what's love got to do with it: my thoughts on *fail
In Bengali, shor (pronounced like 'short' but without the 't') is the word for the clotted cream that rises to the top of heated, unpasteurized milk. You skim it off the top, and it's used in the milky sweets that Bengalis traditionally prefer. As well, it is devoured merrily on its own, a fabulous treat for all and sundry. That is, so long as sundry doesn't include me. I loathe shor, the way it tastes, the way it feels -slimy, for the record -- I hate everything about it with the fiery passion of a thousand suns. I always have.
Kali, why this irrational hatred of a dairy product, you ask? Well, I just don't like it, that's all.
...also there is this loosely related and entirely true story: it turns out that shor has other uses besides deliciousness. For instance, as renowned scientists like Lamarck could probably confirm, legend has it that a careful application of shor to the skin is tantamount to applying... bleach. To become white like the cream, see? The reason I know this? So glad you asked. It's because when I was four years old, my grandmother tried it on me. You see, she was worried - she herself was pretty fair skinned - sort of a creamy color, incidentally - and her son, my father, is (relatively) fair himself -- probably a milky tea shade. But he married my mother who is probably more cocoa colored (horror!) and they had me - at that time, probably a strong coffee with cream. AND I WAS A GIRL. How would anyone marry me ever??? I was DARK, and my father had let DARKNESS into the gene pool and OMG WHAT WOULD HAPPEN? But fortunately there was an easy answer: shor. She'd just lighten me with clotted cream, and it would all be copacetic. Just to continue the comestible and color theme, I guess.
So there we are in the bathroom, and she is trying to apply the stuff to my skin like lotion, and I start screaming and crying and struggling to get away because I don't like the way it feels at all (did I mention slimy? And you try to imagine being rubbed all over with slimy, warm, congealed milk and see how you like it!) I was never really a tantrum having child, apparently, though I did cry a fair amount in an emo-single-tear-rolling-down-the-cheek kind of way and refuse to eat things I found distasteful (mostly by whisking the food off my plate and into odd hiding places when no one was looking, which is a story for a different time) - and I was very, very stubborn. But the struggling and screaming were apparently new. My mother hears the noise from elsewhere in the house, hurries in, and realizes that I am embarrassing her in front of her mother-in-law (cchi, cchi, how badly brought up...). Since she always feels at a disadvantage in this house anyway (remember: she brought the dark, after all!), she is even more embarrassed than perhaps she ought to have been and quickly takes me out of the bathroom, leaving my grandmother to figuratively (and literally, one presumes) wash her hands of the situation.
My mother takes me - still freaking out - into the other room and slaps me a few times for misbehaving.
Although she has apologized to me for this more times than I can count, I've never let her forget it (“Hey, remember that time Thakurma was trying to bleach me and you slapped me because I was clearly issuing a political objection??? Now what were you saying about not getting me a pony???” Because I am just that petty.) Seriously though, I've forgiven my mother (although, Ma, I would still like that pony) and while my grandmother was never particularly fond of me (nor I of her), we muddled along somehow until she died from Alzheimer's when I was sixteen. And I don't think I ever thought that her desire to make me more fair-skinned stemmed either from malice or her lack of interest in me. On the contrary, I believe her actions really did spring from genuine and disinterested concern for my welfare. Clearly, I was at a disadvantage being dark in a marriage market she had no idea would be, for me, entirely hypothetical and she was trying to remedy that.
Interestingly enough, a year or so later, when I was in kindergarten, I had this friend, whom I'll call A. (I use the term “friend” very loosely. It was more like I was her devoted slave, and she played with me when there was no one of greater coolness available.) Most often - when she wasn't playing Thundercats with the kids who ranked higher in our social hierarchy - we would play a version of this My Little Pony/She-Ra crossover, in which She-Ra (played by A.) would battle imaginary villains while perched on Bow-Tie's back. Naturally, I was Bow-Tie, the most boring My Little Pony on earth. I wasn't allowed to talk either, because in this universe, the ponies didn't. (Looking back, this explains a lot about me and my psycho-sexual development, but that is really a story for a different time.) Later in life, say around third grade, A. used to spin elaborate stories about how she was secretly descended from Joan of Arc (yeah, I don't know either...) but at this point, her inventions mostly involved another secret relation: me. As the story went, my (evil!) parents had secretly stolen me from A's and my previously happy home, and then covered me WITH BROWN PAINT to hide their crime! And when I went home and took a bath before bed, she informed me, all I had to do was scrub really hard and then my true whiteness would shine through.
