By: Jane Tabet-Kirkpatrick
"Maybe it's not the fire that keeps us warm, but it's us" (Image generated by AI).
A friend of mine recently posted a TikTok that provoked some intense thought. The one minute snippet was an honest, emotionally charged, selfie-framed recording that broadcasted the anxiety of our times. She choked up as she asked her perceived audience: “We all agree, right? We are all seeing this right? Because I need to feel validated in my despair.” In the video she didn’t have to define what she meant by this, and I don’t think it’s necessary. We are all living through this. The state of the world, one that seems to be unraveling at exponential speed. Each year we wonder how it could get worse, what bad news can be unearthed, what horrid image will come across my phone screen, what atrocity of man will we stomach as we twiddle our thumbs. I understand screaming into the void, wanting the “validation in despair.” I wanted to write this piece as a long response, to say that I feel it too, I see it too and I want to try my best to validate those feelings, and offer some of my philosophical musings on how we deal with this.
I have been thinking a lot about how to impart some hard-earned wisdom in this piece without coming off as an all being, know-it-all from the future. However, none of this seems appropriate without examining how my idealistic and youthful evolution eventually gave way to my broader existential philosophy.
When I was younger, I thought I would change the world. I, rather genuinely, thought that I would fix all the problems that were going on around me and that it was (somehow) solely my responsibility. I had a slight gift of intelligence and I wanted to use that to its nth degree, to rectify all the issues that seemed so “fixable.” I had such extremely high expectations for my life that 12 year-old me would probably be disappointed. Sorry, Jane, you’re not an international human rights lawyer leading some crusade to save humanity, you’re twenty-four and live at home with your parents. At times, maybe even current Jane gets disappointed or discouraged by my perceived “failure”, but I have come into a Renaissance, a rebirth, a reexamination—a mitigation of my expectations.
In the new year, I proudly declared that I was on a mission to “reign it all in” . I was going to gather everything up and get it back on track. I was going to get it together, to work out, to eat better, to read more—I was going to get my life back. I had high expectations for those fleeting first weeks of the new year. At the time maybe I didn’t realize the significance of what I was saying. After all, it was made under a New Year’s Eve elixir (alcohol). But I think my New Year’s resolution actually pairs rather nicely with the response I was hoping to somehow give to my friend after seeing their TikTok; it extends more broadly to what I have experienced in the philosophical exercise of growing up. “Reigning it all in” feels like condensing everything, making it smaller, more manageable, and most importantly letting go of the things that were forever going to be lost to me. These things that were too far caught up in the unraveling for me to reach out and bring back. This year, I’m on a journey to mitigate my expectations for my life and the possibilities that exist. A major part of growing up has been growing out of the impossible visions for my future that bound me to the younger girl who believed that she was responsible—or capable, or even qualified—to fix everything.
The most difficult part of this growing up has been sacrificing a part of myself that thought I was limitless. Now I accept these limitations—I mitigate them. But, it doesn’t have to be melancholy; rather it is freeing. I want to clarify that mitigation is not synonymous with minimization; rather, I believe in the complete contrary. By implementing mitigation in my life I have realized that it is not so big and it’s not in a state of constant undoing. I am in control and it has made my life fuller, brighter, and more manageable.
But, what does that look like? For me, I have mitigated my expectations of what my real, literal, physical, non-virtual, and off-line life looks like. Ironically, the impetus to this entire conversation, a TikTok, has been the exact thing I have learned to filter out. Don’t get me wrong: I’m ON the internet, but I have made it a recent mission to anchor myself to my physical community. I have reoriented what is important in my life which is the community and people that surround me. I have tried my best to release the clutches of never ending content that reminds me of all the things that I can’t do and can’t fix and can’t help with. Rather, I can be here, I can help others deal with this. Ever since my “reintroduction to society” I have become kinder, attentive, and aware of how much good I am capable of. Maybe it's as simple as this: I can’t change the world, but I can change someone’s world. I’ll gladly admit that these ideas are simple—that we should be nicer and kinder to our community—but those are not totally ir-revolutionary and we sometimes need to be reminded of them.
In the comment section of my friend’s Tik Tok there was an outpouring of support. “We are going to get through this together,” someone wrote. You know the saying: misery loves company, and maybe we are all truly miserable, but we don’t have to be alone. I’ve made a deeper realization that, by and large, we are all living through the same life. To answer my friend's question, yes, we are all seeing this. Our individualism is not profound or unique, we are a part of a collective, a community, a society. We are all gathered around the fire of misery, but maybe it’s not the fire that keeps us warm, maybe it’s us. We can help each other, fix each other, and validate each other. We can be together in this.
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