Today, Explained - Optimism in 2020

Episode Date: August 26, 2020

Being an optimist can seem ridiculous right now, but in the inaugural episode of The Cut podcast, host Avery Trufelman is searching for some well-grounded positivity. She finds it in conversation with Cheer’s La’Darius Marshall. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. Must be 19 years of age or older to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. it's today explained i'm sean ramis verham optimism has taken a beating this year we kicked 2020 off with the world on fire australia was burning now Now it's California. Between the two, a global pandemic,

an economic downturn, the killing of George Floyd, protests that were sometimes brutally suppressed. People are struggling to pay rent, to feed their families, to find inspiration. People are worried about the post office, and there's still a good part of the year to go. How do we find the good when there's so much bad? Maybe ask a cheerleader. That's what Avery Truffleman decided to do. She's the host of a new podcast from the Vox Media Podcast Network. It's called The Cut. For those of you who don't know, The Cut is like a stylish, sexy, culturally cool subdivision of New York Magazine. And now there's a new podcast to complement the text version. New episodes come out every Wednesday.

And since it's Wednesday, we thought we'd share the very first episode of The Cut with you. It's all about finding positivity in a very bad year. Listen, enjoy, subscribe, and maybe you'll start to feel hopeful again, even for a fleeting moment. The cut. The cut. The cut. The cut.

The cut. The cut. I was just telling everybody, they were making fun of me, but my coronavirus hobby is going to be, I'm going to become a beekeeper while we're on quarantine i already bought my book about beekeeping oh actually yeah actually um this is a recording from march 9th when i avery truffelman flew across the country

to come visit the offices of new york magazine to audition to be the host of this podcast that's when i met stella bugbee the editor-in-chief of The Cut, and we went to the studio to see what our chemistry would be like. And I bought the beekeeper's bible. I'd been joking about it the other day, like, you know what would be a really good name for a honey company? It's like Bugbee's Apiary, you know? So then I was like, what would it take to make honey in Brooklyn?

I didn't know Stella, my potential new boss, and I couldn't tell if she was joking or not. I mean, we were all just kind of hesitantly laughing in the face of the future, even as we were slapping on hand sanitizer and conspicuously not touching our faces. Sure, I couldn't shake Stella's hand, but I was hopped up on imagination. I'd been reading New York Magazine all my life, and the Cut is one of my favorite places on the internet, so I was just starstruck. I fantasized about working for the Cut. I imagined myself breezing into the office in a fabulous coat and big earrings,

clutching one of those Greek diner-style paper coffee cups. It all just seemed so glamorous and New York. And there was such exciting energy swirling around that day I visited the office in March. Everyone was planning for the April issue of The Cut, and it looked like it was going to be a really fun one. The cover story was going to be a profile of Ladarius Marshall from the Netflix documentary series Cheer. I'm not normally very up on TV, but I was really into Cheer. So I was relieved Stella and I had something to talk about.

You are a freaking Navarro cheerleader. Privilege. If you haven't watched Cheer, it's this multi-part Netflix documentary series about this elite cheerleading squad based in Corsicana, Texas, at this junior college called Navarro. Ladarius Marshall is arguably the most talented of the boys on the team,

and he knew it. He could come off as a bit of a diva, but you root for him anyway. Girl, I've been saying I've been better than everybody since I was born. Ladarius is just so captivating and charismatic on the show, and the cut had nabbed his first ever big cover shoot. And it turned out Ladarius was a natural at it. It's like he could be a model, he could be an actor, he could go host entertainment tonight. Adrienne Green is a senior editor at The Cut who is working on the Ladarius cover story.

2020 was going to be Ladarius' last year cheering with Navarro College. And we were all so excited to see what would be next for him. You know, like, there's so much glitz and glamour that kind of, like, surrounds him wherever he goes. That day I visited the offices of The Cut, all the writers were infected with the cheerleading spirit, just amped up on this profile. I remember nervously sitting in a conference room with Stella and seeing, out of the corner of my eye, that all the writers for the cut were laughing and trying on these genuine Navarro college cheerleader bows. Yeah, I remember a group of us put on our bows and walked into a meeting and people were like, there they go.

