Together Through the Dark

On Building the Third Places

I always share sky photos because I know that when I’m looking at the sky, other people around the world are looking at the sky too. It makes me feel less lonely.

I haven’t felt much like writing lately.

Part of my lack of desire is because I completed two huge writing projects this year, and I’ve felt strange about them both because I can’t really talk about either of them yet. One is a co-authored project already on its own publishing timetable, and the other is completed novel that no one other than me has read a single word of yet. I am very proud of both of these manuscripts, and both will find their paths eventually, because I don’t ever give up. But in the meantime, I’ve found myself sitting with a profound grief over these endings. I miss the work. I miss crawling around inside of them, crafting their landscapes and arguments, ferreting out all their intimacies and strange little corners. Without them, I feel lonely, adrift.

The other part is more obvious: the state of the pandemic, the state of Palestine, the general state of the world. I watch people in this country celebrate birthdays and attend concerts and go on vacations, and I’m having a hard time comprehending it. Everything feels frivolous, mocking even, in the face of what’s happening to Palestinians. Everything feels absurd in the face of a virus that has killed and disabled millions but that so many people seem determined to minimize or to completely ignore.

So much death.

So many bodies stacking up, scattered across our screens.

So many people around me insisting that life go on and on and on as usual.

It’s no wonder I’m struggling. Perhaps you are too.

This feeling is particularly acute now, in this strange, elastic window of time between two of this country’s most popular holidays and the end of what has been for so many a catastrophic year. That feeling is unlikely to abate just because the clock will take us into a new year tonight. Day after day, more bombing, more death. Day after day, the pandemic rages on, even though people have chosen to ignore it. With a grim election on the horizon, stagnant wages, the growing criminalization of abortion, the rising costs of food and housing, and so much more, that feeling is likely to grow.

This feeling has me thinking a lot about loneliness lately, something that, perhaps oddly, I welcome. I spent most of my life in a very white environment, and the world that whiteness constructs asks us to constantly perform normalcy, no matter how we feel, because whiteness—as scholars such as David Sibley, Rosemarie Garland Thomson and many more remind us—uses the white, physically and mentally “able” man as the reference point for normalcy, and everything else that deviates from that norm is considered somehow imperfect or inferior. Many of us begin, then, at a disadvantage under the constructs of white supremacy, and we struggle to keep up. Still, we are told we must be happy. We must act fulfilled in order to be fulfilled, no matter our challenges and no matter what role has been prescribed for us. We must always smile. We must always say we’re fine. We must go on.

It has been a relief since my divorce to begin to deconstruct this world and its influences on me. It is a relief to learn to resist whiteness, to embrace a politics of difference, even though it has distanced me from so many people in what I think of as my old life, even though I still have so much to learn and so far to go. I’m learning to embrace my imperfections as lessons to learn rather than as signs that I am inferior. For the first time in my life, I am learning to reinforce relationships with the incredible people who are kind when I do fuck up, who are accountable for their own imperfections, who understand the necessary work of relationship repair. I am learning to let go of the people who are unable or unwilling to do this work. For the first time in my life, I am also learning to sit with my emotions. It is a relief to admit that I am not okay, to understand that that does not mean that there is something wrong with me but instead a recognition that I am living in a world that is deeply fucked and deeply determined to uphold its veneer of happiness and manufactured normalcy.

My therapist helped me come to terms with the fact that I am responsible for my own loneliness. What that means is that I must come to know it as I do myself: I have to sit with it, reckon with it, and understand it in order to break free from its stasis, to learn to appreciate my solitude. But loneliness, as my writer friend Mordecai Martin pointed out recently, is also built into the fabric of our society because we have eradicated almost all of what he calls our “third places’; it has become a political tool of alienation and discontent. We don’t have enough places where we can all gather where we don’t have to spend money, or listen to someone’s proselytizing, or keep ourselves safe from COVID. We don’t have enough places that are accessible for everyone, especially if they live someplace other than a large urban environment. Instead, we have places that have been built and maintained by whiteness and capitalism, and if you do not find your place within them, you are told it is your own damn fault.

It is not your fault. It is a sign of societal failure. We cannot drink and eat and buy and fuck and travel and celebrate our way out of this. Whether we can admit it or not, we are all desperate for places that facilitate real connection, real solidarity, places that honor real grief.

I have managed to find a few third places in the midst of all of this, and they have been a source of genuine safety and joy in the past few years. Texts and phone calls with my dearest friends and with the person I’m in love with, who lives in D.C. My online workshop Craft Year. A Twitter thread of Louisville folks sharing pics of themselves drinking their coffee on Fridays and the lovely camaraderie that has arisen from it. My work with and contributions to orgs who are focused on helping our most vulnerable people. This space, although so far, I have used it somewhat sparingly.

One of the most wonderful third places I’ve been part of recently was on Christmas Day this year, where a group of eight of us gathered for my annual online get-together for folks who spend the holidays alone. For three hours, we laughed and talked over Zoom about loneliness and writing. And afterwards, I felt less lonely. I felt inspired to take action to support people who have been isolated by the pandemic and Palestinians who are desperate to survive. And I felt inspired and eager to write.

My hope for 2024 is that we can build more of these third places. My plan is to do some of that work on my own, because part of taking responsibility for my own loneliness is realizing its tremendous creative power. I wrote two books this year with loneliness at their very heart; I can help to build spaces where other people feel less alone, and I believe they can inspire us to continue to formulate resistance and continue to spread the wealth of care and support to others. We especially need more of them online. I’m thinking about ways to build one like what our group had on Christmas Day, and I’m looking at ways to improve the third spaces and connections that are already so meaningful to me. Because the world is a horrific place, but the only way we get through this is by reaching out, by holding space for one another and holding each other up, by having hard conversations, by doing every damn thing we can to support the people who need our help the most. And as I look for and try to build more third places, I’ve also started a new writing project. I will continue writing, even when I don’t feel like it. Because as I find again and again with writing and with life, we are always moving in darkness, and the only way out of it is through.

I’ll leave you with this piece I wrote for JMWW, which was published exactly three years ago and which I’ve been thinking about a lot in the past few weeks as this year has come to an end. A few things I mentioned are no longer—I now have my own place again, and I found love, beautifully, painfully real this time, much sooner than I ever though possible—but so much of what I wrote is still true. 2020 was a spell, and it casts on and on. 2023 is another, and it will cast on too. We are still rooted in place, even those of us who desperately pretend we are moving forward.

But I am with you. We are here, together. And someday, we will be animals again.

Meanwhile, the world goes on.

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If you found today’s post meaningful, please support an organization like Medical Aid for Palestinians or Jewish Voice for Peace, both of which are working in their own ways toward Palestinian safety and liberation, or contribute to an organization doing the work to support vulnerable folks and those in need in your own community. You can also always support one of my favorite orgs, Kentucky Health Justice Network.

If you’d like to stay in touch and to keep posted on the work I’ll be doing to develop a third place, please subscribe to this newsletter and leave a comment for me.