It's funny, so often I find myself going to an artist's or author's website and getting irritated that there are no recent updates about their work, no news about new publications, no links to interviews or press coverage. These are things that I am always looking for when I'm doing research for an upcoming podcast episode or even when I just want to do a deep dive into the archive of an artist I admire. And yet, of course, on my own website the blog languishes for months at a time with nary a whisper of the things I've been up to. Presumably, if you're bothering to look at my website, you'd want to know what I'm doing, yes? So I'm going to try to commit to more regular updates.

Speaking of which, there's a new episode of Keep the Channel Open up today, featuring my conversation with photographer Ashly Stohl! I've long admired Ashly's work and not only because we both make images of our families—she brings a visual aesthetic to the genre that I don't often see, more influenced by street and documentary photography than by portraiture. And humor! So often that's missing from personal work, or just art in general. We talked about her books Charth Vader and The Days & Years, about artistic collaborations, about how to sequence a photo series, and about the difference between New York and LA. I hope you enjoy it!

As you might guess from the title, I’m going to talk about politics in this one. If you want to skip it, there certainly won’t be any hard feelings on my part.

This morning Special Counsel Mueller gave his first and possibly only public statement about his investigation into the President’s obstruction, and to my ear he made as direct a nod to impeachment that he likely can make, noting that he did not clear the President of wrongdoing, that he wasn’t allowed to accuse the President of wrongdoing, and that if the President were to be accused of wrongdoing that “the Constitution requires a process other than the criminal justice system.” Shortly afterwards, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi issued a statement that paid lip service to the idea of holding the President accountable but very clearly and pointedly highlighted legislation and specifically HR. 1 as Congress’s call to action. Legislation, not impeachment.

Mind you, a bunch of Democratic Presidential candidates are now openly calling for impeachment proceedings to begin. And House Judiciary Committee chair Jerry Nadler responded to a reporter’s question about impeachment by saying “With respect to impeachment, all options are on the table and nothing should be ruled out.” But the Democratic House leadership and particularly Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer are still resistant to starting impeachment proceedings. And a lot of centrist Dems, including my Congressman, want to focus on things like healthcare, immigration reform, and infrastructure. The idea being that impeachment is too politically dangerous and would rile up Trump’s base (and, apparently, undecided moderates), while focusing on legislation would show the American people that Democrats will actually solve problems and govern properly.

That’s a very lofty and high-minded approach that, in my opinion, is most likely to result in a second Trump term.

Here’s the thing: legislation and policy are very important and have real, lasting, material consequences for people’s actual lives. But most people don’t know that and don’t care. The only people actually paying attention to legislation are politicians, lobbyists, and people who have already made up their minds about the President one way or the other. (Yes, I pay attention to legislation. Yes, I have already made up my mind.) More to the point, none of the Democrats’ key legislation this year is going to make a damn bit of difference in the election, because none of it is going to actually be enacted.

House Dems have passed 112 bills this year, among them some excellent and necessary bills protecting and expanding our democracy, banning LGBTQ+ discrimination, addressing equal pay for women, and requiring common sense gun violence prevention measures. These are important bills that we desperately need, that stand absolutely no chance of passing the Republican-held Senate. So far, nine Democratic bills have passed the Senate and become law. None of them are the kind of bill that swing elections. To the extent that any national attention has come to House legislation, it’s been because Republicans have attacked it as socialist, messaging repeated extensively by the press which is certainly not going to do anything to help elect a Democratic President. And to the extent that any House bill does make it through the Senate, those bills are absolutely going to be co-opted and claimed by the GOP, who will take all the credit for anything good that comes out of it. That this will be a lie won’t actually matter to most voters, who have no interest in following the day-to-day process of Congress.