Cut people doing cut stuff again. I was excited to meet all the cut writers that day in March, but I didn't get to. And that's because that day, around 3 p.m., an email rippled through the office like a horror movie. I don't know what the company email actually said, because I was not an employee then, but the message was something along the lines of, go home and don't come back. Suddenly, everyone was grabbing their jackets and racing towards the doors and rows of cubicles emptied before me. And I was like, what is happening? I left so quickly that I left a single AirPod on my desk. Stella Bugbee fled the office, not unlike Cinderella.

Yeah, I left in a hurry. I don't even know what else I left on that desk. I wonder if all those cheerleading bows are still sitting there on the writers' desks, a forlorn memento of a joyous time before. Like, it never occurred to me that we would be still, we would be launching this podcast, like, and that would be the only time we ever met. That seemed really inconceivable to me. We would be launching this podcast, like, and that would be the only time we ever met.

That seemed really inconceivable to me. Of course, it was inconceivable to me, too. I just remember being in shock, getting expelled out into the street. And in the space of a few minutes, all our joking about beekeeping was suddenly ridiculous. I think there's a lot of pressure to project a sense of positivity when you're talking to another person. Nobody really wants to be around someone who is like a Debbie Downer type. And I mean, I knew, I'm sure on some level, I wasn't really going to become a beekeeper. It just seemed really funny to think of that happening. I mean, funny, sure. But under capitalism, positivity also means productivity.

Optimism also means optimizing. For all the talk about using this shelter-in-place time to learn Spanish or bake bread or read War and Peace or get into beekeeping. I don't think that was the reality for most of us. I mean, I don't know. There's like a sense of delusion, I guess would be the right word. In the age of pandemic, the adjective optimistic has actually become a euphemism for delusional. I mean, that is the way it's used on the news, as a polite synonym for unlikely. And President Trump, he and health professionals are optimistic. I think 12 to 18 months is extremely optimistic.

Not going to be nearly as easy an economic recovery as an optimistic market wants to presume at this point. In a weird way, optimism started to mean its very opposite. It reminded me of this old joke where a pessimist says, well, things couldn't get any worse. And an optimist says, well, sure they could. But that's the question. Is optimism saying it could get worse or that it could get better. That's sports writer Jordan Carnes. They just so happen to be my neighbor in Oakland, California, and also one of the only people I interacted with in quarantine life. Locked down together in our neighborhood, unable to see our other friends, unable to hug each other. We started talking a lot about the

show Cheer. I can't imagine the future, which is, you know, like, who can, right? And so I'm watching this documentary and I'm just thinking about, like, how they're doing these things with their bodies in the pyramid that, like, I could never imagine. In Cheer, it's not just waving pom-poms. The Navarro College cheerleaders are doing inconceivable things with their bodies, like flipping 360 degrees in the air and landing in a tent made of their teammates' arms. It's like gymnastics meets dance meets nothing I've ever seen before. And so I just was thinking about, like, their ability to execute this thing that I couldn't imagine while I was also like

not being able to imagine my future. And I was just like, damn, that's optimism. The show Cheer is optimism incarnate, but not just in a way that means productivity or superficiality or denial. It's really a show about how multifaceted optimism truly is. I think when we think of optimism, we think of the cheerleader in makeup with a huge bow in her hair. And that's this hyperbolic image of optimism, which is not how most people feel any given day.

And it turns out, that's not how the cheerleaders on the Navarro College team feel either. There's a lot of stereotypes that go with cheerleading. People think that we're dumb blondes. People think that we just do, like, cheers, like, go team, stuff like that. But we actually put our bodies in a lot of pain. His sport is all about having this veneer of, like, optimism and effortlessness. Adrienne Green, again, who edited the profile of Ladarius for the cut.

It's a grueling sport. It's, like, people falling, arms thwacking, like, lots of, like, really intense and grueling movement. Squeeze your butt. Three, two, one. Lots of like really intense and grueling movement. Squeeze your butt. Three, two, one. It's crazy what we do if you think about it. Like whoever thought of taking two people and a back spot and chucking someone into the air

and see how many times they can spin and how many times they can flip. That person is psychotic. But yeah, I'm the crazy person because I'm the one that does it. And even as the cheerleaders are smiling ear to ear, popping their chins up, raising their arms in victorious glee, they're in real danger at all times. At any instant, a horrific injury can break the spell. Oh, my God! Oh, my God!

