I Am This Chaos

Trump is my true face. 

Like not exactly, but also—yes.

As I watch JD Vance campaign with, and for, someone he once called “the Hitler of our time,” in a room full of like-minded individuals, I think, “How hypocritical.” Gross, I think. Pathetic, even.

And then I think about myself, my own career ambitions, my own greediness and desire… I think about someone I’m currently working with, how I have criticized this person behind their back for talking the talk but not walking the walk, and how also, if they called me tomorrow and said here’s the money to make your project—I would gladly accept it, shut up, and smile.

Does that make me hypocritical? Does that make me gross? Many things can be true at the same time.

So yes, I am not too far from JD Vance.

Not too far from anyone in that room or any room, if I really think about it. If I really take myself, my ego, and the story about how wonderful and righteous I am out of the equation, I would see that I am more similar to anyone in that room than different.

I am not so different from the people I disagree with the most. Not so different from someone who doesn’t want to be let go from their job and will do anything and say anything to keep it. Not so different from someone who will do close to anything to get ahead. All of this is alive in me. Do I feed it every day, no, but it’s there.

In the book, Doppelganger, author Naomi Klein speaks about growing up as a young Jewish woman and how the atrocities of the Holocaust were constantly preached to her: This was terrible. This was horrible. They, who did it, were terrible and horrible. “It asked us to be as outraged and indignant at what happened to our ancestors,” she says, but “our education did not ask us to probe the parts of ourselves that might be capable of inflicting great harm on others, and to figure out how to resist them.”

When we examine the “bad” behavior or thoughts of others, it’s really just bad according to our narrative of the world—it’s pitting us against them. It is only increasing the story that we are different and separate.

But we are closer than we think. In Thich Nhat Hanh’s stunning and timeless poem “Call Me By My True Names,” the late teacher writes:

I am the twelve-year-old girl,
refugee on a small boat,
who throws herself into the ocean
after being raped by a sea pirate.

And I am also the pirate,
my heart not yet capable
of seeing and loving.

Inside of us is the ability to be and become anything. Even the thing we fear most.

In one of the more well-known koans, a Zen master asks his student, “What is your original face?” I meditate on this question often. When feeling righteous and special and somehow better than someone else, I ask myself, “What is my original face?”

Dare I say, Donald Trump is my original face. You are my original face.  

But that can’t be true, can it? We so badly want to present our face as whole, complete, righteous, and not weak. Speaking for myself—I want to be the best version of myself. Maybe this is why I still hide my face when I cry, because I have shame for not being whole. I want my face to be perfect, but my original face is not perfect. It is still forming, both complete and incomplete all at once, full of hypocrisy and truth, capable of inflicting great harm and great love, perfect and still, in need of its own liberation. It cries and pretends it’s not crying all at the same time.

My original face is your original face. It’s my father’s original face. 

When I was recently home, at my parents’ house, the family and I decided to watch the documentary 13th. The documentary, directed by Ava DuVernay, teaches us what the American education system didn’t teach me: that the Thirteenth Amendment didn’t actually end slavery, contrary to popular belief. It hid it, cloaked it behind bars, and called it prison.

One of the most compelling parts of 13th is when DuVernay lays out the ways that we are all complicit in this form of institutionalized slavery. All of us. Even me. This sudden realization led me to try to get my father to admit that even he, a Dominican, could be an agent of this systemic and structural racism. I felt that it could be a moment of understanding between us, getting to know ourselves (our true faces) better, turning over a rock that had yet to see the light. “Admit it, racism is in our history, in our Dominican blood.”

“I’m not racist,” he said.

But I needed him to admit it because I didn’t want to be alone in my disbelief and anger. 

“Everyone’s a little racist,” I told him. “It’s almost impossible to escape.”

He fought me with every ounce of his strength. “Bullshit,” he said, like I was challenging him on if he was a good person.

I told him: “Pops, you can be racist and still be a good person. I’m sure Ted Bundy washed dishes.”

But he wouldn’t relent. We were yelling at each other. Why wouldn’t he admit it? Was this another example of how BIPOC can internalize pain so that they might perpetuate it and also be wounded by it simultaneously?

