“How dare you!!! How dare you make me the subject of your personal blog?!” This from a friend I did NOT write about on my blog. She was referring to a piece I wrote recently called Hate Wins. The piece is about a particularly upsetting experience that Hubs and I had on a call with two other couples. The blog outlines the back-and-forth exchange between myself and one other person on the call; however, I took great care not to mention anyone by name nor did I reveal any identifying information. The title “Hate Wins” drew more attention than my typical blogs. The person now calling me was not so much as a reference in the blog.
“How dare I what? How dare I write about my experience on my blog? I think that is the purpose of blogs, no? Besides, if you read the blog, you know that no one is identified and that I hold myself equally accountable for what happened.”
“No!” she shot back, “That call was supposed to be a safe space for close friends to come together and share! I don’t want to be the subject of your blog. You don’t realize what you’ve done! Words are powerful! There is nothing you can do to make this okay! I feel violated! I want you to never, ever write about me on your blog and, do yourself a favor, never contact me again either!”
Click. She hung up.
Man, oh, man! I cannot remember the last time I had a week that was quite this shitty. I know that, these days in particular, we are all a little more sensitive; I know that our reactions reflect our own demons, our own insecurities, that mostly these over-the-top responses are not personal, but this feels pretty darn personal to me! I kept thinking to myself, Wait, I am a writer. I write. I have a blog. And I totally protected everyone’s identities. And, as Anne Lamott says, “You own everything that happened to you. You tell your story. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”
The cause of this whole upset is that I requested a call entitled “Happy Hour” include more of the participants’ day to day lives, topics that give us a break from the hard and harsh news stories about the pandemic, politics, racism, protests and rioting. One of the members wrote back to say that she declined the request, that she and her partner are committed to peace, that they did not want to be on a call with people who didn’t want to talk about the important issues that are impacting them and our country. I both called and emailed her to explain that I am completely willing to have a call about the important issues; however, let’s have the topic of the call reflect that agenda. Let’s not pretend to be celebrating Cinco de Mayo or birthdays when the real agenda is current events. Her response was further criticism and a refusal to be to speak to me. It ended by her telling me to not reply back to her on this topic. The shock of this response aside, I also felt shamed and muzzled.
And, I have to tell you, I do not feel like my request for a Happy Hour call is all that outrageous as far as requests go. I mean, especially against the backdrop of the Black Lives Matter protests. I kept thinking, jeeze-oh-man, if making a request that a call among friends have a less dreary agenda results in this level of push back and silencing, the Black Lives Matter movement is doomed. How do we, as a society, as people who need to co-exist on the planet Earth, possibly negotiate the current political and racial divide when six well educated white people who have been friends for years can’t make room for their own differing opinions? And, as much as I wanted to wallow in my own self-pitying sandbox, there was some piece of my consciousness that kept reminding me what the Black Community is experiencing. I kept thinking of mothers whose black children had been killed, or the black men and women who’d been killed just because they were black. Cries that Black Lives Matter are so frequently met with ALL lives matter or criticism for protesting. And, while I am in no way saying that my experience is similar to that of the black community, these thoughts kept circling over and over in my head and were just so daunting. I couldn’t quite find my footing in this whole thing.
Then a miracle happened. It came in the form of a text from a kid who I knew years and years ago and this is what it said-
Hey mama bear💗💐
“I read your blog post and I just really wanted to reach out and validate your feelings. You have done everything right. You are beautiful. You are kind. You are wonderful. I love you. You are more than allowed to step away and take a break from everything going on globally to just enjoy a happy hour or whatever your heart desires AND you don’t even need to create a call to action meeting (unless you WANT to). You’re already a hero to so many. Allow yourself to grieve the feeling of a loss of a friend and realize that real loving friends hear and consider your needs and don’t use them against you. Don’t let this bad apple deter you from saying what you need or feel EVER to ANYONE!
If you ever want to FaceTime and have a happy hour just chatting about fun things we did this week, my line is always open ❤️💗🌻💐
Be gentle with yourself and go at your own pace. I’ve always seen all that you do and I’ll always advocate in return for you. Hopefully this help you take a deep breath, relax your jaw muscles and heal from everything you need healing from. I love you so much!!!!”