It's excruciating to watch them practice. The cheerleaders are constantly breaking bones and falling from stories up in the air. Their joints are being dislocated. Their ribs are getting cracked. There are understudies waiting on the sidelines for when someone on the team inevitably gets too injured to practice anymore. Be prepared to step in at any time at any spot. Circle up. Get a break. This is a part of what their optimism means.

Sacrifice. Which is kind of at odds with the definition I had for optimism. I thought optimism, or pessimism for that matter, was about how you envision the future. The future will be good, or the future will be bad. But another definition of optimism is actually about the present. Whatever pain and suffering, anxiety, uncertainty that you might be feeling, none of our emotions last forever. And that's true of these more negative ones as well. That's Emily S. Fahany-Smith, who wrote The Power of Meaning, Finding Fulfillment in a World Obsessed with Happiness. And she redefined optimism for me

as an explanatory style, a way to make sense of pain. Telling yourself that this is a challenge, not a threat, or asking yourself, you know, are there opportunities in what I'm going through for me to learn and to grow, to deepen my relationships, things like that. Because life is suffering. It just is. Bad things happen. And optimism is a matter of how you frame your role in that suffering. It's the narrative you tell that allows you to move forward.

And one thing this research points out is that the redemptive story has been used by oppressed people for ages to kind of help them make sense of their experiences and give them hope, whether it's, you know, the Jews during biblical times or African Americans during the civil rights movement. Both groups kind of deliberately and consciously told these redemptive stories of moving from bondage to liberation. In this way, optimism is a tool of survival. And you can hear the cheerleaders on cheer frame their lives this way all the time. They are constantly giving each other pep talks. Like here's one of Ladaria psyching up the team. Without everybody coming together, we're going to fail and we're going to fall. But as long as we're all together and we're helping each other,

we're going to rise and we're going to get where we need to go. And a lot of these pep talks definitely sound like platitudes. But the thing is, they work. So much of optimism is a mind game. And that's part of why optimism is a more complicated, expansive emotion than we give it credit for. It requires labor. Optimists have a capacity to both acknowledge the difficulty of what's going on while also being able to find some good in it. They acknowledge the horror of what's happening, but even so, there's something about the way their mind works

that allows them to still see hope and find meaning. Optimism, Emily S. Fahany-Smith argues, is not about delusion or denial. Optimists are able to see the reality and, simultaneously, believe the badness is not for naught. They can find meaning in their pain. And this is easier to learn to do if you were raised being told that you are empowered and that you are the hero of your own story. In this way, optimism, to a degree, is a privilege. But not exclusively. So many of the cheerleaders on cheer came from really hard childhoods, including Ladarius. In that time, the abuse that I endured was just so much. I really felt like I was really alone and that there was nobody that was going to come save me, that I was going to literally just die. For Ladarius, and for so many of the cheerleaders on the team,

optimism is the cognitive equivalent of spinning 360 degrees in the air and landing on one hand. They train like hell for it. They're talking themselves up all the time. No matter who you are, once you're a part of this program, if you need something somewhere in the world, there will be a person that has been a part of this program, if you need something somewhere in the world, there will be a person that has been a part of this program and they can help you out.

Once you're a part of the family, you're just in. Their optimism comes from their belief that the pain is worth the support they've found in each other. That the pain is proof to themselves that they can do impossible, unimaginable feats. They are telling themselves that they are growing from their suffering. They have to. Because all their labor and effort leads to just one moment. Every year, there's a big cheer competition in Daytona Beach, where the teams from across the country come to perform their cheer routine. That one ridiculously elaborate routine that they have rehearsed day after day,

hour after hour, through so much pain, all so they can be in this one competition for two minutes and 15 seconds. That's it. You have one chance to do that one routine. One little mistake can just cost it all for us. If you mess up, that was your only chance. You just wasted your whole year.

It is gut-wrenching. There's no professional cheerleading after that. There's no career waiting for them. I mean, there's like the Dallas Cowboys, but they don't do the acrobatics that college cheer does. They're essentially two different sports. And the Navarro College cheerleaders aren't kidding themselves.

They know that the labor and the pain of practice is so much longer and so much more than those two and a half minutes of relative glory at Daytona. When we go to Daytona, no one cares. Everyone's like, okay, cool. Literally no one cares, but you know, it's our job. Watching the show, it broke my heart to think that it's the cheerleaders' job

to get everyone else excited about all the other sports, and then no one cares about their own world of athleticism, as my writer friend Jordan puts it. I mean, cheerleading is like the invisible labor. The cheerleaders have to find meaning in the process, in the larger lessons they're learning and the community they're finding. Because the tangible payoffs of cheerleading are so minute and fleeting, especially now in 2020.