Not only will centrist Democrats’ preference for focusing on legislation fail to deliver them any significant goodwill (because, again, voters don’t notice or care about legislation and Republicans will take credit for anything good anyway), but by failing to pursue accountability in the strongest possible way—that is, impeachment—House Democrats are actually sending the message to voters that the President’s lies, obstruction, corruption, and collusion are just not that big a deal. I know, I know, the word “normalize” has been repeated so many times lately that it’s just become part of the cosmic background radiation of our political discourse. But voter attitudes matter, and encouraging people to view the President’s misdeeds as not worth following up on is effectively conceding the matter.

And then what’s left? Having defanged their own biggest criticisms of the President and having been unable to actually make any meaningful difference in voters’ lives, and being faced with low inflation and low unemployment (numbers that are deeply deceptive that are nevertheless going to be successfully used by Republicans to manipulate public opinion), what are Democrats going to fall back on? What’s the story that’s going to make people care?

Because that’s what makes people vote: stories. Not statistics or data or bills. Narrative. Right now we are faced with the most corrupt, vile, dishonest, destructive President in living memory, a villain so cartoonish that you wouldn’t believe him if he were fictional. And yet instead of rising up to fill a heroic role that people can rally around, Democrats are terrified of opposing him too strenuously.

We need impeachment and we need it to start now. Not because it’s going to get him removed from office—impeachment has no more chance of getting through the Senate than any of the House’s other important measures—but because this is the thing people need to see in order to have hope, and, in turn, to show up and vote for something better. And because failing to impeach, failing to even try to impeach, is the surest way to guarantee a second Trump term.

I took my daughter to her skating lesson Saturday morning. The week before she cried and didn’t want to go, terrified that she would fall. Driving over to the rink this time she said “I’m not as scared today.” On the ice, she was tentative at first but quickly became more confident, even hopping and crouching along with her classmates. After, she said “We did something called a scooter glide and that was scary but I did it.” She smiled, and I smiled.

*

Every time I brush my daughter’s hair—which for a while now has been quite long and therefore requires a lot of brushing—I think about the fact that the only reason I know how to do anything with long hair is because in high school my friends and I were metalheads. I think about growing out our hair, the better to headbang with; practicing how to windmill our hair as we thrashed, the catharsis of aggressive music contrasting with the earnestness of that practice; and learning how to start brushing from the bottom so as to avoid snarls, how to brush underneath for thoroughness. Just two boys, talking about the finer points of heavy metal and hair care.

*

Listening to Scene On Radio’s “MEN” series last week, I found myself finally anxious about my son’s transition to middle school. He’s always been such a good and compassionate kid, always trying to take care of others. But listening to this dad talk about his son, who announced on the first day of sixth grade that he intended to join the Gay-Straight Alliance, but who by the beginning of seventh grade was defending the necessity of using homophobic slurs, it was hard to hear. We’ve always tried to model kindness and tolerance to our kids, to talk about peer pressure, to encourage them to trust their own feelings and be themselves. But the world is such a toxic place and masculinity is such a pervasive pressure, and middle school is so hard and so confusing, trying to figure out your self and your body, your friends, your community and your place in it. I just don’t know what people will come into his life and how they’ll influence him.

But maybe what this really is is that I’m worried and scared of him growing beyond me, of leaving me behind. Of not mattering to him anymore. It is both a silly fear and completely understandable one, I think.

*

A few months ago I woke up to see a coyote standing in my back yard, just standing there in the middle of my fenced-in lawn, which was just getting to the point of being noticeably overgrown. It was gone before I could grab my camera or even my phone, and I didn’t see where it went or how it came in.

At one time, before there were fences and lawns and concrete and patio furniture here—though, not before there were people here, just before people lived this way here—this hill looked, I imagine, much like the hillside just across the street, rocky and scrubby chapparal, the same lizards and birds and insects, though perhaps more of them. At one time coyotes stood in this spot and didn’t look out of place or confused, or at least if a person saw one there they wouldn’t have found it confusing our out of place.

What is confusing is that we assume we have made of this place a place without wildness, a place where things can be in or out of place. We tell ourselves a story of control, of power, and feel comforted, and feel safe. But the world is wild, whatever we say about it. We will one day be dead, we are unsafe, and the world will remind us one way, one day. I saw a coyote outside my bedroom window, and it saw me. I’m more careful now, or at least I try to take care.

