The Awkward Girl's Guide to Creating Content While the World Burns

And also to owls

“How does it feel to be posting your usual content while the world is burning?”

Someone I follow shared this question on Instagram this week, along with a bunch of other graphics, all with the common aim of shaming “influencers” for continuing to post as usual, rather than talking about events in Israel and Gaza.

The posts weren’t aimed at me personally, obviously. I mean, it’s not like the person had shared them thinking, “I really hope Amber sees this and feels called out.”

But, of course, I did see it. And I did feel called out. Because that’s the kind of paranoid I am.

Then I thought about it some more.

How does it feel to be posting my usual content while the world is burning?

I mean, probably about the same as it feels to be doing pretty much ANYTHING right now, I suppose?

Because I’m assuming here — perhaps wrongly — that the vast majority of people in the UK (including the ones calling out “influencers”) did NOT call in sick or quit their jobs the morning after the horrific attack on Israel, in order to dedicate all their time to making a meaningful difference to the situation, did they?

No, I’m guessing most people reading this are going to work as usual this week. That you’re taking your kids to school, putting a load of laundry in the machine, and trying to remember to sign that permission slip for the excursion next month. Maybe you’re even watching a bit of Netflix in the evenings, just to take your mind off things. I expect there are even birthday parties and haircuts, and all kinds of other things you’re doing while the world burns, and I don’t expect there are many people lining up to ask how DARE you?

I also, though, expect that while you’re doing all of these Other Things, your thoughts are probably not very far away from Israel, and Gaza, and the poor, poor people there, who are suffering such unimaginable horrors right now that it’s impossible to comprehend how this level of suffering can exist in a world where there are also pumpkin patches, and shopping lists, and a Halloween disco in the town hall at the end of the month. I expect you think about this a lot. It’s hard not to.

But this is how the world works, even in times of terror. It works by way of people continuing to go about their business as usual, while simultaneously feeling angry and grief-stricken, and often deeply traumatized by the things we see on the news every single day.

It’s not very fair, really.

This is the strange dichotomy of life right now though, and, to illustrate this, on Sunday afternoon we went to an owl sanctuary with my brother-in-law, his wife, and her parents.

An important piece of context for this is that some of my sister-in-law’s family are currently trapped in Gaza.

I’m not even going to try to put into words here how utterly agonizing this is for the people at home, who are left in the position of constantly scanning for news, waiting for calls, and feeling completely and utterly helpless while they wait. I’m going to assume you can imagine for yourselves what that must be like for them. (And I’m also going to assume you understand that my fears for this particular family — and the other ones like them — in Gaza don’t mean I don’t also care about the families in Israel, who are also going through hell. Because our hearts can break for all of them, can’t they?)

But, as I say, we went to the owl sanctuary, because, I think, they just wanted to do something to at least try to take their minds off the news for a bit. I’m not sure the owl sanctuary was the place to do that, though, because the thing you don’t really get from Harry Potter, say (Which is where pretty much all of my knowledge of owls came from until now), is that owls are kind of mean, unfriendly little bastards, who don’t really like humans very much, and would, on balance, probably rather rip our scalps off with their sharp little talons than perform a flight demonstration for us. If you’ve ever seen the Netflix documentary The Staircase, you might know what I mean here.

“This guy could easily pick up a small child in his talons,” said the owl handler cheerfully, referring to an evil-looking eagle owl, who was sitting on the perch closest to us, and who kept doing that thing where they seem to revolve their heads through 360 degrees. Its big yellow eyes bored into mine. I swallowed nervously, trying to work out if I should break eye contact, or if it would just take that as its cue to pounce. It felt like the kind of thing this owl would do.

“He doesn’t want to play today,” said the handler, who’d been throwing gruesome pieces of chopped-up animals around the enclosure for 5 minutes, to no avail. Then she reached into the bag she had tied around her waist, pulled out a dead baby chick — one of the fluffy yellow ones with orange feet that they bring into classrooms at Easter — and fed it to the owl, who swallowed it whole, still with its eyes fixed on mine.

(This is not the owl in question. This owl is portrayed by an actor.)

“You next, sucker,” the owl seemed to say.

“Is that a REAL baby chick, Mummy?” asked Max, as the chicks’ yellow feet disappeared down the owl’s throat. “Is it true that an owl could pick up a child?”

This was how I discovered I don’t really like owls that much. And why the day, which had already felt bleak and strange and awful, didn’t really get much better for the up-close encounter with the circle of life.

Afterwards, we all went out for lunch.

We looked at owls while the world burned!

We ate roast dinners while the world burned!

And, of course, we talked almost exclusively about The Situation, although you wouldn’t necessarily have known it to look at us.

I have really struggled with how to talk about this, whether I should talk about it, and what I should say, if so. It doesn’t feel right to bring it up in a newsletter about what I did this week. It doesn’t feel right NOT to bring it up in a newsletter about what I did this week, because no matter WHAT I did this week, part of my mind was still focused on three little kids who played with Max at my brother-in-law’s wedding, and who are now caught up in something so terrible I had to remove the Twitter app from my phone so I didn’t have to see the photos people kept sharing.

I don’t buy into the idea that anyone with “a platform” owes it to us to turn that platform into a political one, regardless of the fact that its stated purpose is to review makeup, or to host videos of the person cleaning her kitchen, or whatever. I honestly think its pretty wild — and maybe even a bit dangerous — to try to insist that fashion and beauty “influencers” are the appropriate people to educate us all on a complex, decades-long conflict that a lot of us don’t really know all that much about, and that they should do this purely because they have “a platform” that makes it technically possible.

At the same time, though, I’d feel like I was lying if I wrote this week’s newsletter and tried to tell you we went to the owl centre and just looked at the owls. Because we didn’t. Instead, we spent the week doing all of the things we normally do, but nothing felt normal. I suspect next week will be much the same, although I can’t help but hope that it won’t, and that it might bring some small glimmer of hope instead.

The only thing I can say for sure, though, is that it definitely won’t include owls…