this will hurt

a Paris party thought about revolution

I went to a party last weekend. I knew two people (the hosts). It was fancy dress. It started at 10pm. At which time it was -1C.

I managed to brave all such hurdles and rode a communal bike in the nostril-piercing cold (with a hoodie over the top of my precarious head dress) to the outer edges of the 11th arrondissement.

Scarf and flower clip styling courtesy of my friend Clare’s 10-year-old daughter May.

The party was wild and you might say very French (if you were someone who went to parties in France often enough to make such an assessment). There was a cheese “table” and the DJ chain-smoked. I managed to misjudge the “Tropical/forbidden fruits” theme as straight-up Carmen Miranda; the French clearly went with an exotic “burner” vibe. One woman failed to wear a top. There was a tequila “speak-easy” going on in the bath, in which I imagine most people failed to wear a top or a bottom. And in various corners of the large warehouse-style apartment piles of humans sprawled on cushions and sheepskin rugs and did what the French do best - talked deep and hard.

I joined a pile over by the fire and a very dark (in outlook) guy leaned over and asked me in French,

“What’s the most challenging question you’re asking yourself at the moment?”

A cracker of a question.

I replied after some short reflection,

“How can I be in this pain better, and invite others to be in their pain better too?”

He smiled and asked me to explain further.

I talked through a number of the arguments I’ve made here already, including how our collective future is going to rest on our ability to handle the tough times that are almost certainly ahead. I told him I no longer engage in speculation about whether it will be AI or nuclear war or climate change that will take us down (he’d interjected to ask my take on this). Our fate will be determined - either way - by whether we fragment and lose our shit, or whether we find a way to come together in our humanity and emerge into something…more beautiful.

And this, this ability to handle things and not lose our shit, will be determined by how well we are able to be in, live in, and accept pain. (For anyone fresh to this point, it’s one of the theses of The Collapse Book, which is now titled I Eat the Stars and that you can read in its first draft form here.)

But I’d also just read a quote earlier that day that had been haunting me.

And it’s the real reason I answered as I did. It’s from the trauma theorist Judith Herman¹.

She wrote in 1993:

“It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks for is that the bystander do nothing….The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of pain. The victim demands action, engagement, and remembering.”

I mean, the quote speaks for itself, but I’ll take the time to flesh out what I took from it, which I shared with dark (outlook) guy.

We are surrounded by dark triad perpetrators who require our numb acquiescence as citizens (or bystanders) in order to progress their cruel, inhumane, dangerously fascist agendas. We numbly do nothing as they criminalise protests, disappear journalists and ban books; as they come for the Trans people, the migrants, women and the Palestinians. Fascism, thusly, becomes hyper-normalised. The baseline shifts. Martial law rolls in. Elections disappear. Human rights are stripped. Genocides are justified.

I imagine some of you are thinking of that quote from the German priest in the wake of World War ll. I am.

First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist

Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew

Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me

Why do we choose, or succumb to, the numb route? Because we are simply, tragically not able to share the burden of each other’s pain.

There are reasons for this. Overwhelm. Distractions. The neoliberal narrative that says we should not be in discomfort. Privilege. Whatever². They all now exist as excuses. Because clearly we can all see we have to now be in pain better. We have to bear it (another theses from my book). We have to stay longer and share the burden.

We are going to have to hurt.

We are going to have to feel (again).

And to feel all of it…

Honestly, I believe that so much of everything about life going forward is going to require “better being in pain”…and in grief…and in fear…and in love. We will need our felt experience to guide us. If we don’t learn to feel again, all those cognitive biases that protect us in peace times (when a certain amount of denial is evolutionarily healthy to allow us to get on with flourishing instead of perpetually worrying) will keep us stuck in this deadly numbness that sees us side with the perpetrator. And our inhumanity.

I’ve recently come across this critical theory Phd student and teacher Louisa Toxværd Munch who shares impassioned videos on social media about the mechanics of neoliberalism and revolution. In this video that she published as I was writing this very post she talks about how crucial it is during liminal times (“the time of monsters³”; such as the one we’re in) that we don’t stay stuck in a numb “zombified” state. If we do, the revolution, the co-creation of the better world, doesn’t happen and the fascists win the future.

I also clocked this 2024 study that showed that people don’t actually respond to looming emergencies until they feel pain. The researchers tried all kinds of different ways of presenting climate data to people, but found that the only one that really cut through was giving a yes-or-no answer to painful realities. Yes, their local lake will stop freezing over in winter; no, they will not longer be able to have kids’ hockey comps and annual community bonfire nights anymore. I’ve been arguing for years that the “hopeful” messaging that the climate movement have used for decades (so as to not scare the bystanders) is ineffective (and ultimately dangerous). People must feel if they’re going to be involved in change. They must viscerally be in the truth if they’re to move forward with agency.

I’m also compelled to share all this because, honestly, this challenge is playing out at a personal level big time and I’m wanting to hold myself accountable to someone (I hope you don’t mind!).

And, frankly, at the heart of what I’m trying to say here is that we need to normalise feeling (again). We need to role model being in pain, and in grief, and remembering. And, oh GOD yes, in love.

Because the weft to pain’s warp is love!

I’ve been stuck - emotionally, spiritually - for months. And it’s because I’m not doing pain well enough. I’m skirting around it. I’m doing things at half-measure. I’m strategising it with theories and clever language.

While I might be feeling the pain, I’m not being radically guided by it. I’m still ricocheting into distraction, in search of dopamine hits (food, exciting new experiences, alcohol), reverting to left-brained tactics (like strategising) that are familiar but no longer work.

And so the change, the “emerging my way to something more beautiful”, the revolution that needs to happen within me and through me is just not happening. Weeks, months are drifting by (I’m relating to the themes circulating this week “It’s December. Again.”). I can hear the bigger calling, I can smell the edge that I’m needed at. I can feel the freedom that dangles ahead. But I’m groundhog-daying. Ugh.

I haven’t known what to do about it. But bloody hell I’m bored of it. At 3am last weekend I left the party just as it was really kicking into gear. I walked home in the snow. The world looked so pretty. I went searching for that Feist song and put my headphones in. And felt.

Know what I mean? (MTK).

Sarah xx

PS The next post goes into more detail on this theme. How to hurt our way through collapse (beautifully).

1. From her book Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence--From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror

2. In a recent study, over 30 per cent of US college students reported avoiding painful information on any given day, most often about money, the news, or physical activity. Over two weeks, only 14 of 181 participants managed to avoid avoiding entirely.

3. Per the Antonio Gramsci line that Louisa quotes in her video: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”