Caught between Hope and Nihilism

Every year around this time I wake up and realize that the deadline for proposals to the Big Summer Conference is November 1. And every year around this time I brainstorm madly for some kind of session that matches the Conference's yearly theme ("Drive" this time, since it's in Detroit).

After today's wake-up and brainstorm, it looks like I'm going to be pulling together a roundtable about the deep, enduring emotions (affects) that drive social movements in performance. My idea is to have each roundtable participant write/present something about a particular emotion. I have a friend who's researching fear. Another writes about outrage (a favored topic of mine in the past). Someone else is doing love.

Eventually I need to decide what to do myself. I'm caught between hope and nihilism.

Just put that on my tombstone: "I'm caught between hope and nihilism."

Actually, I don't want a tombstone. Or a funeral, really. I'd prefer to leave no trace and disappear from human memory as quickly as possible. Nihilism FTW! Except--I feel guilty thinking that. Can nihilism ever be anything other than a mental pathology? (There's my paper, probably.)

There's already a go-to performance scholar for hope: Jill Dolan. Hm. I should ask her. She's a super-star, of course, and likely already engaged. But it's worth a shot. I hope she says yes! LOL.

Nihilism and pessimism aren't safe topics for me, really. They're fascinating in the way that unhealthy-for-me things often are, like chocolate fudge ice cream sundaes from Baskin-Robbins. Or chocolate pudding. Or chocolate anything. I can get into really, really bad spots thinking too much about pessimism.

I have a pessimistic bent and a tendency to depression. This is both a neutral fact of my brain/personality and a complication for me as a Christian. The second fruit of the Spirit, we're told, is joy. It's right after love. Christians should be joyful, hopeful, cheerful. I'm not by nature a cheerful person.

I strive for pragmatism tempered by humble gratitude. The more I can recognize my kneejerk pessimistic thoughts as reactivity, the better. But even after that, it is often hard for me to discern reason for hope (as my recent posts have illustrated). When obliged to be a leader or a teacher, I can shift into an optimistic gear. It's a fake-it-til-you-make-it kind of gesture. Sometimes it works to get me out of a spiral.

But we'll see.