Textual Healing

The speech below, adapted from a longer, previously published essay entitled “On Possibility,” was given at “Art After Trump: A Response & A Gathering,” a reading featuring artists and arts administrators that was put together in the wake of the 2016 Presidential Election, hosted by and held at the Housing Works Bookstore Cafe on December 15, 2016. An audio file of the speech can be found at the end of this  post. The “Art After Trump” event and portions of this speech were also featured in Max Cea’s December 20, 2016, Salon article “Artivism is a fierce and reflexive response to the election of Donald Trump: Will it make change?”.

Like many artists and activists, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about where art and activism intersect and how I’ll be able to keep showing up for both endeavors in this scary political landscape. One thought that’s been helping me grapple with all the uncertainty and fears of futility is this: At their most effective, the best art and the best activism share a foundation of empathy. Our current political climate is sorely lacking in empathy, so I believe we’ll be needing a lot more of it in our art, our activism, and our personal lives in the coming months. In that spirit I’m sharing the following quick story:

I’ve done BRAKING AIDS ride, an annual 3-day, 300-mile bike ride since 2008. It raises money to fund Housing Works’ life-saving services, and it connects our mission to end AIDS and homelessness, which can easily seem abstract, to real people. Every year, the ride gives me a different perspective on the cause, on activism, and what it means to fight for positive change.

Me, overjoyed at being halfway home, BRAKING AIDS® Ride 2016.

Still, I’ve wondered if we’re preaching to the already converted. Whose minds and hearts are we really changing pedaling across four states in three days?

Then a few years ago something happened that made me rethink that doubt about our own impact.

Every year Day 2 of the ride is Red Dress Day. Everyone is urged to wear red so that from overhead, the cyclists on the road look like a red AIDS ribbon. Many people get creative, wearing elaborate outfits that garner attention: Picture over 100 people bicycling through New England, all of them in red, many in costumes or drag.

A small group of riders and crew gathering during lunch at the beach to make a red ribbon, Red Dress Day, BRAKING AIDS® Ride, September 2013.

Two BRAKING AIDS® Ride cyclists on Red Dress Day, September 2013.

Three years ago, my friend Linda got up at dinner after Red Dress Day and shared this story: When she and some other crew members arrived at our host hotel that afternoon, the same place we stayed the previous year, an employee recognized her and said, “See? I heard you guys were coming back this year, so I wore a red shirt to work today.” They ended up hugging, two virtual strangers, right there in the hotel lobby. Normally a hug doesn’t last more than a second. But this guy held on, and it became clear this went beyond a gesture of solidarity. He clung to Linda, tears welling up, and he whispered to her that his father had been diagnosed with HIV during the previous year.

BRAKING AIDS® Ride volunteer crew member Linda Zipko hugging a new friend, who wore a red shirt for Red Dress Day, September 2013.

I don’t know what happened to that hotel employee. I can’t say what he felt or if the moment stayed with him. I don’t know if he told anyone else his story or about wearing his red shirt. I only know that showing up in a red shirt that September day meant that this guy had waited for us for close to a year, in the hopes of having a brief connection with our ride community, a bunch of strangers — to say in some small way “HIV affects my life, too,” and in doing so, perhaps to feel less alone with that.

I’ve also wondered about his choice to speak to Linda. He could have worn his red shirt as a private symbol for himself and said nothing. What if he had felt too vulnerable to talk to Linda? What if Linda hadn’t been up to sharing the story with us? We’d still have had an impact on a stranger. The difference is we wouldn’t know it.

We affect one another. All the time. We can’t always know how or when.

We don’t always know.

I think of how many people have shaped who I am, how sometimes it’s small interactions that strike a chord and change me — a gesture, a word of reassurance, some tough love, a meeting of the eyes. Then I remind myself how rarely I share the fact of that impact with those people, often because I’m not aware of it myself until later.

We don’t always know.

For every moment like the one between Linda and the hotel staffer, one that’s tangible proof that who we are, what we do, and how we treat one another matters, a dozen other hidden moments may be happening to other people, changes percolating inside them because of something we said or did, something we may never be aware of. Something that alters their trajectory forever, however slightly.

I imagine the vastness of all we don’t know, of all those hidden moments of empathy — both the ones I benefit from and the ones in which I affect others. That vast cloud stretches the expanse of the sky, beyond the horizon, behind the crests of mountains, into realms we cannot see. I take great comfort in dreaming about its possibility.

Me in September 2014, having just completed the first 200 miles out of 300 miles of BRAKING AIDS® Ride, an annual 3-day bike-ride fundraiser.