How do we write about ordinary things when the feed feels apocalyptic?

Finding balance as a writer

Prairie on Fire, oil on canvas by Charles Deas, 1847

For so long, I’ve started my days with Substack. Pour a coffee, still all bed-head, and open the feed. I’ve never liked or used social media, but Substack never felt like social media. It never felt like Facebook or TwitterX or heaven forbid, Instagram where I can feel insecure before I even jump in the shower because yay social influencers.

Sipping coffee, smiling at Gary’s clips of the kitten. Admiring Jill’s chicken art and Lorene’s colors. And omg Deborah, not just beautiful art but stories. Leo’s haiku and the stunning watercolor art of KL Rockwell. Allison’s gorgeous found poetry art and silly GenX memes that make me laugh. Viktor’s stories from Ukraine. You know?

I could link to so many more. People whose work uplifts me and informs me. People I look for if they don’t show up because the feed was drunk.

Just — humanity. You know? People. Art, stories, life.

But now? I’m greeted by ICE protests, Epstein files, hearings, indictments, video clips, people screaming at Congress to do something and clips of far-right men attacking children for protesting and it’s all just outrage threaded through outrage.

Sometimes, horror shows up with no warning. Children were buried where? Could you not warn a person before you post that yellow highlighted horror? But I get it…

We’re living in a world where Germans are defending Europe from American Nazis, the president is a pedophile and Congress isn’t doing anything because they want the money the billionaires who are also in the Epstein files pay them. And heaven forbid, don’t read the comments because the far-right trolls and Russian bots are just vile.

It’s not that the art, poetry, and stories aren’t still there. They are.

But all the horror — it takes a toll.

Here’s what some people say. We need more art. When the world is on fire, it’s art and storytellers who get us through. Write stories. Make art. And I get that. I do.

But also?

I have eyes.

Just like when I watched the Alex Pretti video. The Renee Good video. I saw what happened. Saw that it didn’t match what the government told us about them.

I have eyes.

I see the art and stories getting one heart for every ten hearts on a story about Trump or the Epstein files or Congress, or ICE or Minnesota or France going after Musk. Easy to say make more art, but that’s not where our collective attention is.

I get that, too. We take sides. We do.

Elie Wiesel told us why we must—

“Always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.” — Elie Wiesel

But it takes a toll. We are not made for this. Humans are made to run, run for your life when danger is imminent. Flee the fire or the attacker. And then breathe. How do you stop and take a breathe when it doesn’t stop coming? When it’s not just Nazis and pedophiles, but AI taking our jobs and rich men taking our healthcare?

But still. It would be nice if we could throw a little more love at the posts that bring our blood pressure back down instead of sending it up another number or two.

The toll isn’t just on writers. It’s on our readers, too.

I had a paid subscriber actually send a message to tell me why he’s cancelling his paid subscription. He said I’ve become too political. Little references in my writing. Stuff I re-stack in Notes. It’s all too much for him. Doesn’t want to look at it anymore.

He said I’m sorry. I really enjoy your writing. But I just can’t with all this.

I’ve seen people write Notes about that.

About people unsubscribing and many of them say well then, f—k you. I understand the sentiment, I do. But I don’t share it. I don’t share it at all. It just makes me sad.

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It’s not like this is new. Virginia Woolf wrote through two wars. Sat at her desk writing columns about parties and consciousness while bombs fell on London.

But it took a toll. Crept into her work. In Mrs Dalloway, the shell shock lives alongside the flowers and the guests. The mental toll and the ordinary share a page. The shattered thought process and wandering mind, you can see it in her words.

Before the war, Hemingway’s writing was romantic, journalistic, searching. Then he served as an ambulance driver in WWI and it shaped his prose. We talk about how he changed the face of writing, but it was war that did that. The clipped dialogue, the emotional restraint, his ice-berg theory of writing — that came after the trauma.

He said what isn’t said carries more weight than what is.

Think about that in the context of today, yeah?

Vonnegut, too. Before enlisting, he wrote typical narrative. Then he enlisted in the U.S. Army. Captured in December, 1944. Prisoner of war. He was held in a Slaughterhouse. Survived a bombing by crawling into an underground meat locker. And after the bombing, he was forced to remove the bloodied corpses from the ruined city.

He was awarded a Purple Heart and a Prisoner of War Medal.

It changed his writing. His post-war writing was dark satire, absurdism, nonlinear storytelling. The mind can’t process horror in a straight line, they say.

I could list so many more. George Orwell and Anne Frank. T.S. Eliot and Wilfred Owen. Walt Whitman and Tolstoy. Writers who lived through apocalyptic times and it changed them as a writer. Because how can it not? It’s not just war.

When I first learned I have ancestors who died in the holocaust I was horrified, started reading books to understand the world they lived in. Viktor Frankl, Wiesel and more. One book had a scene where two women were sitting at a table drinking coffee and watching as Nazis beat a man to death in the street and they just kept chattering, laughing, drinking their coffee. Oblivious. God save me from those people.

I look in my drafts and see the article about the magic of metaphor and the one about the most beautiful sentences I’ve ever read in a book. I don’t know how to see those posts in the feed tucked between all the horrors.

I don’t know how to be the person that looks tone deaf. So they sit.

It’s not even just that I hesitate to post them. It’s that I know the horrors are where everyone’s mind is. Feels like offering hot dogs at a vegan convention. You know?

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Charles Deas was an American artist, born in Pennsylvania. In 1847, he painted a piece of art called Prairie on Fire. It’s a man, rescuing a little girl from a world on fire. The horse is spooked, eyes wild as they flee the flames. Omg, people loved it.

Isn’t that what good men do, come to the rescue of a world on fire?

Today our feeds are full of men who threw little girls into the fire.

Interesting thing about Deas. He studied painting young, but found his way when he went to Wisconsin to visit his brother in the Army. He painted Native Americans, trappers, and members of the U.S. military.

Then he moved to St. Louis and became a frontier painter. Miracle of miracles, The National Academy of Design in New York recognized his work, elected him as an associate member. They hung his work in galleries across America.

His paintings had wide appeal so they had them engraved, sold them as prints. He was in the New York Galleries, had his work reproduced in New York Illustrated Magazine of Literature. On fire, in his twenties, and a whole life ahead of him.

And then at the age of 29 — he was locked up in an asylum. Against his will.

They say he got into mesmerism and went crazy and maybe he did. But the part most stories leave out is that right before he was forcibly institutionalized, he’d approached his backers and said he wanted to start a gallery of works to honor the struggles of Native Americans. The tribes he’d lived among as he painted them.

And then suddenly — he was crazy? Okay.

He still painted. Nineteen years, painting in the Bloomingdale Insane Asylum in New York. Painting art no one wanted. No one would show his work. They said the work wasn’t good anymore. At age forty eight, he had a stroke and died there.

They say history repeats itself and call it crazy, but his story reminds me of all the people unsubscribing from anyone who can’t look away. Unsubscribing from anyone whose opinion doesn’t match theirs. The work is no good anymore, right?

Times change. Technology changes. People, not so much.

I don’t know how to find the balance between the art and beauty we need so desperately and the horrors that draw our eyes. I guess no one really does. We’re just doing what artists and writers always have. Finding our way. One day at a time…

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P.S. February gift for paid members will be a list of 10 small mistakes that hurt on Substack. Because it’s never big things that trip us up, it’s the little things we don’t think of or see. It will be out late next week, so watch your email for it. 💌

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