(I cannot deny wrong-doing without doing the Mona Lisa Saperstein voice.)
This week on the Reformed Journal, something I think about all the time: the ways we pretend that we were always the way we are now, the harms of our failure to acknowledge change, why we’re so reluctant to be honest about it– “the fantasy of a creating a better past,” to quote Lori Gottlieb.
The trouble with my actual friends and loved ones, the people with whom I might like to celebrate, is that they have known me long enough to know that I have had all kinds of opinions and done all kinds of things that are at a minimum embarrassing, and furthermore clear evidence that I have been and done wrong before. And the trouble with the internet is that it’s so easy to find evidence of all the bad opinions and choices I have made that suggest that I have not always been the kind of Right and Good I am busily demonstrating myself to be now.
It’s just– harder to tell the truth than I used to think it was, both because the telling is hard and also because discerning the actual truth is hard, too.
Read the whole thing here.
Things I have been reading and thinking about:
This really helpful state of the situation conversation between
writer Sam Matey and about climate futures, science communication, and resilience. Please read! And if you’re around Ann Arbor, Mich., Dr. Hayhoe is giving a lecture on April 24; see you there.This long and meandering essay about art and vulnerability and growing up that I found somewhere–I don’t remember where, but it was soothing.
From
on Instagram: hang on to your hat.