Welcome to the Bad Timeline. Tips for living here.

Welcome to the Bad Timeline.

You, whoever you are, have finally recognized the haunting manifest in your surroundings. Perhaps you have always recognized the dark sides of your reality, watched them converge, understood they are already here. Or, perhaps you once glanced them in your periphery, shadows to look away from, but a shocking event has now made said looking away impossible, has now seen these shadows present too close to home to ignore. Perhaps your eyes have been long shut—decidedly or undecidedly so—but have now been pried open by said shocking event, and you have witnessed so much that even when you shut your lids, the images haunt you still.

Welcome.

Say, unlike us, you’ve not been raised under multiple military governments, have not quite yet lived under an authoritarian dictatorship, a fascist-lite leadership, a democracy-in-name-only nation. Say, like us, you’re yet to encounter a truly ultratraditionalist, ultraconservative, ultrareligious society of forced confirmism. It would be easy for us, therefore, to succumb to a tirade of I-told-you-so’s and you’re-not-specials. (And you must forgive us, because to be human is to succumb to such human proclivities). But once we are done sniding, chittering, laughing, we will be yanked back to earth by the saying: Slippery ground does not discriminate. That is to say: we are not special; you are not special. None of us is special, because we do not have power.

In a Bad Timeline, power, you will learn, is the only thing that makes you special.

In a Bad Timeline, you will immediately feel the need to survive. There are many ways to do this. One way is to attempt to become special. Many will attempt to. Some will succeed. But what they don’t tell you about a Bad Timeline is that those who are special in one need it to continue being a Bad Timeline in order to continue being special. Bad Timelines never last (even those who are special know this). They can only float for so long before they sink under their own weight. So: yoke yourself to a sunk ship if you wish.

Here’s another: survive by looking away. Pretend it’s not really happening. La la la la la. Another human proclivity for which you can be forgiven. But remember: Slippery ground does not discriminate. Easier to slip, even, when your eyes are shut.

Here’s a third way: survive and resist (or, shall we say, survive by resisting).

This, we have learned from all those other Bad Timelines, depends on who you decide to be in this moment, and the means you have, as a people, to continue to talk to each other. For example, if you were raised, like some of us were, in 80s and 90s Nigeria, newspaper vendor stalls were centers of community. We would watch the average adults in our city gather to read and discuss protest essays and critical political cartoons in the day’s newspapers and latest magazines. There would be fiction, gossip, satire, hyperbole, reportage, personal essays, all written to get under our skin, force us out of our clothing. Impossible to leave the stall without new questions raised.

People, talking. It sounds simple, but it is not. Not even close. It is why the first port of call for the special is always for both those things—the people, and the talking—to be constantly, overwhelmingly, under attack, chipped away piece by piece until whatever is left is so whittled down that it is unable to stand on its own two feet.

Therefore, any honest manifestation of your survival-by-resistance will always require a concerted, continuous investment in disruption, unpalatability, walking outside the lines—everything that signifies the opposite (and therefore, a refutation) of imposed expectations. If, in this bad timeline of yours, you seek a survival situated within usual comforts, we have bad news for you—it will be insufficient. If you seek to survive in a manner that is normative, we have even more bad news for you—that is not honest resistance.

Once, you could shut everything out; now, no longer—to sleep at all is to invite these horrors to your door. You must stay awake if you wish to survive this Bad Timeline. To stay awake is to re-calibrate your thinking, to revisit the manner in which you have existed in this world. Staying awake is the first step toward healing, survival (resistance) and a vanquishing of shadows. Here are some tips that may help with that.

There is no normal

It is a human urge to seek and strive for the familiar, the normal, but you must resist it. The world you know is gone, and is unlikely to return—whatever semblance of it may exist on the other side of this will be irrevocably changed. (Perhaps, there is an argument to be made that the world you thought you knew in the first place was not the world you lived in at all.) What you must do now is prepare for this world you surely are living in.

This is my new normal, then? No, we are saying that there is no such thing as normal. Perhaps you mean to reference the normative or typical, which are really just other terms for power. You must shrug off this desire for the normative, the dominant, and open yourself up to a life outside of these lines. You exist beyond the normative now (perhaps you always have). Embrace it.

Seek stories, but unfamiliar ones

The singular hero who rides in to save the day is a hegemonic creation. Solutions to communal challenges are often communal themselves. A dopamine-swelling tale of victims triumphing against seemingly unvanquishable odds is insufficient if it does not simultaneously grapple—exhaustively, in a clear-eyed manner—with the systemic patterns and institutions that created these victims in the first place. A rallying cry for survival that offers nebulous platitudes or self-pitying rhetoric is incomplete without concretion. One must boldly stake a claim or else leave this work to those who will.