*

(Brandon, if you’re reading this one, I apologize for the asterisks.)

*

I hope you’re well. I’m feeling a little low today, a little worn out and lonely and frustrated. But it will pass.

I wrote this yesterday. I don’t know if it says quite what I want to say, but here it is.

*

Yesterday, a man opened fire on a synagogue just a few miles from my house. Just a few miles from my house, a white nationalist killed a woman in a house of prayer and wounded three other people. A few miles away from me, in a town where we say “The schools are good,” and “It is a great place to raise a family,” and “It is safe,” a woman died after leaping in front of a bullet to save the life of her rabbi.

Today I left my house and drove a few miles and stood on a corner with a small crowd of people in that safe town. We wore black and held signs and waved at the passing cars who honked and waved in support. Some of us cried and a few people spoke with anger and fear in their voices but mostly we just stood and held our signs and waved, together.

This morning I spent an hour in my bed, crying, and then I got up and went and joined people on a street corner in order to feel like I was doing anything at all. Tonight I will take my family out for noodles and frozen treats, and I’ll watch my children smile, and I’ll wonder about all the things the world will show them that I can do nothing about. My youngest, four, doesn’t know much about the world’s cruelty yet. We keep it from her, mostly, and this is a luxury so many children don’t get. Just a few miles away, a child is in the hospital after being shot by a man whose fear and anger was manipulated into violence.

My son, hearing about this man’s fears, denounced them as unfounded. And yet, I told him, it doesn’t matter what’s real to our feeling of fear. Fear feeds anger, anger leads to violence, even without reason.

This morning I cried for an hour. I mourned, yes, for a woman’s life, lost, and for two men and a girl wounded so senselessly. I mourned, too, for the life we all were promised, that safe place, those good schools, a Saturday morning with no thought but home, family, an easy peace needing no defense, no vigilance. Yes, a life—mine—not of fighting or fear but of breakfast cereal and books and socks to be folded, of growing old, of dancing together in our living room, in a house where nothing bad happens, not really. A life, maybe, that never existed, not really, but I didn’t know it yet.

*

I hope that, wherever you are, you have what you need right now. If you have enough to spare, please consider making a donation to Chabad of Poway, to help their recovery.

I’m skeptical of Pete Buttigieg. He seems like a nice, approachable guy, and the way he talks reminds me of the aspirational way that Obama talked about America. But there’s something about the way he talks about coastal elites and bringing in Trump voters that makes me uneasy, not to mention the way that he talks about “security” as one of the pillars of his campaign.

I’m skeptical of Kamala Harris. She has done a lot of things I like since becoming a Senator, both in terms of legislation and in terms of how she’s handled every confirmation hearing I’ve watched. But as California’s Attorney General she had a “tough on crime” position that makes me unsure exactly how she’d approach criminal justice reform as a President.

I’m skeptical of Bernie Sanders. I’ll be honest, I voted for Sanders in the 2016 primary. And I appreciate how he’s been consistently and unapologetically for progressive policies. But he just keeps saying things that make it clear that he doesn’t understand much about how race, gender, and other marginalizations intersect with class, and at this point I’m not sure if he’ll ever understand.

I’m skeptical of Elizabeth Warren. Warren has by far the most thoroughly developed and well articulated policy agenda of any candidate I’ve ever seen, and although I haven’t read them all, the ones I’ve read I’ve liked. But the way she talked about her “Cherokee DNA” for so long and the fact that it took her so long to listen to Native people about why that was a problem makes me wonder how much she understands those whose marginalizations she doesn’t share.

I’m skeptical of Beto O’Rourke. I found it thrilling that he came so close to unseating Ted Cruz, and some of the speeches he gave during that campaign gave me chills. But since he lost that race, a lot of what he’s said and done has struck me as sort of clueless and self-absorbed and fragile, and I don’t know what kind of a President he’d make.

