Tag: tiktok

On Fatigue (or We Tired/The Struggle Continues)

Sometimes I just want to lay in a dark room with sleep music emanating from my iPhone speakers. Indulge in a facsimile of peace. A facsimile because there is no peace. Bombs don’t get fatigued. Quadcopters don’t need to rest and recharge. Warmongers are relentless in their march toward destruction. A starving child in a flooded tent in Rafah can’t turn off her increasingly aggressive hunger pangs. Her mother, electric with stress, attempts to tame her daughter’s ravenous urges with bread made of animal feed and a generous sprinkle of coarse salt. There is no peace.

I am so exhausted. Shall we all just lay down and die? Ok, on my order… 3, 2 annnd 1. 

I had a stray thought this morning. What if the genocide continues for another 100 days? What if? Do I keep writing? Posting? Sharing? When will we look away from the struggle? The obvious answer is that we must continue to bear witness. Our minds have become conditioned to process 60-second clips of information. And so, in the midst of this genocide of the Palestinians, hundreds of men and women traverse the muddy, devastated ruins of Gaza City, Khan Younis and Rafah to broadcast 60 seconds of bodies helter-skelter across blood stained hospital floors, or corpses partially trapped under the rubble. 

They upload reels of toddlers covered in ash and bleeding from the head. They post TikToks of bodies recovered from rubble and wrapped in those ubiquitous fuzzy blankets everyone seems to own. These are the milder images. The ones that give you a sense of keeping up with current events. Enough to confirm that war is hell and to satisfy the image that you’re a paragon of liberal middle-class respectability. Just enough consumption to trigger mild horror, but not too much that it kills your desire to sip a glass of cab over today’s Wordle. 

The content that really triggers the bone weary fatigue—images and live video that the New York Times and MSNBC preemptively sanitize and lock away in private archives—are images of the father carrying his son’s body parts through the streets in dirty, plastic grocery store bags, the dead premature infants rotting in incubators of the raided and then abandoned Al-Nasr hospital. Instead, Western audiences are cossetted with Israeli propaganda and soft-focus images of hostages taken from a Kibbutz. Interviews with aggrieved Israeli families lead the nightly news segment. In Palestine, everyone is suspect. Collective punishment is rained down to obliterate collective remembrance. 

There is power in the remembering. The retelling. The word must be passed and seeded into Palestinian soil. We must struggle mightily against the urge to capitulate to exhaustion. For those that survive the bombings, the massacres and the sniper attempts, a space must be created to pass the word. To name the thing (Genocide) and to drag the perpetrators (IOF) into the disinfecting sunlight. 32,000* Palestinians have been killed by the Israelis.

What do we owe each other as humans? In the absence of political power, do we mitigate our moral debt by paying attention? Each time I open Instagram lately I’m confronted by an image of a starving child. Jaundice and peeling lips and sharp rib cages are a grim stand-in for some mother’s beloved. The overwhelm is insidious in it’s seduction. How easy to simply look away. Close the app and watch an episode of Real Housewives of Wherever. Let the scripted, petty conflagrations weave a gauzy shroud of escape over my memory. Who does fatigue, and it’s cousin, forgetting, serve? Does it pave the way for the Israeli body politic to draft new frontiers, new myths, and new cultural narratives unchallenged?

One of the greatest accelerants of fatigue is hunger. Sustained hunger gnaws at focused resistance and replaces it with delirium. Israel has weaponized food access in it’s ongoing assault on anyone that would dare dream of a free Palestine. Those Palestinians that still draw breath move through Gaza’s destroyed coastal strip in a state of utter famine. Air drops packed with expired, non-Halal food have killed desperate Gazans. Those that don’t drown or get crushed to death seeking aid serve as Israeli machine gun fodder as they desperately swarm the trickle of aid trucks allowed in. The lucky ones escape with blood-soaked bags of flour. 

