’t make them feel like doormats, or out of jobs that they fought to the tooth and nail for.
Does anyone ever leave the incubator?
Then comes the REPORTING, the confessionals. It goes like this: the more you spew your life into the camera or at your kids that didn’t ask or over lunch with your girlfriends, the more you become exempt from the actual work of accountability, which is often asking yourself hard questions. Everyone’s gazing endlessly into their phone cameras. Nobody sees that we are just trapping ourselves, in hyper-definition, in the pulsating stream of self-detailing.
Maybe we need less perfect mirrors: water in shimmering ponds, polished bronze. Would that help us articulate what we really want? What we really are, in this space and time?
wanting should feel GOOD and free
When I was 13, I authored a Jonas Brothers fanfic that was very dramatic, very popular, (200+ active readers was VERY popular to me. Still is.), and quite spicy (for a 13-year-old to write at least).
My parents were crushingly suspicious of the internet (and my broadening, adolescent curiosity and impulses) and 1950’s severe when I confirmed their worst suspicions: that I could not be tamed or shaped. It wasn’t a matter of IF I got caught or disappointed them, but WHEN. And when? WOW, that felt like every single day.
Weaving a spicy love triangle between my troubled and tattooed protagonist, Joe, and Nick (sorry Kevin, you were omitted by default!) was 100% worth the months of grounding and the thundering displays of corporal retribution.
And so was the birth of my concept of desire.
How many stars would be smacked into me? My moment of discovery always proved to me that I had guessed too few—my parents always had a few to spare. How many weeks of confinement? (An entire winter and half of spring, to be exact!) Would it be worth the disappointment, the inevitable embarrassment of giving them a teenage daughter who could not stop wondering and wanting?
13 year old me: Always. I would take a million stars for just a taste.
“One day, it will stop, but you will continue to pay.
Until then, the only safe place for WANTING is in your imagination and dreams.”
Wanting things and feeling good about them? I am a big, spanking-new baby at this.
Everything I’ve pursued and wanted has always been within the constraints of, “What sort of punishment will I have to endure to get this?”
My search for the OVERLAP of all experiences strains me. Don’t think that just because I write about this that I have mastered lightness in shadows. I’m just a girl. I too have to implore myself to follow the outlines, the experiences of my parents: my father’s own abusive adults and the mental oppression from an expectant uncle and jealous half-brothers. My mother, and the weight of her mother, a woman who was beautiful and cruel and probably didn’t want to be a mom, and be everything her two sisters weren’t.
Those are all there.
Just zoom out, step back. —Advice from a wise Aquarian.
But where there is yin, we must accept the yang. We must also zoom in, not to make our filters so closed, so claustrophobic, but to find space between the atoms and building blocks of what we experience.
Space to sow seeds of change, forgiveness, and hope.
My mom says that her childhood could be characterized by a Kelly Clarkson song, “Because of You.” The other day, I asked myself for the millionth time, “Why haven’t I been able to do the BIGGEST things I’ve truly wanted, in my heart of hearts?””
A sobering realization: I am also that Kelly Clarkson song.
I’ve been told that I’m independent, brave, and free. Comparatively sure, but still always within codependency, enmeshment, and fear that I will be inevitably punished. Whatever I really want will never be okay, so everything I’ve pursued has been within the constraints and support of the world I was given.
The punchline is also this: I have not been brave.
Somewhere down the line, the punishment worked and I gave up. I swallowed the pill because honor, predictability, and stability were easier. I was tired of paying in stars, in disappointment. Hence, a decade long stint of trying everything EXCEPT being who I was—going to back to school for architectural engineering when I despise math, getting a respectable, soulless 9-5 in which my whole job was spent trying to fool people into thinking I was helping them make MORE money doing useless things. Wanting so hard to give up, stop trying that I would agree to date someone whose lips would curl into that ratlike grin when he talked about my body (often) and who’d laugh about not having read a book since his senior year of high school. Just to name a few.
“What do you actually want?”