I’m skeptical of Cory Booker. Booker’s first campaign ad was legitimately wonderful, and I like the way he talks about hope. But his history of supporting charter schools and school choice vouchers gives me pause.

I’m skeptical of Joe Biden. It certainly matters to me that President Obama holds Biden in such high regard, but Biden’s support of Reagan- and Clinton-era criminal justice policies, and his support of pro-Wall Street legislation throughout his career, and the way he just doesn’t get it when it comes to touching people makes me very concerned that a Biden Presidency would be a step backwards.

I’m skeptical of all of them. I’m skeptical of Amy Klobuchar and Kirsten Gillibrand and Jay Inslee and Eric Swalwell and Tulsi Gabbard and Andrew Yang and Marianne Williamson. I’m skeptical of the candidates whose names I can’t even remember. But I’m going to vote for one of them in the primary, and I’m for damn sure going to vote for whoever the Democratic nominee is in the general election. I have already donated to campaigns and I will probably do so again, and next fall I’ll be doing what I can to organize volunteers to get the vote out, and I’ll be out walking precincts myself.

The point here isn’t to slag any candidate or to dissuade anyone from voting. Far from it. But if there is anything we should have learned by now, it is that no politician and no candidate deserves our loyalty or even really our trust. In 2008 I believed in Barack Obama with my whole heart. Over the next eight years he did a lot of things I liked but he also deported 3 million immigrants.

No candidate is going to save us. Every candidate has done and will do things that hurt people. Every elected official needs to be held accountable by their constituents, and that means none of us can take for granted that they’ll do the right thing; we have to check up on them, and keep checking up on them. Candidates, especially presidential candidates, are not the answer. The real work of democracy is only ever done on the ground by everyday citizens, and that will never stop being true.

So, yes, let’s do our research. Let’s pick our candidates and support them and vote. But please, let’s not ever make the mistake again of confusing government for leadership. We are the leaders, you and me and our 350 million friends and family members and neighbors. Government is the tool through which we express our will. It’s important to remember that.

The cathedral of Notre Dame burned yesterday, which was also the day that I learned that Gene Wolfe had died. Juliette and I talked about both in the evening, and she asked me if I felt sad. I said that "sad" wasn't quite the right word for what I felt—both felt profound and tragic, both felt like losses. But I wasn't sad, exactly. Perhaps it all felt too big to be contained in an emotion as simple as sadness.

In Wolfe's most famous series, The Book of the New Sun, we see an Earth millions of years in the future, an Earth in which most of the details have evolved to the point of being almost unrecognizable. But it's that almost that gets me. In these books you see deserts where the glittering sand is made of the eroded glass from the windows of a long-dead city, you see continents having shifted, coastlines changed. Even the sun has started to fade. But a close reader can see the echoes of our own time in Wolfe's distant future, and in any case the basic forms of human connection remain.

Still, reading those books, I can't help but think about what remains and what doesn't. How permanence is ultimately an illusion. Or maybe even a lie. Yesterday I saw someone tweet something to the effect that watching something ancient and beautiful burn felt like an encapsulation of our time. Yesterday I watched the cathedral spire fall. I watched and watched again, like so many people did. Construction on the cathedral began in 1160, and wasn't finished for a hundred years. I imagine what it must have felt like to start building something, knowing that you'd never live to see its completion. What it means to have faith that the work would be taken up by someone else. Though, I suppose in some way I do know something of that faith, because what else sustains anyone who works toward social justice? People have been working on that project for longer than a century already, and I still don't expect to see it achieved. But what a cathedral that would be.

It feels like right now, all of our cathedrals are burning, that we are all watching helplessly while our edifices burn. If we didn't set the fires ourselves. And I'm thinking about how hopeless it so often feels, how powerless I feel to stop anything. But also how fires, unopposed, spread. It feels too pat to end an email like this with a call to arms. It feels perhaps even disrespectful. But I guess what I'm thinking is that everything ends, that I and you will end, but that we still spend our lives building anyway. In my worse moments, this seems futile; in my best, it's beautiful. I don't know exactly where I am today, but I'm thinking about what the world has lost, about the impossibility of replacing anyone or anything once it's gone, about the need to keep moving into an unknown future.

