Splitting Genocide

I planned my wedding during a genocide. My partner and I got engaged on April 27, 2024, 203 days into Israel’s latest attempt to destroy the Palestinian people across the sea. It was the happiest day of my life.

I loved planning our wedding. It’s something I always dreamed of and I dove headlong into the endless advice and inspiration online. I scrolled from “5 things I wish I knew before my wedding” videos to updates on which hospital had been attacked now: al-Awda, al-Shifa, Nasser, Al-Aqsa, the Indonesian.

We picked out a venue, a florist, a caterer. Food became progressively scarcer in Gaza as Israel tightened their blockade of aid trucks at the borders.

Famine set in. We got married.

My algorithm had become a disturbing mix of wedding content and genocide coverage. Social media has made it easy to watch this atrocity unfold in real time—and also very easy to look away. If you don’t want to know what’s going on, you don’t have to. Haven’t you noticed how if you stop, even for a day, interacting with content about Gaza, it will stop showing you? Haven’t you come across that blurred-out content and decided whether or not to hit the “show me anyway” button? I’ve hit that button, gotten mired in those feelings of outrage and horror and despair and fear and disgust and rage and utter overwhelm. I scroll to the next video in pursuit of something like regulation. It’s a video about wedding hair and makeup. I watch.

The algorithm picks up on how we choose to engage or not engage, reflecting something back about us. As I scroll through my own feed, I fail to reconcile how this happiest chapter of my personal life could possibly coexist with such global suffering. I reckon with this split mirrored back to me by my phone screen.

What I’m describing is, I think, particularly prevalent for white women (like myself). Not everyone’s algorithm reflects the same defensive structure. For people of color and other groups who have no choice but to engage because what is happening is happening to them, the algorithm looks different. But for white women, particularly white women of financial means, there’s something about viewing a livestreamed genocide from the safety of the other end of our phones that taps into a generations-deep privilege of being able to look away. Of being spared the ugly realities for so long that psychological comfort comes to feel like a birthright.

But when I pay attention, I can feel the internal contours of that split and the moments I ricochet across it. I can feel myself defensive over that comfort, defensive over my newlywedded bliss. My guilt and shame for scrolling away. My capacity to hold the extent of this horror stretched too thin, I reach for comfort, I reach for numbing, I reach for the fantasy of unawareness.

My patients ricochet, too. Many of them are financially privileged liberal or progressive white women. And I can hear and feel how it’s starting to break down for them—for us. I hear it in “doomscrolling,” I hear it in the freeze response of not knowing what to do that will “make a difference,” the result being not doing anything at all.

I also hear it in “I’m not reading the news right now; it’s bad for my mental health,” “I don’t interact with that content on social media,” “I’d rather use therapy time to talk about other things going on for me.” The weight of what they “don’t want to talk about” is just a bit too heavy to be completely split out of the room.

But I also feel it in how even the “good weeks” feel “empty,” “disconnected,” “just not quite right.” The horrors of our present world may have been split off for the moment, but there is an ominous hollowness to these sessions that has me feeling they must be waiting right outside the therapy room door.

Because now, what we have had the privilege of looking away from is seeping through the cracks in our defenses. The same forces that are flattening Khan Younis, Jabaliya, Gaza City are showing up in our own backyard as different names for the same thing: disappearing immigrants to concentration camps built on native, endangered land; defunding Medicaid for the most vulnerable while cutting taxes for billionaires; flirting with the notion of rolling back federal recognition of the marriage I only just began.

We can’t split something off when we’re surrounded by it. Or we can try, but this begins to look like bipolar swings between manic denial and depressive collapse. And in neither of these states, critically, does any action toward change occur. So I am interested, instead, in trying to bridge the divide between denial and collapse. I’m interested in finding more generative, integrative ways of engaging with what is happening in Gaza and in the world for myself and for the people I work with.

As with any split, this necessitates building our capacity to hold both. To gently yet consistently be confronted with one side when we cling too tightly to the other. Frankly, just looking at my own Explore page is an exercise in this. Within this confrontation is an invitation to become more familiar with our own “algorithms,” those internal contours of the split. For myself, and I think for many privileged white women, there exists a pivotal moment of shame followed by shutdown that I would like to turn towards and get to know better rather than look away from. I would like to befriend this part of myself enough to slow down, anticipate, and possibly prevent that split-second ricochet across the divide of consciousness. I imagine peeking over the edge into that chasm, finding a shade of gray.

What would shades of gray look like reflected in an algorithm? I’m not quite sure, as I don’t believe social media is very good at nuance. In fact, I recognize capitalism has at least as much to do with what anyone’s algorithm looks like as their defenses do. The wedding industrial complex certainly did its manic best to keep me pacified for a year.

So I think we’ll have to create that gray area outside our phone screens. Creativity being the operative idea here, as the active antithesis to passive consumption. Engaging with the realities of our world from a stance of creativity is, I believe, one way of metabolizing what might otherwise get split off. It allows space in which to reckon with terrible truths while leaving room for not only imagining paths forward but doing something to forge them. Of course, Palestinians have been creatively finding ways of resisting and persisting in their fight for liberation for over 79 years. Haven’t you seen those videos of Palestinian children creating art of their dreams for a liberated future in the rubble?

So when I’m feeling overwhelmed, poised to split to the next video on my feed, I’ve been trying to stop scrolling. There are better ways to stay informed, anyway. I’ve been trying to put down my phone and sit with this tension. Trusting, as psychoanalysis teaches us, that sitting with the discomfort of the tension creates change. At the very least, it has created this essay.