The familiar patterns in our dominant storytelling are familiar for the reason that they aim for the least provocation, at times bordering on dishonesty in order to achieve this. In a Bad Timeline, what one wants is to be provoked by truth, which leads to discomfort and defamiliarization, the hallmarks of honest storytelling.

It is impossible to truly and permanently dismantle, as Audre Lorde says, the master at his own game using his own tools. Temporarily, perhaps, like a balm, a band-aid, something to soothe. But permanent healing to the wound? One must work through the sanitization, the itching, the pain, the cleaning. One must contend with the unfamiliar, the uncomfortable, the unpalatable.

Seek comfort, but also discomfort

Comforts are desirable things in times of darkness. A warm fire and a hot meal to keep the darkness hovering outside your door at bay. A warm blanket and warm socks at night. A ray of sunlight peeking through dark clouds, keeping you from despairing. Comforts are good things to reach for in bad times, so long as one understands exactly what they are—comforts—and what they are not—resistance.

Resistance—honest, truthful, bared-teeth resistance—is barely ever comfortable or palatable. It requires confronting people, systems, institutions and, most challenging of all, ourselves. Doing so will be discomfiting, but one will be required not to relent, to persevere on and on and on, in a neverending cycle until resistance is fully achieved. Does this sound grueling? Resistance is grueling. Resistance celebrates, but it does not necessarily offer a pat on the back for doing one’s part, for doing the right thing. Resistance does not seek the nebulous, sanitized goal of tolerance, but impact, and even consequences; it does not seek to unify and shake hands with entities invested in its smothering and capture, but to grab those hands and twist until they break.

Resistance is not holy or pure or pristine. Honest resistance—that which has not been captured by the same systems and institutions that revile its power, sanded of its edges and remade into something impotent and palatable—is fraught and anxious, messy and marring, but it is the right fucking thing to do every time, complexities and contradictions included.

Laugh, but don’t just laugh

“Suffering and smiling,” sings the late Fela Kuti of a people in a Bad Timeline of their own. You have to laugh, lest you cry—isn’t that what we say? Therefore, laughing is a valid pathway to purging the demons within us. Comedy, black humor, satire—these are known to proliferate in Bad Timelines. There is also the urge to gloat, to make fun of those who were most instrumental in bringing about this Bad Timeline, believing they’d be immune to its proclivities or shielded from its effects, only to have their faces eaten by the face-eating party. It is understandable to succumb to this humanly endeavour.

Laugh. But don’t just laugh.

Do not treat the Bad Timeline with levity—this is serious business. At least those who are special, who are invested in irrevocably keeping this a Bad Timeline, are serious about it. If you are chided for taking things too seriously, then congratulations, you have not been taking them seriously enough! Be specific about the goals you want to achieve with your work, and pursue them relentlessly. Do not laugh yourself to sleep. Stay woke.

Resistance can take many forms (beyond protest, activism and other direct action)

Direct action is what we often think of when the word “resistance” pops into our minds. Boycotts, protests, signing letters, refuting institutional policies—these are established paths to nonviolent resistance. But as author Alexander Chee recently discussed, even these can take many forms and can look like many different things. And that’s before we get to resistance that is more in the form of indirect action.

Sometimes, your resistance will be local—it’s the choices you make in your home, your neighbourhood, your social circles. You may be unable to change institutional policy, but you sure can make the openly misogynist, racist, xenophobic, bigoted, morally and emotionally bankrupt persons in your circles uncomfortable. You can make yourself an unwelcome space for proponents of the Bad Timeline, even without direct confrontation (although if you have some of that special sauce, a.k.a power and/or privilege, you must use it in this instance).

You must also work hard on yourself. Resistance starts with first resisting the acid rain of social norms that have made home in our minds, our patterns and behaviours. This is harder than we think, but you can do it. Remember: what resistance most requires is honesty, care, and a willingness to embrace discomfort. Sometimes, it is all you can afford. So do it anyway.

There are still Good Timelines, however inadequate

Bad Timelines do not occur all at once. Sometimes, they happen first to some, then to others. Sometimes, they overlap and their effects multiply. Sometimes, they happen to a section of us, while not happening to others (which is to say, the reality of your Bad Timeline is possibly a Good Timeline for someone who does not share your reality; say, one who is maybe special).

For every Bad Timline, there is likely a parallel Good Timeline, however inadequate. Sometimes, you’re in it; sometimes, you’re not. Today, a Bad Timeline; tomorrow, a Good Timeline. Slippery ground does not discriminate. The wind shifts quicker than we know it.

All this to say: chin up. Focus on getting through this one. We have done it before. You can do it.