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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: it's today explained I'm Sean Rameswaram. Optimism has taken a beating this year. We kicked 2020 off with the world on fire. Australia was burning. 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?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Maybe ask a cheerleader. That's what Avery Trufelman 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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. Actually. Yeah, actually.
--:-- Avery Trufelman: This is a recording from March 9th, when I, Avery Trufelman, 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 into the studio to see what our chemistry would be like.
--:-- Avery Trufelman: And I bought the beekeeper's Bible. I'd been joking about it the other day. Like, you know what would be like a really good name for a honey company is like Bugbee's Apiary, you know? So then I was like, what would it take to make honey in Brooklyn?
--:-- Avery Trufelman: 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.
--:-- Avery Trufelman: 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.
--:-- Avery Trufelman: 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.
--:-- Avery Trufelman: 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 La'Darius Marshall from the Netflix documentary series Cheer.
--:-- Avery Trufelman: 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. It's a privilege.
--:-- Avery Trufelman: 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. La'Darius 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.
--:-- La'Darius Marshall: Girl, I've been saying I've been better than everybody since I was born.
--:-- Avery Trufelman: La'Darius is just so captivating and charismatic on the show, and the cut had nabbed his first ever big cover shoot. And it turned out La'Darius was a natural at it. It's like he could be a model. He could be an actor. He could go host Entertainment Tonight.
--:-- Adrian Green: 2020 was going to be La'Darius' last year cheering with Navarro College. And we were all so excited to see what would be next for him. You know, like, there is so much glitz and glamour that kind of, like, surrounds him wherever he goes.
--:-- Avery Trufelman: 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.
--:-- Avery Trufelman: 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.
--:-- Avery Trufelman: 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.
--:-- Avery Trufelman: 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.
--:-- Avery Trufelman: 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.
--:-- Avery Trufelman: 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.
--:-- Avery Trufelman: 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. Of course, it was inconceivable to me too.
--:-- Avery Trufelman: 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.
--:-- Avery Trufelman: 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.
--:-- Avery Trufelman: 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.
--:-- Avery Trufelman: I mean, funny, sure. But under capitalism, positivity also means productivity. Optimism also means optimizing.
--:-- Avery Trufelman: 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.
--:-- Avery Trufelman: 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.
--:-- Jordan Carnes: 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.
--:-- Avery Trufelman: 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.
--:-- Avery Trufelman: But that's the question. Is optimism saying it could get worse or that it could get better?
--:-- Avery Trufelman: That's sports writer Jordan Carnes. They just so happened to be my neighbor in Oakland, California, and also one of the only people I interacted with in quarantine life.
--:-- Avery Trufelman: 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.
--:-- Avery Trufelman: 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.
--:-- Avery Trufelman: 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.
--:-- Adrian Green: It's like gymnastics meets dance meets nothing I've ever seen before.
--:-- Avery Trufelman: And so I just was thinking about their ability to execute this thing that I couldn't imagine, while I was also not being able to imagine my future.
--:-- Avery Trufelman: 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.
--:-- Avery Trufelman: It's really a show about how multifaceted optimism truly is. I think when we think of optimism, we think of, like, the cheerleader in makeup with, like, a huge bow in her hair.
--:-- Avery Trufelman: And, like, that's, like, this, like, hyperbolic image of optimism, which is, like, 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.
--:-- Adrian Green: 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.
--:-- Avery Trufelman: His sport is all about having this veneer of, like, optimism and effortlessness. Adrian Green, again, who edited the profile of La'Darius for The Cut.
--:-- Avery Trufelman: It's a grueling sport. It's like people falling, arms thwacking, like lots of like really intense and grueling movement.
--:-- Adrian Green: Squeeze your butt. Three, four, six, one.
--:-- Avery Trufelman: It's crazy what we do if you think about it. Like whoever thought of taking two people in 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.
--:-- Adrian Green: But yeah, I'm the crazy person because I'm the one that does it.
--:-- Avery Trufelman: And even as the cheerleaders are smiling ear to ear, popping their chins up, raising their arms in victorious glee, they are in real danger at all times.
--:-- Avery Trufelman: At any instant, a horrific injury can break the spell. Oh my God! Oh my God! It's excruciating to watch them practice.
--:-- Adrian Green: The cheerleaders are constantly breaking bones and falling from stories up in the air. Their joints are being dislocated. Their ribs are getting cracked.
--:-- Avery Trufelman: There are understudies waiting on the sidelines for when someone on the team inevitably gets too injured to practice anymore.
--:-- Adrian Green: Be prepared to step in at any time, at any spot. Circle up. Get a break.
--:-- Avery Trufelman: This is a part of what their optimism means. Sacrifice.
--:-- Avery Trufelman: 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.
--:-- Emily S. Fahani-Smith: Optimism is actually about the present. Whatever pain and suffering, anxiety, uncertainty that you might be feeling, none of our emotions last forever.
--:-- Avery Trufelman: And that's true of these more negative ones as well. That's Emily S. Fahani-Smith, who wrote The Power of Meaning, Finding Fulfillment in a World Obsessed with Happiness.
--:-- Avery Trufelman: 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?
--:-- Avery Trufelman: 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.
--:-- Avery Trufelman: 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.
--:-- Avery Trufelman: 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.
--:-- Avery Trufelman: 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.
--:-- Avery Trufelman: They are constantly giving each other pep talks. Like here's one of Lanaria 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.
--:-- Avery Trufelman: 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.
--:-- Avery Trufelman: And that's part of why optimism is a more complicated, expansive emotion than we give it credit for. It requires labor.
--:-- Avery Trufelman: 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.