NPR

There have been at least 3 flour massacres in Gaza. The first in North Gaza at Al-Rashid Street (112 killed), the second occurred as starving Gazans waited for humanitarian aid in Kuwait Square (20 killed). The third was an IOF attack on an UNWRA food distribution warehouse (1 staffer killed and 22 wounded). In each scenario Palestinians shook off the fog of despair, if only momentarily, and rallied their will to live another day. They gathered at preauthorized distribution sites, only to be rounded like cattle and slaughtered by guns and hellfire missiles.

On April 1st, the West learned that even the umbrella of celebrity philanthropy can’t shield good samaritans from liquidation. 7 aid workers with the World Central Kitchen (WCK), traveling in a 3 vehicle caravan on a route approved by the IOF were struck and killed by precision guided Israeli missiles. Their vehicles were clearly marked, their movements coordinated and their bodies swathed in WCK badges and logos. No matter. They were agents of Palestinian survival. As such their lives were forfeit. The Instagram reels of their bloodied bodies laid in the dirt with a first responder shoving their passports into the camera lenses played on a loop until my eyes got dry.  My exhaustion was only narrowly defeated by horror and disgust that day. 

And yet, I remain a slave to conditioning. I click, swipe, scroll, falling deeper into a macabre highlight reel. It’s a form of self-flagellation. Each post shared is like a whip to my consciousness. A sharp intake of pain to jolt me out of the stupor of defeat. I cannot halt the funding of Israeli weapons. I haven’t stormed the halls of Congress to confront the Zionist sympathizers in Ralph Lauren suits. But I can keep watch. I can sit and let the horror of what’s happening in Palestine constrict me. I can write and contribute to the record.

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On Bisan

There were twelve thousand viewers glued to the livestream as I clicked into Bisan’s video. Wrapped in a baby blue PRESS vest and matching helmet, she huddled in a dark room at Nasser Hospital with 3 to 4 other Gazans speaking rapid-fire Arabic as drones buzzed in the background. Her tired dark eyes were grim and threaded with terror as she read the flood of comments across her screen. She plead with followers to educate themselves on Zionist aggression against Palestine and to demand a ceasefire. Automatic gunfire rang out as people placed virtual flower crowns and chintzy cowboy hats on her head. This genocide is being live-streamed. 

As I sat in my humid bathroom glued to the screen I had to remind myself to blink. To breathe. To pray. When would the moment come when a bomb struck her building or an IOF solider fired through the door? Would her connection drop upon impact or would we see her flesh blown apart in real time? Every 30 seconds or so, Bisan would wince or silently gasp as the artillery noise inched ever closer. As if to confirm she wasn’t trapped in a dream, she’d ask the viewers if they heard it too. Viewing the livestream was like floating in a sea of thousands of death doulas holding her virtual hands. We came to bear witness. If this be the bitter end, damnit she won’t be alone. 

The buzzing of the armed drones crawled deeper and deeper into my brain. I struggled to tamp down panic. The sort of panic that comes when you are body slammed by the sudden realization that you are utterly helpless in this moment. Chants for a ceasefire and protests in the street and social media shares cannot remove Bisan from the dark warrens of a hospital under bombardment. I can only watch…and wait.

25 thousand* Gazans have been killed since Israel began its campaign in Palestine. Thousands more have been wounded/orphaned/starved to death. To say nothing of the untold number of bodies buried under the rubble. The numbers are staggering. The sheer volume of killing lends itself to abstraction. Statistics about the deaths per hour and exponentially larger casualty counts mask the very human lives so cruelly being snuffed out. And so I clutch at Instagram Stories and TikToks and X feeds about the reality on the ground. I zoom in on photos. I learn their names. Motaz has hung up his journalist hat to turn inward and embrace his family as bombs continue to fall. Plestia, although she’s made it to Australia, continues to use her platform to foreground images of Palestinian joy amidst scenes of devastation. Al-Jazeera journalist Wael buried his son Hamza before dashing back to the ruined and bloody halls of a local hospital to report on the unfolding catastrophe on babies and other civilians. He was recently evacuated to Egypt (then Qatar) after narrowly surviving an IOF drone assault. 

