“Fly dove, sing sparrow! Give me Cupid’s famous arrow!” Thoroughly Modern Millie.
It’s clear to me now that humans just want to belong. It’s the thing they want most, to be included, to be involved, to be inside. To be the circle’s center or circumference. This tendency towards tribalism explains almost everything both right and wrong with our societies today.
Political parties, solidarity, Twitter mobs, support groups, the family, the shared sense of being from a certain city—all draw their power from this essential tendency. So it follows that if we make a heaven of any given circle then hell must be the outside: the outer darkness.
Rejection.
Second only to humiliation, rejection stings human beings like a sword through the chest, and it is just as unmooring.
Those that critique the existence of “cancel culture” fundamentally misunderstand its aims. They claim that because no one loses their job, because a famous person remains famous, or because our hearts continue to beat that no one has been canceled. That’s a colossal error. The point of cancel culture is not the snatching of checks and opportunities, that’s just a fun byproduct. No, the point is rejection.
There is no bigger circle to be thrown from than your own community. Beginning your day as comfortably cool and ending it as a social pariah, it must feel like the common earthworm being snatched from his tacklebox and skewered with a steel hook.
And there is no smaller circle than what he and I had. Just two writers swapping stories, paragraphs, pithy little nothings. Most of the work was his (almost everyone’s output is greater than mine). But we shared many more things: like our past together, like our hands intertwined, like his mouth on mine.
We did not share a city, but it was alright, because we’d see each other every now and again. A coffee here, a gift there, and even a real date once.
He came to my house again and I received him warmly and our physical relationship touched new shores. He gave me a gift, a graphic novel whose dustjacket I tore trying to open the wrapping paper. Even now, gifts from him feel like an honor.
Later, when halves touched I sensed a reluctance in him, and ultimately we spent our time talking before he left. Something felt wrong.
His text message a couple days later began:
I have been thinking. I know you want to please me, but—
I’ll spare you the rest. It’s not that important. Know only that it was not a sword and not a hook but a needle. Sharp. Hot. Not suturing my heart but wounding it.
He said we should stick to nonphysical things. There was no way to read it but as a reset: from the casual lovers and creative collaborators we’d been this past year back to friends. I felt cold all over and hot inside.
So this was the outer darkness.
In his song “Evergreen,” Omar Apollo croons, asks: “Was there something wrong with my body? Am I not what you wanted, babe?” And in my heart I’m asking the same thing. My text messages were curt. Hard periods.
My feelings were tacit, and his plain.
It can’t be my technique, we’d hardly done anything, and yet I cringe thinking about the conclusions someone could draw from reading this. Beyond that familiar fog, I’m sure it’s not my body—but in the moment I can’t see past my own cloudy vision. Something I said? No, no. Perhaps it’s like a square peg and a round hole.
The needle burrows deeper.
It’s not really about him. I have other partners. He’s just a variable. Just an X. But his inclusion in a familiar formula triggers processes destined to repeat over and over again. “Is it me?” I ask the calculator as I crunch, crunch, crunch the past twenty years of these rejections.
Is it me.
Is it me.
Is it me.