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Jan. 12th, 2015 06:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sevenswellsIt's five in the morning and I can't fucking sleep. I haven't been able to go to sleep before three these past few days.
Went to the march with everyone else. It... wasn't cathartic. I don't know. I still feel empty and worried and disgusted and I still don't know what to think.
The time of grief has passed and now all that's left is fear. I don't feel better, even after being on the streets with the rest of France. My head is constantly swimming with bad thoughts and people hurt and bombs exploding and repressive laws.
A close friend of mine who's a journalist was working at her office, which happens to be right on top of the Charlie Hebdo headquarters, on the day the shooting happened. She heard everything. The gunshots, the cries, the islamist slogans. Of course, she's still extremely shocked and traumatized. We tried to talk about it on Saturday night, the day before the march. In an attempt to cheer her up a bit, I tried to gather some positivity about the fact that people had rallied together very quickly in a show of unity, and that had to be a good thing, right? She, who's usually quite sunny and optimistic, replied, matter-of-factly: "Yeah... for the time it lasts."
I can't get her words out of my head. Everything happened so quickly, and the grief and the pain came crashing down on us almost immediately and all the while, while we were experiencing this horrible turmoil of inconceivable emotions, people were already commenting on what had happened and what was happening and what was going to happen afterwards. All at once. We've been aware of the eyes of the whole world as we heard and read horrible things about not only those killed but France in general, while we were still in pain. We lashed out in defence, we turned against each other, we accused, we protected, we cried, we recused, we explained, we excused, we attacked, we counter-attacked, words, words, words, piling up on one another at the speed of how quickly they were being typed... all of it, so fucking quickly. And it's still so confusing. We were asked what we were thinking when we couldn't even think. And we can all feel now the wind is already changing, just as quickly. "For the time it lasts" indeed.
What's left now of "Je suis Charlie"? Not much. I was very protective of it while it was happening and when people attacked that stupid slogan (I hate this age we're living in where we have to boil everything down to slogans and hashtags and 140 characters and fucking idiotic icons and symbols and concepts universal and non-offensive enough for every fucking idiot on Earth to understand and chant), but I don't recognize myself in those words either, if I'm perfectly honest. Not because of Charlie Hebdo and what they may or may not have been, not because of a rejection of this national unity I've tried my best to be so protective of along with everyone else, just... Just because what I felt, what I'm still feeling, this whole fucking huge ball of emotions and confusion and aborted reflexions can't be summed up by those three words, by a fucking slogan... it doesn't feel right. Not because I'm such a special snowflake, I've adopted slogans before because they felt true to me, and because they summed up an idea really well, but this, this whole fucking situation that I'm an unwilling part of... "je suis Charlie", "je ne suis pas Charlie", fuck you and your hashtags and your slogans, it's bullshit. It's all empty. I'm still trying to work all this shit out, and there can't be such an easy answer. We're still trying to justify that fucking slogan when we don't even care all that much, and it's just another debate we don't need. One of the first reactions I saw online immediately after the news fell was "there are no words". I saw someone reply to that almost in the same instant: "No there aren't but we'll have to find some soon enough, won't we?" Now there are words everywhere, but that first reaction to me is still valid and hasn't changed. "There are no words". Why do we have to immediately find words when there are none? I wanted to take part in the movement, show something, make a gesture, and all I came up with was a big blank. Nothing. All I could manage was the colour of mourning.
When my friend heard the gunshots and saw the two armed men on the street from her office window, she told me that her main thought was "it's not possible. Not here. It's not possible." They thought the gunshots had to be firecrackers. They thought the two men were only here to intimidate or threaten, that it had to be all for show somehow, that they had missed their mark.
And that's the thing, isn't it. The whole impossibility of it. It's not only that we still can't understand what happened -- we still can't process the reality of it. And in our age of short sentences where everything happens so fast and where our emotions can't even keep up, how can it feel any realer?
