Welcome to Getting Better! This is where I invite you to stop doom-scrolling, and to delight instead in a personal narrative essay. Or, as is the case this week, to answer my existential questions. Then (and only then), get off your device and live your life. Subscribe for free weekly pieces or upgrade to support my work. So glad you’re here 🥰
shared this Nick Cave quote with our Mindful Writers group last month and then asked us to answer the question: What does it mean to be human?Our humanness is not given to us. Instead, it requires our participation in its construction and realisation, which often comes about through collapse or calamity. We rummage through the chaos of our inner worlds, through our multitude of selves, to discover what we are, what we wish to be, and our authentic relationship with the world. This process requires a kind of winnowing of those selves and the dispensing of any that are no longer of service to the work of becoming fully human. We must separate the wheat from the chaff. This is a necessary but painful form of spiritual renovation - to discard those ancient and destructive versions of oneself and become an actual person, unique among other people. We must do this lest we be frozen in a stasis of the soul.
— Nick Cave, “The Red Hand Files”
My answer morphed into on a long journal rant about the physical closeness we’re so (relatively) estranged from today and that I believe is required to be fully human. It was satisfying to get some of my frustration — with our noses in our devices, our inability to make eye contact (last week’s post), living in favor of text messages and a fear of knocking on doors, etc. — out of my body and onto the page.
But I didn’t really get to the kernel of truth I was seeking, and the question has been nagging at me for weeks now.
What is humanness? And what does it mean to be human? And are these two questions even the same?
I’ve gone down many rabbit holes.
Human as an active verb rather than a passive noun keeps bubbling to the surface — very much in line with Nick Cave’s words.
But then a friend this morning brought up being in a vegetative state. This has been the source of a lot of pain for a lot of families, with so many of us declaring we would rather you pull the plug than allow us to live (or not) in this way. But do we say to pull the plug because we are no longer human in that state? And is being human the goal?
Or is it because we believe our humanness has faded into something too pitiful or painful to keep flickering in this way?
Do we really want to go on living as humans without our humanness?
Surely the woman locked in a room staring at her iPhone or MacBook all day every day is a human just as much as the woman next door making art with her little ones. But is the same degree of humanness present?
I find it’s much easier for me to come up with negative definitions than a positive one. I know what it feels like to be disconnected from my humanness. My humanness was not with me when I was in a deep depressive state, unable to recognize myself in the mirror or find any appetite for food or life. My body was there but I would have been fine leaving it. I felt I already had.
On the flip side, my humanness felt intensely alive at 11:30pm, 1am, 2:30am, 4am…when my baby boy was a few days old and my husband and I were feeding him expressed milk with a syringe, like a baby bird, every 90-120 minutes around the clock because of my trouble nursing. My humanness was pulsing with life despite my physical human body feeling depleted, worn down, on the verge of breaking.
So is it about tending to one another? Being in service?
This thread is on a constant loop in my thoughts and in my journal these days.
I’m so curious to hear from you: what does it mean to be human?
And is that the same thing as humanness?
When do you feel most connected to your humanness?
Just what you're doing, being vulnerable to others, instead of just the social media highlight reel, which is honestly more fun in the moment.
I love that my sharing of that quote prompted so much pondering from you, and this great post! I think caregiving to ourselves, to others, to the creatures we share this planet with, and to the planet itself, is a big part of humanness. And it’s something we have lost our way from. I am obsessed lately with the misinterpretation humans have made of Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” theory and how that has led us down a path away from our natural human way of connection, community and love. This is the theme at the heart of the novel I am writing now. I do believe we can find our way back though. Many of us already are.