happy easter, the world is ending

marketing the apocalypse, etc.

I had a dream last night that it was the apocalypse and I was in an abandoned house in Detroit and it was the middle of the night and there were people wandering the streets whose minds had been rotted; who babbled demonically and had odd slanting smiles, empty eyes. Everyone had lost themselves, everyone’s intent was survival and murder and everyone had gone so far inside themselves that there was no way to bring them back. I was trying to leave the abandoned Detroit house and make it home (my childhood home, which is always my home in my dreams) when a woman with a glowing third eye started to walk towards me and then I woke up and went to Easter service.

Lent has been long and furious and strange. I’ve been spending late nights scrolling and long mornings scrolling, panicking. I’ve been waking up from incoherent nightmares to grasp for my phone, hoping that the blue light will launch me into the day with something akin to energy, but instead I stay, nestled, for 10, 20, 30 minutes, scrolling. I start with news and move to Instagram, oscillate from comfort to despair to comfort and back again. I deleted NPR and downloaded the BBC app in the hope that a global framework would somehow make the news less frenetic, but it hasn’t. And either way, there’s nothing to temper the freneticism of Instagram—the poems, the factoids, the children and animals and memorials for the dead, and, more recently, the ads for bug out bags, for martial law kits, for basic emergency training.

Maybe you too have noticed that the end of the world has become a marketing opportunity; maybe you too have noticed that most every video I scroll past on Instagram that urges me to “plan my escape” and “start thinking ahead, before it’s too late” also offers me a code I can use to discount the services of that particular creator as they tell me about my Quick And Easy Visa, Top Ten Places to Be a Digital Nomad, Three Quick Ways to Get Residency, The Best Five Countries where your dollar will stretch the farthest—never mind the apocalypses already happening there, spurred on by the weight of your American dollar.

Your apocalypse, these creators say, is not guaranteed; your apocalypse can be avoided if you’re smart, and savvy, and making at least 30,000 a year from online income.

The apocalypse of your staying can be avoided, too; I discovered “Prepper Reddit”, which declares that if “SHTF” (shit hits the fan), there are the poor people who haven’t planned and then the folks who have got it figured out. Hoard your food, hoard your water, buy a go bag, buy two, stock up on canned goods, stock up on toilet paper, fill your car, have back-up gallons of gas; buy a gun, buy two. Good defenses, Prepper Reddit says, will become essential at the end of the world.

At 4am some night last week I fell into this, I broke my Lenten Amazon boycott to buy a camping stove and a hand crank radio. I listen to it in the mornings now; it solar charges on my window sill and plays Latin pop music.

I keep canned goods in my front closet now. I took MREs from the food pantry where I work. I’ve started to fill empty bottles with water. I thought it would comfort me, but truly, it’s made me feel dirty.

The market for the apocalypse is fueled by deep hunger and predicated on the idea that the only goal a person should have in an apocalypse is survival. The market for the apocalypse is insistent that, at the end of the world, your only priority should be yourself, your preservation, your continuance, continuance, continuance, whatever the cost, as Nick Laird would say.

But continuance is a myth, a myth predicated on myth. The myth of the safe country, the myth of the perfect go-bag. There is no item you can store, no place that you can go, that will guarantee your safety. We were in danger before there were presidents. We were in danger before there was war. To be alive is to be in danger. To be alive is to be certain that one day, you will not be.

I’m not saying survival isn’t a good goal for the apocalypse. But it seems to me like an incomplete one.

I think here of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, of Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi; I think of the journalists and aid workers killed in Gaza, about how much worse their chances of survival became when they chose the risk of documentation; I think of the trans and queer people who lived through the twentieth century not with stealth, but with risk, with aggressive, insistent “visibility” before that word meant rainbow merch and corporations at pride; when that word meant choosing to walk down the street with the person you love even if you knew that it made it less likely that both of you would make it to the end of the street. Or the AIDS crisis, its own apocalypse, where survival became less important than loving who you could, while you could, and making sure those that did die didn’t do so alone.

I’m not advocating for martyrdom; I’m not telling anyone to be casual with their life or their love for their life. But a lot of the hysteria that I’m feeling at the moment, some of which I think is also collective, I’m realizing more and more, is justifiable only under a set of priorities that sees fear and pain and loss as The End of the World.

But they are not.

This morning, at the Easter service at the church where I work, I talked to my teens about death and heaven, what they think happens after they die. Support for heaven was about fifty fifty. All of the teens who believed in it were in agreement that there’s no way to know exactly what it is til we get there. One teen said nothing happens when we die. Another said they think we get reborn, but lose our memories, which in his mind, is the same thing as dying. One said that they found the idea of heaven stifling; what do you do, they asked, when all the emotions are good? Does it sound boring, I asked, and he said yeah, yeah it does.

I don’t want to die but I don’t want to shape my life under a set of rules where if I continue, I win, and if I risk, I lose.

Survival and resurrection are not the same thing, continuation does not mean there will not be death, continuation demands death because life, genuine life, demands death; infinite sameness is not the same thing has being alive.

Last year, I heard for the first time, Franny Choi’s apocalypse poem about all the ways the world has ended, and the world keeps ending (you can read here), which is a reminder of the fact that there are constantly worlds ending, contant, ongoing apocalypses, people around the world who have lived and died or are living and dying in conditions of apocalypse, in Sudan, in Lebanon, in Russia, in Hungary, on the streets of Brooklyn tonight and in Brooklyn’s hospitals tonight and in Brooklyn’s apartments tonight, where surely there is death and despair, surely there is nothing new under the sun, Lord have mercy.

Idk. I think I started writing this bc I was tired of apocalypse influencers and tired of my own lizard brain panicking about an American condition that is far more existential than particular and material and now I am ending it feeling slightly worse than I did when I began.

But the core of what I’ve been finding hope in, the core of what I’m attempting to write about, at the end of Easter, at the end of a long and despairing Lent, is the knowledge that the physical world and physical death is a limited understanding of what our reality is; that there is life beyond this moment, and the energy we choose to conduct ouselves with has a life of its own that is in fact eternal. There is more grace in the world than I can ever possibly understand, and there is abundant grace and compassion for my wild and feral lizard brain; but my goal is to borrow and learn from the grace of the world so that I can grow into a being that is less afraid, not because there aren’t many things to be afraid of, but because the thing I am most afraid of, my own non-existence and the non-existence of those I love, is sort of guaranteed, and the only way to endure that is through grace, through faith, through belief that the grace of the world, the grace of God, stretches beyond death, understands it, redeems it somehow; not with false optimism, but with a truth so heavy that it transcends the momentum of my despair, with reality so dense that it undoes me.

Which is all very esoteric. Mostly, lately, I’ve been breathing. Count 4 in, 4 out. Make a square with your in breath. Make a square with your out breath. Pretend there’s a candle in front of your lips. Recite the names of everyone you love. Think of 5 happy memories. Put your hands on your own shoulders. Put your hands on your own heart.

There’s an exercise in Buddhism I’ve been practicing where you touch your left hand to your right and let your left hand love your right hand with compassion until it’s full, and then you switch the hands and do the same thing. I have had hands laid on me before, powerfully so, but have never had that experience from laying hands on myself before, until now. I do it while I’m driving, I do it while I’m sitting, I do it when I have panic attacks, and it does, wildly, feel like healing, like the closing of a circuit. It feels wonderful. It feels full. It makes both hands feel somehow better.

At the end of the world, if there is one, when there is one? I would like to be a hand loving other hands, not only my own, and getting love out of it.