Bianca Giaever and the gift of yourself
Weeping in public is one of the greatest decadences in life. I know because I do it as often as I possibly can. Which isn't very often because it's not something you can plan for or fabricate.
Every now and then, though, I'll stumble upon some piece of magic (read: a podcast episode) that makes me sob uncontrollably and unexpectedly as I go about my day.
Weeping in public is the highest praise I can give to any creation. It means you've created something that I'm helpless in the face of. That I feel so much (awe, or sadness, or connection) that there's nothing else I can do but show my soft underbelly to the world. To cry helplessly in the street for all the world to see.
You have ruined my day. You have made my body a conduit of pure emotion. You have reached me. You have made me and you, complete strangers, into us.
/
Of course, being the highest praise means that I don't weep in public as often as I'd like to. I genuinely wish everything I listened to moved me to tears. But the droughts between the tears are so long that I mostly forget that it's possible.
And then, off my guard, it happens.
What will or will not make me weep in public isn't something I understand. I don't want to understand it. To know the trick would take away the magic.
But I think, on the other side of that coin, is that the person making the thing probably doesn't know either.
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The first moment to make me cry in Bianca Giaever's "Two Years with Franz" was a subtle one. A tiny one. One that she couldn't have possibly known about or planned for. It was something that existed outside of the story. It was Bianca herself.
Here's the moment:
"I kept listening, and I kept listening. I told my friends about the tapes. And
then eventually, so much time passed that I stopped telling them. And they
stopped asking.
When I came across a good tape, I would always play it for my boyfriend.
Sometimes, at night before bed, we would read Franz’s poems out loud to
each other.
Franz, and the tapes, they became part of our relationship…
my boyfriend was the only person with enough context to understand what
the tapes meant to me. What Franz meant to me."
I know that she couldn't have known I would cry there because she doesn't know I exist. (Although I emailed her once, in a past life, asking what she was working on next).
Because she doesn't know that I exist she doesn't know that what she describes is the thing I miss most right now. Somebody who has context. Who understands what anything means to me. And to whom that now has a shared meaning - mattering to them because it matters to me.
The overarching narrative is about big love. But the thing that got me was the little love. The imperceptible things you feel only in their absence.
/
And so what's the point? What's the lesson to be learned here. It's not about what makes people cry, but about what makes things worth doing.
She didn't have to put herself into the story. But she did. Because it was the honest thing to do. And it's also the thing that set off the waterworks. She rolled over, and showed the world her soft underbelly.
/
In an interview that I watched recently (that may or may not have been an episode of Hot Ones), Hasan Minhaj said that the best advice he ever received was from John Stewart, who told him to move towards his discomfort.
For me, personal writing, inserting myself (my real self) into my writing has always been something that's made me uncomfortable. Something that I thought nobody would care about. Something that has always felt, to me, as too earnest to be bearable.
And it's something that I'm trying to do more and more of.
“What is most personal is most universal.”
That's the lesson.