How to Stay Sane in an Age of Division

by Elif Shafak

How is it possible then that in an era when social media was expected to give everyone an equal voice, so many continue to feel voiceless?

Stories bring us together, untold stories keep us apart.

We are made of stories – those that have happened, those that are still happening at this moment in time and those that are shaped purely in our imagination through words, images, dreams and an endless sense of wonder about the world around us and how it works. Unvarnished truths, innermost reflections, fragments of memory, wounds unhealed. Not to be able to tell your story, to be silenced and shut out, therefore, is to be dehumanised. It strikes at your very existence; it makes you question your sanity, the validity of your version of events. It creates a profound, and existential anxiety in us. In losing our voice something in us dies.

when you feel alone don’t look within, look out and look beyond for others who feel the same way, for there are always others, and if you can connect with them and with their story, you will be able to see everything in a new light.

The moment we stop listening to diverse opinions is also when we stop learning. Because the truth is we don’t learn much from sameness and monotony. We usually learn from differences.

We must strive to become intellectual nomads, keep moving, keep learning, resist confining ourselves in any cultural or mental ghetto, and spend more time not in select centres but at the margins, which is where real change always comes from.

And now we all stand and stare at a political system that churns out slogans like advertising copy, at a financial market that is motivated only by greed and profit, at the recent events that don’t move in the linear progressive way expected, realising that underneath the polished veneer of rhetoric that we have been sold, there is – and always was – hollowness. No wonder, then, that we are deeply disillusioned.

and we, too, find ourselves falling ill due to the state of uncertainty we are surrounded with – betwixt and between,* neither capable of letting go of the old order that made us increasingly unhappy nor capable of building a new world with solutions from lessons learned.

And are we immigrants synonymous to our accents? Or are we, or can we ever aspire to be, more than that? This is not to deny that our accents are fundamentally important to who we are, and they are near and dear to our hearts. They are an inextricable trace of the paths we have travelled, the loves we have loved and never forgotten, the scars we still carry and which still hurt. But that doesn’t mean we are from our accents.

We do not give up on the places we love just because we are physically detached from them.

Motherlands are castles made of glass. In order to leave them, you have to break something – a wall, a social convention, a cultural norm, a psychological barrier, a heart. What you have broken will haunt you. To be an emigré, therefore, means to forever bear shards of glass in your pockets. It is easy to forget they are there, light and minuscule as they are, and go on with your life, your little ambitions and important plans, but at the slightest contact the shards will remind you of their presence. They will cut you deep.

The motherlands we have walked out on resemble the oaths we have taken as children. We might not believe in them any more, we might not even think about them much, but they still tie our tongues. They are the secrets withheld, answers swallowed, hurts unspoken, old wounds opened fresh, first loves unforgotten. Adamant though we may be to abandon our motherlands, because God knows we have had enough of them, enough of their stupidities and absurdities and hostilities and cruelties, the truth is they will never abandon us. They are shadows that tag along with us to the four corners of the earth, sometimes they walk ahead of us, sometimes they fall behind, but they are never too far. That is why,...

I would like to think of myself as a citizen of the world, a citizen of this planet, a global soul. I have multiple belongings.

Multiple belongings are nurtured by cultural encounters but they are not only the preserve of people who travel. It is an attitude, a way of thinking, rather than the number of stamps on your passport. It is about thinking of yourself, and your fellow human beings, in more fluid terms than solid categories.

In an era characterised by insecurity, fragility and downward mobility, when everything feels transient, what exactly does education guarantee?

‘The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world as if it were nothing at all. No other loss occurs so quietly; any other loss – an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. – is sure to be noticed.’

Anger in the face of injustice and oppression is not only a dignified human response but often the antithesis of indifference. Anger is also the emotion with the longest memory.

APATHY – SEEMINGLY TRANQUIL yet probably the most pernicious emotion. Just as the colour white is a combination of all colours, apathy is a combination of many emotions: anxiety, disillusionment, bewilderment, fatigue, resentment … mix them fast, mix them hard and you end up with pervasive paralysis, lack of feeling, numbness.

How do we simultaneously remain engaged and manage to remain sane?

We all need to be more engaged, more involved citizens wherever we might happen to be in the world.

It is mostly through stories that we learn to think, perceive, feel and remember the world in a more nuanced and reflective way. As we gain a better understanding of the struggles of people from different backgrounds, and start to imagine lives beyond the one we are living, we recognise the complexity and richness of identities and the damage we do to ourselves and to others when we seek to reduce them to a single defining characteristic.

Do not be afraid of complexity. Be afraid of people who promise an easy shortcut to simplicity.

We have all the tools to build our societies anew, reform our ways of thinking, fix the inequalities and end the discriminations, and choose earnest wisdom over snippets of information, choose empathy over hatred, choose humanism over tribalism, yet we don’t have much time or room for error while we are losing our planet, our only home. After the pandemic, we won’t go back to the way things were before. And we shouldn’t.