A Bright Clean Mind. Camille DeAngelis
and cursing at them, stabbing at their soft bellies with pitchforks. These men, in turn, have been bullied by their corporate overlords.
Here is the truth of it then: I would be teased and mocked at school, and then I would come home and consume fried eggs and meatballs, chocolate chip cookies, and tall glasses of milk. I was complicit in a system of cruelty I thought I would have done anything to overturn if only I were older and stronger and smarter. Now I have grown into that person, and I want to know why we who are brave enough to be vulnerable don’t recognize the feelings of the most vulnerable creatures of all. We artists are supposed to understand better than anyone how cruel it is to mock or bully people who don’t think or act or look like we do. It is our empathy that allows us to render our characters alive enough to cheer for, real enough to cry over, but something’s not connecting. In 2010 a scientific study (organized by the neuroscientist Massimo Filippi) indicated that the brain activity of those who accept the moral argument in defense of animals is more responsive to images of both human and animal suffering than that of meat eaters. In reaction to the torment of another, the vegetarian brain lights up where the omnivore’s brain does not.
In his book Flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi doesn’t put too fine a point on it: citing bull and dogfighting, gladiatorial combat, boxing, and other displays of culture, he writes that “cruelty is a universal source of enjoyment for people who have not developed more sophisticated skills.” This is true not just of the pint-sized brutes who terrorize the schoolyard—already living a stereotype at the age of seven or ten—but of those who have not refined their critical thinking to the point that they are able to discuss our treatment of animals without resorting to hostility or contortioned logic. Ashley Capps wrote a poem about a cow she saw in a pasture every day for months until one day she wasn’t there and never would be again—“A hip pulls / loose, shoulders dismantle in the hands / of some masked worker. There is nothing / in this world that loves you back”—and to dismiss these lines as sentimental would not be a “sophisticated” response.
Most humans are able to look back with a sense of perspective on the insults and bruises they’ve received. I was lucky to have parents, stepparents, and other family members who consistently nurtured my self-esteem, and I never had cause to feel unsafe or unloved. They told me life would get easier, and it did: as I grew up, I cared less and less what anyone might think of me, my writing, or any of my other creative efforts. It’s never going to get easier for the animals, though. They can’t ever transcend their tormentors so long as people like us are still eating and wearing the products of their bodies. As German activist Malte Hartwieg says, “You like farm animal rescue stories, but you’re not vegan? Do you realize that those farm animals are being rescued from you?”
The artist who offered this “sticking point”—a photographer, scriptwriter, and blogger, a very nice man who was likely bullied in school far worse than I was—is the kind of omnivore who agrees with every vegan-themed post I put up on social media. Habit is the only thing holding him back from going veg, and I suppose he manages to put those thoughts out of his head when he sits down to dinner. But to me, this doesn’t seem so different from standing by silently while the class jerk beats up your best friend. “Teach us to care and not to care,” T.S. Eliot wrote in “Ash Wednesday,” and this is the paradoxical path of us sensitive souls: to care less about what the trolls and bullies say and think, and care more for those on the receiving end of the torment, even when they don’t look like us.
Recalibrating Your Language
Begin training yourself to notice the cruelty encoded in many of the words and figures of speech we take for granted. “Killing it” and “crushing it” have entered the popular vernacular as a way of saying someone is doing really well—but killing or crushing whom? (It turned my stomach to see the photo a high-school classmate posted of his two-year-old daughter holding a small fish at the end of a line. “She’s killing it!” he enthused. Indeed, she has.) Notice when you or the people around you inadvertently use language that demeans animals or other humans, and consider how you might express the same idea more compassionately: “kill two birds with one stone” can become “feed two birds with one hand,” “killing it” can become “acing it,” and so on. Colleen Patrick-Goudreau dives deep into animal-related language and etymologies in her Animalogy podcast, which I highly recommend.
Here’s another example, a line I love from Henry Lien’s novel Peasprout Chen, Future Legend of Skate and Sword: “How tenderhearted he is to love even things that are so different from us.” Peasprout is only just waking up to the truth of animal suffering; in the future she will not refer to animals as “things,” and she may say “who” instead of “that.” It may seem like a small matter, but referring to an animal as she or he instead of it de-objectifies and dignifies that animal (even if you’re not sure of the sex; I don’t know about you, but I’d rather be called a he than an it!)
Sticking point #8: “This market is so saturated that it’s more important than ever for me to position myself to STAND OUT.”
In early 2015, I met a friend of a friend with a presence that was warm and familiar, and when I found out what he does for a living, I felt a cosmic tap on the shoulder: you need to work with him. Tim is more than a coach or a therapist; his approach is a combination of talk therapy, life coaching, and energy healing, which sounds like baloney until you experience it for yourself. I wanted to tell more meaningful stories, to write books that would truly help and inspire people (in addition to entertaining them), and I wanted to feel that I deserve to make an adequate living from my writing.
In our epic monthly sessions, we worked on all that and more, and I felt more clear-headed and empowered than ever. But when Tim would say things like “I see you becoming a voice for the women’s movement,” a small but undeniable part of me wanted to shrivel up and hide under the futon, so we had to examine that too. Tim occasionally hosts personal-growth workshops at his home—a cozy nineteenth-century farmhouse north of Boston—and during the one I attended, we paired up and sat facing one another making steady eye contact, taking turns “witnessing” and “being witnessed.” When it was my turn to be witnessed, I gave in to the urge to take off my glasses so that my partner’s face was fuzzy. This way I wouldn’t have to look at her looking at me. “This is stupid,” I whined to myself. “What the hell is the point of this?”
Alfredo Meschi, Project X. Photo by Sara Morena Zanella.
By the end of the exercise, I was longing to remove myself from the room. I said “excuse me,” as if I were only going to the toilet, and instead I hurried down the long corridor to Tim’s dining room and ducked under his massive antique table, where I cried as quietly as possible. In my world, it doesn’t qualify as a revelation unless accompanied by copious amounts of tears and snot.
A little while later, Tim—that blessed man!—came into the dining room and sat down on the carpet beside me. “I thought it was odd that you seemed so resistant to that exercise,” he said gently. “Well, now we know you’re afraid to be seen.”
Even if you’re not a visual artist, I bet you have recurring images in your head just like I do—pictures I may someday get around to drawing or painting if I don’t outgrow them first. The most resonant of these is from my teenhood, a self-portrait in which my skin matches the pattern of the intricate William Morris paper on the wall behind me. A paradox still asking to be painted in oils.
It defies logic, I know. I wanted so badly for my novels to be “taken seriously,” yet I felt nervous and embarrassed whenever I received a glowing review or an invitation to appear at a bookstore or festival. I’d like to have a larger following on social media so that more people have the chance to read my helpful books—this one and Life Without Envy—but the prospect of having to manage the inevitable snark and trolling, perhaps multiple times a day, totally turns my stomach.