Eventually, I backed off and let him have his truth. Maybe out of respect, an understanding of what he sacrificed, how he’s done so much for me. It’s my pops, for Christ’s sake.

The morning after watching the documentary and fighting with my father, my mother pulled me aside and told me: “Last night your father cried in my arms like he hadn’t in a lifetime. He cried and apologized for bringing his kids into this world with so much hate.”

I have never seen that side of my father ever. He doesn’t know my mother shared this with me. 

How can we work with the discomfort of dealing with people who have different politics, feelings, stories, delusions, or beliefs from ours? How do we probe our own motivations and subconscious biases while simultaneously protecting our energy so that we might have enough resolve to act in ways that affirm our character and values? These are not comfortable conversations for any of us. It’s not easy to take accountability, to see yourself in another, but we must all be honest about how we got here so that we can imagine a new way.

Joanna Macy, the Buddhist scholar, environmental activist, author, systems theorist, and ecologist (longest business card ever), talks about befriending the pain of our world. That we can’t change it until we arrive and see it, feel it. That night my father befriended a part of himself. Since that day, I have seen him soften more and more to the chaos of what is and to the discomfort of difficult conversations. What started as a fight eventually brought us closer to each other. 

We have to be brave enough to not look away. Brave enough to not push it away. If we keep pushing this narrative of difference, we get exactly what we have now—a rift that gets larger. If we resist these parts in us, we get war, we get violence, we get left versus right, this versus that, us versus them, me versus you: aka separation. Liberation dies in division. 

War begets war, hate begets hate—that is always the formula. You bomb me; I bomb you. You hurt me; I hurt you. You dig a line in the sand; I make it fatter. We can’t dehumanize others without dehumanizing ourselves. It’s all connected. 

It’s not easy to take accountability, to see yourself in another, but we must all be honest about how we got here so that we can imagine a new way.

I want to feel whole and less disconnected, less separate—I think you do too. I don’t have a direct answer for how we make this happen, but I do think it lies in knowing that our original face is everywhere we look, and it’s asking us to see its pain. It’s asking us to listen.

In The Book of Delights, Ross Gay describes joy as “entering and joining with the terrible.” Choosing to enter and choosing to join with the terrible, not just entering and joining with the pleasant stuff but the ability to be present with it all. We (each and every one of us) experience it all: pain, sorrow, hurt, boredom, joy, worry, doubt, confusion, and the great inevitable death, of ourselves and of our loved ones. That is what binds us.

What if we all took a page out of Ross Gay’s book and consciously acknowledged and entered that terribleness together? Could we then face the catastrophes and devastations of our world without needing to look away? 

Because our original face is not fixed. What we are, where we are going, and what we are becoming is not a destination as it is often touted and shouted in speeches from various podiums about the devastation of the climate or the filibuster. Our original face is a relational practice of now. A cocreated set of decisions, happenings, and loved-out-loud questions in the only moment where there is breath: now.

By genuinely asking “What is my original face?” and making room to see that this is it—with all its shit, all its fake news, its hopes, backhanded compliments, and DEI efforts. Trump, JD Vance, Kamala, name-calling, speaking out of turn, losing my cool, all the “othering” each side takes part in to affirm their own me-ness, this is my face. I have othered in this way—I try not to, but I have and likely will in the future. There is no one separate from the three poisons—greed, aversion, and delusion—and yet constantly we try to act like only the ones we disagree with have them. It is all one face.

This chaos, this distress, this war is not going to stop. Not tomorrow, probably not even in November. And yet we can be liberated with it, not outside of it, but with it. To practice liberation is to be in touch with all aspects of life—with each side and freckle and scar on our beautiful face. Each day thousands of children die of hunger. Each day plant and animal species go extinct, never to return. And yet there are also agents of peace who are healing communities on a daily basis. As Tupac once wrote, “Did you hear about the rose that grew from a crack in the concrete?” Our face is both dreadful and a miracle. Our original face is so much more than we can even imagine.

There is always a different way to see things. 

Your original face is not separate from mine, and mine from yours. Yet we are lucky enough to have the chance to get intimate with it, to feel the grief and pain of it, and to be an instrument of change, if we enter it together.