Last week I spent four days in Portland, Oregon, at the annual AWP Conference. If you don't know what AWP is, it's the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, and the conference is the largest writers conference in the US. This was my first time attending and I'm still sort of mulling the experience over, two days after arriving home.

1. At the "Literary Podcasting: The Good, the Bad, and the Books" panel, David Naimon talked about how he prepares for an interview, and how when he's reading with the expectation that he will be talking with the author, he's never completely "immersed in the fictive spell," but rather always keeps an eye toward how the book is constructed. Even after having had more than 30 conversations with writers on my own show, I still find that I tend to get drawn fully into many books. It's with photographs and podcasts that I'm able to maintain that critical distance, and I wonder what that says about me.

2. I got to see Danez Smith, Franny Choi, and Rachel Zucker—three of my favorite podcasters—in conversation for the "Art of the Interview" panel. I think the thing that most stayed with me was during the conversation about the use of silence in an interview. Rachel Zucker talked about the cadences of a person's voice, how every pause is part of that person's personal rhythm, how editing those silences out is like changing the meter of a poem. I've always attempted to strike a balance between maintaining the integrity of my guests' voices and making sure that my listeners get clean audio, but this is something I have to think about more.

3. José Olivarez was one of the co-hosts of the podcast The Poetry Gods, an old favorite of mine that was influential in how I conceived of my own show. I got to hear him speak at the "Digital Denzines: Five Approaches to Poetry Podcasts" panel, where he talked about starting his show because there weren't any shows beforehand that sounded like the conversations he was having about poetry with his friends. I think that's something a lot of artists do: make the thing they want to see in the world. Activists do it, too. And I'm wondering what the things are that I want to see that nobody has made yet.

4. I learned that Garth Greenwell has perhaps the most magnificent reading voice that I've ever heard. His reading in the "Sexuality of Textuality" panel was amazing.

5. Between Twitter and my podcast, I've gotten to know and even become friends with a lot of writers and editors. But for the most part I hadn't met any of them in person. I finally got the opportunity to meet many of them at the conference last week, which was lovely but also had an amusing rhythm to it. In almost every case, when I first introduced myself—saying "Hi, I'm Mike,"—there would be this moment of hesitation or confusion. But then as soon as they saw the last name on my badge, their whole demeanor would change and their faces would break into a big smile.

   I was thinking, later, that it might be a good idea to change my profile pic to something less obscure but, on the other hand, then I might not get to see that moment of recognition.

6. I'm not really used to the experience of people being happy or excited to meet me. I find, so far, that it's quite pleasant but also induces in me an anxiety about not living up to expectations.

7. Something that became somewhat clear to me at this conference is that the literary community has a certain stratification to it. Critically acclaimed or bestselling writers and important editors and publishing people seem to have a completely different experience of conferences from people who might be published but are more obscure. They, in turn, have a different experience from emerging writers.

   For me, this produced rather a lot of discomfort, but not because of the differences themselves. In my experience, most writers are not prima donnas and are just as interested in having normal human interactions as anyone else. But the demands on literary stars are just different—I could sit in an audience or have a conversation with a friend without drawing a crowd, but that's not true when tens or hundreds of thousands of people have read and loved your books. I think it's actually both reasonable and necessary for people at that level to have healthy boundaries.

   Rather, my discomfort is mainly a product of not knowing where I fit in. As a writer I'm about as emerging as you can get—I only have one real published piece so far, and next to no one knows who I am. As a podcaster I've had intimate and length conversations with a number of writers I admire, but my show is small enough that I'm not well-known there either. I have friends with whom I've talked extensively online, but it's not the sort of friendship where anyone is asking me to help them move or babysit their kids. So when I meet someone and they say they'd like to hang out, I believe them, but I just don't know how to follow up on it. I don't feel comfortable imposing, and when your time is already spoken for then it is an imposition for someone to ask for any of it, even with good intentions.

