Fallout, despair, and looking for the good stuff.

plus, new music coming very soon.

Firstly, I’ve got another new single coming out June 14 called ‘Feel It All,’ and you can pre-save it by clicking on the cover art. <3

If you haven’t heard Hope You Know It (or any of the rest of the other songs I’ve released lately, for that matter) you can click on the cover art below to find them!

Okay—now let’s talk about Fallout please.

Have you seen it? I’m not much of a gamer so I had no familiarity with the game that inspired the (apparently record-smashing) Amazon hit series, but…ask me how much I love Walton Goggins and you’ll get some version of a real life heart eyes emoji, so I had to at least give it a two-episode college try. I was a little shocked by what I saw, since I went into it knowing next to nothing, and those of you who have seen it will probably understand why—it’s more than a little bit brutal at times, and the premise is certainly bleak af. (Don’t worry, no spoilers here, beyond laying out the premise of the show which is explored in episode 1)

Fallout is set in a fictitious (but realistic) 1950s California town at the height of nuclear war panic; Walton Goggins plays a flourishing movie and tv star who’s been hired to shill for a prominent nuclear vault technology company (ever-so-creatively named ‘Vault-Tec’). His wife is an executive at said company, and naturally, the intersection of commerce and war panic and marriage is full of … shall we say, surprises.

When the worst happens, some people go into their vaults (mainly privileged/rich people, naturally) and others are left to survive the…you guessed it…fallout. The show explores what happens when people eventually emerge from the vaults several hundred years later and begin to interact with the hardened, desolate world of survivors. Walton Goggins plays the former movie star turned ‘The Ghoul’, and I’ll let you go ahead and google that rather than reveal anything about his character here.

Anyway, anyway, anyway…why am I writing about all this? Well, I’ve been finding myself feeling a little more contemplative lately about the state of the world and its systems and governments, as well as about my place in all of it. Fallout may or may not have been meant as a catalyst to that type of thought, but I like to think there was some intention put into it in that respect; if everything as we know it were to fall apart, who or what would we become? Who are we as a species *already*, while still living in the fever dream of these societal experiments? I well know that I am unable to fully divest myself from the systems that both help and harm me. I am typing this reflection on a keyboard attached to a computer whose technology wouldn’t be possible at this time without the sacrificing of children to hard slave labor (and death) in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. I am sitting in a house on land that was once tended by Cherokee, Yuchi, and Shawnee tribes and subsequently taken over and settled by force. I am a part of all of this. I cannot escape that, and no amount of righteous thinking or belief will absolve me. As a lifelong seeker of absolution, a longtime shame addict, and a dedicated pursuer of ‘doing the right thing,’ my complicity in the reality of the world’s corruption and greed and violence has finally hit home.

The other side of this is — I also can see how little control I really have over any of it. My place of birth, my upbringing, and my privilege are all things I did not choose. I simply happened to be born here and not there, then and not now, to these people and not those people. And if I were to spend the rest of my life trying, I could never right a fraction of the wrongs in the world. All the rightness in the world, all the honesty about my own complicity in oppression, can’t save the world—or me.

Did you know that the reason Red Lobster is going out of business isn’t, as meme culture would have you believe, because they were tanked by their all-you-can-eat shrimp promotion? It’s at least partially because they were bought by a hedge fund company who, after purchasing what essentially amounted to the Applebee’s of seafood, began charging each franchise rent on the properties they now owned. I know there’s more to it than that, but the reality is that deals like this are going on all around us, all the time. From something as relatively innocuous as fast casual shrimp to the maniacal arms trading and profiteering going on via the Israeli government’s assault on Palestine; little old me and little old you are kind of just mayflies having our one day in the sun, while the systems keep on keepin’ on.

If you can’t tell, I haven’t felt much optimism lately. “Despair is the luxury of the privileged,” I have told myself until I’m blue in the face. But it’s begun to dawn on me that privilege is a spectrum, and although I do enjoy a LOT of privilege in this world I am not privileged ENOUGH to impact billionaires or global economies beyond whatever measly little boycotting or protesting or tweeting I might find myself compelled to do.

The back of history is pock-marked and littered with cysts of war, brutality, greed, and corruption. In many ways, none of this is new. That used to lend me a crumb of comfort, but these days, I just feel grieved. In the absence of belief in a planned-for future heaven where all these things are made right, I am left to deal with the fallout of what has been and the reality of what is—and the uncertainty of what is to come.

We all have things we say to ourselves at the end of the day to help ourselves fall asleep. For some, it’s “when I die, hallelujah, by and by, I’ll fly away,” and for others it’s something more akin to Cormac McCarthy’s “the point is there ain't no point.” These ideas, opposing though they may be, seem to me to be little more than pacifiers to put ourselves to bed with. Neither of them is provable. Neither of them is ultimately knowable. And yet…we all have to make our peace with things — and ourselves — somehow. So if I sort of imagine that these ‘pacifiers’ are less like ‘silly little implementations of comfort’ and more like ‘methods of making peace with it all’, I find myself feeling a little more free to figure out what my pacifier is. Because gosh dammit, I still need sleep. And whatever the harsh realities of the world may be, I’d like to continue showing up for my family, my friends, and myself.

One thing I’ve been doing to (successfully, I might add) keep myself from succumbing to despair is following the oft-suggested and at this point, cliché, advice of one Mr. Fred Rogers—looking for the helpers. That phrase may be imperfect, but it reminds me that maybe keeping my mental lens zoomed out so far isn’t helping my emotional health very much. I do look around and see that people everywhere are committing random acts of kindness every day — that there are humans putting themselves in positions to help where they can, who they can, and how they can. And maybe if I spend a little time focusing on them, I can spend a little less time focusing on how terrible everything is. Hope, for me, is a choice—an act. It’s certainly not a feeling.

In that spirit, I wanted to share a few good things with you that I’ve seen lately.

The Camps Breakerz Crew have spent 20 years bringing hip-hop and breakdancing culture to the Gaza strip, offering psychological relief to children growing up in war through movement and dance.

Glennon Doyle’s nonprofit Together Rising has raised over a million dollars to send in aid to Gazans, via the local feeding work of Anera.

Ruthie Lindsey is doing a free online event on Thursday, May 23 for women who want to cease to define themselves by shame and suffering. If that sounds like you or someone you know, you can find more information here.

Tim Letts donated a kidney to one of his Uber passengers.

If you have any good news to report, please feel free to share your comments (along with any thoughts on this topic, as always.)

Hope you’re all staying well out there.

xo,

Audrey