Daytona was supposed to be in April. It was supposed to be the grand finale for Ladarius's cheer career. And then it becomes like, how do you start to think about your future when the moment that was supposed to be like your 10 minutes to stand in the sun isn't there anymore. It's wild to know that we all had canceled Daytonas of our own in 2020. Things we were looking forward to and banking on and ways we thought this year was going to be different. And they just went away. When I was looking for a sublet in Brooklyn, I wanted to make extra sure it had a walk-in closet. Not to house my collection of fabulous

new coats like I had been dreaming of, but because I know that's where I'm going to be recording this podcast for the foreseeable future. Everyone is kind of like stuck in this limbo of like there was supposed to be some magic in this year. And now there's not. And what do I do about it? And who better to ask than the cheerleader? After the break, we checked back in with Ladarius Marshall. Long after the cut cover came and went.

After Cheers stopped filming. And after Daytona was canceled. What now? Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp. Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. Thank you. Member FDIC. Terms and conditions apply. The Cut. The Cut.

The Cut. The Cut. The Cut. First of all, hey, I'm so sorry about Daytona. Oh, I'm all right. Oh, it's okay. We got to move on from it and move past it. I mean, can I ask how you found out? Was there some big announcement from the team? Yeah, it was our coach. She had pulled us all into the, uh, into our basketball stadium and she had told us all there,

said that we won't be able to continue with our season due to COVID. Everybody was crying, especially the third years. I was just sitting there like this. I was like, girl, y'all knew COVID was going to happen. If everything gets shut down, you know they're going to shut us down, y'all. We is not invincible. We ain't Superman. I told them there will not be a season.

I tried to warn them. We have to be positive. I was like, girl, this is a disease that they don't have a cure for. We ain't having that. But, like, what did that mean, being positive about it? Like, what did that mean? I guess it was, like, looking out, like, warning the season and continue thinking that, like, girl, no.

We was not going to continue no season. So, like, how are you finding optimism now because when I like it's funny around the same time you were finding out about Daytona I was at the offices of the cut looking at your photo shoot and we're all like oh my god Lederick what's he gonna do is he gonna like host entertainment tonight is he gonna be in movies it just seemed like this was gonna be I mean not saying it's not your year, but we're all, like, ready for it to be your year. Like, what do you make of it now? I'm still going to college.

I'm going to college. I'm here in Mississippi. And I've decided, even, like, on all this stuff, I was, like, I was sitting here because at first I was getting myself a little down. I was, like, you know what? I'm a little sad. Because I'm, like, dang, I didn't get to finish my season. And what's next? i was getting myself a little down i was like you know what i'm a little sad because i'm like dang i didn't get to finish my season and what's next and so then i was like you know what since everything in the world is shut down because me just like y'all was saying girl i was ready to

be on the tv be on the road i was ready to go and i was like you know what i gotta i gotta find something something different something new to inspire me. So I did. I found out that I really like radiology. So I'm going to be doing a radiology program to get my degree in that. I mean, did you first start talking to radiologists because of tear injuries? Oh, yes. Because I had hurt my fingers and I wanted to see what was wrong with them. But you know, black people don't go to the hospital unless you about to die. So we decided, I was like, you know, honestly, if I could just check my own fingers, then it wouldn't be a

problem. And that's when that whole thing started churning in my head. So I was like, you know what, honestly, I'm going to go into that field because that seems like fun to me. And it was during quarantine when I decided that, because I was like, I want something that's going to be a staple in this world. Because you can't get rid of doctors and stuff like that, baby. They ain't going nowhere. We don't always, always need them, always. Because if you ain't got no doctors, girl, we all just sign it. We might as well go ahead and sign our death certificate. How do you do that magic thing you learned to do? How do you turn your, because you've experienced some like really bad stuff in your life and you've still been able to turn it around.