8. Time, time, it's always a matter of time. I got to meet so many people, and I'm legitimately grateful for that opportunity. But I got to actually spend time with very few. What time I did get to hang out and actually talk with people felt like a gift, but I also spent most of the conference on my own. Perhaps that might have been different if I hadn't gotten sick, or if I'd had my own events or panels to keep me occupied. I'm not sure. But it's on my mind as I consider how to approach the conference in the future.

If you were at AWP this year, I hope that you enjoyed yourself. I'd love to hear about it, either way.

Last week I was listening to a recent episode of the podcast Commonplace, featuring a conversation between host Rachel Zucker and poet and activist Juliana Spahr (if you don’t already listen to Commonplace, I highly recommend it). I always find Zucker’s conversations interesting and enlightening, but this one has stuck with me a bit more than usual because a large part of the conversation had to do with something that I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about for the past two years: the limitations of art as a means of protest or activism.

Almost exactly two years ago, just before the inauguration, I found myself distraught, feeling helpless and looking around for anything to do. I’d always had strong opinions about, well, everything, but I’d never been motivated to do more than just talk about the ills of the world. Talk and, I suppose, vote every other year. But suddenly I was faced with the reality of a Trump presidency and all I could think was that my life of complacency had in some way contributed to the horror we were now in. That just talking or writing or making photographs about injustice wasn’t enough. I ended up joining a grassroots organization and becoming something I never thought I’d be, something I’d even explicitly disdained in my youth: an activist.

Two years in, I’m still an activist. I’m also still an artist. (I’m also tired, all the time.) Often times I feel a tension between these two roles—any time spent on one is time not spent on the other, and I nearly always feel that loss. I want to do both, and more besides, but it’s just not physically possible. And so I wonder, over and over again, what can my contribution be? What ought it be? What must it be?

In an interview in 2003, Kurt Vonnegut talked about this very question. His response—delivered with all the sardonic wit that we expect from Vonnegut—has since become famous: “When it became obvious what a dumb and cruel and spiritually and financially and militarily ruinous mistake our war in Vietnam was, every artist worth a damn in this country, every serious writer, painter, stand-up comedian, musician, actor and actress, you name it, came out against the thing. We formed what might be described as a laser beam of protest, with everybody aimed in the same direction, focused and intense. This weapon proved to have the power of a banana-cream pie three feet in diameter when dropped from a stepladder five-feet high.”

Is he right about that? Well, yes and no—at least, that’s my opinion. If I’ve learned anything in the past two years it is that there is no substitute for actual organizing. Less than an hour before I sat down to write this, the Senate passed a bill to re-open the government after the President finally backed down. The only reason that this happened is because of two years of consistent progressive activism, two years of marches and phone banks and visits to Congressional offices and voter registration and community outreach and knocking doors and getting out the vote. It happened because people got up and made it happen, flipping the House of Representatives and holding their elected officials accountable and never letting up the pressure. And there is simply no way that art, alone, could have accomplished that.

But it’s also not true that art has no place or function in activism. To paraphrase something that I once heard activist Mariame Kaba say, if politics is about achieving what’s possible, then activism is about changing the limits of what’s possible. Or, if you prefer, “rebellions are built on hope.” Art and literature are engines for building empathy, giving us opportunities to understand and feel an emotional connection to people whose life experiences are different from our own. It’s that connection that allows us to expand the boundaries of what we imagine for the world. It’s that understanding that tells us what to fight for and why.

This is why I reject the notion that we have to make a choice between art and revolution. We need both. We need art and literature and creativity to teach us, to stoke our passion, and to keep us going when we get discouraged. But once we’re motivated, we have to follow it up with action to actually achieve the changes we want to see in the world.

