Our collective kid is being bullied
And we just have to watch it happen. Plus: Anger! Resentment! Malkovich!
I give speeches. I could maybe do one for your organization. Here’s a new one I’ll be doing that is timely.
THE OTHER HEALING: TRAUMA AND MENTAL RECOVERY AFTER COVID
The impact of COVID-19 is usually measured by infections, hospitalizations, and its economic devastation, but even those who do not personally contract COVID must grapple with long term mental health consequences. Long after a vaccine emerges and spreads, we as a society will need to deal with our trauma going forward. You simply can't go through all that depression, anxiety, despair, and disruption unscathed. In a new talk that can be presented virtually or in-person, author and podcaster John Moe explains how to understand our individual and collective suffering and what can be done about it. Drawing from his experiences and conversations around simple and complex trauma, John tries to understand what it means in the short term, what it means in the long term, and how to address it.
On kids, COVID, and soft-spoken yet menacing character actors.
I remember years ago, seeing an interview where John Malkovich said that if anyone hurt his kids, he would be willing to kill that person. The interviewer was taken aback. Sure, Malkovich always seems intense in performance but kill someone? Is the veteran character actor justifying homicide?
As soon as I became a dad, I totally got it: it’s not a statement of a readily available willingness to kill, it’s a recognition of an instinct that spans many species around the world. You protect your child and you seek to eliminate threats to that child so that said child may grow and prosper and perpetuate the species. It’s a drive, as sure as the sex drive that put the child there in the first place.
I’ve been thinking about that issue a lot during COVID-19 because among all the other horrible things the virus is doing, it’s hurting children. It’s trauma. It’s causing damage that will linger long after the vaccines are widely administered. I have friends who are teachers and have kids of their own and the reporting is universal: shit’s fucked up. The kids are miserable. Their attention is shot, their anxiety is through the roof, and learning is difficult or impossible. Kids are constantly worrying that they will die of the virus, that a family member will die, a friend or neighbor will die. And if they don’t lose actual humans in their lives, they’ll lose things like graduations, trips, and other plans. Sure those things aren’t as heavy as death but they are part of a threatened future. The entire future.
Our kids are getting hurt.
But there’s no one to counterattack. We can feel a ton of ire at the recently-defeated President but you can’t physically attack him or even yell at him in person. He wouldn’t hear you and wouldn’t comprehend it if he did. If he could understand the suffering of others, we wouldn’t be in this situation. You can be angry at COVID but you can’t throw a punch at it. You can curse God like some character in a very old play but that’s not doing you any good.
We adults - not just parents but any adult who recognizes the need to help kids - still have that Malkovichian instinct to destroy the threat, to fight back on the kids’ behalf. We just have nowhere to put it. We’re a covered pot at full boil.
And we need to know that about ourselves. As the adults in this society we need to do all we can to protect kids during a pandemic but also recognize the raging frustration about not being able to do more.
It sucks but fully knowing how and why it sucks can make the effects of suckiness less problematic. I wish we could karate attack the pandemic.
Does carrying a grudge build up my back muscles? No.
In looking up John Malkovich and trying to find that interview, I saw that he had studied acting at the William Esper Studio in New York. When I learned that, my brain instinctively started tearing Malkovich down. “Malkovich kind of sucks, actually,” a voice in my brain said about an actor I’ve admired for a long time. He does not suck. He rules. I dismissed the dumb voice immediately but the thought had crossed.
What was going on there? A heavy grudge I’ve carried for years.
When I graduated college, I headed straight for the MFA acting program at Rutgers University in New Jersey, which was headed by Bill Esper. I was dazzled by his long resume as a master instructor of the Sanford Meisner method, which aims to produce actors rooted in truthfulness instead of being showy or fake. I wanted to be a gritty and largely humorless New York actor, the kind he created. I had loved comedy and loved big showy performances, yet I sought, I guess, self-annihilation.
Turns out Esper, at least by the time I “studied” with him, was a paper tiger. A front, really. At Rutgers, other much more committed teachers did most of the acting instruction whereas in his class, Esper would tell the same very old and always confusing anecdotes over and over, allowing maybe 20% of the time for actual acting exercises. And he was verbally abusive, believing the key to making an actor good was to tear down their existing sense of how to make art in order to reconstruct it in accordance with his own vision. After two years of frustration (me with myself, me with them, them with me) I quit the three year program and they asked me not to return. A divorce.
I went away stinging at the frustration and rejection of it all. It was humiliating because I’d been had. I fell for it. Fell for him. Got suckered.
I’ve carried that grudge, that anger, ever since, though I’ve worked on it a lot in recent years. When William Esper died last year, I took notice of involuntarily feeling glad. I take no pride in that. I take no shame either. You can’t control how you feel, you can only control how you act on those feelings.
It is awful to carry that much mental weight for so long. It’s exhausting all the time. It sucks to spring into a defensive, angry mindset when doing something as simple as Googling John Malkovich. And no, Googling John Malkovich is not a sequel to Being John Malkovich.
The truth of my situation was that I had some limited capacity as an actor and the program ran against my fundamental beliefs on art and humanity. I should not have been there and then I wasn’t and that was fine. I needn’t have lugged my bitterness along these last 30 years, but the longer you lug a grudge, the more it gets built into your spine and the harder it is to remove.
The Pepsi Challenge but with relatives.
Because of COVID, many people are not spending holidays with their extended family. And it gives you a chance for a little A/B testing. What about those people you always spend those holidays with? Who among them do you WANT to spend holidays with and who do you feel like you’re SUPPOSED to spend holidays with? I know it’s not that simple in real life. But I encourage you to at least think about it. You’ll have plenty of time and more solitude.
And now, Wikihow photos from articles about dealing with obnoxious relatives.