--:-- Avery Trufelman: Five, six, seven, eight! Ten, nine! Ten, nine! God, grant us the serenity! God, grace and serenity. We accept the things that we cannot change. We encourage you to change the things that we cannot change.
--:-- Avery Trufelman: Optimism, Emily S. Fahani-Smith argues, is not about delusion or denial. Optimists are able to see the reality and, simultaneously, believe the badness is not for naught.
--:-- Avery Trufelman: 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.
--:-- Avery Trufelman: 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 La'Darius.
--:-- La'Darius Marshall: 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.
--:-- Avery Trufelman: For La'Darius 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.
--:-- La'Darius Marshall: 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, they will be a person that has been a part of this program and they can help you out.
--:-- La'Darius Marshall: 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.
--:-- La'Darius Marshall: 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.
--:-- La'Darius Marshall: 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.
--:-- La'Darius Marshall: 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.
--:-- La'Darius Marshall: 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.
--:-- La'Darius Marshall: 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.
--:-- La'Darius Marshall: 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 cheerleader's job to get everyone else excited about all the other sports, and then no one cares about their own world of athleticism.
--:-- La'Darius Marshall: 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.
--:-- La'Darius Marshall: 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 my 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?
--:-- La'Darius Marshall: 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.
--:-- La'Darius Marshall: 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.
--:-- La'Darius Marshall: 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 a cheerleader?
--:-- Avery Trufelman: After the break, we check back in with La'Darius Marshall, long after the cut cover came and went, after Cheer stopped filming, and after Daytona was canceled. What now?
--:-- Support for Today Explained comes from Chime. Nobody likes fees and complicated banking, says Chime. And Chime gets that, says Chime. Chime is a financial technology company that says they understand that every dollar counts.
--:-- La'Darius Marshall: I'm still going to college. I'm going to college. I'm here in Mississippi. And I've decided even like all this stuff, I was like, I'm 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?
--:-- La'Darius Marshall: And so then I was like, you know what? Since everything in the world is shut down because me just like y'all was seeing a 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 got to find something different, something new to inspire me.
--:-- La'Darius Marshall: So I did. I found out that I really like radiology. So I going to be doing a radiology program to get my degree in that. I mean, did you first start talking to radiologists because of cheer injuries?
--:-- La'Darius Marshall: 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 have 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.
--:-- La'Darius Marshall: And that's when that whole thing started churning in my head. Like, so I was like, you know what? Honestly, I'm going to go into that field because that's 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 you can't get rid of doctors and stuff like that, baby.
--:-- La'Darius Marshall: They ain't going nowhere. We 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.
--:-- La'Darius Marshall: 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?
--:-- La'Darius Marshall: 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.
--:-- La'Darius Marshall: 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 woman ain't making you happy, leave. Everyone is worth more than that.
--:-- La'Darius Marshall: 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 do all that stuff that you can't do. You have to work on the holidays. They don't.
--:-- La'Darius Marshall: Oh my God, Ladarius, are you down for the revolution? Is this what you're proposing?
--:-- La'Darius Marshall: I've been down for it. I'm tired. I'm tired. I want the world to be good. I want the world to be something worth it. If there's a thousand people and there's two bosses, who has more power even though somebody has more money? the people.
--:-- La'Darius Marshall: 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.
--:-- La'Darius Marshall: And you think it'll happen? Like, are you optimistic about that?
--:-- La'Darius Marshall: Baby, if everybody stay as mad as they were, then yes, it will. There's no reason that Breonna Taylor's killers, murderers should still be free. And I don't care. And I said it.
--:-- La'Darius Marshall: How do 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.
--:-- La'Darius Marshall: 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 Breonna Taylor's murder so clearly was for no reason.
--:-- La'Darius Marshall: 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 do it. I felt myself when this whole Black Lives Matter started happening, I was like, you know what? The world really is corrupt.
--:-- La'Darius Marshall: 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.
--:-- La'Darius Marshall: 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.
--:-- La'Darius Marshall: 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 not it would have been that but it was 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.
--:-- La'Darius Marshall: It just, like, I don't have faith like you have. And I'm so envious that you do. Like, I wish I could put my faith in God or something like God. But like, for people who don't have God to lean on, how can we find optimism right now?
--:-- La'Darius Marshall: Girl, you know, 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.
--:-- La'Darius Marshall: 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.
--:-- La'Darius Marshall: Because the world is going to always have corruptness. Like 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.
--:-- La'Darius Marshall: Whether it'll 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.
--:-- Avery Trufelman: Because when I think of things in the future, I'm like, oh, girl, what if I won'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.
--:-- Avery Trufelman: 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.
--:-- Avery Trufelman: Optimism looks like it's trying to reach for an unimaginable thing. But what La'Darius 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.
--:-- Avery Trufelman: 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.
--:-- Avery Trufelman: I'm really, really happy to be here. And I'm glad you're here too.
--:-- B.A. Parker: This episode was engineered and scored by Brandon McFarland, who also composed our theme song. Special thanks to Karinza Kadinas and Sangeeta Singh Kurtz.
--:-- Avery Trufelman: Stella Bugbee and Nishat Kurwa are the show's executive producers. I'm Avery Trufelman, and thank you for listening.
--:-- Support for this show comes from Macy's. Fall is right around the corner, and that means layering season is too. Macy's Fall Fashion Guide can help you get a pulse on all the latest trends and must-haves.
--:-- Avery Trufelman: Try a romantic look with a sheer top from INC. Or mix it up with some fun textures, like a faux fur bomber jacket from Karl Lagerfeld Paris. No matter your vibe, you can explore the Macy's Fall Fashion Guide and find the perfect look for you. Shop in-store or online at nacy's.com.