Now, some people are going to have the time and resources and ability to do more than one thing, and to the extent that you’re able to be both an artist and an activist, that’s great. But it’s also important to recognize that movements are bigger than any one person, that no one should or even can do everything themselves, that we all have a role to play. Not everyone can grab a bullhorn and lead a rally. Not everyone can write a poem that makes the reader understand our shared humanity. None of us should be complacent, but all of us have specific strengths and skills we can offer. I believe we can change the world, each of us, and all of us together.

Note: I will be discussing the plot of the 2016 musical Dear Evan Hansen in this post. If that sort of spoiler might bother you then it might be best to skip this one.

For Christmas this year J got me tickets to see Dear Evan Hansen. After hearing people talk about that show for close to two years I finally started listening to the soundtrack a few months ago, and it's been in pretty heavy rotation ever since. Last weekend we drove up the coast to Costa Mesa, the closest city to us on the show's national tour. It was a lovely evening—we drove by some familiar places from our Orange County days, ate a delicious meal, and the show itself was amazing. The music, the staging, the performances—it was all just great.

Still, as much as I have loved and still love that show and particularly its music, I couldn't help but have some misgivings about the story. If you're not familiar with the musical, at the beginning of the show we meet Evan Hansen, a socially awkward and isolated teen who desperately wishes he could have some friends. The title refers to an assignment he receives from his therapist, to write himself motivational letters. After a classmate, Connor Murphy, kills himself, Connor's parents find one of Evan's letters in Connor's pocket, mistake it for a suicide note, and assume that Evan and Connor must have been friends. Caught up in the moment, Evan doesn't deny this, and by perpetuating that misunderstanding finds himself gaining popularity at school, a girlfriend in Connor's sister Zoe, and a second family in Connor's parents. This goes on until eventually the lie is revealed, and it all falls apart.

This kind of story of a mistaken identity and false relationship is one that's been done many times in theater and film. The 1995 Sandra Bullock movie While You Were Sleeping comes to mind, for example. In fact, I think a lot of older movies and plays have turned on this sort of plot device, and it's usually played for laughs and everything winds up in a perfectly happy ending—when Peter Gallagher comes out of his coma in While You Were Sleeping there is some climactic drama when Sandra Bullock's lies are revealed but in the end everyone forgives her and she winds up marrying Bill Pullman and everything is great. Dear Evan Hansen definitely treats Evan's lies with more gravity—Connor's parents appear to ultimately forgive him, but he's still left relatively alone by the end of the show, though having grown and learned from his experience.

The question I keep coming back to is whether the show means to say that Evan's growth and learning make all of his lies and the harm he causes worthwhile. J thinks not, because of how the show ends on a bit of a bittersweet note with Evan alone. I just don't know, though. Certainly we get much more about Evan's sorrow and regret over having lied (as expressed in the climactic song "Words Fail") than we do about how the Murphys process that revelation and come to a place of forgiveness (which occurs off stage, between scenes). And in the last scene, when Evan tells Zoe that her parents didn't have to keep his lies a secret, she tells him that this experience saved them.

On the drive home, J and I talked about this. She felt that perhaps I was being overly critical, not having enough empathy or consideration for a character that was clearly suffering from depression and anxiety, and who as young person wouldn't have had the life experience or tools to properly deal with the situation he found himself in. Which is a fair point, and certainly I think that if the show ended by punishing Evan like some Greek tragedy, that would have been profoundly unsatisfying. The thing is, Evan's not a real person, he's a character who was written. And I just can't get past wondering why he was written this way, why the show's creators wanted to tell this story in this way.

Then again, it's really difficult for me to get away from myself and my own biases and insecurities and fears when judging a work of art. I don't think anyone really can, nor do I even think it's necessarily something one should strive for. Really, the thing that's most likely driving how I feel about this show is how much I can relate to Evan. When I was in high school, I was lonely and felt isolated, and out of that isolation I acted in ways that sometimes hurt other people. Not to the same degree as here, but hurts are real even when they're not catastrophic. Seeing a story in which a sad, lonely boy is, if not redeemed then at least extended compassion, is something that immediately feels validating and comforting to me. And that's always a response that makes me start asking questions. I did it quite recently with Sarah Rees Brennan's YA fantasy novel In Other Lands. And now I'm doing it here.