Oddly, no amount of scrubbing seemed to do the trick; I think I assumed I just wasn't doing it hard enough.
The thing about these two separate incidents from sources of such widely disparate backgrounds - one, my grandmother, Bengali, living in India, fair-skinned, around sixty and two, my five year old classmate, Jewish, resident of the Upper West Side of Manhattan, is how similar they are. In both cases, I believe, the person was basically well-intentioned. At least, I'm fairly certain my grandmother was (in this regard) and it's hard to describe a five year old as being actively racist in a way that blames them for their behavior. It's not like I cry into my cornflakes when I remember these incidents, but my memories of them are perfectly clear, precisely delineated, unblurred by time.
My relationship with A. was fairly representative of my childhood as a whole: it could be described as a long series of unrequited loves. Or at least I thought they were unrequited; I've learned that no one ever remembers the same story in the same way. I wouldn't have described myself as a victim of bullying, per se; my problems always seemed vaguer, intangible, I could never put my finger on them, but they almost always hung around these points of difference - race, ethnicity, nationality, class - and they never seemed to go away. Why did kids make fun of my name, saying it sounded like Toilet? (It didn't.) Why did they ask me to translate when we watched these Nat. Geographic films on Eskimo & Inuit peoples? Why were they always making fun of my clothes? My pronunciation? Why did I never got chosen to do X thing even though I tried so hard - was it my fault? My lack of talent? I assumed yes. Was there something about myself I could never fix even if I tried? Was I just not scrubbing hard enough?
It took me a long time to come to terms with the fact that yes, I have experienced racism, yes, these things are racist and not just the sign of my inner failings emerging to be writ large on my forehead for all to see (just like I always knew they would someday). It took me a long time to understand that people I know and love, people that know and love me are sometimes racist, not just in a general, vague, centralized way, but toward me. This doesn't, by the way, negate the love that we have for each other, nor should it. I found this to be a particularly hard lesson, because love wants to excuse and explain and rationalize. We want to feel that we love things that are good and that we don't love things that are bad.
It doesn't work that way.
I've come to understand that I don't even think it should. Love, you see, doesn't matter. Okay, that's not precisely what I mean. It matters, of course, personally. But we hurt the people we love, and we are kind to people to whom we are indifferent. Does the love negate the hurt? Does the lack of love invalidate the kindness? Of course not. It's on an entirely different plane. Some of my favorite love stories are those where the protagonists do terrible things to one another, and love each other the whole time because love exists alongside action, not inside it. (See, for instance, films such as The Lion in Winter, The Duchess, Stage Beauty, Dangerous Liasons.) Perhaps a better way to put it would be to say love is, on this front, irrelevant.
Why can't we let love and affection and fondness exist on their own terms and in their own conversation? Which is not the conversation of racism and privilege and bigotry. It is not the language of good and evil, right and wrong. They don't cancel each other out. They can't. They live in entirely different dimensions.
I want to tie this back into all the various bouts of *fail that we in fandom, particularly sf/f fandom, have been treated to over the last couple of years. After reading so many thought provoking posts, I always come back to this single question. Fandom, after all, is a story of love. And I think that's why it always seems as if people and narratives and genres we love are disappointing us. The conclusion I've come to is that we need to take affection out of this equation, and admit that good does not necessarily equal lovable. We don't love things because they are right, but more often because of some secret interior alchemy that we probably don't fully understand; in most cases, rightness just becomes rationalization after the fact of falling for.
So, hi. I love Georgette Heyer and Dorothy Sayers. Neil Gaiman. Amanda Palmer. I love Ender's Game. I love Lord of the Rings and Buffy and Doctor Who. Supernatural. Merlin. I love War for the Oaks and Blood and Iron. All of these creators and creations have demonstrated failures of principle - failures of rightness, and I acknowledge this. And I think we should talk about it. Let's pull them to pieces. Let's call them out. Let's attack. Let's explain how they could be better. Let's work harder to be better ourselves and let's remember how and why these failed, and how they succeeded, if they did. Let's understand that none of this will change the fact that I love them. And it doesn't need to, because that's not what we're talking about here. That's not what we're trying to change.
