⌂ Possible Reactions to Bad News
On empathy, indifference, and keeping the door to the world open
Trigger Warning
The essay below mentions a lot of ugly things happening in the world. I wrote it many years ago and it’s heartbreaking to see how little has changed. Or worse: How humanity seems to have digressed.
“Possible Reactions” was first published in The Pinch (in a slightly different version).
Possible Reactions
When you switch on your wireless and reconnect with the world, the message on your screen either breaks the news or something more.
If it breaks the news, you either try to provoke your concern or escape into indifference.
A. Trying to provoke your concern, you will be hard on yourself. Your child or friend or husband or mother did not die today, was not beaten or shot, was not even directly threatened by what happened, but these anonymous poor girls don’t deserve to be kidnapped or bombed or denied their abortion rights. You need to do something. Act or cry out in public. What type of cold-hearted bitch are you for glancing at the clock and thinking: I better run to the store right now or we’ll have nothing but rice for dinner tonight. It’s your duty to empathize with anyone who suffers under the boot of corruption / violence / evil / patriarchy. You need to imagine that the fire raging in that sometimes very faraway country and sometimes very near area is burning your loved ones to a crisp. You need to believe that the children drowning in the Mediterranean or dying of thirst alongside some desert border could have come from your womb. Your privilege of having been born and currently living in a relatively safe place does not give you the right to disengage from misery. You are complicit in all that is wrong, due to the taxes you pay and the products you consume. Due to your compliance. And if you’re not willing to stand up, then at least feel everything, ache from knowing the injustice of being tortured on account of your thoughts, your skin, your desires.
B. Trying to escape into indifference, you will flatten the world by laying blame. Not your fault, you will tell yourself while brewing a cup of fair-trade tea. You’re not the problem in this world. You’ve never killed anyone or drawn blood. You don’t conceal vast amounts of wealth in an offshore bank account. With the little money you make, you don’t buy or produce weapons. You don’t own oil company stock either; moreover, you don’t even own a car. So this heavy bomb exploding on a busy square in a city you only know by name has absolutely nothing to do with you. Neither do the missiles falling on children hospitals, nor the violent attacks on unarmed people. You don’t have to feel guilty or bad. In fact, if you want to live at all, if you want to sleep at night and keep a few friends around, you cannot concern yourself with every tragedy. Be like the others you see shopping on the street, their bags full of stuff they don’t need. Be indifferent.
If the message on your screen breaks something more, you either open the door to the world or withdraw into solitude.
A. Opening the door to the world, you will choose one or more of the following options:
I. You seek human contact online. You log on to social media and browse through your timelines. You read how others respond to the death of yet another great filmmaker or another attack on democracy, and you feel less alone in your grief. You may even change your profile pic.
II. You wire a certain amount to a relief fund, hoping that the homeless people you see on your screen will receive some of that money in the form of fresh water or medicine.
III. You call a friend or relative and talk things over. If only the two of you could rule the world. You hang up feeling you’ve accomplished something / nothing.
IV. You visit websites of international organizations and copy their lists of what you might contribute. Warm socks for refugees. English books for foreign libraries. You go through your closets and test your generosity. What is a luxury and what is a need? If time allows, you contact others to do the same.
V. You call a local hospital and ask whether you should come by and donate blood. You secretly hope they won’t ask you to come by next week, because next week you will need all your courage to deal with a fresh trauma.
VI. You watch the news in shock, drinking or pacing or both.
VII. You break down and sob.
VIII. You protest.
B. Withdrawing into solitude, you take up your pen and write.
Epilogue
Possible Reactions was, as I explained above, written many years ago, before the pandemic and before I became a nomad. But it still captures how I feel when bad news comes in, which is daily.
If I were to rewrite the essay today, I would add more options to 2.A: Opening the door to the world can also mean seeking out beauty in nature and art, reflecting on gratitude, meditating on kindness, and taking care of small things such as cooking a healthy meal for a person you love.
Author News
Do you feel the need to take up your pen and write?
Is it time to join a group of writers helping and inspiring one another?
I’m a presenter for the HerStories Project Incubator.
This is a 4-week community writing experience starting on March 6th. It’s designed for midlife women who want to write together, meet one another, join online workshops (such as mine), and learn a lot in the process.
My presentation is called The Writer as Character: How to Craft Narrators Readers Trust. I will discuss:
how a personal essay differs from a diary entry or piece of reportage
what a narrative persona is and why an essay needs one
how to create a narrative persona that best serves your story
what writers can do to establish trust and make their stories resonate
how the tools of a novelist can help bring a narrative persona to life
If you’d like to participate, you can sign up for the 4-week experience and also join presentations on (for example) Writing Op-Eds that Spark Change, Writing about Trauma, and Writing about Family. There are 10 presentations in total, and you can join them in person or watch the recordings later.
If you sign up through my affiliate link, part of the fee will flow back to me.
HerStories Project is a community of midlife women who write. They are on Substack as
and organize creative incubators on a regular basis.Related Posts
If you enjoyed this post, you might also be interested in reading:
Time to Say Goodbye
When this newsletter finds you, I’m packing my bag. Sadly, our month on the self-sustainable cacao plantation has come to an end. Daniel and I are traveling to Isabela on Friday, the biggest of the Galápagos Islands. It’s raining more frequently and more heavily now, so we’re unsure how much time we can be out and explore, but we hope to see at least one penguin and a few flightless cormorants.
All my best,
Claire
P. S. Comments on this essay are particularly welcome. How do you react to bad news?
Thank you for this article, Claire! This is exactly the problem for so many of us including many of my clients - and when we are reacting instead of responding, we are all stuck in an endless loop of anxious triggers that often bring up a sense of helplessness. I have been offering group coaching to deal with this, because it's such a huge problem. I find it helpful to pick one issue to respond to/support/speak out about so that I can feel more effective and less helpless. Having my issue gives me permission to let the other issues go. If I can sign something in a minute, of course I will, but I don't feel bad doing less when I know I have my issue. I sign up for google alerts and read books about that issue (or dedicated substacks) instead of single news sources which can be skewed. This way I am in control instead of letting the news cycle trigger me.
Thanks for this column. Everyone needs to hear this. And safe travels!