And then, following a tumultuous summer, I looked down and realized that my wings were clipped. Whatever flying I’d been doing for my entire adolescence, teenage years, and adulthood was just flapping in a cage. Deep down, I suspected this, but I hoped it would never reveal itself. I hoped I could just make it in the cage, that the cage would be enough.
To my dear reader:
When we ask for the chance to know who we REALLY ARE, all of the tenderness we hide becomes open to the air, its millions of dust particles, sunbeams, urban-smog, and the infinite waves of emotion, psycho-residue, and parallel timelines of what COULD’VE been.
So yes, the truth can be quite painful. Good fucking LORD, it can hurt. And the more significant the dissonance, the more resounding the SHOCK, the CLICK of everything aligning.
But think of all the things that are both TRUE and BEAUTIFUL and DIFFICULT TO WITNESS in this human experience, unable to be adulterated or reshaped or hidden.
The cry of a newborn amidst the blood, guts, tearing, and the nearness of their mother’s death that must occur to bring life.
The circle of life: fuzzy, pink-nosed little creatures, and hatched turtles that will be plucked from their nests to be chomped and swallowed as sustenance, so their prey can feed them to their own babies (that will probably become prey mere days after feeding) who will poop them out and provide support to a very important (!!) algae that carries the fate of the entire ocean ecosystem.
The sobering thought that this algae is shouldering more for the Earth than any B2B marketing agency, or tech mogul, or Kardashian could in several lifetimes—but it didn’t have a choice, that’s just the way the motherfucking cookie crumbles.
And of course, the clash between our inevitable fallibility, our never-ending potential for love, and our wanting Life to be good.
There it is: the intersection, the overlap of my own and everything that seems to be a practice in escapism, denial. We all want Life to be good to us and those we love. I see this in every human who falls asleep at bus stops, eats their lunch alone in food courts, works overnight jobs, or .
I see this and then imagine my mom, in her fears, yet also my most perfect memory of her: her looking back at me in our old green Explorer after I cried my eyes out on my first day of kindergarten.
I feel my dad’s disappointment and rage, but then the warmth of his uniform, braced against me in a hug outside of my classroom, back in Irvine.
I see this in myself, as I sit here, no fucking clue if my decision to be a writer and an artist will actually pay off, to anyone but especially me. Yet still with a tremendous amount of love for whatever I’ve got in this lifetime as a mother, a daughter, a sister, and just some fucking girl.
Goddamn it! We are really here, aren’t we?
There is space for it all.
finding the generous truth
Don’t pity me! See me! Learn from me! If that seems silly, then go ahead and pathologize this and me if you must. Go ahead. It feels good, I know.
I was lying around on my phone, watching Tiktok, bitching about Tiktok, and then bitching about my bitching about Tiktok. When did everything get so claustrophobic? When did all of our perceptions, problem-solving, and realities become so stingy?
Where was the generosity?
The art of finding the generous truth
Generosity is first, the act of giving, but more deeply, the decision that there is enough in the first place. Enough food, enough money, enough perspective, enough space. Sometimes, this will be a defiance of the physical evidence, but you will believe that when you dip your cup into the well, water will appear.
Also, it cannot be conjured in scarcity. Maybe that’s why it sounds almost inherently incompatible with something like overlap. I believe the mainstream notion of the truth treats it as something that mercilessly expands into the situation, crushing itself into each square inch.
But to be GENEROUS wouldn’t be about telling my poor little Jonas Brother fanfic that it can’t have this space. It’s not even about asking it to move over or deflate itself.
Generosity would tell us that another truth can be here, too, without the need to calculate the space it will take because there will be enough space for it to be and do whatever it has to do.
There would be no reimagining, writing in new details. No amendments either, but perhaps just a little push to see how descriptive we could get in what the fuck is happening,
and an openness to noting where everything touches,
eclipses the others.
Because what is dusk over the Golden Gate,
other than those brief moments in which day and night
stretch into each other
and hold the same space?
**I did not link this because what it is/who it was is not relevant to any of this, and I didn’t want you to get sucked into the black hole of social media! It was Rosalía, if you’re really curious.