For an example of what I mean, see Elizabeth Moon and the whole Wiscon thing. (Yes, this is the long post I have been promising for aeons. Still with me? Okay.) A brief recap for the .06 of you who a) don't remember/weren't keeping track, and b) are also still vaguely interested in what I am rambling on about:
ELIZABETH MOON: (a writer of some note in the sf/f community, generally thought to be on side of the angels, feminist, activist, etc.) *writes a 9/11 post on “citizenship” that turns out to be poorly thought out, Islamophobic, racist and unbelievably offensive in many ways*
INTERNETS: WTF?!
ELIZABETH MOON: *handles situation even more poorly by deleting all comments, standing by her fail, keeping the post up, refusing to apologize, and generally showing her ass*
INTERNETS: WTF WTF WTF.
WISCON (a feminist, progressive con with a social justice slant): Um, she was supposed to be one of our Guests of Honor this year.
INTERNETS: There is not enough WTF in world, okay?
WISCON: Guys, come on. We can't UNinvite her, that's just rude.
Chaos ensues.
It ended up being a gigantic clusterfuck of epic proportions; after many missteps, Wiscon finally withdrew her invitation as guest of honor, but it was not exactly a heartening situation. The whole thing was handled badly from start to finish, in my opinion. But in the discourse that emerged (which degenerated into the usual *fail toolkit, including the tone argument and all the other gems of which we are so fond) I kept seeing defensive responses that fit into one of the following forms:
A) But Elizabeth Moon is my friend/favorite author/feminist/really active on the social justice front. She has a right to her opinion/couldn't really have meant what she was saying and it's terrible how she's being pilloried by the internet dogpile. You are hurting her feelings (and my feelings) by calling her out/attacking her/not honoring her as Wiscon after you already said you wanted to.
B) FREEDOM OF SPEECH. You can't punish people for speaking their minds on their own blogs!
I think my feelings on Choice A should be pretty clear at this point. Listen, sometimes things are terrible, and you love them anyway. It's true that sometimes I see authors screw up and I can, in fact, no longer read their work. Sometimes that happens: I am so appalled that I can no longer look at the text. Sometimes they manage to kill my affection. And you know what? Sometimes they don't. I still love Ender's Game. Who am I to dictate who or what you care for? What we can say, however, is that the shit Orson Scott Card spews about queer people (and a host of other issues) is bigoted and on that, regardless of the fact that my love for Ender's Game is unalterable, I vote 'no', with a side of 'fuck you'. I might love the book. I might even love the writer. I might also love the fandom. This is unlikely to change. That does not mean I will not hurt the feelings of the book, the writer, or their fans by calling them out on their shit. If they say it in public, it is fair game, no?
Because the universe does not owe us an existence free from harm, particularly the harm of hurt feelings. We should be allowed to try to protect ourselves from harm, but we don't get a guarantee that we will never suffer any. Which leads me to... Choice B - freedom of speech. This is probably one of the most abused phrases on the internet. In the United States, freedom of speech is protected under the First Amendment to the Constitution, which reads as follows:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
What this means, in broad strokes: in the United States, you cannot be prosecuted by the government for speech. What this does not mean: you can say whatever the hell you want with no fear of reprisal or consequence. Generally speaking, the government has no right to prevent you from speaking, but private action is an altogether different animal. If you go on your blog, or facebook or whatever, and say some insulting shit about your boss, or your workplace, and your boss reads it? Yeah, they can probably fire you. This isn't censorship. No law is preventing you from hitting that 'publish' button. You just might not like what happens afterwards.
We talk a lot about 'safe' spaces here in internet fandom, on both sides of this argument. I don't believe there is, or can be any such thing, although maybe the beauty is in the effort to make them so - even as we know the geometric plot of any such attempt is asymptotic - tending towards, but never quite reaching. What I want to suggest, however, is that safety is, perhaps, overrated. I don't mean that we shouldn't fight the wrong things in the world; I don't mean that folks like you and me, who've been marginalized in whatever ways, should silently consent to injustice, or that folks (also like you and me) who have privilege, shouldn't continually strive to be better. The opposite, in fact. What I think I am trying to say is that the world I want to live in is filled with both peril and enchantment. To discard one, is to discard the other. Because...