As humans we are so strongly wired to seek pleasure and avoid pain. That in itself isn't a bad thing, it's basic to survival. But it can become a problem when an unwillingness to endure discomfort blinds you to the ways in which you might be harming other people. Ideally, we'd all be able to do both, to be able to both be gentle and compassionate towards ourselves while also admitting and correcting our faults. There's such a strong pull toward excusing oneself, though, and away from an honest assessment of one's flaws, that it can be very difficult to find that balance. And as easy as it is to snuggle deep into the blanket of denial, it's just as easy to overcorrect and swing into self-loathing. I'm not really sure where I am on that continuum right now.

There's so much I love about Dear Evan Hansen. The music is just phenomenal, soaring and lifting as it does. And hearing the message that no one deserves to be forgotten, that we will all be found, that in truth we aren't as alone as we feel—it feels good. I just always come back to this question: at what cost does this good feeling come? Maybe I am being too critical of this show, and I'd love to hear about it if I am. But I think that this is a good question to ask.

Last January I chose the word Grace as my word for the year. I had spent much of the previous year pushing myself to do more, more, more—the world was in crisis and I had worn myself out trying to fight, to resist, to endure. I knew that what I had been doing was not sustainable, that I wasn't built for rage or conflict, that I needed more flex and more give in my life and my approach and my interactions with other people. I needed to find more acceptance, of the world and of others and of myself.

I returned to that word, Grace, over and over again throughout the year. And really, as a guiding principle it was a successful one. I think that I spent more of my time being present and aware, being kind and generous—really, being the kind of person that I want to be. Keeping that word close to me is something that I want to continue doing for the rest of my life.

Still, in thinking about where I was at the beginning of 2018, I can't help but wonder how much of my choice to orient myself toward acceptance and even a certain passivity was driven by fear. By the fear that no matter how hard I struggled, it would not be enough to effect the change that I felt I needed. That perhaps obscurity, invisibility, was what I'd end up with, and indeed what I deserved.

This past fall at a photography festival, I was talking with a friend after we'd both finished having our portfolios reviewed. She asked me how I thought they went, and I said something like "Oh, they went well, but then they usually go well. People were very complimentary about the work, but nothing's going to happen with it. And that's OK. Maybe I don't even want anything to happen with it." It's not the first time I've said something like that. For a lot of my life, I've struggled with a fear of success. The thing is, I know just how lucky I've been, how much of what we think of traditionally as "success" is mostly a matter of having an advantage that you didn't earn. Growing up, neither I nor most of my friends had a lot, and the fact that I now live a fairly comfortable life has at times struck me as something shameful, not because I haven't worked hard but because I know how little hard work matters without opportunity. My wife calls it survivor's guilt, and perhaps she's not far off there.

Looking back at where I was a year ago, I think about how much time I've spent trying to convince myself to want less. I might dress it up in language to make it seem profound—noting, for example, that Buddhism teaches that desire is the root of suffering. Or I might chalk it up to something culture, perhaps the Japanese idea of the tall nail being hammered down. But if I'm being honest, it has a lot more to do with that shame than with anything else.

Looking forward to 2019, I'm realizing that I have desires and ambitions, and that I want to engage with them instead of trying to ignore or disavow them. It is and always will be important to me to be of service to others, to maintain a sense of humility and gratitude and grace. And I never want my success to come at anyone else's expense, nor to make anyone else smaller by my taking up more space in the room. But in my best moments I believe that it's possible for me to help make the room bigger so that all of us can breathe more easily, that if I had a bigger platform I could use it to do more for other people than what I'm able to do now, and that as long as I know what my values are and remember to live by them, there's nothing that need be shameful about success. The word I'm choosing for 2019 is a reminder of all of that.

My word for 2019 is Growth.