a very nice man who was likely bullied in school far worse than I was—is the kind of omnivore who agrees with every vegan-themed post I put up on social media. Habit is the only thing holding him back from going veg, and I suppose he manages to put those thoughts out of his head when he sits down to dinner. But to me, this doesn’t seem so different from standing by silently while the class jerk beats up your best friend. “Teach us to care and not to care,” T.S. Eliot wrote in “Ash Wednesday,” and this is the paradoxical path of us sensitive souls: to care less about what the trolls and bullies say and think, and care more for those on the receiving end of the torment, even when they don’t look like us.
Recalibrating Your Language
Begin training yourself to notice the cruelty encoded in many of the words and figures of speech we take for granted. “Killing it” and “crushing it” have entered the popular vernacular as a way of saying someone is doing really well—but killing or crushing whom? (It turned my stomach to see the photo a high-school classmate posted of his two-year-old daughter holding a small fish at the end of a line. “She’s killing it!” he enthused. Indeed, she has.) Notice when you or the people around you inadvertently use language that demeans animals or other humans, and consider how you might express the same idea more compassionately: “kill two birds with one stone” can become “feed two birds with one hand,” “killing it” can become “acing it,” and so on. Colleen Patrick-Goudreau dives deep into animal-related language and etymologies in her Animalogy podcast, which I highly recommend.
Here’s another example, a line I love from Henry Lien’s novel Peasprout Chen, Future Legend of Skate and Sword: “How tenderhearted he is to love even things that are so different from us.” Peasprout is only just waking up to the truth of animal suffering; in the future she will not refer to animals as “things,” and she may say “who” instead of “that.” It may seem like a small matter, but referring to an animal as she or he instead of it de-objectifies and dignifies that animal (even if you’re not sure of the sex; I don’t know about you, but I’d rather be called a he than an it!)
Sticking point #8: “This market is so saturated that it’s more important than ever for me to position myself to STAND OUT.”
In early 2015, I met a friend of a friend with a presence that was warm and familiar, and when I found out what he does for a living, I felt a cosmic tap on the shoulder: you need to work with him. Tim is more than a coach or a therapist; his approach is a combination of talk therapy, life coaching, and energy healing, which sounds like baloney until you experience it for yourself. I wanted to tell more meaningful stories, to write books that would truly help and inspire people (in addition to entertaining them), and I wanted to feel that I deserve to make an adequate living from my writing.
In our epic monthly sessions, we worked on all that and more, and I felt more clear-headed and empowered than ever. But when Tim would say things like “I see you becoming a voice for the women’s movement,” a small but undeniable part of me wanted to shrivel up and hide under the futon, so we had to examine that too. Tim occasionally hosts personal-growth workshops at his home—a cozy nineteenth-century farmhouse north of Boston—and during the one I attended, we paired up and sat facing one another making steady eye contact, taking turns “witnessing” and “being witnessed.” When it was my turn to be witnessed, I gave in to the urge to take off my glasses so that my partner’s face was fuzzy. This way I wouldn’t have to look at her looking at me. “This is stupid,” I whined to myself. “What the hell is the point of this?”
Alfredo Meschi, Project X. Photo by Sara Morena Zanella.
By the end of the exercise, I was longing to remove myself from the room. I said “excuse me,” as if I were only going to the toilet, and instead I hurried down the long corridor to Tim’s dining room and ducked under his massive antique table, where I cried as quietly as possible. In my world, it doesn’t qualify as a revelation unless accompanied by copious amounts of tears and snot.
A little while later, Tim—that blessed man!—came into the dining room and sat down on the carpet beside me. “I thought it was odd that you seemed so resistant to that exercise,” he said gently. “Well, now we know you’re afraid to be seen.”
Even if you’re not a visual artist, I bet you have recurring images in your head just like I do—pictures I may someday get around to drawing or painting if I don’t outgrow them first. The most resonant of these is from my teenhood, a self-portrait in which my skin matches the pattern of the intricate William Morris paper on the wall behind me. A paradox still asking to be painted in oils.
It defies logic, I know. I wanted so badly for my novels to be “taken seriously,” yet I felt nervous and embarrassed whenever I received a glowing review or an invitation to appear at a bookstore or festival. I’d like to have a larger following on social media so that more people have the chance to read my helpful books—this one and Life Without Envy—but the prospect of having to manage the inevitable snark and trolling, perhaps multiple times a day, totally turns my stomach. I want to “stand out,” but it’s more important never to feel exposed or unsafe—or at least this has been my subconscious reasoning. When writer and cultural critic Jill Louise Busby posted a video in which she says, “We are obsessed with comfort and security, and that is not revolutionary,” I felt a sharp tingle of recognition.
There are several reasons why I haven’t been comfortable making myself “too visible,” too many to delve into here. The point is that we can’t fulfill all the good we’re capable of if we’re too afraid of being insulted or laughed at or willfully misunderstood. It’s one thing to “play small” to avoid making your partner, parents, or friends feel insecure (to the point of resentment, perhaps) that you’ve become more successful than they are; it’s an understandable impulse though it serves no one. But when you can’t find it in you to clear your throat and say what needs to be said, to stand up for those who aren’t able to stand up for themselves, you fall into line with all that is conveniently unjust in this society. Same goes if you are seeking recognition in order to feel wanted and adored—if your art ultimately benefits no one but yourself.
When we feel the drive to announce ourselves, to take up space and snatch a few precious seconds of attention for our work, it is a useful exercise in ego management to consider the forced invisibility of others. Hip-Hop Is Green founder Keith Tucker introduced me to the concept of symbolic annihilation, developed by George Gerbner in 1976 to describe how members of underprivileged groups are underrepresented and misrepresented in the media—if they’re represented at all—using stereotypes and denying individual identities in order to maintain our current system of social inequality. In 1978 sociologist Gaye Tuchman expanded on the concept, writing that symbolic annihilation manifests in three ways: by omission, trivialization, and condemnation. “That’s why you don’t see me on TV,” Tucker says. “You don’t see [hip-hop artist] KRS-One’s music playing anywhere. You don’t see other artists who are talking about meaningful things…it’s been omitted.”
But Tucker would agree that no one is less seen than animals in factory farms; as the adage (usually attributed to Paul McCartney) goes, if slaughterhouses had glass walls, most people would choose vegetarianism. When you look down at your breakfast plate, you don’t see the filthy crowded cages in the eggs or the dis-assembly line in the bacon. In your cheese or yogurt or veal, you don’t see the calf torn from his mother’s side, crying out for her milk and her warmth and comfort. It is a bizarre thing that an artist like me should want so ardently to be seen and appreciated while