…the things you love will hurt you.
...you can fight the evil in the things you love and still never stop loving them.
… and pain is an inevitable byproduct of life.
Why not embrace it?
Kali, why this irrational hatred of a dairy product, you ask? Well, I just don't like it, that's all.
...also there is this loosely related and entirely true story: it turns out that shor has other uses besides deliciousness. For instance, as renowned scientists like Lamarck could probably confirm, legend has it that a careful application of shor to the skin is tantamount to applying... bleach. To become white like the cream, see? The reason I know this? So glad you asked. It's because when I was four years old, my grandmother tried it on me. You see, she was worried - she herself was pretty fair skinned - sort of a creamy color, incidentally - and her son, my father, is (relatively) fair himself -- probably a milky tea shade. But he married my mother who is probably more cocoa colored (horror!) and they had me - at that time, probably a strong coffee with cream. AND I WAS A GIRL. How would anyone marry me ever??? I was DARK, and my father had let DARKNESS into the gene pool and OMG WHAT WOULD HAPPEN? But fortunately there was an easy answer: shor. She'd just lighten me with clotted cream, and it would all be copacetic. Just to continue the comestible and color theme, I guess.
So there we are in the bathroom, and she is trying to apply the stuff to my skin like lotion, and I start screaming and crying and struggling to get away because I don't like the way it feels at all (did I mention slimy? And you try to imagine being rubbed all over with slimy, warm, congealed milk and see how you like it!) I was never really a tantrum having child, apparently, though I did cry a fair amount in an emo-single-tear-rolling-down-the-cheek kind of way and refuse to eat things I found distasteful (mostly by whisking the food off my plate and into odd hiding places when no one was looking, which is a story for a different time) - and I was very, very stubborn. But the struggling and screaming were apparently new. My mother hears the noise from elsewhere in the house, hurries in, and realizes that I am embarrassing her in front of her mother-in-law (cchi, cchi, how badly brought up...). Since she always feels at a disadvantage in this house anyway (remember: she brought the dark, after all!), she is even more embarrassed than perhaps she ought to have been and quickly takes me out of the bathroom, leaving my grandmother to figuratively (and literally, one presumes) wash her hands of the situation.
My mother takes me - still freaking out - into the other room and slaps me a few times for misbehaving.
Although she has apologized to me for this more times than I can count, I've never let her forget it (“Hey, remember that time Thakurma was trying to bleach me and you slapped me because I was clearly issuing a political objection??? Now what were you saying about not getting me a pony???” Because I am just that petty.) Seriously though, I've forgiven my mother (although, Ma, I would still like that pony) and while my grandmother was never particularly fond of me (nor I of her), we muddled along somehow until she died from Alzheimer's when I was sixteen. And I don't think I ever thought that her desire to make me more fair-skinned stemmed either from malice or her lack of interest in me. On the contrary, I believe her actions really did spring from genuine and disinterested concern for my welfare. Clearly, I was at a disadvantage being dark in a marriage market she had no idea would be, for me, entirely hypothetical and she was trying to remedy that.
Interestingly enough, a year or so later, when I was in kindergarten, I had this friend, whom I'll call A. (I use the term “friend” very loosely. It was more like I was her devoted slave, and she played with me when there was no one of greater coolness available.) Most often - when she wasn't playing Thundercats with the kids who ranked higher in our social hierarchy - we would play a version of this My Little Pony/She-Ra crossover, in which She-Ra (played by A.) would battle imaginary villains while perched on Bow-Tie's back. Naturally, I was Bow-Tie, the most boring My Little Pony on earth. I wasn't allowed to talk either, because in this universe, the ponies didn't. (Looking back, this explains a lot about me and my psycho-sexual development, but that is really a story for a different time.) Later in life, say around third grade, A. used to spin elaborate stories about how she was secretly descended from Joan of Arc (yeah, I don't know either...) but at this point, her inventions mostly involved another secret relation: me. As the story went, my (evil!) parents had secretly stolen me from A's and my previously happy home, and then covered me WITH BROWN PAINT to hide their crime! And when I went home and took a bath before bed, she informed me, all I had to do was scrub really hard and then my true whiteness would shine through.