How do you think other people can learn to do that? I feel like you can learn how to do that when you take it for what it is. You look at the issue for just that, an issue, an inconvenience. So it's always thinking about what is going to make me the happiest because the world is just going to be the world. Baby, do what makes you happy. If people don't understand that, if your job ain't making you happy, quit. If your man ain't making you happy, leave. If your job ain't making you happy quit if your man ain't making you happy leave if your woman ain't making you happy leave you everyone is worth more than that do not subject yourself to giving a corporation or something so much of your time and while they get to sit down and they get to go visit their family they get all the big dogs they get to go visit their family. They get all the big dogs. They get to go do all of that stuff that you can't do.

You have to work on the holidays. They don't. Oh my God. Are you down for the revolution? Is this what you're proposing? I'm tired. I want the world to be good. I want the world to be something worth it.

If you, if there's a thousand people and there's two bosses, who has more power even though somebody has more money? The people. That ratio, baby, I promise you, when you start voting these people out and you start making sure the right people are in place, then I promise you the world is going to be just a little, even if it makes a small percent of a change, it's going to be enough for the world to see. And you think it'll happen? Like, are you optimistic about that? Baby, if everybody stay as mad as they were, then yes, they will. There's no reason that Breonna Taylor's killers, murderers should still be free. And I don't care. And I said it.

How you walk into somebody else's house and you kill them when they haven't done a single thing wrong and the most you can do is, oh, it's the wrong person. No apology, no arrest, no nothing. But how do we square that circle? Like, how can we find, like, there's so much to be mad about.

Like, the world is so unfair. And the idea that we're supposed to be able to, like, try to find optimism or like try to believe that everything happens for a reason when Brianna Taylor's murder so clearly was for no reason. Like how are we supposed to find the good when there's so much bad? Let me tell you this right here. This is how I deal with it. I felt myself when this whole Black Lives Matter started happening. I was like, you know what? The world really is corrupt.

We got the people out here killing each other in the military. We got Breonna's killer still out here killing her for no reason. We got George Floyd out here dying over $20. And I just sit there and sometimes I really be like, they really just hate people nowadays. Like the world is so ill. And then I keep thinking, those people are going to get what's coming to them. That's how I stay optimistic. Because we may not be able to see it, but what God is going to do.

I always, I use God all the time. I was like, everything happens for a reason. If he saw fit for us to go and do that and do Navarro and do Daytona, then it would have been that. But he did not see fit. And it wasn't just one thing that was canceled. Everybody's thing was canceled. He didn't see fit for anybody to be doing what they were supposed to be doing.

Maybe that was meant to happen. Maybe that was saving us from something that could have been way worse. I don't have faith like you have, and I'm so envious that you do. I wish I could put my faith in God or something like God. But for people who don't have God to lean on, how can we find optimism right now? Girl, look, I want you to find your spiritualness. I want you to find what makes you happy. Like think of something that's pure, whether it's a baby or an elderly person. And I want you to think of

how happy that person makes you. And I want you to think of where your life is going to go, where your life is going to be. Because when you survive this, like you've survived everything else, you're going to be better out than thinking, oh, I hate the world, I hate the world. Because the world is going to always have corruptness. It's never going to completely wash away and change. So when you go into life and you're like, you know what,

I understand this is bad right now, but I understand it. And there will be change. If not today or tomorrow, it'll happen. Whether it happen when I'm alive or it happens in the next generation or the next generation, it's going to happen. So that's where I feel like that's where most of my optimism comes from. Because when I think of things in the future, I'm like, oh, girl, what if I don't even get to that point? So then I was like, you know what? We're going to be happy about what we have right now. It feels impossible to try to imagine the future. For myself in this new job at the Cut and my new life in the new New York City and in this nation and in this world. It's like what Jordan said about watching the Navarro cheerleaders

form pyramids with their bodies. Optimism looks like it's trying to reach for an unimaginable thing. But what Ladarius exemplifies is that realism and optimism don't preclude each other. In some ways, they buttress each other. They help make significance in what we're all going through now. Because that's all life is, right? We're all just going through it, trying to figure out what it all means. And that's what we're going to do here on this show

every week. Make meaning of all this stuff, good and bad. I'm really, really happy to be here. And I'm glad you're here too. This episode was engineered and scored by Brandon McFarland, who also composed our theme song. Special thanks to Karinza Kadinas and Sangeeta Singh Kurtz. Stella Bugbee and Nishat Kerwa are the show's executive producers. I'm Avery Truffleman, and thank you for listening.