Following the initial assault on Nasser Hospital the Israelis dropped Gaza into yet another communications blackout. I’d refresh my Instagram every hour praying for an update from Bisan. As I moved through the next 24 hours, time seemed to thicken and slow down. I struggled through what felt like an absurd work routine. Virtual meetings, Outlook notifications and production metrics provided a soundtrack to my dreadful anticipation of her death. And then there it was. An Instagram story from Bisan calling for a Global Strike from January 21st to January 23rd. She admonished us (me) to not despair, to keep up the fight against this second Nakba. Same baby blue PRESS vest, same matching helmet. Standing in front of a dirty mirror, Bisan spits in death’s face and affirms that after 107* days of genocide she’s still alive. 

Free Palestine. 

*The casualty count increases daily.

*109 days at the time of this writing. The assault on Gaza continues.

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On Fear and Failure

No one talks about the fear of failure. Everyone online is winning, crafting their aesthetic, a ball of success, laughing at bitches as they shine in their villain era. OR, they’re soft, it’s velvet couches, luxury loungewear and freshly ground coffee slowly poured in a Chemex. OR, it’s grind culture. Hustle harder boo. You have the same 24 hours as Beyonce. While ya’ll sleeping your favs are up at 5am posting #gymlife selfies and broadcasting lives about catching flights not COVID. TikTok and IG provide the scaffolding for my toxic voyeurism. Everytime I scroll, every new post or video is like a leather lash braided into my psychic whip. The intensity of my self-flagellation increases with every 30-second clip of a random stranger, someone decidedly aspirational with an opaque source of income living their absolute best life. I fucking haaaaate myself. I’m not aesthetic, my Peloton is a casual acquaintance at best and unlike every thinker/writer/scholar I follow on Twitter, I haven’t written anything in many moons. 

See, I’m ace at conjuring vivid and explicitly detailed scenes of my impending failure. And because I’m absolutely fucking certain that I’ll fail, because I’ve spent so many years living in that certainty, I’ve become frozen. Stuck in a cryotank of excuses. Well Zeba and Nikole have already written about that. You’re closer to 40 than 25 girl, the moment has passed. You have no audience because you don’t “get” personal branding. And for that matter, wtf does branding have to do with writing anyway? Writing doesn’t pay and the rent in Cali has you in a chokehold. But none of that matters because it’s already been written about, or currently being written about, by bitches that are smarter, quicker, more connected, bolder, than me. 

So I sit and I agonize and I mourn and I dream. Dream of actually trying to walk into the brilliance of my purpose before life inevitably snuffs me out. Mourn the wasted years when I could’ve been writing instead of burrowing into my depression. Agonize on whether I should just…..try it. In her Masters Class episode Maya Angelou said something that has stuck with me. “So try to live your life in a way that you will not regret years of useless virtue and inertia and timidity. Take up the battle. Take it up. It’s yours. This is your life. This is your world.” I burst into tears when I heard that. Her brown eyes seemed to be staring straight into mine as she spoke. Maya was talking to me. No one else. Her ability to excavate my soul and unearth the source of my affliction almost made me believe there is a god. 

So here I am. Writing this. A meditation on the price of fear. On paper I’m ok. I report to a 9-5 and get my share of raises, promotions and recognition. I’m a parent. I’m a spouse. I have a nice car. I live near the beach. I have lots of things and I want for nothing. For a girl born in crack-era Watts it’s a small miracle I’ve made it this far. But it’s all trash. It’s basura. I wake up, I wife, I mom, I work, I Netflix, I TikTok, I sleep. Capitalist America says lock into this cycle for another 30 years (or more) and then go quietly into that good night. 

The cost of this life has been utterly staggering. I float through days of middle-class respectability like a haint, just substantial enough to be felt, but not fully formed. Many people struggle with the “what is my purpose” question. Not me. Rather, I exist with the existential cancer of knowing exactly what will satisfy my soul, and yet letting decades slip by as I allow myself to be continuously dragged by fear. I’m exhausted by it all. I want to be blood, sinew, bone, hormones. A fully fleshed creature. And I can’t be fully fleshed unless I reject the conditioning that has me believing I ain’t shit. That I’m doomed to fail. That it’s already been done with a level of excellence I could never achieve. Fuck that noise. I’m taking what’s mine.

Posted on by Amber 0