Oddly, no amount of scrubbing seemed to do the trick; I think I assumed I just wasn't doing it hard enough.
The thing about these two separate incidents from sources of such widely disparate backgrounds - one, my grandmother, Bengali, living in India, fair-skinned, around sixty and two, my five year old classmate, Jewish, resident of the Upper West Side of Manhattan, is how similar they are. In both cases, I believe, the person was basically well-intentioned. At least, I'm fairly certain my grandmother was (in this regard) and it's hard to describe a five year old as being actively racist in a way that blames them for their behavior. It's not like I cry into my cornflakes when I remember these incidents, but my memories of them are perfectly clear, precisely delineated, unblurred by time.
My relationship with A. was fairly representative of my childhood as a whole: it could be described as a long series of unrequited loves. Or at least I thought they were unrequited; I've learned that no one ever remembers the same story in the same way. I wouldn't have described myself as a victim of bullying, per se; my problems always seemed vaguer, intangible, I could never put my finger on them, but they almost always hung around these points of difference - race, ethnicity, nationality, class - and they never seemed to go away. Why did kids make fun of my name, saying it sounded like Toilet? (It didn't.) Why did they ask me to translate when we watched these Nat. Geographic films on Eskimo & Inuit peoples? Why were they always making fun of my clothes? My pronunciation? Why did I never got chosen to do X thing even though I tried so hard - was it my fault? My lack of talent? I assumed yes. Was there something about myself I could never fix even if I tried? Was I just not scrubbing hard enough?
It took me a long time to come to terms with the fact that yes, I have experienced racism, yes, these things are racist and not just the sign of my inner failings emerging to be writ large on my forehead for all to see (just like I always knew they would someday). It took me a long time to understand that people I know and love, people that know and love me are sometimes racist, not just in a general, vague, centralized way, but toward me. This doesn't, by the way, negate the love that we have for each other, nor should it. I found this to be a particularly hard lesson, because love wants to excuse and explain and rationalize. We want to feel that we love things that are good and that we don't love things that are bad.
It doesn't work that way.
I've come to understand that I don't even think it should. Love, you see, doesn't matter. Okay, that's not precisely what I mean. It matters, of course, personally. But we hurt the people we love, and we are kind to people to whom we are indifferent. Does the love negate the hurt? Does the lack of love invalidate the kindness? Of course not. It's on an entirely different plane. Some of my favorite love stories are those where the protagonists do terrible things to one another, and love each other the whole time because love exists alongside action, not inside it. (See, for instance, films such as The Lion in Winter, The Duchess, Stage Beauty, Dangerous Liasons.) Perhaps a better way to put it would be to say love is, on this front, irrelevant.
Why can't we let love and affection and fondness exist on their own terms and in their own conversation? Which is not the conversation of racism and privilege and bigotry. It is not the language of good and evil, right and wrong. They don't cancel each other out. They can't. They live in entirely different dimensions.
I want to tie this back into all the various bouts of *fail that we in fandom, particularly sf/f fandom, have been treated to over the last couple of years. After reading so many thought provoking posts, I always come back to this single question. Fandom, after all, is a story of love. And I think that's why it always seems as if people and narratives and genres we love are disappointing us. The conclusion I've come to is that we need to take affection out of this equation, and admit that good does not necessarily equal lovable. We don't love things because they are right, but more often because of some secret interior alchemy that we probably don't fully understand; in most cases, rightness just becomes rationalization after the fact of falling for.
So, hi. I love Georgette Heyer and Dorothy Sayers. Neil Gaiman. Amanda Palmer. I love Ender's Game. I love Lord of the Rings and Buffy and Doctor Who. Supernatural. Merlin. I love War for the Oaks and Blood and Iron. All of these creators and creations have demonstrated failures of principle - failures of rightness, and I acknowledge this. And I think we should talk about it. Let's pull them to pieces. Let's call them out. Let's attack. Let's explain how they could be better. Let's work harder to be better ourselves and let's remember how and why these failed, and how they succeeded, if they did. Let's understand that none of this will change the fact that I love them. And it doesn't need to, because that's not what we're talking about here. That's not what we're trying to change.