Went to the march with everyone else. It... wasn't cathartic. I don't know. I still feel empty and worried and disgusted and I still don't know what to think.
The time of grief has passed and now all that's left is fear. I don't feel better, even after being on the streets with the rest of France. My head is constantly swimming with bad thoughts and people hurt and bombs exploding and repressive laws.
A close friend of mine who's a journalist was working at her office, which happens to be right on top of the Charlie Hebdo headquarters, on the day the shooting happened. She heard everything. The gunshots, the cries, the islamist slogans. Of course, she's still extremely shocked and traumatized. We tried to talk about it on Saturday night, the day before the march. In an attempt to cheer her up a bit, I tried to gather some positivity about the fact that people had rallied together very quickly in a show of unity, and that had to be a good thing, right? She, who's usually quite sunny and optimistic, replied, matter-of-factly: "Yeah... for the time it lasts."
I can't get her words out of my head. Everything happened so quickly, and the grief and the pain came crashing down on us almost immediately and all the while, while we were experiencing this horrible turmoil of inconceivable emotions, people were already commenting on what had happened and what was happening and what was going to happen afterwards. All at once. We've been aware of the eyes of the whole world as we heard and read horrible things about not only those killed but France in general, while we were still in pain. We lashed out in defence, we turned against each other, we accused, we protected, we cried, we recused, we explained, we excused, we attacked, we counter-attacked, words, words, words, piling up on one another at the speed of how quickly they were being typed... all of it, so fucking quickly. And it's still so confusing. We were asked what we were thinking when we couldn't even think. And we can all feel now the wind is already changing, just as quickly. "For the time it lasts" indeed.
What's left now of "Je suis Charlie"? Not much. I was very protective of it while it was happening and when people attacked that stupid slogan (I hate this age we're living in where we have to boil everything down to slogans and hashtags and 140 characters and fucking idiotic icons and symbols and concepts universal and non-offensive enough for every fucking idiot on Earth to understand and chant), but I don't recognize myself in those words either, if I'm perfectly honest. Not because of Charlie Hebdo and what they may or may not have been, not because of a rejection of this national unity I've tried my best to be so protective of along with everyone else, just... Just because what I felt, what I'm still feeling, this whole fucking huge ball of emotions and confusion and aborted reflexions can't be summed up by those three words, by a fucking slogan... it doesn't feel right. Not because I'm such a special snowflake, I've adopted slogans before because they felt true to me, and because they summed up an idea really well, but this, this whole fucking situation that I'm an unwilling part of... "je suis Charlie", "je ne suis pas Charlie", fuck you and your hashtags and your slogans, it's bullshit. It's all empty. I'm still trying to work all this shit out, and there can't be such an easy answer. We're still trying to justify that fucking slogan when we don't even care all that much, and it's just another debate we don't need. One of the first reactions I saw online immediately after the news fell was "there are no words". I saw someone reply to that almost in the same instant: "No there aren't but we'll have to find some soon enough, won't we?" Now there are words everywhere, but that first reaction to me is still valid and hasn't changed. "There are no words". Why do we have to immediately find words when there are none? I wanted to take part in the movement, show something, make a gesture, and all I came up with was a big blank. Nothing. All I could manage was the colour of mourning.
When my friend heard the gunshots and saw the two armed men on the street from her office window, she told me that her main thought was "it's not possible. Not here. It's not possible." They thought the gunshots had to be firecrackers. They thought the two men were only here to intimidate or threaten, that it had to be all for show somehow, that they had missed their mark.
And that's the thing, isn't it. The whole impossibility of it. It's not only that we still can't understand what happened -- we still can't process the reality of it. And in our age of short sentences where everything happens so fast and where our emotions can't even keep up, how can it feel any realer?
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Date: 2015-01-12 04:04 pm (UTC)*méga hugs*
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Date: 2015-01-12 04:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-01-12 07:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-01-15 12:56 pm (UTC)