I burst into tears. Right there at the dinner table. Hubs, who has also been impacted by the reaction of our now former friends, who is also upset about the current political and racial climate, has been exceedingly concerned that anything either of us says or does might turn into an indictment. Hubs placed a plate in front of me and looked blankly at me for a moment.
“Now what?”
“Oh my God! You will not believe the text I just got from Sunny!”
“You pissed off Sunny?”
“No, no, no. I didn’t piss off Sunny. She read Hate Wins and sent me this text. “Here”, I said, handing him the phone, “read it.”
And right there in that moment, I felt my energy returning. I felt my conviction surfacing back, my footing more secure, all from this one text. This kid! This kid, who graduated from the high school that I worked at for years, reached out because she knows who I am. This kid, really this amazing young woman because it has now been years since she was a high school student, was adopted and raised by white parents in a predominately non-black community. She was never in one group in high school, but straddled many groups because she had so many facets to her. This was not some suburban kid who reached out to send me hearts and flowers. This kid knows what it is like to be on the outside not knowing what to do to get inside the circle.
A couple of years ago, Sunny and her boyfriend were walking down the street in New York when her boyfriend was jumped by an undercover police officer. The police officer thought they were part of a group of kids who were spray painting graffiti on the sides of buildings. In fact, they were on their way to a restaurant to have dinner to celebrate the end of the fall semester of college, and the completion of Sunny’s independent research project. Not knowing their assailant was an undercover police officer, Sunny pepper sprayed him. Both she and her boyfriend were arrested for assaulting a police officer. She spent the night in jail, and her family had to hire an attorney to get her out. This incident cost her a job that she was supposed to start within a couple of weeks, not to mention the thousands of dollars it cost her family in legal fees. The prosecutor offered a community service plea agreement, but Sunny refused saying that she wanted her day in court. We all feared that Sunny would end up in jail instead of the dorm room she was planning on returning to in the fall. But not Sunny! She insisted on her day in court. It turns out that the judge threw the case out! I thought back on this incident and just loved that this young woman, who could have looked at Hate Wins through any number of lenses – black versus white, liberal versus conservative, young versus old – chose to look through the lens of how important human connection is. She read my post, got how upset and hurt I was, and reached out to offer support.
Through my tears I texted back and tried to express the miraculous impact of her text. I told Sunny how alone I had been feeling and how, in one week, I felt like I had pissed off white people, black people, and gay people, and that I was just waiting for my Asian and Latina friends to join the Let’s Hate Donna Parade. And then she wrote back and said this-
💗” Remember, hate will never win baby. Never has, never will! The most beautiful thing about the fact that hate will never win is that so many of us are in this together against hatred, that you can take a break and come back *when you’re ready*. If you’re not ready tomorrow or even until next week- don’t worry we got this and your back covered. Don’t rush it. When your intentions are pure, you don’t lose anyone. They lose you. I love you with all my heart as well. “
The Universe has sent me many miracles over the years, but this one, I have to say, was really well played! This one goes down as one of the all-time best miracles ever. I knew immediately that I would have to write about this whole thing because I can see now that Hate really is NEVER going to win. Hate may be having its day in the sun now and again, but it isn’t really going to win.
I called my friend Melissa to tell her the story. She had been tracking my blog articles and had been getting day-to-day updates of what was going on with this group of people, how impacted I felt at the lashing out, how I kept reviewing my own behavior over and over and coming up short on all ends. It was so cathartic to be able to call with some good news, to have some piece of my own soul feel like it could take a breath and relax after so many days of stifling heaviness.
“What are you going to do?” Melissa asked.
“Do?” I was confused.
“Yeah, what are you going to do? Last week, when your other friend had a similar response, you picked up the phone to try to clear the air. Are you going to call this friend back and try to do the same? Are you going to email her? Or are you going to wait and see if she contacts you?”
“Oh, no, I’m not going to call her. I’m going to blog about it!”