For an example of what I mean, see Elizabeth Moon and the whole Wiscon thing. (Yes, this is the long post I have been promising for aeons. Still with me? Okay.) A brief recap for the .06 of you who a) don't remember/weren't keeping track, and b) are also still vaguely interested in what I am rambling on about:
ELIZABETH MOON: (a writer of some note in the sf/f community, generally thought to be on side of the angels, feminist, activist, etc.) *writes a 9/11 post on “citizenship” that turns out to be poorly thought out, Islamophobic, racist and unbelievably offensive in many ways*
INTERNETS: WTF?!
ELIZABETH MOON: *handles situation even more poorly by deleting all comments, standing by her fail, keeping the post up, refusing to apologize, and generally showing her ass*
INTERNETS: WTF WTF WTF.
WISCON (a feminist, progressive con with a social justice slant): Um, she was supposed to be one of our Guests of Honor this year.
INTERNETS: There is not enough WTF in world, okay?
WISCON: Guys, come on. We can't UNinvite her, that's just rude.
Chaos ensues.
It ended up being a gigantic clusterfuck of epic proportions; after many missteps, Wiscon finally withdrew her invitation as guest of honor, but it was not exactly a heartening situation. The whole thing was handled badly from start to finish, in my opinion. But in the discourse that emerged (which degenerated into the usual *fail toolkit, including the tone argument and all the other gems of which we are so fond) I kept seeing defensive responses that fit into one of the following forms:
A) But Elizabeth Moon is my friend/favorite author/feminist/really active on the social justice front. She has a right to her opinion/couldn't really have meant what she was saying and it's terrible how she's being pilloried by the internet dogpile. You are hurting her feelings (and my feelings) by calling her out/attacking her/not honoring her as Wiscon after you already said you wanted to.
B) FREEDOM OF SPEECH. You can't punish people for speaking their minds on their own blogs!
I think my feelings on Choice A should be pretty clear at this point. Listen, sometimes things are terrible, and you love them anyway. It's true that sometimes I see authors screw up and I can, in fact, no longer read their work. Sometimes that happens: I am so appalled that I can no longer look at the text. Sometimes they manage to kill my affection. And you know what? Sometimes they don't. I still love Ender's Game. Who am I to dictate who or what you care for? What we can say, however, is that the shit Orson Scott Card spews about queer people (and a host of other issues) is bigoted and on that, regardless of the fact that my love for Ender's Game is unalterable, I vote 'no', with a side of 'fuck you'. I might love the book. I might even love the writer. I might also love the fandom. This is unlikely to change. That does not mean I will not hurt the feelings of the book, the writer, or their fans by calling them out on their shit. If they say it in public, it is fair game, no?
Because the universe does not owe us an existence free from harm, particularly the harm of hurt feelings. We should be allowed to try to protect ourselves from harm, but we don't get a guarantee that we will never suffer any. Which leads me to... Choice B - freedom of speech. This is probably one of the most abused phrases on the internet. In the United States, freedom of speech is protected under the First Amendment to the Constitution, which reads as follows:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
What this means, in broad strokes: in the United States, you cannot be prosecuted by the government for speech. What this does not mean: you can say whatever the hell you want with no fear of reprisal or consequence. Generally speaking, the government has no right to prevent you from speaking, but private action is an altogether different animal. If you go on your blog, or facebook or whatever, and say some insulting shit about your boss, or your workplace, and your boss reads it? Yeah, they can probably fire you. This isn't censorship. No law is preventing you from hitting that 'publish' button. You just might not like what happens afterwards.
We talk a lot about 'safe' spaces here in internet fandom, on both sides of this argument. I don't believe there is, or can be any such thing, although maybe the beauty is in the effort to make them so - even as we know the geometric plot of any such attempt is asymptotic - tending towards, but never quite reaching. What I want to suggest, however, is that safety is, perhaps, overrated. I don't mean that we shouldn't fight the wrong things in the world; I don't mean that folks like you and me, who've been marginalized in whatever ways, should silently consent to injustice, or that folks (also like you and me) who have privilege, shouldn't continually strive to be better. The opposite, in fact. What I think I am trying to say is that the world I want to live in is filled with both peril and enchantment. To discard one, is to discard the other. Because...
…the things you love will hurt you.
...you can fight the evil in the things you love and still never stop loving them.
… and pain is an inevitable byproduct of life.
Why not embrace it?