It Shouldn’t Be This Hard. It is this Hard. What is Should?

Something started to bother me last night while I was DJing on the Current. Somebody random on twitter shared a photo of the Capitol Building under siege and pointed out that that event was exactly six months ago. We are asking so much of ourselves, and I am asking so much of myself, to just keep on grinding and meeting or exceeding or work requirements, our health requirements, our societal requirements. It seems like an especially important time to exceed expectations, we are in a period of upheaval where our country can come out better or worse, but has zero shot at coming out the same. But I find myself paralyzed towards any action I deem valuable.

I had the chance to interview I-Self Devine for the Current some weeks ago and he said he was so excited to be living through these times. It boggled my mind. But having known I-Self for about 20 years now, he’s been preparing for moments when revolutionaries, forward thinkers, change makers were needed. And they’ve always been needed, but their need is so obvious now, so tangible now. And I’ve had the exact opposite feeling about the past year. . .I am just an honest mouthpiece for how fraudulent our country is but I have no guts to change anything. I am an armchair thinker talking about it, but actual change? Hard pass. Too stressful. Too afraid of being wrong. Too afraid of being killed. Too afraid of being fired.

But that’s not who I thought I was. I did college in two chunks and my second half was probably close to 40% African-American Studies courses to make that part of my individualized degree. I soaked the content up like the adult college student that I was and I saw myself in the shoes of a lot of the activists in those pages. I remember looking at the young blond man holding his teeth into his bloody mouth with the cuff of his suit next to John Lewis. I thought, if this opportunity to speak bruises to power was available in my day, I’d be drying the blood up with my suit. But it’s come, and I’m not. I’m donating money, I’m speaking more courageously than expected for someone who DJs on a major station in a major market, I’m going to protests twice a year. But I’m not bloody. I’m not Heather Heyer, I’m not Deona Knadjek.

But I’m not in my own work in a way that in some sense in my mind would excuse my absence from this opportunity to change the world. I’m distracted at work. I can’t stay focused on the foods I was successfully eating everyday during lockdown. I can’t find my way to practicing bass or exercising after I put my kids to bed. I just deflate, I just clean the kitchen, I read three pages of a book and go to bed. I have so many things I want to do for Purple Current and the Current and I can’t. I can’t bring myself to do them cause I can’t find the hours, or I can’t find the motivation, or I know the support to do them isn’t there.

I float between these worlds of believing that the world is changing and that I can’t be a part of it because I’m raising my kids. I hate it. I hate feeling it and I can’t figure out how to forgive myself for any of it. My wife said she has a new understanding and a better understanding for fat people after living with me and loving me. I wish I had the same from living with myself. I am relentlessly disappointed in me, in what I choose to do and not to do. And that makes me addicted to the external praise, which is why I have worked so hard to excel in fields like music and radio that dole out praise profusely if you do good work. And I am now facing a time at work where I am getting a different sense of my self worth, financially, creatively and frankly holistically. And it is shattering me. It is shattering me to know what they really think of me. And how do you make sure you think of yourself the right way. . .when in fact you never have thought of yourself the right way. So now your self confidence declines further, and now of course it’s harder to not have two cups of cowboy caviar while Scott Van Pelt talks to Mark Jackson. And of course it’s harder to not get the big at Potbelly’s. And you got a job that you always thought was cool, you sit at a desk you always thought it would be cool to sit at. . .and it is cool. But your stepmom doesn’t think it’s cool, and that can stay in your brain way longer than your neighbor saying you have the coolest jobs in the world. Ultimately you are out of phase, you are torn and you just wonder if anyone else is thinking “100 people died of heat stroke in. . . . . . .OREGON, in OREGON” , , ,there are headlines everyday that I think would be the biggest news story of 1995 or of 1925, but they last three days we move on. There are body parts being distributed slowly across parks in Northeast Minneapolis. It’s now bigger news if police aren’t wearing cameras when they shoot and kill a young black man but the verdicts are largely the same, camera or no. We are in a churn of nightmares on a rapidly heating planet and it’s hard to just keep on making plans with friends and deciding who to interview on the radio.